No More Learning

Kafka's call For the Establishment and Support of a Military and Civilian Hospital for the Treatment ofNervous Diseases in German Bo- hemia stated:
This great war which encompasses the sum total of human misery is also a war on the nervous system, more a war on the nervous system than any previous war. All too many people succumb to this war of nerves. Just as the intense industrial- ization of the past decades of peace had attacked, affected, and caused disorders of the nervous system of those engaged in industry more than ever before, so the enormously increased mechanization of present-day warfare presents the gravest dangers and disorders to the nervous system of fighting men. 147
Under its initial conditions of a "war of nerves" between literature and Carl Lindstrom A. -G. , the exchange of love letters was doomed to fail, even though it later switched to handwriting and returned to "in- creased mechanization" only in 1916, when typed postcards were the fastest way of passing through the war censorship between Prague and
? Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt
! 'OR DAS KONiORmCH IIOHMEN IN PRAo.
? a. -CO. t . 1o . . . . to to P? am. leI; Ko. 18. 113.
N"' i! .
ai 191
? SehrgeehrtesFrau1ein
? Fur den leieht megliehen Fall,dass Sie sieh meiner aueh im gering. sten nieht rnehr erinnern kennten, stelle ieh rnieh noeh einmal vor :
Jeh heisse Franz Kafka und bin der Menseh,der Sie zum? erstenmal
am Abend beirn Herrn Direktor Brod in Prag begrusste ,J
ann liber
den Tisch hin l'hotographiBll von einer Thaliareise, eine. naeh der andern)
reichte und der schleesslieh in dieser Hand,mit der er jetzt die 1'asten sehlagt , ihre Iland hielt ,! Oit der Sie das Versprechen bekra:(- tigten,im naehsten Jahr eine Palastinareise mit ihm machen zu wollen.
Wenn iie nun d iese Reise noeh immer machen wollen-3ie sagten d a- mals,Sie waren nicbt wankelmlithig und ich bemerkte auch an Jhnen niehts dergleichen-dannwird es nieht nur gut,sondern unbedingt not- wendig sein,dass wir schon von jetzt ab liber diese Reise uns zu ver- standi3'ln suchen. Denn wir werden unsere gar fUr eine Palastinareise viel zu kleine Urlaubsze i t b i s auf d en Grund ausnutzen mUssen und das. werden wir nur kennen,wenn wiT uns so gut als me? :lich vorberei- tet haben und liber aIle Vorber? itungen einig sind.
Eines muss ich nur eingestehen,so schlecht es an sich klingt und
so schlecht es uberd ies zum Vori? en passt :Jch bin ein unplinktl icher Briefschr? iber. Ja es ware noch arger,als es ist,wenn ia&k ich nicht die Schreibmaschine hatte;denn wenn aueh einmal meine Launen zu einem Brief nicht hinreichen sollten,so sind schliesslieh die Fin- gerspitzen zum Sohreiben immer noeh da. Zum Lohn daflir erwarte ieh aber aueh niemals , d ass Briefe pilnktlieh kommen; selbst wenn ieh e i nen Brief mit taglieh neuer Spannung erwarte ,bin ieh niemals enttauseht , wenn er nieht ko? t und kommt er sehliesslieh,erschreekex iehgern.
Jch merke baim neuen Einlegen des Papiers ,dass ich mich vielleich1 viel Bchwierir,er gemacht habe,als ich bin. Es wurde mir ganz recht ge- schebn, "enn ich d iesen Fehler gemacht haben soll te , d enn waru? : schrei bE ich auch diesen Brief nach der sechsten BUrostunde und auf einer
Scbre ibmascbine , an d i e ich nicbt sehr gewobnt bin.
Aber trotzdem,trotzdem -es ist der einzige Nacbteil des Schreib- maschinenschreibens , dass man sicb so verlauft-wenn es aucb dagegen ? e. denken geben sollte,pr? ktische Bedenken meine icg,mich auf eine Rei- se als TIeisebegleiter,-fuhrer,-Ballast,-Tyrann,and was sich noch aus mir ent"ickeln konnte,mitzunehmen,gegen mich als Korrespondenten -und d arauf kiime es j a vorlaufig nur ap. -d'arfte nichts Entscbeidendes XIII:Jl von vornberein e inzuwendlln se in und S ie konnten es wohl mit mir ver- suchen.
Prag , am 20. September 1912.
Jbr herzlich ergebener
? . :;? ? +
Berlin, Austria and Prussia. 148 In 19I7, while Lindstrom's acoustical me- dia network, with its financial leverage, helped the Army High Command establish the film corporation UFA,149 Kafka terminated his engagement to Felice Bauer. Shortly thereafter, the woman, freed from the bombard- ment of letters, married an affluent Berlin businessman.
In one of his last letters to his last female pen pal, however, Kafka took stock: of misused love letters and communications vampires, of re- duced physical labor and information machines.
How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one an- other by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold-all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enor- mously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communica-
Typewriter 2 2 5
? ? Franz Kafka's first letter to Felice Bauer.
2 2 6 Typewriter
tion, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal ser- vice it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish. ISO
Hence only ghosts survive the Kafka-Bauer case: media-technological projects and texts reflecting the material limitations of the written word. Even though, or because, Kafka considered the "very existence" of gramophones "a threat,"151 he submitted to his employee of a phono- graph manufacturer a series of media links that were supposed to be able to compete with Lindstrom's empire. Aside from a direct link involving a parlograph, which "goes to the telephone in Berlin" and conducts "a lit- tle conversation" with a "gramophone in Prague," Kafka envisions a "typing bureau where everything dictated into Lindstrom's Parlographs is transcribed on a typewriter, at cost price, or at first perhaps a bit below cost price. "152 That was not, of course, the most up-to-date proposition (thanks to Dr. Seward and Mina Harker), but one with a future. In Bron- nen's monodrama Ostpolzug of I926, "an electrically hooked-up dicta- phone dictates into an equally electric typewriter. "153 And since "the ma- chine makes further inroads" into "the function of brains" themselves, instead of merely "replacing the physical labor of man, . . . a typewriter is announced [in I925] that will make the typist superfluous and will translate the sound of words directly into typed script. " 154
Kafka, however, for whom Ms. Bauer did not type a single manu- script, let alone construct media networks, stuck to old-fashioned litera- ture. From the typewriter he only learned to dodge the phantasm of au- thorship. As with his first love letter, the "I," "the nothingness that I am,"155 disappeared under deletions or abbreviations until all that re- mained was a Joseph K. in The Trial and a K. by itself in The Castle. The office machines of his days also freed the Kafka of his literary nights from the power of attorney, that is, the authority to sign documents:
I could never work as independently as you seem to; I slither out of responsibility like a snake; I have to sign many things, but every evaded signature seems like a gain; I also sign everything (though I really shouldn't) with FK only, as though that could exonerate me; for this reason I also feel drawn to the typewriter in any- thing concerning the office, because its work, especially when executed at the hands of the typist, is so impersonal. l56
Mechanized and materially specific, modern literature disappears in a type of anonymity, which bare surnames like "Kafka" or "K. " only em-
? Franz Kafka's postcard to Felice Bauer.
? 2 2 8 Typewriter
phasize. The "disparition elocutoire du poete"157 urged by Mallarme be- comes reality. Voice and handwriting treacherously could fall subject to criminal detection; hence every trace of them disappears from literature. As Jacques Derrida, or "J. D. ," observes in a May 1979 love letter whose address must also be without (a) proper name(s):
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced, but written. Myself, r am a man of speech, r have never had anything to write. When r have something to say r say it or say it to myself, basta. You are the only one to understand why it really was necessary that r write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what r desire, what r know my desire to be, in other words you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. r have necessarily written upside down-and in order to surrender to Necessity.
and "fort" de toi.
r must write you this (and at the typewriter, since that's where r am, sorry: . . . ). 158
Hence Derrida's Postcard consists of one continuous stream of typed letters punctuated by phone calls that are frequently mentioned but never recorded. Voice remains the other of typescripts.
"I, personally," Benn says about Problems ofPoetry (Probleme der Lyrik), "do not consider the modern poem suitable for public reading, neither in the interest of the poem nor in the interest of the listener. The poem impresses itself better when read. . . . In my judgment, its visual ap- pearance reinforces its reception. A modern poem demands to be printed on paper and demands to be read, demands the black letter; it becomes more plastic by viewing its external structure. " 159 Hence a Pallas named Herta von Wedemeyer solves all problems of poetry because she trans- forms Benn's scribbled ideas-"a lifeless something, vague worlds, stuff thrown together with pain and effort, stuff brought together, materials that have been grouped, improved upon and left undeveloped, loose, untested, and weak"16? -via transcription into art. Under the conditions of high technology, Pallas, the goddess of art, is a secretary.
"Fundamentally, the typewriter is nothing but a miniature printing press. " 161 As a doubled spatialization of writing-first on the keyboard, then on the white paper-it imparts to texts an optimal optical appear- ance. And, following Benjamin's forecast, as soon as "systems with more variable typefaces" (such as rotating head typewriters or thermal print- ers) become available, "the precision of typographic forms" can directly enter "the conception of . . . books. " "Writing [is] advancing ever more deeply into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness":162
0000000000Q (R)(R)0(R)00(R)CD000
00(R)(R)0(R)00@0(R) 00008000000
Image of a T3 Remington "Ur-keyboard," 1875.
from Mallarme's "Coup de des" and Apollinaire's "Calligrammes," those typographic poems that attempt to bring writers on par with film and phonography,163 to poesie concrete, that form of pure typewriter poetry.
T. S. Eliot, who will be "composing" The Waste Land "on the type- writer, " "finds" (no different from Nietzsche) "that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. " Instead of "subtlety," "the typewriter makes for lucid- ity,"164 which is, however, nothing but the effect of its technology on style. A spatialized, numbered, and (since the r 8 8 8 typewriters' congress in Toronto) also standardized supply of signs on a keyboard makes pos- sible what and only what QWERTY prescribes.
Foucault's methodical explanation, the last and irreducible elements of which are at the center of his discourse analysis, can easily eliminate the sentences of linguistics, the speech acts of communications theory, the statements of logic. Only to be confronted by two factual conditions that seem to fulfill all the criteria for an elementary "statement" of discourse analysis: "The pile of printer's character which I can hold in my hand, or the letters marked on the keyboard of a typewriter. "165 Singular and spa- tialized, material and standardized, stockpiles of signs indeed undermine so-called Man with his intentions and the so-called world with its mean- ing. Only that discourse analysis ignores the fact that the factual condi- tion is no simple methodical example but is in each case a techno-histor- ical event. Foucault omits the elementary datum (in Latin, the casting of dice or coup de des) of each contemporary theoretical practice and begins discourse analysis only with its applications or configurations: "the key- board of a typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of letters, A, Z, E, R, T, listed in a typewriting manual, is the statement of the alpha- betical order adopted by French typewriters. "166
Foucault, the student of Heidegger, writes that "there are signs, and
Typewriter
2 29
2 3 0 Typewriter
that is enough for there to be signs for there to be statements,"167 only to point for once to the typewriter keyboard as the precondition for all pre- conditions. Where thinking must stop, blueprints, schematics, and indus- trial standards begin. They alter (strictly following Heidegger) the rela- tionship of Being to Man, who has no choice but to become the site of their eternal recurrence. A, Z, E, R, T . . .
Until Arno Schmidt's late novels, beyond Foucault, which repeat or transcribe all keyboard numbers at the top of the page and all keyboard symbols in the margin, and thus can only appear as typescripts.
Until Enright's collection of poems The Typewriter Revolution and Other Poems celebrates "the new era" in unsurpassable material appro- priateness. 168
THE TYPEWRITER REVOLUTION
The typeriter i s crating
A revlootion in peotry Pishing back the frontears And apening up fresh feels Unherd of by Done or Bleak
Mine is a Swetish Maid
Called FACIT
Others are OLIMPYA o r ARUSTOCART RAMINTONG or LOLITEVVI
TAB e or not TAB e
i. e. the ?
Tygirl tygirl burning bride Y, this is L
Nor-ryo -outfit
Anywan can od it
U 2 can b a
Tepot
C! *** stares and III strips
Cloaca nd t -
Farty-far keys to suckcess !
A banus of +% for all futre peots ! ! LSD & $$$
? ? The trypewiter i s cretin A revultion in peotry
" " All nero r
o how they ? away
@ UNDERWORDS and ALLIWETTIS without a .
FACIT cry I! ! !
Remington's and Underwood's invention ushered in a poetics that William Blake or John Donne with their limits/ears could not hear, for it transcends mystical tigers in the silence of the night, or a metaphysical erotics between heaven and confessional. Only the excessive media link of optics and acoustics, spellings and acronyms, between the letters, num- bers, and symbols of a standardized keyboard makes humans (and women) as equal as equal signs. Blake's "tiger, tiger, burning bright," is succeeded by the stenographer, that burning poet's bride. The history of typewriter literature in nuce. And always to continue and/or copy-hu- mans, U. s. flags, or spy aircraft. "You too are a poet" with typos (errata).
Toward the end of the First World War, a young and ironic Carl Schmitt conceived the world history of inscription. To rewrite it here in its entirety is impossible, simply because res gestae and res narratae coincide. It is enough that the diary-typing machines called Buribunks, as well as the "twenty divisions" of buribunkological dissertations,169 have evolved from humble beginnings into a modern loop of endless replication.
CARL SCHMITT, "THE BURIBUNKS: A HISTORICO-PHILOSOPHICAL MEDITATION" (1918)
Today, because we have been granted the privilege of enjoying the glorious notion of the diary at its zenith, we tend to overlook what a majestic deed man performed when-perhaps as the unknowing instrument of the world spirit-he planted with the first innocuous note the first seed, which now overshadows the earth as a gigantic tree. A certain, I would say, moral feel- ing of obligation urges us to question what historical personage embodies the precursor to this wonderful epoch, the messenger pigeon that the world spirit has sent in advance of its last and most highly refined period. We are obliged to put this question at the center of our principal investigation.
Typewriter 23I
? ? ? ? 2 3 2 Typewriter
It would be a mighty triumph for Buribunkology if it could identify a hero such as Don Juan as its ancestor and-in opposition to the charge of scholarly absentmindedness-take pride in its paradoxical descent from this virile and decidedly unscholarly cavalier. Indeed, Don Juan's conquests have been registered, but the crucial point is to whom the intellectual prop- erty of this idea can be attributed. In his champagne aria, Don Juan himself smgs-
Ah, la mia lista doman mattina d'una decina devi aumentar
-a feeling of which the true Buribunkologist is frequently possessed when he ponders the daily increasing scope or the daily rising number of his pub- lications. He may very well be tempted to compare his sense of achievement with the plucky self-confidence of the frivolous conqueror of women. Still, this seductive parallel should not distract us from the profound seriousness of our endeavor or lead us to lose the distance from our possible founding father, which sober objectivity and detached science dictate to us. Did Don Juan really have the specifically buribunkological attitude that urged him to keep a diary, not for the sake of recording, superficially, his manly con- quests, but-if I may say so-out of a sense of sheer obligation and debt vis-a-vis history? We cannot believe so. Don Juan had no interest in the past, just as he fundamentally had no interest in the future, which for him did not go beyond the next conquest; he lived in the immediate present, and his interest in the individual erotic adventure does not point to any signs of a beginning self-historicization. We cannot detect any signs of the attitude characterizing the Buribunk, which originates from the desire to record every second of one's existence for history, to immortalize oneself. Like the Buribunk keeping a diary, Don Juan relishes each individual second, and in that there is certainly a similarity of psychological gesture. Instead of conse- crating his exploits on the altar of history in the illuminated temple, how- ever, he drags them into the misty cave of brutal sensuality, devouring them animal-like to satiate his base instincts. ". Not for a single moment does he have what I would like to call the cinematic attitude of the Buribunk-he
". Hence, one could say that Don Juan is not one who ruminates upon lived experience, if one were to charge the buribunkological keeping of a diary with being a kind of intellectual rumination. That such a claim is untenable is easy to prove, for the diary-keeping Buribunk does not experience anything prior to his entries; rather, the experience consists precisely in the making of an entry and its subsequent publication. To speak of rumination is thus simply nonsense, because there is no initial act of chewing and swallowing.
? ? Typewriter 2 3 3
never apprehends himself a s the subject-object o f history-in which the world soul, writing itself, has become realized. And the register that Lep- orello keeps for him he takes along only as an afterthought, as a delectable flavoring for his horizontal delights. Hence, we have legitimate doubt whether, for example, from the 1,003 Spanish representatives, more than three owe their entry into the register to the very existence of the register it- self. Put differently, we wonder whether Don Juan has been prompted into action by his inner need to start and keep a register, if only in those three cases, the way numerous major achievements in the arts, in science, in everyday life have been produced solely with the idea of their recorded exis- tence in a diary or newspaper-the diary of the masses-in mind.
The reg- ister was never the final cause; in implementing the acts of innervation at is- sue, it was-in the rectangle of psychological forces-relegated to the role of an accidental, of an accompanying positive motor. Thus, for us Don Juan is finished.
All the more interesting is the behavior of Leporello. He relishes the sensuous leftovers of his master, a couple of girls, a couple of choice
morsels; for the most part, he accompanies his master. A Buribunk does not do that, for a Buribunk is unconditionally and absolutely his own master, he is himself. Gradually, however, what awakens in Leporello is the desire to partake in the escapades of his master by writing them down, by taking
note of them, and it is at this moment that we see the dawn of Buribunk- dom. With the aid of a commendable trick he surpasses his master, and if he does not become Don Juan himself, he becomes more than that; he changes from Don Juan's wretched underling into his biographer. He becomes a his- torian, drags Don Juan to the bar of world history, that is, world court, in order to appear as an advocate or prosecutor, depending on the result of his observations and interpretations.
Was Leporello, however, cognizant of the implications of starting his register as the first step in a gigantic development? Certainly not. We do not want to dismiss the mighty effort behind the small register of the poor buffo, but we cannot under any circumstances recognize him as a conscious Buribunk-how should he have done it, anyway, the poor son of a beautiful but culturally retrograde country in which the terror of papal inquisition
has crushed and smashed all remaining signs of intelligence? He was not meant to see his nonetheless significant intellectual work come to fruition;
he holds the treasure-laden shrine, but he does not hold the key to it. He has not understood the essential and has not said the magic words that open the way to Aladdin's cave. He was lacking the consciousness of the writing sub- ject, the consciousness that he had become the author of a piece of world
? 2 3 4 Typewriter
history and hence a juror on the world court-indeed, to exercise control over the verdict of the world court, because his written documents were proof more valid than a hundred testimonies to the contrary. Had Leporello had the strong will to this kind of power, had he ventured the magnificent leap to become an independent writing personality, he would first have writ- ten his own autobiography; he would have made a hero of himself, and in- stead of the frivolous cavalier who fascinates people with his shallow dispo- sition, we would quite probably have gotten the impressive picture of a su- perior manager who, with his superior business skills and intelligence, pulls the strings of the colorful marionette, Don Juan. But instead of taking pen into fist, the poor devil clenches his fist in his pocket.
Upon close scrutiny, the utter inadequacy of Leporello's registration method appears in numerous defects. He puts photographs in sequence without ever making an attempt to shape the heterogeneous discontinuity of successive seductions into a homogeneous continuity; what is missing is the mental thread, the presentation of development. We don't get any sense of demonstrated causal connections, of the mental, climatic, economic, and so- ciological conditions of individual actions, nothing relating to an aesthetic observation about the ascending or descending bell curve of Don Juan's evolving taste. Similarly, the register has nothing to say about the specific historical interest in the uniqueness of each individual procedure or in each individual personality. Leporello's disinterest is utterly incomprehensible; he does not even communicate any dismay when he is daily witness to his mas- ter's ingenious sexuality-how it is aimlessly scattered to the winds instead of being rationally disseminated into purposive population growth. Still
less evident is his willingness to provide reliable research data on details: nowhere does Leporello inquire into the deeper motivations of individual seductions, nowhere do we find sociologically useful data on the standing, origin, age, and so on of Don Juan's victims, as well as their pre-seduction lives-at most, we are left with the summary conclusion (which is probably not sufficient for a more serious scientific investigation) that they came from "every station, every form, and every age. " We also don't hear anything
about whether the victims later organized themselves into a larger, commu- nal mass initiative and provided mutual economic support-which no doubt would have been the only right thing to do, given their numbers. Naturally, what is also missing is any statistical breakdown within the respective cate- gories, which would have recommended itself in light of the high number of 1,003; even more, what is missing is any indication as to how the dumped girls had been taken care of by the welfare system, which in many cases had become necessary. Naturally as well, there is no inkling that, in light of the
Typewriter 23 5
brutal exploitation of male social superiority in relation to defenseless women, the introduction of female suffrage is a most urgent and legitimate demand. It would be in vain to ask for the larger precepts that underlie the development of the collective soul, the subjectivism of the time, the degree of its excitation. In a word, inadequacy here is turned into reality. Leporello is oblivious to the welter of the most urgent scientific questions-much to his own disadvantage, because he has to submit his obliviousness to the judgement of history. Oblivious to pressing questions, he did not engage in as much as one investigation that the most immature student of the humani- ties today would have pounced upon, and hence missed the opportunity of evolving the consciousness necessary to recognize the significance of his own identity. The dead matter has not been conquered by the intellectual labor of its workman, and the flyers on the advertisement pillars continue to an- nounce: Don Juan, the chastised debauchee, and not: Leporello's tales. . . .
Not until Ferker did the diary become an ethical-historical possibility; the primogeniture in the realm of Buribunkdom is his. Be your own history! Live, so that each second of your life can be entered into your diary and be accessible to your biographer! Coming out of Ferker's mouth, these were big and strong words that humanity had not yet heard. They owe their distribu- tion into the nooks and crannies of even the most remote villages to a worldwide organization aimed at disseminating his ideas, an organization well managed and having the support of an intelligent press. No village is so small that it is without a blacksmith, as the old song went; today, we can say with not a little pride that no village is so small that it is not imbued with at least a touch of Buribunkic spirit. The great man,'" who presided like the chief of a general staff over his thousands of underlings, who guided his enormous business with a sure hand, who channeled the attention of the troops of researchers to hot spots, and who with unheard-of strategic skill focused attention on difficult research problems by directing pioneering dis-
. ' On this issue, all relevant documents show a rare unanimity. In his diary, Maximilian Sperling calls him "a smart fellow" (Sperling's Diaries, vol. 12, ed. Alexander Bumkotzki [Breslau, 1909], p. 8 16). Theo Timm, in a letter of August 21 to Kurt Stange, describes him as "a fabulous guy" (Timm's Letters, vol. 21, ed. Erich Veit [Leipzig, 1919], p. 498). In her diary, Mariechen Schmirrwitz says, "I find him splendid" (vol. 4, ed. Wolfgang Huebner [Weimar, 1920], p. 43 5 ). Following his first meeting with the man himself, Oskar Limburger exclaims, "He is enormous, watch out for him" (Memories ofmy Life, ed. Katharina Siebenhaar [Stuttgart, 1903], p. 87). Prosper Loeb describes him as of a "de- monic nature" (Konigsberg, 1899, p. 108). He is a "heck of a guy," says Knut vom Heu in his letters to his bride (edited by their son Flip; Frankfurt a. M. , 1918, p. 71), and so on.
? 236 Typewriter
sertations-this impressive personality experienced a truly sensational rise. Born of humble origins and educated without Latin in the middle school of his small town, he successively became a dentist, a bookmaker, an editor, the owner of a construction company in Tiflis, the secretary of the head- quarters of the international association to boost tourism on the Adriatic coast, the owner of a movie theater in Berlin, a marketing director in San Francisco, and, eventually, Professor of Marketing and Upward Mobility at the Institute of Commerce in Alexandria. This is also where he was cre- mated and, in the most grandiose style, his ashes processed into printer's ink, as he had specified in detail in his will and which was sent in small por- tions to printing presses all over the world. Then, with the aid of flyers and billboards, the whole civilized world was informed of this procedure and was furthermore admonished to keep in mind that each of the billions of letters hitting the eye over the years would contain a fragment of the im- mortal man's ashes. For eons, the memorial of his earthly days will never disappear; the man-who even in death is a genius of factuality-through an ingenious, I would say antimetaphysical-positivist gesture, secured him- self a continued existence in the memory of humanity, a memory, moreover, that is even more safely guaranteed through the library of diaries that he re- leased in part during his lifetime, in part after his death. For at each mo- ment of his momentous life he is one with historiography and the press; in the midst of agitating events he coolly shoots film images into his diary in
order to incorporate them into history. Thanks to this foresight, and thanks as well to his concomitant selfless research, we are informed about almost every second of the hero's life. . . .
Now we are finally in a position to define historically the crucial contri- bution of this ingenious man: not only has he made the radically transfor- mative idea of the modern corporation feasible for human ingenuity with- out leaving the ground of the ethical ideal; not only has he demonstrated through his life that one can build a career of purposive ambition and still be an ethically complete being, bound under the sublation of the irreconcil- able duality of matter and mind in a way that invalidates the constructions of theologizing metaphysics, which were inimical to the intellectual climate of the twentieth century, through a victorious new idealism; he has, and this is the crux, found a new, contemporary form of religion by strictly adhering to an exclusionary positivism and an unshakable belief in nothing-but-mat- ter-of-factness. And the mental region in which these numerous and contra- dictory elements, this bundle of negated negations, are synthesized-the un- explainable, absolute, essential that is part of every religion-that is nothing but the Buribunkological.
Typewriter 2 3 7
N o Buribunkologist who i s also a genuine Buribunk will utter the name of this man without the utmost reverence. That we must emphasize up front. For when we disagree with the critical appraisal of our hero by noted Ferker scholars in the following discussion, we do so not without emphatic protest against the misunderstanding that we fail to recognize Ferker's tremendous impulses and the full stature of the man. Nobody can be more informed by and imbued with his work than we are. Nevertheless, he is not the hero of Buribunkdom but only its Moses, who was permitted to see the promised land but never to set foot on it. Ferker's truly noble blood is still tinged with too many unassimilated, alien elements; atavistic reminiscences still cast their shadow over long periods of his life and dim the pure image of self-sufficient, blue-blooded Buribunkdom. Otherwise, it would be inex- plicable that the noble man, doubting his inner sense of self, shortly before his death was willing not only to enter into a bourgeois-religious marriage but also to marry his own housekeeper-a woman who we know was com- pletely uneducated, downright illiterate, and who eventually (aside from in- hibiting the free exfoliation of his personality) sought to prevent, for rea- sons of devout bigotry, his cremation. . . . To have surpassed these inconsis- tencies and to have made Buribunkdom, in its crystal-clear purity, into a historical fact is the work of Schnekke.
As a fully matured fruit of the most noble Buribunkdom, this genius fell from the tree of his own personality. In Schnekke we find not the least visi- ble trace of hesitation, not the slightest deviation from the distinguished line of the Ur-buribunkological. He is nothing more than a diary keeper, he lives for his diary, he lives in and through his diary, even when he enters into his diary that he no longer knows what to write in his diary. On a level where the I, which has been projecting itself into a reified, you-world constellation, flows with forceful rhythm back into a world-I constellation, the absolute sacrifice of all energies for the benefit of the inner self and its identity has achieved the fullest harmony. Because ideal and reality have here been fused in unsurpassable perfection; what is missing is any particular singularity, which shaped Ferker's life in such a sensational way but which, for any dis- cussion focusing on the essential, must be understood as a compliment rather than a critique. Schnekke is, in a much more refined sense than Fer- ker, a personality, and precisely because of that has he disappeared behind the most inconspicuous sociability. His distinct idiosyncrasy, an I deter- mined solely by the most extreme rules of its own, is located within a spec- trum of indiscriminate generality, in a steady colorlessness that is the result of the most sacrificial will to power. Here we have reached the absolute zenith of Buribunkdom; we need not be afraid of any relapse, as with
23 8 Typewriter
Ferker. 'f The empire of Buribunkdom has been founded. For in the midst of his continuous diaries, Schnekke (with his strong sense of generality and his universal instinct) saw the opportunity to detach the diary from its re- strictive bond with the individual and to convert it into a collective organ- ism. The generous organization of the obligatory collective diary is his achievement. Through that, he defined and secured the framing conditions of a buribunkological interiority; he elevated the chaotic white noise of dis- connected and single Buribunkdom into the perfect orchestration of a Buri- bunkie cosmos. Let us retrace the broad lines of development of this socio- logical architecture.
Every Buribunk, regardless of sex, is obligated to keep a diary on every second of his or her life. These diaries are handed over on a daily basis and collated by district. A screening is done according to both a subject and a personal index. Then, while rigidly enforcing copyright for each individual entry, all entries of an erotic, demonic, satiric, political, and so on nature are subsumed accordingly, and writers are catalogued by district. Thanks to a precise system, the organization of these entries in a card catalogue allows for immediate identification of relevant persons and their circumstances. If, for example, a psychopathologist were to be interested in the pubescent dreams of a certain social class of Buribunks, the material relevant for this research could easily be assimilated from the card catalogues. In turn, the work of the psychopathologist would be registered immediately, so that, say, a historian of psychopathology could within a matter of hours obtain reli- able information as to the type of psychopathological research conducted so far; simultaneously-and this is the most significant advantage of this dou- ble registration-he could also find information about the psychopathologi- cal motivations that underlie these psychopathological studies. Thus
" What a difference there is between Ferker's and Schnekke's attitudes toward women! Never is there any thought in Schnekke about getting married in church; with instinctive surefootedness he recognizes it as a ball and chain
on the leg of his ingenuity, and he manages-despite a series of rather fully de- veloped erotic relationships-to escape from marriage with the surety of a sleep- walker. He always remains cognizant of the needs surrounding the free develop- ment of his uniqueness, and he rightfully invokes Ekkehard in his diary when
he says that marriage would inhibit his essential I-ness. At the same time, we should not overlook the impressive progress evident from Ferker to Schnekke when it comes to women. There is no illiterate woman in Schnekke's life, no one who with petit-bourgeois ridiculousness would claim to restrain genius's needs for unrestrained activity; no one who would not have been proud to have served Schnekke as the impetus for his artistic achievements and thus to have enjoyed the most gratifying reward of her femaleness.
? Typewriter 2 3 9
screened and ordered, the diaries are presented in monthly reports to the chief of the Buribunk Department, who can in this manner continuously su- pervise the psychological evolution of his province and report to a central agency. This agency, in turn, keeps a record of the complete register (and publishes that register in Esperanto) and is hence in a position to exercise buribunkological control over all of Buribunkdom. A series of relevant practices-such as periodic and mutual photo opportunities and film pre- sentations, an active exchange of diaries, readings from diaries, studio visits, conferences, new j ournals, theater productions preceded and followed by laudatios on the personality of the artist-ensure that the interest of the Buribunk in himself and in the quintessentially Buribunkic does not become mere decorum; they prevent as well a damaging, countercultural waning of interest, which leads us to doubt whether the refined existence of the Buri- bunk world will ever come to an end.
Nevertheless, here too we see a rebellious spirit in evidence, albeit rarely. And yet it needs to be said that in the Buribunk world, there exists an unlimited and infinitely understanding tolerance, as well as the highest re- spect for a person's individual liberty. Buribunks are allowed to write their diary entries free from any coercion whatsoever. Not only is one allowed to say that he lacks the mental energy for further entries and that it is only the grief felt for his failing energies that gives him the energy necessary for fur- ther entries; that is, in fact, one of the most beloved types of entry, which is widely acknowledged and appreciated. He can also put down, without fear- ing the least pressure, that he considers the diary one of the most senseless and bothersome practices, an annoying chicanery, a ridiculous old hat-in brief, he is not prevented from using the strongest language. For the Buri- bunks well know that they would violate the nerve center of their being were they to mess with the principle of unconditional freedom of speech. There even exists a reputable organization that sets itself the task of buri- bunkically recording Anti-Buribunkdom, just as there is an agency created for the purpose of fostering, in impressive entries, the ability to articulate disgust and loathing for the agency and even protest against the obligatory diary entry. Periodically, when diary entries threaten to glide into a certain uniformity, leaders of the Buribunks organize a successful movement aimed at raising individual-personal self-esteem. ". The high point of this liberality,
". In this context, certain undaunted neo-Buribunkic initiatives deserve an honorable mention. They have led to the establishment of a prize-winning ques- tion that is raised periodically, "What real progress have the Buribunks made since the days of Ferker ? " and to decided efforts in that direction.
? ? 2 4 0 Ty p e w r i t e r
however, resides in the fact that no Buribunk is forbidden from writing in his diary that he refuses to keep a diary.
Naturally, such freedom does not reach the point of anarchic chaos. Every entry about refusing to keep a diary must be amply supported and de- veloped. Whosoever, instead of writing about one's resistance toward writ- ing, really omits writing altogether violates the general intellectual openness and will be eliminated on grounds of antisocial behavior. The path of evolu- tion silently passes over the silent ones; they are outside of all discourse and as a result can no longer draw attention to themselves. Finally, sinking step by step until hitting the bottom of the social hierarchy, they are forced to manufacture the external conditions for the possibility of noble Buribunk- dom, for example, high-quality, handmade paper, upon which are printed the most distinguished diaries. . . . That is a rigorous but completely natural selection of the fittest, for whosoever cannot compete in the intellectual struggle of diaries will soon degenerate and disappear in the mass of those equipped only to produce the external conditions just mentioned. As a result of this physical labor and other menial services, such people also are no longer in a position to exploit, in Buribunk fashion, each moment of their lives, and they thus yield to an inexorable fate. Since they don't write any- more, they cannot respond to possible inconsistencies in their personal file; they no longer stay current, they disappear from the monthly reports and become nonentities. As if swallowed by the earth, nobody knows them any- more, nobody mentions them in their diaries, they are neither seen nor
heard. Regardless of the intensity of their lament, even if it were to drive them to the edge of insanity, the honorable law does not spare anyone who has dishonorably excluded him- or herself, just as the laws of natural selec- tion themselves know no exception.
And so, through tireless and engaged activity, the Buribunks seek to achieve such a perfection of their organization that, even if only over the span of hundreds of generations, an unprecedented progression is ensured. Daunting calculations-may progress not render them utopian! -have sug- gested that culture will eventually reach such a level that, thanks to unhin- dered evolution, the ability for diary writing will gradually become inborn in the Buribunk fetus. If so, fetuses could, with the help of appropriate, yet- to-be-developed media, communicate with one another about their cardinal perceptions and hence (by demystifying the remaining secrets of sex re- search) provide the necessary, factual basis for a refined sexual ethics. All that, of course, is far in the distance. It is, however, a historical fact that al- ready today there exists a grand and densely organized mass of Buribunk- dom-and hence a speaking, writing, bustling Buribunkdom compelled to
? ? Typewriter 24 I
enjoy each person's essential personality-that forges ahead into the sunrise of historicity.
The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak, therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish, therefore I am. This contains no contradiction, but rather the progressive sequence of identities, each of which, following the laws of logic, transcends its own limitations. For Buribunks, thinking is nothing but silent speech; speech is nothing but writing without script; writing is nothing but anticipated publi- cation; and publication is, hence, identical with writing to such a degree
that the differences between the two are so small as to be negligible. I write, therefore I am; I am, therefore I write. What do I write? I write myself. Who writes me ? I myself write myself. What do I write about? I write that I write myself. What is the great engine that elevates me out of the complacent cir- cle of egohood? History!
I am thus a letter on the typewriter of history. I am a letter that writes itself. Strictly speaking, however, I write not that I write myself but only the letter that I am. But in writing, the world spirit apprehends itself through me, so that I, in turn, by apprehending myself, simultaneously apprehend the world spirit. I apprehend both it and myself not in thinking fashion, but-as the deed precedes the thought-in the act of writing. Meaning: I am not only the reader of world history but also its writer.
At each second of world history, the letters of the typewriter keyboard leap, impelled by the nimble fingers of the world-I, onto the white paper and continue the historical narrative. Only at the moment that the single letter, singled out from the meaningless and senseless indifference of the keyboard, hits the animated fullness of the white paper, is a historical reality created; only at that moment does life begin. That is to say, the beginning of the
past, since the present is nothing but the midwife that delivers the lived, his- torical past out of the dark womb of the future. As long as it is not reached, the future is as dull and indifferent as the keyboard of the typewriter, a dark rat hole from which one second after the other, just like one rat after the other, emerges into the light of the past.
Ethically speaking, what does the Buribunk do who keeps a diary each and every second of his life ? He wrests each second off of the future in or- der to integrate it into history. Let us imagine this procedure in all its mag- nificence: second by second, the blinking young rat of the present moment crawls out of the dark rat hole of the future-out of the nothing that not yet is-in order to merge (eyes glowing with fiery anticipation) the next sec- ond with the reality of history. Whereas with the unintellectual human be- ing, millions and billions of rats rush without plan or goal out into the infi-
2 4 2 Typewriter
nite expanse of the past only to lose themselves in it, the diary-keeping Buri- bunk can catch each of those seconds, one at a time, and-once aligned in an orderly battalion-allow them to demonstrate the parade of world his- tory. This way, he secures for both himself and humanity the maximum amount of historical facticity and cognizance. This way, the nervous antici- pation of the future is defused, for no matter what happens, one thing is for sure: no second peeling off of the future is getting lost, no hit of the type- writer key will miss the page.
The death of an individual is also nothing but such a rat second, which has no content in itself-whether one of happiness or grief-but only in its historical registration. Of course, in the rat second of my death, I can no longer hold pen and diary, and I am ostensibly no longer actively involved in this historical registration; the crux of diary keeping, the will to power over history, disappears and clears the field for somebody else's desire. If we dis- regard the pedagogical aspects of this situation, that is, its application not to waste a second in order to impose our will to power onto historiography in the making, we must confess that the termination of our will to history goes very much against our will, for the will to power in the first instance always refers to the will to one's own power, not to that of a certain historian of fu- ture generations. Such concerns, however, lend themselves to serious confu- sion, and we have already seen how even in the case of the great Ferker, the fear of death had a downright catastrophic influence on his historical repu- tation. Today, however, thanks to the evolving consciousness whose sunlight kills the bacteria of the fear of death, there is little danger of any confusion among the Buribunks.
We see through the illusion of uniqueness. We are the letters produced by the writing hand of the world spirit and surrender ourselves consciously to this writing power. In that we recognize true freedom. In that we also see the means of putting ourselves into the position of the world spirit. The in- dividual letters and words are only the tools of the ruses of world history. More than one recalcitrant "no" that has been thrown into the text of his- tory feels proud of its opposition and thinks of itself as a revolutionary, even though it may only negate revolution itself. But by consciously merging with the writing of world history we comprehend its spirit, we become equal to it, and-without ceasing to be written-we yet understand ourselves as writing subjects. That is how we outruse the ruse of world history-namely, by writing it while it writes us. 17o
? ? Typewriter 2 4 3
World history comes to a close as a global typewriters' association. Digi- tal signal processing (DSP) can set in. Its promotional euphemism, post- history, only barely conceals that war is the beginning and end of all arti- ficial intelligence.
In order to supersede world history (made from classified intelligence reports and literary processing protocols), the media system proceeded in three phases. Phase I , beginning with the American Civil War, developed storage technologies for acoustics, optics, and script: film, gramophone, and the man-machine system, typewriter.