ON KAFKA’S APHORISMS AND SHORT STORIES

Howard Slater on Franz Kafka ‘s aphorisms and short stories from Break/Flow 2 including the appendixes never published online before.

Maybe someone always has another agenda and you’ll often find that if they refuse to hear you they may well know or suspect or believe that what you will say will not be to their liking and their liking could just well be to protect themselves, often to protect their ambition, their placing, their sense of authority. Maybe their refusing to hear you should not be read as your inferiority, which is the implied intention of their refusal, but as the power, the threat, that having previously overheard you, they fear the implications of what you will say, for of course you have to say it, and, knowing that it may be a matter of permission, you may well scream it.

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In 1920, when Kafka sent his diaries to Milena Jesenska she received them with several pages torn out. These pages, the ‘aphoristic’ entries between 6 January and 29 February have only very recently been translated and issued in a revised edition of Kafka’s short stories. These aphorisms are a scream Kafka-style. In them there are astonishing fragments that express not only Kafka’s experiences of writing but also the subdued and subtly expressed communistic impulses that underlie much of his writing. The common interpretation of Kafka, the one I am trying to write myself out of, is that of a writer of religious parables who prefigured the move towards the bureaucratisation of society, a writer who spoke, albeit in a both an explicit and in a multi-layered form, of what is erroneously known as the human condition. The acceptance of such a condition is the acceptance of hopelessness and Kafka himself reveals this condition as being nothing other than a social construct. Yet if Kafka is still seen as a harbinger of an angst-ridden existentialism and if to a certain degree his reputation persists in this way then this is as much a by-product generated by the process of his popularisation. Existentialist chic was sold much like beatnik chic like situationist chic like Foucauldian chic. The problem with this selling is that a presentation of the surface, of the clichés extracted from those texts sets in as a barrier that filters-out what can lie behind. A barrier preventing relationships with texts. It is undeniable that the aura of gloomy misanthropy that has attached itself to Kafka is an unavoidable facet of his work, but the spaces of exploratory darkness that he offers up should not be read as an expression of irrevocable hopelessness nor as a means of giving vent to some uniquely idiosyncratic and asocial facets of Kafka’s own character. They are an expression of social processes that are never faced up to. We call these social complexities ‘depressing’ and by this we mean that we have neither the strength, the energy, nor the courage to face up to these dark corners. But what’s ‘depressing’ about finding out where this strength and energy has gone? Work, family paradigms, failures of communication, involuntary processes of identification, the eddying effects of an incomprehensible and, at times, arbitrary power which lead to a constricting guilt are all strong themes of Kafka’s work, themes which at times seem to pervade the writer himself, taking him over to the degree that he becomes revelatory of the emotional life of capitalism.

Kafka’s 1920 Aphorisms read like a cross between an ever-flexible preface to his short stories and some discarded and overlooked communist manifesto. Torn pages. Disgust. At the last crucial moment Kafka withholds from a more public statement as if he is an uncertain stutterer. Maybe a permission is needed that could ease his fear of jibing interlocutors … but who or what could grant such permission? In answer to this question Kafka shows that such a concerned and protective authority is not only unforthcoming but non-existent. Similarly, the tearing out of the pages is itself indicative of the presence of the absence of communism. Kafka’s fear of what the social has been constructed as, how it operates, his fear of the incommunicative cruelties it can contain, its lack of possible empathy is as central to his act of self-censorship as it is to the “disconnected starts” of his writing. It’s not so much that the world is not ready for what Kafka has to say as if he has somehow slipped through, genius-like, into a distant future but that it seems, moreover, never ready to hear such simple intimacies and thereafter be able to learn of itself by learning through someone else, or, as Kafka puts it: “listen to myself outside of myself”. Yet authority is ever-present, patrolling the interior, laying out the borderlands and encouraging Kafka to seek a permission that is at least double-edged: a permission to speak against and a permission to speak at all. The former implies an oppressive authority that acts to proclaim, stifle and manipulate response. The latter, and here we get into Kafka’s shadowing of communist theory, is the interiorisation of that authority… not just a socially-manufactured self-doubt leading to self-censorship but the perpetuation of an emotional equilibrium; the appearance of social constraints in what others, even comrades, will permit themselves to listen to. Protective positionings. Maybe this is the incursion of the social into the unconscious? The controlling facets existing beyond conscious-recognition that slip through unawares. Maybe the invisibility of such facets gives rise to the emplacing of religious concepts like the ‘human condition’? Just as Marx barefacedly expresses the economic processes of capitalism so Kafka, not being concerned with the presentation of ideological positives, creates characters and personas that are an inconsistent ‘mix’, and, by these means, comes to directly express the actuality of these social processes and reactive compliances: “He has the feeling that merely by being alive he is blocking his own way. From this obstruction, again, he derives the proof that he is alive”. Self-restraint is a form of social control that keeps everything at an ebb and this involves what is socially defined as on or off-limits, what is seen as apt subject matter in a given situation. Sometimes the smallest expression of frustration is deemed unproductive. A first written warning for swearing around the office may lead to an increased keenness to conform to the exigencies of production, to work ourselves, to retreat and walk knowingly into traps. It is experiences such as these that Kafka expresses time and time again. His articulation of this interiorised blockage, the psychic control of guilt, the withholding of desire in a variety of instances and the incursion of societal norms is a crucial area of investigation for any movement towards social change, for it is partly these submerged factors, their incomprehensibility, that block revolutionary change; factors that could be collectively expressed as ‘voluntary servitude’ and which Kafka expresses as “obedience to some unknown law”.

Kafka’s story In The Penal Colony contains a strong expression of this voluntary servitude. In many respects the descriptions of the torture machinery could be read as a decoy, for when we discover that the condemned man’s crime is not to have woken in the night to salute at his superior’s closed door we see that the real torture, expressed by Kafka as an aside, and thereby inferred to be so common-place as to be ubiquitous, is for this man to have been discovered not in the thrall of voluntary servitude, not oppressing himself. His duty is to conform and to conform without supervision or without the exercise of a conspicuous force. Whilst it may seem that the apparent slightness of the transgression doesn’t merit such a punishment and that this may lead the reader to presume the presence of a dictatorial state or a Last Judgement-like punishment, Kafka is careful to include within the narrative that a more lenient Commandant is coming to the fore who is to reject the torture machinery as inhumane. In this way the passage towards democracy is hinted at, and, at the same time, some kind of passage from sadism to masochism. If the torture machinery is no longer needed then does this imply that voluntary servitude is so widespread, that compliance has been won, that self-exploitation is by far more productive? That the officer in control of the torture machinery is prepared to be its last victim, that he almost wants to meld with the cogs and harrow is an indication of a reflex-like obedience, a desire for self-sacrifice. Having ‘Honour Thy Superiors’ transcribed into his flesh would not be a punishment for him but a confirmation of his beliefs, an apt epitaph to a pliability that has seen him renounce himself. Punishment in this sense is a reward.

For Kafka, the setting of stories at a place of work is crucial for his depiction of the submissiveness of voluntary servitude. In Blumfeld, we see a lonely middle-manager being tormented by ‘bouncing balls’ in his flat before we later discover that he is also tormented at work by frivolous, work-shy assistants and a superior who has little respect for him. Insecurities cut through all aspects of his life. Being ‘underestimated’ means that other colleagues are keen to compete with and outshine him. This only means that Blumfeld re-doubles his efforts to prove himself. He is overly-compliant, feeling that the office would collapse without him and fearing such an outcome as if he were the main recipient of the profits. He manages the work-shy assistants with a keen surveillance, clamps down on unproductive sexualised play and prohibits one of the assistants who has shown a desire to want to sweep the office. Yet Blumfeld is as obsessed by the assistants as he is by the bouncing balls. He fears both with an anxiousness that proves a fertile ground for voluntary servitude: he reports for work half an hour early “not from ambition or an exaggerated sense of duty but simply from a certain feeling of decency.” This comment is ambiguous in the extreme and through it we see how Kafka gamefully leads the reader towards the wrong conclusion by voicing Blumfeld’s reasons for his submissiveness as a feeling of decency. Kafka is exhorting us to look at all three reasons given and between “ambition”, “duty” and “decency” we see a whole interiorisation of social responsibility being tied into Blumfeld’s own feelings of worthiness. He must be wanted, he must be needed and unable to find any sense of respect anywhere other than at work Kafka suggests that the bouncing balls can be read as an expression of that playful and non-conformist part of Blumfeld that exists submerged within him. The bouncing balls are the creation of his desiring-energy, the possible-pull of his imagination made tangible and in this way the depths of Blumfeld’s voluntary servitude lies in the fact that, unable to countenance this aspect of himself, he desperately tries to give the balls away to local children. The conscious slave who dare not express his consciousness .

Such feelings of anxiety centred around work are expressed more extremely in The Transformation. Here the narrator wakes up, discovers himself to have been transformed into a beetle and almost immediately begins to worry about being late for work. Though this has the effect of naturalising Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis into an insect it is, as with Blumfeld, suggestive of the colonisation of the individual by the world of work and the demands of profit. There is nothing else to think about, even after sleep and dreams, even after being transformed into a beetle the pre-occupation is with getting to work and adjusting once again to the routine. On a humorous level this story heightens the ridiculousness of the stories we come up with when phoning-in sick, yet even so this transformation, this becoming other than what he ought to be, seems initially to be desired by Gregor. As horrible as it may be to become a beetle Gregor seems to take time, seems to relish getting familiar with his new body, exploring his new self and discovering anew his mundane environment. In many ways he has created himself. The terror of his transformation is communicated in terms of what other people think. Their lack of sympathy and understanding. The social pressures that are exerted. The almost instant visit to his home by the Chief-Clerk reinforces these means of guilt-inducement, connecting it to his family on whose behalf, we are informed, Gregor has held the job down. The Chief-Clerk almost becomes an additional member of the family, an extended disciplinary function, and through these means Kafka expresses Gregor’s terror as a fear of the economic implications reaching-in and as a horror of the nuanced similitude between work and familial structures. Gregor just doesn’t want to go to work and perhaps he has already incurred the doubts of the Chief-Clerk, perhaps his servitude is not so voluntary, perhaps he has transformed himself into a beetle because he is sickened by an existence in which “the slightest lapse immediately gave rise to the gravest suspicion”, where freedom disappears behind power-plays of a second’s duration. As with Blumfeld, the sense of being doubted by an employer leads to insecurities and if this is not enough to launch a re-invigorated voluntary servitude then the threat from the Chief-Clerk to Gregor that he is not indispensable can surely perform the trick. In both these stories a sense of ‘self-worth’, a reason for living, is shown to have been grafted onto the needs and requirements of capitalism, so that the needs of capitalism and the desires of individuals coincide. Reward is punishment.

In The Great Wall of China, Kafka appears to be expanding such scenarios out onto a larger social framework. In this story, work on building the ‘great wall’ is a continual task, one that involves all citizens and is documented in ancient literature. The never-ending and mythic proportions of the building of the wall is central to the functioning of this society as are the apparent reasons for its construction: to keep rampaging nomads out of China. It is through this task that control and submissiveness is instantiated. That the system of construction is described as ‘piecemeal’ serves the purpose of preserving the fitness of the workforce, maintaining their interest, adding momentum to their belief, but also of providing opportunities to celebrate the erection of sections in social rituals that reinvigorate the workers. Furthermore, the ‘piecemeal’ construction methods have been decreed by the high command and the narrator’s creeping doubts as to this choice create a situation in the story where the narrator suggests that the “command willed something inexpedient”. The upshot of this is that there is the slow awareness in the reader that the wall, like waged-labour, functions to dominate the citizens, occupying not only their time but their consciousness to such a degree that they cannot see beyond it. Within the story Kafka depicts an array of devices that go towards expanding our understanding of voluntary servitude: the piecemeal construction itself, the fragmentation, wards off the sense of continuity that could lead to discovery. The wall stops. There are gaps and so there are gaps in the knowledge of the citizens. Their doubts are never pursued toward fragile conclusions but deflected away from action. It creates what Kafka calls, in the 1920 Aphorisms, formal necessity; a kind of model of psychic terrain, a structure of possible thought grafted onto the citizens by means of the rules and procedures of work. The stopping and starting, the return to work each day creates a kind of repetition-compulsion, an addiction that is articulated as a “permanent sense of personal responsibility”. Elsewhere in the story there is the underpinning of literature and of teaching: the wall’s purpose is “commonly taught and recognised”, the one book mentioned describes how the wall must serve as the foundation for the erection of a Tower of Babel, and so this work, this construction, must be prolonged for all eternity, an ideological task that can never be finished. Work replicates itself, a function without outcome. A labour of security that secures the status quo. From the point of view of voluntary servitude this creates a situation of continual deferment, of unfulfillable hopes and of “universal uncertainty” which in turn lay the citizens open to accepting and adopting the desires of the high command: “it was really only in spelling out the decrees of the high command that we came to understand ourselves”. More complicatedly there is the control of the country’s history by the slow dissemination of ‘belated events’: not only does the wall have no obviously verifiable purpose but the events of the country’s history are related to the subjects as if they had only just happened. There is no present. Thus Kafka articulates the role of tradition, of induced faith in the doctored stories of the past as a necessary component of voluntary servitude. He points towards the role of belief systems, the pliancy of a people who are happy to be ruled and spoken for by those they have never encountered and by arbitrarily interpreted laws they cannot understand.

Yet the building of the wall is also described as a “great communal task” and this gives rise to the paradoxical effect that one of the roots of this voluntary servitude, as we have seen with Gregor Samsa, may lie in people’s reluctance to transgress the boundaries of the group: colleagues, friends, party, nation, humanity. This may often be expressed as a sense of respect towards others, not wanting to let others down, to be seen to be pulling your weight. A communistic impulse maybe, but one that is complexified, perverted even, by the lack of clear insights into what underpins and tangentially informs a particular group: profit, power, cultural capital, reputation. Voluntary servitude is linked into this sense of belonging and the fear of being expulsed from a group to which a person’s sense of self worth depends, but it is also intimately related to a tributary operation of power that is replete throughout Kafka. Paranoia. This seems to hinge on the fear of something that may not exist, that may not actually happen, that may never have been uttered. It depends on the imagined sense of what motivates the group. An imaginary factor that functions as real: an implied threat from a manager, a reprimand from a comrade, the tone of a parental scalding, the closed door of a meeting, all create a sense of expectancy and doubt, a necessary space onto which is imprinted a future obedience to command. To avoid such threats and the sense of an anticipatory suspension into which uncomfortable fear and anxiety pour what happens is that you get in there first, become submissive and eradicate the threat at the same time, it seems, that you abdicate a part of yourself. A part very much connected to the imaginative capacities. Voluntary servitude then becomes a means of avoiding anxiety and awkward problems, of seeking self-protective and simplified niches within the limits of the group. Conforming to what it is imagined is expected and obeying before the command is even uttered. That this servitude’s key area of operation seems to be the paradoxical and ever-obfuscating line between the self and the group is continually expressed by Kafka in those peculiar ‘mixes’ of his narration-personas. In stories like Investigations of a Dog the narrator is obedient and compliant at the same time that his first steps towards a questioning of authority are so tentative as to contain a respect for that authority. This points towards the themes of discovery and investigation that are always occurring within Kafka’s writing: “Why do I not as the others do, live in harmony with my people and quietly accept whatever disturbs the harmony; ignore it as a small error in the great account, and keep my eyes ever fixed on what binds us happily together, not on what draws us… out of the circle of our kin”. The investigations, the pursuit of clues and ways-out are used within the stories as a way of furthering that sense of disquiet that is, in Kafka’s writing, the first necessary step towards loosening the hold of voluntary servitude: constant questioning makes small fissures appear. Why is the narrator-dog drawn towards the music of the ‘company of dogs’ at the same time that he feels impelled to call a halt to their making an ‘exhibition of themselves’? Here, the sense of contradiction, paradox and inconsistency that Kafka draws us towards is itself a part of the over-riding discomfort that pervades his writing. In this way he puts into full view the ever-present techniques of conditioning by means of paranoia and guilt, at the same time that, in terms of the group, the investigations can be seen to demarcate the conformity of voluntary servitude and self-complacency from burgeoning instances of self-orientation and self-creation. Insight may not be clear, pure and dogmatic but it marks the beginnings of a critical insight all the same.

The researches of the narrator-dog point us in many directions at once. They point us towards Kafka’s fascination with childhood and the social-meaning of what is to be suddenly declared an ‘adult’. For Kafka, verbally battered by a father who saw his writing as immature and irresponsible, childhood seems to be a vital period of life that one should retain contact with: “I have preserved my childish nature”. The childish part of ourselves is commonly repressed by professionalisms, attemptedly eradicated at educational establishments and in most cases permanently submerged at the stage of parenthood. For Kafka this ‘free-state’ of childhood is at turns expressed by many of his characters who display a rural and at turns archaic sense of honesty. But in the story Josephine, The Songstress there are indications that he is saddened by the too-swift passage to an adulthood that preserves none of the unconditioned impulses and insubordinate experimentations of childhood: “We have no youth, we are grown up all at once, and we stay grown up for too long; as a result a certain weariness and hopelessness runs through the nature of our people”. By means of term ‘responsibilities’ this ‘adulthood’ is another factor through which voluntary servitude is instilled, it is the way that people come to mildly accept the demands of a society through seeing its limitations and contradictions as insurmountable and unchangeable. Optimism and passion are exchanged for a resigned and bounded fulfilment. In many ways ‘becoming an adult’ is the most pervasive and inter-linked of identities that are on offer, one which draws us into a deeper conformity that severs all ties with imaginative residues and draws-back those initially unsteady oppositional thoughts into a firmer conventionality through their being characterised as ‘childish’, ‘self indulgent’ and ‘pretentious’. Changes occur in adolescence and then they are supposed to cease.

This quietism and stagnation is one of the core responses that society requires and it is explicitly voiced by Kafka in the 1920 Aphorisms when he declares that “the limitation of awareness is a social requirement”. By working to delimit inquisitiveness, society creates an empty terrain upon which can be built the conditions of compliancy which generate, at the same time, the obediences of voluntary servitude. Without their researches, quiet observations and insistent questions Kafka’s characters would become dependent upon others who have the recognised authority to speak. Admonishment and obfuscation are common responses and in the face of such ‘answers’ there is very little to say. Yet instead of remaining silent Kafka’s characters display an attitude of resistance, one that doesn’t accept the traditions and irrevocable ‘human conditions’ but pursues its lines of questioning in the direction of limits that come to apply pressure on the accepted behaviours and protective myths that his fictional-societies depict. But Kafka shows that what is crucial about these investigations, this fledgling critical attitude, is that they are linked to “the cares that we actually have to struggle with each day”. They are common questions which not only have a child-like innocence and persistence, but are pursued independently from academic institutions and infer the presence of an auto-didacticism. Like the Village Schoolmaster’s treatise on the Giant Mole these researches come from unexpected quarters and benefit from their lack of prior conditioning into the forms of scholarship and by the way they do not conform to what are considered suitable areas of subject matter. His characters do not “proceed in the proper scientific manner”. Kafka often pokes fun at the pomposities of academia and the absurdity of intellectual competitiveness to the degree that a crucial aspect of his writing style is the way he parodies the restrictive and grandiose formalities of academic language. He goes as far as to ridicule such practices in his story Report to The Academy where he has an ape deliver a lecture to a gathering of auspicious professors. What seems crucial to Kafka is that the academics “can’t fling themselves straight into the arms of each new discovery”, they can’t be driven by curiosity and desire but are shackled to their “responsibility towards scientific knowledge, towards posterity”. They too are in the thrall of voluntary servitude, self-conceitedly responding to traditional agendas and professional expectations and it is in this way that we can see that Kafka’s valorisation of inquisitiveness is not simply about being ‘childish’, nor is it simply translatable into conventional terms of ‘knowledge’ or ‘consciousness-raising’, but is a matter of sincerity of intention as it tends towards autonomy. The questionings create an independence at the same time that they create an awareness of those characteristics that limit the full extent of that independence, and what Kafka seems to be suggesting is that these ‘bad’ elements of ourselves should not be dogmatically suppressed but faced up to and investigated so that we can, in the words of Foucault, “grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system”. This is borne out in Kafka’s stories when he shows that an integral component of these endeavours is the questioning of our own assurances, a certain polemics against the self which implies a courage “to know what it is that one can know”. This level of self-awareness has various ramifications but foremost among them is the necessary dissolution of the self that this entails and by extension the appearance of others. In this way the narrator of Investigations of a Dog points towards the underlying communistic impulse of the investigations when he states that “countless observations and essays and opinions on this subject have appeared, it has become a science of such vast dimensions that it is not only beyond the grasp of any single scholar but beyond all scholars collectively, it is a burden too weighty for all save the entire dog community…”.

In Kafka’s writing other people are always present. His Diaries show him to be in continual communication to the extent that he has an inability to cut-out and filter what goes on around him. It creates imaginary feedback. This maladjustment is immature and paranoiac to the extent that the normality of voluntary servitude requires boundaries and limits to possible-communication: options and encounters are to be carefully controlled and researches must have a goal. In the 1920 Aphorisms, Kafka foregoes his usual craftedness and expresses these feelings of intense openness: “A piece like a segment has been cut out of the back of his head. The sun looks in and the whole world with it”. This is tantamount to an expression of a direct and unacknowledged communism that knows that without empathy, co-experience and feeling for others then there can be no societal change. Again, like his writing-style, Kafka seems to pare things back to a point where they seem to revel in a kind of obviousness. Kafka expresses a variant of communism that seem to emanate from that unformed and often religiously heretical terrain before the arrival of the working class and through it we are being moved, not back to a pure state but towards an understanding of communism as one that is present in the smallest gestures. Gestures that are ordinarily obscured by theoretical exegesis and a rhetorics blinded by self-conceit. Somewhere along the line, that communism is about having care and forethought for others has been lost. The desire to change things for the better involves a consciousness of everyone: “sometimes in his arrogance he has more anxiety for the world than for himself”. Anxiety as all-embracing. This simple yet outrageous diary entry reveals the fact that desire is diffuse, aims everywhere at once and is unable to cease. It is prepared to go beyond self-interest to the point of embracing the potential damages that can ensue from such deferments of the ‘self’ that Kafka describes. These expressions of the ‘no-self’, of ‘ego-fragmentation’, are seen as one of the elements of ‘psychotic experience’, and rather than appear abnormal Kafka is careful to qualify his entry by using the word “arrogance”. Here we return to voluntary servitude. Kafka must qualify his entry as arrogant so as to enable him to shroud the statement with the trappings of a ‘personal’ defect. If the anxiety which is felt for others is not arrogant then it is directly transgressive of voluntary servitude because it breaches the boundary between the self and others. So not only is Kafka’s “arrogance” an aspect of the ‘blockage’, an expression of the emotional life of capitalism urging him to cease his reflections, it is a direct expression of the taboo against seeing beyond yourself towards points of contact with others. It is arrogant, almost god-like to have such feelings, it is not what you are taught, it is not what you inherit. Communism is insane. In the story The Village Schoolmaster, this selflessness of desire is expressed by the narrator who wishes to draw attention to the village schoolmaster’s treatise on the giant mole by means of his own researches. In his efforts to defend the Schoolmaster’s honesty, the aim of his own work, he is prepared, in the introduction to his own text, to “disclaim positively any major part in the affair” and to expunge his own name from the text. This will to anonymity, the withdrawal from competitiveness, is a further indication of the dissolution of the self and the presence of communistic impulses in Kafka’s writing.

Even when a Kafka character is completely alone, as is the creature-narrator of The Burrow, even when one could charge Kafka with self-indulgence and self-centredness the direct effect of the story is about this creatures imaginings of those around him. He feels and listens for presences around the burrow and, even though these are considered threatening, this in itself points towards the fear of other people that capitalism is constantly foisting onto its subjects. Again, connection and contact must be sanctioned: work mates, wife, kith and kin. There have to be safety-nets to avoid one from straying because contact is a risk that doesn’t have to be taken. Like researches they must be made up to a limit, withdrawn from and their conclusions feared. Something could happen. This risk of exposure seems to relate to the possible self-transformations that can be contracted when one is open to contact with others. In the 1920 Aphorisms Kafka notes how he imagines himself inside a painting looking at boats from the riverside. After noting that “the convivial spirit was not confined to the separate boats”, another example of diffuse desire, he adds that were he to feel a part of this conviviality “his whole origin, upbringing, physical development would have had to be different”. Rather than interpret this thought as an articulation of Kafka’s ‘alienation’ and thereby reduce it to the self-centredness of capitalist subjectivity, it is more fruitful to see this will to change in connection with Kafka as a beetle, a mole, a dog and thereby as a further expression of his ‘becoming-other’. The cessation of individualistic perspectives. This is borne out when later in the same entry Kafka recognises that what keeps him distant from the holidaymakers are not feelings that belong to him exclusively and exclude him permanently but are feelings that each of the people he surveys can also share in. Emotions can be transformed into characters. Subjective dissolution creates the space to contain crowds: “He lives in the Dispersion. His elements, a freely roaming horde, wander about the world” . This subjective dynamism is explosive to the point that if “there are different subjects in one and the same man (sic)” then the distinction between the self and others is not as rigidified as is commonly believed. It becomes possible to perceive the differences as either nuances of time and context and/or socially constructed debilitations and the more multiple a person can be then the greater are their points of contact with others. Self-creation can therefore be seen not as an individualistic pursuit but as a means of accessing greater degrees of co-experience and identification with others, increasing empathy and solidarity to the detriment of the self-enclosure, the solipsism required by voluntary servitude.

With this in mind it is probable that Kafka’s most potent contribution to resisting voluntary servitude is that which is tied into his very process as a writer: that by ‘becoming-other’ he produces himself. If we adopt Foucault’s paralleling of the concept of voluntary servitude as “a salvation-orientated operation in a relationship of obedience to someone”, we see that what is required is the subjects remaining static long enough to establish the obedience coupled to the mutual agreement of the goal of that salvation. This will forever remain the case if neither party “produce themselves” and thereby create a friction within the relationship of obedience and a doubt as to the efficacy of the goal. The processes of writing, playing and enacting where the writer experiments with emotions, carries out investigations and thereby invents himself and others, is one which is intimately tied to social change. Writing is one of its pre-suppositions, a shared textual space were permission need not be requested, were authority can devolve and from where confidence can grow. Even though Kafka confesses that he has “no conception of freedom”, he can at least conceive of its absence and from the tension that this creates there emanates imaginative capacities, auto-productions, capable of depicting and resisting voluntary servitude. Kafka’s is a practice of freedom, an attempt to write himself out of oppression often by coming to understand the extent to which he oppresses himself. This endeavour does not need to declare itself communist or socialist. Such a declaration would limit his explorations into the indiscernible operations of power and direct him towards the authoritative and overly consistent realm of ready-made answers. The dogmatic do not know that they are oppressed but neither do they run the risk of exposing themselves. For Kafka this sense of vulnerability is crucial to the charge of his writing, for surrounded by a “silence on the really important matters” and weighed down by a “destructive indifference” from his fellows, Kafka has no means of measuring the acceptability or relevance of what he says. At the same time that he feels connected he also senses that there is a lack of vital, emotionally charged communication which in itself points to the widespread existence of a voluntary servitude that acts censoriously to maintain the divide between the public and the private: “If only dogs did not know infinitely more than they will admit, more than they will admit to themselves”. Inner quiet is instilled. But despite this, as if with trust in the communal impulse, Kafka feels that the silence must be broken and that “speaking out is still worth the attempt, since the permitted way of life is no life [you wish] to lead”. A life free from such risks is the protected-life of voluntary servitude, a life fortified against experience and change and one in which desire constantly recedes from grasp to be transmuted into obligations and a duty to serve. Desire has no need of permission. By creating unfamiliar perspectives and virtual communities from where there is a possibility to produce ourselves and the social, writing shows itself as always containing the potential to transmit resistance: “The concentrated otherness of the person writing let’s oneself be made into his counterpart [and] when one is brought back to oneself one remains behind in one’s own being, which has been newly discovered, newly shaken up and seen for a moment from the distance”. Alienation or defamiliarisation? No longer ourself, Kafka shows the individual to be nothing other than a collection of singularities. A renewed communist perspective…

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Appendix K1

Fasting Artist

In Kafka, voluntary servitude reaches such depths of self-oppression that it is transposed into a fiction of self-abnegation, a complete lack of pleasure to the point of masochism. Or so we think… The theme of fasting, which crops up in Investigations of a Dog and is explicit in The Fasting Artist, can be read as an expression of the Christian forty days and forty nights. Fasting has religious connotations about self-control and about placing your faith in a being superior to yourself. Cleansing the body. The body as temple. Yet, though authority is present in Kafka, it is not a supernatural authority but a social authority: the interdiction of a law that cannot be questioned. Thus, the fasting is carried out by the characters of these stories as something they wish to do for themselves: a means of responding to the unresponsive.

In the first story, the narrator-dog decides that with there being no answers to his questions about nourishment, the only way to further his investigations is to fast. He describes his actions as being in “opposition to the normal course of things” and attempting to “undermine science.” He is taking his investigations to self-imperiling extremes. In the latter story, fasting is an art, an entertainment upon which others spectate, and the fasting artist of the story wishes to perfect his fasting, to go on fasting presumably to the point that he too risks death.

Both these examples of fasting seem to be analogous to creative work. The denial that writing demands, at least the one it demands from Kafka, is the denial that comes about from his withdrawal from society. In the latter story, this is added to by the fact that the fasting is ‘spectated,’ ‘criticised,’ and vicariously experienced by an audience. Here Kafka seems to be drawing attention to the display of suffering and the eagerness of the crowd to view these extreme experiences at the same time that the fasting artist is eager to give them such entertainment.

We could draw a parallel with the Officer of The Penal Colony: the fasting artist is conscientious in his work, looking to improve his performance in life-threatening ways, just as the Officer tends the torture machinery so lovingly that he would expose himself to its harrows. Moreover, Kafka uses the theme of fasting as a means of working through his fear of exposing himself through writing: what could be more exposed, more vulnerable than a person who is emaciating before our eyes? Kafka’s thin anorexic body causes a self-opprobrium.

Fasting is closely related to suicide. It takes the body towards extremes of malnourishment, and in the case of the hunger strike, it throws down a challenge that tests the resolve of the authorities. In many instances it is the last remaining weapon and in this way the body is used to express extremes of emotion and feeling that are otherwise incommunicable or have been intransigently refused a hearing. Yet Kafka’s fascination with “voluntary hungering” is related to a not too dissimilar economy of desire centered around his own body. There are many entries in Kafka’s diaries where he shows himself to be obsessed by levels of energy. Continually watching himself for signs of weakness and tiredness. This becomes related to a sense of sexual hungering, an enforced celibacy that is tied to Kafka’s wish to direct all his energies towards writing to the extent that he breaks off his engagement with Felice Bauer citing his need to write as the main reason. Yet, maybe it is not so obviously a withholding of sexual release, maybe what is communicated in the diaries is that the tensions that surround his need to write become libidinalized: cathectic energy becomes diffuse, attaches itself to the act of writing and transforms the anxious tension into pleasure. Describing how he “fills the word with himself” we are witness to just such an intense libidinal focus on Kafka’s part, where the release of words comes to be both a physical and an embodied activity that can never cease or reach completion. The word itself is a stimulus—an ‘indirect source of sexuality’—that can be sensualized.

What’s more, that Kafka’s writing was frowned upon by his father, seen as a waste of his son’s time, could also have been a factor that was spliced together with this libidinalization of writing. As with masturbation there is no purpose. The tension increases because Kafka has to work for a living. Being unable to write when he likes creates a situation of fasting. Being denied what he desires creates a multiplication of that desire. He is “filled with anxiously restrained abilities” and this further obstacle of work at the office could itself enhance the desiring-machine he is already unconsciously constructing: “calling forth such powers which are then not permitted to function, effusions which are not released but must instead spend themselves in being repulsed.”

One of the control panels of this machine can be operated by creating a situation of voluntary hungering, actually manufacturing rises and falls in libidinal energy and administering when and how this energy can be released, in what direction and towards what temporary fulfillment. A reservoir of energy, a plateau phase of text that is never completed.

Anxiety, hunger, and libidinal desire are all sensations felt within the stomach. A tingling. A hollowness… the sensualization of risk, fear, and stifled captivity. Could it be that through Kafka we learn that techniques of “voluntary hungering” go towards comprising one of our defenses against oppression, that we are able to turn around, subvert, the tightness of captivity and transform it into an energy to be directed back at that oppression?

Is the fasting artist the creator of an alchemical adrenalin? To an imaginary father Kafka says: “Everything you say against me helps my ideas, they do not stop, becoming stronger they fill my head.” If prohibition creates this heightened sense of commitment, then can self-incurred prohibition have a similar effect? Could it be that a society increasingly dependent upon voluntary servitude, a clean control and a calm decapitation, necessitates the response of voluntary hungering in order to sharpen and make visible the incisions of desire?

Or is it the route of the ascetic, the penitent… a means of meting out punishment on the self for all manner of imaginary transgressions? Self-abnegation and/or social responsibility?

**

Appendix K2

Minor Literature

At first it was baffling to see someone with Kafka’s reputation as falling under the rubric of ‘Minor Literature’. Deleuze & Guattari were adamant and rather than it being their sole discovery, their conclusion, we see that they have followed a subtle line out from Kafka’s Diaries where he expresses just this point as part of his discussion on the possibilities for a Czech national literature. Here, in the entry for 25th December 1911, Kafka offers a case for an independent writing within national boundaries, but in the slipstream manages to articulate benefits other than his avowed “coherence of national consciousness” and “assimilation of dissatisfied elements.” Kafka’s texts are nothing if they are not a space for correlations and, in musing over the benefits of a national literature, he comes to write critically of a “literature rich in great talents.” It is these elements of Kafka’s diary entry that Deleuze & Guattari christened ‘minor literature’ and for the former, it is a matter of these “great talents” effecting an operation whereby they silence those around them, or, when they are elevated by literary history, come to be surrounded by clichés.

Not having a tradition to hold people back creates a “multiplicity of interpretations” and feeds into the creation of new areas of subject matter, areas which are looked on disdainfully by the “great literature” as “petty themes” but whose “polemical possibilities” mark, for Kafka, a capability of “absorbing everyone.” Momentary revolutions beneath the quotidian.

Even without this Diary entry it is still possible to relate to Kafka as a practitioner of ‘minor literature’, for, unknown for most of his life, Kafka writes like someone who has been left to his own devices, someone who is pursuing his own desires as a matter of urgency and not as a matter of ‘work.’ As The Fasting Artist says: “I have to fast. I can’t help it.” There is no communicated sense in Kafka of a writer who is at all proud or fulfilled in his efforts. It is more a matter of his being isolated, disgusted, and embarrassed, telling Max Brod, as he did, to burn all his manuscripts.

So, what we see with Kafka, as a German Jew living in Czechoslovakia, is a person writing with very little sense of having any tradition behind him. That this has accrued around him now should maybe not detract from the context of his own time where he wrote in an isolation that simultaneously offers up this sense of a community in absence together with a community of mediocre, flailing talents whose virtues he extols:

“Why should I not rather believe that all dogs from the beginning of time are my comrades, all of them striving in their own way, all unsuccessful in their own way, all silent or tiresomely prattling in their own way, just as this hopeless quest entails?”

This reveals certain facets of minor literature. That Kafka feels connected to others, that it is the process of writing that counts and not the achievements as such—achievements that can then remove the writer from the context of his own experience. Success may always be on another’s terms, and minor literature rejects fame and celebrity status as a distraction from engagement, as a means of placing a personality before the intent of the ideas that are expressed.

In attempting to bring others together, even if this be something as abstract as a community of readers, then it is necessary to feel an empathy with the writer. Minor literature such as that of Trocchi, Bataille, Hanley, etc., is marked by its enticing openness. “It becomes apparent whether his contemporaries did more harm to him, or whether he did more harm to his contemporaries; in the latter case he was a great man,” writing great literature?

In his diary entry of the 25th December, Kafka expresses a belief that minor literature does not present any of the usual obstacles to the readers being ‘affected’ by what he or she reads. Not being weighed down by expectations, overblown preambles, and critical acclaim, minor literature allows greater room for a more personalised discovery, a more intimate form of communication through which the reader gets a stronger sense of his own participation in a dialoguing process than would be forthcoming from the feted and, as a consequence, more dried-out texts:

“As the story goes on, so the listener is flattered and drawn into the story and given a special right to be a listener.”

Minor literature is about what follows, what is set off, about what idiosyncratic readings it encourages:

“The pursuit of secondary characters… this sense of belonging together which I then have.”

The act of expression, any expression, then comes to the fore:

“We all pipe, but naturally, no one dreams of calling that an art, we pipe without paying any attention to it, indeed without noticing it.”

In such a way, Kafka, true to a non-extant minor literature, establishes the situation that literature is itself neither the privileged nor the only medium of expression. In The Josephine Story, “piping” is contrasted to Josephine’s singing, and in the 1920 Aphorisms, Kafka describes his own writing as “hammering.”

A minor literature like Kafka’s occupies a similar conceptual field to that of Kant’s prognosis of the importance of the French Revolution. Rather than draw our attention to the guillotines and power plays of Danton and Robespierre which left social relations unchanged, Kant warns us against expecting “this event to reside in grand gestures and major infamous acts” but to look out for the imperceptibles by means of which these events can be rearticulated in our own times. Kafka expresses many of these in terms of ‘asides,’ small comments within larger sentences where the main thread of his narrative is undermined by seemingly inconsequential tangents. Yet, for Kant, the never-noted effect of the Revolution is the occurrence of a “sympathy of aspiration that borders on enthusiasm” which is both its more widespread and longer-lasting effect.

An effect that is expressive of minor literature. Both require an alteration of perspective as to what denotes the radical, for, as Kafka noted in his diary entry, is it so impossible to acknowledge “literary events as the objects of a political solicitude”?

***

Appendix K3

Auditory Hyperaesthesia

Kafka’s ear is attuned to music and noise. Drones, howlings, patterings, scrapings, trumpets, violins. His texts sometimes sing. Yet Kafka requires such a silence that he is prepared to crawl on all fours into his sister’s room and beg her to be quiet. Though music is vital to Kafka, the sound of a neighbor practicing the piano is enough to drive him to distraction.

The story Investigations of a Dog gives us the two entrances into Kafka’s fascination with music and noise. Here, the young dog has an experience of music whilst coming across the ‘company of dogs.’ These passages depict how overwhelming this experience is:

“It swept one away… and quite against one’s will, resisting with all one’s might, howling as if in pain, one was forced to attend solely to the music, this music that came from all sides… carrying the listener along with it… so close that it seemed far away and barely audible.”

Within the context of the story, the young dog vainly resists the temptations towards self-loss that the music entices him with. The ‘company’s’ orgiastics create a vertigo within him between enjoyment and the responsibility to warn them that their behavior is not permitted. But he cannot fulfill his responsibilities.

This formative experience of the narrator shows how music has the power to shatter conditioning and ‘change minds,’ for later in the story, the narrator abandons his initial investigations and embarks on a study of ‘dog music.’ Though resistant to the experience, the music has affected him.

This power that music has is not a…

Supernatural phenomenon but an emotional attraction that has an involuntary pull and once heard, Kafka offers, you cannot desist from listening. Indeed, during the period of fasting, the young dog also hears noises from “every side” and is unable to “reduce the uninhibited clamour of the world.” This clamour is itself the sound of the social, for as Kafka writes in Josephine, the Songstress:

“Piping… comes almost as a message from the people to each individual.”

For Kafka, music becomes noise and noise becomes music. He is unable to cease from listening out and loving music so much that the noises he hears through the wall have this same irrational pull. They block a train of thought. They distract him from work until, perhaps in frustration, he begins to use his fear of noise as a component of his stories. The bouncing balls of the Blumfeld story make a noise on the floorboards and prompt the elderly bachelor to put mats over the floor and cotton wool in his ears. The short Fratricide story tells the tale of a murder to the accompaniment of ‘ringing words.’

But it is perhaps The Burrow, a story written at the end of his life, where this fear of noise comes directly to the fore. Although The Burrow is about all manner of things simultaneously—home, work, security, art, illness—what it seems most concerned with is the creation of fortifications around the creature that create calm and quiet. It shows that this creature’s anxieties, its inability to relax, can also come to create reasons for further fear. For this creature, security is related to the quiet it can obtain at the centre of the burrow, in the ‘Keep.’ But the more this becomes apparent to the creature, the more it is jeopardized by the self-protective instinct to constantly check. Initially fearing an attack from the surface level of the burrow, the creature, whose “ear has become attuned with practice”, becomes preoccupied with a ‘whistling’ sound that can be heard inside the burrow, even in the inner sanctum of the ‘Keep.’

Whereas the Josephine character is able to use such disturbances as “extraneous sound” to “heighten her songs,” Kafka’s expression of anxiety about noise shows us that this attraction to sound is just as much about self-presence as about self-loss.

Again, what we have is this appearance of the ‘outside’ and the perceived threat. The fear of noise can be an expression of paranoia, which can be itself summoned forth by a need to know that which is impossible to know or, more generally, that which is purposefully withheld. Paranoia is related to powerlessness, to questioning and self-interrogation.

How long will the piano lesson go on that distracts Kafka? But the fear of noise is also created by the interest Kafka has in others, the way he is open to any influx from the social. Potential presences cut off by a whole gamut of decorums and distances. Paranoia as expressed by the fear of noise is as much this belief in the necessity for others at the same time that it is an expression of a socially-induced separation.

How can Kafka ask the piano player to stop? What right has he to place his pleasure above that of another? In The Burrow, the whistling is the sound of someone else, and this someone else could have been a comrade.

Howard Slater

NOTES

All Kafka quotations from The Transformation and Other Stories, Penguin 1992; The Great Wall of China and Other Stories, Penguin 1991. Supplemented by reference to Kafka’s Diaries 1910-23, ed. Max Brod, Penguin 1964.

Foucault appeared out of The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, Semiotext(e) 1997.

“Nothing but musts. Do you understand why we must?”

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