No More Learning

. . . I'm counting on chance to see that a copy here and there will arrive among the people and find its way into a solitary room. ""O This mode of distribution solves the social question in that it puts the people between quotation marks and establishes only individual cases. Rilke's strange wanderings through Prague seek out the "folks" that for the eso- teric Hofmannsthal solely constitute the real. But "people" can no longer be sought out, because there are no longer any multipliers and hence no longer any methods for the distribution of poetry. Rilke's project avoided schools, the only institution that produces readers as such. And the hospi- tals and guilds he included function less as multipliers than as the letter- drops used in espionage. The writer, fallen to the level of functionary, lets his Chicory (as the plant name indicates) fall on the biblical stones by the side of the road. All he "counts" on is "chance. " And one cannot cal- culate chance without using statistics. Whether literature since I900 reaches anyone at all remains a question for empirical social research.
The only philological evidence available is the way in which impossible addresses to particular readers, or measures adopted in order not to reach the educated individual enter textuality. Only a mode of dealing with de- bris counts as a mode of distributing texts that constitute the debris of a discourse network. In this, literature opposes the classical-romantic pro- gram of proliferating Poetry.
A final word on Hoffmann and Lindhorst. Young men and feminine readers were caught in the classical-romantic manner with very finely woven nets. The well-known bureaucrat and secret Poet commissioned a judge and Poet to function as a poetic multiplier. This secondary Poet then brought a young man into the picture, who learned hermeneutic reading so perfectly that he became capable of writing Poetry. Feminine
? REBUS 341
readers were then able to puzzle endlessly over which woman was the true object of the Poet's love, and young but poetic bureaucrats, faithful disciples of Anselmus, learned to read the image of Woman with suffi- cient hallucinatory vividness to be able to find the image again in so- called life. Nothing in this program survived the turning point of 1900. The eradication of the ambiguous name, which could designate author- individuals like Anselmus or Amadeus and bureaucrats like Heerbrand or Hoffmann, was enough to ensure the break. Even though Rilke schol- ars continue to make friends with Malte, Malte Laurids Brigge none- theless remains the "young, insignificant foreigner, Brigge. " The name as pure signifier excludes imaginary identification. Kafka's "K. " and "Joseph K. " allow only the kind of game that Freud played with his anon- ymous personnel of Emmy v. N's and Anna 0. 3. Such bare and dismem- bered family names cannot support a continuous history of Bildung and thus alphabetization. Heroes that labor under agraphia or alexia can never represent the Author.
"Biography no longer counts. Names don't matter," as it was once put inthetelegraphicstyleof19Iz. "I Thenamethatinthediscoursenetwork of I800 was or became "sound and smoke" ("Schall und Rauch"; Fuust, 1. 3457) was of course that of the Master-HErr. After its eradication, au- thors' names could fill its place, and their poetic biographies could inspire readers to write and feminine readers to love. But the despoticsignifier that stands over the discourse network of 1900orders soul murder or the twi- light of mankind. Thus authors' names disappear, some into the nullity of individual cases, others into a factual anonymity. "He who knows the reader, does nothing further for the reader"-so, according to Nietzsche, he provides no information on his own spiritual history and the "probable further course of his development. " Doblin the doctor, for instance, gave this psychoanalytic comment on Doblin the writer: "I have nothing to say concerning my mental development; as a psychoanalyst, I know how false any self-disclosure is. In psychic self-relation I'm a touch-me-not, and ap- proach myself only through the distance of epic narration. " Rubiner, for instance, took the anthology title Twilight of Mankind literally and re- fused the publisher's traditional request for biographical information. "Ludwig Rubiner requested that no biography be included. He believes that the recounting not only of acts but also of lists of works and dates derives from a vain error of the past, that of the individualistic grand-artist. His conviction is that only anonymous, creative membership in commu- nity has any importance for the present or future. ""'
The writers who beginning in 1912contributed to a journal with the significant title The Loose Bird [i. e. , "a loose fellow"]-such as Max
? Brod, Robert Musil, Ernst Stadler, Robert Walser, and Franz Werfel- carried the project to factual anonymity. Rubiner explains what the loose bird means:
Anonymity is the rule in this journal published by Demeter. Is it possible to con- ceive of a word that would give the least indication of this shake-up, of the bliss of this realized utopia? What must be made clear is that a century whose function was to give us mess tins, single-sized boots, and scores by Wagner no longer exists as a hindrance for the mind. . . . Anonymity is again the rule in a new journal: that is, after a century there is once again commitment and relation.
The day that one person really had the courage to think the concept of ano- nymity through to its end is the day that belongs to the creative period of contem- porary history. "'
The anonymity of loose birds is thus an intentional break with classical- romantic writing, a discursive event intended to make discursive events possible. In the elite space of the cult of the letter that the discourse net- work of 1900left to makers of words, an earlier, widespread practice is taken up "again. ''"s This "relinquishing of the author" can be psychi- atrically conceptualized as depersonalization"""or celebrated as the crea- tive act of "the mind"-in each case anonymity guarantees words the effects of radical foreignness. "The mind leaps into the stone-walled space of the objective. A word, a sentence is left to resound in the world. ""-
But beware: the one person who "really had the courage to think the concept of anonymity through to its end" could be named George. When in the last issues of Pages for Art "authors' names were omitted as nones- sential elements," Rubiner, the upright leftist without name or biography, was alarmed. Then the one, despotic signifier, without betraying names, issued the call to World War I. Words were left to resound in the world and could not be neutralized by ordinary legal procedures. "' And it be- came terrifyingly clear what "loose bird" means.
UN COUP DE DES JAMAISN'ABOLIRA LE HASARD.
Artists who no more sign their works than "the earth signs the grass that grows out of who leave their Chicory on comers at workers' pubs, who issue their right- or left-wing calls to battle without the civic anributability of names, all perched on stochastic dispersion and oper- ated in the strategic field. The discourse network of 1900created the con- ditions of possibility for a genuine sociology of literature. The combined program announced in Gustave Lanson's title Literary History and Soci- ology follows the loose birds and depersonalized writing hands that have flown across paper since 1900. The fact that writers write words that an ego neither intends nor answers for makes the book a social fact. "The book, therefore, is an evolving social phenomenon. Once it is published,
? the author no longer possesses it; it no longer signifiesthe thought of the author, but the thought of the public, the thought of the publics that suc- ceed one another in turn. "
Here, what divides theory from practice is that Lanson writes about thoughts, whereas for a long time signifiers had not only not signified an author's thoughts, but not signified anything at all. Whatever factual readers do with the social fact of the book can be done entirely without thinking. When a school library opened its Poetic Treasureto ten-year- old Hans Carossa in 1888, he "did not understand a tenth of what [he] read," but was "gripped and formed by the sound and rhythm of the poems. " Orders are always more effective when nothing or no one neu- tralizes them. Where Reiser, Karl Friedrich von Kloden, e tutti quanti were offended by incomprehensible letters, Carossa was bewitched, as if by magical incantations. What offended him was just the opposite. "I was a little disturbed in the beginning by the names that stood beneath each poem and did not belong there; at least I could not imagine what such funny words as Klopstock, Riickert, Morike, Goethe, or Kopisch had to do with that intimate music. " '*I
A young man like Carossa is incapable of letting his anger issue into acts and eradicating funny names like Goethe. The wrath of a mature woman is required. This woman's name is Abelone and she is unable to sit by when a man named Brigge unsuspectingly reads around in
Goethe's Correspondence with a Young Girl.
"If you would at least read aloud, bookworm," said Abelone after a little. That did not sound nearly soquarrelsome, and since I thought it high time for a recon- ciliation, I promptly read aloud, going right on to the end of the section, and on again to the next heading: To Bettina.
"No,not the answers," Abelone interrupted. . . . Then she laughed at the way I was looking at her.
"My goodness, Malte, how badly you've been reading. "
Then I had to admit that not for one moment had my mind been on what I was doing. "I read simply to get you to interrupt me," 1confessed, and grew hot and turned back the pages till I came to the title of the book. Only then did 1 know what it was. "And why not the answers? " 1 asked with curiosity.
Abelone seemed not to have heard me. She sat there in her bright dress, as though she were growing dark all over inside, as her eyes were now.
"Give it to me," she said suddenly, as if in anger, taking the book out of my hand and opening it right at the page she wanted. And then she read one of Bet- tina's letters.
I don't know how much of it I took in, but it was as though a solemn promise were being given me that one day 1should understand it all. '"*
Lanson's law is rigorous. Books circa 1900are social phenomena, pos- sessed by no one, not even their original author. Historical change makes
REBUS 343
? Goetbe's Correspondence with a Young Girl into the correspondence of a woman with no one-because a second woman interrupts every time Goethe, in the name of his name, puts of a loving admirer. A century later, his name is gone; Brigge has to look back at the title for it, and Abelone (like the Notebooks as a whole) does not even pronounce it.
Discursive manipulations are incisions. Topologically speaking, mapped onto the discourse network of 1900a correspondence carried on during the years 1807to 1812is no longer equivalent to its earlier self. Proximities in a book (between love letters and replies) are destroyed, and other proximities (between love and love and love) are established. The transposition of media creates a new corpus, the corpus Bettina Bren- tano. "Just now, Bemna, you still were; I understand you. Is not the earth still warm with you, and do not the birds still leave room for your voice? The dew is different, but the stars are still the stars of your nights. Or is not the whole world of your making? "'"'The corpus of Bettina Brentano, also called the world, appears in the place of authorship and of the domi- nance of the work. Where the creator named Goethe is absent, space fills with the voices of birds and women. A letter writer who was quite happy to be insignificant does not become an author posthumously. But what she wrote into the wind ceases, in the absence of authorship, to cease. Precisely because it does nothing but eternally repeat a love, this writing is suddenly timely. It is timely when the eternal recurrence of opaque thisness defines all writing.
Each discourse network alters corpora of the past. The anonymous or pseudonymous women who remained at the margins of writing circa I800 now move into the center of the system, because the authors or men in whose work they perished were perishing in turn. Women in Eigbteentb- and Nineteenth-Century German Intellectual Life-whether in statistics or in increasing singularity, women were honored in such monographs circa 1900. '"Goethe's mother, with her orthographically catastrophic letters, provided a model for the free essay. '"'Rahel Varnhagen is taken to be a "great power" of the classical period. '" George dedicated a poem to the shore of the Rhein where Karoline von Giinderode threw herself in. Bemna Brentano, finally, marked the limit and failure of Goethe. When intransitive writing becomes the sign of literature, unheard-of women, writers of letters, prefigure the new act of writing, whereas texts written in authorial code and thus familiar to the general world of readers become anathema. Brigge writes to Bettina Brentano:
You yourself knew the worth of your love; you recited it aloud to your greatest poet, so that he should make it human; for it was still element. But he, in writing to you, dissuaded people from it. They have all read his answers and believe them rather, because the poet is clearer to them than nature. But perhaps it will some-
? day appear that here lay the limit of his greatness. This lover was imposed upon him, and he was not equal to her. What does i t signify that he could not respond? Such love needs no response, itself contains both the mating-call and the reply; it answers its own prayers. lh-
Significantly,it was not Brigge who achieved this transvaluation of all values. By reading Goethe's answers he would have cancelled out the in- transitive love once more, if he had not read so badly and for the sole purpose of being interrupted. If there is to be an kccrrrure fkminine, one must put an end to alphabbise. Instead of progressing continuously to- ward his own authorship by reading Goethe, Brigge exposes his reading to an interruption that functions like the Geneva stop of film or the ta- chistoscope of psychophysics. When Abelone takes up the book and reads, she does not substitute good reading for bad. For the first time, she reveals (as Larisch might say) the "between" of Goethe's answers. Her listener does not gain hermeneutic understanding, only the promise that "one day" he "should understand it all. "
A woman who reads out loud the unheard-of (in both senses of the word) love letters of a woman closes a circle around both sexes that ex- cludes male hermeneutics. Because there is no author to suggest to femi- nine readers that his soul is the cryptic word of their love, Abelone is re- leased from the obligation of close reading. The functions that defined the sexes in the discourse network of 1800,the productive continuation of texts and pure consumption, both fall away. Brigge is not Anselmus and Abelone is not Veronika. He hands the book to her and she does what she likes with it. One hundred years later, then, what was impossible between Bettina Brentano and Goethe occurs. "But he should have humbled him- self before her in all his splendor and written what she dictated, with both hands, likeJohn on Patmos, kneeling. There was no choice for him before this voice which 'fulfilled the angels' function. '"'"* Reading aloud in a voice that continues to amplify because it feeds back into another woman, Abelone dictates all of Brigge's future insights. She dictates what Bettina Brentano was unable to dictate under the conditions of classical dis- course. The function of angels is of course to announce a death. Dicta- tions are always the death of the author. Whereas Goethe "left empty" the "dark myth" that a woman's voice had prepared for his death,'"' the writer of the Notebooks assumes this myth. The era of the other inter- pretation means being without the honorable title of author and being subject to the dictates of others. Kneeling, as Goethe failed to, Brigge
transcribes. With that, however, the promise that emanated from Abe- lone's incomprehensibility "is still being fulfilled. " I'"
Everything written about women in the Notebooks is dictated by a re- sounding voice, at once Abelone and Bettina: that, for instance, there is
REBUS 345
? nothing to say about her, "because only wrong is done in the telling"; "' that there is no question of writing letters to her, only drafts of letters that Brigge does not send; that all attempts to rise to the level of an author by writing for young ladies (as Goethe might have put it) come to nothing against the will of women "to remove from [their] love all that was tran- sitive"; ''I and that an intransitive love can only consist in a kind of writ- ing that circa 1900is incorporated as literature. What does it mean that women, according to Rilke, "for centuries now . . . have performed the whole of love; they have always played the full dialogue, both parts"? '-'As in Adelbert von Hanstein or Ellen Key, it outlines an alternative literary history consisting of unanswered and intransitive calls of love-of Bettina Brentano, Sappho, Heloike, Gaspara Stampa, Elisa Mercoeur, Clara d'Anduze, Louise Labbe, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Julie Lespinasse, Marie-Anne de Clermont, and so many others. '"
Where the divinity of the author disappeared, women who write appeared, as irreducible as they are unread. Because their texts exist, their writers cannot be confounded with the One Mother who has made someone an author (as Goethe confounded even Bettina Brentano). The discourse network of 1900 obeyed the rule of impossible exhaustion no- where more rigorously than in the field of sexual difference. Not only are Schillerian abstractions such as "Nature" or "The Walk" impossible, but so are all discourses that unify the sexes. Such is the insight that Brigge receives in dictation from his impossible beloved.
Is it possible that one knows nothing of young girls, who nonetheless live? Is it possible that one says "women," "children," "boys," not guessing (despite all one's culture, not guessing) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?
Yes,it is possible . . .
But if all this is possible-has even more than a semblance of possibility-then surely, for all the world's sake, something must happen. The first comer, he who has had this disturbing thought, must begin to do some of the things that have been neglected; even if he is just anybody, by no means the most suitable person: there is no one else at hand. This young, indifferent foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit down in his room five flights up and write, day and night: yes, he will have to write: that is how it will end. "'
? Queen's Sacrifice
&femme n'ixistepas. Womeninthediscoursenetworkof1900areenu- merable singulars, irreducible to the One Woman or Nature. All the media and the sciences that support the network compete in a queen's sacrifice.
Technical engineers make the first move. The Hungarian chess master Rezso Charousek, immortalized in Gustav Meyrink's Golem, immortal- ized himself through a queen's sacrifice. And Edison, as celebrated by Vil- liers de I'Isle-Adam, betrayed the secret of his profession. "By the way, I'd like to be introduced to that great lady 'Nature' some day, because every- body talks about her and nobody has ever seen her. "'
The novel Tomorrow's Eve unfolds this aphorism across its entire plot. An English lord has fallen helplessly in love with a woman whose beauty (as if to confirm the physiologist Paul Mobius) is surpassed only by the imbecility of everything she says. The father of the phonograph then decides to furnish his despairing friend with a love object that has no troublesome aspects. He reconstructs the man's beloved electromechani- cally in all her corporeality, but exchanges for her mind that of the Woman. Tomorrow's Eve-as Edison's automaton is called-"replaces an intelli- gence with Intelligence itself. "2 A "copy of Nature" is created, which is more perfect than the original in both mind and body, and which will thus "bury" nature. ' Not only is the flesh of the Android imperishable, but the cultural technologies built into her surpass all the possible desires of any lover. Instead of lungs she has two electrical phonographs-far ahead of the then-current state of research-which contain the most beautiful words of love ever spoken by Poets and Thinkers. Lord Ewald
?
has only to switch from one woman to the Woman and speak to the An- droid, and the two phonographs will spit out, according to the method of Ebbinghaus, the vocabulary fed into them. They are capable of producing different replies to tender words of love for sixty hours, as a mechanism plays through all possible combinations of the material.
Of course Lord Ewald, to whom Edison explains everything in tech- nical detail, is shaken at first. He cannot think of loving an automaton's limited vocabulary and repertoire of gestures, until the engineer demon- strates that love is always only this litany. Whereas women in plurality (as the case of Abelone shows) say things entirely different from what men would like to hear, the Woman pleases with each of her automatic words. Edison showed before Erdmann, then, that not only every professional language but all everyday language makes d o with a modest store of sig- nifiers, and that, finally, in matters of love as well "the great kaleidoscope of human words" is best left to automatized female media-professionals. '
The programmed outcome occurs; Lord Ewald falls madly in love with the One Woman or Love; and Edison is able to bring a century of "ah's," "oh's," andOlympiastoaclose. "ThismustbethefirsttimethatScience showed it could cure a man, even of love. "' Only the spear can heal the wound it has made. The technological substitute perfects and liquidates all the characteristics attributed to the imaginary image of Woman by Poets and Thinkers. Spallanzani's Olympia could utter the one primal sigh; Edison's mechanical Eve talks for sixty hours. The great lady Nature whom everyone talks about and no one has seen dies of perfect simula- tion-Tomorrow's Eve, or the negative proof that Mother Nature does not exist. In consequence, only women in plurality remain after Edison's experiment, as discarded experimental material, to be sure, but nonethe- less real.
After the technologists come the theoreticians. If the phantasm of Woman arose in the distribution of form and matter, spirit and nature, writing and reading, production and consumption, to the two sexes, a new discourse network cancelled the polarity. As long as women too have an "innate, ineradicable, blindly striving formative principle" that "seizes mental material,"" the complementarity of form and matter, man and woman, is irretrievably lost. Henceforth there are Ariadnes, Bettinas, Abelones, and thus women's discourses. To formulate "the essential dif- ference between the sexes" in "terms such as 'productivity' and 'recep- tivity"' is mere "parochialism in the age of modern psychology. "' Instead of establishing one sole difference between the sexes, modern psychology, through observation and experiment, discovers differential differences that are dependent variables or respectively applied standards. * Even phi- losophers like Otto Weininger-who used psychophysical data and mea-
? QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 349
sured brain weight in an attempt to develop an ideal of each sex-con- cede that "in actual experience neither men nor women exist," but only the mixed relationships or differential differences to which quantitative description alone does justice. ' Weininger's less speculative colleagues did not even attempt to define ideals. The title of an essay by Ernst Simmel, "On the Psychology of Women," written long before Brigge's Notebooks, clearly indicates that it is impossible to speak of members of a sex except in the plural. "'
The many women established in the discourse network of 1900were looked at in every light save that of love. Tomorrow's Eve shows, after all, that the necessary and sufficient condition for love is the Woman as simulacrum. Empirical individual females, unburdened of the ideal, took on other roles. They could speak and write, deviating from the classical polarity of the sexes. Franziska von Reventlow does not mention her child's Name-of-the-Father anywhere in her writing. Accordingly, "we" are confronted, in an anthology entitled Love Songs of Modern Women, "not simply with the normal course of a woman's love life," but with "its demonic and pathological aberrations" as well. "
Since 1896the word and deed of psychoanalysis have existed to ac- commodate these demons and pathologies. The other illness for which Freud provided a cure-obsessional neurosis, the scourge of men-is "only a dialect of the language of hysteria,"ILor of women's language. Freud was faced with the radical new task of listening to women for thirty years and gathering everything they said under the enigmatic ques- tion "What does a woman want? " The fact that the question remained unanswered, as Freud finally confessed, not gratuitously, to a woman who had been his student," is one more piece of evidence for the nonexis- tence of the Woman. Her one "ah! " and the one way in which it might be cured, according to a classical therapist by the name of Mephisto, disap- pear together. The place left vacant is filled by enumerable words, which Freud registers, as if at the bidding of Edison in Villiers's novel. Gramo- phonics commands that one no longer read Holy Writ, but that one listen to divine vibrations-especially since hysteria, although a complete lan- guage, has as many dialects and variations as Morgenstern's Weather- Wendish. Only by offering no response to the love of his female patients could Freud draw out the peculiar vibrations of female sexuality. This rule of nonresponsiveness established as part of psychoanalytic method what Brigge learned from Bettina and Abelone: there is no longer desire when satisfied by the other sex. When Freud once gave in to temptation and, following all the rules of transference, identified the desire of a fe- male hysteric with a certain "Mr. K. " and this "K. " with himself, the cure failed. To the "complete confusion" of the beginner Freud, "the homo-
? sexual (gynecophilic) love for Mrs. K. " was "the strongest unconscious current" of Dora's love life. ''
One of Lacan's mathemes states that psychoanalytic discourse exists as the transposition of hysterical discourse. This implies that women are no longer excluded from knowledge. The nonexistent beloved of all men yields to drives and their vicissitudes, among which genital love is now only an accident-it is even taboo in the consulting room in the Berg- gasse. There was no Poetry to feed the enigmatic knowledge unknowingly transported by female hysterics, or to translate it into love for Freud, to his greater glory as author. Women's knowledge remained knowledge and was transmitted to women-which indeed "would ruin any chance . . . ofsuccessataUniversity""-as thescienceofpsychoanalysis. Marie Bonaparte, to whom Freud divulged his question about the question of women, was only one of many women students; Lou Andreas-Salom6 was another (to say nothing of Freud's daughter).
"Ladies and Gentlemen"-so begins the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, delivered at the University of Vienna during the winter semesters from 1915 to 1917. A discourse based on women's discourse can and must, even under academic conditions, return to women. This distinguishes it from the Discourse of the University, which from I 800 on systematically excluded women so that countless bureaucrats could con- duct their dance around the alma mater. Only a Great Mother could make possible the hero so necessary for subjects of the university to utter any knowledge: the author. I6 A masculine discourse on and from the Mother fed university discourse, just as hysteric discourse fed psychoana- lytic discourse. In 1897, immediately before the only university reform that has ever been worthy of the name, when Arthur Kirchhoff gathered his judgments of Prominent University Professors, Teachers,and Writers on the Aptirude of Women for University Study, the university subject Dr. Hajim Steinthal opined that women should not attend the university, for "in the uncertain hope of producing another Goethe, I could only re- gret the certainty of losing a mother-of-Goethe. " "
Lectures to "Ladies and Gentlemen" thus eliminate, along with "Frau Rat," the necessary preconditions of authorship, even if they produce a great many women writers and analysts. Either there is an alma mater on one side and on the other young men to whom (excluding such impos- sible women as Giinderode) an authorial God's Kingdom is revealed, or the whole interpreter's game between man and the world comes apart. If man and woman, author and mother, can no longer be added up-and the synthesis of form and matter, spirit and world, was man in a psycho- logical sense and the world in a philosophical sense-it was because on August I 8, 1908, a forty-year war for the admission of women to univer-
? sities finally led to victory, even in Prussia. It then became impossible to lead male and only male students around by the nose in the Faustian manner-during the lectures they had so many Cleopatra's noses right before their eyes.
The university reform was a radical turning point in the relationship between sexuality and truth. What disappeared was "the particular char- acter of German students" and that "unbridled student atmosphere" known from the Auerbach's Keller (in Goethe's Fuust). For the first time, women talked about sexuality and thus "cast off the ideal that Germans fortunately still demand from a woman. "'n In other words, only Eve or the One Woman can satisfy the desires of professors and male students, whereas the plurality of women students enter a domain of discourse that, since Edison, no longer knows love. "Having both sexes in the class- room" necessarily means "putting no emphasis whatsoever on sexual dif- ference" and "confronting the phenomena of intellectual-historical life soberly and objectively" rather than in fantasies of love. I9
No sooner said than done. Immediately before he delivers the good news to the ladies among the ladies and gentlemen present that, anatomi- cally, they also have a phallus, and that in dreams they have the symbols wood, paper, and books, Freud states that he owes an account of his treatment of primary sexual characteristics. zoHis response matches the principles of coeducation just cited. "As there can be n o science in u s ~ m Delphzni, there can be none for schoolgirls; and the ladies among you have made it clear by their presence in this lecture-room that they wish to be treated on an equality with men. ""
Now that is equal rights. Nothing stands in the way of writing for women, who, first, have a phallus or stylus and who, second, are wood, paper, or books-least of all a determination of the human race that dif- ferentiated authors as engravers and women as the writing tablets of na- ture. If both sexes can be found on both sides of the difference, they are ready for a writing apparatus that can d o without a subject and a stylus. There was a time when needles in the hands of women wove cloth, when pens in the hands of authors wove another cloth called text. But that time is past. "Machines everywhere, wherever one looks! There is a replace- ment for the countless tasks that man performed with an able hand, a replacement and one with such power and speed. . . . It was only to be expected that after the engineer had taken the very symbol of feminine skill out of women's hands a colleague would come up with the idea of replacing the pen as well, the symbol of masculine intellectual produc- tion, with a machine. ""
Machines do away with polar sexual difference and its symbols. An apparatusthat can replace Man or the symbol of masculine production is
QUEEN'S SACRIFICE 35I
? also accessible to women. Apart from Freud, it was Remington who "granted the female sex access to the office. "z'A writing apparatus that does not represent an erotic union of script and voice, Anselmus and Ser- pentina, Spirit and Nature, is made to order for coeducational purposes. The typewriter brought about (Foucault's Order of Things overlooks such trivialities) "a completely new order of things. ""
Whereas the first generation of women students, described in Mari- anne Weber's The Changing Image of University Women, "consciously renounced the garland of feminine grace," another type soon appeared. This type discovered "an infinite variety of new kinds of human contact in the previously unavailable possibilities of intellectual exchange with young men: comradeship, friendship, love. " Unsurprisingly, this type also "finds ready encouragement from most professors. " Mrs. Forster- Nietzsche was told by a professor in Zurich that "the emancipated women of the earlier period are gradually becoming more charming," and they "are highly valued as secretaries and assistants at universities and librar- ies. "l" She could have heard the same thing from an ex-professor of Basel who went half-blind and had to alternate between using secretaries and typewriters.
"It is better to become the amanuensis of a scholar than to d o scientific work at one's own cost"-such was Ellen Key's advice to working women. z-They found a place in the university mid-way between being slaves at the typewriter and research assistants. As the example of Felice Bauer shows, the situation was the same in office work. Employed by a firm that happened to manufacture phonographs, Kafka's fiancee was promoted from a secretarial to a managerial position in just a few years, simply because she was a good typist. Certainly "office work, whether keeping the books, handling accounts, or typing, gives a woman little op- portunity to make her special, most characteristic contribution. "znYet despite or because of this The Entrance of Women into Male Professions, as one title put it, occurred in the field of text production. Women have the admirable ability "to sink to the level of mere writing machines. " Whereas men, with the commendable exception of a writers' elite and the Stefan George script, continued to depend on their classically formed handwriting and thereby blindly, without resistance, left a market posi- tion unoccupied, young women "with the worst handwriting" advanced "to operating a typewriter"-as if, from the pedagogue's point of view, "one were building a church tower in thin air, having forgotten the foun- dation walls. "zv
That is just it. Foundation walls no longer count. Remington typewrit- ers turned the systematic handicap of women, their insufficient education, into a historical opportunity. The sales division of the firm just cited had
? only to discover, in I 88 I , the masses of unemployed women-and out of an unprofitable innovation came the typewriter as mass-produced prod- uct. '' A two-week intensive course with a rented typewriter made the long classical education required for the secretary Anselmus and his fun- damentally male colleagues in the nineteenth century unnecessary. "The so-called 'emancipation' of women"" was their taking hold of the ma- chine that did away with pedagogical authority over discourse. Office work, in Germany and elsewhere, became the front line in the war be- tween the sexes because it was "not a profession protected by entrance and selective examinations. "
Jonathan Harker, a lawyer in an English notary office, keeps a diary while traveling to Transylvania with documents to be delivered to Count Dracula. The notebook is his salvation from the strange pleasures that
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? overcome the Count night after night. Harker, like Brigge, Ronne, Lauda, and all the others, notes: "As I must do something or go mad, 1write this diary. " " Harker has learned stenography, but even so notebook writers still gain identifiability, coherence, and thus individuality from their handwriting.
Meanwhile Harker's fianc6e sits longingly at the typewriter back in Exeter. Whereas her betrothed will one day simply inherit the notary practice on the death of his employer, Mina Murray is sorely in need of new discursive technologies. She is an assistant schoolmistress but, not content with pedagogic half-emancipation, she dreams of doing "what 1 see lady journalists do. " So she diligently practices typing and stenogra- phy in order to be able "to take down what he wants to say" after her marriage to J ~ n a t h a n . 'H~owever (as Lily Braun had so rightly seen), the "disintegration of the old family structure" sets in "precisely where one thought oneself quite conservative":" for office girls, even if they have other dreams, there is no "return to any sort of position in the family. "%
The typewriter and officetechnology can never be contained in the closed space of motherhood. Their function is always that of the interface be- tween branching and specified streams of data. This becomes clear as Stoker's novel develops.
Instead of simply taking dictation from Jonathan, now her husband, Mina Harker is forced to become the central relay station of an immense information network. For the Count has arrived secretly in England and is leaving scattered and fearful signs of his presence. One is a madman in whose brain the psychiatrist, Dr. Seward, discovers new and dreadful nerve paths; he immediately has the verbal traces of these paths spoken into his phonograph. Another is Mina's friend, Lucy Westenra; two small wounds appear on her throat and she becomes increasingly somnam- bulant, anemic, and (to put it briefly) hysterical. Finally, there is a Dutch physician, who "has revolutionized therapeutics by his discovery of the continuous evolution of brain-matter. "'- This allows him to discover what is actually behind the scattered evidence of the horror. But his in- sight would remain a gray theory of vampirism if Mina Harker did not undertake the task of exhaustive evidence gathering. She who dreamed of doing what she saw lady journalists do uses her typewriter to transcribe every diary entry, every phonograph roll, every relevant newspaper clip- ping and telegram, every document and log book. She makes copies of her transcriptions; she delivers these daily to all the investigators, and so on and on. "
The Count, had he any idea of what was occurring, might have ex- claimed in the words of Schreber: "For years they have been keeping books01other notations, in which all my thoughts, my verbal expres-
? sions, my personal articles, all objects in my possession or anywhere near me, all people I come into contact with, etc. , are written down. "
It is not always easy for a woman to incorporate into a text every shred of evidence of a perverse desire. Seward's (not to say Stransky's) phono- graphic roll turns faster than a typist's hands would like. The "wonderful machine" is also so "cruelly true" that the transcribing Mina perceives the beating of tormented hearts "in its very tones. " ' But a discourse func- tionary does not give in, simply because she has become a discourse func- tionary. Her friend, however, like so many hysterics since Eugene Azam and Richard Wagner, suddenly manifests a second personality at night: while still wretched and docile, she refuses medication, draws her gums back from her eyeteeth, and speaks in an uncharacteristically soft, sala- cious voice. It is as if Kundry in the first act of Pursiful had become Kun- dry in the magic garden.
"What does a woman want? " In the discourse network of 1900 the alternatives are no longer motherhood or hysteria, but the machine or destruction. Mina Harker types, whereas Lucy Westenra's second per- sonality is the will willed by a despotic signifier. On the one hand, a de- sexualization permits the most intimate diaries and most perverse sexu- alities to be textualized; on the other hand, there is the truth. Indeed, precisely the truth corresponds to Freud's original insight and was simul- taneously being publicized by an extended juristic-journalistic dragnet: the fact that hysteria consists in having been seduced by a despot. Lucy's sleepwalking does not arise from her own soul, but from her paternal in- heritance. *'The dreams of wolves and the bites from eyeteeth are no fan-
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s
? tasies; they are the Count's engrams in brain and throat. Whereas Mina types, her friend ends up on the nocturnal side of machine writing. Two tiny bite wounds on the throat materialize Beyerlen's law that eyeteeth or a piece of type, through a single, brief application of pressure, place the entire engram in the proper position on skin or paper. "The spot that should be seen is always visible, except at the moment when visibility is necessary or is believed to be necessary. " For blind acts of writing, only after-the-fact decoding is possible. But someone who, like Lucy's Dutch physician, is deeply immersed in Charcot's theory of hysteria can take the wounds and dreams of a hysteric for the sexuality they signify and hunt down the dream wolf (at the risk of becoming hysterical oneself) by the light of day.
No despot can survive when a whole multimedia system of psycho- analysis and textual technologies goes after him. The special forces have "scientific experience," whereas Dracula has only his "child's brain" with engrams dating back to the battle of Mohacs (1526). "He does have an inkling of the power about to bring him down, for otherwise he would not throw the phonographic rolls and typescripts he finds into the fire. But the hunters have Mina and "thank God there is the other copy in the safe. "" Under the conditions of information technology, the old-European despot disintegrates into the limit value of Brownian motion, which is the noise in all channels. "
AstabtotheheartturnstheUndeadtodust. Dracula'ssalaciouslywhis- pering bride, the resurrected vampire Lucy, is put to death a second time, and finally, on the threshold of his homeland, so is he. A multimedia sys- tem, filmed over twenty times, attacks with typescript copies and tele- grams, newspaper clippings and wax rolls (as these different sorts of dis- courseareneatlylabeled). Thegreatbird nolongerfliesoverTransylvania.
"They pluck in their terror handfuls of plumes from the imperial Eagle, and with no greater credit in consequence than that they face, keeping their equipoise, the awful bloody beak that turns upon them . . . Everyone looks haggard, and our only wonder is that they succeed in looking at all. "'' It is always the same story in the discourse network of 1900. The last lines of Henry James, before the agony began, were pre- served by a typewriter. And the enigma of their meaning is the prehistory of this materiality.
The writer James, famous for his compact yet overarticulated style, turned to dictation before 1900in order to move from style to "free, un- answered speech," thus to "diffusion" or flight of ideas. In 1907Theo- dora Bosanquet, an employee in a London typing service who was at the
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time busy typing the Report of the Royal Commission on Coast Erosion, was ordered to report to James, who in the initial interview appeared as a "benevolent Napoleon. " Thus began Bosanquet's "job, as alarming as it was fascinating, of serving as medium between the spoken and machined word. " Alarming, because Bosanquet was of course only the will of the dictator's will, who in his dreams again and again appeared as Napoleon. Fascinating, because she became indispensable: whenever the pink noise of the Remington ceased, James would have no more ideas. "
Gertrude Stein'sdark oracle predicted everything, all of it, even that an oracle was incapable of warning anyone. The writer who engaged a me- dium in 1907 in order to shift his style to "Remingtonese" was felled by a stroke in 1915. Sheer facts of literary history realize an epoch's wildest phantasm. The blood clot in the brain did not deprive James of clear dic- tion, but it did claim all prearranged meanings. Paralysis and asymbolia know only the real. And this real is a machine. The Remington, together with its medium, were ordered to the deathbed in order to take three dic- tations from a delirious brain. Two are composed as if the emperor of the French, that great artist of dictation, had issued and signed them; the third notes that the imperial eagle is bleeding to death and why it is bleeding.
Nothing is more unthinkable, but nothing is clearer: a machine regis- ters itself.
When King David was old and of many days, he asked for a beautiful young woman to warm him. And they gave him Abigail of Sunem. The writer does not ask for Theodora Bosanquet, but for her typewriter. And the queen's sacrifice is complete.
In the discourse network of 1900-this is its open secret-there is no sexual relation between the sexes. Apparent exceptions do not alter the fact. If Maupassant, who probably for the same venereal-opthalmological reasons as Nietzsche occasionally dictated to a secretary, could not re- frain from sleeping with her, it was only as preparation for a full-stage separation comedy. " The comedies of unification, by contrast, are left to the media and their literary ancillary industries. According to a fine taut- ology, men and women, who are linked together by media, come together in media.