Relays

"This will be important reading for anyone interested in the enormous influence of communication systems on literature and philosophy."

Autorentext
Bernhard Siegert is a Research Scholar at the Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin. He is co-editor, with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Friedrich Kittler, of Der Dichter als Kommandant: D'Annunzio erobert Fiume.

Klappentext
This book examines how one aspect of the social and technological situation of literature--namely, the postal system--determined how literature was produced and what was produced within literature. Language itself has the structure of a relay, where what is transmitted depends on a prior withholding. The social arrangements and technologies for achieving this transmission thus have had a particularly powerful impact on the imagination of literature as a medium.
The book has three parts. The first part reconstructs the postal conditions of classic and Romantic literature: the invention of postage in the seventeenth century, which transformed the postal system into a service meant to be used by the population (instead of by the prince alone); the sexualization of letter writing, which was introduced in the middle of the eighteenth century and changed the reading of a letter into an interpretation of intimate confessions of the soul; and Goethe's turning of this new ontology of the letter into a logistics of literature whereby literary authorship was constructed by means of postal logistics, with the precision of engineering.
The second part analyzes nineteenth-century postal innovations that facilitated communication through letters and examines how literary works were able to live off such communication. These innovations included the reform of the post office; the invention of the postage stamp; the Universal Postal Union, which subjected letter writing to an economy of materials and uniform standards; and the telegraph and the telephone, which surpassed literature in terms of speed, economy, and analog-signal processing.
In the third part, on the basis of a close reading of Franz Kafka's letters to his typist-fiancée, the author demonstrates how postal logistics of love and authorship have worked in the era of modern postal systems and technical media. Kafka's correspondence is deciphered as a "war of nerves" waged by means of all available techniques and conditions of transmission.


Inhalt
List of tables and figures; Introduction; 1. An epoch of the postal system; Part I. The Logistics of the Poet's Dream: 2. On time (registered letterI); 3. Gellert's coup: folding the private letter; 4. Post day in Wahlheim; 5. Set the controls for the heart of the night; 6. Postage; 7. Goethe's postal empire; 8. The timbre of a calling (attunement); 9. The logistics of the poet's dream: kleist; Part II. On The Way To New Empires 1840-1900: 10. System time (registered letter II); 11. Postage one penny: Rowland Hill's post office reform; 12. The standards of writing; 13. Hill/Babbage/Bentham: the mechanical alliance of 1827; 14. Mail in 1855: a misuse of love letters; 15. The worl postal system, or the end of the world; 16. The postcard; 17. The telegraph: land and sea; 18. The virgin machine; Part III. Mail Beyond Human Communication: 19. Typewriter and carbon paper; 20. The poet's matter in extremis; 21. Mail, or the impossibility of writting letters; 22. In the presence of noise; Notes; Bibliography.

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