Journal of Visual Culture

http://vcu.sagepub.com

Miniatures: Harun Farocki and the Cinematic Non-Event

Gerhard Richter
Journal of Visual Culture 2004; 3; 367
DOI: 10.1177/1470412904045247

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://vcu.sagepub.com

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Journal of Visual Culture can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at University of Missouri-Columbia on March 27, 2008

2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
journal of visual culture

Miniatures

Harun Farocki and the Cinematic Non-Event

What are you working on?, Mr. K. was asked. Mr. K. answered: I am
engaged in a great effort: I am preparing my next error.
(Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner)

Is one ever prepared for an event? Indeed, what would it mean to be

prepared for an event in the emphatic sense? Would the event for which one
had prepared still fully be an event? Would not ones very state of prepared-
ness cancel the eventness of the event, inscribing the futurity of the event
into the reassuring bounds of the known and of the already experienced? Is
not any event that deserves to be called an event one of the names for the
entering of an experience or image into history in a manner that transforms
the world in some way, leaving a mark that, as they say, makes history? And
does this eventful making of history not always correspond to a more or less
decisive break with what came before, with all previous events, with all
previous history, and with all previous images of history, a break that marks
the event as something historic? Is not the true event without common
measure with all previous events and therefore outside the realm of any
experience for which I could have prepared, the unexpected that arrives
without invitation, an other to the ordinary course of my being in the world?
To be sure, the very notion of ex-perience, literally a moving through,
would seem to be predicated upon the unpreparability of the general event
and upon the unpreparedness of the one to whom a particular event occurs.
The emphatic event resists the hermeneutic disclosure of any predetermined
or stable meaning. Following Walter Benjamins well-known differentiation
between two modes of experience, Erlebnis, a superficial impression or
momentary thrill, on the one hand, and Erfahrung, a deeply felt transforma-
tive and reflective experience, on the other, we could say that there can
be no Erfahrung without the radical alterity that sponsors a profoundly
unexpected event, that is, defines both public and private histories. Perhaps
we could even say that one can prepare for the cheap thrills of Erlebnis, but

journal of visual culture

Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 3(3): 367-371 [1470-4129(200412)3:3]10.1177/1470412904045247

Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at University of Missouri-Columbia on March 27, 2008

2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
368 journal of visual culture 3(3)

never for the occurrence of an Erfahrung in the sense of the psychomaterial

mark that is left by a deeply joyful or traumatizing event.
Questions such as these constitute a leitmotif that traverses the 60-some films
that the German-based filmmaker Harun Farocki has made since the 1960s.
For instance, his edgy 1990 documentary film Leben, BRD (released in the US
as How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany) brings into a provoca-
tive constellation 32 scenes that were recorded during instructional sessions
in various German cities, primarily in Berlin. Among other things, these
scenes include: images of future parents attending birthing classes; nurses
learning how to assist in child delivery; police officers rehearsing how to
intervene in domestic disputes and how to arrest uncooperative tenants;
bank employees role playing how to manage angry customers; students
receiving instruction in the proper sequencing of the courses in a meal with
regard to temperature and the putative tendency of a particular food to
shrink or expand the stomach; a child having his cognitive skills tested by a
psychologist; car safety instructors demonstrating the correct procedure for
removing oneself and ones passenger from an overturned vehicle while
hanging upside down by the safety belt; a strip-club dancer receiving
meticulous instruction in how to synchronize her movements with the beat
of the music; and German soldiers being trained for war.1 In this version of
life, the objective is to leave nothing to chance: everything must be taught
and learned, rehearsed, codified, tested, corrected, cited and mastered as
though Farockis subjects were unable to escape a never-ending simulation
or trial run for life, a life that remains perpetually deferred. In their earnest
enactments of a wide range of personal and professional situations, these
subjects become actors who play themselves, taking on the role that is most
familiar and, in its blinding familiarity, most unfamiliar. Rehearsal of a life yet
to come, an imagined life that is not simply ones own but also that of the
future self whom one trains oneself to be, the tested and proficient self: these
fantasies mobilize the behavior of those who, like Farockis subjects, wish to
see life, as a training camp in which techniques for living are practiced by the
professionally living.
The implications of Farockis filmic images for an understanding of the
concept of eventness are brought into shaper focus when we place his
images into syntactical relation with Jacques Derridas (2003) discussion of
the political and philosophical status of the event in the aftermath of
September 11, 2001. There, he reminds us that the terrorist attacks, like any
event, should not be thought of in isolation from Heideggers notion of the
event as Ereignis. The Er-eignis not only signifies the appropriation of the
proper (what is eigen), but also becomes affected by a certain Ent-eignis, a
form of ex-propriation in which the comprehensibility of the event simulta-
neously withdraws. If in the undergoing of the event this event at once
opens itself up to and resists experience, if the event speaks of a certain
unappropriability of what comes or happens, then we could say that the
event is first of all that which I do not first comprehend, and even that the
event is first of all that I do not comprehend; indeed, the event is a name for
my incomprehension (p. 90, original emphasis). Derrida continues:

Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at University of Missouri-Columbia on March 27, 2008

2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
 Miniatures 369

After all, every time something happens, even in the most banal, every-
day experience, there is something of an event and of singular
unforeseeability about it: each instant marks an event, everything that
is other as well, and each birth, each death, even the most gentle and
most natural ... any event worthy of this name, even if it is a happy
event, has something that is traumatizing. An event always inflicts a
wound in the everyday course of history, in the ordinary repetition and
anticipation of all experience ... The ordeal of the event has as its trag-
ic correlate not what is presently happening or what has happened in
the past but the precursory signs of what threatens to happen. It is the
future that determines the unappropriability of the event, of the
present or the past. Or at least, if it is the present or the past, it is only
insofar as it bears on its body the terrible sign of what might or perhaps
will take place, which will be worse than anything that has taken
place. (pp. 901, original emphasis)

Following this logic, the event is one of the names, even the name, of what
cannot simply be anticipated or, in the moment of its occurrence, explained
in terms of the patterns of understanding and mechanisms of interpretation
that we have deployed in response to previous events. For an event to be
what it is, it necessarily gestures backward to the Greek meaning of trauma,
the wound. Even joyful events inflict a scar precisely because they always
catch one by surprise, finding one, in spite perhaps of so much preparation,
unprepared for the experience. They inscribe the one who experiences
them in a new symbolic order in a way that brings about, among other
things, a sense of crisis. On a multitude of levels, the event is the other to all
expected experience, even when it is expected.
But the event also points beyond itself, to an elsewhere whose possibility it
intimates but which it cannot confirm or deny. To say, therefore, that the
event not only relates to its occurrence at this moment or in the past but also
to its futurity, to an event that has not yet happened, but which is now think-
able based on the model of this present or most recent event, is to think of
the event in terms of its to-come structure. Among many other things, the
event tells us that such an event is not only thinkable but indeed possible and
that future events could perhaps be even worse or more traumatic. The event
that causes a deep Benjaminian Erfahrung, whether joyous or full of sorrow,
is related to all previous true events, that is, takes its place among them
while nevertheless remaining absolutely singular; but it also affirms the
possibility of the unpredictable that may or may not occur, that may or may
not visit me but already, in my consideration of it, haunts me.
The test subjects, class participants, and objects of simulation that in
Farockis film prepare ceaselessly for the futurity of what is to come in a
certain sense wish to cancel the eventness of the event. This desire resonates
on more than one level. They wish to undo the radical dialectic of appropria-
tion and expropriation that marks the event; they wish to foreclose the
event-structure of the event by negating the possibility that it could catch
them by surprise, unprepared, untrained, inexperienced and helpless:

Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at University of Missouri-Columbia on March 27, 2008

2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
370 journal of visual culture 3(3)

serving food at the wrong temperature or not knowing how to exit an over-
turned vehicle correctly. The implicit hope is to prevent any true event from
ever imposing itself upon their lives by dispensing with the necessity of
having to respond to the unpredictable futurity of a potentially even more
traumatic or transformative future event. Hoping to lead an uneventful life,
they deny the eventness of the event, acting as though this life were only a
rehearsal for a real life that is still to come, in another place and at another
time. Like the machines and industrial devices in Farockis film whose collec-
tive purpose is to prepare an object for the event and thus to cancel the event
precisely by making it anticipatable and therefore uneventful from the
device that repeatedly opens and closes a car door to the apparatus that
makes washing machines slide down an incline and bang against a wall to the
industrial simulator that acts as an obstacle to a vacuum cleaners forward
and backward motion to the robot that simulates the sinking of a human
posterior into an upholstered chairs cushion to the ceaseless raising and
lowering of a toilet seat cover like these machines, Farockis human
subjects hope to assume a calculable and techno-medially conditioned post-
human relationship to the experience of the event and, ultimately, to the
non-eventful event of experience itself. That a global community can be
increasingly modeled on these fantasies and post-human inscriptions is not
inconceivable; indeed, the process may already be underway, as Farocki
insinuates in his American Framing: Notes for a Film about Malls (2001).
Is there a future form of experiencing the event that would not be foreclosed
a priori by the testing, preparing and simulating that deny the event-structure
of the event, as in Farockis film? Is it possible to remain faithful to the
radical singularity of the event and to the ways in which its unpredictability
and occluded futurity make ethical and political demands on us? Can we
imagine a future experiencing of the event that would allow it to be part of
what is to come and allow it to be read in a multitude of places and in a
plurality of voices as something that cannot be reduced that is, literally:
lead back to a prescribed program? One certainly would hope so. But in
the moment of having considered the eventness of the event in this way, in
the moment of reflecting upon it and upon its ethico-political and philosoph-
ical demands, have I not already tacitly begun to betray it? Am I not partially
preparing not to prepare for the event and thus preparing for it, even as an
experience that requires my radical non-preparation? One of the many
ethical and political consequences that Farockis film imposes upon us is a
consideration of the difficulty that, in speaking theoretically about the
actions of the films characters, we may already, albeit perhaps on a different
level, be re-enacting the kind of simulation, preparation and testing that we
find so problematic in the film. Is it possible that we too, by theorizing the
event as that which transforms us through the inflicting of a wound, are not
entirely immune to the impulse to explain and to contain the event, even if
in a more theoretical or cinematic vocabulary? It is worth noting that
Farockis filmic gaze refrains from ridiculing the often absurd attempts by its
subjects to master the dialectic of enlightenment that situates them at the
nexus of the disturbing relation between rationality and the irrational,
demystification and the perpetuation of new and perhaps even more fateful
Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at University of Missouri-Columbia on March 27, 2008
2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
 Miniatures 371

myths. After all, we can never be certain that what Benjamin once called the
pimp language (Zuhltersprache) of philosophical terminology remains
entirely uncontaminated by the fuzzy opening image of Farockis film in
which an explicit pornographic scene, apparently computer-simulated, is
viewed by a minor who excitedly rubs the length of his video-game joy stick.
The stakes of this matter are high, because we can never be quite sure that
the programmatic gesture of How to Live in the Federal Republic of
Germany does not also open onto questions of another film that remains to
be made: How to Live in the Theoretical Humanities Today. The question of
this other film, this potential and uncontainable opening-onto, is itself a
question posed to, with, and by the event to come.

Note
1. He could have added a scene depicting university students being meticulously
prepared for each eventuality that they might encounter in their seasonal work
as Santa Clauses, since German universities typically offer special training classes
for students who are hired by families to visit their children as a Weihnachts-
mann on Christmas Eve. Well-trained university students remain the preferred
seasonal hires to deliver holiday gifts to the offspring of Germanys upper
bourgeoisie.

Reference
Derrida, Jacques (2003) Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, in Giovanna
Borradori (ed.) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jrgen Habermas
and Jacques Derrida, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Farocki, Harun (2001) American Framing: Notes for a Film about Malls/
Amerikanische Einstellung: Notizen zu einem Film ber Malls, in Nachdruck/
Imprint: Texte Writing, pp. 292305. New York/Berlin: Lukas & Sternberg/Verlag
Vorwerk 8.

Gerhard Richter
University of Wisconsin-Madison
[grichter@facstaff.wisc.edu]

Downloaded from http://vcu.sagepub.com at University of Missouri-Columbia on March 27, 2008

2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.