Anonymity

What should I be called? By what would I have you call me, you who summon me into your booth? What should you call me, interviewer, who would draw me from my anonymity? A letter: you are to attend an interview on … Addressed to me, to my name, that letter. And so am I here, in the waiting space in an open plan office.

Open plan – everything is open, there are only two rooms that are closed off. Otherwise, booths, booths and booths, to which I will be called in turn. Still the question: what would I like to be called? What name, here, would I like to be mine, I who barely own myself? What name could be mine, what would I like to hear, interviewer, from your mouth?

The office is a reasonable place, that’s clear enough. We are not to be kept waiting too long; we are called clients, we are accorded the respect due to jobseekers as we are called now. Jobseekers, not the unemployed. We are seeking work and not just marooned from it – not left on an obscure island in the middle of the ocean that great ships pass by and ignore. Above all, we are not to be stranded – each one of us has an advisor, each is supposed to attend sessions to assess our jobhunts.

Do we need any help? Can we be offered any assistance? Yes, it is a resonable place, little is required of us, other than we attend, every now and again, in person. We will bring ourselves to the office and present ourselves for questioning – isn’t this to keep our side of the bargain? Isn’t this to keep up with our responsibility? We are called in, and summoned thus from the uncertain space of the outside. Called in, and made to account for ourselves here, in person, in our own voice.

But how to translate what happens out there to the language of the office? How to speak of infinite days and nights – how to speak of the expanse each of us knows and is there behind our eyes? For truly we have been marooned – truly it is as if the great ships have passed and we’ve forgotten everything but our shipwreck. What day is it? What date? Crusoe kept a record of the passing of days, but do we?

We are anachronisms, we know that. We’ve been passed by, we know it. You who would summon us know it well: we are lacking in self-esteem, your clients. We’re lacking in motivation. We need to be formed and molded. They’ve met our type before. We’re all the same! There are so many of us! We are a type, that is clear. There’s nothing special about me and nothing special about you. What petty narcissism to feel different to anyone else!

That’s why we can be summoned in the same voice. That’s why the call can ring out and bring us in. Summoned – the reasonable voice has remit over the infinite. It speaks, and the infinite becomes finite – the undetermined folds itself into a knot of hard determinacy: a name, each of us is to have a name. But what is I would like to be called?

You are reasonable, interviewer. I am your client. A client – this is who I am, it is my unity. And your client – I am at your disposal. You call me, and I come. You tell me you’re at my disposal – that you would like to help me. This is welcome. Who can doubt but that I need help? I’m stranded – the great ships are passing by, and where am I?

Help – I need that. I need to think of my future, to direct my thoughts into a plan for escape. Else a whole life will be spent thus – marooned. I have to take care of myself, to unify what I am, to pull myself together. That’s where you help, isn’t it? By writing to me, by calling out my name in the office, by having me come to you as your client, I receive my name, it comes to me again. A name, a social security number, a case number – so am I identified, and brought back to myself.

Outside, I was never in possession of that, a name. But inside? A name is fitted to me; it is mine. By my name am I picked out from the others. Mine – it is my name; the anonymous has been banished. The anonymous, which corrodes me and rusts me like the old cranes by the docks, is held at bay; it is a new morning; I belong to the present.

Summon me, bring me to myself. I was sleeping for my whole life, I know that. I was asleep – I lived in dreams, in my dreaming – that was not a life. It is to begin here, a life – my life. I will be bound to life – here. We will be joined, one to the other – here.

But how is it that my name in your mouth seems to miss me? How is it, as at the doctors when a name is read and then a buzzer pushed, that the name does not reach me, sounding out in vain? Am I am not to designated? Am I not to be picked out from the rest? Did it bring me to the limit of my strength even to come here, even to sit among others in the waiting room?

What would I have you call me? What name would be mine? What name could reach me and reach you by reaching me? I would like it to be known: I am different to you. I would like that to be known: the fact of my difference and that I remain in my difference. I will turn to you without facing you, do you know that? I have no face, not here, not inside, do you know that?

Every name is mine. Every name that is called here is mine. Who am I? The one called by each of these names, the faceless one who comes to you without coming, who is inside without being inside. Who am I, the one who remains marooned when he is rescued, who stays unemployed even when a job is found for him? Am I not present, too, in your heart, interviewer? Am I not the one who is marooned in you?