No More Learning

"*. What is here vaguely circumscribed as "abstraction" had long cemented the classical bond of friendship between poets and thinkers. But in 1900 film and the gramophone (radiowould not appear until twenty-fiveyears later) would lead to the very opposite result by isolating the word theoretically as well, leaving to the media its previous effects o n the imagination. The rankings of the individual arts in a synchronic system inevitably shifted. nRBut his- torical derivations of modernist word literature, such as Gunther Sasse's, are perhaps superfluous; by presupposing a "situation in need of clarifica- tion, namely, that not until one hundred years after the thematization of language in philosophy, did the same problem become central in litera- ture,"" such an approach creates more problems than it solves. But be- cause there was once a brief friendship between literature and philoso- phy, literary historians still read Humboldt's philosophy instead of test series.
THE GREAT I A L U d 249
? 250 1900
All the evidence indicates that the high literature of 1900 gave up its symphilosophizing because other contemporary movements gained prominence. The new sciences and technologies made it necessary to re- nounce the imagination. MallarrnC stated this when he answered an in- quiry On the Nustrated Book with a decided "No. " "Why," he asked in response, "don't you go right to the cinematographs, for their sequence of images will replace, to great advantage, many books in image and text. """ If reform primers and novels of artistic development cunningly used images to contribute to an imperceptible alphabetization and identi- fication, high literature cut out everything available to the other media. For all his love of film, Kafka conveyed to his publisher his "horror" at the very thought that an illustrator of his Metamorphosis "might even want to draw the insect itself. Not that, please! I don't want to diminish the area of his authority, but issue my request only on behalf of my natu- rally better grasp of the story. The insect itself cannot be drawn. It cannot be drawn even from a great distance. "" Literature thus occupies, with creatures or noncreatures that can only be found in words, the margin left to it by the other media. Illustrations outgrew their baby shoes, their con- tributory role, and learned to walk and wield power in the unconscious of the movie house; the symbolic remained, autonomous and imageless as once only God had been.
The literary ban on images allowed only twoexceptions. One occurred when Stefan George wanted to document the fact that he was not a classi- cal author and thus not for the young ladies. He gave his artist and book designer, Melchior Lechter, "a nonartistic task" that "leaves the realm of art" and ended any further collaboration between them. qLThe Commem- oration for Maximin was to be prefaced, not by the hand-drawn portrait Lechter suggested, but by Maximilian Kronberger's photograph. Only the scandal of technological media in the midst of the ritual of letters could materialize the scandal of the master desiring a singular and real body.
The other exception was systematic. After 1900 letters were permitted to construct figures, because they had always been figures. This too di- rectly reversed classical norms. Schleiermacher "completely" excluded from Poetry verses in dialect as well as those others "that look like an axe or bottle. "" Ninety-eight years later, Apollinaire justified his Calli- grammes by citing the competition of film and records.
It would have been strange if in an epoch when the popular art par excellence, the cinema, is a book of pictures, poets had not tried to compose pictures for medi- tative and refined minds that are not content with the crude imaginings of the makers of films. These last will become more perceptive, and one can predict the day when, the photograph and the cinema hav. ing become the only form of pub-
? lication in use, the poet will have a freedom heretofore unknown. One should not be astonished if, with the means they now have at their disposal, poets set them- selves to preparing this new art. "
Pictures made of letters remain in the cleared area, in the technological niche of literature, without suffering any material inequality vis-a-vis the other media that, Apollinaire prophesies, will soon be the only ones. Such pictures had been despised for a century, because any emphasis on the figural quality of letters would have made it more difficult to ignore them. To achieve the psychophysical insight, to see letters "as a great quantity of strange figures on a white background," or as calligrammes, "one has only to look at a newspaper page upside down. '" The literality and mate- riality of the written can be realized only at the expense of readability and in limited experiments. Apollinaire and Mallarmk competed with the technological medium of film, whereas it would have seemed sufficient to distinguish letters and books from traditional painting. The call for a cult of typefaces issued by writers circa 1900 had nothing to do with fine writing, everything to do with machines. In the words of Anton Kaes: "The reform movement in literature that ran parallel to the rise of the movies as a mass medium took shape against the background of the new technological media. "'"
Research into the localization of language replicated the typewriter. The tachistoscope of the physiologists of reading was the twin of the movie projector, with the side effect of typographically optimizing the typewriter. Brain physiology did away with the illusion that language is more "than a play of mechanical equipment learned by practice," which "is set into ordered motion by ideas, just as one can operate a sewing, adding, writing, or talking machine without needing to be familiar with its construction. '"' Prior to consciousness, then, there are sensory and motor, acoustical and optic language centers linked by nerve paths just as the working parts of a typewriter are connected by levers and rods. As if taking Nietzsche's dictation style as a metaphor, brain physiology formu- lates the path from the sound image of the word to the hand that writes and to consciousness as an inaudible dictation, to which only autonomic reaction is appropriate at the level of consciousness. 9pTo produce actual discourse, there must be impulses in the cerebral cortex "through which the word, as an acoustical and optical image, is transposed into its sen- sory sound parts on a sound clavier. " All keyboards (including those that produce sounds), however, are spatial arrangements, or a sort of type- writer keyboard of language. A "cortical soundboard" virtually conjures up the lever system of the old Remingtons. "
THE GRFAT LALIJa 251
? 252 1900
As soon as one connects the brain physiology of language with the psychophysics of the senses via the tachistoscope, the hypothetical ma- chine in the brain becomes a real machine in front of the retina. The letters and words presented for milliseconds by the tachistoscope are al- eatory choices from prepared stores or vocabularies. The procedure is only apparently arbitrary and "peculiar to our experiments. " For "as rich as the number of words in our civilized languages has gradually become, their number diminishes considerably in each language during a particu- lar period, for a particular domain of literature, and for a particular au- thor. " Irn Periods, genres, authors-all play on unconscious word key- boards and even more unconscious letter keyboards. The philosopher become experimenter Erdmann says nothing of them; instead, he presents the basic rule that words are recognized in their "totality," that is, by those traits "in which the black marks of the letters contrast with the white background. " In which case, "the surface areas of the white back-
ground are as essential for the whole configuration as the black ones
are. "
Erdmann's followers and critics, however, were not philosophers or hermeneutic interpreters, and they limited their investigations to the ma- teriality of letters. They turned the tachistoscopes to speeds higher than those at which reading can take place because only disturbances and defi- ciencies betray the fundamental secrets of letters and forms of script. The film projector's twin thus functions in an opposite manner. The pro- jector, in the unconscious of the movie house, presents a continuum of the imaginary, generated through a sequence of single images so precisely chopped up by and then fed through the projector's mechanism that the illusion of seamless unity is produced. With the tachistoscope, in the darkened laboratory of the alphabetical elite, a cut-up image assaults as a cut in order to establish out of the torment and mistaken readings of vic- tims the physiologically optimal forms of letters and script. As with the typewriter, which has its own key for spacing, intervals are built into the experimental procedure. But they also become the test result. The ta- chistoscope demonstrates that on the most basic level reading consists in perceiving not letters but the differences between them, and that word recognition proceeds by hitting upon discontinuous, single letters that lit- erally stick out. Systematically evaluated misreadings indicate that letters at x-height (vowels and some consonants) are relatively undifferentiated, but that consonants with ascenders or descenders serve as typographic recognition signals. '"' According to Julius Zeitler, the historically re- newed primacy of the letter is based on a "decomposition of the letter continuum into groups. " "There are whole series of words, analogous in
their letter composition, that run through heterogeneous meanings if one
101
? THE GRFAT LALUM 253
letter in the same position is changed. . . . If the new meaning of the word image that has been altered in this way is to be registered, the letter must be determined, that is, it must be spelled out. When this does not occur, the original word image is constantly reassimilated, as is the original meaning along with it. " I"'
The letter-crosswords with which Reformation primers liked to play could therefore be resurrected. One theorist of elementary education il- lustrated Zeitler's theory for his deaf and dumb children with the follow- ing example: 'Iu
One need only read this series as a column-and Saussure'stheory of lan- guage as a combinatory system is born. As it says in the structuralist bible: l n 5
In every such case the isolated sound, like every other unit, is chosen after a dual mental opposition. In the imaginary grouping anma, for instance, the sound m stands in syntagmatic opposition to its environing sounds and in associative op- position to all other sounds that may come to mind:
r-
1anma V
d
But, as Derrida was the first to rediscover,** the modest letter re- searchers or grammatologists were more rigorous than linguistics' found- ing hero. Their tachistoscope locates pure differentiality not in "sounds," that is, in incorporeal sound images of words, but in the material signs of type. Thus the machine demonstrates and practices what structural lin- guistics accomplishes insofar as it writes down nonsense words such as anma, even though it stresses their use in speech. In order to engrave an example of the differentiality of phonemes into his own text, Saussure
? was forced to shift to the distinction between necessary and arbitrary, graphematic and graphic differences between letters.
The value of letters is purely negative and differential. The same person can write t, for instance, in differentways:
The only requirement is that the sign for t not be confused in his script with the signs used for I, d, etc. '"'
It is because the example of the three handwritten t's does not constitute an example, but is rather a conclusive demonstration with which differ- ences in sound could never compete, that structural linguistics and psy- chophysical positivism belong together. Instead of continuing in the line of Schleiermacher'shermeneutics,'"*Saussure systematized, at the price of a methodological phonocentrism, the countless scriptural facts that ex- periments circa 1900produced and let stand in their facticity.
But the love of facts can also bear fruit. It might not produce a system, but it does produce typographies. Erdmann's measurement of the relation between letters and background, Zeitler's differentiation of letter recogni- tion according to x-height, ascenders, and descenders, Oskar Messmer's calculation of the frequency of these three types in coherent texts, all cul- minated in a knowledge of differentiality that could become immediately practical. The secular war between Fraktur and roman scripts, for in- stance, no longer need be burdened with the imaginary values of Things German in opposition to the world. After simple tests with both types of script-with the tachistoscope, in low light, with beginning pupils and professors-the superiority of roman was a matter of fact. Semiotic posi- tivism allowed Friedrich Soennecken to explain that roman consisted of two basic lines, whereas Fraktur consisted of "no less than sixty-six basic lines differing in form and size. '"OP This sort of massive differential differ- ence made decisions easy for researchers who published works such as The Economy and Technology of Learning: ' l o "Anyone who has ever ex- perimented with the tachistoscope knows that the simpler a type of script is, the easier it is to learn. " ''I
Indeed, under the conditions of pure differentiality there is nothing simpler than the opposition that, in theory and praxis, determines the current century: binary opposition. If roman consists of only two "ele- ments, the straight line and the half circle,''11zthen an ideal script has been found, one whose elements can be combined and analyzed quite dif-
? ferently from Pohlmann's o r Stephani's handwriting norms. An economy took the place of organic merging, one that (perhaps following the new standard of Morse code) technically optimized signs and the differences between them.
Thus differences appeared even in roman typeface, the very mini- malization of difference. Saussure distinguished necessary and arbitrary differences among letters; embracing necessary difference, since I 900 the various roman typefaces that reject ornament have flourished and be- come as pervasive as chemically pure industrial design. "' Forms to be filled out call for block letters; lower case and sans serif are the height of Manhattan advertising chic.
The call was answered. Because roman capital letters are what "the child first encounters at every turn"-"on street signs, street cars, post offices, train stations""'-the block letters of technological information channels found their way into elementary-school instruction. Rudolph von Larisch's students in Vienna learned from a manual Instruction in Ornamental Script; but they learned a surface art that rejected all "per- spective and shadow effects" of the Stephani type of word painting. The goal, "in competition with other demands," was "a HIGHER degree of readability": "that the characteristic qualities of a letter be stressed with all possible force and the difference from similar letters be stressed. " I I ' Psychophysicists and structural linguists hardly say it more clearly. The medium of writing and paper no longer pretended to be a springboard to painted nature. Using uniformly thick lines, Eckmann and Peter Behrens,"" Larisch and Soennecken drew block letters as block letters.
The decomposition of roman letters, as it confronts elementary binary opposition, is the mirror image of their composition. To write block letters is not to connect signs with other signs but to combine discrete elements piece by piece. In the age of engineers an armature construction set replaces the growth of plants and originary script. 'l- Separate letters consisting of separate elements are based, in strict opposition to classical writing rules, on Saussure's most daring opposition: that between signs and emptiness, medium and background. "The beginner has to learn to look, not simply at the form of the letters, but constantly BETWEEN the letters; he must use all the power of his vision to grasp the surface forms that arise between the letters and to assess the effect of their optical mass. ""* A reversal of every habit or facility thus grants the "BETWEEN" the same status as the positive marks it separates. So Larisch knocked children over the head with the lesson that psychophysics produced with the tachistoscope and with newspapers turned upside down: the fact that letters are what they are only against and upon a white background. A "BETWEEN" in capital block letters is a sheer autonym. And if educators
? 256 1900
circa 1800 aimed at mitigating the shock of binary opposition by con- necting lines and an attenuation of the black-white contrast, Larisch-as
a student of William Morris-gave his students the "feeling of how poorly the softening halftone fits into a printed book," in that "simple, powerful outlines and the full contrast of black and white spaces have an appearance characteristic of printed type. ""'
And yet-the implications of the tachistoscope and the economy of letters for literature and literary science become even more obscure, if possible, here on the page, for all its black and white space. One needs the whole power of one's vision to glimpse the overlooked visibility of texts. The black and white of texts seems so timeless that it never occurs to readers to think of the architects of that space. The forgotten techni- cians of 1900,however, revolutionalized the page of poetry, from the most playful verses to the most ritualized. Morgenstern's Gallows Songs enact the derivation of what the Stefan George typeface practiced in mute solemnity.
Es war einmal ein Lattenzaun
rnit Zwischenraum,hindurchzuschaun.
Ein Architekt, der dieses sah, stand eines Abends plotzlich da-
und nahm den Zwischenraumheraus und baute draus ein grosses Haus.
Der Zaun indessen stand ganz dumm, rnit Latten ohne was herum.
Ein Anblick griisslich und gernein. Drum zog ihn der Senat auch ein.
Der Architeckt jedoch entfloh nach Afri- od- Arneriko.
There used to be a picket fence
with space to gaze from hence to thence.
? THE GREAT LALUU 257 approached it suddenly one night,
removed the spaces from the fence and built of them a residence.
The picket fence stood there dumbfounded with pickets wholly unsurrounded,
a view so naked and obscene the Senate had to intervene.
The architect, however, flew to Afri- or Americoo. ""
"The Picket Fence" is the fairy tale of a new age. Where Anselmus saw the woven arabesques of handwritten letters, the cold eye of the architect sees the opposite. One evening Larisch's imperative-to look constantly BETWEEN the letters, to grasp the space outlined between them with all one's strength-is realized word for word. In so doing, the architect does not discover merely how indispensable concepts of relation are. "! Some- thing more tangible is at stake: the fact that the readability of signs is a function of their spatiality. The architect's manipulation of space demon- strates that, when the lack is lacking and no empty spaces remain, media disappear, "naked and obscene," into the chaos from which they were derived.
Consider the final stanza of "The Picket Fence" in light of the architec- ture of block letters. Whereas "the alliteration of Africa and America feigns an ending in -(i)~a,'"w~h~ich also plays with the ending of oder [the placement of "or"], a "between" appears in the realm of the graph- eme: the space designated by the dash. The words of the poem, complete autonyms in this sense, foreground their own intervals between stem and ending. Morgenstern's constructed architect does not disappear into far- off lands, but into the space between signs that he had usurped.
From this vanishing point called paper, it is only a step to "the ideal of purely abstract, absolute poetry," an ideal of such brilliance "that it also means the end of poetry; it can no longer be imitated or surpassed; it is transcended only by the empty white page. "I2' "The Picket Fence" de- scribes the binary opposition between letters or pickets [Lettemlhtten] and the space between them, but "Fish's Night Song" uniquely enacts this opposition without any description at all. "' In it, the reduction to straight line and half curve that distinguishes roman from Fraktur scripts be- comes textual event. Circumflex and dash, two signifiers that define themselves through mutual opposition and relation, are the absolute minimum economy of the signifier. Their binary opposition to each other, canceled or articulated through the shared opposition of both to paper,
An architect who saw this sight
? 258 1900
constitutes the poem that meets all the reading-psychological desiderata of its epoch. Period. For there is nothing more to write about a minimal signifier system.
Or there would be nothing more to write if the poem did not have a title composed in the very different, redundant, signifier system of the twenty-six letters. Through the title, one discourse network answers an- other across the turning point that divides them. "Fish's Night Song" is the cancellation of Goethe's "Wanderer's Night Song 11. " In the latter, a human voice outlasts the surrounding sounds of nature for one breath in order to express the promise that it, too, would find rest in the lap of Mother Nature. In the former, the text brings a mute fish not to speech, but into a typogram. It thus realizes Schleiermacher'snightmare: namely, that a real optics would render superfluous the imaginary, imaginal as- pects that meaningful words suggest to alphabetized readers. As mute and dead as any script, the fish no longer needs the phonocentric consola- tion of a seamless transition between speech and nature. The signs on the page cannot be spoken by any voice-regardless of whether one reads them as fish scales or discrete elements of the roman typeface. Man and soul, in any case, no longer apply. With all the wanderers between day and night, Spirit and Nature, male and female, Man simply died around 1900. It was a death to which the much-discussed death of God is a foomote.
Stephani wrote that written letters provide notes for the mouth instru- ment. But a mute fish demonstrates that signs can mock all speech and nonetheless still be written signs. The half curve and dash, the two mini- mal signifieds of Soennecken and of the "Night Song," can be found on every universal keyboard. The first German monograph on the typewriter
? thus celebrated the fact that "with a little inventiveness one can produce very fine borders and flourishes" on Remingtons and Olivers. 'z' It pre- sented the prototype of modernist ideal poetry years before Morgenstem.
Not only is the human voice incapable of reproducing signs prior to and beyond alphabets, but writers, by prescribing their own alphabets, can remove their texts from hermeneutic consumption. The existence of a Stefan George script in the discourse network of 1900demonstrates that "Fish's Night Song" is the signet of the whole system.
The Stefan George script, which Lechter fabricated and used through- out the first edition of George's Collected Works, was adapted from George's handwriting. But it was handwriting only in name. First, the single letters-beyond any supposed Carolingian reference-were based on a contemporary advertising grotesque. 1zhSecond, any handwriting that can be transposed into reusable typeface functions fundamentally as mechanized script.
Technology entered the scene in archaic dress. Larisch came up with "the ideal of a personal book" that would be "self-designed, -written, - ornamented, and -bound. " IL- That is exactly what George did before Lechter and Georg Bondi made him aware of the possibility of technologi- cal reproduction. Under the pressure of media competition, high literature returned to the monastic copyists whom Gutenberg had rendered unneces- sary and Anselmus had made to seem foolish. At the same time, however, the personal book (that oxymoron) was to be set in block letters that, "equal in their characteristics," have none of the redundant differences of individual handwritten letters. According to Larisch, the historic "mo- ment" was "favorable" for old-fashioned, manually made books because "precisely now the use of typewriters is becoming widespread. " "*
The ascetics of handwork art, even when they played at being medi- eval, were in competition with the modern media. As soon as there were typewriters, there were fashioners of texts like Mark Twain or Paul Lindau, who had "the production means of the printing press at their dis- posal" on their desks. According to Marshall McLuhan, the fact that "the typewriter fuses composition and publication" brought about "an en- tirely new attitude to the written and printed word. ""' Like innovation, its effects surpassed its applications. When Larisch and George stylized their handwriting until it became a typeface, they achieved what Malling
THE GREAT LALUU 259
? 260 1900
Hansen and Nietzsche had been praised for: script "as beautiful and regular as print. " ' l o "Perfect lyrical creations and perfect technical ob- jects are one and the same. ""'
The new relation to the printed word became printed reality in the layout of George's books. From the time of his break with Lechter, at the latest, his books constituted an imageless cult of letters. The cry of mate- rial equality extended from the single lyrical word to the entire alpha- betical medium. If modem, Morris-inspired publications, such as Goals of Internal Book Design, state in tautological conclusion that "paper and type make up a book," the poets of the George circle were "more or less the first to realize that a book consists of paper and type. "''z
But it is not only the fact that books of the turn of the century "looked very booklike" that places them into technological contexts. "' More im- portant, the Stefan George script (as typeface, in the form of its letters, and in its orthography and punctuation) presupposed, maximized, and exploited experimentally obtained standards. In terms of the physiology of reading, it was evident that the "letters and other elements of the type- face" and "the capital and small letter should be as similar as possible. " It follows that roman is by far "more efficient" than Fraktur, which would be "unthinkable as a typewriter typeface. '"" The Stefan George script met just these standards; in its new letter forms for e, k, and t, capital and lowercase letters were even more alike than in ordinary roman type. '" George eliminated the ascenders from two of the twenty-six letters (kand t). This might seem a minimal innovation, but in combination with Grimm's orthography (the use of small letters for nouns, the elimination of h from many th combinations, and the use of ss rather than the Eszett), it had a significant cumulative effect. Whereas the physiologist Messmer counted 270 letters above or below x-height in an ordinary text a thousand letters long, I find in George an average of only 200 extended as opposed to 800 small letters.
(The same passages in Duden orthogra- phy would contain nearly one hundred more ascenders and descenders. )
Messmer could show that words such as physiological or psychologi- cal, taken simply as collections of letters containing a high percentage of ascenders and descenders, d o not convey the "unitary whole impression" that distinguishes words such as wimmem, nennen,or weinen. "" Ex- tended letters quicken the pace of tachistoscopic word recognition, but in a special script or cult of the letter intended to hinder any alphabetized skipping over of letters, material equality is everything and a gain in speed is nothing. Therefore masses of words like wimmern, nennen, and weinen fill the eighteen volumes of an oeuvre whose esotericism is phys- iologically guaranteed. In it, homologies, recognitions, and knowing smiles are exchanged between the most aristocratic of writers and the
? THE GREAT LALULA 261
modest experimenters of I900. The inventor of psychotechnology con- firmed an esotericism in the inventor of the Stefan George script that-a first in the history of writing-could be measured. "The fact that the elimination of capital letters from the beginning of nouns constitutes a strong check against rapid absorption can be easily verified, should read- ers of Stefan George find it necessary, by psychological experiment in an easily measurable procedure. " 'I'
These lines are as true as they are prophetic. Whereas readers of Nietzsche stumbled only here and there over italicized introjections, read- ers of George have trouble with every letter. A perfect experimental pro- cedure forestalls understanding in order to fix the eyes on signifiers as murky as the "Fish's Night Song. " But the readers were fascinated and forgot they were experimental subjects. In opposition to the technologi- cal media, they conjured up a secondhand old Europe. Consider Gert Mattenklott's consideration of George: "The image of Stefan George ap- pearsfinallyasthesheerallegoricalcorpse. . . . Everythingarbitraryand individual is transcribed into a meaningful universal, perhaps most clearly when George made his own handwriting resemble a typeface in- tended to replace the conventional one. "''nThese lines are as false as they are Benjarninesque. Their writer is simply unaware of the technologies of his own century. The facts that the typewriter made it inevitable that handwriting should come to resemble type, that there was the project of a "world letter" to unburden memories,'" and that the logic of the signifier explodes the "meaning" of the age of Goethe all fall victim here to an allegory of allegory. "Conventional handwriting" is a non-concept. If his- tories of the material basis of literature are to be possible, apparent con- ventions, especially in the elemental field of writing, must be dismantled and examined as feedback control loops and programs. George, whether a corpse or not, was evidence of an epochal innovation.
No appeal to timeless conventions could ever explain why a nameless artist (not George) changed his handwriting three times between 1877 and I 894, attracting the attention of psychiatrists with the third change and landing among them with the fourth. Above all, however, conven- tions cannot explain why science took precisely this patient at his word or pen and made facsimiles of his handwriting. '"' Only the assumption that the four writing experiments portray an upheaval, as if in time-lapse photography, can explain both acts of writing, that of the patient and that of the psychiatrists. Proceeding exactly as had George (who, of course, was not born writing block letters), the anonymous artist made the tran- sition from the rounded and connected handwriting ideal of Stephani or Lindhorst to the cult of the letter. One of the first studies of its kind, en- titled Handwriting of the Insane, noted that it was "in no way acciden-
? 262 1900
tal" that patients' handwriting lost "the normal connecting lines between adjacent letters. '"'' As if to demonstrate the explosive force of discursive events, the isolation of letters leads to the isolation of their writers.
I
In 1894, the Encyclopedic Review commissioned a young medical student to query writers about the recent appearance of graphology. Mallarmi's answer runs:
Yes,I think that writing is a clue; you say, like gesture and physiognomy, nothing more certain. Nevertheless, by profession or by taste, the writer recopiesor sees first in the mirror of his mind, and then transcribes in writing once and for all, as if invariable. The immediate effect of his emotions is therefore not visible in his manuscript, but there one can judge his personality as a whole. '"
This states the issue directly. While graphology was being developed to provide another type of evidence, literate people fell into two subclasses: on the one hand, those whose handwriting was a direct reflection of their unconscious and so could be evaluated psychologically or criminologi- cally; on the other, the professional writers, who were writing machines' without handwriting. Among the latter, what appears to be the produc- tion of a soul is always only the reproduction on a keyboard of invariable letters. Writers' texts therefore could not be interpreted unless graph- ology made "major modifications. " That is exactly what happened when Ludwig Klages studied an original manuscript of George (as was explic-
* Here and throughout this chapter, there is a play on the etymology of khreibmuschine ("typewriter," but literally "writing machine"). [Trans. ]
? itly noted in George's Works):'" "ornament," rather than the usual "ex- pressive marks,'' necessarily became the object of interpretation. '" Pro- fessional, intransitive writing barred the abyss of the unconscious and ruled out the techniques of gathering evidence. The remaining word spe- cialists quickly learned the lesson that the phonograph taught foolhardy Wildenbruch. MallarmP became an incomprehensible personality en bloc; George was practical enough, in his monthly dealings with the Deutsche Bank, to have his favorite disciple write the signature on his checks, Stefan George. "He said that Gundolf could sign his name in such a way that even he could not tell, at a later date, whether he or Gundolf had signed it. "14'
For all the disdain of words that made him the founding hero of Bildung, Faust still believed in and obeyed the binding power of his signa- ture. Without the bureaucratic ethos, the pact between the humane disci- plines and the state would not have come about. For all his cult of the word, George, the technician in spite of himself, played a little strategic game in his commerce with the bank. A signature that, like the graph- ologically dreaded "machinescript," avoids "every trait of intimacy" and thus can always be forged, can be found in print. '" Although the techni- cians, on their side, soon discovered George's trick, he did demonstrate
DAS WORT Wundar von feme oda mum
Bmchr ich an meines lander saum
Und home bis die gmuc nom Den namtn fond in ihrem born -
Dmuf ronnr: ichr greihn dicht und nam Nun blUhr und glann es durch die man. . . .
Einn long ich on nach parr fohn Mn einem rlcinod reich und Lon
SK sudm long und gob mir rund:
,So xhlah hier nichrs ouf riehm grundc
Womuf es meincr hand cnuann
Und nic mtin land den x h a u gewonn . . .
So Icrnr: ich murig den m k h r : Kein ding sei wo das WOK gebrichr.
THE GREAT L A L U a 263
? 264 1900
something. Only as long as people believed in their inwardness did that inwardness exist. Man stands or falls with the signature of his signature. It is impossible to give exemplary status to Man and to Language in one and the same discourse network. "-
Thus circa 1900 the universal bureaucratic ethos of the age of Goethe was replaced by professional ethics. In the competitive struggle of media everyone swears by a particular professionalism. It can mean nothing else when lyric poets after George prominently publish poems entitled "THE WORD. "
THE WORD
I carried to my country's shore
Marvels and dreams, and waited for
The tall and twilit norn to tell
The names she found within the well.
Then I could grasp them, they were mine, And here I see them bloom and shine . . .
Once I had made a happy haul And won a rich and fragile jewel.
She peered and pondered: "Nothing lies Below," she said, "to match your prize. "
At this it glided from my hand And never graced my native land.
And so I sadly came to see:
Without the word no thing can be. "*
? Rebus Untranslatability and the Transposition of Media
A medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves re- shaping them to conform to new standards and materials. In a discourse network that requires an "awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other,"' transposition necessarily takes the place of translation. LWhereas translation excludes all particu- larities in favor of a general equivalent, the transposition of media is ac- complished serially, at discrete points. Given Medium A, organized as a denumerable collection of discrete elements E; . . . E;, its transposition into Medium B will consist in reproducing the internal (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) relations between its elements in the collection E: . . . EL. Because the number of elements n and m and the rules of association are hardly ever identical, every transposition is to a degree arbitrary, a ma- nipulation. It can appeal to nothing universal and must, therefore, leave gaps. The elementary, unavoidable act of EXHAUSTION is an encounter with the limits of media.
The logic of media may be a truism in set theory or information the- ory, but for Poets it was the surprise of the century. Before they founded TheNew Empire, the kingdom of blank machine-written bodies of words, poets more than any other profession remained faithful to the classical discourse network. The translatability of all discourses into poetic sig- nifieds endowed poets with such privilege that only bitter experience forced them to renounce their constitutive illusion. For an entire century poets had worked with language as if it were merely a channel. ' Love and
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intoxication transported the author into hallucinations that he would later, as "marvels and dreams," have only to transcribe. Being the general equivalent of all the senses, the imagination guaranteed that every "jewel" would have no trouble finding a name. Because addicted masculine and feminine readers quickly read past these names, their effect was anything but equality among the various aesthetic materials: through backward- moving translation, discourses became once more a sensual Nature, one that "blooms and shines. "
In 1919the exchange broke down. The nom with whom a Poet bar- tered his imaginative visions for words is no longer a Mother, the one who, as the unarticulated beginning of articulation, guaranteed unlimited expression. The nom has only a bourn or treasury in which signifiers co- exist spatially as denumerable elements. Whatever jewels glow in other media need not necessarily have equivalents, even in Stefan George script. After a long and exhaustive search, the nom breaks this sensational news. Whereas poetic translation was led on by the constant promise of fulfill- ment, literature is a transposition of media; its structure is first revealed, in the best positivistic and consequently Dasein-analytic manner, by deficits. '
Experimenters with the tachistoscope and writers at the nom bourn agree that in every language "the number of words is limited at a particu- lar time, in a particular domain of literature, and for a particular author. " An economy of the scarcity of signs replaced universal trade in 1900. George did not limit his economizing with words to his programmatic poem. He was also the "first modern German poet whose vocabulary is contained in a complete dictionary," which, however, does not make him into an "unfathomable spring. "' It would have been better-aside from the exhaustibility of even the deepest nom bourns-to check at least once with the positivists. Poetic languages, like that of the symbo- lists, which "made it necessary to compile a special dictionary for their works (J. Plowert, Petit glossaire pour servir a l'intelligence des auteurs dkcudents et symbolistes)," thus identify themselves as "professional jargon. " '
Consequently, George's final stanza celebrates The Word as the ethic of a media professional. In what sounds like resignation, Heidegger's un- erring art of reading deciphers something quite different.
His renunciation concerns the poetic relation to the word that he had cultivated until then. Renunciation is preparedness for another relation. If so, the "can be" in the line, "Without the word no thing can be," would grammatically speaking not be the subjunctive of "is," but a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on. If so, the "may be" in the line, "Where word breaks of n o thing may be," would mean: do not henceforth admit any thing as being where the word breaks off. -
? An imperative issues from the realization that the transposition of media is always a manipulation and must leave gaps between one embodiment and another. This imperative does not deny that there are media other than writing; it rejects them. On the threshold of the Indian temple caves of Shiva, whose name, Elloru, George celebrates as he had the nonsense word Tzholu,are the lines:
Pilger ihr erreicht die hiirde.
Mit den triimmern eitler biirde Werft die blumen werft die floten. Rest von trostlichem geflimme!
Ton und farbe miisst ihr toten Trennen euch von licht und stimme An der schwelle von Ellora.
Pilgrims, you have reached the gate With your pack of worthless freight. Leave the garland, leave the flute, Shreds of solace, shreds of show, Tints shall fade and sound be mute, Light and voices cease to flow
On the threshold of Ellora. n
To deny the other media would be absurd, because color and sound, light and the voice have become recordable, become part of the general accel- eration, "in the sense of the technical maximization of all velocities, in whose time-space modem technology and apparatus can alone be what they are. "9 Henceforth command will conflict with command, medium with medium. High literature circa 1900became a despotic, indeed mur- derous command to limit data to what the medium of script could ex- haust. Its spirit [Geist],according to Morgenstern's very serious play on words, ought to be named ''It is called / It commands" [Heisst]. "'The spirit-or George-became a dictator giving dictation, followed by young men who killed off what was real in them and recorded by secretaries who derived a complete pedagogy from the recording threshold of Ellora.
At conferences of the art-education movement "the possibility of trans- lation in the deepest sense" was rejected precisely in a figure who pro- moted translatability and world literature. Stephan Waetzoldt, an official in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Education, and Church Affairs, ex- perimented with native and foreign students to determine whether it was possible to translate Goethe's poem "Dedication. " His results were:
It isnomore possible for a Frenchman to become a German than it is to translate French into German or vice versa. Only where everyday matters, the banal, or the smctly mathematical are expressed, can there be any question of real translation. One can rethink or re-form something in another language, in another image of
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the world, but one can never actually translate. How could you ever translate
Musset, and how could you ever translate Goethe! ''
The imaginary (the everyday) and the real (the mathematical) can thus be translated, but the symbolic allows only transpositions. Poems there- fore provide the greatest inner resistance to translation. To demonstrate (again in opposition to Goethe) that the poetic effect is nearly lost in prose translations, despite his own doctrine of hermeneutic understand- ing, Dilthey cited Fechner, the inventor of psychophysics. " Reference to scientific studies was the innovation here. Magical or theological un- translatability was an ancient topos that became fashionable again circa 1900,"but no appeal to magical spells could hide the fact that psycho- technical untranslatability had been experimentally and recently estab- lished rather than miraculously found.
Magical spells or incantations are isolated, foreign bodies in actual lan- guages; circa 1900,however, entire artificial languages were deliberately created. Referring to his contemporaries, Morgenstern claimed the right of "imaginative youths . . . to invent a tribe of Indians and all it entails, its language and national hymns" and, with reference to his "Lalulii," termed himself "one of the most enthusiastic Volapukists. " Around I885,there was a fashionable project to construct "Ideal-Romanic" (reminiscent of the world language of Volapiik) as an extract of the vari- ous forms of Vulgar Latin. Lott, Liptay, and Daniel Rosa contributed to this linguistically much "more solid edifice,"" as did (a little later) a stu- dent of Romance languages by the name of George, who invented his Lin- gua Romana in 1889. '"
The Lingua Romana allowed George to anticipate Waetzoldt's experi- ments with students using his own Germanic and Romance-language me- dium: he wrote translations of Ideal-Romanic poems in German and vice versa. Since Champollion, the decoding of unknown languages had rested upon the foundation of a bilingual informant. But this was not so for the languages that George constructed at the age of seven or nine for himself and his friends, shortly before Morgenstern's Indian language game. His poem "Origins" presents a childhood on the pagan-Roman Rhine, which has come under the influence of the language of the Church-until George counters the traditional incantation hosanna with one of his own making.
Auf diesen triirnrnern hob die kirche dann ihr haupr Die freien nackten leiber hat sie streng gestaupr Doch erbte sie die prachte die nur starrend schliefen Und iibergab das maass der h6hen und der tiefen Dem sinn der beirn hosiannah iiber wolken blieb Und dann zerknirscht sich an den griberplatten neb.
? Doch an dem flusse im schilfpalaste
Trieb uns der wollust erhabensterschwall: In einem sange den keiner erfasste
Waren wir heischer und herrscher vom All. S,iissurrd befeuernd wie Attikas choros Uber die hiigel und inseln klang:
CO BESOSO PASOJE PTOROS
co ES ON HAMA PASOJEBOAN.
The Church then reared her head above these stones, and she Grew stem and scourged the flesh she found too bare and free. But she was heir to pomp, aflash in death-likesleeping,
And gave the standard set for height and depths in keeping
To minds that in Hosannahs wheeled above the clouds
And on the slabs of tombs in self-abasementbowed.
But near the stream in a palace of reed
On by the tide of our lust we were swirled, Singing an anthem which no one could read, We were the masters and lords of the world. Sweet and inciting as Attica's chorus
Over the mountains and islands flung:
CO BESOSO PASOJE PTOROS
co ES ON HAMA PASOJE~ 0 ~ r ; r . l ~
The poem enacts its theme. The secret language of the IMRI triumphs because it remains a norn bourn. George would quote and allude to it many times," would even present it in conversation to a linguist and ex- pert in secret languages, who immediately confirmed that it was a rare example of wholly invented grammars and vocabularies "-but the great- est translator in the German language did not think of translating it as well. When George's disciples discovered a handwritten translation of portions of the Odyssey into the IMRI language among George's papers, it was logical and not merely pious of them to destroy the single bilingual document.
According to Nietzsche, language exists only because nature has thrown away the keys to its secrets. George's quotation from his own lan- guage, in a poem entitled "Origins," shows that the writers of 1900 would yield nothing to nature. co BESOSO PASOJE PTOROS / co ES ON HAMA PASOJE BOAN. How painhlly trivial, then, is the "suspicion" of a literary critic that "the content of those lines could be painfully trivial. "'" Precisely because the IMRI undo the act with which the Church trans- ferred the measure of heights and depths to meaning or the signified, many worse things are possible: the two lines might not have any content whatsoever.
Literature that simulates or is constructed out of secret languages and
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that thus always stands under the suspicion of being "a kind of non- sense,"" forces interpretation to rearrange its techniques. The classical path to origins in the soul or childhood of the author is gone; a "littt- rature 5 rtbus" demands (not only with Dilthey) an objective interpre- tation on the model of cryptographic decoding techniques. The "new symbolism" employs "symbols in a completely different way" than was common in the classical-romantic lyric; it takes not "feeling itself" as its theme "but another and distant object" under the rules of the transposi- tion of media. " Thus a technical, rather than a psychological-historical, understanding retransposes or decodes the transposition. Georg Simmel demonstrated this for poetic works as well as for black-box machines.
A creation of the mind that is intended to be understood can be compared to a problem or puzzle that the inventor has constructed with a code word. If some- one attempting to solve the puzzle should find a second word, one that, objec- tively, solves the puzzle with equal logical and poetic success, the second word is as perfectly "correct" a solution as the one intended by the poet; indeed the latter has not the slightest priority over the former or over all the other, in principle unlimited, code words that might still be found. "
Interpretation is only a special instance of the general technique of transposing media. There is no psychological bridge between the en- coding author and the decoding interpreter, but a technical contest. Each has at his disposal a nom bourn, so that with luck, which nothing and no one guarantees, the elements and associative rules of Medium A can be reproduced in the elements and associative rules of Medium B. When Bettina Brentano attempted to interpret Goethe's "Charade" as a recipro- cal declaration of love, without being able to crack the Herzlieb code, she was unfortunately working in a different discourse network. Had she been able to attend Simmel'sseminars in Strasbourg, as many women did around 1900,much would have been easier. An interpretive method without an author as idol obviates not only the vain effort of deciphering, but also the threat of discovering Herzlieb in the riddle after all.
Indeed, for short periods the transposition of media can be lifesaving. In 1902Emil Strauss published a novel about a gymnasium student and born musician who is driven to suicide by the dust-covered new human- ism of his teachers and their lesson plans. After having been forbidden to play his beloved violin, Heinrich Lindner spends every afternoon doing his homework.
During the first few days it was not so bad; indeed, he thought with slight bitter- ness: Everything is turning out well! But on the fourth day he suddenly caught himself not concentratingonthe equation he was supposed to he solving but read- ing the letters as notes, and, without being aware of it, he had already hummed a whole page of the hook.
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"Good God! "he cried out laughing, "what nonsense! " But he could not resist looking at the page once more and consciously attempting to see if there might be, somewhere among the boring letters, a hidden musical combination. Soon, however, he was no longer laughing; he noticed that he could no longer concen- trate on the mathematical value of the letters, and that the simplest sequence of letters would remind him of a musical phrase or suggest a motif. "
It is thus sheer mockery when the obtuse bureaucrats hermeneutically certify that their problem student, despite "very irregular reading," is ca- pable of "penetrating the spirit of an author. ''2' One who reads note val- ues rather than algebraic variables (and also letters in other places), is proceeding neither irregularly nor according to an author's psychology. His reading is conceivably a precise transposition of media and can be interpreted and legitimized by Simmel's objective interpretation. It is no less radical an act in that Lindner is not alone. His contemporary Alban Berg transposed letters into notes (as a means of erotic disguise); for the hero of the novel, the same process is an unconscious and thus lifesaving compulsion, a special instance of alexia with the purpose of evading high school alphabetizing.