In Kafka are students assistants? Not quite. Assistants stand around like waiters, are unreflective and often act as messengers: eg the comic types who follow K around in The Castle giggling and poking each other. They are assistants to K but know nothing of surveying so cannot assist him. They and students share one thing which is a single expressive Kafka-activity (eg fasting, waiting, studying). Consider the student in Amerika; he doesen't study, ie reflect and understand; it doesen't get him anywhere yet he has to do it, forever, ' for the sake of consistency'. The physiognomy of studying is an anguished, trance-like activity involving frantic consultations, pressing papers to his face and desperate note taking; no sleep and endless coffee. Assistants lack this driven quality but according to Benjamin, unlike students, have the prospect of redemption. Redemption is tied to the lack of reflection. Students are higher up the intellectual hierarchy to assistants but the act of studying is automatic. Foolishness offers the chance of being saved. Foolishness entails forgetting, an aspect denied to students. Yet it is an odd form of forgetting; the Oklahoma actors in Amerika are saved but not through some special insight. Oblivion is the key; the actors act out a forgotten version of their earlier selves of which they are, at best, dimly aware; the briefest of glimpses of this earliest version is all that can be expected. Students are stuck in the the perpetual present, cannot move on like Gracchus, always awake, compulsively reading without purpose, yearning for oblivion.
