No More Learning

Still, this seductive parallel should not distract us from the profound seriousness of our endeavor or lead us to lose the distance from our possible founding father, which sober objectivity and detached science dictate to us. Did Don Juan really have the specifically buribunkological attitude that urged him to keep a diary, not for the sake of recording, superficially, his manly con- quests, but-if I may say so-out of a sense of sheer obligation and debt vis-a-vis history? We cannot believe so. Don Juan had no interest in the past, just as he fundamentally had no interest in the future, which for him did not go beyond the next conquest; he lived in the immediate present, and his interest in the individual erotic adventure does not point to any signs of a beginning self-historicization. We cannot detect any signs of the attitude characterizing the Buribunk, which originates from the desire to record every second of one's existence for history, to immortalize oneself. Like the Buribunk keeping a diary, Don Juan relishes each individual second, and in that there is certainly a similarity of psychological gesture. Instead of conse- crating his exploits on the altar of history in the illuminated temple, how- ever, he drags them into the misty cave of brutal sensuality, devouring them animal-like to satiate his base instincts. ". Not for a single moment does he have what I would like to call the cinematic attitude of the Buribunk-he
". Hence, one could say that Don Juan is not one who ruminates upon lived experience, if one were to charge the buribunkological keeping of a diary with being a kind of intellectual rumination. That such a claim is untenable is easy to prove, for the diary-keeping Buribunk does not experience anything prior to his entries; rather, the experience consists precisely in the making of an entry and its subsequent publication. To speak of rumination is thus simply nonsense, because there is no initial act of chewing and swallowing.
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never apprehends himself a s the subject-object o f history-in which the world soul, writing itself, has become realized. And the register that Lep- orello keeps for him he takes along only as an afterthought, as a delectable flavoring for his horizontal delights. Hence, we have legitimate doubt whether, for example, from the 1,003 Spanish representatives, more than three owe their entry into the register to the very existence of the register it- self. Put differently, we wonder whether Don Juan has been prompted into action by his inner need to start and keep a register, if only in those three cases, the way numerous major achievements in the arts, in science, in everyday life have been produced solely with the idea of their recorded exis- tence in a diary or newspaper-the diary of the masses-in mind. The reg- ister was never the final cause; in implementing the acts of innervation at is- sue, it was-in the rectangle of psychological forces-relegated to the role of an accidental, of an accompanying positive motor. Thus, for us Don Juan is finished.
All the more interesting is the behavior of Leporello. He relishes the sensuous leftovers of his master, a couple of girls, a couple of choice
morsels; for the most part, he accompanies his master. A Buribunk does not do that, for a Buribunk is unconditionally and absolutely his own master, he is himself. Gradually, however, what awakens in Leporello is the desire to partake in the escapades of his master by writing them down, by taking
note of them, and it is at this moment that we see the dawn of Buribunk- dom. With the aid of a commendable trick he surpasses his master, and if he does not become Don Juan himself, he becomes more than that; he changes from Don Juan's wretched underling into his biographer. He becomes a his- torian, drags Don Juan to the bar of world history, that is, world court, in order to appear as an advocate or prosecutor, depending on the result of his observations and interpretations.
Was Leporello, however, cognizant of the implications of starting his register as the first step in a gigantic development? Certainly not. We do not want to dismiss the mighty effort behind the small register of the poor buffo, but we cannot under any circumstances recognize him as a conscious Buribunk-how should he have done it, anyway, the poor son of a beautiful but culturally retrograde country in which the terror of papal inquisition
has crushed and smashed all remaining signs of intelligence? He was not meant to see his nonetheless significant intellectual work come to fruition;
he holds the treasure-laden shrine, but he does not hold the key to it. He has not understood the essential and has not said the magic words that open the way to Aladdin's cave. He was lacking the consciousness of the writing sub- ject, the consciousness that he had become the author of a piece of world
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history and hence a juror on the world court-indeed, to exercise control over the verdict of the world court, because his written documents were proof more valid than a hundred testimonies to the contrary. Had Leporello had the strong will to this kind of power, had he ventured the magnificent leap to become an independent writing personality, he would first have writ- ten his own autobiography; he would have made a hero of himself, and in- stead of the frivolous cavalier who fascinates people with his shallow dispo- sition, we would quite probably have gotten the impressive picture of a su- perior manager who, with his superior business skills and intelligence, pulls the strings of the colorful marionette, Don Juan. But instead of taking pen into fist, the poor devil clenches his fist in his pocket.
Upon close scrutiny, the utter inadequacy of Leporello's registration method appears in numerous defects. He puts photographs in sequence without ever making an attempt to shape the heterogeneous discontinuity of successive seductions into a homogeneous continuity; what is missing is the mental thread, the presentation of development. We don't get any sense of demonstrated causal connections, of the mental, climatic, economic, and so- ciological conditions of individual actions, nothing relating to an aesthetic observation about the ascending or descending bell curve of Don Juan's evolving taste. Similarly, the register has nothing to say about the specific historical interest in the uniqueness of each individual procedure or in each individual personality. Leporello's disinterest is utterly incomprehensible; he does not even communicate any dismay when he is daily witness to his mas- ter's ingenious sexuality-how it is aimlessly scattered to the winds instead of being rationally disseminated into purposive population growth. Still
less evident is his willingness to provide reliable research data on details: nowhere does Leporello inquire into the deeper motivations of individual seductions, nowhere do we find sociologically useful data on the standing, origin, age, and so on of Don Juan's victims, as well as their pre-seduction lives-at most, we are left with the summary conclusion (which is probably not sufficient for a more serious scientific investigation) that they came from "every station, every form, and every age. " We also don't hear anything
about whether the victims later organized themselves into a larger, commu- nal mass initiative and provided mutual economic support-which no doubt would have been the only right thing to do, given their numbers. Naturally, what is also missing is any statistical breakdown within the respective cate- gories, which would have recommended itself in light of the high number of 1,003; even more, what is missing is any indication as to how the dumped girls had been taken care of by the welfare system, which in many cases had become necessary. Naturally as well, there is no inkling that, in light of the
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brutal exploitation of male social superiority in relation to defenseless women, the introduction of female suffrage is a most urgent and legitimate demand. It would be in vain to ask for the larger precepts that underlie the development of the collective soul, the subjectivism of the time, the degree of its excitation. In a word, inadequacy here is turned into reality. Leporello is oblivious to the welter of the most urgent scientific questions-much to his own disadvantage, because he has to submit his obliviousness to the judgement of history. Oblivious to pressing questions, he did not engage in as much as one investigation that the most immature student of the humani- ties today would have pounced upon, and hence missed the opportunity of evolving the consciousness necessary to recognize the significance of his own identity. The dead matter has not been conquered by the intellectual labor of its workman, and the flyers on the advertisement pillars continue to an- nounce: Don Juan, the chastised debauchee, and not: Leporello's tales. . . .
Not until Ferker did the diary become an ethical-historical possibility; the primogeniture in the realm of Buribunkdom is his. Be your own history! Live, so that each second of your life can be entered into your diary and be accessible to your biographer! Coming out of Ferker's mouth, these were big and strong words that humanity had not yet heard. They owe their distribu- tion into the nooks and crannies of even the most remote villages to a worldwide organization aimed at disseminating his ideas, an organization well managed and having the support of an intelligent press. No village is so small that it is without a blacksmith, as the old song went; today, we can say with not a little pride that no village is so small that it is not imbued with at least a touch of Buribunkic spirit. The great man,'" who presided like the chief of a general staff over his thousands of underlings, who guided his enormous business with a sure hand, who channeled the attention of the troops of researchers to hot spots, and who with unheard-of strategic skill focused attention on difficult research problems by directing pioneering dis-
. ' On this issue, all relevant documents show a rare unanimity. In his diary, Maximilian Sperling calls him "a smart fellow" (Sperling's Diaries, vol. 12, ed. Alexander Bumkotzki [Breslau, 1909], p. 8 16). Theo Timm, in a letter of August 21 to Kurt Stange, describes him as "a fabulous guy" (Timm's Letters, vol. 21, ed. Erich Veit [Leipzig, 1919], p. 498). In her diary, Mariechen Schmirrwitz says, "I find him splendid" (vol. 4, ed. Wolfgang Huebner [Weimar, 1920], p. 43 5 ). Following his first meeting with the man himself, Oskar Limburger exclaims, "He is enormous, watch out for him" (Memories ofmy Life, ed. Katharina Siebenhaar [Stuttgart, 1903], p. 87). Prosper Loeb describes him as of a "de- monic nature" (Konigsberg, 1899, p. 108). He is a "heck of a guy," says Knut vom Heu in his letters to his bride (edited by their son Flip; Frankfurt a. M. , 1918, p. 71), and so on.
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sertations-this impressive personality experienced a truly sensational rise. Born of humble origins and educated without Latin in the middle school of his small town, he successively became a dentist, a bookmaker, an editor, the owner of a construction company in Tiflis, the secretary of the head- quarters of the international association to boost tourism on the Adriatic coast, the owner of a movie theater in Berlin, a marketing director in San Francisco, and, eventually, Professor of Marketing and Upward Mobility at the Institute of Commerce in Alexandria. This is also where he was cre- mated and, in the most grandiose style, his ashes processed into printer's ink, as he had specified in detail in his will and which was sent in small por- tions to printing presses all over the world. Then, with the aid of flyers and billboards, the whole civilized world was informed of this procedure and was furthermore admonished to keep in mind that each of the billions of letters hitting the eye over the years would contain a fragment of the im- mortal man's ashes. For eons, the memorial of his earthly days will never disappear; the man-who even in death is a genius of factuality-through an ingenious, I would say antimetaphysical-positivist gesture, secured him- self a continued existence in the memory of humanity, a memory, moreover, that is even more safely guaranteed through the library of diaries that he re- leased in part during his lifetime, in part after his death. For at each mo- ment of his momentous life he is one with historiography and the press; in the midst of agitating events he coolly shoots film images into his diary in
order to incorporate them into history. Thanks to this foresight, and thanks as well to his concomitant selfless research, we are informed about almost every second of the hero's life. . . .
Now we are finally in a position to define historically the crucial contri- bution of this ingenious man: not only has he made the radically transfor- mative idea of the modern corporation feasible for human ingenuity with- out leaving the ground of the ethical ideal; not only has he demonstrated through his life that one can build a career of purposive ambition and still be an ethically complete being, bound under the sublation of the irreconcil- able duality of matter and mind in a way that invalidates the constructions of theologizing metaphysics, which were inimical to the intellectual climate of the twentieth century, through a victorious new idealism; he has, and this is the crux, found a new, contemporary form of religion by strictly adhering to an exclusionary positivism and an unshakable belief in nothing-but-mat- ter-of-factness. And the mental region in which these numerous and contra- dictory elements, this bundle of negated negations, are synthesized-the un- explainable, absolute, essential that is part of every religion-that is nothing but the Buribunkological.
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N o Buribunkologist who i s also a genuine Buribunk will utter the name of this man without the utmost reverence. That we must emphasize up front. For when we disagree with the critical appraisal of our hero by noted Ferker scholars in the following discussion, we do so not without emphatic protest against the misunderstanding that we fail to recognize Ferker's tremendous impulses and the full stature of the man. Nobody can be more informed by and imbued with his work than we are. Nevertheless, he is not the hero of Buribunkdom but only its Moses, who was permitted to see the promised land but never to set foot on it. Ferker's truly noble blood is still tinged with too many unassimilated, alien elements; atavistic reminiscences still cast their shadow over long periods of his life and dim the pure image of self-sufficient, blue-blooded Buribunkdom. Otherwise, it would be inex- plicable that the noble man, doubting his inner sense of self, shortly before his death was willing not only to enter into a bourgeois-religious marriage but also to marry his own housekeeper-a woman who we know was com- pletely uneducated, downright illiterate, and who eventually (aside from in- hibiting the free exfoliation of his personality) sought to prevent, for rea- sons of devout bigotry, his cremation. . . . To have surpassed these inconsis- tencies and to have made Buribunkdom, in its crystal-clear purity, into a historical fact is the work of Schnekke.
As a fully matured fruit of the most noble Buribunkdom, this genius fell from the tree of his own personality. In Schnekke we find not the least visi- ble trace of hesitation, not the slightest deviation from the distinguished line of the Ur-buribunkological. He is nothing more than a diary keeper, he lives for his diary, he lives in and through his diary, even when he enters into his diary that he no longer knows what to write in his diary. On a level where the I, which has been projecting itself into a reified, you-world constellation, flows with forceful rhythm back into a world-I constellation, the absolute sacrifice of all energies for the benefit of the inner self and its identity has achieved the fullest harmony. Because ideal and reality have here been fused in unsurpassable perfection; what is missing is any particular singularity, which shaped Ferker's life in such a sensational way but which, for any dis- cussion focusing on the essential, must be understood as a compliment rather than a critique. Schnekke is, in a much more refined sense than Fer- ker, a personality, and precisely because of that has he disappeared behind the most inconspicuous sociability. His distinct idiosyncrasy, an I deter- mined solely by the most extreme rules of its own, is located within a spec- trum of indiscriminate generality, in a steady colorlessness that is the result of the most sacrificial will to power. Here we have reached the absolute zenith of Buribunkdom; we need not be afraid of any relapse, as with
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Ferker. 'f The empire of Buribunkdom has been founded. For in the midst of his continuous diaries, Schnekke (with his strong sense of generality and his universal instinct) saw the opportunity to detach the diary from its re- strictive bond with the individual and to convert it into a collective organ- ism. The generous organization of the obligatory collective diary is his achievement. Through that, he defined and secured the framing conditions of a buribunkological interiority; he elevated the chaotic white noise of dis- connected and single Buribunkdom into the perfect orchestration of a Buri- bunkie cosmos. Let us retrace the broad lines of development of this socio- logical architecture.
Every Buribunk, regardless of sex, is obligated to keep a diary on every second of his or her life. These diaries are handed over on a daily basis and collated by district. A screening is done according to both a subject and a personal index. Then, while rigidly enforcing copyright for each individual entry, all entries of an erotic, demonic, satiric, political, and so on nature are subsumed accordingly, and writers are catalogued by district. Thanks to a precise system, the organization of these entries in a card catalogue allows for immediate identification of relevant persons and their circumstances. If, for example, a psychopathologist were to be interested in the pubescent dreams of a certain social class of Buribunks, the material relevant for this research could easily be assimilated from the card catalogues. In turn, the work of the psychopathologist would be registered immediately, so that, say, a historian of psychopathology could within a matter of hours obtain reli- able information as to the type of psychopathological research conducted so far; simultaneously-and this is the most significant advantage of this dou- ble registration-he could also find information about the psychopathologi- cal motivations that underlie these psychopathological studies. Thus
" What a difference there is between Ferker's and Schnekke's attitudes toward women! Never is there any thought in Schnekke about getting married in church; with instinctive surefootedness he recognizes it as a ball and chain
on the leg of his ingenuity, and he manages-despite a series of rather fully de- veloped erotic relationships-to escape from marriage with the surety of a sleep- walker. He always remains cognizant of the needs surrounding the free develop- ment of his uniqueness, and he rightfully invokes Ekkehard in his diary when
he says that marriage would inhibit his essential I-ness. At the same time, we should not overlook the impressive progress evident from Ferker to Schnekke when it comes to women. There is no illiterate woman in Schnekke's life, no one who with petit-bourgeois ridiculousness would claim to restrain genius's needs for unrestrained activity; no one who would not have been proud to have served Schnekke as the impetus for his artistic achievements and thus to have enjoyed the most gratifying reward of her femaleness.
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screened and ordered, the diaries are presented in monthly reports to the chief of the Buribunk Department, who can in this manner continuously su- pervise the psychological evolution of his province and report to a central agency. This agency, in turn, keeps a record of the complete register (and publishes that register in Esperanto) and is hence in a position to exercise buribunkological control over all of Buribunkdom. A series of relevant practices-such as periodic and mutual photo opportunities and film pre- sentations, an active exchange of diaries, readings from diaries, studio visits, conferences, new j ournals, theater productions preceded and followed by laudatios on the personality of the artist-ensure that the interest of the Buribunk in himself and in the quintessentially Buribunkic does not become mere decorum; they prevent as well a damaging, countercultural waning of interest, which leads us to doubt whether the refined existence of the Buri- bunk world will ever come to an end.
Nevertheless, here too we see a rebellious spirit in evidence, albeit rarely. And yet it needs to be said that in the Buribunk world, there exists an unlimited and infinitely understanding tolerance, as well as the highest re- spect for a person's individual liberty. Buribunks are allowed to write their diary entries free from any coercion whatsoever. Not only is one allowed to say that he lacks the mental energy for further entries and that it is only the grief felt for his failing energies that gives him the energy necessary for fur- ther entries; that is, in fact, one of the most beloved types of entry, which is widely acknowledged and appreciated. He can also put down, without fear- ing the least pressure, that he considers the diary one of the most senseless and bothersome practices, an annoying chicanery, a ridiculous old hat-in brief, he is not prevented from using the strongest language. For the Buri- bunks well know that they would violate the nerve center of their being were they to mess with the principle of unconditional freedom of speech. There even exists a reputable organization that sets itself the task of buri- bunkically recording Anti-Buribunkdom, just as there is an agency created for the purpose of fostering, in impressive entries, the ability to articulate disgust and loathing for the agency and even protest against the obligatory diary entry. Periodically, when diary entries threaten to glide into a certain uniformity, leaders of the Buribunks organize a successful movement aimed at raising individual-personal self-esteem. ". The high point of this liberality,
". In this context, certain undaunted neo-Buribunkic initiatives deserve an honorable mention. They have led to the establishment of a prize-winning ques- tion that is raised periodically, "What real progress have the Buribunks made since the days of Ferker ? " and to decided efforts in that direction.
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however, resides in the fact that no Buribunk is forbidden from writing in his diary that he refuses to keep a diary.
Naturally, such freedom does not reach the point of anarchic chaos. Every entry about refusing to keep a diary must be amply supported and de- veloped. Whosoever, instead of writing about one's resistance toward writ- ing, really omits writing altogether violates the general intellectual openness and will be eliminated on grounds of antisocial behavior. The path of evolu- tion silently passes over the silent ones; they are outside of all discourse and as a result can no longer draw attention to themselves. Finally, sinking step by step until hitting the bottom of the social hierarchy, they are forced to manufacture the external conditions for the possibility of noble Buribunk- dom, for example, high-quality, handmade paper, upon which are printed the most distinguished diaries. . . . That is a rigorous but completely natural selection of the fittest, for whosoever cannot compete in the intellectual struggle of diaries will soon degenerate and disappear in the mass of those equipped only to produce the external conditions just mentioned. As a result of this physical labor and other menial services, such people also are no longer in a position to exploit, in Buribunk fashion, each moment of their lives, and they thus yield to an inexorable fate. Since they don't write any- more, they cannot respond to possible inconsistencies in their personal file; they no longer stay current, they disappear from the monthly reports and become nonentities. As if swallowed by the earth, nobody knows them any- more, nobody mentions them in their diaries, they are neither seen nor
heard. Regardless of the intensity of their lament, even if it were to drive them to the edge of insanity, the honorable law does not spare anyone who has dishonorably excluded him- or herself, just as the laws of natural selec- tion themselves know no exception.
And so, through tireless and engaged activity, the Buribunks seek to achieve such a perfection of their organization that, even if only over the span of hundreds of generations, an unprecedented progression is ensured. Daunting calculations-may progress not render them utopian! -have sug- gested that culture will eventually reach such a level that, thanks to unhin- dered evolution, the ability for diary writing will gradually become inborn in the Buribunk fetus. If so, fetuses could, with the help of appropriate, yet- to-be-developed media, communicate with one another about their cardinal perceptions and hence (by demystifying the remaining secrets of sex re- search) provide the necessary, factual basis for a refined sexual ethics. All that, of course, is far in the distance. It is, however, a historical fact that al- ready today there exists a grand and densely organized mass of Buribunk- dom-and hence a speaking, writing, bustling Buribunkdom compelled to
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enjoy each person's essential personality-that forges ahead into the sunrise of historicity.
The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak, therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish, therefore I am. This contains no contradiction, but rather the progressive sequence of identities, each of which, following the laws of logic, transcends its own limitations. For Buribunks, thinking is nothing but silent speech; speech is nothing but writing without script; writing is nothing but anticipated publi- cation; and publication is, hence, identical with writing to such a degree
that the differences between the two are so small as to be negligible. I write, therefore I am; I am, therefore I write. What do I write? I write myself. Who writes me ? I myself write myself. What do I write about? I write that I write myself. What is the great engine that elevates me out of the complacent cir- cle of egohood? History!
I am thus a letter on the typewriter of history. I am a letter that writes itself. Strictly speaking, however, I write not that I write myself but only the letter that I am. But in writing, the world spirit apprehends itself through me, so that I, in turn, by apprehending myself, simultaneously apprehend the world spirit. I apprehend both it and myself not in thinking fashion, but-as the deed precedes the thought-in the act of writing. Meaning: I am not only the reader of world history but also its writer.
At each second of world history, the letters of the typewriter keyboard leap, impelled by the nimble fingers of the world-I, onto the white paper and continue the historical narrative. Only at the moment that the single letter, singled out from the meaningless and senseless indifference of the keyboard, hits the animated fullness of the white paper, is a historical reality created; only at that moment does life begin. That is to say, the beginning of the
past, since the present is nothing but the midwife that delivers the lived, his- torical past out of the dark womb of the future. As long as it is not reached, the future is as dull and indifferent as the keyboard of the typewriter, a dark rat hole from which one second after the other, just like one rat after the other, emerges into the light of the past.
Ethically speaking, what does the Buribunk do who keeps a diary each and every second of his life ? He wrests each second off of the future in or- der to integrate it into history. Let us imagine this procedure in all its mag- nificence: second by second, the blinking young rat of the present moment crawls out of the dark rat hole of the future-out of the nothing that not yet is-in order to merge (eyes glowing with fiery anticipation) the next sec- ond with the reality of history. Whereas with the unintellectual human be- ing, millions and billions of rats rush without plan or goal out into the infi-
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nite expanse of the past only to lose themselves in it, the diary-keeping Buri- bunk can catch each of those seconds, one at a time, and-once aligned in an orderly battalion-allow them to demonstrate the parade of world his- tory. This way, he secures for both himself and humanity the maximum amount of historical facticity and cognizance. This way, the nervous antici- pation of the future is defused, for no matter what happens, one thing is for sure: no second peeling off of the future is getting lost, no hit of the type- writer key will miss the page.
The death of an individual is also nothing but such a rat second, which has no content in itself-whether one of happiness or grief-but only in its historical registration.
Of course, in the rat second of my death, I can no longer hold pen and diary, and I am ostensibly no longer actively involved in this historical registration; the crux of diary keeping, the will to power over history, disappears and clears the field for somebody else's desire. If we dis- regard the pedagogical aspects of this situation, that is, its application not to waste a second in order to impose our will to power onto historiography in the making, we must confess that the termination of our will to history goes very much against our will, for the will to power in the first instance always refers to the will to one's own power, not to that of a certain historian of fu- ture generations. Such concerns, however, lend themselves to serious confu- sion, and we have already seen how even in the case of the great Ferker, the fear of death had a downright catastrophic influence on his historical repu- tation. Today, however, thanks to the evolving consciousness whose sunlight kills the bacteria of the fear of death, there is little danger of any confusion among the Buribunks.
We see through the illusion of uniqueness. We are the letters produced by the writing hand of the world spirit and surrender ourselves consciously to this writing power. In that we recognize true freedom. In that we also see the means of putting ourselves into the position of the world spirit. The in- dividual letters and words are only the tools of the ruses of world history. More than one recalcitrant "no" that has been thrown into the text of his- tory feels proud of its opposition and thinks of itself as a revolutionary, even though it may only negate revolution itself. But by consciously merging with the writing of world history we comprehend its spirit, we become equal to it, and-without ceasing to be written-we yet understand ourselves as writing subjects. That is how we outruse the ruse of world history-namely, by writing it while it writes us. 17o
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World history comes to a close as a global typewriters' association. Digi- tal signal processing (DSP) can set in. Its promotional euphemism, post- history, only barely conceals that war is the beginning and end of all arti- ficial intelligence.
In order to supersede world history (made from classified intelligence reports and literary processing protocols), the media system proceeded in three phases. Phase I , beginning with the American Civil War, developed storage technologies for acoustics, optics, and script: film, gramophone, and the man-machine system, typewriter. Phase 2, beginning with the First World War, developed for each storage content appropriate electric transmission technologies: radio, television, and their more secret coun- terparts. Phase 3, since the Second World War, has transferred the sche- matic of a typewriter to a technology of predictability per se; Turing's mathematical definition of computability in 193 6 gave future computers their name.
Storage technology from 19 1 4 to 19 1 8 meant deadlocked trench war- fare from Flanders to Gallipoli. Transmission technology with VHF tank communications and radar images, those military developments parallel to television,171 meant total mobilization, motorization, and blitzkrieg from the Vistula in 1939 to Corregidor in 1945. And finally, the largest computer program of all time, the conflation of test run with reality, goes by the name of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Storing/transmitting/cal- culating, or trenches/blitz/stars. World wars from I to n.
In artificial intelligences, all media glamor vanishes and goes back to basics. (After all, "glamor" is nothing but a Scottish corruption of the word "grammar. ")172 Bits reduced the seeming continuity of optical me- dia and the real continuity of acoustic media to letters, and these letters to numbers. DSP stores, transfers, calculates-millions of times per sec- ond, it runs through the three functions necessary and sufficient for me- dia. The standard for today's microprocessors, from the point of view of their hardware, is simply their systematic integration.
Calculations are performed by a central processing unit (CPU) that, in the case of Zilog's Z80 microprocessor, cannot do much more than manipulate blocks of 8 bits either logically (following Boolean algebra) or arithmetically (through basic addition). Storage is subdivided into a Read-Only Memory (ROM), which retains once and for all inscribed data, preferably commands and computing constants, and a Random Ac- cess Memory (RAM), which reads the variable data of a measured envi- ronment and returns mathematical data to control that environment. The exchange between individual modules runs along uni- or bidirectional
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? Setup of a microprocessor (Z8o).
busses (for data, addresses, and control commands such as WRITE or READ), and the transfer from and to the environment runs via an in- put/output port (110) at whose outer margin, finally, the conversion of continuities into bits takes place.
And since, from the microprocessor to large processing networks, everything is nothing but a modular vice, the three basic functions of stor- ing/transferring/processing are replicated on internal levels no longer ac- cessible to programmers. For its part, the CPU includes ( I ) an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), (2) several RAMs or registers to store variables and a ROM to store microprograms, and (3) internal busses to transfer data, addresses, and control commands to the system's busses.
That's all. But with sufficient integration and repetition, the modular system is capable of processing, that is, converting into any possible me- dium, each individual time particle of the data received from any envi- ronment. As if one could reconstruct, custom-made from one microsec- ond to the next, a complete recording studio comprising reel-to-reels plus radio transmission plus control panel and switchboard. Or, as if the Buri- bunks' immense permeation with data coincided with an automated Buri- bunkology that could be switched, at the speed of electrical current, from a register of data to a register of persons or even their self-registration. The construction of the Golem, at any rate, is perfect. The storage media of the founding generation were only capable of replacing the eye and the ear, the sensorium of the central nervous system; the communications me- dia between the two wars were only capable of replacing the mouth and the hand, the motorics of information. Which is why, behind all registers,
PORT A PORT 8
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Standard architecture of a cpu.
all channels, a human being still appeared to be doing the transmitting. So-called thinking remained thinking; it therefore could not be imple- mented. For that, thinking or speech had to be completely converted into computing.
"I WILL LEARN HOW TO COMPUTE ON MY TYPEWRITER," writes an in- mate of Gugging (on his red device for this red and black book). Alan Turing did nothing else. Instead of learning his public school's prescribed handwriting, he reduced typewriters to their bare principle: first, storing or writing; second, spacing or transferring; third, reading (formerly re- served for secretaries) or computing discrete data, that is, block letters and figures. Rather than conclude that humans are superior, as did his colleague Godel, with whom he jointly refuted the Hilbert program (in support of a complete, consistent, and decidable mathematics, that is, a mathematics that could in principle be delegated to machines),173 Turing was suicidal-in life as well as in his job. He dropped the unpredictable in order to relieve mathematicians of all predictable (or recursive) func- tions and to construct the machine that Hilbert had presumed as a for- malism. The hypothetical determinism of a Laplacian universe, with its humanist loopholes (1795), was replaced by the factual predictability of finite-state machines. Rather full of pride, Turing wrote:
The prediction which we are considering is, however, rather nearer to practicabil- ity than considered by Laplace. The system of the "universe as a whole" is such
Typewriter 2 4 5
? 24 6 Typewriter
that quite small errors in the initial conditions can have an overwhelming effect at a later time. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centime- tre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping. It is an essential property of the mechanical systems which we have called "discrete state machines" that this phenomenon does not occur. Even when we consider the actual physical machines instead of the idealised machines, reasonably accurate knowledge of the state at one mo- ment yields reasonably accurate knowledge any number of steps laterY4
The overwhelming effects of this predictability have since reached Man's employment statistics. The consequences of Turing's politics of sui- cide: "As Victorian technology had mechanised the work of the artisans, the computer of the future would automate the trade of intelligent think- ing. . . . The craft jealously displayed by human experts only delighted him. In this way he was an anti-technocrat, subversively diminishing the authority of the new priests and magicians of the world. He wanted to make intellectuals into ordinary people. " 175
The first to be affected were of course stenotypists. After eleven years, Turing's Universal Discrete Machine fulfilled the prophecy that an appa- ratus " also renders superfluous the typist. " His simulation game, in which a censor is to but cannot actually decide which of two data sources A and B is human and which is a machine, significantly has a precursor. According to Turing, computer B replaces the systemic position of a woman who-in competition or gender war with a man A-seeks to per- suade the data gap C that she is the real woman. But since both voices are severed from the "written, or, better still, typed" flow of information, Remington's secretary gives her farewell performance. Whenever trans- vestite A insists that he has strands of hair "nine inches long," the human predecessor of the computer writes to her censor, as mechanically as fu- tilely, "I am the woman, don't listen to him! "176
With which the homosexual Turing raised to the level of technology Dionysus's sentence, "Must we not first hate ourself if we are to love our- self? " With the added observation that against total desexualization, protest will "avail nothing. "177 Computers write by themselves, without secretaries, simply with the command WRITE. (Anyone who would like to see the phallus in the 5 volts of a logical I, and the hole in the 0. 7 volts of an 0, confuses industrial standards with fiction. ) Only those intersec- tions between computers and their environment that, following ASCII code (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), are net- worked bit by bit with typewriter keys178 will continue to offer women jobs for a while. When ENIAC, "the first operational computer," accord-
Ty p e w r i t e r 2 4 7
ing to misleading American accounts, calculated projectile trajectories and A-bomb pressure waves during the Second World War, one hundred women were hired in addition to male programmers. Their job: "to climb around on ENIAC's massive frame, locate burnt-out vacuum tubes, hook up cables, and perform other types of work unrelated to writing. " 179
By contrast, Turing, with an eye toward "computers and guided pro- jectiles," predicted good times for men, programmers, and mathemati- cians. 180 But it was a strange kind of mathematics into which he imported the elegance and complexity of classical analysis. What disappeared in the split-up of binaries was not only the continuity of all graphs and tra- jectories examined since Leibniz, and which Fourier's theory and Edison's phonographs simply followed. What was much more drastic than such primitive step functions was his crucial innovation: the abolition of the difference between numbers and operational symbols, data and com- mands. For even if numbers stood for data relationships, the signs + or - were still inhabited by a human spirit who appeared to give the command to add or subtract. Turing's Universal Discrete Machine, however, con- verted these (and all other) letters into their monotonous rows of bina- ries. In machine language, the command ADD is neither a human enun- ciation nor a letter symbol, but just one of many series of bits. (In a Z80, the command "Increase the number in the accumulator by 2" would be IlOO OlIO/00000010. )ItwasnotG6del'shumanistbeliefbutratherhis simple trick of Godelization that once again emerged victorious: only af- ter commands, axioms, or, to put it briefly, sentences had been converted into numbers were they as infinitely manipulable as numbers. End of lit- erature, which is made up of sentences.
Every microprocessor implements through software what was once the dream of the cabala; namely, that through their encipherment and the manipulation of numbers, letters could yield results or illuminations that no reader could have found. Computers are endless series of numbers only whose relative position decides whether they operate as (verbal) commands or (numeric) data or addresses. If John von Neumann, the mathematician of the Second World War, had not taken certain precau- tions for his machines, a command sequence of numbers such as ADD could also add up, aside from the usual data, command sequences them- selves, until no programmer would be able to comprehend the starry mathematics to which that take-off had abducted their computer.
The neat separation of data, addresses, commands-that is, of stor- age contents, points of transfer, and processing steps-by contrast, as- sures that for each address, there is only one command or datum on the
2 4 8 Typewriter
bus. A box of numbered paper slips that can log on not only (as with the Buribunks) to certain books, chapters, pages, terms, but to any individual bit of the system. Computer algorithms, instead of simply reproducing a logic, consist of "LOGIC + CONTROL. "181 No wonder that govern- mental ingenuity invented the impossible job of the data security special- ist to camouflage the precision of such data control.
On the other hand, since Turing, the possible job of a programmer has run the risk of forgetting mathematical elegance. Today, prior to the conquest of digital signal processors, the hardware of average computers is at a kindergarten level: of all the basic forms of computation, it barely manages addition. More complex commands have to be reconverted into a finite, that is, serial, number of cumulative steps. An unreasonable chore for humans and mathematicians. Where recursive, that is, automa- tizable, functions succeed classical analysis, computation works as a treadmill: through the repeated application of the same command on the series of interim results. But that's it. A Hungarian mathematician, after he had filled two whole pages with the recursive formulas according to which a Turing machine progresses from I to 2 to 3, and so on, observed in German as twisted as it was precise: "This appears as an extraordinar- ily slowed-down film shot of the computation processes of man. If this mechanism of computation is applied to some functions, you start living it, you begin to compute exactly like it, only faster. "182 Consolation for prospective programmers . . .
Slow-motion shots of the spirit will exorcise it. Chopped up like movements in front of the camera, equations finally solve themselves without intuition because every discrete step during storage, transfer, and calculation takes place with bureaucratic precision. The discrete machine forms a solitary union with cinema and typewriter, but not with neuro- physiology. That is what distinguishes it from the dream typewriter con- structed by Friedlaender's Dr. Sucram, who in his main line of work took care of the Gray Magic [Graue Magie1 of three-dimensional cinema.
The doctor concentrated on his experiments with a curious little machine model. He put a metal helmet on his head; fine wires connected the helmet to the key- board of the typewriter. Without any movement on the doctor's part, the levers of the machine started moving. It was a ghostly sight to behold.
"What kind of a device is that? " [BosemannJ pointed to the helmet from which emerged the wires connecting to the keyboard.
"An extraordinarily comfortable typewriter, Mister Bosemann. It saves me a typist. I am in the process of letting the ethereal emanations of the brain work for me directly. Up to now, our thoughts, no matter how practical, have been moving
Typewriter 249
the world only in indirect ways. Our machines do not yet work under the direct influence of our thoughts, our will. I plan a direct transmission. "! 83
The typing, computing, and sewing machines in the brains or books of Nietzsche and KuRmaul hence became reality. The founding myth of a media landscape, which would only be the worldwide unfolding of neu- rophysiology, reached its peak in Friedlaender's machine fiction. Fourteen years later, it ends in Turing's machine, which was also never built but is mathematically conceivable. The computer and the brain are functionally compatible, but not in terms of their schematics. Since the nervous sys- tem, according to Turing, is "certainly not a discrete-state machine," that is, not infinitesimally precise, all the unpredictabilities of a Laplacian uni- verse loom over it. 184 Thus, "the real importance of the digital procedure lies in its ability to reduce the computational noise level to an extent which is completely unobtainable by any other (analogy) procedure. " And even if-following Neumann's elegant simplification-the neural, but not the hormonal, conduits operate according to a digital model, their information flow is still five thousand times slower than that of comput- ers. 18S The brain, however, compensates for this loss of transmission through the parallel processing of whole sets of data; statistical breadth (presumably based on majority gates) for which computers can compen- sate only through serial processing and recursive functions. What remains unrealized, at any rate, is Dr. Sucram's desire for "letting the ethereal em- anations of the brain work for me directly. "
The white noise of brains, of the ether, of the globe: the total type- writer has nothing to do with that. But everything to do with trenches/ blitz/stars.
Even if "there is little in our technological or physiological experience to indicate that absolute all-or-none organs exist,"186 the oldest knowl- edge of gods, ghosts, and generals knows better. The language of the up- per echelons of leadership is always digital. In the scriptures of the priests, Yahweh distinguishes for seven days between day and night, morning and evening, sun and moon, earth and heaven, land and water (not to mention good and bad). That is what the priests, who have edited and continue to administer this holy scripture, call God's creation. But "it is nothing but the creation of nothing other than signifiers. "187 Earth and heaven can do without Elohim's inscription; it exists, prior to God's creation and after God's death, in another holiness, for which the Holy Bible only has the word tohu bohu:188 the random noise of events. The language of the up- per echelons of leadership, by contrast, is digitalization; it transforms
2 5 0 Typewriter
sources of accidental noise into absolute all-or-none organs. Otherwise, commands and censures, those two antisymmetrical instruments of lead- ership, could not be communicated.
And if the invading of communication channels by scrambling noises makes it necessary, the language of the upper echelons goes so far as to overcode the binary opposition with another, that is, redundant, binary opposition. In the German General Staff,
a military language practice that was exercised and used for decades . . . aimed strictly at distinguishing between "western" and "eastward" in military briefs and reports. The reason was that one wanted to establish a distinct sound differ- ence between the two terms, because otherwise messages and dictates delivered orally or over the phone might easily have resulted in fateful mix-ups. . . . The layman might think of this as a triviality, but every soldier is surely cognizant of the far-reaching implications of this regulation.
For planning wars on two fronts, the opposition between east and west is as fundamental as that between heaven and earth for the gods of creation. Therefore, when Major General Alfred JodI, the last chief of an illustri- ous short (hi)story, "used the word 'eastern' rather than, as was common protocol, 'eastward' in an army report ofJune 14, 1940, during the west- ern offensive of 1940 . . . even though he himself had emerged from the ranks of the army . . . he violated without much ado a time-tested prac- tice and triggered widespread and intense indignation in the officers' corps. "189
The tohu bohu and, in its wake, analog media run through all the various types of conditions except the NO. 190 Computers are not emana- tions of nature. Rather, the universal discrete machine, with its ability to erase, negate, and oppose binary signs, always already speaks the lan- guage of the upper echelons. On the transmitting side, the general staffs of the Axis, just as, on the receiving end, those in London or Washington.
Whether or NOT the Japanese empire took seriously the resource em- bargo threatened by Roosevelt (that is, attack the United States), whether or NOT Vice Admiral Nagumo's flotilla would sink the Pacific battleships at Pearl Harbor with carrier-bound aircraft, whether or NOT he would maintain silence in his areas of operation off the Aleutian Islands (he did): these were precisely the digital puzzles of 194 1 , solvable only through the interception and decoding of necessarily discrete sources of information. And since the machine mathematics of the current century endowed gen- eral staffs with the ability to encrypt their orders automatically, that is,
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immeasurably more efficiently than by hand, decoding had to be done by machines as well. The Second World War: the birth of the computer from the spirit of Turing and his never-built principal relay.
This escalation between senders and receivers, weapons and anti- weapons, is told quickly and most precisely in the words of Guglielmo Marconi, which were broadcast from a gramophone record on Radio Roma by the inventor of the radio immediately after his death (as if to un- derscore the new acoustic immortality). Marconi, a senator and marchese of fascist Italy, "confessed" that
forty-two years ago, when I achieved the first successful wireless transmission in Pontecchio, I already anticipated the possibility of transmitting electric waves over large distances, but in spite of that I could not hope for the great satisfaction I am enjoying today. For in those days a major shortcoming was ascribed to my invention: the possible interception of transmissions. This defect preoccupied me so much that, for many years, my principal research was focused on its elimination.
Thirty years later, however, precisely this defect was exploited and turned into radio-into that medium of reception that now reaches more than 40 million listeners every day. l9l
Which unnamed circles feared the interception of transmissions is not hard to guess. Which circles charged Marconi with the elimination of this defect, that is, with the construction of a wooden iron, is even easier to guess. Nothing in the analog medium of the radio allows the negation of signals, their spy-proof inversion into their opposite, or nonsense. Hence, general staffs, who were afforded perfect communication to the front and possibilities for blitzkrieg by Marconi's invention, had to rely on the de- velopment of discrete encoding machines. Immensely inflated flows of in- formation demanded a form of text processing as automatic as it was dis- crete-the typewriter.
Since 1919, the engineer Arthur Scherbius had experimented in Berlin- Wilmersdorf with a "secret typewriter. " In 1923, he himself thus founded Chiffriermaschinen A. G. (Encoding Machines Corporation) and secured for his model the promotion of the world postal club. l92 For the first time, Remington'S typewriter keyboard was no longer the boring and unequiv- ocal one-way link between input and output, softened only by typos. For the first time, hitting a letter key offered numerous combinatory surprises. The 26 letters of the alphabet ran over electric conduits into a distribution system consisting of three (later, four or five) rotors and an inversion ro- tor, which always selected other substitute letters. With each strike of the
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Typewriter
? ? ? RLMNE
o
o0000
o0 000
1 - Walzen
2 - Steckerleiste und
? 000000000 00000 00 000000000
(C)(C)(C)@(C)(C)(C)o(C) (C)(C)(C)(C)@(C)(C)(C) (C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)
Blockdiagramm dcr EDigma-Mascbinc
A= 5NMLRL-lM-lN-I5-1 B = 5 P N M L R L-l
D= 5p3NMLRL-IM-IN-lp-35-1 Pcrmutationcn dcr Bucbstabcn A, B, C, 0, E, F.
Block diagram of the Enigma machine: Above, ( r ) rotors, ( 2 ) connector tray and connectors, ( 3 ) lamps, ( 4 ) battery, and ( 5 ) keyboard. Below, permutations of the letters A-F.
typewriter key, the rotors (just like the second, minute, and hour hands of clocks) advanced by one revolution, only to return to their original posi- tion not until 267, or 8 billion, hits later.
That is how Scherbius, with his machine mathematics, liberated cryp- tographers from their manual work.