You can observe here the emergence of a link between the thesis that a subject is of the order not of what is but of what happens­—of the order of the event—and the idea that the individual can be sacrificed to a historical cause that exceeds him.

The idea is that if we wish to attain the real of time we must construct it, and that, when all is said and done, this construction depends entirely on the care with which we strive to become the agents of truth procedures.

—Alain Badiou, The Century

8-9 Ruppiner Strasse, Berlin

I have come to the end of several weeks’ stay in Berlin, more or less as one arrives at a station immediately before one’s final destination. This sense of being immediately prior to getting off the train, I noticed, is constantly reinforced by protocols of exits and entrances in public transportation in DE: “Einsteigen, bitte; züruck bleiben, bitte” being the overvoiced routine whenever the doors close prior to departure, and “ausstieg links/rechts” being announced (at least on S-Bahns) just before arrival. There’s also a curiously ethereal musical phrase that occurs at the end of the line of every bus or tram, which signifies “everyone will exit the bus at this time; the bus/tram will go no further”—as one steps down. One could compose a montage of sounds that serve as subvocal cues for framing time and space in this manner: for announcing arrivals and departures; for new text or voice messages; for crossing or not crossing the street; for oversized trucks backing up.

Each of these sounds provides an existential punctuation mark that depends on its sonic substrate but invokes specific meaning frames: this is the form of a journey by train or streetcar or bus; the sending and receiving of messages has a structured protocol (you have mail; the cell phone is now switched off); time and space are subdivided into forms of intention that anticipate the senses (so that a blind person knows when the light changes via sonic signal); and masses exist in space in ways that exceed absolute knowledge (not only in Heisenberg’s terms, but simply in that the driver of the garbage truck cannot see what’s immediately behind him). German culture has made such devices of intentionality into a public language, and something of a reflexive sense of language itself is structured into these devices. Between frame semantics and techno sampling, a semiotic architecture of sound is presented to the senses.

The field in front of me is a particularly marked station on the long train ride that was the twentieth century: it is an empty space or urban void or disused area or construction site left over from dismantling a stretch of the Berlin Wall. It may or may not be being preserved as a relic or memorial space; as I observe it now, a concrete path from an earlier era (of patrol duty? hasty re-urbanization? a bicycle or jogging path?) bisects the large open space up to the point where a private plot of ground is set off by a chain-link fence. Where this fence intersects the previously existing concrete path (which continues through the yard area set off as private), a profusion of native foliage has overgrown the fence, forcing anyone walking on the path to skirt it to the right, thus creating a new path. There are several such new paths (to and from the concrete one, which preceded them), as well as an overgrown, poorly maintained sidewalk from the DDR era on the left, and a row of trees that screens the border zone from Bernauer Strasse, which would have been separated by the Wall as a roadway in the West.

The space I am writing from did not exist as inhabited space in the period of the Wall (1961-89); it is a new construction, with all the superior design features and building details (state-of-the-art elevator; steel and glass entryway with shiny buttons and video camera; teak floors and wood-plank balconies; dispersed and tasteful lighting; new materials for dining counter and electric range) developed in the West. The building at one point might have seemed triumphalist; now, it is a relatively upscale address in an up-and-coming neighborhood that no one would mistake for bourgeois. Numerous twenty-somethings live here; their baby prams are everywhere; they may have promising careers, or the beginnings of same, but no one has a lot of money. The slogan “arm aber sexy” (poor but sexy) is Berlin’s motto this year; there is still a lot of unemployment, but living conditions are great. As an abstract good, “liveability” in Berlin exceeds the standards achieved by any American city, which would die for the café on the corner. And there are opportunities: the owner of the apartment where I am staying is renting it for money to pay for a year-long round-the-world junket to Malaysia and India. She’s a tall, aggressive, somewhat brassy woman who works as a schoolteacher and seems absolutely driven to make it to the next moment; I fit into her plans, so she likes me (I think).

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