Reading Kittler and Hoffman via Freud: The Affective Excess of Composition

Frederich Kittler’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 and E.T.A Hoffman’s The Golden Pot both focus on the illusory space between the origin of an idea and its final, material expression. In Discourse Networks, Kittler traces a materialist literary history of writing in which he shows how the Romantic ideal of poetic expression as a mystical channeling of the natural world coincided with the expressivist composition pedagogies of early 19^th century handwriting textbooks. In his chapter “Language Channels,” Kittler provides a detailed analysis of E. T. A Hoffman’s The Golden Pot as a way of illuminating this socio-cultural zeitgeist of the early 1800’s romantic quest for a hermeneutics of both writing and reading. Essentially, Kittler claims that the discourse network of romantic writing propagated a hermeneutic framework that conceived of literature (and language in general) as an im-mediate “channel” for the uncorrupted perception of truth and/or individual self-expression. Kittler describes this essence as the “general equivalent” that discounted the importance of “untranslatable elements in the signifiers of any language” (71). Language was literally immaterial.

The ideas, emotions, and perceptions that the romantics attempted to put into words, was (ironically) the very notion of not being able to put ideas, emotions, and perceptions into words. Kittler writes, “[t]hinking and thought are the effects of a disembodiment of language. If it were otherwise, whatever had been thought would not be capable of surpassing all the oral and written discourses that have ever transpired. It surpasses them, however, in the joy of its positive namelessness” (75). For the romantics, it is the very removal of language that is constitutive of thought. This is why notions of passion and love were so vital to the romantics because these experiences (although undoubtedly common and thus seemingly communicative) transcended the static nature of the textual form embodied by the mindless vocation of the copyist. For them, to be “disembodied of language” was to create and express in ways that were not limited to the modes of previous inscriptions, whether written or oral.

However, as Kittler reveals as endemic to the discourse network of 1800, there is a strange disconnect between the repression of the conceptual origin of a text and the privileging of its material origin. Referencing the early handwriting pedagogy of Pohlmann and Stephani, Kittler shows how the growing insistence on “easily flowing” handwriting (material) reflected the concern for “easily flowing” (immaterial) translation from world to page, immediate impression to mediated language: “The great metaphysical unities invented in the age of Goethe…could be seen as the flow of the continuous and the organic simply because they were supported by flowing, cursive hand-writing” (83).

Kittler’s unique brand of media archeology is so compelling in this instance due to his refusal to submit his analysis to a linear cause-effect model. In reading this chapter, one does not get the impression that Kittler is claiming a singular, medial cause for the discourse network of 1800 but rather a survey of the material feedback loops that work to perpetuate and (in)form the ideology of a particular time and place.

Indeed, Hoffman’s The Golden Pot reveals this tension between supposedly immediate perception and mediated communication in its continued gesturing towards the fantastic and imaginary. Kittler uses the terms “nature/love/woman” to describe the synonyms for the hallucinatory realm of truth and visceral perception that Anselmus envisions in his passion for Serpentina and awakes to find transcribed upon his previously blank parchment. Much like the romantic poets of early 19^th century, Anselmus transcends the materiality of writing.

Freud’s description of déjà vu in “Fausse Reconnaissance in Psychoanalytic Treatment” echoes a similar theme of medial transcendence. As the title implies, the essay deals with the failings of memory (fausse reconnaissance) in recollecting past events which, for Freud, are rich grounds for psychoanalytic exploration. For the psychoanalyst, the transcendent self that was championed by romantic pedagogies is only accessible through the material realm of language (i.e. the unconscious), which can merely gesture to those visceral impressions through phrases like “I have experienced this before.”

Similar to psychoanalytic theory itself, these expressions of trans-linguistic desire come to us in terms of a displaced proximity. Phrases such as “having been through it all before” reflect the repression and expression of libidinal desire and the tension that exists within the human psyche between desire itself and the expressions of this desire through language and dreams. In this scenario, as the psychoanalyst well knows, the material manifestation of desire is all we have. For the romantics, déjà vu is a recollection of a “disembodiment of language” that is only false to the extent that one attempts to materialize it in words. Through déjà vu, one is trapped in the state of pre-linguistic impression that is all the more stubborn in its translation to language due to its extrapolation from the context in which it was first encountered. Déjà vu might be an instance of pure, im-mediate sensation because the visceral impressions one encounters within consciousness are not so easily separated from the logic of their surroundings, thus when they resurface in another context, perhaps falsely (reconnaissance), they are not recognized because they are bereft of the materiality that originally accompanied them.

Perhaps something similar to déjà vu occurs within the affective process of writing itself. Visceral memories emerge from prior linguistic constructions, but their affective force, instead of merely reinscribing (copying) a connection to its past material instantiation, forge something new that is still somehow strangely recognizable. This is what Freud refers to as the uncanny (unheimlich), a term that derives its etymology from a differential relation to the German word heimlich meaning “homelike” or “familiar.” Writing is uncanny (unfamiliar) because the process proceeds for the writer affectively even as it halts for her materially. Each placement of a comma or period marks a moment of material transgression of affect as it flows (organically) through the (inorganic) materiality of the text.