No More Learning

That Freud did not advance as far as the phono- graph, which with particulars like the voice or breath would have be- trayed persons' identities to even the most naive media consumers, is the very structure of writing. Only small, factual details remain as indices, which as people's symbolic aspect inscribe them in public networks of discourse. Certainly Freud's novels leave "no name standing which could put a lay reader onto the right track. ""* But because psychoanalysis is concerned with gathering evidence of the letter, names remain essential. Without the play of signifiers, whose differences are as incomprehensible as they are important, unconscious connections would be destroyed.
Under the hesitantly established heading, "The Presentation of Man" in Freud, Muschg writes of the "remarkably anonymous characters that occupy his writings. "6YIt is indeed a strange anonymity that consists of indices and names. Obsessional neurotics appear as the Rat-Man or Wolf-Man,'" hysterics as Anna O. , Frau Emmy v. N. , Dora, Fraulein Elizabeth v. R. For these figures the texts develop neither imaginative im- ages nor novels of Bildung-none of the representations of man in the Spirit of 1800,in other words. Only a mass of spoken material is pre-
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sented, through which unconscious inscriptions run their jagged, telltale course. The rebus is written down as rebus. Because Freud's own texts will be scrutinized by distasteful colleagues, the texts encode each rebus a second time according to the rules of media transposition. Thus wherever a rebus appears to be solved, another one begins (along with yet another book on Freud). Anyone who can decipher the initials of the Wolf-Man in the castrated word (W)Espe,just as the formidable Sherlock Holmes discovered the place name Ballarat in the ordinary word rat,-'has still not fixed upon a referent, to say nothing of a man behind the words. Simmel's objective interpretation allows for solutions quite other than those of the author; Freud permitted and practices "Constructions in Analysis,"-2 which beyond psychoanalytic practice determined the constructions of his writing as well. The surname of the Wolf-Man has only recently been revealed. For seventy years it was anyone's guess as to whether the initials S. P. corresponded to the Wolf-Man's passport or whether they were the discreet fiction of a writer who had encoded a solved rebus a second time.
Small facts like initials or abbreviated names are thus quite literally the contact surface on which two discourses oppose and touch one another: on one side the speech of the patients, on the other side the writing voca- tion of their doctor. It is finally impossible to determine which of the two one might be reading at any given moment, simply because inscriptions on one side trace through to the reverse side. The contact surface-as is only proper in a discourse network that does justice to the material as- pects of media-consists simply of paper. Whether in Freud's sense or not, his paper is and remains the place where the discourse network of 1900comes into contact with people. Either the patients really spoke as if speech were a masquerade for the rebus, or psychoanalysis selected from the flow of the voice only what it could transpose into signifiers and then transpose a second time to foil roman a clef readers. In any case, psycho- analysis occupies the systemic position taken by Poetry in the discourse network of 1800. The position consists in the place of initiation. If voices and dream images are to be grounded in the logic of the signifier, they must first cross the threshold of psychoanalysis; if, in return, any rituals of the sign or psychophysics are to be inscribed on individual bodies, they must first cross the threshold of psychoanalysis. The discourse network of 1900 places all discourse against the background of white noise; the pri- mal soup itself appears in psychoanalysis, but only to be articulated and thus sublimated via writing proper. "
There is nothing further to say about the wider effects of such a strat- egy. The only nontrivial problem is one of method. If Freud's technique consists in transposing optical and acoustical streams of data into words
? and words into the signifier script of his own texts, then his universal sci- ence confronts only one superfluity or impossibility: data that have al- ready assumed written form. Wherever articulation has already occurred, "the dissection and division of something that would otherwise be lost in the primal soup" is unnecessary. Thus Freud granted texts, regardless of who their authors were, a special status. Whether or not the texts were distinguished by literary honors was secondary to a certain testimonial function . -4
The pact between Freud and the people who believed that dreams could be read, despite the objections of all philosophers, would have had no discursive support if the spoken dream stories of patients had not been media-transposed by literary dream texts and confirmed by the ordinary documentary means of pen and paper. The mere written existence of Jensen's Gradiva, a novella about mania and dreams, was sufficient to de- fend Freud against attack. That it is not of particularly enduring value, that its author "refused his co-operation"-' when approached and thus would not personally authorize its transposition into the medium of psy- choanalysis, is insignificant. Objective interpretation can do without au- thorial assent. Freud thus reached the following conclusion on the rela- tionship between writers and analysts: "We probably draw from the same source and work upon the same object, each of us by another method. And the agreement of our results seems to guarantee that we have both worked correctly. Our procedure consists in the conscious ob- servation of abnormal mental processes in other people so as to be able to elicit and announce their laws. The author no doubt proceeds differently. He directs his attention to the unconscious in his own mind, he listens to its possible developments and lends them artistic expression instead of suppressing them by conscious criticism. Thus he experiences from him- self what we learn from others-the laws which the activities of this un- conscious must obey. But he need not state these laws, nor even be clearly aware of them; as a result of the tolerance of his intelligence, they are incorporated within his creations. "'"
The same source, the same object, the same result-writers and psycho- analysts moved into a proximity equal to that which joined the Thinkers and Poets of I 800. Yet the reverse conclusion is equally possible and logi- cal: namely, that writers end up on the side of the patients. If Freud's pa- tients and the hero of the novella share the same dreams, paranoid struc- tures, and hysterias, then these must belong to the writer's unconscious as well. There is one small difference, however: hysteria speaks, but Jensen publishes. Mania and Dreams can no longer be attributed to an individ- ual case. The material already present in the medium that supports the psychoanalyst has achieved "artistic expression. " Rather than proceeding
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according to the rules of hermeneutics and assuming that fictional heroes naturally dream the dreams of their authors, Freud finds in Gradiva writ- ten dreams "that have never been dreamt at all, that were invented by a writer and attributed to fictional characters in the context of a story. "- Therefore, there is no need to pomon out statistically distributed non- sense to individual cases. Jensen, no different in this from Freud, is sepa- rated by a thin but impermeable piece of paper from its reverse side, from mania and dreams, and is above the suspicion of being their referent. His relation to the primal soup is not one of participation, but simulation. For invented individuals he invents dreams that in spite of this squared fiction "contain in embodied form" all the "laws" of the unconscious. Laws, let us note, and not, say (asone often prefers to read) contents. With its cen- tral metaphor, the burial of Pompeii under lava and ash, Jensen's novella does not symbolize this or that repressed content, but rather provides a "parable" of the metapsychological process of repression itself. "There really is no better analogy. "'R
In distinction from the doctor (Freud once more leaves out the mystery of his self-analysis), the writer does not extrapolate the laws of the un- conscious from others' mouths, which are unable to say why their sense becomes nonsense and their nonsense sense. A strange listening in on his own mental processes gives him not only their repressed contents but be- yond that their signifying logic. Once again, then, the writer seeks out a nom-like authority, which administers the rules of all writing. but be- cause they are rules, it remains unnecessary and impossible to "pro- nounce" the unconscious laws that have been discovered. It is enough that they have been given a material location: paper, on which discursive rules such as repression are "embodied. "
In written material, therefore, the localization that defines psycho- analysis in the discourse network of 1900is left out-because it has al- ready occurred. If the diverse local centers of the brain-physiological localization doctrine are linked together in the typewriter, psychoanaly- sis-m ysteriously true to its neurophysiological beginnings-reverses the founding relationship. Its textual theory replaces that body with a type- writerly corpus.
The text as embodied psychoanalysis does not distinguish the literary or even the classical. It is simply the effect of a medium that governs the analyst himself, First when he reads the flow of the voice as a rebus, and second when he writes. In order to achieve this effect, it is sufficient for a mania, rather than flood Freud's senses with hysterical visuality and the spoken faqade of dreams, to have been written down. If and because a work called Memoirs of My Nervous Illness is present in the form of a
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book, psychoanalysis treats it very differently than it would a mentally ill person on the couch.
Freud's "Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia" seems at first to be a compromise solution arrived at in an attempt to extend his practice to cases who, in contrast to neurotics, cannot wander around freely and so (if they have not lost language alto- gether) can only send out messages in bottles. Paranoiacs cannot be ana- lyzed; they "cannot be compelled to overcome their internal resistances, and . . . in any case they only say what they choose to say. " Such, how- ever,eversincePilate's6yiypa& yiypa& ("WhatIhavewritten Ihave written"; John 19:22),is the very definition of a text. Which is why "pre- cisely" in the case of a paranoiac "a written report or a printed case his- tory can take the place of personal acquaintance with the patient" (read:
. his spoken story). "
So much for the introduction to and justification for the analytic act.
By the end everything reads much differently. Schreber's book, instead of simply replacing the flow of the hysteric's voice, attains all the honors of theory, in that the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness also contains what is indeed memorable: the embodied laws of the unconscious. As with Jensen, the writer Freud greets as a colleague, albeit one who was at the time a patient in the Sonnenstein asylum in Pima.
Since I neither fear the criticism of others nor shrink from criticizing myself, 1 have no motive for avoiding the mention of a similarity which may possibly dam- age our libido theory in the estimation of many of my readers. Schreber's "rays of God," which are made up of a condensation of the sun's rays, of nerve-fibres, and of spermatazoa, are in reality nothing else than a concrete representation and pro- jection outwards of libidinal cathexes; and they thus lend his delusions a striking conformity with our theory. . . . these and many other details of Schreber's delu- sional structure sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes whose existence I have assumed in these pages as the basis of our explanation of paranoia. I can nevertheless call a friend and fellow-specialist to wimess that I had developed my theory of paranoia before I became acquainted with the con- tents of Schreber's book. It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than 1should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe. *"
After seventy-five pages of interpretation, Freud proclaims that inter- pretation has hardly been necessary. He finds the basic assumptions of his libido theory in Schreber also. There could be no clearer literary testi- mony from one author to another. Here psychoanalysis runs into legal difficulties quite different from those encountered in writing case histo- ries: in case histories, the analyst must protect the identities of those de- scribed, but here the author must protect his copyright. In Schreber'scase
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"the object of the analysis is not actually a person, but rather a book produced by that person," and so "the problem of professional discretion does not enter in. "" Yet a more serious problem raises its head. In order to present Schreber as a mere witness and not cede him the psvchoana- lytic copyright, Freud has to call another wimess to the stand. A psychia- trist friend will swear to the fact that the patient and his analyst (in the terms customary for fictional disclaimers) arrived independently at the same results.
Psychoanalytic discourse itself must be at stake if its founder moves to head off charges of plagiarism. In fact, Schreber'smania archives as body and text the libido theory that psychoanalysis reached only through the long detours of interpretation. Schreber's relation to the theory is that of all writers. Jensen, according to Freud, could register and write down processes occurring "in his own mind"; Schreber, according to Freud, does this with "endopsychic perceptions. " The Memoirs depicts a nerve- diseased body as the theater for whole theomachies, where divine nerve rays invade and retreat, destroy organs and extract brain fiber, lay down lines of communication and transmit information-a psychic informa- tion system that Freud takes at its word rather than as mania. Freud is not so believing at other points, as, for example, when the paranoiac accuses his psychiatrist, Flechsig, of persecutorial intent; behind this image of his colleague Freud senses only the patient's father. In describing the mind as information system, however, the psychotic text, which describes the sys- tem throughout its four hundred pages, is said to be the unmetaphoric truth.
There are grounds for this methodological distinction. The Oedipus complex is the nucleus of the neuroses, but the mental apparatus is co- extensive with psychoanalysis itself. Only by "assuming the existence of a spatially extended, advantageously constructed apparatus developed in meeting the exigencies of life," can Freud build his science "on a basis similar to that of other natural sciences. " But these bases are not available for experimental verification. One can only infer them with the help of "artificial aids," because "'reality' will always remain 'unknowable. ""' Accordingly, "reality" would be a necessary and impossible limit concept on the edge of the system, were it not for Schreber's endopsychic per- ceptions, which without doubt describe a body, his own, as a spatially extended mental apparatus. The corpus of the psychotic text provides psychoanalysis with its indispensable but undiscoverable basis: a body. A body is the piece of evidence without which psychoanalysis, by con- temporary standards, would have remained empty speculation.
From the first, aphasia studies had made brain localization into a methodological space; psychoanalysis becomes the destination of the
? long route that traverses this space. Schreber's mania guarantees that there is "not more mania contained" in analytic theory than its inventor would "wish. " Processes that allow endopsychic perceptions in an expe- rimental subject, however delirious, cannot not exist from a psycho- physical standpoint. Schreber's body is the verso of the pages Freud filled with writing.
The Doctor of Law Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-I~II)s,on of the widely known inventor of the Schreber garden, which is still cultivated on the edge of German cities, entered the Leipzig University Nerve Clinic of Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig in 1884 as a failed candidate for the Reichstag, was released in 1885, was appointed in 1893 to the second highest judi- cial position in the Kingdom of Saxony, the Presidency of the Senate of the Supreme Court, immediately thereafter entered Flechsig's clinic once more, was transferred several times, was released in 1902, and in 1907 was finally institutionalized until his death. The Memoirs appeared in a private edition in 1903 with the declared intention of allowing "expert examination of my body and observation of my personal fate during my lifetime. " "'
Freud's "Psycho-analytic Notes" thus appeared just at the moment to filloutandcashthisblankcheck. *'In 1911,whoevergavehisbodyover to science would get a response posthaste. Not only is the mental appa- ratus, as described by the psychotic and psychoanalytic corpus, a single, highly complex information system; the two corpora in tandem consti- tute this system a second time. Tidings of the impossible reality reach the symbolic, via media transposition. Freud receives what Schreber sends; Schreber sends what Freud receives. All that remains unsaid is why the whole discourse network worked so promptly and precisely around one individual body. Freud was much too concerned with the testimonial value of the received messages to investigate the logic of the channels. What Schreber writes, what writers write-everything became for Freud an anticipation of psychoanalysis. And he is not alone in this. Schreber too grants poets like Wagner occasional anticipations of his neuro- theology. " In the competition for corporeal knowledge, then, the ques- tion about which channels of knowledge constitute the body is left out. The discourse network of 1900 withholds its proper name.
The Memoirs constitutes an ''exhaustion''a6of Schreber's body while he was still alive. The transposition of a body into a corpus was just as necessary-namely, as necessary for survival-as was the fictional com- poser Lindner's transposition of letter to note values. After Schreber has published his book (against the wishes of his family and the medical es- tablishment), the natural sciences of the mind have only to open it-and
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? Schreber's person is "offer[ed]. . . as an object of scientific observation for the judgment of experts. " Otherwise, "at some future time" the ex- perts could only confirm "such peculiarities of my nervous system . . . by dissection of my body,'' for "1 am informed that it is extremely difficult to make such observations on the living body. ''87
Schreber as writer or Schreber as anatomical preparation-these are the only alternatives in the discourse network of 1900. Like all writers of the epoch, he plays the role of the "victim of his own writing,"nnin order to be able, in place of his autopsy, to prepare refuse, a bodily substitute, a text. Only thus can his case remain "soul murder"*9and not descend to the postmortem examination of those peculiarities that make people with nervous diseases so attractive to their psychiatrists. The patient dissects his own organs and notes their modifications while he is still alive, with a positivism that honors psychophysics and comes close to correcting fac- tually Kraepelin's Psychiatry (on the subject of hallucinations). Schreber thus practiced, as if to realize Nietzsche's assertion "for there is no soul," preventative soul murder.
But "soul murder"-in Schreber's divine "primary-" or "nerve-lan- guage" an autonym for the neurophysiological relationship between him and God-is also a chapter title in Ellen Key's The Century of the Child. Schreber could once more confront his blind exegetes and their multiple associations on the phrase, with the extent of his reading of contempo- rary works, which aside from Kraepelin, Du Prel, and Haeckel, also in- cluded her. What is called divine nerve-language in divine nerve-language and not accidentally contains many "expressions which would never have occurred to" Schreber, namely expressions "of a scientific, and par- ticularlymedicalnature,"n issimplythecodeoftheepoch. In1903itdid not take private religious illuminations to reduce, in the first sentence of one's book, the soul to nervous tissue and to the language of nervous tissue, or in the final sentences to see one's own mental illness "in the sense of a nervous illness," although not in its ordinary sense. "
But if the soul has only neurophysiological reality, university nerve clinics are more likely than Ellen Key's schools to be responsible for soul murder. A book that does not bear the title Memoirs of M y Nervous III- ness was unable to use the words nervous illness without the epithet so- called, and set forth from the beginning the doctrine that there are "no independent illnesses of the mind without those of the body. "9LThe book is Paul Flechsig's inaugural lecture as the second professor of psychiatry in the history of the University of Leipzig. The first was named Johann Heinroth and was faithful to Hoffbauer and Rei1 in teaching the "mis- taken doctrine" of mental cures. A "chasm" thus "gaped" between him and his successor Flechsig, one "no less deep and wide than the chasm
? between medieval medicine" and modem medicine. " In "the age of Flechsig and Wernicke," (Benn's term)," souls became nerve information systems, and cures became experiments. The "'localization of nervous diseases"' entered "a new epoch" (as Freud says)9'with Flechsig, who posed for his festschrift photograph in front of the picture of a massive, cut-open brain. Only the individual case created difficulties, relative ones, in the Leipzig University Nerve Clinic; only curing such a case created absolute difficulties. On the one hand, the brain contains "the key to every natural conception of mental activity" and a fortiori to those of mental di~turbancesO. ~n~the other, "the protected position of the brain" means that the substratum of the psychoses, namely, chemical and physi- cal nerve damage, "can be detected in the living only through more or less composite inferences. " Thus the psychiatrist Flechsig was impelled onto a royal diagnostic road that was simultaneously a therapeutic dead end: "the emphasis on postmortem e~amination. "~-
No sooner said than done. The corpse of Holderlin, an insane or, in other words, not bureaucratically employed teacher, was among the first to enter the new order of things via the dissection table. %The corpse of Schreber, a judicial bureaucrat who had gone over into the new order, suffered the same, now foreseeable, fate (withoutthe feared or hoped-for modifications in nervous tissue being found). "
And yet, what was said had already been done. After Flechsig decreed postmortem examination to be the psychiatric royal road, Schreber's dis- creet, anonymous reference to having "been informed" about the diffi- culties of in vivo diagnosis of insanity is superfluous. In Schreber's case, the situation of the text leaves no doubt: the imaginative copyright to the patient's theology, developed from the notion of the epistemological ad- vantages of being a corpse, belongs to Paul Flechsig. '"
The above picture of the nature of God and the continued existence of the human soul after death differs markedly in some respects from the Christian views on these matters. I t seems to me that a comparison between the two can only favour the former. God was not omniscient and omnipresent in the sense that He contzn- uously saw inside every individual living person, perceived every feeling of his nerves, that is to say at all times "tried his heart and reins. " But there was no need for this because after death the nerves of human beings with all the impressions they had received during life lay bare before God's eye, so that an unfailingly just judgment could be reached as to whether they were worthy of being received into the realms of heaven. '"'
The precision of this image of God is equaled only by Flechsig's festschrift photograph. Everything runs according to the plan set out in Flechsig's inaugural lecture, Bruin and Soul. That God can discipline his still-living victims with mental cures or psychological introspection is an age-old fallacy. The soul consists of nervous tissue, which makes in vivo inves-
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tigation impossible, but the nerves are perfect data recorders and for that reason will yield all their secrets to the clinical eye at the moment of dis- section. In other words: according to this theology, "within the Order of the World, God did not really understand the living human being and had no need to understand him, because, according to the Order of the World, He dealt only with corpses," until he initiated his world-order- defying relationship to Schreber. '">The theology simply equates God with the professor. Psychophysics banned all introspection, and theology complied; Flechsig restricted all diagnoses to corpses, and pious Schreber, performing the written dissection of his nerves, could only accommodate him. With that Schreber fabricated, to the joy of Freud, once a neu- rologist, the impossible piece ofevidence for psychoanalysis: endopsychic perceptions of brain functions.
Channels of information are indeed intimately linked. Schreber's case, rather than being an independent and indubitable piece of evidence for a libido theory, demonstrates the nexus between psychophysics and psy- choanalysis. As reader and writer, Freud walked blindly into the dis- course network to which he himself belonged. The Project for a Scientific Psychology and the Memoirs of M y Nervous IIIness are two continua- tions of a single discourse. No wonder they ran into the plagiarism prob- lem of being reverse sides of one another.
Just where Freud could have resolved the imaginary rivalry, his keen intellect failed before the discourse of the Other.
Although he cannot not have noticed that the language of Schreber's nerves and delirium is the language of the experimental neurologist Flechsig,"" his interpretation systematically replaces the name Flechsig with that of the inventor of the Schreber Garden. All the patient's sentences concerning his doctor and "God Flechsig"'" are treated only as the displacement of a homosexual libido directed at the father. With this, Freud founded the boundless Schreber literature that anchors all the sufferings of Schreber fils in the wild childrearing methods of Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber. The head bandages or orthopedic bed invented by Schreber senior and mentioned in passing in the Memoirs are then declared the "true background of Schreber'sconception of God as One Who knows man only as a corpse. " I"' Flechsig's message of the death of man, more hidden than Nietzsche's, has not reached the exegetes. Again and again the attempt is made to explain
the second industrial revolution by the first: Schreher as information sys- tem is related to orthopedic mechanics, the writing machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony" to frieze heads and planers. But nerve-language remains nerve-language, and typewriters with their own specially constructed means of making script visible are Underwood models. '" The system of 1900could spare itself the effort to spare muscular energy because it un-
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dertook to create substitutions for the central nervous system itself. Be- yond mechanical head bandages, Schreber's paranoia followed the lead of an insane neurophysiologist. His book begins (running the risk of libel suits) with an open letter to Flechsig, asking the distinguished privy coun- selor to put aside his anger for once, as the undersigned has done, and answer the rigorous scientific query whether he possibly
like so many doctors, could not completely resist the temptation of using a patient in your care us an object for scientific experiments apart from the real purpose of cure, when by chance matters of the highest scientific interest arose. One might even raise the question whether perhaps all the talk of voices about somebody having committed soul murder can be explained by the souls (rays) deeming it impermissible that a person's nervous system should be influenced by another's to the extent of imprisoning his will power, such as occurs during hypnosis. "'-
The professor in Leipzig never answered this open letter (which appeared in Leipzig). Whereas Schreber could embroil his later psychiatrists in expert-testimony disputes, which his legal understanding helped him to win, the soul murderer maintained a silence that even today puts exegetes on the wrong track. All the interest in Schreber's so-called father prob- lems substitutes consanguinity for enmity, causality for war. But the clas- sical pedagogic power of Schreber senior can only be equated with the extremely efficient disposition of power in 1900. "T'~he nerve-language at the basis of the new disposition states that "an educative influence di- rected outwards" has been played out. '"'' Because God or psychiatrists, according to the world order, can only know corpses, a temptation to conduct psychophysical experiments arises. "The miracles directed against my bead and the nerves of my head""" inscribe themselves into the nervous system without a pedagogic detour and substitute an experi- mental arrangement for the impossible cure for paranoia. The practical consequence is that anything identifiable as "influences on my nervous systememanatingfromyour[Flechsig's]nervoussystem" breaksdownin the discourse of the doctor or experimenter into "mere 'hallucinations"' of his patient. "'
If psychophysics can explain its effects out of existence, then experi- mental subjects have no choice but open warfare and thus publication. Schreber writes to Flechsig in Flechsig's language in order to demonstrate in the latter's own territory that Schreber's purported hallucinations are facts effectuated by the discourse of the Other. The Memoirs stand and fight in the war of two discourse networks. They constitute a small dis- course network with the single purpose of demonstrating the dark reality of another, hostile one.
The mentioned writing-down-system is extraordinarily difficult to explain to other people even vaguely. . . .
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Books or other notes are kept in which for years have been written-down all my thoughts, all my phrases, all my necessaries, all the articles in my possession or around me, all personswith whom I come into contact, etc. I cannot say with certainty who does the writing down. As I cannot imagine God's omnipotence lacks all intelligence, I presume that the writing down is done by creatures given human shape on distant celestial bodies . . . but lacking all intelligence; their hands are led automatically, as it were, by passing rays for the purpose of making them write down, so that later rays can again look at what has been written.
To illuminate the purpose of this whole system I must enlarge further. "'
Enlarging somewhat further, it first of all should be explained that rays are nerve-language information channels that maintain a psychotechni- cal, material link between Schreber and Flechsig (or his incarnation as God), very much counter to the conditions of the world order. Rather than manifesting Himself only to corpses, God occupies SchreberS ner- vous system by innervating all local language centers with the exception of the external speech apparatus; that is, like a good aphasia researcher, he stimulates only sensory and motoric word images. "'No wonder, then, that the nerve-language appears to be hallucinated, no wonder that it can also bridge cosmic distances. According to Flechsig, who wrote an influ- ential monograph on nerve tracts, "the greatest part of the human cere- brum'' consists "in nothing more than millions of well-isolated circuits, measuring thousands of kilometers. "'" All the data on Schreber wanders through such interwoven cables to its destination on distant planets. The information comes in, is registered, and can be reread by other rays, which are preparing to move in the opposite direction. The neurologist- god of 1900 is a single discourse network. Whether he (like the gods of Rousseau or the Apocalypse) still uses the book as a storage bank no longer matters. All books are discourse networks, but not all discourse networks are books. If the recording occurs mechanically and without any Geist, the probability of its being a purely technical procedure is greater. "It is presumably a phenomenon like telephoning. " There is, for example, the appearance of a writing angel in the trademark of a gramophone company.
It is no accident that the neurotheological discourse network stores particulars, and stores them exhaustively. Not one of Schreber's thoughts, sentences, or personal possessions is left out. The paranoid machine op-
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erates like an integrated system of all the data-storage devices that revolu- tionized recording circa 1900. And because its strategy was aimed not at statistical series but at exhausting the arbitrary case of Schreber, it also exemplifies the methodological project at the basis of psychoanalysis.
In 1882Stanley Hall began, in what was still a very statistical proce- dure, to gather material for a study entitled Tl7eContentsof Children's Minds. Soon thereafter the investigation also included individual cases, as when the vocabulary and neologistic creations of two thirteen-year-old girls were inventoried. 'IhConsequently, Erdmann could define even a po- etic vocabulary as a denumerable group of words. And consequently Freud, in his case histories, could develop a "neurosis inventory," which included all the thoughts, turns of phrase, and significant persons in the lives of his patients. The feeble-minded discourse network around Schre- ber is thus (as if to demonstrate Freud's remark on the incalculable prox- imity between mania and theory) tl7e discourse network of 1900. Only delirious memoirs betray the actual purpose of the immense effort at re- cording and storage, which "has increased to such an extent that it now includes almost all the words used in the human language. "
Exhaustion links individual cases to the discourse network of 1900. The material taken from Schreber's nerves and stored on distant suns is explicitly intended for inscription. Because it "seems to lie in the nature of the rays that they must speak as soon as they are in motion," they grant their victim, by virtue of an appropriate autonymity, this "law""* and then further the words for everything that Schreber coincidentally hap- pens to be doing. It is thus made certain that his nerves do not constitute an exception to the law, but rather serve up a verbal stew with compul- sive automatism. The rays have "the boundless impudence-1 can use no other expression-to demand that 1should express this falsified nonsense in spoken words as if it were my own thoughts. "'" As with Pameelen, the discourse network dictates nonsense, which, however, does not remain in the no man's land of psychophysical experiments, but demands Schreber's signature. It is not enough that he suffer the compulsive need to speak, which robs him of sleep and "not-thinking-of-anything-thought,''l o those basic rights of man, but he must also say that be is the speaker of all the nonsense. This is inscription as coupling.
The sudden, direct link between data-storage machines and individual cases liquidates a basic concept of 1800:the ownership of discourses. That Schreber is forced to sign the nonsense forced upon him logically reverses the storage procedures that ensnared him and his contempo- raries. God in his ignorance of Man countenances what by the bureau- cratic norm is the "completely mistaken view" that when Schreber, "for example, reads a book or newspaper, . . . the thoughts contained therein are my own thoughts. " The patient threatened with soul murder need
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only quite accidentally sing a few notes from the revenge aria in the Magic Flute, and immediately his brain fills with whispering voices "which pre- sume that . . . I am actually in the grip of despair. "'" Data-storage ma- chines are much too accurate to make the classical distinctions between intention and citation, independent thought and the mere repetition of something already said. They register discursive events without regard for so-called persons. Thus the pretext of being able to distinguish be- tween mental ownership, citation, and parapraxes became as superfluous as in psychoanalysis. "' To attribute each and every flatus vocis to a speaker as his mental property means to divest him of everything and drive him into insanity-an unparalleled trick indeed.
The writing-down also serves as another peculiar trick which again is based on a total misunderstanding of human thinking. It was believed that my store of thoughts could be exhausted by being written-down, so that eventually the time would come when new ideas could no longer appear in me. . . . This was the trick: as soon as an idea I had had before and which was (already) written-down, recurred-such a recurrence is of course quite unavoidable in the case of many thoughts, for instance the thought in the morning "Now I will wash" or when playing the piano the thought "This is a beautiful passage," etc. -as soon as such a budding thought was spotted in me, the approaching rays were sent down with the phrase "We have already got this," scil. written-down. '"
It makes no difference, then, whether the heavenly secretaries inscribe sentences or describe things as they occur. At one moment Schreber has to subscribe to the view that the imbecility forced on him is natural to him, at another that what is natural to him is imbecility. As precisely as Ebbinghaus sorted out previously learned nonsense, the nerves note all of Schreber's previously spoken sentences, so that he is subject to the recur- rence of recurrence itself. In triumphant Saxon accents, the nerves mock the correct High German faith of the bureaucrat on leave, according to which thinking and speaking are the nature of Man. With the eternal re- currence of "We already have't; we already have't" [harnmirschon ham- mirschon] eternal recurrence triumphs over original genius, as does psy- chophysics over Absolute Spirit. In order to make someone an imbecile, it suffices to impute to him an exhaustible supply of possible thoughts. Every discursive manipulation produces whatever claims it happens to make. It is not for nothing that the beings in charge of recording have no need for minds; their imbecilic inventorying drives Schreber out of his. The psychiatric insight that lists, address books, inventories, and a fortiori discourse networks are fundamentally examples of the flight of ideas, be- comes practice. The case of Schreber verifies once more Stransky's obser- vation that the flight of ideas can have pathological grounds as easily as it can have experimental grounds.
But when experiment and pathology coincide and the experimenter in-
? deed does drive the experimental subject crazy, the remaining problem is self-defense. All the gods that pursue Schreber announce their plan as "We want to destroy your reason"; against all such pursuit Schreber at- tempts "my allotted task of at all times convincing God . . . of my un- diminished powers of reason. '"" To this end he not only reads news- papers and books, but also cultivates the "notion" that "human thinking is inexhaustible; for instance reading a book or a newspaper always stimu- lates new thoughts. " ' l ' The basic principles of the classical discourse net- work have thus deteriorated into being the defensive weapons of a mental patient. In the crossfire of psychophysics, the last bureaucrat is left with only the sediment of his education, whose norms, however, are taken apart bit by bit. Inexhaustibility, this signum of great works, becomes in Schreber's desperation an attribute of newspapers as well. Poems suffer a similar fate. Among the "methods of defense" that make "even the most drawn-out voices finally perish," Schreber included reciting verses learned by heart, "particularly Schiller's ballads. " But he then had to realize that "however insignificant the rhymes, even obscene verses" did just as well as his classical poet. "As mental nourishment" obscene verses are "worth their weight in gold . . . compared with the terrible nonsense my nerves are otherwise forced to listen to. " '"
Newspaper rather than oeuvre, memorization rather than understand- ing,bawdyverseratherthanSchiller-the PresidentoftheJudicialSenate (on leave) himself takes apart the education that should have provided a defense against his neurologist-tormenter. The old bureaucratic race of the Schrebers must pay for the fact that Flechsig's plot denied Schreber "choice of those professions which would lead to closer relations with God such as that of a nerve specialist. ""- Only countering one medium with another can save one from psychophysics, and onlv mimicry can save one from voices that level all discourses to the stratum of their mate- riality. "There had been times when I could not help myself but speak aloud or make some noise, in order to drown the senseless and shameless twaddle of the voices. ""a That this tactic, despite every refinement, "ap- peared as raving madness to the physicians who did not know the true reason" simply demonstrates once more how indistinguishable pathology and experiment are. "' God makes an imbecile of someone who resists the onslaught with imbecility. The voices generate "more o r less senseless and partly offensive phrases, vulgar terms of abuse, etc. "; l'" Schreber com- bines Schiller and bawdy verse, poetry and noise. As in every war, the defensive forces have to learn from the attacking side. The case of Schreber is "the unheard-of event," as Goethe defined the proper material of the novella, of responding to Flechsig's psychophysics with a psychophysical nonsense.
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And that, if it is not madness, is at least literature. In the Sonnenstein asylum high above the Elbe, a solitary and unrecognized experimenter practiced the apotropaic techniques that twelve years later would win fame and a public for the Zurich Dadaists in the Cafe Voltaire. On March 29, 1916, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, and Emil von Janko appeared
in the performance of a p o h e simultun. This is a contrapuntal recitative, in which three o r more voices speak, sing, whistle, and so on simultaneously, so that t h e i r e n c o u n t e r s c o n s t i t u t e t h e e l e g a i c , c o m i c , o r b i z a r r e c o n t e x t of t h e t h i n g . T h e obstinacy of the voice is starkly expressed in such simultaneous poems, and so too is the determining effect of accompaniment. The noises (an rrr drawn out for minutes, banging sounds or the wail of a siren, and so on) have an existence whose energy surpasses that of the human voice. The p o h e simultun deals with the value of the voice. The human voice represents the soul, the individuality in its errant journey accompanied by demonic guides. The noises provide the back- ground-the inarticulate, the fatal, the determining. The poem attempts to ex- pose man's entanglement in mechanistic processes. With typical abbreviation it shows the conflict of the vox humunu with a world that threatens, strangles, and destroys, whose speed and noise are inescapable. "'
The insane asylum and the artists' cafe witness performances too simi- lar to require comment. Only Hugo Ball's commentary requires com- ment, in that it abandons its own insight into the determining importance of indeterminate and unarticulated elements. Schreber too wandered be- tween demonic guides and mechanistic processes, but he did not employ the vox humana (which is an organ register, not Nature) in order to as- sert individuality. He simulated-as Huelsenbeck, Tzara, and Janko also did-noises whose energy surpassed that of his own voice. He took the side of the unarticulated, which is the background of all modem media. Those who roar, howl, or whistle are not presenting lachrymose theories of Man in a technological world; rather, they aim at discursive effects against definite and hostile discourses. The inhuman discourse network of 1900 is as inescapable as Gertrude Stein's dark oracle, but precisely its inhumanity allows one to escape from the imperative of sense. Like the audience in the coffee house, Schreber is released from all "effort" to "distinguish single words in the confusion of voices,"'" just as in the cof- feehouse words drown in the noise of the self-produced confusion of four artists' voices. When power rescinds its classical imperative of establish- ing only signifieds, even the victims gain new pleasure. The rays are by nature flighty and forgetful; thus Schreber too can indulge his beloved thoughts-thinking-nothing. God, the neurological mutant, places physi- cal pleasure above all morality; thus Schreber too is permitted enjoyment on consistent grounds: "On the other hand God demands constant en-
joyment, as the normal mode of existence for souls within the Order of
? the World. It is my duty to provide Him with it in the form of highly de- veloped soul-voluptuousness. . . . If l can get a little sensuous pleasure in this process, I feel I am entitled to it as a small compensation for the ex- cess of suffering and privation that has been mine for many years past. ""'
Wherever sense ends, enjoyment begins: a pleasure in the margins that a discourse network of pure signifiers leaves to its victims. Recollection and the establishment of sense, work and the deferral of drives may once have been the tasks of an individual, judicial bureaucrat-but the nerves and their slave practice a Nietzschean or "natural tendency. . . to forget" that "would soon have erased any . . . impressions'"" and knows only the many present moments of voluptuousness. Becausethere is already an exhaustive comprehension of data, data-storage machines need not be implanted in people as well, thus giving each a soul. The discourse net- work around Schreber is more merciful than Lindhorst's archive. Roar- ing, forgetful, suffering flight of ideas, the Senate President on leave can enjoy a freedom this side of bureaucratic and human dignity. That free- dom has been the definition of a subject since 1900. Schreber, because Flechsig's psychophysics used or misused him in experiments counter to the world order, became singular as only used pencils, knives, and watches could be. In opposition to the productive individual, he is allowed simply to consume whatever "falls off" chains of signifiers in the way of "sensual pleasure. " The subject of the unconscious is literally a "residuum. " I "
Individual differences drop onto the position of the subject. Whether the arbitrary case is called Schreber or Nietzsche means little. Assistant physician Dr. Ziehen said of his patient, Nietzsche: "He speaks rapidly, loudly, and without coherence, often for many hours. His mood is mor- bidly cheerful and exalted. """ Dr. Weber, director of the Sonnenstein in- sane asylum, said of Schreber, his guest at the family dinner table: "Ob- viously it often requires his greatest energy not to utter the 'bellowing noises,' and as soon as the table is cleared while he is still on his way to his room one can hear his inarticulate sounds. '"'' The "howling monkey" Nietzsche produced just such howls or "miraculous bellows" before the daughters of the desert. But whereas Nietzsche still appeared as a Euro- pean who found the perfect "sign amnesia" I'" only in the envied opposi- tion of two women, Schreber took the flight of ideas so far as to forget his gender. If "my whole body is filled with nerves of voluptuousness from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, such as is the case only in the adult female body, whereas in the case of a man, so far as 1know, nerves of voluptuousness are only found in and immediately around the sexual organs,"'" then this body is "a woman. "
Not the Woman, who does not exist, but a woman with the great privilege from which drive deferment and bureaucratic duties have kept
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? her: "succumbing to intercourse. """ Any man who becomes a neurophysi- ological case can n o longer be a man. In repeated petitions addressed to his doctor, as formal as they were pressing, a Senate President requested an experimental test of his proposition that he was a woman with nerves of voluptuousness interpenetrating his body from head to toe.
Thus the neurologist's strategy to extract SchreberS brain tissue failed due to its SUCC~SS. '~S'ensual pleasure is gained by killing off Man and the male. Schreber enjoyed the becoming-a-woman that threatened him; he used the discourse network that emptied him. Although the Memoirs of M y Nervous Illness no sooner promises than forgets to provide an "an- thology""' of all the senseless, insulting, common, and obscene dis- courses that the discourse network has stored and mobilized in making Schreber an imbecile-the bulk of its four hundred pages is just this an- thology. In the Memoirs a choice anthology of sexual descriptions that the bureaucrat Schreber would never have uttered or put on paper can and must be written down. The moral and legal measures Schreber could have taken to ensure an author's mental ownership fail when it comes to writing down a discourse network. "' Having become a woman in order to take the dictation of a neurologist God, having become a taker of dic- tation in order to be permitted to write the voluptuousness of being a woman, Schreber is free. Schreber as Writer [Schreberals Schreiber]lu writes up what has written him off. Without originality, mechanically, like nothing so much as those mindless beings who attend to the task of recording, he put Flechsig's neurophysiology or imbecilic nonsense on paper. Nothing and no one could hinder him in so doing. "For all mir- acles are powerless to prevent the expression of ideas in writing. ""'
A Simulacrum of Madness
In the eyes of I don't know which,-perhaps a very near culture we will be the ones who broughttwosentences into the closest proximity, sentences that are both as contradictory and as impossible as the famous "1 am lying," and that both desig- nate the same empty autoreferentiality: "I am writing" and "I am mad. '"
Literature in the discourse network of 1900is a simulacrum of mad- ness. As long and insofar as someone writes, his delirium is protected from the loss of the word. Distinguished from madness by a nothing named simulacrum, by a foil named paper, writing traverses the free space of eternal recurrence. Literary writing is its own justification pre- cisely in its empty self-referentiality.