genius of language; that it fulfils instructions that it has not been informed of, and erects
bastions in the unconscious.
In the employment agency, the unemployed occupy themselves with waiting. Since in
relation to their number that of positions vacant may at the moment be negligible, the
activity of waiting becomes almost an end in itself. I have observed that, when the
situations vacant are read out, many hardly still listen. They are already too indifferent to
be capable of believing in being selected. Young lads and older people—in dense throngs
they guard and defend common property without active employment. The fact that they
mostly keep on their caps and hats may be a weak sign of freedom of the will. Only in the
room does one remove the head-gear; but this space is actually not a room but, at most, a
passageway, even though one wiles away one’s time in it for months on end. I do not
know of a spatial location in which the activity of waiting is so demoralizing. And this is
quite aside from the fact that in these times of stagnation the goal is missing for them:
above all what is lacking for them is the brightness. Here, the rebellious desire to make a
noise is not permitted, nor does the enforced idleness retain any other kind of inspiration.
On the contrary, idleness takes place completely in the shadows and must rely upon the
social title of the autocracy who give birth to it. And yet much would be glossed over, for
poverty is continuously exposed to its own glare. At one time, it spreads itself out with
visible blotches and blemishes and, at another, it retreats in a bourgeois-prim manner into
seclusion. In the case of a better dressed tailor, for instance, the cuff of the shirt was
selected as the ultimate hidden recess. He contrived to hide it on some occasions whereas
at others he outwardly exposed it all the more deliberately. The bodies are often
neglected and a stuffy mist exhudes in the waiting rooms. Thus, abandoned to the
unexplained association with one another, waiting becomes for the people a double
burden. In every possible manner they seek to bide away the meaningless time but, in
whichever direction they direct their efforts, the meaninglessness follows after them.
They enter into conversations that should distract them from waiting and indeed at last
should give up its unending background. They play dice, chess and cards, all of them
games of chance that are jesting with lack of chance, because here the breakthrough of
chance to happiness is prevented by the crisis that has risen up to destiny. The older ones
perhaps make friends with waiting as if with a comrade; in contrast, for the young
unemployed it is a poison that slowly permeates them.
I am witness to the following conversation. A man complains to the official: ‘I have
now been without work for a year and still have not obtained a job.’—‘But this person is
already unemployed for a year and a half’, is the reply given to him. A reply of
demonstrative clarity which succeeds on the basis of the decision that in the case of the
same qualifications the placement process depends upon the length of unemployment. In
some occupations, candidates for employment can only be taken into consideration if
they have been without work beyond a certain time. The primitive justice that rules in the
employment agencies is intended for the masses, and the unemployed individual is a
particle of the mass. The fact that the masses go in and go out is imprinted by the rubber
stamp mark of the agency office. Time and time again these walls, these theatrical stage
props, witness the endless queues that form before the counters, the shifting groups that
coalesce and disperse, the patterns of people crystallizing around the speaker. Where such
a model of the massed is aroused, justice can undertake nothing other than to muster the
masses. It must balance the quantities, the amounts of time and space that serve for its
Rethinking Architecture 60