ars combinatoria - whitney anne trettien

Around 1650, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer devised an ingenious ballet. It's simple: first, give each dancer a board inscribed with a letter of the alphabet; then watch as new words or phrases emerge from dance. The very movement of the dancer's bodies will act as a combinatory mechanism from which language springs (Westerhoff 465).

There is no evidence that Harsdörffer ever produced such a ballet. Perhaps the first modern conceptual poet, Harsdörffer's genius lies in his ability to construct reality through language -- that is, to use language not as a mirror for the world, but as its fundamental building blocks. He used pieces of wood to make anagrams (Delitiae II.514), designed letter-dice to teach children to build word combinations (Trichter II.18; see Westerhoff 464), and assigned numbers to letters to unlock a poem's hidden values (Trichter II.26-9), earning him the title Der Spielende, or "the Player," in the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. Each of these games uses language not as an abstraction, the purely rational product of the mind, but as quite literally a material object to be manipulated and moved, cut-up and combined. As Westerhoff explains,

In this simple mechanization we see how the ideas of the combinatorial nature of the world on the one hand and language on the other hand meet: letters are inscribed onto material elements, so that a permutation of these out of itself generates an anagram without requiring any ingenuity. For the baroque poet this structural isomorphism between language and matter explains why this method of anagram production works, while this fact itself serves as a further manifestation of the very same isomorphism. Because language and matter both follow combinatorial principles, it is possible to mechanize the former by inscribing it onto the latter. In the "language machine" the combinatorial features of language and the world which are generally distinct are unified into a single artifact. (Westerhoff 464-5)

In no mechanism is this belief more evident than the Fünffacher Denckring der Teutschen Sprache, or the Five-fold Thought-ring of the German Language:

The Denckring is a database of the German language composed of five predicate variables: prefixes (forty-eight values), initial letters or diphthongs (fifty values), medial letters (twelve values), final letters of diphthongs (120 values) and suffixes (twenty-four values). Instead of using a table structure, however, each variable is inscribed along the edge of a disc and nested with each of the other discs, forming a simple combinatory mechanism that can generate any information stored in the database. As Harsdörffer explains,

Will ich nun alle Stammwörter ordenlich finden / so fange ich bey dem A deß zweyten Ringes an / und drehe darzu das kleine a deß dritten Ringes: dann suche ich den vierten Ring Aab / Aabb / Aabd / &c. blinde oder deutunglose Wörter / biß auf das ch / Aach / Aquisgranum, eine benamte Stadt in Niderland / Aal / eines Fisches und eines Schusters Werckzeug Namen / Aas (cadaver)&c. (Delitiae II. 516-7)

By spinning the discs, then, the user can generate up to 97,209,600 words – 300 times as many as are in the most complete printed dictionary ever produced, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Harsdörffer claims that "wird sich verhoffentlich kein Wort in unsrer gantzen Sprache finden / welches nicht auf diesem Ring weisen seyn solte" (Delitiae II.519), although of course in reality the rings are incomplete (Zeller 167). In addition to representing "die gantze Teutsche Sprache auf einem Blätlein" (Delitiae II.516), the Denckring also forms new words that do not yet exist in German but, because they are formed by combining correct radicals and letters, could exist as legitimate words. As Harsdörffer explains, explicitly tying his device to the linguistic theories of Schottel,

Ist also dieses eine unfehlbare Richtigkeit / ein vollständiges Teutsches Wortbuch zu verfassen / und beharren wir in der Meinung / daß alle solche zusammen gesetzte Wörter / welche ihre Deutung würken für gut Teutsch zulässig / sonderlich in den Gedichten / ob sie gleich sonsten nicht gebräuchlich / wie hiervon zu lesen der umb unsere Sprache wolverdiente Herr Schottelius in seiner Einleitung und in seinen Lobreden der Sprachkünst vorgefüget. (Delitiae II.518).

Because the Denckring materializes proper root-words and mechanizes the proper formula for combining them, any output it produces must also be proper German. In other words, in this view language is fundamentally a material and mechanical phenomenon: material because it is rooted in monosyllabic stem-words that are themselves rooted in "die Teutschen letteren oder Buchstabe" (Schottel 61.31), and mechanical because meaning is not computed rationally but through an absolute and abstracted algorithm. As Newman points out (writing more generally of Harsdörffer's linguistics), far from secularizing the vernacular, its physical instantiation "in textual form adds to its authority and testifies to the reality of divinity present in the German tongue" (Newman 97), bringing the reader closer to an originary lingua adamica that is divinely, not merely prescriptively, proper.

It does not seem to bother Harsdörffer that it is a book, a man-made, printed text, that he relies upon for assurances about the divine capacities of the written word -- precisely the opposite. The availability of this knowledge in textual form adds to its authority and testifies to the reality of divinity present in the German tongue. (Newman 97)

On a practical level, Harsdörffer envisions the Denckring as part of his poetic process. The device makes its first appearance in his Poetischer Trichter or Poet's Funnel, a book on different theories and forms of verse and, as is written in the Delitiae Mathematicae et Physicae, "hat ... seinen Gebrauch in Erfindung der Reimwörter / wann man die Reimsilben auf dem dritten und vierten Ring suchet und die Reimbuchstaben auf dem zweyten Ring darzu drehet" (Delitiae II.518). Similarly, unlike columnar tables printed in books – indeed, if the Denckring were printed as a folio dictionary, it would fill thousands of volumes – the structure of nesting rings allows the poet to identify words that match a particular rhyme scheme, provides immediate random access to the lexicon, and is mobile, encouraging poets to incorporate it into poetic games and performance pieces. Perhaps most importantly, in using the Denckring the poet is not locating an item in a list, but dynamically generating meaning in the moment: that is, the very motion of the poet's hand assembles a whole word out of dissembled parts, engaging the baroque spirit of inventio. More than a mere storage device, the Denckring is a writing implement, mediating the relationship between the poet's physical body and the generated text.

God assembled the world from thirty-two divine letters and numbers; the poet spins a wheel inscribed with trace elements of the lingua adamica to generate 97,209,600 wor(l)ds, many of which exist only as possibilities. By embodying the theory of Stammwörter, the Denckring also embodies its contradictions, turning the very institution that legitimates it – that is, God, the divine – into a mere mechanism that dumbly spits out meaning. For if the poet has at her disposal the material elements of creation and God's combinatory metric, what what Book of Nature could be read that the poet couldn't already write herself?

Combinatorial creation, anagrams, the notion of root elements -- these ideas converge in the concept of Stammwörter, or German morphemes rooted in the originary language of Adam.

One of the most well-known German linguists of the early seventeenth century and a proponent of Stammwörter theory, Justus Georg Schottel wrote a series of grammars promoting the antiquity and expressiveness of German, calling for (like Opitz's Aristarchus) a return to the pure, Adamic vernacular. The first, Teutsche Sprachkunst (1641), begins with a collection of ten "Testimonia der Gelarten von der Trefflichkeit der deutschen Sprache," or testimonies from the learned on the excellence of the German language. Just as the kabbalist's Sefirot connects the ten digits to the the ten manifest attributes of God, each of the ten testimonies in the Teutsche Sprachkunst expand upon a different quality of excellence inherent in the German tongue, laying the foundation for Schottel's own commentary on German's combinatorial capacity.

A year after its publication, Prince Ludwig I of Anhalt-Köthen invited Schottel to join the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, where he was granted the title der Suchende, or "the seeker," and the emblem of a cabbage. Shortly after that, Schottel, who had been tutoring Duke August the Younger of Brunswick-Lüneburg's young sons since 1638, was joined in the Duke's household by Sigmund von Birken, a prolific poet and friend to Georg Philipp Harsdörffer. In 1645 Schottel himself became the tenth member of Harsdörffer's Pegnesische Blumenorden under the name "Fontano," the adjectival version of the Latin word for "fountain" or "spring."

The security of royal patronage, friendships with imaginative thinkers and access to the most extensive library in Europe, the Duke's Herzog August Library, helped Schottel weave together his linguistic theory, most fully developed in the massive Ausführliche Arbeit von der teutschen Haubtsprache (1663). To historicize his native tongue, Schottel traces the German language back to Ashkenaz, "ein Altvater der Teutschen / hat mit sich die alte Celtische oder Teutsche Sprache von Babel gebrach" and from Ashkenaz all the way back to Adam (Schottel HaubtSprache I.34). Thus, while the Confusion of Babel may have muddied the lingua adamica, it did not completely erase it: in fact, German, Schottel claims, has its roots in the pure vernacular of the Garden of Eden:

Dem allen nach wird gewißlich folgen daß / gleich wie das jtzige Teutschland annoch dasselbe Teutschland ist / welches vor etzlichen tausend Jahren gewesen / ob es schon jtzo besser bebauet / herrlicher ausgeschmükt ... Also ist gleichfals unsere jtzige Teutsche Sprache / eben dieselbe uhralte weltweite Teutsche Sprache ... denn wie das Land / Teutschland bleibet / also müssen die Stammwörter / Teutsche Wörter bleiben die denn ihre natürliche Eigenschaften (davon in dieser Sprachkunst wird gehandelt) so lange in sich / samt jhrer Deutung / gehabt haben / so longe sie in rerum natura gewesen. (Schottel HaubtSprache I.48)

Rerum natura, the nature of things: an allusion to De rerum natura, a poem by Lucretius circa the first century B.C. In it, Lucretius posits an Epicurean, atomistic world of infinite possible combinations -- of "dissimiles ... formae glomeramen in unum / conveniunt" (Lucretius II.686-7). For Lucretius and Epicurus before him, each atom is a discrete unit of irreducible and self-evident meaning "quod nusquam sine permitiali / discidio potis est seiungi seque gregari, / pondus uti saxis, calor ignis, liquor aquai" (Lucretius I.451-3).

Although not explicitly tied to the creation myth -- in fact, Lucretius appears to explicitly reject Adamic theory (see Eco 1997 88-9) -- Lucretius' atomism provides the groundwork for conceptualizing Schottel's Stammwörter. Like atoms, Stammwörter are fundamentally irreducible, isolatable units of meaning, much as linguists today might speak of morphemes. However, unlike morphemes Stammwörter are not rational conceptions of the human mind, but are inextricably interwoven with the material text. For Schottel they are like letters, having size and weight:

Gleich wie aber die Teutschen letteren oder Buchstabe alle einlautend / eben also sind die ersten Surtzelen oder die Stammwörter der Teutschen Sprache gleichfalls einsilbig. (Schottel HaubtSprache I.61)

Similarly, like atoms and letters, or like the primitive concepts of Leibniz's lingua characteristica (Westerhoff 459), a root-word combines (gefüget) with other words to form meaning, "gewisser massen gebildet werden" (Schottel HaubtSprache I.70). These combinations are possible because one radical -- that is, one signifier -- corresponds directly and immediately to the concept it signifies. This relationship is not one of mirroring, in which two distinct entities reflect one another, but, to return the materialism inherent in Stammwörter, of embodiment. Thus in some sense a root word simply is the essence a concept. As Schottel explains:

Durch die natürlich bekandte Unmüglichkeit ist es schlecht unmüglich eine leichtere / gründlichere und wundersamere Art der Letteren oder Buchstaben und Wörter / als die Teutschen sind auszubringen: Sie sind nicht allein einlaufend / die durch einen natürlichen Zufall den dehörigen Laut veruhrsachen / sonderen ihr einstimmiger Laut ist so wunderreich / und ihre Zusammenstimmung so überkünstlich / daß die Natur sich hierin völlig und aller dinges ausgearbeitet hat. Denn / ein jedes Ding / wie seine Eigenschaft und Wirkung ist / also muß es vermittelst unserer letteren / und krast derer / also zusammengefügten Teutschen Wörter / aus eines wolredenden Munde daher fliessen / und nicht anders als ob es gegenwärtig da were / durch des Zuhörers Sin und Herze dringen. Zum Exempel nehme einer nur diese Wörter: Wasser fliessen / gesäusel / sanft / stille ac wie künstlich ist es / wie gleichsam wesentlich fleust das Wasser mit stillem Besäusel von unser Zungen? (Schottel HaubtSprache I.59)

Many baroque thinkers echo Schottel's admiration for the onomatopoeic qualities of the German tongue, taking it as proof of German's excellence and divine origins. In his Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, Harsdörffer argues that the German language

Speaks in the languages of nature, quite perceptibly expressing all its sounds. ... It thunders with the heavens, flashes lightening with the winds, foams with the waves, creaks with the locks, sounds with the air, explodes with the cannons; it roars like the lion, lows like the oxen, snarls like the bear, bells like the stag, whinnies like the horse, hisses like the snake, meows like the cat, honks like the goose, quacks like the duck, buzzes like the bumble bee, clicks like the hen, strikes its beak like the stork, caws like the crow, coos like the swallow, chirps like the sparrow. … On all those occasions in which nature gives things their own sound, nature speaks in our own German tongue. For this, many have wished to assert that the first man, Adam, would not have been able to name the birds and all the other beasts of the fields in anything but our words, since he expressed, in a manner conforming to their nature, each and every innate property and inherent sound; and thus it is not surprising that the roots of the larger part of our words coincide with the sacred language. (Harsdörffer Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele, quoted in Eco 99)

Here Harsdörffer brings the concept of Stammwörter full circle, back to the lingua adamica. From a finite number of radicals, infinite meanings become possible, constructing entire linguistic universes unknown to humans since the Confusion of Babel, perhaps even since the Fall. The more pure these radicals are -- that is, the more they embody the divine properties of the universe, the Paths of Wisdom -- the closer their combinations come to God's creation. Thus finding and excavating Stammwörter in the German tongue not only legitimates the vernacular, uplifting it from its state of corruption and neglect, but also exalts its speakers by allowing them to enter a more direct, almost prelapsarian communion with God.

Yet, ironically, by presenting Stammwörter as a form of onomatopoeia, Schottel and Harsdörffer undermine the very theory they are attempting to support. Once linguistic perfection is no longer anchored in the moment of Adamic naming, any language, divinely formed or artificial, may become more perfect simply by molding its sounds to the "language of nature." Likewise, if humans can excavate the lingua adamica from an ordinary vernacular, then they possess the basic elements of creation, the building blocks from which all meaning constructed, and hence the power to re-construct the world in their own image -- to build a new Tower of Babel. Although Schottel takes pains to historicize his project, to present it as a descriptive account of the German tongue, in the end it is both prescriptivist and interventionist, wresting the power of the divine and placing it in the hands of man.

In some ways, these apparent contradictions should come as no surprise. The first half of the seventeenth century was a period of transition, when scholars and poets and writers and publishers were struggling to develop new standards for the changing practices of art, and for the emerging culture of experimentation in natural philosophy. Of course, the baroque era was also a period of spiritual and social upheavel, as bitter religious wars ravaged central Europe. One must expect that the linguistic theories of Schottel and Harsdörffer would reflect these competitions between the mechanical and the divine, and natural and the artificial. Yet, as Jane Newman points out in a clever deconstruction of New Historicism, history is not simply the "background, 'origin,' and ultimate goal of textual expression," and texts are not merely "mirrors of historical conditions 'on the outside'" (Newman 7, 10). In fact very few linguistic texts of the German baroque "'refer' or 'respond' to an 'outside'" history at all (Newman 10). Rather, Newman argues, texts are institutions, which "means, above all, understanding them as historical events in a maximally concrete sense": as "a material phenomenon that comes into existence at a given moment and testifies to that moment" by both "separating itself (as text) from it and by embedding it in a rhetoric of transcendence" (Newman 20):

To study the institutional identity of a text as well as the function of textual institutions relies, then, on analyzing both the inaugural function of the text, its power to be foundational and to provide a historical beginning, and its monumental function, the strategies whereby it not only testifies to that beginning but also transcends it by serving as a fixed model for specific future (perhaps not only textual) behavior. These strategies gain their authority by strategically 'forgetting' and then recoding in a 'monumental' textual form the historicity of the inaugural moment as a moment beyond and outside history. (Newman 22)

Schottel's theory is both monument and foundation -- it both historicizes the vernacular and de-centers the very Judeo-Christian narrative that legitimizes it. In short, like Stammwörter themselves, it both reflects and transcends its moment of creation. All Schottel needs is the key to unlock the lingua adamica hidden just beneath the surface of the German tongue.

The great lesson that Kabbalah can teach contemporary interpretation is that meaning in belated texts is always wandering meaning, even as the belated Jews were a wandering people. Meaning wanders, like human tribulation, or like error, from text to text, and within a text, from figure to figure. What governs this wandering, this errancy, is defense, the beautiful necessity of defense. For not just interpretation is defense, but meaning itself is defense, and so meaning wanders to protect itself. In its etymology, 'defense' refers to 'things forbidden' and to 'prohibition', and we can speculate that poetic defense rises in close alliance with the notions of trespass and transgression, crucial for the self-presentation of any new strong poet. (Bloom 82)

As Gershom Scholem puts it, the Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation, is "small in size but enormous in influence" (Scholem 1974 23). Written sometime around the eighth century, it is the earliest extant text in the Kabbalist tradition, laying out a cosmogeny of combination and permutation . It begins:

With 32 mystical paths of Wisdom
engraved Yah
     the Lord of Hosts
     the God of Israel
the living God
     King of the universe
El Shaddai
     Merciful and Gracious
     High and Exalted
     Dwelling in Eternity
     Whose name is Holy -
          He is lofty and holy -
And He created His universe
     with three books (Sepharim),
          with text (Sepher)
          with number (Sephar)
          and with communication (Sippur). (Sepher Yetzirah 1.1)

The thirty-two paths created by God come from 1) the ten digits, futher manifest in the Ten Sefirot, or emanations of God, and 2) the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which come together through 231 "gates," clusters of letters that form the roots of the Hebrew verb (Scholem 1974 25). "He hath formed, weighed and composed with these twenty-two letters every created thing," the Sefir Yetzirah reads, "and the form of everything which shall hereafter be" (Sepher Yetzirah II.2). Aryeh Kaplan, who translated the above passage, elaborates:

The letters and digits are the basis of the most basic ingredients of creation, quality and quantity. The qualities of any given thing can be described by words formed out of letters, while all of its associated quantities can be expressed by numbers. (Kaplan 5)

Much like the Christian "Book of Nature," which sees God's creation as an all-encompassing text coextensive with the Bible, the Sefir Yetzirah treats the world as fundamentally textual, a spatial environment to be "read." However, unlike the "Book of Nature," Kabbalism is interested not only in reading the world as the end-product of God's work, but in (re)producing the mechanisms of creation to unlock new meaning. Thus for the Kabbalist "the world-process is essentially a linguistic one, based on the unlimited combinations of letters" to form new spiritual environments (Scholem 1974 25).

We are dealing with a treasure-hoard of the second degree, one that refers to the notations of nature, which in their turn indicate obscurely the pure gold of things themselves. The truth of all these marks -- whether they are woven into nature itself or whether they exist in lines on parchments and in libraries -- is everywhere the same: coeval with the institution of God. (Foucault 34)

Kabbalists extend the idea of manipulation, combination and permutation to all sacred texts, employing a set of three basic hermeneutic tools to uncover the secret meanings embedded in the rolls of the Torah. The first, Temurah, involves rearranging words and sentences to generate new texts from the base elements of the old, much like anagrams. Notarikon similarly cobbles together a new text from the old, but using only the first and last letter of a series of words. And, combining the thirty-two letters and ten digits of creation, Gematria assigns numerical values to letters which then acquire quantitative significance. Underlying each of these practices is the belief that letters, written language, exist as material objects with a primarily spatial, rather than temporal, existence. Even the voice has a physical presence in the Sefir Yetzirah: it is "impressed upon the air, and audibly modified in five places; in the throat, in the mouth, by the tongue, through the teeth, and by the lips" (Sepher Yetzirah II.3). As a physical entity, then, Scripture is not strictly linear but contains multiple dimensions, even extralinguistic dimensions, unlocked by cutting and anagrammatically permuting the text.

In many ways this work you're reading now is a Ka(nni)bbalistic reading of its source texts -- a golem, a monstrous creation that lives dispite the inanimate and artificial nature of its constituent parts.

Meaning, whether in modern poetry or in Kabbalah, wanders wherever anteriority threatens to take over the whole map of misreading, or the verbal universe, if that phrase be preferrred. Meaning swerves, enlarges oppositely, vacates, drives down so as to rise up again, goes outside in the wan hope of getting itself more on the inside, and at last attempts to reverse anteriority by forsaking the evasions of mental space for those of mental time. A poem's images or Kabbalistic hypostases are thus types of ambivalence (not of ambiguity) that cope with the burden of anteriority. (Bloom 89)

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries find central Europe weak and disorganized. Around three hundred different princes, prelates, counts and knights ruled over a loosely-affiliated smattering of states, provinces, towns and fiefdoms, all grouped under the central governance of the Holy Roman Empire (apologetically appended with "of the German Nation" in 1512). Foreign leaders such as the King of Spain and the King of Denmark held fiefs within the Burgundian Circle, while German rulers held foreign territories, causing them to be both directly under and outside the authority of the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Charles V himself, a Habsburg, ruled the Spanish realms of Castile and Aragon and often appealed to the King of Spain to help suppress internal divisions -- an alliance which threatened the independence of the German princes, who retaliated by cementing their own alliances with the King of France, the Emperor's enemy.

Religious conflict further strained the already tenuous ties between local rulers and the Emperor. In 1555, after a series of Protestant uprisings in the first half of the sixteenth century, Emperor Ferdinand I, brother and successor to Charles V, signed a peace treaty with the Schmalkaldic League, a group of Lutheran princes, dukes and rulers. The treaty, called the Peace of Augsburg, officially (though not effectively) ended the religious conflict by the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, or "whose region, his religion": that is, whatever religion the leader of the territory believed in, whether Catholic or Protestant, so must all subjects believe.

Although intended to curb violence, in fact, by cementing religious divisions through a policy of mutual hatred and intolerance, the Augsburg Peace agreement ironically destroyed any lingering sense of unity amongst the scattered states of the Holy Roman Empire and further weakened the authority of state leaders; for, as C. V. Wedgwood writes, the Lutheran princes and dukes "were demanding from the Emperor what they refused to their own people" (Wedgwood 46). Those who refused to convert to the state's religion were forced to emigrate, leading to large populations of refugees, massive migrations, and the spread of disease and famine across an already unstable region. By 1618, tensions were so high that when Ferdinand II, another Habsburg and a staunch Catholic, became King of the largely Protestant Bohemia, the nobility threw his representatives out a window, starting a religious war that would last the next thirty years.

As Ferdinand's imperial governors were falling (quite luckily) onto a pile of manure in Prague, Martin Opitz, a young Protestant student from Lower Silesia, was traveling north along the Oder toward Frankfurt an der Oder, a mid-size trading town nestled in the heart of Brandenburg. When Opitz arrived in 1618 to study law, the state of Brandenburg, like most of the Empire, was cut deep with religious divisions. Although resistant to the Reformation in the early decades of the sixteenth century, its rulers had since "jerked from Lutheranism to Calvinism and back, blazing a trail of dispossession, exile and violence" that threatened to destroy what little religious harmony remained within the state. As Wedgwood recites,

In Brandenburg the Elector declared that he would rather burn his only University than allow one Calvinist doctrine to appear in it. Nevertheless his successor became a Calvinist and introduced a pastor at Berlin, whereat the Lutheran mob broke into the newcomer's house and plundered it so effectively that he had to preach on the following Good Friday in a bright green undergarment, which was all that the rioters had left him. (Wedgwood 47)

It was in this environment that the young Opitz entered the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, where he published his first essay, a polemic on behalf of the German language entitled Aristarchus; sive, de contemptu linguae Teutonicae.

"Quotiescunq; majores nostros Germanos, viros fortes ac invictos, cogito," Opitz begins, "religione quadam tacita ac horrore ingenti percellor"; for the German tongue is "a charming tongue, a decent tongue, a serious tongue" well-suited to alexandrine and Neoclassical verse. Yet, to express the artistic potential of his "charming" native tongue, Opitz chooses Latin, the "corrupt" language of Catholicism, switching occasionally to German when citing his own original poetry. Thus reflecting the culture of the Holy Roman Empire itself, the essay begins by presenting columns of clean, Roman typeface --

-- but then slowly becomes colonized by pockets of Gothic font that playfully bursts across the page in expressive curls:

While the essay and even the lines of the pages attempt to contain these Gothic outbursts through an imposed aesthetic harmony, the forced unity only leads to greater discord as the exiled, dispossessed tongue attempts to reclaim, even to re-colonize, the page. In fact, on this page Latin is quite literally pushed to the edge, squashed between the enclosing ranks of German:

Thus not only does the text reflect the kind of political battles being fought at the time, it actually becomes a soldier in the war, re-drawing territorial boundaries. Seen from this angle, Aristarchus does not ironically reinforce the need to use Latin but actually undermines it, forcing Latin toward the margins as German stakes a claim to its own space. The verses may be Neoclassical in form but, as Opitz makes clear, they belong to German.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Tower of Babel (1563) is a golem. Unlike the tall, toddering towers of Meister der Weltenchronik or, later, Athanasius Kircher, Brueghel's creation is a thick mound, slowly spiraling out of the sea, consuming the surrounding countryside. It teams with human life -- tiny figures crawl through its crevices, hanging from machinery -- and yet it is distinctly inhuman, an inanimate monster composed of decaying parts.

Part Ziggurat and part Colosseum, Brueghel's Tower embodies the concept of recursion -- a fundamental principal in both the language of humans and code, the language of computers. Each level is composed of a series of nesting blocks that emanate from the center, forming a set of concentric wheels that point up toward heaven. Yet the blocks are not entirely planar. By constructing the elements on a slight angle, the tower's blocked, circular design and rounded Roman arches are at tension with its spiralling shape, causing it to crumble from the inside. Indeed, although it stretches into the clouds, it is clear the tower can never reach heaven; already its carefully-cut blocks are crumbling to dust, almost as they are added to the wall. As the king stands beside his eviscerated tower, inspecting the unused bricks strewn over the hillside, the painting illuminates the stark difference between design and implementation, between the dream of unity and the disparate reality of its parts.

While today it is common for philosophers and linguists to conceive of language as a system of rationally-understood syntactical relationships between larger units of meaning, such as words or whole sentences (see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought), the Cartesian revolution in linguistics did not occur until the latter half of the seventeenth century. During the first half, the letter still dominated linguistic theory as the primary unit of sound and sense. As Hudson writes,

Language was envisioned as an aggregate of discrete signs, each denoting a mental image, with in turn mirrored a natural world of separate physical objects. As the syntactical relations between signs could not be easily visualized, they tended to be neglected. (Hudson 43)

Like many other baroque thinkers, Harsdörffer identified the material form of letters in objects of the world -- or, rather, found the world in the materiality of letters. In these images from the Delitiae mathematicae et physicae - Der mathematischen und philosophischen Erquickstunden, Dritter Theil (1653, 44-5), Harsdörffer plays with signifying nature of Buchstaben, lending his writing (as Juliet Fleming puts it, describing early modern graffiti) "meaning in excess both of its signified content, and of its easily recognized aesthetic dimensions -- a meaning that has to do with the fact of its appearance in matter" (Fleming 115).

If words represent reality to our understanding, then, like existing things, they must consist of assembled elements. Reducing language to physical properties visually organized on the page justifies operating on words as objects. If the written and spoken language can be touched, tabulated, and visualized, then it can be secured, improved, perfected and rationally taught. (Cohen 8)

The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with forty Pupils about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations. But the World would soon be sensible of its Usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted Thought never sprung in any other Man's Head. Every one knew how laborious the usual Method is of attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was twenty Foot Square, placed in the middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at Work. The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were fourty fixed round the Edges of the Frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This Work was repeated three or four Times, and at every turn the Engine was so contrived that the Words shifted into new Places, as the Square bits of Wood moved upside down.(Swift III.5)

The Aristotelian Telescope, a machine for producing metaphors, from Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before.

The base consisted of a great chest or case whose front held eighty-one drawers -- nine horizontal rows by nine vertical, each row in both directions identified by a carved letter (BCDEFGHIK). On the top of the chest, to the left stood a lectern on which a great volume was placed, a manuscript with illuminated initials. To the right of the lectern were three concentric cylinders of decreasing length and increasing breadth (the shortest being the most capacious, designed to contain the two longer ones); a crank at one side could then, through inertia, make them turn, one inside the other, at different speeds according to their weight. Each cylinder had incised at its left margin the same nine letters that marked the drawers. One turn of the crank was enough to make the cylinders revolve independently of one another, and when they stopped, one could read triads of letters aligned at random, such as CBD, KFE, or BGH. (Eco 92)

Padre Emanuele turned his cylinders and searched through his drawers, fast as a conjuror, so the metaphors seemed to arise for him as if by enchantment, without anyone's noticing the mechanical gasping that produced them. (Eco 95)

The connection between the Denckring and the hand is strong. Four hands populate the edges of the mechanism, positioned as if they were the reader’s own. The hands in the upper left and lower right hold instruments -- a compass and a quill, respectively --

-- while the other two display symbols, a heavy ring and a small wreath:

The former represents writing as a material, artifactual practice mediated by instruments, tools and technologies, linking it visually to emerging practice of experimental philosophy. In fact, the Deliciæ Physico-Mathematicæ (the text in which the Denckring appears) is peppered with illustrations of disembodied hands holding tools to measure, slice, or organize matter -- instruments that, like written language, help us to understand the surrounding world by rendering it in human terms.

The other hands around the Denckring, though, depict language as symbolic -- an atemporal monument that materializes and therefore preserves the abstract. In Western culture, a wreath represents both eternity and death, the fate of language upon inscription, while the hand in the top right corner gestures outward, palm facing up, over the word "unvergessen," or "unforgotten." Thus two hands around the Denckring illustrate the transient, performative act of writing -- the quill sits poised, as if preparing to set pen to paper -- while the other two symbolize its material product: the written text. As Jonathan Goldberg writes,

There is then a history of technology that is also the history of "man," the programmed/programming machine: the human written. The human cannot simply be returned to the divine/oral origin; the hand is there from the start, as the locus of retroactive redetermination. Thus, from the start, the written being and the writing being are coincident and differential, opening and enclosing at one and the same time interiority and exteriority, the human and the technological, the mind and the body, speech and writing in their narrow sense; from the start, the relationships between these and all other differential terms exist within the possibility of protention and retention and the differential possibilties of rhythms of emergence. (Goldberg 24)

Harsdörffer's Denckring collapses these boundaries between speaking, reading and writing, presenting the totality of a language that nonetheless does not exist outside the combinatory potential of its mechanism. Roland Barthes asserts that the "text" -- an authorless, "irreducible ... plural," an "explosion, a dissemination" -- is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to the "work," which is a authored and pedigreed piece of Literature; but in fact the Denckring shows that the ergodic text is an important part of baroque culture. In Harsdörffer's poetry generator, the author-function is algorithmic and abstract, constructing a structure or code which the reader then must assemble through the motion of the hand -- a motion connected with that of writing, of measuring.

Oral and written are derivative, then, from the handedness of the human. As Raymond Williams says, there are "relationships embodied in writing." For Derrida, that is literally true; the writing being is also being written, whether at the instinctive level or while writing at the computer. In the relationship between writing in the general and in the specific sense -- in relationships which are not merely at the order of conceptuality, but which are also social and historical -- the field of a differential inscription of human being comes into view. (Goldberg 24)