Sound Writing: Experimental Modernism and the Poetics of Articulation 9780226817767

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Sound Writing

Sound Writing Experimental Modernism and the Poetics of Articulation

Tobias Wilke

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81775-­0 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81777-­4 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81776-­7 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226817767.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilke, Tobias, 1976–, author. Title: Sound writing : experimental modernism and the poetics of articulation / Tobias Wilke. Description: 1. | Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2021037135 | ISBN 9780226817750 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226817774 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226817767 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Speech. | Sound. | Elocution. | Sound poetry. Classification: LCC P37.5.S68 W55 2022 | DDC 302.2/242—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037135 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

In t roduct ion  1

1. Voice Figures: Visible Sound and the Poetics of Articulation (1787–­1965)  14 Oaoa, or The Eidophonetic Poem  14 Vibrating Disks and Primary Letters  32 Photographing Speech  44

2. Toward a Science of Verse: Speech Movements, Graphic Inscription, and the Study of Poetry (1871–­1915)  64 Writing of the Mouth  64 “The Art of Reading Curves”  86 Symbolic Sounds  96

3. Mama—­Papa—­Dada: Poetic Expression at the Threshold of Language (1916–­1947)  110 Remaking Verse in the Vocal Tract  110 From Babble to Gesture to Word (and Back)  128  dada: Reading Graphic Articulations  140 Birdsong in Translation  150

4. Verbi-­Voco-­Visual Explorations: Experimental Modernism in a Technical Age (1947–­1967)  167 “Visible Speech” between Body and Bits  167 Rearticulating Poetic Experimentation  186 Beyond Lineality, or The Expansion of Writing  202 Ac know l e d gm en t s  223 Bibl iog ra phy   225 I nde x  247

Introduction

Modernist sound writing emerged as writers turned their attention to the physical process of spoken language. Their goal was to capture this vocal-­ acoustic phenomenon—­the bodily articulation of sound—­in legible form. At stake in the project was therefore the possibility of a crossing-­over from the audible to the visible, from speech to notation, from body to trace and/ or sign. This book shows how the search for possibilities of this kind—­and the various media, techniques, and concepts employed—­transformed the age-­old genre of poetry into a site of radical linguistic experimentation. The trajectory of this transformation spans roughly one hundred years: The idea of sound writing first took shape in the context of an empirical “science of  verse,” from the 1870s onward, when researchers began to seek out the “exact” properties of poetic language through the graphic registration of articulatory movements. This interest then migrated, in the decades following World War I, from the sphere of laboratory research to the realm of aesthetic production where it crystallized in multiple avant-­garde strategies for reducing poetry to its most elemental conditions in vocal sound production. Both the scientific and the literary concern with sound writing reappeared, finally, during the 1950s and 1960s when articulation became the key category for rethinking poetic “experimentation” against the backdrop of a new technological age. By tracing these different stages of sound writing, I offer a novel approach to the history of the avant-­garde, which has almost always been examined in terms of a fundamental break with the nineteenth century and its (classical, figurative, realist, bourgeois) norms of aesthetic representation.1 1. The most influential scholarly account in this regard has certainly been Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-­Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

2  I n t r o d u c t i o n

This emphasis on discontinuity has largely obscured the extent to which key strategies of avant-­garde experimentation remained fundamentally conditioned by prior developments from domains outside the sphere of aesthetic production. Using modernist sound writing as a critical lens, my analysis highlights how the avant-­garde explicitly disavowed established aesthetic principles by appropriating scientific-­experimental concepts and techniques. I argue, therefore, that experimental modernism must be conceived much more broadly than is usually done. The term “experimental,” with respect to the aesthetic production of the twentieth-­century avant-­ gardes, has most often been deployed as a kind of catchall adjective for the innovative, critical, or nontraditional aspects of these movements, while the question of its genuinely scientific implications has remained largely neglected.2 The present study sheds light on the far-­reaching historical significance of precisely these implications, demonstrating that the category of the modernist experiment constitutes a framework with roots extending well back into the nineteenth century and encompassing both aesthetic and scientific forms. At the same time, this expanded perspective serves to designate the historical specificity of the avant-­garde’s investment in sound writing—­as the poetic emphasis on vocal sound is by no means a uniquely modernist phenomenon. The association between verse and embodied voice, whether of poet or performer, is as old as the genre itself and remains in force even after inventions like the phonetic alphabet and the letterpress begin transforming “oral cultures” into “written” ones.3 The characteristic prevalence of rhetorical devices such as rhyme, euphony, assonance, or onomatopoeia marks poetic language as inherently oriented toward the acoustic aspects of its verbal material—­which means also toward the possibility of its actual acoustic realization. And the practice of vocal performance continues to evolve, within the context of the cultural shift toward writing, into an ever more specialized and rarefied cultural technique—­a kind of art form to be cultivated in its own right—­which

2. For a recent example of this widely established use of the term, see Joe Brae, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, “Introduction,” in The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, eds. Joe Brae, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (New York: Routledge, 2012): 1–­18, at 2. 3. On the definition and history of oral poetry, see Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) and Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, trans. Kathryn Murphy-­Judy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). For some classic, though by no means uncontested, accounts of the historical shift from orality to writing and print, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 2012) and Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1962).

Introduction 3

comes to operate like a secondary, “literate” form of orality in the age of print.4 What is new, however, vis-­à-­vis poetry’s long history of orality, is the way avant-­garde writers of the twentieth century began to focus on the mechanism of  linguistic sound production, which occurs through the interplay of organs like vocal cords, larynx, pharynx, palate, tongue, teeth, and lips. While poetic discourse has always maintained close ties to the vocal and sonic dimensions of  language, the modernist projects of sound writing investigated here could only emerge once the bodily process of articulation had become the central concern, rather than a merely implicit condition, of poetry and its related practices. The idea that bodily articulation was not only a vehicle, or means, for turning written words and immaterial thoughts into sound, but rather its own independent object, or purpose, of study—­an object that could be recorded and transcribed, stored and transmitted, reproduced and even “read”—­was the critical condition for the becoming-­traversable of the entire aesthetic domain this book seeks to chart. And this shift, in turn, was possible only against the backdrop of scientific discourses that took shape throughout the nineteenth century, for it was these discourses that defined articulation as a poetically pertinent phenomenon in the first place. Prior to this period, the term “articulation” had been primarily employed to describe the anatomical constitution of human and animal bodies—­the “jointed” organization that integrates their individual limbs within an organic whole (Latin articulatio = “division into joints”). This notion of articulated structure was then introduced in an analogous sense to the philosophy of  language, around 1800, where it came to denote the idea that human speech could be divided analytically—­like other organisms—­ along the “joints” that connect its elemental parts.5 It was only with the disciplinary rise of physiology throughout the nineteenth century, however, and with the introduction of physiological methods to the analysis of speech, that the concept of articulation acquired the semantic function 4. The expression “literate orality” is Walter Ong’s. See Orality and Literacy, 157. On the theory and history of poetic recitation and the cultural development of modern “vocal arts,” see Charles Bernstein, ed., Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and the comprehensive discussion in Reinhart Meyer-­Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001). On the role of sound in poetry, see also, more generally, Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, “Introduction,” in The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, eds. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 1–­17. 5. For a discussion of this older, language-­philosophical understanding of “articulation,” see Markus Wilczek, Das Artikulierte und das Inartikulierte: Eine Archäologie des strukturalistischen Denkens (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012): 87–­114.

4  I n t r o d u c t i o n

it has maintained in scientific contexts ever since.6 In addition to the formerly prevalent, anatomical understanding, the term began to designate the physical movements through which linguistic sound takes shape across a number of so-­called Artikulationsstellen (places of articulation) inside a speaker’s throat and mouth.7 This new designation shifted the concept’s emphasis from describing bodies and languages as internally articulated— i.e., “jointed”—­systems toward analyzing speech as a temporal process that unfolds through the human body’s interior organization. The understanding of articulation as a thoroughly dynamic phenomenon hinged methodologically, above all, on various new recording devices that made it possible, for the first time, to document speech movements in precise ways. Ranging from specialized laboratory instruments conceived as “labiograph” (lip-­writer), “glossograph” (tongue-­writer), or “laryngograph” (larynx-­writer), to certain applications of photographic and (proto) cinematic technology, these apparatuses allowed scientists to capture the articulatory activity of lips, tongue, or larynx in a visually permanent form, which they argued could then be analyzed. What these apparatuses en­ abled researchers to do, in other words, was to approach speech in a manner equivalent to other recordable bodily processes such as breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure, and pulse, which had been studied by means of graphic methods since the 1840s.8 The consequence of this analogous treatment was not only that the physiological aspects of speech gained prevalence—­in experimental practice and scientific debates—­over all of its other, specifically linguistic dimensions. It also meant that articulation in this new, dynamic sense was brought into view with the help of semiotic strategies that produced from the very beginning a thoroughly mediated picture of its corporeal “nature.” Nineteenth century physiologists, then, came to understand articulation as the physical motor function that distinguishes speech from all other 6. For a current example, see John Clark, Colin Yallop, and Janet Fletcher, An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010): 10–­53. In addition to its continued application in phonetics and linguistics, the concept has by now made its way into disciplines as diverse as sociology, architecture, and communication theory. 7. The language-­scientific accounts that document this incipient terminological shift include Eduard Sievers, Grundzüge der Lautphysiologie: Zur Einführung in das Studium der Lautlehre der indogermanischen Sprachen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876) and Friedrich Heinrich Hermann Techmer, Zur vergleichenden Physiologie der Stimme und Sprache (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1880). 8. On the role of such graphic recording techniques in nineteenth century physiology, see Robert Brain, “Representation on the Line: Graphic Recording Instruments and Scientific Modernism,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, eds. Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002): 155–­77.

Introduction 5

(vocal) acoustic effects. What is more, they conceived of articulation as a corporeal phenomenon that yielded, or called for the production of, its own meta-­acoustic material traces. For the researchers working in this field, articulation crucially did not belong to the properties of the speaking voice alone, but instead forged a link between linguistic sound and graphic notation. From their perspective, the body’s articulatory movements rendered speech inherently writable, defining it as a process that could materialize not only in audible signals but in readable signs as well. And it is precisely this view, in turn, of articulation as a principle that connects rather than separates vocalization and writing practices, on which subsequent inquiries into the articulatory aspects of poetic language would build. The techniques, models, and practices that will here be examined under the umbrella designation of modernist sound writing do not simply reorient poetic language back toward (mere) orality. Rather, they explore the physicality of speech—­conceptually and on paper—­by intertwining body and voice with various forms of phonetic visualization. In his recent study of “oral literature” as a theoretical concept, Haun Saussy has persuasively demonstrated the link between historical notions of orality and the appearance of particular writing systems—­including, for instance, the scientific methods of “autography” in nineteenth-­century disciplines like phonetics.9 Such writing systems form the decisive backdrop, Saussy maintains, against which and by means of which orality gets defined. The present book pursues this nexus into a domain of experimental-­ modernist practices where embodied speech acquires unprecedented literary-­aesthetic significance precisely on the basis of the modern scientific fascination with inscribed forms of vocal articulation.10 Emphasizing the imbrication of orality and inscription implies a move away from established ways of contrasting writing with speech, which came to prominence in the wake of poststructuralism, and which have crucially shaped many of the best-­known (media) histories of literary modernism. The most prominent example in this regard is certainly Friedrich Kittler’s seminal study Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, which posits that the emergence of a modernist “inscription system” (Aufschreibesystem) at the turn of the twentieth century hinged on the radical separation between the graphic and vocal registers of language (with a unilateral privilege accorded to the

9. See Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 10. Here and throughout, the concept of writing will be understood to encompass any kind of material inscription that functions—­or is taken to function—­as a graphic equivalent to articulate speech. For a comparable terminological position, see Saussy 86–­87.

6  I n t r o d u c t i o n

former).11 Kittler cites the advent of acoustic media like the phonograph and gramophone as the decisive event that caused this dissociation: With their capacity for preserving and reproducing (real) sound, such media deprived literature of its previous function of storing (virtual) acts of vocalization, causing modernist writers to turn their attention instead to the purely graphic materiality of alphabetic script. In this book, by contrast, I propose an entirely different media-­historical narrative. Voice and speech did not get displaced, I argue, from the corpus of modernist literature, but were rather redefined as part of its medium-­specific constitution, via a broad range of avant-­garde strategies that served to re-­inscribe vocal articulation in and through writing.12 This historical diagnosis corresponds to an equally critical methodological reorientation. Where Kittler, in a polemical and political turn against traditional models of interpretation, once proposed to dispense with the (hermeneutic) reading of modernist works altogether, and to focus instead on “spelling out” 13 their material surfaces, I invoke a history of precisely such material surfaces—­and the devices that condition them—­in order to demonstrate that, in fact, when rigorously spelled out, they demand to be read. In emphasizing this readability, my approach builds on more recent developments within the interdisciplinary field of sound studies that have brought into focus the variable cultural and historical conditions under which sound is (re)produced, disseminated, and perceived in the age of modernity.14 These debates have also extended to the aesthetic functionali11. See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Kittler’s model of two distinct “discourse networks” located at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—­and his unmistakable belief  in the latter network’s superiority over the former—­forms a clear media-­historical counterpart to Jacques Derrida’s systematic critique of Western “phonocentrism.” While the period around 1800 adheres, in Kittler’s account, to the traditional philosophical doctrine that privileges “originary” speech ( phōnē ) over merely “derivative” writing ( graphē ), this prioritization becomes “exorcised” from and by new literary inscription techniques in the years around 1900. For Derrida’s own critical treatment of “phonocentrism,” see, paradigmatically, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 12. Not coincidentally, Kittler ignores the poetic production of the historical avant-­garde movements almost entirely, remarking laconically at one point only that “no proof is needed with respect to the writers of experimental modernism” (Discourse Networks, 249; translation modified). 13. Kittler 317. 14. For the technological aspect, see in particular Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). On the history of auditory perception and the development of specifically modern “hearing cultures,” see Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–­1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) and Veit Erlmann, Reason and

Introduction 7

zation of sound, but they have centered primarily on art forms and media like music, radio, and (sound) film, while research on sound in the specific context of the avant-­garde has revolved mainly around topics like the Futurist “art of noise” or the role of acoustic effects in theater and performance art.15 What remains absent from these debates, in other words, is a thorough engagement with the history of poetic sound writing in modernist contexts—­a history that is inseparable, as I suggest, from the question of sound’s relation to visuality,16 and which can only be adequately understood vis-­à-­vis the exploration of “visible speech” in techno-­scientific con­ texts. Scholars working in the field of sound studies have indeed noted occasionally that “the phonographic collapse of speech and writing into visible speech and vociferous graphemes” 17 was a phenomenon of critical importance to the avant-­garde. Yet the comprehensive and manifold ways in which this phenomenon played out poetically, from the early to the mid-­ twentieth century, have received virtually no attention up until now.18 By directing attention to this uncharted terrain, the present book offers a novel

Resonance: A History of  Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010). For a more general overview of research areas and approaches that can be grouped under the umbrella designation of “sound studies,” see The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, eds. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 15. For a sample of pertinent scholarly literature, see Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Music, Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Lea Jacobs, Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Mladen Ovadija, Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-­Garde and Postdramatic Theatre (Montreal: McGill–­Queen’s University Press, 2013); Adrian Curtin, Avant-­Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 16. Recent scholarly discussions of this relation have been focused primarily on music and multimedia art, while matters of linguistic sound and poetry have remained largely beyond consideration. See, for instance, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, ed. Yael Kaduri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and See This Sound: Audiovisuology 2; Essays; Histories and Theories of Audiovisual Media and Art, eds. Dieter Daniels, Sandra Naumann, and Jan Thoben (Cologne: Walter König, 2011). 17. Douglas Kahn, “Introduction: Histories of Sound Once Removed,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-­Garde, eds. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994): 1–­29, at 18. 18. In his book The Pulse of Modernism, Robert Brain has detailed the institutional and technological conditions that facilitated the development of a nineteenth-­century science of speech, and even draws a concluding link to the poetic practices of the early twentieth-­century avant-­ garde (Futurism and Dada, in particular). Yet he does not go on to explore these practices—­and their central concern with the graphic inscription of vocal sound and sound production—­in any further literary-­historical detail. See Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of  Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-­de-­Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015): 225.

8  I n t r o d u c t i o n

genealogical account of modernist writing practices, and thereby situates these practices anew within a broader media history of the acoustic. A brief look at one literary example—­one of Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s so-­called poster poems (plate 1)—­may help to elucidate some of the contributions the present study aspires to make. Produced at a Berlin print shop in 1918 and ostensibly the result of a mere “chance” process, Hausmann’s piece has most commonly been viewed as a poetic composition in which the material inscription of letters takes precedence over any conventional semiotic function.19 In this account, the “random” sequence of alphabetic characters and other typographic symbols does not serve only to eschew the function of semantic communication. It also uncouples the elements of alphabetic script from any potential act of audible vocalization, inasmuch as it combines barely pronounceable clusters of consonants with “purely graphic marks” that cannot, in any traditional sense, be sounded out at all, and whose effect is thus a “blocking of direct articulation.”20 Neither, however, is Hausmann’s letter sequence as arbitrary as it has always been taken to be, nor can a purely “literal” understanding of this sequence hope to do justice to the semiotic complexity of its composition. Rather than offering up a purely contingent arrangement of types, the poem instead turns on the deformation of a conventional word—­the German noun Offenbarung, or “revelation”—­which it converts into a series of characters chosen largely from the beginning of the alphabet (OFFEAHBDC). This lexical play is then followed by the icon of a hand pointing downward from above: in its vertical orientation, the pointer quite evidently underscores the semantic reference to an event of revelation, while also linking this reference, horizontally, to the subsequent cluster of letters, which are typographically framed as an (intentional and portentous) act of speech („qjiE! ). While the hand icon taken in isolation might thus seem to “interdict or silence ‘immediate’ voicing,”21 due to its apparent lack of any

19. See Raoul Hausmann, Am Anfang war Dada, eds. Karl Riha and Günter Kämpf (Gießen: Anabas, 1972): 43. 20. Ina Blom, “Raoul Hausmann’s Typography,” in Winter Solstice, Equinox, Summer Solstice, concept by Olafur Eliasson, Bettina Pehrsson, and Caroline Eggel (Stockholm: Jarla Partilager, 2009): 102–­11, at 110. In a reading reminiscent of Kittler’s bifurcated historical model, Blom views the typographic composition of Hausmann’s poster poems as indicative of an effort “to stress the paradigm of writing and print culture as opposed to the paradigm of the voice, with all its metaphysical connotations” (emphasis mine). For similar arguments, see Arndt Niebisch, Media Parasites in the Early Avant-­Garde: On the Abuse of Communication and Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 76, and most recently Kurt Beals, Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-­Garde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020): 136–­39. 21. Blom, “Raoul Hausmann’s Typography,” 110.

Introduction 9

corresponding vocal sound, in context it can in fact be read as a sign that announces the (former or future) presence of a speaking body. Several historical and theoretical frames of reference become relevant here: In traditional literary terms, Hausmann’s composition alludes to the close association between divine inspiration and vocal performance that had informed ancient practices of oral poetry, and which began to reemerge during his own time via the widespread avant-­garde fascination with glossolalia, the spiritual phenomenon of “speaking in tongues.”22 Simultaneously, however, the composition incorporates this playful invocation of a higher and inspirational force, which ostensibly first enables poetic discourse, into a typographic design with quite different, and equally far-­reaching, semiotic implications. The poster poem cites—­and in citing “performs”—­a command to give voice to its own letters, and in so doing stages the transition from writing to vocal articulation in print.23 Or perhaps more precisely: The poem insists on the fundamental inextricability of vocal articulation from writing, and so also of the vocal and graphic registers of language, by inscribing a metonymic reference to the body () among the symbolic elements of alphabetic script. The pointing hand demands to be understood not only as an icon but also as an indexical sign, since it is an icon that embodies, quite literally, the very principle of indexicality, by way of its reference to a manual act of designation. As a direct pictorial equivalent of the elementary verbal expression “da” (“there”)— ­or “da- ­da”—­the pointer points us toward the specific avant-­garde context within which the poem was produced, namely that of Dada Berlin. What Hausmann highlights through this gesture, quite literally, is the particular character of his own approach to typographic experimentation—­and, by extension, its independence vis-­à-­vis other, closely related endeavors such as Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s parole in libertà, which had first been issued a few years before. Marinetti aimed to “liberate” words from the constraints of both traditional book design and conventional syntax by breaking up the linear uniformity of the printed page, and by arranging lexical units and single letters (more) freely

22. For the most elaborate example of this literary interest, see Andrej Belyj, Glossolalie: Poem über den Laut/Glossolalia: A Poem about Sound, trans. Thomas R. Beyer (Dornach: Pforte, 2003). On glossolalia as a linguistic phenomenon, see also Roman Jakobson and Linda R. Waugh, The Sound Shape of  Language (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002): 214–­18, and Michel de Certeau, “Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias,” trans. Daniel Rosenberg, Representations 56 (1996): 29–­47. 23. More generally on the notion of poetry’s visual performativity, see Johanna Drucker, “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Bernstein, 131–­61, and 149–­5 1 for discussion of Hausmann specifically.

10  I n t r o d u c t i o n

in innovative patterns that were often meant to convey onomatopoetic effects.24 Though Dadaists like Hausmann remained indebted to Marinetti’s call for a “typographic revolution,”25 they did not adopt his interest in a phonographic writing technique geared predominantly toward the mimetic replication of nonlinguistic sounds (especially those of war machinery and battle). Instead, Hausmann shifted his focus to the typographic medium itself, in an effort to explore its potential for inscribing the process of articulatory sound production—­a process that begins, developmentally speaking, with elementary syllables like “da” and “da-­da.” Beyond this delineating function, however, the typographic pointer in Hausmann’s poem also serves to make a more general semiotic point: It invokes the inherently indexical capacity of  language to operate, as Roman Jakobson and others have theorized, in a relation of “factual, existential contiguity”26 to physical bodies, and thus in a manner that necessarily exceeds the limits of a purely conventional system of signs. The nineteenth-­ century scientific ideal of a visualized speech, which gives graphic re­p ­ resentation to the corporeal movements of the articulatory apparatus, is playfully echoed here in the becoming-­graphic of the indexical-­corporeal dimension as such—­a conceptual link that Hausmann himself would underscore, in retrospect, by designating his poster poems as “optophonetic” compositions.27 Later chapters will explore in depth the relation between letters and different, primarily indexical modes of transcribing speech in scientific, poetic, and artistic contexts; the relation between the materiality of these graphic marks and their possible signifying functions across the semantic, emotional, and physiological dimensions of spoken language; and the relation between the body as “apparatus” of linguistic sound production and (literary) writing as a medium of reflection on this production process. In pursuing these relations, I reveal how compositions like Hausmann’s grow out of, and conceptually mediate among, a history of scientific and

24. For a selection of pertinent works, see Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Words in Freedom and Related Prose, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara Strudholme (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 25. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—­Untrammeled Imagination—­Words in Freedom” (1913), in Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006): 120–­3 1, at 128. 26. Roman Jakobson, “Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2: Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971): 697–­708, at 700. Building on C. S. Peirce’s categorical distinction between index, icon, and symbol, Jakobson exemplifies the “indexical relation between signans and signatum” by invoking the classic (indeed, literal) case: “The forefinger pointing at a certain object is a typical index.” 27. Hausmann, Am Anfang war Dada, 43.

Introduction 11

aesthetic experimental practices aimed at redefining the very “nature” of poetic language. Compositions of this kind, I argue, form part of broader, period-­specific cultures of experimentation that cut across, and to a significant extent also shift, the borders between scientific and literary discourse.28 The historical corpus on which this argument is based focuses primarily on materials from the German-­speaking countries of central Europe, but extends also to contemporaneous sources from France, Russia, Italy, and the United States. Each chapter traces how certain experimental techniques and theoretical concepts circulated widely, in order to reveal not only “transversal connections”29 between scientific and literary endeavors, but also the cultural routes along which modernist strategies of sound writing developed, from their earliest stages in the nineteenth century to their later manifestations in the mid-­twentieth. The first chapter introduces the book’s subject matter from a broad historical angle, in order to highlight how modernist inquiries into the process of articulation developed out of a more long-­standing cultural fascination with the phenomenon of visible sound. This fascination dates back to the Romantic age, during which physicist Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni’s work on the so-­called sound figures (Klang  figuren) inspired far-­reaching semiotic speculations about the possibility of recording spoken language in an analog visual form. The chapter sketches how this initially hypothetical idea of inscribing vocal utterances directly, without symbolic mediation, in corresponding graphic traces became an experimental reality during the second half of the nineteenth century, when new recording methods turned the articulating body into the production site for a “natural” kind of phonetic writing. The ways in which this scientific practice was appropriated—­ but also critically transformed—­by twentieth-­century avant-­garde writers is then exemplified through the lens of another paradigmatic work of Raoul Hausmann’s, the hybrid collage-­poem Oaoa from 1965. While the first chapter thus serves to establish the larger trajectory of the book as a whole, the following sections each zoom in on a single, more 28. The term “cultures of experimentation” has been used by historians of science to identify networks of laboratory-­based research designs, during a given time period, that have certain technological, material, or other defining features in common. See Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, “Cultures of Experimentation,” in Cultures Without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge, eds. Karine Chemla and Evelyn Fox Keller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017): 278–­95, at 278. I expand the concept beyond a purely scientific frame of reference in order to address the work of researchers, theorists, and writers who shared certain ways of approaching poetic language at the level of its articulatory constitution. 29. See Joseph Vogl, “Für eine Poetologie des Wissens,” in Die Literatur und die Wissenschaften 1770–­1930, eds. Karl Richter, Jörg Schönert, and Michael Titzmann (Stuttgart: M & P Verlag, 1997): 107–­27, at 122.

12  I n t r o d u c t i o n

closely defined historical constellation. The second chapter focuses on the period from the early 1870s to the First World War, in order to examine how the scientific practice of studying speech by means of graphic technolo­ gies found one of its most striking applications in the project of an apparatus-­ based “science of verse.” Though this project never reached the degree of systematization and widespread acceptance to which it aspired, it remains historically significant for two major reasons. First, it was precisely the ambition of subjecting verse to scientific techniques of analysis that brought the (potential) aesthetic significance of articulation into focus. Second, the laboratory practices of researchers like Ernst Brücke, E. W. Scripture, and Robert Givler increasingly transformed their object of inquiry by isolating the phonetic, articulatory aspects of the literary material from its signifying function. This protomodernist tendency of separating sound from sense culminated after 1900 with new psychological concepts like Wilhelm Wundt’s “vocal gesture” and Theodor Lipps’s “acoustic symbolism,” which theorized (poetic) language as being grounded in elemental bodily acts of speech. The third chapter shows how the interest in the aesthetic potential of articulation migrated, beginning around the time of World War I, from the domain of scientific analysis to the literary discourses of different European countries. The discussion begins with an extended consideration of two critical sources from 1916, Viktor Shklovsky’s reflections on the “trans­ rational” poetry of Russian Futurism and Hugo Ball’s proclamation of his “verses without words” at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, before broadening its focus to a corpus that combines partly canonical, partly underexplored materials across three decades. From seminal manifestos of the late 1910s, to the never-­realized anthology Dadaco (1919–­20), to Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate (Ur Sonata) from the 1920s, to Schwitters’s collaboration with Hausmann on the journal Pin in 1946–­47, to László Moholy-­Nagy’s treatment of avant-­garde poetry in his final book Vision in Motion (1947)—­ the chapter traverses a body of texts and visual compositions that reveal the manifold ways in which the striving toward a poetic “renewal” or “revolution” of language became inextricably linked to practices of “laying bare” its articulatory conditions. The fourth chapter, finally, focuses on the subsequent two decades, from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, during which articulation reemerged as a central concern of various neo-­avant-­garde projects on both sides of the Atlantic. Through an analysis of pertinent models that appeared under designations such as “projective verse” (Charles Olson) and “vibrational writing” (Carlfriedrich Claus), I examine how notions of articulation became a critical means for negotiating the poetic legacy of the interwar avant-­garde in the form of modified, “verbi-­voco-­visual” (Marshall

Introduction 13

McLuhan) writing strategies. But the chapter also places these postwar efforts in a media-­historical constellation that was characterized, in the late 1950s and 1960s, by the emergence of computer-­based models of literary composition, which developed under the aegis of German information theorist Max Bense. Defining poetic experimentation as a function of cybernetic machines rather than language-­producing bodies, Bense radically challenged the conceptual relevance of physical articulation for any truly (neo-­)avant-­garde poetics. Seen as a whole, then, this book traces an arc whose origin and end coincide with the advent of two different sets of writing technologies: While analog recording devices of the late nineteenth century fostered the discovery of articulation as an aesthetically pertinent phenomenon, this role was eventually called into question by—­and in turn defended against—­the incipient literary use of digital computing methods during the postwar de­ cades. A final peak of modernist concerns with speech and sound writing, in the sense investigated here, can be located quite precisely, as the concluding chapter shows, around the year 1967. These concerns thus form part of a historical moment—­a liminal moment, indeed—­during which another, decidedly postmodernist outlook on writing, voice and speech began to emerge via Jacques Derrida’s wide-­ranging critique of “phonocentrism.”30 By calling attention to the long-­neglected role of écriture in Western thought, Derrida’s intervention spawned an “intertextual materialism”31 across the humanities, whose proponents would favor notions of textuality and script over any concept of embodied, vocal (self-­)expression. Rather than upending hierarchical oppositions between writing and speech, therefore, literary and media-­historical studies in the wake of poststructuralism have tended to reinstate precisely such oppositions—­with a structural privilege now given to writing rather than voice—­and thus to block insight into historical models of inscribed orality. It is this blocking effect that accounts, in large part, for the fact that the history of experimental-­modernist sound writing has not been previously told. And it is into this breach that the current book attempts to leap.

30. In his three 1967 books, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida unfolds the outlines of  this critique, which also entails a fundamental redefinition of “articulation” as an underlying, structural principle conditioning both graphic inscription and vocal sound production. See in detail chapter 4, pp. 211–17. 31. Jed Rasula, “Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Bernstein, 233–­61, at 234.

1: Voice Figures Visible Sound and the Poetics of Articulation (1787–­1965)

Oaoa, or The Eidophonetic P oem A photograph taken in the mid-­to late 1960s by Marthe Prévot, Raoul Hausmann’s companion of the postwar decades and subsequent heir of his estate, shows the nearly eighty-­year-­old writer, painter, and “Dadasoph” engaged in a private poetic performance (fig. 1). The picture captures Hausmann against the backdrop of his studio’s shaded walls, his head and upper body partially exposed to radiant light emerging from an invisible source to his right. He has turned his eyes away from the camera at a slight angle—­directing them perhaps toward another observer of his presentation whom we cannot see—­while resting his chin on the edge of a framed piece of paper which he holds tightly in front of his chest with both hands. From within this photo-­internal frame, a second pair of eyes looks out directly at the photographer and at us: the shot is taken from below, which means that it is this second, disembodied pair of eyes, rather than the first, that appears at eye level with the beholder, and that, consequently, constitutes the compositional center of the photograph as a whole. These other eyes, however, are also Hausmann’s own—­or rather, they were his, almost half a century before, at the moment when their gaze was recorded in a different picture, which was then subsequently cut up and rearranged into the work of montage Hausmann here displays.1 Within the context of Prévot’s 1. According to Hausmann’s own account, this earlier photograph of his was taken in the summer of 1919, and hence around the same time when his title of “Dadasoph” was first officially established in the Club Dada in Berlin. See Hausmann’s letter to Jan Tschichold from April 9, 1930, in Scharfrichter der bürgerlichen Seele: Raoul Hausmann in Berlin 1900–­1933. Unveröffent­ lichte Briefe, Texte, Dokumente aus den Künstler-­Archiven der Berlinischen Galerie, ed. Eva Züchner (Ostfildern: Hatje, 1998): 275–­76, at 276. Largely undissected prints of the same photograph can be found in a number of different collages from the early Weimar period: Hannah Höch’s seminal work Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauch-­Kulturepoche

Voice Figures 15

F igu re 1. Marthe Prévot, Raoul Hausmann in his apartment in Limoges, ca. 1965–­1970, photographic print. © Collection Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart

photograph, the presence of these fragments of an earlier portrait creates a differential doubling: They reproduce a past expression of the same eyes that are pictured above, and in so doing they prefigure—­in a mode of asynchronous simultaneity—­the moment in which this second, later image would be taken. Even more conspicuous, visually speaking, is an additional, closely related reduplication, for the shape of  Hausmann’s opened mouth also appears Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife though the Last Epoch of Weimar Beer-­Belly Culture in Germany) (1919), John Heartfield’s design for the cover of the journal Der Dada 3 (1920), as well as Hausmann’s own collage ABCD (1923–­24).

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twice, in near-­identical positions, revealing both times—­at the center of his lips and teeth—­the darkness of his oral cavity. Both photographs, this correspondence suggests, show Hausmann in the process of emitting sound—­a sound inaudible to us but visible in the process of its bodily emergence. The performance staged in front of Prévot’s camera thus links two different acts of vocalization across a divide of nearly five decades: Reenacting his earlier gesture in a corporeal form, while also displaying its mechanical reproduction, Hausmann aligns past and present movements spatially, along a vertical axis that defines the image we see. Once again, however, it is the mouth inside the collage that takes precedence in this constellation, as emphasized most clearly by its visual framing through two overlapping circles. This framing not only delineates, quite literally, the primary target for the viewer’s gaze; it also serves to underscore that another correspondence is at play between the photographic cutout and the surrounding graphic elements. For the image of the gaping mouth appears here in an opening that functions simultaneously as part of the collage’s written character. By placing this element on top of the hand-­drawn letter O, Hausmann inscribes the photographic trace of his own bodily gesture in an arrangement otherwise readable as (a kind of ) text. This act of inscription, in turn, suggests that Hausmann’s presentation before the camera aims to highlight, at its literal-­spatial core, a certain relation between the oral production of linguistic sound and the latter’s graphic transcription in the form of alphabetic signs. What is fundamentally at stake in this scenario is thus the relationship between speech and writing—­between corporeal expression and symbolic code—­and the mediation of these two poles via a poetic practice that encompasses both the optical and acoustic dimensions of its material. It is Hausmann’s lifelong insistence on the significance of this doubled focus that renders his work a suitable lens through which to introduce the larger concerns of this book as a whole. The following discussion unfolds, therefore, by way of a close consideration of the specific poetic and performative arrangement captured in Prévot’s photograph. It does so, however, with the primary goal of opening up a much wider perspective on the manifold, wide-­ranging historical contexts this arrangement evokes: contexts that make it possible to recognize in Hausmann’s work a retrospective reflection on the way in which articulation was able to become an object of literary relevance in the first place. And what emerges, on the basis of such a contextualizing reading, is first and foremost the intimate association between this twentieth-­century becoming-­object of articulation, within the domain of poetic practice, and its nineteenth century becoming-­object within the domain of experimental science—­as registered, above all, by the appearance of new, apparatus-­based methods for inscribing bodily speech.

Voice Figures 17

The experimental-­modernist “return” to orality, so the present chapter makes clear, did not take shape through the withdrawal of the speaking body from the regime of written signs. Rather, it unfolded on the basis of technologies designed to record acoustic phenomena in visual, and hence also readable, form. This alternative media history matters, on the one hand, because it allows us to gain access to the specific textual logic of the many avant-­garde compositions like Hausmann’s, which might otherwise appear to simply evade any and all literary-­analytical explication. But it matters also, at a significantly higher level of generality, because the surprising readability of individual works like Oaoa turns out to cast new light on the historico-­theoretical stakes of avant-­garde poetic practice as a whole, including broadly influential concepts like “originary language,” aesthetic “defamiliarization,” and the “destruction” of conventional meaning. Produced in the same year in which Prévot photographed Hausmann performing the piece, the composition of Oaoa (fig. 2) seems to afford, at first sight, relatively little opportunity for a reading that would go beyond the mere identification of its individual elements, a description of their numerical and spatial distribution over the page they fill, or perhaps a characterization of the rhythmic pattern that results from the sequential variation of letters across the four horizontal lines. A biographical perspective, which places its focus on the source material of the photographic collage, adds to these options the possibility of viewing the work as a retro­ spective reflection on Hausmann’s career as a writer: It becomes meaningful, for instance, from this perspective, that both the cut-­up portrait and the collage configuration date back to the pivotal years of 1918 and 1919, during which Hausmann first began to experiment with phonetic poetry.2 It becomes meaningful, furthermore, that this earlier collage was initially conceived as an illustration for the 1918 manifesto Synthetisches Cino der Malerei (Synthetic Cinema of Painting), the work whose public presentation marked the inception of Hausmann’s Dada activities (fig. 3).3 And it 2. For Hausmann’s autobiographical account of these literary beginnings, see the section “Poème phonétique” in his 1958 book Courrier Dada, ed. Marc Dachy (Paris: Editions Allia, 1992): 53–­64. 3. Hausmann delivered this manifesto, under the initial title “Das neue Material in der Malerei,” at a soiree in the Berlin Secession building on April 12, 1918, which is generally regarded as the first official event of the Dada movement in Berlin. It remains uncertain, though, when he produced the typographic design that juxtaposes the manifesto’s second title—­chosen in keeping with a Futurist-­inspired emphasis on the dynamization of vision (Synthetisches Cino)—­with the photographic collage of eyes and mouth. In his last, posthumously published book Am Anfang war Dada, eds. Karl Riha and Günter Kämpf (Gießen: Anabas, 1972), Hausmann dates the composition to 1918, while a photographic glass negative of the collage—­preserved in the archives of the Berlinische Galerie—­is signed and dated to 1919. See Züchner, ed., Scharfrichter der bürger­ lichen Seele, 432n5. Contrary to Hausmann’s own suggestions, however, Hanne Bergius has argued persuasively that the composition may, in fact, have been created as late as 1930–­3 1, on

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F igu re 2. Raoul Hausmann, Oaoa, 1965, crayon on paper with photographic collage, 30.8 × 23.8 cm. © Collection Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart

the occasion of the groundbreaking exhibit Fotomontage held at the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek Berlin in 1931, and that Hausmann may have backdated the piece with the aim of underscoring his role as a pioneer of this avant-­garde technique. See Hanne Bergius, “Dada Triumphs!”: Dada Berlin, 1917–­1923: Artistry of Polarities: Montages—­Metamechanics—­Manifestations, trans. Brigitte Pichon (New York: G. K. Hall, 2003): 104–­5.

Voice Figures 19

Figu re 3. Raoul Hausmann, Synthetisches Cino der Malerei, date uncertain, typographic print with photographic collage. Photograph © Anja Elisabeth Witte/Berlinische Galerie

becomes meaningful, finally, that Hausmann recycles (part of ) this photographic collage in his 1965 poem by mounting it on top of the handwritten, capital letter O, which reinscribes the metonymic reference to his literary beginnings within a graphic symbol of circular (en)closure.4 What, however, does the photographic collage actually show? We see here, as the result of a multistep process of cutting and pasting, an iconic constellation of sense organs, in which Hausmann’s eyes appear to be orbiting, like two planets or satellites, around the gravitational center of his wide-­open mouth. The collage thus rejoins the previously disjointed (or 4. There are, to be precise, several acts of recycling that occurred between the two works, which means that the relation between Oaoa and Synthetisches Cino is thoroughly mediated through a whole series of metonymic displacements. In 1932, Hausmann commissioned a photographic reproduction of Synthetisches Cino der Malerei from a commercial photographer in Berlin who appears to have supplied him with a number of prints. See Hausmann’s letter to his wife Elfriede from June 21, 1932, in Scharfrichter der bürgerlichen Seele, ed. Züchner, 432–­33. Fifteen years later, he would include one of these prints in a letter to Kurt Schwitters, dated April 4, 1947, in which he labeled it with the (misleading) caption, “first photomontage ever made 1918 by RHausmann.” This print—­and its accompanying letter—­are preserved today, as part of Schwitters and Hausmann’s correspondence on their collaborative publication project PIN, in the holdings of the Kurt Schwitters Archiv, Sprengel Museum Hannover, inv. no. que 06839708. In 1951, Hausmann incorporated another print of the 1932 reproduction in a new collage, entitled Dada Raoul, where it appears dissected into five separate pieces that are mounted together with the letters of the words “DADA” and “RAOUL.” Another fourteen years later, finally, he included part of another print in his composition Oaoa.

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dissected) organs of vision and vocalization, of sight and sound production, inside a graphically defined force field designed to pull the gaze toward the void enclosed by lips and teeth. The oral gesture thereby highlighted has most often been understood in the context of Dada’s response to World War I, as a politically motivated scream reflecting the societal experience of catastrophic violence and destruction. Richard Sheppard, for example, places Hausmann’s collage in proximity to George Grosz’s well-­known war paintings, maintaining that “Hausmann, too . . . transmitted something of the same sense of human bestiality in the image of the gaping mouth filled with carnivorous teeth.” 5 Hanne Bergius, in a similar vein, characterizes Hausmann’s photographically captured act of “yelling” as an expression of Dada’s “actionist-­iconoclastic”6 tendencies, which were oriented toward the instigation of social revolt. Readings of this kind are, without doubt, biographically legitimate and historically plausible. They are also, however, crucially incomplete, for the domain that they leave untouched is the very one that Hausmann’s later recycling of this collage, within the context of Oaoa, suggests is fundamental to his own (perhaps retroactive) understanding of its importance, namely: the domain of poetic activity. Viewed with respect to this domain—­which is to say, also, with respect to the work’s very conditions of production—­the gesture of the wide-­open mouth needs to be considered not only as a reference to the emphatically inarticulate phenomenon of screaming, but also, and perhaps primarily, as a reference to the all-­important moment of transition from scream to speech, cry to vowel, primordial utterance to poetry. Indeed, as the position of Hausmann’s lips and teeth quite clearly indicates, he has in fact been photographed not in the act of simply “yelling,” but rather of (loudly) pronouncing the German vowel “a”—­and hence of forming precisely that sound traditionally presumed to demarcate the threshold between prelinguistic and articulate forms of vocalization. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, in the first entry of their groundbreaking Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary), write of the vowel “a” that it is “the noblest, most original of all sounds, resounding from chest and throat, which the child learns first of all and most easily, and which, quite justifiably, the alphabets of most languages place at their very beginning.” 7 As the sound that lies al-

5. Richard Sheppard, Modernism—­Dada—­Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000): 180. 6. Hanne Bergius, “Fotomontage als avantgardistisches Konzept des Widerspruchs,” in Bild­ sampling: Wie viele Bilder brauchen wir?, eds. Martin Scholz and Ute Hembold (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-­Verlag, 2006): 111–­26, at 115. 7. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 1: A-­Biermolke (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854): column 1.

Voice Figures 21

ready nascent in the infant’s earliest cries, but only later takes on a clearly bounded linguistic shape, the “a” is traditionally aligned, for the Grimms and their contemporaries as for the linguists of Hausmann’s time, with the natural beginnings of speech. It consequently deserves its conventional status, in the Grimms’ view, as the first element within the cultural order of phonetic writing systems. Hausmann, in other words, is here citing the origins of  human language—­or rather, making art by citing him­ self citing the origins of human language—­in a gesture that goes definitively  beyond the biographical, sociohistorical contexts of both past work and war. On the one hand, then, the portrait turns out to evoke the evolutionary beginnings of articulation, demarcating the surrounding poem as a text that is concerned with the emergence and most basic condition of spoken sound. On the other hand, the placement of the collage within the context of Oaoa simultaneously reframes the transition from scream to articulate “a” through the bounded structure of a written sign—­the poem’s other principal letter, “o”—­which underscores Hausmann’s focus on a natural origin of linguistic expression that has been culturally, because graphically, contained. By combining the two media of photographic record and alphabetic code, Hausmann effectively creates a hybrid figure of sound within which the (indexical image of the) corporeal production of speech coalesces with its graphic symbolization.8 And this semiotic constellation suggests not only that the entire letter sequence of Oaoa possesses a specifically articulatory dimension; it implies also that this articulatory di­ mension bears a privileged relationship to the project of “renewing” poetic language. This latter aspect of Hausmann’s project takes on clearer contours in light of some of the other intertexts with which his 1965 poem corresponds, and which can therefore help to take the analysis of its compositional logic a few critical steps further. With its choice of purely vocalic material—­and the corresponding exclusion of any consonantal characters—­Oaoa mirrors first of all one of the iconic examples of early twentieth-­century avant-­garde poetry, published by the Russian Futurist Alexei Kruchenykh in 1913, as part of his manifesto “Declaration of the Word as Such.” Operating within the broader Futurist program of “liberating” language from conventional meaning, Kruchenykh’s poem was famously and self-­consciously the first

8. On the indexical nature of photography, and more generally on the semiotic distinction between indices and symbols, see the classic treatment in Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of  Peirce, ed. and introd. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955): 98–­119, at 106.

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to be created “exclusively of vowels,”9 with an opening line combined of the same three letters that make up the entirety of Hausmann’s later text: oea ieei a e e E.10

Kruchenykh credited poetic compositions like this one with the ability to contribute to the creation of “a universal language,” 11 which would be in principle accessible to any speaker whatsoever regardless of nationality or sociocultural background. Such compositions embodied, for him, the utopian possibility of a common substrate at the root of currently existing idioms, which could then be strategically marshaled against the petrified lexical structures of pragmatic, everyday communication. Kruchenykh thus intertwined the idea of returning to a primordial stage of language with the future-­oriented promise of  limitless communicability—­a communicability that would operate outside the boundaries of conventional signification, via the restoration of an “original purity” 12 of semantically unimpaired sound. At the same time, however, as has often been noted, his own exemplary vowel poem was in fact constructed on the basis of a culturally and linguistically specific source—­the first line of the Russian “Pater Noster” (“Отче Наш”)—­which he converted into a different, “transrational” 13 form by eliminating all consonants. Kruchenykh, in other words, employed a defamiliarizing technique of isolation in order to reduce an existing, highly traditional prayer-­poem to its bare vocalic elements.14 In 9. Alexei Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” in Russian Futurism through its Mani­ festoes, 1912–­1928, trans. and eds. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988): 67–­68, at 67. 10. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” 67. 11. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” 67. 12. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” 67. 13. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” 67. On the Futurist notion of a “transrational” language, see in more detail below, 110–17. 14. See also, in this context, Kruchenykh’s vowel poem “The Heights (Universal Language)” (1913), which is patterned after the vocalic structure of the Russian “Credo” and contains, specifically in its middle part, some verses that are mirrored quite precisely in the composition of Hausmann’s Oaoa: “e u yu / i a o / o a / o a e e i e ya / o a / e u i e i / i e e / i i y i e i i y.” Cited here after Imagining Language: An Anthology, eds. Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998): 358. On Kruchenykh’s operation of vocalic isolation, see also John White, “Italian Futurism and Russian Cubo-­Futurism,” in The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, eds. Joe Bray, Allison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (London: Routledge, 2012): 21–­3 5, at 29–­30. On Kruchenykh’s vowel poems and their relation to the poetics of Russian Futurism more generally, see Craig Dworkin, “To Destroy Language,” Textual Practice 18, no. 2 (2004): 185–­97.

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so doing, he established a systematic principle that Hausmann, fifty years later, would turn into a device for creating—­and interlinking—­a whole series of “vocalized” texts of his own. Conceived almost certainly with Kruchenykh’s pioneering verses in mind, Hausmann’s Oaoa thus needs to be understood as the result of an entire chain of textual permutations and variations that can be traced through to his poetic production of the early 1960s.15 Most directly, Oaoa derives from another, almost purely vocalic poem composed shortly earlier (“Phonetic Poem,” fig. 4), from which the later text isolates a segment of the first two lines.16 These first two lines, in turn, point back to an even earlier piece; their sequential arrangement (“Oa oao O A E / eee III AoU”) adapts material from another typescript, dated to October 1961, in which five German words with precisely these beginning letters (“Alle,” “Oben,” “Einer,” “Ich,” “Unten”) are positioned in five clusters across the space of one page (fig. 5). This chain, then, makes visible a previous, lexically organized text from which the later, seemingly purely phonetic arrangements were gradually distilled, in a manner reminiscent of Kruchenykh’s technique. And the semantic traces of this previous text, with its contrast between “Alle Oben” (“All Above”) and “Einer Unten” (“One Below”), remain legibly present even where Hausmann goes on to reduce the conventional words to a series of initial vowels: the vertical organization of Oaoa “sets” the first, verse-­like line of “o”s and “a”s above the second and final line of “Eeee.” When Hausmann, in a French title appended to another manuscript from the same period, characterizes his work as “la poesie initiale de voyelles [sic]” 17—­i.e., as the initial, or originary, poetry of vowels—­this ambiguous designation accordingly carries two interrelated implications: On the one hand, it refers to the way in which the compositions here discussed were structurally anchored in the beginning letters of particular words. On the other hand, it invokes a general notion of linguistic restitution that echoes Kruchenykh’s idea of a (re)discoverable, purified substrate underneath or beyond the realm of ordinary language.18 Seen in this light, the specific 15. Hausmann explicitly refers to the “phonetic inventions” of Russian Futurists like Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov in an essay he composed the same year as his poem Oaoa. See Raoul Hausmann, “Introduction à une histoire du poème phonétique (1910–­1939),” German Life and Letters 19, no. 1 (October 1965): 19–­25, at 19. 16. A slightly different version of this typewriter poem was reproduced as a facsimile in the Flemish avant-­garde journal De Tafelronde 11, no. 4 (1966): 15. 17. Raoul Hausmann, “La poesie initiale de voyelles  .  .  . [sic],” Archives Raoul Hausmann, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, inv. no. A.VI.4/ 64-­02-­FR-­AL. 18. See, here, once more, Hausmann’s 1965 essay on the history of phonetic poetry, in which he relates his own poetic efforts—­like those of the Russian Futurists—­to “the necessity of

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F igu r e 4. Raoul Hausmann, “Phonetic Poem,” 1965, typescript, Archives Raoul Hausmann, inv. no. A.III.1/65-­01-­a. © Collection Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart

vowel sequence “Oaoa” also turns out to be simultaneously readable on both a historico-­referential and a language-­theoretical level. On the one hand, it refers back to a cluster of lexical elements that can be taken to ex­ press Hausmann’s view that other members of the interwar and postwar avant-­gardes had made it to the top of the art world (“Oben Alle”), while his own situation as an expatriate in Limoges—­the small town in central finding a new form of linguistic expression.” Hausmann, “Introduction à une histoire du poème phonétique,” 21.

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Figu re 5 . Raoul Hausmann, “[A A A A],” 1961, typescript, Archives Raoul Hausmann, inv. no. A.VI.1.1/61-­04. © Collection Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart

France where he had been living in exile since 1944—­was characterized by experiences of isolation and marginalization (“Einer Ich Unten”).19 On the other hand, the letters of Oaoa unmistakably also “articulate” a concern with the very essence of language as such. The combination of the characters o and a plays on the proverbial notion of the A und O, which in German 19. For a detailed biographical account of Hausmann’s exile in postwar France, see Delphine Jaunasse, Raoul Hausmann: L’isolement d’un dadaïste en Limousin (Limoges: Presses Universitaires des Limoges, 2002).

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refers to “the heart of the matter”—­A and O, the “Alpha and Omega,” are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet as well as traditional, Christian signifiers of temporal origins and ends—­while simultaneously subjecting this notion to a playful gesture of reversal (since o comes before a). Through the juxtaposition of these two elements, Hausmann signals that his composition serves, in his view, to highlight the most basic principles and conditions (“the heart of the matter”) on which a renewed form of poetry is (or ought to be) based. And since he does so precisely by invoking the opening and closing symbols of the oldest phonetic writing system in the West, he simultaneously suggests that these most basic principles and conditions, in his view, have everything to do with the graphic representation of spoken sounds.20 Taken as a whole, then, the composition of Oaoa thematizes the roots of phonetic writing—­the Omega and Alpha of script—­at precisely the same time as it stages an emblematic return to the physical foundations of speech in corporeal movement. Through its programmatic juxtaposition of alphabetic code and photographic collage, the piece makes clear that Hausmann’s poetic concern with a more “originary” form of language is not to be understood as a quest for bodily expression beyond the confines of symbolic representation, nor as a return to some purely natural form of sound outside the codification in cultural signs. Instead, the notion of an originary language becomes linked to a notion of poetic articulation that arises exclusively at the intersection of vocalization and notation, body and writing—­as a phenomenon that is essentially and inherently bound to its transcription—­and whose acoustic effects can therefore always also be made to be seen. The broader conceptual implications of this peculiarly hybrid understanding of poetic essence, which Hausmann will turn out to share with so many other members of various twentieth-­century avant-­gardes—­and which has never before been explicitly unpacked as such—­can be approached via a journey through Hausmann’s theoretical writings from his later period. This journey, in turn, will prepare the way for an exploration of the historical and theoretical preconditions without which neither the true historical specificity, nor the true theoretical radicality, of this new understanding can come into view. From the late 1950s to the mid-­1960s, Hausmann composed and published a series of essays in which he formulated a theoretical framework for his own poetic practices, as well as more general reflections on the principles of phonetic poetry per se. In one of the earliest of these texts, 20. Crucially, the Greek alphabet was the first to assign distinct graphic characters to all vocalic sounds, which had remained (largely) unrepresented in previous writing systems.

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“Bedeutung und Technik des Lautgedichts” (“Significance and Technique of the Sound Poem”), from 1959, he claims that poetic expression, in the wake of the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardes, “has attained a completely new character: . . . it has turned into deliberate decomposition and resorts to the letters of the alphabet, to the first and last phenomenon of human sound-­form [Klang form].”21 Crucially, however, he then proceeds to maintain that this reorientation toward the most basic units of writing goes hand in hand with a relocation of poetry’s foundations in the speech organs. “The first definitively ‘lettrist’ poem,” he contends, “.  .  .  which has originated from the mouth, from human speech, has been discovered through and for the vast unliberated sound possibilities of a primordial language [Ur-­Sprache].”22 Reverting explicitly to a utopian notion of linguistic purification à la Kruchenykh, Hausmann thus relates the graphic elements of his phonetic poetry not only to the acoustic signals they represent, but also, and more fundamentally, to the principal site of those signals’ corporeal production. He proposes a model of poetic composition in which the vocal articulation of speech sounds conditions the visible emergence of letters, and in which these letters remain linked, in turn, to the corporeal act from which their audible equivalents arise. Hausmann’s later texts work even more explicitly to anchor the process of poetic composition in the dynamic activity of the speech organs. In another, thematically related essay from 1963, he writes: “The poem is made in the mouth, says Tzara; yet there it still remains under the control of categorial memories. The poem is made with sounds that originate from the larynx and vocal cords, and it knows no syntax but only progression and inhibition.”23 Hausmann here tacitly manipulates the quotation he borrows from his former fellow Dadaist Tristan Tzara, who had declared in a 1920 manifesto that “thought is made in the mouth.”24 But he also conceptually extends Tzara’s notion of creative orality to other parts of the human 21. Raoul Hausmann, “Bedeutung und Technik des Lautgedichts,” nota 3 (1959): 30–­31, at 30. This essay was later issued in English under the (somewhat misleading) title “Meaning and Technique in Phonic Poetry,” trans. Stephen Bann, Form 5 (1967): 16. 22. Hausmann, “Bedeutung und Technik des Lautgedichts,” 31. 23. Raoul Hausmann, “Morphopsychologische Indifferenz Dadas,” manuskripte 8 (1963): 20–­21, at 20. 24. Tristan Tzara, “Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981): 86–­87, at 87. Emphasis original. Hausmann invokes his adaption of Tzara’s statement in virtually all of his own poetry-­related essays of the 1960s. See, for example, Hausmann, “Bedeutung und Technik des Lautgedichts,” 30; Raoul Hausmann, “Aussichten oder Ende des Neodadaismus,” in Adelheid Koch, Ich bin immerhin der größte Experimentator Österreichs—­ Raoul Hausmann: Dada und Neodada (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1994): 227–­3 16, at 263; Raoul Hausmann, “Obituary: Der Dichter Hans Arp,” German Life and Letters 21, no. 1 (1967): 63–­65, at 64.

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speech apparatus—­parts that remain, as he claims, more divorced from the logical, “categorial” influences of habitual, conventional word production. According to this view, poetic expression needs to be considered as the result of unconscious bodily movements that emerge initially at a level well before and below the realm where the lexical and syntactical structures of ordinary language can take effect. Hausmann contrasts, in other words, the purely corporeal activity of organs like larynx and vocal cords with their subsequent subordination to semantic function, in order to assert that the phonetic poem aims to capture purely corporeal activity as such: If we record [aufzeichnen] the numerous possibilities offered by our voice—­the differences between sounds that we produce through manifold techniques of breathing, the tongue’s positioning within the palate, the opening of the larynx, and the tension of the vocal chords—­we attain new conceptions [Anschauungen] of what can be called the will to creative sound-­form.25

Certainly, it is difficult to see how the symbolic code of the alphabet in itself could express the range of respiratory and articulatory variations and nuances Hausmann appears to have in mind—­after all, the function of phonetic letters as a standardized writing system builds precisely on the abstraction they afford from any particular instances of vocalization. Nonetheless, the idea that written poetry ought to somehow “record” the broad spectrum of different utterances facilitated by the vocal organs, in an effort to lay bare a primordial state of linguistic sound production, forms a critical premise for the production of compositions like Oaoa—­poems that function, according to Hausmann, in “both respiratory-­gestural and optical-­spatial”26 registers at once. From 1959 onward, Hausmann’s privileged name for this ability to function in two registers at once, and thus to orient the audience simulta­ neously toward voice and script, is Eidophonie, or “eidophonetics.”27 Despite the fact that this neologism became the dominant and most consistently 25. Hausmann, “Bedeutung und Technik des Lautgedichts,” 30. 26. Hausmann, “Aussichten oder Ende des Neodadaismus,” 274. 27. The concept appears initially, though not yet in regard to poetry, in an unpublished 1952 text on cinema, entitled “{De la cave} #Le# {Au} cinéma du present,” Archives Raoul Hausmann, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, inv. no. A.V.2/52-­a. It is first introduced as a poetic term in the essay “Bedeutung und Technik des Lautgedichts,” and in a 1960 manuscript entitled “Die Befreiung der Vorstellung,” Archives Raoul Hausmann, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, inv. no. A.V.4/60-­AL-­a. Thereafter, the concept appears in all major texts in which Hausmann discusses his own poetic practices. For two of the latest examples, see Raoul Hausmann, “Le structuralisme telquel et

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used term in Hausmann’s poetry-­related writings of the 1960s, the concept occupies a curious blind spot in the reception of Hausmann’s work: scholars routinely speak instead of the “opto-­phonetic” orientation of his poetic theory and practice, thereby prioritizing an expression that Hausmann himself used much less frequently.28 This preference has had the effect of obscuring some of the most radical aspects of the approach. Derived from the Greek terms eidos (which refers to “that which is seen,” i.e., a visual shape, appearance, or essence) and phōnē (which means either “sound” or “voice”), the notion of Eidophonie designates the overall thrust of a poetic agenda aimed at re-­envisioning language in its fundamental phonetic dimensions. Yet “the entire eidophonetic act,”29 of which Hausmann speaks in 1964, unfolds its dynamic force, for him, via processes that extend well beyond the specific functions of eyesight and vocalization alone. To support this claim, Hausmann repeatedly invokes the more comprehensive constitution of the human organism, emphasizing that the organs of vision and speech remain subject to the influence of more basic physiological phenomena such as blood flow, peristalsis, and pulse, and hence to activity patterns at a vascular level whose unfolding “imposes variable rhythms and cadences [tacts] onto eidophonetics and its oral performance.”30 Even more crucially, he further suggests that the emergence of a “phonetic eidos”31 from those broader bodily foundations takes place as its own, interior form of seeing—­a form of seeing that precedes, organizes, and culminates in the sounds of spoken expression, together with their exterior, visible notation. While the semantics of the term “opto­ phonetics” relate more exclusively to speech made perceptible externally to the eye (optíkos = “pertaining to the sense of sight”), Hausmann’s notion of Eidophonie thus reflects the idea that the thoroughly embodied process of poetic composition entails also, in itself, “a renewed, inner optics,” which shapes the “purely oral evaluations [of speech elements] in the la phonie,” and “La structuration directe,” De Tafelronde 13, no. 1–­2 (1968): 32–­33 and 34–­3 5, respectively. 28. For his earliest literary application of this term in a published text, see Raoul Hausmann, “Zur optisch-­fonetischen Dichtung,” Streit-­Zeit-­Schrift 5, no. 1 (1964): 39–­41. For an exemplary scholarly treatment of  Hausmann’s “optophonetic” poetics, see Cornelius Borck, “Sound Work and Visionary Prosthetics: Artistic Experiments in Raoul Hausmann,” Papers of Surrealism 1 (Winter 2005): 1–­25, at 14–­18. 29. Raoul Hausmann, “Typhonisme: Asthénie, Pycnie et Psychomorphologie. Le fonctionnement vasomoteur et la création poétique,” De Tafelronde 12, no. 4 (1967): 44–­46, at 45. A German version of this text was published posthumously as “Typhonismus: Asthenie, Pyknie und Psychomorphologie,” in Elektronische Eidophonie und andere Aufsätze, ed. Karl Riha (Siegen: Universität-­Gesamthochschule Siegen, 1991): 18–­21. 30. Hausmann, “Typhonisme,” 46. 31. Hausmann, “Typhonisme,” 45.

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mouth.”32 The stripping down of language to its bare phonetic substrate, in other words, occurs for him in accordance with a deeper-­than-­eye-­level, “eidetic” kind of vision, which is deeply and inextricably entrenched in corporeality, in contrast, for instance, to any and all phenomenological models of Wesensschau to which he occasionally alludes.33 To be sure, Hausmann’s conception of this inner faculty remains entirely speculative in kind; he neither elaborates on its functioning in any more theoretical detail, nor does he aim to offer further proof of its existence. Furthermore—­and despite his strong emphasis on physiological aspects—­ his invocation of a nonocular, interior form of sight clearly remains indebted to a much older, traditional topos of the poet as a seer or visionary, which in turn links up to a much older, traditional understanding of poetry as essentially, if not exclusively, oral.34 The real novelty of eidophonetics as a means of approach, however, can be seen in the way in which Hausmann ties the purported inner eidos inextricably to its corresponding, externalizing inscription in the material form of written signs. Rather than operating as a self-­contained, “higher” form of intuition, which could then potentially “actualize” itself (or not) in a poetic verse, Hausmann’s profoundly un-­Platonic form exists only by virtue of an externally-­oriented process of mediation that ends in writing: the process by which an articulatory, gestural dynamic of sound production becomes “‘eidophonetically’ superimposed with typographic shapes [Formgebungen].”35 As the spatial metaphor suggests, Hausmann conceives of this functional continuum between inner vision, speech, and writing as an essentially layered, multilevel phenomenon. And it is precisely this vertical topographical character that finds a literal expression in the overlapping elements of his 1965 text collage. 32. Raoul Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 14 (1965): 1193–­96, at 1194. 33. The classic phenomenological conception of “eidetic intuition” (eidetische Anschauung) is, of course, Husserl’s, though Hausmann refers more directly to the adaptation of the concept by the Weimar psychologist Erich Rudolf Jaensch. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960): 69–­72, and Erich Rudolf Jaensch, Die Eidetik und die typologische Forschungsmethode (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1925). Hausmann himself introduces the term “eidetic” in thematic relation to language development in a 1947 manuscript, “Les pulsions eidétiques,” Archives Raoul Hausmann, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, inv. no. A.V.2/47-­a. In another unpublished text, “Aperception et vision de l’homme préhistorique,” from 1952, “eidetic vision” is conceived as an originary form of perception that the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardes set out to restore. See Archives Raoul Hausmann, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, inv. no. A.V.2/53-­a. 34. See Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992): 207–­10, for a brief treatment of this connection. 35. Hausmann, “Aussichten oder Ende des Neodadaismus,” 275.

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Conceived in closest proximity to Hausmann’s broader theoretical con­siderations—­and consisting, as it does, of several material and semiotic layers in which handwritten letter (O), typographic element (), and photographic snippets of mouth and eyes all visually coalesce—­the composition of Oaoa can therefore be viewed as the eidophonetic poem par excellence. Its arrangement of elements playfully figures precisely the “inner” kind of seeing that is at work, for Hausmann, within the letter-­sound, by placing the cutouts of his own physical eyes quite literally within the outline of the graphic letter-­sign. The credo that “the phoneme is made not only in and by the mouth but also through vision” 36 takes shape here in a constellation that quite literally glues together the organs of sight and speech, while the surrounding alphabetic characters double the photographic reference to this ocular-­articulatory genesis by means of the sounding vowels they graphically denote. Indeed: the “o” and “a” of Hausmann’s poem, themselves, considered as symbolic ciphers, can now be seen to relate—­semantically—­not only to the traditional Greek signifiers of beginning and end, and not only to the words of Hausmann’s earlier poem (“Oben,” “Alle”) from which they were compositionally derived, but also, in their capacity as initial letters, to precisely those two optical and acoustic dimensions whose interplay alone makes possible, for Hausmann, the desirable, avant-­garde reorganization of poetic expression.37 The point of the eidophonetic poem, in sum, is to function as a medium for the exploration of an elementary “sound dialectic,” which unfolds in, or rather as, the relation between what is visible and what is audible, what is written and what is spoken, what is recordable and what can be notated. As the following section of this chapter argues, it is precisely in this respect that Hausmann’s poetics demands to be viewed against the backdrop of an older epistemological paradigm—­a paradigm of conceiving sound in the form of readable figures—­whose scientific and poetic lineage can be traced all the way back to the Romantic age. The purpose of establishing this link is to render visible, on the one hand, the way in which twentieth-­century literary concerns with articulation remained conceptually indebted to the idea of writing as a material self-­inscription of sound-­producing bodies—­an idea that emerged initially during the Romantic period and subsequently played out in various technological constellations over the course 36. Hausmann, “Typhonisme,” 45. In the German version of this passage, Hausmann uses the term Vision, which refers more clearly than its English counterpart to a nonocular form of seeing. See Hausmann, “Typhonismus,” 19. 37. See Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” 1194. Furthermore, “O” and “A” can also be understood, conversely, as referring to the bodily organs involved in the reception of the eidophonetic poem: the Ohr (ear) and Auge (eye).

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of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, this broader genealogical perspective can also help to delineate the historical specificity of the strategies through which avant-­garde writers like Hausmann would turn poetry into a medium for re(dis)covering an ostensibly original language, and for staging a far-­reaching attack on conventional systems of signification.

V ibrat ing Disks and Primary L etter s The idea of sound as potentially readable, via the hidden but discoverable figurations of a natural script, first acquired cultural prominence in the years around 1800, as the consequence of discoveries made by the German physicist and pioneer of acoustics, Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni. Chladni introduced his famous notion of the so-­called sound figures (Klang figuren) in his 1787 treatise Entdeckungen zur Theorie des Klanges (Discoveries in the Theory of Sound ).38 As an experimental scientist, he devoted his research to the vibrational behavior of (inanimate) sounding bodies such as strings, rods, bells, and plates. He especially sought to determine how sonic vibrations spread through planar objects like glass and metal sheets, an analytic purpose for which he devised “a means of representing any possible sound of such bodies, without interference of any others, not only in an audible but also in a visible form.”39 In order to trace the spatial extensions of the vibratory movements in question, Chladni prepared each of his plates by dusting its surface with sand, before running a violin bow across one of its edges; the contact with the bow caused the disk to emit a “strong and sustained”40 sound, while the sand on its top dispersed in various directions, yielding a figure that corresponded to the sound. In conducting these experiments, Chladni thus adopted an established musical technique for new scientific purposes; he handled and “played” his disks almost like musical instruments, and indeed emphasized repeatedly that a certain degree of manual skill and training was necessary to hold them in an appropriate fashion and to strike their edge with the bow at a proper angle and place.41 38. See Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1787): 19. Though his work built, in part, on the experimental techniques of earlier physicists like Robert Hooke and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, it was Chladni who named, popularized, and systematically investigated the sound figures as a physical phenomenon. 39. Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges, 1. 40. Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges, 18. 41. Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges, 18–­19. Based on his acoustic research, Chladni later went on to design and construct several musical instruments of his own, one of which he referred to as the “euphon.” See, in this context, Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, Beyträge zur praktischen Akustik und zur Lehre vom Instrumentenbau, enthaltend die Theorie und

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What Chladni’s innovative, musicoscientific technique produced was essentially a kind of negative image of the sound it sought to capture. Once the vibratory movement induced by means of the violin bow had ceased, a pattern of straight and circular lines remained visible on those parts of the disk—­the so-­called nodal points—­that had not been set in motion by the acoustic waves, and where the sand had therefore been able to settle and collect. These granular accumulations accordingly did not represent the course of the sonic vibrations themselves, but rather the “binary difference”42 between moving and nonmoving parts of the plate. They effectively outlined those areas within the object’s plane where vibratory movement had actually taken place, and in so doing transformed this dynamic (inter)action between sound waves into a static order of spatial oppositions. For Chladni, this procedure had the decisive advantage of rendering sound in a (more) permanent form, which in theory would allow it to be examined further—­and at leisure—­by the eye. He was technologically incapable, however, of actually preserving the indexical traces on his sand-­covered plates for longer periods of time; due to their material composition, they remained thoroughly fragile phenomena that could not be moved around or stored.43 Lacking any means for fixing his sound figures directly onto the plates, Chladni thus resorted to a second-­order method of graphic representation in order to document the results of his experiments, and to make them known to a wider public.44 He recorded the sand patterns he had observed in hand-­drawn sketches, which served Anleitung zum Bau des Clavicylinders und damit verwandter Instrumente (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1821). 42. On this aspect, see the discussion of Chladni’s experimental practice in Bettine Menke, “Adressiert in der Abwesenheit: Zur romantischen Poetik und Akustik der Töne,” in Die Adresse des Mediums, eds. Stefan Andriopoulos, Gabriele Schabacher, and Eckhard Schumacher (Cologne: DuMont, 2001): 100–­120, at 104. 43. Chladni shared this predicament with contemporaneous scientists like Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy, who experimented with the photochemical recording of  light effects but remained unable to stabilize their images in a permanent form. For a discussion of Chladni’s work in relation to the development of early photography, see Chitra Ramalingam, “Fixing Transience: Photography and Other Images of Time in 1830s London,” in Time and Photography, eds. Jan Baetens, Alexander Streitberger, and Hilde Van Gelder (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010): 3–­26. It was not until the mid-­nineteenth century that photography, having evolved into a functioning storage medium, would be used to document and preserve the phenomena Chladni had first examined several decades before. See Anonymous, “Die photographische Abbildung einer Chladnischen Klangfigur,” Allgemeine Deutsche Naturhistorische Zeitung 3 (1857): 234. 44. In addition to their dissemination in print, Chladni proceeded to popularize his sound figures by giving frequent live demonstrations of his method throughout Europe. In 1809, he famously presented his discoveries to Napoleon Bonaparte, who responded with enthusiasm to “this man [that] makes us see sounds.” See H. J. Stöckmann, “Chladni Meets Napoleon,” European Physical Journal Special Topics 145 (2007): 15–­23.

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F igu re 6 . Johann Stephan Capieux, table of sound figures, etching on copperplate, in Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1787): n.p.

in turn as the basis for etchings by a professional engraver, Johann Stephan Capieux, who transferred Chladni’s drawings onto copperplates that could be reproduced in print. On these copperplates—­eleven of which Chladni published as an appendix to his 1787 treatise—­the etchings of sound figures were arranged in tabular form so as to highlight both correspondences and variations among the visual structures they displayed (fig. 6). Predominantly circular in shape, as Chladni had mostly used round glass and metal sheets for his experiments, the figures were placed in rows and numbered

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sequentially from left to right, which aligned them with the linear organization of (other) printed pages, and with the direction in which the latter are commonly read. Viewed from a semiotic perspective, these tables therefore did not display the indexical traces Chladni had produced on his plates, but rather iconic representations of those traces; they consisted of images that were similar to, but by no means identical with, the original sound figures themselves. Furthermore, Chladni explicitly conceded that his sketches were in many instances idealized and to some extent even concocted illustrations of what he had observed in the process of experimentation. “Generally,” he wrote, “most of the figures appear very rarely in as regular a manner as they have been drawn in the tables; in the case of figures that are composed of many parts, some parts are usually so indistinct that their actual constitution must be guessed on the basis of their relation to other, more clearly discernable parts.”45 In order to compensate for the imperfections that resulted from the varying material consistency of his plates and from the influence of other interfering factors, Chladni completed the patterns he saw by filling in those sections that he assumed—­or imagined—­to be missing. He graphically improved upon his figures for their documentation in printed form, and in so doing created manually altered versions rather than accurate one-­to-­one reproductions of the physical, less clearly figure-­ like patterns. Nevertheless, it was first and foremost the principle of a visible, yet seemingly unmediated self-­registration of sound that captured the philosophical interest and sparked the literary imagination of Chladni’s contemporaries, who came to see in his sound figures a phenomenon of broader—­and, indeed, specifically poetic—­significance. And it is through this intensive philosophical and literary reception in the years around 1800 that Chladni’s scientific work also comes to constitute a critical backdrop for Raoul Hausmann’s mid-­twentieth-­century investigations into the foundations of a new kind of “eidophonetic” art.46 Hausmann’s most likely source of inspiration, 45. Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges, 20. 46. Some scholarly accounts have drawn connections between Chladni’s experiments and Hausmann’s “optophone,” a never-­realized instrument for the automatic conversion of visual light effects into corresponding audible vibrations (and vice versa), which he conceived in various versions over the course of the 1920s. None of these accounts, however, notes the relationship of Hausmann’s poetic work to Chladni’s scientific legacy, or offers a more detailed analysis of what precisely Hausmann’s efforts may have in common with Chladni’s. See Dieter Daniels, “Hybrids of Art, Science, Technology, Perception, Entertainment and Commerce at the Interface of Sound and Vision,” in See This Sound: Audiovisuology: Essays; Histories and Theories of Audiovisual Media and Art: 2, eds. Dieter Daniels, Sandra Naumann, and Jan Thoben (Cologne: Walter König, 2011): 9–­25; Birgit Schneider, “On Hearing Eyes and Seeing Ears: A Media

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in this respect, is the Romantic poet Novalis’s unfinished novel Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Novices of Sais), from 1798–­99, an excerpt of which—­including a passage pertaining directly to the sound figures—­appears as an undated typescript among his papers.47 In the famous opening section of this novel fragment, Novalis articulates through the voice of his narrator the kind of neo-­Pythagorean, nature-­philosophical perspective that would continue to shape the Romantic reception of Chladni’s scientific experiments: Various are the roads of man. He who follows and compares them will see strange figures emerge, figures which seem to belong to that great cipher-­ writing [Chiffernschrift] which we discern written everywhere, in wings, eggshells, clouds and snow, in crystals and in stone-­formations, on ice-­ covered waters, on the inside and outside of mountains, of plants, beasts and men, in the lights of heaven, on disks of sheet metal and glass that are touched and bowed [ gestrichen], or in iron filings round a magnet, and in strange conjunctures of chance. In them we suspect a key to the magic writing, even a grammar, but our surmise takes on no definite forms and seems unwilling to become a higher key.48 Aesthetics of Relationships between Sound and Image,” in Daniels, Naumann, and Thoben, eds., See This Sound, 174–­99; and Marcella Lista, “Empreintes sonores et métaphores tactiles: Optophonétiques, film et vidéo,” in Sons & lumières: Une histoire du son dans l’art du XXe siè­ cle, eds. Sophie Duplaix and Marcella Lista (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2004): 63–­75. Crucially, Hausmann chose to rename his envisioned apparatus in the mid-­1960s by starting to refer to it as the “eidophone,” a terminological shift that aligned the instrument’s purpose explicitly with the then-­prevalent concept of his poetic agenda. See, for example, Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” 1195, and Raoul Hausmann, “Eidophonie électronique,” De Tafelronde 12, no. 3 (1967): 49–­54. For a discussion of Hausmann’s eidophone, see also chapter 4, 199–202. 47. See Raoul Hausmann, “Novalis,” Archives Raoul Hausmann, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, inv. no. B.III.1/05-­b. Together with this transcript from a German edition of Novalis’s works, Hausmann also produced a French translation of the same text passage. See Raoul Hausmann, “Novalis, Les Apprentis de Sais,” Archives Raoul Hausmann, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, inv. no. B.III.1/06. He also cites Novalis’s text at the beginning of his 1967 obituary for Hans Arp. See Hausmann, “Obituary,” 63. 48. Novalis, The Novices of Sais, trans. Ralph Manheim (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2005): 3–­5. Translation modified. In German editions of the text, the reference to Chladni’s sound figures reads “auf berührten und gestrichenen Scheiben von Pech [ pitch] und Glas [ glass].” See Novalis, “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,” in Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, vol. 1: Das dichterische Werk, eds. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977): 79–­ 109, at 79. Friedrich Weltzien has suggested convincingly, however, that the word “Pech” likely represents a transcription error made by Novalis’s friends Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel when they prepared the text for posthumous publication in 1802. Since Chladni experimented primarily with plates of sheet metal (Blech) and glass, it is plausible to assume that Novalis, too, originally made reference to these two materials. See Friedrich Weltzien, “Elektrisches

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Placing the sound figures in the context of other natural phenomena such as geological patterns, magnetism, and astronomical constellations, Novalis here posits the existence of a unifying semiotic system through which all these different shapes and forces may become readable in the future, provided one can identify the “higher key” that makes it possible to decipher their meaning. The process observable on Chladni’s glass and metal plates is thus understood within a broader logic according to which nature writes itself in the form of visible, though as yet illegible signs; it is interpreted as evidence of a general underlying principle of natural self-­inscription that governs, in Novalis’s view, the cipher-­like structures of the material world as a whole. Against the backdrop of this universalizing notion of nature as script, Novalis repeatedly returned to the idea that Chladni’s method afforded an especially favorable opportunity to observe how “strange figures emerge” from and within the sensible world. In the notes he compiled for another unfinished book project—­the encyclopedic work conceived under the name Das Allgemeine Brouillon (The General Brouillon) in 1798–­99—­he speculates that it might be possible to apply Chladni’s technique of acoustic self-­registration to a broader range of audible phenomena. In a fragment entitled “382. K[unst]L[ehre]” (“Theory of Art”), he writes: “One should (force) everything to acoustically impress itself [sich abzudrucken], to render itself in silhouettes, to encipher [chiffriren] itself. Lines are fixed motions. A circle arises through the central oscillation of a plane.”49 Here, too, Novalis’s description corresponds quite precisely, with its combination of terms like “lines,” “circle,” and “oscillation of a plane,” to Chladni’s experimental procedure; it endows this procedure, however, with a different, much wider significance. As indicated above, Chladni’s research had remained limited to the recording of individual tones, as his technical setup permitted him neither to visualize composite sounds consisting of different frequencies, nor to represent gradual changes of sounds over time, nor to capture any other acoustic vibrations than those emitted by the glass and metal disks themselves. Novalis, by contrast, suggests that the practice of fixing sound waves in patterns of lines and circles could, or at least ought to be, extended in an analogous way to virtually anything acoustic, with the aim of creating a complete visual register of the figures that are discernible within the audible realm. Menetekel: Ritters Abbreviaturen einer allgemeinen Schrift,” in Die Lesbarkeit der Romantik: Material, Medium, Diskurs, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009): 185–­209, at 197. 49. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, trans. and ed. David W. Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007): 57. Translation modified. Emphases in the original. For the German wording of the passage, see Novalis, “Das Allgemeine Brouillon: Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik 1798/99,” in Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Har­ denbergs, vol. 3: Das philosophische Werk II, ed. Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983): 205–­478, at 309.

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The promise of this hypothetical endeavor clearly hinges, in Novalis’s view, on the technical possibility of “enciphering” sound in the form of physical traces, which he characterizes as a strictly autonomous, contact-­ based process. Significantly, he places his only reference to the experimentalist’s subjective agency—­the German verb nöthigen (to force)—­in parentheses so as to emphasize its merely subordinate role vis-­à-­vis the mechanical interaction between sound and recording surface, while the reflexive expression sich abdrucken (to impress or imprint itself  ) underscores the ostensibly self-­organizing nature of the experimental process. It would not be entirely accurate, however, to conclude from this rhetorical emphasis that Novalis here envisions “an experimental setup for the self-­ registration of sounds without any semiotic mediation.” 50 What inspired Novalis’s fascination with the sound figures was not their nonsemiotic, but rather their nonconventional character. His vision of expanding Chladni’s technique to “everything” acoustic aimed not at the elimination but rather at the naturalization of graphic signs. The goal was a system of visual representation for all possible sounds, which would not depend on arbitrary convention as in the cases of musical and linguistic notation, but rather derive directly and causally from the corresponding vibrations themselves. As is already clear from this brief overview, Novalis’s reflections on Chladni’s work substantially exceeded the latter’s own scientific objectives.51 And this theoretical excess becomes nowhere more radically apparent than in a second, closely related section of Novalis’s encyclopedic project, which speculatively links sound figures to alphabetic letters in a relation of (former) identity. Under the title “362. Phys[ik] und Gramm[atik]” (“Physics and Grammar”), he writes: Figurelike motions of sound, like letters of the alphabet. (Were letters originally acoustic figures? Letters a priori?) Lateral and figurelike motions of light and heat. Colored images are figures of light. The light ray is the stroked bow of a violin. What takes the place of sand here? One actually (forces) the sound to impress itself [sich selbst abzudrucken]—­to become enciphered—­on a copperplate.52

As previous scholarly accounts have pointed out, Novalis’s association of Chladni’s figures with an original kind of alphabetic writing was chiefly based on certain structural and phenomenal analogies: Inasmuch as the 50. Menke, “Adressiert in der Abwesenheit,” 105–­6. 51. For a similar diagnosis, see Jürgen Daiber, Experimentalphysik des Geistes: Novalis und das romantische Experiment (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001): 185. 52. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, 54. Emphases original.

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sand patterns on Chladni’s plates corresponded in any given case to one particular sound, which they transformed from a temporal sequence of vibrations into a single, spatial unit, they displayed the form of discrete, reproducible signs that were—­like letters—­composed of circles and lines.53 Novalis, however, further interprets these structural analogies as indicative of a (possible) genetic relationship. The fact that Chladni’s “acoustic fig­ ures” share certain general features with alphabetic characters suggests, he proposes, that the latter may once have emerged, like the former, as indexical traces of their corresponding sounds. Novalis thus imagines the existence of another alphabet before (or behind) the present-­tense, conventional code of phonetic characters; he envisions a prior (or even “a priori”) kind of script through which the acoustic vibrations of speech could inscribe themselves directly in the form of nonarbitrary signs. What is more, he even goes on to suggest that a certain remainder of this natural correspondence might still be—­latently—­present within the conventional system of the modern-­day alphabet. Toward the end of the section “Physics und Grammar,” Novalis writes: “So-­called arbitrary signs mightn’t be as arbitrary as they appear—­but stand in a certain real nexus with what is signified.”54 With his phantasmatic propositions, Novalis brought Chladni’s discovery to bear on the graphic representation of  linguistic sound, a question that had remained entirely outside of Chladni’s own interests and concerns. No less significant, however, is a second shift of focus that characterizes Novalis’s adaptation of Chladni’s experiments, and which has gone completely unnoticed in previous readings of the passage above. In a crucial detail, Novalis speaks of the self-­inscription of sound as taking place “on a copper­ plate,” which refers not to the disks on which Chladni originally recorded his sound figures, but invokes instead the printing surface (“Kupfertafel”) onto which the patterns were later copied by hand for the purpose of their inclusion in Chladni’s treatise. As shown above, Chladni himself expressly emphasized that a visual—­and by extension semiotic—­discrepancy separated these published illustrations from the original traces. Novalis, by contrast, hypothetically blends the two processes of producing sound figures on sand-­covered plates and reproducing their representations in print: If sound could “become enciphered,” as he puts it, on the material substrate of printable tables, there would be no rupture between acoustic vibrations and their visualization on the pages of books. The sound figures would then appear not only “like letters of the alphabet,” but function even more specifically as typographic elements. Due to a physical continuity between 53. See Menke, “Adressiert in der Abwesenheit,” 107. 54. Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, 54.

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imprint (Abdruck) and print (Druck), they would directly extend the “motions of sound” from which they arise into the fixed shapes of signs that can be impressed mechanically on paper. In light of this focus on the materiality of writing and print, it is perhaps not all that surprising that Novalis’s reflections appealed to Raoul Hausmann in his mid-­twentieth-­century efforts to construct a historical lineage for his own poetic agenda. In his theoretical writings from the late 1950s onward, Hausmann repeatedly credits Novalis with having envisioned a radical “revolution of language” 55 that would later find its realization in the literary practices of the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardes.56 More specifically, he portrays his Romantic predecessor as a pioneer in the development of an “eidophonetic” kind of poetry, suggesting that Novalis anticipated an exploration of sound-­vision relationships that Hausmann himself would later come to “fulfill” through his own experiments with the elementary units of both writing and speech. In a general form, this identification with—­and appropriation of—­Novalis’s ideas becomes manifest in a 1963 essay on the “transformations of language” from the Romantic era to the mid-­twentieth century, in which Hausmann offers the following view of his Romantic forerunner’s achievements: During the period of German Romanticism, poets like Achim von Arnim, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Novalis pursued in-­depth studies of  language and semantic meaning, not only with respect to poetic language in the classical sense, but also and primarily with regard to common discourse and the word—­let’s say right away: the phonemes. Novalis is certainly one of those intellects who has advanced this research the furthest, not only in the field of semantics but also in relation to colors for example  .  .  . He conceived equivalences [Zusammenhänge] between sounds and colors, and in so doing created a mutual correspon­ dence between the spheres and meanings of poetry and the eidos that were

55. Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” 1193. 56. See Hausmann, Courrier Dada, 58. In drawing a genealogical line from Romanticism to twentieth-­century phonetic poetry, Hausmann chiefly refers to certain passages in Novalis’s work where poetic language is conceived as an autonomous play of partly—­if not completely—­ desemanticized words. These passages include a reflection from Fragmente und Studien (1799–­ 1800) in which Novalis envisions poems as being “merely euphonious” and “devoid of all sense and coherence,” as well as the famous prose piece “Monolog” (1798–­99), which Hausmann incorporates in full into his own extensive essay “Aussichten oder Ende des Neodadaismus.” In a section entitled “Die écriture automatique und die Artikulationen,” he characterizes Novalis’s text as the first to have relocated the origins of poetic expression to “the prelogical stage of oral processes.” See Hausmann, “Aussichten oder Ende des Neodadaismus,” 276–­77.

Voice Figures 41

entirely unfamiliar and new in kind. The first impulses for an optophonetic—­or rather eidophonetic—­art originate with Novalis.57

Hausmann here projects the core concept of his own poetics onto Novalis’s oeuvre, thereby presenting the notion of Eidophonie as the consequence and culmination of a development that spans more than one and a half centuries. Given that Novalis’s own speculations about the nexus between sound/speech and vision/writing were decisively shaped by his encounter with Chladni’s scientific discoveries, Hausmann’s reflection on the Romantic origins of avant-­garde poetry can thus be taken to reveal a genealogical link between his work and Chladni’s sound figures as well. Such a genealogical link takes on a specific and concrete form in a composition like Oaoa, whose programmatic intertwining of vision and sound can now be considered in relation to the graphic documentation of Chladni’s recordings, and to the literary interpretation these drawings received at the hands of Novalis. Viewed as a whole, the spatial organization of Hausmann’s Oaoa already displays a certain degree of resemblance with the arrangement of Chladni’s figures in tables, all the more so since the most frequently recurring character of the text—­the letter o—­corresponds visually to the circular shapes of Chladni’s drawings. These drawings, to be sure, appear much more ordered, unified, and geometric in kind; yet Hausmann’s composition, too, aligns its discrete handwritten elements largely according to a pattern of straight horizontal and vertical lines. This overall correspon­ dence is further reinforced in the piece’s compositional center—­the combination of capitalized O and photographic collage (fig. 7)—­where the manually inscribed letter is doubled and partly overlaid with a typographic circle, and hence with a mechanically reproduced shape that calls up even more directly the perfectly round contours of Chladni’s figures (fig. 8). At the end of the eighteenth century, Novalis had been the first to associate sound figures with alphabetic letters, speculating that Chladni’s experiments made visible what writing in its Ur-­form might once have been.58 57. Raoul Hausmann, “Die Wandlungen der Sprache bis zur écriture automatique und dem Lautgedicht,” Nesyo 4–­5 (1963): 18–­19, at 18. 58. Following Novalis’s early death in 1801, his speculations were taken up and continued by his friend and admirer, the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who drew even further-­reaching connections between sound figures and letters. As Ritter contended, the sounds that could be made visible externally on Chladni’s plates also produced a corresponding internal effect within the hearer’s perceptual apparatus. They inscribed themselves, according to him, through electrical processes in the nervous system, thereby yielding a kind of physiological “fire writing” that the mind could then proceed to “read” like alphabetic characters. See “Appendix,” in Key Texts of Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–­1810) on the Science and Art of  Nature, trans. and ed. Jocelyn Holland

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Figu re 7 ( le ft) . Raoul Hausmann, Oaoa (detail), crayon on paper with photographic collage, 30.8 × 23.8 cm. © Collection Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, Château de Rochechouart F igu re 8 ( r ight) . Johann Stephan Capieux, table of sound figures (detail), etching on copperplate, in Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1787): n.p.

In his work from the mid-­1960s, Hausmann effectively offers a visual counterpart to Novalis’s reflection by joining the symbolic representation of spoken sound (“O”) to a graphic shape () that evokes the plates Chladni used for his recordings. A third circular element of the composition—­the photographic snippet of Hausmann’s own, wide-­open mouth—­makes his allusion to the idea of letters originating as physical traces of speech even more explicit. In one of the passages cited above, Novalis identifies the patterns of the sound figures as the “fixed motions” of the vibrating disks, referring to Chladni’s experiments as a process in which “a circle arises through the central oscillation of a plane.” Hausmann, in turn, inserts the physical organ of articulation at the center of the surrounding circular lines, thereby linking the latter to the acoustic vibrations that (may) have emerged from the darkness of the oral cavity. Following Friedrich Kittler’s seminal analysis, scholars have argued repeatedly that poetic theories and discursive practices around 1800 were

(Leiden: Brill, 2010): 470–­507, at 471–­74. For more detailed discussions of Ritter’s ideas in this regard, see Weltzien, “Elektrisches Menetekel,” 197–­208, and especially Caroline Welsh, Hirn­ höhlenpoetiken: Theorien zur Wahrnehmung in Wissenschaft, Ästhetik und Literatur um 1800 (Freiburg: Rombach, 2003): 70–­109.

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geared toward the utopian goal of a “script that sounds” 59—­the ideal of a kind of writing that would both derive from and lead back to its origin in a speaking voice. Novalis’s literary speculations on the basis of Chladni’s scientific experiments certainly fit this broader paradigm: his fantasy of reading sound figures like alphabetic characters, and his corresponding hypothesis about letters having emerged from the physical traces of speech, both attest quite clearly to this commitment. Hausmann, in his programmatic text collage from 1965, alludes to this idea of locating a voice within writing. He does so, however, by means of a transformative play. On the one hand, the gesture of making letters “speak” is clearly marked in his composition as contingent on an act of montage, and hence as depen­ dent on a procedure that exposes the composite character of its results. Here, the operation of reinserting speech at the center of an alphabetic script does not make the symbolic code of writing disappear (entirely) behind an organic process of articulation; rather, it is the synthetic effect of their coupling that the arrangement brings into focus. On the other hand, Hausmann achieves this synthetic effect through an indexical medium—­ photography—­that registers not acoustic vibrations like Chladni’s physical plates and Novalis’s imagined “letters a priori,” but instead corporeal movements of speech production. In Novalis’s interpretation of Chladni’s discoveries, it was the visible self-­inscription of sound waves that yielded (potentially) readable figures and afforded an analogous conception of alphabetic characters as indexical traces of spoken sound. Hausmann plays on this assumed link between acoustic figures and letters, but pairs it with a reference to a much later scientific practice—­the practice of recording the process of sound articulation—­that crucially extended the notion of readability from graphically inscribed signs to the gestures of the speaking body. It is the historical emergence of this later scientific practice—­a practice through which physical speech movements were effectively turned into visual signifiers of their corresponding sounds—­that will come into view in the following section. The focus will thus shift from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, and from the sphere of incipient acoustic research and its literary reception to the scientific disciplines of physiology and phonetics. Crucially, it was in the context of these fields that the bodily dynamic of articulation became defined as an epistemic object that could be addressed (only) by experimental means. As researchers began to analyze the process of speech production, they devised a range of methodologies that form a critical historical link between the originally Romantic idea of a natural sound writing—­the notion of a different, quasi-­alphabetic 59. Bettine Menke, “Töne—­Hören,” in Poetologien des Wissens, ed. Joseph Vogl (Munich: Fink, 1999): 69–­95, at 80.

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system of indexical inscriptions—­and the subsequent adaptation of this idea in poetic practices of the twentieth century.

Photographing Speech Whereas the connections drawn around 1800 between Chladni’s figures and written or spoken language had remained entirely speculative in kind, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed several attempts to apply the experimental principle of visualization scientifically to the analysis of linguistic sound.60 The first critical step in this direction was taken by French printer Édouard-­Léon Scott de Martinville, who obtained a patent for an invention named “phonautograph” in 1857, and who described the working principle of this device in an essay of the same year, stating that “the human voice is written by itself (in the language peculiar to acoustics, of course) on a sensitive stratum.”61 As Novalis, more than fifty years earlier, had postulated that “one should (force) everything to acoustically impress itself,” Scott could thus conceive of his invention as a technical realization of this Romantic idea, since it provided the means, according to him, “of forcing nature herself to constitute a written general language of all sounds.”62 To this end, the phonautograph was constructed of a funnel, a flexible membrane, a writing stylus, and a revolving drum covered with smoke-­blackened paper. When words were spoken or sung into the funnel, the sound waves of the vocal utterance would cause the instrument’s membrane to vibrate, which in turn caused the stylus to trace these vibrations on the recording surface where they took on the visual shape of undulating lines.63 The results of this procedure were indexical inscriptions that made it possible, for the first time, to measure the amplitudes and frequencies underlying various acoustic phenomena such as volume and pitch, and thus to render the human voice and its audible manifestations accessible to exact scientific investigation.

60. For a historical source that places this later research explicitly in the tradition of Chladni’s acoustic experiments, see Rudolph Koenig, Quelques expériences d’acoustique (Paris: n.p., 1882): 32–­38 and 61–­70 in particular. 61. See Édouard-­Léon Scott de Martinville, “Fixation Graphique de la Voix,” in The Phonauto­ graphic Manuscripts of Édouard-­Léon Scott de Martinville, ed. and trans. Patrick Feaster (Bloomington, IN: FirstSounds.org, 2009): 23–­42, at 23. For a discussion of the phonautograph in relation to Chladni’s previous experiments, see also Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 43–­46. 62. Scott de Martinville, “Fixation Graphique de la Voix,” 24. 63. For reproductions of these original “phonautographs,” see Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio 980–­1980, ed. Patrick Feaster (Atlanta: Dust-­to-­Digital, 2012): 75–­89.

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Over the following decades, researchers across Europe adopted Scott’s pioneering apparatus for a variety of techniques and instruments that served the corresponding purpose of registering the acoustic vibrations of spoken language in graphic form. Devices by the name of “speech writer” (Sprachzeichner) and “logograph” came to be used for extensive studies of individual vowels and consonants, over the course of which the physical properties of these basic phonetic units were isolated, calculated, and analyzed.64 At the same time, the growing scientific interest in “visible speech”65 also began to play out in a related but methodologically different tendency, which focused not on the acoustic signals, but on the physiological conditions of linguistic sound production. This development took shape in part through a convergence between experimental phonetics, photographic technology, and certain practices of deaf instruction that had become of increasingly central concern to late nineteenth-­century pedagogues. In an effort to improve on previous methods for teaching deaf people (then called “deaf-­mutes”) how to comprehend speech, proponents of this branch of pedagogy began to turn to the new means of linguistic analysis, and in particular to the principle of creating permanent visual records of vocal utterances.

64. For some pertinent examples of this development, see Victor Hensen, “Ueber die Schrift von Schallbewegungen,” Zeitschrift für Biologie 23, NF 5 (1887): 291–­302; Paul Wendeler, “Ein Versuch, die Schallbewegung einiger Konsonanten und anderer Geräusche mit dem Hensen’schen Sprachzeichner graphisch darzustellen,” Zeitschrift für Biologie 23, NF 5 (1887): 303–­20; E. A. Meyer, “Zur Tonbeweung des Vokals im gesprochenen und gesungenen Einzelwort,” Die Neu­ eren Sprachen 4 (1896): 1–­21; A. Samoljoff, “Zur Vokalfrage,” Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie des Menschen und der Thiere 78 (1899): 1–­26. For an overview of this branch of research, see Felix Krueger, “Beziehungen der experimentellen Phonetik zur Psychologie,” in Bericht über den II. Kongreß für experimentelle Psychologie in Würzburg vom 18. bis 21. April 1906, ed. Friedrich Schumann (Leipzig: Barth, 1907): 58–­1 22, at 82–­8 5. 65. Most directly, this notion is associated today with Alexander M. Bell’s treatise Visible Speech from 1867, which introduced a new system of phonetic notation based on the articulatory properties of spoken sounds. See Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Al­ phabetics, or Self-­Interpreting Physiological Letters, for the Writing of All Languages in One Alphabet (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co, 1867). Bell’s undertaking, however, harks back to an older tradition with roots in philosophical and theological debates of the preceding centuries. Especially noteworthy in this regard is the seventeenth-­century Bishop John Wilkins, whose project of (re)creating a “universal language” in the service of linguistic disambiguation also entailed the idea of modeling alphabetic characters on the corresponding movements of the speaking mouth. See John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (London: Samuel Gellibrand and John Martyn, 1668). On Wilkins’s notion of a natural alphabet and its phonetic implications, see also Joseph L. Subbiondo, “John Wilkins’ Theory of Articulatory Phonetics,” in Papers in the History of Linguistics: Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, eds. Hans Aarsleff, Louis G. Kelly, and Hans-­Josef Niederehe (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987): 263–­70.

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As the French educational reformer Felix Hement remarked in an 1885 article, “Les progrès récents dans l’enseignement des sourds-­muets” (“Recent Advances in the Instruction of Deaf-­Mutes”), this reorientation built primarily on the observation that spoken language operates as such in both audible and visible registers at once. “Speech,” he wrote, “manifests itself in effect in two ways: namely, through the sounds that are taken in by the ear, and through the movements and position of the speech organs [organes verbaux] that are apprehended by the eyes. Or, if you prefer, it manifests itself through audible phenomena and through visible signs. Speech can be heard or seen.”66 As Hement went on to specify, it was precisely this dual character that allowed deaf people to compensate for their lack of hearing by developing a different skill. Though incapable of perceiving speech acoustically, any deaf person could—­potentially—­decode spoken utterances by learning “to apprehend the passage of the rapid movements that are passing, so to speak, on the lips. He reads lips, as the pertinent expression says.”67 Yet while this technique of lipreading gained unprecedented currency among instructors of the deaf in that period,68 it continued to pose a significant challenge to both teachers and students, as considerable efforts were necessary to acquire sufficient practice in identifying and deciphering the “visible signs” that were characteristic of any single spoken sound. It was for this reason that pedagogues started to seek out technical means of recording speech movements in the form of permanent, reproducible images—­images that might aid the process of training the eye in its ability to parse the changing positions of the lips like a sequence of written characters. And it is precisely this idea—­the idea of rendering the mouth’s articulatory activity more easily readable through its visual mediation in (static) pictures—­that makes the emergence of late nineteenth-­century applied phonetics relevant for the present discussion. At the end of his brief essay, Hement included a series of three copperplate etchings (fig. 9) that had been executed, as the caption emphasizes, on the basis of previously recorded photographs. Framed around the head of an unidentified speaker, each of these pictures documents the typical shape of the lips during pronunciation of one particular French vowel 66. Felix Hement, “Les progrès récents dans l’enseignement des sourds-­muets,” La Nature 611 (February 14, 1885): 166–­6 8, at 167. Emphases original. 67. Hement, 167. Emphasis original. 68. For two noteworthy examples of this trend, see Alexander Melville Bell, Facial Speech Read­ ing and Articulation Teaching (Washington, DC: Volta Bureau, 1890) and Hermann Gutzmann, “Das Ablesen des Gesprochenen vom Gesicht,” Medizinisch-­pädagogische Monatsschrift für die gesammte Heilkunde 2 (1892): 69–­8 5 and 102–­11. Gutzmann’s treatise later appeared in English under the title “Facial Speech-­Reading,” American Annals of the Deaf 44 (1899): 272–­8 5, 317–­3 5, and 412–­19.

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F igu re 9. Lip positions during articulation of the French vowels “A,” “O,” and “Ou,” copperplate engravings after photographs, in Felix Hement, “Les progrès récents dans l’enseignement des sourds-­muets,” La Nature 611 (February 14, 1885): 168

sound—­“a,” “o,” and “ou”—­while the entire sequence reveals a gradual progression from the most open (“a”) to the most closed (“ou”) position. Each of the pictures accordingly represents one particular “snapshot” of the articulatory organs that had been extracted from the continuous process of speech, and which was meant to function in this isolated spatial condition as a stable visual sign of the corresponding sound. Though Hement did not proceed to discuss the practical utilization of such images in any further detail, he clearly envisioned a future in which they would be employed systematically toward pedagogical ends. He thus anticipated a subsequent development during which photography would be placed in the service of deaf instruction on a much grander scale, a development that started to materialize just a few years later in the laboratory of the preeminent nineteenth-­century physiologist Étienne-­Jules Marey. The decisive impulse in this context came from Hector Marichelle, professor at the Institut national des sourds-­muets in Paris, who approached his former teacher Marey with the idea of analyzing speech by means of serial photography.69 Marey, who had been applying this technology to the study of animal and human locomotion since the early 1880s, entrusted 69. For a discussion that places this idea in the context of other phonetic experiments conducted in Marey’s lab, see Bernard Teston, “L’oeuvre d’Étienne-­Jules Marey et sa contribution

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his assistant Georges Demeny—­at the time director of Marey’s Station physiologique—­with the task of putting Marichelle’s suggestion into practice. Demeny, in turn, presented the initial results of his experiments to the French Academy of Sciences in July 1891.70 Some months later, he also published an essay, “La photographie de la parole” (“Photography of Speech”), which included a first specimen of the pictures he had obtained—­a sequence of twenty-­four chronophotographs famously showing Demeny himself in the process of speaking the sentence “Je vous aime” (fig. 10). The particular way in which these images were reproduced in print is remarkable for several reasons. While the photographs had been recorded originally as a medium close-­up showing Demeny’s entire head and upper chest, they were further reduced in this published version to a segment of his face, with the resulting frames enclosing only the space between his chin and eyes. Compared to Hement’s exemplary illustrations a few years before, which had still maintained the integrity of the speaker’s facial physiognomy, Demeny’s series thus appears focused even more closely on the speech organs and their externally visible activity. The explanatory caption added underneath—­“chronophotographic images of a person’s mouth”—­ indicates as much, and the fact that the original pictures were cut so as to situate the changing positions of lips and teeth at the very center of each individual frame strikingly illustrates this intended emphasis. Furthermore, Demeny’s recording represents a new approach inasmuch as it captures the temporal sequence of one extended verbal utterance, and hence also the visible transitions between different articulate sounds. In its entirety, it reproduces two seconds of speech, photographed at a rate of twelve images per second, which are placed in this published version alongside a written transcript of the spoken sentence they display. Though only in an approximate fashion, the letters of “Je vous aime” serve here to demarcate those points in the image series where each particular sound or sound combination had begun to take shape through the opening or closing movements of the mouth; they accordingly serve to render the photographs legible to the common viewer, and to demonstrate exemplarily how pictures of this kind—­when used as practice material—­might facilitate the development of lipreading as a specialized skill. The overall goal of Demeny’s endeavor, then, was to replicate the dynamic character of the articulatory process through the linear succession of a l’émergence de la phonétique dans les sciences du langage,” Travaux Interdisciplinaires du Laboratoire Parole et Langage 23 (2004): 237–­66. 70. See Anonymous, “La photographie de la parole,” La Nature 949 (August 8, 1891): 158. This press report includes the official note Demeny submitted to the Academy on the occasion of his presentation.

Figu r e 1 0 . Georges Demeny, chronophotographs of Demeny speaking the sentence “Je vous aime,” in “La photographie de la parole,” Paris-­Photographe 1, no. 7 (1891): n.p.

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static images. When viewed as a series, these images were meant to evoke an impression of continuous, real-­life movement, despite the fact that they showed, taken one by one, only fractions of speech in the frozen condition of discrete photographic stills. To achieve the desired lifelike appearance, Demeny therefore proceeded to construct his own viewing apparatus for the pictures he had obtained, an apparatus that served the purpose of synthesizing the individual photographs by means of a perceptual illusion. Patented under the name “phonoscope” in 1892, this device consisted of a box with a small aperture, which contained two round disks that could be rotated at different speeds by means of a handle. In a contemporary illustration, the phonoscope is shown with its front cover partly removed, thereby revealing in its interior the crucial design (fig. 11). On the disk in the back, the photographs of a spoken utterance like “Je vous aime” were arranged in a circular fashion, while the disk in the front was kept opaque except for a single viewing window shaped in correspondence with the pictures behind it. When both disks were set in motion simultaneously—­and with the front disk rotating three times as fast as the one in the back—­the photographs would become viewable through the phonoscope’s aperture in such a way as to yield a subjective perception of actual bodily movement. Demeny himself, in an 1892 essay titled “Les photographies parlantes” (“Photographs that Talk”), described the instrument’s visual effect accordingly: “If one watches in the phonoscope the consecutive photographs of a person who is talking,” he wrote, “one observes in an impressive manner how the portrait comes to life and moves the lips.” 71 For obvious reasons, Demeny’s invention has repeatedly received attention from media and film historians, who typically assign the phonoscope a central place in the late nineteenth-­century emergence of various cine­ matic technologies. Introduced more than three years prior to the Cinéma­ tographe Lumière, the contraption is generally regarded as a direct precursor to (silent) cinema, to which it can be shown to bear some clear conceptual, functional, and even iconographic affinities.72 Here, however, this cinematic 71. Georges Demeny, “Les photographies parlantes,” La Nature 985 (April 16, 1892): 311–­15, at 314. Emphasis original. 72. Notably, Demeny already suggests the possibility of coupling the phonoscope with a projection device such as the so-­called Molteni lantern, which would also be used a few years later as part of the Cinématographe Lumière. See Demeny, “Les photographies parlantes,” 314. For scholarly accounts that relate Demeny’s phonoscope to the technological emergence of cinema, see Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of  Étienne-­Jules Marey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 176–­82, and Deac Rossell, Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998): 50–­55. For an analysis that places Demeny’s experiments in the broader context of physiognomic traditions, and relates his work to the representation of the human face in early films, see Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography,

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Figu re 1 1 (le ft) . Louis Poyet, representation of Georges Demeny’s phonoscope, copperplate engraving, in Georges Demeny, “Les photographies parlantes,” La Nature 985 (April 16, 1892): 312 Figu re 12 (righ t) . Raoul Hausmann, Synthetisches Cino der Malerei (detail), date uncertain, typographic print with photographic collage. Photograph © Anja Elisabeth Witte/Berlinische Galerie

dimension of Demeny’s device is pertinent mainly to the extent to which it relates to the primary context of the instrument’s application. As Demeny reports in his 1892 article, his “synthetic apparatus” 73 was initially tested by three students at Marichelle’s Institut national des sourds-­muets, who ostensibly succeeded in reading the spoken utterance from the sequence of rotating pictures. Though the phonoscope is today usually considered first and foremost in light of the developments toward film that would follow, its immediate purpose lay in providing a visual surrogate of  linguistic sound as it is being spoken. It was conceived with the goal of outsourcing instruction in the skill of lipreading to mechanical devices, and hence also with the idea of reorganizing this particular pedagogical practice according to modern standards of efficiency. (Demeny would later undertake steps to market the phonoscope commercially as an entertainment device to a broader audience, though ultimately without any lasting success.) Viewed in terms of its own genealogy, Demeny’s apparatus for reconstituting movements and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–­1940, ed. and introd. Mark S. Micale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004): 141–­71, at 161–­64. 73. Demeny, “Les photographies parlantes,” 312.

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of speech needs to be understood therefore, above all, as a continuation of earlier efforts to inscribe acoustic phenomena indexically in a medium accessible to the eye. Notably in this context, Demeny’s spinning disks correspond to the circular shape of Chladni’s vibrating plates, and they each enclose on their surface—­in a manner analogous to the sound figures—­the physical traces of an audible event. If, then, Demeny’s phonoscope could be said to echo in its design Chladni’s glass and metal sheets as much as it anticipates the film reel, it simultaneously provides a striking link to Raoul Hausmann’s later adaptation—­or citation—­of the nineteenth century history of visualized sound.74 This link may be most directly evident in the collage Synthetisches Cino der Malerei (fig. 12), which Hausmann initially created during the Weimar period, and which he would recycle after the war as part of his phonetic composition Oaoa. On the one hand, the technological reference in the collage’s title—­ “synthetic cinema”—­already corresponds quite precisely to the functional principle of Demeny’s viewing device. On the other hand, the spatial arrangement of typographic and photographic elements further reinforces this connection, insofar as it calls up the idea of rendering speech movements readable as “visible signs,” through their mechanical reproduction and display. Viewed from this perspective, Hausmann’s large black circle can be taken to iconically evoke the form of Chladni’s vibrating plates as well as Demeny’s rotating disks. The positioning of the two snippets showing Hausmann’s eyes in particular recalls the placement of photographs in the phonoscope, where they would be aligned with the circular edge of the movable disk. Together with the cutout of the wide-­open mouth located in the center, the positioning of the eyes thus alludes to the technical possibility of setting such static images in motion. Though the reference to this possibility remains playful, the collage creates a scenario in which the typographic circle itself might function like a rotating device, and in which the dynamic process of articulation—­arrested in a still condition within the single shot in the middle—­could be brought back to a semblance of life. This notion of the photograph as a kind of film-­still avant la lettre, which carries within it, implicitly, something of the structure of the alphabetic letter—­since the still represents a discrete, bounded chunk of the perceived

74. In a 1965 essay, Hausmann also describes his poetic agenda as being geared toward a new kind of “Skopophonie” (from skopein = to look at + phoné = voice, sound), which calls to mind quite explicitly the name of Demeny’s earlier device. See Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” 1195. As various references in other writings attest, Hausmann possessed at least a general awareness of the physiological and photographic experiments conducted in Marey’s laboratory.

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temporal continuum—­undergoes a decisive, and indeed quite radical, transformation, at the hands of another scientist whose work helped shape the experimental paradigm inherited by Hausmann and his contemporaries. The scientist in question was the physician Hermann Gutzmann, who would later become known for having established phoniatrics as a medical (sub)discipline in Germany. Himself the son of an instructor of the deaf, Gutzmann trained as a speech therapist and kept practicing in this capacity until his death in 1922. For more than two decades, he directed his own private Berlin clinic for patients with speech disorders; during World War I, this clinic became a center for the treatment of traumatized soldiers, whose experiences on the battlefield had led to impediments ranging from stammering to complete dumbness.75 Gutzmann, who had already written on the subject of lipreading early in his career, learned of Demeny’s photographic experiments through various press reports that circulated in France and Germany during the early 1890s. Inspired by these reports, he started to conduct his own research into the “practical utilization” of speech photography, which he outlined in an 1895 lecture before the Medical Society of Berlin. In this lecture, Gutzmann cited the pioneering recording of “Je vous aime” published four years before but went on to raise doubts as to how useful examples of this kind could really be. In order to amass sufficiently comprehensive practice material for the purpose of deaf instruction, he argued, it would have been necessary to obtain an “infinite quantity” 76 of photographs showing the articulation of different words and phrases. What was needed instead, according to him, was therefore a far more economical solution: namely, a photographic system of individual “sound images” that could be combined and rearranged at will so as to assemble from these discontinuous elements a potentially unlimited number of spoken utterances. If one were able, he explained, to fabricate a set of analogous sound images [Lautbilder] that indicate the different speech sounds and the transitions between them, one could employ these images as types [Typen] in order to display any conceivable word inside some sort of stereoscopic apparatus. The relation between these movable types and the stereotypes of Marey’s serial recordings would

75. For a brilliant discussion of such war-­related practices of (speech) therapy and their relation to visual and literary works of avant-­garde figures like Hausmann, see Brigid Doherty, “See: ‘We Are All Neurasthenics!’ or, the Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 82–­132. 76. Hermann Gutzmann, “Die Photographie der Sprache und ihre praktische Verwerthung,” Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift 33, no. 19 (May 11, 1896): 413–­16, at 414.

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have to be the same as the relation between movable letters [Drucktypen] and the blocks cut out of wood that were commonly used prior to the invention of the printing press.77

In order to create a photographic script capable of representing speech sounds one by one, Gutzmann proceeded in a number of steps. He focused his camera even more directly on the section of the face where articulatory movements could be observed externally; he then selected from the close-­ ups of different lip positions those he deemed most characteristic of any given sound; finally, he defined these typical—­or rather, typified—­images as basic semiotic units that were meant to function, in effect, in a manner analogous to written alphabetic signs (fig. 13). Compared to Demeny’s experimental practice, Gutzmann’s project thus operated on a newly radical principle of photographic montage. While Demeny had devised his phonoscope with the aim of visually reconstituting the particular words and sentences he had previously spoken into the camera, Gutzmann used his photographic “types” to compile various utterances that had not been recorded as such.78 And while Demeny’s scientific agenda remained entirely focused on the aspect of rendering speech movements more readily readable, Gutzmann’s method of dissecting and assembling sequences of “sound images” implies an additional interest in how the mouth, with the help of mechanical devices, could be used to write in an unprece­ dented way. The broader currency of this latter idea in nineteenth-­century studies of the articulatory process will come into view again in the following chapter. For the moment, it will suffice to consider, via a comparison with Chladni and then with Demeny, only the most salient semiotic implications of his influential intervention into the project of speech photography. While it is true that neither Demeny’s nor Gutzmann’s photographic techniques found the widespread pedagogical application their creators had envisioned—­both remained confined in their use largely to the specific institutional contexts in which they were first developed and tested—­these turn-­of-­the-­century experiments nevertheless both broke new historical ground through their attempts to establish an alternative notion of script: one capable of recording and representing spoken language in a visual yet 77. Gutzmann, “Die Photographie der Sprache und ihre praktische Verwerthung,” 414. Emphases original. 78. During his 1895 lecture, Gutzmann evidently aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of his approach with the help of several stereoscopic viewing devices. Each of these devices contained a series of glass slides that could be set in motion mechanically, and which displayed the photographic “types” corresponding to the individual sounds of a particular spoken word or phrase (Gutzmann used examples like “showel” and “good morning” for this purpose). See Gutzmann, “Die Photographie der Sprache und ihre praktische Verwerthung,” 415.

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F igu re 13. Hermann Gutzmann, photographic “types” of lip positions during transition from “A” to “U,” in “Die Photographie der Sprache und ihre praktische Verwerthung,” Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift 33, no. 19 (May 11, 1896): 416

nonsymbolic form. The general thrust behind Demeny’s and Gutzmann’s scientific practices can thus be productively compared to the semiotic ideas and fantasies that had emerged during the Romantic period one hundred years before. Where Chladni’s discoveries in the years around 1800 had sparked speculations as to whether it might be possible to develop a means for the visible self-­inscription of all sounds, including those of the human voice, the project of speech photography in the 1890s shifted the focus from acoustic vibrations to the motoric process of articulation. In doing so, however, it maintained the conceptual investment in a form of “natural” writing. On the one hand, the procedure of capturing speech via photographic

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images remained in itself highly mediated and artificial—­much like the procedure of capturing sound figures via drawings—­dependent, as it necessarily was, on various decisions by the experimenting scientists (ranging from the selection of camera angle and focus to the choice of lighting and exposure times). On the other hand, the results of the process were portrayed according to the very same logic of purely mechanical self-­ registration as Chladni’s sound figures had been almost a century earlier. In clear contrast to a Romantic writer like Novalis, however, late nineteenth-­century scientists like Demeny and Gutzmann no longer considered indexical traces and alphabetic letters to stand in a relation of possible kinship. For them, photographic “sound images” were of critical relevance precisely insofar as they provided—­unlike written characters—­a direct, physical extension of the body’s articulatory activity, and hence a potential alternative to the symbolic regime of conventional signs. The point of Gutzmann’s project, from the perspective of the early twentieth-­ century avant-­garde inheritance, is that he radicalizes this position to the point of perversion, and in doing so, transforms the entire principle of indexical representation. The images he constructed were effectively meant to constitute a different kind of phonetic alphabet: one in which the individual, visual “types” derived from corporeal movements—­each correlated with an individual sound—­would function as a standardized and reproducible, artificial yet nonarbitrary system for the transcription of human speech. Conventional letters, to be sure, did still appear alongside the sample photographs of speech movements published during the 1890s, as both Demeny’s “Je vous aime” and Gutzmann’s lip positions “during transition from a to u” attest. Yet these letters—­used in both cases solely as captioning devices—­remain extrinsic to the corresponding images themselves. Here and in the profusion of related works by other scientists that would follow, well into the twentieth century, conventional writing plays a pronouncedly supplementary role, serving purposes of demonstration or clarification that have ultimately little of substance in common with the (ostensible, aspirational) readability of the actual motor activity, i.e., of the physical signs. Some twenty years later, in the same Berlin that had become, with Gutzmann’s clinic, a center of speech photography, Raoul Hausmann would create a work—­often regarded as the final piece in his Dadaist phase—­ that quite clearly plays with, and off, the paradigm of bodily writing established in the work of these scientific precursors. The collage ABCD (plate 2), from 1923–­24, incorporates at its center the very same photographic portrait that also appears, cut up into pieces, in Synthetisches Cino der Malerei and in Oaoa. A brief analysis of this composition can help to spell out—­quite literally—­how Hausmann transforms the experimental paradigm to which he so clearly alludes, and to detail some consequences

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of this transformation that will bring the historical arc of our discussion to a close. In the scholarship, ABCD has generally been discussed in the context of its function as an artistic self-­portrait. This function is suggested not only by the image at the center of the composition, but also by several surrounding elements that reference the formative period of Hausmann’s career in the late 1910s and early 1920s. The cone-­shaped scrap of paper extending from the right edge of the collage to Hausmann’s mouth iconically invokes—­via its pattern of a starry sky—­the collaboration with fellow Dadaist Johannes Baader, with whom Hausmann founded, in 1919, an offshoot of Berlin Dada named Club der blauen Milchstraße. Partially visible below Hausmann’s chin is an advertisement card for the MERZ-­Matinée, staged together with Kurt Schwitters on December 30, 1923 in Hanover, where Hausmann presented phonetic poems as well as a lecture on the “laws of primordial sounds.” The Czech banknote on the bottom left can be taken to recall, metonymically, the so-­called Anti-­Dada/Merz-­Tour to Prague on which Schwitters and Hausmann embarked in September 1921, while the typographically assembled word VOCE—­placed to the left of Hausmann’s head and vaguely reminiscent of a human ear in its shape—­is often regarded as nod to Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose typographic creations exercised critical influence on Hausmann’s own work in this domain. These biographically related materials are then juxtaposed with various (other) reality fragments that constitute a commentary on the broader political situation of the early Weimar years: Tickets to the Kaiser Jubilee held in 1913 for Emperor Wilhelm II evoke the bygone era of the German monarchy, whereas the snippet of a map in the upper right corner cites the culmination and collapse of European imperialism during the First World War. The overall visual effect of the arrangement is one of historical-­documentary profusion encroaching upon the face in the middle: Positioned askew among the pieces of printed matter that both confine and anchor its contours, Hausmann’s head is partly overlaid with, and thus invaded by, typographic signs from all sides. The most significant of these signs, in this context, is clearly the letter sequence ABCD—­a sequence simultaneously echoed in the collage’s title and in other serial clusters of characters distributed across the sheet—­which is mounted into the space between Hausmann’s upper and lower teeth. It is the placement of this element that makes the image readable, against the backdrop of our previous discussion, as a reference to the norms of scientific recording practices, which here get profoundly refunctionalized in the service of new poetic ends. Ina Blom has suggested that Hausmann positions the letter sequence ABCD “as if evoking the linguistic charts that show the location of the

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different sounds in the cavity of the mouth.” 79 This suggestion is fruitful, but I would maintain that it does not go far enough. Neither does Hausmann’s allusion to the visual conventions of phonetic analysis have anything hypothetical about it, nor do the diagrams indicating different “places” of articulation constitute the closest point of reference for his composition. With its focus on the externally visible position of the lips, his arrangement instead directly cites the kind of photographic records to be found in the work of Demeny, Gutzmann, and others—­while reinserting into the picture precisely those alphabetic characters that their “sound images” had been intended to replace. Appearing between his teeth, Hausmann’s letters are thus being represented as elements quite literally internal to the legibility of his bodily articulation; they render the dark space of the wide-­open mouth accessible to acts of reading—­or, indeed, spelling—­and in so doing reflect the persistence of a symbolic code within the representation of embodied speech. From this perspective, it is also important that the sequence ABCD does not transcribe the spoken utterance visible in the photograph, as was the case with Demeny and Gutzmann’s captions. Instead, it imposes the conventional order of the alphabet as a writing system onto a single shot picturing the pronunciation of a, thereby exceeding and extending the latter explicitly by means of (other) graphic signs. At the same time, the coupling of photograph and letters in ABCD appears to suggest that the process of articulation, too, could continue precisely along this sequence of written characters, perhaps in the direction of a recited sound poem. Seen in this way, the composition would evoke the possibility of turning the alphabet itself (back) into sound by reciting its consecutive elements aloud (a possibility that would also bring Hausmann’s collage into playful proximity with pedagogical scripts designed for basic vocal exercises, as well as with certain, specifically literary “spelling” practices of the period). The possibility of considering the letter sequence ABCD as the nucleus of a poem becomes particularly plausible in light of several texts that Hausmann’s friend and close collaborator Kurt Schwitters composed and published from the early 1920s onward. His aptly titled “Register (elementar)” (“Register [elementary]”) from 1922, for instance, consists of a slightly expanded and modified version of the Latin alphabet, whose letters are typeset in a verse-­like manner in groups of three or four characters per line. Two other texts, “Z A (elementar)” (“Z A [elementary]”) (1921) and “Alphabet von hinten” (“Alphabet in reverse”) (1922), in turn, are composed of the 79. Ina Blom, “Raoul Hausmann’s Typography,” in Winter Solstice, Equinox, Summer Solstice, concept by Olafur Eliasson, Bettina Pehrsson, and Caroline Eggel (Stockholm: Jarla Partilager, 2009): 102–­11, at 105.

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alphabet spelled in reverse order and with some other minor alterations, which renders them exemplary realizations of Schwitters’s conviction that, “consistent poetry is constructed from letters.”80 A few years later, Schwitters would go on to adapt the “constructive” principle of these early pieces in his major poetic work, Ursonate, whose final version from 1932 concludes with the alphabet spelled backward four consecutive times, and written out phonetically according to a particular “key” that indicates the actual pronunciation of the individual letter names in German (“Zätt Ypsilon iks/ Wee fau Uu . . .”81). Schwitters, in sum, carried out a number of transformative operations over the course of the 1920s and ’30s, through which the alphabet itself became a text to be recited, thereby linking the systemic foundation of all poetic writing to its (re)articulation by the speaking voice. Indeed: Hausmann himself reports, in a retrospective account, that Schwitters had already begun to give live performances of “the alphabet read in reverse” as early as their joint trip to Prague in 1921—­performances that Hausmann regards, somewhat patronizingly, as his friend’s “first step toward a sound poem.”82 Around the same time, Schwitters furthermore began to create staged photographic records of his vocal renditions of Ursonate (fig. 14), and thus to “document” the process of the poem’s articulatory realization in a manner reminiscent of phonetic experiments (though he did not, like Hausmann, reutilize these particular photographs as part of further metatextual arrangements).83 80. Kurt Schwitters, “Consistent Poetry,” in Poems Performance Pieces Proses Plays Poetics, eds. and trans. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2002): 223–­25, at 225. Schwitters’s alphabet poems appeared first in his book Elementar. Die Blume Anna. Die neue Anna Blume: Eine Gedichtsammlung aus den Jahren 1918–­1922 (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1922): 17, 18, and 30, respectively. Other contemporaneous examples of such alphabet-­based poetry include Louis Aragon’s poem “Suicide” (1920) and some of the “Letterklankbeelden” (letter-­sound images), which the Dutch painter and writer Theo van Doesburg published under the pen name I. K. Bonset in his journal De Stijl in 1921. See Cannibale 1 (April 25, 1920), n.p., and De Stijl 4, no. 11 (November 1921): 160. 81. See Kurt Schwitters, “Ur Sonata,” in Poems Performance Pieces Proses Plays Poetics, eds. and trans. Rothenberg and Joris, 52–­80, at 80. 82. See Raoul Hausmann, “Kurt Schwitters wird Merz,” in Am Anfang war Dada, eds. Riha and Kämpf, 63–­71, at 65. 83. In addition to the undated examples reproduced here, there exist two other particularly noteworthy photographic records of Schwitters’s articulatory practices. During a 1936 visit to Paris, Schwitters was portrayed by Man Ray in a series of photographs that show him reciting passages from Ursonate at the latter’s studio. For reproductions of these images, see Man Ray Photographs, introd. Jean-­Hubert Martin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982): 60–­61. In 1944, Schwitters’s son Ernst took a corresponding series of pictures during a performance of the poem in London. These photographs are held today within the Kurt Schwitters Archiv, Sprengel Museum Hannover, inv. no. GV, B. 23.05. They are reproduced, in part, in MERZ: In the Beginning

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F igu re 14. Kurt Schwitters, page from photo album showing Schwitters during recitation, original lost, date uncertain

If, then, Schwitters ventured to explore the alphabet’s possible function as a poetic text in its own right, Hausmann’s collage ABCD can also be viewed as a gesture of repurposing poetic history for metapoetic purposes: purposes that subject the eponymous sequence of letters to a programmatic operation of cut-­and-­paste in order to reimagine—­via the scientific techniques of speech photography—­the conditions of the poem’s articulatory emergence. The result is a constellation in which wide-­open mouth and typographic characters appear as co-­constitutive of the potential poem—­“ABCD”—­that figures as the centerpiece of the work as a whole. This poem in nuce thus serves to assert Hausmann’s own literary authorship at the same time as it alludes to Schwitters’s textual creations—­not coincidentally, the word readable in the collage right below Hausmann’s name, Seelenmargarine, derives from the equally idiosyncratic term See­ lenautomobile, which Hausmann had coined as a designation for his first

Was Merz: From Kurt Schwitters to the Present, eds. Susanne Meyer-­Büser and Karin Orchard (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2000): 230.

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phonetic poems in 191884—­and it demarcates in so doing a historical moment where the interplay between graphic script and bodily articulation had already become a broader concern among avant-­garde writers. The initial emergence of this poetic interest from the mid-­to late 1910s onward, and its relation to the scientific developments that preceded and paralleled it, will come into focus in more detail in the third chapter of this book. Here, the more immediate goal is to highlight once more, by way of conclusion, how Hausmann’s work renders discernible, in a singularly emblematic fashion, the larger conceptual trajectory that runs from practices of visualizing sound and speech in nineteenth-­century fields like acoustics and experimental phonetics, through the related literary projects of the historical avant-­garde, to the revival, renegotiation, and revision of these poetic endeavors during the postwar decades. In the context of this larger trajectory, Hausmann’s ABCD can be seen to provide an intermediary link among the various historical contexts examined in the previous parts of the chapter. The composition refers back to the scientific prehistory of a genuine poetics of sound writing—­a prehistory during which new technical possibilities for visually capturing both acoustic vibrations, and, later, speech movements, generated claims about an alternative and more natural form of alphabetic script. While the photographs produced in laboratories around 1900 remained geared toward the goal of rendering articulatory processes readable for clearly defined, strictly practical purposes, Hausmann undercuts any such utilitarian objectives in order to explore instead the material conditions of a truly “elemental art”: one whose exposed linguistic elements are intended to appear absolutely bare of all function, “liberated from usefulness and beauty.”85 He performs, in other words, an act of historical citation that isolates an existing semiotic practice from its original, intended applications, and recontextualizes it, through the technique of montage, within a thoroughly different agenda. The word VOCE in ABCD, located just beyond the image of Hausmann’s actual mouth with its quasi-­scientific, alphabetic inscription, serves to emphasize the direction of this critical shift in the mode of a marginal commentary: As a signifier assembled from cutout letters, it alludes to the idea of locating a voice within writing (or deriving writing from

84. The term is first, however, documented in writing on the program for a Dada soiree held on April 30, 1919, in Berlin. See Bergius, “Dada Triumphs!,” 55. 85. Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, Ivan Puni, and László Moholy-­Nagy, “A Call for Elemental Art,” trans. Michael W. Jennings, in G: An Avant-­Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film 1923–­1926, eds. Detlef Mertins and Michael W. Jennings (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010): 241. The manifesto was published originally as “Aufruf zur elementaren Kunst,” De Stijl 4, no. 10 (1921): 156.

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the voice), but invokes this possibility, in turn, precisely through the graphic characters of conventional script. At the same time, Hausmann’s collage from the Weimar years also points forward to his later oeuvre of the 1960s, in which he restaged this appropriation of an earlier scientific tradition for the postwar literary scene, and in which he further developed this appropriation via the new concept of Eidophonie. When he refers to his own poetic compositions as “eidophonetic experiments,”86 and repeatedly asserts the “deep necessity of such investigations”87 in his essays of the period, he does so not because he likes the way such scientific vocabulary sounds. Rather, he does so because he poetically “experiments” and “investigates” in a way that quite self-­consciously appropriates and cites scientific models. Hausmann’s literary explorations of sound-­vision relationships build on, deepen, and pervert experimental principles that were developed first during the nascent stages of acoustics in the late eighteenth century, and later during the rise of technologically based phonetic research in the late nineteenth. As detailed above, the 1965 text collage Oaoa with its juxtaposition of handwritten letters, typographic symbol, and photographic print can in this respect be viewed as a paradigmatic piece, which collects and extends the insights of earlier Dadaist compositions like Synthetisches Cino der Malerei and ABCD. If Hausmann, in his 1923–­24 collage, coupled alphabetic writing and bodily speech movement by placing the former both inside and on top of the latter’s photographically captured trace, his 1965 arrangement reiterates but also specifies this connection. Here, the articulatory gesture itself has become part of the letter from which it is made to visually emerge—­it figures, in effect, as a photographic “type” in the sense of Gutzmann’s envisioned alternative alphabet, but serves crucially to transform from the inside, rather than to depart from, the surrounding elements of symbolic script. And if the collage ABCD can be understood as a kind of retrospective sum of Hausmann’s Dadaist activities during the Weimar period, his later poetic reconfiguration of writing and speech in Oaoa can be taken to imply yet another, transformative act of recalling those critical years. The letters of Oaoa enact, after all, not least also a defamiliarizing play on the very word Dada, whose particular role within the emergence of literary practices of articulation will be examined in another section of this book. This role, however, can become sufficiently clear only against the backdrop of other, earlier developments that the following chapter will chart. Before avant-­garde writers like Hausmann began to conduct their literary experiments in the 1910s and 20s, the conceptual link between articulatory 86. Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” 1196. 87. Hausmann, “Die Wandlungen der Sprache,” 19.

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movement and poetic language had already been forged elsewhere: namely, in the context of scientific inquiries into the specific laws of verse, which utilized techniques of indexical visualization for the analysis of phenomena like metric patterns, speech melodies, and variations of pitch across the poetic line. These research activities at the juncture of physiology, phonetics, and experimental psychology produced, in the decades leading up to World War I, not only an entirely new body of knowledge about existing poetic forms. They also yielded, in effect, an arsenal for creating a new kind of poetry on the basis of articulatory principles—­an arsenal the avant-­garde would subsequently put into practice.

2: Toward a Science of Verse Speech Movements, Graphic Inscription, and the Study of Poetry (1871–­1915)

Writing of the Mou th In November 1883, the Cuban poet José Martí, who was living in exile in New York and serving as a contributing editor for the Spanish-­language magazine La América, alerted his readership to the invention of a most curious device. Based on secondhand knowledge he had acquired through other press reports, he maintained that the new contraption—­an apparatus named “glossograph” by its creator—­might provide the solution to a fundamental dilemma faced by certain intellectuals and writers: It appears that the instrument long hungered after by volcanic-­minded thinkers and true poets, whose ideas generally come in compact and ephemeral bundles like sheaves of lightning bolts, has now been invented. Such thinkers say that sometimes, after extended lulls, their ideas arrive like armies of butterflies beating at their temples with their wings and brushing against their lips as if summoning up the words that can depict them, words that never arrive quickly enough to color in those restless and assailing butterflies on the page. A certain Gentilli—­who is worthy of his name—­has invented the glossograph and has exhibited it at the Vienna Exposition of Electricity. The glossograph is a small, highly ingenious device that, when placed inside the mouth, to which it adjusts effortlessly, does not prevent speech and reproduces it on paper as perfectly as a fifteenth-­century scribe. It requires only that you speak with the utmost clarity, and each syllable, as it is pronounced, is immediately set down on the expectant page, without any further effort by the speaker, and without confusion for the reader, either, once he has learned what the new signs correspond to. . . . Never, never will the fastest hand be able to reproduce the prancings, dashes, sudden pauses, unexpected outbursts, wavelike swellings, and

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galloping revelations of ignited thought! Blessed be the inventor of the glossograph.1

Framing his brief account of the instrument’s functional principle with metaphor-­laden musings on its cultural promise, Martí interweaves throughout this passage a number of well-­established, literary topoi. The eruptive character of genuine inspiration, the dynamic elusiveness of the mind’s creative powers, the irreconcilable disparity between immaterial spirit and material letter(s), the utopian nature of expressive immediacy—­ all these long-­standing notions are brought into play here to delineate the potential of the new appliance. At the same time, however, Martí casts the problem of conveying intellectual and poetic “revelations” through writing in the specifically modern terms of energy transmission. While his initial image for the onset of creative processes—­the “sheaves of lightning bolts”—­invokes a natural phenomenon of electrical discharge, the essay proceeds to reflect on the possibility that such unregulated, transient powers could in fact be channeled, and even made permanent, by means of technology.2 Martí’s claim that the glossograph might be capable of capturing the dynamism of “ignited thought” likens the forces of inspiration to charges, currents, and tensions that can be exploited through electrical engineering. Indeed, his essay ultimately suggests that the device he describes could find its true purpose in the task of conducting the internal energies of the mind to an external, graphic storage system—­a function that the traditional method of handwriting allegedly fails to fulfill. Although Martí also voices the concern that the mechanics of the glossograph might still interfere with the flow of spontaneous expression (due to the rather odd “placement of the apparatus in one’s mouth”3), his otherwise celebratory account provides a productive point of entry into a larger, late nineteenth-­century constellation that juxtaposes literary discourses with new scientific recording technologies. For while the glossograph, 1. José Martí, “The Glossograph,” in Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002): 145–­46, at 145. For a brief discussion that relates this essay to the broader context of Martí’s own poetic oeuvre, see David Phillip Laraway, “José Martí and the Call of Technology in ‘Amor de ciudad grande’,” MLN 119, no. 2 (2004): 290–­301. 2. Not coincidentally, the direct source for Martí’s essayistic treatment of the glossograph was most likely a brief anonymous article entitled “A New Electrical Device,” which had appeared shortly before in an 1883 issue of the weekly Electrical Review, a New York–­based magazine devoted to the themes of  “Electric Light, Telephone, Telegraph and Scientific Progress” (unknown volume, issue, and page numbers). This account, in turn, drew on an anonymous report by the London newspaper Pall Mall Gazette, published in September 1883, which had introduced the device under the more flamboyant headline “A New Electrical Miracle” (Pall Mall Gazette 5792 (September 27, 1883): 11–­12). 3. Martí, “The Glossograph,” 145.

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contrary to Martí’s visionary prognosis, was presumably never used to compose a single line of poetry, it belongs by virtue of its function and workings to a whole group of similar instruments that assumed a critical role, from the 1870s onward, in the experimental analysis of poetic texts. Like the invention of the glossograph, the rise of these scientific methods took place initially in Germany and Austria, though they quickly spread to other European countries and the United States. And while Martí was certainly unaware of these kinds of developments at the time he composed his essay, he intuited a future application for his depicted “ingenious device” that in fact turned out to bear strong ties to historical reality. A closer look at the glossograph’s basic principle of operation can therefore prepare the way for an understanding of the more general objectives that informed an entire branch of emergent research practices during this period. It was precisely the idea of tracing speech movements directly and mechanically in graphic form—­an idea expressed already by the glossograph’s very name (“tongue-­writer”)—­that would go on to shape new scientific investigations into the “objective” laws of verse, culminating in a comprehensive reconceptualization of the very means for establishing such laws. Poetry was now being considered, for the first time in history, as a phenomenon that could be—­and in fact, must be—­measured, quantified, and analyzed by “exact” and technological means. This transformation signaled, on the one hand, a critical shift in the reception of literary texts, which had always previously been studied in their immaterial-­geistigen rather than their material-­corporeal dimensions. And, on the other hand, the laboratory coupling of speaking bodies and technical instruments re­ sulted in new kinds of apparatus-­based writing production, which thoroughly challenged the traditional literary medium of (handwritten) script. The glossograph initially became an object of (short-­lived) public interest after it had been presented to various scientific audiences in 1882, first at the University of Leipzig and subsequently at the renowned Physiological Society in Berlin.4 Devised by the Austrian civil engineer Amadeo 4. Following these presentations, news of the invention began to circulate in various German, French, British, and North American papers and periodicals. See, for example, Anonymous, “Gentilli’s Glossograph: Ein automatischer Schnellschreibapparat,” Illustrirte Zeitung 2019 (March 11, 1882): 200; Anonymous, “Gentilli’s Glossograph: An Automatic Short-­Hand Apparatus,” Scientific American 46, no. 25 (June 24, 1882): 394; Clarence J. Blake, “The Glossograph,” American Journal of Otology 4 (1882): 190–­93. A year later, the instrument was exhibited at the Internationale Electrische Ausstellung in Vienna, which spurred a second wave of international press reports that would ultimately also come to José Martí’s attention in New York. Despite this publicity, however, the glossograph never met with any commercial success, and in fact never made it beyond the stage of individual prototypes. Contrary to the hopes of its creator, who had envisioned the device to enter into industrial mass production, it would soon

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Gentilli, whose main expertise lay in the field of railroad construction, the contraption immediately evoked comparisons with Edison’s phonograph, which had been patented just four years before. Yet Gentilli was quick to assert that his apparatus was the first to record spoken language in material inscriptions that could afterward be read. As he maintained, his invention had created the unprecedented possibility of registering the flow of speech automatically, at normal speed, in easily decipherable script. The inventor did not proceed in his studies from an acoustic principle—­on which the telephone and the phonograph are based—­as one might hardly ever succeed in making practical use of the microscopic hieroglyphs obtained in this way. Instead, he converted the articulatory movements of the individual speech organs into visible, permanent signs.5

Contrary to the phonograph, then, which operated by engraving sound waves mechanically in the form of tiny glyphs, Gentilli’s instrument was designed to transcribe not the audible effects but the physiological processes of human speech production. To this end, the glossograph consisted of an elaborate system of levers and electrical contacts that translated the motor activity of tongue and lips, as well as the vibrations of the larynx and the air pressure of expiration, into electromagnetic signals for the activation of several “writing pens.”6 These pens, in turn, were attached to a rotating drum covered with sooted paper, on which they would leave graphic marks in the shape of six parallel lines—­lines that displayed, in correspondence with the articulatory movements, small indentations for each individual, spoken sound (fig. 15). According to this principle, any single phoneme thus manifested itself—­visually—­through a particular motor effect of the speech organs involved in its enunciation. Inscribed across the set of lines, these effects would then be distinguished from one another by means of a key that matched each inscription to the sound it graphically “expressed,” with the result that the curve-­like tracings could (ostensibly) be viewed and decoded as a text. The fact that the signs of glossographic script were not as readily recognizable as the traditional alphabetic code produced in the process of only be remembered by a few specialists working in the field of speech physiology. See Giulio Panconcelli-­Calzia, “Über Entstehung und Entwicklung der Sprechschreibmaschinen,” in Pho­ netik und Kultur (Hamburg: Hansischer Gildenverlag, 1938): 65–­78, at 74–­75. 5. [Amadeo Gentilli], “Gentilli’s Glossograph: Ein automatischer Schnellschreibapparat, Mitgetheilt von Hrn. Gentilli im Anschluss an einen in der Berliner physiologischen Gesellschaft am 10. März d. J. gehaltenen Vortrag,” Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie, Physiologische Abthei­ lung (1882): 182–­86, at 182. 6. [Amadeo Gentilli], “Gentilli’s Glossograph: Ein automatischer Schnellschreibapparat, Mitgetheilt von Hrn. Gentilli im Anschluss,” 182.

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F igu re 15. Amadeo Gentilli, partial key of the glossograph’s writing system, in “Gentilli’s Glossograph: Ein automatischer Schnellschreibapparat,” Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie, Physiologische Abtheilung (1882): 184

handwriting or typewriting, but rather required practice to be learned and labor to be interpreted, was outweighed in Gentilli’s eyes by the advantages his apparatus afforded in terms of its semiotic output rate. In enabling its users to create essentially simultaneous records of spoken utterances, the practice of “glossography” would soon, according to its inventor, surpass the pace of every existing manual writing technology—­including the technology of standard stenographic methods, which it was designed to replace—­and find its application in various fields ranging from journalism to linguistic research to speech therapy. Something other than a purely practical interest in comparative speeds of transcription, however, was also at stake for Gentilli in his work on the invention, as evidenced by the terms in which he contrasted its “mouth-­writing” 7 with the principles of established, hand-­based writing systems. The technique of registering the movements of the speech organs mechanically, rather than representing their acoustic effects by means of letters or other conventional signs, served the far-­reaching purpose of establishing the medium of a “natural writing 7. A[madeo] Gentilli, “Ueber die automatische Registrierung der Sprache,” Vierteljahrsschrift der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Zürich 38 (1893): 371–­83, at 380.

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[Naturselbstschrift]” in which the bodily process of articulation would “inscribe itself ” via graphic traces that were indexical rather than symbolic.8 With this conceptual proposition, Gentilli tapped deep into the technological imaginary of the nineteenth century, during which various kinds of recording technologies and practices—­from Chladni’s sound figures around 1800, to Scott’s midcentury phonautograph, to the project of speech photography in the 1890s—­became linked to the notion of a natural writing. In a manner analogous to the rhetoric surrounding these other technologies, Gentilli insisted that the glossograph registered the physiological process of articulation independently of any cultural code—­despite the fact that the apparatus itself was highly artificial in kind, and despite the fact that alphabetic characters remained indispensable for deciphering its graphic output. For Gentilli, these initially incomprehensible graphs, which needed to be fixed like photographic images, with the help of a chemical solution, in order to become permanent, maintained a perfect continuity with the articulatory movements from which they had sprung.9 In consequence, he claimed, they constituted a categorically different form of notation from any system of arbitrarily chosen symbols, such as letters or ideographs. While Gentilli’s belief in the revelatory power of mechanical transmission resonates closely with the broader, phantasmatic logic that accompanied the rise of multiple other nineteenth-­century recording technologies, it also points more particularly to the manner in which this logic had begun to play out, during his time, within the specific context of experimental phonetics. Aimed as it was at an automatic transcription of the entire speech process, the glossograph’s design explicitly presupposed the physiological identification of various “areas of articulation,” 10 whose dynamic manifestations could be registered individually, together with a corresponding classification of linguistic sounds into different phonetic categories. The de­vice thus had its most direct origins, or at least preconditions, in the knowledge of a newly emerging discipline that was oriented toward the experimental analysis of both the bodily foundations and the acoustic signals of spoken language.11 As will become clear below, it was precisely from within this disciplinary context that the idea of making the articulatory organs “write themselves” began to 8. See [Amadeo Gentilli], “Gentilli’s Glossograph: Ein automatischer Schnellschreibapparat, Mitgetheilt von Hrn Gentilli im Anschluss,” 185. These terms were echoed in the press reports on Gentilli’s invention. See, for example, Anonymous, “Gentilli’s Glossograph: An Automatic Short-­Hand Apparatus,” 394. 9. See Gentilli, “Ueber die automatische Registrierung der Sprache,” 380. 10. Gentilli, “Ueber die automatische Registrierung der Sprache,” 375. 11. These two branches of experimental phonetics were later distinguished terminologically as “genetic” (physiological) and “gennemic” (acoustic) approaches. See Giulio Panconcelli-­ Calzia, Experimentelle Phonetik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1921): 7–­8.

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inform the study of poetic phenomena, as scientists shifted the focus of verse analysis, in a programmatic fashion, “from literary monuments to speaking man, from ‘language on paper’ to the psychophysiological processes of living speech.”12 These researchers sought the essence of poetry not in its written form, but in the process of its audible recitation, a process that could then, crucially, be mechanically captured and transposed into a different form of visual notation. Up until now, these late nineteenth-­century efforts to produce a “science of verse” have been treated primarily from the perspective of their technological or institutional conditions.13 The following discussion, by contrast, demonstrates that the relevant technologies and practices actually also yielded new, historically specific conceptions of poetic language, transforming their object of study in ways that would ultimately feed back into the sphere of twentieth-­century literary practice. The developments in question found their earliest manifestation in the work of the German-­Austrian physiologist Ernst Brücke, who is known today primarily as the teacher of the young Sigmund Freud, but who also exercised much broader influence during the late nineteenth century, through his research into the basic physical laws of spoken language and verse.14 Having trained in Berlin under one of the pioneers of modern physiology, Johannes Müller, and holding a chair at the University of Vienna, Brücke turned his interest toward the physiological conditions of speech as early as the late 1840s.15 By the 1870s, he had extended this interest to the par­ ticular principles of poetry, which he discussed in detail in his 1871 treatise Die physiologischen Grundlagen der neuhochdeutschen Verskunst (The Physi­ 12. Felix Krueger, “Beziehungen der experimentellen Phonetik zur Psychologie,” in Bericht über den II. Kongreß  für experimentelle Psychologie in Würzburg vom 18. bis 21. April 1906, ed. Friedrich Schumann (Leipzig: Barth, 1907): 58–­1 22, at 59. 13. See Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-­de-­siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015): 64–­92; Henning Schmidgen, “Literatur im Labor: Die Entwicklung psycho-­physiologischer Praktiken, 1800/1900,” in Gefühl und Genauigkeit: Empirische Ästhetik um 1900, eds. Jutta Müller-­Tamm, Henning Schmidgen, and Tobias Wilke (Munich: Fink, 2014): 25–­43; Stefan Rieger, Schall und Rauch: Eine Mediengeschichte der Kurve (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009): 249–­84. 14. Freud spent several years working in Brücke’s Vienna laboratory during the 1870s. In 1927, he remarked in retrospect that Brücke had remained the teacher “who carried more weight with me than anyone else in my whole life.” See Sigmund Freud, “Postscript,” in The Question of  Lay Analysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey, introd. Peter Gay (New York: Norton & Co., 1978): 87–­96, at 90. 15. See Ernst Brücke, Grundzüge der Physiologie und Systematik der Sprachlaute für Linguisten und Taubstummenlehrer (Vienna: Gerold, 1856). For a discussion of the broader development of nineteenth century phonetics, see Joachim Gessinger, “Sprachlaut-­Seher: Physiologie und Sprachwissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft: Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Philipp Sarasin and Jakob Tanner (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998): 204–­44.

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o­logical Foundations of Modern High German Poetry). In this work, Brücke summarizes the results of experiments conducted with the help of different recording techniques, including a method for registering the activity of the lips during the process of rhythmic recitation; and he reveals, in passing, that his own decision to obtain such graphic traces of articulatory movements was related to—­if not inspired by—­recent reports “that an instrument has been invented for the immediate transcription of spoken words. Upon taking the device into the mouth, the movements of the speech organs activate different transmitters, which leave marks on a strip of paper driven by a clock work, in a manner similar to the Morse telegraph.” 16 Evidently referring in this passage to an early version of Gentilli’s apparatus, Brücke goes on to express his skepticism as to how practical such a contraption could actually be: as Martí would do roughly a decade later, Brücke points out that a machine of this kind might ultimately interfere with the very process it was meant to capture. Instead, he opts for a “simple mechanism”17 that allows him to record spoken lines of poetry without altering the pace or distinctness of normal articulation. In order to grasp the purpose of this particular experimental procedure, and to expound its broader methodological significance, it is first necessary to establish some of the more basic premises and implications of Brücke’s overall analytic framework. With his declared ambition to lay the foundations for a new “scientific investigation of verse,” 18 Brücke contributed to a broader nineteenth-­century tendency—­propagated most famously and enthusiastically by his contemporary Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 1871 treatise Zur experimentalen Aesthetik (On Experimental Aesthetics)—­of introducing experimental approaches into the study of traditionally humanistic subjects.19 He also, more specifically, sought to challenge the authority of traditional philology and its established methods of textual analysis. Just as the nascent discipline of phonetics took shape on the whole in opposition to the dominant paradigm of nineteenth-­century historical linguistics, with its project of tracing language change over time and across different idioms, so Brücke’s specific focus on the physiological basis of (German) poetry distinguished itself radically from the prevailing standards of prosodic and metric examination.20 16. Ernst Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen der neuhochdeutschen Verskunst (Vienna: Ge­ rold, 1871): 32. 17. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 32. 18. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, IV. 19. In the opening section of his book, Fechner commits himself to the oft-­cited goal of “finding starting points for an exact investigation of a field that previously seemed to elude any such exact investigation.” See Gustav Theodor Fechner, Zur experimentalen Aesthetik (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1871): 3. 20. See here, paradigmatically, Brücke, Grundzüge der Physiologie, 1–­2.

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While philologists had always exclusively applied their interpretive techniques to the written texts of the past, Brücke maintained that poetic works could be experimented upon phonetically only in the form of their present, audible articulation, as “verses spoken by the living mouth.”21 Only in this form, he claimed, could they be made into objects of empirical observation in the laboratory, and only in this form could they be reproduced at will so as to facilitate a systematic replication of experimental results. Such pragmatic considerations implied a polemical conceptual dimension as well, for, in the effort to adhere strictly to scientific principles like observability and replicability, Brücke was led to define poetry as, in its essence, speech. He contrasted the bodily “liveness”22 of recited lines with the dead script of former ages and in so doing called into question the previously undisputed, central status of letters as both the object and medium of literary analysis. This privileging of a “secondary oralization”23 over literality explains, at a pragmatic level, why Brücke chose to limit his studies to verses composed in his own mother tongue: He excluded Latin and Greek poetry because he deemed it no longer possible to determine how exactly their ancient meters had once been pronounced, and he disregarded texts written in other, especially Romance, languages of the present because he felt personally unable to vocalize them with perfect accuracy. This focus on vocal recitation also explains, however, at a far more foundational level, how poetry comes to be aligned with the most basic processes of biological life: German verse consists of a sequence of syllables that are pronounced over the course of certain, temporal intervals during which the expiratory pressure increases and decreases periodically. The rhythm [Takt] of verse is beaten by muscles capable of regulating the spatial volume of the chest cavity, the segmentation of syllables is achieved by the speech organs proper, including the larynx.24

Conceiving of the poetic line quite literally as a series of movements within the vocal apparatus, Brücke thus suggested that verse is, ultimately, a function of elementary, vital processes like breathing. Only phonetic research—­in contrast to philological metrics—­could therefore be expected to 21. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, IV. 22. See Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, V. Brücke emphasizes expressly that he chose to study versified language exclusively in its condition as a “living object,” which effectively likens his analytic approach to a technique of vivisection. 23. Rieger, Schall und Rauch, 249. Rieger adapts Ong’s concept of  “secondary orality” in order to designate the process through which a thoroughly literate tradition was artificially reconverted in scientific laboratories into a set of text-­based yet thoroughly vocal practices. 24. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 84.

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adequately account for this fundamentally animate character of the object, via methods designed to register the corporeal dynamic of articulation in precise, quantifiable units. Brücke implemented all these methodological principles largely through a systematic analysis of different metric patterns that ranged from simple structures like iambus and trochee to more complex poetic forms such as Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas.25 In order to obtain “direct measurements”26 of the overall rhythmic effects created by these patterns, he developed various experiments during which he would recite selected verses in several, slightly altered ways; he also introduced, in this context, the graphic recording device that he conceived as a more practical alternative to (the idea of ) Gentilli’s glossograph. In contrast to the latter’s intricate design, Brücke constructed his implement with the help of a single, wooden lever in order to connect his own bottom lip to a “writing mechanism”—­a glass tube filled with ink—­which was, in turn, attached to a revolving drum covered with paper.27 During recitation the apparatus would register the lip’s up-­and downward movements and trace them across the writing surface in the form of one continuous line. What resulted from this process, then, were in Brücke’s terms “images”28 in which the metrical composition of each individual spoken verse took visible shape (fig. 16). Brücke clearly viewed this method of “making the lip write on the kymograph”29 as a means of transcribing speech without any significant subjective intervention: he made sure to emphasize, in this connection, that the graphs included in his treatise had not been copied by hand, but were directly and mechanically reproduced from the original kymographic recordings. For him, these “kymograms”30 constituted a superior form of scientific evidence due to their twofold semiotic character. On the one 25. The first part of Brücke’s treatise examines the conditions under which these originally ancient schemata can (be made to) conform to the German language with its specific laws of natural word accentuation. The second, more extensive part is devoted to an investigation of  “metric times,” which characterize the distribution of accented syllables across different verse patterns. 26. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 23. 27. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 34–­3 5. In its overall design, Brücke’s device was thus a modified version of the so-­called kymograph that had been introduced to the field of physiology by his friend Carl Ludwig in the late 1840s, and which originally served to register changes in blood pressure in the graphic form of waves (hence the name “kymograph,” i.e., “wave-­writer”). Throughout the second half of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, Ludwig’s invention remained the defining technological basis for a plethora of phonetic recording instruments. 28. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 32. 29. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 32. 30. See Giulio Panconcelli-­Calzia, Quellenatlas zur Geschichte der Phonetik (Hamburg: Hansi­ scher Gildenverlag, 1940): 51.

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Figu re 16 . Ernst Brücke, records of lip movements during rhythmic recitation, in Die physiologischen Grundlagen der neuhochdeutschen Verskunst ( Vienna: Gerold, 1871): 33

hand, they related indexically to the motoric processes of articulation. They functioned, in other words, as physical traces through which an otherwise transient sequence of bodily movements could acquire material permanence. On the other hand, they also displayed an iconic resemblance to these movements, as suggested by the remark that the graphic traces corresponded directly—­in their own ups and downs—­to the opening and closing motions of the lips. The curves thus derived their particular evidentiary status from the way in which they were taken to extend the activity of the speech apparatus itself. What is more, they maintained this status not despite but precisely because of the fact that they captured the temporal structure of recited verses in spatial form. As Brücke (and the other scientists who would follow in his footsteps) believed, the scientific analysis of poetry needed to do more than simply reanimate its object by placing it (back) inside a “living mouth.” Such an analysis, which sought to discern and measure the exact rhythmic properties of a poetic line, with its varying degrees and intervals of articulatory emphasis, also needed to “objectify” the flow of versified speech through a technique of spatial visualization: a technique that would exceed—­and indeed, supplant—­the naked sensory faculty of hearing, in terms of its analytic potential.31 Articulation, in other words, could not be studied or even properly conceived without being written down. The audible act of recitation in itself remained an ephemeral phenomenon, whereas 31. For a methodological discussion that equates the spatial representation of articulatory movements with their scientific “objectification,” see Giulio Panconcelli-­Calzia, Die experimentelle Phonetik in ihrer Anwendung auf die Sprachwissenschaft (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1924): 138–­39.

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its visibly captured traces took on the stable character of an inscribed orality that constituted, precisely in contrast to the original act, a possible object of scientific investigation. The mechanism of speech production thus acquired, at the very historical moment when it metaphorphosed into the locus of poetry, a kind of hybrid character—­part foundation to be plumbed, part morass to be escaped—­which took up residence in an intermediary zone between bodily life and script. And it was this scientifically constructed site, in turn, that would go on to play such a formative role in the subsequent history of a poetics of articulation. A case could of course be made, from within the familiar binary of voice and writing, that Brücke’s program works primarily to reinstate a Western regime of ocularcentric knowledge within the sphere of the aural.32 Such a case, however, would necessarily miss much of what is truly new about this historical moment, since it obscures the innovative character of the new space in which body and script now interact. My emphasis, therefore, will lie rather on the way in which Brücke constructed his opposition between two profoundly different kinds of writing systems. In a gesture that mirrors his rejection of the traditional philological object (namely, the alphabetic signs of which written verses are composed) he set out to challenge the convention of defining metric patterns by means of orthographic symbols. What his mechanically produced graphs of lip movements served to demonstrate, in this regard, was the insufficiency of any general schemata that would use sequences of macrons (–­), breves (˘), and accents (´) to indicate the distribution of long and short, or stressed and unstressed, syllables across the poetic line. These combinations of diacritical marks, Brücke suggested, had no way of accounting for the articulatory particularities of each individual verse; they were abstractions that merely approximated the specific ways in which certain metrical structures would actually be pronounced, and they therefore needed to be replaced with a different kind of notation, one that could capture the precise variations between accented and unaccented verse units in the form of equally exact, empirical data. Brücke’s curves testify, on the one hand, to an emerging late nineteenth-­ century belief that all phonetic phenomena could in principle be graphically represented in such a way as to be “most evident [am anschaulichsten]

32. This effect has been emphasized in various scholarly accounts of the nineteenth century sciences of sound and speech. See Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 35–­5 1; Douglas Kahn, “Introduction: Histories of Sound Once Removed,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-­Garde, eds. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994): 1–­29, at 18; Gessinger, “Sprachlaut-­Seher.”

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to everybody.”33 They also, however, document another crucial methodological choice that would turn out to prove extremely influential in the decades that followed. For the verses Brücke recited and recorded in the course of his experiments were lines he had specifically fabricated himself by combining semantically undefined syllables—­syllables that would yield particularly distinct lip movements due to their labial consonants—­in accordance with certain metric rules. “In order to eliminate the influence of different vowels and consonants entirely,” he maintained, “and to write the rhythm of verse in itself, one can even compose all syllables of the same letters, such as ba, bam, and pap.”34 In his effort to create clear and distinct records of metrical structures, in which the peaks and valleys of each curve would correspond unambiguously to the realizations of arsis (Hebung) and thesis (Senkung) within the respective verse, Brücke thus aimed to isolate the motor function of rhythmic emphasis from other, regular factors of articulation like the sequential variation of speech sounds.35 As he explained, the first of the graphs he reproduced in his treatise showed “the Alcaic verse composed of the syllable pap,” while in the case of the second, “the syllabic sequence bimbám bambámbam bámbabam bámbabam had been written according to an Alcaic rhythm;” the third curve, finally, represented according to him “the Alcaic verse created entirely of the syllable ba.”36 These artificially produced, reiterative lines represented a liminal case in Brücke’s work, as he otherwise experimented with more conventional literary material drawn from German authors like Goethe, Platen, and Chamisso, whose poems he subjected to various forms of scansion-­based measurement. His decision, however, to illustrate the recording method of “making the lip write on the kymograph” via the rhythmic recitation of meaningless syllables, suggests that he ascribed to these linguistic formations a more than merely marginal, and more than merely pragmatic, function. What his experimental strategy implied was rather the central assumption that the physiological laws of poetic language find their clearest expression at the most elementary—­and hence, presemantic—­level of 33. Panconcelli-­Calzia, Experimentelle Phonetik, 12. Robert Brain has suggested persuasively that the experimental visualization of speech during the late nineteenth century would become a critical factor in the development of linguistic key concepts like the “image vocale” (Michel Bréal) and the “image acoustique” (Ferdinand de Saussure). Yet the initial objective of phonetic research was to produce not only a “visual analog” to spoken utterances but more than that: namely, a material extension of the articulatory process itself. See Robert Brain, “Standards and Semiotics,” in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998): 249–­84, at 252 and 261. 34. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 32. 35. See Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 5. 36. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, 33–­34. Emphases original.

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articulate speech. Brücke’s approach thus reveals how the emerging scientific interest in speech movements and their poetic relevance entailed from the very beginning a strong tendency to abstract from the level of  linguistic signification, and to study versified language (almost) purely in its physical properties. The new methods of visualizing these properties were closely intertwined with—­and indeed, presupposed to some extent—­the desemanticization of the literary material under investigation. Seen from this angle, Brücke’s scientific experiments turn out to prefigure, in part, the systematic stripping away of conventional meaning that would come to define the poetic experiments of avant-­garde writers some fifty years later. The composition of his test material reveals within his work—­despite his other, conservative predilections in aesthetic matters—­a certain protomodernist strand. He not only devised a new analytic perspective on verse but also employed in so doing a formal operation that would later play a key role in thoroughly antitraditional practices of poetic defamiliarization. Brücke’s pioneering work was continued and expanded upon by scientists in several countries. Not least due to political circumstances of the period, these researchers did not always receive or (directly) acknowledge each other’s achievements, with the result that the investigations carried out in different national contexts have often been treated as relatively separate traditions in the scholarly literature. Still, they all form part of a broader development that unfolded across Europe and eventually also made its way to the United States. In Germany, Brücke’s approach to poetry formed the basis for the investigations of phonetician Ernst Alfred Meyer, who maintained the scientific credo of restricting experimental analysis to “the living word, the spoken verse”37 and discussed the physiological foundations of metrical structures through a detailed examination of basic syllabic units like “pa,” “da,” and “ma.”38 In France, researchers working in the laboratory of the physiologist Étienne-­Jules Marey began to apply graphical methods to speech movements on a much broader scale, in a development that ultimately resulted in the institution of the world’s first specialized phonetic laboratory at the Collège de France in 1897.39 From this lab emerged, under the aegis of its first director, the Abbé Jean-­Pierre 37. Ernst A. Meyer, Beiträge zur deutschen Metrik (Marburg: Universitäts-­Buchdruckerei, 1897): 2. 38. See Meyer, Beiträge zur deutschen Metrik, 54. 39. For exemplary work conducted in Marey’s lab, see in particular, Ch[arles]-­L[eopold] Rosapelly, “Inscriptions des mouvements phonétiques,” Physiologie expérimentale: Travaux du laboratoire de M. Marey 2 (1876): 109–­3 1, and J[ules] Marey, “L’inscription des phénomènes phonétiques,” Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées 9 (1898): 445–­56 and 482–­90. For a more detailed account of Marey’s work in this particular area, see Bernard Teston, “L’œuvre d’Étienne-­Jules Marey et sa contribution a l’émergence de la phonétique dans les sciences du langage,” Travaux Interdisciplinaires du Laboratoire Parole et Langage 23 (2004): 237–­66.

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Rousselot, extensive studies on French meter, in which various devices were used to reveal rhythmic variations across the (spoken) poetic line—­ thereby contradicting standardized rules of prescriptive verse theories.40 Yet the most radical propositions for “a completely new science of verse,”41 which would supplant prevailing philological paradigms with the help of new analytic technologies, came from the American psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture, who was also the first scholar to import the relevant methodologies from Europe to the United States. Scripture—­in Jonathan Sterne’s words, “perhaps the most aptly named figure in the history of sound technology”42—­had a fascinating and at times tumultuous career that led him through a number of different academic institutions on two continents: He obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig, and subsequently became, in 1892, the founding director of the new Psychological Laboratory at Yale. In this capacity, he conducted research on perceptual illusions and reaction time before shifting his interest, in the late 1890s, toward a psychology of expressions founded on phonetic methods of investigation. His self-­understanding as an “experimental avant-­gardist,”43 however, soon led to fierce internal disputes with his more conservative colleagues at Yale, and eventually to his dismissal from the university in 1902.44 Throughout the following years, he continued his studies as an independent guest researcher in Munich and Berlin, where he collaborated

40. See Georges Lote, L’Alexandrin français, d’après la phonétique expérimentale (Paris: Éditions de la Phalange, 1913). Rousselot, who is known especially for his research on the dialectal varieties of French, documented the technological arsenal of his phonetic laboratory in his magnum opus, Principes de phonétique expérimentale, 2 vols. (Paris: Welter, 1897–­1908). See Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016): 97–­115, for a detailed discussion of  Rousselot and Lote’s methodologies. Another French researcher who marshaled graphic methods for the study of verse was the physiologist Charles Henry. See Charles Henry, Rapporteur esthétique: Notice sur ses applications à l’art industriel, à l’histoire de l’art, à l’interpretation de la méthode graphique (Paris: Seguin, 1888). Henry’s research fed directly into the development of verse libre as a metrically unbound form of poetic composition. On this connection, see Robert Michael Brain, “Genealogy of ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’: Experimental Phonetics, Vers Libre, and Modernist Sound Art,” Grey Room 43 (2011): 88–­117, at 93–­96. 41. E. W. Scripture, “Äußerungen deutscher Dichter über ihre Verskunst,” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 66 (1928): 216–­5 1, at 216. 42. Sterne, The Audible Past, 48. 43. See Abraham Aaron Roback, History of American Psychology (New York: Collier, 1964): 196–­99. 44. For an account of Scripture’s contested position in the field of turn-­of-­the-­century American psychology, see Michael M. Sokal, “Biographical Approach: The Psychological Career of Edward Wheeler Scripture,” in Historiography of  Modern Psychology, eds. Josef Brozek and Ludwig J. Pongratz (Toronto: Hogrefe, 1980): 255–­78.

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with leading German psychologists like Theodor Lipps and Carl Stumpf.45 In 1906, Scripture returned again to the States to begin work in the field of speech neurology at Columbia University. After fifteen years of analyzing graphic speech records mainly from a medical and psychiatric perspective, he was finally appointed to a chair of experimental phonetics at the University of  Vienna in 1923, where he resumed his earlier investigations into the basic articulatory laws of verse. As the various publications that document these studies attest, Scripture’s work retained some strikingly direct ties to Brücke’s, not only because the latter part of his research on verse was carried out at the very same institution as Brücke’s groundbreaking experiments half a century before.46 A photograph included in his article “Researches on the Voice” (1908), for example, demonstrates the manner in which Scripture proceeded to create “lip records” by letting his subjects speak into his own type of labiograph (fig. 17). He also continued, well into the 1920s, to apply this principle to the study of poetic phenomena, as some sample curves in his late methodological compendium Anwendung der graphischen Meth­ ode auf Sprache und Gesang (Application of the Graphic Method to Speech and Song) from 1927 reveal (fig. 18). These graphs served to exemplify how the “motor rhythms” of several metrical patterns were characterized by varying degrees and shifts in articulatory emphasis.47 What is more, they indicate that Scripture had used for this purpose some syllabic combinations quite similar to Brücke’s, combinations that in his case oscillate between nonsensical sequence (“papapa”) and potentially meaningful word (“papa”).

45. During his multiyear stay in Germany, Scripture was even permitted to record the voice of German Emperor Wilhelm II for preservation at the Library of Congress, which he hoped would “form the beginning of phonetic archives in America.” See E. W. Scripture, “The German Emperor’s Voice: With a Brief Essay by the Emperor, Spoken into Professor Scripture’s Phonograph,” Century 73 (November 1906): 135–­39, at 139. Scripture’s side project of preserving spoken utterances by “prominent and interesting personalities” like the German Kaiser found its parallel in Stumpf ’s efforts to establish the later-­to-­be famous phonogram archive at the University of Berlin. See, with a brief reference to Scripture, Carl Stumpf, “Das Berliner Phonogramm-­Archiv,” Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 2, no. 8 (February 22, 1908): 221–­45, at 239–­42. 46. Scripture used his tenure in Vienna to establish his own phonetic laboratory, and hence effectively institutionalized the disciplinary separation from (general) physiology, which had not yet taken effect during Brücke’s time at the university. See E. W. Scripture, “[Autobiography],” in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. III, ed. Carl Murchison (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1936): 231–­61, at 253–­54. 47. See E. W. Scripture, Anwendung der graphischen Methode auf Sprache und Gesang (Leipzig: Barth, 1927): 8.

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  Figu r e 1 7. E. W. Scripture, documentation of graphic lip records, in “Researches on the Voice,” Laryngoscope 18, no. 3 (March 1908): 163

Scripture, however, also moved beyond the scope of Brücke’s project in several decisive ways. He not only devised more-­comprehensive experimental designs for capturing additional physiological components of the articulatory process, in order to obtain more-­complete images of the various movements involved in the realization of spoken verse. He also, and even more significantly, introduced some conceptual changes that resulted in a different understanding of what exactly these experimental data ultimately showed. A good starting point for tracing this reorientation can be found in the opening sentences of Scripture’s treatise Researches in Experi­ mental Phonetics (1906), a book that summarizes several years of investigations into the material laws of spoken language. Indicating here that his entire research on human speech, down to its most foundational aspects, had been directed toward the phonetic examination of poetry, Scripture states: These investigations had their origin in an attempt to use the methods of natural science in studying the nature of verse. The only true verse is that which flows from the mouth of the poet and which reaches the ears of the public; printed verse is only a makeshift for the verbal communication. It

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F igu r e 18 . E. W. Scripture, lip records of metric patterns, in Anwendung der graphischen Methode auf Sprache und Gesang (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1927): 8

is evident that the only way to undertake a scientific study of verse is to get it directly as it is spoken and then to use the methods of analysis and measurement.48

In this programmatic passage, Scripture reaffirms the privilege of vocal liveness over written letters, which Brücke had propagated through his work several decades before. But he also further specifies this privilege in a subtle yet significant way by asserting that only “that which flows from the mouth of the poet” can be considered verse in its actuality. To be sure, a phrase of this kind may at first appear to consign Scripture to the role of naïve phonocentrist, anachronistically committed to an untenable “metaphysics of presence.”49 A closer look at the actual implications of 48. E. W. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1906): 3. 49. Sterne, The Audible Past, 48.

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this phrase, however, will provide insight into the specific conditions under which Scripture reconceived the “nature” of poetic language, and will thereby help to demonstrate that this reconceptualization shifts the science of verse in a previously unexplored direction. The word “flow,” frequently invoked by Scripture to describe the dynamic of a spoken verse unfolding over time, carries much of the weight of this shift. Insofar as verse emerges, according to him, through “a continuous course of action” 50 by the speech organs, it needs to be viewed as an undivided entity. In a 1907 article entitled “Graphics of the Voice,” he writes: “The schemes of the prosodists are . . . mere scholastic jugglery with the letters of printed verse, which have nothing to do with the living verse spoken by the poet. . . . Living verse has no regard to syllables, feet, etc.; it is a flow of emotional expression which follows psychological laws.”51 Scripture, in other words, went a step further than Brücke in dispensing with the divisional principles of “older metrics.” 52 To pay “no regard to syllables, feet, etc.” meant for him to acknowledge the fact that verse originally and essentially consists in a continuous movement rather than a collection of individual parts, and that this movement can only retroactively and artificially be split up into a series of discrete segments. This impossibility of dissecting “a continuously changing speech ges­ ture”53 into clearly defined bits and pieces compelled Scripture to argue in a more direct and more radical fashion than Brücke that “verse form can only be determined exactly in a verse curve.”54 Only this method of graphic notation, in his view, could adequately capture the inherently “flowing” character of rhythmically structured speech. Or perhaps more accurately: only on the basis of the graphic shape of these curves, with their appearance in the form of continuous, wavelike lines, could the true concept of verse as an essentially fluent phenomenon actually appear. Scripture, unlike Brücke, went so far as to interpret the (ostensibly) iconic quality of his mechanically produced recordings as evidence for the actual underlying structure of poetic language. It would be misleading, however, to characterize this development as a quasi-­automatic effect of the technical devices themselves. While the recording instruments, through their graphic output, created the possibility of viewing poetry as a “smooth flow of sound,” 55 the curves first 50. E. W. Scripture, “The Nature of  Verse,” British Journal for Psychology, General Section XI, no. 1 (1920): 225–­3 5, at 233. 51. E. W. Scripture, “Graphics of the Voice,” Independent 68, no. 3073 (October 24, 1907): 969–­ 76, at 975. 52. Scripture, “[Autobiography],” 239. 53. Scripture, “[Autobiography],” 254. 54. Scripture, “Äußerungen deutscher Dichter über ihre Verskunst,” 250. 55. Scripture, “The Nature of  Verse,” 233.

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needed to be interpreted in a certain way in order to reveal a fundamental discrepancy between traditional metrical concepts and the articulatory reality of verse. What they actually represented in their capacity as indexical proofs, in other words, was a matter of exegetic operations—­operations that served to establish, rather than merely observe, a correspondence between the visual properties of the graphic traces and the “nature” of what they transcribed. In close connection with the notion of flow, Scripture simultaneously introduced a second conceptual element that set his approach apart from Brücke’s earlier work. When he declared that verse should ideally be studied “by catching it as it flows from the mouth of the poet, freezing it, and then examining it in detail with the microscope,”56 he designated its origin in the speech apparatus of one particular speaker—­its creator—­whose body thus became the ultimate source for determining the precise dynamic composition of the respective poetic line(s). Ernst Brücke, in devising his experiments, had expressly excluded any questions of authorial self-­articulation from his field of investigation; he had sought to study the metrical structure of verses purely based on general physiological laws of pronunciation, and hence “completely irrespective of the principles that guided the poet in the process of composition.”57 Scripture, by contrast, now reinserted the figure of the author into the picture. For all his critique of traditional nineteenth-­ century philology, he thus effectively retained one of its central interpretive categories, albeit under different methodological premises: Not the symbolic realization of authorial intent, as in the case of established hermeneutic approaches, but the poet’s bodily expression of a “rhythmic swing”58 through his verses formed the object of his interest. To be sure, this object remained a merely theoretical construct—­a kind of liminal fantasy—­ throughout most of  his work, since the majority of his experiments on verse were conducted without any author’s involvement whatsoever. (Instead, Scripture employed trained speakers for this purpose, including actors, instructors of the deaf, and generally “educated” individuals.) During the final phase of his career, however, Scripture repeatedly attempted to put the theoretical principle of capturing what “flows from the mouth of the poet” quite literally into practice, by making his Viennese laboratory into the site of various authorial self-­recordings. A photograph from the mid-­1920s, for example, shows the Austrian writer Franz Ginzkey—­a then-­popular figure who is relatively little known today—­in the process of speaking two lines of his poem “Das Buch” (“The 56. Scripture, “Graphics of the Voice,” 969. 57. Brücke, Die physiologischen Grundlagen, IV. 58. Scripture, “The Nature of  Verse,” 235.

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Figu r e 19 . E. W. Scripture, recording of verses spoken by the poet Franz Ginzkey, in Anwendung der graphischen Methode auf Sprache und Gesang (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1927): 15

Book”) into one of Scripture’s registering devices (fig. 19). This direct physical coupling between the poet’s body and the mechanism of an “oral speech-­ writer (Mundsprachzeichner)”59 yielded a “mouth curve,”60 which Scripture went on to examine in terms of the varying articulatory intensities it displayed. The overall results of his measurements and calculations were then summarized in various tables and diagrams, in order to reveal that spoken verse is a stream of psychic speech power. The German word Sprachleistung is better because the term power is often misunderstood; power is the rate of doing work. In verse the power fluctuates with more or less regularity. These fluctuations produce an effect of repetition. For many purposes the power may just as well be treated as contained in a series of points that correspond to centers of gravity or centroids of force.61

This programmatic definition reconceives poetic language in explicitly physical terms, as a current of rhythmic wavelike fluctuations set in 59. Scripture, Anwendung der graphischen Methode, 15. Not coincidentally, Scripture remarks in this context that the instrument’s recording capabilities had first been tested with syllabic sequences like “pa-­pa-­pa” and “ma-­ma-­ma.” These preliminary trials hence served to establish, once again, the experimental foundations on which more complex, poetic speech patterns could be analyzed. 60. Scripture, Anwendung der graphischen Methode, 15. 61. Scripture, “[Autobiography],” 239–­40.

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motion by the poet’s psychological energies. In accordance with this reconceptualization, Scripture’s experimental work on poetry culminated in the project of analyzing the graphic records he had obtained from the speech organs of contemporary poets, with the aim of detecting rhythmic patterns of energy distribution that could be captured neither by the notation of traditional metrical scansion nor the conceptual apparatus of traditional hermeneutic interpretation. “The free rhythmical flow,” so a study conducted under Scripture’s supervision at Yale declared, “is the expression of impulses, unconsciously operative, that are in the mind of the poet in writing verse.”62 Scripture thus considered the recording surface of his graphic instruments as a space where these impulses, after “flowing” through the transmitting tube of the apparatus, could manifest themselves in the visible shape of speech inscriptions. This presumed continuity between internal mental processes and external material traces implied that the curves yielded more than merely physiological information, and that they were to be studied as the indexical inscription not only of articulatory movements (as in the case of Brücke’s experimental design) but of articulated mental labor. In short, they “demand[ed] psychological explanation”63 as well—­an extraordinarily influential idea that the following part of this chapter will discuss in more detail. In a sense, then, it can be said that Scripture’s mature version of a “writing of the mouth” brought the developments traced in this section full circle. Where José Martí, several decades earlier, had imagined that Gentilli’s glossograph might ultimately facilitate an unhindered transcription of mental energies within the process of poetic creation, Scripture sought to reproduce, and capture for science, precisely such uninhibited expressions of “psychic speech power.” Scripture’s phonetic research thereby effectively realized some of the literary fantasies expressed in Martí’s essay—­fantasies which had been inspired by the very instrument that also left its mark on Ernst Brücke’s experiments, and thus on the rise of late nineteenth-­century scientific approaches to poetry more generally. From the technology-­driven reflections of a New York–­based poet who had read about a new “automatic writing device” exhibited in Vienna in 1883; to the investigations of a German physiologist who—­upon hearing of the same invention—­created the first graphic records of spoken verse in his Viennese laboratory; to the continuation of these apparatus-­based inquiries by an American scientist whose career would lead from the United States to Vienna in 1923 (and who wrote in an autobiographical sketch that his 62. J. E. Wallace Wallin, “Researches on the Rhythm of Speech,” Studies from the Yale Psychologi­ cal Laboratory 11 (1901): 1–­142, at 1. 63. Scripture, “Äußerungen deutscher Dichter über ihre Verskunst,” 216.

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“scientific methods of thought were and still are specifically German”64): what took shape in and through this unprecedented constellation of literary discourse and scientific research practices was a decisive shift in the concept of poetic language, and in the understanding of the poetic project, that would continue to resonate throughout the decades to follow. The central object of analytic concern was no longer what verse said but rather what it embodied—­both physiologically and psychologically—­by virtue of its graphically capturable, scientifically accessible articulatory form. The body’s movements, when properly recorded and analyzed, constituted for these researchers a source of empirical evidence through which poetry could be approached in its most foundational properties, via a series of transpositions from written text to speaking mouth to mechanical device to visible trace. This series, however, was not all. For the principle of transcribing, and potentially even composing, lines of poetry in the form of curves challenged not only the privileged status of the medium—­alphabetic script—­in which verse had traditionally appeared; in addition, this new kind of writing, a writing of and by the mouth, turned out also to imply the necessity of a correspondingly new kind of reading.

“ The Art of Reading Curve s” Scripture initially developed his interest in the phonetic laws of poetry during the late 1890s, in the wake of a controversy that ensued between one of his colleagues at Yale, Greek philologist Thomas Dwight Goodell, and another classicist at Harvard regarding the metrical principles of ancient Greek poetry and present-­day English verse.65 Aspiring to settle this dispute with the help of scientific means, he began to conduct graphic recording experiments in his laboratory, which he expected to yield empirical evidence in favor of one or the other scholarly opinion.66 Instead of arriv64. Scripture, “[Autobiography],” 243. 65. For details, see Scripture, “The Nature of  Verse,” 225. See also, with a reference to Scripture’s experiments, Thomas Dwight Goodell, Chapters on Greek Metric (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1902 [dated 1901]): 85. 66. In his earliest experiments on poetry, Scripture made use of an experimental design that coupled the acoustic and graphic recording technologies of his time. He first produced gramophone records of spoken verses, before using an elaborately constructed “tracing machine” to convert the tiny grooves of the gramophone discs—­i.e., the inscriptions of mechanically registered sound waves—­into magnified graphs on paper. He thus attempted to create another kind of indexical writing that would make the sounds of speech accessible to detailed visual analysis, in a manner analogous to the way in which devices like the labiograph were being employed to capture the motor activity of the articulatory organs themselves. For a discussion of this method and its technological details, see E. W. Scripture, “Researches in Experimental Phonetics,” Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory 7 (1899): 1–­101, at 7–­14. In the years following his

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ing at quick and clear results, however, he was soon faced with an excess of visual data that was anything but readily accessible in its qualitative semiotic significance. When Scripture, therefore, published a brief account of  his experiments in the journal Modern Language Notes in 1901, where it appeared between papers on more canonical subjects like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Goethe’s Faust, he not only sought to introduce his philological audience to a field of study that had hitherto been “little explored.”67 He also combined this intervention into the discourse of turn-­of-­the-­century literary studies with a somewhat urgent plea for assistance directed at his academic readership. “Curves of speech, when carefully and correctly obtained,” he stated, “contain far more information than any one worker can abstract from them.”68 And he concluded: “It is necessary to have the combined efforts of many workers in order to properly handle the material obtained.”69 Having realized that the graphic output of his instruments far exceeded his analytic resources at Yale, Scripture envisioned a large-­scale collaborative endeavor in which scholars from multiple institutions would contribute to the arduous process of examining, measuring, and interpreting the recordings produced in his laboratory. The ultimate goal would be to establish “the art of reading curves” 70 as a widely accepted methodological practice. And the point, or purchase, of such a practice, in Scripture’s view, would be the new psychological dynamics thereby revealed. “Hardly any problem of greater interest,” he declared, “could be proposed than that of discovering the manner of getting from a voice curve the data concerning the action of the vocal organs in such an exact and minute form that conclusions

initial experiments at Yale, Scripture began to adopt physiological research methods à la Brücke, and eventually even favored these methods during the later phase of his career. See Scripture, Anwendung der graphischen Methode, 72. On Scripture’s technological “fantasy” of deciphering gramophone records like writing, see Sterne, The Audible Past, 49–­50. On the relationship between phonographic technology and various notions of “script” in the late nineteenth century more broadly, see Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 67. E. W. Scripture, “Speech Curves,” Modern Language Notes 16, no. 3 (March 1901): 71–­79, at 71. 68. Scripture, “Speech Curves,” 71. 69. Scripture, “Speech Curves,” 71. 70. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves, 6. Some of the terms introduced by Scripture in his 1901 article in Modern Language Notes are especially significant in this context, as they make clear the extent to which the scientific analysis of speech inscriptions would become a matter of  “reading” in the dual sense of deciphering and interpreting the material at hand: “The curve at first sight is no more intelligible than a line of Chinese ideographs. . . . The meaning of these details . . . is not apparent at first observation; only by patient and persistent unraveling of the tangled curve is an inkling of it obtained.” (Scripture, “Speech Curves,” 73.)

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can be drawn concerning the variations in the voice as depending on every emotion.” 71 Though Scripture’s plans for a collaborative interpretive project did not come to fruition, his ambitions were certainly shared by other researchers of his time. The psychologist Felix Krueger, for instance, conducted experiments at the University of Leipzig with the aim of determining, “whether and how psychological processes and conditions—­specifically, the emotions—­find their expression in the movement of pitch of the speaking voice.” 72 Krueger’s experiments, too, were based on the recitation of poetic texts, which provided in his view the most apt material for this purpose “by virtue of their fixed, artistically necessary forms.” 73 And he, too, used a mechanical recording device—­a “laryngograph” (larynx-­writer) designed to capture the vibrations of the vocal cords—­in order to create visual tracings on paper that could then be deciphered as externalized material indices of the affects or feelings the speaker had “expressed.” In their parallel orientation, Scripture’s and Krueger’s experiments thus reveal how the project of a “science of verse” began to take aim, around the turn of the century, at the question of the emotional aspects of articulation. In shifting the focus from the bodily movements of speech production to the expressive significance inherent to these movements, the new “psychological-­phonetic approach” 74 drew its most important theoretical inspiration from the work of Wilhelm Wundt (in whose Leipzig laboratory both Scripture and Krueger had trained), and more specifically from a conceptual framework Wundt had established in his psychological analysis of (spoken) language. A closer look at this framework can therefore help to uncover the premises under which the emotional counterparts to certain physically attested speech phenomena—­in Wundt’s terms, “the melody and rhythm of speech with their subjective psychological correlates, the qualitative variation of feelings and the intensity of affective arousal” 75—­ became the privileged focus of experimental studies of verse around 1900. 71. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves, 39. 72. Felix Krueger, “Die Messung der Sprechmelodie als Ausdrucksmethode,” Atti del v. Con­ gresso internazionale di psicologia tenuto in Roma dal 26 al 30 aprile 1905 sotto la presidenza del prof. Giuseppe Sergi (Rome: Forzani, 1905): 245–­46, at 245. 73. Krueger, “Beziehungen der experimentellen Phonetik zur Psychologie,” 116. Though Krueger chose to ridicule (some of  ) Scripture’s efforts in the same article, his scientific project does maintain clear affinities with the endeavor of  his American colleague. On Krueger’s criticism of Scripture, see also Rieger, Schall und Rauch, 276–­78. 74. Felix Krueger, “Demonstration des Kehltonschreibers,” in Bericht über den II. Kongreß für experimentelle Psychologie in Würzburg vom 18. bis 21. April 1906, ed. Friedrich Schumann (Leipzig: Barth, 1907), 243. 75. Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 1, Die Sprache: Erster Teil , 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1911): 281.

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Beginning already in the 1870s, Wundt advanced a comprehensive research program dedicated to exploring the role of basic bodily processes as expressive mechanisms of emotional life: He measured physiological arousal symptoms such as respiration, heartbeat, and pulse, and he used this data to draw conclusions about the psychological phenomena to which they—­according to his view—­corresponded. He also began early on to extend this psychophysiological perspective to the expressive purposes of speech production, which he conceived, in keeping with his overall approach, as founded in the muscular activity of respiratory system, larynx, and mouth.76 It was not until the turn of the century, however, that Wundt embarked on a comprehensive study of  language, with the aim of detecting the general laws that would explain how linguistic phenomena emerged from, and evolved within, the most basic organizational patterns of mental life. Wundt based this investigation on the assumption that it was necessary to examine language in its present, “living” condition, and hence to shift the analytic focus away from the questions that had occupied historical linguists throughout the nineteenth century.77 He thus proceeded in a manner that closely paralleled the principles of experimental phonetics as outlined by Brücke, and in doing so created the foundations for another, new scientific subdiscipline—­a discipline that would several decades later come to be known as “psycholinguistics.” 78 Wundt unfolded his psycholinguistic approach in the first volume of his magnum opus, Völkerpsychologie (Folk Psychology), originally published in 1900, which he opened by defining the object of his interest as follows: We can designate the psychophysical expressions of life, to which language belongs as a particular, characteristically developed form, with the general concept of expressive movements [Ausdrucksbewegungen]. Every language consists of vocal utterances or other sensorily perceptible signs, which have been produced by muscular effects and which outwardly convey inner states, ideas, feelings, and affects.79

76. See, here, the concluding chapter in Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psycho­ logie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874): 847–­58, which caps off the exposition of his scientific system with a brief discussion devoted to the psychological evolution of language. 77. See here, paradigmatically, Wilhelm Wundt, Probleme der Völkerpsychologie (Leipzig: Wiegandt, 1911): 48. For a detailed presentation of his approach in contradistinction to the paradigm of historical linguistics, see Wilhelm Wundt, Sprachgeschichte und Sprachpsychologie: Mit Rücksicht auf  B. Delbrück’s “Grundlagen der Sprachforschung” (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1901). 78. See Willem J. M. Levelt, “Speech, Gesture, and the Origins of Language,” European Review 12, no. 4 (2004): 543–­49, at 543. 79. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 43.

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As the fundamental category of “expressive movements” indicates, Wundt considered vocal language to be one component of a larger psychophysical economy that manifested itself at different levels (reflexive, instinctive, and volitional) of organization, and that had developed along evolutionary principles.80 Like the language of corporeal gestures that preceded it genetically, human speech depended on a general functional correlation, indeed unity, between bodily motor activity and psychological conditions. This functional unity implied, on the one hand, that “inner states,” and particularly states of affective arousal, find their externalization always and necessarily in certain forms of muscular action: “Any affect,” so Wundt contended, “is . . . accompanied by movements that correspond to its character.”81 And it implied, on the other hand, that these movements also, in turn, retroactively modify the internal conditions they serve to express, either by “discharging”82 psychological energies from the organism or by amplifying them in accordance with a physiological feedback mechanism. Every vocal utterance, by virtue of belonging to the larger category of expressive movement, participated in this dynamic of physiological and psychological codetermination. The “vocal movement of the speech organs,”83 for Wundt, was merely an extension, variation, and combination of more elementary, emotionally expressive motor processes such as breathing and the muscular activity of the face: “As an expressive movement,” he maintained, “which it continues to be at any stage of its evolution, [language] emerges from the entirety of expressive movements that characterize animal life in general.”84 The most important consequence of this position was 80. Wundt adopted the notion of “expressive movements” from Charles Darwin’s The Expres­ sion of  the Emotions in Man and Animal (London: John Murray, 1872), but he considered Darwin’s evolutionary explanations ultimately insufficient with regard to the concept’s psychological applicability. See, in this context, Wilhelm Wundt, “Ueber den Ausdruck der Gemüthsbewegungen,” Deutsche Rundschau 11 (1877): 120–­33, and Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psy­ chologie, 838–­47. 81. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 65. 82. See Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 66. 83. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 343. Emphasis original. 84. Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 2, Die Sprache: Zweiter Teil, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1912): 650. See, in this context, also the following passage, in which Wundt details the way that vocal language both originates and differs from other forms of bodily expression: Considered psychologically, the speech sound is an expressive movement, which distinguishes itself from other expressive movements by involving the muscular sound apparatuses [Tonapparate] of the larynx and oral cavity, as well the respiratory muscles that serve to blow on these sound apparatuses. The particular muscular effects that endow the sound produced in this manner with those manifold tonal and noise-­like qualities through which

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that the expressiveness of speech was presumed to reside primarily in the muscular action of the vocal organs themselves, and only secondarily in the latter’s audible results: “The original expression of the psychological process is the articulatory movement, not the sound, such that the sound relates to the psychological process always only indirectly, by virtue of the affinity between speech movement and sound.”85 Consequently, it was chiefly the different components of this bodily motion that needed to be investigated, from a psycholinguistic perspective. Since emotional conditions could be externalized only via the motor functions that produce speech sounds as their (side) effects, Wundt’s analysis gave precedence to those dynamic factors that determine, rather than merely reflect, the affective qualities of vocal utterances. This nexus of systematic considerations gave rise to one of the key concepts of  Wundt’s linguistic theory: a concept that bears special significance not only for his influence on turn-­of-­the-­century investigations of poetry, but more generally for the entire historical trajectory of poetic conceptions pursued in this book. Aiming to establish the expressive primacy of the speech movements over the acoustic signals in which they result, Wundt declares: The essential part of the originary linguistic utterance is accordingly not the sound itself but the vocal gesture [Lautgebärde], the movement of the articulatory organs, which . . . dovetails with the overall expression of feelings and ideas as but a special kind of the mimic movements. The speech sound, in turn, is only an aftereffect of the vocal gesture—­an effect, to be sure, that can also maintain a certain correspondence [Verwandtschaft] with that which it expresses, due to the relations between articulatory movement and speech sound production.86

Wundt borrowed the concept of “vocal gesture” from the mid-­ nineteenth-­century linguist Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse. In this passage, however, he redefines it to accord with the premises of his own analytic

it acquires its specificity as speech sound, belong in a wider sense to the sphere of mimic movements. Compared to the mute symptoms of emotion, which primarily reside in the expressions of the face, the mimic movements associated with the speech sounds are different only insofar as they include not only external but also the inner movements of muscles located inside the oral cavity and pharynx, most notably the muscular organ that distinguishes itself through the highest degree of flexibility and tactile sensitivity: the tongue.” (Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 258. Emphases original.) 85. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Zweiter Teil, 651. 86. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Zweiter Teil, 651–­5 2. Emphasis original.

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model.87 For him, the term served to highlight the fact that spoken language is first and foremost, fundamentally, a corporeal act through which internal psychological energies and external, audible signs are joined. Insofar as speech sounds arise from motor processes within the vocal apparatus, which themselves develop concomitantly with emotional conditions, spoken language necessarily expresses these conditions—­with which it also remains continuous—­in a more than purely arbitrary way: “Chance, then,” so Wundt concludes, “is not the creator of linguistic sound; rather, the relation of sound to what it signifies [bedeutet] is determined entirely by the accompanying . . . movements.”88 Within the resulting theory of language, audible signs were thus presumed to possess a basic phonetic iconicity, which implied the existence of a fundamental similarity between the sound and its genesis in the state of affective arousal it expressed. By redefining speech as an essentially gestural phenomenon, on the basis of a shift from the acoustic to the articulatory dimension, Wundt proposed a conceptual framework that would have an especially direct impact on the experimental studies of poetry carried out by some of his students during the early twentieth century. Scripture, for instance, asserted explicitly that the articulatory phenomena recorded in his curves were “not mechanical combinations of sounds; they are living vocal gestures.”89 What the graphic traces rendered visible, for him, in a permanent, stable fashion, were not purely physiological processes but psychologically “readable” acts of speech production. And from this idea there derived the further methodological claim that the researcher could use speech curves to determine the affective value of any particular poetic line, as well as to reconstruct more general, emotionally based patterns of rhyme and meter. Scripture began to speak also, in this context, of a “speech melody” or “melody plot,”

87. See Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Zweiter Teil, 344. For Heyse’s original conception of the term “Lautgeberde,” see his posthumously published treatise, System der Sprachwis­ senschaft, ed. Heyman Steinthal (Berlin: Dümmler’s Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1856): 73–­74. In his earlier work, Wundt employed the similar term “Klanggeberde” in order to designate the way in which linguistic expression occurs originally, at the beginning of its psychophysical evolution, in conjunction with (other) bodily gestures. See Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psy­ chologie, 849. For scholarly discussions of Wundt’s concept of the “vocal gesture,” see Brigitte Nerlich and David D. Clarke, “The Linguistic Repudiation of Wundt,” History of Psychology 1, no. 3 (1998): 179–­204, and Frank Vonk, “The ‘Vocal Gesture’ from Wundt to Mead: A Chapter in the Historiography of the Psychology and Sociology of  Language,” in History of  Linguistics, 1993: Papers from the Sixth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, Washington DC, 9–­14 August 1993 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995): 235–­44. 88. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Zweiter Teil, 653. 89. E. W. Scripture, The Study of  English Speech by New Methods of  Phonetic Investigation (London: Milford, 1923): 9.

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Figu re 2 0 . E. W. Scripture, tracing of Heinrich Heine’s poem “Der Fichtenbaum,” in Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1906): 73

by which he meant the variations of pitch that occur over the course of a certain speech sequence (like one recited verse). For him, as for Wundt and Krueger, the rising and falling of the voice carried special significance as one of the most clearly “emotive”90 phenomena of (poetic) language. And he accordingly sought to experimentally examine speech melodies by isolating specifically those vibrations that appeared to him to be most directly grounded in—­and hence indicative of—­certain subjective feeling states. A tracing of two lines from Heinrich Heine’s 1823 poem “Der Fichtenbaum” (“The Spruce Tree”), produced during Scripture’s time as a guest researcher in Germany, gives a clear indication of the method he used (“by making inscriptions and measuring the waves”91) to investigate such speech melodies (fig. 20). The verses were “spoken from memory” by one of Scripture’s assistants, a “cultured Berliner” named Baron von Hagen, and captured by “placing a speaking tube before the mouth or over the

90. See, in this context, Roman Jakobson’s characterization of (lyric) poetry as being “intimately linked with the emotive function” of  language, which can be found in his seminal essay “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of  Poetry, ed. and pref. Stephen Rudy (The Hague: Mouton, 1981): 18–­5 1, at 26. Jakobson references Anton Marty’s Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie (Halle: Niemeyer, 1908), published almost contemporaneously with Scripture’s experiments on speech melodies, as the first systematic application of the term “emotive.” 91. Scripture, The Study of  English Speech, 9.

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larynx and recording the vibrations on a smoked drum.”92 Scripture then measured the vibrations associated with each individual phoneme, marked their average frequencies on a numerical scale, and connected these marks through a continuous line, which resulted in a curve depicting the rising and falling of the voice tone during recitation. The arrangement in which Scripture chose to present the results of this experiment merits a closer look, both because of what it shows about the wider semiotic implications of such experimental “mouth writing,” and because of what it implies, in turn, about what it would mean to actually read these graphs. On the one hand, then, the fluctuating movement of the verse melody is clearly correlated to a numerical metric, which ties the various points on the curve to precise vibrational quantities (as indicated by the numbers included on either side of the curve). On the other hand, this same fluctuating movement is also correlated to the letters that appear directly beneath the curves, which provide a kind of translation into more traditional alphabetic terms. Scripture created this juxtaposition by aligning the conventional written version of the poem—­“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam / Im Norden auf kahler Höh’” (“A spruce is standing lonely / In the north on a barren height”)—­with the graphic representation of its vocalized form, via a tellingly two-­step process: At the bottom, the poetic line appears in its standard orthographic form, as a series of words, while in the middle, between the words and the curves, this same line appears again—­now significantly less conventionally “readable”—­as a sequence of individual phonetic symbols that designate spatially the temporal points at which particular sounds and sound combinations were articulated. Without these two different lines of letters, the graph would make no sense. To some extent, therefore, the legibility of Scripture’s “mouth writing” clearly remained dependent on the very same alphabetic code that he was seeking to replace. At the same time, however, it was precisely the presence of these different kinds of graphic material, at their different levels, that allowed Scripture to assert, quite literally, the semiotic superiority of vocal trace, which appears, here, over and above all the other modes of writing. In striking contrast to the straight horizontal lines of printed text below, which bear no visible relation to the vibrational quantities through which they are “actualized” in speech, the curve makes use of a vertical, numerical 92. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves, 72. On Baron von Hagen’s role in this context, and on the institutional background of Scripture’s research in Germany more generally, see Scripture, “Graphics of the Voice,” 975–­76. Von Hagen also played a certain part in the history of the phonogram archive that was being established during these years at the University of Berlin. See Julia Kursell, “A Gray Box: The Phonograph in Laboratory Experiments and Field Work, 1900–­1920,” in The Oxford Handbook of  Sound Studies, eds. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 176–­97, at 188–­90.

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dimension that remains inaccessible to conventional writing. By virtue of its up-­and-­down movements, the graph can claim an iconic correspon­ dence to the (audible) phenomenon it represents, which is now presumed to stand (as it did not, yet, for Brücke) in a similarly iconic correspondence to fluctuations in the quantity or intensity of psychological affect. Based on this latter idea, Scripture went on to suggest that the relevant changes of intonation had in fact been prescribed by the original act of literary expression: “A poet,” he proclaimed, “can thus expect that the entire cultured public will respond to the melody he feels that he is putting into his verse.”93 Within certain linguistic and educational limits, in other words, the melody plot would necessarily be actualized in the form in which it had originally been composed, and hence would also serve to convey the psychological dynamic—­the “feeling”—­from which it had initially emerged. This continuity of feeling, in turn, implied the possibility of transposing the method of reading curves from living voices to dead ones, which is to say, of “resurrecting” emotional values for an articulatory apparatus that was, itself, no longer available for investigation and verification. It thereby offered a way out of the methodological dilemma that had been called into being by the new psychophysiological concept of poetry, which situated the capacity for expression exclusively within the (living, breathing, present) authorial body.94 Scripture, however, did not stop here. He went on to imagine that it might even be possible, one day, via a subsequent step of analysis, to discover more universal, author-­independent “laws of melody”95 by comparing the average intonations of different lines and poems. Since it was for him the case “that 93. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves, 72. 94. Scripture’s ideas intersect here with the contemporaneous project of German philologist Eduard Sievers, whose famous Schallanalyse was conceived as a recitation-­based technique for reconstructing the personal speech melodies inscribed within literary works of the past. Sievers, who expressly sought to complement the prevailing “eye philology” of nineteenth-­century literary critics with his own brand of “speech or ear philology,” maintained not only that it was possible to decide on questions of authorship and attribution by orally detecting the melodic structures of written verse; he also believed that poets could be classified into various types based on the audible characteristics according to which they had chosen and arranged the lexical elements of their texts. See here, in particular, Eduard Sievers, “Über ein neues Hilfsmittel philologischer Kritik,” in Rhythmisch-­melodische Studien: Vorträge und Aufsätze (Heidelberg: Winter, 1912): 78–­111, and Eduard Sievers, Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse: Zwei Vorträge (Heidelberg: Winter, 1924). For a detailed discussion of Sievers’s project, see Reinhart Meyer-­Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001): 73–­1 25. Despite the fact, however, that Sievers had made some significant contributions to the field of late nineteenth-­ century phonetics, he developed his method of sound analysis without employing any graphic or acoustic recording instruments whatsoever, a fact that drew sharp criticism from experimental scientists like Scripture, who viewed Sievers’s approach as lacking a solid foundation in reliable, objective data. See, to this effect, Scripture, The Study of  English Speech, 13–­14. 95. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves, 72.

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in the melody plot we have a record of the emotion,”96 he assumed that the fluctuations of pitch discernible in the curves could ultimately serve to identify in poetic texts “the speech types that go with joy, sorrow, determination, lassitude, and so on”97 in general, and thus to reveal some of the basic psychological patterns on which the composition of verse was founded.98 Here, again, in this vision of future scholarship, the point of poetic expression becomes aligned with its unconscious emotional rather than its intentional semantic content, such that the question any potential reader-­analyst needs to ask is not what the words say but how one speaks them. Against the backdrop of Wundt’s notion of the vocal gesture and its afterlife, therefore, it becomes possible to recognize the wider conceptual implications of the shift that would ultimately transform the idea of “mouth writing,” and its corresponding graph reading, from a physiologist’s tool or poet’s fantasy into the fundament of a new, psychophysiological poetics. Recording instruments like the laryngograph and speechwriter operated for Wundt and his students, within the context of this new paradigm, as media for investigating, and demonstrating, the various ways in which the mind articulated itself as body. And the new models of reading that emerged to do justice to these new kinds of writing sought to unfurl the consequences of such a position for the traditional project of engaging with texts. Against the classical philological understanding of letter signs as conventional symbols, wherein an authorial spirit can be arbitrarily encoded, these verse scientists advocated for a notion of language-­world, poet-­reader continuity, in which a prior and deeper form of relationship between “symbol” and “symbolized,” writing and thought becomes thinkable. This prior and deeper relationship found its first explicit theoretical formulation within another evolving branch of empirical psychological studies, known under the collective name of Einfühlungsästhetik. And it was in the context of this development that the experimental tendency of isolating the sounding properties of poetry from its meaning also received its most sophisticated and far-­reaching justification.

Symbolic S ound s Despite some important roots in the eighteenth century—­most notably, in the social philosophy of Adam Smith and in the anthropological thought of 96. Scripture, “Graphics of the Voice,” 973. 97. Scripture, The Study of  English Speech, 30–­31. 98. On the broader, late nineteenth-­century trend of creating such “emotion pictures” with the help of graphical methods, see the rich discussion in Otniel E. Dror, “The Scientific Image of Emotion: Experience and Technologies of Inscription,” Configurations 7 (1999): 355–­401.

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Johann Gottfried Herder—­the aesthetics of empathy really came into exis­ tence, both terminologically and conceptually, in the years around 1870.99 It thus emerged contemporaneously with the rise of experimental phonetics, as exemplified by the studies of Ernst Brücke, and with the beginnings of the Wundtian project of psychophysiology. Of central importance in this development was the art historian Robert Vischer, who officially introduced the concept of Einfühlung in his seminal 1873 treatise Ueber das op­ tische Formgefühl (On the Optical Sense of  Form).100 Vischer set out to analyze the aesthetic appreciation of visual forms, in a manner partially analogous to Brücke’s approach to poetry, as a phenomenon anchored in various bodily motor processes. In doing so, he built explicitly upon Wundt’s methodological credo of “explain[ing] mental stimulation [ geistige Erregung] in every case through and together with bodily stimulation.” 101 He thereby initiated a new branch of late nineteenth-­century psychophysiological investigation, which followed the by-­now familiar pattern of applying natural scientific methods to a traditionally humanistic domain. Though Vischer himself did not perform experiments to support his claims, his pioneering theoretical approach laid the groundwork for an experimental approach to aesthetics, which took the concept of empathy as its foundation: by the turn of the century, empathy had become the most widely discussed concept in German aesthetic theories of both experimental and traditional varieties. Its most prominent proponent during these years was Theodor Lipps, who held a chair in philosophy at the University of Munich, and who simultaneously served as the founding director of the university’s

99. Other important figures in the concept’s genealogy include mid-­nineteenth-­century German philosophers Rudolf Hermann Lotze and Friedrich Theodor Vischer. For a more detailed discussion of this prehistory, see “Introduction,” in Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, eds. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994): 1–­8 5. Specifically on the eighteenth-­century roots of  “empathy” in relation to the concept’s late nineteenth-­century codification, see also Gustav Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘Empathy’,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 151–­63. 100. See Robert Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik (Leipzig: Credner, 1873): VII. For the English translation of  Vischer’s text, see “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Empathy, Form and Space, eds. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, 89–­123, at 92. The German term Einfühlung—­effectively a nominalization of previously existing expressions like sich einfühlen (“to feel oneself into”)—­was first translated into the English neologism “empathy” in Edward B. Titchener’s Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-­ Processes (New York: Macmillan, 1909): 21. On the concept’s migration into the Anglophone world more generally, see the detailed discussion in Susan Lanzoni, “Empathy in Translation: Movement and Image in the Psychological Laboratory,” Science in Context 25 (2012): 301–­27. 101. Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form,” 92.

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Psychological Institute.102 Though Lipps’s own understanding of Einfühlung diverged from Vischer’s in various significant ways—­he broadened the scope of the concept to (all) other domains of aesthetic experience, while shifting the focus from its physiological to its mental aspects—­his work, too, maintained some close connections with Wundt’s, as well as with concurrent developments in the experimental study of poetry. These connections become especially evident in some passages of the comprehensive volume Grundlegung der Ästhetik (Groundwork of Aesthetics), published in 1903 (and hence in the same year in which E. W. Scripture spent several months studying melody plots as a guest researcher at Lipps’s Munich institute).103 The work contains Lipps’s most elaborate treatment of poetry, which he frames through a general account of  language clearly indebted to Wundt. Under the chapter headline “Die Ausdrucksbewegungen und die Einfühlung” (“Expressive Movements and Empathy”), he opens his discussion with an almost verbatim repetition of Wundt’s basic assumptions—­ although he does not refer to Wundt explicitly—­and correspondingly asserts that speech is to be considered, first and foremost, as part of a larger dynamic of bodily motor functions. “Not the sounds,” he explains, but the expressive movements are of primary concern here. The latter form a specific category of bodily movements. They are called expressive movements because they serve to convey an inner state—­a state we detect immediately in these movements when observing them. Ultimately, however, all our movements are in a way expressive movements, just as all sounds [Laute], including speech sounds, are always also expressive or affective sounds [Ausdrucks-­oder Affektlaute].104 102. Today, Lipps is primarily known for the critique that his theory of empathy inspired in the form of Wilhelm Worringer’s epoch-­making dissertation Abstraction and Empathy: A Con­ tribution to the Psychology of Style (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). No less important from a historical perspective, however, is the central role he played in redefining (and institutionalizing) aesthetics as a branch of empirical psychology, an ambition he shared with various other scholars of  his time, including figures like Johannes Volkelt, Karl Groos, and Hermann Siebeck. For a more detailed account of Lipps’s academic career and influence, see Niels W. Bokhove and Karl Schuhmann, “Bibliographie der Schriften von Theodor Lipps,” Zeit­ schrift für philosophische Forschung 45 (1991): 112–­30, at 112–­18. For a general discussion of Lipps’s conception of “psychological aesthetics” and its methodological foundations, see Tobias Wilke, “Schwingungs-­Bilder: Ästhetische Einfühlung zwischen Seele und Gehirn,” in Gefühl und Genauigkeit: Empirische Ästhetik um 1900, eds. Müller-­Tamm, Schmidgen, and Wilke, 45–­73. 103. See Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves, 5. Lipps also served as dissertation advisor to Felix Krueger, who became Wundt’s assistant at the University of Leipzig in 1902 and eventually succeeded Wundt in his chair in 1917. 104. Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst. Erster Teil: Grundlegung der Ästhetik (Leipzig: Voss, 1903): 107.

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The passage unmistakably rearticulates the Wundtian supposition according to which “a movement that expresses no affect whatsoever does not occur, or occurs at the most in certain liminal cases,” 105 as well as the related idea that affect, bodily movement, and speech sound function together as the different components of “a single overall experience [ein ein­ ziges Gesamterlebnis].” 106 Yet Lipps also specifies this psychophysiological focus in a manner congruent with his chapter title, by claiming that the emotional expressiveness of all human motor activity can only be perceived as such due to a basic mechanism of empathy. “The movements of the human body that we observe,” he states, “are either exclusively, or at least in part, affective movements.  .  .  . At all times, some internal condition or some general form of inner activity expresses itself through them. This, however, is only to say: We feel this condition or activity into those movements [  fühlen . . . ein].” 107 According to this model, then, any bodily motion first needs to be (re)invested with psychological energy by the observer in order to register as emotionally charged. Its expressive function becomes recognizable through a spontaneous act of projection by means of which the perceiving subject (“we”) locates a corresponding inner state within an externally discernible motor process. Only by virtue of this empathetic capability, Lipps maintains, is it possible to apprehend the human body’s expressive movements as such at all; and only by virtue of this capability is it possible to experience the acoustic signals of speech—­the audible effects of just such expressive movements—­as “expressive or affective sounds.” On the basis of these general theoretical designations, Lipps proceeded to turn his attention to the specific character of poetry, which he approached—­in keeping with his overall perspective—­as a form of empathic projection. In his extensive discussion of various metrical structures, he attempted to draw conclusions about how traditional patterns like iambus, trochee, dactyl, and anapest relate to the underlying dynamic principles of psychological activity itself.108 Different patterns of rhythmic organization take effect for Lipps as the expression of different patterns of “inner motion,” a conditioning relationship he exemplifies in a manner that clearly intersects with Scripture’s terminology and ideas: “The stressed element 105. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 132. 106. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 482. 107. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 132. Emphases original. 108. At a most general level, Lipps identifies these principles in terms of 1) an alternation between the “excitement and relaxation of attention,” which lies at the root of the rhythmic distinction between stressed and unstressed elements; and 2) the “steady continuation of psychological processes,” which manifests itself in the sequential repetition of rhythmic units. Together, both principles constitute, according to him, “the law or tendency of periodic changes in emphasis” (Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 296).

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[of a metrical foot] is what dominates, unites, and consolidates the unit that is made up of several elements. It is the center of gravity, the climax [Gipfelpunkt] of a unified apperceptive wave, in which several waves have merged.” 109 Just as Scripture contended in his writings that any point of articulatory emphasis within a poetic line was “like the centroid of a system of forces or the center of gravity of a body in being a point at which we can consider all the forces to be concentrated and yet have the same effect,” 110 so Lipps conceives of rhythmic accentuation as the peak of a continuous, “wave”-­ like flow of psychic energies. And just as Scripture developed his technique for identifying the energetic centroids of verse in an effort to challenge, and even replace, the “mechanical,” scansion-­based principles of traditional metrics, so Lipps, too, asserts with regard to the metrical laws of poetry that “verses do not tend to be composed of identical feet.” 111 For him, their rhythmic essence derives, rather, from the constant, undivided flux of a psychological process whose dynamic unfolding endows the lines with “inner life” 112—­a process whose ever-­changing, undulating movement recalls the graphic shapes of Scripture’s recordings. Lipps’s emphasis on empathy, however, contributed a decisively new dimension to the psychophysiological reinterpretation of poetic expression, since it allowed him, for the first time, to explicitly and completely sever the idea of “natural” emotional content from “conventional” semantic function. Where Wundt and Scripture had merely gestured in this direction by making emotional content into the “true” or “primary” source of poetic meaning—­to which the semantic sense could then be seen to relate like a kind of debased, derivative shadow—­Lipps developed a notion of auditory resonance, or sympathetic vibrations, that justifies excluding semantic questions from the equation altogether. He called the resulting system of asemantic affinities “symbolism,” 113 and he asserted that the reception of these empathically registered affinities, by which he also meant the reception of the affective energies set in motion by a particular poem, can take place at the level of rhythmic and melodic qualities as such:

109. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 304. 110. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics, 101. 111. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 315. 112. See, in this context, also the related characterization from Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 315: “Rhythm, as a psychological experience, is this movement of our apperceptive activity. . . . And this movement is not a kind of being moved [Bewegtsein], but a way of moving oneself [Sich­ bewegen], and hence an activity: namely, my own activity that has been felt into [eingefühlt] the rhythm as a whole.” 113. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 487.

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The symbolism of the rhythmic elements is tied to these elements themselves, and hence to the musical or “sound element” [Klangelement] of  language in a broader sense of the word. As much as the pace of recitation, or the up and down of the voice etc., may depend on the meaning of the words—­the characteristic life that I detect in these phenomena is tied to the acoustic impression. It does not immediately reside in what the words signify [bedeuten].114

Lipps advances here—­according to a logic that effectively draws the theoretical consequences from the graphs of researchers like Scripture and Krueger, where rhythm and pitch variations appear spatially divorced from the semantic register of the words—­the thesis that poetry “acts” symbolically primarily by means of its presemantic or extrasemantic properties (such as the “up and down of the voice” during vocalization). The term “symbolic” is therefore being used in a sense that runs precisely counter to the one made famous by Charles Sander Peirce right around the same time, according to which symbols are signs defined exclusively by conventional laws.115 For Lipps, “the meaning that the word ‘symbolism’ is supposed to have in this context” is that of “being accessible to empathy,”116 which is to say, that of participating in the psychophysiological relationship of nonarbitrary, expressive continuity between internal emotional energies and external material forms. When Lipps ascribes a symbolic character to the purely acoustic dimensions of verse, he therefore implies that there exist correspondences between certain rhythmic and melodic patterns, on the one hand, and the affective qualities that can (and must) be projected onto these phenomena, on the other hand. He assumes that poetry systematically exploits the possibilities of a universally accessible, universally valid phonetic iconicity, which connects the sound patterns of poetry’s audible materiality with the psychological dynamic that sets those patterns in motion.117 Lipps’s symbol, 114. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 491. Emphases original. 115. Peirce’s seminal account of semiotic functions was made public in its second, revised version in the same year (1903) in which Lipps published his reflections on acoustic symbolism. For Peirce’s definition of the term “symbol,” see “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. and introd. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955): 98–­119, at 102: “A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object.” Peirce’s first and chief examples of this semiotic category are, not surprisingly, the arbitrarily chosen signs of linguistic communication. See Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 112–­ 14. Emphasis original. 116. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 481. 117. See, here, Peirce’s characterization of icons as those signs that have “some Quality in common with the Object” and hence signify by virtue of a “similarity or analogy” with their referent (Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic,” 102 and 107).

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in other words, is a version of Wundt’s vocal gesture, which has now been generalized into the common denominator of all speech: Language—­or more precisely, the whole that consists of words, speech or poetry—­is symbolic already as a mere sound complex, or as a combination of sound complexes, irrespective of any “meaning” [Sinn]. We can designate the elements of this symbolism as acoustic elements. We could also call them the musical elements of linguistic symbolism, as these elements are shared between language and music, or find their analogy in music. Insofar as the language artwork [Sprachkunstwerk] is endowed with life and beauty by virtue of this symbolism, it is an acoustic artwork [Klangkunstwerk].118

It would be easy to misinterpret this characterization of language and language art as a mere return to an earlier, Romantic paradigm in which poetry becomes poetry by virtue of its striving to become music. Lipps, however, is actually coming to his notion of a music-­language intersection from precisely the other side. The point is not, within his paradigm, that musical sound should provide the model for its linguistic counterpart, such that the “most poetic” form of language would turn out to be in some sense the “least linguistic.” The point is rather that the expressive dynamic of speech production is now providing the foundation for every experience of “acoustic symbolism” whatsoever, which means also, for any empathic engagement with music: We immediately express inner states of arousal . . . in sounds [Laute]. The notes and sounds [Klänge] of music are related to those sounds, though sometimes more and sometimes less. And correspondingly, these latter [musical] sounds . . . appear to be the expression of an interiority as well. There appears to be an interiority that expresses [verlautbaren] itself immediately through them, an affective element, an inner drive, a striving and wish to pour oneself out and make room to breathe [sich auszuströmen und Luft zu schaffen].119

Only by virtue of an empathic interpretation that unfolds in relation to the model provided by spoken language, Lipps claims here, does music acquire its corresponding ability to influence and express human emotions. It thus provides neither the only nor the primary means of making affective energies discernible in their acoustic purity, since the more original and 118. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 487. 119. Lipps, Grundlegung der Ästhetik, 478.

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fundamental encounter with the power of expressive sound occurs instead within the phonic play of poetry. This reassessment of the role of sound in verse, and of the relationship between sound and meaning in language as a whole, did not lead Lipps to abandon conventional ideas about poetic form. Indeed: the conservative literary predilections he shared with other proponents of turn-­of-­the-­ century Einfühlungsästhetik could hardly be any clearer.120 Yet in his efforts to establish the dynamic of empathy, and with it that of acoustic symbolism, as a principle of universal explanatory scope, Lipps articulated a scientific theory that anticipated—­if only indirectly—­the subsequent, more radical strategies of poetically dividing sound from sense. Scholars have highlighted repeatedly that the German strand of Ein­ fühlungsästhetik in general—­and Lipps’s theory, in particular—­played a foundational role in the emergence of abstract visual art during the early twentieth century.121 Indeed, the search for a language of artistic expression that would operate through correspondences between emotions and basic elements of sight and sound became prominent in the works of painters like Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, with the latter building directly on Lippsian ideas he encountered in the Jugendstil milieus of Munich.122 What has received no attention, by contrast, is the fact that Lipps’s influence within this overarching trend of the period did not remain confined to the visual arts but extended also into the domain of poetic theory. Here, too, Kandinsky offers a special case in point: In his essay Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in 1911–­1 2, he portrays the word as an entity that can be treated, through certain techniques, in such a way as to “make it lose its external sense as a name.” 123 In a move that 120. See paradigmatically, in this context, the dissertation of one of  Lipps’s students, Paul Stern, Einfühlung und Association in der neueren Ästhetik: Ein Beitrag zur psychologischen Analyse der ästhetischen Anschauung (Hamburg: Voss, 1898): 62. 121. On the contribution of Lipps to this development, see Malika Maskarinec, “Das Gewicht der Abstraktion: Der Körper als Maßstab ästhetischer Erfahrung um 1900,” in Gefühl und Genauigkeit: Empirische Ästhetik um 1900, eds. Müller-­Tamm, Schmidgen, and Wilke, 75–­103, at 94–­103, and Jutta Müller-­Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung: Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kul­turtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2005): 236–­41. 122. This reception was facilitated by various mediating figures like August Endell and Hermann Obrist, who attended Lipps’s lectures at the university. See Magdalena Bushart, “Die Expressionisten und die Formfrage,” in Das Problem der Form: Interferenzen zwischen moderner Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, eds. Hans Aurenhammer and Regine Prange (Berlin: Mann, 2016): 239–­ 56, at 243–­44, and Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979): 23–­34. 123. Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 1994): 114–­219, at 147.

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effectively draws the consequences of an “acoustic symbolism” à la Lipps, Kandinsky thus envisions a new form of poetry in which the linguistic material would be stripped entirely of its signifying function, with the effect that “only the pure sound remains.” 124 And he goes on to declare that (only) this purified sound of “objectless” words can provide a perfect expressive vehicle for the “inner” sound of emotional vibrations that the poet ought to externalize: “Here, great possibilities open up for the literature of the future.” 125 Several years before poets would start to explore these possibilities, however—­and even before Kandinsky arrived at his vision for a new kind of poetry-­to-­come—­Lipps’s theory had already been taken up in the context of another experimental practice, which, in the service of verse science rather than verse, performed operations on language that rivaled the (future) avant-­gardes in their audacity. The experimental work in question, conducted by the young American psychologist Robert Chenault Givler for his doctoral thesis and ultimately published as a monograph entitled “The Psycho-­Physiological Elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry” (1915), stands at a critical historical juncture: In pulling together many of the various strands of analysis that had formed within academic institutions in Germany, Austria, and the United States from the 1870s onward, it constructs a kind of synthesis of prevailing verse-­scientific models, at the very moment when these models were starting to be harnessed—­and polemically reconfigured—­by the poetic experiments of the emerging avant-­ garde movements. Givler embarked on his endeavor in 1907, under the supervision of another former student of Wundt’s, Hugo Münsterberg, who was directing the laboratory for experimental psychology at Harvard. The task Givler set for himself at the time—­to investigate “the effects produced by the speech elements in poetry upon both the motor and the introspective consciousness” 126—­would occupy him for almost eight years: It involved more than four years of preparatory work that served the purpose of generating a suitable set of stimulus materials, followed by three years of experimentation, from 1911 to 1914, during which the recording and mea­ suring of spoken verses yielded “nearly 300,000 bits of data.” 127 Some of these bits were of the familiar, curve-­writing sort. Others were different, for Givler sought to combine his objective, graphic records of poetically 124. Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art,” 147. 125. Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art,” 147. 126. Robert Chenault Givler, “The Psycho-­Physiological Effect of the Elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry,” Psychological Monographs 19, no. 2 (1915): 1–­132, at 1. 127. Givler, 130.

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expressive motor effects with introspective protocols in which his subjects reported upon the emotional conditions they experienced while reciting the lines. Work of this kind had also been done in Wundt’s laboratories in Leipzig, and Givler referred directly to a variety of these investigations.128 His interest was aimed at the psychological qualities—­the general “feeling-­ tone,” 129 in Wundtian terms, or “the emotional value of the sounds in poetic language,” 130 in Lippsian ones—­which the participants ascribed to the verses they spoke. Givler, however, had drawn the consequences of Lipps’s doctrine of acoustic symbolism, and Wundt’s notion of the sound gesture, in a manner that allowed him to go well beyond either of his predecessors in the interpretation of what actually constitutes a “verse.” For he began this part of his experiment by letting his subjects recite and introspect on various semantically undefined series of syllables, in order to determine their “reaction to the bare tonal elements” 131 employed most frequently in English verse. This strategy of using metrical sequences composed entirely of simple syllabic units like “la-­bo,” “la-­mo,” “la-­do,” “ne-­rol,” “ti-­rel,” etc., thus marks a new point where the methodological trend toward desemanticization—­ initiated by Brücke’s recordings of similar nonsense lines four decades earlier—­converged with the psychological focus on basic, empathetic responses to linguistic patterns. While Brücke had fabricated his meaningless verses with the objective of creating particularly apt material for the study of labial movements and their role in rhythmic accentuation, Givler’s reliance on the same principle was aimed at isolating the emotional effects of each individual sound and sound combination from all sense-­oriented in(ter)ferences. Yet Givler did not restrict this practice to foundational research on the most elementary, phonetic components of verse. For him, the separation of sound from meaning not only served the purpose of investigating “such elements combined in simple relations”;132 rather, it could also 128. The use of psychological introspection in conjunction with physiological measurements had, in fact, become the standard methodological procedure in this institutional context. For the application of this combined approach to the expressive functions of language, see, paradigmatically, Krueger, “Beziehungen der experimentellen Phonetik zur Psychologie,” 89: “The psychological conditions and relations [Zusammenhänge] of speech must be examined through systematic series of experiments in which introspection [Selbstbeobachtung] has to play an equally decisive role as in all psychological experiments.” 129. Givler, “The Psycho-­Physiological Effect of the Elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry,” 10. For an illustrative summary of some of the introspective reports obtained under this direction, see Givler 38–­42. 130. Givler, 1. 131. Givler, 1. 132. Givler, 1.

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be applied to existing poetic works by means of a technique he called “transmogrification.” 133 “Transmogrification” consisted in creating artificial, nonsensical lines out of  poems by canonical writers like Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, or Shakespeare: For a first set of experiments, Givler derived his transmogrified verses from the purely statistical frequency with which different sounds and sound combinations appeared in the work of the respective poet; a particularly characteristic “Keatsian” line, for example, would thus take the form of “Nĭ rŭl sŭ vēēd rĭ nĕst ĭt ĕl ĭth rēēn.” 134 For a second set of experiments, by contrast, specific lines were converted individually into pieces of “meaningless jargon” 135 whose overall tonal patterns matched those of the literary originals; a verse like Keats’s “One faint eternal eventide of gems” (taken from the 1818 poem “Endymion”) would in this manner be rendered as “Wŏn fĕmz ē nānj ŏv dī năl tẽr ĕn tēēv.” 136 By having his subjects recite and introspect on both these desemanticized compositions and their “normal, meaningful” 137 counterparts, Givler was able to compare the emotional responses evoked by the two sets of poetic stimuli. He thereby hoped to establish the relative degree to which the effects of a given line or poem could be attributed to its characteristic sound qualities alone. Givler acknowledged explicitly that his goal of eliminating the semantic dimension from existing verses via their “transmogrification” could not be achieved in full: Complete isolation of phonetic properties from conventional linguistic meaning had to remain an ideal, liminal case, due to the psychological fact “that the tendency to make words out of these meaningless experiments was super-­strong with nearly all of the subjects.” 138 Nevertheless, Givler believed that his research allowed him to conclude “that the sounds of poetry, especially lyric poetry, are able of themselves to arouse a mood congruous to that mood which the normal recitation of the original poem would arouse.” 139 This possibility, however, implied in turn that verses did not even need to be composed of familiar words in order to

133. Givler, 1. 134. Givler, 53. 135. Givler, 43. 136. Givler, 59. 137. Givler, 57. 138. Givler, 37. For another, contemporaneous study that arrives at similar conclusions, and whose results Givler explicitly refers to in the documentation of his own experimental work, see Louise Roblee and M. F. Washburn, “The Affective Value of Articulate Sounds,” American Journal of Psychology 23, no. 4 (1912): 579–­83, at 579: “A nonsense syllable is always likely to suggest something in the observer’s mind.” 139. Givler, “The Psycho-­Physiological Effect of the Elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry,” 108.

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achieve a certain emotional effect—­they could just as well consist of elements that were purely acoustically “symbolic” in a Lippsian sense. Givler’s experimental practice, in other words, took the scientific trajectory pursued in this chapter to its most radical conceivable extreme: Even though he did not expressly draw the conclusion himself, his research methods challenged the necessity for poetry to have any (discernible) semantic content at all. Or conversely speaking, it opened up the conceptual possibility that verse could be written exclusively with regard to a “tonal calculus,” 140 and hence according to a logic in which the applicability of different sounds and sound combinations would depend largely on the speech movements required for their vocalization.141 It is because Givler acted on this theoretical insight, even if he did not articulate it, that his work marks such an important transitional moment in the trajectory here charted, namely: the moment when a new, genuine kind of “sound poetry” began to emerge from the scientific laboratory as a result of the phonetic and psychological analysis of traditional verse. For while Givler used canonical English poems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for his studies, he simultaneously produced his own kind of verses that clearly belong to the threshold of the early twentieth. And while these verses themselves did not find any dissemination beyond the confines of his lab experiments, Givler’s account of their creation reveals how closely his technique of “transmogrification” resembles certain literary practices that would acquire prominence in the following years: To transmogrify these . . . experiments we first wrote the poem on a large card marked out in small squares, indicating the accented consonants and vowels in red ink, and the unaccented in black; the card was then cut up, a line at a time, and the transmogrification was accomplished by uniting the scattered elements again with the tonal pattern of the poem in mind and the injunction to avoid making words or suggestions of words in the tonal product that resulted.142

According to this description, the procedure of transforming longer passages from Coleridge and Keats into “meaningless jargon” took place by physically dissecting and recombining the elementary (written) sound units of the original texts. It thus effectively occurred through a process of 140. Givler, 127. 141. Among the physiological factors that determine the emotional valence of the basic “tonal elements” in poetry, Givler highlights in particular “breathiness, vigorous movement of the lips, and the employment of the ends of the tongue in articulation” (29). 142. Givler, 82–­83.

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montage that replaced the former poetic whole with another: a version quite literally recycled and glued together. To be sure, the original poem still provided the standard and measure for reassembling the cut-­up bits of its “tonal pattern,” since the whole point of the exercise was to produce something acoustically comparable to the existing verses upon which these operations were performed. Yet in combining the principle of montage with the methodological directive that “words must not be made,” 143 Givler’s “transmogrified” compositions definitively point forward rather than backward. Where José Martí, in 1883, had fantasized about adopting a technical device like the glossograph for the purposes of poetic creation, Givler’s research design three decades later introduced a new method of verse production from within the scientific laboratory, and in the process anticipated the development of another, much more comprehensive set of literary tendencies to come. His work thus forms a bridge between the late nineteenth-­century project of a “science of verse” and the beginnings of experimental modernism: Just one year after Givler published the results of his investigations in 1915, Hugo Ball would proclaim a new genre of poetry that he referred to as “verses without words,” which turned on a strikingly similar procedure of lexical desemanticization. A few years later, in 1920, Tristan Tzara published his instructions “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” which turned on the principle of cutting up existing, conventional texts into their lexical components and recombining these units at random into a new, nonsensical whole.144 Givler’s scientific technique of “transmogrification” thus found its literary counterparts in the sphere of literary production, in ways that the subsequent chapter will discuss in detail. Despite E. W. Scripture’s continuing efforts throughout the 1920s, the project of an experimental science of verse began to wane from the landscape of psychological laboratories after 1914, not least because the results that had been obtained did not prove sufficiently generalizable. Once again, Givler’s work is paradigmatic in this context as he comes close to admitting that the endeavor he had pursued for nearly eight years did not yield correspondingly large-­scale results: “It might seem to some,” he remarks rather soberly at the very end of his treatise, “that far more should have been found out concerning the psychophysics of poetry than we have to offer in the closing.” 145 Yet even if the individual findings created within 143. Givler, 58. 144. See Tristan Tzara, “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” in Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. Barbara Wright (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2016): 39. 145. Givler, “The Psycho-­Physiological Effect of the Elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry,” 130. For the remainder of his academic career, Givler would devote himself to other

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this branch of research did not reach the desired level or scope, the more general principles, methods, and ideas that emerged in its context certainly did. The ambition of anchoring poetic phenomena in the basic physiological conditions of speech; the understanding of articulatory movements as emotionally expressive gestures that could be recorded and analyzed by means of their indexical, graphic inscription; the closely related idea that the psychophysical expressiveness in question revealed itself most clearly and most powerfully where linguistic sound appears isolated from its (potential) semantic functions; the notion that poetry operates fundamentally through a mechanism of empathetic resonance: all these conceptual elements began to reemerge within the sphere of artistic experimentation from the mid-­1910s onward, where they would be regrouped under altered premises and toward other ends. While the legacy of scientific approaches to verse, in other words, continued to unfold in a context radically different from their original milieu, the general orientation toward poetry as an embodied form of expression remained alive. The goal in the following chapter will therefore be to illuminate more generally how scientific, literary, and artistic efforts contributed to, but also diverged within, a shared historical paradigm, a paradigm in which poetic expression was made—­in an unprecedented fashion—­into a matter of the articulating body itself.

areas of psychological research, ranging from behavioral studies to the investigation of ethical predispositions.

3: Mama—­Papa—­D ada Poetic Expression at the Threshold of Language (1916–­1947)

Remaking Ve r se in the Vocal Tr act In 1916, the young Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, who was stationed as an army officer in St. Petersburg at the time, published an essay titled “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language.” In this text, he traces an arc from turn-­of-­the-­century investigations into the laws of articulation—­and into the articulatory “foundations” of verse—­to the new literary practices that were beginning to take shape, during the early to mid-­1910s, in the context of the European avant-­garde movements. Shklovsky’s essay demarcates, therefore, quite precisely the historical juncture between the scientific endeavors explored in the previous section of this book, and the poetic developments that will come into view throughout the present chapter. Placing his text at this juncture, however, is meant to suggest neither any direct, clear-­cut causalities, nor a strictly linear (or even unidirectional) progression of methods, texts, and events. What Shklovsky’s essay serves to bring into view, here, is rather the circulation of a wider concern among different discursive and cultural contexts, and a constellation of roughly contemporaneous developments that all revolved, in their own specific ways, around the poetic significance of physical speech production. Crucially in this regard, Shklovsky had already begun work on his essay before the war, in 1913, upon reading Alexei Kruchenykh’s manifesto “Declaration of the Word as Such,” in which the central literary doctrine of one branch within Russian Futurism—­the notion of za-­um1—­found its earliest programmatic definition through the idea of writing poems in “a 1. The term has most commonly been rendered as “trans-­rational,” or “trans-­mental.” For a discussion of these and other possible translations, see Gerald Janecek’s seminal study Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, 1996): 1–­3.

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language which does not have any definite meaning.”2 Yet while the initial source of inspiration for Shklovsky’s deliberations lay in this Futurist proclamation of poetic renewal, the final 1916 version of his essay offers a wider, pan-­European perspective, addressing the emergence of za-­um as part of a larger cultural trend that had become manifest across several nations. The pursuit of a “trans-­rational” language, Shklovsky emphasizes, was by no means the isolated endeavor of a few writers like Kruchenykh who were seeking “fuller expression”3 outside the confines of a conventional lexicon. Rather, similar interests had taken effect in other areas of contemporary culture as well, ranging from the new popularity of scat—­“the fashion for almost totally meaningless ‘Negro songs’ ”4—­in cultural centers like Paris, to the “increasing manifestations of glossolalia” 5 in sectarian circles like the Pentecostal movement, which was flourishing in various European countries at the time. It was therefore with all of these concurrent developments in mind that Shklovsky, in the opening paragraphs of his essay, introduced his subject matter as one of broad theoretical concern. He writes: Some people assert that they can best express their emotion by a particu­ lar sound-­language which often has no definite meaning but acts outside of or separately from meaning, immediately upon the emotions of people around. The following question arises: is this means of expressing emotions peculiar only to this group of people, or is it a general phenomenon of language which has not yet been clearly understood?6

To develop a clear conception of the actual scope of this phenomenon did not mean, for Shklovsky, merely to identify the different contexts in which “trans-­rational” forms of linguistic expression could be observed. Rather, it meant to relate these manifestations to a common underlying principle of language production: to explain their existence on the basis of certain functional laws from which their significance, genetically speaking, could be derived. What Shklovsky intended to devise, in other words, was a scientifically grounded model that would establish the objective conditions to which “trans-­sense” language owed its possibility. And the strategy he 2. Alexei Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” in Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–­1928, trans. and eds. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988): 67–­68, at 67. 3. Kruchenykh, “Declaration of the Word as Such,” 67. 4. Viktor Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language,” trans. Gerald Janecek and Peter Mayer, October 34 (Autumn 1985): 3–­24, at 11. 5. Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language,” 24. 6. Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language,” 5–­6.

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chose for this purpose was to define language in terms of bodily processes of articulation. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, researchers of the preceding decades, from Ernst Brücke to Robert C. Givler, had fabricated their own desemanticized verses in order to experiment on, with, and through the articulatory movements that they deemed constitutive for (the effects of ) various poetic devices. Shklovsky, in turn, took a complementary step in his essay: Building upon a scientific understanding of articulation that had emerged from phonetic and psychological laboratories since the late nineteenth century, he aimed to elaborate a conceptual framework for addressing literary tendencies like za-­um, which were beginning to venture beyond the limits of conventional language in poetically unprecedented ways. Shklovsky’s chief point of scientific reference in this regard was the work of  Wilhelm Wundt, whose linguistic theories had found a lively reception in Russia since the turn of the century, owing in particular to a popularizing summary by the philologist F. F. Zelinsky, published just one year after Wundt’s own book on language, in 1901. Though Shklovsky appears to have encountered Wundt’s ideas only indirectly, by way of Zelinsky’s mediating account, these ideas nevertheless provided a critical foundation and foil for his attempt to turn articulation into a literary-­theoretical concept, and to apply it analytically to the role of meaningless sound in poetry and other cultural contexts.7 Shklovsky seized specifically on certain terms and principles that Wundt himself had outlined in his book chapter “Lautnachahmungen in der Sprache” (“Linguistic Imitations of Sound”), in which he turned his discussion to onomatopoetic expressions and their particular place within the evolution of language as a whole. According to Wundt’s analysis, these expressions indisputably possess identifiable, definite meanings, as examples like the bird names “cuckoo” and “crow,” or verbs like “to tweet” and “to pipe,” make immediately clear.8 Yet their existence simultaneously testifies, he argued, to a stage of linguistic development in which the relation between sound and sense has not yet become (purely) a matter of social convention, but rather remains anchored

7. For more details on this reception, see Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language,” 9n27, and Janecek, Zaum, 15–­20. Notably, the specific Wundt passages that Shklovsky refers to in his essay were translated into Russian in 1912 as part of a larger translation of  Wundt’s trea­ tise  Probleme der Völkerpsychologie (Leipzig: Wiegandt, 1911), which contains a chapter excerpted largely from his more comprehensive discussion in Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 1, Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1911). Shklovsky, however, does not seem to have known or consulted this translation. 8. See Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 329–­30.

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in a natural correspondence between the two. And it was Wundt’s account of what actually produces this natural “affinity”9—­his understanding of the underlying mechanism on which it was based—­that Shklovsky adopted and modified for his own purposes, in order to extend the explanatory scope of the Wundtian model to linguistic expressions that had no conventional meaning at all. In keeping with his overall approach to language, Wundt had addressed the phenomenon of onomatopoeia from the perspective of its origins in the dynamic activity of speech production. In contrast to the prevalent notion that onomatopoetic expressions result from a direct acoustic imitation of objects or events, he argued that any similarity between sound and referent—­as in cases like “cuckoo” or “tweet”—­was in its inception not an intended effect, but merely the byproduct of an instinctive, articulatory response to an external stimulus. In his view, onomatopoeia emerged originally from a process in which certain sensory impressions (such as the calls of birds) evoked in the human organism “a drive or reflex-­like movement of the articulatory organs, a vocal gesture [Lautgebärde] which is as adequate to the objective stimulus as is the pointing or depicting gesture of the deaf-­ mute to the object.” 10 If onomatopoetic expressions, then, appeared to correspond closely to the acoustic or other sensorial phenomena they served to name, the actual source of this correspondence had to be located, according to Wundt, in the motoric functions of the sound-­producing organs. As he put it: The sound was not produced because it bore a certain resemblance to the objective impression. Rather, it conversely came to resemble the impression because the articulatory movement from which it emerged necessarily brought about this effect. This points us towards the sound movement [Lautbewegung] of the speech organs, which generates the sound in the first place. For what is directly caused by the external impression are not the sounds themselves, but the instinctive sound movements . . . which, by expressing the subjective feelings that result from the impression, also involuntarily imitate [nachbilden] the external event that arouses those feelings. These accompanying movements [Mitbewegungen] are involuntary acts like all other original gestures; they are not, however, mere reflexes but instinctive actions in which the existing psychological arousal manifests itself.11

9. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 331. 10. Wundt, Probleme der Völkerpsychologie, 39. Emphasis original. 11. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 343. Emphasis original.

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Viewed from this evolutionary angle, onomatopoeia become comprehensible as the secondary consequence and corollary of a psychophysical process whose primary purpose lies in discharging emotional energies from the organism. The bodily movements that express a subjective reaction to a certain sensory stimulus—­movements that include “in particular the finely nuanced movement of tongue and lips” 12—­yield articulate sounds as their side effects; and these sounds, in turn, acquire an initially unintended similarity to their referent, due to the way in which the articulatory activity parallels the dynamic character of the movement-­inducing object itself. In short, onomatopoeia, in its initial stage of development, entails, for Wundt, “in no way an imitation of the sound but an involuntary imitation of the event by means of sound,” 13 which can begin to appear as an intentionally created product of acoustic mimesis only retroactively, through its recurrent, common use. By positing a general psychophysical mechanism from which the existence of preconventional linguistic expressions could be genetically derived, Wundt had produced a theory calculated to appeal to Shklovsky, who aimed to establish the widespread occurrence of “trans-­sense” language as an uncontestable, empirical fact. Yet Shklovsky also took issue with Wundt’s model, which in his view remained too narrowly confined to the explanation of sounds that originated in the organism’s response to an external reality. Whereas Wundt had restricted his focus to cases of onomatopoeia, which could be causally tied to external, physical objects or events, Shklovsky proposed to expand the perspective in the direction of a second kind of vocal gesture, which he considered to be solely indicative of internal emotional energies: It appears to us that the closest neighbors to onomatopoetic words are “words” without concept and content that serve to express pure emotion, that is, words which cannot be said to exhibit any imitative articulation, for there is nothing to imitate, but only a concatenation of sounds and emotion—­of a movement in which the hearer participates sympathetically by reproducing a certain mute tensing of the speech organs.14

In contrast to onomatopoetic expressions, which by definition maintain a close relation to sensorial phenomena, Shklovsky thus conceived of “trans-­sense” language as the externalization of inner feelings through articulatory movements—­movements whose corresponding sound effects 12. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 345. 13. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 344. First emphasis mine. 14. Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language,” 9.

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had no other source than the poet-­speaker’s own psychological condition. With this logic, he devised a means for anchoring compositions like those of the Russian Futurists (compositions that did not make use of conventional onomatopoeia but rather suspended the principle of naming identifiable objects altogether) in an elementary and essentially emotive process of personal word creation. In this regard, too, the literary examples of za-­um certainly possessed for Shklovsky a great deal of similarity with other manifestations of “trans-­sense” language that he observed in his time. However, his essay also advances the idea that emotional expression through meaningless sound coincided in the particular case of Futurist poetry with the second, aesthetic function of exposing the dynamic bodily character of speech in a pleasurable way: “In the enjoyment of meaningless trans-­sense language,” he writes, “the articulatory aspect is undeniably important. It may even be that in general the greater part of the pleasure in poetry is to be found in the articulations in the original dance of the speech organs.” 15 Two crucial claims are tightly interwoven here: First, Shklovsky supposes that poetic language as such turns essentially on the principle of making palpable the kinetic, emotionally charged sensations of linguistic sound production—­sensations that go (largely) unnoticed in all other forms of language use. And second, he suggests that this principle of aesthetic foregrounding becomes especially, indeed, “undeniably” evident in the literary practices of the Russian avant-­garde. What these practices thus bring into focus, for him, is a dimension of language that becomes fully perceptible only in the absence of semantic conventions, which govern not only ordinary pragmatic discourse but traditional forms of poetry as well.16 Shklovsky would take up this critical idea again a few years later in his book Literature and Cinematography (1923), which he wrote and published while living in political exile in Berlin. Therein, he associates the strategy of using meaningless sounds to expose the bodily movements of speech with a return to an Ur-­stage in poetry’s development: Perhaps in the original poem we are dealing not so much with a shout as with an articulative gesture, with the peculiar ballet of the speech organs. 15. Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language,” 20. 16. Shklovsky comes close here to formulating his famous doctrine of a “laying bare of the device,” whose conceptual origins are usually seen in his slightly later treatise, “Art, as Device,” from 1917. The idea that poetic language draws attention to its own articulatory basis in a sensorially palpable way—­and that “trans-­sense” poetry does so in a particularly direct, radical fashion—­prefigures from this perspective the more general notion of “defamiliarization” through which Shklovsky would distinguish literature from other forms of discourse. For his canonical formulation of this concept, see Viktor Shklovsky, “Art, as Device,” trans. Alexandra Berlina, Poetics Today 36, no. 3 (2015): 151–­74, at 162.

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Such palpability of pronunciation, the “sweetness of verses on the lips,” may also vary in the reception of a contemporary poem.17

The passage is significant for the way in which it links the (supposed) evolutionary beginnings of poetic expression to the literary developments of Shklovsky’s own time, in a move that echoes the broader trends toward primitivism prevalent among the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardes. But Shklovsky’s choice of words also indicates here that his notion of an “original dance of the speech organs” served to expand Wundt’s psycholinguistic concept of the “vocal gesture” in yet another significant direction. Whereas Wundt’s explanatory focus had remained confined not only to the phenomenon of onomatopoeia but more generally to the expressive function of articulatory movements, Shklovsky extends the model’s scope to account for “the fact that emotions can be evoked by the sound and articulation of words.” 18 Unlike other, more exclusively monologic forms of “trans-­sense” language (such as certain kinds of “ecstatic” speech), poetic sound combinations without conventional meaning served, in his view, not simply to externalize but to transmit the psychological energies from which they originated. Ultimately, then, the scientific ideas that Shklovsky adopted from Wundt led him to posit his own literary-­theoretical model of a mechanism by means of which emotional conditions could be conveyed, poetically, on the basis of their corresponding motor processes alone: The “trans-­sense” sounds of a given poem would stimulate, in his account, a process of artic­ ulatory mimicry in the recipient’s vocal apparatus, and in so doing arouse affective states that were similar, if not identical, to the ones from which they had initially emerged. Shklovsky, to be sure, presents little scientific evidence in support of this particular claim, compiling instead a series of anecdotal examples and personal observations. At one point, he even admits explicitly that he is simply presuming the existence of “some still uninvestigated close connection” 19 between the sounds of “trans-­sense” language and their (possible) emotional effects on the listener or reader. Similarly absent from Shklovsky’s essay is a closer consideration of the relation between the vocally based composition of verse and its dissemination in writing, although it is clear that his model conceptually implies a functional continuum between the two. The articulatory movements underlying a poem’s creation can be reenacted, on his assumptions, even 17. Viktor Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography, trans. Irina Masinovsky, introd. Richard Sheldon (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008): 9. 18. Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language,” 8. Emphasis mine. 19. Shklovsky, “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language,” 21.

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during the reception of its written form, in such a way that the reader’s speech apparatus silently reproduces those bodily movements to which the written characters—­via their function as symbolic signs for spoken sound—­correspond. Despite his declared ambition to anchor his discussion in empirical, objectifiable facts, Shklovsky therefore advances, in the end, a rather speculative theory of how “trans-­sense” language operates in the context of poetic discourse. This speculative theory, however, does represent the earliest attempt to address the new literary significance of “meaningless sound” from a systematic, verse-­scientific angle. And in this capacity, it testifies historically to a liminal moment in which poetic phenomena like za-­um had acquired sufficient cultural prominence to call for an analysis by means of new—­and equally “advanced”—­methodological frameworks.20 While Shklovsky himself explicitly placed the literary innovations of Russian Futurism in the broader context of scientific developments in Germany and cultural developments across Europe, the year of his essay’s publication saw the beginnings of another avant-­garde movement that would take the nexus he posited to a whole new level. Despite—­or rather, precisely because of—­this near-­simultaneous appearance, Shklovsky’s theories could not have been known to the writers and artists who gathered, in the spring of 1916, on the stage of a small cabaret in the city of Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, where expatriate intellectuals from all over Europe had taken refuge during the First World War.21 And conversely, Shklovsky 20. Shklovsky composed his essay during the same time in which he helped to establish the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOJAZ) in St. Petersburg, whose brand of Formalist inquiry into the “literariness” of literary texts would remain deeply indebted to the example of Futurist poetics. For a brief account of the foundation of OPOJAZ and Shklovsky’s role in it, see Ewa M. Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-­American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1971): 21–­33. 21. The most famous Russian émigré, of course, being Lenin, who took residence in Zurich in February 1916, just two weeks after the Cabaret Voltaire had been opened, and only a few doors down from the venue’s address at Spiegelgasse no. 1. In his diary-­based memoir Flucht aus der Zeit, Hugo Ball comments on the “strange incident” of this neighborship in an entry dated August 7, 1917. See Hugo Ball, Flight Out of  Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 117. On Lenin and Shklovsky, see Alastair Renfrew, “The Beginning and the End: The Formalist Paradigm in Literary Study,” in 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics, ed. Jean-­Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 145–­67. It has often been assumed that the founding members of the Cabaret Voltaire—­Hugo Ball in particular—­had at least some awareness of the poetic agenda of the Russian Futurists, and hence of exactly those manifestations of “trans-­sense” language that had inspired Viktor Shklovsky’s near-­simultaneous reflections. Wassily Kandinsky is thought to have served as the mediating figure in this context: Undoubtedly familiar with some early examples of za-­um, he may have shared his knowledge with Ball after they became acquainted in Munich in 1912, where Kandinsky had formed the Blaue Reiter group, and where Ball was working as a

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could not yet have been familiar with the literary, artistic, and performative practices that would emerge from this cabaret’s space and soon became associated with the designation “Dada,” under which name they would thereafter spread to several other European cities. Once again, however, the point here is not to chronicle a linear relationship that would lead “from” Shklovsky “to” Dada (or vice versa) and could be cast in terms of (direct) influence or reception. Instead, the goal is to further trace a more general process of circulation, and to show how the scientific concepts that had made their way from Germany to Russia at the turn of the century, and received an initial literary-­theoretical interpretation at Shklovsky’s hands, acquired an ever more powerful presence in a thoroughly international milieu of poetic production.22 For the Dadaists developed a whole roster of experimental strategies for envisioning, creating—­and creating art from—­material inscriptions of the speech process. The result was a radical reconceptualization of poetic language in terms of corporeal, “vibratory” forces that express themselves in “articulatory gestures,” which can in turn—­once inscribed and mediated through textual compositions—­be marshaled against the regimes of conventional language and traditional aesthetic production. Rather than striving to leave the existing lexicon definitively behind (the project Shklovsky had claimed for “trans-­sense language”), the Dadaists worked to transform the symbolic code of socially established meanings from within. And they did

theatre dramaturge. For two accounts that assume a connection of this kind, see Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999): 372n20, and Steve McCaffery, “Cacophony, Abstraction, and Potentiality: The Fate of the Dada Sound Poem,” in The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, eds. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 118–­28, at 123. 22. The Russian Futurists had occasionally referenced the physical aspects of speech production in their works. See, for instance, Kruchenykh’s treatise Phonetics of the Theater (1923), according to which it is the purpose of za-­um “to intuit an unusual sound sequence, to refresh the ear and the throat, the organs that receive and reproduce sound.” Alexei Kruchenykh, Phonetik des Theaters, trans. and introd. Valeri Scherstjanoi (Leipzig: Reinecke & Voß, 2011): 64 (this text has not been translated into English to date). Another example is Velimir Khlebnikov’s famous proto-­Futurist poem “Bo-­beh-­ób-­bee is the lip song” (1908–­9), which reflects already through its title on the corporeal dimension of vocal sound production. See Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works of  Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. 3: Selected Poems, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Ronald Vroon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987): 30. Beyond these occasional references, however, articulation did not yet play any central conceptual part in Futurist models of poetry-­ making. Shklovsky’s systematic attempt to theorize the principles of za-­um via recourse to a scientifically informed theory of articulatory movement went therefore, in this respect, significantly beyond the agenda of the literary works he cited. See also Steve McCaffery, “Voice in Extremis,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 162–­77, at 164.

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so by “returning” to the physiological workings of the speech apparatus in order to plumb the gap—­using procedures of poetic writing rather than scientific measurement—­that separates the register of conventional signification from all the other semiotic levels it simultaneously presupposes and conceals. The beginnings of this development become paradigmatically visible in Hugo Ball’s famous proclamation of a “new genre of poems, verses without words, or sound poems,”23 which he conceived and publicly presented in the summer of 1916, first at the Cabaret Voltaire and shortly thereafter at the first “official” Dada soiree held at the Zunfthaus zur Waag in Zurich. Like the za-­um poems treated by Shklovsky, Ball’s compositions revolved around a far-­reaching separation of sound from semantics, which was associated with a general notion of poetic liberation and renewal. Ball, however, went on to embed this general notion in an astonishingly specific account of the physical movements through which his “wordless” verses ostensibly took shape, and, by taking shape, became accessible to poetic writing. In a diary entry from June 23, 1916, purportedly composed directly after reciting his poems at the cabaret for the very first time, Ball offers a brief description of how he conceived his literary innovation prior to the event, by preparing the written texts that would serve him as scripts during his oral performance: “I have invented a new genre of poems, verses without words, or sound poems, in which the balance of the vowels is weighed and distributed solely according to the values of the intonation sequence [Ansatzreihe]. I gave a reading of the first of these poems this evening.”24 As regularly as these sentences have been cited in scholarly accounts, they have nearly always been considered exclusively with an eye toward the overt naming and founding gesture they serve to convey. Neither, however, can Ball’s declaration of unprecedented literary novelty be taken at face value, nor is there any reason to confine the analytic focus to his explicit but rather dubious claim of radical poetic innovation.25 For the truly new

23. Ball, Flight Out of  Time, 70. Translation modified. 24. Ball, Flight Out of  Time, 70. Translation modified. 25. Among the important precursors to Ball’s undertaking were writers like Kandinsky, Marinetti, and Christian Morgenstern, whose works were performed at the Cabaret Voltaire soon after the venue’s opening in February 1916. See Ball, Flight Out of Time, 51. Morgenstern’s poems, which had first appeared in the collection Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs) from 1905, operated in a longer tradition of nonsense verse à la Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Yet his perhaps most iconic piece, “Das große Lalula” (“The Great Lalula”)—­a text to which Morgenstern himself once referred as a “phonetic rhapsody”—­already veered in the direction of the more radical attempts at desemanticization that would become a Dadaist trademark roughly a decade later. See Christian Morgenstern, Alles um des Menschen willen: Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Margareta Morgenstern (Munich: Piper, 1962): 326.

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aspect of his proclaimed agenda emerges where Ball, in the second part of the first sentence, offers a precise description of the compositional principles that constitute his “verses without words.” The broader significance of this description for a history of sound writing lies in the way in which it ties the process of poetic creation to the articulatory externalization of bodily vibrations, and in so doing focuses attention on the underlying conditions of vocal sound production, rather than on the acoustic phenomenon of vocal sound in itself. Though Ball’s own designation of his new compositions as “sound poems” might seem to indicate a primary concern with language as disembodied audible material, he goes on to link their production to an underlying corporeal process of molding linguistic sound(s), in a move that takes him well beyond the traditional “oral” nexus of verse, voice, and song. According to Ball, the innovative character of his verses lies in the operations of calculated measurement (“weighed”) and arrangement (“balance”) that distribute sounds along the poetic sequence “solely” on the basis of their articulatory qualities, as determined by “the values of the intonation sequence (Ansatzreihe).” The peculiar term Ansatzreihe alludes, on the one hand, to the terminology of vocal music, in which the word Ansatz designates an articulatory gesture of beginning that marks a tone’s inception; and it alludes, on the other hand, to the related anatomical concept of the Ansatzrohr (vocal tract), which refers to the bodily space between larynx, lips, and nose: i.e., to precisely that area where the raw sound emerging from the lungs and vocal chords begins to take on a clearly defined, linguistic form.26 From the mid-­nineteenth century onward, phoneticians had focused their experiments on the systematic investigation of the vocal tract and its dynamic functions. Ernst Brücke, in his pathbreaking 1856 book Grundzüge der Physiologie und Systematik der Sprachlaute für Linguisten und Taubstummenlehrer (Outlines of the Physiology and System of Speech Sounds for Linguists and Deaf-­Mute Instructors), devised a new method for transcribing speech into graphic symbols that would delineate the “conditions of the vocal tract”27—­i.e., the combined positions of the articulatory organs—­required for the pronunciation of any given sound. In treatises published more closely to the time of Ball’s self-­declared poetic invention, researchers like Hermann Gutzmann and Giulio Panconcelli-­Calzia offered diagrammatic representations, or “sound pictures,” of the different articulations that take 26. The common English translation of Ball’s text, which renders the German compound Ansatzreihe as “beginning sequence,” obscures this close relation to the terminology of phonetics. See Ball, Flight Out of Time, 70. 27. Ernst Brücke, Grundzüge der Physiologie und Systematik der Sprachlaute für Linguisten und Taubstummenlehrer (Vienna: Gerold, 1856): 132.

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place inside the oral cavity, pharynx, and nasal cavity (figs. 21 and 22).28 In a manner complementary to other strategies of scientific documentation—­ such as the photographic recording of lip and tongue movements, or the application of laboratory instruments like the labiograph—­these diagrams served to render visible the internal motor processes underlying each phonetically discrete, audible unit of speech. The “dance of the speech organs,” which Shklovsky would metaphorically invoke in his 1916 essay, was here being dissected into the constituent elements—­the different poses, so to speak—­that determine the shaping of vocal sound. Seen in light of this terminology and practice, Ball’s allusion to the “placing” of the voice and the “intonation” of vowels turns out to both echo and modify key concepts of phonetic analysis that arose to facilitate the scientific writing of spoken language in the form of a sequence, or Reihe, of varying muscular states in the throat and mouth. The fact that this terminological resonance is by no means coincidental, but rather indicative of a more general orientation within Ball’s poetics, becomes further evident in the way he chose to introduce his poems on stage. According to the account in his diary, Ball had framed his performance on June 23 by reading out “some programmatic remarks” in which he elaborated on the broader purpose of his compositions.29 Though these initial remarks themselves have not been preserved, they were likely at least partially identical to the well-­known declaration that Ball would present exactly three weeks later, on the occasion of the second (documented) recitation of his “verses without words,” which occurred at the I. Dada-­Abend (Autoren-­Abend) on July 14, 1916. Scholars have variously designated this later programmatic text as Ball’s “Dadaist Manifesto,” as the evening’s “Opening Manifesto,” or even as the “First Dadaist Manifesto” more generally.30 Yet its most immediate purpose, for Ball himself, was certainly to convey the central idea behind the newly “invented” poems that were to follow. My analysis will thus take its point of departure not from the most commonly cited opening section of the text, which has so often been read as a general proclamation about the nature of the Dadaist movement, but

28. See Hermann Gutzmann, Physiologie der Stimme und Sprache (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1909): 131–­64, and Giulio Panconcelli-­Calzia, Einführung in die angewandte Phonetik (Hamburg: Fi­ scher’s Medicinische Buchhandlung, 1914): 43–­108. 29. See the entry dated June 24, 1916, in Ball, Flight Out of Time, 71. Translation modified. 30. However, none of these different names can be substantiated easily on the basis of Ball’s original typescript from 1916, which does not include any clearly identifiable title at all. See, here, in more detail the discussion of the text’s publication and reception history in my essay, “The Making of a Manifesto: Historiography, Transcription, and the Beginnings of Dada,” Germanic Review 91, no. 4 (2016): 370–­91.

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Figu re 2 1. Giulio Panconcelli-­Calzia, model of the vocal tract, in Einführung in die angewandte Phonetik (Hamburg: Fischer’s Medicinische Buchhandlung, 1914): 42

from the passage in which Ball introduces the verses he went on to recite directly afterward: I shall be reading verses that are meant to do no less than to do away with [to renounce] conventional language. Dada Johann Christian [Fuchsgang] Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada [Dalai Lama] Bible [Buddha] and Nietz­ schke [sic] [Zarathustra]. Dada hm’dada, Dada hm’dada. Dada [m]hm-­ dada. What matters is the rhythm [connection] and that it gets disrupted a bit at first. What matters is my own rhythm [my very own]. I don’t want any words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own rhythm [nonsense], and in addition vowels and consonants that [correspond to it] come from myself. If this rhythm [vibration] is seven ells long, I also want words along with it that are seven ells long. Mr. Schulze’s words are only 2 ½ centimeters long. [That is much too little for great times like these.] Here I can demonstrate [one can really see] how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels cast somersaults [simply drop the sounds, just about as a cat miaows]. Words emerge, shoulders of words,

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F igu r e 2 2. Giulio Panconcelli-­Calzia, articulatory diagram of the vowel “a,” in Einführung in die angewandte Phonetik (Hamburg: Fischer’s Medicinische Buchhandlung, 1914): 85

legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh! One shouldn’t [let] too many words [emerge]. These verses have the possibility [opportunity] to get right of all the filth [here I wanted to drop language itself ] that clings to this accursed language, as though left behind by stockbrokers’ hands that have worn off the coins. I want the word where it [ends] begins [and] where it comes into being [begins]. [Dada is the heart of words.]31

Previous interpretations of these sentences have overwhelmingly centered on the critical, negative, and even destructive aspects of Ball’s undertaking, identifying his polemic against the (ab)use of language in commerce,

31. Here and in the following, I cite Ball’s text on the basis of  his 1916 typescript, while using and frequently modifying the established English translation by Christopher Middleton, a translation that deviates in numerous details from the wording of the original source. Throughout the quoted sections, Ball’s handwritten corrections and additions to the typescript are reproduced in brackets, while crossed-­out passages and illegible elements have been omitted. See Hugo Ball, “[Das erste dadaistische Manifest],” Estate of Hugo Ball, Schweizerisches Literaturarchiv Bern (SLA), inv. no. SLA-­HEN-­D-­01-­A-­02-­b-­01, 2; Hugo Ball, “Dadaist Manifesto,” trans. Christopher Middleton, in Flight Out of  Time, 220–­21, at 221.

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journalism, and politics as the passage’s most significant element.32 The declared intention of “doing away with” the conventional words of every­ day discourse can certainly be understood in this vein, as an outgrowth of early twentieth-­century practices of Sprachkritik that had acquired new ur­ gency in the wake of the meaning-­shattering experiences of the First World War. No less important, however, is the other side of the procedure Ball envisions, which links the eradication of lexical and semantic conventions to a positively charged exploration of the processes by which articulate sound “comes into being” at all. Rather than merely attempting to undo (established) linguistic meaning, his “verses without words” would appear to tackle the question of what can happen, poetically—­and what other kinds of meaning might emerge conceptually—­when attention is focused on the making rather than the madeness of language. Ball introduces this crucial dimension of creative exploration by invoking in his statement not one but two related notions of articulation. On the one hand, he suggests that his poems serve to demonstrate how individual articulate sounds—­vowels and consonants—­can be recombined sequentially into newly created words. On the other hand, he likens this process metaphorically to an amalgamation of various limbs such as shoulders, legs, arms, and hands, which brings into view the anatomical constitution of the speaking body: its “articulate” character as a composite of different, jointed parts.33 Notwithstanding the overall playfulness of the imagery Ball employs throughout the passage, from “somersaulting” vowels to the catlike “dropping” of sounds, his dual reference to the corporeality of language production demands to be understood in terms of a quite serious, and strong, conceptual claim: the renewal of linguistic expression is here being tied to an investigation of its origins in the articulatory structure of physical movement, and to the possibility of capturing the results in a new kind of poetic writing. Ball expands on this implicit claim by portraying the poetic act, which combines articulate sounds into previously unknown arrangements, as a process of capturing, or transcribing, underlying dynamic forces: the “rhythms” or “vibrations” that Ball claims to be his very own, and to which the newly created words ought to somehow “correspond.” Ball comes close in this regard to the theories of other avant-­garde figures—­Kandinsky and Marinetti, most notably—­who had previously postulated the artistic 32. This common perception has no doubt been reinforced by Ball’s own added emphasis in his diary that, “in these sound poems [Klanggedichte] we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted.” Ball, Flight Out of Time, 71. Translation modified. 33. On this dual understanding of articulation, see also the discussion in Catherine Damman, “Dance, Sound, Word: The ‘Hundred-­Jointed Body’ in Dada Performance,” Germanic Review 91, no. 4 (2016): 352–­66, at 357–­59.

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externalization of emotional “vibrations” by means of abstract forms.34 Crucially, however, Ball also introduces the notion that the expressiveness of his newly created words could be measured and quantified in spatial terms. Here, too, his turn of phrase might initially seem frivolous: the mocking contrast between the too-­short, conventional words of the prototypical bourgeois “Mr. Schulze” and Ball’s own (desire for) longer, more original ones, links the creation of such extended vocabulary to an assertion of virility, fertility, and the (masculine) ability to procreate. Yet beyond this obvious play on the trope of phallic prowess, Ball’s text has literal—­and literally graphic—­implications. When he calls for words to become no less than “seven ells long,” in accordance with the equally extended rhythmic excitation they supposedly express, he envisions a poetic innovation that corresponds quite precisely to the new techniques of graphic transcription that arose out of the experimental analysis of poetry from the late nineteenth century onward. Whereas the conventional lexical units on printed book pages had traditionally measured at most “2 ½ centimeters,” the new scientific methods for recording and visualizing spoken verse yielded arrangements in which the resulting speech curves far exceeded the length of standard written words. A striking example of this effect can be found in E. W. Scripture’s tracing of the popular English nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” (fig. 23), which directly juxtaposes a graphic record of the poem’s vocalization with its common appearance in alphabetic writing. Within this constellation, the letters and words that make up just four short verses in the poem’s printed version (“with my little eye/I saw him die./Who caught his blood?/I, said the fish”) are pulled apart to indicate the places where each individual spoken sound has taken shape in a particular wavelike pattern, in a visual analogue to the acoustic vibrations that constitute its audible form. This conversion of speech into graph occurred on a scale that rendered the tiniest 34. For Marinetti’s conception of this process, see his manifesto “Destruction of Syntax—­ Untrammeled Imagination—­Words in Freedom,” in Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006): 120–­3 1. In contrast to the materialistic terms of Marinetti’s model, Kandinsky operates in more esoteric registers when he famously claims that, “the correct means that the artist discovers is a material form of that vibration of his soul to which he is forced to give expression.” See “On Stage Composition,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 1994): 257–­65, at 258. On Kandinsky’s influence on Ball in this respect, see also Richard Sheppard, “Kandinsky’s Early Aesthetic Theory: Some Examples of Its Influence and Some Implications for the Theory and Practice of Abstract Poetry,” Journal of European Studies 5 (1975): 19–­40, at 26–­28. On the relation between scientific concepts of vibration and perfor­ mative practices of the avant-­garde, see Mike Vanden Heuvel, “Good Vibrations: Avant-­Garde Theatre and Ethereal Aesthetics from Kandinsky to Futurism,” in Vibratory Modernism, eds. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 198–­214.

Figu re 2 3 . E. W. Scripture, partial tracing of the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?,” in Researches in Experimental Phonetics (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1906): plate IX

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fractions of time in much larger metric units (“1 mm = 0.0016s.”), with the result that the curves of a mere sixteen, largely monosyllabic words from “Cock Robin” ended up filling a table of nineteen horizontal, elongated “lines.”35 In a closely related 1907 article, “Graphics of the Voice,” Scripture comments that the requisite degree of magnification—­chosen to make the curves more easily accessible to further quantification and computation—­ yielded a vast amount of graphic material in which “a spoken vowel is often a yard long.”36 And he goes on to concede, with a subtext of innuendo that recalls Ball’s, that the dimensions produced by this method could have an overwhelming effect on the sensibilities of some observers: “As one frivolous visitor to the laboratory remarked, this [practice of magnification] is a good way to get onto a man’s curves.”37 It was thus in phonetic laboratories and their observational setups that Hugo Ball’s own notion of extending “a man’s curves”—­his vision of drawing out his sounds and words in order to match an underlying, “seven ells long” vibration—­first began to acquire a concrete reality.38 Put differently, Ball’s swaggering introduction to his newly conceived verses on stage, in 1916, finds a direct conceptual precedent in the operations that scientists, over the course of the previous decades, had performed on the lexical units of (mostly) traditional poems. To be sure, Ball did not undertake any such experiments in phonetic visualization himself, in contrast to other avant-­garde figures like Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters who would venture in this direction just a few years later. Nonetheless, his programmatic remarks quite unmistakably reflect the idea of rendering articulate language visible in the process of its bodily making. His declared intention of “demonstrating” (zeigen) this process, in a manner that would allow the observer to “see” (sehen) how individual sounds can evolve physically into new words, testifies to this orientation, as does the fact that he employs 35. As Robert Brain has suggested persuasively, it was precisely “lineation [that] made possible the rendering of verse in the periodicities of graphically recorded curves.” Robert Michael Brain, “Genealogy of ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’: Experimental Phonetics, Vers Libre, and Modernist Sound Art,” Grey Room 43 (2011): 88–­117, at 96. 36. E. W. Scripture, “Graphics of the Voice,” Independent 68, no. 3073 (October 24, 1907): 969–­ 76, at 972. 37. Scripture, “Graphics of the Voice,” 972. 38. Notably, Scripture conducted his initial research on speech curves largely during the years 1903–­6, partly as a guest researcher at Theodor Lipps’s Psychological Institute at the University of Munich. This institute was housed at the time within the university’s Department of Philosophy, where Hugo Ball would attend courses as a student in the years 1906–­7 and again between 1908 and 1910. In 1905—­a decade prior to Ball’s eventual arrival in Switzerland—­Scripture set up another phonetic laboratory in Zurich, where he spent several months before returning to the United States. See E. W. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics: The Study of Speech Curves (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1906): 5.

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similarly visual terms like “word images” (Wortbilder) and “sound figures” (Klang figuren) in a diary entry composed shortly before his performance.39 In sum, what Ball’s introductory reflections on his poems reveal is his concern with a new, more “dynamic” and “immediate” mode of poetic expression, which depends both on attending to the way sounds are physically produced and on reconceiving the way they are physically inscribed. If a contemporary scientist like Scripture based his analyses of verse records on the assumption that “the entire intellectual and emotional impression conveyed by the voice from the speaker to the hearer is contained in the speech vibration and registered in the speech curve,”40 Ball’s programmatic declaration of method insists that poetic work can proceed along similar lines: It suggests that poetic expression ought to unfold as the unrestricted transfer of psychophysical energies into, and through, the motoric process of sound production, yielding (acoustic) vibrations that can be traced back to the same structural principle as the (mental or affective) “vibrations” from which the vocal organs receive their initial impetus. Douglas Kahn has advanced the general, far-­reaching argument that the avant-­garde’s fervent interest in (figures of ) vibration yielded notions of sound largely detached from corporeality: “Because of the infiltrating and transmissive ethereality of vibrational space,” he writes, “the terrestrial anchoring of objects and bodies was largely ignored.”41 Ball’s imaginative rhetoric, however, offers a significant counterexample to this tendency, since it invokes the concept of vibration precisely in order to ground linguistic sound within the material body. And as will become clear in what follows, Ball was not alone in this endeavor. Indeed: the vibratory nexus of sound, affect, body, and writing, as envisioned here in 1916, would eventually become the heart of an avant-­garde poetic project that found its most programmatic manifestation in the proliferation of reflections surrounding the meaning—­and writing—­of the sound string “dada.”

F rom Babble to G e st ure to Word (and Back) Such an understanding of vibratory activity—­as a psychophysical, by no means purely acoustic or “ethereal” phenomenon—­turns on the idea of 39. See the entry dated June 15, 1916, in which Ball characterizes his poetic efforts in these terms, just a week before his “verses without words” premiered on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire. Ball, Flight Out of Time, 67. 40. Scripture, Researches in Experimental Phonetics, 39. 41. Douglas Kahn, “Introduction: Histories of Sound Once Removed,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-­Garde, eds. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994): 1–­29, at 15. This diagnosis would seem to apply to a writer like Kandinsky (whom Kahn explicitly cites) rather than to the avant-­garde figures discussed in detail in the present chapter.

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the poet, and by extension, the poetic product, as a single dynamic system capable of encompassing both the interior excitation of expressive, articulatory movements and the exterior, audible effects of “verses without words.” Viktor Shklovsky, in his reflections on the “concatenation of sounds and emotion” in “trans-­sense language,” had postulated a functional continuum of this kind by adopting and expanding on Wundt’s notion of originary vocal gestures, which are presumed to precede the development of conventional signification. The Dadaist treatment, it will turn out, takes this model to an extreme that effectively turns it inside out, forcing a reconsideration of the relations among its principal components. To see how this works, we need to turn first to an account of the scientific backdrop against which the poetic transformation unfolds.42 Wundt’s treatment of language in his Völkerpsychologie includes a detailed analysis of children’s speech development. This analysis describes the ontogenetic beginnings of language production as a sequence of distinct but overlapping functional stages. Writing in this context not only as a scientist but as a father who has observed his own children in the linguistic “laboratory” of the nursery, Wundt portrays the emergence of speech as a process in which the infant’s initial vocal utterances of inarticulate screaming gradually give way to other forms, or levels, of expression: first, to the appearance of sound combinations that take on a clearly defined phonetic shape, and subsequently, to the use of these sound combinations as signs that acquire referential meaning.43 42. This need not mean that the relationship between Wundt and Ball must be conceived as one of direct influence, as in the case of Shklovsky’s well-­documented reception; the question of whether, and to what degree, Ball had any detailed awareness of Wundt’s linguistic theories remains uncertain. Nonetheless, his poetic agenda of exploring “how articulated language comes into being” clearly intersects with the scientific interests of  Wundt at various points. Furthermore, there exists clear evidence that several artists whom Ball knew and collaborated with during his Zurich years—­including the choreographer Rudolf Laban and the dancer Suzanne Perrottet—­possessed some knowledge of Wundt’s brand of psychophysiology. See the discussion in Damman, “Dance, Sound, Word,” 354–­59. In his dissertation Nerve Languages: The Critical Response to the Physiological Psychology of  Wilhelm Wundt by Dada and Surrealism (University of Texas at Austin, 2010), Peter Michael Mowris suggests that Ball became deeply familiar with Wundt’s work during his time in Munich, a claim he seeks to support by citing various forms of contextual evidence, including the fact that Ball studied at the institute where Theodor Lipps was lecturing on psychology, as well as Ball’s acquaintance with Kandinsky, whose great-­uncle, psychiatrist Viktor Kandinsky, had first translated Wundt into Russian in the early 1880s. None of these biographical facts, however, offers any specific clues as to how much Ball may actually have learned about Wundt via these channels, or makes it possible to conclude whether he ever read any of Wundt’s writings himself. 43. See Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 284n1. Wundt was neither the only nor the first scholar of the period who proceeded in this manner. For other significant examples of scientists who recorded, categorized, and analyzed the speech development of their own

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Crucially, then, from the perspective being pursued here, Wundt actually identifies two separate thresholds of linguistic development, suggesting that articulation and signification need to be conceived as “two mechanisms that are completely distinct in terms of their interior and exterior conditions.”44 Articulated sound, in his view, initially emerges from the child’s vocal organs prior to, and independently from, its eventual signifying function as the acoustic substrate of recognizable words. In the earliest observable forms—­basic syllables like “ma,” “pa,” and “da,” and their endless repetition in the infant’s “babbling monologues”—­articulated speech is solely indicative of certain underlying emotional states, and it remains, apart from this expressive function, entirely meaningless.45 Building on the findings of the English psychologist James Sully, Wundt writes: The sounds ma-­ma and da-­da, observed by Sully as early as the eighth month of life, belong to the phase of pure articulate emotional sounds, a phase during which the first of these two sounds usually accompanies the crying movements, whereas the second one belongs to those utterances that the child produces, among others, while being in a comfortable mood.46

The nonreferential, nonverbal expression “da-­da” thus comes to represent, here, together with the analogous sound complexes “ma-­ma” and “pa-­pa,” a stage of speech production that exists before the emergence of language “proper.”47 As syllabic reduplications, these sounds testify phonetically to their rootedness in the repetitive nature of the child’s monologic babble; yet they also manage to confine this potentially infinite repetition progeny, see William Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes: Beobachtungen über die geistige Entwicklung des Menschen in den ersten Lebensjahren (Leipzig: Grieben, 1882); Hermann Gutzmann, Des Kindes Sprache und Sprachfehler: Gesundheitslehre der Sprache für Eltern, Erzieher und Ärzte (Leipzig: Weber, 1894); G. Stanley Hall, Ausgewählte Beiträge zur Kinderpsychologie und Pädagogik, trans. Joseph Stimpfl (Altenburg: Bonde, 1902); and, perhaps most famously, William Stern and Clara Stern, Die Kindersprache: Eine psychologische und sprachtheoretische Untersuchung (Leipzig: Barth, 1907). 44. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 304. 45. See, in more detail, Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 285–­87. On the topic of these purely expressive “babbling monologues,” see also Stern and Stern, Die Kindersprache, 147–­49. 46. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 295. Emphases original. See James Sully, Studies of Childhood (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1895): 140 and 153, for Sully’s own observations regarding the use of these expressions. 47. For other scientific records that list “dada” as one of the child’s earliest articulate utterances, see Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes, 317, and especially the extensive tabulations of different cases of infantile speech development, in Stern and Stern, Die Kindersprache, 159–­62.

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structure within the bounded structure of a mere doubling, and in doing so, they testify simultaneously to their status as articulated speech. The result is a limit phenomenon that demarcates “the very boundary where the articulate sound passes over into the word,”48 an empty yet stable form that awaits or perhaps even calls forth its eventual semantic content. This latter transition from form to word, according to Wundt, involves a shift from the natural to the conventional domains. Whereas the first evolutionary shift from screaming to articulated babbling still occurs, for him, independently of any cultural influences, the subsequent transformation of “meaningless articulate sounds”49 into signs takes place only once the infant has begun to operate within a system of established linguistic conventions. The incipient association of “ma-­ma” and “pa-­pa,” for instance, with the mother and the father, is by no means a spontaneous achievement of the speaking child, but rather an effect of socially induced learning. Once the child starts to use these expressions in their function as parental names, she does so under the semantic directives provided by her linguistic environment; she reappropriates these expressions, in other words, as elements of a preexisting, culturally defined lexicon shared collectively by a group of (older) speakers. Wundt’s linguistic theory found one of its most enthusiastic and expansive implementations in the philological studies of the Austrian-­Swiss linguist Wilhelm Oehl, whose attempts to reconstruct a protovocabulary of prelinguistic origins unfolded in strikingly close spatial and temporal proximity to Ball’s transformation of poetic practice. Oehl, who held a professorship for German philology in Fribourg, Switzerland from 1912 onward, reported experiencing “a flash of inspiration” while studying the lexical stock of various non-­European languages, which led to his inquiries into a phenomenon he would eventually come to designate “elementary word creation.”50 Oehl completed the first part of this research in the spring of 1916, at the same time as the Cabaret Voltaire was operating in Zurich, and he published a first set of results one year later, in 1917. What Oehl sought to discover through his studies, which involved comparing “the material of all language families [Sprachstämme] of the world,” 51 was a universal

48. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 628. 49. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 283. 50. Wilhelm Oehl, “Elementare Wortschöpfung,” Anthropos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Völker-­und Sprachenkunde 12–­13, no. 3–­4 (1917–­18): 575–­624, at 583. Oehl’s writings received their most prominent (critical) treatment in Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie, published originally in 1934. See Karl Bühler, Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990): 235–­41. 51. Oehl, “Elementare Wortschöpfung,” 576.

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“mechanism of word construction” that could account for the similarities he had observed among these families. And what he identified as the earliest, most basic lexical structure was the articulated form of the so-­ called babbling words (Lallworte).52 Compiling extensive lists of examples drawn from written sources around the globe and throughout history, Oehl concluded that these babbling words were the “most naïve, natural, and primordial”53 forms of verbal expression, which had retained their partic­ ular sound shape and signifying function since the very beginnings of human language development. “The simplest forms, which usually appear as syllabic reduplications,” he wrote in 1917, “are the following: mama, papa; nana, tata; nana, kaka, yaya; lala; sasa. . . . In all languages of humankind, this phonetic raw material serves to designate the immediate environment and the most primitive vital activities of the child.”54 In keeping with the grand scale of his linguistic ambitions, Oehl did not shy away from imbuing his undertaking with biblical overtones, describing his work on the subject as an effort to discover, “where in the beginning was the word.”55 But he also secularized and empiricized this claim of originary revelation by situating his analyses within the explanatory framework of an “elementary parallel,” or “elementary kinship,” among all human speakers.56 What explained, in Oehl’s view, the transcultural and transhistorical universality of the babbling words he had collected and identified was the fact that the acquisition of articulate speech occurs everywhere and at all times according to the same psychophysiological laws. Seen from this angle, expressions like “mama” and “papa” that appear identically in otherwise vastly different and unrelated languages could no longer be considered in terms of purely statistical frequency; they rather needed to be understood as the necessary (by)products of the way in which any infant, during its “babbling phase,” learns to produce genuinely linguistic sound(s):

52. On this notion see also Oehl’s later treatise, Das Lallwort in der Sprachschöpfung (Fribourg: St. Paulusdruckerei, 1932): 2. 53. Oehl, Das Lallwort in der Sprachschöpfung, 6. 54. Oehl, Das Lallwort in der Sprachschöpfung, 2–­3. Emphases original. 55. Oehl, “Elementare Wortschöpfung,” 591. The reference here is, of course, to John 1:1 (“In the beginning was the word”), which takes on additional importance in light of Oehl’s repeated emphasis that he completed the first part of his project around Easter 1916. Notably, Hugo Ball invokes the same Bible verse in a diary entry dated June 18, 1916, in which he reflects on the literary “experiments” that had been carried out at the Cabaret Voltaire up until that point. Composed just a week after Pentecost, which had been celebrated on June 11, the entry culminates in the claim that the Dada group had been able “to rediscover the evangelical concept of the ‘word’ (logos) as a magical complex image [Komplexbild ].” Another five days later, Ball’s poems would premiere at the cabaret. Ball, Flight Out of Time, 68. 56. Oehl, Das Lallwort in der Sprachschöpfung, 6.

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Linguistics conceives of babbling words as words that have been formed by imitating the babble of children during the first years of life. . . . At first, the child spontaneously produces sounds, syllables, and groups of syllables that do not have any particular meaning in and of themselves, but to which the adults, i.e. primarily father and mother, attribute a meaning they deem suitable. To this category belong in particular the babbling syllables [Lallsilben] mama and papa, to which the parents quite arbitrarily ascribe the meaning of ‘mother, father,’ or vice versa. (In many languages, mama means ‘father,’ and papa means ‘mother.’)57

It is precisely this threshold status of the expression “dada”—­the dual condition of articulatory stability and semantic variability—­from which Ball’s declaration of July 14, 1916 takes its point of departure, and out of which, more generally, the specific poetic relevance of the name “Dada” emerges. In his programmatic reflections, Ball suggests that the expression, which he calls the “heart of words,” is intimately tied to the (re)making of articulate language through poetry. Following a brief and parodistic announcement of “Dada” as a “new art movement,” he writes: Dada comes from the lexicon [Lexikon]. It is terribly simple. In French, it means hobby-­horse [Steckenpferd]. In German, it means Good-­bye, Slide down my hump, See you some other time! In Romanian: “Yes, indeed, you’re right, that’s how it is. Yes, actually. That’s what we’ll do.” And so forth. An international word. [Just a word and the word as movement] Very easy to understand. [It is rather] Terribly simple.58

The opening of this declaration, with its list of (mock) definitions, reflects the three main languages in which the central protagonists of the Cabaret Voltaire communicated, wrote, and performed: German in the cases of Richard Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings, and Ball himself; German and French in the case of Hans Arp; as well as Romanian and French in the cases of Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco.59 By insisting that the expression “dada” was circulating widely among the members of different linguistic communities across Europe, Ball would appear to be suggesting that it can indeed be regarded as “an international word”: one that cut across cultural and political borders at a time when the Dadaists’ home countries were 57. See Oehl, Das Lallwort in der Sprachschöpfung, 2. Emphases original. 58. Ball, “[Das erste dadaistische Manifest],” 1; Ball, “Dadaist Manifesto,” 220. Translation modified. 59. On the cabaret’s multilingual character and its political implications, see Andreas Kramer, “Speaking Dada: The Politics of Language,” in Dada and Beyond, vol. 1: Dada and Discourses, eds. Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011): 201–­13.

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at war with one another.60 At the same time, however, this designation of “dada” as a boundary-­transcending lexical element can also be taken to suggest that its signifying function precedes and exceeds the plurality of the specific meanings it has attained in various languages. And Ball’s text further implies that this more basic and more comprehensive signifying function is closely tied to the way in which “dada” represents, as he asserts, “the word as movement.” In the notion of the (proto) word as movement lies a further significant point of intersection with the discourses of turn-­of-­the-­century psychology and linguistics, one that serves to distinguish the expression “dada” from its fellow “babbling words.” Scholars like Wundt, who observed the babble of their children in the nursery, noted the “international character” of all infant language, and concluded that the latter was “in this regard akin to gestural language.”61 But they also emphasized that this linkage between speech and bodily movement was paradigmatically present in the case of the particular sound gesture “da-­da,” whose earliest and most universal signifying function derived precisely from an accompanying manual gesture, namely: the infant’s act of pointing at the objects in her environment. In contrast to other babbling words like “ma-­ma” and “pa-­pa,” which first acquire referential meaning for the child as the conventional names for mother and father, “da-­da” was to be understood as a “natural demonstrative vocal gesture,”62 one that served to designate virtually anything of interest, and which could be found, according to the records of various observers, among the vocal utterances of German, English, French, Russian, Polish, and other children. From a linguistic perspective, therefore, “da-­da” represented the most paradigmatic case of an expression whose capacity to signify emerged originally, at the most basic level, out of the (other) corporeal movements to which it was linked. This expression consequently came to embody, in the debates around 1900, the evolutionary precondition for any (other) form of linguistic reference, insofar as acts of manual pointing were generally regarded as indispensable clues through which children learned to associate speech sounds with particular objects in the first place.63 To put it in more strictly semiotic terms, “da-­da” functioned in theories of language acquisition as an essentially indexical sign that was presumed to lay the foundation for the developmentally later use

60. For a discussion of the Dadaists’ programmatic and organizational striving for internationalism, see Timothy Benson, “Dada Geographies,” in Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada, eds. David Hopkins and Michael White (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014): 15–­39. 61. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 311. 62. Stern and Stern, Die Kindersprache, 317. 63. See Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 309.

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of purely symbolic linguistic expressions, which are bound to their referents by convention alone. Ball, too, treats the indexical dimension of “dada” as paramount. He does so, however, by starting from the opposite end of the developmental spectrum: his characterization treats “dada” as a form that has already gone through the transition from presemantic babble to lexicalization, and whose significance can consequently only be approached via the semantic functions it has attained in the context of the various existing national languages. The term “lexicon,” against this backdrop (“Dada comes from the lexicon”), refers not only to a particular, written source, like the famous dictionary in which the Dadaists-­to-­be allegedly “found” the name for their collective endeavors in the spring of 1916. It refers also, and perhaps primarily, to the spoken vocabulary used collectively by the members of a given linguistic community, the inventory of lexemes that develops as particular sound combinations are selected to signify certain objects, concepts, and ideas.64 Ball’s passage thus shifts the perspective—­in a move that runs counter to any empirical, evolutionary line of development—­from fixed semantic definitions like the French “hobby-­horse,” or the Romanian “yes, indeed,” to the dynamic, open-­ended designation of “the word as movement,” and so also to the status of “dada” as a deictic, gestural expression that might be universally applied. This reversal of the scientific order indicates a critical, yet often overlooked, implication of Ball’s poetic agenda: The kind of “elementary word creation” he envisions in his programmatic statement takes place expressly from within the existing system of conventional signifiers, via a process that works through and against a range of different, already available meanings. The inverted logic of this procedure becomes particularly evident in the passage that immediately follows the one cited above, where Ball proceeds to practice a kind of linguistic “pointing” at the various factors that define, for him, the historical context of his literary declaration in Zurich in 1916: Dada psychology, Dada Germany complete with indigestions and fog paroxysms, Dada literature, Dada bourgeoisie, and you [most beneficial, most venerated] esteemed poets [gentlemen friends], you who poetize around the naked point [you who have always poetized with words but never the word itself ]. Dada world war without end, Dada revolution without beginning, Dada you friends and also-­poets, manufacturers and testicle-­bearers [evangelists]. Dada Tzara, Dada Huelsenbeck, Dada ḿ’dada, Dada ḿ’dada.

64. The standard English translation of the passage renders the German word Lexikon as “dictionary,” which all but eliminates the term’s twofold meaning on which Ball’s text clearly plays.

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Dadá dera [mhm-­Dada], dadá-­dera [dada die] dadadera [dada dai] dada. [Dada Hue Dada Tza].65

Rather than simply listing disparate elements in a sequence that culminates in nonsensical chatter, Ball’s text here stages indexical reference performatively by placing “dada” in direct physical contiguity to its “objects,” thus using it like a demonstrative pronoun that “points” at the various concepts and names it precedes. Indeed: if one considers the fact that German nationals, members of the Swiss bourgeoisie, war refugees, poets, and Ball’s fellow-­Dadaists Tzara and Huelsenbeck were all physically present when he read his enumeration aloud, it becomes possible to view the passage as a ludic demonstration of how “dada” gestures beyond the other signifiers to which it attaches, and toward the different kinds of “bodies” these words serve to identify and address. A far more extensive and developed version of this play with linguistic layers can be found in the “definition” of Dada provided by Richard Huelsenbeck’s late essay “Dada Lives.” Huelsenbeck here narrates one of his many retrospective accounts of how the word “dada” was discovered, ostensibly by chance, in the spring of 1916, when he and Hugo Ball were browsing together through a German-­French dictionary. Though this account was written and published in 1936, two whole decades after Ball’s proclamation, it closely echoes the way in which Ball introduces “dada” as a poetic cipher of “elementary word creation.” And even though—­or rather, precisely because—­Huelsenbeck’s origin tale is almost certainly entirely fictional, it serves to illustrate the way in which the relationship between conventional words and vocal gestures was staged in written form, as a central focus of the movement’s literary agenda. Huelsenbeck recounts, in a style positioned somewhere between personal memoir and historiographical record: One day Hugo Ball was seated in his modest room in a Zurich tenement flat. Besides his wife, I was the only person present. We were discussing the question of a name for our idea, we needed a slogan which might epitomize for a larger public the whole complex of our direction. This was all the more necessary since we were about to launch a publication in which all of us wanted to set forth our ideas about the new art. We were conscious of the difficulty of our task. Our art had to be young, it had to be new, it had to integrate all the experimental tendencies of the Futurists and Cubists. Above everything, our art had to be international, 65. Ball, “[Das erste dadaistische Manifest],” 1; Ball, “Dadaist Manifesto,” 220. Translation modified.

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for we believed in an International of Spirit and not in different national concepts. Hugo Ball sat in an armchair holding a German-­French dictionary on his knees. He was busy in those days with the preliminary work for a long book in which he wanted to show the deleterious changes German civili­ zation had undergone as a result of Luther’s influence. Consequently, he was studying countless German and French books on history. I was standing behind Ball looking into the dictionary. Ball’s finger pointed to the first letter of each word descending the page. Suddenly I cried halt. I was struck by a word I had never heard before, the word dada. “Dada,” Ball read, and added: “It is a children’s word meaning hobby-­ horse.” At that moment, I understood what advantages the word held for us. “Let’s take the word dada,” I said. “It’s just made for our purpose. The child’s first sound expresses the primitiveness, the beginning at zero, the new in our art. We could not find a better word.” Emmy Hennings, who in those days was already oriented towards Catholicism and who, at that very moment, was busy erecting an altar in another corner of the room, came over to us. She, too, thought that dada was an excellent word. “Then we’ll take Dada as the slogan for our new artistic direction,” said Ball. That was the hour of the birth of Dadaism. The following day we told our friends, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Hans Arp what we had found and decided on. They were enthusiastic about the word Dada. And so it happened that it was I who pronounced the word Dada for the first time. I was the first to point it out and to insist that we use it as a slogan for our efforts.66

Critically, Huelsenbeck describes the word’s discovery in this passage as contingent on an act of pointing.67 “Dada” is “found,” according to the scenario he depicts, quite literally through the deictic gesture of Hugo Ball’s finger moving across the dictionary’s page, and hence by means of the very kind of bodily indexicality to which the expression, evolutionarily speaking, corresponds. As was also already the case with Ball’s declaration, Huelsenbeck’s creation story operates in clearly sexualized terms: Ball’s 66. Richard Huelsenbeck, “Dada Lives,” trans. Eugene Jolas, Transition 25 (Fall 1936): 77–­80, at 78–­79. 67. This crucial element is not yet present in the two previous accounts of Dada’s “birth,” which Huelsenbeck had published already during the 1920s. See Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada siegt: Eine Bilanz des Dadaismus (Berlin: Malik-­Verlag, 1920): 6 and 9–­10, and “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981): 23–­47, at 24.

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finger functions here quite openly as a phallic symbol that engenders the conception of the new name, with Huelsenbeck acting as a second creator (or voice) in the background, and with the dictionary serving as a kind of fertile ground (or womb), which is positioned, not coincidentally, on Ball’s lap. Ball’s traditionally patriarchal posture—­he is seated in an armchair—­is as telling in this context as the displacement of the only woman, Emmy Hennings, to the fringes of the origin scene: the event is staged as an affair of two men and their eventual linguistic progeny.68 Within this sexualized context of (exclusively) male procreation, the act of manual indication serves to highlight, connect, and contrast the two different ways in which “dada” can signify, thereby implicitly identifying this very ambiguity with the fertilizing source of the creative process. The word, as it is initially encountered in the dictionary, appears as part of an alphabetically ordered list of conventional lexemes; it is “discovered” as a written sign that Ball is prompted to read in conjunction with its accompanying semantic definition: “It is a children’s word meaning hobby-­horse.” “Dada” is thus quite literally introduced as a “babbling word” in the sense of scholars like Wundt and Oehl: as a lexical expression that derives phonetically from the infant’s first articulations (“da-­da”), but whose recorded meaning is based entirely on the social agreement that it should denote, in French, a particular object associated with children’s play. Precisely through the combined act of indexical pointing and vocalization, however—­Ball reads the word aloud—­there enters into Huelsenbeck’s text another, equally significant aspect of “dada” that would not have been documented in any existing dictionary, since Huelsenbeck’s suggestion to choose the expression as a “slogan” of artistic innovation explicitly does not depend upon the conventional meaning(s) articulated by Ball. Instead, Huelsenbeck reiterates this act of articulation (“ ‘Let’s take the word dada,’ I said”), in order to shift the focus in the following sentence from the “word” to “the child’s first sound,” and hence toward a linguistic phenomenon that lies evolutionarily before any inventory of codified lexical signs. Through this shift, Huelsenbeck arrives at a scenario in which “dada” is ultimately rediscovered as an originary vocal gesture on the basis of its common semantic definition. What he stages is thus less an act of creation than a process of reanimation, a process in which the return to “primitiveness, the beginning at zero” occurs via the mediating operations of the body. Here, too, mere sound appears not before but after the conventional word, and its identification is linked conceptually to a close affiliation between 68. For a reading that interprets this displacement in terms of a male fantasy of autonomous self-­reproduction, see Nicola Behrmann, “Scenes of Birth and Founding Myths: Dada 1916/17,” Germanic Review 91, no. 4 (2016): 335–­49, at 336–­3 7.

Pl ate 1 . Raoul Hausmann, OFFEA, 1918, poster poem labeled by Hausmann’s hand as “typographic arrangement,” print on paper, 32.6 × 48 cm. Photograph © Anja Elisabeth Witte/ Berlinische Galerie

Pl ate 2 . Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923–­24, collage and photomontage on paper, 40.4 × 28.2 cm. © bpk | CNAC-­ MNAM/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn 2021

Pl ate 3. Hugo Ball, “Karawane,” typographic montage with photograph, trial sheet for the unpublished anthology Dadaco, 1919–­20. Photograph © Israel Museum, Jerusalem/Avshalom Avital

Pl ate 4 . John Heartfield, self-­portrait with montage of texts by Ball and Huelsenbeck, trial sheet for the unpublished anthology Dadaco, 1919–­20. Photograph © Israel Museum, Jerusalem/Ofrit Rosenberg

Pl ate 5 . Harley Parker, cover design for Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications 8 (October 1957). © Estate of Harley Parker/ Estate of Marshall McLuhan

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articulatory movements and manual gesture. This demonstrative aspect of “dada” had already been present in Ball’s declared intent of showing the undoing and remaking of language through his poems; Huelsenbeck’s essay further explicates—­and literalizes—­this dimension in order to designate a point where the physiological process of articulation and an embodied form of signification can be actively seen to intersect. The point, here, is not to add yet another conjecture to the seemingly endless speculations about the name “Dada”’s historical origin, which run through scholarly accounts of past decades like a particularly tangled red thread. The point is rather to uncover the conceptual logic that begins to shape a new branch of poetic production from 1916 onward. Irrespective of the question of where the Dadaists “actually” found the word they adopted, a comparison with the language-­scientific discourse surrounding the expression “da-­da” helps to render visible several of the movement’s most far-­reaching, yet previously unregistered, claims and principles. The name “Dada,” in this view, can be seen to encapsulate a whole range of strategies for addressing and exploring the psychophysiological threshold of language. The expression marks the point of intersection between meaningless babble and linguistic signification, insofar as it is, empirically speaking, both expressive vocal gesture and conventional sign. The relationship between these two levels of meaning, however, is further mediated by a third level of indexical expression, which designates its objects in the manner of a demonstrative bodily act. “Dada” accordingly oscillates not only between the two stages of preverbal sound and signifying speech, but also between two different modes of semiotic reference: one that operates on the basis of physical contiguity, like a pointing finger, and one that is anchored in arbitrary semantic association alone. This threefold constellation of pure articulate sound, indexical gesture, and symbolic code has largely escaped the attention of previous scholarship. Though the close nexus between the literary function of “Dada” and its status as “one of the child’s earliest utterances” has often been noted—­following, once again, various leads established by the Dadaists themselves—­the more intricate interplay among the expression’s multiple semiotic dimensions has remained almost entirely unexplored.69 Yet it is only by bringing this interplay into view that it becomes possible to discern how the programmatic reflection on the word “dada,” the exploration of bodily sound production in and through poetry, and the visualization 69. See, for example, Rudolf Kuenzli, “The Semiotics of Dada Poetry,” in Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, eds. Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979): 51–­70, at 69. Kuenzli identifies the word “Dada,” due to its infantile associations, as indicative of an unequivocal striving for “childlike simplicity.”

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of both these concerns at the graphic level of various texts, all coalesced within a larger project centered around the inscription of articulatory movement. And it is, in turn, only in light of this overarching, multifaceted investment in sound writing that many key documents of Dada can be read. In what follows, I will attempt to demonstrate how such an unconventional mode of reading—­with its simultaneous focus on the visual, the corporeal, the acoustic, and the semantic—­might unfold in practice.

 dada: Reading Graphic Articul ations Huelsenbeck’s decision to so elaborately recount the episode of “dada”’s ostensible discovery, twenty years after the events of 1916, can be primarily attributed to his desire to counter various other historiographical accounts of Dada’s origins, which had appeared throughout the early 1930s—­ accounts in which the Romanian-­French Dadaist, Tristan Tzara, rather than Huelsenbeck or Ball, received credit for having “stumbled across” the expression in a dictionary.70 The dispute as a whole represents yet another late-­Dadaist exercise in generating (self-­)contradictory, self-­aggrandizing claims, and neither variant of the dictionary story can therefore be taken at face value. Tzara does, however, deserve the title of pioneer in another, far more significant respect, since it was he who first attempted to “capture” the semiotic-­gestural implications of “dada” in a corresponding typographic form. In one of the programmatic pieces from his Zurich period, published under the title “Manifeste Dada 1918” (“Dada Manifesto 1918”) in his own journal Dada, he juxtaposes the so-­called manicule—­the icon of a pointing hand—­with the text’s pivotal statement, “Dada ne signifie rien” (“Dada does not mean anything”; fig. 24). The addition of this new element, at the level of typesetting and print, deserves closer attention than it has generally received, insofar as it marks the precise point where the Dadaists’ exploration of their name’s linguistic potential begins to ex-

70. The first of these accounts was Georges Ribemont-­Dessaignes’s “Histoire de dada,” published in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1931, which closely followed Tzara’s own, self-­ aggrandizing version of the name’s origin. For an English translation of Ribemont-­Dessaignes’s text, see “History of Dada,” in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Motherwell (1981): 101–­20. Ribemont-­Dessaignes’s version was then taken up, shortly thereafter, in Georges Hugnet’s multi-­part treatise “L’Esprit dada dans la peinture” from 1932–­1934. Hugnet’s essay first appeared in English in conjunction with the exhibit Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936–­1937, where Huelsenbeck was living in exile at the time. See Georges Hugnet, “The Dada Spirit in Painting,” in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Motherwell (1981): 125–­96. For a brief account of the retrospective controversy between Tzara and Huelsenbeck, see John Elderfield, “Dada: The Mystery of the Word,” in Ball, Flight Out of Time, 238–­5 1, at 240–­41.

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F igu re 24. Tristan Tzara, “Manifeste Dada 1918,” Dada 3 (December 1918): n.p. © International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries

pand into a programmatic reflection on the materiality of their writing. The theoretical orientation toward graphic inscription, already implied in Ball’s vision of his elongated, vibratory word creations, morphs here into an innovative practice of text design which uses alphabetic characters together with other visual elements to stage the semiotic implications of “dada” in a new and quite literally demonstrative manner. Considered at the most basic visual level, Tzara’s placement of the pointing hand at the beginning of the line—­a line set off against the bulk of the text also by means of font size, bold print, and spacing—­draws additional attention to the words that follow. The icon thus serves the same function for which manicules were being widely employed in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century advertising, also and especially in printed announcements of theater and cabaret performances, and hence precisely

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within the cultural milieu from which Dada originally emerged.71 Tzara’s incorporation of the icon into the center of his manifesto is in this sense an instance of Dadaist mimicry, a practice which served to strategically inscribe Dadaist undertakings within contemporary circuits of marketing, consumption, and popular (mass) culture more generally. It is also, however, something much more and other than mimicry, for by interpolating the iconic representation of an indexical gesture into his linguistic statement about a (negative) semantic essence, Tzara manages to integrate all three levels of Dadaist semiotic reflection, for the first time, into the material surface of a specifically Dadaist form of writing. In Huelsenbeck’s fictional narrative, it is Ball’s act of pointing at the letters on the page from above, while reading them aloud, that facilitates the recovery of the child’s “first sound” from the confines of the conventional word. In Tzara’s manifesto, by contrast, the relation between indexical gesture and linguistic reduplication is inscribed into the horizontal dimension of the printed text via the typographical juxtaposition of two different kinds of signs. “Dada” morphs, here, from an expression that denotes “nothing” in and of itself into a word that attains a referential quality, inasmuch as it is framed by an accompanying act of manual designation. The sequential coupling of manual gesture and vocal utterance, in writing, points emblematically beyond the overt declaration of meaninglessness, highlighting “dada” as a word that could potentially be applied, precisely because of this lack, to virtually anything in sight. And this implied shift from an original semantic emptiness toward a signifying potential—­effectively the reverse trajectory to the one staged in Huelsenbeck’s story—­lays in turn the foundation for another, subsequent move to the list of positive meanings, which Tzara goes on to cite in the sentences that immediately follow. In an overt and parodic contrast to his initial characterization, Tzara proceeds here to identify the various ways in which “dada” does indeed signify in many different languages, including its familiar denotation in French (“un cheval de bois”) and its role as a “double affirmation in Russian and in Romanian,” both of which Hugo Ball had cited in his 1916 declaration as well. Tzara’s pioneering feat, which tied the constitution of “dada’s” (potential) meaning to the process of its typographic inscription, did not remain the only attempt of its kind. During the subsequent, post-­Zurich development of the movement, his idea would be taken up and modified in 71. See Charles Hasler, “A Show of Hands,” Typographica o.s. 8 (1953): 4–­11, at 6, for a brief discussion of this particular use in event advertising. More generally on the history of the manicule and its role in the history of reading and publishing, see William H. Sherman, “Towards a History of the Manicule,” in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): 25–­5 2.

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Figu r e 2 5. “Was ist dada?,” Der Dada 2 (December 1919): n.p., page rotated for reproduction. © International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries

multiple Dada publications, where the icon of a pointing hand—­often appearing in direct proximity to the word “dada” itself—­became a constantly recurring, eye-­catching leitmotif.72 This continuation is most visible in a little text montage that appeared, just one year after Tzara’s manifesto, in the magazine of the Berlin Dadaists, Der Dada (fig. 25). The montage—­usually attributed to the journal’s editor Raoul Hausmann, though no explicit designation of authorship was given in the magazine—­both recycles and rearranges the core elements of Tzara’s earlier design, by incorporating 72. In the context of Tzara’s own, post-­Zurich oeuvre, the most remarkable example is “Chronique Zurichoise,” in Dada Almanach: Im Auftrag des Zentralamts der deutschen Dada-­Bewegung herausgegeben von Richard Huelsenbeck (Berlin: Reiss, 1920): 10–­29. Numerous manicules can also be found in various magazines of the late 1910s and early 1920s, including Der Dada (1919–­ 1920), Mécano (1922–­1924), and MERZ (1923–­1932).

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them into a sequence of questions that are typeset in different fonts and sizes. Rather than offering any declarative statement in the manner of Tzara, the text opens by addressing the identity, or meaning, of “dada” in an interrogative mode (“What is dada?”). It then plays through a series of (im)possible definitions (“An art? A philosophy? a politics? A fire insurance? Or: state religion? is dada real energy?”), before culminating at last in a contradictory equation introduced by a typographical index (“or is it  Nothing at all, i.e. everything?”). The composition thus juxtaposes the final element of Tzara’s line (“rien”) with its semantic opposite, while simultaneously relocating the manicule in a suggestive way. The repositioning of the pointing hand to the center of the composition’s final sentence yields a syntactical arrangement in which the indexical element serves to link “dada,” consecutively, to both “nothing at all” and “everything.” The manicule accordingly gestures here, quite literally, through the (possible) lack of all significance and toward a (possible) universal applicability. Seen from this angle, the concluding qualification (“d.h.”) makes further explicit what had been implicitly encoded in the deictic element of Tzara’s programmatic claim: It spells out a transition through which “dada” passes, if only hypothetically, from semantic emptiness toward limitless meaning, in a move introduced—­and visually mediated—­by the typographic representation of an indexical, bodily act. This by-­now familiar dynamic of semantic oscillation, between a (declared) zero and an (imagined) abundance of signification, takes center stage already in Roman Jakobson’s 1921 treatment of the movement, in the brief essay “Dada” (originally published in Russian). Jakobson describes the expression “dada” in terms that closely follow Tzara’s: “It is simply a meaningless little word thrown into circulation in Europe, a little word with which one can juggle à l’aise, thinking up meanings, adjoining suffixes, coining complex words which create the illusion that they refer to objects.” 73 Curiously, however, given Jakobson’s own fascination with the peculiarities of the indexical register and the problematic of sound writing, he remains oblivious to the broader, poetico-­philosophical implications of the Dadaists’ concerns with different modes and levels of linguistic signification. On the basis of a purely “semantic” summary of their name, he even goes so far as to claim that their explorations of (mere) sound entailed “nothing new,” 74 in comparison with the Futurists who had preceded them 73. Roman Jakobson, “Dada,” trans. Stephen Rudy, in Language in Literature, eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987): 34–­40, at 37. Emphasis original. 74. Jakobson, “Dada,” 38.

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by a few years. This overly partisan diagnosis, which certainly stems at least in part from Jakobson’s close allegiance during his early years as a literary critic to Russian poets like Velimir Khlebnikov75, ignores the emphasis that Tzara (and others) place on the conditions of the passage from zero to surplus, and thus also on the formal-­material-­medial character of the transition between an initial semantic indeterminacy, on the one hand, and the playful evocation of a spectrum of arbitrarily chosen denotative functions, on the other hand. Particularly telling, in this respect, is Jakobson’s decision to use Tzara’s central statement, “Dada means nothing,” as an epigraph for his own essay, while at the same time eliminating the hand icon, which is to say: the very element on which the Dadaist meaning, or perhaps better, the poetic function, of the cited sentence actually turns.76 This same omission was later to be repeated in multiple editions and translations of Tzara’s manifesto, as well as, most recently, in a reproduction of Hausmann’s text montage “Was ist dada?” 77 In all of these cases, the manicule has simply disappeared. Such widespread disregard for the significance of the pointing hand is indicative of a relatively conventional, semantically oriented mode of reading that has long obscured a crucial facet of Dadaist writing practices. For what the Dadaists’ inscriptive techniques turn out to suggest, when taken seriously, is that the medium in and through which the expression “dada” first begins to signify—­a medium that for them has everything to do with the dimension of bodily movement—­ can itself become the “stuff ” of poetic experimentation. Typographical innovations like the quasi-­alphabetic use of the manicule arise from the desire to give graphic form to this all-­important middle ground of poetic experience, this bridge between sound and meaning, physis and psyche. The pointing hand thus points us, so long as we agree to read rather than erase it, toward a more general Dadaist principle of mediating corporeal movement through writing: a principle that extends also, and perhaps even

75. Roman Jakobson’s first major piece of scholarship was the essay “Modern Russian Poetry: Velimir Khlebnikov,” published in Russian in the same year as his brief reflections on Dada. See the (partial) English translation of the text in Edward J. Brown, ed., Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1973): 58–­82. 76. See Jakobson, “Dada,” 34. 77. See, for example, Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto. 1918,” in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Motherwell (1981): 76–­82, at 77, and Raoul Hausmann, “What Is Dada?”, trans. Kathryn Woodham and Timothy Ades, in The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): 99. This English translation is set in number of different fonts and sizes so as to approximate the overall visual effect of the corresponding German text. Curiously, however, this ambition to preserve the typographic features of the original does not extend to the hand icon, which is left out of the English version and simply “replaced” by blank white space.

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primarily, to the seemingly purely acoustic experimentation with elementary sound units in poetry. This aspect of the Dadaists’ central poetic principle can be illustrated by returning to Ball’s “verses without words,” in the form of their very first typographical rendering, which was created in 1919–­20 for the never-­realized anthology Dadaco (plate 3). The large-­scale publication project was “to represent and symbolize in its entirety,” according to Huelsenbeck, “the tendencies that we have pursued for years under the name Dada.” 78 And the proof sheet containing Ball’s “Karawane” (“Caravan”)—­arguably the most widely known, most often quoted, most frequently reissued example of what he recited at the Cabaret Voltaire on June 23, 1916—­gives graphic expression to the same body-­writing nexus that Ball’s programmatic introduction to the poems had implicitly thematized. The Dadaco design visually mediates the poem’s linguistic material through a combination of various typefaces, font sizes, and colors. But it also juxtaposes this typographic montage with the now-­famous photograph of Ball in the costume that he reportedly wore during his performances. The arrangement accordingly combines within the space of a single page both typography and photography, phonetic writing, and an indexical “record” referencing the embodied event of the poem’s original vocalization. In doing so, it effectively transforms Ball’s original reflections on the process by which “articulate language comes into being” into a reflection on the process by which this process gets (Dadaistically) written. To untangle the relationship between these two levels of reflection, it will be necessary to take a closer look at the verbal material of Ball’s poem. With the notable exception of its title, “Karawane” 79 can indeed be described as a series of “verses without words,” inasmuch as it comprises no 78. Richard Huelsenbeck to Kurt Wolff, May 4, 1920, in Zürich-­Dadaco-­Dadaglobe: The Correspondence between Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Wolff (1916–­1924), ed. Richard Sheppard (Tayport: Hutton Press, 1982): 46. The compendium Dadaco was first publicly advertised in late 1919 in the journal Der Dada. By February 1920, however, rising production costs and personal conflicts had caused the project to be abandoned, as can be inferred from a letter by the intended publisher Kurt Wolff. See Kurt Wolff to Richard Huelsenbeck, February 12, 1920, in Zürich-­Dadaco-­Dadaglobe, ed. Sheppard, 41. While the anthology itself did not materialize in print, a set of four proof sheets (of four pages each) had already been typeset by the time Wolff withdrew his support. These proofs, which Huelsenbeck would later refer to as the “ruins of Dadaco” in a postcard addressed to Wolff (see Richard Huelsenbeck to Kurt Wolff, exact date uncertain, in Zürich-­Dadaco-­Dadaglobe, ed. Sheppard, 45), have been preserved and were first reprinted in part in Motherwell’s 1951 anthology The Dada Painters and Poets. They later appeared in a complete facsimile edition in Arturo Schwarz, ed., Documenti e periodici dada (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1970). 79. The poem is alternatively also known as “Elefantenkarawane” (“Caravan of Elephants”) and “Zug der Elefanten” (“Procession of Elephants”). On the provenance and status of these

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further elements that belong as such to the standard lexicon of German speakers. It makes little sense to conclude on this basis, however, that Ball’s poetry is also “a verse without German language,”80 since even a brief glance cannot fail to detect the parts, or traces, of some existing German words within the clusters of vowels and consonants: “fant” as the last syllable of “Elefant,” “russul” as a variation of “Rüssel” (trunk), “bloiko” as a possible play on the phonemically similar verb “blöken” (to bleat), the adjective “gross” (big) that appears here as a syllabic component of the made-­up expression “grossiga,” or the exclamation “holla,” an interjection of surprise that figures twice within the sequence “hollaka hollala.” Additionally, the poem comprises identifiable elements from several other languages, such as the French adjective “joli” (pretty), “giga” as derived from the ancient Greek “gigas” (giant), “habla” as the Spanish word for speech, and various expressions that can be found in non-­European languages, including “bung” (Indonesian for “companion”), “tumba” (Swahili for “bundle”), or “kusa” (Indonesian for “elephant hook”).81 Viewed together, these elements of a truly international lexicon could be said to constitute, semantically, a scene quite in keeping with the title: The poem presents itself, according to a reading of this kind, as the quasi-­magic conjuration of an imaginary African (or Indian) landscape in which exotic animals appear to be moving along in a sort of procession, with the shouts of the beaters (“holla”) and the stomping noises of the elephants’ feet (“ba-­umf ”) forming accompanying acoustic effects. A second procession, however, layered beneath or on top of the first, undermines the possibility of such a purely semantic “decoding,” for the poem’s formal organization is characterized by the gradual, sequential disappearance of clearly signifying components. The European words that would have been noticeable to Ball’s original audience(s) are concentrated within the first five lines, while the last verses contain barely anything that would have registered as conventional language to the average listener or reader in Zurich 1916 or Berlin 1920. And the poem also systematically juxtaposes its various meaning-­bearing, lexical elements with other, “meaningless” elements that correspond to the basic syllabic units of articulate speech—­elements composed of single consonant-­vowel pairings like “ba,” different titles, see the editorial commentary in Hugo Ball, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1: Gedichte, ed. Eckhard Faul (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007): 220. 80. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 48. 81. For a comprehensive list, see the editorial commentary in Ball, Gedichte, 221. For an excellent analysis that links the multilingual discourse of Ball’s poem to the experience of geopolitical dislocation during the First World War, as well as to a corresponding effort to create a new kind of “linguistic identity” centered on particularity and difference, see T. J. Demos, “Circulations: In and Around Zurich Dada,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 147–­58.

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“la,” and, of course “da”—­which has the effect of rendering even this vanishing of the lexical dimension less recognizable. Taken as a whole, then, the poem traces a trajectory from the fully and immediately comprehensible title, through an intermediary stage of partially existing expressions, to (the approximation of ) mere sound with which it concludes. The movement that the text enacts, in other words, does not correspond to the one it is often taken to depict, but consists instead in a shift away from the conventional, semantically fixed, arbitrary sign “Karawane” toward the final, potentially onomatopoetic but otherwise meaningless element of “ba-­umf.” What Ball’s poem stages is thus first and foremost the process of words first emerging and then dissolving over the course of the poetic sequence, a process described figuratively in his programmatic reflections through the analogy between lexical elements and individual body parts (“shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words”). This dynamic effect can only be achieved in relation to the lexical stock of familiar language(s), which Ball’s composition correspondingly both invokes and dismembers. Against this backdrop, it becomes obvious that Ball’s poetic practice cannot in fact be oriented, as has so often been assumed, toward the complete suspension of conventional meaning. His “verses without words” do not promote “the romantic ideal of an original, adamic language that resides innocently in a pre-­logical or pre-­cultural state.”82 Nor is it appropriate to say that they “fail to escape an ultimate organization by the signifier,”83 since an escape of this kind is precisely not what they attempt. Though Ball expressly declared in his introductory remarks that his poems should dispense with the words of “others,” the resulting poems perform this dispensation as unfolding act rather than accomplished fact. And such an act necessarily presupposes the entire reservoir of existing signifiers as its point of departure, because without this frame of reference the critical thrust of its deconstructions would remain illegible.84 “Dada” as conventional word, as we have repeatedly seen, must precede “dada” as meaningless sound in order for the latter to acquire its peculiar mode of poetic power. It is a dynamic that finds its most emblematic expression, within the composition of “Karawane,” in the compound “anlogo” from the beginning of the seventh line, since Ball’s neologism here quite literally negates

82. Dafydd Jones, “Dada’s Radical Negation: The Declamators and Poets of Noise,” in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices in Critical Resistance (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014): 17–­ 36, at 31. 83. McCaffery, “Voice in Extremis,” 164. 84. For a reading that notes the lexical elements in “Karawane,” yet interprets the text nonetheless as an attempt to abandon conventional signification in favor of a nonarbitrary, “adamic” language, see Kuenzli, “The Semiotics of Dada Poetry,” 65–­69.

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(“an” = not, without) the very notion of the word (“logos”) on which his construction simultaneously depends. Viewed as a whole, in other words, Ball’s poem approaches the articulatory foundations of language through its transformative play on conventional lexical categories, including the Biblical and philosophical concept of “the word” as such. And the composition of the Dadaco proof sheet, in turn, takes this transformative play one step further by performing it on conventional forms of graphic expression. Considered at the most basic level, the poem’s typographic design serves to mediate between the original, handwritten scores of Ball’s presentation—­scores that are visible but not readable on the two music stands captured in the photograph—­and the intended circulation of his “verses without words” in print. At another level, however, the arrangement can also be taken to mediate between the text’s typeset appearance and the act of its bodily performance, which the adjacent picture, if only by association, invokes. This second mediating function becomes manifest especially in the combination of various typefaces, font sizes, and colors, with which the Dadaco design appears to heed Marinetti’s call for a “typographical revolution” as laid out in his 1913 manifesto “Destruction of Syntax—­Untrammeled Imagination—­Words in Freedom.” Calling for a destruction of the traditional book page with its “harmonious” organization by means of visually unified letters, Marinetti declares: “We shall therefore use three or four different colors of ink on a single page, and should we think it necessary, as many as twenty different typographical characters. . . . With this typographical revolution and this multicolored variety of characters, my purpose is to double the expressive power of words.”85 The design of “Karawane” playfully reflects, in this vein, on the task of creating an optical analogue to the “expressive,” vibratory energies that Ball had attributed both to the act of poetic creation and to the event of poetic articulation.86 And the connection between writing and body is further emphasized by the fact that one of the poem’s longest verses extends spatially into the frame of the adjoining photograph, where it is thus quite literally reinscribed within the space of the performative practices that the picture calls to mind. The variation of typographic elements 85. Marinetti, “Destruction of Syntax—­Untrammeled Imagination—­Words-­in-­Freedom,” 128. Emphasis original. 86. While Ball neither created nor (presumably) even authorized the typographic rendering of his poem for Dadaco, he had a keen interest in the visual aspects of Marinetti’s parole in libertà. Several of Marinetti’s typographic compositions were reportedly hung on the walls of the Cabaret Voltaire. Moreover, Ball chose to include Marinetti’s poem “Dune” in the anthology Cabaret Voltaire—­the first joint publication issued by the Zurich Dadaists in 1916—­in which the letters of the text sprawl in different sizes and directions across two adjacent pages. See Hugo Ball, ed., Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich: Julius Heuberger, 1916): 22–­23.

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functions here as a new kind of notational technique for capturing the dynamic, articulatory, movement-­based medium of spoken sounds, as well as of sounds that are conceived to be spoken. This play with the medial conditions of visual, acoustic, mental, and corporeal articulation, conceived as the basis for a new practice of graphic design and poetic writing, runs through the entire Dadaco project. On multiple other pages of the anthology, fragments of Ball’s poem “Karawane” appear in the manner of a recurring slogan (plate 4), always in conjunction with (parts of ) photographs that reference the corporeality of vocal sound production. John Heartfield’s self-­portrait (1919), for instance, placed in the bottom right corner of the page, emphasizes the gestural character of speech in a manner that has typically been linked to Berlin Dada’s penchant for a rhetoric of political agitation.87 The proximity of the image to the adjacent fragments (“anlogo bung / anlogo bung”) from Ball’s “Karawane,” however, suggests that the self-­portrait may well also be figuring here the acoustic-­articulatory nexus from which a Dadaist poetics of sound writing emerges. Heartfield’s image serves to situate the printed citation of Ball’s “verses without words” in graphic relation to the kind of expressive, vibratory activity that functions for this poetics as both its origin and its end: as the dynamic force that gets “expressed” at the levels of both verbal material and visual design, and which can then be “actualized” vocally in the process of live performance.

Bi r d s ong in Tr ansl ation The relationship between pre-­or extralinguistic phonations, on the one hand, and the poetic project of an articulation-­based sound writing, on the other hand, received perhaps its most radical and extensive treatment at the hands of another, not-­quite-­Dadaist author, Kurt Schwitters, who began to venture in this direction just a few years after Ball. Schwitters retained the Dadaists’ focus on elementary processes of sound production, but unlike Ball, Huelsenbeck, and Tzara in their meditations on “dada,” he did not restrict himself to human expressions, which are always at least potentially in the process of becoming language. Instead, he expanded his perspective to include other, more profoundly and more permanently

87. See, for example, Brigid Doherty, “ ‘See: We Are All Neurasthenics!’ or, the Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 82–­132, at 91–­93, and Hanne Bergius, “Dada Triumphs!”: Dada Berlin, 1917–­1923: Artistry of Polarities: Montages—­Metamechanics—­ Manifestations, trans. Brigitte Pichon (New York: G. K. Hall, 2003), 238. For an in-­depth treatment of this political aspect, see also Michael White, Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-­Garde and the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

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nonlinguistic kinds of vocal utterances: namely, the utterances of other biological species that can never—­in contrast to the babbling of children—­ develop into language in any proper sense of the word. At stake, for Schwitters, was thus a question about the relationship between articulated sound production and human language, and so also about the ability of poetry to internalize the external boundary of linguistic being. Similar questions about the relationship between animal and human forms of vocal production had already become a matter of intense debate among scientists by the turn of the twentieth century. For these scientists, as for Schwitters, it was in particular one natural phenomenon that attained prime importance in the attempt to explore the difference between human speech and its inhuman “outside”: namely, the sound patterns of singing birds. As has often been noted, Schwitters’s liaison with the Dada movement, which began as early as 1918, was by no means an uncomplicated and straightforward affair. He never became an official member of the Dadaist circles of Berlin—­partly, though not exclusively, because of his concurrent involvement with the Expressionist Sturm group. Maintaining his hometown, Hanover, as a permanent base, Schwitters proceeded to operate instead as his own “one-­man movement,”88 for which he coined the designation Merz in 1918–­19. He did, however, adopt some favored genres and strategies of Dada into his literary and artistic production, and he collaborated with various Dadaists on an individual basis, most notably Raoul Hausmann, with whom he staged a number of pivotal events such as the Anti-­Dada/Merz-­Tour to Prague in September 1921 and the MERZ-­Matinée in Hanover in December 1923. In one of the last letters he sent to his friend, in 1947, Schwitters later summarized this altogether ambivalent relationship as follows: “I was a Dadaist without intending to be one. I really am Merz. And it is Merz that composed the Ursonate, a symphonic transposition [Umsetzung] of your Dada poem.”89 Schwitters here names his major poetic work, in a gesture of simulta­ neous identification and dissociation, as an example of his liminal, not-­ quite-­Dadaist perspective, suggesting that his composition should be viewed as a “transformation,” or “permutation,” or perhaps even “realization” (the German term Umsetzung carries all these possible connotations)

88. John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985): 30. For a more recent discussion of Schwitters’s ambiguous position within and outside Dada, see also Michael White, “Dada Migrations: Definitions, Dispersal, and the Case of Schwitters,” in A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. David Hopkins (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2016): 54–­69. 89. Kurt Schwitters to Raoul Hausmann, March 29, 1947, in “Correspondance Kurt Schwitters-­ Raoul Hausmann, 1946–­1947,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art modern 76 (2001): 30–­111, at 102. Emphasis original.

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of a(nother) Dadaist text. Hausmann, too, would later emphasize repeatedly that Schwitters had begun his project in the form of vocal exercises during their joint trip to Prague, on the basis of Hausmann’s printed poster poem fmsbwtözäu from 1918, which Schwitters recited in varying ways.90 Following these initial steps, Schwitters continued to expand his composition, in writing, over the course of more than a decade, first publishing a few brief excerpts in 1923 and performing an initial version of the entire work in 1925, before issuing the final print version in 1932. In this final version—­typographically set in the manner of a score by renowned book designer Jan Tschichold—­the text of Ursonate still maintains strong continuities with its original “source,” since the letter sequence of Hausmann’s poster poem provided the material for both the “Prelude” and the “First Part” of Schwitters’s composition.91 But the text also adopts, at a more general level, the poetic principle of deforming and defamiliarizing elements from a conventional (German) lexicon, which had been associated with the name “Dada” since Ball’s performances fifteen years before.92 On the page reproduced here (fig. 26), for instance, Schwitters undertakes a variation on the conceptually pertinent adjective “primitive” by partially overwriting it with an appended reduplication (“titti”). In so doing, he combines a semantic reference to the evolutionary beginnings of human speech with the playful reenactment of the most basic forms of language production—­the kind of “primitive” sounds that had been recorded, cataloged, and analyzed by linguists of the preceding decades. Schwitters does more, however, than simply riff on an existing Dadaist strategy. For the permuted lexical elements like “priimiititti,” “tatta,” “lalla,” etc., which play on primordial expressions of articulate speech, are here juxtaposed with another type of syllabic combination (“tuii tuii tuii 90. Hausmann gives a detailed—­though unquestionably also biased—­account of the trip to Prague and the beginnings of Ursonate in his later essay, “Kurt Schwitters wird Merz,” in Am Anfang war Dada, eds. Karl Riha and Günter Kämpf (Gießen: Anabas, 1972): 63–­71. 91. See Kurt Schwitters, “ursonate,” in Das literarische Werk, vol. 1: Lyrik, ed. Friedhelm Lach (Cologne: Dumont, 1973): 214–­42. 92. It remains uncertain, however, to what extent Schwitters may have been familiar with Ball’s poetry during the time of his work on Ursonate. With the sole exception of “Karawane,” which was included in Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanach in 1920, Ball’s “verses without words” did not appear in print until 1928, when the Dutch avant-­garde journal De Stijl published four of these poems as part of a commemorative issue on the occasion of Ball’s untimely death just a few months before. See “totenklage,” “wolken,” “katzen und pfauen,” and “gadji beri bimba,” De Stijl 8, no. 85–­86 (1928): 100–­102. It was not until 1932, at a time when work on Ursonate had already been completed, that texts of both writers appeared side by side for the first time, in an issue of the avant-­garde journal Transition that included Ball’s poems “Wolken” (“Clouds”) and “Katzen und Pfauen” (“Cats and Peacocks”), as well as Schwitters’s “Lanke tr gl: skerzoo aus meiner soonate in uurlauten.” See Transition 21 (March 1932): 304–­5 and 320, respectively.

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Figu r e 26. Kurt Schwitters, “Ursonate,” MERZ 24 (1932): 183. © Kurt Schwitters Archiv, Sprengel Museum Hannover

tuii,” “tee tee tee tee”) that evokes the acoustic impression of various bird calls.93 On the surface, such sound sequences may simply appear to continue a long-­standing literary tradition of onomatopoetic imitation, which dates back to ancient times and became especially prevalent during the Romantic period, before being revived again by avant-­garde poets of the early 93. Other prominent examples can be found in the section titled “Scherzo,” which Schwitters published independently, in various versions, prior to issuing the final version of Ursonate. He also recorded the passage on gramophone twice, in 1925 and 1932 respectively. See Schwitters, “ursonate,” 228–­30.

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twentieth century.94 Yet contrary to what previous scholarship has generally presumed, Schwitters in fact moves far beyond this older, mimetic paradigm, which is centered on the idea of approximating bird calls by means of human language.95 For him, the point lies not in poetically blurring the boundary between birdsong and speech, but rather in staging their differential relation in writing. His focus is less on a (possible) acoustic similarity between these two phenomena than it is on the (actual) disparity of their underlying conditions of sound production—­and on the possibility of writing down this difference. What sets his approach apart from the traditional register of onomatopoetic expression—­and what simultaneously defines his contribution vis-­à-­vis other avant-­garde writers of the period—­is thus the way in which he turns the boundary between human language and the “language” of birds, between articulated speech and warbling, into the stuff of poetic experimentation. The question of what constitutes “articulation,” and of whether the contours of the concept can be made to appear in poetic writing, whether articulation can be graphically articulated, is one that motivates his compositions throughout his career. The specificity of this poetic approach can best be appreciated, as was also the case for the Dadaists’ project, against the backdrop of the corresponding scientific context, with which Schwitters’s experiments share so many of their principal conceptual concerns. The context in question spans the period from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and revolves around shifting ideas about the role of articulation—­together with 94. Aristophanes’s play The Birds (414 BCE) famously offers the oldest extant example of this practice, replicating the nightingale’s calls through syllabic sequences like “Tiotío tiotío tiotinx” and “Tototóto tototóto tototinx.” See Aristophanes, The Birds, trans. George Gilbert Aimé Murray (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950): 80. For a text that mocks the onomatopoetic rendering of bird calls so pervasive during the Romantic age, see Heinrich Heine, “Neuer Frühling IX” in Säkularausgabe: Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse, vol. 2: Gedichte 1827–­1844 und Versepen, eds. Stiftung Weimarer Klassik and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Berlin: Akademie-­Verlag, 1979): 11. A chief example from the context of the avant-­garde is Velimir Khlebnikov’s notion of birdsong as a kind of “transrational language” (za-­um) in its own right that can be transcribed “phonographically” in poetic form. See in particular the first section, titled “Birds,” in his 1922 text “Zangezi,” in Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. 2: Prose, Plays, and Supersagas, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989): 331–­3 2. On Khlebnikov’s “bird poetics,” which grew in part out of his own ornithological observations, see also Julia Kursell, Schallkunst: Eine Literaturgeschichte der Musik in der frühen russischen Avant-­garde (Munich: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 61, 2003): 299–­3 26. 95. See Karl Riha, “Die Sprache der Vögel: Lautgedichte und phonetische Poesie,” in Prämoderne Moderne Postmoderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995): 91–­116, at 108–­11, and Peter Demetz, “Varieties of Phonetic Poetry,” in From Kafka and Dada to Brecht and Beyond, eds. Reinhold Grimm, Peter Spycher, and Richard A. Zipser (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982): 23–­33.

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F igu re 2 7. Johann Friedrich Naumann, phonetic transcription of the nightingale’s song, in Naturgeschichte der Vögel Mitteleuropas, vol. I, part II , new ed., ed. Carl Hennicke (Gera-­Untermhaus: Köhler, 1905): 16

the writing of articulated sound—­for the understanding of purely natural, nonhuman utterances like those of avian species. The period around 1800 saw not only the flourishing of onomatopoeia in Romantic poetry, but also the first attempts on the part of scientists to identify, distinguish, and notate the typical calls of various birds. In his multivolume compendium Naturgeschichte der Vögel Mitteleuropas (Natural History of Central European Birds), originally published 1822–­1860, pioneer ornithologist Johann Friedrich Naumann made some of the earliest systematic efforts to transcribe the variable calls of singing birds like the nightingale by means of alphabetic characters (fig. 27). Though he expressly conceded that certain elements of the bird’s vocal expression eluded a fully adequate imitation in phonetic writing, Naumann compiled a comprehensive list of syllabic equivalents that were intended to represent different kinds of piping, warbling, trilling, and chirping sounds. He also arranged these syllabic sequences typographically in such a way as to align them with the conventions of poetry and (human) song. Even more striking than this formal correspondence in print, however, is the fact that Naumann’s transcript includes among the many sound variations it catalogs one of the “primeval syllables [Ursylben]”96 that linguists would later begin to count among the first and most basic elements 96. Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes, 297.

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of children’s speech, namely: the syllabic sequence “dadada,” or “dada,” which twice serves here to render legible certain acoustic patterns within the nightingale’s song. Naumann, to be sure, did not take note of, let alone discuss, this convergence himself. For him, the relationship between birdcalls and human language remained unproblematic, or rather entirely beyond consideration, since he pursued neither comparative nor evolutionary questions. And although Naumann’s notational practice—­the use of letters for recording the vocal patterns of the nightingale—­necessarily established a parallel between the writing of human speech and the writing of birdsong, this connection simply reflected for him the lack of alternative technical possibilities during the first half of the nineteenth century, and it consequently did not inspire any further semiotic reflections. The situation changed dramatically in the years around 1900, when scientists for the first time began to draw explicit comparisons between the utterances of singing birds and those of babbling children. Pursuing the question of what united these two primitive forms of vocal expression—­ and what set them apart—­researchers began to explain this relationship in terms of the corporeal process of speech production, and hence via recourse to the underlying motor functions that give vocal sound its audible shape. The focus thus shifted from the purely acoustic interest that had shaped notational techniques like Naumann’s—­whose purpose had been to write down adequately what otherwise could only be heard—­to a concern with articulatory movements. And this shift prepared the way for a new perspective on the (im)possibility of incorporating nonhuman sound like birdsong into the phonetic realm of human speech. One of the first formulations of this new perspective can be found in the short essay “On Bird Language” (1900), by the French linguist Michel Bréal. Bréal, who had been instrumental in instituting the world’s first phonetic laboratory at the Collège de France just three years before, expresses in this text his conviction that there exists a single evolutionary continuum along which both birdcalls and human speech should be viewed: The latter is, for him, in several important ways simply more advanced than the former, and studying the former may consequently, as he argues, “reveal the original state of things.”97 He insists, however, that this continuum is also marked by a fundamental articulatory rupture. Turning his focus to the phenomenon of sound repetition in birdcalls, he states:

97. Michel Bréal, “On Bird Language (to Jean Finot, editor of the Revue des revues),” in The Beginnings of Semantics: Essays, Lectures, and Reviews, ed. and trans. George Wolf (London: Duckworth, 1991): 260–­63, at 261.

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I suspect that the cause is physical. The speech organs once in movement, less effort is required to let them continue to operate until further notice. The final sound, a kind of involuntary conclusion which is noticeable in most birds’ sounds, comes from the effort required to end their chirping. Compare children: the words papa, mama (any parent knows this) have been cut off from the endless string of sounds which issue from babies’ mouths. It is not inaccurate to compare their language to a kind of warbling.98

Emphasizing here both structural similarity and developmental difference between bird and infant language, Bréal highlights the liminal status of the linguistic sounds he explicitly names: On the one hand, expressions like “mama” and “papa” unmistakably retain a reiterative character and therefore represent, as psychologist James Sully had remarked just a few years earlier, a “continuation of the repetitions observable in the earlier babbling.”99 They can still be identified, in other words, as an outgrowth (or relict) of the kind of incessant motor activity that drives the earliest articulations of children, and which likens these articulations, in Bréal’s view, to the self-­perpetuating nature of birds’ trilling or warbling calls. On the other hand, Bréal indicates that expressions like “mama” and “papa” effectively arrest the chain of potentially indefinite repetitions in the clearly defined boundaries of reduplication—­according to an “impulse to double sounds” 100—­and thereby demarcate precisely the point where human speech begins to diverge, evolutionarily speaking, from any avian sound production. Inasmuch as these reduplications are, as he puts it, “cut off ” from the continuous vocal patterns that precede them, they turn into actual, recognizable words that the speaking child can start to use for the purpose of designating “mother” and “father.” Bréal did not remain alone in his attempt to grasp the evolutionary threshold between birdcalls and human language in these particular terms. Wilhelm Wundt, in his comprehensive analysis of children’s speech development—­ published in the very same year as Bréal’s brief essay—­turns to the subject repeatedly, in order to claim that the reiterative nature of infant babble fulfills the same basic emotive function as the utterances of singing birds. He writes: 98. Bréal, 262–­63. 99. Sully, Studies of Childhood, 156. Sully explains the phenomenon of children’s babble in terms that closely parallel Bréal’s. The inclination of infants to continuously repeat the same sounds, he suggests, “may be due to physiological inertia, the mere tendency to move along any track that happens to be struck, the very same tendency which makes a prosy speaker go on repeating himself ” (137). 100. Sully, 156. Emphasis mine.

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To this stage of purely emotional expression belongs also the development of sound repetitions . . . like da-­da-­da-­da, ba-­ba-­ba-­ba, ma-­ma-­ma-­ma. The child appears to feel especially comfortable while uttering them. . . . These repetitive forms entail for the first time a certain temporal regularity of the consecutive sounds, which reveals traces of a rhythmic feeling and a pleasure in rhythmic impressions. This feeling, however, is of the simplest kind, in a manner analogous to the most basic forms of tone modulations in birds, which appear to serve a psychologically similar purpose.101

At the same time, Wundt distinguishes birdcalls and human speech even more clearly than Bréal had done as two physiologically distinct, and therefore also psychologically distinct, forms of vocal expression. Referring to the different organization of the vocal apparatus in birds and humans, he emphasizes the fact that only the latter possess “a vocal tract of very flexible dimensions, which is therefore to a high degree capable of producing articulate sounds [Lautartikulationen].” 102 Only humans, that is to say, can truly (learn to) shape the flow of respiratory air phonetically through the dynamic interplay of larynx, pharynx, and oral cavity, which yields a broad range of vowels and consonants as its effects. Birds, by contrast, are able to vocalize sounds in the musical understanding of tones (Töne) or notes (Noten) but can neither spontaneously utter nor even properly imitate articulate Laute in a genuinely linguistic sense. Consequently, it remains impossible, from Wundt’s perspective, to accurately render birdcalls by means of the alphabetic signs that serve to designate the phonetic elements of human speech. Transcriptions like those created by Naumann—­whose version of the nightingale’s song he also explicitly cites103—­can yield only vaguely similar results at best, with the broader implication that any form of onomatopoetic imitation must always and necessarily remain “highly symbolistic” 104 in kind. One of the results of this scientific position, which takes the condition of being articulated (or articulable) as the structural prerequisite for phonetic transcription, is thus the conceptual undoing of Naumann’s late-­Romantic practice of avian notation in particular, and of onomatopoetic strategies for mimicking natural phenomena in general. The principle of “recording” birdcalls with letters had lost its methodological footing by the turn of the century and continued to subsist, in the decades that followed, on the mere margins of ornithological research, while acoustic media like 101. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 287. Emphases original. 102. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 266. 103. See Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 267–­68n2. 104. Bühler, Theory of Language, 232.

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the phonograph, and later the tape recorder, came to play an increasingly central documentary role.105 When Schwitters elects to return, therefore, to the older practice of writing down the sounds of birds, the function of his experiments likewise differs starkly from those of his predecessors. Generally speaking, traditional onomatopoetic strategies are geared toward matching language as closely as possible to the kinds of sound that it is not—­toward achieving a maximum degree of mimetic proximity, by which language can effectively transcend its own boundaries in the direction of what resonates outside it. Schwitters, by contrast, does not seek to bring linguistic expression closer to the “primitive sounds” that reside beyond its limits. His concern lies instead—­and conversely—­in exploring what happens to an extra-­or prelinguistic phenomenon, like the song of birds, once it is brought into the realm of articulated speech. The initial title of Schwitters’s major poetic composition—­“Sonate in Urlauten” (“Sonata in Primal Sounds”)—­does not at all indicate, in this interpretation, an attempted return to some mystical, originary stage of vocal expression, in which speech could appear as unmediated and “natural” as the avian sounds the work invokes.106 The title signals, rather, that an encounter with the Ur of natural origins will occur here only insofar as this origin can be poetically transposed into the particular sound shapes of human language and their (typo)graphic representation. Only a productive, transpositional rather than a receptive, imitative process of inscription, in other words, can turn the fundamentally inarticulate sounds of birdcalls into the writable material of a readable poetic text. And only a process of inscription capable of reflecting on its own conditions of possibility can qualify in this context as productive: both the opening and closing parts of Ursonate consist of letter sequences that “spell out” distinct acts of (human) articulation, with the result that the entire poem is effectively contained within the spectrum of possibilities afforded by a dynamic, bidirectional interplay of vocal articulation and writing. In the case of the opening (“Prelude” and “First Part”), Schwitters phonetically transcribes his own vocal rendition of Hausmann’s printed poem fmsbwtözäu (reproducing its characters as “fmms bö wö tää zää Uu” 107), thereby creating a kind of second-­order 105. For a historical overview of these methodological trends, see Myron C. Baker, “Bird Song Research: The Past 100 Years,” Bird Behavior 14 (2001): 3–­50. For more recent scientific debates surrounding the relationship between birdsong and human speech, see Johan J. Bolhuis and Martin Everaert, eds., Birdsong, Speech and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 106. During the 1920s, Schwitters had developed his project under this working title. See Kurt Schwitters, “Meine Sonate in Urlauten,” i10 11 (1927): 392–­402. For a scientific application of the term “Urlaute,” see especially Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes, 309– ­56. 107. Schwitters, “ursonate,” 214.

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literality that serves to graphically capture the oralization of a previous cluster of typographic signs. In the case of the conclusion (“Finale”), Schwitters calls even closer attention to the role of the alphabet as a writing system, repeating it four times over, in reverse order, according to a phonetic key that indicates how the individual letter names are typically pronounced in German (“Zätt üpsiilon iks / Wee fau uu . . .” 108).The rest of the poem is composed of sound combinations that mediate between (and are mediated by) these two registers of alphabetic script and speaking voice, with the printed text functioning at once as a readable “record” of prior instances of audible sound production and as a score for further acts of recitation. The various birdlike sound patterns do not represent an exception to this rule, but rather the outer limit of its power: far from exhibiting “an impulse to imitate animal articulation” 109—­an impossibility in any case, from an early twentieth-­century linguistic perspective, once articulation has been reconceived as a strictly human phenomenon—­Schwitters’s “tuii tuii tuii tuii” and “tee tee tee tee” instead co-­opt the song of birds for human sound writing. Such poetry becomes, in Schwitters’s hands, a kind of universal matrix, or medium, into which all other sounding forms, from warbling to babble to prior Dada poems, can be transposed. The Urlaute, in this account, would be not quite Dada insofar as they are more than Dada. And Schwitters’s project of composing with them would represent less an exception to the “rule” of Dadaist linguistic exploration, with its focus on the human articulatory apparatus, than a metaexploration devoted to probing the outer limits of Dada’s inherent poetic potential. The question of the relationship among these various liminal positions and their potentials—­Dada’s position vis-­à-­vis conventional language, Sch­wit­ ters’s position vis-­à-­vis Dada—­was taken up again by Schwitters in an entirely different, retrospective tonality, from the historically liminal position of 1946. By this point in time he had been living in exile for nearly a decade, eventually taking up residence in the English village of Ambleside in 1945, where he existed in a state of personal and professional isolation. Largely deprived of opportunities for publishing and exhibiting his work, he was forced to make ends meet as a portrait painter but continued his other forms of poetic and artistic production in private. It was from this overall marginalized position that he embarked, in 1946, on a renewed collaboration with Raoul 108. Schwitters, “ursonate,” 242. Schwitters had a keen interest in developing his own pronunciation “systems,” which he pursued in programmatic pieces like “Trial Guide to the Pronunciation of W W PBD,” originally published in the magazine G in 1924 and reissued in an English translation in Form 4 (1967): 28. A later example of this ambition is the 1946 text “Key to Reading Sound Poems,” in Das literarische Werk, vol. 5: Manifeste und kritische Prosa, ed. Friedhelm Lach (Cologne: Dumont, 1973): 392–­94. 109. Demetz, “Varieties of Phonetic Poetry,” 26.

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Hausmann, which was aimed at reviving their joint undertakings from the interwar era. Hausmann, too, was residing in exile and in precarious existential circumstances, having moved to Limoges, central France, in 1944. Their collaborative project therefore unfolded exclusively in the form of an epistolary exchange from one exile to another, during which they developed the plan for a coauthored, single-­issue journal named Pin (which stands alternatively for “Present Inter Noumenal” or “Poetry Intervenes Now”).110 Featuring recent poems by both writers along with some theoretical texts on (sound) poetry, the magazine was intended to represent, as Schwitters remarked in a letter to Hausmann from February 1947, a document of “real dada.” 111 And when the publication plans failed only shortly thereafter—­the project was rejected by the intended publisher as coming twenty-­five years too late—­Schwitters reiterated once more to his friend that their undertaking was, in his view, “as necessary now as Dada was in 1919.” 112 It was in the context of this attempted reanimation, launched from a position of belatedness and solitude, that Schwitters sent Hausmann his poem “Alle Vögel” (“All Birds”), which functions like a kind of postscript to the agenda he had first pursued between the wars, in his work on Ursonate. The letter, from July 25, 1946, reads as follows: What I did is only the composition. Your fmms inspired me to write the whole sonata. I did variation [sic] of that as well as variatione [sic] of Dresden. I will write you some new poems: Um zehn nach drei Ist der Lenz vorbei. Alle Fliegen, die schon da sind, Alle Mütter, die Mama sind, Alle Herren, die Papa sind, Singen Lieder, die “dada” sind. Alle Vögel alle.113

110. For an instructive discussion of this epistolary exchange, see Isabelle Ewig, “Retour vers le futur: Présentation de la correspondence Kurt Schwitters-­Raoul Hausmann, 1946–­1947,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art modern 76 (2001): 21–­29. 111. Kurt Schwitters to Raoul Hausmann, February 16, 1947, in “Correspondance Kurt Schwitters-­Raoul Hausmann, 1946–­1947,” 99. 112. Schwitters to Raoul Hausmann, March 29, 1947, 103. Ultimately, Pin would first appear in print nearly fifteen years after Schwitters’s death, in an English-­language edition issued in 1962. See Pin and the Story of  Pin, ed. Jasia Reichardt (London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1962). 113. Kurt Schwitters to Raoul Hausmann, July 24–­25, 1946, in Wir spielen, bis uns der Tod abholt: Briefe aus fünf Jahrzehnten, ed. Ernst Nündel (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1974): 213–16, at 214.

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Composed in German but framed by correspondence conducted primarily in English, Schwitters’s poem embeds the words “Mama,” “Papa,” and “dada”—­with the latter conspicuously placed in quotation marks—­within three otherwise identical relative clauses. Thus “parallelized,” they appear as each other’s linguistic complements and byproducts, in a triangular familial arrangement that aligns “dada” with the structural position of the child. On the one hand, one may see in this constellation a late echo of Hugo Ball’s tongue-­in-­cheek suggestion, in a diary entry from April 1916, that the word “dada” should be understood in German to signify “foolish naïveté, joy in procreation, and attachment to the baby carriage.” 114 By grouping “Mama,” “Papa,” and “dada” together as a lexical family, Schwitters playfully affirms, in retrospect, their shared semantic association with fertility, progeny, and the kind of babble that emerges from the stroller. On the other hand, Schwitters simultaneously reframes these associations by linking “dada” to the singing of “all birds,” which are explicitly named as the subject of the concluding line.115 In doing so, he refers also and primarily to a much older literary source, namely: to the late-­Romantic writer August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s poem “Frühlings Ankunft” (“Spring’s Arrival”) which was composed in 1835 and subsequently canonized in the German treasury of children’s songs. The opening stanza of this well-­known text reads as follows: Alle Vögel sind schon da, Alle Vögel, alle! Welch ein Singen, Musici’rn, Pfeifen, Zwitschern, Tirelir’n! Frühling will nun einmarschir’n, Kommt mit Sang und Schalle.116 [All the birds are already here, All the birds, all! 114. Ball, Flight Out of  Time, 63. 115. An earlier version of the poem can be found on an individual sheet of paper dated Febru­ ary 18, 1944 (Kurt Schwitters Archiv, Sprengel Museum Hannover, inv. no. que 06840399). This earlier version, however, does not yet include the crucial bird-­reference in the final line, which Schwitters appended only when he incorporated the text in his 1946 letter. He later transcribed the poem in his notebook “Poems from 1918 to 1946 by Kurt Schwitters,” where it appears under the newly added title “Alle Vögel . .” (Kurt Schwitters Archiv, Sprengel Museum Hannover, inv. no. que 06835056,T,002). 116. August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Kinderlieder, ed. Lionel von Donop (Hildes­ heim: Olms, 1976): 20.

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What a singing, a music-­making, A whistling, twittering, trilling! Spring will now come marching in Will come with song and sound.]

As even a cursory glance reveals, Schwitters uses the intertextual reference to Fallersleben primarily to mark a difference—­after all, he begins his own poem with the laconic declaration that spring is “over,” thereby effectively renouncing any allegiance to a Romantic poetics of nature celebration. And whereas Fallersleben, in the middle section of his stanza, goes on to enumerate—­or in the case of expressions like Zwitschern (“tweeting”) and Tirelir’n (“warbling”) to onomatopoetically imitate—­various kinds of birdcalls, Schwitters shifts the focus of his poem instead toward the first articulate sounds in which, according to a linguist like Bréal, human speech originally distinguishes itself from the languages of “all birds.” The conventional concepts of Mütter (mothers), Herren (gentlemen) and Lieder (songs) are here quite literally reduced to their linguistic origin and most essential “being.” The mothers become “Mama,” the gentlemen become “Papa,” and the songs they sing become “dada,” a constellation that sums up, in retrospect, the broader implications of the Dada movement’s truly liminal poetics. For while the reduplication “dada” may have initially emerged, together with “mama” and “papa,” from an undifferentiated acoustic string of babble, Schwitters here emphasizes that the Dadaist project of poetic reflection, which explores the linguistic threshold from above rather than below, takes structural precedence over any such empirical beginnings. In returning to the most basic elements of speech, the songs of  Dada transcend and rewrite the evolutionary passage toward articulate sound, creating a medium within which even the vocal utterances of “all birds” can appear. The poem gestures in this direction through the syntactical structure of its verses, whose parallelism implies that “all birds”—­like the mothers and fathers listed before them—­will finally join in the singing of “dada.” Schwitters’s playful rewriting of the Fallersleben poem thus reiterates, in a comic register, the programmatic core of his interwar poetics: in “Alle Vögel” he insists, once again, that the purpose of “dada” does not (or rather, did not) lie in approximating a prelinguistic stage of birdlike warbling, but rather in the act of poetically forcing all nature to articulate itself as “dada.” Something important has changed, however, in the decades separating the Ursonate from “Alle Vögel,” for the polemically ambitious, universalist interpretation of Dada’s liminal position—­and by extension, of Schwitters’s own—­now implicitly coexists alongside a more modest, differential one. Schwitters went on to rewrite the initial German version of his poem in the language of his English exile, thereby creating a second variant of

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Figu r e 2 8. Kurt Schwitters, “Dadar,” 1947, typescript, Kurt Schwitters Archiv, inv. no. que 06840180,T Bl.3. © Kurt Schwitters Archiv, Sprengel Museum Hannover

“Alle Vögel,” which appears under the new title “Dadar” in the final typescript for Pin (fig. 28). The appended remark “rewording R.H.” suggests that Hausmann, too, was involved in the process of transposing the poem into its alternative English version, a circumstance that reflects a more general practice of mutual editing that he and Schwitters had established throughout their collaboration on the project. This collaborative transposition from German into English enacts a strategy of linguistic displacement whose historical conditions Schwitters had described in his letter dated July 24–­25, 1946: “Dear Houseman [sic]! I think, you are like me in a state that you can no more speak propper [sic] German, but do no not really propper [sic] speak any language. I for example speak three languages, the third is Norwegian. I sometimes take words from the one language to the other.” 117 As these sentences not only proclaim but performatively attest, Schwitters’s use of English was indeed somewhat improper—­and probably, at least to some extent, deliberately so, since the impropriety serves also to underscore his alienation from the whole idea of a native tongue. The shift from “Alle Vögel” to “Dadar” both articulates and reiterates Schwitters’s biographical and historical experience of dislocation between different languages, all the more so since the text appears to have received its final form from Hausmann, who was himself by that time writing predominantly in French, and who possessed an even less idiomatic command of English than Schwitters. This transposition of a transposition (from “Frühlings Ankunft” by Fallersleben to “Alle Vögel” by Schwitters, and from “Alle Vögel” by Schwitters to “Dadar” by Schwitters and Hausmann) marks the point where

117. Schwitters to Raoul Hausmann, July 24–­25, 1946, 213.

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the triumphalist liminality of Schwitters’s universal medium, his Urlaute, comes to intersect with the precarious marginality of his (and the Dadaist project’s) actual historical situation. In 1916, the appeal of “Dada” had been closely associated with its status as an ostensibly “international word,” which appeared to precede and transcend linguistic boundaries within Europe and around the world, on the basis of its relationship to the universally human origins of articulate speech. Thirty years later, the constellation has changed significantly: In the title and final line of Schwitters and Hausmann’s collaboratively produced poem, “Dada” has morphed into “Dadar,” a word that exists neither in German nor in English yet remains (or becomes) readable precisely against the backdrop of the differential relation between the two languages. The reworded English version of the text maintains throughout its series of relative clauses the grammatical structure of German, placing in each case the verb form “are” at the end of the sentence and verse. The effect is a sequential progression that leads, over the course of the last three lines, from “daddies are” to “dada are” to the concluding element of “Dadar,” which contracts “dada” and the present-­tense plural of the verb “to be” into a single, indivisible whole. This idiosyncratic operation reestablishes the close association of Dada’s poetic endeavors with a fundamental quest for linguistic being, but it does so in the guise of a neologism rather than a universal word: an unknown verbal entity that cannot be located within any existing lexicon, and that consequently belongs rather nowhere than everywhere. Viewed together, the poems “Alle Vögel” and “Dadar” thus demarcate the historically specific position from which Schwitters and Hausmann, in the years following the Second World War, sought to reiterate their commitment to the Dadaist poetic program.118 The Pin project was driven by the goal of returning to, solidifying, and celebrating certain avant-­garde achievements of the past, which Schwitters and Hausmann aimed to render visible again, across an epochal rupture in European history that had forced those achievements (and their proponents) largely out of public sight. This endeavor, however, did not meet with any (immediate) success. In March 1947, Schwitters gave the last public performances of Ursonate on the occasion of two sparsely attended poetry recitals in London. The plans for Pin were abandoned shortly thereafter, and the manuscript would not materialize in print for another fifteen years. Hausmann, in turn, abandoned 118. See also, in this context, the various other, multilingual references to the “language” of birds that pervade the manuscript of Pin and are especially apparent in poems like Schwitters’s “Super-­Bird-­Song” and Hausmann’s “Oiseautal” (whose partly French, partly German title might be translated into English as “Bird Valley”). See Pin and the Story of Pin, ed. Reichardt, 38 and 55.

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virtually all his poetic pursuits for a whole decade. By the time he began to resume and reformulate these efforts once again, in the late 1950s, the project of sound writing had been appropriated by a new generation of postwar writers who would take up and extend, but also contest and move beyond, the literary practices of their pathbreaking predecessors.

4: Verbi-­Voco-­V isual Explorations Experimental Modernism in a Technical Age (1947–­1967)

“ Visible S peech” bet ween Body and Bit s As the plans for the journal Pin began to take shape in the letters Schwitters and Hausmann were exchanging between Ambleside and Limoges in 1946–­47, another exiled protagonist of the interwar avant-­garde, László Moholy-­Nagy, was at work on his final book, Vision in Motion. In this book, he aimed to identify the most significant achievements of the European avant-­garde movements, and to ascertain the relevance of these aesthetic innovations for the postwar era.1 The result was a compendium that surveyed developments across a broad spectrum of art forms and media, ranging from painting to photography, to sculpture, to film, to poetry, with an eye to determining their meaning for Moholy-­Nagy’s own experimental education program. This program, which he introduced in 1937 at the Institute of Design in Chicago, and which built on principles he had first deployed during his tenure at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, revolved around the premise that art must express elementary psychophysiological energies. Students at both the Bauhaus and the Institute of Design in Chicago were thus taught to creatively externalize these energies within a variety of different aesthetic media. And they were taught, furthermore, to link this focus on a “biological mechanics of emotion and expression”2 to

1. Crucially, in this context, it was Moholy-­Nagy who facilitated the renewed collaboration between Schwitters and Hausmann, who had been out of contact since the late 1930s. From his own exile in Chicago, Moholy-­Nagy wrote to Hausmann in the summer of 1946 and provided him with Schwitters’s then-­current address in England, which prompted the revival of the correspondence between the two émigrés, and by extension their plans for a joint publication. See Raoul Hausmann to Kurt Schwitters, June 15, 1946, in “Correspondance Kurt Schwitters-­Raoul Hausmann, 1946–­1947,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art modern 76 (2001): 30. 2. László Moholy-­Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947): 320.

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a critical reflection on the social conditions that shape the prevailing semiotic codes of artistic production and everyday communication. In Moholy-­Nagy’s view, the poetic creations of Dada embodied this twofold orientation in a paradigmatic fashion, since they combined a profound interest in the original, corporeally based mechanism of sound-­making (which derives its “elementary phonetic power”3 from the organism’s inner vibratory energies) with an emphasis on processes of socially based, lexical semiosis (which endows articulate sound with context-­dependent meaning). The poems of writers like Ball and Schwitters held a privileged status for him as models for the kinds of student exercises he documents at the end of his book, which consisted in transforming conventional sentences into material for “inventive visual and acoustic combinations.”4 The hope was that the educational task of literary “word modulation” 5 specifically, and the institutionalized pedagogical curriculum of cultivating individual expressive capabilities more generally, might foster novel kinds of social relationships among the participating subjects, and in doing so contribute aesthetically to the making of a new postwar world. Moholy-­Nagy was far from alone in his attempt to harness the power of the avant-­garde for postwar purposes. The period of the 1950s and 60s generated a broad range of other, similar efforts on the part of a younger generation of writers, who began to reconsider—­and indeed, reappropriate—­ various avant-­garde techniques that had been introduced two to three decades before. The focus of the following chapter is on the question of what exactly happened, in the context of this more general remobilization, to the project of an articulatory sound writing, which gets taken up again, modified, and ultimately challenged against the backdrop of a new scientific paradigm, which itself takes up again, modifies, and ultimately challenges the older paradigm of psychophysiological articulation. This new scientific paradigm began to develop in American laboratories of the 1940s and 50s, via a return to the psychophysiological project of “visible speech.” And it developed, furthermore, in close conjunction with the emergence of information theory, which yielded fundamentally different analytic approaches to the most basic articulable units of the language stream, to the foundations of speech, and thus also to the structural conditions inherent to poetry. In the context of this scientific shift, the question of poetic “essence” was rearticulated once more through the gesture of returning to an irreducible empirical substrate, and it was paired with the notion that such 3. Moholy-­Nagy, 326. 4. Moholy-­Nagy, 355. On the particular significance of Ball and Schwitters, see Moholy-­Nagy, 316–­19 and 325–­26. 5. See Moholy-­Nagy, 354.

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a return would enable poetry itself to advance beyond its (avant-­garde) past and toward another (neo-­avant-­garde) future. Moholy-­Nagy’s Vision in Motion included a host of literary examples that were quoted at length or in their entirety, and it therefore functioned much like an anthology of avant-­garde texts—­many of which had once appeared (if at all) in remote, small-­print-­run editions and journals, before being banned from public circulation entirely under the Nazi regime. The rediscovery of avant-­garde literary techniques as a model for future poetic activity turned out to go hand in hand, in other words, with the emergence of a new, archival impetus, which aimed to produce a semiofficial historical record of such techniques. A few years later, the project of editorial preservation and historiographical documentation took the much more explicit form of an extensive collection, The Dada Painters and Poets, put together by the young American painter Robert Motherwell in 1951, which also provided the first English translations for many of its materials.6 The book incorporates a broad spectrum of literary genres and visual art forms, ranging from the typographic arrangements of the Dadaco trial sheets and photomontages like Hausmann’s Synthetisches Cino der Malerei, to manifestos by Tristan Tzara and André Breton, to autobiographical accounts like Huelsenbeck’s essay “Dada Lives” and excerpts from Hugo Ball’s diary-­ based memoir. It also features a formerly unpublished piece from the Pin project, Raoul Hausmann’s sound poem “Birdlike.” Due to its expansive character—­and its close institutional connection, via the publishers Wittenborn and Schultz, to the art scene of postwar New York—­Motherwell’s anthology precipitated a widespread rediscovery of Dada among North American artists and writers. The historicizing gesture of assembling a representative overview, which Motherwell explicitly designed to familiarize his contemporaries with a past period of literary and artistic experimentation, thus also paved the way for the rise of several future-­oriented, neo-­ avant-­garde writing practices. A prominent figure whose work heralds the beginnings of this new postwar phase of sound writing is the American poet Charles Olson. Though Olson explicitly invoked only English-­language predecessors like Pound and Williams, his poetic agenda actually overlaps quite significantly with that of the European avant-­garde, since he too sought to use verse to explore the 6. See The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951). Motherwell’s anthology first appeared as part of the Documents of  Modern Art series of the New York art booksellers George Wittenborn and Heinz Schultz, a venue for which Motherwell also served as the general editor. The book was reissued in a new edition in 1967, at a time when public and scholarly interest in the avant-­garde was starting to develop on a broader scale. It has since been reprinted various times as a Harvard UP paperback, and remains a critical, often-­ referenced sourcebook to date.

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articulatory roots of language. And though Olson’s efforts in this vein may seem in some respects less radical than those of his European forebears from Shklovsky and Ball onward—­since he continues to rely primarily on conventional verbal material—­he nevertheless manages to push the shared agenda in a fundamentally new direction: by tying the techniques of poetic articulation more firmly than ever before to the technologies of their mechanical registration. The primary reason, then, why Olson deserves prominent treatment in the present context is not simply that he developed a poetics centered on an engagement with sound, speech, and the body; for concerns with corporeality would shape the activities of a broader range of experimental poets in various countries—­from England to France to Italy to Canada—­over several decades to come.7 The particular relevance of Olson’s contribution derives, rather, from the way he conceived the nexus between physical sound production and graphic inscription, which will function here as a mediating link both to scientific debates of the postwar period and to the subsequent development of sound writing during the 1950s and 60s, in the works of pertinent figures like Carlfriedrich Claus, Franz Mon, Raoul Hausmann, and Ernst Jandl. Olson served on the faculty of Black Mountain College from 1948 onward, where his colleagues included various members of the European interwar avant-­garde (among them former Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius and Josef Albers) as well as American artists of his own generation, such as Robert Motherwell and John Cage. In 1953, Olson succeeded Albers as rector of the college, and Albers’s experimental model of unrestrained artistic (self-­)education also left an unmistakable mark on Olson’s own poetic theory and practice, prompting him to place new emphasis on the vocal performance of his works: Olson’s Albers-­influenced “notion of composition as process”8 went on to influence much subsequent American literary activity.9 Both aspects of this new focus—­on orality and on the 7. Notable figures in this context include Bob Cobbing in Britain, Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck in France, Arrigo Lora Totino and Giovanni Fontana in Italy, and bpNichol and Steve McCaffery in Canada, among many others. For an excellent survey of various examples from the postwar era to the present, see Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, eds., The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 8. Johanna Drucker, “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 131–­61, at 157. 9. For a brief account of the institutional history of Black Mountain College and Olson’s role in it, see Kaplan Harris, “Black Mountain Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, ed. Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 155–­66, at 156–­59. For some recent treatments of Olson’s poetics and its broader literary contexts, see David Herd, “From Olson’s Breath to Spicer’s Gait,” in Contemporary Olson, ed. David Herd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015): 77–­88, and, with a particular focus on embodiment and selfhood, Mark Byers, Charles Olson and American Modernism: The Practice of the

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dynamic act of making the poem, in the etymological sense of poiesis—­ are closely intertwined in the conceptual framework of Olson’s landmark manifesto “Projective Verse,” first published in Poetry New York in 1950. If Olson’s work within the pedagogical context of Black Mountain College functioned generally as the catalyst for a new phase of avant-­gardism in the United States, his manifesto quickly assumed the more specific role of “a cornerstone of avant-­garde poetics, perhaps the key theoretical statement in defense of the ‘new poetry.’ ” 10 This reception certainly had at least partially to do with his rhetorical staging of the text’s contemporary moment as a pivotal turning point in the history of poetic production. The manifesto’s opening sentence declares that the poetry of the present, if it is to once again assume its rightful position at the forefront of cultural development, faces the peculiar challenge of forging a path back toward the foundations of its future relevance: “Verse now, in 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up, and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as his listenings.” 11 For Olson, therefore, the poet’s foremost obligation lies in disclosing the possibilities embedded “in his physiology,” 12 which he can accomplish by descending “down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from,” 13 and by creating a kind of feedback loop between expiration and hearing that channels bodily energy into the poem’s gradual creation. It is the enactment of this vertically conceived process of “speak[ing] from the roots” 14 that allows verse “to advance to its proper force and place,” 15 by propelling it forward on its trajectory across a horizontally conceived plane, or “field,” of compositional possibilities. The shift of focus toward the biological source of (oral) expression serves to recapture “all the speech-­force of language,” 16 which has been compromised, as Olson further contends, Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Olson’s role in the development of poetic performance practices in North America is briefly discussed in Charles Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, 5–­7. 10. Marjorie Perloff, “Charles Olson and the ‘Inferior Predecessors’: ‘Projective Verse’ Revisited,” ELH 40, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 285–­306, at 285. In her article, Perloff goes on to deliver a scathing critique of Olson’s claim to radical poetic innovation, arguing that large parts of his conceptual framework are in fact derived from the works of the literary forerunners he expressly ventured to supersede. 11. Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Selected Writings of Charles Olson, ed. and introd. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966): 15–­26, at 15. Emphasis original. 12. Olson, 25. 13. Olson, 26. 14. Olson, 25. 15. Olson, 17. 16. Olson, 20. Emphasis original.

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by the adherence to traditional formal units and rules—­and, in particular, to metric conventions that inhibit any free flow of air from the organism into the external, “projective” space of the poem. The dynamism of Olson’s model thus hinges very clearly on a trope of corporeal reanimation, on a breathing of “life” back into the matter of poetry. Importantly, however, the breath in question is not conceived as an undifferentiated force, but rather as an inherently articulated phenomenon that takes shape in the bounded form of phonetic syllables, whose status as the “smallest particles,” “elements,” or “minisms” of speech Olson emphasizes at multiple points of his text.17 The point, in other words, is that poetry, when properly conceived, can provide access to more natural, more foundational units of language. And these more natural, more foundational units find their fullest contemporary expression, according to him, only when they are formally inscribed within the sequential arrangement of a written poetic line. Such a line “comes . . . from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes” 18; it functions as an extension of the bodily process, whose articulations it simultaneously serves to “register,” 19 and so to render visible rather than audible, upon the material substrate of paper. It belongs to the most frequently discussed aspects of Olson’s manifesto that his emphasis on the inscription of breath is framed by a historical narrative that would at first appear to suggest a clear dichotomy—­indeed, a disconnect—­between voice and writing. The cultural prevalence of script and print, he contends, has displaced embodied expression from the domain of poetry, causing “the removal of verse . . . from its place of origin and its destination”20 in the movements of corporeal speech production. Several years before Marshall McLuhan would start developing his broad claims regarding the dominance of (phonetic) writing and the printing press in the West, Olson thus names the rise of these technologies as the reason why poetic practice has become alienated from its actual source, namely, from the animate, speaking body. He then goes on to maintain, however, that this increased separation of verse from voice has reached a possible turning point, due precisely to the invention of a mechanical writing device that can be placed in the service of breath and speech: The irony is, from the machine has come one gain not yet sufficiently observed or used, but which leads directly on toward projective verse and its 17. See Olson, 17–­19. 18. Olson, 19. 19. Olson, 17. 20. Olson, 22. Emphasis original.

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consequences. It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. . . . For the first time, he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.21

Olson here envisions a phenomenon that McLuhan, referring directly to Olson’s reflections, would later describe as “a reversal of form [that] happens in all extremes of advanced technology,”22 as a process in which a tool devised initially for purely typographic purposes can start to produce “opposite oral effects.”23 But the significance of the typewriter, for Olson, does not lie primarily in its ability to effect such a reversal. Both Olson’s cultivation of a new “freedom of oral stress,”24 on which McLuhan and many subsequent commentators place their focus, and his equally influential proposal for transmitting vocal energies from poet to reader via the use of expiratory “spacing” on the typed page,25 find their justification in the notion of an originary fusion of speech and writing that in fact runs counter to McLuhan’s media-­historical narrative. For Olson, the typewriter acts as a “recorder . . . of the poet’s work”26; it registers indexically the kinds of inherently writable divisions on which all properly poetic speech is necessarily based. The bodily feedback loop between breathing and listening feeds into the instrument’s system of keys and levers via finger movements that are supposed to translate the temporal dynamic of vocal articulation into the spatial arrangement of correspondingly distributed marks. The latent writing of poetically articulated speech is thereby extended—­indeed, “projected”—­into the realm of “actual” writing, on the basis of an assumed

21. Olson, 22. 22. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Critical Edition), ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera: Gingko Press, 2003): 351. 23. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 351. 24. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 350. McLuhan highlights in this context especially the (possible) coincidence of speaking and typing during the poem’s composition, which he views as a technically induced recovery of earlier oral modes: “Seated at the typewriter, the poet . . . has the experience of performance as composition. In the nonliterate world, this had been the situation of the bard or minstrel. He had themes, but no text. At the typewriter, the poet commands the resources of the printing press” (349). 25. For a recent discussion of the inherent problems of these claims, and on the implications of Olson’s poetic model more generally, see Brendan C. Gillott, “Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ and the Inscription of the Breath,” Humanities 7, no. 4 (November 1, 2018). 26. Olson, “Projective Verse,” 23.

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functional continuity between body and apparatus that undergirds Olson’s only seemingly nontechnical idea of poetry’s respiratory reanimation. Though Olson was certainly by no means the first poet to use the typewriter for compositional purposes, he did appropriate the device in wholly unprecedented ways.27 By ascribing traditional primacy to the breathing, speaking body and its articulations—­while simultaneously championing the nonbreathing, nonspeaking typewriter as the necessary technological condition for “projective verses” to be realized—­he conceived an utterly nontraditional, because fundamentally inscribed, form of orality. It is therefore not really fitting to say that in this model “text is to function in a manner analogous to the tape recorder,”28 and hence like the acoustic-­ electronic recording device that Olson and various other postwar poets would start to utilize with increasing frequency from the late 1950s onward. At the time of its inception, the notion of “projective verse” revolved instead around the quite different project of converting audible speech into readable script. And such a project cannot be reduced to a mere precursor phenomenon, which would be rendered obsolete by the subsequent appearance of magnetic tape technology, with its more “direct” capacity for registering the voice. Nor, however, can such a project be reduced to a mere successor phenomenon, which would be rendered irrelevant by the prior appearance of “typographical experiments [that] existed long before the Projective Verse movement got under way,”29 since the whole character of the typography-­poetry and typewriter-­poet interactions has here been newly envisioned. The broader media-­historical implications of this new postwar conception, which finds a particularly pregnant formulation in Olson’s program but is certainly not restricted to his experiments, can best be seen against the backdrop of contemporaneous developments in the science and technology of speech registration. A few years after “Projective Verse” first appeared in print, several articles were published in American scientific journals that discussed the idea of a “phonetic typewriter,” or “speech typewriter,” from an engineering point of view. These papers advanced a strikingly literalized version of the functional link between body and instrument that Olson had postulated, since their topic was a new contraption designed to facilitate an “electronic and mechanical translation of the sounds of the voice into the corresponding typed syllables.”30 Such a device 27. On the broader history of “typewriter poetry,” see the excellent documentation in Marvin and Ruth Sackner, eds., The Art of  Typewriting (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015). 28. Gillott, “Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’,” 7. 29. Perloff, “Charles Olson and the ‘Inferior Predecessors’,” 293. 30. Harry F. Olson and Herbert Belar, “Phonetic Typewriter,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 28 (1956): 1072–­81, at 1081.

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promised to effectively merge traditional print technology with an acoustic recording mechanism, which would then yield a new brand of essentially spoken script. It therefore represented, according to the authors of one of the articles, a historical shift in the “field of communication.”31 The scientific interest in developing a truly voice-­operated typewriting machine was of course not the same as Olson’s: where Olson called for the “liberation” of breath from its history of cultural oppression by “manuscript, press,”32 the scientists sought rather the efficient transmission and preservation of “information carried by speech.”33 The prototypes of the newly conceived device were composed of a microphone, an apparatus for analyzing and converting sound waves into electric signals, a memory component, and an elaborate system of switches, relays, and levers that served to activate the keys of an attached (conventional) typewriter in correspon­ dence with the phonetic input provided by a speaker (fig. 29). The machine thus relied in part on the technical principle of the telephone—­the transmission of acoustic waves via matching electrical currents—­but it combined this principle with an entirely different mode of output, since instead of translating the currents back into the acoustic realm of audible sound, it converted them into a new mechanical realm of types imprinting onto paper. One of the syllabic sequences used to test the preliminary version of the apparatus—­“I—­can—­see—­you—­type—­this—­now”34—­paradigmatically reflects this intended transition from spoken-­ness to readability. And it was the prospect of being able to “print out” the “sounds of the spoken language” that prompted another speech researcher of the period, W. N. Locke, to credit the appliance with an “enormous” range of “potential applications,” and to anticipate its full realization “within a few years.”35 Locke—­who was instrumental in launching speech analysis as a scientific enterprise at MIT in the 1950s, together with scholars like Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle—­went on to refer in this context to an “almost explosive increase”36 of related research activities, an explosion he traced back to the experiments conducted at Bell Telephone Laboratories during and immediately after the Second World War.37 These experiments were 31. Olson and Belar, 1072. 32. Olson, “Projective Verse,” 22. 33. Olson and Belar, “Phonetic Typewriter,” 1072. 34. Olson and Belar, 1080. 35. W. N. Locke, “Speech Typewriters and Translating Machines,” PMLA 70, no. 2 (April 1955): 23–­3 2, at 27. 36. Locke, 25. 37. The “linguistics group” at MIT was associated with the Research Laboratory of Electronics and staffed with members of various language departments. In his function as chair of Modern Languages, Locke started to organize meetings on speech analysis as early as 1949, though the

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Figu re 2 9 . Prototype of a phonetic typewriter, in Harry F. Olson and Herbert Belar, “Phonetic Typewriter,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 28, no. 6 (November 1956): 1081

documented extensively in a volume, Visible Speech (1947), whose title already signals the focus of the work in question, as well as its indebtedness to a conceptual and institutional lineage reaching back into the nineteenth century.38 Indeed, the title expressly reiterates (but also implicitly adapts) the eponymous catchphrase of Alexander Melville Bell’s famous treatise from 1867, in which Bell proposed his system of (handwritten) symbols as a new form of notation for the accurate phonetic transcription of articulate sounds.39 phase of more formal group work did not begin until 1951, when Halle joined the MIT faculty. Jakobson, in turn, was officially appointed at the rank of institute professor in 1957 while maintaining his primary institutional affiliation with Harvard. 38. See Ralph K. Potter, George A. Kopp, and Harriet C. Green, Visible Speech (New York: D. van Nostrand Company, 1947). 39. See Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics, or Self-­ Interpreting Physiological Letters, for the Writing of All Languages in One Alphabet (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co, 1867) and the system’s pedagogical illustration in Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech Reader for the Nursery and Primary School (Cambridge, MA: Moses King, 1883).

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F igu re 30. Sound spectrogram of the words “visible speech,” in Visible Speech, eds. Ralph K. Potter, George A. Kopp, and Harriet C. Green (New York: D. van Nostrand Company, 1947): 4

Devised originally as a contribution to the field of deaf instruction, Bell’s alternative alphabet inspired the similarly oriented work of his son, Alexander Graham Bell, who began his own professional career as a teacher of the deaf. It was Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone, patented in 1876, that resulted several decades later in the institution of Bell Tele­ phone Laboratories in New York City, where research on phone circuits and voice transmission would eventually also spark renewed interest in the production of visual speech by means of specially constructed machines. The authors of the Bell Labs book Visible Speech explicitly acknowledged this genealogy. In their introduction to the volume, they explain that their own experiments were meant to build upon, but also to supersede, the original efforts of their predecessors, by offering “a system of natural phonetic symbols translated from speech itself, a type of record that would seem to fulfill Alexander Graham Bell’s early ambition.”40 They illustrated this claim through a sample recording that visualizes, programmatically, the very phrase “visible speech” (fig. 30), thereby rendering Bell’s agenda quite literally subject to the more advanced transcription methods developed and practiced during the 1940s in the laboratories bearing his last name. Compared to the elder Bell’s writing system for the designation of specific articulatory qualities, the “visible speech” records that emerged from the Bell Telephone Labs display a much more detailed, and much less readily identifiable, graphic organization, in which the boundaries between individual sounds are often hard to discern. Indeed, speech appears here represented initially not as a sequence of distinct characters or types but 40. Potter, Kopp, and Green, Visible Speech, 4.

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as a continuous band of tracings that “picture”41 the sonic oscillations of vocal utterances in terms of their frequency (pitch), intensity (volume), and temporal duration. These so-­called spectrograms—­produced with a writing stylus on electrically sensitive paper—­operate in a thoroughly different register of technical inscription from Bell’s. But what they share with the original notion of “visible speech” is the critique of traditional alphabetic notation, and the project of constructing a different, “natural phonetic alphabet in which sound patterns are related directly both to the manner in which the sounds are produced and to the aural impression.”42 The goal of deriving a new, nonarbitrary system of distinguishable signs from the patchy black-­and-­white patterns of the spectrograms thus led to efforts to divide the visual continuum of the recordings into discrete character-­like units. The results of this experimental practice were then compared, matched, and organized as a set of ABCs in which each of the identified forty-­eight patterns was taken to represent exactly one phoneme of the English language (fig. 31). The point, of course, was to highlight that the established (Latin) alphabet with its mere twenty-­six letters did not provide a sufficiently large or precise repertoire for capturing the more diverse spectrum of sounds—­especially vowel sounds—­in spoken (American) English. Only a writing system based directly in the articulatory process itself, ran the inherently polemical claim, would make it possible to account adequately for this variety and, by extension, for the actual empirical sound structure of any other natural language around the world. On the one hand, therefore, the new brand of “visible speech” was conceived in clear contradistinction to any existing conventional system of notation; on the other hand, it entailed its own naturally based kind of “code,” a code that could be studied, memorized, and used to “read” the otherwise incomprehensible spectrograms. In this regard, the volume of speech recordings published in 1947 was intended also to function as a textbook or training manual that would instruct a wider audience in the practice of deciphering “visible speech” in a manner analogous to printed text. Once this reading skill had been widely established, the authors predicted, it would become possible to apply the spectrographic method of “printing words phonetically”43 to all sorts of cultural domains. They envisioned, for instance, the development of a voice-­driven typewriting machine that would serve to capture live spoken utterances, and whose visual output

41. Potter, Kopp, and Green, 11. 42. Potter, Kopp, and Green, 56. 43. Potter, Kopp, and Green, 56.

Figu re 3 1. Sound spectrograms of English phonemes, in Visible Speech, eds. Ralph K. Potter, George A. Kopp, and Harriet C. Green (New York: D. van Nostrand Company, 1947): 55

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might then be accurately “read back in the original sounds, as a secretary reads back her shorthand notes.”44 The plans for this apparatus did not come to fruition. And the slightly later idea of a speech typewriter that would combine an acoustic recording principle with the symbolic letter system of the traditional alphabet remained confined to the prototype stage. Nevertheless, these projects form a critical link between a longer scientific history of inscribing articulatory-­ vocal activity in visual form, and the specific context of the postwar period, in which poets like Charles Olson began seeking the “roots” of verse in the breathing-­speaking body as mediated by machines. Olson’s recourse to the physiological “nature”45 of the speech process—­and his simultaneous emphasis on “recording” the latter by means of mechanical writing—­ presumes that the dynamism of corporeal movement can be effectively captured in the distribution of graphic inscriptions across the space of the page. This distribution can then be read, he contends, in such a way as to reenact through the (audible or silent) reading process the respiratory-­ vocal activity from which the poem originally sprang. Olson speaks in this context of the poet using “the machine as a scoring to his composition, as a script to its vocalization,”46 which underlines the idea of a two-­directional translation: first from bodily “act”47 to typewritten marks, and then from the latter back to the former. At stake in both the scientific and poetic domains, in other words, was the vision of a successful body-­machine, acoustic-­graphic translation. And the central question in both cases was what such translation makes visible about the foundational “nature,” or “essence,” of linguistic articulation: What, exactly, was being rendered readable in the passage from bodily speech to machine writing and back again? What components of speech needed to remain stable for a translation to qualify as accurate (enough) and what aspects could go by the wayside? The answers to these questions continued to transform over the course of the various postwar experiments, and the end result was a paradigm shift that morphed into a battle—­not markedly less polemical in the scientific domain than the poetic one—­between two opposed models of language structure: between an older psychophysiological paradigm of corporeal articulation and a newer

44. Locke, “Speech Typewriters and Translating Machines,” 27. For a list of other intended applications that range from the domains of phonetics and philology to ornithological studies, see Ralph K. Potter, “Visible Patterns of Sound,” Science 102, no. 2654 (November 9, 1945): 463–­70, at 464. 45. Olson, “Projective Verse,” 25. 46. Olson, 22. 47. Olson, 26.

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cybernetic paradigm of algorithmic information, between the notion that bodies use machines to express themselves and the notion that bodies, at bottom, just are (another kind of ) machines. The first step along this trajectory, in the scientific context, was a renewed emphasis on the problem of first causes, and on the priority of bodily movement over sound. The Bell Labs researchers began by insisting that their experimental visualizations went beyond the perceptible structure of audible speech to the underlying corporeal activity of speech production, due to the fact that the sounds were in effect “a function of the positions of the articulatory organs of the speaker.”48 As one scientist working at Bell Telephone Laboratories wrote in 1951, the goal was to render the recorded acoustic frequencies of speech recognizable as equivalents of the sound-­producing movements of the tongue, lips, and jaw, and thus of “vocal gestures.”49 The new recording technologies, it was claimed, produced graphic traces that “depict[ed]” 50 a corporeal process of shaping linguistic sound, rather than just a mechanical sequence of sonic vibrations. Half a century earlier, E. W. Scripture had argued in analogous terms that his speech curves did not simply picture the physical properties of sound waves, but rather facilitated the deciphering of these waves as the effects of “living vocal gestures.”51 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the proponents of the postwar project of “visible speech” were at pains to demonstrate that the results of their research program went further than Scripture’s turn-­of-­the-­century efforts. To underline the contrast between their new methods and his older ones, the authors of Visible Speech juxtaposed an excerpt from Scripture’s tracing of the

48. Locke, “Speech Typewriters and Translating Machines,” 25. 49. Gordon E. Peterson, “Vocal Gestures,” Bell Laboratories Records 29 (1951): 500–­503 and 510, at 500. Peterson derives this concept from the book Human Speech by the British lay scientist Richard Paget, who had worked primarily in the domains of speech analysis and deaf instruction (and whose linguistic theories also left a mark on the work of the later James Joyce). In his book, Paget advances an evolutionary account of language that locates the origins of speech in certain “pantomimic gestures of the organs of articulation.” Sir Richard Paget, Human Speech: Some Observations, Experiments, and Conclusions as to the Nature, Origin, Purpose and Possible Improvement of  Human Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1930): 157. With this idea, Paget in effect reformulated one of Wilhelm Wundt’s central claims in his book Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 1, Die Sprache: Erster Teil, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1911), where the concept of “vocal gesture” is extensively theorized in corresponding terms. Paget claimed, however, to have encountered Wundt’s work only retroactively, after having developed his own model of linguistic evolution independently of the German predecessor. 50. Peterson, “Vocal Gestures,” 502. 51. E. W. Scripture, The Study of  English Speech by New Methods of Phonetic Investigation (London: Milford, 1923): 9. See the discussion in chapter 2, 92–­96.

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Figu re 3 2. Sound spectrogram of the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?,” in Visible Speech, eds. Ralph K. Potter, George A. Kopp, and Harriet C. Green (New York: D. van Nostrand Company, 1947): 317

nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” with their own spectrographic recording of “the same words by another speaker” (fig. 32). They concluded with the following, subtly momentous claim: “This latter pattern is analogous to the pattern of a rug, spread out so that it is clearly visible. The former is analogous to seeing all the threads of the rug unraveled and bundled together. The pattern material is there, but in no shape to be visualized as a meaningful whole.” 52 Playing on a long-­standing literary trope of text as fabric—­and adapting this trope to the graphic inscriptions of vocalized poetry—­the researchers from Bell Telephone Labs thus suggested that Scripture’s techniques had failed to lay bare the inherent organization of the speech processes he represented. Only the more refined technical possibilities of the spectrograph were now deemed capable of registering speech in such a way as to display the intrinsically analyzable traces of phonetically articulated sound. This claim, in other words, signaled a critical shift in scientific methodology not because it went hand in hand with the use of a novel, and ostensibly more accurate, form of recording technology, but because it marked the inception of a new approach to language foundations: a new approach that would eventually culminate in a new set of answers about where these foundations should be sought. A hint of this coming swerve—­away from the articulatory movements of bodies and toward the articulatory stasis of informational “bits”—­is already present in the words with which the authors of Visible Speech sum up their differences from Scripture: “In reading visible speech, it is the total pattern that contains the information.” 53 To conceive 52. Potter, Kopp, and Green, Visible Speech, 315. For Scripture’s own use of the “thread” metaphor in regard to his graphic recordings, see his article “Speech Curves,” Modern Language Notes 16, no. 3 (March 1901): 71–­79, at 73. 53. Potter, Kopp, and Green, 43.

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of the recorded wave traces in terms of the “information” they carry meant also to interpret them with an eye toward “extracting” the sound’s essential aspects from a host of other, negligible acoustic properties.54 Such an orientation resituated the study of visible speech inside a theoretical framework that was emerging contemporaneously and coterminously with the Bell Labs work on linguistic inscription, namely, the framework of information theory, which reinterprets the production and transmission of linguistic “signals” as a multileveled process of “coding.”55 Information theory is most closely associated with the name of Claude Shannon, who joined the staff of the laboratories in 1941 and published his seminal paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948) in the labs’ own periodical, the Bell System Technical Journal.56 Like the experiments carried out with the spectrograph, in other words, Shannon’s theoretical treatise grew out of research geared chiefly toward the construction of telephone circuits, an engineering process that at the time was also referred to as “computing,” due to the calculations of the requisite circuit-­ switches it involved. And in the same way that the analysis of “visible speech” adopted the concept of information for its explanatory purposes, Shannon’s information theory adopted the case of spoken utterances for the purpose of exemplification.57 Shannon focused his model on the “effect of noise in the channel,” 58 which might hinder the accurate communication of messages from an “information source” (like a speaker’s brain) to

54. See, paradigmatically, Potter, “Visible Patterns of Sound,” 463. 55. See the codification of this perspective in James L. Flanagan, Speech Analysis: Synthesis and Perception (Berlin: Springer, 1965): 1. Flanagan, who had trained at MIT’s Acoustics Lab and directed the Speech and Auditory Department at Bell Telephone Labs during the 1960s, describes speech as a “coding” of information that occurs at articulatory, acoustic, and auditory levels. In this model, spoken communication functions through the conversion of “neural signals” (which control the muscular movements within the vocal tract) into “fluctuations of air pressure” (the order of sound waves propagating from a “sender” to a “receiver”) and back into the ear’s mechanical motions and the “electrical pulses” of the auditory nerve. From the idea of these different, encoded forms of “speech information” runs a direct connection to the subsequent emergence of digital language-­processing technologies, as discussed in Flanagan’s own pioneering article “Computers That Talk and Listen: Man-­Machine Communication by Voice,” Proceedings of the IEEE 64, no. 4 (April 1976): 405–­15. 56. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Bell System Technical Journal 27, no. 3–­4 (July and October 1948): 379–­423 and 623–­56. 57. This is especially true of the popularizing introduction to the paper in Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949): 1–­28. This introduction illustrates the general structure of communicative processes via frequent recourse to “the special, but still very broad and important, field of the communication of speech” (3). 58. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 379.

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a “destination” (like a listener’s brain).59 In doing so, he remained committed to the practical problem of transmission efficiency that also drove the development of engineering applications at Bell Telephone Labs: It is of course no accident that he opted for the acoustic term “noise,” which recalls the static of electric wires, to designate any possible kind of interference in a communication channel, thereby turning the notion of unarticulated sound into the central metaphor for all causes of information loss. The institutional and conceptual convergence between speech research and information theory resulted in the incipient application of the mea­ suring unit “bit” (from “binary digit”60) to the phenomenon of articulate linguistic sound. Initially, this term had been coined to designate the two-­ way function of switches in electric circuits (“open” vs. “closed,” “off ” vs. “on”). Owing to Shannon’s work, it now became the standard measure for determining the information amount that could pass through a given communication channel during a certain time interval, whereby “bits” stood for the number of binary decisions that were necessary to encode the particular transmitted message (and not any other message) in the signal.61 From this context, the unit was adopted by Roman Jakobson and other linguists of the early 1950s, who observed that speech analysis and information theory had come to share a concern with “the same domain of verbal communication,”62 and who took up the idea of “parsing both the oral message and the language code that underlies it into discrete binary units of information as their ultimate components.”63 Significantly, Jakobson and his colleagues at MIT pursued this goal by employing the same kind of “visible speech” records previously introduced at Bell Telephone Labs: They created spectrograms of utterances in various languages—­ranging from English and French, to Czech and Russian, to Arabic and Xhosa, among many others64—­which were then used to identify, compare, and match individual phonemes, with the goal of establishing a fundamental system of “distinctive features”65 that could be used to describe the sound structure of any natural linguistic code. To 59. For a specification of the model along these lines, see Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 7. 60. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 379. 61. See Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 9–­10, for an elaboration on this point. 62. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Communication Theory,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2: Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971): 570–­79, at 570. 63. Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar M. Fant, and Morris Halle, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: Distinctive Features and their Correlates (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1952): 45. 64. For examples, see the Appendix in Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, 46–­5 2. 65. Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, V.

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be sure, this approach did not imply that all existing languages share the same stock of phonemes, or that they all display exactly the same set of internal distinctions between phonemic qualities. Yet despite their often widely varying sound repertoires, they can all be reduced—­according to the model’s central claim—­to binary oppositions like “vocalic/nonvocalic,” “consonantal/nonconsonantal,” “voiced/unvoiced,” “nasal/oral,” etc., that indicate the presence or absence of certain “features,” and that are themselves physiologically anchored in the capabilities of the human vocal apparatus.66 The crucial implication, from the perspective of a genealogy of sound writing, was thus the way in which graphic recordings of the bodily speech process now functioned to abstract from this process “the amount of phonemic information”67 contained in the inscribed sound. What mattered was no longer the status of these records as material traces or extensions of corporeal activity as such. Rather, they provided a means for advancing—­via analysis and calculation—­from the visual registration of individual “articulatory data”68 to the breaking-­down of this data into (series of ) numbers of bits, and hence to a notion of speech as an inherently digital phenomenon. The acoustic output produced by the articulatory process was no longer conceived, in other words, as a continuous, undivided “flow” that could be transcribed and preserved accurately (only) with the help of analog media technologies. Instead, such analog technologies served to reveal the way in which oral discourse was always already structured digitally, as a sequence of discrete, isolable elements, whose meaning-­communicating function derived from the meaning-­differentiating function of the underlying distinctive feature “bundles.”69 The entire project of quantification, which had been a hallmark of speech analysis since at least the late nineteenth century, consequently began to acquire a new character. The postwar convergence between information theory and linguistic research fostered the idea that the “sound shape” 70 of language could be represented and encoded in the numerical form of binary digits (like 0 and 1). This encoding opened up the possibility of an “apparatus-­based phonemic analysis” 71 by means of early computer technology. But it also shifted the focus of inquiry more generally toward a disembodied set of relations between sound qualities, which was presumed 66. See Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, 40. 67. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Communication Theory,” 570. 68. Werner Meyer-­ Eppler, Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie (Berlin: Springer, 1959): 293. 69. Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis, 4. 70. Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, 6. 71. Meyer-­Eppler, Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie, 319.

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to precede, and to remain conceptually independent of, any particular act of corporeal articulation.

R earticul ating P oetic Experimen tation The shift from body to bit as the foundational unit of postwar linguistic experiments had powerful implications for the development of postwar experimental poetry, which revolves in large part—­as I will seek to show here—­around a battle over poetic foundations. Representatives from all three of the main battle camps, to be discussed in what follows, agreed that the task of the radical poet is to return us to the most basic roots of language—­the word “radical” derives from the Greek radix, meaning “root”—­in order to project us toward a future in which poetry will regain its lost cultural relevance. They disagreed, however, both among themselves and with Olson, about where to go looking for those roots, and hence about the kinds of poetic practices that could potentially lay them bare. Nowhere do the stakes and terms of this disagreement become more clearly visible than in the controversy surrounding one of the most important documents of postwar avant-­garde activity, the 1960 anthology movens.72 Published in Germany, this anthology gathered an astonishingly wide range of contributions pertaining to contemporaneous developments in poetry, visual art, architecture, electronic music, and linguistic research. In doing so, it both highlighted correspondences among these different fields and staked an implicit claim for the cutting-­edge status of its assembled projects. I will focus here on two literary contributions to the book, both by writers commonly associated with the concept of Concrete Poetry, which by the mid-­1950s had become a thoroughly international phenomenon.73 These writers—­the East German Carlfriedrich Claus and the West German Franz Mon—­argued for a notion of natural, bodily articulation as the underlying essence of both speech and writing, and for a practice of uniquely poetic articulation as the performative distillation of this essence. Their position simultaneously extends and subverts Olson’s, with which 72. Walter Höllerer, Manfred de la Motte, and Franz Mon, eds., movens: Dokumente und Analysen zur Dichtung, bildenden Kunst, Musik, Architektur (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960). Derived from the Latin verb movere (= to move), the noun “movens” is used in German to designate the “driving force” behind a development. 73. Major centers of Concrete Poetry formed in North America, Brazil, the German-­speaking countries of Central Europe, and Scandinavia, among other regions. For documentations of this wide international range, see Max Bense and Elisabeth Walther, eds., rot 21: konkrete poesie international (Stuttgart: hansjörg mayer, 1965); Emmett Williams, ed., An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (New York: Something Else Press, 1967); and Stephen Bann, ed., Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (London: London Magazine Editions, 1967).

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it has much in common, by making a new mode of sound writing into the goal rather than the means: where Olson had represented his typewriter experiments as the vehicle for an ultimately regressive return to the natural givens of an inherently articulated breath, both Claus and Mon seek, in different ways, to transfigure the natural givens of breath through and into writing. Their experiments thus constitute, on the one hand, a point of culmination for many of the prewar avant-­garde models of sound writing, while providing, on the other hand, an explosive touchstone for the postwar debate about the priority of bodies versus bits. For Carlfriedrich Claus, as for Olson, it is chiefly the “articulation of breathing out” 74 that drives the process of poetic creation. Such articulation begins with “manners of speaking” which are physiologically conditioned by the corporeal domain of the speech organs—­Claus’s term is Kehlwelt, or “throat world”—­and which must then be further developed through an appropriate kind of vocal training.75 “Comprehensive exercises,” he declares, “gradually establish the sensitivity of the phonation system that is indispensable for the production of sound texts [Klangtexte], which is to say: for the—­mostly spontaneous—­‘sedimentation’ (Franz Mon) of a sound spot [Klangfleck], of a sound figure [Lautfigur].” 76 For Claus, as for Olson, these oral practices are intimately linked to a notion of writing: Claus views the articulatory constitution of speech as inherently oriented toward its own “inscription,” first within the medium of air and subsequently in graphic form.77 Claus, however, draws different consequences from this proximity between speech and writing than Olson does. According to him, the project of “working on a precise articulation of breath” 78 entails an entirely new approach to the use of script, one in which writing would no longer function merely as a means of symbolically representing articulations from elsewhere (i.e., speech), but rather as an independent domain of indexical registration. The acoustic and the visual dimensions of language thus come to evolve concurrently, “with the most diverse possibilities of

74. Carlfriedrich Claus, “die Vibrationen im Klangbilderaum . . . ,” in movens: Dokumente und Analysen zur Dichtung, bildenden Kunst, Musik, Architektur, eds. Höllerer, de la Motte, and Mon, 76. 75. See Carlfriedrich Claus, “Klangtexte Schriftbilder,” nota 3 (1959): 13–­14, at 14. 76. Claus, “Klangtexte Schriftbilder,” 14. 77. Claus writes in this regard that “the entire organism of the throat-­world-­experimenter ‘inscribes’ itself, spontaneously, into the air, thereby modifying the latter with everything it entails.” Carlfriedrich Claus, “Sicht-­, hörbare Phasen umfassenderer Prozesse: Notizen zu franz mon, artikulationen, 1959,” nota 4 (1960): 43–­44, at 43. Emphasis original. 78. Claus, “Klangtexte Schriftbilder,” 14.

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correspondence . . . among each other.” 79 Claus responds here most directly to the ideas set forth by his close friend and interlocutor, the West German writer Franz Mon, in a 1959 article entitled “Artikulieren und Lesen” (“Articulation and Reading”). Therein, Mon identified two different ways of recording articulatory processes in permanent form: “Any trace of articulation [Artikulationsspur] can be preserved. In this regard, one needs to distinguish between preservation through notation and preservation through sedimentation. The latter is a mere trace, while the former employs an established system of signs. With the help of modern devices, any aesthetic process can also be sedimented.”80 While the principle of sedimentation yields indexical records of articulation as a physical phenomenon, the principle of notation relies on the symbolic characters of the alphabet (or other conventional graphic signs) in order to render spoken sounds in writing. The fact that Mon refers to “modern devices” in this context indicates that he associated the possibility of registering speech in a nonsymbolic manner primarily with the technical apparatus of the tape recorder, which had become more widely available during the late 1950s, and with which both Mon and Claus were beginning to experiment at the time.81 Claus, however, suggests that the semiotic principle of “sedimentation” does not remain restricted to the application of such new media technologies, but that it can also be fused with the use of traditional letters. Despite its conventional character, alphabetic writing can be employed, in his view, to directly express the dynamism of otherwise unrealized respiratory-­ articulatory processes. The creation of “letter movements”—­their distribution and spatial arrangement in “figures” other than the common straight lines of verse—­serves from this perspective to capture “speech curves [Sprechkurven]”82 in visible form. Inscribed in the graphic shape of nonlinear patterns, the characters of phonetic script are thus meant to function in a manner that exceeds their established role as a means of symbolic notation. “These figures,” Claus declares, “evidently consist of ‘acoustic’ sedimentations, ossifications,—­letters,”83 a paradigm that collapses Mon’s 79. Claus, “Klangtexte Schriftbilder,” 14. 80. Franz Mon, “Artikulieren und Lesen,” nota 3 (1959): 17–­25, at 18. 81. In a letter to Claus dated February 5, 1959, Mon declares that, “to own a tape recorder . . . is today as important as it was important for Goethe to own a quill.” See . . . eine nahezu lautlose Schwingungs-­Symbiose: Die Künstlerfreundschaft zwischen Franz Mon und Carlfriedrich Claus. Briefwechsel 1959–­1997. Visuelle Texte. Sprachblätter, eds. Ingrid Mössinger and Brigitta Milde (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2013): 34. 82. Claus to Franz Mon, August 23, 1959, in  .  .  . eine nahezu lautlose Schwingungs-­Symbiose, eds. Mössinger and Milde, 43. 83. Claus to Franz Mon, September 16, 1959, in . . . eine nahezu lautlose Schwingungs-­Symbiose, eds. Mössinger and Milde, 44.

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conceptual distinction into a hybrid notion of alphabetic signs as indexical traces. Claus sought to implement his ideas primarily through two complementary poetic strategies, both of which are documented in the anthology movens. The first strategy involved the creation of so-­called vibratory texts (one of them commissioned specially for the book) in which the eponymous acoustic phenomenon is visualized through agglomerations of handwritten characters sprawling across the entire page up to its four edges and beyond (fig. 33). Forming zones of varying density rather than distinguishable lines, these letter sequences indeed resemble, in their overall graphic appearance, inscriptions of vibration-­like movement rather than a text composed of (legible) words. Claus himself describes this effect as an “entanglement, decomposition, layering of signs”84 that aims to expose the “sympathetic vibration [Mit-­Schwingung] of various organs during speech”85 at the expense of all lexical conventions. The second strategy involved the creation of typed arrangements he called “letter punctuation [Letternpunktik],”86 a kind of textual composition that turns on the visual isolation of individual characters, but spaces them in such a way as to evoke the impression of the aforementioned “letter movements.” The examples of this practice included in movens—­taken from a larger series of variations labeled as “phases”—­underscore this intended status (fig. 34). Viewed in sequence, they register, and indeed embody, a dynamic process through which (clusters of ) elementary letter-­sounds successively shift in relation to one another, forming varying patterns that structure the surrounding page in different ways. We are a long way, here, from Olson’s practice of “projective” composition, which adhered not only to lexical conventions but also to the straight, horizontal line of type as the standard graphic form of verse. The second writer who contributed significantly to this postwar reconceptualization of sound writing is the already cited Franz Mon (alias Franz Löffelholz), who served as chief editor of the anthology movens.87 Mon is perhaps the postwar period’s most outspoken proponent of an articulatory poetics. His ambition to (re)establish articulation as the core concept of an experimental literary agenda becomes evident as early as his first independent publication—­a collection of texts aptly titled artikulationen (1959)88—­and it continues to inform his contributions to movens, which 84. Claus, “Klangtexte Schriftbilder,” 14. 85. Claus, “die Vibrationen im Klangbilderaum . . . ,” 76. 86. Claus, “Klangtexte Schriftbilder,” 14. 87. Mon to Carlfriedrich Claus, March 22, 1959, in . . . eine nahezu lautlose Schwingungs-­Symbiose, eds. Mössinger and Milde, 35. 88. See Franz Mon, artikulationen (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959).

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Figu re 33 . Carlfriedrich Claus, “Vibrationstext,” in movens: Dokumente und Analysen zur Dichtung, bildenden Kunst, Musik, Architektur, eds. Walter Höllerer, Manfred de la Motte, and Franz Mon (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960): 77

include an essay of the same title, “Artikulationen.” The text places this programmatic catchword at the center of a discussion of poetry’s foundations, and it turns on a notion of “articulatory gestures [Gestik]”89 that bears striking similarities to Wundt’s psychophysiological concept of the “vocal gesture”: For Mon, as for Wundt, the gestural “movements” in question are as much emotional as they are corporeal, and the corresponding poetry 89. Franz Mon, “Artikulationen,” in movens: Dokumente und Analysen zur Dichtung, bildenden Kunst, Musik, Architektur, eds. Höllerer, de la Motte, and Mon, 111–­13, at 113.

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Figu re 3 4. Carlfriedrich Claus, “6 Phasen von 52” (detail), in movens: Dokumente und Analysen zur Dichtung, bildenden Kunst, Musik, Architektur, eds. Walter Höllerer, Manfred de la Motte, and Franz Mon (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960): 23

is thus expressive in the most literal of senses. Speech, in Mon’s understanding, takes the form of a “gestural curve,” which “drifts along in the force of expiratory airflow.”90 Poetry, in turn, is charged with the task of exposing precisely this inherently gestural dynamic of articulation, which can be achieved only at the expense of other, communicative functions: 90. Mon, “Artikulationen,” 111.

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“It is possible to reduce the amount of semantic values [in speech] to the point where they are absorbed by the force and the particularity of the articulatory process; thus, this process—­which otherwise gets barely noticed and recognized—­emerges in its own character . . . and attains a gestural quality.”91 The avant-­garde pedigree of such a perspective is unmistakable. Mon expressly refers to the pioneering achievements of earlier poets like Hugo Ball and Raoul Hausmann,92 but he also quite clearly (if perhaps influenced conception unwittingly) adapts Viktor Shklovsky’s Wundt-­ of poetry as a “dance” of the speech organs. For Shklovsky, the process of rendering articulatory movements audible by means of “a particular sound-­language”—­a language divested of conventional meaning—­was simultaneously a process of laying bare the foundational conditions of poetic enjoyment per se. Similarly, Mon contends that “speaking along the axis of articulation is a dance of lips, tongue, teeth—­articulate, and hence incisive movement”93; and that poetry, which draws our attention to these movements, is the medium for learning to aesthetically perceive this most basic dimension of speech production. Unlike Shklovsky, however—­and in keeping with the general thrust of literary Concretism during the late 1950s—­Mon further specifies this relationship between articulation and gesture, poetry and linguistic foundations, by invoking the graphic-­spatial character of written verse. If poetry, in his model, serves to explicitly articulate an otherwise imperceptible articulatory dynamic, it does so through a figure of inversion rather than unveiling: “Speech that reverses itself into poetry [sich zur Poesie umkehrt] aims to get hold of what is most natural and what has been forgotten under the complex and consuming workings of language.”94 The notion of a reversal is crucial here, for it marks the moment of Mon’s proposed intervention, at the same time as it calls up the original meaning of “verse” (from Latin vertere) as a form of “turning.” Mon draws a conceptual link between the way in which verse is visually inscribed—­by moving from line to line in a series of changes of direction—­and the experimental-­poetic task of folding speech back onto itself, with the goal of “recovering” its origins in bodily gesture. From the very concept of verse as writing, in other words, there derives the imperative of re-­turning to a linguistic stage prior to the 91. Mon, “Artikulationen,” 111. 92. See Mon, “Artikulationen,” 113, and especially the slightly later radio feature “Literatur im Schallraum” (“Literature in Sonic Space”) from 1966–­67, which is reprinted in Franz Mon, Texte über Texte (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1970): 102–­15. 93. Mon, artikulationen, 31. See also Franz Mon, “Die zwei Ebenen des Gedichts,” Akzente 4 (1957): 224–­28, at 227. 94. Mon, artikulationen, 31–­3 2.

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“meaning-­accumulating continuum”95 of ordinary discourse, under which the activity of the speech organs usually remains concealed. Poetry can only truly come into its own, according to Mon, where it manages to resist conventional lexical and syntactic constraints—­“to privilege aesthetic information over semantic information”96—­also or even primarily at the level of the written “record” itself. The polemical opposition between “aesthetic information” and “semantic information,” which stems from Mon’s 1965 article “Schrift als Sprache” (“Writing as Language”), already hints at the fact that Claus and Mon’s postwar paradigm of an articulatory poetics had acquired a new enemy to correspond to its new self-­understanding. Shortly after movens appeared in print, the anthology was reviewed by Max Bense, a professor of philosophy of science at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, and—­ together with the phonetician and communication researcher Werner Meyer-­Eppler—­Germany’s preeminent proponent of information theory. Bense was the first scholar to develop an elaborate system for applying information-­theoretical approaches to the analysis of aesthetic objects, a project for which he invented the label “information aesthetics.”97 By the time of his movens review, he was already a prominent and polarizing figure in West German intellectual debates, due primarily to his active promotion of emerging computer technology as the privileged domain for poetic and artistic experimentation. This predilection provoked adverse reactions from conservative critics, but it also put Bense at odds with other contemporaneous forms of “experimental” literature, which he himself deemed outdated because of their continued adherence to established avant-­garde notions, principles, and techniques. The movens review operates in this vein: it performs a far-­ reaching and scathing critique of the entire project, ultimately going so far as to condemn the anthology as “obsolete and useless.”98 Bense directs his objections, in particular, toward the articulatory poetics of Claus and Mon; such experiments, he claims, are effectively parasitic upon, as well as inferior to, the achievements of previous avant-­garde poets like Schwitters or Arp. The works of these earlier writers from the interwar period, he argues, offer “substantially better and more original” takes on “the problems of

95. Mon, artikulationen, 14. 96. Franz Mon, “Schrift als Sprache,” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 15 (1965): 1251–­58, at 1254. 97. For a comprehensive summary of this undertaking, see Max Bense, Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1969), reprinted in Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 3: Ästhetik und Texttheorie, ed. and introd. Elisabeth Walther (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998): 251–­417. 98. Max Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” Grundlagenstudien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft 1 (1960): 122–­26, at 126.

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Figu re 3 5. Werner Meyer-­Eppler, sound spectrograms, in Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie (Berlin: Springer, 1959): 294

articulation and vibration.”99 Bense attributes the inferiority of postwar attempts in this direction to the striking discrepancy that separates their perspective from that of concurrent developments in domains like communications theory and scientific speech analysis. And this incongruity is rendered all the more conspicuous, in his eyes, by the fact that the anthology movens does, in fact, include some examples of state-­of-­the-­art scientific experiments, which Bense regards as much more advanced and, by extension, much more aesthetically relevant than the literary compositions with which they appear side by side. Bense associates the promise of a “potential expansion of artistic productivity” 100 in particular with the experimental work of his colleague Werner Meyer-­Eppler, whose contributions to movens include several periodic curves of speech sounds produced at the phonetics laboratory of the University of Bonn. These curves—­which picture the acoustic oscillations of different vowels by means of an electronic recording process—­ served to sample a larger research program for which Meyer-­Eppler had imported, over the course of the 1950s, the “visible speech” technologies first established at Bell Telephone Laboratories (fig. 35).101 By performing 99. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 123. 100. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 125. 101. See Werner Meyer-­Eppler, “Optische Transformationen,” in movens: Dokumente und Analysen zur Dichtung, bildenden Kunst, Musik, Architektur, eds. Höllerer, de la Motte, and Mon, 159–­60, at 160.

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spectrographic analyses on the basis of these graphic records, he sought to parse speech into a series of “information cells” 102 in a fashion analogous to Jakobson’s system of distinctive phonemic features, to which he makes extensive reference.103 In the process, he also advanced a model for treating the process of articulation as a mathematical—­and mathematically soluble—­problem that could be studied and defined in terms of numerical properties alone.104 It is precisely the implications of these endeavors, in Bense’s view, that the contemporaneous literary approaches to “the problems of vibration and articulation” fail to acknowledge. Though Meyer-­Eppler’s experiments are featured in movens, the anthology’s poetic contributions fall short of drawing any (real) consequences from the new scientific understanding of speech-­as-­information, and in so failing “violate the basic principle of experimental literature: to keep abreast of theory.” 105 As a result of this conceptual asynchrony, textual strategies in the manner of Claus and Mon are for Bense, ultimately, anachronistic remainders of an earlier, outlived period of avant-­gardism rather than pathbreaking achievements in their own right.

102. Meyer-­Eppler, Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie, 24. 103. See Meyer-­Eppler, Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie, 321–­27. Meyer-­ Eppler, who taught at the University of Bonn from 1949 until his untimely death in 1960, attended the first large-­scale conference on “Speech Communication” organized by MIT’s Electronics Research Laboratory in 1950. This brought him into close contact with the latest methodological and technological developments at American research institutions, including Shannon’s theory of information, which became a critical basis for his own subsequent work in the domains of phonetics and communication research. See Hans G. Tillmann and Jessica Siddins, “The ‘Bonn Connection’ and Its Consequences: Paul Menzerath and Werner Meyer-­ Eppler’s Reunification of Phonetics and Phonology and the Emergence of a New Phonetic Speech Science Based on Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication,” presented at the First International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research, September 4–­5, 2015, Dresden, Germany. Carlfriedrich Claus refers to the phonetic research of Meyer-­ Eppler’s colleague Paul Menzerath in his essay “Klangtexte, Schriftbilder,” 14. 104. See, in this context, especially Werner Meyer-­Eppler and Gerold Ungeheuer, “Die Vokalartikulation als Eigenwertproblem,” Zeitschrift für Phonetik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft 10 (1957): 245–­57, where the human vocal tract is (re)modeled in terms of mathematically definable shapes whose sound-­producing functions can be captured—­based on these spatial properties—­in corresponding differential equations. Meyer-­Eppler’s research on the artificial replication of linguistic sound production, which led to projects like the development of an “electronic larynx,” closely relate to the formative role he played in the emergence of electronic music from the 1950s onward. See Werner Meyer-Eppler, Elektrische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und synthetische Sprache (Bonn: Dümmlers, 1949). On this aspect of  Meyer-­Eppler’s work, see in detail Elena Ungeheuer, Wie die elektronische Musik ‘erfunden’ wurde . . . : Quellenstudie zu Werner Meyer-­Epplers musikalischem Entwurf zwischen 1949 und 1953 (Mainz: Schott, 1992). 105. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 126.

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The primary objective of Bense’s critique is certainly a strategic one, since he proceeds to confront the ostensibly outdated poetic practices documented in movens with another—­namely, his own—­model of literary innovation. For him, the proper way of developing a new, information-­based approach to textual experimentation lies in exploring possibilities that have probably remained relatively unknown to the self-­ declared practitioners and theoreticians of text like Mon, Rot, Brock, Bremer, Claus, and Höllerer: I’m thinking of the modulation [Aussteuerung] of stochastic texts by means of program-­controlled, electronic computers, with respect to the construction of logically . . . or aesthetically . . . appraisable texts through these machines.106

Bense refers here to the earliest computer-­based methods of literary text production, which had been devised in the late 1950s under his direction by the software engineer Theo Lutz. Regarded today as one of the pioneers of digital poetry, Lutz programmed his so-­called stochastic texts on a Zuse Z22 mainframe, using a vocabulary derived from Kafka’s novel Das Schloss (The Castle), and principles of probability and randomness he first described in a brief article from 1959.107 According to Bense, these experiments embody “future conceptions of aesthetic text production” that will unfold “on the basis of statistics and information theory.” 108 His review of movens thus comes to function simultaneously like a manifesto for a new paradigm of avant-­garde literature, one that stands in closer proximity to contemporaneous scientific developments. Henceforth, he insists, the textual creation of “aesthetic conditions (Zustände)” 109 should be considered chiefly a matter of algorithms that can be used to control and manipulate the sequential distribution of letters, syllables, and words in conscious, methodical, and even automated ways. From a given repertoire of linguistic elements, letters or words should be selected and combined according to predefined stochastic rules rather than subjective preferences. And the more “improbable” the resulting arrangements appear—­when viewed in

106. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 124–­25. 107. See Theo Lutz, “Stochastische Texte,” augenblick 4, no. 1 (1959): 3–­9. An English translation of this text by Helen MacCormac (2005) is available online at http://www.stuttgarter-­schule .de/lutz_schule_en.htm. For a discussion of Lutz’s experimental practice in the larger context of automatized writing processes, see Jörgen Schäfer, “Passing the Calvino Test? Writing Machines and Literary Ghosts,” in Digital Media and Textuality: From Creation to Archiving, ed. Daniela Côrtes Maduro (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2017): 23–­46. 108. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 125. 109. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 126.

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relation to the statistical laws of the corresponding natural language—­the more innovative and aesthetically relevant they should be considered.110 Research on the statistical structure of natural languages had already been central to the work of Claude Shannon at Bell Telephone Laboratories, who devised a method for determining the probability with which particular letters follow upon one another in written English.111 This endeavor was expanded upon by Werner Meyer-­Eppler in Bonn, who experimented with the variation of letter frequencies in German texts and produced in the process some nonsensical, (pseudo-­)verbal sequences in which he him­ self recognized an “unmistakable echo of Dadaist constructions.” 112 Only Bense, however, took the step of deriving from these developments the claim that information theorists and computer scientists had become the true heirs of the avant-­garde project of literary experimentation.113 By an­ alyzing linguistic distribution patterns and feeding the resulting stochastic information back into specially designed computer programs, these scientific-­turned-­poetic pioneers had begun to facilitate the emergence of a “perfected artificial poetry,” 114 in which Bense saw nothing less than the final stage and conceptual telos of experimental modernism per se. If the latter had always been chiefly concerned with exposing the “material autonomy” 115 of language, this goal was about to find its purest realization in the “original productivity of machines,” 116 whose automatism might then in turn be imitated by human writers with the goal of “practicing” stochastic modes of writing. Bense’s intervention proposed, in other words, a striking reversal of roles between man and machine, poet and medium, which called into question the very category of artistic subjectivity, and with it the “aesthetic problem of vibration and articulation.” 117 Some fifty years before, the 110. On this inverse relationship between statistical probability and aesthetic innovation, see Max Bense, “The Projects of Generative Aesthetics,” in Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas, ed. Jasia Reichardt (London: Studio Vista, 1971): 57–­60, at 58. 111. Shannon’s seminal publication in this regard is the paper “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English,” The Bell System Technical Journal 30, no. 1 (1951): 50–­64. 112. Meyer-­Eppler, Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie, 75. 113. See Bense, “The Projects of Generative Aesthetics,” 58, where he presents his own approach to textual composition as a kind of fulfillment of the analytic-­statistical procedures first established by Shannon. 114. Max Bense and Reinhard Döhl, “zur lage,” manuskripte 5, no. 1 (1965): 2. On Bense’s distinction between “artificial” (experimental) and “natural” (conventional) poetry, see especially Max Bense, Theorie der Texte: Eine Einführung in neuere Auffassungen und Methoden (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1962): 143–­47. 115. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 122. 116. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 126. 117. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 124.

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appropriation of scientific knowledge from the related domains of phonetics and psycholinguistics had shaped the poetic focus on articulation and its emergent exploration through models and techniques of expressive sound writing as devised by Shklovsky, Ball, and other members of the interwar avant-­garde. Bense, by contrast, contends that scientists of the postwar era have taken over the task of spearheading aesthetic progress—­and that they have done so precisely by opening up a path toward other, nonexpressive modes of experimental text production. As he declares toward the end of his review, “experimental literature clearly cannot be mastered intuitively,” 118 which implies also that it must be severed conceptually from its presumed foundations in precisely those gestural, bodily, and emotional processes of artistic self-­expression that poets like Claus and Mon continued to place at the center of their poetics in the late 1950s. The particular irony of this proposed shift lies, of course, in the fact that it emerges from the very brand of linguistic research that had once been initiated under the banner of a “visible speech,” and in doing so had given rise to the very aesthetic program Bense claims to replace. From Alexander M. Bell’s late nineteenth-­century system of phonetic notation, to the foundation of Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1920s, to the experiments with “visible speech” patterns conducted in this institutional setting during the 1940s, to the concomitant inception of Shannon’s theory of communication, to the impact of these analytic frameworks on the work of postwar speech researchers like Jakobson and Meyer-­Eppler: the continuities among these various scientific developments make clear that Bense’s information-­based approach to literary production actually derives, genealogically speaking, from the same experimental practices that inspired the interwar avant-­garde. At least one member of the interwar avant-­garde—­Raoul Hausmann—­ attempted to draw the implications of this shared lineage in order to resist Bense’s programmatically inhuman conclusions. Hausmann’s postwar body of work thus represents the third camp in the debate about poetic foundations to which I alluded above: His program of an eidophonetic poetics emphatically rejected the possibility that the true form, or eidos, of poetry, could be located anywhere other than in the phonetic realm. As analyzed in detail at the outset of this book, the form of the phoneme, in all its Platonic, graphic, phonological, and human-­corporeal dimensions, remained for him the indisputable root unit upon which any truly radical poetry must build. And his work in a whole range of media—­including, notably, the production of typewriter poems that emerged in response to the works of contemporaries like Claus—­served to underscore this orientation. 118. Bense, “Movens: Experimentelle Literatur,” 125.

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Hausmann therefore fervently refused Bense’s proposal to uncouple the act of poetic experimentation from the realm of embodied subjective experience, and he consistently ridiculed the notion of a creative process that could be governed by “punch-­card machines and multiplication tables.” 119 At the same time, he made a concerted effort to respond to Bense’s critiques by bringing the paradigm of poetic articulation (back) into line with the scientific and technological developments of the electronic age: not by allowing the new cybernetic machines to take over, as Bense demanded, but by imagining such machines as “prostheses” that mediate between the eidos and its poetic articulation. In a 1965 essay published in the journal Sprache im technischen Zeitalter (to which Bense also contributed), Hausmann suggests that the poetic task of acting as a “hear-­seeing script-­speaker (hörsehender Schreib-­Sprecher)” 120 might in the future be fulfilled “with the help of an electronic-­technological instrument, an apparatus that can cybernetically control itself, the opto- or eidophone.” 121 Hausmann had initially conceived of a device called the “optophone” in the early 1920s, as a technical means for converting light effects into acoustic vibrations (and vice versa), and he kept working intermittently on the project throughout the Weimar period.122 Though he remained incapable of ever building the apparatus (he unsuccessfully filed for a patent in 1927), these original plans have garnered considerable scholarly attention in recent years, in part because Hausmann’s (failed) invention has been taken to anticipate various later, more successful technologies.123 At the same time, commentators have repeatedly emphasized that 119. Raoul Hausmann, “Typhonisme: Asthénie, Pycnie et Psychomorphologie. Le fonctionnement vasomoteur et la création poétique,” De Tafelronde 12, no. 4 (1967): 44–­46, at 45. See also Raoul Hausmann, “Nachwirkungen des Dadaismus in der deutschen Literatur,” German Life and Letters 21, no. 1 (1967): 21–­27, at 25–­27. 120. Raoul Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 14 (1965): 1193–­96, at 1194. 121. Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” 1195. 122. See the instrument’s first description (in Russian) in Raoul Hausmann, “Optofonetika,” Veshch’ Objet Gegenstand 3 (1922): 13–­14. For the German version of this essay, published only much later during the final years of Hausmann’s life, see Raoul Hausmann, “Optophonetik,” manuskripte 10, no. 29–­30 (1970): 53–­54. 123. The technical genealogies to which Hausmann’s device has been subsumed range from the emergence of sound film in the mid-­to late 1920s, to the video art of the 1960s, to the development of computer-­based audiovisuality in the late twentieth century. For some exemplary accounts in this regard, see Marcella Lista, “Raoul Hausmann’s Optophone: ‘Universal Language’ and the Intermedia,” in The Dada Seminars, eds. Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkowsky (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/D.A.P., 2005): 83–­101; Ina Blom, “The Touch through Time: Raoul Hausmann, Nam June Paik, and the Transmission Technologies of the Avant-­Garde,” Leonardo 34, no. 3 (2001): 209–­15; Jacques Donguy, “Machine Head: Raoul Hausmann and the Optophone,” Leonardo 34, no. 3 (2001): 217–­20. For scholarly treatments of

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Hausmann’s plans for his never-­realized apparatus should be seen as a direct outgrowth of—­and theoretical equivalent to—­his earliest experiments with sound poetry in the late 1910s, a connection that is usually drawn by subsuming both literary and technological efforts under the broader umbrella category of “optophonetics.” Hausmann’s earlier version of the visual-­acoustic interpolation, however, did not yet revolve around the question of specifically linguistic foundations. The applications he envisioned for his instrument in the 1920s were not focused on experiments with the human voice and its manifestation in articulate speech, but rather on other kinds of sounds induced through components of the electronic apparatus itself. Only in the 1960s, against the backdrop of his polemical engagement with Bense, did Hausmann begin to retroactively associate the device—­which he now claimed could also be called an “eidophone”—­with the process of properly linguistic sound production, and thus also with the project of poetically accessing a phonetic eidos or essence. The new version of the device was intended to generate “in a technological manner purely phonetic directives from which one could draw conclusions for innovative oral creations that remain completely indepen­ dent of any fateful oracles.” 124 Alluding here to the oral roots of poetry in sacred ritual and divination—­but also, perhaps, to the equally inhuman dictates of Bense’s profoundly nonoral computer programs—­Hausmann thereby reimagined his apparatus as a genuinely modern counterpart to traditional sources of poetic inspiration, as well as to the tyranny of the algorithm. His machines, in contrast to Bense’s, would help to stimulate a new “sound-­image fantasy” 125 in the subject, and to channel the expressive energies of this fantasy toward the creation of new vocal-­visual forms. Just one year before, Bense had asserted in strikingly similar terms that “the raHausmann’s optophone in relation to its early twentieth-­century scientific contexts, see especially the brilliant discussion in Cornelius Borck, “Blindness, Seeing, and Envisioning Prosthetics: The Optophone between Science, Technology, and Art,” in Artists as Inventors, Inventors as Artists, eds. Dieter Daniels and Barbara U. Schmidt (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008): 108–­29. See also Arndt Niebisch, “Ether Machines: Raoul Hausmann’s Optophonetic Media,” in Vibratory Modernism, eds. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 162–­76, and Ghislain Lauverjat, “Visions optophoniques (1919–­1971): Raoul Hausmann et les sources scientifiques de l’optophonie; Exemple de l’inflexion constructiviste au travers de la nature physique de la lumière,” in Raoul Hausmann et les avant-­gardes, eds. Timothy Benson, Hanne Bergius, and Ina Blom (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2014): 169–­94. The optophone was eventually (re)constructed in the late 1990s by British artist Peter Keene, on the basis of Hausmann’s original designs. See Donguy, “Machine Head,” 219–­20, for a brief discussion of this reconstruction. 124. Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” 1196. 125. Hausmann, “Zur Gestaltung einer energetischen Sprachform,” 1195.

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tional and methodical author has superseded the mystic and metaphysical blusterer.” 126 Whereas Bense, however, envisioned transferring the task of methodical text production (almost) entirely to self-­regulating machines, Hausmann proposed instead a kind of feedback loop whereby a technical apparatus would generate “input” for processes to be “executed” by a speaking/writing body. Hausmann remained notably vague on the question of how, exactly, such a back-­and-­forth exchange between machine and corpus might actually be expected to work. In his brief remarks on the matter, he merely suggested that the imagined device—­consisting of parts like a microphone, a loudspeaker, a photo cell, a light source, and electronic relays—­could somehow motivate and inform a new poetic agenda centered around the visual inscription of spoken sound.127 What this hypothetical function makes clear, however, is that the optophone came to function in the historical context of the 1960s as a site of multiple polemical reappropriations: It allowed Hausmann to reinterpret the objectives of his earlier work from the interwar period, which had been devised, as he now recalled, to “entirely liberate the phonetic poem from the bondage of the book.” 128 It formed part of his effort to reaffirm the authority of this project against the agenda of postwar writers like Claus and Mon, who claimed to have inherited Hausmann’s early focus on sound-­vision relationships, but who made no attempt to follow his postwar turn toward the notion of an optical-­acoustic eidos.129 Most 126. Bense and Döhl, “zur lage,” 2. 127. Hausmann’s adherence to the idea of the optophone sets his poetic “use” of electronic media technology apart from the work of other poets, who began to experiment increasingly over the course of the 1960s with the acoustic manipulation of vocal sound by means of the tape recorder. These writers—­including members of the Fylkingen group in Sweden and François Dufrêne and Henri Chopin in France—­remained indeed concerned with the phenomenon of articulation; yet their “electro-­acoustic” experiments did not place the focus (as Hausmann’s plans for the optophone still did) on the problem of converting speech from audible into visible form. On these developments, see Larry Wendt, “Sound Poetry: I. History of Electro-­Acoustic Approaches, II. Connections to Advanced Electronic Technologies,” Leonardo 18, no. 1 (1985): 11–­23. 128. Raoul Hausmann, “The Optophonetic Dawn,” trans. Frank W. Lindsay, Studies in the Twentieth Century 3 (1969): 51–­54, at 52. 129. Though Claus and Mon credited Hausmann explicitly as the most significant antecedent of their literary practices, his relationship to his self-­declared successors remained fraught, oscillating between the acknowledgment of shared concerns and the desire to reassert the primacy of his own endeavors. In a whole series of letters and manuscripts from the early to mid-­1960s, Hausmann invoked terms like “influence,” “imitation,” and “dependency” in order to establish a historical and conceptual hierarchy between his “original” form of literary avant-­gardism and derivative “neo-­Dadaist reformation attempts,” which he saw paradigmatically embodied in movens. See Raoul Hausmann, “Aussichten oder Ende des Neodadaismus,” in Adelheid Koch, Ich bin immerhin der größte Experimentator Österreichs—­Raoul Hausmann: Dada und Neodada

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significantly, it represented his vision for adapting literary experimentation to current technological principles, as Bense had demanded, without reducing it to a mechanical sequence of cybernetic operations. It was this latter facet of Hausmann’s postwar program that pointed most clearly forward. Despite the fact that his postwar writings are quite clearly intended to serve an at least partially backward-­looking agenda—­ the agenda of defending the priority of his own, earlier avant-­garde projects against the claims of relative newcomers like Claus, Mon, and Bense—­and despite the fact that this postwar agenda, even or especially where it moves definitively beyond the interwar one, remains sketchy in the extreme: Hausmann’s attempts to reconceptualize the avant-­garde poetics of articulation, within an explicitly hybrid framework of humans productively interacting with machines, culminates in a proposed approach that bears striking similarities to contemporary models of poetic experimentation. From the 1960s onward, the development of new, electronics-­based art forms like video art and later computer art took the relationship between poet and machine, body and writing, sound and visuality in directions very different from those predicted and demanded by Bense. Where the latter had envisioned a substitution, the artists themselves tended to strive for syntheses, integrating bodily articulations ever more fully into the workings of electronic circuits or digital processes—­and, in the process, carrying the tradition of avant-­garde sound writing all but unnoticed into the present.

Beyond Linealit y, or The Expansion of W riting The reason why this genealogical link has so often gone unnoticed by historians of literature, art, and media has everything to do with the concurrent development of the discipline now known as media studies, which, as it turns out, also takes one of its primary points of departure from the tradition of avant-­garde sound writing. The present book will conclude with the story of this ambivalent heritage: in what follows, I will juxtapose two profoundly different, but equally influential media-­historical approaches (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1994): 227–­316, at 241. See also Hausmann’s later text, “Nachwirkungen des Dadaismus in der deutschen Literatur,” 21–­26. In the years 1959–­60, Hausmann maintained a lively epistolary exchange with Claus and even dedicated an essay, “Vorbedingungen zu Sprechübungen” (“Prerequisites for Speech Exercises”) to his younger colleague (Archives Raoul Hausmann, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-­Vienne, Château de Rochechouart, inv. no. A.III.2.1/60-­02.). The friendly correspondence came to an abrupt end due to a personal quarrel over the exchange of a recording, which may have additionally fostered Hausmann’s objections to the 1960 anthology. On this falling-­out, see Claus to Franz Mon, July 23, 1960, in . . . eine nahezu lautlose Schwingungs-­Symbiose, eds. Mössinger and Milde, 75–­76.

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to the question of how sound writing ends—­namely, Marshall McLuhan’s theory of the emerging “electronic age” and Jacques Derrida’s project of “grammatology”—­each of which in its own way simultaneously extends and eradicates the significance of the history I have here reconstructed. I hope thereby to demonstrate the need for an alternative perspective that would resist both gestures of supersession, and in doing so open up the tradition of sound writing once again to the possibility of contemporary resonance. The case of Marshall McLuhan is one of a proximity so complete it engulfs: from McLuhan’s perspective, the avant-­garde project of sound writing is now our own, because what was once a vanguard vision of the future has become a mainstream reality. In 1967, the same year that Hausmann published his last text on the eidophone,130 the New York–­based avant-­ garde publisher Something Else Press—­owned and run by experimental poet and Fluxus member Dick Higgins—­launched a book titled Verbi-­Voco-­ Visual Explorations, with Marshall McLuhan listed as (main) author on the cover.131 Together with another seminal volume that appeared the same year, The Medium Is the Massage, the book capped off a more than decade-­ long development, during which McLuhan worked out the media-­historical narrative that would earn him his status as a pop-­cultural icon of the 1960s and ’70s. It is a narrative that works, in part, by uncoupling the avant-­garde project of sound writing from the avant-­garde problem of how to make art. This oft-­cited, oft-­misrepresented narrative revolves around two critical thresholds that bookend 2500 years of  Western cultural history. For McLuhan, the first of these thresholds coincides with the purported “invention” of the phonetic alphabet in ancient Greece, which caused a shift in cultural privilege from the spoken to the written word.132 The translation of orality into a system of abstract visual letters—­for McLuhan, an essentially “metaphorical” 133 process—­brought about a fundamental reorganization of 130. See Raoul Hausmann, “Eidophonie électronique,” De Tafelronde 12, no. 3 (1967): 49–­54. 131. Marshall McLuhan et al., Verbi-­Voco-­Visual Explorations (New York: Something Else Press, 1967). The first half of book—­consisting of twenty-­four short essays—­stems from McLuhan’s own hand, while the book’s second half is made up of contributions by six other scholars. Nevertheless, the volume was issued effectively under McLuhan’s name only, certainly not least due to marketing considerations on the part of the publisher. 132. With its exclusive, thoroughly Western focus on ancient Greece, McLuhan’s model disregards the even earlier, Semitic origins of phonetic writing, which have been addressed in more recent scholarship on the matter. See, for example, Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography (Jerusalem: Magnes Press/Brill, 1982). 133. On the metaphorical character of phonetic writing, see, for example, Marshall McLuhan, “Radio and TV vs. the ABCED-­Minded,” Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications 5 (1956): 12–­18. In 1969, McLuhan characterized phonetic writing succinctly as the

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human perception and social life, reshaping both the relationship between the senses and the structure of communicative processes. McLuhan summarizes in The Medium Is the Massage: the dominant organ in pre-­alphabet societies was the ear. . . . The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. Man was given an eye for an ear. Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alephbet [sic], a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragment bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-­like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms—­particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s and c-­o -­n-­n-­e-­c-­t-­e-­d. The line, the continuum –­this sentence is a prime example–­ became the organizing principle of life.134

In a gesture of playful self-­reference that belongs among the trademarks of McLuhan’s work, the passage clearly emphasizes its own linear typographical organization, and by extension, its adherence to the established perceptual regime of (Western) writing: McLuhan here makes clear that the kind of theoretical analysis his text offers hinges on the very medium it critically analyzes. In so doing, he also makes clear that his text inhabits the liminal position demarcated by the second threshold of his historical model, and by extension, the only historical vantage point from which the wide-­ranging consequences of the phonetic alphabet can be theorized at all. This second threshold is defined by the twentieth-­century advent and proliferation of new electronic media—­ranging from the telephone and radio to television and the computer—­which take on an increasingly dominant role in the “visual-­acoustic metaphor on which all civilization rests.” See Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969): 19. 134. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967): 44–­45.

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dissemination of information, and in the process bring about the “end” of the cultural hegemony of writing, together with the exclusive dominance of its privileged object, the printed book. It is this historical transformation that renders the profound medial effects of script visible in the first place, generating the theoretical interstice at which McLuhan purports to position himself: Still rooted in the age of writing whose end he claims to be observing, McLuhan uses his own writing to act as the herald of another, incipient epoch in which the book’s linear visuality will give way to a new medial model. What electronic media like telephone, radio, and even television facilitate, according to McLuhan, is a return to the spoken word, to voice and hearing, to “acoustic space.” 135 This return does not have the character of a simple regression back to some prehistoric, prealphabetic condition (despite the fact that McLuhan himself occasionally represents it as such).136 At stake for him (most of the time) is not the impending obliteration, but rather the fundamental oralization of writing—­together with the corresponding visualization of orality. Whereas the invention of the Greek alphabet had once engendered, according to his claims, “the translation of oral tradition into written and visual modes,” the mid-­twentieth century witnesses instead “the rapid translation of varied visual and auditory media into one another’s modalities.” 137 Not a mere shift from writing (back) toward orality and speech, then, but the fusion of visual and acoustic registers within the domain of writing belongs for McLuhan to the crucial media-­technological developments of his time. And precisely this effect—­the reorientation toward orality and speech in and through writing—­lies at the heart of the “verbi-­voco-­visual explorations” that McLuhan’s 1967 book announces in its very title. McLuhan’s definition of this second threshold moment is expansive—­as befits a narrative that encompasses millennia—­and it includes the avant-­ garde. In his efforts to promote and perform a kind of writing “that takes upon itself the lineaments of a visible speech,” 138 he clearly and consciously

135. On this important concept, see Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, “Acoustic Space,” in Explorations in Communication: An Anthology, eds. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1960): 65–­70. In contrast to the linear-­visual space of alphabetic writing, acoustic space is conceived as multidimensional, multidirectional, immersive, and emotionally charged. 136. McLuhan’s own, polemically unsubtle formulations have admittedly done much to foster such misinterpretations, from the blunt declaration, “We are back in acoustic space,” to the general pronouncement that “all cultures strive to return to the integral inclusiveness of the oral state.” See McLuhan, Counterblast, 17 and 82. 137. Carpenter and McLuhan, “Acoustic Space,” 70. 138. Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002): 138.

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places his work in the tradition of earlier aesthetic practices, from Futurism and Vorticism to Dada and the Bauhaus, that pioneered such “verbi-­voco-­ visual” experiments. In a 1954 essay that mentions the “verbi-­voco-­visual” nexus for the first time—­the term itself is borrowed from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, where it appears in the context of a television broadcast—­McLuhan contrasts the avant-­garde’s superior awareness of media-­historical transformations with the conservative outlook of the traditional “bookman as such,” declaring it fitting “that real understanding of the changes in modern communication should have come mainly from the resourceful technicians among modern poets and painters.” 139 To embark on an analysis of the dawning electronic age in the postwar decades meant therefore, in McLuhan’s eyes, to build and expand on these poetic and visual innovations in a way that renders them utterly general. This relationship becomes paradigmatically evident in the context of Verbi-­Voco-­Visual Explorations, which styles itself quite self-­consciously as a belated avant-­garde work, or rather, perhaps more accurately, as an arrière-­gardist consolidation of avant-­garde concerns. The volume is itself a reissue of one of McLuhan’s own, earlier works from 1957, namely: the eighth and final number of the seminal journal Explorations, published by the University of Toronto under the joint editorship of McLuhan and anthropologist Edmund Carpenter.140 In its original form, the issue’s front 139. Marshall McLuhan, “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press,” Sewanee Review 62, no. 1 (1954): 38–­55, at 42. Joyce himself uses his newly minted compound word only once, in Book II, Episode 3 of his novel. See James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1966): 340. Contemporaneously with—­but independently of—­McLuhan, a young group of Brazilian neo-­avant-­ garde poets, the Noigandres, also took up Joyce’s expression in their writings, most notably in their landmark 1958 manifesto “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” in which they described their brand of “concrete” poetry as a “verbivocovisual” form of textual composition. See Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” trans. Jon Tolman, in Novas: Selected Writings by Haroldo de Campos, eds. and introd. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007): 217–­19, at 218. Via the works of the Noigandres, Joyce’s verbal creation finally also made its way into the theoretical writings of Max Bense, for whom the Brazilian poets had opened up new ways of treating language in its purely material—­and hence also quantifiable—­dimensions. See Max Bense, Brasilianische Intelligenz: Eine cartesianische Reflexion (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1965): 59–­70, and “Konkrete Poesie,” Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 15 (1965): 1236–­44. On these connections, see in more detail Tobias Wilke, “Information and the Object of Poetry: ‘Verbi-­Voco-­Visual Explorations’ between McLuhan and Bense,” Culture Theory Critique 61 (forthcoming). 140. The journal ran from 1953 to 1957 and served primarily to disseminate the research of an interdisciplinary scholarly working group—­the so-­called Culture and Communications Graduate Seminar—­which McLuhan and Carpenter were directing at the university. “Verbi-­Voco-­Visual,” published in October 1957, was the last collectively produced number of the series, followed two years later by an additional ninth issue, on “Eskimo” culture, authored solely by Carpenter and without any involvement of McLuhan.

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matter included a colophon that elaborated on the significance of the typographic layout of the cover (plate 5), as well as on the programmatic title placed along the left edge: The graphic design of the cover derives from the spherical nature of the oral world. Verbi-­Voco-­Visual standing for the word as sound (πειρω) and as sight (hieroglyphs). The hieroglyphs are placed on a curve, the lower curve, reading from left to right means ‘looking for the ways’ and the top curve reading from right to left means speech. exploring the word!141

The avant-­garde nexus of the “verbi-­voco-­visual” thus assumes from the start the central role it was to continue to play in McLuhan’s oeuvre: it encapsulates both the object and the basic strategy of his analytic agenda, inasmuch as it performs—­at the level of the strung-­together word itself—­a novel connection between speech and writing, between the acoustic and graphic dimensions of language. In order to emphasize this aspect of connectivity, McLuhan chose to hyphenate the compound, which in Joyce’s novel had appeared as one continuous, hyphenless verbal element. Spacing the word in this manner allowed him to introduce into Joyce’s neologism the notion that the links between the spheres of the “vocal” and the “visual” needed first to be forged across an existing divide. And McLuhan chose to “illustrate” this activity of linking with a photomontage taken from Moholy-­Nagy’s 1947 compendium Vision in Motion, a work that functioned for him as a kind of sourcebook (fig. 36).142 Moholy-­Nagy’s image of an ear in place of an eye suggests a fusion of optical and acoustic perception, or perhaps even a shift from seeing (back) toward hearing, and it therefore recalls, in this context, McLuhan’s narrative about the impending inversion of the cultural order first established in ancient Greece, through which “man was given an eye for an ear.” 143 It also, however, serves to highlight the status of this inversion as an avant-­garde pedagogical project: Moholy-­Nagy’s photomontage emerged from the artistic experimentation conducted at his Institute of Design in Chicago, where it functioned as part of an explicitly pedagogical 141. Marshall McLuhan, “About the Cover,” Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications 8 (1957): n.p. 142. Among the many visual and literary documents assembled and discussed in Moholy’s book, there appears also, not incidentally, Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, which is praised for a writing style geared toward a “joined eye and ear sensation” (Moholy-­Nagy, Vision in Motion, 344). This characterization lies evidently not far from McLuhan’s discovery of the “verbi-­voco-­ visual” in Joyce’s text. 143. McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage, 44.

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Figu re 3 6 . Harley Parker, front matter to Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications 8 (October 1957): n.p. © Estate of Harley Parker/ Estate of Marshall McLuhan

platform for the “reprogramming of sensory life” 144 by aesthetic means, a goal Moholy-­Nagy had brought with him from his interwar days as a professor at the Bauhaus. McLuhan’s scholarly work from the 1950s onward subscribed to a corresponding imperative. For him, the media-­technological changes of the postwar era lent renewed urgency to the task of fostering modes of perception that would be adequate to the new historical situation. His “verbi-­voco-­visual” inquiries in Explorations 8 represent his first comprehensive move in this direction, since they seek not only to theorize, but also to implement a shifting relationship between the acoustic and graphic registers of language, between ear and eye, between orality and writing. The goal of fostering this connection informs the entirety of the volume’s cover design, which juxtaposes two different writing systems, one pictographic, one phonetic—­in order to invoke both the invention of the 144. See McLuhan, Counterblast, 33.

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Greek alphabet and its historical overcoming. The presentation of the verb πειρω (“to pierce through,” “to run through”) serves to illustrate this critical historical shift: On the one hand, the use of the word recalls the cultural prevalence of phonetic inscription as instituted—­in McLuhan’s view—­in ancient Greece, and with it the long-­lasting perceptual dominance of the eye that followed from the decision “to abstract sound from meaning and then to enclose that sound in visual space.” 145 On the other hand, the word’s curved typographic design suggests that the established visual order of Western (print) culture has begun to undergo, within itself, a reorientation toward oral modes of expression and perception. From this perspective, it is also particularly significant that the very center of the cover’s composition consists of two red circles pierced through by the writing of the title “Explorations.” These spherical elements are mounted one on top of the other to form the number of the journal issue (“8”), but they can of course also be read as two Os, and hence as a doubled reference to the issue’s focus on exploring the oral by means of writing. The O is, furthermore, the only letter of the (Western) phonetic alphabet whose graphic shape resembles the lips’ position during the process of its vocalization; semiotically speaking, it thus functions as a conventional phonetic symbol at the same time as it refers iconically, by way of physical resemblance, to a bodily act of articulatory sound production. In harmony with these various circular emblems of a quasi-­cyclical historical logic, all script on the cover of Explorations 8 dispenses with the straight, horizontal organization of classic print in favor of a multidirectional layout. Writing extends here both vertically and diagonally, and even appears curved so as to mirror the curvature of the adjacent graphic shapes. It is thereby brought into quite literal conformity with what McLuhan calls the “spherical nature of the oral world”—­since the oral world is spherical for McLuhan, inasmuch as sound spreads dynamically in multiple directions at once and in so doing fills, or creates, a space that sur-­rounds the listener’s body from all sides.146 In order to replicate such an enveloping experience in print, Toronto-­based typographer Harley Parker, who was commissioned to design the cover and layout of Explorations 8, used a new photo-­based typesetting technique called Flexitype, which had previously been deployed only in commercial advertising.147 145. McLuhan, Counterblast, 80. 146. See Carpenter and McLuhan, “Acoustic Space,” 67–­6 8. 147. See Gary Genosko, “The Designscapes of Harley Parker: Print and Built Environments,” Journal of Cross-­Cultural Image Studies 8, no. 3 (2018): 153–­64. Parker would continue to collaborate with McLuhan on various other publication projects throughout the 1960s, including the volumes Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) and Counterblast (1969).

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For Parker as for McLuhan (who had maintained a keen interest in advertising ever since the publication of his first book, The Mechanical Bride, in 1951), the chief advantage of this technique lay in its potential for visually altering the conventional appearance of words, as illustrated by the case of πειρω and its transformation in the direction of a spherical object. By means of Flexitype, the verbal material could be stretched, twisted, and otherwise manipulated in its graphic shape, a possibility that McLuhan deemed particularly apt for the thematic purpose of his “verbi-­voco-­visual” investigations. “Inherent in the visual distortion of the word is the possibility of its sounding,” 148 declares an editorial note at the end of Explorations 8. Such attempts to make writing “sound,” in accordance with an avant-­ garde logic of pedagogical reprogramming, run through the entire journal, which thus delivers its message, as Richard Cavell fittingly remarks, “as much through its artistic dimensions as through any other aspect of its medium.” 149 Here, as in other publications, McLuhan seeks to create a countersphere to the purely visual world of traditional print, and thus to actively liberate the word’s acoustic-­vocal dimension from its long enclosure in “the physic s of t ypographic linealit y.” 150 Far from playing the role of a detached observer, he strives also to further advance the development he claims to be witnessing during his time: an “oral revolution” 151 brought about by the rise of electronic media, whose effects on the proliferation of (spoken) sound extend into, and thereby reorganize, the space of the printed page as well. The programmatic centerpiece of the journal issue, in this regard, is a section placed under the catchword “Manifestos,” whose typographic appearance recalls a shaken-­up newspaper headline, and hence an “inverse” phenomenon of modern-­day print culture to which McLuhan ascribed the “oral task” of “scream[ing] loudly.” 152 (This alleged “tipping over” of script into voice and sound amounts to the same effect as in the case of the typewriter, about which McLuhan writes with direct reference to Charles Olson that it “brought writing and speech . . . into close association.” 153) McLuhan 148. Marshall McLuhan, “Typography,” Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications 8 (1957): n.p. Genosko describes this graphically intended effect as the “acoustification of printed pages.” See Genosko, “The Designscapes of Harley Parker,” 156. 149. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 109. 150. Marshall McLuhan, “Verbi-­Voco-­Visual,” Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications 8 (1957): n.p. 151. Marshall McLuhan, “Verbi-­Voco-­Visual,” n.p. 152. Marshall McLuhan, “The Journalist’s Dilemma, or The Fox and his Gripes,” Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications 8 (1957): n.p. 153. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 351. For a corresponding statement, see also McLuhan, “Verbi-­Voco-­Visual,” n.p.

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announces through this headline and section his indebtedness to a strand of experimental modernism that extends from Marinetti’s typographic strategies in his parole in libertà, and Hausmann’s notion of optophonetics, to the emergent “verbi-­voco-­visual” practices of Concrete Poetry in the 1950s and 1960s.154 Juxtaposing brief samples of his own writings with excerpts from vanguard declarations issued nearly half a century before, McLuhan’s “Manifestos” montage serves to establish continuity across a historical divide. The “Manifestos” section serves also, however, to announce the supersession of the very voices it cites. What was future is now (in the process of becoming) present, which means that what was once the provenance of an elite group of technician-­poets will soon be a matter of mere common sense. In the words of McLuhan’s most programmatic claim regarding the new conditions of the postwar era: “We are back in acoustic space” (fig. 37). In addition to Hausmann’s final eidophonetic text and McLuhan’s Verbi-­ Voco-­Visual Explorations, the year 1967 also “mark[ed] the opening of the major debates on ‘macluhanisme’ in France,” 155 due to the first French translation of McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy. And this latter event coincided in turn with the 1967 publication of a quite different, indeed radically opposed narrative about the origins and future of the sound-­writing relationship, which also had the effect of diverting theoretical attention away from the nexus of sound and art: Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Derrida mentions McLuhan by name only later, and only twice, in all of his voluminous writings. (The first time is in a paper delivered in 1971 in Montreal, where he critiques McLuhan’s “ideological representation” of an incipient return to the oral world.156) But the opening pages of his groundbreaking 1967 work can in fact be read in part as a thinly veiled attack on 154. McLuhan was an avid reader of Marinetti’s work and encountered Hausmann’s ideas, if not directly, through their elaboration in Moholy-­Nagy’s book Vision in Motion, which he read and reviewed as early as 1949. See Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 109–­15, for a thorough discussion of these influences. On McLuhan and the development of Concrete Poetry in North America, see 136–­5 2. 155. Donald F. Theall, “McLuhan as Prepostmodernist and Forerunner of French Theory,” in Marshall McLuhan, vol. II: Theoretical Elaborations, ed. Gary Genosko (London: Routledge, 2005): 379–­92, at 380. 156. See Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988): 1–­ 23, at 20. The second mention of McLuhan can be found in a 1982 interview in which Derrida reiterates his critique, stating that “there is an ideology in McLuhan’s discourse that I don’t agree with, because he’s an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that’s a very traditional myth.” Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Excuse Me, but I Never Exactly Said So’: Interview with Paul Brennan,” On the Beach 1 (1983): 42. See, in this context, also Richard Cavell, “Specters of McLuhan: Derrida, Media,

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Figur e 3 7. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, passage from Counterblast, 1954, set in Flexitype, in Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications 8 (October 1957): n.p. © Estate of Harley Parker/ Estate of Marshall McLuhan

precisely the kind of theoretical discourse that McLuhan’s publications had generated. Derrida invokes here “this death of the civilization of the book, of which so much is said,” 157 in order to dismiss the popular talk about the impending end of the Gutenberg Galaxy as mere “fashion”—­and as the product of a belatedly avant-­garde self-­understanding that amounts, in his view, to “ignorance.” 158 Together with the programmatic title of his first chapter, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” Derrida’s polemic Materiality,” in Transforming McLuhan: Cultural, Critical, and Postmodern Perspectives, ed. Paul Grosswiler (New York: Peter Lang, 2010): 135–­62. 157. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976): 8. 158. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 6.

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faults his unnamed opponent(s) for a short-­circuited equation between the deterioration of the book’s cultural predominance (a historical process Derrida does not dispute) and an assumed trend toward the restoration of “full,” embodied speech. Quite on the contrary, Derrida contends, the displacement of the codex from its centuries-­long privileged position has opened up the possibility of registering “a new mutation in the history of writing”:159 one in which the power and priority of writing will by no means begin to wane, but will instead become more completely visible and thinkable than at any prior point in the history of Western thought. Certainly, Derrida’s brief critique of the popular discourse surrounding the “end of the book” is by no means an accurate representation of McLuhan’s theoretical positions—­since McLuhan did not simply proclaim a shift away from alphabetic script toward new modes of (electronically conditioned) orality, but rather a merging of the two domains—­nor was it probably intended as such. Yet together with the references to other, contemporaneous developments in cybernetics, information theory, and linguistics (Derrida cites Jakobson’s above-­discussed remarks about a convergence between these fields160), the repudiation of a McLuhanesque “ideology” of the oral serves strategically to set the stage for Derrida’s own theoretical project. This project famously involves “deconstructing” the common, ordinary, even “vulgar” 161 understanding of writing as a secondary sign system that remains parasitic upon speech. In contrast to this vulgar understanding, Derrida puts forward his seminal concept of “arche-­ writing,” 162 which names a structural principle of inscription that ostensibly precedes and conditions any particular form of graphic notation. Arche-­ writing is a transcendental, a priori operation that underlies, according to Derrida, both speech and graphic notation alike. As such, it marks an “absolute extension to the concept of writing,”163 which seeks, on the one hand, to free this concept from its long-­standing philosophical marginalization as a “derivative auxiliary form of language,” 164 and, on the other hand, to free the concept of language from its traditional equation with “phonematic or glossematic production.” 159. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 8. 160. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 69. Jakobson’s insight that continuous speech can be parsed into discrete bits of information is designated in this context as a “most important” idea for Derrida’s own project. Early on, Derrida also makes reference to developments in sound-­recording technology, citing “all the means of conserving the spoken language” in ways that go beyond the established “ ‘written’ translation” of speech into phonetic letters (Of Grammatology, 10). 161. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 63. 162. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 56. 163. Derrida, “ ‘Excuse Me, but I Never Exactly Said So’,” 42. 164. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 7.

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Arche-­writing, then, is a construct that works to dismantle a prevailing hierarchy—­the primacy assigned “to voice, to hearing, to sound and breath, to speech” over its inscription by means of phonetic letters—­without simply reversing the relationship of priority between the two poles. Instead of privileging the graphic medium of script, which for Derrida remains writing only in the “narrow” or “colloquial” 165 sense of the word, he focuses instead on an original capacity that “permits the articulation of speech and writing” 166 and thus constitutes the very possibility of their unfolding in sensible and intelligible form. It is this definitive turn away from the oral, as the privileged place to go looking for the origins and foundations of linguistic articulation, that makes Derrida’s anti-­McLuhanesque intervention so relevant here at the conclusion to the present book. His understanding of “articulation” is explicitly and polemically unphysiological, in line with the Saussurean Structuralist doctrine that he simultaneously inherits and critiques (for not going far enough in its demotion of speech). Saussure’s proposal, as laid out more than fifty years earlier in his Course on General Linguistics (1916), had been to exclude the activity of the speech organs from the domain of his newly conceived discipline of synchronic linguistics.167 In an effort to secure the independence and coherence of this new discipline, he chose to disregard—­or rather, to reject as linguistically irrelevant—­the findings of physiologists and experimental phoneticians who had been investigating the corporeal processes of articulatory sound production from the late nineteenth century onward. The capacity to articulate thoughts via linguistic signs, he argued, must precede and condition the capacity to produce articulate noises by means of the vocal apparatus; it belongs—­structurally speaking—­primarily to the internal differentiation of the general system of langue, and only secondarily to individual acts of parole. To make this point, Saussure turned to a much older model of articulation, whose paradigmatic instantiation is the “jointed” structure of the living body: 165. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 53 and 63. 166. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 63. Emphasis mine. 167. Saussure justifies this decision by way of a media-­technological analogy: “The vocal organs are as external to language as are the electrical devices used in transmitting the Morse code itself; and phonation, i.e., the execution of the sound-­images, in no way affects the system itself.” Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959): 18. Here and in the following I refer to the 1916 Cours version compiled by Saussure’s students and colleagues Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Though recent scholarship has moved considerably beyond this source, it remains relevant due to its long and wide-­ranging reception history, which includes Derrida’s treatment of Saussure’s ideas in Of Grammatology.

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The question of the vocal apparatus obviously takes a secondary place in the problem of speech. One definition of articulated speech might confirm that conclusion. In Latin, articulus means a member, part, or subdivision of a sequence; applied to speech, articulation designates either the subdivision of a spoken chain into syllables or the subdivision of the chain of meanings into significant units; gegliederte Sprache is used in the second sense in German. Using the second definition, we can say that what is natural to mankind is not oral speech [langage parlé ] but the faculty of constructing a language, i.e. a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas.168

Derrida cites this passage, and with it Saussure’s conception of language as an internally organized, articulated system of clearly defined structural components, or “members.” 169 The German linguistic tradition, within which Saussure was educated, had long conceived of language on the model of a “jointed” and thus cleanly divisible organic body: Saussure’s direct contemporary, linguist Georg von der Gabelentz, employs the term gegliederte Sprache in this manner, as does, much earlier, Wilhelm von Humboldt, among many others.170 But what is decisive about Saussure’s reference to this tradition, from Derrida’s perspective, is the explicitly polemical contrast he draws between the conditions of system-­internal organization and the conditions of vocal sound production. The point, for Saussure, is clearly to privilege the concern of (his) linguistics with the (only) primary facts of language—­what he calls the “correspondence” between “distinct signs” and “distinct ideas”—­over any experimental-­scientific inquiries into the ostensibly “secondary” functions of the human speech apparatus, which he considers structurally nonfoundational. Derrida repeats Saussure’s polemical gesture when he rejects any attempt to define the essence of speech in terms of a “mundane science, . . . a 168. Saussure, 10. Emphases original. 169. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 66. 170. See Georg von der Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft: Ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bis­ herigen Ergebnisse (Leipzig: Weigel, 1891): 4. Humboldt develops his thoughts on the articulate nature of language especially in his 1820 lecture “Ueber das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung” (“On the Comparative Study of Language and its Relation to the Different Periods of Language Development”). See Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV: 1820–­1822, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Berlin: Behr, 1905): 1–­34. On Humboldt’s understanding of articulation, see also, in more detail, Markus Wilczek, Das Artikulierte und das Inartikulierte: Eine Archäologie des strukturalistischen Denkens (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012): 108–­13. On the trajectory of the concept at the intersection of philosophy, biology, and linguistics, with particular reference to the revival of its Platonic heritage, which Derrida also invokes, see Sarah Pourciau, The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of  Language Science (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

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psycho-­physio-­phonetics.” 171 For him, too, the “power of articulation” 172 needs to be sought beyond the domain of spoken language, since it is both more elementary and more encompassing than the corporeal production of audible discourse. And he, too, ties this insistence on a different, deeper notion of linguistic foundations to the establishment of a new paradigm for the study of language, namely the project of his grammatology, which will ultimately also seek to deconstruct the entire nineteenth-­century conception of a “positive science.” 173 The concept of articulation, like that of writing, acquires here two equivocal senses—­one “colloquial,” one “originary”—­which relate to one another in the manner of epiphenomenon to ground. Articulation, in the former sense, refers to vocal sound production, and in the latter, to the force of “arche-­writing as it is already at work within speech.” 174 It thereby names the manner in which spoken language is inherently conditioned by something other than itself, or perhaps more precisely, the manner in which it becomes itself only by virtue of an alien, structurally antecedent principle.175 It is only because speech always already carries within itself this originary otherness, which is also an originary written-­ness, according to Derrida, that it can be “captured” in empirical graphic marks at all.176 The spacing of letter-­based, phonetic inscription renders materially visible, in effect, what must already be intrinsic to the only seemingly undivided, continuous stream of spoken discourse, namely: an a priori potential that transcends vocal, written, and organic instances of “actual” articulation, and whose structural-­dynamic character amounts to “both a differentiation, or separation, of parts, and a joining of them.” 177 The goal here cannot be to delve into the extremely complex question of the relationship between Derrida’s understanding of articulation and Saussure’s, or into the perhaps even more complex question of how his notion of “arche-­writing” modifies the many other, prior notions of a write-­ability inherent to speech—­avant-­garde and postwar, poetic and scientific, implicit and explicit—­which have been explored over the course of this book. For it is not so much the intricacies of Derridean thought itself, but rather the 171. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 64–­65. 172. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 228. 173. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 63. 174. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 228. 175. It is in the sense of this relationship that Derrida contends: “Articulation is the becoming-­ writing of language.  .  .  . The becoming-­writing of language is the becoming-­language of language” (Of Grammatology, 229, emphasis original). 176. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 66. 177. Christopher Johnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 128.

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legacy of the Derridean intervention, that has for decades helped to foreclose insight into the history of modernist sound writing. With the proposition that “articulation and therefore the space of writing operates at the origin of language,” 178 Derrida opened up a theoretical perspective that diverged dramatically from earlier corporeal approaches to the puzzle of linguistic foundations, with their emphasis on the movements of the speech organs as the true ground of poetic discourse. Subsequent literary and media-­historical adaptations of Derrida’s work, from the 1980s onward, responded by retraining their interpretive attention ever more exclusively on the noncorporeal aspects of communication, and in particular on the technological bases of existing “inscription” systems. In doing so, they proceeded to literalize and ossify the conceptual asymmetry inherent to Derrida’s theoretical framework, which plays on the equivocation between Writing and writing: under the banner of a battle against the influence of Western phonocentrism, they extended the philosophical priority of arche-­writing, as conferred by Derrida, to empirical manifestations of writing and writing machines. And the result was a pervasive, quasi-­reflexive privileging of experiments with “graphic articulations” 179 and alphabetic letters over experiments with voice and speech, which effectively rendered an entire dimension of twentieth-­century literary production interpretively illegible. This dimension, whose different stages of development have been the subject of the present book, began to disappear from both the poetic and the theoretical stage during the mid-­to late 1960s. By this point, Max Bense had proclaimed a new paradigm of experimental, literary writing that challenged the avant-­garde status of any contemporary poetics centered on the inscription of corporeal-­articulatory processes. Marshall McLuhan had adopted modernist concerns with body, sound, and speech for the purposes of his own media-­theoretical analyses, which turned the poetic project of (re)writing orality into a mere side effect of the impending transition toward a new technological age. And Derrida had launched his project of deconstructing the phonocentric prejudice of Western thought, which fostered widespread emphasis on the primacy of writing over speech and relegated the latter to the role of irrelevant epiphenomenon. The challenge of a genealogy of sound writing, against such a backdrop, is to acknowledge the significance of these historical endpoints—­and the theoretical perspectives they represent—­without participating in any of their various gestures of foreclosure. A poetic model of such an approach 178. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 229. 179. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990): 33.

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Figur e 3 8. Ernst Jandl, “3 Visual Lip Poems,” Form 3 (1967): 22

will serve here as a kind of epigraph. Austrian poet Ernst Jandl, in 1967, published an experiment he called “3 Visual Lip Poems” (fig. 38), which succeeds in (playfully) producing a new kind of art out of the silencing of the older articulatory model. The result is an implicit meditation on the relationship between past and present, closure and openness, body and writing, which categorically refuses the unidirectional dynamic of supersession. The experiment has, for Jandl, both poetic and scientific antecedents. His lines of single letters and syllables recall iconic pieces of avant-­garde poetry from the prewar era—­ranging from Schwitters’s alphabet poems and his Ursonate, to Kruchenykh’s vocalic revelations of a “universal language”—­as well as similar compositions from the postwar period like Hausmann’s nearly contemporaneous Oaoa. And the title “3 Visual Lip Poems” invokes the scientific project of “visible speech,” together with the techniques of lipreading central to this project’s development at the hands of pedagogues and physiologists of the deaf from the late nineteenth century onward. A brief caption placed between the title and the poems themselves—­“Dedicated to the moustache of Daniel Jones, the great En­ glish phonetician” 180—­makes this connection explicit. Jones (who chaired 180. Ernst Jandl, “3 Visual Lip Poems,” Form 3 (1967): 22.

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Figu re 39. Kurt Schwitters, “W W PBD,” 1922, with photograph of Schwitters reading, date uncertain, photographer unknown, Form 3 (1967): 28

the International Phonetic Association until 1967, the year of his death), is known especially for his work on diagrams that visualize the production of so-­called cardinal vowels by indicating the height of the tongue arch and the shape of the lips during the process of articulation. To develop these diagrams, Jones made extensive use of camera photographs and even X-­ray images documenting the positions of the relevant speech organs. Many of the photographic illustrations included in his seminal textbook An Outline of English Phonetics (1918) show indeed his very own mouth—­and mustache—­as an exemplary site of British vowel pronunciation.181 Against this familiar backdrop, however, Jandl does something utterly novel. The poems were published in the British avant-­garde journal Form, in an issue that also included various documents illustrating the poetic practices of Kurt Schwitters, among them a photograph of Schwitters reciting the letter poem “W W PBD” (for which he had once specifically composed a “trial guide” with rules for pronunciation), next to a typeset version of the poem itself (fig. 39). Jandl, who elsewhere placed his ways

181. See Daniel Jones, An Outline of English Phonetics (Cambridge: Heffer, 1960): VI. Jandl encountered Jones’s work and the photographs contained therein as a student of English literature at the University of Vienna. See Ernst Jandl, Das Öffnen und Schließen des Mundes: Frankfurter Poetik-­Vorlesungen (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985): 11. On Jones’s scientific contributions more generally, see Beverley Collins and Inger M. Mees, The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999).

220  c h a p t e r f o u r

of “experimenting in poetry” 182 clearly and consciously in the tradition of Schwitters,183 picks up on this avant-­garde gesture of tying the writing of the poem to the record of the oral performance of the poem. Yet he transforms the juxtaposition into a fusion that parodically deflates avant-­garde claims for the originarity of speech, even as it also continues to insist on the irreducible kernel of embodied vocal performance: The reciter is the paper of the visual lip-­poem. The visual lip-­poem is spoken without intonation. It is written in the air by the lips. The untrained reader speaks the visual lip-­poem in front of a mirror; with a trained reader the movements of the mouth will suffice to create the impression of the poem. Whoever knows visual lip-­poems by heart will never grow totally blind. Deafness, muteness, and deafmuteness are suspended by the visual lip-­poem. Those born blind are the only ones beyond its reach.184

This passage operates in a mode of tongue-­in-­cheek playfulness that is characteristic for Jandl, but its quite radical conceptual claims deserve nonetheless to be taken seriously. The notion of the speaking body as both writing surface and writing tool, the focus on poetry as a performative practice to be developed through exercise and self-­observation, and the emphasis on overcoming organic deficiencies by means of poetic experimentation, are all transformative, forward-­pointing aspects of an approach so new and so tentative that Jandl returns to it only one other time in his oeuvre. The crux of this approach is a model of writing sound by subtracting sound: the articulatory divisions that underlie speech are here being aligned with the movements of lips that have been emptied of all acoustic “material,” and the task of poetry is here being identified with the rendering visible of an utterly un-­Derridean form of arche-­writing.185 “Written in the air by the lips,” Jandl’s poems cease to exist each time they are 182. Ernst Jandl, “In the Mid-­fifties . . . ,” Form 3 (1967): 21. The visual lip-­poems were originally composed in 1957 and appeared subsequently in various periodicals, as well as in Jandl’s seminal volume of poetry, Laut und Luise, from 1966. They have been reprinted more recently in Imagining Language: An Anthology, eds. Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998): 243. 183. See Jandl, Das Öffnen und Schließen des Mundes, 71. 184. Jandl, “3 Visual Lip Poems,” 22. 185. Some thirty years later, one of the earliest computer animations produced in the German-­ speaking world would take its point of departure from Jandl’s poetry in order to produce a digitally coded, artificial synthesis of sound and sight, audible speech, and visible mouth-­writing. Eku Wand’s three-­minute-­long clip, Gedichte von Ernst Jandl (Poems by Ernst Jandl ), displays a grid of twenty-­five identical pairs of lips that are programmed to “articulate” in synchrony with a recording of Jandl’s own voice, in the process forming various visual patterns that include

Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations 221

recited—­in their status as corporeal texts—­as the movements of their articulatory realization pass. And yet these ephemeral visible movements, Jandl further contends, are all there really ever is. The old avant-­garde ideal of an (almost) universal language reappears here in his suggestion that virtually everybody—­except those who are blind from birth—­will be able to “read” and thus “write” such poetry. But the event of poetic communication now takes place in a dimension beyond and beneath the avant-­garde’s fundamentally vibratory domain. With Jandl’s poetry, we arrive at a place where the writing of articulation—­and the tradition of articulation as writing—­ falls expressly and productively silent.

letter forms like “I, “Z,” and “X.” For a full version of the clip, see https://textinart.wordpress .com/2012/09/24/gedichte-­von-­ernst-­jandlpoems-­of-­ernst-­jandl/.

Acknowledgments

In my six years of working on this book—­and a few more of envisioning it—­numerous other voices have helped to shape my explorations into the history of “sound writing.” The first ideas for the project were born in a graduate seminar on sound and poetry that I offered almost a decade ago, and they continued to evolve in the setting of various other courses—­on the European avant-­garde movements, on empathy theory, and on aesthetic emotions—­during the following years. I owe gratitude to the students in all these classes for many inspiring discussions that contributed decisively to the development of my research. Their curiosity, enthusiasm, and expertise have been a constant and indispensable resource for my schol­­ arly work. As the project progressed, various parts of it were presented in lectures and conference papers. I am especially grateful to my hosts and audiences at Sprengel Museum Hannover, Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Utah, Stanford University, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Columbia University, Technische Universität Dresden, Rutgers University, Westfälische Wihelms-­Universität Münster, eikones–­Center for the Theory and History of the Image, and Universität Bern for the opportunities to share my work, and for a plethora of valuable questions, comments, and suggestions that allowed me to rethink, advance, and expand my arguments. I am also deeply indebted to the colleagues in different institutional contexts who read and provided critical feedback on earlier drafts of these chapters, and to those mentors and friends who furthered the project in manifold other ways: Nicola Behrmann, Philipp Ekardt, Eva Geulen, Zeynep Gürsel, Michael Jennings, Markus Klammer, Malika Maskarinec, Sean Silver, Oliver Simons, Ralph Ubl, and Dorothea von Mücke. I also thank my collaborators in the Languages of Emotion research cluster at

224  A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

the Freie Universität Berlin, Jutta Müller-­Tamm and Henning Schmidgen. Though our joint work on the history of empirical aesthetics was carried out quite a while ago, it has left some clear traces in the present book. Furthermore, I want to express my sincere gratitude to a number of organizations and institutions that provided generous financial support for the project. Work on the manuscript was made possible by a Chamberlain Fellowship and a Lenfest Junior Faculty Award at Columbia University, a NOMIS Foundation Fellowship at eikones–­Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the Universität Basel, and a Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin. This funding afforded me with the two most precious scholarly goods—­freedom and time—­and allowed me to complete the book in academic settings that were both intellectually stimulating and collegial. The NOMIS Foundation also provided generous funds to cover the expenses related to image reproductions and copyrights. In conjunction with the fellowship year at eikones during which I was able to engage deeply with the field of image studies, this financial support fittingly facilitated the visual features of the present book. I owe special thanks to two anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press, for their generous and insightful comments that helped me tremendously in refining certain aspects of the manuscript for publication. At the press, I am deeply grateful to my editor, Susan Bielstein, for taking an immediate interest in the project, and for her invaluable support during every stage of its progress, from proposal to drafted manuscript to finished book. James Whitman Toftness provided valuable advice on image permissions and the technical aspects of manuscript preparation. Jessica Wilson copyedited the manuscript with great care and made numerous helpful suggestions for improvement. Finally, I am endlessly grateful to the most important people in my life: to my parents, Ulrike and Jürgen Wilke, whose love and support have been the foundation for everything I have achieved academically and beyond; to my two young sons, Ezra and Eliah, whose joy and curiosity are the greatest delight and a true inspiration for me every day; and to my wife, Sarah, the most amazing partner and scholar imaginable, who has made this book possible in so many ways. With all my heart, I dedicate it to her.

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index

“[A A A A]” (Hausmann), 25 ABCD (Hausmann), 15n1, 56–­62 acoustic figures, 38–­39, 43. See also sound figures acoustic media, 5–­6, 158–­59 acoustic research, 32n41, 43 acoustic space, 205, 210–­1 2, 212 acoustic symbolism, 12, 101–­7 acoustics: and aesthetics, 6–­7; and articulation, 1, 130; history of, 7–­8; indexical, 52; and orality, 17; and phonetics, 61; and poetic articulation, 26, 147; and poetic language, 2, 12; and reading, 140; and sound writing, 1, 7–­8, 120, 150; and speech, 39, 51–­5 2, 99, 181, 220 adamic language, 148 aesthetic production, 1–­2, 118 aesthetics: and acoustics, 6–­7; and articulation, 12–­13, 197; and avant-­garde, 1–­2, 167, 196; and defamiliarization, 17; of empathy, 96–­97; experimental, 71; information, 193, 196; and semantics, 193; and sound, 6–­7; and statistical probability, 197n110 af Klint, Hilma, 103 Albers, Josef, 170 “All Birds” (Schwitters), 161–­65 alphabet, Greek, 25–­26, 205, 208–­9

alphabet, Latin, 58–­59 alphabet, phonetic, 2, 56, 178, 203–­4 , 209 “Alphabet in reverse” (Schwitters), 58–­59 América, La (magazine), 64 anthropology, 96–­97, 206 Anti-­Dada/Merz-­Tour, 57, 151 Application of the Graphic Method to Speech and Song (Scripture), 79 Aragon, Louis, 59n80 architecture, 4n6, 186 Aristophanes, 154n94 Arnim, Achim von, 40 Arp, Hans, 36n47, 133, 137, 193 art: and avant-­garde, 203; electronics-­based forms, 202; and psychophysiology, 167; visual, 103, 169, 186 art of noise, 7 articulation: and acoustics, 1, 130; and aesthetics, 12–­13, 197; and analog recording devices, 13; and avant-­ garde, 6, 12–­13, 62–­63; blocking of, 8; bodily process of, 1, 68–­69; colloquial, 216; corporeal, 4–­5, 10, 26–­28, 72–­73, 118, 150, 180–­81, 185–­86, 214, 216, 220–­21; and cybernetics, 180–­81; diagram of vowel “a,” 123; and digital computing, 13; and gestures, 192; graphic, 8, ei60–­61, 140–­50, 154, 217; history of, 3–­4 , 11; indexical, 10, 73–­74,

248 i n d e x articulation (cont.) 109; and language, 169–­70, 215–­17; language-­philosophical understanding of, 3n5; Lautartikulationen, 158; lip positions during, 47, 55; and neo-­ avant-­garde, 12–­13; organic process of, 43; originary, 216; and phonetics, 76n33, 176; as physical phenomenon, 188; physiology of, 3–­5, 69, 80, 139; places of (Artikulationsstellen), 4; and poetic experimentation, 1, 8; and psychology, 91; and psychophysiology, 132, 168, 180–­81; and reading graphics, 140–­50; recordings of, 4, 43; scientific contexts of, 3–­4; and semantics, 3–­4 , 124, 133; and semiotics, 4, 21, 76n33; and signification, 12, 130, 139; and sound, 1, 116, 130–­3 1, 139, 151, 154–­55, 182; and sound writing, 1, 3, 120, 144, 150, 168, 198; and speech, 4–­5, 7, 27, 47–­48, 76, 132, 147–­48, 180, 186–­87, 214–­17, 220; and speech photography, 55; in static images, 48–­50; and symbolism/symbols, 43, 139, 176, 187, 209; term, usage, 3–­4; traces of (Artikulationsspur), 188; and vibration, 193–­95, 197; and visible sound, 11; and vocal gestures, 92; and writing, 6, 9, 74, 159, 186, 214, 216–­17, 221. See also poetics of articulation “Articulation and Reading” (Mon), 188 “Artikulationen” (essay), 189–­90 artikulationen (Mon), 189–­90 assonance, 2 autography, 5. See also phonautographs avant-­garde: and aesthetics, 1–­2, 167, 196; and art, 203; and articulation, 6, 12–­13, 62–­63; and experimental, 2, 78; history of, 1; interwar, 12, 167, 170, 198; literature, 196; media-­historical approaches to, 202–­3; neo-­, 12–­13, 168–­ 69, 206n139; and phonetic writing, 11; and poetic articulation, 202; and poetic experimentation, 1, 8–­9, 12–­13, 17, 62–­63, 77, 104, 202; and poetic expression, 31; and poetry, 40–­41, 62–­63, 168–­69, 218–­21; and Romantic

origins of poetry, 40–­41; and science of speech, 7n18; and signification, 32; and sound, 1, 7; and sound writing, 1–­3, 6–­7, 187, 198, 202–­3; and speech, 7, 216; and writing, 6, 169, 216. See also Bauhaus; Cubism; Dada; Fluxus; Futurism; Vorticism Baader, Johannes, 57 babbling, of children, 128–­40, 150–­5 1, 156– ­63 Ball, Hugo: on articulation, 124; and avant-­garde, 170, 192; on babble of children, 138; and Cabaret Voltaire, 12, 117–­18n21, 119, 128n39, 131, 132n55, 133, 146, 149n86; on curves and vibration, 127; and Dada, 121–­28, 131, 133–­42, 146–­50, 152, 162, 168, 169–­70; on elementary word creation, 135; on poetry, 121–­28, 131, 133–­42, 192; at Psychological Institute (Munich), 127n38; on sound poems, 119–­28, 168, 198; and sound writing, 198; on verses without words, 12, 108, 119–­29, 128n39, 146–­50, 152n92, 168, 170; and Wundt, 129n42, 131 Bally, Charles, 214n167 Bauhaus, 167, 170, 205–­6, 208 Belar, Herbert, 176 Bell, Alexander Graham, 177 Bell, Alexander Melville, 45n65, 176–­77, 198 Bell System Technical Journal, 183 Bell Telephone Laboratories, 175–­77, 181–­84, 194–­98 Bense, Max, 13, 193–­202, 206n139, 217 Bergius, Hanne, 17–­18n3, 20 biology: and linguistics, 215n170; and mechanics of emotion and expression, 167–­68; and oral expression, 171–­72; and poetry, 72; and vocal recitation, 72 birdcalls/birdsong: phonetic transcription of nightingale’s, 155; and poetic experimentation, 154; and sound writing, 160; and speech, 154, 156, 159n105; in translation, 150–­66;

i n d e x   249 as transrational language (za-­um), 154n94 “Birdlike” (Hausmann), 169 Birds, The (Aristophanes), 154n94 Black Mountain College, 170–­71 Blaue Reiter group, 117–­18n21 Blom, Ina, 8n20, 57–­58 Bonset, I. K., 59n80 “Book, The” (Ginzkey), 83–­84 bpNichol, 170n7 Brain, Robert: on articulation, 76n33; on experimental visualization of speech, 76n33; on graphic recording techniques and physiology, 4n8; on lineation and curves, 127n35; on science of speech, 7n18 Bréal, Michel: on birdcalls/birdsong, 156–­58, 163; on image vocale, 76n33 Breton, André, 169 Brücke, Ernst: on articulation, 12, 71–­75, 85, 112; on basic physical laws of spoken language and verse, 70; on graphic traces of articulatory movements, 71, 74; laboratory practices of, 12; on lineation and curves, 75–­76; on new method for transcribing speech into graphic symbols, 120; and ocularcentric knowledge, 75; and phonetics, experimental, 97; on physiology of poetry, 70–­77, 74, 83, 86–­87n66; on physiology of speech, 70–­77, 83, 86–­ 87n66, 120; on poetry as speech, 72; on poetry recitation, 70–­89, 74, 95, 97, 105, 112; on privilege of vocal liveness, 72n22, 81; and psycholinguistics, 89; on psychophysiology, 97; on science of verse, 71; and Scripture, 79–­83, 85; on versified language as living object, 72n22 Bürger, Peter, 1n1 Byron, Lord, 106 Cabaret Voltaire, 12, 117–­18n21, 119, 128n39, 131–­33, 146, 149n86 Cage, John, 170

Capieux, Johann Stephan, 33–­34, 42; tables of sound figures (etchings on copperplates), 34, 42 “Caravan” (“Karawane”) (Ball), 146–­50, 152n92 Carpenter, Edmund, 205n135, 206 Carroll, Lewis, 119n25 Castle, The (Kafka), 196 Cavell, Richard, 210 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 76 children, babbling of, 128–­40, 150–­5 1, 156– ­63 Chladni, Ernst Florens Friedrich: and acoustic research, 32n41, 43; as ex­perimental scientist, 32, 36; and Hausmann, 41; musicoscientific technique of, 32–­33, 38; and nature-­ philosophical perspective, 36; Romantic reception of, 35–­36; on sound figures, 11, 32–­44, 52, 55–­56, 69; and speech photography, 54–­56 Chopin, Henri, 170n7, 201n127 chronophotographs, 48–­50, 49 Cinématographe Lumière, 50–­5 1 Claus, Carlfriedrich, 12, 170, 186–­98, 201–­2 Club Dada (Berlin), 14n1 Club der blauen Milchstraße, 57 Cobbing, Bob, 170n7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 107 Collège de France, 77, 156 Columbia University, 79 communication(s) research, 175, 193, 195n103 communication(s) theory, 4n6, 183, 194– ­95, 198 computer technology: and literary composition, 13; and phonemic analysis, 185–­86; as privileged domain for poetic and artistic experimentation, 193. See also cybernetics; electronic media; information theory; sound technology concrete poetry, 186–­87, 206n139, 210–­11 Concretism, literary, 192 corporeal gestures, 16, 90 Counterblast (McLuhan), 212

250 i n d e x Course in General Linguistics (Saussure), 214 Cubism, 136 cultures of experimentation, 11 curves. See lineation/lineality: and curves; reading curves; speech curves; verse curves Cut with the Kitchen Knife though the Last Epoch of  Weimar Beer-­­Belly Culture in Germany (Höch), 14–­15n1 cybernetics: and articulation, 180–­ 81; and information theory, 213; and linguistics, 213; and literary experimentation, 201–­2; and poetic articulation, 199; and poetic experimentation, 13. See also computer technology; electronic media Dada: actionist-­iconoclastic tendencies of, 20; history/origins of, 140; and poetic experimentation, 145; as poetic expression at threshold of language, 110–­66, 168; and poetry, 9, 108, 168; and poster poems, 8–­14, 17–­20; and reading graphic articulations, 140–­ 50; rediscovery of, 169; and science of speech, 7n18; and semantics, 133, 138, 144; and semiotics, 142; and signification, 119, 129, 144; and social revolt, 20; and sound writing, 140, 150; and speech photography, 56–­57, 62; and verbi-­voco-­visual explorations, 197; and visible speech, 205–­6; and vocal gestures, 129–­30, 134, 138; World War I, response to, 20; and writing, 128. See also avant-­garde Dada (magazine), 140, 141 Dada, Der (magazine), 15n1, 143, 143, 146n78 Dada Almanach (Huelsenbeck), 143n72, 152n92 “Dada Lives” (Huelsenbeck), 136, 169 “Dada Manifesto 1918” (Tzara), 140–­41, 141 Dada Painters and Poet, The (Motherwell), 169 Dada Raoul (Hausmann), 19n4

Dadaco (anthology), 12, 146, 149–­50, 169 “Dadaist Manifesto” (Ball), 121 “Dadar” (Schwitters), 163–­65, 164 Davy, Humphry, 33n43 De Stijl (journal), 59n80, 152n92 deaf people/deafness, 45–­48, 53, 83, 113, 120, 177, 181n49, 218, 220 “Declaration of the Word as Such” (Kruchenykh), 21–­22, 110–­11 Demeny, Georges, 47–­58, 49 Derrida, Jacques, 211–­17; on arche-­ writing, 213–­14, 216–­17, 220; on articulation, 214–­17; on death/end of books, 212–­13; on grammatology, 202–­ 3, 211, 216; on phonocentrism, 6n11, 13; and sound writing, 211, 216–­17 “Destruction of Syntax—­Untrammeled Imagination—­Words in Freedom” (Marinetti), 125n34, 149 Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Kittler), 5–­6 Discoveries in the Theory of Sound (Chladni), 32–­44, 34, 42 Documents of Modern Art series (Wittenborn and Schultz), 169n6 Doesburg, Theo van, 59n80 Dufrêne, François, 210n127 “Dune” (Marinetti), 149n86 eidetic, 30 eidophone, 36n46, 199–­200, 203. See also optophone eidophonetic poetry, 14–­3 2, 40, 62, 198. See also optophonetic poetry; phonetic poetry eidophonetics, 28–­30, 35–­36, 40–­41, 62, 203, 211. See also optophonetics Eidophonie, 28–­30, 41, 62 eidos, 29–­30, 40–­41, 198–­202 electronic media: and acoustic space, 205; and dissemination of information, 204–­5; and end of writing and books, 204–­5; and optophone, 201n127; and oral revolution, 210; poetic use of, 201n127. See also computer technology; cybernetics; information theory

i n d e x   251 empathy: and acoustic symbolism, 101–­3; aesthetics of, 96–­97; and emotional expressiveness, 98–­100; and poetic expression, 100, 109; and psychophysiology, 101; and symbolic sounds, 101–­3; theory of, 98n102, 223 enciphering, 37–­39 Endell, August, 103n122 euphony, 2, 32n41, 40n56 experimental: term, usage, 2. See also under aesthetics; avant-­garde; literature; modernism; phonetics; psychology; science experimentation, cultures of, 11. See also poetic experimentation Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications (journal), 206–­10, 208, 212 expression, poetic. See poetic expression expressive movements, 89–­91, 98–­99, 104–­5 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 71 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 206–­7 Flanagan, James L., 183n55 Flexitype, 209–­10, 212 Fluxus, 203 fmsbwtözäu (Hausmann), 152, 159–­60 Folk Psychology (Wundt), 89, 129 Fontana, Giovanni, 170n7 Form (British avant-­garde journal), 218, 219, 219, 220n182 Fotomontage (exhibit), 17–­18n3 French Academy of Sciences (Paris), 48 Freud, Sigmund, 70 Futurism: and avant-­garde, 7, 21; and dynamization of vision, 17n3; and liberation of language/words, 9, 21–­22; and phonetic inventions, 23n15; and poetry, 12, 21, 22n14, 23–­24n18, 111, 115, 117, 118n22; Russian, 12, 21, 22n14, 23–­ 24n18, 23n15, 110–­11, 115, 117, 118n22; and semantics, 144–­45; and speech production, 118n22; and transrational language/poetry, 12, 22n13; and typographic creations, 57; and visible speech, 205–­6

Gabelentz, Georg von der, 215 Gallows Songs (Morgenstern), 119n25 General Brouillon, The (Novalis), 37 Gentilli, Amadeo, 64–­73, 85 German Dictionary (Grimm), 20 gestures. See corporeal gestures; indexical: gestures; manual gestures; sound gestures; vocal gestures Ginzkey, Franz, 83–­84, 84 Givler, Robert Chenault: on emotional conditions experienced while reciting poetry, 104–­5; and experimental modernism, 108; laboratory practices of, 12; and Münsterberg, 104; and psychological research, 108–­9n145; and separation of sound from sense, 12; on transmogrification, 105–­8 glossograph (tongue-­writer), 4, 64–­69, 68, 71, 73, 85, 108 glossolalia (speaking in tongues), 9, 111 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 76, 87, 188n81 Goodell, Thomas Dwight, 86 grammatology, 202–­3, 211, 216 graphemes, 7 graphic inscription, 7n18, 13n30, 64, 109, 141–­43, 170, 180, 182 graphic traces, 11, 68–­69, 71, 74, 83, 92, 126, 181 “Graphics of the Voice” (Scripture), 82, 127 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 20–­21 Groos, Karl, 98n102 Gropius, Walter, 170 Grosz, George, 20 Groundwork of Aesthetics (Lipps), 98 Gutenberg Galaxy, The (McLuhan), 211–­1 2 Gutzmann, Hermann, 46n68, 53–­58, 62, 120–­21 Hagen, Baron von, 93–­94 Halle, Morris, 175–­76 Hausmann, Raoul, 15, 18, 19, 42, 51, 127, 203, 218; and avant-­garde, 17–­18n3, 26, 32, 40–­41, 62–­63; and Baader, 57; and birdcalls/birdsong, 159–­61, 164–­66; and Chladni, 41; and Dada, 8–­10,

252 i n d e x Hausmann, Raoul (cont.) 14, 17–­20, 56–­57, 62, 143–­45, 151–­5 2, 169–­70; and eidophonetic poems, 14–­3 2, 40; and eidophonetics, 28–­30, 35–­36, 40–­41; in exile/as expatriate, 24–­25, 161; and hybrid collage-­poems, 11–­3 2; on optophonetics, 10, 211; and phonetic poetry, 60–­61; poetic agenda of, 40–­43; on poetic essence, 26; and poetic experimentation, 192, 198–­202, 218; poster poems of, 8–­14, 17–­20; and Schwitters, 12, 57–­60, 161, 164–­65, 167; on sound-­vision relationships, 40, 43–­44, 52, 56–­63, 201; and typography, 10; and visible speech, 167, 169–­70 Heartfield, John, 15n1, 150 Heidsieck, Bernard, 170n7 “Heights, The (Universal Language)” (Kruchenykh), 22n14 Heine, Heinrich, 93–­94, 154n94 Hement, Felix, 46–­48 Hennings, Emmy, 133 Henry, Charles, 78n40 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 97 hermeneutics, 6, 83, 85 Heyse, Karl Wilhelm Ludwig, 91–­92 Higgins, Dick, 203 Höch, Hannah, 14–­15n1 Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich, 162–­63 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 40 Hooke, Robert, 32n38 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 133–­42, 146, 150, 152n92, 169 Hugnet, Georges, 140n70 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 215 Husserl, Edmund, 30n33 ideographs, 69, 87n70 indexical: acoustics, 52; articulation, 10, 73–­74, 109; expressions, 139; gestures, 139, 142; inscriptions, 43–­44, 85, 109; registers/registration, 144, 187; representation, 56; signs, 9, 134–­3 5, 188–­89 (see also signification); traces, 33, 35, 39, 43, 56, 68–­69, 188–­89 (see

also sound figures); visualization, 62–­63 indices, 88; and symbols, 21n8 infants, babbling of, 128–­40, 150–­5 1, 156– ­63 information theory, 195n103; and aesthetics, 193, 196; and computer-­ based models of literary composition, 13; and cybernetics, 213; and linguistic inscription, 183; and linguistic research, 185; and linguistics, 213; and speech analysis/research, 184; and visible speech, 168, 183–­84. See also computer technology; elec­­ tronic media inscription system (Aufschreibesystem), 5–­6. See also graphic inscription; indexical: inscriptions; orality: inscribed Institut national des sourds-­muets (Paris), 47, 51 Institute of Design (Chicago), 167, 207–­8 International Phonetic Association, 218–­19 intertextual materialism, 13 intonation, 95–­96, 119–­21, 220 Jaensch, Erich Rudolf, 30n33 Jakobson, Roman, 9n22, 213; on Dada, 144–­45; on indexicality, 10, 144; institutional affiliations f, 175–­76n37; on lyric poetry, 93n90; and poetic experimentation, 195, 198, 218; on sound writing, 144; on speech analysis, 175, 184; on visible speech, 184–­8 5 Janco, Marcel, 133, 137 Jandl, Ernst, 170, 218–­21 Jones, Daniel, 218–­19 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 176 Joyce, James, 181n49, 206–­7 Kafka, Franz, 196 Kandinsky, Viktor, 129n42 Kandinsky, Wassily, 117–­18n21, 125n34, 128n41, 129n42; and Cabaret Voltaire,

i n d e x   253 119n25; and emotional vibrations, 124–­25; and language of artistic expression, 103–­4 “Karawane” (“Caravan”) (Ball), 146–­50, 152n92 Keats, John, 106–­7 Keene, Peter, 200n123 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 23n15, 118n22, 145, 154n94 Kittler, Friedrich A., 8n20; on acoustic media, 5–­6; on discourse networks, 5–­ 6; on experimental modernism, 6n12; and script that sounds, 42–­43 Kruchenykh, Alexei, 21–­23, 27, 110–­11, 118n22, 218 Krueger, Felix, 88, 93, 98n103, 101, 105n128 kymograms/kymograph, 73, 76 labiograph (lip-­writer), 4, 79, 86n66, 121 Laboratory for Experimental Psychology (Harvard), 104 language: adamic, 148; and articulation, 169–­70, 215–­17; of artistic expression, 103; as corporeal, 92; indexical capacity of, 10; liberation of, 21–­22; making of, 124; and music, 7n16, 38, 102; natural, 178, 196–­97; nature of, 10–­11; originary, 17, 21, 32; philosophy of, 3; phonematic or glossematic production of, 213; and phonetic iconicity, 92, 101; physical laws of, 70; physiology of, 10; psychology of, 88; and psychophysics, 89–­92, 114; and psychophysiology, 89–­90, 139; revolution of, 40; and sound, 103; sound shape of, 185; as symbolic, 102; transformations of, 40; transrational, 12, 22–­23, 154n94; trans-­sense, 110–­19, 129; universal, 22, 45n65, 218, 221; and writing, 217. See also poetic language laryngograph (larynx-­writer), 4, 88, 96 Lautartikulationen, 158 Lear, Edward, 119n25 Lenin, Vladimir, 117n21 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 32n38 lineation/lineality: and curves, 75–­76, 127n35; typographic, physics of, 210; and writing, 202–­21

linguistic research, 45, 68, 185–­86, 198 linguistics: and biology, 215n170; corporeal, 120, 181, 217; and cybernetics, 213; and experimentation, 1; and information theory, 183, 185, 213; and mental life, 89; originary, 91; and philosophy, 215n170; and phonetics, 4n6; and psychology, 134; and psychophysiology, 92n87; and signals, 77, 139, 144, 183; and sound, 3–­5, 7n16, 16, 28, 39, 44–­45, 51, 69, 92, 109, 112, 120, 128, 132–­33, 157, 181, 184; and sound production, 3, 10, 28, 45, 115, 195n104, 200; and subjectivity, 196; and symbolism/symbols, 102, 134–­3 5; synchronic, 214; and visible speech, 183, 193, 198. See also linguistic sound; psycholinguistics lip records, 79–­81, 80, 81 Lipps, Theodor: on acoustic symbolism, 12, 103–­5; on aesthetics, 98; and Psychological Institute (Munich), 97–­98, 127n38, 129n42; and science of verse, 97–­107; and Scripture, 78–­79; and symbolic sounds, 97–­107 lipreading, 47, 55; and mechanical devices, 51; as specialized skill, 48; and speech photography, 53; and visible signs, 46; and visible speech, 218 lip-­writer (labiograph), 4, 79, 86n66, 121 literature, experimental, 189–­90, 193–­98, 201–­2 Literature and Cinematography (Shklovsky), 115–­16 Locke, W. N., 175–­76 Löffelholz, Franz. See Mon, Franz logographs, 45 Lora Totino, Arrigo, 170n7 Lote, Georges, 78n40 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 97n99 Ludwig, Carl, 73n27 Lutz, Theo, 196 Man Ray, 59n83 manicules, 140–­45

254 i n d e x “Manifeste Dada 1918” (Tzara), 140–­41, 141 “Manifestos” (McLuhan), 210–­11 manual gestures, 134, 138–­39, 142 Marey, Étienne-­Jules, 47–­48, 52n74, 53– ­54, 77 Marichelle, Hector, 47–­48, 51 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: and Cabaret Voltaire, 119n25; and emotional vibrations, 124–­25; and liberation of words, 9–­10, 149n86, 211; and typography, 10, 57, 149, 210–­11 Martí, José, 64–­66, 71, 85, 108 materialism, intertextual, 13 “Mathematical Theory of Communication, A” (Shannon), 183–­84 McCaffery, Steve, 170n7 McLuhan, Marshall, 214; on acoustic space, 205, 210–­11; Bauhaus influence on, 207–­8; on electronic age, 202–­3; on phonetic writing, 172; on printing press, 172; on sound writing, 203; on technology, 173; and verbi-­voco-­visual writing strategies, 12–­13, 203–­12 Mécano (magazine), 143n72 Mechanical Bride, The (McLuhan), 210 media. See acoustic media; electronic media Medium Is the Massage, The (McLuhan), 203–­4 melody, 92–­93, 98, 99–­101; and rhyme/ rhythm, 88, 93, 100–­101 Menzerath, Paul, 195n103 MERZ (magazine), 143n72, 153 Merz (movement), 151 MERZ-­Matinée, 57, 151 meter(s): ancient, 72; French, 77–­78; and rhyme/rhythm, 92, 173 metrics, and rhyme/rhythm, 85 Meyer, Ernst Alfred, 77 Meyer-­Eppler, Werner, 193–­98 Middleton, Christopher, 123n31 Modern Language Notes, 87 modernism, experimental, 6n12; and acoustic space, 205, 210–­12; aesthetic and scientific forms of, 2; literary, 5; and

science of verse, 108; in Technical Age (1947–­1967), 167–­221; term, usage, 2; and typography, 210–­11. See also postmodernism; protomodernism Moholy-­Nagy, László, 12, 167–­69, 207–­8, 211n154 Mon, Franz, 170, 186–­98, 201–­2n129 Morgenstern, Christian, 119n25 Motherwell, Robert, 169–­70 mouth writing, 64–­86; and psychophysiological poetics, 96; and semiotics, 94; visible, 220n185; and vocal gestures, 96 movens (anthology), 186–­98, 190, 191, 201n129 movens (movere = to move), as driving force behind a development, 186n72 Müller, Johannes, 70 Münsterberg, Hugo, 104 music: electronic, 186; and language/ poetry/sound, 7n16, 32–­33, 38, 102 muteness, 220. See also deaf people/ deafness Napoleon Bonaparte, 33n44 Natural History of Central European Birds (Naumann), 155 Nature, La, 47, 51 Naumann, Johann Friedrich, 155–­58 Noigandres (Brazilian neo-­avant-­garde poets), 206n139 noise, art of, 7 Novalis, 35–­44, 56 Novices of Sais, The (Novalis), 35–­36 Oaoa (Hausmann), 11, 14–­3 2, 18, 41, 52, 56, 62, 218 Obrist, Hermann, 103n122 ocularcentric knowledge, 75 Oehl, Wilhelm, 131–­33, 138 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 6n11, 13n30, 211, 213n160, 214n167, 216n175 Olson, Charles, 12, 169–­76, 180, 186–­89, 210–­11 Olson, Harry F., 176 “On Bird Language” (Bréal), 156 On Experimental Aesthetics (Fechner), 71

i n d e x   255 “On Poetry and Trans-­Sense Language” (Shklovsky), 110–­19 On the Optical Sense of Form (Vischer), 97–­98 On the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 103–­4 Ong, Walter, 2n3, 3n4, 72n23 onomatopoeia, 2, 113–­16, 155 onomatopoetics, 9–­10, 112–­15, 148, 153– ­55, 158– ­59, 163 optophone, 35n46, 199–­201. See also eidophone optophonetic poetry, 10, 29, 29n28, 199–­ 200, 211. See also eidophonetic poetry optophonetics, 29–­30, 40–­41, 200. See also eidophonetics oral revolution, and electronic media, 210 orality, 217; and acoustics, 17; and communication, 203–­4; creative, 27–­28; electronically conditioned, 213; experimental-­modernist return to, 17; historical models of, 13; inscribed, 5–­6, 13, 74–­75, 174; literate/literary form of, 2–­3, 5, 72n23; and poetic language, 2n3, 5, 9; and poetry, 3, 170–­71; secondary, 72; and speech, 27–­28, 205; visualization of, 205; and writing, 2, 5, 205, 208 ornithological research/studies, 154n94, 155, 158–­59, 180n44. See also birdcalls/ birdsong orthography, 75, 94 oscillation, semantic, 79, 144 Outline of English Phonetics, An (Jones), 218–­19 Outlines of the Physiology and System of Speech Sounds for Linguists and Deaf-­ Mute Instructors (Brücke), 120 Paget, Richard, 181n49 Panconcelli-­Calzia, Giulio, 120–­23 Parker, Harley, 208–­10, 212 parole in libertà (Marinetti), 9, 149n86, 211 “Pater Noster” (Kruchenykh), 22–­23 pedagogy, 45–­47, 51, 54, 58, 168, 171, 176n39, 207–­8, 210, 218

Peirce, Charles Sanders, 10n26, 21n8, 101 Perloff, Marjorie, 171n10 phantasmatic logic/propositions, 39, 69 philology, 71–­73, 75, 78, 83, 86–­87, 95n94, 96, 112, 131, 180n44 philosophy, 6n11, 35–­36, 45n65, 96–­97, 144, 149, 213, 217; of language, 3; and linguistics, 215n170; of science, 193 phonautographs, 44–­45, 69. See also autography phonemes, 31, 67, 94, 178, 184–­86; analysis and computer technology, 185–­86; form of, 198; and poetic language, 40; and semantics, 40; sound spectrograms of, 179, 194–­95; and sound writing, 185 phonetic iconicity, 92, 101 “Phonetic Poem” (Hausmann), 23, 24 phonetic poetry, 17–­18, 23–­28, 40n56, 57, 60–­61, 80–­81, 86, 101, 201. See also eidophonetic poetry “Phonetic Typewriter” (Olson and Belar), 176 phonetic typewriters, 174, 176 phonetic visualization, 5, 127 phonetic writing, 11, 21, 26, 146, 155, 172, 203–­4n132–­133 phonetics, 45, 80–­82, 85–­86, 86–­ 87n66, 87n70, 93–­94, 180n44, 219; and articulation, 76n33, 176; and autography, 5; and communication research, 195n103; and inscription, 209; and linguistics, 4n6; and physiology, 43, 63; and poetry, 86, 101, 103; and psycholinguistics, 89, 197–­98; and psychology, 63, 78, 88; psycho-­physio-­, 215–­16; and speech, 88, 172, 213n160; and symbolism/ symbols, 26, 94, 177, 188, 209. See also eidophonetics phonetics, experimental, 79–­82, 86–­87, 93–­94, 126; and acoustics, 61; genetic (physiological), 69n11; gennemic (acoustic), 69n11; and phantasmatic logic, 69; and psycholinguistics, 89–­ 90; and psychophysiology, 97; and

256 i n d e x phonetics, experimental (cont.) synchronic linguistics, 214; and visible speech, 45 phoniatrics, 53 phonocentrism, 6n11, 13, 81, 217 phonology, 198 phonoscopes, 50–­54, 51 “Photographs That Talk” (Demeny), 50 photography, indexical nature of, 21n8. See also speech photography “Photography of Speech” (Demeny), 48 photomontages, 14, 19n4, 54, 146, 169, 207–­8 “Physics and Grammar” (Novalis), 38–­39 physiognomy, 48, 50–­5 1n72 Physiological Foundations of Modern High German Poetry (Brücke), 70–­71 Physiological Society (Berlin), 66 physiology: of articulation, 3–­5, 69, 80, 139; and deaf people, 218; and graphic recording techniques, 4n8; of language, 10; and phonetics, 43, 63, 69n11; of poetry, 30, 70–­77, 83–­86, 86–­87n66; and psychology, 63, 89; of speech, 3–­4 , 10, 66–­67n4, 69–­77, 83, 86–­87n66, 90, 92, 104–­9, 120. See also psychophysics; psychophysiology “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” (Noigandres), 206n139 Pin (journal), 12, 165, 167, 169 pitch: and rhyme/rhythm, 101; and volume, 44, 178 Platen, August von, 76 poems. See poetry poetic experimentation, 170; and artic­ ulation, 1, 8; and avant-­garde, 1, 8–­9, 12–­13, 17, 62–­63, 77, 104, 202; and birdcalls/birdsong, 154; and cybernetics, 13; and Dada, 145; and overcoming organic deficiencies, 220; and poetics of articulation, 202; and protomodernism, 77; rearticulation of, 186–­202; and sound writing, 1; and subjective experience, 199; and symbolic sounds, 97–­98; and writing, 218–­20

poetic expression, 26–­28, 31, 40n56, 96, 100, 109, 190–­91; and Dada, 110–­66, 168 poetic language, 81–­8 5, 99–­100; and acoustics, 2, 12; and articulation, 1, 5, 11n28, 12, 21, 62–­63, 76–­77, 118; emotive phenomena of, 93; free rhythmical flow of, 84–­8 5; and linguistic sound production, 115; and literary practice, 70; nature of, 10–­11, 81–­82; and orality, 2n3, 5, 9; and phonemes, 40; as physical, 84–­8 5; physiological laws of, 76–­77; and psychology, 84–­86, 104–­5; and science of verse, 70, 81–­82; scientific methods, 85–­86; and speech, bodily acts of, 12; underlying structure of, 82 poetics of articulation, 1, 3, 5, 8, 11n28, 12, 21, 72, 76–­77, 79, 109, 110, 118, 189, 220–­21; and acoustics, 26, 147; and avant-­garde, 202; and cybernetics, 199; and eidos, 198–­99; and electronic age, 199; history of, 75; and mechanical registration, 170; as performative, 186; and poetic experimentation, 202; and visible sound, 14–­63; and writing, 149 poetry: artificial, 197; and avant-­garde, 40–­41, 62–­63, 168–­69, 218–­21; and biology, 72; collage-­, 11–­3 2; concrete, 186–­87, 206n139, 210–­11; corporeal, 172; and Dada, 9, 108, 168; as dance of speech organs, 115–­16, 121, 192; and defamiliarization, 77; and eidos, 40–­ 41; emotional conditions experienced while reciting, 104–­5; lip-­, visual, 218, 218–­21; lyric, 93n90, 106; montage, 107–­8; and music, 7n16, 102; and nature of language, 10–­11; new, 171; oral, 2n3, 9; and orality, 3, 170–­71; and phonetic iconicity, 92, 101; phonetic laws of, 86; phonic play of, 103; physical laws of, 70; physiology of, 30, 70–­77, 83–­86, 86–­87n66; projective, 12, 171–­75, 189; psychophysics of, 108–­9, 128–­29; and psychophysiology, 95–­96, 100–­101, 104–­8; recitation,

i n d e x   257 3n4, 70–­89, 74, 93–­95, 97, 104–­6, 112, 121; and semiotics, 10; and signification, 32, 119; and sound, 103–­ 4, 145–­46; and speech, 29–­30, 43–­44, 72, 75, 104–­8, 192; as speech, 72, 192; and speech photography, 60; study of, 64, 69–­70, 79, 98; transrational, 12, 22–­23; typography-­, 174; visual performativity of, 9n23, 218–­20; and vocal gestures, 190–­91; and vocal sound production, 1; and writing, 128, 192. See also oral poetry; phonetic poetry; poetic experimentation; poetic expression; poetic language; poetics of articulation; science of verse; sound poems/poetry; verses without words Poetry New York, 171 poiesis, 171 postmodernism, 13. See also modernism: experimental; protomodernism poststructuralism, 5, 13. See also structuralism Poyet, Louis, 51 Prévot, Marthe, 14–­17 printing press, 2, 53–­54, 172–­73 projective verse, 12, 171–­75, 189 “Projective Verse” (Olson), 171 prostheses, 199 protomodernism, 12, 77. See also modernism: experimental; postmodernism psycholinguistics: and phonetics, 89, 197–­98; and phonetics, experimental, 89–­90; and speech movement, 91; and vocal gestures, 114, 116 Psychological Institute (Munich), 97–­98, 127n38, 129n42 psychological laboratories, 78, 108, 112 psychology: and acoustic symbolism, 12; and articulation, 91; experimental, 63, 104; and language, 88; and linguistics, 134; and phonetics, 63, 78, 88; and physiology, 63, 89; and poetic language, 84–­86, 104–­5; research, 108–­9n145; and speech, 88, 90–­92, 94–­95, 105n128; and vocal gesture, 12. See also psychophysiology

psychophysics: and language, 89–­92, 114; and onomatopoeia, 114; of poetry, 108–­9, 128–­29. See also physiology; psychophysiology “Psycho-­Physiological Elements of Speech in Relation to Poetry, The” (Givler), 104 psychophysiology, 129n42; and art, 167; and articulation, 132, 168, 180–­81; and emotional expressiveness, 99; and empathy, 101; and expressive move­ ments, 90; and language, 89–­90, 139; and linguistic expression, 92n87; and phonetics, experimental, 97; and po­ etry, 95–­96, 100–­101, 104–­8; and speech, 69–­70, 89, 104–­8, 132; and visible speech, 167–­6 8; and vocal gestures, 190. See also physiology; psychology; psychophysics Pulse of Modernism, The (Brain), 7n18 reading: and acoustics, 140; corporeal, 140; graphic articulations, 140–­ 50; and manicules, 142n71; and semantics, 140; and writing, 86, 140 reading curves, 86–­96. See also speech curves “Recent Advances in the Instruction of Deaf-­Mutes” (Hement), 46–­48 recitation. See under poetry “Register [elementary]” (Schwitters), 58 Researches in Experimental Phonetics (Scripture), 80–­82, 86–­87n66, 87n70, 93, 93–­94, 126 “Researches on the Voice” (Scripture), 79–­80 rhyme/rhythm, 83; and melody, 88, 93, 100–­101; and meter, 92, 173; and metrics, 85; and pitch, 101; as rhetorical device, 2; symbolism of, 101 Ribemont-­Dessaignes, Georges, 140n70 Rieger, Stefan, 72n23 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 41–­42n58 Rousselot, Abbé Jean-­Pierre, 77–­78 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 76n33, 214–­16 Saussy, Haun, 5, 78n40

258 i n d e x Schlegel, Friedrich, 36n48 Schultz, Heinz, 169n6 Schwitters, Ernst, 59n83 Schwitters, Kurt, 12, 19n4, 57–­60, 60, 127, 150–­55, 159–­6 8, 193–­94, 218–­20, 219 science, experimental, 16–­17, 32, 95n94, 108 science, philosophy of, 193 science of verse, 63, 78; and acoustic symbolism, 101–­5; apparatus-­ based, 12; approaches to, 109; and embodied voice, 2; and experimental modernism, 108; foundations for, 71; and poetic language, 70, 81–­82; and sound writing, 1; and speech movements, 64–­109; and vocal gestures, 91–­92, 101–­2, 105. See also poetry Scott de Martinville, Édouard-­Léon, 44–­45, 69 Scripture, E. W. (Edward Wheeler): on authorial/creator rhythmic swing, 83; and Brücke, 79–­83, 85; on emotive phenomena of poetic language, 93; as experimental avant-­gardist, 78; as experimental scientist, 95n94, 108; on flow, 82–­8 5; graphic records/ tracings of spoken verses, 84, 125–­27, 126; laboratory practices of, 12; and lip records, 79–­81, 81; and Lipps, 78–­79; on melody, 92–­93, 98, 99–­101; and philology, 86–­87; on phonetic examination of poetry, 80–­81, 93; on phonetics, 80–­82, 85–­86, 86–­ 87n66, 87n70, 93, 93–­94, 126; as phonocentrist, 81; on poetic language, 81–­85, 99–­100; on reading curves, 86–­96; and recording of verses, 83–­84; and science of verse, 78; and sound spectrograms, 181–­82, 182; and sound technology, 78; and Stumpf, 78–­79; tracings of, 125–­27, 126; on verse curves, 82–­83; and voice research, 79–­80; and Wundt, 78, 88, 178 Sechehaye, Albert, 214n167 semantic oscillation, 79, 144

semantics, 22; and aesthetics, 193; and articulation, 3–­4 , 124, 133; and Dada, 133, 138, 144; and Futurism, 144–­45; and phonemes, 40; and reading, 140; and signification, 144; vs. sound, 119; and verses without words, 124; and vo­cal gestures, 138 semiotics, 21n8; and articulation, 4, 21, 76n33; and Dada, 142; and eidophonetic poems, 31; and kymograms, 73; and mouth writing, 94; and poetry, 10; and recording spoken language in analog visual form, 11; and speech photography, 54–­55; and typography, 9 Shakespeare, William, 87, 106 Shannon, Claude, 183–­84, 195n103, 197– ­98 Sheppard, Richard, 20 Shklovsky, Viktor, 169; on internal emotional energies, 114–­15; on linguistics, 112, 115; on poetry as dance of speech organs, 115–­16, 121, 192; and sound writing, 198; on transrational poetry, 12; on trans-­sense language, 110–­19, 129; on vocal gestures, 114, 116; and Wundt, 112 Siebeck, Hermann, 98n102 Sievers, Eduard, 4n7, 95n94 “Significance and Technique of the Sound Poem” (Hausmann), 26–­27 signification: and adamic language, 148; and articulation, 12, 130, 139; and avant-­garde, 32; and Dada, 119, 129, 144; linguistic, 77, 139, 144, 183; and poetry, 32, 119; and semantics, 144; and universal language, 22; visible, 46, 52. See also indexical signs “6 Phasen von 52” (Claus), 191 Smith, Adam, 96 Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOJAZ), 117n20 sociology, 4n6 Something Else Press, 203 “Sonata in Primal Sounds” (Schwitters), 159–­60 sound, 31; aesthetic functionalization of, 6–­7; and articulation, 1, 116, 130–­3 1,

i n d e x   259 139, 151, 154–­55, 182; and avant-­garde, 1, 7; and color, 40–­41; -­form, 27–­28; images, 53–­59, 200; and language, 103; linguistic, 3–­5, 7n16, 16, 28, 39, 44–­45, 51, 69, 92, 109, 112, 120, 128, 132–­33, 157, 181, 184; meaningless, 112, 115, 117, 148; and music, 38, 102; nonlinguistic, 10; and phonographic writing techniques, 10; pictures, 120–­21; and poetry, 103–­4 , 145–­46; as readable, 32–­44; vs. semantics, 119; and sense, 12, 112–­13; and speech, 86n66, 149–­50; studies, 6–­7; symbolic, 96–­109; technology, 78; unarticulated, 184; visible, 11, 14–­63; -­vision relationships, 7, 40, 43–­44, 56–­ 63, 201–­2; and writing, 154–­55. See also sound figures; sound gestures; sound movements; sound poems/poetry; sound production; sound writing; speech sound figures, 11, 32–­44, 34, 42, 52, 55–­56, 69, 127–­28, 187–­88; as fixed motions of vibrating disks, 42. See also acoustic figures; indexical traces sound gestures, 43, 105, 134. See also sound movements; speech gestures; vocal gestures sound movements, 38–­40, 42–­44, 113–­ 14. See also sound gestures; speech movements; vocal movements sound poems/poetry, 26–­27, 58–­59, 103–­4, 107, 118n21, 119–­20, 124n32, 160n108, 169; and optophonetics, 10, 199–­200 sound production, 1, 7n18, 13n30, 19–­20, 30, 90–­91n84, 91, 118n22, 120, 128, 139–­40, 150–­5 1, 154, 157, 160, 170, 209, 214–­16; linguistic, 3, 10, 28, 45, 115, 195n104, 200. See also speech production sound technology, history of, 78. See also computer technology sound writing, 170; and acoustics, 1, 7–­8, 120, 150; and articulation, 1, 3, 120, 144, 150, 168, 198; and avant-­ garde, 1–­3, 6–­7, 187, 198, 202–­3; and

birdcalls/birdsong, 160; and Dada, 140, 150; experimental, 13; genealogy of, 7–­8, 185, 217–­18; as goal vs. means, 186–­87; history of, 1–­2, 7–­8, 13, 216–­ 17, 223; and literary practices, 166; modernist, 1–­2, 5, 13, 216–­17; natural, 43–­44; origins and future of, 211; and physical process of spoken language, 1; and physicality of speech, 5; as poetic emphasis on vocal sound, 2; poetics of, 1–­2, 7, 43–­44, 61; postwar reconceptualization of, 13, 166, 169, 189, 202; Romantic idea of, 43–­44; and science of verse, 1; and speech, 13; stages of, 1–­2; transversal connections of, 11; and visible speech, 7; as vocal-­ acoustic phenomenon, 1, 120, 150. See also mouth writing; writing sound-­vision relationships, 7, 40, 43–­44, 52, 56–­63, 201–­2 speaking in tongues (glossolalia), 9, 111 spectrograms/spectrographs, 177, 177–­ 79, 179, 181–­82, 182, 184, 194, 194–­95 speech: and acoustics, 39, 51–­5 2, 99, 181, 220; and articulation, 4–­5, 7, 27, 47–­48, 76, 132, 147–­48, 180, 186–­87, 214–­17, 220; and avant-­garde, 7, 216; basic elements of, 163; and birdcalls/ birdsong, 154, 156, 159n105; bodily acts/movements of, 12, 88, 115–­16; communication of, 183n57; conversion of into graphs, 125–­27; corporeal, 16, 21, 26–­28, 43, 90, 92, 156, 172, 181, 187, 217; as digital phenomenon, 185; dynamic activity of, 113, 115; embodied, 5, 58, 213; experimental visualization of, 76n33; expressiveness of, 89–­91, 102; foundations of, 168; graphic technologies for study of, 12; of infants, 20–­21, 129–­30; as information, 195; inscriptions, 85, 87n70, 187; letters as physical traces of, 42–­43; literary-­aesthetic significance of, 5; living, 69–­70; melody and rhythm of, 88; neurology, 79; and onomatopoeia, 113; and orality, 27–­28, 205; originary, 6n11,

260 i n d e x speech (cont.) 132, 159, 173, 216, 220; and phonetics, 88, 172, 213n160; physical aspects/ physicality of, 5, 118n22; physiology of, 3–­4, 10, 66–­67n4, 69–­77, 83, 86–­ 87n66, 90, 92, 104–­9, 120; and poetic language, 12; and poetry, 29–­30, 43–­ 44, 72, 75, 104–­8, 192; psychic power of, 84–­85; and psychological-­phonetic approach, 88; and psychology, 88, 90–­ 92, 94–­95, 105n128; psychophysiology of, 69–­70, 89, 104–­8, 132; as readable, 52, 92; and recording in analog visual form, 11; registering flow of, 67; science and technology of, 7n18, 174; scientific practice of study of, 12; and sound, 86n66, 149–­50; and sound writing, 13; sounds of, 86n66; as temporal process, 4; transcription of, 10; and typography, 8–­9; and vocal gestures, 102; and voice, 6; as writable, 5; and writing, 5–­7, 13, 16, 30, 40, 42–­43, 62, 149, 156, 173, 180, 186–­ 87, 205, 207, 210, 213–­14, 216–­17. See also sound; speech analysis; speech curves; speech gestures; speech movements; speech organs; speech photography; speech production; visible speech speech analysis, 3–­4 , 86–­89, 175–­76, 181n49, 184–­86, 194. See also speech research speech curves, 87n70, 92, 125, 127n38, 128, 181, 188, 194. See also reading curves speech gestures, 82, 90–­92, 150. See also sound gestures; speech movements; vocal gestures speech movements, 4, 12, 42–­46, 52–­56, 61–­62, 115–­16; and science of verse, 64–­109. See also sound movements; speech gestures; vocal movements speech organs, 27–­28, 46, 48, 67–­6 8, 71–­72, 82, 85, 90–­91, 113–­16, 157, 187, 192–­93, 214, 217, 219; dance of, 115–­16, 121, 192. See also vocal tract speech photography, 44–­63, 69

speech production, 43–­44, 67, 75, 88–­89, 92, 102, 110, 113, 118n22, 130–­3 1, 156, 172, 181, 192. See also sound production speech research, 175, 184, 198. See also speech analysis speech writer (device), 45 Sprache im technischen Zeitalter (journal), 199 “Spring’s Arrival” (Hoffmann von Fallersleben), 162–­63 “Spruce Tree, The” (Heine), 93 Staatliche Kunstbibliothek Berlin, 17–­18n3 Station physiologique (Marey), 47–­48 stereoscope, 53–­54 Sterne, Jonathan, 78 structuralism, 214. See also poststructuralism Stumpf, Carl, 78–­79 Sturm group, 151 subjectivity: artistic, 197–­99; and enciphering, 38; and linguistics, 196; of phonoscope, 50; and poetic experimentation, 199; and sound movements, 113–­14; and speech melodies/rhythms, 88, 93 “Suicide” (Aragon), 59n80 Sully, James, 130, 157 symbolic sounds, 96–­109 symbolism/symbols, 10n26; acoustic, 12, 101–­7; alphabetic/typographic, 8–­9, 28, 43, 62, 94, 180, 188; and articulation, 43, 139, 176, 187, 209; and asemantic affinities, 100–­101; and ciphers, 31; and corporeal expression, 16; and embodied speech, 58; and empathy, 101–­3; graphic, 11, 19, 21, 68–­69, 120; and indexical gestures, 139; and indices, 21n8; and language, 102; linguistic, 102, 134–­3 5; and onomatopoetics, 158; orthographic, 75, 94; phonetic, 26, 94, 177, 188, 209; of rhythm, 101; and sound images, 56; and speech curves, 188; and spoken sound, 42, 116–­17, 188; and trans-­ sense language, 118–­19

i n d e x   261 Synthetic Cinema of Painting (Hausmann), 17–­18, 19, 42, 51, 52, 56–­57, 62, 169 Technische Hochschule (Stuttgart), 193 technology. See computer technology; cybernetics; electronic media; sound technology “3 Visual Lip Poems” (Jandl), 218, 218–­20 Tieck, Ludwig, 36n48 “To Make a Dadaist Poem ” (Tzara), 108 tonal patterns, 106–­8 tongue-­writer (glossograph), 4, 64–­69, 68, 71, 73, 85, 108 traces. See graphic traces; indexical traces Transition (journal), 152n92 transmogrification, 105–­8 transrational language/poetry, 12, 22–­23, 110–­1 2, 115, 117–­19, 154n94 trans-­sense language/poetry, 110–­19, 129 Tschichold, Jan, 14n1, 151–­5 2 typesetting, 140, 209–­10 typewriter poetry, 23n16, 174n27, 196, 198 typewriters, 68, 172–­81, 186–­87, 210–­11; phonetic, 174, 176 typography, 8–­10, 30–­3 1, 39–­40, 52, 57, 140–­46, 149–­50, 152, 159–­60, 173–­74, 210–­11 “Typography” (McLuhan), 210n148 Tzara, Tristan, 27–­28, 108, 133–­3 7, 140–­46, 150, 169 University of Berlin, 79n45, 94n92 University of Bonn, 194–­95 University of Leipzig, 66, 78, 88, 98n103 University of Munich, 97–­98, 103n22, 127n38, 129n42 University of Toronto, 206 University of Vienna, 70, 79n46, 219n181 Ursonate (Ur Sonata) (Schwitters), 12, 59, 151–­53, 153, 159–­66, 218 verbi-­voco-­visual explorations, 12–­13, 167–­221; and acoustic space, 210–­11

Verbi-­Voco-­Visual Explorations (McLuhan), 12–­13, 203–­1 2 verse, science of. See science of verse verse curves, 75–­76, 82–­83 verses without words, 12, 108, 119–­29, 128n39, 146–­50, 152n92, 168, 170 “Vibrationstext” (Claus), 190 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 97n99 Vischer, Robert, 97–­98 visible signs, 46, 52. See also signification visible sound: and articulation, 11; and poetics of articulation, 14–­63. See also visible speech visible speech, 11, 76, 85–­86, 167–­86; and Bauhaus, 167, 170, 205–­6; and Dada, 205–­6; deciphering, 178; and information theory, 168, 183–­84; lineaments of, 205–­6; and linguistics, 183, 193, 198; and lipreading, 218; and phonetics, experimental, 45; and psychophysiology, 167–­6 8; scientific interest in, 45; sound spectrograms of, 177, 177–­79, 179, 182, 184, 194; and sound writing, 7; and speech curves, 194; technologies, 194; and vocal gestures, 181; and Vorticism, 205–­6; and writing, 205–­6. See also visible sound Visible Speech (Bell), 45n65, 175–­77 Visible Speech (Potter, Kopp, Green), 176–­77, 179, 181–­82 Vision in Motion (Moholy-­Nagy), 12, 167–­69, 207–­8, 211n154 visual arts, 103, 169, 186 visual lip-­poems, 218, 218–­21 visualization: indexical, 62–­63; of orality, 205; phonetic, 5, 127 vocal arts, 3n4 vocal gestures, 136; and articulation, 92; and Dada, 129–­30, 134, 138; expressive, 139; and internal emotional energies, 114; living, 92, 181; and mouth writing, 96; natural demonstrative, 134; and onomatopoeia, 113; originary, 91, 129, 138; and poetry, 190–­91; and psycholinguistics, 114, 116;

262 i n d e x vocal gestures (cont.) as psychological concept, 12; and psychophysiology, 190; and science of verse, 91–­92, 101–­2, 105; and semantics, 138; and speech, 102; and symbolic sounds, 101–­2; and visible speech, 181; Wundt’s theory of, 12, 91–­92, 96, 101–­2, 105, 114, 116, 129, 181n49, 190–­91. See also sound gestures; speech gestures; vocal movements vocal movements, 90. See also sound movements; speech movements; vocal gestures vocal tract, 110–­28, 158, 183n55, 195n104; model of, 122 Voice and Phenomenon (Derrida), 13n30 voice figures. See sound figures Volkelt, Johannes, 98n102 volume, and pitch, 44, 178 Vorticism, 205–­6 “W W PBD” (Schwitters), 160n108, 219, 219 Wand, Eku, 220n185 “Was ist dada?” (“What is dada?”) (Hausmann), 143, 144–­45 Wedgwood, Thomas, 33n43 “Who Killed Cock Robin?” (nursery rhyme): graphic record/tracing of vocalization of, 125–­27, 126; sound spectrogram of, 181–­82, 182 Wilkins, John, Bishop, 45n65 Wittenborn, George, 169n6 Wittenborn and Schultz (publishers), 169 Wolff, Kurt, 146n78 word images, 127–­28 word modulation, 168 words in freedom (Marinetti), 9, 149n86, 211 Wordsworth, William, 106 Worringer, Wilhelm, 98n102 writing: alphabetic, 38–­39, 54; arche-­, 213–­14, 216–­17, 220; and articulation, 6, 9, 74, 159, 186, 214, 216–­17, 221; automatic, 85, 197; and avant-­garde,

6, 169, 216; and body, 10, 26, 128, 149, 202, 218; cipher-­, 36; corporeal, 16, 145–­46, 180; and Dada, 128; indexical, 86n66; and language, 217; and lineation/lineality, 202–­21; materiality of, 40, 140–­41; mechanical, 172–­ 73, 180; modernist practices, 7–­8; natural, 55, 68–­69; and ocularcentric knowledge, 75; and orality, 2, 5, 205, 208; originary, 173, 216; and poetic articulation, 149; and poetic experimentation, 218–­20; and poetry, 128, 192; postmodernist outlook on, 13; and print, 2n3, 8n20, 40; and printing press, 172; and reading, 86, 140; and sound, 154–­55; and speaking body, 220; and speech, 5–­7, 13, 16, 30, 40, 42–­43, 62, 149, 156, 173, 180, 186–­87, 205, 207, 210, 213–­14, 216–­17; and speech photography, 69; stochastic modes, 197; systems, 5, 21, 26, 28, 58, 68, 75, 160, 177–­78, 208–­9; technologies, 13; term, usage, 5n10; and thought, 96; vibrational, 12; and visible speech, 205–­6; and vocalization, 5; and voice, 75, 172. See also mouth writing; phonetic writ­ ing; sound writing Writing and Difference (Derrida), 13n30 “Writing as Language” (Mon), 193 Wundt, Wilhelm: on affective qualities of vocal utterances, 91; on articulation, 130–­3 1; on babble of children, 134, 138; and Ball, 129n42, 131; on birdcalls/ birdsong, 157–­58; on children’s speech development, 129–­30, 134–­3 5, 138, 157–­58; on emotive phenomena of poetic language, 93; on expressive movements, 89–­91; on feeling tone, 105; linguistic theories of, 89, 91, 112–­ 14, 131; and Münsterberg, 104; and Oehl, 138; on onomatopoeia, 113–­14, 116; on phonetics, experimental, 89; on poetry as dance of speech organs, 115–­16, 121, 192; and psycholinguistics, 89–­90, 114; and psychological analysis

i n d e x   263 of (spoken) language/speech, 88–­89, 98–­99, 105; on psychophysics, 89–­91, 114; on psychophysiology, 97; and Scripture, 78, 88, 178; and Shklovsky, 112; on vocal gestures, 12, 91–­92, 96, 101–­2, 105, 114, 116, 129, 181n49, 190– ­91

Yale University Psychological Laboratory, 78, 85 “Z A [elementary]” (Schwitters), 58 za-­um (transrational language), 110–­1 2, 115, 117–­19, 154n94 Zelinsky, F. F., 112