No More Learning

Fourteen or fifteen years after an unforgotten day in school on which he constructed a phonograph out of cardboard and parchment paper, candle wax and the bristles of a clothes brush,'" Rilke attended anatomy lectures at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Among all the medical samples, what "enchanted" the writer was a "special housing closed against all worldlv space"-the skull. Rilke acquired a skull and spent the evenings studying it-with the result that his childhood memory was completely rewritten. If it once seemed that "this autonomous sound [would] remain unforgettable, apart from us, preserved outside," the stu- dent of anatomy learned that not the sounds "from the funnel," but "those markings traced on the cylinder of the phonograph"" were much more essential. But the sutura coronalis effects the shift from reproduction to inscription, from reading to writing in the technological age. "In the peculiarly vigilant and demanding light of the candle the cranial suture was quite evident and I soon realized what it reminded me of: those un- forgotten lines that were once scratched onto a little wax roll by the point of a bristle! "
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The suture that divides the two cranial hemispheres like a sagittal inci- sion designates the status of all script for a writer of 1900. Only a scratch or cut into the flesh of forgetfulness itself can be unforgettable. What Nietzsche learned investigating the genealogy of morals, what Kafka's ex- plorer learned in the penal colony," Rilke was able to learn from anat- omy. If ever an initiation did justice to the material, then this was it. The cranial suture functions as the left-over trace of a writing energy or art that, instead of "making variations o r imitating," "had its joy in the dance of existences," in a "dictatorial art that presents dispositions of energy. " A "consciousness of an ethical nature,"" of the kind evoked in the titles of Nietzsche and Kafka, can add nothing to this. Technology and phys- iology are responsible for material inscription.
More exactly, a system composed of technology and physiology is re- sponsible. That is what the skull for years had "suggested again and again" to Rilke the writer.
The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has-let us assume- a certain similarity to the closely woven line which the needle of the phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of sound, but existed of itself natu- rally-well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music . . .
Feelings-which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe-which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then have made its appearance in the world . . . "
Unlike poets such as Shakespeare or Gottfried Keller, who throw their heroes into the traditional melancholy associations at the sight of a skull, the writer is an experimenter. He suggests, more radically than techni- cians and physiologists-and in a language that maintains a wonderful balance between precision and caution-a phonographic test of human body parts. The insight of information science, that recording and play- back devices are essentially convertible,'ballows the decoding of a track that no one had ever encoded. But the fact that nature has thrown away the keys to its secrets is no reason, in 1900,to leave the rebus untouched. Let deranged people like Gehrmann attempt to solve it with mere books, but "we," the art-physiologists and artists, "inevitably think of a process similar to Edison's phonograph when it comes to the molecules and nerve tracts in the brain. " '-Simmel's objective interpretation, Freud's analytic construction, Rilke's apparatus-all can track traces without a subject. A writing without the writer, then, records the impossible reality at the basis of all media: white noise, primal sound.
That is only logical. Certainly "it" has been making noise from time
? immemorial, as long as there has been Brownian motion. But for any dis- tinction between noise and information to be possible, the real must be able to move through technological channels. Printing errors occur in the hook as medium, but there is no primal sound. The phonographic repro- duction of a groove "that is not the graphic translation of a sound" mocks translatability and universal equivalents. Setting gramophone needles onto coronal sutures is only possible in a culture that gives free reign to all discursive manipulations. And of course anything that "exists natu- rally," like the skull, thereby loses its distinctiveness. At such extremes the transposition of media creates only unconscious programs out of so- called nature. Otto Flake and Proust dreamed of making literal reproduc- tions of the inscribed pathways in their brains; Rilke made technological suggestions for the technological realization of their dreams. Yet Rilke re- serves this realization for writers. It was not for the "Poets," who, accord- ing to Rilke's historically exact insight, "were overwhelmed" by "almost only" one sense, the visual, whereas "the contribution made by an inat- tentive sense of hearing" was practically nil. Rilke had in mind an artistic practice that "contributes more decisively than anyone else to an exten- sion of the several sense fields," that is, with more determination than even "the work of research. " 'li
Writers and analysts of the mental apparatus thus engaged in open, unrelenting competition. The very Rilke who fled psychoanalytic vivisec- tors programmed, as the writer's only task, the transposition of coronal sutures. Even his enigmatic "inner-world space" was only another name for the engram stored in the brain and transcribed by writers. The evi- dence is that Rilke called the skull a "special housing closed against all worldly space" and thereby restated the physiologist's insight that, for such a housing, "our own body is the external world. "s9Interpreters who read "inner-world space," this technological and physiological system, philosophically, thus remain as far behind the state of the art, as belated as their totemic animal, the proverbial owl.
More than one hundred pages on aphasia research and phonographs, psychoanalysis and paranoia, will perhaps not have been wasted if they make it possible to spell out for the first time, and not merely to under- stand, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Spelling in the Notebooks is taken over by psychiatrists (whereas phi- losophers d o not appear at all). Doctors in the SalpZtriPre are the ones who make a-v-a-n-tout of avant, which Brigge (as the title of the book indicates) has only to note down. The question is why this twenty-eight- year-old, who is not in the SalpetriPre to gather racy material on doctor- patient relationships," shows up in the insane asylum instead of sticking
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to anatomy lectures and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The answer is that Brigge, like his novelist, "had once considered psychiatric treatment, but dropped the idea just in time. "
He enters the Salpetriire, explains his case, is registered for electro- shock therapy, is questioned briefly by a couple of assistant doctors, and is sent back to the waiting room. While Brigge is waiting for the promised or threatened electrical shocks, the discursive event occurs: his ears catch a hot, flaccid stuttering "a-v-a-n-t. " Psychophysical decomposition of language becomes the secret code of an initiation. Just like the word DADA, which occurs in a child's "babbling phase" and reminds people "of their honorably dirtied diapers and of the cry that is now supposed to delight the world,"6*the "a-v-a-n-t" also leads to a short circuit between experiment and primal sound, psychophysics and children's language.
And, then, as 1listened to the hot, flaccid stutteringon the other sideof the pam- tion, then for the first time in many, many years it was there again. That which had struck into me my first, profound terror, when as a child I lay ill with fever: the Big Thing. Yes,that was what I had always called it, when they all stood around my bed and felt my pulse and asked what had frightened me: the Big Thing. And when they got the doctor and he came and spoke to me, I begged him only to make the Big Thing go away, nothing else mattered. But he was like the rest. He could not take it away, though I was sosmall then and might easily have been helped. And now it was there again. . . . Now it grew out of me like a N- mor, like a second head, and was a part of me, though it could not belong to me at all, because it was so big. . . . But the BigThing swelled and grew over my face like a warm bluish boil and grew over my mouth, and already the shadow of its edge lay upon my remaining eye. "
At precisely the place or precisely in place of a psychiatric treatment that does not occur, because Brigge flees the Big Thing and the Salpetriire in one and the same movement, what does occur is the return of his child- hood. To drop the idea of psychoanalysis just in time thus means to walk the royal road alone and lift infantile amnesias. But lower abdominal play is not what returns with the repressed; it is the debris of a horror that could not be spoken and for which "the Big Thing" is still a euphemism. What appears is something real that cannot be spoken in any language because the very act of introducing it into language filters it out. Only the primal sound of the overheard psychiatrist is capable of evoking it, whereas the pleas of Brigge the child and Brigge the twenty-eight-year-old to his doctors can d o nothing.
The law governing delirium and hallucination determines that what has not entered the daylight of the symbolic appears in the real. The de- lirious Brigge becomes the debris of the debris that pours from his head. A second head, larger than the feverish one, blocks his eyes and mouth. Everything happens, then, as if Ronne's impossible gesture were possible.
? The brain, this warm bluish boil, turns itself inside out and encloses the external world. Because no one and nothing can introduce the material substratum of language into language, the shadow of neurophysiology falls on Brigge's mouth.
What occurs in the place of this eclipse is-writing. "I have taken ac- tion against fear. I have sat all night and written,""' Brigge writes of the fear that drove him in and then out of the SalpCtriPre. Writing therefore means: to put the exploded "inner-world space," the tumescent brain, down on paper, rather than have the explosion or tumor treated by the appropriate scientific methods. From then on Brigge spends his days read- ing in the Bibliotheque nationale and his nights writing on the sixth floor of his hotel. Rilke once told Gebsattel that one cannot live without the couch, but one could "read and write and endure,'; 64 Brigge uncouples his writing from speech and communication: he notes down whatever makes him mute, and when he writes letters they are never sent. There is no longer any question, then, of a life in poetry, led simultaneously in Atlantis and Dresden, on paper and in loving embraces. The medium of script reveals its coldness; it is purely archiving. Therefore it cannot re- place, represent, or be life, but only remember, repeat, and work through. To d o something against fear means to write down the fear itself.
The objects of writing are neighbors who somehow come within hear- ing, who creep out, and in some cases reach the brain to multiply and thrive there like pneumococci. The objects of writing are insane kings whose flesh has become indistinguishable from the amulets that cover it and the worms that devour it. The objects of writing are the dead heaped over battlefields, intertwined like a monstrous brain, and the dying, all of whose accumulated meanings vanish and for whom a large tumor rises in the brain-like a sun that transforms the world for them.
There is thus only one object of writing: the primal soup of brain physiology. What interests Freud is its organization; what interests Brigge is noting it down.
Better perhaps to have remained in the darkness, and your unconfined heart would have sought to be the heavy heart of all that is indistinguishable. . . .
0 night without objects. 0 obtuse window outward, o carefully closed doors; arrangements from long ago, taken over, accredited, never quite understood. 0 stillness in the staircase, stillness from adjoining rooms, stillness high up against the ceiling. 0 mother: o you only one, who shut out all this stillness, long ago in childhood. . . . You strike a light, and already the noise is you. And you hold the light before you and say: it is I; don't be afraid. "'
The fact that there is articulation at all becomes the enigma of a writing that inevitably articulates. Because Brigge (unlike Freud) does not raise the standards of his medium to norms of the real, it remains a question
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whether they are "better" than primal soup. But thus his simple descrip- tion correlates with psychophysical results.
It is wrong to assume that originally (as soon as the sense organs function) there were nothing but particular impressions out of which secondary connections among impressions were then formed. . . . The original situation should rather be thought of as a diffuse, whole sensibility. For example, when we lie daydreaming on the sofa with closed eves, we do not notice anything particular in the bright- ness that penetrates our eyelids, in the distant noise on the street, in the pressure of our clothing, or in the temperature of the room, but rather fuse all these things in the totality of our receptivity. Such-though much more vague and muffled- is how we must first think of the sensibility of the infant. Before we investigate the associations between pamcular impressions, we must first ask how the child manages to isolate a particular phenomenon out of this confused, whole state. H
As anticipatory as ever, Ebbinghaus addressed this question to his col- league, Stem, and isolated infantile isolation.
A very young child looked from a particular position into a particular room. He received a dihse, hardly differentiated impression. Now his mother pulls him in his wagon into an adjoining room; for the most part another whole impression replaces the first. But the mother and the wagon have remained the same. The optical stimuli they produce thus find the material disposable to them as well as their mental effects somewhat prepared in advance, and in addition they reinforce one another through mutual association; the other, modified stimuli do not have this double advantage. . . . The impression derived from the sight [of the mother] forms more and more easily on the one hand, and on the other hand it differenti- ates itself more and more from the various diffuse backgrounds in which it was originally dissolved: the sight of the mother becomes a progressively more inde- pendent part of the given whole impression. 6'
When one isolates the perceptual isolation of the child rigorously enough, it is no longer that of the child. The construction of articulated environ- ments proceeds through the first human contacts. What Ebbinghaus de- scribes coincides with what Brigge calls the shutting out of the indistin- guishable. The Notebooks, or the Remembrance of Things Past, critically decried as "mystical" or "oedipal" whenever they evoke childhood and the mother, simply inquire into the elemental relation, circa 1900,be- tween particular and background, sign and primal soup, language and primal sound. The answer to this inquiry can only be that discrete signs arise from sheer iteration. The mother (in Ebbinghaus) must return in order to be distinguished from the diffuse backgrounds; the mother (in the Notebooks) must say, "It is 1, don't be afraid. " Behind all identities and selections lurks the endless region of darkness.
"We know not what the imagination would be without darkness, its great school. "" reads the first empirical, child-psychological study of its kind, A Study of Fears. Eleven years before the Notebooks, in his case
? histories Stanley Hall archived all the childhood fears of Brigge: aside from mirrors, needles, and masks, there was also the moment that played such a key role for Malte and Marcel.
28. F. , I 8. The great shadow over all her early life was the dread of the moment her mother should kiss her good night and leave her alone in the dark; she lay tense and rigid, held her breath to listen with open mouth, smothered herself under the clothes, with which her head must always be covered, fancied forms bending over her, often awoke with her heart pounding and a sense of dropping through the air, flying or falling backward, feeling quivery for hours; she now vows "I will always put my whole foot on the stairs. ""'
The fact that Otto Rank's book on incest picked out the corresponding fear of Brigge, and only that one, as if to apprehend one more oedipal suspect,-"betrays the competition between literature and psychoanalysis. Childhood fears were copiously noted down in the discourse network of I 900. Psychophysics provided the theoretical and statistical framework; psychoanalysis and literature made texts of fitting individual cases, until the system was complete. None of the three discourses had solid points of reference in the two others; there is only a network of the three.
The object or abject caught in the net, however, was the child. None of the three discourses has any further concern for what mothers d o and say, for the kind of love or education they instill in their children. Instead of minimal signifieds of a first love, all that counts are the first signifiers on an indistinguishable background. The archiving of first signs, even if they are as vague as "the Big Thing" or as babbled as the "0-0-0-0-lda," that is, "fortlda" of Freud's grandson became a communal task. " The itera- tion and opposition of minimal signifiers provided material enough for constructing a system. And systems exist to be written down.
One winter evening the child Brigge is drawing. A red pencil rolls off the table and onto the carpet. The child, "accustomed to the brightness above and all inspired with the colors on the white paper," cannot find the pencil in the "blackness" under the table: dalfort. Instead, he sees his own searching hands as strange, blind creatures. Much has been written about this depersonalization, but not about the pencil, paper and black- ness, these three necessary and sufficient conditions for a medium, of which interpretations themselves are a part. And the pencil returns years later, as if it came back from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, only to desig- nate itself as the sign of a sign. A little gray woman turns it over endlessly in her miserable hands, until Brigge realizes that "it was a sign, a sign for the initiated," and senses "that there actually existed a certain compact" with the w~man. '~
Pencils are produced in order to make signs, not to be signs. But right before Brigge's eyes the woman transposes the writing instrument into
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special contexts that cut across the literary-alphabetic code. The pencil, once lost in the signless darkness of the carpet, as if in a jungle, returns as "the Big Thing" to reduce all writing to one code among others. Precisely the fact that it is "old," if not a piece of debris, makes it significant. In the Notebooks newspapers are sold by a blind man, who cannot read them. " Writing materials come to be misused by sign-giving analphabets. And so it goes in a discourse network that measures cultural technologies by their deficiencies and particular things by their degree of wear and tear. The pretty pictures produced prior to its disappearance by Brigge's pencil under the gaze of a reading governess do not count; for they are only the Basedow raisins of an alphabetizing power. What counts and is therefore put down on paper is the analphabetic adventure with writing material and paper. Freud's patient, the one who confused m and n, knew this story well.
The discourse network of I800 had archived the way in which children autonomously reproduced the engrained alphabet. But it did not begin to comprehend other children with other pleasuredfears. The discourse net- work of 1900cut apart the pedagogic feedback loop and directed children to write down their analphabetism. It was a paradoxical and impossible role that could only be taken on as simulacrum.
Brigge fills pages about an old pencil; the art-education movement had essays written on "The Rusty Pen. " Packed together with 144other simi- lar pens in industrial boxes three weeks previously, it is finally "good for nothing else" than to be thrown in the waste basket, But because only use singularizes, the useless pen becomes the subject of a writer. His semi- official name is the happy child; his empirical name is Heinrich Schar- relmann-a high school teacher who, in the place of pens and pupils that don't write, wrote a book entitled Happy Children. "
As it is in little things, so it is in big ones. At the convention of the art- education movement in Weimar, which dealt with German language and literature from October 9 to 11, 1903,laymen were in attendance along with thirty-four educational bureaucrats. One of the nonteachers, Dr. Heinrich Hart, clarified his status at the beginning of his address.
When my friend, Caesar Flaischgen, asked me to speak about the choice of litera- ture for schools at the art-education conference, l was seized by a slight fear. How could I possibly presume to speak about educational matters! I have never-I must admit to my shame-stood at the lectern, and any educational talent 1pos- sess barely suffices to educate myself. (Laughter. ) 1 intended to decline the invita- tion at once, when it occurred to me that I have indeed had a relationship to schools in one respect, and how would it be if I presented myself to the gathering of distinguished art educators not as a colleague, but as a pupil. . . .
The three combined words, "Education, School, Poetry," d o not resound with inspiring harmony in my poor pupil's soul. I will not go into further detail about
? what I suffered and endured during the years that I was taught, infused with, and force-fed poetry. "I don't want your pity. " 1 will only say, if you will pardon me this, that for a time I placed poetry in the same category as cod-liver oil and medicine. -'
With this bitter pill for educational bureaucrats, the pupil himself speaks up. But what would have been a scandal in the discourse network of I 800 produces only hearty laughter among the art educators. The mythic pupil can say that medicine is the shadow side of pedagogy. He can say that he is neither educated nor an educator, simply because the highest alpha- betization (readingthe Poets) never reached him. Instead, Dr. Hart became (ashe is listed in the program of speakers) a "writer. " After Nietzsche, the career path of makers of words presupposes not being able to read. Any- one who "still has nightmares"-" about reading Horace in school is a walking archive of childhood fears, perfectly suited to the sciences of nonsense. "The analysis of material from pupils," reads one question- naire that queried prominent people concerning their years as pupils, "is a necessity that cannot be sufficiently stressed. "' And observe: the most bitter and derisive items in this material come from "poets and writers. "" Indeed, among people who could speak it was considered fashionable in 1912"to view the tragedies of youth and school children, which had been portrayed in a few fine stories of the period, as something that was almost obvious and obligatory. ""
That is only logical in a discourse network that needs someone for the impossible role of the writing analphabet. Writers are thus commissioned to simulate the pupil or the madman. Children who in searching for lost pencils fail to recognize their own hands are no less delirious than chil- dren whose reading of Horace still gives them nightmares decades later. When the art-education convention puts writers on the program in order to draw all their plans for reform from the "poor pupil's soul," the simu- lacrum of madness receives semi-official recognition. Ellen Key's "school of the future," in which first of all the analphabets "pronounce their judg- ment" on teachers and lesson plans found its beginning. *"
But the tragically isolated Poet is the most cherished illusion of inter- preters. One overlooks the system-immanent function of literature. Texts written to order for a new pedagogy were at best credited as portrayals of the "suffering imposed by the social order. "
The hero of Meyrink's Golem "repeats" words so often and so "spas- modically, that they suddenly appear nakedly as meaningless, frightening sounds from a barbaric, prehistorical past"-above all, the word h-o-o-k. His grand plan is to "take on the alphabet in the primer in reverse order from Z to A, in order finally to arrive at the spot where [he] began to learn in school. "*' A as in ape-that is the null point at which Kafka's "A
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? Report to an Academy" begins. The leap out of a speechless and anal- phabetic ape-truth to the alphabetization of the report itself becomes the subject of a story that links the acquisition of language with a tootling gramophone and alcoholism. *zIt is a force-feeding like Hart's, by whose analysis future academies and culturization campaigns will profit.
Literary texts of 1900 record how an alphabetic culture is to be de- fined from an analphabetic outside. Brigge's notebooks (to keep to the story) are also written with the child's vanished pencil. "The infinite real- ity" of being a child, in which it is certain "that it would never end," de- termines every sentence on reading and writing. Brigge never stops writ- ing down the endlessness of agraphia and alexia.
It is well simply to recognize certain things that will never change, without de- ploring the facts or even judging them. Thus it became clear to me that I never was a real reader. In childhood I considered reading a profession one would take upon oneself, later some time, when all the professions came along, one after the other. . . .
Until the beginning of such changes I postponed reading too. One would then treat books as one treated friends, there would be time for them, a definite time that would pass regularly, complaisantly, just so much of it as happened to suit one. . . . Rut that one's hair should become untidy and dishevelled, as i f one had been lying on it, that one should get burning ears and hands as cold as metal, that a long candle beside one should h u m right down into its holder, that, thank God, would then be entirely excluded. . . .
Of what I so often felt later, I now somehow had a premonition: that one had no right to open a book at all, unless one pledged oneself to read them all. With e v e r y l i n e o n e b r o k e of f a b i t of t h e w o r l d . B e f o r e b o o k s i t w a s i n t a c t a n d p e r h a p s it would be again after them. But how could I, who was unable to read, cope with them all? '3
If being alphabetized means being able to translate immeasurable heaps of letters and books into the miniature model of meaning, then it is and remains a norm of the others, beyond Brigge as only the Beyond can be. A historical system departs from the earth to disintegrate in beauty and nothingnessR4In this world, to which Brigge remains true, there are only bodies, burning ears, and cold hands. These bodies can either not read at all or, when they sit in the BibliothPque nationale, are completely strange bodies, without eyes and ears and with "the hair of someone sleeping. " Everything looks, then, as if professional readers were more analphabetic than a child, who at least still believes in the illusion of being able to read in the future. Instead, those who frequent the library- who for the first time in the history of German writing are described from theoutside-have indeedlearnedsomething,butatthepriceoftheirdis- appearance. "One is not aware of them. They are in the books. ""'
In 1799the warning was issued to undertake all reading "in the work- place of our inner selves" and "not to forget ourselves" over what we are
? reading. Otherwise we would "lose our presence of mind and become in- sane through distraction. """ In 1910 it makes no difference whether one can read or not: madness overtakes one anyway. Because there is no syn- thetic function capable of selecting among the enumerable masses of data with the eventual aim of establishing meaning, books continue to pile up beyond any possible comprehension. According to Brigge, reading would only be possible and permissible if it could accommodate all books. Thus in reading an impossible exhaustion takes the place of transcendental apperception.
In 1803one could assure that the healthy mind "seeks to establish unity everywhere in the manifold, and processes all given material ac- cording to its organization. In the consciousness of self it winds the im- measurable thread of time into a ball, reproduces dead centuries, and gathers the infinitely extended limbs of space, mountain ranges, forests, and the stars cast over the firmament into the miniature portrait of an idea. "*- The poetic screenplays of 1800and their ability to gather up space and time could not be more beautifully described. Space shrank for cultured writenheaders until the world fit into the box of the New Melu- sine, or the whole earth, in a poetic dream of flight, "looked only like a golden bowl with the finest engraving. " Time shrank for cultured writers/ readers until "the longest stories" were "pulled together in short, brilliant minutes,"Rsor the immeasurable threads of one's own life came together into the yarn of a briefly leafed-through book of Provenpal poetry. Such miracles become impossible under the law of exhaustion. Certainly tech- nical devices are extraordinarily capable of expanding or contracting time and space. But a device is not a mind and establishes no unity in whatever dispersion it encounters. It is of no help to people. In their bodily forgetfulness, agraphia, and alexia, they can only work through serial data (to borrow once more the apt language of programmers) in real-time analysis.
The twenty-four hours in the life of Leopold Bloom undergo a real- time analysis. Real-time analysis threatens to become la recherche du temps perdu. Only a real-time analysis can "achieve" (in the Rilkean sense) childhood. But the rule of remembering, repeating, and working through does not govern only biographies and psychoanalyses. Without "choice or refusal,"*9 Brigge's notebooks also present what every her- meneutics has avoided: power. "For whatever of torment and horror has happened on places of execution, in torture-chambers, madhouses, opera- ting theatres, under the vaults of bridges in late autumn: all this has a tough imperishability, all this subsists in its own right. . . and clings to its own frightful reality. People would like to be allowed to forget much of this; sleep gently files over such grooves in their brains. " But just as
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"dreams . . . trace the designs again,"" so do the Notebooks. That is, they intentionally refuse to provide a miniature portrait, as Rei1 quite rightly characterized it, in the spirit of German classicism; rather, they provide real-time analysis of engrams. It is a procedure as "fateful" as only pre-Gutenberg technologies could be. For what moved and delighted a certain insane king of France in passion plays was "that they continually added to and extended themselves, growing to tens of thousands of verses, so that ultimately the time in them was the actual time; somewhat as if one were to make a globe on the scale of the earth. ""
A globe on the scale I :I; Brigge could erect no finer monument to commemorate his descriptive procedure. He only needs to take care that nothing exceptional creeps into the process, even something as minimal as the act of writing itself. Yet as a twenty-eight-year-old, when he reads Baudelaire or the book of Job, Brigge is still not completely alphabetized. Because "an alphabetic individual thinks only in particulars,"" his deal- ings with texts remain a Passion Mystery.
There it lies before me in my own handwriting, what I have prayed, evening after evening. I transcribed it from the books in which I found it, so that it might be very near me, sprung from my hand like somethingof my own. And now I want to write it once again, kneeling here before my table I want to write it; for in this way I have it longer than when I read it, and every word is sustained and has time to die away. "
Thus Brigge, in his personal book, despite Gutenberg and Anselmus, writes as if he were a simple monk-copyist. But if reading is choice and refusal, then models of texts, too, can only be permitted on the scale of I :I. Writing becomes, rather than miniatures of meaning, an exhaustion that endlessly refuses to end. For if Brigge has transcribed the passages (which of course are not disfigured with authorial names) from Baude- laire and Job, the effect is still as if he had never done it. He must, he intends to, "write it once again," so that each word can function in the real time of its being written down. "Transcribing is superior to reading and spelling in that the motoric representation of writing is immediately linked to the sensory representation of writing and to the motoric repre- sentation of language. "" And so it goes. The Notebooks actually contain two pages that Brigge transcribes from his transcription, that the pub- lisher Rilke transcribes from this transcription of a transcription, and that the printing press transcribes countless times (throughout which Baudelaire's French of course remains untranslated).
"How do we raise the level of performance in German? ," asked an art educator the year the Notebooks appeared. His answer: through "transcription exerci~es,''~t'he subroutine that psychophysics had so rig- orously isolated. Under the pressure of competition from other media,
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writing once again became what it had been before universal alphabetiza- tion-a professional specialty-while ceasing to be indivisibly and auto- matically coupled with reading. Because writing requires manual craft, transcription replaced reading among the practitioners of high literature. Dealing with texts thus became the One Way Street at whose junction Benjamin (a pupil of art-education) recognized the despotic traffic sign of the signifier. His observation that "the reader follows the movement of his ego in the free space of revery," whereas "the transcriber" lets this movement be "commanded"% could have been transcribed from the Notebooks.
The discourse network of 1900 rescinds the freedom of the writing imagination. No one who picks up a pen, from a child in school to a writer, is better positioned than the professional typists who with each "hand movement. . . follow the instructions literally, that is, do nothing more than what they stipulate. ""There is a method to exercises in writ- ing and transcribing. The age of engineers demands technically exact re- productions of technical processes.
Brigge's father had stipulated in his will that the doctors should per- form a perforation of his heart. The son explains why, rather than avoid- ing such a horrible sight, he reproduced it as a literary witness. "No, no, nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be fore- seen. In hagination one passes over them and does not notice that they are lacking, hasty as one is. But the realities are slow and indescribably detailed. "'* The sentences practice the insight they contain. They them- selves owe nothing to imagination, but are rather transcriptions of art- pedagogical method. Heinrich Scharrelmann had pointed to a fundamen- tal unimaginability years before Brigge.
It is unbelievable how little we adults see, how inexactly we observe things around us. . . . How many bicycles the city dwellerseesrush by every day. If one is not the owner of a bicycle, who knows all its parts very well, one might try to sit down and draw it. The most incredible sketches would be produced, because memory fails the drawer and he doesn't know where the pedals are attached, whether the chain is linked to the front or back wheel, where the seat is, and so forth. One need only attempt to make a mental sketch of any everyday object to be struck by the poverty and inexacmess of our notion of that
One need only read the perforation of the heart and the bicycle in paral- lel, as examples of literary and pedagogical practice, to determine that they are not examples at all. Writing circa 1900necessarily addresses operations and apparatuses as the only two approaches to the real. In fact, there can be no miniature portraits of the real, as they were cher- ished by inwardness and produced by the imagination. Circumstances
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that "are composed of many individual details" escape the grasp of any hermeneutics; they have to be scored up and denumerated. The reason is simple: there are only constructed facts or circumstances. Programs, dia- grams, and numbers exist in order to encode the real. Thus the philoso- pher Alain, continuing in the line of Scharrelmann and Brigge, summed up all the criticism of the poetics of Kant and Hegel in the terse observa- tion that one cannot count the columns of an imagined Pantheon. '"'
The fundamental unimaginability of the real calls for autopsies in which its discrete elements are specified one after another. That is what Brigge does in Paris when (avoiding the Pantheon) he makes torn-down houses, blind newspaper sellers, hospital waiting rooms, and moribund patients the subject of a writing that proceeds exhaustively, like tech- nological media. Poets who hate the approximate belong in a culture of doctors and engineers. Torn-down houses still count in technology, as do hopeless cases in medicine. The writer takes pleasure in making use of discarded material-and therefore broken-down walls take the place of the Hall of Fame. Engineers and doctors make particular things that function; Brigge's writing does the reverse when it "makes" the acciden- tal and singular newspaper seller "the way one makes a dead man. " "'I It changes nothing in the logic of construction.
It changes nothing, not even if the construction seems to be imaginary. Before Scharrelmann and thus long before Brigge, Daniel Paul Schreber, "in the unending monotony of my dreary life," trained himself in a kind of "drawing" that consisted in establishing representations, without pen- cil and paper, of landscapes and women's breasts "in such surprising faithfulness and true color" that Schreber himself and the divine rays "have almost the exact impression of the landscapes I want to see again as if they were actually there. " The solitary man at Sonnenstein thus imagined, but with such precision that the imagination could go hand in hand with physiology. "In the same way as rays throw on to my nerves pictures they would like to see . . . I too can in turn produce pictures for the rays which I want them to see. "'"zNothing distinguishes nerve rays thus impressed from the angel to whom Rilke, beginning with the Duino Elegies,showed the simplicities and details of the earth.
But those who have no dealings with nerves or angels are forced to develop techniques of material reproduction. In contrast to the inex- actness that adults betray in drawing bicycles, Scharrelmann's pupils practice gestural simulation.
When I next asked, "How does the knife sharpener work? ," many children were at once prepared to imitate the movements of the sharpener. They imitated not only the pumping of the foot on the pedal and the hands holding the knife, but they also mimicked the bent back, the head thrust forward, the shifting glances to
? check the edge, brushing of dust, and so on, so naturalistically, carefully, and completely that 1 was astounded at the accuracy and certainty of the children's ability to observe. I myself have sometimes learned to observe carefully some adult action by first watching children imitate it. ""
This, too, is a method for raising the level of achievement in German. Instead of writing interpretations and thoughtful essays, the pupils en- gage in a bodily reproduction of technical processes, a reproduction that teaches observation and description. One need only trade the knife sharp- ener for an epileptic (which is more appropriate for the literary use of discarded material), and one has "The Portrayal of the So-called Jerk-Tic by Rainer Maria Rilke. " As a psychiatrist showed in a study with that title, the Notebooks provide a clinically exact picture of the illness, com- pletely in keeping with the conception of it in contemporary medical sci- ence. IMIt is not a question of the so-called jerk-tic's portrayal by Rainer Maria Rilke, however, but of its simulation by Malte Laurids Brigge: in the description, Brigge follows his mad subject, takes on his anxieties and gestures, and only thus encounters something real that would remain closed to empathy or hermeneutics. When a man with jerk-tic and an- other man who simulates him as naturalistically, carefully, and com- pletely as Scharrelmann's class simulated the knife sharpener, when these twowalk down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, one after the other, then an allegory walks through Paris: the writer as simulator of madness.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge could perhaps better be called Memoirs of My Simulations of Nervous Illness. Just as the rule of ex- haustion that governs all Brigge's descriptions returns in the writing itself, so also does the procedure of simulation. A key passage shows that Brigge's hands as well as his feet follow the tracks of madness. After he has noted how all prearranged meanings vanish at the moment of death and how a tumor in the brain becomes the sun of a new world, there is a note that describes his own note taking. "For a while yet 1 can write all this down and express it. But there will come a day when my hand will be far from me, and when I bid it write, it will write words I do not mean.
The time of that other interpretation will dawn, when not one word will remain upon another, and all meaning will dissolve like clouds and fall down like rain. " '"'
Anyone who, as occult medium, predicts the end of hermeneutics and the victory of occult media, has a right not to be subjected to her- meneutics. No commentary, then, only further evidence for "the time of that other interpretation. "
In the century of the child, there was a reform movement for freeessay writing. The free essay was the opposite practice of the rereading that classical-romantic times established as the rule of the German essay-
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? whether as interpretation that presented another reading of the work or as the thoughtful essay that promoted thoughtful, writing hands. In the free essay, that the pupil does not "reread" anything, that "his pencil flies across the table," is "just right. "'" "To produce means to give the creative power free reign over the treasure chests of our brains. '""- The pupils are thus permitted to write what is inscribed in their brains, not what they believe their teacher believes they ought to be thinking. This freedom is "not at all easy" to bring about: "They always insist they aren't allowed to write 'that kind of thing. '"'" The reason: for a century the pedagogic essay stood under the sign or title "Our School Essay as Disguised Dime Novelist. " Pupils have "had eight years of instruction in essay writing, have written 'good' essays every week; every sentence has been scru- tinized, filed down, and propped up. " They have "had to analyze charac- ters in William Tell and write reports about deep-sea fauna. " Because a logic of the signified stood over the whole process, the essay "was charged with the task of unifying all preceding exercises (orthographic, gram- matical, etc. ) into a whole. "'"
The free essay, by contrast, uncouples the subroutines whose imagi- nary unity has been called German. It is pure writing: writing minus grammar, orthography, and the norm of the high idiom. But that can only occurwhen rereading is no longer practiced, by teachers as well as pupils, when essays no longer return censored in red ink.