Kafka and the machine
A couple of months after the outbreak of the First World War, Franz Kafka, an insurance clerk in Prague, wrote a story called In the Penal Colony. Unlike most of his work, he finished it quite quickly, within a month or so of beginning, and unlike most of his work it was published during his lifetime, some five years after its completion. The story describes a Forschungreisende — variously translated as “Traveller” or “Explorer” — who comes to an island where an Officer shows him an execution machine. Designed by the colony’s previous Commandant, its mechanism — a labyrinthine arrangement of wheels, wires and pulleys — slowly bleeds its victims to death by incising expository messages into their skin. The machine is the Officer’s pride and joy, and much of the tale is taken up with his enthusiastic descriptions of its design and operation.
Like virtually all of Kafka’s work, the story has been much-discussed and subjected to religious, political, philosophical and psychoanalytical interpretation. Yet the authors of these commentaries often fail to notice that Kafka’s tales intrinsically resist their procrustean efforts. Kafka was interested in feelings more than in ideas, in emotions rather than analysis. The influential critic, Walter Benjamin, denies his stories are “parables” but immediately qualifies this by observing, “they do not want to be taken at their face value”.
Kafka’s fables explore the imaginative possibilities opened up by the author’s own halting, wary encounters with reality. They offer a series of suppositions which lead through rigorously logical, eminently lucid stages into the obsessional worlds of his imagination. A trained lawyer, later employed as an insurance clerk, Kafka endows his narratives with such distinctly-rendered, evidential detail that they end up colonising his readers’ minds, working down into the subterranean channels of our consciousness to return us to our own fears, anxieties, preoccupations, compulsions. Kafka’s stories, once read, are hard to forget.
Most books hailed as chronicles of a future foretold soon fail. Brave New World and 1984 are examples. Although both highly readable and apposite, they are hardly reliable guides to the events that followed their publication. Kafka’s work, however, endures. This was partly because his writing wasn’t widely known until the future they prefigured had actually come about, but even more, because the world he conjures up is the one that surrounded him. Instead of prophesying a future, his writing evoked a version of his present.
Kafka was essentially indifferent to general speculation, but what he took from daily existence were emotions. He grew up under an oppressive father in a restrictive home. He had a handful of tormented love affairs, conducted dull duties in insurance offices and, in his spare time, worked incessantly on compositions which never found wide recognition, let alone success, and left him with a pervasive sense of failure.
Yet his confined existence as an introverted Jewish youth in an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire was quite enough. What makes him so remarkable is that, by looking through the narrow window of his brief life, Kafka seemed to understood it all — not only the war that had just begun, but the revolutions that were yet to begin, the totalitarian societies that were soon to come into existence and, above all, the festivals of unbridled hatred that would soon lead to slaughter in the name of class, blood, race and nation. (He died from tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of forty one. Fifteen years later, his three sisters were murdered in the Holocaust). The rise of anti-Semitism certainly played a role in the development of his mind, but his insights had an instinctive universality. More, perhaps, than anyone else of his time, he perceived the vast reservoir of cruelty that exists in the human heart and understood the ways people disguise its reality from themselves, taking instead a perverse delight in nourishing, justifying and praising it.
“In the Penal Colony” is an extraordinarily prescient story. If Kafka is our contemporary, and his work, as I believe, has much to tell us about our present moment, then this one short story is a notable example. It begins with the Officer remarking to the Traveller: “It’s a peculiar apparatus.” As we soon discover, he takes pride in the execution machine but wishes to appear an objective witness, suspecting rightly that the Traveller may not share his enthusiasm for it. The two characters have been brought together by an imminent execution which, out of politeness to the Commandant, the Traveller has agreed to observe. The condemned man, manacled to a soldier, is standing nearby with “an expression of such dog-like resignation that it looked as if one could set him free to roam around the slopes and would only have to whistle at the start of the execution for him to return.” This mingling of horror and sardonic humour is one of Kafka’s special notes.
The Traveller watches as the Officer prepares the machine for its gruesome task. He is obliged to listen as the Officer eagerly explains the mysteries of the machine, the achievements of the previous Commandant in designing it and the special features of some of its moving parts such as, for instance, the lump of cotton wool which at the appropriate moment is conveniently pressed into the victim’s mouth “to prevent him screaming and biting his tongue to pieces”.
The Traveller soon learns that this particular Condemned Man is to have the words “Honour Your Superiors” inscribed on his body. Along with decorative additions which ensure the torture will be slow and the spectacle educative for both victim and spectators, the procedure will take up to twelve hours until death occurs (although sometimes, we learn, it can take as few as six). The crime committed by the Condemned Man, the Officer explains, was that he fell asleep while guarding an officer’s room and objected when he was woken at 2.00 am. To the Traveller’s surprise, he has not been charged, let alone been given an opportunity to defend himself. When the Traveller protests at this lack of due process, the Officer informs him that, in the penal colony, he has been appointed judge because he helped the former Commandant “in all matters of punishment” and knows most about the apparatus:
“The basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a doubt… The captain came to me an hour ago. I wrote up his statement and right after that the sentence. Then I had the man chained up. It was all very simple. If I had first summoned the man and interrogated him, the result would have been confusion. He would have lied, and if I had been successful in refuting his lies, he would have replaced them with new lies, and so forth. But now I have him, and I won’t release him again. Now does that clarify everything? But time is passing. We should be starting the execution, and I haven’t finished explaining the apparatus yet.”
The Traveller reminds himself that in a penal colony, “special regulations were necessary” and contents himself with the tacit hope that the Commandant may, in future, bring in a new procedure. Reflecting later, he easily finds justifications for his inaction: “It’s always questionable to intervene decisively in strange circumstances,” he reminds himself, “for the purpose of his travelling was merely to observe and not to alter other people’s judicial systems in any way.”
Meanwhile the Officer hurries on with a detailed description of the wounds inflicted by the machine on the bodies of its victims. His ardour, Kafka makes clear, is sustained by a perverted belief in the morally elevating effects of the executions on the spectators and also on the condemned themselves. According to the Officer’s rationalisations, the victims are transformed by comprehending the reason for their death in the very moment it is carved into their flesh. In reality, the Officer is in thrall to the technical mastery represented by the machine itself, as shown by his loving descriptions of its elaborate mechanisms and complex operations:
“You see two sorts of needles in a multiple arrangement. Each long needle has a short one next to it. The long one inscribes, and the short one squirts water out to wash away the blood and keep the inscription always clear. The bloody water is then channeled here in small grooves and finally flows into these main gutters, and the outlet pipe takes it to the pit. The officer pointed with his finger to the exact path which the bloody water had to take.”
Here technology exerts its distinctive attraction in the age of the machine, namely the numbing of the moral sense and its replacement with considerations of efficiency.
In an unforgettable passage, Kafka has the Officer look back nostalgically to the executions of former times when the old Commandant was still in charge, before the new Commandant had allowed the machine to fall into a state of semi-disrepair:
“You should have seen the executions in earlier days! The entire valley was overflowing with people, even a day before the execution. They all came merely to watch… The whole society — and every high official had to attend — arranged itself around the machine. The machine was freshly cleaned and glowed… And then the execution began! No discordant note disturbed the work of the machine… It was impossible to grant all the requests people made to be allowed to watch from up close. The Commandant, in his wisdom, arranged that the children should be taken care of before all the rest… Often I crouched down there with two small children in my arms, on my right and left. How we all took in the expression of transfiguration on the martyred face! How we held our cheeks in the glow of this justice, finally attained and already passing away! What times we had, my friend!”
In Kafka’s story, the execution does not finally take place, as the Officer realises the Traveller will not support his efforts to persuade the Commandant to continue the use of the machine. Instead he takes the place of the Condemned Man, deciding to die in an act of self-sacrificial glory at the hand of the machine he worships.
Kafka was born in 1883, and in the century before his birth, military technology had permitted massacres of defenceless people as empires spread across every continent. The First World War brought these massacres back to Europe as millions of men were sent into the industrial killing grounds, inspired by a mixture of patriotic delusion, social pressure and legal compulsion. What was still to come was the belief that industrial violence should be deployed in a final settling of accounts with various designated enemies — national, social, racial, ideological. The higher ideals of the enlightenment, those “self-evident” truths of the equality of men and “their inalienable rights”, which Jefferson had referred to in his preamble to the Declaration of Independence, have always been tinged with blood. The border between those secular ideals and the rapacity of those in possession of superior power has always been permeable. It can be readily torn aside by nations and, of course, within nations.
Today in the digital age, quite as much as in Kafka’s time, the fascination with technology remains an immense reservoir of distraction and delusion. In military matters, for example, along with the weapons of mass destruction already possessed by many nations, we have in recent decades added precisely-targeted, remote-controlled drone weapons. Throughout America’s interminable “war on terror”, drones have been used to assassinate America’s enemies. Under Obama, these attacks were conducted nominally under congressional oversight, but in practice by military operatives with wide powers of discretion. In February, 2013, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein — then chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence responsible for Senate supervision of the drone programme — was quoted on a political blog, The Hill, on the question of Senate oversight of the programme:
“Right now it is very hard because it is regarded as a covert activity, so when you see something that is wrong and you ask to be able to address it, you are told no.” Drone attacks have frequently resulted in civilian casualties although this topic, like every other aspect of the programme, remains both secret and controversial. There is little doubt, however, that the numbers have run into the thousands.
A direct line can be drawn from George W. Bush’s attempt to set the world on fire after 9/11 to Donald Trump’s presidency. Brandishing declarations of danger in every direction, US governments, and allies like the UK, have undermined traditional western values. The resultant coarsening has been perhaps the war’s most striking and depressing legacy. During Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign, it was quite clear that, whoever won, the raw, irredentist emotions pent up within the Republican Party — emotions which Bush had fronted and promoted over the previous eight years — would be back in a more extreme form, probably sooner rather than later. QED.
Drone strikes continue in 2020. Apart from the killing of the Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad last January, there have also been strikes in Yemen and Somalia. Supporters of such strikes say they are an efficient way of killing terrorists, but there are problems with this line of argument. In the first place, there is little definitive proof that drones do kill terrorists. They kill people, and the activities and intentions of those people are inevitably unclear.
More accurately, these are cases of something more like state terrorism, which are guided by operatives sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away against individuals identified by local agents using uncertain criteria. The secrecy that surrounds the whole programme makes it impossible to trust any of the claims made for it. Even if you believe that a system authorising the remote assassination of non-state actors is justifiable in theory, would you also believe that the identification of targets meets sufficiently high standards of proof? Would you believe that concern for innocent bystanders is sufficiently taken into account? Would you believe that the consequences are serious in cases of negligence? Looking at the US record since 9/11, you would have to be remarkably credulous to believe any of that.
Drone strikes embody the seductions of technology in the application of prophylactic violence. They allow the populations of rich and powerful countries to presume that such attacks do not really constitute violence because they are relatively precise. Examined more closely, their vaunted precision is the advertising pitch. The real key to their deployment within the US’s permanent array of punitive weaponry is that such operations are remote in every sense of the word. They turn the act of killing into a technical speciality performed without anyone involved getting blood on their hands. Seen from the US mainland, swaddled in its vast indifference, the blood is invisible, the screams inaudible, the agony someone else’s, and too far away to matter much, if at all.
Yet drones are merely one aspect of a much deeper, broader shift which echoes Kafka’s warnings. Just as pertinent an example of what might be called technological metamorphosis — that is, the translation of ethical issues into matters of procedure — is the loss of any sense of mutual responsibility. This has not come about, as many believe, purely as a result of digital technology. But the processes that have led to a hyper-individualised consensus, in which large numbers of western citizens see social and political demands on them in purely transactional terms, were in motion well before the arrival of digital systems. Yet technical progress has accelerated these shifts in belief and feeling. In the aggregate, they have helped fragment our social worlds into a myriad of individual cells while paradoxically — if logically — handing immense power to governments and corporations to control and manipulate the apparently autonomous spaces we have fashioned for ourselves.
Nothing is more delusional, as it turns out, than this sense of autonomy, for in our contemporary world the nightmarish sensations described by Kafka in his uncannily perceptive works have taken up residence in our psyches. Naturally, our world isn’t a replica of the one Kafka describes but in the realm of the emotions, there are persistent echoes of the Kafkaesque. The pervasive, disorienting sense of being observed, controlled, directed and even threatened — perceptions at the core of Kafka’s novels — are today’s everyday experience. Just as in Kafka’s world, we are never quite certain who is observing and the precise nature of the threat we face, we can also never escape the knowledge that we are under observation and the fear that we may at any moment be subject to accusation. In this sense, ours is a world that preserves the soul of Kafka’s insights. Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, wrote an essay in praise of his compatriot just over thirty years ago. In it, he presents Kafka as the first interpreter of totalitarian political systems, even though he died before such systems came into being:
“Kafka made no prophecies. All he did was see what was ‘behind’. He did not know that his seeing was also a fore-seeing. He did not intend to unmask a social system. He shed light on the mechanisms he knew from private and microsocial human practice, not suspecting that later developments would put those mechanisms into action on the great stage of History.”
In Kafka’s famous, 100-page letter to his father which he wrote towards the end of his life and never sent, but gave to his mother who never passed it on, he expressed the detailed sense of maltreatment that emerges in works like The Castle and The Trial as distinctive features of modern society. The power of his work rests ultimately on the connection he establishes between the personal and the social, and particularly in the way he saw immense significance in what most people dismiss as simply dull and ordinary. Kundera asks: “How has Kafka managed to transform… grey, anti-poetical material into fascinating novels? The answer can be found in a letter he wrote to Milena” — that is, Milena Jesenká, one of the women with whom Kafka shared an intense correspondence.
“The office is not a stupid institution; it belongs more to the realm of the fantastic than of the stupid.” The sentence contains one of Kafka’s greatest secrets. He saw what no one else could see: not only the enormous importance of the bureaucratic phenomenon for man, for his condition and his future, but also (even more surprisingly) the poetic potential contained in the phantasmic nature of offices.
But it was not only in offices that Kafka saw this poetic potential. He saw it in the world too, with its technical obsessions, its mechanised, hallucinatory power — a power that it with us still.
