For if the incessant noise can whisper
anything
to writers, its mes- sage can only be Nietzsche's sentence "I am a maker of words: what do words matter!
KittlerNietzche-Incipit-Tragoedia
?
I1 1900
y =(+a) +(-a) +(+a) +(-a) +. . . Bolzano
? Nietzsche: Incipit Tragoedia
"My time extends only from the summer months in Sils-Maria (Nietz- sche's 'Foreword to the Early Works') and in the foothills of Antibes, as Monet painted it, into this winter of damnation and nights of fire. "' The historical adventures of speaking d o not form a continuum and so do not constitute a history of ideas. They are marked by breaks that in a single stroke can consign entire discourse networks to oblivion, and they have plateaus that make one forget the advance of armies and hours even dur- ing the winters of world wars. What came to an end during the summers of Sils-Maria, those few summers of free writing, was everything "in the order of culture, scholarship, and science, of the familial and benevolent character that distinguished German literature of the nineteenth century in so many ways. "> Thus Gottfried Benn, with characteristic exacmess, selected and gathered up the particular functions that constituted the dis- course network of I 800. The official locus of production for German Po- etry was the nuclear family; scholars saw to its multiplication; and a sci- ence that claimed the title Science provided its justification. If, with Hofinannsthal, one claims that only this organization of discourse is le- gitimate, then everything that began with Nietzsche comes to nothing. In the empty space where one would wish to see a "new literature," there would be only "Goethe and beginnings. "' But the break was so radical that those fascinated with Goethe had difficulty recognizing that the "literature" that developed in place of German Poetry was in fact litera- ture. "Two men determine the German aesthetic of our time: Goethe and Nietzsche. One forms it, and the other destroys it. '" When the one Mother gave way to a plurality of women, when the alphabetization-
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made-flesh gave way to technological media, and when philosophy gave way to the psychophysical or psychoanalytic decomposition of language, Poetry also disintegrated. In its place arose, whether German or not, an artistry in the full range of this Nietzschean term: from the magic of letters to a histrionics of media.
Over the beginning of literature circa 1900stands a curse. "Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader. Another cen- tury of readers-and the spirit itself will stink. That everyone may learn to read, in the long run corrupts not only writing but also thinking. "' Zarathustra's curse strikes at the technological-material basis of the dis- course network of 1800:universal alphabetization. Not content or mes- sage but the medium itself made the Spirit, the corpus composed of Ger- man Poetry and German Idealism, into a stinking cadaver. The murderer of the letter met its own death.
Nietzsche therefore described, although in a transvaluation of all val- ues just what the reading and writing reformers of 1800did. Except for thesigndeterminingvalue, thereisnodifferencebetweenthetwofollow- ing descriptions of reading (the first published in 1786, the second in 1886).
With practice, everything should become a knack as natural as feeling, so that one can survey the whole easily and quickly without being conscious of every single detail, and then make one's choice. Knowledge of letters is not yet knowl- edge of reading, even though mechanical reading is nothing more than pronounc- i n g letters. O n l y o n e w h o c a n t a k e i n w h o l e w o r d s o r e v e n l i n e s a t a g l a n c e , w i t h - out thinking of individual letters, knows how to read. 6
Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page-rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words-just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. . . . All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are-accus- tomed to lymg. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. '
Nietzsche's description confirms the great extent to which the educa- tional programs of 1800had achieved statistical reality. * But a sobering period follows that triumph. Hermeneutic reading, once praised as knack or even feeling in order to make it palatable, isscorned and called a lie. When unfeelingly described as discursive manipulation rather than viewed from the inner perspective of its beneficiaries, universal alphabetization turnsout to be the beginning of self-deception and, as such, of the pro- liferation of artists. Modern readers who arbitrarily hit upon five words out of twenty in order to get to the meaning as quickly as possible prac- tice the same technique as writers and rewriters.
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The most astonishing thing may come to pass-the host of the historically neutral is always there readv to supervise the author of it even while he is still far off. The echo is heard immediately: but always as a "critique," though the moment before the critic did not so much as dream of the possibility of what has been done. The work never produces an effect but only another "critique"; and the critique itself produces no effect either, but again only a further critique?
From skipping over letters to surveying an author, from an elementary trick in reading to semi-official literary criticism-the method remains the same. According to Fichte, hermeneutics simply means writing any- thing about a work, with the exception of its actual text. Nietzsche's di- agnosis of a pathological increase in the population of authors continues a complaint made when the malady had just begun;'" but Nieasche named the root of the evil. In Human, All too Human, one reads in the section entitled "The Name on the Title-Page":
That the name of the author should be inscribed on the book is now customary and almost a duty; yet it is one of the main reasons books produce so little effect. For if they are good, then, as the quintessence of the personality of their authors, they are worth more than these; but as soon as the author announces himself on the title-page, the reader at once dilutesthe quintessence again with the personality, indeed with what is most personal, and thus thwarts the objectof the book. "
Alphabetized reading, which would continue writing rather than rec- ognize letters on the page, thus has a correlate in production: the func- tion of authorship. From the same exterior position in which his irony revealed the arbitrary choice among twenty words, Nietzsche also scorns the new rule of discourse that embellishes title pages with names. The hu- man, all too human o r personal, indeed, most personal, which is attributed by the anthropology of language to all signs, burdens a reading that "at once looks beyond the work" and asks after "the history of its author. . . . in the previous and possible future progress of his development. " 1z
Alphabetization, reading that continues writing or the name of the au- thor-with the exception of the feminine reading function, Nietzsche's unsparing analysis brings together all the control loops of the classical discourse network. The summary results in a negative evaluation. Words have no effect because they are skipped over; reading issues only in writ- ing; authors' names detract from the phenomenon of the book. In ret- rospect the discourse network of 1800is a single machine designed to neutralize discursive effects and establish "our absurd world of edu- cators"-"to the 'able servant of the state' this promises a regulating schema"-founded on the ruins of words. "
On the basis of this analytically very accomplished summation, Zara- thustra can dare to call the Spirit a stinking cadaver.
Nietzsche knew what he was talking about. The former student of the
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royal academy truly owed "the totality of his education" to the discourse network of 1800;according to the rector, Pforta under Prussian occupa- tion constituted "a self-contained educational state, which completely ab- sorbed all aspects of the life of the individual. "" In 1859,on the one- hundredth birthday of Schiller, students heard a teacher, who had been commissioned by Prussian authorities to write the first textbook on Ger- man literary history, deliver an address on the greatness of the Poet; they then spent the evening hours, after a celebratory dinner, in general, but private, reading of Schiller in the school library. " One spent the rest of one's school time attempting to deal with one's own person in the manner that Karl August Koberstein's literary history dealt with the classical writ- ers. As Poet and Critic unified in one person, the schoolboy Nietzsche wrote, aside from poetic works, the corresponding poetic autobiogra- phies, which, after conjuring the inexhaustible days of his childhood, regularly listed his private reading and writing. "My Life"; "Course of My Life"; "A Look Back"; "From My Life"; "My Literary and Musical Activity''-and so on runs the list that an author from the new crop by the name of Nietzsche added to the classical discourse network. Only much later, namely, at the university level of the same educational path, could he read the "autobiographical constructions, which were to have justified the contingency of his being"'" for what they were: German es-
says, programmed by pedagogues and written by students in the royal academy. Looking longingly toward a different "Future of Our Educa- tional Institutions," Nietzsche, the professor of philology, described their nineteenth century:
The last department in which the German teacher in a public school is a t all ac- tive, which is also regarded as his sphere of highest activity, and is here and there even considered the pinnacle of public-school education, is the "German essay. " Because the most gifted pupils almost always display the greatest eagerness in this department, it ought to have been made clear how dangerously stimulating, pre- cisely here, the task of the teacher must be. The German essay is a call to the individual, and the more strongly a pupil is conscious of his distinguishingquali- ties, the more personally will he do his German essay. This "personal doing" is further encouraged at most schools by the choice of essay topics, and I find the strongest evidence of this in the lower grades, where pupils are given the non- pedagogical topic of describingtheir own life, their own development. . . . How often does someone's later literary work turn out to be the sad consequenceof this pedagogical original sin against the spirit! '-
All the sins of the classical discourse network thus concentrate in the German essay. Alone, crying in the wilderness, Nietzsche discovered the material basis of any literary work and, in particular, of his own. The pamphlet Our School Essay as LI Disguised Dime Novelist was soon to appear in mass editions; with affectionate stylistic criticism it demon-
? strated the identity between, on the one hand, Karl May, Buffalo Bill, and Texas Jack, and on the other hand, the 386 model essays on Iphrgenia written by teachers. '*
The Spirit stinks because of the pedagogic original sin against it. First the German essay generates productive literary men (more precisely, schoolboys); second, it generates the autobiographies of their produc- tion; third, it generates-because they so gladly make "obligatory" the "judgment of works of poetry" ''-the literary-critical continuators, those who wrote "Letter to My Friend, in Which 1 Recommend the Reading of My Favorite Poet" and generally neutralized discursive effects. l"
Even in dead-silent, solitary rooms, the gymnasium students of the nineteenth century were never alone; the "totality of their education" contained them as the German essay contained the literary industry. They could intend and understand everything that paper patiently took and gave-except the "influence of women," as Nietzsche later learned to his "astonishment. "" Theywereverywellpreparedforacultureofuniversal alphabetization.
Thus the classical-romantic discourse network ended in megalomania and desperation. A fragment, not accidentally entitled "Euphorion," sets the courtly signature "F W v Nietzky, homme ktudit en lettres" beneath a self-portrait of naked despair.
It is deathly still in the room-the one sound is the pen scratching across the paper-for 1 love to think by writing, given that the machine that could imprint our thoughts into some material without their being spoken or written has yet to be invented. In front of me is an inkwell in which I can drown the sorrows of my black heart, a pair of scissors to accustom me to the idea of slitting my throat, manuscripts with which I can wipe myself, and a chamber pot. "
This is a primal scene, less well known but no less fraught with conse- quences than the despair of Faust in and over his study in the Republic of Scholars. The scholar is replaced, however, by the very man of letters whom Faust made to appear magically as the redeemer from heaps of books. The one who signs himself "homme Otudit en lettres" has experi- enced nothing beyond the formative education of the gymnasium, which as an "appeal to the individual" is the opposite of scholarly training. The scene of writing is therefore bare of all library props, and thus bare, too, of any enigma about how supposed texts are to be translated into Spirit and meaning. The solitary writer is a writer and nothing more: not a translator, scribe, or interpreter. Bare and impoverished, the scratching of the pen exposes a function that had never been described: writing in its materiality. ThereisnoBibletoGermanize,novoicetotranscribe, andso there are none of the miracles that in I800 obscured that materiality. One no longer writes around the fact of writing-writing has become its own
NIETZSCHE 181
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medium. Even in the clinic for nervous diseases in Jena, Nietzsche was "happy and in his element" as long as he had pencil^. ^' But already the man of letters F W v Nieaky, in contrast to the schoolboy Wilhelm Friedrich Niensche, is through with putting literary works, literary auto- biographies, and discussions of literature on paper-beyond the act of writing there is nothing at all. Whether or not the star pupil of the Schulpforta Gymnasium would have had anything to say, had the ped- agogues left him alone, is unimportant. In the "Euphorion" fragment, in the countless notebooks that until the final day in Turin recorded thoughts and laundry receipts, possible book titles and headache reme- dies, to say nothing of the few scribbles from the insane asylum, which found their way back to the empty schema of the autobiographical Ger- man essay? Nietzsche's papersrecord only the primal scene and its en- during enigma.
What is most disturbingin the posthumous fragments is the fact that they are not a collectionof notes, but rather a collection of writing exercises, indeed rhetorical exercises in the sense of attemptsat various styles, in which the ideasare then run through their declensions. Nietzsche finally achieved a lexicon in which words emptied of all context were brought back into phrases, or were idiomized, so to speak; it was a mute exercise, carried on without further commentary, between the vocabulary notebook, the translation guide, and the collection of stylistic howlers. "
When writing remains a writing exercise, a spare and dismal act with- out any extension into what is called book, work, or genre, there is no place for the "personal presentation and formation" so dear to the essay pedagogues. The "appeal to the individual" to become an individual and author comes to nothing precisely because the model pupil takes it liter- ally. For the one who takes up the pen and writes is no one; instead of serving an individual, the inkwell drowns a black heart; instead of aiding the process of revision and rereading, the technical premises of author- ship, the pair of scissors has a quite different task. And as with the indi- vidual, so too with his production-manuscripts destined for the cham- ber pot. Zarathustra's nose for Spirit or the stench of the writing culture thus comes from a scene of writing in which the props-pen, inkwell, scissors, chamber pot-have done away with the ego and its meanings. The author disappears, to say nothing of the readers he might address; in the "Euphorion" fragment writing produces refuse and feces rather than poetic works. Precisely because Nietzky is another Euphorion, who pos- sessed in his parents a complete classicism and romanticism, in that he had at his command every facility of the classical-romantic discourse net- work, the pedagogic promises and the literary training, there was no eu- phoria; he fell, true to his name until the end.
? Modem texts would follow this downward trajectory in various ways. Nietzky-Nietzsche touched on the zero point on which literature in 1900 would build. It is intransitive writing that is not directed toward written truths or readers; rather, "all its threads converge upon the finest of points-singular, instantaneous, and yet absolutely universal-upon the simple act of writing"; it is writing that "breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representation" and that can be "a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor. "zC
In the deathly still room, only the pen makes a sound. Neither sound nor phonetic method supports a writing that occurs without preliminary speech and so without a soul. If something precedes its materiality, it is only the materiality of sound itself. An isolated, early observation by Nietzsche records the deafening noise in this still scene of writing: "What I fear is not the horrible shape behind my chair but its voice: not the words, but the frighteningly inarticulate and inhuman tone of that shape. If only it would speak as people speak! "I-
In its beginning German Poetry had shut out the animal sounds of a poodle and preferred, when translating prelinguistic feelings, to follow the advice of a Spirit that only later articulated its own name. An inar- ticulate tone defines the zero point of literature, a tone not only inhuman, but also not animal or demonic. T'he creaturely sounds that filled the lan- guage space of the sixteenth century were silenced when Man became aware of a beloved language or a woman's voice. The inhuman tone be- hind Nietzsche's back is not the speech at the beginning of articulation; it is not speech at all. All discourse is powerless against it because all dis- courses add to it and fall prey to it. Within the realm of all sounds and words, all organisms, white noise appears, the incessant and ineradicable background of information. For the very channels through which infor- mation must pass emit noise.
In 1800simple, unarticulated tones were excommunicated. They fo- mented an insanity that, in contrast to the fixed idea, had no poetic value: that of the imbecile. '* If one had no "ability to comprehend the speech of others," one was required to assume "the posture of reading aloud and slowly during an attack. "" Writers like Faust or Anselmus were allowed to trust their inmost feeling only because it was supported by reading, which in turn was supported by a human language or voice.
Nietzsche, however, wrote before and after white noise. He took so literally the German essay's appeal "to listen to one's own thoughts and feelings" that thoughts and feelings turned into their opposites: the lis- tener hears a "humming and roaring of the wild camps" within him, which fight an irreconcilable "civil war. " Where there should have been a
NIETZSCHE 1 8 3
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prelinguistic inwardness, susceptible to articulation and development, "a roar went through the air. " 'O
The frightening, inarticulate tone that Nietzsche heard behind his back hums in the ears themselves. What does not speak as people speak would be called (if it could have a name) "Nietzsche. " The autobiography dem- onstrates this for Nietzsche's own beginning: "At an absurdly early age, at seven, 1 already knew that no human word would ever reach me. " I' The medical records from Jena demonstrate it for his end: "Often screams inarticulately. " ' l Everything began for him, then, when human or peda- gogical encouragement was unable to cover over the noise at the basis of all information channels and instead merged with it. And everything ended when he left The Will to Power sitting on his desk, turned around in his chair, and dissolved into the noise that had horrified him for as long as he lived or wrote.
The woman's voice that made Anselmus write occupied the same chair he did: it exemplified the interlocking media network of speaking and writing, of the soul and Poetry. The voice that formed the ground for Nietzsche's writing exercises remained behind his chair, and he was un- able ever to unlearn the horror it inspired. It halted all erotic exchange between orality and writing, reducing writing to pure materiality. "You should have sung, my soul," is a pathetic sentence-in that "there is no soul" and "aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology. "" Henceforth, there exist only the two sides of an exclusion. Behind the chair there is white noise, that is, physiology; in front of the chair, there are the inkwell, the scissors, paper, and words as multiple as they are empty. For if the incessant noise can whisper anything to writers, its mes- sage can only be Nietzsche's sentence "I am a maker of words: what do words matter! what do 1matter! ""
Writing and writers as accidental events in a noise that generates acci- dents and thus can never be overcome by its accidents: Nietzsche comes quite close to the poetics of Mallarmt. Faust's helpful Spirit diverted the act of writing toward a goal in the beyond, the transcendental signified of the word; Hippel's anathema excluded literary hacks from the realm of souls; makers of words, however, never escape the medium they institute. An anecdote concerning Mallarmt illustrates this. "Degas occasionally wrote verses, and some of those he left were delightful. But he often foundgreatdifficultyinthisworkaccessorytohispainting. . . . Oneday he said to Mallarme: 'Yours is a hellish craft. I can't manage to say what I want, and yet I'm full of ideas. . . . 'And Mallarmt answered: 'My dear Degas,onedoesnotmakepoetrywithideas,butwithwords. ""' Thelast
? NIETZSCHE 185
philosopher and the first modern poet agreed even in their choice of words. Mallarm6 decomposes the phrase maker of words in a single sen- tence. For Nietzsche it became impossible to put his own thoughts and feelings on paper because all meaning was lost in noise. For Mallarmi meanings or ideas had been played out, so that there was no longer any translation from one medium, literature, to another, such as painting. There was nothing to makers of words (according to the word-maker Nietzsche); Mallarmi called his hellish profession the "elocutionary dis- appearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words. '"" Writing that can discover the basis of its rights neither in what is written nor in the writer has its message only in the medium it constitutes. In 1900,in direct descent from Nietzsche, "word art" became synonymous with literature. "
A professor who was no longer a professor and an educational bureau- crat who no longer wanted to be one stood at the threshold of a new dis- course network. 'nSoon every child would learn that makers of words are not authors and that words are not ideas. The confusion between words and ideas that had supported an entire classicism did not end only in soli- tary rooms. On December 4,1890,the emperor's irrefutable mouth issued an order placing German as a school subject at the center of all pedagogy and essay writing at the center of this enter. '^ With that, Ger- man ceased to be beyond all school instruction, a realm where words were always bypassed for their meanings and thus for the university disci- pline of philosophy. Consequently, a decree of 1904did away with the study of philosophy as an "obligatory part of the doctoral examina- tion. ""' Indeed, the great experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbing- haus nearly succeeded in having philosophy replaced by physiological psychology in examinations for teaching positions. Schools also came close to teaching that aesthetics is nothing more than applied physiology.
But if writing came to be at the center of the center in school, physiol- ogy also found its way into the classroom, even without being included in examination regulations. The noise that grounded Nietzsche's writing was put down on paper. Free essays, advocated by the art-education movement beginning in 1904,contributed neither to unfolding the indi- viduality of their authors nor to the ideality of their thoughts. At an ex- treme they simply led to writing down the droning in feverish children's heads. What Nietzsche already knew at the absurdly early age of seven years attained positive discursive reality. Art education gave up on reach- ing its pupils with human or pedagogical words. Instead, it emphasized how "productive the child is with its language," and complained that children should be "forced to produce in a foreign language, namely that of the adult. "" Little makers of words were most free if their speaking
? 186 1900
and writing remained untouched by a mother's mouth. In 1900linguists and psychologists claimed that even "the newborn child brings language, universal language, into the world: we do not teach it to speak, we only teach it our own language. "4LIt thereby follows that there is no Mother's Mouth at the origin of human speech and masculine writing. Instead of the female Other, who with the minimal signified ma created the begin- ning of articulation and Poetry, there is an autarchic children's language, which cannot be formed by parents because it respects no national bound- aries and spontaneously produces signifiers such as Amme or Mama? ' Makers of words thereby lose the authority that had once made them au- thors. Ever since, there has been only deathly stillness and white noise in the writing room; no woman or muse offers her kiss.
The discourse network of 1900could not build on the three functions of production, distribution, and consumption. Discursive practices are so historically variable that even elementary and apparently universal concepts are lacking in certain systemswIn 1900no authority of produc- tion determines the inarticulate beginning of articulation. An inhuman noise is the Other of all signs and written works.
For if the incessant noise can whisper anything to writers, its mes- sage can only be Nietzsche's sentence "I am a maker of words: what do words matter! what do 1matter! ""
Writing and writers as accidental events in a noise that generates acci- dents and thus can never be overcome by its accidents: Nietzsche comes quite close to the poetics of Mallarmt. Faust's helpful Spirit diverted the act of writing toward a goal in the beyond, the transcendental signified of the word; Hippel's anathema excluded literary hacks from the realm of souls; makers of words, however, never escape the medium they institute. An anecdote concerning Mallarmt illustrates this. "Degas occasionally wrote verses, and some of those he left were delightful. But he often foundgreatdifficultyinthisworkaccessorytohispainting. . . . Oneday he said to Mallarme: 'Yours is a hellish craft. I can't manage to say what I want, and yet I'm full of ideas. . . . 'And Mallarmt answered: 'My dear Degas,onedoesnotmakepoetrywithideas,butwithwords. ""' Thelast
? NIETZSCHE 185
philosopher and the first modern poet agreed even in their choice of words. Mallarm6 decomposes the phrase maker of words in a single sen- tence. For Nietzsche it became impossible to put his own thoughts and feelings on paper because all meaning was lost in noise. For Mallarmi meanings or ideas had been played out, so that there was no longer any translation from one medium, literature, to another, such as painting. There was nothing to makers of words (according to the word-maker Nietzsche); Mallarmi called his hellish profession the "elocutionary dis- appearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words. '"" Writing that can discover the basis of its rights neither in what is written nor in the writer has its message only in the medium it constitutes. In 1900,in direct descent from Nietzsche, "word art" became synonymous with literature. "
A professor who was no longer a professor and an educational bureau- crat who no longer wanted to be one stood at the threshold of a new dis- course network. 'nSoon every child would learn that makers of words are not authors and that words are not ideas. The confusion between words and ideas that had supported an entire classicism did not end only in soli- tary rooms. On December 4,1890,the emperor's irrefutable mouth issued an order placing German as a school subject at the center of all pedagogy and essay writing at the center of this enter. '^ With that, Ger- man ceased to be beyond all school instruction, a realm where words were always bypassed for their meanings and thus for the university disci- pline of philosophy. Consequently, a decree of 1904did away with the study of philosophy as an "obligatory part of the doctoral examina- tion. ""' Indeed, the great experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbing- haus nearly succeeded in having philosophy replaced by physiological psychology in examinations for teaching positions. Schools also came close to teaching that aesthetics is nothing more than applied physiology.
But if writing came to be at the center of the center in school, physiol- ogy also found its way into the classroom, even without being included in examination regulations. The noise that grounded Nietzsche's writing was put down on paper. Free essays, advocated by the art-education movement beginning in 1904,contributed neither to unfolding the indi- viduality of their authors nor to the ideality of their thoughts. At an ex- treme they simply led to writing down the droning in feverish children's heads. What Nietzsche already knew at the absurdly early age of seven years attained positive discursive reality. Art education gave up on reach- ing its pupils with human or pedagogical words. Instead, it emphasized how "productive the child is with its language," and complained that children should be "forced to produce in a foreign language, namely that of the adult. "" Little makers of words were most free if their speaking
? 186 1900
and writing remained untouched by a mother's mouth. In 1900linguists and psychologists claimed that even "the newborn child brings language, universal language, into the world: we do not teach it to speak, we only teach it our own language. "4LIt thereby follows that there is no Mother's Mouth at the origin of human speech and masculine writing. Instead of the female Other, who with the minimal signified ma created the begin- ning of articulation and Poetry, there is an autarchic children's language, which cannot be formed by parents because it respects no national bound- aries and spontaneously produces signifiers such as Amme or Mama? ' Makers of words thereby lose the authority that had once made them au- thors. Ever since, there has been only deathly stillness and white noise in the writing room; no woman or muse offers her kiss.
The discourse network of 1900could not build on the three functions of production, distribution, and consumption. Discursive practices are so historically variable that even elementary and apparently universal concepts are lacking in certain systemswIn 1900no authority of produc- tion determines the inarticulate beginning of articulation. An inhuman noise is the Other of all signs and written works. N o distribution can use language as a mere channel and thus attract ever more writers and read- ers. Like any medium in 1900,discourse is an irreducible fact that will not disappear in philosophical meaning or psychological effects. There- fore it cannot allow a consumption that would retranslate speech back to its origin.
This all constitutes a largely unwritten chapter in literary studies, and it still needs to be described in its technological and institutional aspects. But the hermit of Sils had already traversed this space, without institu- tions, almost without technologies, simply as his tragedy. Although he does not seem an imposing figure, a founder of a new discourse? in his failed experiments Nietzsche was the victim offered up to a writing other than the classical-romantic.
The experiments began with a theory of language concerned, to quote the title of an essay, with "Truth and Falsehood in an Extramoral Sense. " Considered apart from the ostensible truth-telling demands of moralistic or even educative voices, language is no longer the translation of prelin- guistic meanings, but rather one medium among others. Media, however, exist only as arbitrary selections from a noise that denies all selection. Nietzsche absorbed the lesson of the scene of his writing so completely that "Nature" itself, rather than assuming human or maternal form be- came one with the frighteningly inarticulate tone. "She threw away the key: and woe to the fateful curiosity that once would look out and down-
? NIETZSCHE 187
ward through a crack in the room of consciousness and would sense that man, in the indifference of his ignorance, rests on the merciless, the crav- ing, the voracious, the murderous, and hangs in dreams on the back of a tiger. "-
No medium of information can translate the terror that excludes con- sciousness and that consciousness in turn excludes. Falsehood, in an ex- tramoral sense, is truth. A lie is only a lie of selection, which veils the terror or even, like someone at his desk, turns his back on it. Reading is one example, in that Nietzsche compares the actual text from which ran- dom selection was made to an unthinkably complex object of nature. But language itself does not function any differently.
A juxtaposition of different languages shows that words never have anything to do with truth or adequate expression: for otherwise there would not be so many different languages. The "thing in itself" (and that would be pure, inconsequen- tial truth) is incomprehensible and utterly unworthy of effort for the creator of language as well. He designates only the relations of things to men and for their expression makes use of the most daring metaphors. First of all a nervous impulse is translated into an image. First metaphor. The image is again further formed into a sound! Second metaphor. And each time there is a complete leap, from one sphere into a completely different and new
Whereas in the discourse network of 1800an organic continuum ex- tended from the inarticulate minimal signified to the meanings of factual languages, there is now a break. Language (as its plural suggests) is not the truth and consequently not any truth at all. **Though there is no na- ture of language for philosophers to uncover behind its bold metaphors? another, physiological nature appears. Nietzsche's theory of language, like his aesthetics, proceeds from nervous impulses. Optical and acoustic responses to impulses, images and sounds, bring about the two aspects of language, as signified and signifier. Yet they remain as separated from one another as they are from the pure stochastic processes to which they re- spond. The break between the imaginal signified and the acoustic signifier cannot be bridged by continuous translation; only a metaphor or trans- position can leap the gap. Separate sense media come together against the background of an omnipresent noise-as "completely different and new spheres. " Instead of deriving media from a common source like the poetic imagination, Nietzsche divides optics and acoustics into a "world of sight" and "world of sound. "
Each of the two media repeats its common relation to an origin that, being a random generator, is not an origin. Nietzsche dreamed of a music that would not, like all German music, "fade away at the sight of the vo- luptuous blue sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky," music that"prevailsevenbeforethebrownsunsetsofthedesert. "'I Onlyanau-
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dible world in which sound and color triumph over form and morality would remain, despite any process of selection, close to its inhuman background, one that (aswe know) answers to the god's name Dionysus. But the optical medium of Apollo does not function any differently.
When after a forceful attempt to gaze on the sun we turn away blinded, we see dark-colored spots before our eyes, as a cure, as it were. Conversely, the bright image projections of the Sophoclean hero-in short, the Apollonian aspect of the mask-are necessary effects of a glance into the inside and terrors of nature; as it were, luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night. "
Nietzsche's visual world is born in the eye itself. Entoptical visions heal and transpose pain in the eyes, which, in a reversal of all tradition, is not caused by a blinding sun but by a horrible night. This ground, against which colors and forms are only selections, is at once preserved (by pain) and metaphorically veiled (by the reversal of darkness into light). Apollo- nian art, too, fulfills a condition constitutive of technological media by meeting the "demand that it should not only be similar to the object, but should furnish the guarantee for this similarity by being, so to speak, a creation of the object itself, that is, by being mechanically produced by it. "S'No imagination can stand up to such demands; where psychological translation once sufficed, material transposition now becomes necessary.
Moving "images of light" by which the eye forms an image of its own retina have little to do with productions of Sophocles at Athenian fes- tivals. Nietzsche's Apollonian art describes something quite different- the technological medium of film, which the Lumitre brothers would make public OR December 28, 1895. Nietzsche and the Lumikres based Apollonian art and the movies on applied physiology: the entoptical after- image, or the illusion, created by afterimage and strobe effect, in which discrete images proceeding with sufficiently high frequency appear to form a continuum. And if the Apollonian hero is "in the last analysis nothing but a bright image projected on a dark wall, which means ap- pearance through and through,"" then all the elements of film have come together: first, the black before each selection, which for Nietzsche was original night and in film is the protective concealment of the reel during transport; second, the optical or even entoptical hallucinatory effect; third, the projection screen, precisely the contribution of the Lumitres, which made Edison's cinemascope of 1891 into the movies. sS
A music that holds its own in the desert and a theater that is film avant la lettre ""-by their physiological effects these innovations explode the limits of European art. They become media. As in Wagnerian opera, their heroic predecessor, media no longer speak "the language of the culture of a caste and in general no longer recognize any distinction between the
? cultivated and the uncultivated. "" Only the ingrained alphabetization of I 800 made it possible to celebrate and understand the "philologist-poet" Goethe in the way that his Discourse of the Master understood under- standing. An aesthetics of applied physiology, by contrast, required nei-
ther training nor elite culture.
But Nietzsche was not Wagner. For makers of words, even if they
dream of music and movies, there remains only the paradoxical desire to break open the general medium of culture within and by means of its own structure. Therefore Nietzsche began by countermanding the Faustian revolution. Goethe's universality joined philological and poetic practice to create Spirit from letters and human happiness from study. When even as a student Nietzsche scolded Faust for his method of translation, he did so in the name of a philology that was still a particular competence of the Republic of Scholars. An old-fashioned professional ethic confronted uni- versal alphabetization. Whereas "we modems read nothing but thoughts" and distill Faustian meaning from five out of twenty words, Nietzsche praises the ascesis of the philologist who still reads words and under- stands "conjectural criticism" as "an activity of the kind employed in solving a rebus. '' '*
All appearances to the contrary, Nietzsche made no serious attempt to rescind the historical fact that everyone was now able to learn to read. He did not plan an "imitation of the historical practices of communication" fortheirownsake;'9 theywereonlytoprovidehimwiththemeansofand weapons for his own writing project. Instead of practicing conjectural criticism to solve the rebus of purported texts, he invented riddle after riddle. Philological insights, for instance, that in Horace's poetry "this minimum in the extent and number of the signs" attains "the maximum . . . in the energy of the signs" in that "every word-as sound, as place, as concept, pours out its force right and left,"" became for Nietzsche the writer a design for his own experiments. Zuruthustru was a "play of every kind of symmetry" "down to the choice of vowels. "6'
In the guise of historical regression, Nietzsche pushed the structures of writing to an extreme. Faust's translation of hdym marked a moment in the history of the sign when there was no awareness of the paradigmatic; by contrast, Nietzsche's writing, in its program and practice, established pure differentiality. A topology of the signifier, as Saussure would apply it to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, orders the text and therefore its programmed reception as well. Nietzsche demanded an "art of inter- pretation" by which each sign was to be read together with contiguous signs as well as with those for which it was a substitute. In place of her- meneutic rereading he saw a simple, physiological "rumination-some-
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thing for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a 'modem man. '"6* All of Nietzsche's stylistic techniques embody this one com- mand-including the sentence that issued it. His typographical accents were intended to keep the reader from "skipping over" the imperative and, being "held by the restrictive clause, to spell it. ",' Alphabetized flu- ency is throttled; the insistence of the signifier takes the paradigm man/ animal apart syntagmatically (in a transvaluation of all connoted values). As cows, the readers (or rather the feminine readers) Nietzsche demanded became analphabetical. "He who knows the reader does nothing further for the reader"; but where nonreaders are being eliminated, style itself must enforce the difficult process-the old-European norm-of spelling out the text.
Ever since Nietzsche, the logic of the signifier has become a technique of sparseness and isolation, and minimum signs release maximum energy. Hermeneutic theories, with their notions of context, are inadequate to such a calculus. They are familiar onlv with organic relationships and with a continuous-that is, psychological or historical-narrative repre- sentation of them. The relative value of signifiers, by contrast, is given mathematically; its articulation is called counting.
To count words-in the days of romanticism this was the ridiculously outmoded fixed idea of a Fixlein with his kabala of the Bible;" in the age of media it becomes a primary and elementary necessity. Mallarmi de- rives the essence of literature from the fact that there are twenty-four let- ters:' In the opening line of a poem, Rilke raises his eyes "from the book, from the near, countable lines. " What Nietzsche praises in Horace ap- plies also to the "telegraphic style" of his own aphorisms. " For simple, economic reasons telegrams demand the paucity of words that for Nietz- sche had a physiological basis in nearsightedness and lenses of fourteen diopters.
Where the hermit of Sils seems to retreat from universal alphabetita- tion into the prehistorical, he is preparing the way for the rule of the enig- matic letter in the discourse network of 1900. The topology and econom- ics of the signifier are a matter more for engineers than for Renaissance philologists. Only a very ordinary understanding of the Sociological Foundations of Literary Expressionism in Germany could see in August Stramm and Ferdinand Hardekopf "a certain disjunction between their avant-garde literary activity and their professions as postal official and parliamentary stenographer. "6- In reality there is no truer or more urgent juncture. Stramm's poems, with their six to eight lines of one to three words each, are the telegraphic style as literature. They are entirely ap- propriate from a postal inspector who, after thorough training in the
? postal and telegraphic services, wrote a doctoral thesis entitled "Histori- cal, Critical, and Fiscal Policy Investigation of the World Postal System's Postage Rate and Its Basis" for the philosophical faculty of the University of Halle. Once there is a world postal system, signifiers have standardized prices that mock all meaning. Once there are telegrams and postcards, style is no longer the man, but an economy of signs. "*What Horace meant to Nietzsche the philologist of ancient languages is for Stramm "the gen- eral business principle of obtaining the greatest possible value for the least expense. " It was, of course, a principle that raised "exchange of in- formation" and, in particular, expressionist poetry to the second power: the costs are "costs that do not immediately create value or raise values, but which make the creation of value possible. "69They are discourses in the good Nietzschean manner, then, as a self-heightening of structures of mastery, which became ever more necessary under the conditions of stan- dardized and mass produced information. Only the minimax of sign en- ergy escapes the fate of incalculable masses of data, as in Nietzsche's inner civil war. From the "empirical law of correspondence production, ac- cording to which each letter posted from one country to another country elicits another letter from the second country to the first,"-" there follows finally only noise.
In The WandererandHisShadow, Nietzsche first experiments with the telegraphic style. The conjectural critic had become so ill, his eyes so nearsighted, that each letter he read exacted its price. The professor from Basel had become so tired of his profession that the night in his eyes gave birth to a shadow, one beyond culture and the university.
My sickness also gave me the right to change all my habits completely; it permit- ted, it commanded me to forget; it bestowed on me the necessity of lying still, of leisure, of waiting and being patient. -But that means, of thinking. -My eyes alone put an end to all book wormishness-in brief, philology: I was delivered from the "book"; for years 1did not read a thing-the greatest benefit I ever con- ferred on myself. -That nethermost self which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent under the continual pressure of having to listen to other selves (and that is after all what reading means) awakened slowly, shyly, dubiously-but eventually it spoke again. -'
A physiological accident made Nietzsche's second experiment pos- sible. Near-blindness released writing from being the productive continua- tion of reading it had been in I800 or the commentary on a pile of books it had been in the Republic of Scholars. Though Nietzsche's method of philo- logical spelling out governed his own work, he was no longer a scholar, one "who at bottom does little nowadays but thumb books-philolo- gists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day. "R At the point where the
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eyes or imagination of others see printed paper, night intervenes. Hegel's refutation of sense-certainty would d o nothing for someone too blind to read. The absolute certainty of night and shadow put the cultural me- dium of the book on the same level as physiological media, which had their ground and countersupport in the desert, noise, and blinding dark- ness. In place of the uncounted words already written, in place of philolo- gists' two hundred books per day (first counted by Nietzsche), an uncon- scious self appears, which in its refusal to do the required reading is as foreign and physiological as the voice behind the chair. What finally be- gins to speak is, of course, never reached by any word. Near blindness, more effective than the devouring of books by women ever was, grants forgetfulness.
But the accident of illness brought about merely the conditions that distinguish all signifiers. In order for a sign to exist, it must necessarily stand against a background that cannot be stored by any mechanism. For letters, this is empty white paper; in another case, the mirror-image trans- position of writing, it is the empty black sky.
To write-
The inkwell, crystal clear like a conscience, with its drop of darkness at the
bottom, so that something may come out of it: then, set aside the lamp.
You noticed, one does not write the alphabet of stars luminously, on a dark field, only, thus is it indicated, barely begun or interrupted; man pursues black
on white.
This fold of dark lace, that holds the infinite, its secret, woven by thousands,
each one according to its own thread or unknown continuation, assembles distant interlaced ribbons where a luxury yet to be inventoried sleeps, vampire, knot, leaves and then present it. -*
The inkwell, in whose darkness Nietzky would drown his black heart; the lamp set aside, which the half-blind hardly need anyway; the dark field on which stars are stars and where the afterimages of Apollonian visions ease pain-the materiality of signifiers rests on a chaos that de- fines them differentially. Nietzsche could call his styles, because of their "variety" or in spite of it, "the opposite of chaos. "" A precondition for something to "come out," that is, to be written down, is a relation to the dark ground. The fact that writing reverses this relation of figure and ground (Max Wertheimer would soon study the physiology of perception involved) into dark marks against luminous space changes nothing in its logic. As a "fold of dark lace" that "assembles distant interlaced rib- bons," letters are determined by the space between them.
The logic of chaos and intervals was implemented as a technology by the discourse network of 1900-through the invention of the typewriter. When his eyes decreed an end to all bookwormishness, Nietzsche
? wrote that he had no idea how he would handle written material (letters and notes). He was thinking about getting a typewriter, and he had been in contact with its inventor, a Dane from Copenhagen. " Five months later, Paul Rie brought the machine, which cost 450 Reichsmark, to Genoa. It had "unfortunately been damaged during the trip. A mechanic was able to repair it within a week, but it soon completely ceased functioning. " 76
Nietzsche as typist-the experiment lasted for a couple of weeks and was broken off, yet it was a turning point in the organization of discourse. No other philosopher would have been proud to appear in the Berlin Daily as the owner of a strange new machine. -' As far as one can recon- struct the unwritten literary history of the typewriter, only journalists and reporters, such as Mark Twain and Paul Lindau, threw away their pens in the pioneering days of I880. The stinking Spirit, as it led its skim- ming readers, also made its move to a machine that, in contrast to the pen, was "capable of putting one's first thoughts, which are well known to be the best, onto paper. "'* Nietzsche's decision to buy a typewriter, before greater interest in the new technology arose in Europe around
1890,had a different motivation: his half-blindness. Indeed, the first typewriters (in contrast to the Remington of 1873)were made for those who were blind, and sometimes (as with Foucauld and Pierre) by those who were blind. Nietzsche's Dane from Copenhagen was Malling Han- sen, pastor and teacher of the deaf and dumb, whose "writing ball" of 1865o r 1867 "was designed for use only by the blind," but by virtue of improved mechanics and working speed "was the first practical and us- able typewriter. ""
Nietzsche, who even as a school boy dreamed of a machine that would transcribe his thoughts, knew better than his biographer Kurt Paul Janz, who with feigned outspokenness (and probably out of respect for fab- ricators of munitions and buyers of typewriter patents like the Reming- tons) flatly denied the Dane (whom he calls Hansun) any credit for the invention. '" Nietzsche's choice, by contrast, as half-blind as it was certain, picked out a machine whose rounded keyboard could be used "exclu- sively through the sense of touch," because "on the surface of a sphere each spot is designated with complete certainty by its spatial position. "*'
Spatially designated and discrete signs-that, rather than increase in speed, was the real innovation of the typewriter. "In place of the image of the word [in handwriting] there appears a geometrical figure created by the spatial arrangement of the letter keys. "I2 Indeed, a peculiar relation- ship to place defines the signifier: in contrast to everything in the Real, it can be and not be in its place.
y =(+a) +(-a) +(+a) +(-a) +. . . Bolzano
? Nietzsche: Incipit Tragoedia
"My time extends only from the summer months in Sils-Maria (Nietz- sche's 'Foreword to the Early Works') and in the foothills of Antibes, as Monet painted it, into this winter of damnation and nights of fire. "' The historical adventures of speaking d o not form a continuum and so do not constitute a history of ideas. They are marked by breaks that in a single stroke can consign entire discourse networks to oblivion, and they have plateaus that make one forget the advance of armies and hours even dur- ing the winters of world wars. What came to an end during the summers of Sils-Maria, those few summers of free writing, was everything "in the order of culture, scholarship, and science, of the familial and benevolent character that distinguished German literature of the nineteenth century in so many ways. "> Thus Gottfried Benn, with characteristic exacmess, selected and gathered up the particular functions that constituted the dis- course network of I 800. The official locus of production for German Po- etry was the nuclear family; scholars saw to its multiplication; and a sci- ence that claimed the title Science provided its justification. If, with Hofinannsthal, one claims that only this organization of discourse is le- gitimate, then everything that began with Nietzsche comes to nothing. In the empty space where one would wish to see a "new literature," there would be only "Goethe and beginnings. "' But the break was so radical that those fascinated with Goethe had difficulty recognizing that the "literature" that developed in place of German Poetry was in fact litera- ture. "Two men determine the German aesthetic of our time: Goethe and Nietzsche. One forms it, and the other destroys it. '" When the one Mother gave way to a plurality of women, when the alphabetization-
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made-flesh gave way to technological media, and when philosophy gave way to the psychophysical or psychoanalytic decomposition of language, Poetry also disintegrated. In its place arose, whether German or not, an artistry in the full range of this Nietzschean term: from the magic of letters to a histrionics of media.
Over the beginning of literature circa 1900stands a curse. "Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader. Another cen- tury of readers-and the spirit itself will stink. That everyone may learn to read, in the long run corrupts not only writing but also thinking. "' Zarathustra's curse strikes at the technological-material basis of the dis- course network of 1800:universal alphabetization. Not content or mes- sage but the medium itself made the Spirit, the corpus composed of Ger- man Poetry and German Idealism, into a stinking cadaver. The murderer of the letter met its own death.
Nietzsche therefore described, although in a transvaluation of all val- ues just what the reading and writing reformers of 1800did. Except for thesigndeterminingvalue, thereisnodifferencebetweenthetwofollow- ing descriptions of reading (the first published in 1786, the second in 1886).
With practice, everything should become a knack as natural as feeling, so that one can survey the whole easily and quickly without being conscious of every single detail, and then make one's choice. Knowledge of letters is not yet knowl- edge of reading, even though mechanical reading is nothing more than pronounc- i n g letters. O n l y o n e w h o c a n t a k e i n w h o l e w o r d s o r e v e n l i n e s a t a g l a n c e , w i t h - out thinking of individual letters, knows how to read. 6
Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page-rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words-just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. . . . All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are-accus- tomed to lymg. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. '
Nietzsche's description confirms the great extent to which the educa- tional programs of 1800had achieved statistical reality. * But a sobering period follows that triumph. Hermeneutic reading, once praised as knack or even feeling in order to make it palatable, isscorned and called a lie. When unfeelingly described as discursive manipulation rather than viewed from the inner perspective of its beneficiaries, universal alphabetization turnsout to be the beginning of self-deception and, as such, of the pro- liferation of artists. Modern readers who arbitrarily hit upon five words out of twenty in order to get to the meaning as quickly as possible prac- tice the same technique as writers and rewriters.
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The most astonishing thing may come to pass-the host of the historically neutral is always there readv to supervise the author of it even while he is still far off. The echo is heard immediately: but always as a "critique," though the moment before the critic did not so much as dream of the possibility of what has been done. The work never produces an effect but only another "critique"; and the critique itself produces no effect either, but again only a further critique?
From skipping over letters to surveying an author, from an elementary trick in reading to semi-official literary criticism-the method remains the same. According to Fichte, hermeneutics simply means writing any- thing about a work, with the exception of its actual text. Nietzsche's di- agnosis of a pathological increase in the population of authors continues a complaint made when the malady had just begun;'" but Nieasche named the root of the evil. In Human, All too Human, one reads in the section entitled "The Name on the Title-Page":
That the name of the author should be inscribed on the book is now customary and almost a duty; yet it is one of the main reasons books produce so little effect. For if they are good, then, as the quintessence of the personality of their authors, they are worth more than these; but as soon as the author announces himself on the title-page, the reader at once dilutesthe quintessence again with the personality, indeed with what is most personal, and thus thwarts the objectof the book. "
Alphabetized reading, which would continue writing rather than rec- ognize letters on the page, thus has a correlate in production: the func- tion of authorship. From the same exterior position in which his irony revealed the arbitrary choice among twenty words, Nietzsche also scorns the new rule of discourse that embellishes title pages with names. The hu- man, all too human o r personal, indeed, most personal, which is attributed by the anthropology of language to all signs, burdens a reading that "at once looks beyond the work" and asks after "the history of its author. . . . in the previous and possible future progress of his development. " 1z
Alphabetization, reading that continues writing or the name of the au- thor-with the exception of the feminine reading function, Nietzsche's unsparing analysis brings together all the control loops of the classical discourse network. The summary results in a negative evaluation. Words have no effect because they are skipped over; reading issues only in writ- ing; authors' names detract from the phenomenon of the book. In ret- rospect the discourse network of 1800is a single machine designed to neutralize discursive effects and establish "our absurd world of edu- cators"-"to the 'able servant of the state' this promises a regulating schema"-founded on the ruins of words. "
On the basis of this analytically very accomplished summation, Zara- thustra can dare to call the Spirit a stinking cadaver.
Nietzsche knew what he was talking about. The former student of the
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royal academy truly owed "the totality of his education" to the discourse network of 1800;according to the rector, Pforta under Prussian occupa- tion constituted "a self-contained educational state, which completely ab- sorbed all aspects of the life of the individual. "" In 1859,on the one- hundredth birthday of Schiller, students heard a teacher, who had been commissioned by Prussian authorities to write the first textbook on Ger- man literary history, deliver an address on the greatness of the Poet; they then spent the evening hours, after a celebratory dinner, in general, but private, reading of Schiller in the school library. " One spent the rest of one's school time attempting to deal with one's own person in the manner that Karl August Koberstein's literary history dealt with the classical writ- ers. As Poet and Critic unified in one person, the schoolboy Nietzsche wrote, aside from poetic works, the corresponding poetic autobiogra- phies, which, after conjuring the inexhaustible days of his childhood, regularly listed his private reading and writing. "My Life"; "Course of My Life"; "A Look Back"; "From My Life"; "My Literary and Musical Activity''-and so on runs the list that an author from the new crop by the name of Nietzsche added to the classical discourse network. Only much later, namely, at the university level of the same educational path, could he read the "autobiographical constructions, which were to have justified the contingency of his being"'" for what they were: German es-
says, programmed by pedagogues and written by students in the royal academy. Looking longingly toward a different "Future of Our Educa- tional Institutions," Nietzsche, the professor of philology, described their nineteenth century:
The last department in which the German teacher in a public school is a t all ac- tive, which is also regarded as his sphere of highest activity, and is here and there even considered the pinnacle of public-school education, is the "German essay. " Because the most gifted pupils almost always display the greatest eagerness in this department, it ought to have been made clear how dangerously stimulating, pre- cisely here, the task of the teacher must be. The German essay is a call to the individual, and the more strongly a pupil is conscious of his distinguishingquali- ties, the more personally will he do his German essay. This "personal doing" is further encouraged at most schools by the choice of essay topics, and I find the strongest evidence of this in the lower grades, where pupils are given the non- pedagogical topic of describingtheir own life, their own development. . . . How often does someone's later literary work turn out to be the sad consequenceof this pedagogical original sin against the spirit! '-
All the sins of the classical discourse network thus concentrate in the German essay. Alone, crying in the wilderness, Nietzsche discovered the material basis of any literary work and, in particular, of his own. The pamphlet Our School Essay as LI Disguised Dime Novelist was soon to appear in mass editions; with affectionate stylistic criticism it demon-
? strated the identity between, on the one hand, Karl May, Buffalo Bill, and Texas Jack, and on the other hand, the 386 model essays on Iphrgenia written by teachers. '*
The Spirit stinks because of the pedagogic original sin against it. First the German essay generates productive literary men (more precisely, schoolboys); second, it generates the autobiographies of their produc- tion; third, it generates-because they so gladly make "obligatory" the "judgment of works of poetry" ''-the literary-critical continuators, those who wrote "Letter to My Friend, in Which 1 Recommend the Reading of My Favorite Poet" and generally neutralized discursive effects. l"
Even in dead-silent, solitary rooms, the gymnasium students of the nineteenth century were never alone; the "totality of their education" contained them as the German essay contained the literary industry. They could intend and understand everything that paper patiently took and gave-except the "influence of women," as Nietzsche later learned to his "astonishment. "" Theywereverywellpreparedforacultureofuniversal alphabetization.
Thus the classical-romantic discourse network ended in megalomania and desperation. A fragment, not accidentally entitled "Euphorion," sets the courtly signature "F W v Nietzky, homme ktudit en lettres" beneath a self-portrait of naked despair.
It is deathly still in the room-the one sound is the pen scratching across the paper-for 1 love to think by writing, given that the machine that could imprint our thoughts into some material without their being spoken or written has yet to be invented. In front of me is an inkwell in which I can drown the sorrows of my black heart, a pair of scissors to accustom me to the idea of slitting my throat, manuscripts with which I can wipe myself, and a chamber pot. "
This is a primal scene, less well known but no less fraught with conse- quences than the despair of Faust in and over his study in the Republic of Scholars. The scholar is replaced, however, by the very man of letters whom Faust made to appear magically as the redeemer from heaps of books. The one who signs himself "homme Otudit en lettres" has experi- enced nothing beyond the formative education of the gymnasium, which as an "appeal to the individual" is the opposite of scholarly training. The scene of writing is therefore bare of all library props, and thus bare, too, of any enigma about how supposed texts are to be translated into Spirit and meaning. The solitary writer is a writer and nothing more: not a translator, scribe, or interpreter. Bare and impoverished, the scratching of the pen exposes a function that had never been described: writing in its materiality. ThereisnoBibletoGermanize,novoicetotranscribe, andso there are none of the miracles that in I800 obscured that materiality. One no longer writes around the fact of writing-writing has become its own
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medium. Even in the clinic for nervous diseases in Jena, Nietzsche was "happy and in his element" as long as he had pencil^. ^' But already the man of letters F W v Nieaky, in contrast to the schoolboy Wilhelm Friedrich Niensche, is through with putting literary works, literary auto- biographies, and discussions of literature on paper-beyond the act of writing there is nothing at all. Whether or not the star pupil of the Schulpforta Gymnasium would have had anything to say, had the ped- agogues left him alone, is unimportant. In the "Euphorion" fragment, in the countless notebooks that until the final day in Turin recorded thoughts and laundry receipts, possible book titles and headache reme- dies, to say nothing of the few scribbles from the insane asylum, which found their way back to the empty schema of the autobiographical Ger- man essay? Nietzsche's papersrecord only the primal scene and its en- during enigma.
What is most disturbingin the posthumous fragments is the fact that they are not a collectionof notes, but rather a collection of writing exercises, indeed rhetorical exercises in the sense of attemptsat various styles, in which the ideasare then run through their declensions. Nietzsche finally achieved a lexicon in which words emptied of all context were brought back into phrases, or were idiomized, so to speak; it was a mute exercise, carried on without further commentary, between the vocabulary notebook, the translation guide, and the collection of stylistic howlers. "
When writing remains a writing exercise, a spare and dismal act with- out any extension into what is called book, work, or genre, there is no place for the "personal presentation and formation" so dear to the essay pedagogues. The "appeal to the individual" to become an individual and author comes to nothing precisely because the model pupil takes it liter- ally. For the one who takes up the pen and writes is no one; instead of serving an individual, the inkwell drowns a black heart; instead of aiding the process of revision and rereading, the technical premises of author- ship, the pair of scissors has a quite different task. And as with the indi- vidual, so too with his production-manuscripts destined for the cham- ber pot. Zarathustra's nose for Spirit or the stench of the writing culture thus comes from a scene of writing in which the props-pen, inkwell, scissors, chamber pot-have done away with the ego and its meanings. The author disappears, to say nothing of the readers he might address; in the "Euphorion" fragment writing produces refuse and feces rather than poetic works. Precisely because Nietzky is another Euphorion, who pos- sessed in his parents a complete classicism and romanticism, in that he had at his command every facility of the classical-romantic discourse net- work, the pedagogic promises and the literary training, there was no eu- phoria; he fell, true to his name until the end.
? Modem texts would follow this downward trajectory in various ways. Nietzky-Nietzsche touched on the zero point on which literature in 1900 would build. It is intransitive writing that is not directed toward written truths or readers; rather, "all its threads converge upon the finest of points-singular, instantaneous, and yet absolutely universal-upon the simple act of writing"; it is writing that "breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representation" and that can be "a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor. "zC
In the deathly still room, only the pen makes a sound. Neither sound nor phonetic method supports a writing that occurs without preliminary speech and so without a soul. If something precedes its materiality, it is only the materiality of sound itself. An isolated, early observation by Nietzsche records the deafening noise in this still scene of writing: "What I fear is not the horrible shape behind my chair but its voice: not the words, but the frighteningly inarticulate and inhuman tone of that shape. If only it would speak as people speak! "I-
In its beginning German Poetry had shut out the animal sounds of a poodle and preferred, when translating prelinguistic feelings, to follow the advice of a Spirit that only later articulated its own name. An inar- ticulate tone defines the zero point of literature, a tone not only inhuman, but also not animal or demonic. T'he creaturely sounds that filled the lan- guage space of the sixteenth century were silenced when Man became aware of a beloved language or a woman's voice. The inhuman tone be- hind Nietzsche's back is not the speech at the beginning of articulation; it is not speech at all. All discourse is powerless against it because all dis- courses add to it and fall prey to it. Within the realm of all sounds and words, all organisms, white noise appears, the incessant and ineradicable background of information. For the very channels through which infor- mation must pass emit noise.
In 1800simple, unarticulated tones were excommunicated. They fo- mented an insanity that, in contrast to the fixed idea, had no poetic value: that of the imbecile. '* If one had no "ability to comprehend the speech of others," one was required to assume "the posture of reading aloud and slowly during an attack. "" Writers like Faust or Anselmus were allowed to trust their inmost feeling only because it was supported by reading, which in turn was supported by a human language or voice.
Nietzsche, however, wrote before and after white noise. He took so literally the German essay's appeal "to listen to one's own thoughts and feelings" that thoughts and feelings turned into their opposites: the lis- tener hears a "humming and roaring of the wild camps" within him, which fight an irreconcilable "civil war. " Where there should have been a
NIETZSCHE 1 8 3
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prelinguistic inwardness, susceptible to articulation and development, "a roar went through the air. " 'O
The frightening, inarticulate tone that Nietzsche heard behind his back hums in the ears themselves. What does not speak as people speak would be called (if it could have a name) "Nietzsche. " The autobiography dem- onstrates this for Nietzsche's own beginning: "At an absurdly early age, at seven, 1 already knew that no human word would ever reach me. " I' The medical records from Jena demonstrate it for his end: "Often screams inarticulately. " ' l Everything began for him, then, when human or peda- gogical encouragement was unable to cover over the noise at the basis of all information channels and instead merged with it. And everything ended when he left The Will to Power sitting on his desk, turned around in his chair, and dissolved into the noise that had horrified him for as long as he lived or wrote.
The woman's voice that made Anselmus write occupied the same chair he did: it exemplified the interlocking media network of speaking and writing, of the soul and Poetry. The voice that formed the ground for Nietzsche's writing exercises remained behind his chair, and he was un- able ever to unlearn the horror it inspired. It halted all erotic exchange between orality and writing, reducing writing to pure materiality. "You should have sung, my soul," is a pathetic sentence-in that "there is no soul" and "aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology. "" Henceforth, there exist only the two sides of an exclusion. Behind the chair there is white noise, that is, physiology; in front of the chair, there are the inkwell, the scissors, paper, and words as multiple as they are empty. For if the incessant noise can whisper anything to writers, its mes- sage can only be Nietzsche's sentence "I am a maker of words: what do words matter! what do 1matter! ""
Writing and writers as accidental events in a noise that generates acci- dents and thus can never be overcome by its accidents: Nietzsche comes quite close to the poetics of Mallarmt. Faust's helpful Spirit diverted the act of writing toward a goal in the beyond, the transcendental signified of the word; Hippel's anathema excluded literary hacks from the realm of souls; makers of words, however, never escape the medium they institute. An anecdote concerning Mallarmt illustrates this. "Degas occasionally wrote verses, and some of those he left were delightful. But he often foundgreatdifficultyinthisworkaccessorytohispainting. . . . Oneday he said to Mallarme: 'Yours is a hellish craft. I can't manage to say what I want, and yet I'm full of ideas. . . . 'And Mallarmt answered: 'My dear Degas,onedoesnotmakepoetrywithideas,butwithwords. ""' Thelast
? NIETZSCHE 185
philosopher and the first modern poet agreed even in their choice of words. Mallarm6 decomposes the phrase maker of words in a single sen- tence. For Nietzsche it became impossible to put his own thoughts and feelings on paper because all meaning was lost in noise. For Mallarmi meanings or ideas had been played out, so that there was no longer any translation from one medium, literature, to another, such as painting. There was nothing to makers of words (according to the word-maker Nietzsche); Mallarmi called his hellish profession the "elocutionary dis- appearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words. '"" Writing that can discover the basis of its rights neither in what is written nor in the writer has its message only in the medium it constitutes. In 1900,in direct descent from Nietzsche, "word art" became synonymous with literature. "
A professor who was no longer a professor and an educational bureau- crat who no longer wanted to be one stood at the threshold of a new dis- course network. 'nSoon every child would learn that makers of words are not authors and that words are not ideas. The confusion between words and ideas that had supported an entire classicism did not end only in soli- tary rooms. On December 4,1890,the emperor's irrefutable mouth issued an order placing German as a school subject at the center of all pedagogy and essay writing at the center of this enter. '^ With that, Ger- man ceased to be beyond all school instruction, a realm where words were always bypassed for their meanings and thus for the university disci- pline of philosophy. Consequently, a decree of 1904did away with the study of philosophy as an "obligatory part of the doctoral examina- tion. ""' Indeed, the great experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbing- haus nearly succeeded in having philosophy replaced by physiological psychology in examinations for teaching positions. Schools also came close to teaching that aesthetics is nothing more than applied physiology.
But if writing came to be at the center of the center in school, physiol- ogy also found its way into the classroom, even without being included in examination regulations. The noise that grounded Nietzsche's writing was put down on paper. Free essays, advocated by the art-education movement beginning in 1904,contributed neither to unfolding the indi- viduality of their authors nor to the ideality of their thoughts. At an ex- treme they simply led to writing down the droning in feverish children's heads. What Nietzsche already knew at the absurdly early age of seven years attained positive discursive reality. Art education gave up on reach- ing its pupils with human or pedagogical words. Instead, it emphasized how "productive the child is with its language," and complained that children should be "forced to produce in a foreign language, namely that of the adult. "" Little makers of words were most free if their speaking
? 186 1900
and writing remained untouched by a mother's mouth. In 1900linguists and psychologists claimed that even "the newborn child brings language, universal language, into the world: we do not teach it to speak, we only teach it our own language. "4LIt thereby follows that there is no Mother's Mouth at the origin of human speech and masculine writing. Instead of the female Other, who with the minimal signified ma created the begin- ning of articulation and Poetry, there is an autarchic children's language, which cannot be formed by parents because it respects no national bound- aries and spontaneously produces signifiers such as Amme or Mama? ' Makers of words thereby lose the authority that had once made them au- thors. Ever since, there has been only deathly stillness and white noise in the writing room; no woman or muse offers her kiss.
The discourse network of 1900could not build on the three functions of production, distribution, and consumption. Discursive practices are so historically variable that even elementary and apparently universal concepts are lacking in certain systemswIn 1900no authority of produc- tion determines the inarticulate beginning of articulation. An inhuman noise is the Other of all signs and written works.
For if the incessant noise can whisper anything to writers, its mes- sage can only be Nietzsche's sentence "I am a maker of words: what do words matter! what do 1matter! ""
Writing and writers as accidental events in a noise that generates acci- dents and thus can never be overcome by its accidents: Nietzsche comes quite close to the poetics of Mallarmt. Faust's helpful Spirit diverted the act of writing toward a goal in the beyond, the transcendental signified of the word; Hippel's anathema excluded literary hacks from the realm of souls; makers of words, however, never escape the medium they institute. An anecdote concerning Mallarmt illustrates this. "Degas occasionally wrote verses, and some of those he left were delightful. But he often foundgreatdifficultyinthisworkaccessorytohispainting. . . . Oneday he said to Mallarme: 'Yours is a hellish craft. I can't manage to say what I want, and yet I'm full of ideas. . . . 'And Mallarmt answered: 'My dear Degas,onedoesnotmakepoetrywithideas,butwithwords. ""' Thelast
? NIETZSCHE 185
philosopher and the first modern poet agreed even in their choice of words. Mallarm6 decomposes the phrase maker of words in a single sen- tence. For Nietzsche it became impossible to put his own thoughts and feelings on paper because all meaning was lost in noise. For Mallarmi meanings or ideas had been played out, so that there was no longer any translation from one medium, literature, to another, such as painting. There was nothing to makers of words (according to the word-maker Nietzsche); Mallarmi called his hellish profession the "elocutionary dis- appearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words. '"" Writing that can discover the basis of its rights neither in what is written nor in the writer has its message only in the medium it constitutes. In 1900,in direct descent from Nietzsche, "word art" became synonymous with literature. "
A professor who was no longer a professor and an educational bureau- crat who no longer wanted to be one stood at the threshold of a new dis- course network. 'nSoon every child would learn that makers of words are not authors and that words are not ideas. The confusion between words and ideas that had supported an entire classicism did not end only in soli- tary rooms. On December 4,1890,the emperor's irrefutable mouth issued an order placing German as a school subject at the center of all pedagogy and essay writing at the center of this enter. '^ With that, Ger- man ceased to be beyond all school instruction, a realm where words were always bypassed for their meanings and thus for the university disci- pline of philosophy. Consequently, a decree of 1904did away with the study of philosophy as an "obligatory part of the doctoral examina- tion. ""' Indeed, the great experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbing- haus nearly succeeded in having philosophy replaced by physiological psychology in examinations for teaching positions. Schools also came close to teaching that aesthetics is nothing more than applied physiology.
But if writing came to be at the center of the center in school, physiol- ogy also found its way into the classroom, even without being included in examination regulations. The noise that grounded Nietzsche's writing was put down on paper. Free essays, advocated by the art-education movement beginning in 1904,contributed neither to unfolding the indi- viduality of their authors nor to the ideality of their thoughts. At an ex- treme they simply led to writing down the droning in feverish children's heads. What Nietzsche already knew at the absurdly early age of seven years attained positive discursive reality. Art education gave up on reach- ing its pupils with human or pedagogical words. Instead, it emphasized how "productive the child is with its language," and complained that children should be "forced to produce in a foreign language, namely that of the adult. "" Little makers of words were most free if their speaking
? 186 1900
and writing remained untouched by a mother's mouth. In 1900linguists and psychologists claimed that even "the newborn child brings language, universal language, into the world: we do not teach it to speak, we only teach it our own language. "4LIt thereby follows that there is no Mother's Mouth at the origin of human speech and masculine writing. Instead of the female Other, who with the minimal signified ma created the begin- ning of articulation and Poetry, there is an autarchic children's language, which cannot be formed by parents because it respects no national bound- aries and spontaneously produces signifiers such as Amme or Mama? ' Makers of words thereby lose the authority that had once made them au- thors. Ever since, there has been only deathly stillness and white noise in the writing room; no woman or muse offers her kiss.
The discourse network of 1900could not build on the three functions of production, distribution, and consumption. Discursive practices are so historically variable that even elementary and apparently universal concepts are lacking in certain systemswIn 1900no authority of produc- tion determines the inarticulate beginning of articulation. An inhuman noise is the Other of all signs and written works. N o distribution can use language as a mere channel and thus attract ever more writers and read- ers. Like any medium in 1900,discourse is an irreducible fact that will not disappear in philosophical meaning or psychological effects. There- fore it cannot allow a consumption that would retranslate speech back to its origin.
This all constitutes a largely unwritten chapter in literary studies, and it still needs to be described in its technological and institutional aspects. But the hermit of Sils had already traversed this space, without institu- tions, almost without technologies, simply as his tragedy. Although he does not seem an imposing figure, a founder of a new discourse? in his failed experiments Nietzsche was the victim offered up to a writing other than the classical-romantic.
The experiments began with a theory of language concerned, to quote the title of an essay, with "Truth and Falsehood in an Extramoral Sense. " Considered apart from the ostensible truth-telling demands of moralistic or even educative voices, language is no longer the translation of prelin- guistic meanings, but rather one medium among others. Media, however, exist only as arbitrary selections from a noise that denies all selection. Nietzsche absorbed the lesson of the scene of his writing so completely that "Nature" itself, rather than assuming human or maternal form be- came one with the frighteningly inarticulate tone. "She threw away the key: and woe to the fateful curiosity that once would look out and down-
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ward through a crack in the room of consciousness and would sense that man, in the indifference of his ignorance, rests on the merciless, the crav- ing, the voracious, the murderous, and hangs in dreams on the back of a tiger. "-
No medium of information can translate the terror that excludes con- sciousness and that consciousness in turn excludes. Falsehood, in an ex- tramoral sense, is truth. A lie is only a lie of selection, which veils the terror or even, like someone at his desk, turns his back on it. Reading is one example, in that Nietzsche compares the actual text from which ran- dom selection was made to an unthinkably complex object of nature. But language itself does not function any differently.
A juxtaposition of different languages shows that words never have anything to do with truth or adequate expression: for otherwise there would not be so many different languages. The "thing in itself" (and that would be pure, inconsequen- tial truth) is incomprehensible and utterly unworthy of effort for the creator of language as well. He designates only the relations of things to men and for their expression makes use of the most daring metaphors. First of all a nervous impulse is translated into an image. First metaphor. The image is again further formed into a sound! Second metaphor. And each time there is a complete leap, from one sphere into a completely different and new
Whereas in the discourse network of 1800an organic continuum ex- tended from the inarticulate minimal signified to the meanings of factual languages, there is now a break. Language (as its plural suggests) is not the truth and consequently not any truth at all. **Though there is no na- ture of language for philosophers to uncover behind its bold metaphors? another, physiological nature appears. Nietzsche's theory of language, like his aesthetics, proceeds from nervous impulses. Optical and acoustic responses to impulses, images and sounds, bring about the two aspects of language, as signified and signifier. Yet they remain as separated from one another as they are from the pure stochastic processes to which they re- spond. The break between the imaginal signified and the acoustic signifier cannot be bridged by continuous translation; only a metaphor or trans- position can leap the gap. Separate sense media come together against the background of an omnipresent noise-as "completely different and new spheres. " Instead of deriving media from a common source like the poetic imagination, Nietzsche divides optics and acoustics into a "world of sight" and "world of sound. "
Each of the two media repeats its common relation to an origin that, being a random generator, is not an origin. Nietzsche dreamed of a music that would not, like all German music, "fade away at the sight of the vo- luptuous blue sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky," music that"prevailsevenbeforethebrownsunsetsofthedesert. "'I Onlyanau-
? 188 1900
dible world in which sound and color triumph over form and morality would remain, despite any process of selection, close to its inhuman background, one that (aswe know) answers to the god's name Dionysus. But the optical medium of Apollo does not function any differently.
When after a forceful attempt to gaze on the sun we turn away blinded, we see dark-colored spots before our eyes, as a cure, as it were. Conversely, the bright image projections of the Sophoclean hero-in short, the Apollonian aspect of the mask-are necessary effects of a glance into the inside and terrors of nature; as it were, luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by gruesome night. "
Nietzsche's visual world is born in the eye itself. Entoptical visions heal and transpose pain in the eyes, which, in a reversal of all tradition, is not caused by a blinding sun but by a horrible night. This ground, against which colors and forms are only selections, is at once preserved (by pain) and metaphorically veiled (by the reversal of darkness into light). Apollo- nian art, too, fulfills a condition constitutive of technological media by meeting the "demand that it should not only be similar to the object, but should furnish the guarantee for this similarity by being, so to speak, a creation of the object itself, that is, by being mechanically produced by it. "S'No imagination can stand up to such demands; where psychological translation once sufficed, material transposition now becomes necessary.
Moving "images of light" by which the eye forms an image of its own retina have little to do with productions of Sophocles at Athenian fes- tivals. Nietzsche's Apollonian art describes something quite different- the technological medium of film, which the Lumitre brothers would make public OR December 28, 1895. Nietzsche and the Lumikres based Apollonian art and the movies on applied physiology: the entoptical after- image, or the illusion, created by afterimage and strobe effect, in which discrete images proceeding with sufficiently high frequency appear to form a continuum. And if the Apollonian hero is "in the last analysis nothing but a bright image projected on a dark wall, which means ap- pearance through and through,"" then all the elements of film have come together: first, the black before each selection, which for Nietzsche was original night and in film is the protective concealment of the reel during transport; second, the optical or even entoptical hallucinatory effect; third, the projection screen, precisely the contribution of the Lumitres, which made Edison's cinemascope of 1891 into the movies. sS
A music that holds its own in the desert and a theater that is film avant la lettre ""-by their physiological effects these innovations explode the limits of European art. They become media. As in Wagnerian opera, their heroic predecessor, media no longer speak "the language of the culture of a caste and in general no longer recognize any distinction between the
? cultivated and the uncultivated. "" Only the ingrained alphabetization of I 800 made it possible to celebrate and understand the "philologist-poet" Goethe in the way that his Discourse of the Master understood under- standing. An aesthetics of applied physiology, by contrast, required nei-
ther training nor elite culture.
But Nietzsche was not Wagner. For makers of words, even if they
dream of music and movies, there remains only the paradoxical desire to break open the general medium of culture within and by means of its own structure. Therefore Nietzsche began by countermanding the Faustian revolution. Goethe's universality joined philological and poetic practice to create Spirit from letters and human happiness from study. When even as a student Nietzsche scolded Faust for his method of translation, he did so in the name of a philology that was still a particular competence of the Republic of Scholars. An old-fashioned professional ethic confronted uni- versal alphabetization. Whereas "we modems read nothing but thoughts" and distill Faustian meaning from five out of twenty words, Nietzsche praises the ascesis of the philologist who still reads words and under- stands "conjectural criticism" as "an activity of the kind employed in solving a rebus. '' '*
All appearances to the contrary, Nietzsche made no serious attempt to rescind the historical fact that everyone was now able to learn to read. He did not plan an "imitation of the historical practices of communication" fortheirownsake;'9 theywereonlytoprovidehimwiththemeansofand weapons for his own writing project. Instead of practicing conjectural criticism to solve the rebus of purported texts, he invented riddle after riddle. Philological insights, for instance, that in Horace's poetry "this minimum in the extent and number of the signs" attains "the maximum . . . in the energy of the signs" in that "every word-as sound, as place, as concept, pours out its force right and left,"" became for Nietzsche the writer a design for his own experiments. Zuruthustru was a "play of every kind of symmetry" "down to the choice of vowels. "6'
In the guise of historical regression, Nietzsche pushed the structures of writing to an extreme. Faust's translation of hdym marked a moment in the history of the sign when there was no awareness of the paradigmatic; by contrast, Nietzsche's writing, in its program and practice, established pure differentiality. A topology of the signifier, as Saussure would apply it to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, orders the text and therefore its programmed reception as well. Nietzsche demanded an "art of inter- pretation" by which each sign was to be read together with contiguous signs as well as with those for which it was a substitute. In place of her- meneutic rereading he saw a simple, physiological "rumination-some-
NIETZSCHE 1 8 9
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thing for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a 'modem man. '"6* All of Nietzsche's stylistic techniques embody this one com- mand-including the sentence that issued it. His typographical accents were intended to keep the reader from "skipping over" the imperative and, being "held by the restrictive clause, to spell it. ",' Alphabetized flu- ency is throttled; the insistence of the signifier takes the paradigm man/ animal apart syntagmatically (in a transvaluation of all connoted values). As cows, the readers (or rather the feminine readers) Nietzsche demanded became analphabetical. "He who knows the reader does nothing further for the reader"; but where nonreaders are being eliminated, style itself must enforce the difficult process-the old-European norm-of spelling out the text.
Ever since Nietzsche, the logic of the signifier has become a technique of sparseness and isolation, and minimum signs release maximum energy. Hermeneutic theories, with their notions of context, are inadequate to such a calculus. They are familiar onlv with organic relationships and with a continuous-that is, psychological or historical-narrative repre- sentation of them. The relative value of signifiers, by contrast, is given mathematically; its articulation is called counting.
To count words-in the days of romanticism this was the ridiculously outmoded fixed idea of a Fixlein with his kabala of the Bible;" in the age of media it becomes a primary and elementary necessity. Mallarmi de- rives the essence of literature from the fact that there are twenty-four let- ters:' In the opening line of a poem, Rilke raises his eyes "from the book, from the near, countable lines. " What Nietzsche praises in Horace ap- plies also to the "telegraphic style" of his own aphorisms. " For simple, economic reasons telegrams demand the paucity of words that for Nietz- sche had a physiological basis in nearsightedness and lenses of fourteen diopters.
Where the hermit of Sils seems to retreat from universal alphabetita- tion into the prehistorical, he is preparing the way for the rule of the enig- matic letter in the discourse network of 1900. The topology and econom- ics of the signifier are a matter more for engineers than for Renaissance philologists. Only a very ordinary understanding of the Sociological Foundations of Literary Expressionism in Germany could see in August Stramm and Ferdinand Hardekopf "a certain disjunction between their avant-garde literary activity and their professions as postal official and parliamentary stenographer. "6- In reality there is no truer or more urgent juncture. Stramm's poems, with their six to eight lines of one to three words each, are the telegraphic style as literature. They are entirely ap- propriate from a postal inspector who, after thorough training in the
? postal and telegraphic services, wrote a doctoral thesis entitled "Histori- cal, Critical, and Fiscal Policy Investigation of the World Postal System's Postage Rate and Its Basis" for the philosophical faculty of the University of Halle. Once there is a world postal system, signifiers have standardized prices that mock all meaning. Once there are telegrams and postcards, style is no longer the man, but an economy of signs. "*What Horace meant to Nietzsche the philologist of ancient languages is for Stramm "the gen- eral business principle of obtaining the greatest possible value for the least expense. " It was, of course, a principle that raised "exchange of in- formation" and, in particular, expressionist poetry to the second power: the costs are "costs that do not immediately create value or raise values, but which make the creation of value possible. "69They are discourses in the good Nietzschean manner, then, as a self-heightening of structures of mastery, which became ever more necessary under the conditions of stan- dardized and mass produced information. Only the minimax of sign en- ergy escapes the fate of incalculable masses of data, as in Nietzsche's inner civil war. From the "empirical law of correspondence production, ac- cording to which each letter posted from one country to another country elicits another letter from the second country to the first,"-" there follows finally only noise.
In The WandererandHisShadow, Nietzsche first experiments with the telegraphic style. The conjectural critic had become so ill, his eyes so nearsighted, that each letter he read exacted its price. The professor from Basel had become so tired of his profession that the night in his eyes gave birth to a shadow, one beyond culture and the university.
My sickness also gave me the right to change all my habits completely; it permit- ted, it commanded me to forget; it bestowed on me the necessity of lying still, of leisure, of waiting and being patient. -But that means, of thinking. -My eyes alone put an end to all book wormishness-in brief, philology: I was delivered from the "book"; for years 1did not read a thing-the greatest benefit I ever con- ferred on myself. -That nethermost self which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent under the continual pressure of having to listen to other selves (and that is after all what reading means) awakened slowly, shyly, dubiously-but eventually it spoke again. -'
A physiological accident made Nietzsche's second experiment pos- sible. Near-blindness released writing from being the productive continua- tion of reading it had been in I800 or the commentary on a pile of books it had been in the Republic of Scholars. Though Nietzsche's method of philo- logical spelling out governed his own work, he was no longer a scholar, one "who at bottom does little nowadays but thumb books-philolo- gists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day. "R At the point where the
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eyes or imagination of others see printed paper, night intervenes. Hegel's refutation of sense-certainty would d o nothing for someone too blind to read. The absolute certainty of night and shadow put the cultural me- dium of the book on the same level as physiological media, which had their ground and countersupport in the desert, noise, and blinding dark- ness. In place of the uncounted words already written, in place of philolo- gists' two hundred books per day (first counted by Nietzsche), an uncon- scious self appears, which in its refusal to do the required reading is as foreign and physiological as the voice behind the chair. What finally be- gins to speak is, of course, never reached by any word. Near blindness, more effective than the devouring of books by women ever was, grants forgetfulness.
But the accident of illness brought about merely the conditions that distinguish all signifiers. In order for a sign to exist, it must necessarily stand against a background that cannot be stored by any mechanism. For letters, this is empty white paper; in another case, the mirror-image trans- position of writing, it is the empty black sky.
To write-
The inkwell, crystal clear like a conscience, with its drop of darkness at the
bottom, so that something may come out of it: then, set aside the lamp.
You noticed, one does not write the alphabet of stars luminously, on a dark field, only, thus is it indicated, barely begun or interrupted; man pursues black
on white.
This fold of dark lace, that holds the infinite, its secret, woven by thousands,
each one according to its own thread or unknown continuation, assembles distant interlaced ribbons where a luxury yet to be inventoried sleeps, vampire, knot, leaves and then present it. -*
The inkwell, in whose darkness Nietzky would drown his black heart; the lamp set aside, which the half-blind hardly need anyway; the dark field on which stars are stars and where the afterimages of Apollonian visions ease pain-the materiality of signifiers rests on a chaos that de- fines them differentially. Nietzsche could call his styles, because of their "variety" or in spite of it, "the opposite of chaos. "" A precondition for something to "come out," that is, to be written down, is a relation to the dark ground. The fact that writing reverses this relation of figure and ground (Max Wertheimer would soon study the physiology of perception involved) into dark marks against luminous space changes nothing in its logic. As a "fold of dark lace" that "assembles distant interlaced rib- bons," letters are determined by the space between them.
The logic of chaos and intervals was implemented as a technology by the discourse network of 1900-through the invention of the typewriter. When his eyes decreed an end to all bookwormishness, Nietzsche
? wrote that he had no idea how he would handle written material (letters and notes). He was thinking about getting a typewriter, and he had been in contact with its inventor, a Dane from Copenhagen. " Five months later, Paul Rie brought the machine, which cost 450 Reichsmark, to Genoa. It had "unfortunately been damaged during the trip. A mechanic was able to repair it within a week, but it soon completely ceased functioning. " 76
Nietzsche as typist-the experiment lasted for a couple of weeks and was broken off, yet it was a turning point in the organization of discourse. No other philosopher would have been proud to appear in the Berlin Daily as the owner of a strange new machine. -' As far as one can recon- struct the unwritten literary history of the typewriter, only journalists and reporters, such as Mark Twain and Paul Lindau, threw away their pens in the pioneering days of I880. The stinking Spirit, as it led its skim- ming readers, also made its move to a machine that, in contrast to the pen, was "capable of putting one's first thoughts, which are well known to be the best, onto paper. "'* Nietzsche's decision to buy a typewriter, before greater interest in the new technology arose in Europe around
1890,had a different motivation: his half-blindness. Indeed, the first typewriters (in contrast to the Remington of 1873)were made for those who were blind, and sometimes (as with Foucauld and Pierre) by those who were blind. Nietzsche's Dane from Copenhagen was Malling Han- sen, pastor and teacher of the deaf and dumb, whose "writing ball" of 1865o r 1867 "was designed for use only by the blind," but by virtue of improved mechanics and working speed "was the first practical and us- able typewriter. ""
Nietzsche, who even as a school boy dreamed of a machine that would transcribe his thoughts, knew better than his biographer Kurt Paul Janz, who with feigned outspokenness (and probably out of respect for fab- ricators of munitions and buyers of typewriter patents like the Reming- tons) flatly denied the Dane (whom he calls Hansun) any credit for the invention. '" Nietzsche's choice, by contrast, as half-blind as it was certain, picked out a machine whose rounded keyboard could be used "exclu- sively through the sense of touch," because "on the surface of a sphere each spot is designated with complete certainty by its spatial position. "*'
Spatially designated and discrete signs-that, rather than increase in speed, was the real innovation of the typewriter. "In place of the image of the word [in handwriting] there appears a geometrical figure created by the spatial arrangement of the letter keys. "I2 Indeed, a peculiar relation- ship to place defines the signifier: in contrast to everything in the Real, it can be and not be in its place.
