theia. Truth, as altheia or Entbergung, marks the irreducibility of such ambivalence, whether with respect to thinking, being, or technics.Gestalt, Gestell, Geschick
AT THE CONCLUSION of his essay questioning—and in quest of—technics, Heidegger suggests that the problems involved point beyond the consecrated disciplinary discourses that have hitherto monopolized the field:
Because the goings-on of technics [das Wesende der Technik] are not technical, essential meditation upon technics and decisive confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] can only happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, related to that essence and on the other fundamentally different from it.
Such a realm is art. But only when artistic meditation for its part does not shut itself off from the constellation of truth that our questioning is after.
In so questioning we bear witness to a state of emergency: because of technics itself [lauter Technik] we do not yet experience the goings-on of technics, because of aesthetics itself [lauter Aesthetik] we no longer experience the goings-on of art. Yet the more we question the goings-on of technics, the more enigmatic become the goings-on of art.1
In this conclusion, which does not merely name an enigma—that of “art”—but is itself enigmatic in its allusiveness, Heidegger asserts that, in order to reach a genuine understanding of what is at stake in modern technology, it is necessary to go beyond the concepts and discourse of “technology itself,” of what he calls, in German, lauter Technik, the din of which tends to drown out rather than reveal what is really going on in and as technics. Just as the over-loud discourse of traditional aesthetics—lauter Aesthetik—obscures through its specious familiarity what might really be going on under the deceptively familiar name of “art.”
In what follows, I will take Heidegger’s suggestion as a point of departure in trying to discern more precisely certain aspects of the “enigma” or “secret” hidden by the ostensible clarity of aesthetics, in order then to move in a direction that Heidegger himself would surely never have followed but in which his questions nevertheless seem to point. I will suggest that the “affinity” of art and technics is perhaps nowhere more suggestively problematic than in the history of what is called “theater,” of its “theory” as well as its “practice,” and, above all, in the persistent difficulty in keeping the two apart. Against the backdrop of this convergence, certain distinctive effects of modern technics—especially in relation to what is called “media”—display and deploy their significance.
Let me begin, then, by recalling, resuming, and in the process simplifying the major arguments that lead Heidegger to conclude that the goings-on of technics must be examined from the perspective of an “art” that is “poetic,” but not necessarily “aesthetic.”
Both “poetics” and “technics” are initially, according to Heidegger, forms of Entbergung, usually translated as “revealing.” This term is unsatisfactory for at least two reasons. First, it utterly effaces an essential dimension implied by the German word, which can also mean to “save,” in the sense of to protect or secure.2 For this reason, I have in previous writings preferred to render the word as “unsecuring” rather than as “revealing.” Yet there is another reason not to overlook this less obvious, more connotative meaning of bergen. The notion of “securing” does not just add another meaning to that of “revealing”: it implies a different structure of meaning, one that is irreducibly conflictual, requiring negotiation and compromise. Where there is “unsecuring,” there must also be a threat, a danger. “Unsecuring” points to a conflict and, in turn, to a relation of forces that requires a response of some sort. But no single, unified response can, as such, resolve the conflict. What is decisive in Heidegger’s use of this, as of other terms, is that such words are always the site of an unresolvable ambivalence. What is not necessarily obvious in the English word revealing is how the movement it designates is indissociably bound up with a counter-movement that doubles and splits it. Precisely this ambivalence allows Heidegger to assimilate Entbergen to his notion of truth, altheia. Truth, as altheia or Entbergung, marks the irreducibility of such ambivalence, whether with respect to thinking, being, or technics.
In order, therefore, to understand what is actually going on in Heidegger’s account of technology, it is indispensable to take into account his emphatically ambivalent approach to truth. Although he discusses this notion in many places in his work, none is more relevant to his analysis of technics than “The Origin of the Work of Art,” written in 1936, because, as already mentioned, Heidegger suggests that art—a certain notion of art—can provide the key to the goings-on of technics. In the earlier essay, which defined art as “the setting to work of truth,” the ambivalent structure of truth as altheia emerges with relative clarity:
Truth is un-truth insofar as part of it derives from the realm of the not yet (un)revealed in the sense of secured concealment [Verbergung].… Truth goes on [west] as truth in the counter-movement [Gegeneinander: literally, “against one another”] of lighting-clearing and concealing-securing. Truth is the originary strife [Urstreit] in which, always in its own way, the Open is striven for [erstritten], into which everything stands in [hereinsteht] and from which everything that discloses itself as [a] being [Seiendes] holds back [sich zurückhält] and withdraws.3
In its constitutive ambivalence, Heidegger’s elaboration of truth as altheia diverges radically from the traditional notion of truth as adaequatio or correspondence in its constitutive ambivalence. Whereas the notion of truth as adequation presupposes an underlying identity as tertium comparationis, altheia insists upon an irreducible and generative strife as that which transforms the relationship from an essentially static one, presupposing a self-identical referent as its ground, to an unstable dynamic that participates in the relation it both engenders and undercuts. In place of the self-contained ground, the referent, there emerges a conflictual process in which something can “reveal” itself, step into the open only by at the same time withdrawing or obscuring that upon which it depends. Truth as altheia must thus compose with a differentiation that is as inevitable as it is unstable and that is therefore highly contentious:
Whenever and however this strife breaks out and occurs, the disputants, clearing and concealing [Lichtung und Verbergung], diverge. Thus the openness of disputed space is conquered [erstritten]. The openness of this opening, i.e. truth, can only be what it is, namely this openness, if and so long as it installs itself in its opening. Hence, there must always be a being in this opening, wherein openness takes its stand and its constancy. …
Truth happens only by opening a space of strife and play [Streit- und Spielraum] in which it installs itself [sich einrichtet]. Because truth is the countercurrent [das Gegenwendige] of clearing (Lichtung) and concealing [Verbergung], what is here called installation belongs to it. (OA, pp. 67–68)
In order for the general, but abstract movement of truth as altheia to concretize itself—which means to singularize itself, to become this truth and not just truth in general—it must “install” itself, institute itself, set itself up (and down) in a particular place and in a particular manner: as this particular being. But what is so particular about installation is that it can not be understood in terms of the relation of part to whole. This, at least, is what its simultaneous “withdrawal”—in Heidegger’s German, Entzug —seems to suggest, since all such emergence involves simultaneously a withdrawal,4 every move a remove. The term that perhaps best designates the peculiar particularity of a part that is not just part of a whole is singularity. The singular is neither the particular nor the unique: rather, it is that which doesn’t fit in, the odd, and as such, that which is never self-contained. We will return to this shortly.
For the moment, however, let us follow a bit further Heidegger’s question of technics and its strange goings-on. Technics, he argues, should not be reduced to neutral instrumentality in the service of man. Rather, in communicating with truth as altheia, it entails a mode of being that is prior even to knowledge and science, with which it is, however, associated from the Greeks on. This nonidentity of technics and knowledge is why the less idiomatic translation, “technics” is to be preferred to the more familiar “technology.” For Heidegger, Technik is in many ways closer to technique than to technology, in the sense of a systematic organization and application of knowledge. Technics involves a practice, a way of being in the world that cannot be reduced to knowledge, however closely it is related to it.
Initially, as understood in ancient Greece, technics involved a process of revealing, of bringing forth that which on its own could not see the light (QT, p. 13). Modern technics, however, while still a mode of revealing and unsecuring, no longer consists primarily in a “bringing-forth” in the sense of poisis, but rather in a “driving out [Herausfordern]” (QT, p. 14) in the sense of extracting energy for subsequent storage. This extraction for storage in turn involves a redefinition of place and placing that is decisive in Heidegger’s approach to this question. The following celebrated—or notorious—example well illustrates that redefinition:
The hydroelectric plant is set in the current of the Rhine [Rheinstrom]. It sets up its water pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets machines in motion whose thrust sets up electric current, for which the long-distance power station and its cable network have been ordered and set up. In the realm of the interlocking effects of this placing-on-order [Bestellen] of electrical energy, the Rhine current itself appears as something placed on order [als etwas Bestelltes]. (QT, p. 16)
Though phenomena of “nature” are generally held to contain their own principle of movement within themselves, the Rhine here is described as having become a mere occasion for the technical intervention of the hydroelectric plant. And this is not just any intervention: it is, Heidegger stresses, one that transforms place, Stelle, into the particular form of placing signified by the German verb bestellen and later by its nominative counterpart, Bestand. The word bestellen, the translator of this text, William Lovitt, notes, normally means “to order, command” (QT, p. 15 n.); he adds that it can also mean “to plough or till the earth,” preparing it, setting it in order to be planted. What is crucial here is the subordination of the notion of place or placing, Stelle or Stellen, to a very particular kind of project, one that, according to Heidegger, increasingly characterizes modern thought and society: that of “regulating and securing” (QT, p. 16), which in turn implies, as its ultimate aim and criterion, the amassing of a Bestand, of a “standing reserve,” as Lovitt translates. But Bestand is also the noun formed from bestehen, that which “stands” the test of time, as it were, by staying the same, being constant. Heidegger sums this up as follows:
Everywhere [everything] is placed on order [bestellt], on constant standby [auf der Stelle zur stelle ze stehen], ready in place for the further placing of orders [für ein weiteres Bestellen]. Whatever is thus placed on order has its own standing. We call it the Bestand, standing stock. This word here says more, and something more essential, than mere “reserve” [Vorrat]. … It designates nothing less than the manner in which everything approaches [an-west] that is affected by the [movement of] extracting-exacting revealing-unsecuring [herausfordernden Entbergen]. Whatever stands by, in the sense of standing-stock, no longer stands over against us as object [Gegenstand]. (QT, p. 17)
In short, the ascent of the Bestand is marked by the decline of the Gegenstand, the object. Modern technology is thus defined as the epoch of a certain subjectivity, which tolerates no separate objects but rather seeks to transform everything into the means of its own survival. “Regulation and securing” imply an organization of the world in which all being is turned into a means of staying the same, of bestehen as Bestand.
This defining tendency of modern technics culminates in what Heidegger calls, in German, the Gestell:
Gestell is called the collecting of that setting and placing [jenes Stellens] that sets after humans, challenging them to reveal and unsecure the real in the manner of the placing of orders [Bestellen] as standing stock [Bestand]. Gestell is called the kind of revealing that prevails in the goings-on of modern technics but that itself is not at all technical. (QT, p. 20)
Gestell, which Lovitt translates “enframing” and I have rendered as “emplacement,” is not itself “technical” because what it defines is never simply identical with itself, self-same. Rather, it entails the effort to produce or secure self-containment, self-preservation, constancy, but under conditions that are irreducible to any univocal mode of being. Heidegger therefore introduces another term to indicate wherein the Gestell, and hence the goings-on of technics, can never be limited to the perpetuation of a Bestand. This term is, once again in German, Geschick, past participle of the verb schicken, which collects the modes of “sending” and thus constitutes “the essence of history as Geschichte.” History, in this sense, involves not the fulfillment of a story or of a subject, but a process of sending and being sent. This means, quite simply, that everything that is, is what it is only by virtue of coming from somewhere else and of pointing elsewhere. Of course such a movement is anything but simple.
Normally, we would understand this movement, as we tend to do all movement, in the sense of locomotion : that is, as a change of place. Places are preassigned and stable, unmoved movers enabling movement to be construed as passage from one to the other. Movement thus construed presupposes a certain prior fixity of place. Already in Being and Time, however, Heidegger questions this model of locomotion as the sole paradigm of movement.5 Instead of Bewegung, he calls for a rethinking of Bewegtheit, in the sense of being moved, or, if one takes care not to psychologize the word, of e-motion. A hint of this kind of being moved, in all of its conflictuality, can be seen in our oscillating translation of Entbergung as both “unsecuring” and “revealing.” Such oscillation and uncertainty reflects the highly paradoxical redefinition of place going on in Heidegger’s elaboration of the Gestell. On the one hand, modern technics relates places to a more general process of placing and replacing, of placing on order and reordering places. In this replacement, nothing is secure. All places become sites of “securing” and “controlling,” and as such are made available and disposable. In this sense, the Gestell that for Heidegger defines the (ambivalent) essence of modern technics sets the stage for a highly contradictory and unstable attempt to establish stability. It entails the effort to secure positions by rendering places replaceable.
Even the most empirical, unreflected experience of the recent past furnishes ample evidence of the prescience of Heidegger’s insights here: the obsession with “security,” whether national, international, local, or personal, has not ceased to grow and dominate political discourse since the end of the Second World War.6 And it has increasingly played itself out as a striving and struggle to make places disposable.
Nevertheless, it would be grossly inaccurate to suggest that Heidegger condemns purely and simply the goings-on of modern technics. Rather, he warns of the destructive consequences of allowing modern technology to become an end in itself. This would be tantamount to making “control and securing” (or, in current American military language, “command and control”) the ultimate criterion by which world order is to be measured. To “command and control” means also to “search and destroy,” which in turn means to locate and position: “global positioning” in the name of security. Such control and securing presupposes an ultimately self-present self or subject, to be maintained and preserved as it is. But insofar as it is also a Geschick, the Gestell of modern technics takes part in a movement that goes beyond the destructive complicity of total dislocation with total stability. That movement Heidegger seeks to articulate by retracing the usual use of the German noun Wesen, generally translated into English as “essence,” to an earlier, more dynamic linguistic condition, that of wesen as verbal infinitive:
It is from the verb wesen that the noun is derived. Wesen understood as a verb is the same as währen [“to last or endure”]. Already Socrates and Plato think the Wesen [“essence”] of something as the ongoing [das Wesende], in the sense of the Währenden [“enduring”]. But they think enduring as continuing [Fortwährende] (aei on). Enduring, however, they construe as that which maintains itself, staying the same [das Bleibende] in everything that occurs. This staying the same they in turn discover in appearing [Aussehen] (eidos, idea), for instance, in the idea “house.”
But it can never in any way be established that enduring is based solely in that which Plato [thinks] as the idea.… Instead of Fortwähren, “continuing,” Goethe once used the word Fortgewähren, “granting further.” (QT, p. 30)
It is striking how often Heidegger turns to the gerund as a way of moving the static noun toward the more dynamic verb. In so doing he accentuates the difference between a notion of “enduring” construed as staying the same, remaining oneself, as fortwährend, and a movement of granting through which other possibilities are given: gewährend.
Nowhere here does Heidegger actually specify just what such granting might consist in. But while never stating it as such, he nevertheless says it, or rather, writes it. And perhaps this is the only way that such granting can be adequately articulated, particularly if what it involves is more a matter of how than of what. In his Introduction into Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that the predominance of the copula, the is, in determining how the to-be has been thought in the West, is symptomatic of the way thinking has reduced being to the status of an entity or a property that can be predicated of an entity. Such privileging of the copula has in turn reflected the way in which time has been construed on the basis of the “now,” understood as a self-contained moment of presence. As a historical alternative Heidegger refers to the Greek enklysis, the forerunner of our infinitive.7 However, the German infinitive, when used as a noun, tends to overlap in English with the gerund. And in German Heidegger resorts to the gerund precisely when he seeks to reconcile the generality of the to-be with the singularity of its occurrence or event (Ereignis), as in the passage just quoted.8 Wesen, he argues there, is misunderstood when capitalized as a noun. Instead, it must be understood above all as a verb, as an infinitive, wesen, and even more, as a gerund, das Wesende, which should therefore be translated, not as “what essences” (present indicative), but rather as something like “the ongoing,” whereby the tense counts as much as—if not more than—the conceptual content of the word. In the same passage, Heidegger repeatedly uses the gerund to articulate the particular type of movement involved in granting, das Gewährende (or Fortgewährende), which he distinguishes from das Bleibende, literally, from “remaining—or staying—the same.”
What is being articulated here is perhaps nothing other than the aporetical juncture of being (as Sein) with to-be (as Seienden): that is, what might be described as the aporetical singularity of being, which, Heidegger never tires of saying, is not to be understood as a general concept, a genre, under which beings are to be subsumed as species. Rather, what is involved is a process that is partially brought to a halt in singular beings, which in turn are never simply reducible to their present state. Two aspects of the gerund and the present participle allow them to articulate this notion of being. First, since they take place as a series of iterations, they are never simply in one place at one time. They can therefore be said to define a mode of being present that is never present to itself. In repeating that self, the present participle or gerund displaces it, dislocates it, shifts it away from wherever it has been, moves it fort, while at the same time fixing it da. This ambivalent presentation results in the second trait, which consists in the way the presence of the present participle is structurally split, defined by simultaneity with its utterance or articulation. This fold creases presence rather than simply increasing it.
Granting as sending, Schicken, and as destined, Geschick, would thus con-sist in the disjunctive reiterations of a series that never comes fullcircle, the “con-” of the prefix literally marking out the irreducible relation to, or being with that Jean-Luc Nancy has suggested is the irreducible character trait of being as such. Another possible “translation” that would attempt to articulate this disjunctive quality of being would be that alluded to above as “parting with.” But insofar as such being or parting with implies a constitutive relation to something else that can never be made fully available as a Bestand, as standing stock, “with” here signifies “without” as much or more than “within.”9The “with” turns the self inside-out, exposing it to the other: separation as relation.
But to speak simply of such granting as the creasing or splitting of an interiority, exposing the irreducible relationality of all immanence, is to remain confined by a perspective still determined by the horizon of what it seeks to supplant: by the Bestand of the standing stock and, hence, by the subject. What Heidegger, not without a certain religious pathos, describes as the “saving power” (QT, p. 33) of the Gestell suggests an alternative to such subjectivity: not the individual self is saved, but rather possibilities of taking place that would no longer be those of a “subject.” To discover how Heidegger construes those possibilities, we need only recall the key phrase in the passage cited earlier regarding altheia: “The openness of this opening [Offenen], i.e. truth, can only be what it is, namely this openness, if and so long as it installs itself [sich einrichtet] in its opening [in ihr Offenes]” (OA, p. 67).
Truth does not simply exist in general: it must “install” itself “in its opening” as “this openness.” The decisive question here is how such a singular process of installation—what Heidegger calls sich einrichten —the installation or institution of truth in and as the openness of a certain here and now—is to be construed. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” from which this passage is taken, provides an initial response. Such installation in the open, understood as the singularization of being, takes place in and with the work of art or, rather, with a certain conception of the work of art. It is the work understood, not in the sense of classical aesthetics, as a harmonious resolution of contraries in a well-formed and meaningful whole, but rather in the more conflictual sense of a Streit- and Spielraum, an arena of strife, conflict, but also play. This place is singular, which means situated, localized, but not closed or complete. The work is structured by what Heidegger calls the Riβ, the tear or break. It is a tear that does not simply pull apart but in separating also joins. (Heidegger plays here on a series of German words with the common root Riβ: Grundriβ, Aufriβ, Umriβ, and, above all, zusammenreiβen, literally, “tearing together,” though used in German as a synonym for “pulling oneself together,” OA, p. 71.)
The work of art, then, appears as a singular space structured by a sundering, by a Riβ that joins what it separates through Fugen, through joints and articulations. And yet Heidegger is not satisfied with this account. Some twenty-five years later, in 1960, he returns to this text, originally published in 1936, in order to add a series of notes and comments. One of these marks out the limits beyond which his initial discussion of the work, in his retrospective view, could not go:
In referring to the self-installing of openness in the open, thinking touches a region that cannot be explicated any further here. It should be noted only that, if the essence of the unconcealedness of [the singular] being [des Seienden] in any way belongs to the to be itself (cf. Being and Time, §44), then the latter allows the play-room [Spielraum] of openness (the clearing of the there) to happen and introduces it as such, wherein each being [Seiende] emerges [aufgeht] in its way. (OA, p. 68)
How is the emergence of singular being to be construed? Each emerges “in its way,” which presumably is not simply the way of the others. Such emergence is described here as that of a certain openness installing itself in the open. Through such “self-installation” the to be is put into play, but with reference to a certain space or place—the German word Raum, cognate to English room, designates both. Space converges with place as “room,” in particular, as the “play-room” of “beings.” The question thus shifts to this “play-room”: how is it to be thought?
In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” to which Heidegger returns, implicitly, at the end of his quest after technics, this room is still construed as that of a work. However riven, sundered, and conflictual, the notion of work still determines the horizon of the instantiation of being in this text. To be sure, it is no longer the work of classical aesthetics, a work that would be meaningfully self-contained; rather, it is a work repeatedly designated as a Spielraum, a play-room, but also—lest we be overtaken by the Schillerian overtones of this term—a stage of conflict and dispute. Heidegger accordingly conceives of the “work” as that which defines itself through the Anstoβ (impulse) it provides (OA, p. 73): through its “manifold jolting” (dieses vielfältige Stoβen,” OA, p. 75), which moves the beholder, reader, or listener elsewhere.
The medium in which this jolting takes place is thus one of alteration, displacement, dislocation. But insofar as this space is defined by Heidegger as “the setting to work of truth,” the specific manner in which truth sets itself (in)to (the) work as this truth, this work—the question of its Einrichtung as a singular installation, remains obscure.
In his 1960 addendum, Heidegger takes up this obscurity in two remarks. First, he notes that the question points toward the relation of language to poetry, which in turn involves “the interrelatedness [Zusammengehörigkeit] of the to be and saga [Sage: also, “saying”]” (OA, p. 100). Having suggested the direction in which the question of installation must be pursued, he then goes on, in a second and related remark, to underscore “the inescapable state of emergency” that afflicts both reader and author with regard to this text, and not just this text alone. The difficulty for the reader consists in the impossibility of relating the explicit propositions of the text to the “silent sources of that which has yet to be thought [des zu-Denkenden],” whereas the author remains constrained, “on the various steps of his way, to speak in whatever language is most favorable at the time” (OA, p. 101).
Although such an acknowledgment appears on the one hand to be a truism—every discourse depends to some extent on the language available “at the time of” its enunciation—the remark becomes less banal, although no less ominous, when related to the particular time of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In this context, the statement can be taken to refer specifically to Heidegger’s conjuration in the 1936 essay of a “historical people” as providing the decisive framework within which the “setting to work of truth” must be construed. The essay does not discuss just how this notion of “historical people” is to be thought ontologically. But however much it undoubtedly speaks the “language … most favorable at the time” of its writing, in the place it was written, Heidegger’s invocation of a “historical people” shows how little able he was, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” to draw practical consequences from the analysis of the copula and present indicative delivered one year previously, in 1935, in the lectures that were to form the basis for the Introduction into Metaphysics. His valorization of the “people” and its relation to the “earth,” for instance, depends on the unquestioned ontological value of the present indicative and of its auxiliary, the past perfect, as the following passage clearly demonstrates:
The poeticizing cast [Entwurf] of truth that sets itself to work as figure [Gestalt] is never executed out of the void and indeterminate. Rather, in the work truth is cast toward the coming preservers [den kommenden Bewahrenden], i.e. toward an historical humanity [geschichtlichen Menschentum]…. What is cast (in this way) is never arbitrarily attributed. The truly poeticizing project [dichtenden Entwurf] is the opening of that wherein “to-be-there-and-then” [Dasein] as historical is already cast. This is the earth and for a historical people its earth, the self-enclosing ground upon which it reposes with everything that it, still concealed from itself, already is. (OA, pp. 86–87)
The present participle and gerund are inscribed here three times: as “the poeticizing cast,” as “the coming preservers,” and as “the truly poeticizing project.” With the partial exception of the second occurrence, however, they are subordinated in each instance to the telos of a noun (“project,” “figure,” “historical humanity”) that is grounded in the fact that it “already is,” which is to say, in the parousia of the present indicative, of the now that “is.” The notion of “people” is thus the marker of a specification of being based on this temporality, and hence, as a generic species, a “historical humanity.” “Humanity”—Menschentum —is a word that claims to establish utter continuity between the general and the specific, the genre and the species, a continuity that bares its imperial teeth, as it were, whenever it is extended, as here, to the determination of a particular “people.”
Notwithstanding, what Heidegger cannot think or say in this text he nevertheless inscribes in it, precisely where he seeks to determine its limits and hence the task for thinking that derives from them. The task of thinking must be directed at the zu-Denkenden, using the gerund to define an obligation of the present toward the future (a temporal structure that, to be sure, is implied in all obligation). The task or obligation thus described, however, cannot be construed as the property of any work, however open or riven it may be. In the passages previously cited, which discussed the character of the work as open and openness, Offene and Offenheit, the present participle, gerund, or its derivatives—for instance, the verbal noun öffnung, “opening,” were nowhere to be found.
Can we conclude from this that the task of thinking what Heidegger refers to as the installation of being in and as the conflictual Streit- and Spielraum of beings exceeds the limits set out in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” particularly where those limits are construed in terms of the work as Gestalt?10 And that this excess leads necessarily from Gestalt to Gestell and beyond, to their Geschick? The directions in which such questions point suggest that the “salvation” of technics cannot be sought simply in the “work,” as riven Gestalt, but that both work of art and technics must be thought differently, in terms of destination.
An Uneven Playing Field
In his 1936 essay, Heidegger already characterizes techn as that which “brings the on-going [Anwesenden, the present] as one such [als ein solches, note the indefinite/singular article] out of concealment into the unconcealment of its appearing [seines Aussehens].” In a text written the same year, but in a different place and for a very different audience, Walter Benjamin also addressed the singular movement of technics, approaching it, however, from what would appear, at first sight at least, to be an entirely unrelated perspective. In a lecture entitled “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin described the “venerable chance and resource of theater as that of exposing the present [die Exponierung des Anwesenden].”11 To be sure, the Heidegger of 1936 had already taken precautions to exclude any such theatrical misreading of his notion of technics and its relation to the Spielraum of the to be as openness and clearing (Lichtung). Such a proleptic measure was doubtless felt to be necessary by Heidegger, given the emphasis he had placed on the tendency of all truth to dissimulate its own dissimulation. Hence the need for the following disclaimer: “the open place in the midst of being(s) [des Seienden], the clearing, is never a rigid stage with constantly raised curtain, upon which the play of being(s) plays itself out” (OA, p. 58).
But what if the stage is not “rigid” and the curtain not constantly “raised”? Would a less “rigid stage” be more appropriate for thinking the process by which being, as Heidegger seeks to understand it, strives to install itself—sich einzurichten —as “this” being? It is striking, at any rate, that the same German word imposes itself upon Benjamin in a text written about the same time, which we discussed in the previous chapter. In this passage, Benjamin argues that in contemporary theater the stage is no longer separated from the audience by the “chasm” of the orchestra pit. Although the stage is still distinct from that of the audience, “still elevated,” it functions more as a “podium” than as a sacred space. Benjamin concludes: “On this podium theatergoers must find their place [sich einzurichten]. ”12
The German verb used by Benjamin here is significantly difficult to render into English. Sich einrichten means to set oneself up in relation to an already existing, structured place into which one has just moved. It signifies to “take one’s place” or “make oneself at home,” both colloquial equivalents of the German phrase. And yet, in these idiomatic equivalences something disappears: the relation to a place where one has not been before—another place, an elsewhere —is decisive in determining the place of the self. The self is never therefore simply “at home” on a podium, or on a stage. For a stage is not a house, not even a House of Being.
Perhaps the stage can come to stand for a place in which one is always already placed, without ever being fully at home or definitively positioned. The place would then be the site of a Gestell, a “being-placed” or emplacement that is never simply gestellt, placed once and for all. But in German, gestellt also means “set up” in the sense of being posed, feigned, or contrived. This is also part of what happens on stage. However, as a “podium,” a stage reveals additional qualities: above all, perhaps, it is a place of address. In being raised above the horizontal, it is positioned to appeal to others. This is true of stages in general, but to the extent that a stage is also a podium its relation to its addressees has become more emphatic. It becomes a site from which others are not just addressed, but enjoined. In the presence of a podium, spectators are expected to do more than just observe.
The relation of audience to podium is thus precisely not that of what today would be called a “level playing field”: not just because, as already noted, the podium is elevated, but because the game being played confronts the living with the dead, if we take Benjamin’s figure literally. What would it mean, however, to take it in this sense? Do the actors on the podium-stage announce what Heidegger calls the “coming preservers” or what Benjamin some ten years earlier had called “the mortification of works”?13 A podium, on which political harangues as well as discussions can take place, appears here as a site where the living confront the dead. Whatever else Benjamin’s notion of Einrichtung may entail, it refers to the relation of the living to the dead, of the present to the past—and hence also of both to the future.
In the context in which the notion of stage as podium is introduced, it would be natural to assume that Benjamin draws the term from Brecht’s writing on Epic Theater. There are reasons to doubt this, however. The stage as podium occurs in a very different context, involving another writer with whom Benjamin was concerned at the time he was writing on Brecht. The podium turns up in a chapter from Kafka’s unfinished first novel, formerly known as Amerika and in recent years retranslated, more accurately, as The Man Who Disappeared.14 The title Amerika was the product of Kafka’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod, but the notes in Kafka’s journals show that he had a very different title in mind: Der Verschollene.15 Someone who is verschollen has dropped not so much out of sight as out of earshot: schellen means to resound, resonate, reverberate. The Verschollener is one from whom nothing has been heard for a long time, and of whom every trace has been lost. This is the title that Kafka selected for his first novel. One chapter in this unfinished text figures prominently in Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, to which I will now turn, in the hope of learning something more about the singular installation that appears to be missing, almost without a trace, from Heidegger’s elaboration of the Gestell, but to which his interpretation of modern technics nevertheless persistently points.
Backdrop
Heidegger is of course hardly the first philosopher to regard theater with suspicion. Such an attitude is as old as the reduction of being to beings, of Sein zum Seienden, which Heidegger retraces at least as far back as Plato and Socrates. All the more reason, therefore, for him to have hesitated before endorsing the condemnation of the “stage” that is at the core of the philosophical mistrust of theatricality. To be sure, the Platonic rejection of theatricality has to do not with the “rigidity” of that stage, but with its mobility. But Heidegger, despite his strictures against a metaphysics that valorizes identity in terms of its ability to be fortwährend rather than gewährend, shares this traditional mistrust of theater, however “theatrical” his writing may be in its elaboration of altheia as a revelation that dissimulates its own disguises.
Benjamin, who was not a philosopher nor even a “thinker” in the Heideggerian sense, does not share this mistrust.16 To be sure, he is less concerned with “theater” in the traditional sense than with a theatricality that need not be limited to the stage. He finds it in Brecht’s Epic Theater, but also—to the discomfort of Brecht—in the writings of Kafka.17 His essay on Kafka was written in 1934, ten years after the writer’s death, one year after the Nazis came to power, two years before “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In the center of Benjamin’s interpretation is an attempt to distinguish Kafka from the role of prophet and religious founder that early commentators had ascribed to him. Against this notion Benjamin brings forward two arguments. “Kafka was a parabolist, not a founder of religions” is the first (p. 424). His parables invite citation, recitation, and discussion, but Lehre —the lesson, doctrine, teaching, or moral of the story—”is not there; at most all we can say is that this or that alludes to it.” In the absence of an established and authoritative set of values—whose historical emergence Benjamin had retraced in his study of the German mourning play as a reaction to the radical antinomianism of the Reformation— “organization” becomes an end in itself. Benjamin varies the famous phrase of Napoleon in his conversation with Goethe to read “organization is destiny,” arguing that “the organization of life and of work in human community” (p. 420) gains in importance in proportion to the lack of a transcendent justification. Since this organization lacks legitimacy, however, it remains opaque, impenetrable, something to be surmised and alluded to, the object of parables rather than the basis of doctrine.18 In Kafka’s writings, Benjamin argues, the model of such an unavoidable but opaque organization of everyday life is not the tribunal or the castle but theater. A very special kind of theater, however: one that is difficult to characterize or situate. Benjamin cites and then comments upon a passage toward the end of The Trial:
“K. turns suddenly to the two men in top hats, who pick him up, and asks: ’In what theater do you act?’ ’Theater?’ asked one of the men, looking to the other for help, the muscle in the corner of his mouth twitching. The other gestured like a mute struggling with a resistant organism.” They do not answer the question but everything suggests that it has had its effect on them. (p. 423)
The ubiquity of the theatrical, if not of theater, is thus the result of the absence of clear-cut authority, structure, or meaning. But if it is thus fairly easy for theatricality, an abstraction, to crop up everywhere, it is all the more striking when something similar occurs with theater itself. This seems to occur with the “Natural Theater of Oklahoma,” at least in Benjamin’s reading of it:
Kafka’s world is a world-theater. In it man is from the start [vom Haus aus] on stage. And the crucial test is that everyone is placed [eingestellt] in the Natural Theater of Oklahoma. As to the criteria used in determining acceptance [Aufnahme], they are impossible to decipher. Aptitude for acting, which is what one might think of first, apparently plays absolutely no role at all. This can be expressed in another way: nothing is demanded of the applicants other than to play themselves. That they seriously could be what they assert they are is excluded from the realm of possibility. (pp. 422–23)
With the extension of the theater to the “world,” the notion of “role” also assumes a different significance: traditional acting, Benjamin asserts, plays “absolutely no role” in determining the place, or role, to be assigned to the “applicants.” They will be asked merely to “play themselves.” But what they assert themselves to be is in principle “excluded from the realm of possibility.” In short, what is possible has nothing to do with what the applicants initially assert that they actually are or would like to be. It has more to do with what they have been or what they say they have done (whether true or not). This imparts a thoroughly ambiguous quality to the process through which the Theater of Oklahoma filters its applicants, an ambiguity, as we will see, that is endemic both to theatricality in general and to this text in particular. Precisely this ambiguity prevents the novel from being finished. Kafka will break off work on it after he has written this chapter. He will write one more page of the chapter that was to follow and then stop, never to resume again. Such incompleteness is perhaps the novel’s most revealing trait. It marks the interruption of the narrative drive toward closure and signals the emergence of a theatricality that excludes the kinds of meaningful conclusion often associated with works of art.19 If, as Kafka’s novel suggests, the theatrical suspension of narrative progression may well be involved in all Einrichtung, this could explain why Heidegger was unable to give a fuller account of it in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”
It may even be possible to point toward exactly the area that eluded Heidegger or, rather, that he acknowledged, but only to reject. In an appendix to “The Origin of the Work of Art” written in 1960, Heidegger retrospectively warns against a possible misunderstanding of his use of the word Einrichtung:
Once again we must avoid taking einrichten —”installing”—in the modern sense and understanding it according to the lecture on Technics, as “organizing” and as “finishing off” [“organisieren und fertigmachen ”]. Rather “installing” thinks the “trait that draws [Zug] truth toward the work,” … how truth, in the midst of being(s), itself being work-like, comes into being [inmitten des Seienden, selber werkhaft seiend, seiend werde]. (OA, p. 98)
Two points need to be clarified in this passage, at least. First, Heidegger rejects the equation of “installing” with “organizing”—but only by assimilating “organizing” to what he calls fertigmachen, “finishing off.” In German the phrase fertigmachen has the colloquial meaning of “terminating” in the sense of “doing in” or “away with” a person or a thing. The notion of “organizing” is thus equated here, not just with closure or completion, but also with the more sinister sense of “finishing off.” As we will see, “organization” has a similar connotation in Kafka. But in The Man Who Disappeared it remains just that: a connotation, one possibility among others to be meditated, not simply to be accepted or rejected. For Kafka, “organizing” can also signify “finishing off,” but this remains one possibility among others. Indeed, it is perhaps just to keep this possibility in suspense qua possibility that the novel itself remained unfinished. The conclusion of Der Verschollene is itself verschollen, like an echo that has faded into inaudibility. The German word verschollen carries with it a sense of uncertainty: someone has not been heard from for a long time but might conceivably turn up again, unexpectedly. The person has “gone missing” without a trace. But precisely because of the lack of traces, the person’s final destiny is still in doubt.
Second, installation is not “organization” because it is “drawn by truth toward the work.” Installation is in a “work-like” way: werkhaft seiend. The “work” is the way installation installs itself, singularizes itself, a process that is linguistically marked by the passage from the generality of the gerund as (capitalized) noun (Seienden), to the singularity of the present participle as adjective (seiend) : “daß die Wahrheit inmitten des Seienden, selber werkhaft seiend, seiend werde.” The pull of truth draws “installation” toward being that itself is “worklike.” The relative determinacy and fixity of being a work, however, do not exhaust the possibilities implied by a present participle that can never be entirely delimited or defined. Hence, the present participle is associated, not with entities or beings, but with a Zug, a trait that pulls or draws the work away from wherever it has been.20 Such a Zug retains its meaning of a train or a way while overdetermining it. A train is usually expected to move between set points of departure and arrival. A train that pulls away, however, moves inevitably toward an uncertain destination, like the train ostensibly taking the newly accepted applicants to Oklahoma. The departure of this train precipitously ends the chapter on the Theater of Oklahama and ushers in the following one, which, however, soon breaks off with a shudder, the wind literally chilling the faces of the passengers as they watch the world outside fly by. Kafka could write only one page before stopping, suspending this voyage and leaving his theater members stranded, as it were, forever on their way: unterwegs, as Heidegger might say; or more aptly, with Derrida, en train. In short, the voyagers in the train will never arrive at their destination, but they will not remain immobilized either, as the chain or train leading from Kafka to Heidegger, Benjamin, Beckett, Derrida, and elsewhere suggests. If, in Heidegger’s language, the train could be described as a figure of Geschick, Derrida’s notion of arrivant once again seems even more apt. Given that it designates a movement that must be conceived as anterior to the distinction between “person” and “thing,”21 it describes a movement that is discontinuously “present,” rather than simply past. The train, precisely by virtue of the suspension of its progress, can develop a different type of movement, even if it will never “arrive” at its destination.
Instead of leading toward a conclusion or fulfillment, Kafka’s theater is thus stranded in what appears to be an unbridgeable gap between intention and goal, the space of a Zug, a train ride going nowhere or at least never arriving.22 Such voyages proliferate in Kafka’s writings, and Benjamin was most attentive to them. One instance is the voyage to “The Next Village,” the title of a text by Kafka that is brief enough to quote in its entirety:
My Grandfather used to say, “Life is astonishingly short. Now in my memory it seems so foreshortened that, for instance, I can barely grasp how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without fearing that—even apart from unfortunate accidents—the span of a normal, happily passing life will never suffice for such a trip.”23
But the possibility that every voyage, however long or brief, can be cut short by the potential brevity of human life makes up only one side of the coin. Another, more seductive face finds expression in the short text “The Wish to Become an Indian”:
If in spite of everything one could be an Indian, always ready, and on a racing horse, askance in the air, trembling again and again over the quivering earth [immer wieder kurz erzitterte über dem zitternden Boden], until one shed one’s spurs, for there were no spurs, threw away the reins, for there were no reins, and scarcely saw the country in front as smoothly mowed heaths, with the horse’s mane and head already gone.24
The suspension of the journey as a change of place, as locomotion, as goal directed and defined, allows for another kind of movement to deploy other, less linear, no longer couched in the present indicative or the past participle, but in the iterability of the present participle: the “trembling again and again” of the earth that announces its own disappearance. Even the ground under the hoof beats disappears as the horse races ahead.
As with Heidegger, then, the texts of Kafka describe a movement that exceeds every determinate being as presence, as something that is, and in its stead makes room for a movement that is more like a trembling than a change of place.25 Another such instance, cited by Benjamin from Kafka’s long fragment “The Building of the Great Wall of China,” is also marked by the use of the gerund: “To hammer a table together with painstaking exactitude and skill and at the same time do nothing, yet not so that one could say, ’for him hammering is nothing,’ but rather ’for him hammering is real hammering and at the same time nothing,’ which would make the hammering even bolder, more determined, more real and, if you like, more insane.”26
Cut off from its instrumental, productive purpose, “hammering” becomes “real hammering and at the same time nothing”: “bolder,” but also “more insane.” When the elusive iterability of the present participle lays claim, as gerund, to a certain substantiality, it becomes insanely audacious because it asserts a “reality” that is both immediately present yet impossible to define or delimit. Benjamin compares such “madness” to two figures or motifs in Kafka’s writings: first, to students who study without any visible purpose; second, to actors. Of the students, he notes: “Perhaps these studies are (worth) nothing. But if so, they are close to that nothing that is required for anything to be useful—namely, the Tao” (p. 435). In the actors, even more than the students, however, Benjamin finds the true practitioners of an activity that, cut off from its goal and meaning, touches on the unreal reality of the present participle. In English, precisely this “unreal reality” distinguishes “acting” from “action” or “act.”27 An “acting” president, for instance, is one who is only temporarily invested with the office he “holds”: he is merely a replacement or a surrogate.28
What distinguishes “acting” from action? Without ever making this distinction explicitly, Benjamin suggests that it is dependence upon a script: “Actors have to be instantaneously ready for their cue. And they resemble the assiduous (artisans and students) in other ways as well. For them ’hammering is real hammering and simultaneously also nothing’—namely, when it is contained in their role. They study their parts, and if they were to forget a word or gesture, they would be bad actors” (p. 435).29
Kafka’s writing, according to Benjamin, is “theatrical” above all in the sense of suspending, through what Benjamin calls gesture, the goal-directed movement of meaning and, with it, of meaningful action— for instance, the plot, which is generally associated with theater as well as with narrative. He therefore tends to equate “theater” with “gesture.” And gesture, as he uses it, is excluded from the work of art as traditionally understood. Why? Because gesture involves suspending and opening the closure required to delineate the integrity of the work. What the Riβ is for Heidegger, gesture is for Benjamin. But the consequences are different, as the following passage suggests:
When Max Brod says, “The world was unfathomable [unabsehbar] in what for him [Kafka] were its most important facts,” the most unfathomable of all was surely gesture. Each one is a process, indeed, one can say, a drama in and of itself. The stage on which this drama plays itself out is the world theater, whose background represents the sky. This sky is only a backdrop, however; to search for its proper law would be equivalent to hanging the painted stage backdrop in an art gallery, framed. Behind every gesture Kafka—like El Greco—tears open the sky; but … it is the gesture that remains decisive, at the center of what is going on. (p. 419)30
What marks the theatricality of the gesture, as here described, apart from the traditional work of art is the status of the frame. The work of art, as understood by traditional aesthetics, is self-contained and meaningful, “framed” in a space designed to make it visible. Its frame and site are thereby taken for granted, allowing the beholder to ignore the singular position in which it is displayed. Such indifference to place is materialized in the museum or, more commercially, the art gallery, where by virtue of this indifference the work is predisposed to become an object of speculation. Kafka’s world, by contrast, is theatrical insofar as it is “framed,” not by a sky or heaven, but by a painted backdrop, which is to say, by an artifact that is part of the scene rather than just its delimiter. The “stage backdrop” is a function precisely of its relation to the stage and the audience. This relativity of place and of placement distinguishes the stage, as a theatrical site, from the Aristotelian tradition that construes place as an “unmoved mover,” providing the stable condition of movable bodies.31 The stage is never separable from staging. And this is why the theatricality of theater involves more than just acting.
Strangely enough, Benjamin seems to forget or overlook this in his discussion of the “Theater of Oklahoma.” That is all the more surprising because, unlike Heidegger, he is, as we have seen, willing to acknowledge the importance of “organization” as “destiny.” But in his discussion of the theater in Der Verschollene, this aspect is missing.
This is all the more reason, however, to turn to Kafka’s text. As we will see, the transformation of the stage into a “podium” is the effect, not just of theater in general, but of a very special kind of theater: a theater that is also, and perhaps above all, an organization.
Theater as Destiny
The novel begins with a scene of arrival:
As seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann—whom his parents had sent to America because he had been seduced by a maid, who had had a child by him—entered New York harbor on a ship moving at considerably reduced speed, he saw the Goddess of Liberty, whom he had been observing for quite some time, as though in suddenly intensified sunlight. Her arm with the sword seemed to jut upward in the fresh wind.
“So high,” he said to himself and, without thinking really about leaving, he was pushed up against the railing by the ever-swelling crowd of porters passing him by [an ihm vorüberzogen].
A young man, with whom he had made slight acquaintance during the journey, said in passing, “Don’t you want to leave?” “Sure, I’m done [Ich bin doch fertig],” replied Karl, smiling.32
Karl’s coming to America is hardly the result of a spontaneous decision: seduced by the maid, sent away by his parents, pushed off the boat by the crowd of porters and passengers, he is, in German, fertig, literally, “finished”; idiomatically, ready for anything. But if he is “done,” Karl also hesitates to leave the ship, perhaps in part because of the hectic tempo of the new world into which he is arriving. It is a place of sudden, surprising changes. Unobtrusive details cast a strange light on the scene. The boat carrying Karl is described as moving “at considerably reduced speed” as it enters the harbor, almost as though it, too, hesitates to reach its final destination. And the Statue of Liberty, which here becomes a “Goddess,” does not simply light the way with a torch. Rather, she holds up a more equivocal implement, a sword, which “seem[s] to jut upward” in the wind. Instead of showing the way, this armed Goddess is bathed in what appears as a “sudden” burst of sunlight. Even the sun does not shine constantly in this harbor. Small wonder that Karl hesitates to leave the ship. What awaits him is not just promise and light, but the spectacle of a sword jutting into the sky, equivocal in its significance: freedom, justice, vengeance? A Last Judgment?
This last idea returns in the chapter that is of particular interest here, which begins:
At a street-corner Karl saw a poster that read as follows: “The Oklahoma Theater is recruiting personnel today at the Clayton Racetrack from 6 A.M. until midnight! The great Oklahoma Theater is calling you! If you miss this chance, you miss out forever! If you think of your future, you’re one of us! Everyone is welcome! If you want to be an artist, join us! Our theater can use everyone—everyone in his place! If you decide to join us, we congratulate you here and now! But hurry up and don’t miss the midnight deadline! At twelve o’clock sharp everything closes for good! Accursed be all, who do not have faith! Off to Clayton!’ (p. 271)
The great Theater of Oklahoma may be a World Theater—in fact as his friend, Fanny, will inform him, Karl soon learns that “it’s the biggest theater in the world,” even though she herself has yet to see it and in the meanwhile must trust “some of my colleagues, who were already in Oklahoma” and who “say that it is almost without limit” (p. 276). But limitless or not, this theater, as Karl is to find out, is not just a stage, a theater, a company of actors, but above all, a company tout court, a business, and a big one at that. The Theater of Oklahoma is a global enterprise, at the very least. As already noted, it is curious that Benjamin, who in contrast to Heidegger is generally not averse to considering the socioe-conomic aspects of institutions and installations, and who acknowledges that for Kafka “organization is destiny,” nevertheless ignores or passes over in silence this aspect of the theater, so evident in the text. To be sure, the Theater of Oklahoma is no ordinary business. It appears to overlap with other social institutions, above all church and family, because it promises that in it everyone can and will find his place. And it threatens that those who do not heed its call will be “cursed” forever.
At the same time, since this theater is also a business enterprise, its promises (if not its threats) are regarded with suspicion and skepticism by those who read the poster. Karl, after recounting the text of the poster, goes on to interpret the lack of enthusiasm it elicits:
A good many people stood in front of the poster, but it did not seem to meet with much approval. There were so many posters, no one believed posters any more. And this particular poster was even more implausible than posters usually tend to be. Above all, it had one great defect: there was not a word in it about payment. Had it been even in the slightest worth mentioning, the poster would certainly have included it; it wouldn’t have forgotten the most tempting thing of all. No one cared about becoming an artist, but everyone wanted to be paid for his work. (p. 271)
One is reminded of certain official political discourses today that exalt full employment, but forget to mention the conditions under which such employment is to be had. Although Karl does not dwell on this point, the fact that the poster makes no mention of payment casts a shadow over everything that is to come, opening its evangelical promises to endless doubt.
The poster can ignore “the most tempting thing of all”—salary— because it has something even more tempting, indeed irresistible, to offer:
For Karl, however, the poster contained, in spite of everything, a great temptation. “Everyone is welcome,” it stated. Everyone, meaning also Karl. Everything he had done before would be forgotten, no one would reproach him for it. … He asked for nothing more. He wanted finally to find how to begin a decent career and perhaps here it was. Even if all the great promises on the poster turned out to be a lie, even if the great Oklahoma Theater turned out to be a traveling circus, it was ready to hire people and that was sufficient! Karl didn’t read the poster a second time, but only the part that announced, “Everyone is welcome!” (p. 272)
Far from home, family, and the country of his birth, lost in the immensity and cruelty of “America,” Karl yearns for a place that will take him in and let him stay, a kind of second home. What he finds, however, is the Theater of Oklahoma.
What sort of a theater is it? We will never really find out, not even whether it is a theater at all. We will never learn whether it can keep its promises; none of that will be settled in this text. Like so many of Kafka’s other figures, Karl Rossmann will remain on the fringes of this “theater.” On the fringe he will, however, encounter certain aspects of theater and of theatricality that are often omitted from more explicit treatments, even from texts, such as Benjamin’s, which are concerned with the distinctive transformation of theater in the current age, including its technical and institutional alterations.
Before we get to this strange theater—if we ever really arrive there—it may be helpful to underscore the ways in which the Theater of Oklahoma anticipates Heidegger’s analysis of technics as Gestell, Geschick, and installation. This theater appeals to those who have no “position,” who are unemployed, which in German can also be designated as being “placeless,” stellungslos (p. 283). Such persons are thus Stellungssuchende, a word that occurs several times in the chapter (pp. 274, 287). This theater, as an organization and, more specifically, as an Unternehmen, a business enterprise, is in the business, among other things, of offering “places,” “posts,” “positions”— Stellenangebote, which even today is the title of the “job offers” found in classified ads of German-language newspapers. As an enterprise, this theater is in the business of recruiting personnel. Unlike today’s enterprises, except perhaps in certain sectors, this one seems unlimited in its ability to hire, place, and position. Karl remains understandably skeptical as he mulls over whether or not to spend a major part of his dwindling cash reserves to buy a ticket to Clayton: “According to the poster the number of people to be recruited [die Zahl der Aufzunehmenden] was unlimited, but this is how all such job offers [Stellenangebote] were always formulated. Karl realized that he either had to renounce the position on the spot [auf die Stelle] or take the trip” (p. 272).
Here and throughout the chapter, we encounter yet another characteristic of Heidegger’s account of technics: the demand for instantaneous and ubiquitous availability, Bestellbarkeit. Candidates for the Theater of Oklahoma must be on constant call, long before pagers and mobile phones provided the technology to reconcile total availability with total mobility. In order to qualify for a position in the Theater of Oklahoma, readiness is all: one must be ready, here and now, auf die Stelle, to drop everything and respond to the call. One may have doubts, but there can be no hesitation to believe. Otherwise, one will not merely miss out: one will be cursed and damned for all eternity.
For there will be no second chance. The irreversibility of time and the brevity of human life, which make every voyage, even one to the next village, such an unlikely undertaking, exacerbate the hope of ever finding a safe haven where one can stay and survive as one and the same (Fortwähren). “Accursed be all who do not have faith!” fulminates the poster, which otherwise holds out the hope of a glowing future: Be saved or be damned. Damned are the unbelievers, those who do not have faith, do not give and take credit, for they will miss out, once and for all, and find no place, no job, no post. This rhetoric of intimidation and seduction resounds today in the murmured “messages” of all commercial media: “Stay with us, we’ll be right back… after the break.” “If you think of your future, you’re one of us!” proclaims the poster, implying that if you don’t think of your future, your future will nevertheless think of you.
Thus, even though “nobody believed posters any more,” Karl nevertheless risks his dwindling savings on a subway ticket to Clayton. What greets him upon his arrival, as he reemerges out of the depths, is, first of all, a deafening din: the wild cacophony of “many trumpets” blown without any regard for one another, “ruthlessly,” rücksichtslos. 33 Strangely, however, “this did not bother Karl, rather it confirmed that the Theater of Oklahoma was a major enterprise” (p. 272). But noise is not all he encounters as he comes up out of the subway station. What strikes his eyes is precisely what Benjamin, in his essay on Epic Theater, will designate as the distinguishing feature of contemporary theater: the stage as podium: “In front of the entrance to the racetrack, a long, low podium had been constructed, on which hundreds of women, dressed up as angels in white sheets with large wings on their backs, blew on long, golden, gleaming trumpets” (p. 272).
For Benjamin, the redefinition of the stage as podium marks the desacralization of theater, which had traditionally separated stage from audience by an unbridgeable abyss, the orchestra pit. The elimination, “filling in,” or leveling out of this “abyss” signifies, according to Benjamin, that actors and audience are no longer “separated” the way the “dead” had been opposed to the “living.” Although the stage as podium signifies that this opposition is no longer absolute, it still does not amount to a “level playing field.” What it does suggest is the situation of the German baroque Trauerspiel, where, Benjamin had argued some ten years earlier, the exclusion of transcendence leaves the dead no alternative but to wander the earth as ghosts—or as allegories.34 Indeed, what Karl confronts on that “long, low podium” is an allegorical representation, albeit in a parodic mode, of the Last Judgment: hundreds of women, clad as angels, blowing for all they are worth into golden, gleaming trumpets. What they are announcing, however, is not so much the end of time as the Coming of the Theater of Oklahoma as universal placement office: in Heideggerian terms, as the organization of modern technology, Gestell as Geschick, emplacement as destiny.
Just what sort of a placement is announced in and as this “theater”? The following description of the angels supplies a detail that is missing from Benjamin’s account but that provides a possible response to this question:
[The angels] were, however, not directly on the podium; rather, each stood on a pedestal [Postament] that could not be seen, since the long, undulating sheets of the angels’ costumes concealed it completely. Because the pedestals were very high, probably around two meters, the women’s figures appeared gigantic. Only their small heads disturbed slightly the impression of size, and their loose hair was too short and almost ridiculous, hanging down between the large wings and on the sides. In order to avoid uniformity, the pedestals were of different sizes, so that some women were very low, not much above life-size, next to whom others rose to such heights that the slightest breeze risked blowing them over. And now all of these women blew their horns. (p. 273)
My translation has, if anything, fewer double entendres than the German original. The parodic allegory of the Last Judgment resembles an obscene vaudeville in which innocence and corruption are impossible to separate. Everything seems to demonstrate what was previously described as the ambivalence of Heidegger’s notion of Entbergung, an unconcealing that dissimulates its own dissimulation. The higher the figures are positioned, the greater the risk of falling: this distinguishes theatrical placement from the more pragmatic search for security, constancy, and self-fulfillment that implicitly dominates the discourse of contemporary technics and explicitly that of contemporary politics. Generally excluded from mainstream discourses of technics and politics, ambivalence returns in the fascination of the “media” with the rise and fall of public figures, contemporary analogue to the Boethian “wheel of fortune.”
Although Benjamin makes no explicit mention of this particular scene, he does call attention, implicitly and as though in passing, to a related motif in his double reference to the paintings of El Greco, in which enlargement of the body and elevation of its position go together with a shrinking of the head, as though to suggest the disproportion between worldly positioning and the capacity to control its effects. Above all, there is the constant danger of losing one’s balance at the slightest gust of wind. Or as Fanny, one of the trumpeting angels, who turns out to be an old friend of Karl, will respond when he asks if he can play her trumpet: “Certainly … but don’t spoil the Chorus or I’ll be fired.” No specified wages, but also no job security in the Theater of Oklahoma.
In short, the combination of technics and economics produces a theater that responds to the challenge of modern technics by assigning everyone a place while at the same time making it unmistakably clear that this place is replaceable, movable, transformable, detachable: a place one must be ready to assume or change at any and every moment, in the most radical sense of Bestellbarkeit. The place thus offered promises constancy, Bestand, only to those who arrange themselves with— and not just, within—the great placement agency that is the Theater of Oklahoma. What this agency shares with theater is a certain mutability and transience: it places, but temporarily, conditionally. The great Theater of Oklahoma is a placement agency for temporary workers.35
Like every modern organization, this theater has its own admissions procedures—in German, Aufnahmeverfahren. If one is to be assigned a proper place, that place must first be determined, as the personnel director explains to Karl: “As our poster states, we can use everyone. But naturally we have to know what profession he previously exercised, in order to be able to place the person properly, where his knowledge can best be put to use” (p. 279).
The question of installation, crucial both for Heidegger and for Benjamin, here exceeds the analyses of each: those of Heidegger, because the organization will determine just how the Einrichtung will take place; those of Benjamin, because Einrichtung applies, not just to the stage as podium, but also to the organizational constraints upon which it depends. Why and how this is so is demonstrated by Karl’s very first contact with this theater.
The podium is a construct: one that is temporary, that can and will soon be dismantled and moved elsewhere. In short, the space of the theater, the stage in particular, is not fixed and unmoving but as movable as though it were a body. The “angels” are not simply placed upon this movable, transportable podium, they are elevated above it by being perched on precarious stands: Postamente ; once again, a Germanified Latin gerund—the stand is itself something being posed. On such stands, the angels are posted, but also exposed to the “slightest gust of wind” (p. 273). The precariousness of their perch, itself posed on the podium-stage, can be read as a theatrical staging of Heidegger’s Bestand. The instability of these “one-day stands” on stage is, however, partially concealed by the angels’ flowing costumes, in which they are “completely enclosed or veiled [hüllten es vollständig um]. ”
Such veiling and enclosing contrasts sharply with the protective function often associated with place, especially with regard to the bodies that occupy it. Here, by contrast, the angels’ bodies are not secured by their Umhüllung: that only hides the appearance of vulnerability. This sense of vulnerability is emphasized by the perspectival foreshortening of the angels’ heads, as well as by the description of their hair, which “was too short and almost ridiculous, hanging down between the large wings and on the sides” (p. 273). The smallness of the heads is thus complemented by the hanging down of the hair, emphasizing the disorderly and fragile positioning of these feminine “angels.”
Such disorder is thus associated with their femininity. In the Christian tradition, at least, angels are supposed to be unaffected by gender. The angels in the Theater of Oklahoma, however, recall a bowdlerized burlesque show. This becomes clear as soon as Karl, in the name of all, actually installs himself on the stage. Initially this is not at all his intention. He starts out merely to get information on what the prospective recruits—the Aufzunehmenden (p. 272) and all the Stellungssuchenden (p. 274)—should do next. In order to get such information, however, he has to cross the podium. As he walks across the stage, he suddenly hears his name:
“Karl,” called an angel. Karl looked up and out of joyful surprise began to laugh; it was Fanny. “Fanny,” he called and greeted her by raising his hand. “Come up here,” called Fanny. “You’re not going to walk right past me.” And she jerked her garments apart, exposing the pedestal and a narrow stairway leading upwards. “Is it okay to go up?” Karl asked. “Who’s going to stop us from just shaking hands,” cried Fanny and looked around with anger, to see if someone was not about to arrive with just such a ban. But Karl was already climbing the stairs. “Slower,” cried Fanny, “the pedestal will topple over and take us along with it.” (p. 274)
Once he has arrived at the top, Fanny greets him by exclaiming, “Just look at the job I’ve got.” Her job is to blow as hard as possible into the trumpet while trying to avoid being blown over by the slightest gust of wind. Fanny’s angelic costume conceals not just the pedestal on which she is precariously perched but also a narrow stairway leading up to it. Her costume veils both the situation of her body and the access to it. The body of this angel recalls the fetish, which a decade later Freud will describe as tied into a double knot: on the one hand, seemingly complete, rising above the threats of sexual difference to self-identity, and on the other rendered all the more vulnerable by virtue of its very elevation.36 Like the fetish, Fanny raises her skirt just a bit to reveal, not a proper part of her anatomy (foot) or even of her clothing (shoe), but a stairway leading not just to her, but into her. Yet all there is to go into is a show, a spectacle, a theatrical presentation. Or worse, a publicity stunt. At any rate, nothing substantial, nothing corporeal that can be seen as such. At the heart of the theater, again as with the fetish, lurks the secret, invisible, but, perhaps even more, inaudible. Verschollen. In this acoustical respect the theatrical angel parts company with the fetish, in its traditional visual manifestation, at least.
The Theater of Oklahoma appeals to the ear as much if not more than to the eye. But it makes this appeal not by speech, song, or even music but by noise, a blaring of horns that is all the more powerful for being situated at the limit of music. The trumpets of the angels suggest the apocalypse that the Theater of Oklahoma both conjures up and promises to avert. This is not without bearing on the question of installation. The din may die down long enough for Karl to converse briefly with Fanny, but this respite does not last very long. That is perhaps why Karl never tries to set himself up on the podium. The podium presents itself to him from the very beginning as a passageway to be traversed rather than as a place to be occupied. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that this podium, as stage, stands between the applicants and their admission: to be admitted to this theater one must cross the podium, but not linger on it. If Benjamin suggests that the hallmark of theater qua podium is the obligation of installing oneself on it, then in Clayton this can happen only by treating the podium and everything on it as a passageway. The podium is here, in Kafka’s text, already a forerunner—and descendant—of the Parisian passages that will fascinate Benjamin as the emblematic space of the nineteenth century.
But Karl is far from Paris, and the podium is situated in front of a racetrack, not a labyrinth of streets. The calculated disorder of the city is here replaced by an enigmatic series of procedures, rites of selection and admission that recall nothing so much as traditional military recruiting and channeling. All that is missing from the military scenario is the proper battle and its vehicle, the “enemy.” Where is the enemy in a world where all are to be admitted, and by implication there are only to be victors, no defeated? Theater, like the military, has a place for everyone, perhaps even for the enemy. That alone distinguishes the troupe from the troop (both condensed in the German word used to describe the group to which Fanny belongs: Truppe).
The military aspect of the organization is strengthened by the terms used to designate its elements. When Fanny tells Karl that her time with him is up (“I have to blow again”), she urges him to “try in any case to get a position [einen Posten] with this troupe [bei dieser Truppe]” (p. 276). Later we will learn that the group to which she belongs is “the 10th Recruiting Troupe [Werbetruppe: also, advertising team] of the Theater of Oklahoma” (p. 283). The troupe has its own Führer as well as its own “personnel director [Personalchef]” and so shares the organizational characteristics both of a business enterprise and of a military unit. The German term used in the text, Werbetruppe, can designate both: recruitment in both the military and commercial senses of the term, as well as that of advertising, Werbung, and, more traditionally, erotic entreaty, “courtship.” All of these converge in the Werbetruppe that recruits for the Theater of Oklahoma, which, as we have seen, is, not just a theater as commonly understood, but an organization that is both an employment agency and a business enterprise. Precisely what sort of business it is in, what sort of theater it performs, will never be clarified. This is not the most important aspect for Karl. Rather, what appears to count above all is its ability, as organization, to withstand the passage of time. Thus when Karl expresses his regret upon learning that Fanny and her Werbetruppe have already “left for the next point on [their] itinerary,” he is quickly consoled: “’You’ll see her again in Oklahoma,’ said the servant, ’but now come with me, you’re the last one left.’ He led Karl along the rear of the podium, on which the angels had stood before, but where now there were only the empty pedestals” (pp. 286–87).
All that is left of the angels and their show are “only the empty pedestals.” The podium remains deserted, no longer a site of representation or performance but an empty space, to be traversed on one’s way elsewhere. To where? The image of the empty pedestals is not reassuring. It suggests another “site” that accepts everyone or almost everyone: the cemetery. Or a stage, where performers relate to the audience as do the “dead to the living.” The question remains, however, just how one “installs” oneself in, on, or in view of such a site. The difficulty of providing a response to this question that would be narratable, at least in terms of a traditional novel leading to a conclusion, is perhaps why Kafka was unable to “finish” this novel. Or, perhaps, why he decided to finish it by leaving it unfinished.
What we are left with, as far as this single chapter is concerned, is a loosely connected series of scenes that tell an inconclusive story of Karl seeking entry into the enigmatic world of the Theater of Oklahoma. In conclusion I will discuss two scenes that are particularly revealing of the ambiguous recruitment procedures of the Oklahoma Theater.
These consist in a series of interviews through which the organization gathers information about the candidate’s previous training, with a view to placing him in a position corresponding to his experience. In one of these interviews, Karl is asked to present his “legitimation papers.” When he admits that he has none, a dispute develops between the supervisor, the Kanzleileiter, and the secretary (literally, the scribe, der Schreiber) charged with recording all information and taking minutes. Karl aggravates the suspicion of the supervisor by providing an obviously false (generic) name: “Negro.” When the supervisor is reluctant to approve Karl, his secretary, ostensibly a subordinate, with a movement of his hand, suddenly and surprisingly brings matters to a head: “The supervisor [Leiter, also “head”] turned with open mouth to the secretary, who, however, with a conclusive sweep [abschlieβende Bewegung] of his hand, said ’hired’ and immediately recorded the decision in the registry” (pp. 281, 210).
Benjamin, we recall, placed “gesture” at the core of Kafka’s writing and attributed to it a theatrical significance. This resided in its power to make interruption a positive mode of articulation. The effect of such interruption, however, is never self-contained. It retains its relation to what it is not, just as an interruption only defines itself with respect to what it interrupts, never entirely on its own terms. All of this is powerfully condensed in the gesture the clerk makes with his hand and his resulting proclamation of Karl’s “acceptance” into the organization. Here, then, in this organization the hand rather than the head is decisive, but it is a hand that interrupts and suspends an intention, thus calling attention to the movement, the procedure, the ritual, rather than the meaning.
At the same time, in thus defying expectation this interruptive gesture fulfills one of the oldest demands placed on theater, which receives its initial and canonical formulation in Aristotle’s insistence, in the Poetics, that tragic plots be “complex” rather than “simple” and, above all, be organized around a peripeteia : a sudden and unexpected turn of events. The clerk’s gesture accompanies just such a peripeteia. It is, of course, comic or farcical rather than tragic. And this is so to the extent that it does not satisfy the second demand Aristotle adjudged indispensable to the success of a good tragedy plot: that of anagn
risis, recognition. Here, the only “recognition” that follows the scribe’s act is one of puzzlement: Karl, and with him the reader, can at best recognize the insufficiency of their expectation and of the cognition that informs it. In an enigmatic way, the Theater of Oklahoma depends more on the hand than the head, on the scribe than on the boss, on recording than on deciding. But this awareness does not add up to new knowledge, not in the positive sense, at least.
As already indicated, it is in gesture that Benjamin sees the hallmark of Kafka’s writing. It is a movement whose theatricality consists in the shattering of existing frameworks, while not necessarily putting anything stable in their place. Thus, although the clerk’s gesture and announcement are described as abschließend —definitive, conclusive— they tend to open questions rather than to close them. Most obviously, how or why is it possible for a scribe to take a decision that a department head hesitates to make? All that the reader can conclude is that in this strange theater authority and power are not always to be found where one might expect. The question, “Who or what decides?” remains unanswered in the Theater of Oklahoma. Is it the head or the hand? Both or neither? And what is the role of the organization itself in determining the “final say”? Especially when that organization is also a theater? Who has the final say in a theater? The actors? Director? Producer? Audience? Patron? Censor? Someone else? Or could it possibly be the destiny of the organization—organization as destiny—that no one has the final say, no single figure, at least? Could this be what distinguishes, not just organizations, but theater as destiny : that there is no final say, no last word, perhaps because all words and saying are “final”? But “final” in what sense, from what point of view?
To answer such questions with any degree of plausibility would require what Aristotle, once again, demanded of the ideal tragedy and its audience: to survey and take in the work as a whole, once and for all. This seems unattainable for the vast Theater of Oklahoma. Surely it is not insignificant that this theater recruits at a racetrack. This site, Fanny tells Karl, has been chosen because of its spaciousness. In addition to being vast, a racetrack is also a site of speed, competition, sudden surprises, and even shocks. Even if no horse races are being run, it still recalls risk and chance, winners and losers, hope and despair. Something specific, however, takes place, in this place, when it becomes a place of selection and recruitment, involving humans as well as animals—humans, perhaps, as animals. As a place of selection, the Clayton Racetrack foreshadows other stadiums—from Paris in 1942 to Santiago de Chile in 1973 to Kabul in 2000—whose shadow will cast a pall over much of the twentieth century and in all likelihood over the twenty-first as well.37
Such posthumous history is by no means simply external to the ostensibly harmless details that mark Karl’s experiences at the Clayton Racetrack. Following his successful, if strange, admission, for instance, he is on his way to meet the leader of the whole “recruitment troop” when suddenly “behind him a machine began to creak and hum [schnarren]. He turned around and saw an apparatus on which the names of the victors in the race were made public, but where now the following inscription flashed high above: ’Salesman Kalla with spouse and child.’ Here, then, the names of those admitted were transmitted to their [respective] departments” (p. 283).
The “publication [Veröffentlichung]” of the names of the successful candidates on the screen high above the racetrack, where the names of the victorious horses would normally be displayed, is intended, not for the successful candidates or their colleagues, but rather for the Kanzleien, the departments, who are thus directly informed of the personnel decisions that have been taken. This kind of communication characterizes the organization both as a theater and as a medium. It is an unorthodox theater, to be sure, since it neither tells an intelligible story nor itself easily fits into one. It is also unorthodox in apparently defying Aristotle’s assertion that a “tragedy” can exist without characters (th), but never without action (praxes). In this theater, at least, there is very little action as such, at most the confused reaction of the various applicants to the process of selection. Of course, it is not a tragic theater, although nothing is less certain than that it has a happy ending. What does seem more certain is the constant and characteristic derailing of dialogue and intention. The following scene, in which Karl is briefly welcomed by the troupe leader and then even more quickly dispatched, indicates the kind of “communication” that takes place in the Theater of Oklahoma:
Karl bowed as a sign of leaving, and wanted to say goodbye to the other man, but the latter was already walking back and forth, as though he were completely done with his work, his face directed upward, toward the platform. While Karl descended, next to the stairs the inscription flashed across the board, “Negro, technical worker.” Since everything seemed to be proceeding correctly, Karl would not even have minded so much if his real name had been displayed on the board. Everything was very well organized, because at the foot of the stairs, Karl was met by a servant who put an armband around his arm. When Karl lifted his arm to see what was on the band, it was, quite rightly, “technical worker.” (p. 286)
Although Karl, somewhat reassured, begins to regret not having used his real name, it is too late. Instead, he receives an armband designating the role to which he is assigned: “technical worker.” His real, proper name doesn’t appear to matter so much as this second, generic name, which will define the place—or role—he is to assume in the organization. In this perfectly organized theater, only one thing is lacking: time. There is no time to thank or say goodbye to his benefactors. As he tries to say a word of thanks, the director is “already walking back and forth,” already elsewhere, “his face directed upward, toward the platform,” looking away from Karl. Karl, who has lost his “real” name and much of his history, has acquired a new one, but it is generic and functional in character. Karl is to be constantly available, as a “technical worker,” constantly on order, bestellbar.
What Karl thus seeks but never will find in this theater is what Benjamin, in another context, defines as the aura of the reciprocated glance. Theater as organization is marked by the lack of any such reciprocity. As we have seen, this makes it virtually impossible to say goodbye. There is literally no time left, for separation has already taken place. Joining the theater involves leaving one’s previous life behind. And this takes place even before one can take notice of it, quicker than the speediest racehorse. Karl tries to say goodbye and finds himself “hanging,” as it were.
All those searching for a position, the Stellensuchende, seek desperately to reassure themselves by searching for a glimmer of recognition or acknowledgment in the eyes of those in charge. But those others never look back, only up and away. This is described unforgettably toward the end of the chapter, when Karl belatedly joins the great banquet held to welcome the new members of the theater:
Everyone was buoyant and excited, and at the very moment when Karl, the last to arrive, took his place unnoticed, several persons stood up with raised glasses. One made a toast to the leader of the Tenth Recruiting Troupe, whom he called “father of the job-seekers [Vater der Stellungsuchenden].” Someone pointed out that he could be seen from where they were, and indeed not very far away two men could be glimpsed in the judge’s box. Suddenly all glasses were raised in their direction and Karl too grasped the glass in front of him, but however loudly they cried and however much they sought to call attention to themselves, nothing indicated that the men in the judges’ box had seen the ovation or even tried to. The leader leaned back in a corner while the other man stood next to him, chin in hand. (pp. 287–88)
The search for the “father of the job-seekers” remains without conclusive result, not because no one is found, but because those who are do not respond and, moreover, are positioned so as to make such response impossible: the leader, leaning in a corner, his assistant, chin in hand. Neither the one nor the other seems to have the force to support himself, to stand up on his own, without props. Stage props? At any rate, these reclining figures, with their literal dependence upon place, take the place of upright arbiters and judges, if not of leaders as such.
The response to this disappointing lack of response or even acknowledgment confronts us with a situation that will be familiar to many:
A little disappointed, they all sat down again, now and then someone would turn to look at the stewards’ stand, but soon they were quite preoccupied by the plentiful meal … and anyone who didn’t care to participate in the general conversation could look at pictures of the theater in Oklahoma, which had been piled up at one end of the table, from where they were supposed to be passed from hand to hand. But no very great attention was paid to the pictures, and so it happened that Karl, at the end of the row, got to see only one of them. To judge by this one picture, though, they must all have been very well worth seeing. This picture showed the Loge of the President of the United States. At first sight, one might think it wasn’t a loge at all, but the stage, so far did the curved balustrades jut out into empty space. The balustrades were made entirely of gold. In between little pillars that might have been cut out by the minutest scissors, there was a row of portraits of former presidents. … The loge was brightly lit from all sides and from above; white and yet somehow mild light laid bare the front of the loge, whereas its recesses, deepening pleats of red velvet falling full length and swagged by cords, were a darkly glimmering void. It was hardly possible to imagine human beings in this box, so sumptuously self-sufficient did it look. Karl didn’t forget to eat, but he looked often at the picture, too, having put it next to his plate. (215)
Karl at the banquet table with a picture of the President’s Loge placed alongside his plate—what better image of a certain type of consumption? The dinner guests do not receive a reciprocated glance instead, pictures of the theater are made available to them. These pictures do not show the theater as such, only parts of it: for instance, the President’s Loge. The picture does not depict the president either, any more than it does the theater, rather, “a row of portraits of former presidents,” hang on its walls, “in between little pillars that might have been cut out by the minutest scissors.” The presidential picture-portraits are thus framed explicitly by “pillars” and implicitly by a certain type of “cut-out,” which appears like the work of “the minutest scissors.” The “former presidents” are, therefore, most emphatically cut out of the theater, which does not seem to require them to be present. The Presidential Loge appears in the picture to be so sumptuously self-contained as to no longer need a president to fill it. The “loge” no longer has any contents except itself: its ability to contain. It is pure organization, pure theater, pure place. It is a vessel that contains nothing except itself or, rather, the nothing that is itself: its “recesses, deepening pleats of red velvet” and its “darkly glimmering void.” In its emptiness it is strangely full, in its darkness “glimmering.” Difficult not to recall that a President’s Loge was also the site of the first assassination of an American president: could it be such a memory that “darkly glimmers” from the “void” of this loge?38
But this “so sumptuously self-sufficient” box is actually more than a box, in the theatrical sense. Its “pleats of red velvet” recall the curtains of a stage. What they display, however, cannot be assimilated to any sort of “plot.” Nothing happens: no event, no action, only “a row of portraits of former presidents” framed by “little pillars.” This row of portraits suggests not heroes but ornaments, delimiters of a place that celebrates the absence of all those former presidents, and its resulting independence from anything human. The picture of the President’s Loge is a visual declaration of the independence of place from the bodies it was traditionally held to contain. The Theater of Oklahoma stages itself here as the emancipation of place from body through the medium of visual representation. What is ultimately represented is not just a gallery of portraits, portraying the absence of the sovereign figures whose faces they depict, but concomitantly the creased and riven space that has come to supplant them: the space of the spectator as consumer, a “box” or étui, as Benjamin would have written, in which the commodity is uncannily—unheimlich —at home.
This picture of the Theater of Oklahoma is not without its effects: “Karl didn’t forget to eat, but he often looked at the picture, too, having put it next to his plate.” Like the morning newspaper at the breakfast table or the nightly news at dinner, what it says is less important than that it is there, to dissimulate the void.
• • •
The Consolation of Philosophy is thus replaced by the Consolation of Media, which because of its disposition of space and place is necessarily also a theater. It is a theater that performs the staging of images, framing the void of time through a string of portraits of former presidents. No one portrait counts, but the series as such, for only as a series does it take place. Theater has migrated from person to place, from individual to office, from politics to podiums, pedestals, and pillars. Why theater? Because, in the convergence of organization and business, “theater” remains the ambivalent guardian of the power to place as the power to displace. Theater places everything and everyone “on call,” makes everything bestellbar, while undermining the hope of ever staying in place, of a Bestand.
Although only Karl is privy to it, the picture of the Presidential Loge in the Theater of Oklahoma thus enshrines what the “place-seekers” experience and cannot accept: the absence of acknowledgment. The image of that absence is enshrined as the Presidential Loge, in which it is the loge itself that presides. It presides as image, as hope, and as theater. Only a certain theatricality can provide the place-seekers with what they so desperately crave. Thus, upon learning that he will not get the position with Fanny’s troupe that he had hoped for, Karl finds consolation in “repeating, again and again, that the kind of work counted far less than the possibility of being able to find any place at all where one could stay continuously” (p. 286).
In German, the consolation is expressed even more tentatively, by means of the present participle: “Es kam nicht so sehr auf die Art der Arbeit an, als vielmehr darauf sich überhaupt irgendwo dauernd festzuhalten.” This is what draws him and the others to the Theater of Oklahoma and to this the organization seems to respond. But its response remains equivocal, and the candidates are therefore constantly seeking to reassure themselves. As one of Karl’s fellow job-seekers remarks: “It seems to be a good business, even if it’s not easy to find one’s way around in the beginning. But that’s the way it is everywhere” (p. 282). The German here retains a dimension that is lost in English, for it speaks not of “finding one’s way around” the “business” but rather of “finding one’s way into it”:39 “Allerdings kann man sich nicht gleich in alles einfinden, so ist es aber überall.” But how does one find one’s way into a theater whose epitome is the sumptuous “self-sufficiency” of the Presidential Loge? Can one hold onto a picture of a spectator’s box, even if it is that of a president? Especially that of a chief executive who was assassinated by one of the actors he was supposed merely to behold?
We begin to see how the hectic hesitation with which the novel began, the slowing down of the ship upon entering New York harbor, was already a harbinger of things to come: of unpredictable and menacing bursts of sunlight illuminating the “jutting” sword held by the Goddess. We begin to understand why Karl is always arriving too late, never on time. Even and especially at the Clayton Racetrack, where the servant assigned to lead him to the banquet has to hurry him up in no uncertain terms:
“Come along more quickly, it really took very long for you to be accepted. They must have had their doubts, no?” “I don’t know,” said Karl, astonished, since he didn’t think so. Some fellow human being was already ready, even in the most limpid of situations, to create concern. But faced with the friendly spectacle of the great stadium stands, where they now arrived, Karl soon forgot the servant’s remarks. (p. 287)
But Karl is not permitted to forget those remarks for long. Although he remains unperturbed by the lack of response to the attempted toast, he is unsettled by the manner in which the banquet is abruptly brought to a close by the personnel director. “Karl had strayed away from his place [at the banquet table] far too long, [and] was just about to go back to it, when the head of Personnel” suddenly appears to announce that
“the train that is going to take you to Oklahoma is leaving in five minutes. It is a long journey, but you’ll see that everything has been taken care of. Here I want to introduce the gentleman who will be in charge of your transportation, to whom you owe full obedience.” A short, thin man climbed up on the bench on which the personnel director was standing, took barely time to make a fleeting bow, then began immediately to indicate, with nervously extended hands, how everyone should gather, get organized, and then get moving. At first no one followed him, for the person who had already given a speech pounded on the table and began a word of thanks despite everything. Karl became very anxious—because they had just been told that the train was about to leave. … The speech was paid for by having to run to the station in a military jog [Laufschritt]. That wasn’t very hard, because—as Karl noticed only now—no one carried any baggage. (p. 290)
In the time since Kafka wrote this text, stadiums, racetracks, and precipitous transports by train, leaving barely time to pack one’s luggage, have assumed a sinister significance that was hardly obvious in 1916. The horrific events of the Second World War and its aftermath give this unfinished text a resonance of which its author could presumably never have dreamed. That, however, it should have been a theater—the Theater of Oklahoma—that provides the site and incitement for such a horrifically prophetic depiction should give us cause to pause and reflect.
It is a theater in which, as Benjamin notes, “the applicants are asked to do nothing other than play themselves.”40 Nothing could seem more innocuous. But as the Theater of Oklahoma suggests, perhaps nothing is more difficult, or more dangerous.