The Lives of Others’ Traces: Immedial Coordination in the Lives of Others (Immedia 2/3)

A three-part series of articles exploring how we coordinate through the traces left by other living beings.

Abstract

Immedial coordination is the temporal relation in which earlier living coordination alters nonrecursive ground and later living coordination proceeds through that alteration, usually without access to the originating activity. This companion to The Trace Before the Sign asks how the relation operates inside a densely symbolic human world. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film The Lives of Others (2006) supplies the case: its characters write, listen, report, compose and classify without pause, and their lives are redirected by sweat in upholstery, microphones in walls, a typewriter under a floor, an empty hiding place and a red fingerprint. The distinction between immedial and symbolic coordination is itself an L4 analytical stabilisation, valuable for what it makes visible and making no claim to divide living reality exhaustively. Read through it, the film shows the two interlocking continuously. Symbolic production generates conditions that are later recruited immedially, and immedial residues become objects of symbolic reconstruction. Two movements must therefore be kept apart. In recursive descent, symbolic activity becomes fluent at L1 and remains symbolic. In recursive opening, a residue becomes salient and askable without thereby becoming a symbol. Recursive discernment sometimes requires reconstructing intention and provenance, including the possibility that a symbol or a residue was produced to mislead. The past is settled without being completely recoverable, and most of what stays consequential is never reconstructed at all.

I. A Film about Lives That Never Fully Meet

Years after the Berlin Wall has come down, Georg Dreyman sits in an archive reading the file that the Ministry for State Security kept on him. The reports tell a story that does not fit what he remembers. A machine he hid beneath his floor was never found, and the woman he loved died for reasons that the paperwork does not explain. Then he notices a red fingerprint on a page.

The fingerprint is no confession. It names nobody, and it was not made in order to say anything to Dreyman. It is a physical consequence of earlier activity, preserved on a document built for an entirely different purpose. Dreyman knows what the red ribbon of a certain machine does to the fingers that handle it, and he knows what the report claims to describe. Taken together, the mark and the report allow him to reconstruct part of what the officer who listened to his life, Gerd Wiesler, did to protect him.

The episode falls into three moments. In the first, Wiesler handles and removes the typewriter in the course of doing something else, and the handling leaves a mark. In the second, the mark persists on a document without conveying any message about what Wiesler did, and for years nobody takes it up at all. In the third, Dreyman notices it, relates it to other evidence and recovers a history that had been closed to him. Throughout, the mark remains an unintended material residue. Dreyman's recognition of its evidential weight does not turn Wiesler's handling of the ribbon, after the fact, into an act of communication. The three moments are the structure that The Trace Before the Sign called immedial coordination: earlier living coordination alters nonrecursive ground, and later living coordination proceeds through that ground without the producer being recursively available (Ecks 2026). That article set the relation against symbols in a compact formula: symbols make absence active by reference, and immedial coordination makes absence consequential by residue (see What Do Symbols Do?). The formula concerns absence. Symbols also do much of their work in the present situation, as Section IV will show.

The status of the distinction needs stating at the outset. The distinction between symbolic and immedial coordination is itself an L4 symbolic stabilisation. It distinguishes different ways in which earlier living coordination remains consequential, and it does not divide living worlds into separate symbolic and immedial domains. Living beings need not observe it to coordinate well, and both forms are abstractions from the same continuous, fivefold mediated living. What matters in the end is how living coordination proceeds. The distinction earns its value by making particular processes visible, and it can be important without yielding a perfectly exclusive classification of every encounter. The film is useful precisely because it shows the two forms intertwined, again and again, within single sequences.

The approach stands in deliberate contrast to the most influential theory of traces, Peircean semiotics. For Peirce a sign stands to somebody for something in some respect, and the index, the sign that holds by a real connection to its object, is the natural home of smoke, footprints and fingerprints. Indexes need not be intended, and Peirce went further: a hole left by a bullet, he wrote, is a sign of the shot whether or not anyone has the sense to attribute it to one (Peirce 1931–1958, 2.304). On that view the red mark on Dreyman's file was semiotic from the moment it was made. Living Value Theory declines the absorption. An immedial residue stays outside the sign relation even when it later becomes salient, askable and evidential, and its entry into a sign relation, where that happens at all, is a contingent and often incomplete later achievement (see The Embodied Limits of Peircean Semiotics). Nobody disputes that indexes exist or that they can be powerful. The difference lies in the default move. Peirce's categories of icon, index and symbol are offered as fundamental and exhaustive, so that the domain of nonsemiotic consequence tends to shrink to nothing. The LVT distinction claims no such exhaustiveness, and by declining it keeps that domain open for analysis.

The fingerprint already shows this. The mark persists on a symbolic document and matters only through comparison with other symbolic and material deposits. Dreyman's investigation requires embodied perception, physical access to the file, personal memory, institutional records and the political possibility of asking questions that had until recently been dangerous. The article's central question follows. How is living coordination continuously accomplished through the interlocking of immedial and symbolic processes across the five mediations (see What Are the Five Mediations?)? A subsidiary question follows from it. How do living beings discern whether the differences through which they coordinate arose incidentally, were intentionally produced as symbols, or were deliberately arranged to bring about particular consequences?

The film's characters keep asking that second question. Wiesler tries to tell a prisoner's spontaneous reaction from performance. The Stasi investigates the provenance of typed documents. Dreyman tries to reconstruct his surveillance and finally reconstructs Wiesler's concealed actions from a red mark. In each case the problem concerns how a difference came to exist, which goes beyond what it looks like or appears to mean. The article calls this activity recursive discernment: the investigation of an encountered difference with respect to its production, provenance, intention, authenticity or evidential significance. It is an exceptional achievement. Most of the time living proceeds through conditions whose histories nobody reopens. A viewer, placed above all the characters, can see several such histories running through the same rooms, which is a view that ethnography seldom offers.

The method has six questions, put to each sequence. What earlier living activity produced the consequential difference? What changed and persisted beyond that activity? Who later coordinates through the altered condition, and how? Which of the five mediations are involved in production and in uptake? Is the condition taken up at L1, without separate salience, or does it become recursively opened (see What Is Recursivity?)? Where does symbolic activity produce, redirect, conceal or reconstruct the immedial history? The questions are asked of living processes and never of objects, because residues have no recursive level of their own. The levels belong to the activities that make and meet them.

The article makes three contributions. It shows immedial coordination at work in a human world, including sequences that nobody ever reconstructs. It shows how immedial and symbolic coordination interlock. And it follows the recursive opening of hidden histories, including the discernment of provenance that opening sometimes demands, with attention to how selective, fallible and incomplete that opening is.

II. The Interrogation: From Living Bodies to Evidence

The film opens with a problem that it will not resolve until its last act. In a Stasi prison a man is questioned through exhaustion, immobilisation and threats against his family. Later Wiesler plays the recording to a class of trainees as a lesson in reading prisoners. Innocent people, he tells them, become angry under interrogation, and the guilty go quiet or weep. He treats the prisoner's repeated wording as evidence of a rehearsed story.

The lesson is an exercise in recursive discernment, conducted with misplaced confidence. Wiesler is trying to tell apart the possible origins of what the prisoner does. Is the anger a spontaneous embodied response? Is the silence exhaustion, or deliberate concealment? Is a repeated account a faithful recollection, or a rehearsed symbolic performance? Are the tears suffering, or a manifestation produced to mislead? These are questions of provenance and intention, and of the relation between embodied activity and symbolic articulation. They reach well beyond whether a statement is true or false.

The difficulty is that the interrogation has already changed the body whose conduct it reads. Hours without sleep alter what a person can concentrate on, withhold and endure (see Sleep Disruption as Violence), and Wiesler then classifies the resulting responses as though their origins could be sorted by a simple scheme. Embodiment can certainly provide evidence. The trouble lies in insufficiently warranted inferences about the history that produced the behaviour. Deception is a real possibility in the room, and so is its mistaken attribution. A prisoner might deliberately mislead, an interrogator might read deceit into an innocent person's exhaustion, and a given manifestation might be unintended, deliberately produced or an unintended product of the interrogation itself. The film does not require us to settle the prisoner's guilt to see the problem. It establishes why the provenance of embodied and symbolic manifestations is hard to discern.

Wiesler's theory also brings in the second form of fit. When he compares two verbal accounts, he tests their intersymbolic consistency. When he says that anger signifies innocence, he claims that a symbolic classification fits a bodily process, which is a question of mesocosmic fit (see Three Kinds of Fit). Successful discernment requires that fit between an interpretation and the living process it claims to explain, and the authority of the institution cannot supply it. A coherent classification system is no evidence that the classification fits anything.

Three layers lie together in the scene. The first is ongoing embodied coordination, as the prisoner responds to questions, fatigue, fear and threat. The second is a set of persisting embodied consequences: earlier hours of questioning alter his present capacities to concentrate, answer and resist. This layer lies inside a living, selfrecursive body, and it belongs to the story without being the clearest case of immedial coordination. The third is a deposited nonrecursive residue. The prisoner leaves sweat and odour in the fabric of his seat. That is the clean case.

Apply the six questions. The earlier coordination is the prisoner's embodied activity under stress. The altered ground is the odour retained in the fabric, which the film shows being cut and sealed for storage so that dogs can later be given it. The later uptake is canine identification. The dog carries the analysis out of the human symbolic universe in which the rest of the film is set. It need not know what the prisoner said, what the Stasi recorded or whether the state counts him guilty. Its sensory capacities recruit a chemical residue left by an absent body, so that multisensorial embodiment lies on both sides of the gap. A handler whose training of the animal rests on being-with across species then draws its uptake into an institutional practice of identification (see Being With Others Doesn’t Mean Having to Think about Others). The dog's uptake proceeds at L1, as absorbed sniffing and following. For the handler, who must decide which jar belongs to which file, the scent has been opened and classified.

The contrast with the interrogation is sharp. There, Wiesler reads embodied manifestations as possibly deliberate performances. Here, the sweat and odour were never intended to communicate anything to anyone, least of all to dogs. They are residual consequences of embodied activity that an institution deliberately collected, and the institutional use of the sample leaves that history as it was. The label on the jar is symbolic. What the dog takes up is the odour, and incorporation into a system of identification does not make the odour a symbol. A Peircean reading would call it an index of the prisoner from the moment it soaked into the cloth, and would need an interpretant, a quasi-mind in the dog, to complete the relation. The LVT description needs neither. A body left a residue, and another body coordinates through it.

The opening sequence is a miniature of the whole film. Living coordination produces differences, other living beings recruit them, and an institution tries to stabilise the resulting inferences as knowledge. The passage from difference to evidence is neither automatic nor reliable. The film begins with an institution confident that it knows how to read living bodies, and it ends with an individual who reconstructs a concealed history from a residue that the institution itself overlooked.

III. An Apartment, a Theatre, a Country: Dwelling and Absent Encounters

Before the surveillance of Dreyman begins, his apartment has been changed. While the occupants are away, a team enters, installs listening devices, runs connections through the building and arranges a post in the attic. A neighbour who has seen it is made to understand that she must keep silent. The apartment looks as it did. Dreyman and Christa-Maria Sieland go on living in it, speaking, working, quarrelling, making love and entertaining friends, and the practical possibilities of the rooms have shifted without any sign that they have.

Apply the questions. The earlier coordination is the installation, a short piece of skilled work by people who then leave. The altered ground is a changed acoustic access, in walls and wiring, that persists for years. The later uptake is Wiesler's listening. Mediation is concentrated in multimateriality and in multiversal dwelling, since the same rooms become different worlds for different occupants. The occupants live in them at L1, and nothing is recursively available to them until Hempf's revelation at the end. Symbolic interlocking is everywhere, because what the device makes available is speech, and what happens to the speech is written.

Three processes should be separated. The equipment provides the material condition for listening. Wiesler's attention to what he hears is ongoing multisensorial and symbolic uptake. That uptake is converted into reports, instructions and further interventions. The installation is the immedial alteration. The listening does not count as immedial merely because the speakers do not know who hears them, since hearing a person talk is encountering symbolic activity as it occurs. An immedial alteration here makes possible a long run of symbolic coordination that would otherwise have been impossible, and the two kinds of process are so intertwined that neither can be removed without the other collapsing (see Beyond the Panopticon).

The installation also shows that intention does not make a symbol. The team intended to alter what would later be possible in the apartment. They produced no statement addressed to the occupants, and the apartment did not become a message. Intention to alter later coordination differs from intention to produce a symbol, and The Trace Before the Sign already allowed for intentional immedial interventions. Three kinds of intention need to be kept apart: the intention to bring about a practical alteration, the intention to produce a symbolically recognisable distinction, and the intention to mislead someone about an alteration or its origin. They can overlap without being interchangeable. The microphone installation combines practical alteration with concealment. The surveillance reports are deliberate symbolic articulation. The falsified reports that come later add deception to articulation.

The second case concerns a man who never appears in the surveillance. The director Albert Jerska has been banned from working. Productions are not mounted, rehearsals do not take place, invitations do not arrive and collaborations never form. The process has distinguishable operations, and calling all of it immedial would blur them. A theatre manager who consciously withholds work because of a recognised prohibition is still coordinating through a symbolic classification: Jerska is on a list, and the list is known and obeyed. Over time that compliance produces material and relational arrangements that settle into the conditions through which Jerska lives. Companies form without him, schedules fill, colleagues adjust their habits, and his telephone rarely rings. These later conditions no longer need anyone to consult the prohibition.

Earlier living coordination can thus go on shaping later being-with through encounters that never occur. The non-occurrence of an encounter is no residue, and an unrealised possibility is no material object. The absent rehearsals and collaborations are consequences of persisting arrangements, some kept up by continued symbolic compliance with the ban and others settled into practical conditions that are the properly immedial part of the story. Jerska inhabits a world progressively deprived of particular opportunities for being-with, constituted through the interplay of symbolic decisions and enduring practical conditions.

In both cases what a living being meets as found ground has been made by earlier living activity (see The Ground We Made, the Ground We Found). The exclusion becomes part of the world that Jerska must inhabit, and the surveillance part of the world that Dreyman cannot know he inhabits. The same widens to the country. The political environment consists of stated rules, and also of enduring consequences for where people can go, whom they can meet, what they can make and what they can expect. Changing a political system therefore cannot be reduced to changing its doctrine. What changes is the mesocosm through which living proceeds, and parts of that mesocosm outlast the doctrine that produced them (see A Very Pretty Home).

IV. The Typewriter: Multimateriality and Symbolic Production

The typewriter is the film's most useful object for seeing how immedial and symbolic coordination interlock, and it is the right place to settle whether multisymbolization can take part in immedial coordination.

After Jerska's death, Dreyman resolves to write about the suppression of suicide statistics in the GDR. His activity is intensely symbolic, and it cannot proceed on its own. The article needs paper, a machine, a ribbon, a place to work, collaborators, routes of circulation and procedures for concealment. A Western editor explains the danger: the authorities can in principle match typed pages to registered machines by the faces of their letters. No two machines print exactly alike. Manufacture, wear and small faults give each one letterforms that later activity can attend to, and nobody who pressed the keys intended the differences. The registry of typefaces is a symbolic institution built to recruit them, and the editor's gift of an unlisted machine removes it from the catalogue while leaving its physical particularity untouched.

The suicide article deserves its own treatment. The GDR counts many features of its population while withholding the figures on suicide. The figures are already symbolically constituted by classification and aggregation, and the political problem is their restricted availability. Yet the events behind any such number are histories of living and dying that no statistic exhausts (see How Life Became Another Statistic). Jerska's death changed Dreyman's life directly, and the article offers a second route by which it can enter public consideration. One history remains consequential through several processes, only some of them symbolic: grief in a friend, a blacklist that preceded the death, a score left behind and a table of numbers withheld.

The act of typing yields two kinds of consequence from one mechanical operation. Letters and words become available for competent reading, and the machine's mechanism and ribbon leave physical characteristics on the page. One reader takes up the article for its argument. Another examines the page to establish which machine made it, and can do so without understanding a word of the text.

Three questions need to be held apart here. Origin: how was the consequential difference produced? Persistence: what condition or deposit remains after the originating activity? Uptake: how does later living coordination recruit that condition? The answers need not belong to the same mediation. Dreyman's typing produces a political text, and it also leaves distinctive impressions, transfers ink from the ribbon to the hands that touch it, and wears the type. His concealment of the machine alters the apartment, and its removal will change what investigators can establish. These consequences arise from a history of symbolic production, and they do not all depend on later symbolic uptake.

This is one of the article's main propositions. Immedial coordination does not begin where multisymbolization ends. Symbolic activity can itself produce alterations that later enter immedial coordination, and the symbolic character of the originating activity does not decide how all its consequences will later be recruited. The typed page need not be classified as either a symbolic or an immedial object, because the distinction concerns particular operations of later coordination. The difference between symbolic and immedial uptake remains intact. The page shows only that the two cannot always be separated at the level of whole objects or events.

The hiding place makes the same point from the other side. The machine is concealed beneath a removable section of floor, and the arrangement lets Dreyman go on writing, lets collaborators protect his authorship and lets domestic life proceed around the hidden object. Investigators cannot find the machine without finding and opening the place that holds it. Once the board is fitted, the protection requires no renewed command. It is an intentional immedial intervention, carrying an intention to alter and an intention to conceal and no intention to produce a symbol.

Apply the six questions to the article and the machine together. The earlier coordination is Dreyman's writing, the editor's gift and the construction of the hiding place. The altered ground comprises the printed article, the marks on the typescript, the machine's wear and ink, and the concealed cavity. The later uptake includes readers in the West, officers who study the published text and searchers who will one day lift the board. Recursive availability is split. Readers take up the argument at L3 and L4. The typeface, the ink and the cavity persist as nonrecursive ground with no recursive level of their own. Almost nobody takes them up, and those who live around the hidden machine coordinate with the floor at L1, without separate salience, until somebody lifts the board.

A short excursus is needed here, because the readers of the article, and Dreyman as he types, are mostly not deliberating. Consider an ordinary stop sign. An authorised stop sign is intentionally produced as a conventional symbolic instruction, and a competent driver usually responds without stopping to interpret it. The foot moves to the brake, the eyes check the junction, and the instruction is followed without separate attention. It has descended into fluent L1 mesocosmic coordination. It remains symbolic, because the driver's activity depends on competence in a symbolically articulated distinction, and a driver who had never learned that distinction would not stop. The example also corrects a too narrow view of symbols. A stop sign refers to nothing absent. It organises coordination at this junction, now. The capacity to make absence active by reference is a great achievement of multisymbolization, and not every symbolic operation needs to actualise it (see What Do Symbols Do?).

Recursive descent and immedial coordination are therefore different distinctions. Recursive descent describes coordination that once required explicit recursive engagement becoming fluent, including symbolic coordination descending into L1. Immedial coordination describes a temporal relation in which earlier living activity alters nonrecursive ground that later coordination recruits. A symbol's seamless operation at L1 does not make it an immedial residue, and the later recursive opening of an immedial residue does not make the residue a symbol.

The recursive levels may look like a version of what later readers of Peirce called unlimited semiosis, the open chain in which each interpretant becomes a further sign (Eco 1976). Both describe how living beings move between unreflective proceeding and explicit questioning. The resemblance stops there. Semiosis is the determination of signs by signs. The recursive levels track organisations of living coordination with conditions that may or may not be symbolic, including descent from explicit engagement into fluency, and including conditions such as the cavity under the board that are never opened at all.

Three things at a junction show why intention and provenance matter. One is an authorised stop sign. Another is a patch of red lichen on a roadside rock that, at speed, looks like one. A third is an unauthorised imitation put up by someone who wants drivers to halt there. Their visible forms might be practically indistinguishable, and a driver might at first coordinate with all three in the same way. Their histories of production differ completely, and recursive discernment can reveal differences of provenance, symbolic intention and institutional legitimacy that the surface does not show. The typewriter's history turns on exactly such divergences between appearance and provenance. Peircean semiotics can register them, since its indexes need not be produced as signs, but the architecture of the sign relation subordinates production history to the question of how a difference functions for an interpretant. Here production history is kept as an independent line of inquiry, and the six questions treat origin, persistence and uptake as separable precisely so that it stays available when the surface is ambiguous or deliberately misleading.

Its temporalities also differ. The act of typing lasts moments, the article may circulate for years, the machine's characteristics remain identifiable as long as they leave distinctive impressions, and the hiding place works until it is found or disturbed. One series of acts takes part in several temporal trajectories at once, across different mediations (see A Process Ontology of Differential Temporalities). Writing, as a notation that makes distinctions recoverable, persists differently from the pressures its ink leaves on paper (see On the Origins of Writing). Origin, persistence and uptake are separate questions, and the typewriter shows how symbolic production continually generates new differences that can enter later immedial coordination.

V. Wiesler's Interventions: Interlocking and Interception

Wiesler's first job is to convert what he hears into an institutional record. He selects, describes, classifies and stabilises aspects of an ongoing life, so that absent officials can in principle reconstruct what happened. That reconstruction depends on him, and his reports become the point at which one history of coordination is transformed into another.

The first interception comes from above. When Wiesler's report mentions the minister's car, his superior Grubitz tells him to remove the passage and to discuss such matters aloud. Symbolic activity can occur without leaving a durable symbolic deposit. A spoken decision may subsequently alter material arrangements, routines and people's chances while leaving little documentary evidence of its origin. The originating conversation was symbolic. The immedial question concerns how its consequences persist and go on coordinating the lives of others.

The second interception is Wiesler's own. As his relation to Dreyman changes, he begins to misreport what he hears, remaining inside the reporting system while preventing particular activities from becoming institutionally recoverable. This is a relatively clear case of deceptive symbolic production. The reports are meant to be read as truthful institutional descriptions, and their deceptive operation depends on symbolic uptake: the officials must understand the articulated distinctions and trust them. Because the reports are incomplete or false, Dreyman's activities continue without producing the consequences that the institution would otherwise have attached to them.

The third is the doorbell. Wiesler rings, and the sound brings Dreyman into a position from which he sees Christa-Maria leaving the minister's car. The bell is a conventional signal, but the act of ringing it also reorganises bodily movement, location and visibility. Wiesler changes what Dreyman can encounter without telling him anything, and the result depends on the layout of the building, the timing of her arrival and a visual encounter. A very small intervention reorganises several mediations at once.

The fourth is the film's centrepiece. Under interrogation Christa-Maria names the hiding place, and the Stasi prepares to search. Before the searchers arrive, Wiesler removes the machine. They lift the board and find a cavity with nothing in it. The intervention is deliberate, and its immediate effect does not depend on anyone receiving a message. The material arrangement has changed, the searchers meet an absence, and their possibilities of establishing an evidential connection have changed accordingly. This is the principal contrast with the falsified reports. The searchers need not understand who removed the machine, or why, for its absence to prevent the discovery. Symbolic deception and deliberate alteration of nonrecursive ground can reach similar practical outcomes through different operations. The false report works only if it is read and believed, and the empty cavity works whether or not anyone reads anything. A Peircean description can say that the cavity becomes, for the searchers, a sign that something expected is missing. That later response is real, and the practical success of the removal does not depend on it. Its effectiveness and its semiotic uptake can come apart, and the analysis needs to keep them apart.

The searchers' first uptake of the cavity is bodily, hands and eyes meeting an empty space where an object should be. Their expectation turns this almost at once into a catch at L2, and the absence is opened at L3 as soon as someone asks where the machine went. Symbolic interlocking lies in the plan for the search and, later, in the files that record its failure.

Wiesler's removal conceals without staging anything, since the cavity is simply empty. Other interventions go further. A person may deliberately arrange material conditions that invite another to reconstruct a misleading history, by planting an object, staging apparent evidence or removing something to hide an earlier event. A planted fingerprint can be materially real while misleading the investigator about how it came to be present. Staged traces need not thereby be reclassified as symbols. What matters is that actual production history, attributed production history and later uptake can diverge, and since some deceptive arrangements also carry communicative intentions, their status cannot be read off their appearance. The film does not develop these possibilities, and a general treatment belongs elsewhere. They matter here because they show why Dreyman, years later, cannot simply read the mark he finds.

The removal is also the film's tragic limit, and it prevents any overstatement of what material intervention achieves. Wiesler removes the machine, but Christa-Maria does not know that he has. She anticipates the discovery of the object and the exposure of her betrayal. She runs into the street and is struck by a vehicle. A material intervention has removed a danger, and the person most directly affected goes on coordinating through an anticipation of it. The changed world is not available in her recursive understanding, and the tragedy is more than a matter of misinformation. Two histories of coordination, each running on its own time, fail to meet: the material history of the apartment, altered shortly before, and the anticipatory history of a woman who has lived for weeks with the expectation of discovery. This is one of the film's deepest demonstrations of differential temporality (see Mixed Time).

Wiesler's protection works by changing reports, changing physical arrangements and changing the conditions under which other people will later act. His influence stops there. To coordinate the conditions of another life is no way of determining how that life will continue.

VI. Five Mediations in One Unfolding Coordination

The sequences so far can now be traced across the five mediations, to show how single immedial sequences pass through them.

Multisensorial embodiment appears in the interrogation and in Wiesler's prolonged listening. The important distinction is between present embodied activity and deposited differences that later living recruits. Sweat retained in fabric is a clear case of the second. So is red ink on Wiesler's finger, transferred to paper. Both become consequential across a gap of time and activity, and a dog and a writer in an archive, who differ in almost every respect, each take up a bodily deposit left by a person no longer there.

Being-with is best shown by the relation between Wiesler and Dreyman. The two men become profoundly consequential to each other without ever establishing a reciprocal relationship. Wiesler's actions alter Dreyman's practical possibilities, and Dreyman's writing, music and domestic life alter what Wiesler does next. Not every influence between them is immedial. Wiesler's listening to Dreyman's speech is an ongoing encounter with symbolic activity. The immedial relations are clearest where earlier alterations go on structuring later encounters without the producer being available, and Jerska's lost relationships supply the complementary case of continuing non-occurrence.

The sonata deserves closer attention, because it contrasts with the typewriter. Jerska gave Dreyman a score, a symbolic deposit in the full sense, and Dreyman plays from it on the evening he learns of Jerska's death. Four things should be distinguished. The score makes the performance possible. The sounding performance is Dreyman's present activity at the piano, in which the notation has descended into fluent playing. Wiesler's response in the attic is embodied: he is caught and moved, and the film shows him in tears (see Recursive Resonance). The later consequences of that evening are changes in what Wiesler does next. He may be transformed by the encounter without ever reconstructing the symbolic organisation of the work. None of this makes the whole sequence immedial. Its live core is a direct encounter with music, and the installed channel through which the music reaches him is the immedial element. The sequence shows symbolic and other mediations together producing new living possibilities, including the possibility that a Stasi officer begins to protect the man he is watching.

Multiversal dwelling shows in the different worlds that the apartment supports. For Dreyman it is a home and a workplace, for Wiesler the object of continuous attention, for the Stasi a location in an operation, and for Christa-Maria a place where intimacy, concealment, fear and expected punishment coexist. A mesocosm can be altered by earlier activity even when the alteration is unavailable to some of the lives that coordinate within it.

Multimateriality is revealing because made arrangements go on functioning without their makers. The listening devices sustain access to events elsewhere. The hidden typewriter enables continued writing. Its removal changes what investigators can establish. The archived report keeps both symbolic writing and an unintended red fingerprint. A connection, a prevented discovery, a failed search and an incidental mark are very different forms of persistence, and the word materiality covers none of them adequately (see From Secretions to Silicon Chips).

Multisymbolization is the mediation that most of the characters are busiest with, and the film shows the different positions it can occupy within an immedial trajectory. It can take part in the originating activity that alters the world, as when an order sends a team to wire an apartment. It can produce durable inscriptions and material arrangements, as when Dreyman types. It can carry the later uptake of articulated distinctions, as when officials read Wiesler's reports. And it can carry the recursive opening and reconstruction of earlier histories, as when Dreyman reads his file and writes a dedication. Its involvement in a sequence does not make every operation within the sequence symbolic, and the analysis follows how living proceeds without awarding a whole sequence to a single category.

Recursive descent is an ordinary accomplishment throughout. Wiesler's reading, writing, listening and reporting rest on highly developed symbolic competences, and most of that work proceeds fluently, without explicit rearticulation of the distinctions involved. He does not deliberate over the forms he fills in or the abbreviations he uses. The symbolic world of the film is far from one in which everybody operates continuously at L3 or L4. Symbolic stabilisations make extensive L1 activity possible, in the listening post as at the junction.

The table gathers seven sequences under the same headings. It is a summary and makes no claim to be an exhaustive classification.

Scene	Earlier coordination	Altered ground	Later uptake
Odour sample	Prisoner's embodied activity	Odour retained in fabric	Canine identification
Surveillance	Installation of listening equipment	Altered acoustic access	Wiesler's listening
Jerska's exclusion	Institutional interventions	Restricted professional opportunities	Continued living without available work
Typewriter	Writing and mechanical inscription	Physical marks on paper	Forensic examination
Hidden machine	Dreyman's concealment	Protected material arrangement	Writing and later searches
Removed machine	Wiesler's intervention	Empty hiding place	Failed discovery
Red fingerprint	Wiesler's handling of ribbon and report	Unintended mark on document	Dreyman's reconstruction

Table 1. Seven sequences from the film analysed as earlier coordination, altered ground and later uptake.

One sequence can involve several mediations at its origin and several others in its uptake, and one person can stand in different columns in different rows. Wiesler is the later uptaker in the surveillance row, listening through a channel that others installed, and the earlier coordinator in the removal and fingerprint rows. Dreyman makes the hiding place and, much later, takes up its history. Living beings are continually both inheritors and makers of altered ground. The relation expressed in the three right-hand columns is temporal, and the analysis of mediations differentiates the living processes that fill them.

VII. Recursive Opening: Archive, Red Fingerprint and Recovered History

After reunification Dreyman meets Hempf at a theatre. Hempf tells him that he had been under comprehensive surveillance and indicates where the microphones were hidden. Dreyman goes home and finds them. The installation has existed for years and its effects have been consequential throughout. The equipment does not change when he finds it. What changes is his recursive relation to the conditions through which he had been living (see Recursive Openings).

His understanding of the apartment becomes questionable, an L2 catch. He asks what actually happened, which is L3 askability, and he seeks records that might allow him to reconstruct it. The levels identify different organisations of recursive engagement and are no compulsory stages of discovery. Hempf's revelation arrives from outside, and Dreyman did not climb to it by his own questioning.

The Stasi archive stands for L4, an institution of recoverability. Under new political conditions it becomes accessible, and its reports and classifications make aspects of the past recoverable across the absence of their participants. Records do not transparently reproduce past living, however. They bear the selections, omissions and interventions through which they were produced, and some of these reports were falsified by the man who wrote them. Dreyman has to read the file as a product of earlier living coordination, much as a population statistic has to be read as a deposit made after selected aspects of lives had been observed and classified (see How Life Became Another Statistic).

Now return to the red mark. Report and fingerprint appear on one sheet of paper, and their histories differ. The report's sentences are symbolic deposits, produced deliberately to represent events to later readers. The fingerprint was deposited incidentally during earlier material activity, and it was not produced to disclose anything. Their later uptake draws on different relations, and the sheet shows why production history must be distinguished from observable appearance and from later interpretation. The six questions can be answered precisely. The earlier coordination is Wiesler's handling of the ribbon and, afterwards, of the report. The altered ground is the unintended mark. The later uptake is Dreyman's reconstruction, drawing on embodied handling, a file in an archive, his memory of the machine and the symbols of the report. For years the mark persists as nonrecursive ground that nobody takes up, so that no living uptake at L1 or at any other level is occurring. It is opened by an investigator with access, time and a question. The same page records one version of events in words and quietly contradicts it in ink.

Recursive opening does not transform the fingerprint into a symbol, and it does not reveal a sign that was there all along. A Peircean reading moves smoothly from deposit to index to interpretant, so that once Dreyman reconstructs its significance the mark functions as a sign of Wiesler's intervention, and on Peirce's own account of the bullet hole it was one before anyone noticed it. The analysis here keeps the three moments of Section I apart, and the scene depends on that separation. The mark names nobody and was made to say nothing. It remains an unintended material residue of Wiesler's earlier activity. What changes is Dreyman's coordination with it: a previously unremarked difference becomes salient, askable and available for evidential reconstruction. The resulting explanation is symbolically articulated, and the residue was neither produced as a message nor retrospectively converted into one.

Evidence does not arrive already designated as evidence. An observable difference becomes evidential when it is recursively opened and a warranted connection to its history is established. Dreyman cannot read the mark's meaning, because it has none to read. He has to establish how it came to be there, reconstructing its relation to the typewriter, to Wiesler, to the search and to the official account, and judging whether it is incidental, left on purpose, forged or otherwise misleading. The mark does not announce its own history. An apparently incidental trace may have been deliberately planted, just as an apparently authoritative symbol may have been forged, and recursive discernment must establish how and why a difference came to be present as well as what it could indicate. In Dreyman's case the warrant comes from fit with the characteristics of the machine, the chronological record, the search and the actions of the people involved. Mesocosmic fit and intersymbolic fit are both required, and neither is enough alone (see Mesocosmic and Intersymbolic Fit).

The scene also makes a temporal point. The events of the past have already occurred, and their consequences may remain available as nonrecursive deposits. The future has not been actualised in that way, which gives past events a potential evidential recoverability that future possibilities lack. Recoverability is limited by persistence, access, recognition and warrant. Some past coordinations left little behind, others were concealed, and some surviving traces cannot be interpreted securely. Uncertainty about intention and provenance makes recovery hard even when residues survive, because one surviving difference can support several competing explanations, and the possibility of deliberate misdirection compounds the difficulty. The past is settled without being completely recoverable. A theory centred on the productivity of semiosis tends to treat such non-recovery as a shortfall awaiting further interpretants. Living Value Theory treats selective and incomplete opening as an ordinary feature of living coordination. Everything that Wiesler did is fixed, and Dreyman can recover only the part that left an interpretable mark and that he happened to reach.

The ending completes the circuit. Dreyman identifies Wiesler as the officer behind the designation HGW XX/7 and chooses not to approach him. He writes a book called Sonata for a Good Man, dedicated to that designation, and Wiesler, who now delivers post for a living, finds the dedication in a bookshop. The book establishes recognition across absence. Unlike the fingerprint, the dedication is intended to communicate something to another person, even though Dreyman cannot know whether Wiesler will ever see it. The juxtaposition is exact. The fingerprint is an unintended residue that becomes consequential for Dreyman's understanding, and the dedication is an intentionally produced symbol that becomes consequential for Wiesler's. Wiesler's material intervention helped to preserve Dreyman's chances of living and writing, and Dreyman's symbolic intervention now changes how Wiesler can understand his own life. The film ends by bringing the two processes into relation without erasing their difference.

VIII. Political Power, Closure and the Limits of Recoverability

This section is subordinate to the article's investigation of immediality and makes no claim to be a theory of authoritarian rule.

The Stasi seeks to control the passage from difference to evidence. It determines which activities are observed, recorded, classified and made actionable, and which records are preserved, concealed or suppressed, and these practices shape the conditions under which later living beings can reconstruct past coordination. Its investigations still depend on material arrangements, bodily reactions, preserved records and traces that require interpretation, and its authority does not make the interpretations correct. The method that treats anger as innocence is a confident error, and the confidence is institutional (see What Is a Social Institution?).

Concealment takes more than one form. Grubitz's oral instructions and Wiesler's falsified reports work on what is symbolically recorded. The installation and removal of devices work on what can later be encountered. Both contribute to concealment, and they work differently. A conversation can produce altered employment prospects, investigations and punishments, so that much of what becomes consequential persists through altered ground and not through any available account of the decision. It matters to ask what happened, and also which aspects of what happened remain recoverable, and to whom.

Political conditions govern the availability of recursive opening. Dreyman can examine his files only after great political change, and earlier the questions were too dangerous to ask. The institution depends both on producing official accounts and on controlling the conditions under which they can be challenged, which can involve omission, deception and misdirection, a subject that would need an article of its own. The more fundamental point concerns living coordination itself. People go on living through altered conditions whether or not those conditions can be explained or contested, and a regime's fall changes the recoverability of its past more than it changes what the past did.

IX. Conclusion: The Hidden Coordination of Living Worlds

The fingerprint is memorable because Dreyman eventually discovers it. Countless other altered conditions remain effective throughout the film without ever being investigated. The listening equipment changes what others can hear. An earlier decision prevents Jerska from directing. A hidden object allows Dreyman to work. A removed object prevents an evidential discovery. Wiesler's concealed interventions change the futures of people who do not know that he has intervened. These processes are the ordinary condition of the film's world. What is exceptional is that the film gives its audience access to their hidden histories.

The findings can be stated in four parts. First, immedial coordination is constitutive of the ordinary continuity of living. Earlier activity continually changes the conditions through which later life proceeds, and those conditions normally operate without becoming objects of recursive inquiry. Second, immedial coordination unfolds across the five mediations, including multisymbolization. Embodied residues, relational possibilities, conditions of dwelling, multimaterial arrangements and symbolic productions interlock continuously, since symbols help to make the material conditions that later alter what can be symbolised. Third, recursive opening is selective and consequential. Some unnoticed conditions become available for questioning and reconstruction, and others never do. Symbolic practices can recover, conceal or redirect these histories, and they cannot exhaust them. Fourth, symbolic and immedial coordination must be distinguished without being treated as mutually exclusive domains. Their differentiation is an L4 theoretical achievement, valuable for the more accurate reconstruction of living processes that it permits. Symbolic distinctions can descend into fluent L1 coordination without losing their symbolic character, and previously unnoticed immedial conditions can be recursively opened without being transformed into symbols. Both movements happen continuously within the same mesocosm, and keeping them apart is what separates this account from a semiotics that would absorb every effective trace into the sign relation.

Living beings sometimes have to discern whether the differences they meet were accidental, deliberately produced, symbolically intended or deceptively arranged, and the film shows how hard that can be, from the interrogation room to the archive. Such discernment remains the exception. Life proceeds through historically altered conditions whether or not their provenance is ever established.

The difference from semiotics shows most clearly in what drives the film. A semiotic reading is drawn to the production, circulation and interpretation of signs: the reports, the manuscript, the score, the fingerprint once noticed and the dedication. These matter, and they are not the main engine of the drama. What propels it is a series of alterations whose force does not depend on their being taken up as signs: the microphones installed before the story begins, the settled exclusion of Jerska, the removal of the typewriter, the anticipation through which Christa-Maria goes on coordinating after the danger has gone, and the many interventions that succeed precisely because they never become institutionally recoverable. A semiotics that pulls every effective difference into the sign relation once it matters to someone flattens the asymmetry and the non-recovery that the film treats as decisive.

The film connects to the three cases that opened The Trace Before the Sign: the predator's scent, the worn doors and anthropogenic climate change. The relation is the same despite immense differences of scale, mediation and historical setting. A dog follows the odour of a man it has never met, a hand pushes a door that thousands have pushed, and a species shifts its range in a climate it did not alter. Life continuously inherits worlds altered by earlier living. The film's achievement is to make that ordinarily unnoticed inheritance narratively visible.

The Lives of Others is a film about people who rarely know the full histories through which their lives are being coordinated. They speak, write, interpret, conceal and remember, but they also live through alterations made by other people who are absent, unknown or already dead. What makes the film extraordinary is the display of how much living coordination proceeds without requiring that information to become available at all. Symbols and residues work through each other at every turn, and only a few of their joint histories are ever reconstructed. The fingerprint that finally allows Dreyman to reconstruct Wiesler's intervention is only one residue among innumerable others. Most are never examined. They continue to coordinate living nonetheless. That is the immedial historical depth of the mesocosm.

Selected References

Eco, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian, dir. 2006. Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). Germany: Wiedemann & Berg Filmproduktion.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.