No More Learning

" 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. In fact, research into speech deficits has uncovered cases (aside from the strategic simulation of aphasia) in which patients "lose words, but retain the meaning of notes. "'"
The Trio for Piano, Violin,and Violincello by Heinrich Lindner, Opus I , is subsequently inspired by a train station. The composer manque hears the stationmaster sing commands as melodies (like the "children who while playing give rhythm and alternation to their calls"). Shortly afterwards the concourse sounds in a confusion of voices, but this does
nothing to disturb Lindner's musical dream, because all media circa 1900 presuppose white noise. The "confusion of voices, letting no single sound reach or disturb him," inspires the precocious and supposedly ungifted student to Opus I?
If the transposition of media can make musical notes out of letters and scores out of a confusion of voices, a decoding of the darkest and least translatable of texts is also possible and necessary. "The Great Lalula" has, if not meaning, at least method, and not merely as "a more or less modulatory expression of an entirely definite and to the greatest extent exscene worldcomprehensivewordchildandartview. "'* For the decoding that Morgenstern himself produced, albeit as "Jeremias Mueller, Ph. D. "- that is, with professional distance from his own wordchildandart-allows no modulation whatsoever.
THE GREAT LALULA
Too much has been attributed to this song so far. All it hides is simply- checkmate. No chess player will ever have understood it any other way. But in order to accommodatethe layman and beginner, I will outline the position here.
Kroklokwafii = K a 5 (white) king a 5. The question mark signifies some
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question as to whether the position of the king might be stronger in another posi- tion. But let us proceed.
Semememi! = S e I (black) knight e I . Theexclamation point signifies a strong position. ''
And so on and so forth, until all the nonsense words are exhausted and a crazy checkmate position is left. The self-commentary, far from translat- ing any life of the soul, is once again a transposition of media. The con- tents of the system of notation count only insofar as they equal a hom- onym in the second system. (Nothing in S e I explains the m and i of Semememi. ) Whether from algebraic variable to note values or from letters to chess abbreviations, every transposition leaves gaps. Most im- portantly, however, the result is never a surplus of meaning. "T' much has been attributed to this song so far"-that could be written on the gravestone of an entire literary criticism.
Attention to materials and the transposition of media are two sides of the same positivism. Only the methodologically rigorous isolation of in- dividual groups of signs or cultural technologies can make such exact connections possible. Voice and gesture, lettering and ornament, p'icture and sound, letters and notes, Stefan George script and the "oral reading of poems'' "-all of these connections presuppose technical analyses. There are odd and quite compelling indications of this.
When Morgenstern's late master invented a new type of dance, what had once been a parody of explication, as in "Lalulii," became dead se- rious. Eurythmy consisted in taking letter after letter, part of speech after part of speech, out of Goethe's poems and assigning to each particular signifier an iterable expressive gesture. Once these had been definitively established, the master, Rudolf Steiner, would simply command "faster, faster"-and the female disciples, whose "own, very wise head is some- what out of it, help the essential power of the sound gain its autonomous effect. " 'I
Whether or not such women were of flesh and blood has nothing to do with the parallel connection of media. The Edison of Villiers' novel con- structs a mechanical Eve with a phonographic vocabulary of 2 x 7 hours playing time rather than human lungs and so-called linguistic compe- tence. Because this vocabulary is denumerable, Edison is able to syn- chronize Eve's recorded speech capacity with her no less mechanical ex- pressive movement^. '^ What will and must strike the future beloved of the future woman as a coherent organism is actually technological eurythmy.
What happened in the novel also happened in reality, but with far- reaching sociohistorical effects. From the very beginning the silent film was coupled (either mechanically or through subaltern accompanists)'' with recorded sound. The two separate media, picture without sound and
? sound without picture, allowed synchronization. The progressive literati Albert Ehrenstein, Walter Hasenclever, Else Lasker-Schiiler, Kurt Pinthus, Franz Werfel, and Paul Zech were dismayed that "dismal background piano clinking" and (the scene is Dessau in 1913)"a narrator comment- ing on the action in a mighty Saxon accent" drowned out the film. " But their suggested improvements, all of which tended toward a media-true lbrt pour l'urt of the silent film, themselves coupled the movies and the professionalism of writers. The screenplays that Pinthus and his com- rades offered to the industry as their Movie Book demonstrate with every word that the untranslatability of media is essential to the possibility of their coupling and transposition.
Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow
The transposition of media could be applied from jokes to mysticism to the culture industry. Moreover, it could be grounded methodologi- cally, and so it became the paradigm of a new science. Freud's Interpreta- tion of Dreams, in the date on its title page proudly and proleptically dis- playing the zero number of a new century, inaugurated the transposition of media as science.
Before there can be any interpretation of dreams, three secular falla- cies need to be dismissed. The first is the philosophers' prejudice, which holds that dreams are without objective, reasonable connection and are unworthy of interpretation. As opposed to Hegel (whom, justifiably, he cites only indirectly),' Freud prefers to follow the lay opinion that as- sumes "a meaning, though a hidden one" in the dream. But popular dream interpretation has remained translation in two complementary ways: it makes the whole dream "symbolic" of global meanings, or it translates parts of a dream by "mechanically transferring" each part "into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key. "z Both techniques, the analogical and the digital, presuppose that the two media, the dream and language, are either similar or coextensive. The new science rejects these two views as naive. In a well-known com- parison, Freud defines his procedure of strict transposition of media.
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. The dream-thoughts are imme- diately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictoral
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? value instead of accordingto their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error. Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into rais- ing objections and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are nonsensical. A b a t has no business to beon the roof of a house, and a head- less man cannot run. Moreover, the man is bigger than the house; and if the whole picture is intended to represent a landscape, letters of the alphabet are out of place in it since such objects d o not occur in nature. But obviously we can only form a proper judgement of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each sepa- rate element by a syllable or word that can be represented by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer non- sensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort and o u r predecessors in the field of dream- interpretation have made the mistake of treating the rebus as a pictorial composi- tion: and as such it has seemed to them nonsensical and worthless. '
Interpretive techniques that treat texts as charades or dreams as pic- ture puzzles have nothing to d o with hermeneutics, because they d o not translate. The translation of a rebus fails because letters do not occur in nature, the ultimate reference of all translation. In George's poem "The Word," the poetic imagination and the treasury of language are not co- extensive, just as in Freud's comparison the picture of the landscape is not coextensive with an alphabetic sign system. Negative findings such as these necessitated a new approach. In order to transpose the manifest content of dreams into latent dream thoughts, each of the two media must first be designated as defined sets of elements with defined rules of association (laws of articulation). If Faust marked the moment in the his- tory of the sign in which there was no awareness of the paradigmatic axis, The Interpretation of Dreams conducts the analysis of signs solely ac- cording to the place values of discrete elements. . It does not establish the status of a symbol in the classical sense-in other words, a transcenden- tal signified, which previously absorbed all words, above all the word word. In its place there are now separate subsystems of signifiers, in which the parts of the rebus must be tentatively placed until they fit in a subsystem. Rebus is the instrumental case of res: things can be used like words and words like things. Interpretation has everything to learn from "the linguistic tricks of children, who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects, and moreover invent new languages and ar- tificial syntactic forms. " Therefore every manipulation of letters and words is allowed within the framework of a determined language. Dreams, "impossible as a rule to translate into a foreign language," 'trav- erse all the associative domains of a given language. The transposition of media is thus an exact correlate of untranslatability.
? Neither similar nor coextensive, dream-content and dream-thoughts relate to one another like "Laluli" and checkmate in chess. Freud, "one of the most daring language adventurers and word mystics," is also "a brother of Morgenstem. "' The decoded dream-content is no more poetry than chess notations are poems. Dreams could pass as Poetry only as long as optical and acoustical hallucinations were counted as part of the dream. Nothing remains of the beautiful appearance when the elements of a dream-content are transposed one by one into signifiers, even if the result is a poetical phrase of the greatest significance. Freud's irony is in- tended only for those who would see in the picture puzzle the substitutive sensuousness of a drawing or landscape. As true "syllabic chemi~try"' with which the decoding method competes, the dream is already a piece of technique distant from nature and painted landscapes.
But this technique bears the stamp of its era. Bahr, for example, em- phasized that "nature," where it could "express itself freely and without restraint," namely in dreams, "proceeds punctually and exactly accord- ing to the prescription of the new school" of symbolist "rebus litera- ture. "' With Freud, dream interpretation presupposes cutting apart any continuous series of images before syllables or words can substitute for them. It is no accident that the rebus Freud describes or makes up con- tains a running figure whose head has been conjured away. Only a cripple without a head yields an unconscious, and only the dismembered phe- nomena of the dream yield readable script. The poem of the picket fence divides syllables by the space between them in exactly the same way; and in exactly the same way the film camera cuts up continuous movement. The fact that The Interpretation of Dreams ignores the phenomenon of the dream is the first step toward deciphering dreams. Transpositions liquidate the medium from which they proceed. Every syllable and word of Freud's requirement that one substitute for every image a syllable or word is to be taken literally. This is demonstrated in his treatment of hys- terics, who are "for the most part visually oriented. "
Once a picture has emerged from the patient's memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with his de- scription of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into words. We go on to examine the memory picture itself in order to discover the direction in which our work is to proceed. "Look at the picture once more. Has it dis- appeared? " "Most of it, yes, but I still see this detail. " "Then this residue must still mean something. Either you will see something new in addition to it, or something will occur to you in connection with it. " When this work has been accomplished, the patient's field of vision is once more free and we can conjure up another picture. On other occasions, however, a picture of this kind will remain obstinately before the patient's inward eye, in spite of his having described it; and this is an indication to me that he still has something important to tell me about
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the topic of the picture. As soon as this has been done the picture vanishes, like a ghost that has been laid. '"
F. L. Goltz showed that A Dog Without a Cerebrumhas no visual rep- resentations. Freud shows how one can eliminate images from a dream or memory without a scalpel (and attribute the elimination to the pa- tients themselves). "Putting into words" blinds the "inner eye" in which Anselmus and Hoffmann delighted. Sensitive souls can repeat the fashion- able condemnation that Freud burdened an economy of libidinal expen- diture with an obsolete Mosaic ban on images. " But it was one of the few options left to writers in the discourse network of 1900. Up against a competition that could replace substitutive sensuality with the real flow of data, the administrators of words swore by the phrase "Look at the image again. Has it disappeared? " The flood of images is literally ex- hausted, that is, taken apart element by element in such paradoxical questions. When even the most imaginative hysterics lose their store of images on the couch, they also learn the renunciation that writers com- pleted and announced circa 1900:"Without the word, no thing can be. ""
Und weinen dass die bilder immer fliehen Die in s c h h e r finsternis gediehen-
Wann der klare kalte morgen droht.
And weep because the visions which assail In exultant darknessalways pale
When the clear and cold of dawn return. "
George wrote it down, and Schonberg'smusic made it unforgettable . . . But what spirit has been laid to rest once the hysteric's flood of images has been transposed into words? It is impossible to identify with cer- tainty, but there are indices. The images appear before an inner eye; they appear in a malady that, by contrast to imageless obsessional neurosis, most commonly affects women; they illustrate a love that is obedience to the nuclear family. Could the spirit that Freud drives out not be simply
the classical function of the feminine reader? The hystericizing of women circa 1800,after all, consisted in teaching them to read in such a way that poetic content was translated, through enjoyment and hallucination, into signifieds. What was brought to light on the couch may thus have been only a historical sediment," at the moment when it became dysfunc- tional, in order to teach another kind of reading, the literal, of everyday experience. Psychoanalysis would have stood at the spot of a "bifurca- tion" that from 1900on divided high and popular cultures according to the "phrase, book or picture; there is no third choice. "" Women, chil- dren, and the insane, instead of continuing to dream images in books, discovered the unconscious of the movie house; the science of psycho-
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analysis, by contrast, discovered in women, children, and the insane, in order to inscribe it into them, an elite unconscious of secret scriptural codes. '6At the end of her cure, one of Freud's famous hysterics dreamed that even she was reading calmly in a "big book. "''
Immediately after the initial showing of the first German art film, Otto Rank began to psychoanalyze it. One of his assumptions was "that repre- sentation in the movies, which is suggestive of dream technique in more than one respect, expresses in clear and sensual picture language certain psychological conditions and connections that the Poet cannot always grasp with words. "'" Instead of pursuing such associations, Rank trans- posed the film sequences of The Student of Prague serially into the lexi- con of literary doppelganger motifs and this lexicon in turn into the ana- lytic theory of narcissism. Professional readers overlook the fact that the doppelganger motif films the act of filming itself. The movies are only the "actual psychic surface," the "arbitrary and banal starting point for broaching extensive psychological problems. "" Rank is thus quite con- vinced of the manifest-latent distinction-not only for the psychic appa- ratus, but for the connection between the technical and literary.
And Freud? In 1883, directly continuing the work of Muybridge, Albert Londe built an electrical "short-exposure series" camera, and two years later Charcot used it to film his hysteric patients in the SalpOtriire. The young neurologist Freud was watching. zoBut for him, as well, film recordings-that is, the cutting up of the great hysterical curve-were only an arbitrary and banal starting point. His approach to hysterics broached the completely different problem of exhausting the flood of im- ages. Movies aren't mentioned in The Interpretation of Dreams. Uwe Gaube's fine study Film and Dreams fills this gap by citing American psychologists, who read the manifest dream-content cinematographi- cally. " Philologically and historically speaking, however, it remains a fact that Freud did not even ignore the Other of his decoding. The filmlike, presentative symbolism of the dream images vanished in the rhetorical- scriptural domain instituted by psychoanalysis. Whatever "visual forms of the flight of ideas" haunted unfolding dreams were excluded. zzAs with Saussure, whose linguistics could begin only after the mythical separation of firmament and ~ a t e r , ~of' thoughts and sound, of anything halluci- natory and undifferentiated, the movie pleasures of viewers like Ronne and Pinthus remained a limit concept on the system'sedge. 'The unity of this world appears to me to be something obvious, unworthy of empha- sis. What interests me is the dissection and division of something that would otherwise be lost in the primal SOU^. "^'
The soup is thus not denied, but circumvented. That was the profes- sional path, by contrast to mystical and philosophical contemporaries.
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Rudolf Steiner made into a secret doctrine Benedict's discovery that those saved from death had seen their lives pass before them as in a time-lapse film. " Henri Bergson denounced, in favor of his Creative Evolution, the "cinematographic mechanism of consciousness," which was unable to process the continuous flow of the durke and was limited to discrete im- ages. z6The philosophy of life thus became a kind of movie that would have sacrificed its working principle, the cutting of images, to what was only a cunningly produced illusion in the viewer. Freud, however, per- sisted, like the researcher on the tachistoscope, in investigating a mechan- ics of dreamwork that was accomplished not by an illusory consciousness but by the unconscious itself.
The fact that psychoanalysis, given the options of cinematic dream and the tachistoscope, chose the symbolic method is indicative of its place in the system of sciences in 1900. This place had nothing to do with a "scientific self-misunderstanding" and for that reason also had little to d o with the human sciences. " In his admirable uncertainty about whether the return of language circa 1900represented the last moraine of transcen- dental knowledge or a new beginning, Foucault placed psychoanalysis, ethnology, and structural linguistics in a position where the human sci- ences' inner perspective on Man was transversed by language as an ex- terior element. The uncertainty arose because Foucault conceived dis- cursive rules as comprehensible and therefore overlooked technologies. But innovations in the technology of information are what produced the specificity of the discourse network of 1900,separating it from transcen- dental knowledge and thus separating psychoanalysis from all human sciences.
Freud's early work O n Aphasia was a brilliant, immediately acclaimed critique of brain physiology and its relation to language. Without doing any original experiments or dissections, the neurologist demonstrated to his colleagues that their all too localized language centers did not take into account the primacy of function. The critic maintained his allegiance to all the assumptions of that theory of language; he drew conclusions from deficiencies and isolated discursive functions, although not pri- marily in an anatomical sense. His Project for a Scientific Psychology consequently.
contains a topical model of isolated functions (conscious- ness and the unconscious), whose positions remain strictly functional. The Project provided the very model of contemporary models; the soul became a black box. One need only compare the hypothetical pathways, discharges, cathexes, and (of course discrete) neurones of Freud's text with statements about the material of brain physiology, which, since Sigmund Exner, had described the brain as a "street system" with more or less
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deeply engraved "driving tracks,"*8or as a network of telegraphic "relay stations" with more or less prompt connection^. ^^ Freud's mental appa- ratus, which has recently been interpreted as protostructuralist, merely conformstothescientificstandardsof itsday. " Thesoledifference,though one fraught with consequences, between it and neurophysiology is its lack of anatomical localization. Psychoanalysis, not content with looking forward to "filling in this gap" in a distant future," undertook another kind of localization.
Freud's study of aphasia inherited all the material on speech deficits and defects that doctors had obtained by distinguishing and localizing in- dividual aphasias. " 'Quill pen' instead of 'pencil,' 'butter' [Butter] for 'mother' [Mutter],'Fother' for 'father' and 'mother'" 'I are only selected examples, and their oddly Freudian quality is not just an effect of the con- text they appear in. The Psychopathology of Everyduy Life thankfully made use of the parapraxes in speaking, reading, and writing that the In- dogermanic linguist Rudolf Meringer and the psychiatrist Karl Mayer had gathered from colleagues and patients, in their attempt to demon- strate, first, that parapraxes were not a matter of free ''subjectivity"3' and, second, that they could be localized in an anatomically conceived system of language rules. Freud thus had an immense store of nonsense at his disposal, material that had been statistically ordered by doctors and linguists so as to provide inferences from the known deficiencies to brain functions and from those to language as a system. But anyone who attacks localization breaks the only thread holding together the statistics and lists. The collection of nonsense became a mere aggregate. That was reason enough to reverse the sorting procedure. Instead of ordering the data of countless speakers in columns until the rules of language emerged, psychoanalysis assembled the linguistic errors of one speaker into a text in which the rules of his individual speech came to light.
There were sound psychophysical premises for such a methodological shift. The psychoanalytic distinctions of condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy, on the one hand, and the structural linguistic distinction of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic on the other, are only transpositions of the fundamental principle of associationist psychology. Ziehen established that all associations play only on similarity or con- tiguity, on the paradigmatic or syntagmatic axes. "
Scientific discretion led Meringer and Mayer to indicate only paren- thetically and with abbreviations which colleagues or patients committed particular solecisms; they recorded the fine specimen "Freuer-Breudian method"" under the rubric initial-consonant-syllabic confusion, or ac- cording to rules of similarity. Freud had only to leaf through the con- tiguity of their pages to find the same speaker committing another distor-
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tion of Freud-and the Breuer-Freudian method could suppose, quite unlinguistically, that the particular academic "was a colleague and not particularly delighted with this method. " I6 Nothing could be easier. The experimental or statistical jumble of syllables is given another location on paper. Rather than placing fother, the word combined from father and mother, under the heading of general paraphrase, as would have been done in the early days of neurology, the analyst Freud reads it, in the con- text of all the others provided by the same patient, as part of a single rebus. Of course, father-and-mother is this context.
The same shift in method also brought Jung to psychoanalysis. His first efforts in psychiatry carried on the statistical experiments in associa- tion and flight of ideas of investigators like Emil Kraepelin, Ziehen, and Stransky, although his subjects were limited to the patients in Eugen Bleuler's institute in Burgholzli. From report to report the statistics di- minished and the space devoted to particular cases increased. Just two associations of a hysteric woman, read together, "demonstrate beau- tifully" that "the conscious ego is merely a marionette that dances on the stage of a hidden automatic mechanism. "" Thus one day Jung reversed the sorting procedure and worked exhaustively with a single schizo- phrenic patient. All the patient's neologisms were recorded and spoken back to her, until "all associations" of each "stimulus word" were pro- duced and could in turn be used to produce associations, and so on, to the point where even hieroglyphs provided material for psychoanalytic decoding. '" But Jung was unable to hear that he had himself become a telephonic instrument of torture. "Her suffering had no rhyme or reason for her, it was a 'hieroglyphic' illness. The fact that she had been locked up for fourteen years, so that 'not even [her] breath could escape,' seemed to be nothing more than an exaggerated declaration of her forced institu- tionalization. The suffering through 'mouthpieces that are held in from the outside,' seems to refer to the 'telephone,' or voices. ""
Psychoanalysis does not cut across the human sciences from an outside called language; it traverses the field of psychophysics, working with the latter's premises and material. The shift of focus from language as system to speech does not imply that individuality has become the object of in- vestigations. "No one makes an arbitrary error in speech"-this already- established fact in anatomical and linguistic systems is brought to bear on the singular system of the unconscious. 'O The individual falls in the crossfire between psychophysics and psychoanalysis; in its place is an empty point of intersection constituted by statistical generality and un- conscious singularity. As an instance of initial-consonant-syllabic confu- sion and of Freud repression, a particular colleague is fully classified.
Whereas individuals consisted of matured and unified speech and writ-
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ing, individual cases are specified by the scattered debris of their language use. Uniqueness in the discourse network of 1900is always a result of the decomposition of anonymous, mass-produced products. According to Rilke, two "completely similar" knives bought by two schoolboys on the same day are only "remotely similar'' a week later? ' To use therefore means to wear down: out of industrially guaranteed similarity come broken, but singular things. Because these things, only a little the worse for wear, gather together whole case histories at once, the detectives Holmes and Freud carry the day. Dr. Watson doesn't have a chance when heattemptstofoilhismasterwiththefollowingchallenge:"'I haveheard you say that it is difficult for a man to have any object in daily use without leaving the impress of his individuality upon it in such a way that a trained observer might read it. Now, 1 have here a watch which has re- cently come into my possession . . . "'*' The scratches on the watch pro- vide the cocaine user Holmes with the welcome opportunity to turn page after page in the secret family history of his constant companion. As Bleuler recognized, the sciences of gathering evidence "certainly have a future. " From handwriting, from "its style, indeed from the wear of a pair of shoes," it is possible to deduce the whole person? ' Bleuler's as- sistant, Jung, investigated the psychotic wear and tear on the finished product of language.
The cocaine user Freud, however, in his great small-mindedness, would begin an analysis by considering a neurotic misuse of the finished product that is the alphabet. A twenty-four-year-old patient on the couch in the Berggasse told "the following story from the fifth year of his childhood": "He is sitting in the garden of a summer villa, on a small chair beside his aunt, who is teaching him the letters of the alphabet. He is in difficulties over the difference between m and n,and he asks his aunt to tell him how to know one from the other. His aunt points out to him that the m has a whole piece more than the n-the third stroke. "" The patient sees this as a romantic childhood scene, one that brings back summer and the histori- cal happiness of being alphabetized by the Mother's Mouth. The analyst does not dispute the reliability of the memory, but does question its imaginary significance. Had he done the former, Freud would have been like the physiologists of reading, who never encountered any confusion between m and n (only confusion between n and r, and m and w ) . Be- cause he was concerned more with the differences between letters than with letters, and more with letters than with significance, Freud trans- posed the intervals in a language to the intervals in speech. At the very place where Stephani's mothers' mouths slid lustfully and continuously from m to n,Freud confirms a harsh binary opposition. The opposition between m and n stands in as a "symbolic representation" for another
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opposition that can and must be written as the patient's rebus. "For just as at that time he wanted to know the difference between m and n,so later he was anxious to find out the difference between boys and girls, and would have been very willing for this particular aunt to be the one to teach him. He also discovered then that the difference was a similar one- that the boy, too, has a whole piece more than the girl. ""
An inscription as meaningless as it is unforgettable can thus be de- coded. The triumph of the Freudian transposition of media is to have made it possible to solve singular problems of differentiation with an in- dividual experimental subject. Psychophysicists had certainly recognized that small letters at x-height "are most often subject to confusion";H but no one had asked why individual subjects (themselves as well) produced one kind of mistake and no other. Ebbinghaus was only surprised that nonsense exhibited "very significant and nearly incomprehensible dif- ferences" in what people retained (as the twenty-four-year-old demon- strated). Gutzmann was led only as far as "the discovery of certain sus- pected trains of thought" by the "phonographic tests" he conducted, in that experimental subjects automatically and suspiciously heard or wrote nonsense as meaningful words? ' But any aspects of test material that could not be evaluated physiologically or typographically were discarded. The discarded material was so copious and so literal that no one, includ- ing the twenty-four-year-old, could approach it save as a novice. This is the reason for psychoanalysis. Material discarded by psychophysics can be resorted and then decoded. Freud's discourse was a response not to individual miseries but to a discourse network that exhaustively records nonsense, its purpose being to inscribe people with the network's logic of the signifier.
Psychoanalysis made into something significant-indeed, into the sig- nifier itself-the nonsensical attribution of nonsense to the fact that someone confused precisely the letters m and n. An opposition of letters yields the minimal signifier of a sexualized body. From this point on, the patient knows that alphabetization was only a screen for his sexuality and that sexuality is only a metaphor for the elementary opposition. What is scandalous in Freud is not pansexuality, but the return to a lucid and tan- gible play of letters of an eroticism that, as Spirit and Nature, had per- vaded the so-called world circa 1800. The phallus is as nonsensical and block-letter-like as the small mark that the m has and the n does not have. No handwriting of a continuous individual can get around the latter difference, nor can any illusion in the war between the sexes survive the former difference. What the boy's aunt began as pedagogical educa- tion ends in a system of notation that abolishes pedagogy and the soul.
? What must be said, with Aristotle, is that it is not the soul that speaks, but man who speaks by means of his soul-as long as we take into account that he has received this language, and that in order to sustain it he throws in much more than his soul: even his instincts, whose ground resonates in the depths only to send back the echo of the signifier. It is such that when the echo returns the speaker is delighted and responds with the praise of an eternal romanticism. "When the soul speaks, then" . . . the soul does speak, that is, . . . "oh! it is no longer the soul that speaks. " You can hear it; the illusion will not last long. 4a
All of Freud's case histories demonstrate that the romanticism of the soul has yielded to a materialism of written signs. When a patient "deco- rates his writing and notes with an S," it is only because S is "the first letter of his mother's name" (and not, say, an abbreviation of author- ship). " When the Wolf-Man, recounting a dream, says Espe rather than the hallucinated Wespe ["wasp"], the amputation of the initial letter rep- resents a castration complex that is typographic, and the rebus word Espe is the abbreviation S. P. , or the proper name of the Wolf-Man. '" Precisely because they do not occur in nature, letters are the keys to the uncon- scious. They cancel out conscious intention and hermeneutic understand- ing in order to expose people to their subjection to language. But meth- odologically this means that Freud (to use a pervasive metaphor of 1900) was a proofreader. Instead of reading over mistakes because of his com- pletealphabetization,heseeksoutmistakes. " Inlinewithsuchprofession- alism,intheBerggassemistakessuchas(W)Espeareneitherproducednor recorded in writing. The patients speak; as a good interview psychologist, the doctor avoids taking notes during the session. Otherwise he would only disturb the flow of speech, make "a detrimental," that is, meaningful, "selection" and distract his free-floating attention with bureaucratic tasks. 'LPsychoanalysis provides the singular example of a discourse net- work that has writing as its object but writing's complete opposite as method. Even this rebus can be solved.
Just as the patient must relate everythingthat his self-observationcan detect, and keep back all the logical and affectiveobjectionsthat seek to induce him to make a selection from among them, so the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation . . . without substituting a censorship of his own for the selection t h a t the patient has forgone. To put it in a formula, he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Justasthereceiverconvertsbackintosound-wavestheelectricoscillationsin the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor's unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconsciousness which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient's free associations. ''
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? 284 1900
The paradox of writing without script can only be solved with tech- nological media. Freud, determined to sacrifice his knowing subjectivity, produces a transposition of media onto himself: his ears become a tele- phone receiver. As it is written, men have ears only in order not to hear (and to transform everything into sense). Only the connection between electroacoustical transducers guarantees the reception of a full spectrum of noise, one that is informative to the degree that it is white. Once more, the word is "Listen to the Sacred Vibrations. " All conscious "commu- nicating" between the two counts only as a keyed rebus transmitted from one unconscious to the other. Its manifest sense is nonsense; Freud the telephone receiver picks out the parapraxes that would be mere debris under a postulate of sense.
In order to be able to fish m/nor U P . as telltale, interspersed signifiers out of a flowof speech that is merely the intimidation and resistance, the se- duction and distortion, of a consciousness, the doctor must have recorded them in advance. Freud's telephone analogy does not go far enough. Al- though it avoids the traditional recording device of writing, psycho- analysis works like a phonograph that in its developed form couples electroacoustical transducers with memory. Only sound recorders can register spoken typographic errors (an oxymoronic concept in itself).
Benjamin synchronized psychoanalysis and film with the argument that the former "isolated and made analyzable things which had hereto- fore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception," whereas the other "for the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception . . . has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. "" That doesn't quite do justice to the facts. Technologies and sciences of media transposition do not simply extend human capacities; they deter- mine recording thresholds. In the physiology of the senses these thresh- olds cannot be determined too exactly. Freud's treatment of dream and memory images is not the first or only instance of his exclusion of the whole optical realm. The fact that the doctor and hysteric patient are not allowed to look at one another means that the couch (in the best Nietzschean manner) is a pure realm of hearing. Both people are in the same room, so that eye and other forms of contact would be expected. But because mouths and ears have become electroacoustical transducers, the session remains a simulated long-distance call between two psychic apparatuses (in Freud's fine phrase). Psychoanalysis has no vague paral- lels to film; it has much more precisely learned the lesson of technological sound recorders. Its phonography of unconscious sound waves fishes, not in the wide stream of perception, but only among acoustical data.
The catch is restricted to discrete elements. Not only the imaginary sig- nificance, but also the real aspects of discourse are excluded. Freud had
? as little to d o with the physiology of speech (precisely, that studied by his teacher, E. W. Briicke) as he did with escaping to the images in the movies. Female hysterics, those born starlets, could run through, instead of the single "oh," the many real pleasures and pains of speech on the couch-from spastic halting to stuttering, clicking the tongue, gasping, or muteness-but the supposedly filterless receiver filtered them all out. Freud's inimitably forthright justification: he "could not," unlike any boy on the street, "imitate" these real aspects of speech. " The one who once diagnosed his own "motoric aphasia" recorded, in a complete reversal of Berliner'sgramophone,thelettersofsound-everything thatwasalready written, but only that, in the flow of speech. '6
Movies and the gramophone remain the unconscious of the uncon- scious. Psychoanalysis, the science born with them, confronts sequences of images with a primal repression and sequences of sound with their dis- tortion into chains of signifies Only the day when psychoanalysis be- comes psychochemistry-Freud's dream and the nightmare of others-si might wimess the repression of this repression as well.
A transposition of media that transposes images and sounds into letters does not stop there. By the force of its own logic it finally trans- ferred the letters into books. This is the relation between analytic practice and theory. What would have disturbed free-floating attention during the session later occurs after all: Freud reaches for his pen. As Walter Muschg recognized early on, Freud belonged "to the modem movement of Ger- man letters. " "
Writing circa 1900means being without voice and writing with the alphabet. Fundamentally, psychoanalysts must know when to remain si- lent vis-&vis their word-jumble generators. Not only for "persons with hysterical mutism" did writing become a "vicarious" means of expres- sion; s' the motoric aphasic behind the couch did not suffer from agraphia, either. Written case histories made a "talking cure" into-literature. The expression itself shows how this happened. Freud had no such striking expression for his invention; his first patient, Anna 0. (alias Bertha von Pappenheim), gave her "new type of treatment the name 'talking cure' [in English]. "" The writer in Freud had only to put the foreign words on paper and honor them by his definition.
But this relationship between speech and writing, prompter and au- thor, so fundamental between Freud and his hysteric patients, does not make him a Schlegel or Anselmus, or Pappenheim a Dorothea or Serpen- tina. The simple fact that Anna 0. "during this period of her illness re- markably spoke and understood only English,""' separated her from a Mother's Mouth that could whisper even Sanskrit texts in High German.
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? 286 1900
The discourse network of 1900determined that Freud would not once put the expression "talking cure" into German. Psychoanalysis is not a translating universalization that makes the speech of many women into the originary language of One Woman. In practice as in theory, in listen- ing as in recording, psychoanalysis remained the feedback of data that circumscribed an individual case. "If" Freud's famous hysteric patient should "by chance" come to read the Fragment of her analysis, she would read nothing that she and only she did not "already know. " But because or in spite of this, an "embarrassment" awaits her:6zthe parts of her speech that have found their way into print are not the expressions of a na'ive lay philosophy of the sort that Schlegel ascribed to women, but of the organs and functions of her sexuality.
The meticulous Freud calls his activity the "written record" and "ac- cordingly not absolutely-phonographically-faithful. " But in this ex- plicit competition it has such a "high degree of dependability" that Wildenbruch would for once be made nervous by literature:' Every me- dium that brings the hidden to the light of day and forces the past to speak contributes, by gathering evidence, to the death of Man. This dis- tinguishes psychoanalytic case-study novels from the classical-romantic epic form. When Goethe put together his heroines from the different indi- vidual features of different women, inviting all feminine readers to iden- tify themselves with the Woman, the models, although they may have seen themselves robbed of eyes, hair, or mouths, hardly had the fear or pleasure of being publicly recognized. The discourse network of 1800 had no need of formal, legal guidelines about authorial discretion, be- cause it voluntarily, or philosophically, saw the individual as genus. Not until the current century did popular literature begin by disclaiming any similarity between fictional heroes and living models. One popular novel- ist, Thomas Mann, was drawn into an exemplary trial in 1905and had to defend Buddenbrooks against the charge of being a roman a clef by stressing the transposition of media as his artistic achievement. w In the same year, another novel "Fragment" began: "I am aware that-in this city, at least-there are many physicians who (revolting though it may seem) choose to read a case history of this kind not as a contribution to the psychopathology of neuroses, but as a roman B clef designed for their private delectation. I can assure readers of this species that every case his- tory that I have occasion to publish in the future will be secured against
their perspicacity by similar guarantees of secrecy, even though this reso- lution is bound to put quite extraordinary restrictions upon my choice of material. " 65
The novelist Freud thus does not rule out the novelistic reading of his case histories. He simply disapproves. It is possible, but distasteful, to de-
? code psychoanalytic decodings of individual cases. Such are the intimida- tion tactics of one who turned the subject index in Mayringer-Merer, excuse me, Meringer-Mayer, into a secret-person index. Such is the pro- tection of data records, which are exhaustive only because he, the discreet doctor, in a move of fine symmetry, forbade his patients to have any dis- cretion. Freud broke off the analysis of "a high official who was bound by his oath of office not to communicate certain things because they were state secrets. "" The shift from bureaucratic ethos to psychophysics, from an oath of office to the exhausting of material, could hardly occur more drastically. Writing circa 1900necessarily conflicted with rules of discre- tion-simply because it was no longer the imagination that dictated. Freud would sooner renounce writing books than subject signifiers to the kind of distortions that once translated recognizable, bourgeois Veronicas into the pure signified of a Serpentina.
If the distortions are slight, they fail in their object of protecting the patient from indiscreet curiosity; while if they go beyond this they require too great a sacrifice, for they destroy the intelligbility of the material, which depends for its coherence precisely upon the small details of real life. And from this latter circumstance fol- lows the paradoxical truth that it is far easier to divulge the patient's most inti- mate secret3 than the most innocent and trivial facts ahout him; for, whereas the former would not throw any light on his identity, the latter, by which he is gener- ally recognized, would make it obvious to everyone. 6-
What distinguishes case histories from Poetry is the fact that the depths of the soul do not betray the identities of the persons described to readers addicted to decoding. 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.