SOURCE: Roberts, Mark S. “Wired: Schreber as Machine, Technophobe, and Virtualist.” The Drama Review 40 (fall 1996): 31-46.

[In the following essay, Roberts traces the influence of nineteenth-century scientific advancements and emerging technology on Schreber's paranoia as revealed in Memoirs.]

BECOMING MACHINE

In consequence of the many flights of rays, etc., there had appeared in my skull a deep cleft or rent along the middle, which probably was not visible from outside but was from inside. The “little devils” stood on both sides of the cleft and compressed my head temporarily to assume an elongated almost pear shaped form. The screws were loosened temporarily but only very gradually, so that the compressed state usually continued for some time.

—Daniel Paul Schreber ([1903] 1988:138)¹

Daniel Paul Schreber, perhaps more fatefully than any 19th-century figure, was immersed—sometimes against his will—in a world of appliances, quasi-machines, devices, and mechanistic technology. He was, in fact, born and raised among appliances and devices. According to biographical accounts, Schreber's childhood was spent squarely in the midst of his father's various mechanical inventions, and, at times, he may have even served in the role of a guinea pig to actually test out these orthopedic and child-rearing devices.²

Paul's famous father, Moritz, seemed to have a talent—or, as some would argue, an obsession—for developing a whole range of what would commonly be considered orthotic appliances, devices intended to fit around certain bodily parts, and to improve everything from posture to mental attentiveness and toughness. These devices, profusely illustrated in Moritz Schreber's most popular book, Kallipädie, ranged from simple chin straps to head and back holders, and each contained an elaborate interlacing of leather straps and, sometimes, metal clamps intended to restrain, constrain, discourage, or improve unacceptable movements or postures. One might also imagine that Moritz Schreber, in his capacity as orthopedist, had an office full of various other prosthetic devices, such as artificial limbs, club-foot braces, crutches, back and neck supports, etc. In addition, one could well view Moritz the medical scientist, though still Kantian in his orientation, as emerging into a world of electric magnetism, synaptic charges, and cathexes, since descriptions of his specific medical practice and theories indicate that he was well aware of contemporary views of brain functions consonant with modern neuroscience; that is, those focusing on the electromechanical aspects of brain physiology (see Lothane 1992:173-74). It is clear, then, that Paul's early orientation and the very environment in which he was raised was filled with quasi-mechanical and technological devices, intensified, one would assume, by the constant flow of patients creaking and clanking in and out of Moritz's combination home-office with an array of prosthetics, restraints, crutches, and braces.

Schreber's immersion in the growing techno-culture of the latter half of the 19th century would not be limited to his father's medical practice. As a Gymnasium and University student in the late 1850s and 1860s, he would no doubt have been exposed to a broad range of the popular physical and biological scientific ideas of the period. For example, Alexander von Humboldt's multi-volume work, Kosmos, was widely distributed during the 1850s, and it is estimated that no less than 80,000 copies of the work had been sold by the end of the decade. Among a number of other things, von Humboldt stressed the importance of mechanical inventions in the march of scientific revolutions—so much so, that he placed the invention of the telescope above virtually all other theoretical scientific discoveries (see Cohen 1985:260). His technical work in geography and meteorology—he was a pioneer in delineating isothermal lines—also deeply affected his conception of scientific progress. His technical genius, carried over into the popular Kosmos series, included the very early use of extremely sophisticated scientific instruments in a continuous survey in orography, geophysics, meteorology, earth magnetism, and even a nascent form of ecology. All considered, the emphasis von Humboldt and his followers placed on technological progress must have greatly magnified young Paul's already vivid impressions of the great force and significance of machines, mechanics, and technology, that is, almost on a global scale of determination.

Of course, von Humboldt's contribution was just one among many other advances made in medical, biological, and physical technology and theory during the period. With the contemporaneous work of the Helmholzian school of biophysics, for instance, we encounter a striking vision of a physical and mathematical mechanics applied to human perception, physiology, and, ultimately, to the entire life process. In a certain respect, Hermann von Helmholtz brought the precision of mathematical equation directly inside the human perceptual system, inside the head of the living organism. In his passion for mechanical reduction, Helmholtz, among other things, measured the optical constants of the eye with his own invention, the ophthalmometer, investigated the radii of the curvature of the crystalline lens for near- and far-sightedness, and even proceeded to apply the principles of electrodynamics to brain and nerve physiology. All this was, in turn, seen as possible because of the central theory of the conservation of energy which provided a “scientific” explanation for what was then viewed as troublesome metaphors about the mysterious essences of living things. With Helmholtz's purely mathematical expression of life functions, the organic functions could at last be seen as physico-chemical phenomena, leading to a mechanical explanation for the entire life process.³ One of Herbert Spencer's American disciples, Edward Youmans, provides a vivid and decidedly rhapsodic description of this very process:

Not only does it [the law of conservation of energy] govern the movements of the heavenly bodies, but it presides over the genesis of the constellations; not only does it control those radiant floods of power which fill the eternal spaces, bathing, warming, illuminating and vivifying our planet, but it rules the actions of and relations of men, and regulates the march of terrestrial affairs. Nor is its dominion limited to physical phenomena; it presides equally in the world of the mind, controlling all faculties and processes of thought and feeling. The star-suns of the remoter galaxies dart their radiations across the universe […] and impressing an atomic change upon the nerve, give origin to the sense of sight. Star and nerve-tissue are parts of the system—stellar and nervous forces are correlated.

(in Russett 1989:106)

The neurological extension of mechanics, alluded to by Youmans in the above passage, was perhaps best represented in German psychophysical science by Johann Friedrich Hebart and Gustav Theodor Fechner. Hebart, who died just prior to Schreber's birth (1841), developed a system of dynamic psychology which included a theory of unconscious mental processes and a conception of internal “forces” possessing specific “quantities.” In fact, Hebart very simply defined psychology as “the mechanics of mind.” In his passion for mechanical explanation in psychology, he even went so far as to postulate a mathematical formula for working out how much an idea was suppressed.

Fechner was even more rigorous regarding psychomechanics. Unlike Hebart, who made certain concessions to the Leibnizian and Kantian metaphysical traditions, he imposed what amounted to an absolute mathematical formula on the sensations, arguing that the magnitude of a stimulus could be measured by a given law: one must simply multiply the stimulus magnitude by a constant ratio. Hence, a stimulus of, say, 10, 20, and 40 ounces should yield equal degrees of sensation. Fechner further argued that the subjective intensity of sensation varies directly with the increase of the strength of a stimulus. He even worked out the difference between psychical increases (arithmetic) and physical ones (geometric) in terms of logarithmic equations, accounting for the differences between the two. This logarithmic relation would, in turn, account for the then troublesome “identity hypothesis,” precisely because sensation had indeed been measured in a subject. Effectively, the human organism was nothing more than a mechanical operator, which could be measured by exact mathematical expressions, in terms of logarithmic relations between stimuli gradations.

The psychomechanics of both Hebart and Fechner, of course, inspired much of later 19th century thinking in psychology and brain physio-anatomy. The figure who would eventually become Schreber's polymorphous nemesis, Paul Emil Flechsig, was one of those clinicians of the period who was influenced by this sort of thinking. Flechsig, even as early as Schreber's first hospitalization in 1884, was deeply concerned with the brain as a kind of pseudo-machine whose various parts and locations could be pinpointed in terms of specific functions. His theories regarding mental dysfunction always centered around organic etiology, and he stressed the absolute importance of the “brain mechanism's” relation to the entire organism:

But it should be important to the physician that such psychological analyses are but a small part of his task, and in my opinion in no way the most important. […] The specific medical thinking begins only when the physical factors are kept in mind which are the cause of psychological changes. […] The proper object of investigation is the localization and the nature of the underlying somatic processes or factors, completely in the spirit and meaning of modern scientific pathology—not more and not less. It is enough to demonstrate strong and lawful, even if remote, relations between the physical and the psychical. The exact knowledge of the brain mechanism and the entire organism is indispensable.

(in Lothane 1992:211)

For Flechsig, then, the brain was, so to speak, a complex map, dotted with a multitude of loci, each of which, when pinpointed and fully understood, would yield some specific knowledge about abnormal behavior. It was perhaps with this in mind that he interpreted Schreber's second illness, in 1894, as a form of delusional paranoia—a disorder which Flechsig attributed to “diseases of the association centers and sensory centers” (in Lothane 1992:218). With this extension of psychobiology, psychophysics, and “brain mythology” to Schreber's early treatment and diagnosis, we find a progressively more intimate expression of mechanics in Paul's life, of a direct attempt to determine the precise point at which the psychophysical machine has malfunctioned. Schreber is not only tormented by fearful, desultory hallucinations, but his very treatment and the perception of his “disease” are now profoundly affected by a kind of psychomechanics, by a theory of the body and brain as an interactive machine that is moved by mechanical impulses and drives, and electromagnetic forces. All this was compounded, we can presume, by the dreadful sight of the jars of pickled brains that lined the walls in Flechsig's office, as well as the massive brain chart ensconced above his desk. Slowly, progressively, the devices he had experienced and was subjected to in his youth, the contexts of techno-culture, begin to mesh with the very fibers of his being, with his mind and his body. Not—as Morton Schatzman (1974) and William Niederland (1974) have argued—as the sources of his frightful hallucinations, but, rather, as the central metaphor for what he will eventually become: a machine.

Schreber's progressive mechanization, his being rendered a machine, accelerated during his stay at the Sonnenstein asylum. His attending physician at the asylum, Dr. Guido Weber, like Flechsig, viewed mental dysfunction from a largely psychophysical perspective. He was neither original nor inventive in his view of clinical psychiatry, borrowing much from his mentor, Emil Kraepelin, and spending most of his time publishing and lecturing in the rather technical area of forensics. He was thus most comfortable in following a variety of rather straightforward psychiatric paradigms, and this to the extent of utter dogmatism (see Lothane 1992:271). Weber's mechanistic bias is revealed by his static and extraordinarily rigid view of the whole phenomenon of mental illness. On this, Weber himself writes:

As colorful and inexhaustible the individual variations of cases of mental illness may be, as constant are the main outlines, and apart from the arabesques of the individual case the basic characteristics of the forms of mental illness are repeated with almost surprising, monotonous regularity.

(in Schreber [1903] 1988:317)

The expression “monotonous regularity” itself gets repeated monotonously in almost everything written about Schreber during his years of hospitalization. The staff at Sonnenstein often described his general behavior as rigid and repetitive. Weber, in his report to the Superior Court at Dresden, described his demeanor in a certain instance as “pathological,” as screwing up his eyes, grimacing, and holding his head in an extraordinary position, that is, as excessively mechanical and rigid (in Schreber [1903] 1988:324). He was repeatedly observed sitting in the courtyard at Sonnenstein, immobile and staring up at the sky. Almost like a radar antenna, he would mechanically turn his head from one side to the other, as if receiving some form of cosmic transmission. His famous “bellowing” and “howling” were also described in decidedly hydraulic terms: during conversations which proved to be stressful—for example, with his wife, Sabine—he would race off and release pressure with several good bellows or screams, returning to the conversation perfectly calmed. This release of growing pressure by bellowing was also observed on certain occasions when he was dining with guests at the asylum. Even his obsessive piano playing had something of the mechanical to it. It seemed that whenever he was excessively frustrated or disturbed he would “let off steam” by banging vigorously on the piano. This observed machinelike presence and behavior at Sonnenstein could perhaps best be summed up by an entry on his chart dated September 1895: “Often laughs loudly and piercingly and screamingly repeats the same words. From time to time stands totally still in one spot and stares at the sun and grimaces in a most bizarre way” (in Lothane 1992:295).

Schreber even suffered a certain degree of mechanization—albeit in retrospect—in the hands of Freud, who, oddly enough, was by far the most psychologically oriented of his early interpreters. Despite his rather classic psychoanalytical reading of Schreber's illness—the old unresolved Oedipus complex: passive homosexual fantasies leading to castration anxiety which, later, leads to a homosexual identification with his first doctor, Flechsig, etc.—much of Freud's analysis of the case draws upon markedly psychobiological and psychomechanical concepts. This tendency stems in part, according to Frank J. Sulloway, from Freud's “biogenetic-Lamarckian presuppositions,” which allowed him to attribute considerable traumatic force to what he called “pure fantasy” by tying these early fantasies to a “phylogenetic memory-trace” (Sulloway 1979:387). From this perspective, libidinal, or biogenetic, energy could be seen as having a specific mobility and quantity of force, and thus, like electric current, could be withdrawn, or redirected toward any number of object-choices. This phenomenon becomes quite clear in Freud's own explanation of Schreber's illness, that is, his supposed paranoid dementia:

And we can understand how a clinical picture such as Schreber's can come about, and merit the name of paranoid dementia, from the fact that in its own production of wishful fantasy and of hallucination it shows paraphrenic traits, while in its exciting cause, in its use of the mechanisms of projection, and in its outcome, it exhibits a paranoid character. For it is possible for several fixations to be left behind in the course of development, and each of these in succession may allow an irruption of the libido that has been pushed off—beginning, perhaps, with the later acquired fixations, and going on, as the illness develops, to the original one that lies nearer the starting-point.

(Freud 1953:113)

For Freud, then, Schreber's condition was the result of a libido fixation during the “narcissistic” stage of development—a stage occurring more or less midway between the libido's maturation from auto-eroticism to heterosexual object-choice. Schreber's libido just chose the wrong object—i.e., someone with the same genitals—and he spent the rest of his life regretting it, that is, forming elaborate defenses against the object-choice. The currents of libido, creating fantasies and forces beyond the subject's control, simply designate a path of maturation—in Schreber's case, one that leads ineluctably to a struggle against passive homosexual fantasies, a struggle marked by powerful and debilitating delusions. Given Freud's view, one might conclude that Schreber was, so to speak, “plugged into” madness—a view that differs in kind, but not so much in intent, from those proposed by others in the earlier psychomechanical and psychophysical traditions.

MACHINE AND TECHNOPHOBE

“Plugged into” madness, rendered into a machine, strapped into restraints, probed by devices, subjected to the psycho- and electromechanical theories of the time, Schreber was naturally both intensely aware of the fact that he had become a machine and horrified that he was one. His profound awareness is evident in the many colorful passages in the Memoirs that refer to his mechanization, his feeling—or as some would argue, his delusion—that he had become machinelike and was being “run” by someone or something. His fear of becoming completely mechanical—robotic—and his resistance to this transformation surface in a set of brilliantly inventive strategies intended to combat the repetitiveness and regularity of his treatment and his own experience and behavior.

The most obvious expressions in the Memoirs of electromagnetic forces and mechanics are those involving the “rays” (Strahlen) and their conduits, the nerves, and what Schreber calls “filaments.” Schreber was fully convinced that certain types of filaments or wires were implanted in his body so as to make him receptive, as well as captive, to a variety of vocal messages carried by the rays. He describes the implanting of these “wires” in terms eerily close to the way some sort of radiophonic or telecommunicational device might internally view itself receiving signals from the outside:

I see the same phenomena with my bodily eye when I keep my eyes open; I see these filaments, as it were, from one or more far distant spots beyond the horizon stretching sometimes towards my head, sometimes withdrawing from it. Every withdrawal is accompanied by a keenly felt, at times intense, pain in my head. The threads which are pulled into my head—they are also carriers of the voices—perform a circular movement in it, best compared to my head being hollowed out from the inside with a drill.

([1903] 1988:227)

The analogy of signal reception is extended by Schreber in the Postscript section of the Memoirs, where he attributes his inordinate ability to hear barely audible “cries of help” to a phenomenon like “telephoning”:

I even believe I have found a satisfactory explanation of why cries of help are only audible to me and not to other people […]. It is presumably a phenomenon like telephoning; the filaments of rays spun out towards my head act like telephone wires; the weak sound of the cries of help coming from an apparently vast distance is received only by me in the same way as telephonic communication can only be heard by a person who is on the telephone, but not by a third person who is somewhere between the giving and receiving end.

(229)

Solar and cosmic transmissions (the “rays”) are further described down to the specific configurations of their patterns: they do not arrive in a straight line but rather in a circle or parabola—which, by the way, are forms that certain wave and particle transmissions sometimes assume. When they do arrive, Schreber argues, they must be “slowed down by some mechanical means; otherwise they would simply shoot down into my body, drawn to it by the enormously increased power of attraction […]” (288-89). This description, once again, could apply to any number of modern receiving devices. Schreber's emphasis on “slowing down” the rays with some “mechanical device” is uncannily close to how, for instance, a television receiver operates. Normally, the signal is received as a radio frequency broadcast and then fed into a transformer which converts it into synchronizing pulses that in turn drive the cathode ray tube and the loudspeaker system. The conversion from radio frequency broadcast to synchronizing pulses—what Schreber refers to as “slowing down”—is essential to the entire process, since without it, the initial radio waves would remain undifferentiated.

When discussing the exact nature of the “rays,” Schreber even tends to characterize them in purely electromechanical terms. Although the rays carry a considerable amount of information, Schreber suggests that they are “essentially without thoughts” (die Hauptgedankenlosigkeit). By this he means that the rays are often without memory, devoid of any thought, and therefore of any specific human or divine intentionality. Without thoughts of their own, the rays are simply intermediary devices, intended to convey ideas and information in a wholly detached way—in a way remarkably similar to how artificial intelligence works. The various microcircuits of a computer, for example, store, carry, access, calculate, process, etc., information, but really don't have any thoughts of their own; they electronically translate the information entered by an operator. What is ultimately conveyed is electronically produced bits of information, not thoughts or intentions. A phenomenon not unlike that associated with the “rays-being-essentially-without-thoughts”:

But the nerves without thoughts must also speak in order to slow down their approach. As they however lack thoughts of their own, and as there are no beings with thoughts of their own at the places (on stars, celestial bodies) where they are loaded with poison of corpses (one may picture these beings which are also responsible for the writing-down system either as human shapes like the “fleeting-improvised” men, or in some other way) the quiescent totality of divine rays can (when they approach) only give them or drum into them to speak what they have read as my own undeveloped thoughts. […] This is the rough picture I formed of the thousandfold repetition of the rays “being-essentially-without-thoughts.”

(235-36)

Closely associated with “the rays,” “the voices” are also characterized in electromechanical terms, in terms of a curious “prerecorded” language that operates apart from actual speakers, including Schreber himself. In the Memoirs, Schreber frequently mentions that he is being pursued, constantly taunted, by “voices.” These voices, however, are somewhat unusual—even in this context!—because they continually repeat expectable things and, in the end, become “mostly empty babel of ever recurring monotonous phrases in tiresome repetition” (139). The reasons for this are complex, at least as far as Schreber is concerned. The voices, Schreber insists, issue from several sources or media, but one of the main sources is the “talking birds.” The birds are remnants (single nerves) of souls of human beings, which carry with them a particular “tone-message” associated with their respective human souls. The tone messages are learned by rote, and therefore merely repeated without either feeling or sense. Indeed, given Schreber's description, the words seem to be composed out of purely vibrational sound elements: “I cannot say how their [the birds] nerves are made to vibrate in such a manner that sounds spoken or more correctly lisped by them sound like human words” (167). The voices of the talking birds, then, are not really voices in the sense of human speech at all, but are, rather, the tonal equivalents of spoken words; or, one might suggest, analogous to the way prerecorded sounds are experienced by the listener—not human, but the mechanical tonal equivalent of human speech. Is it live, or is it Memorex?

The sense of audio tape or even photographic recording is also invoked by Schreber when he describes “tests” applied to his apprehension of certain terms, phrases, or visual objects. According to him, God has taken to “examining” him whenever he is in a state of “not-thinking-of-anything.” In short, the procedure consists in God causing people around Schreber to say certain words by stimulating their nerves. An example of this would be a madman throwing in a certain learned term that he had remembered from the past—perhaps a foreign word or two. The terms themselves “come to Schreber's ears” accompanied by the phrase “has been recorded,” which is directly “spoken” into his nerves. This procedure serves to assure that Schreber has indeed heard the phrase, and, ultimately, to test whether he understands it. This can also occur with visual phenomena. Like a camera, whenever Schreber observes certain objects, the phrase “has been recorded” resounds in him:

For example, when I saw the doctor my nerves immediately resounded with “has been recorded,” or the senior attendant—“has been recorded,” or “a joint of pork—has been recorded,” “railway—has been recorded” […]. All this goes on in endless repetition day after day, hour after hour.

(188)

Obviously, there is no shortage of electromechanical analogies in the Memoirs, as Schreber goes on at great length describing his frightening transformation from man into machine—an idea that had marked parallels outside the walls of Sonnenstein, in the late Romantic rejection of the Enlightenment and the long-standing concern with the dehumanizing consequences of the Industrial Revolution. But what is perhaps even more interesting than this transformation is his attempt to resist it, to reiterate his basic humanity and his sense of worth and self-dignity. There are a number of strategies he uses to accomplish this, most of which employ some type of countermeasure to the monotony and regularity of what I have here characterized as his progressive mechanization.

One of the numerous strategies utilized by Schreber to free himself from mechanization consists in his obsessive, seemingly unending conflict in the Memoirs with the supposed “soul-murderer,” Flechsig. From the very beginning of the autobiography itself, which corresponds more or less to the first days of Schreber's second illness and his treatment at Flechsig's University Clinic, Schreber had identified Flechsig as a kind of “machine-master,” as an evil “soul” who holds extraordinary power over virtually every physical and mental move he makes, or, perhaps more accurately, is compelled to make. Hence, in order for Schreber to be truly human, to be free from the monstrous influences imposed upon him by Flechsig's will, he must ultimately defeat his evil machinic persona.

This mastery Flechsig exerted over his mind and body begins, it appears, with a central act of physical repression—that is, at the point at which Flechsig's rather nasty attendants dragged Schreber from bed and brutally abused him, tossing him about, pinning him on a billiard table to restrain him, and then finally throwing him into a cell (66). Following his incarceration, Schreber was further punished by continual isolation at the clinic; a number of restraining drugs were also administered. The drugs, according to Schreber's account, were often “forced down his throat.” As his suppression and isolation became progressively more severe, his feelings of being “used,” abused, and of being generally dehumanized also increased. Finally, Schreber tried to resolve the whole problem of dehumanization by taking matters into his own hands, by employing the only human means he saw possible to escape the horrors of the depersonalizing, degrading, repetitive, painful experience of Flechsig's clinic: suicide. In a manner of speaking, he wished to “unplug” the machine so as to counter Flechsig's pernicious influence:

Completely cut off from the outside world, without any contact with my family, left in the hands of rough attendants with whom, the inner voices said, it was my duty to fight now and then to prove my manly courage, I could think of nothing else but that any manner of death, however frightful, was preferable to so degrading an end. I therefore decided to end my life by starving to death and refused all food.

(76)

Schreber soon learned that more subtle means would work against Flechsig's insidious control. The divine rays, which carried the voices that sometimes attacked Schreber, were originally seen as—at least in part—being under Flechsig's control: “The only possible explanation I can think of is that Professor Flechsig in some way knew how to put divine rays to his own use” (69). When he was attacked by the voices carried by the rays, however, unlike the attacks of Flechsig's “rough attendants,” he tried to counter their colorless force by reciting the poems and prose pieces of the two greatest writers of the German Romantic tradition, Goethe and Schiller, or reeling off words and phrases he had consigned to memory. In the face of compulsive thinking (Denkzwang) and the monotonous cacophony of the voices, carried by the rays, he repeated his own inventions, his own unique aesthetic memories to shut out the mechanical drones (see Weiss 1988:75).

These defenses against the droning “voices” and a variety of other mechanical forces, however, go far beyond the fundamental conflict with Flechsig, extending to a whole series of depersonalizing crises. For example, Schreber often resisted the evil “nerve” forces that threatened his reason and humanity by invoking his own erotic sensations, or what he termed “soul-voluptuousness” (Seelenwollust). Simply stated, soul-voluptuousness was the result of a colossal work of God in which Schreber was to be transformed into a woman, “unmanned,” so as to serve the higher purpose of procreating a future race. This process included the replacement of his masculine nerves with feminine ones. Although this at first occasioned considerable consternation on Schreber's part, he ultimately began to realize that his progressive feminization had an up side: intense voluptuousness. He eventually learned to turn this voluptuousness to his own use, to, among other things, employ it as a counterreaction to any attempt to depersonalize him, or, as he would put it, to “rob him of his reason.” When, for example, he was confounded and attacked by senseless phrases sent to him through his nerves, he was able to render these phrases more palatable and personal by invoking the forces of soul-voluptuousness. He also observed that the nerves themselves were less foreign, less “terrified” when they entered his body, due to the pleasant sensation of soul-voluptuousness: “But the attraction lost all its terror for these nerves, if and to the extent they met a feeling of soul-voluptuousness in my body” (Schreber [1903] 1988:150). Effectively, his own transformed erotic feelings were able to give him a sense of autonomy, of being—at least on some occasions—in control of what he estimated to be “hundreds of thousands” of celestial nerve-visitations.

Along with the colossal struggle with Flechsig and soul-voluptuousness, the so-called “bellowing miracle” (das Brüllwunder) served as still another weapon against Schreber's transformation into a machine. From the onset of his second illness, Schreber was observed as having the peculiar habit of loudly bellowing and screaming. He seemed to do this at odd intervals, at a variety of times, and on differing occasions, which led his doctors and attendants to believe that the so-called “miracle” was strictly compulsive and without much design. Schreber, however, thought differently. He saw a double purpose in the bellowing: first, to create a “representation,” an impression of someone who is demented, and, second, to “drown by bellowing the inner voices” (166).

Schreber does not really explain what he means by the first purpose of the bellowing—that is, creating an impression of a demented person—but he does on several occasions discuss the second purpose. As we have seen, Schreber feels that the “voices” attacking him are one of the main sources of his terror and depersonalization: “[…] my nerves cannot avoid the sound of the spoken words; the stimulation of my nerves follows automatically and compels me to think […]” (174). His entire sense of his own sanity, his very inner peace and being are continually destabilized by the constant, repetitive roar of the inner voices. Like an engine that one cannot shut off, the voices repeat the most elementary, demeaning, repetitive, whirring phrases and sounds imaginable. Hence, the only way that Schreber can find any peace, and, in turn, any sense of his own autonomous being, is to “drown out” these sounds; to scream from the depths of what remains of his own personality, to vocally overwhelm the whirring and mechanical hum of the voices. As he himself says:

[…] I have to allow the bellowing as long as it is not excessive, particularly at night when other defensive measures like talking aloud, playing the piano, etc., are hardly practicable. In such circumstances bellowing has the advantage of drowning with its noise everything the voices speak into my head, so that soon all rays are again united. This allows me to go to sleep again or at least to stay in bed in a state of physical well-being […].

(228)

So Schreber, in the face of becoming an anonymous machine, of being intricately “wired,” of having his every perception and apprehension “recorded,” of being continually victimized by uncontrollable “voices,” etc., felt compelled to develop a set of strategic defenses to counter this mechanization. In doing so, he was able to establish his own personal identity up against what amounted to nearly a lifetime of depersonalization and mechanical usurpation. The recalled flashes of his father's technical devices, strapped around patients, pictured in books; the nascent technoculture in which he developed; the psychophysics and electromechanics of his treatment—all of these, for the moment, would disappear in the intense feelings of self he was able to invoke through these clever endopsychic strategies and defenses. Effectively, Schreber had, for the moment at least, saved himself from the unbearable lightness of a droning, machinelike being.

VIRTUALIST

In Schreber's zeal to penetrate the depths of his mind, to struggle with the hellish inner voices and “miracles” that constantly beset him, he, unknowingly, provided a remarkable, futuristic glimpse into yet another electromechanical phenomenon: virtual reality. Although virtual reality—being virtual—is rather difficult to accurately define, most modern virtualists agree that it entails the creation of some type of hyperrealistic simulation. Howard Rheingold, in his expansive book on the subject, defines the term broadly as “a computer generated artificial world” (1991:1). By this he means that human consciousness is augmented, or perhaps more accurately, mimicked by the instrumentality of a computer. The process typically involves the creation of a completely convincing illusion that one is immersed in a world that actually exists only inside a computer. The so-called “virtual traveler” is customarily hooked-up visually to the computer through an interactive helmet, which is in turn extended by a VR (Virtual Reality) input glove. The VR input glove—like the new body input hookups—virtually “grabs” virtual objects in virtual space; that is, it allows one's visual perceptions and motor responses to navigate through virtual space.

The effects created in virtual space, in VR, are, as might be expected, both spectacular and mind-boggling. A typical virtual voyage might consist of the following:

My consciousness suddenly switched locations, for the first time in my life, from the vicinity of my head and body to a point about twenty feet away from where I normally see the world. The world I saw had depth, shadows, lighting, a look of three-dimensionality to it, but it was depicted in black and white. […] Twenty feet away from my body, my view of the world changed in response to my physical motion. I began to accept the odd sensation that accompanied the act of transporting my point of view to that of a machine—until I swiveled my head and looked at myself and realized how odd it seems to be in two places in the same time. What you don't realize until you do it is that telepresence is a form of out-of-the-body experience.

(Rheingold 1991:255-56)

Sound familiar? It should. There are any number of passages from the Memoirs, particularly in those sections devoted to “miracles,” that correspond almost exactly to this sort of virtual excursion. Schreber's notion of “picturing” (Zeichnen), for example, rests on the assumption that man retains all memories, by virtue of impressions on his nerves, in the form of pictures in his head. These pictures can then be “looked at in the head” by the rays. But, quite remarkably, they can also be watched by the rays outside the head, in what one might conceive of as some sort of fantastic “theatre” of the rays. Indeed, Schreber's description of the occasional shift of the “pictures” from inside to outside his head bears an uncanny resemblance to the futuristic world portrayed in the above-mentioned VR voyage:

[T]hese images become visible either inside my head or if I wish, outside, where I want them to be seen by my own nerves and by the rays. I can do the same with weather phenomena and other events; I can for example let it rain or let lightning strike […]. I can also let a house go up in smoke under the window of my flat, etc. […] I can also “picture” myself in a different place, for instance while playing the piano I see myself at the same time standing in front of the mirror in the adjoining room in female attire […]. In the same way as rays throw on to my nerves pictures they would like to see especially in dreams, I too can in turn produce pictures for the rays which I want them to see.

(Schreber [1903] 1988:181)

Among the many unusual phenomena characteristic of the hyperreal simulations of VR, we can also count what is generally referred to as “tele-existence.” This is a state in which machine-sensed data can be transformed into human-sensed data, so that the operator can experience a symbiosis with some robotic or telemetric device. Effectively, the technology is intended to give humans greater knowledge of and control over reality (existence) through complex electronic devices, as, for example, sensing helmets are used in military aircraft to enhance the technical efficiency of fighter pilots. Tele-existence, then, is, among other things, a means of amplifying human experience and perception so that they can interface with the very complex, barely perceptible world revealed by electromechanical instrumentalities.

Schreber, remarkably enough, also refers to something quite similar to tele-existence in the Memoirs; it turns out to be germane to what he calls “miracles concerned with damaging my body” (247). According to Schreber, he had, during his years at Sonnenstein, suffered an extraordinary number of physical catastrophes: tearing headaches, accelerated breathing, several varieties and colors of plague, penile retraction, diminution of body size due to contraction of the thigh bones or vertebrae, a different heart placed in his body, pulmonary phthisis, lung worm, smashed ribs, “Jew's stomach,” torn or completely vanished intestines and gullet, suppression of the “seminal cord,” putrefaction of the abdomen, muscle paralysis, etc. The only problem concerning the diagnosis and, ultimately, medical science's belief in the actual existence of these dire symptoms, is that no one could find a device sophisticated enough to pick them up, to record these miraculous occurrences. In a manner of speaking, Schreber's afflictions required a radically new kind of measuring device, one that would function something like tele-existence does in VR. He says as much when he laments upon the difficulties one would encounter in making a thorough examination of his body:

If it were possible to make a photographic record of the events in my head, of the lambent movements of the rays coming from the horizon, sometimes very slowly, sometimes—when from a tremendous distance—incredibly swiftly, then the observer would definitely lose all doubt about my intercourse with God. But unfortunately human technique has not yet the necessary apparatus for investigating such sensations objectively.

(248)

Finally, there is a parallel in the Memoirs to what VR people humorously refer to as “teledildonics.” The term “dildonics” was coined to describe a machine invented by a hardware hacker, How Wachspress, which converts sound into tactile sensations. The erotogenic possibilities of the machine naturally depend upon where on the body the consumer wishes to attach it. But VR researchers see bigger things than mere self-stimulation for this sort of technology, and future visions of teledildonics can be enormously intriguing:

Now, imagine plugging your whole sound-sight-touch telepresence system into the telephone network. You see a lifelike visual representation of your own body and of your partner's. Depending on what numbers you dial and which passwords you know […] you can find one partner, a dozen, a thousand, in various cyberspaces that are no farther than a telephone number. Your partner(s) can move independently in the cyberspace, and your representations can touch each other, even though your physical bodies might be continents apart. […] If you don't like the way the encounter is going […] you can turn it all off by flicking a switch and taking off your virtual birthday suit.

(Rheingold 1991:346)

Schreber, as one could easily guess at this point, was well on his way to developing a 19th-century version of teledildonics—at least, within his own head. Without going into excessive detail, one of the most obvious forms of this sort of futuristic sexual encounter occurs with his notion of “soul-voluptuousness” and its relation to the “rays” and “nerves.” If one recalls, the very state of soul-voluptuousness usually involves some “telemetric” contact with the nerves (“nerve-contact”) of certain divine individuals, including, but not restricted to, figures like God, God-Flechsig, Ariman (the lower God), Ormuzd (the upper God), and even, sometimes, the fleeting-improvised-men (flüchtig hingemachte Männer). The reason these figures occasionally “phone in” or get “on line” is the intense erotic sensations existing in Schreber's body, the “soul-voluptuousness.” For instance, whenever God became aware of Schreber's strong feminine sexuality, he would be attracted to his body by virtue of an intensified feeling of eroticism that was transmitted through the filaments connecting Schreber with God. It was as if God's sensual representation was relayed to Schreber as a result of the intense erotic feelings sent through the nerve-contact, and vice versa. Both mutually shared a kind of “hyperspatial” communication in which sexual desire, sensuality, perhaps even orgasmic pleasure were exchanged. In discussing one of these encounters with the lower God (Ariman), Schreber recalls precisely this sort of erotic, hyperspatial partnership: “The lower God (Ariman) as stated, did not object to losing himself with part of his nerves in my body, because he almost always met soul-voluptuousness there” (Schreber [1903] 1988:150).

“There,” of course, being the most private recesses of a man who, when summing up his titanic struggles, emphatically claimed that his ultimate end would be to rest in a state of permanent blessedness and soul-voluptuousness—states that are perhaps becoming the two greatest virtualities of modern life (252).

Notes

1. Daniel Paul Schreber was born in Leipzig in 1842. His father, Moritz Schreber, was a well-known educator and orthopedist, and his work is still popular in Germany today. Paul studied law and eventually went on to become an important jurist, rising to the position of Senatspräsident of the Saxony Appeals Court in Dresden. In 1884 Schreber suffered an illness that was diagnosed as hypochondriasis. After being treated by Paul Emil Flechsig—a neurologist of some note at the time—he returned to his duty as judge. In 1894 he had a much more severe breakdown, and was subsequently sent to the mental asylum at Sonnenstein, where he spent nine years. During his incarceration, Schreber wrote his now famous Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which was eventually published in 1903. It was the Memoirs that served as the source for Freud's proxy analysis of “The Schreber Case,” which was published in 1911. Since then, there have been numerous articles and books written on the case. These works have, over the years, led to lively, sometimes acrimonious, debates about the case and the man. Schreber died in a state of severe mental and physical collapse in the Leipzig-Dösen Asylum in 1911.

2. In his generous comments made on an earlier draft of this paper, Zvi Lothane had suggested that Moritz Schreber was not concerned to develop machines in the conventional sense of the word, nor was he interested in experimenting with mechanical devices, which, in retrospect, is consistent with his own thesis in In Defense of Schreber. I fully accept this suggestion. However, my intention here is not to establish factually that Moritz Schreber actually invented “machines,” but, rather, to draw a loose sketch of the young Paul Schreber growing up in the midst of what would at least appear to a young boy as an unusually mechanistic environment, and would thus serve as a prelude to his “becoming machine.”

3. Regarding the biological and evolutionary sciences, Schreber makes reference in a footnote in the Memoirs to a number of texts that he had already read prior to his illness (see Schreber [1903] 1988:80, fn. 36).

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