WITH THE advent first of film, then of video, and finally of electronic media and the revolution in transmission that they have brought about, it might seem inevitable that theater should assume an increasingly marginal role, socially as well as aesthetically. The times when theater was a major means either for forging social and national identity or for disturbing it are long past, and although theater survives, its cultural significance seems greatly reduced. Nothing demonstrates this tendency more clearly, perhaps, than the latest invention of the consumer electronics industry: “home theater,” which seems designed to absorb the semipublic space of theater into the essentially private space of the home.1 Such absorption tends to reinforce the traditional aspirations of domestic space to become an autarkical microcosm independent of the outside world. Home theater, which in many ways is the domestic counterpart to the automobile—not least in its exploitation as a preferred site of the consumer electronics industry—appears to provide a window onto the world that lifts, as it were, the home out of the limitations and possible dangers of its immediate environment. If the screen of home theater is a window onto the world, no stone can come flying through it, however large it may be and however global its scope. Rather, in tandem with a sound system designed to surround and envelop the viewer-listener, home theater appears to open the home to the outside world while reinforcing its sense of secure self-containment.
Thus, an experience that formerly required some sort of move beyond private, domestic space and some sort of not entirely controllable social contact is privatized and domesticated. It should be noted that “audio” plays as large a part in this process as the more obvious “video.” “Surround sound,” “Dolby Digital,” and “THX” are only the most widespread brand names for systems of acoustical reproduction and enhancement that bring the cinematic world of sound into the private space of the individual.
This is, of course, only one tendency, albeit one of the most widespread, at work in the extremely complex transformations that the relationship between film and theater is undergoing today. Another is the effort, usually on the part of more or less “avant-garde” theater groups, to adapt cinematic and audiovisual techniques to the stage (in the United States, the productions of the New York–based Wooster Group have been among the most notable). Although such efforts deserve, and are receiving, prolonged attention, I want to address here another aspect of the problem, namely, the strange persistence and, indeed, resurgence of “theatrical” motifs in contemporary cinema.2 This huge topic has been the subject of book-length studies.3 Obviously only a very small portion of this complex relationship can be addressed in the space of a single chapter, especially because it is necessary to begin by giving some sort of definition to the most basic terms, whose significance is anything but self-evident. What is meant by theatrical? Not just “theater” in the sense previously alluded to. The word itself, in English and other languages as well, has meanings that are by no means limited to the “aesthetic” realm. As already observed, we speak of “theaters of operation” in a military sense, for instance, and the property of “theatricality” need not be tied to “theaters,” even in the larger, “metaphorical” sense just alluded to. If one tries to “define” the notion of “theater,” and even more that of “theatricality,” one immediately comes upon an obstacle to definition that probably communicates with the essence of what one is trying to define: one butts up against the difficulty of finding proper limits. This difficulty in finding the limits of the word theatrical makes the military use of the word particularly significant, for what allows an area to be designated a “theater” of (military) operations is the importance attached to defining, delimiting, and controlling the space of conflict. In other, more conventional terms, a space or region can be considered to be a military theater of operations when it is about to be transformed from a general space to a particular place. The transition from space to place often depends upon the intervention of forces and factors external to the place under dispute. Some such intervention is required to set the frontiers that will retroactively determine space as place. A theater is thus a locale whose status as determined place depends upon external intervention, and thus upon a relation of forces that can never be “contained” within the place in question. That is the first and perhaps most important trait of the term that the military notion of “theater” brings to the fore. There is, however, at least one other aspect, related to the first. In order for such military “intervention” to be effective, it must be undertaken from a relatively detached and secure position. Only such a position permits the required surveillance—“reconnaissance”—to take place, so that the intervening forces can know just where to intervene. Hence the decisive importance of reconnaissance in the planning of military strategies. However, from a military perspective reconnaissance is only a means to the end of the most effective deployment of force. This is peculiar to the military “theater” but not necessarily to theaters or “theatricality” in general.
The nonaesthetic—here, military—use of the word brings to the fore what is perhaps its salient trait, namely, theater considered as a medium in which conflicting forces strive to secure the perimeter of a place in dispute. “Theater” signifies the imposition of borders rather than a representational-aesthetic genre. The former focuses upon the manner in which a place is secured, whereas the latter regards the place as already taken or given, and therefore as a means or instrument of that which is to be represented. In respect to its mediality, then, theatricality is defined as a problematic process of placing, framing, situating rather than as a process of representation. This aspect is decisive in evaluating the persistence of theatrical modes and motifs in contemporary culture and society in general, and—to come finally to the topic at hand—in cinema in particular.
Having introduced the problem of theatricality in this admittedly very general way, I want now to concretize it by very briefly considering two films.
The first film I want to discuss, all too summarily, is one in which the distinctive temporality of theater—that of the present participle—is already taken up into its title: Being John Malkovich. It is no accident that the title links the present participle—and not just any present participle—to what appears to be a proper name: John Malkovich. The property and authenticity of that name will be even more emphatically affirmed when the figure, image, and voice associated with it appear in “the title role.” Nevertheless, this is not a film about “John Malkovich,” in the sense one might have expected. It does not tell the story of the life of a contemporary movie star, even though it does display pictorial evidence of that life: diplomas, high-school photos, and so on. Rather, the name designates a well-known “actor” acting himself: “John Malkovich” acting “John Malkovich.” The significance of the proper name in this context is anything but simply proper. It is not a linguistic entity designating an extra-linguistic referent, if by the latter is meant someone or something constituted in his or its self-identity independently of all signification. Rather, “John Malkovich” acting overlaps with John Malkovich acted. Any and all expectations attached to the latter as “person” have less to do with his person as such than with its aura: which is to say, with the curiosity about how something like a “person” or “individual” can possibly relate to the impersonal network that constitutes a Hollywood star.
Yet Malkovich is not just a typical Hollywood star: not just another Tom Cruise or Clint Eastwood (with and against whom he plays in the unforgettable film Line of Fire). Why? Because the fascination of Being John Malkovich has to do with the way the film doubles and thereby divides the convergence of image and person that otherwise functions as the condition of Hollywood stardom. One manifestation is Malkovich’s voice: cultivated in a way that is almost unique among today’s Hollywood stars, with a timbre that is as aloof and as it is insinuating, as remote as it is seductive, suspending any univocal identification in an indefinite equivocation of gender.
All of this, however, is a preface to the two aspects of the film that are of interest here: first, the motif of the puppets and the puppeteer; second, the fantasy of penetrating the body and soul of John Malkovich, Hollywood star, first in order to watch, then in order to control. I will inverse chronological order of the film by beginning with the latter part first, and ending with the first part last.
Like any good film that plays with uncanny elements, the specific way in which the figures gain access to Malkovich’s body has its own distinctive history. In the urban apartment buildings of the forties and fifties, and occasionally even today, the isolation of the American urban apartment dweller was often relieved only by particular kinds of communal “chutes”: postal chutes, laundry chutes, or garbage chutes, which became places where otherwise isolated apartment dwellers would occasionally meet and chat. The déchets produced by urban life were eliminated from view by being thrown down such communal garbage chutes. From these chutes the sounds of wailing or whistling winds could often be heard. This wind—in the reversed form of suction—sucks various figures in the film deep into the head and soul of the unsuspecting actor. The film celebrates its own “shooting” in the return of this laundry-garbage-postal chute. Whereas the chute served to transport the excesses of urban domestic life out of sight and mind, although not necessarily out of hearing, the Malkovich chute transforms its willing spectators into sight, mind, and audition. They disappear, first in order to hear and see what “John Malkovich” really is—and then, increasingly, to control what Malkovich sees and means.
As they do so, the privileged site of the autonomous subject since the Reformation, the individual body—the body understood as embodied individual—displays its vulnerability by becoming a staging area of a struggle for power and control. The dispossession of the human body is, of course, no new subject in the history of film: Fritz Lang’s Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) all explore fantasies of the vulnerability of the individual body—and hence, of the individual tout court—to alien forces that explicitly or implicitly have a political agenda. Against the background of this tradition, it is no doubt significant that the political dimension has disappeared in Being John Malkovich. In this film, the “chute” marks the “fall,” not just into the body, but simultaneously of the body considered to be a self-contained vessel and as the vehicle of a no less self-contained soul. At the same time, by ricochet, the body no longer serves to demarcate the internal self-containment of a subject.4 Rather, Malkovich’s body becomes a kind of apartment house or, better, a dwelling for transients. The body emerges both as a temporary container and as an observation post, something like a loge in a theater. After a period of observation, however, the observation post takes on a more military character—it becomes a forward command post that does not merely observe, but increasingly controls the body it is “in.” But its residence in that body is emphatically temporary: the fall out (onto the New Jersey Turnpike) is as certain and abrupt as the fall down the chute.
At first, it is this falling-down-and-out and the observations it makes possible that fascinate. Gradually, however, the story line takes over, thereby reducing and integrating the distinctively non-narrative, theatrical experience. What Benjamin, writing about Brecht’s Epic Theater, describes as the actor’s ability to “fall out of one’s role artistically,”5 and by implication to “fall” into another one, is increasingly submitted to a narrative logic of identification, power, and control. The latter then culminates in the occupation of Malkovich by “Dr. Lester” (played by Orson Bean) and his crew, who thus hope to postpone their mortality indefinitely—or at least for the duration of a story that can thus come to a proper, meaningful end.6
Being John Malkovich thus ends with the good news and happy ending of a collective, conspiratorial fall into grace, one that repeats itself and yet in so doing must try to leave behind the various chutes—garbage, postal, laundry—to which it implicitly alludes. In the process, the open-ended, finite reiterations that constitute the present participle are ironically overshadowed by the ostensible authenticity associated with the proper name and with its vehicle, the individual body. The demand of Hollywood for a meaningful, self-contained storyline is thus fulfilled: the film is not only shot and edited, but also brought to market—that is, “distributed.” In the process, however, the “individual” body is revealed to be a highly divisible container whose function—as already anticipated by Descartes—remains essentially indifferent to that which it contains. The body is thus the site of a struggle for “possession” in which expropriation and reappropriation alternate. The body thus retains certain of its features—name, voice, and figure—while becoming a closed arena (a.k.a. “theater of operations”) for ongoing struggles of appropriation. In the end—this end, at least—the organic, human body of “John Malkovich” reveals itself to be not so very different from the mechanical puppets that confront the spectator of this film at its beginning.
The pathos of those puppets, of course, has to do with the fact that they have no “inside” and therefore can “contain” nothing. Their dependence on the outside world, on the strings that tie them to the puppeteer, is visible and undeniable. Such dependence is generally domesticated by being assimilated to a generational immaturity: puppets are for “children,” not for “adults.” When, however, these puppets display passions and desires that do not conform to the moralistic expectation of youthful innocence, the puppeteer is rewarded by a box on the ears, or on the mouth, by an outraged and indignant parent-spectator, whose avenging blows purport to protect the morality of the child—but also of the adult—from such dubious seductions and contaminations. But the “story” told, mutely, by the puppet show foreshadows that to come in the film “itself.” It tells a story of bodies that have no soul, or no one soul, and are not, therefore, self-determining, autonomous, but rather determined by their “ties” to what they are not, in a fixed and yet always changing space. The story of the puppets, by contrast with the storyline to come, will have no promise or consolation, no hope of resurrection or of immortality, because in the world of puppets, at least, life and death are no longer simply mutually exclusive, no longer simply an alternative. The puppets, filmed largely in close-up, are more poignantly moving than the expressive faces of “living” actors. Why? Because their masks and movements reveal a constitutive heterogeneity that the modern conception of the autonomous individual is obliged to deny or combat. The puppets are suspended on threads; their movements come from elsewhere. They respond; they do not initiate. The “body” of a puppet, a marionette, is never self-contained, not an organic whole; rather, it reflects impulses that come from without. Puppets cannot therefore be said to “act” but at most to react to such impulses; their existence hangs on a thread, in all senses. Their movements would be dramatic were they not removed; and precisely their remoteness constitutes their distinctive poignancy. They are touching because in a sense they are already dead, and not yet born. Therein they serve as reminders of the ways in which the animation of the spectators is also suspended between past and future. The more the spectator is drawn into their drama, the more s/he realizes just how much the joke is on him or her, which perhaps explains why an indignant father, confronted by the passion of these puppets, has no alternative but to vent his anger, and presumably his anxiety, upon the body of the puppeteer (John Cusack).
Although they can hardly be said to “act,” puppets nevertheless “embody” the essence of the acting in which the body itself becomes a stage upon which forces that come from elsewhere play themselves out; such remote bodies are always defined by their relation to the place they occupy without ever possessing. Puppets never take place, and in this they are at odds with humans in the specific sense accorded that term by a powerful Western tradition: namely, that of an independent, autonomous, self-conscious subject. Puppets, by contrast, repeat, respond, react, re-move without ever reaching or aspiring to self-consciousness.7 They are both before and beyond it. Correlatively, their “bodies” never embody: not a soul, nor a mind, nor an identity. Their bodies are nonhuman in the extreme, and yet no less “bodily” for it. Their articulations, joints, and members take their cue from elsewhere, and their being, reiterative and inconclusive, always hangs on a thread. Contrary to appearances, the relation of the puppet to the puppeteer is not analogous to that of the creature to the Creator. The puppet is defined, not by its resemblance to the puppeteer, but by the threads that tie it to and remove it from the source of its movement.
This hanging-on-a-thread is difficult for Western observers to accept, and yet it is doubtless the source of a fascination that has never entirely disappeared. The puppet, devoid of authenticity, without a soul or a heart, embodies the division and separation that constitute acting as an activity that can only be designated to the present participle, as simultaneous with its enunciation. The “threads” on which its existence “hangs” are the materialization of this simultaneity in its ambivalence: linking and separating at once. These threads remain barely visible in the film, and their shadow remains even when its “plot” seeks to leave them behind.
• • •
The status of the “plot” is also a major issue in the second film I wish to discuss, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999). eXistenZ addresses many of the problems with which this book has been concerned: the status of narrative, its relation to meaning and, above all, to the medium. The medium here is, of course, film. But the subject matter also involves another kind of medium, namely, the “game.” The game concerned, of course, is produced by an age in which biotechnology has developed prosthetic power to the point of decisively blurring the difference between natural and synthetic, objective and subjective. As a result, the “game” of eXistenZ is, as its inventor, Allegra Geller, tells audience and future game-players at the outset, “much more than a game …” And yet, that “much more” turns out to be strangely—uncannily—familiar: “it’s an entire game-system.” The notion of system provides a crucial parameter against which the remainder of the film is mobilized. A “system” consists in a limited number of rules that at the same time create an unlimited number of possible actions or events. The rules of chess—or, to take the game mentioned in the film, poker—are limited, at least at any one time; the “games” made possible by that limited set of rules are not. Although those games must conform to the rules, their possible configurations are unlimited. This is what makes game-playing a question of “strategies” rather than merely of application: that is, of just applying the rules of the game. Such strategies, which negotiate with the aleatory, thus seek to impose a relative order upon the intrinsically unlimited number of games made possible by the rules.
What distinguishes the biotechnological game of eXistenZ from other games is, as its name suggests, that its rules are never fully identifiable. Hence, the only “system” that emerges is a certain lack of system. Since, however, the rules of the “game-system” that is eXistenZ are difficult if not impossible to discern, the very notion of “game” is called into question. The concept of “game,” like that of “fiction,” always presupposes its mutually exclusive other: a nonludic “reality” that is self-contained, “natural,” nonfabricated, and nonsynthetic. eXistenZ calls this enabling other into question by totalizing it. Like the “chute” in Being John Malkovich, the individual human bodies of the game-players are opened and attached—“ported”—into an external “game-pod” that looks like a cross between a kidney and a plastic pillow. It is hardly an accident that the scene where the “gameport” is depicted, and installed, occurs at a “gas station” and that the installer (Willem Dafoe, of the Wooster Group) is named, quite simply, “Gas.” Individual bodies are plugged into the game (pod) the way automobiles are plugged into gas pumps. What then occurs is both very old and very new. Instead of the machine “tanking up” in order to effect a movement that is still unmistakably locomotive—that is, from “place” to “place”—the movement that ensues transforms perception of the entire “world” in which “places” are otherwise situated. Once one is plugged in to the game-pod, what occurs is the most classical and characteristic move of cinema: the sudden “cut” or change of scene, whose abruptness can be gauged only against the constancy of the figure undergoing it. This technique is exploited by Buster Keaton in a celebrated sequence from his film Sherlock Junior: Keaton seeks to install himself in one setting, only to find himself suddenly transformed, by the cut, into another.
Such parodic reflection foregrounds the constitutive significance of the “cut” in cinema, a topos highlighted by Vertov and Eisenstein and elaborated by Benjamin.8 The illusion of a progressive, linear, narrative continuity is sustained by a compositional process that relies upon the intrinsic discontinuity of its individual components. The very notion—indeed, term—of film can be seen as a reminder of the tension between manifest, surface continuity and dissimulated discontinuity that distinguishes this medium.
This tension is reproduced as eXistenZ unfolds. The two main players, Allegra and Ted, are like puppets insofar as they must be attached to an external source, the synthetic game-pod (externalized interior bodily organ), in order to “play.” As so often in Cronenberg films, there is even discussion about the reduced importance of “free will,” of which, Allegra observes in a Nietzschean vein, there is “just enough to make things interesting.” Yet, despite all the talk of obscure and uncontrollable “forces” dominating the game, there remains the expectation of an intelligibility predicated upon individual intention. This is expressed naively by Ted, who remains a hesitant game-player even as he increasingly succumbs to its fascination: “I don’t know what’s going on. We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown and seemingly indecipherable, or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.”
To which Allegra replies: “That sounds like my game all right!”
Yet in what sense is it “her” game? As it turns out—if, that is, the concluding scene can be taken at face value (and that is, of course, precisely the question)—she is not its creator or inventor but “only” its main player. The “true” inventor of the game, Yevgenji Nourish, is still nourished by the claim to authorial rights over the game. The “anti-game sentiment” that gives eXistenZ its dramatic tension, indeed, its “plot,” “surely didn’t come from me,” he admits. Indeed, such “sentiment” comes from the game-players themselves, whose physical and mental energies are required for the game to function.
Here the structure of the game of eXistenZ shows what might be called its true colors,9 and at the same time demonstrates what might set this sort of “game” apart from what we have been investigating as the medium of “theatricality.” Both involve “playing”—whether of “roles” or something else. Both tend to unsettle the dichotomous logic that structures the semantic field in which these terms are generally used.
What distinguishes the playing of this kind of “game” from the play-acting of a theater is that the former conforms to an agonistic logic that is irreducibly binary. However futuristic its biotechnology may allow it to seem, the “game” of eXistenZ has one thing in common with the majority of Western games from past centuries: it is played with the expectation of producing winners and losers. When Allegra explains to Ted that she needs him as her game-partner in order to see if her game has survived the shock of the opening scene, he replies: “How can you expect me to compete with the inventor of the game?” To which she replies, somewhat speciously, “You could beat the inventor of poker, couldn’t you?” What is decisive here is not that the “inventor” is the “owner” or master (mistress) of the game—as we will see, this is no longer simply the case—but rather that the game is an activity that allows only one outcome and thereby reduces all differences to the simple alternative win or lose, otherwise known as winner take all. Standing alone among the ruins of a savage battle, with machine-guns rattling and bombs exploding, Allegra cries out: “Have I won?”
That is, indeed, the question that this kind of game presupposes and with which it concludes. It is also the question that makes this game so familiar, all of its biomechanical trappings notwithstanding. This is because, as Allegra remarks, “it’s a game that everyone is already playing.” The name of the game is corporate capitalism. It is a game that overlays competition with complicity, and in so doing relativizes the status of all “proper” names. In the opening scene, the game eXistenZ is presented to a selected audience by representatives of its true owner, who is not its inventor but its financer and marketer, “Antenna Corporation.” “Allegra Geller” is an employee of this corporation, and the game is its property, not hers (she probably has stock options, or course, which give her a stake in the corporation …). At the end of the film, the “same” scene is repeated, but this time the game has changed its name, having now become transCendenZ, and its inventor has changed gender, becoming “Yevgenji Nourish,” nourished by “Pilgrimàge Corporation.” This name is pronounced pilgri-màge, as though to emphasize the “I-magical” quality of the modern corporation, which combines bio-with media technology to invest the hallowed goal of capitalism—profit maximization—with a new and quasi-religious fervor.
What distinguishes game-playing from theatrical play-acting is its agonistic principle of winner take all, which is also the logic of the modern corporation. This agonistic logic of the corporation is also resolutely dual or binary, and it informs the ascendance of “drama” into “plot.” There is the corporation and its rivals, be they other corporations or anticorporate conspirators. As already discussed, the interruptive function of theatrical gesture is increasingly absorbed into the linear progression of a dramatic plot, in which difference is reduced to opposition and to polar conflict. In eXistenZ, such conflict doubles itself. On the one hand, there is the war between “realists” and “gamers.” In the eyes of the realists, the game-players, and above all their inventors, “deform” reality and must therefore be destroyed. It is suggested, however, that the “realist underground,” willing or not, is really a puppet, whose strings are pulled by a competing corporation, “Cortical Systematics.” Thus, the violent attempt to liquidate Allegra turns out to be shadowboxing. In the end, Allegra herself, whether she knows it or not, turns out to be yet another “double agent” acting for “the realist underground,” that is, for the competing corporation, Cortical Systematics. So much for the possibility of revolt, much less of revolution.
Thus, the “systematics” of this world of corporate capitalism, whether “cortical” or “antenna,” inward or outward directed, perpetuates the familiar dualistic logic of profit and loss, winners and losers, exploiters and exploited. It accomplishes this, however, by updating and perpetuating the reduction of theatricality that has been the subject of this volume.
The difference, then, between the “game-system” of eXistenZ and a play-acting that does not serve as a vehicle of plot in the Aristotelian, “mythological” sense, resides in the way the “role” is to be played. In eXistenZ the frame-setting role is organized in accordance with the dichotomous logic of winner and loser, active and passive. The cast is divided into two main categories: actors and extras. Nowhere are the ethnocentric ramifications of this dichotomy more striking than in the scene in the Chinese restaurant. Ted, the hitherto passive second lead, feels an urge—a “game-urge” Allegra says, encouraging him not to resist—“to kill someone.” The “someone” is the Chinese waiter, situated between the passive extra and the active actor. After the murder, the “audience”—and this is the sole scene, apart from the opening and concluding scenes, where an “audience” is shown—stares fixedly, frozen and silent, waiting passively for its “cue,” which Ted obligingly gives it, thereby allowing the “action” to resume and the plot to progress.
This freeze-frame audience recalls both Plato’s cave dwellers and the spectators presupposed by orthodox Aristotelian theater mythology: an audience that is framed and defined by the self-contained plot, by the muthos and its meaning. It is an audience that has no choice but to remain passive, waiting for its cue, or suddenly to spring into action, but in the most destructive way: aiming a revolver and declaiming its intention: “Death to the Demon(ness) …” Not for nothing is this theater a (Protestant) church, where the stark interior becomes a setting for a struggle between faith and fanaticism, gods and demons, continued in the Manichean battle between realists and gamers, between the creator and the inventor. While it is characteristic that this opposition should appear to pit symmetrical individual figures against one another, the reality behind the “realists” is the same as that behind the “inventors”: the corporation, whether called “Antenna,” “Pilgrimége,” or “Cortical Systematics.” The “Systematics” is that of the binary logic of appropriation and expropriation: tertium non datur.
Except perhaps on the stage; or, rather, as the stage: as the “Church” that is anything but the indifferent “setting” of this story. eXistenZ reveals its “true” nature as a game being played within the real game of transCendenZ. What is perhaps most notable about these names of games, however, is the shift in capitalization. That the “capitals” are no longer at the beginning of the names suggests that these names are no longer “proper,” but rather are themselves acronyms of a “systematics” whose logic is open to question—if only because it must be “staged.” It must be staged because of the question with which the Chinese game-player confronts his would-be murderers: “Are we still in the game?”
That question remains without an answer. It marks the end of the film, but perhaps not the end of the “game.” With this uncertain ending what reemerges is thus the question of the game’s limits, but now not as a question that can be framed by plot or intention, by determining where the one stops and the other starts. The question now no longer concerns simply beginnings and ends, but rather the ways in which plot and intention take place at all. One such way leads from the reconverted church to the gas station, the motel room, and the private house, from the “trout factory” to the Chinese restaurant to the battle scene. These places are almost always “interiors,” but at any moment they can be turned inside out. It is the possibility of this turn-about—peripeteia—that the move places, or rather replaces, on the agenda. That these two names or nouns are both derived from the gerund suggests just how theatrical this agenda remains.