Kafka’s Cybernetics of Revolt
LETTER TO HIS FATHER (the “original” title, the one Max Brod baptized the text with after Kafka’s death, is Brief an den—the, not seinen, his—Vater) was written in 1919. Reading it almost a century later, what most jumps out at me from the opening salvos is an image, a micro-conceit. Explaining to his father that the problem isn’t simply that their relationship has lost its way but that, on top of this, the responsibility for this errancy is laid by his father entirely at his, Franz’s, feet, Kafka sardonically quips: “as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering-wheel, to make everything quite different” (als hätte ich etwa mit einer Steuerdrehung das Ganze anders einrichten können). This is not the only time Kafka invokes this figure. An undated one-page story titled “The Helmsman” (Der Steuermann) presents a dream-like scenario in which the narrator, “standing at the helm in the dark night,” is pushed aside by “a tall, dark man” and reduced to feebly and forlornly crying: “Am I not the helmsman?”—then, less certainly, “Am I the helmsman . . . ?”
What seems almost uncanny now is that Kafka’s deployment of a specific nautical-navigational syntax anticipates by several decades the one that Norbert Wiener would carry out when naming his new form, or mode, of systems thinking. The term cybernetics, Wiener explains to readers in his 1950 book Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, is derived from kubernetes, Greek for “steersman” or “governor”—the latter of which, by Wiener’s time, denotes not just the political position but also the inbuilt, self-regulatory device that allows steam engines to assess and respond to their own temperature-data, thus preventing breakdown through overheating. Beneath the banner of the term, Wiener elaborates a giant, almost universally applicable vision through which everything from economics to biology, psychology to media or law, can be both mapped and manipulated by being understood as an information or communication system—understood, that is, as a networked mechanism formed of and driven by a set of circuits, relays and, most importantly, feedback loops. Wiener’s vision, its implicit logic, became the core one of the age of information, not to mention digital surveillance, that emerged throughout the late twentieth century and has established itself so forcefully at the outset of the twenty-first. And Kafka, it seems, shared it. We’ve long known that his work anticipates the Nazi terror, Stalinist bureaucracy and corporate capitalism that came in its wake; but it is becoming increasingly clear that it also adumbrates, both in spirit and to the very letter, and even when he seems to be talking about something else entirely, the unsettling world of Google and the NSA in which we live today.
No other writer, even after Wiener’s coinage, let alone before it, has presented a more fundamentally cybernetic aesthetic than Kafka. Think of the hotel in Amerika, which functions (like Karl’s uncle’s desk with its moving panels and its “regulator” dial) as a giant information-relay device, with messenger boys carrying data held in back-up ledgers to and from back-room telephonists who harvest, transcribe, and despatch more data down their lines, while under-porters answer questions nonstop in the lobby. Or the labyrinthine secretariat of The Castle, in which one department forwards documents on to another while a “Control Authority” is set in place to iron out (supposedly) errors—a set-up that results in the message that K. originated being recited back to him. Or, of course, the gargantuan judicial infrastructure of The Trial, where letters, telegrams, phone calls and endless dossiers tail-chase each other in eternal circles. Letter to His Father is no less infused with this aesthetic than the novels are. An address to the father begins, in its very first sentence, by fielding an inquiry from the recipient as to why the sender has asserted a fear of the recipient—one feedback-loop embedding a second which, in turn, embeds a third. It draws to a close by envisioning an answer to the answer in which the letter’s addressee, now speaking back, summarizes (and counteracts) the sender’s complaints about himself—a similarly regressive circuitry—and signs off by hoping for a “correction that results from this rejoinder.” Halfway through, the entire paternal-filial relationship is rendered as an algorithmic action/reaction formula: A gives B a piece of advice; the advice is rather toxic, and requires of B a damage-repairing exercise should B accept it; B is not obliged to accept it; if he does, it should not cause his whole future world to tumble down upon him. “And yet,” Kafka concludes, “something of this kind does happen, but only for the very reason that A is you and B is myself.”
There’s the rub. Whereas Wiener’s feedback loops are corrective ones, Kafka’s, despite the ameliorating credo to which he half-heartedly pays lip service from time to time (and even then he can’t refrain, when claiming that his letter will make both son’s and father’s living easier, from adding “and our dying”), have quite the opposite effect. They are, we could say, “fuckuptive.” His father’s response or counter-move to any and every statement or proposition Kafka might put before him is negative, not only after the fact but even before it (“you have a dislike in advance of every one of my activities and particularly of the nature of my interest”)—so much so that Kafka internalizes the response pattern and sabotages his own projects and aspirations preemptively. A self-defeating logic installs itself at the heart of all his putative moves, not least that of leaving the whole loop behind by, for example, marrying (an act, he reasons, that might finally propel him out of his father’s orbit into “self-liberation and independence”): that would be akin to a prisoner escaping from prison and (since marriage reinstates the family structure) rebuilding the prison as a pleasure-seat for himself—an impossibility, since “if he escapes, he cannot do any rebuilding, and if he rebuilds, he cannot escape.” To put it another way: the circuitry or system-architecture here is configured in such a way as to render unworkable any operation that the user (Kafka) might actually want to use it to perform; it induces serial and ineluctable instances of system-failure—while itself (as a bigger, overarching system whose goal is precisely to induce such instances of failure) functioning perfectly.
This is, to say the least, a paradoxical situation—one whose nature Kafka understands all too well. He knows, and frequently restates, that both he and his father are caught up in larger networks, larger meshes. Even as he reproaches him, he acknowledges that “you are entirely blameless”; he speaks of “our helplessness, yours and mine”; and of how he and his sisters discuss the “terrible trial that is pending between us and you . . . a trial in which . . . you are a party too, just as weak and deluded as we are.” The choice of metaphor is hardly accidental. Kafka had already written The Trial when he penned this letter; he even quotes from it. The same fuckuptive logic pervades that novel, a sense of being held within “a great organization” whose own buildings are nonetheless dilapidated, whose own functionaries are corrupt and incompetent and whose administrative procedures, even when adhered to, are inherently flawed, ensuring that pleas get filed in the wrong place, or lost, or simply never read. “Yet that, too,” Advocate Huld informs Josef K., “was intentional.” Same in The Castle: K. is held in limbo by a set of glitches and miscalculations given rise to by the very protocol set up between Departments A and B (that algorithmic shorthand again) to move things forward, prevented from carrying out his work as a land surveyor by the very letter that commends him for the land-surveying work he is supposedly already undertaking. And that’s the point: the whole thing works because things don’t quite work. The task, for both K.s, is not to navigate the alarmingly well-calibrated nodes and junctures of a streamlined mechanism, but rather to negotiate a set of errors, incompatibilities.
So is it for the third K., author-protagonist of Letter. Right at the outset, after skimming over a typical instance of counterproductive circularity (the general truth of my fear of you makes it impossible for me to utter any particular truth-statement about it), Kafka flags up incompatibilities between, first, thinking and speaking, then, speaking and writing. As versions of a larger system, language, these modes should be capable of running together, of passing content between one another (thus allowing him to articulate and set down his thoughts)—yet they can’t. It’s tempting for me, as a writer who believes in a kind of primacy of writing, writing about another writer with compatible beliefs, to claim that, for Kafka, the act of writing serves as a fortress against the overwhelming oppressiveness of social or familial life. And, certainly, Kafka is tempted to make this claim too: he notes down some of his father’s meanest utterances, to store as later weaponry, and even, when alluding to his own books, states that “in writing and what is connected with it I have made some attempts at independence, attempts at escape.” But he immediately acknowledges that he has done so only “with the very smallest of success; they will scarcely lead any further.” Ultimately, Kafka is too clever for a naive belief that writing furnishes some heroic, self-affirming path to overcoming adversity. Writing, he admits to his father from the get-go, is no less a broken vehicle for conveying the message he is charged with. It, too, is rendered dysfunctional—partly by the lethal feedbacks and incompatibilities alluded to already, but, above and beyond these, by the fact that “[anyway] the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.” Rather than Sache (which he’ll use one paragraph later), he chooses the word Stoff for “subject” here (weil die Größe des Stoffs über mein Gedächtnis und meinen Verstand weit hinausgeht): “stuff ”—or, more viscerally, matter, inner substance. What the language-or communication-system, glitch-ridden though it may be in the first place, ultimately runs aground on isn’t so much internal error as the sandbank of a vast material excess. If memory and power of reasoning were vessels, this gross stuff would spill and ooze from them; if they were membranes, it would rupture them, disgorge itself; it would then swell yet further, filling the surrounding space, and stay there, long outliving (to return to Kafka’s own Trial-quote) its now-defunct carriers—dark, disgusting and, above all, shameful.
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GILLES DELEUZE and Félix Guattari, in their brilliant short book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, decry the tendency of critics to treat guilt as the theological mainstay of their Kafka readings—that is, to see guilt as the abstract (and absolute) manifestation of a conventionally Judeo-Christian framework within which the works take place. Which doesn’t mean guilt isn’t vital to the works. To understand the role it plays, though, we should—once again—turn to the original. The German word for “guilt” is Schuld, which also means “debt.” The double-sense of the term is far from lost on Chief Financial Officer Josef K., who treats his trial as a reckoning or book-balancing exercise—“no more than a business deal such as he had often concluded to the advantage of the Bank.” Nor is it lost on Letter’s narrator, who has conducted his entire life “like a business man”—albeit one “who lives . . . without keeping any proper books . . . He makes a few small profits, which as a consequence of their rarity he keeps on pampering and exaggerating in his imagination, and for the rest only daily losses. Everything is entered, but never balanced.” When the time comes for “drawing a balance,” the audit concludes that “it is as though there had never been even the smallest profit, everything one single great liability [Schuld].”
Kafka’s relation to his father is essentially an economic one, since, for him, economics form the grid onto which all other fields, not least that of identity itself, are plotted. “I have inherited a great deal from you and taken much too good care of my inheritance,” he muses wrily when pondering his father’s severity: one’s “character” is no more than an economic measure; algorithmically, it could be rendered as inherited sum x multiplied (or divided) by capital-management skills y. His father has “magnificent commercial talents”; he was, through Kafka’s childhood, “tied to the [family] business,” so much so that “the business and you became one for me.” Kafka, by contrast, shows no economic savvy; he has “never taken any interest in the business.” Where his father has worked hard to accumulate wealth, the non-profit-generating Kafka, who recognizes “that it would have been possible for me really to enjoy the fruits of your great and successful work, that I could have turned them to account and continued to work with them,” has been able to “enjoy what you gave, but only in humiliation, weariness, weakness, and with a sense of guilt [Schuldbewußtsein]. That was why I could be grateful to you for everything only as a beggar is.” The son whose “valuation of myself was much more dependent on you than on anything else” bears his very existence “as an undeserved gift from you.” As the anthropologist Marcel Mauss points out, a gift obliges its receiver, places him in debt. This is the debt that Kafka, tasked with “ingratitude,” feels, at all turns and all times, as guilt. “I was penetrated by a sense of guilt”; “the child’s exclusive sense of guilt”; “a boundless sense of guilt”; “fear and a sense of guilt”—the word crops up so many times I gave up trying to count it. The translators try to disperse it, modifying it into “shame” or “blame”; at one point they supply the sequence: “here again what accumulated was only a huge sense of guilt. On every side I was to blame. I was in debt to you.” But where they vary, Kafka repeats—and where they separate “blame” and “debt” out into two closing sentences, Kafka needs only one because his thinking brooks no separation: “Überdies sammelte sich . . . wieder nur eine großes Schuldbewußtein an. Von allen Seiten her kam ich in Deine Schuld.”
“Economics” is derived from the Greek oikos, which means “home” or “hearth”—the idea being that the economic realm allows an individual, a (male) head-of-household, to expand the dominion of his home-management beyond the bounds of his immediate property, thus enlarging the area over which he might exert control. Whether knowingly or not, Letter seems to follow this etymology with utter precision. Kafka’s father lords it over his household; possessed of “a will to life, business, and conquest,” he extends his domain out into the world through his commercial ventures (notice the slippage, as with the case of Irma for example, between children and employees: both are treated the same, since both form part of the same credit-and-debt empire). If man, at base, is homo economicus, if establishing and growing one’s home and its domain is the “very great and very honourable” trajectory one’s life should follow, “the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all,” then Kafka’s father’s life has followed that trajectory without deviation: not coming from wealth himself, he got to found and multiply his oikos. The children, by contrast, being born into his comfort, were denied that plot-line: “we were too well off . . . What you had to fight for we received from your hand.” What this means territorially is that there is no unoccupied space left for them to either found in or multiply into. “Sometimes,” writes Kafka, “I imagine the map of the world spread out flat and you stretched out diagonally across it. And what I feel then is that only those territories come into question for my life that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. And, in keeping with the conception that I have of your magnitude, these are not many and not very comforting territories . . . ”
There is no question, here, of sharing markets: for Kafka, economics is a zero-sum game. Were the son to marry and found his own hearth (and Kafka is crystal clear that “the fundamental idea of both attempts at marriage was . . . to set up house, to become independent”), this would diminish the father’s in direct proportion, oust him from his territory; even a meek announcement by the former of a half-intent to do so damages the latter’s “sense of self-importance,” spurring him to plan his emigration. Self-sufficiency, “breaking away from home,” was “not what you wanted at all, that you termed ingratitude, extravagance, disobedience, treachery, madness.” Ottla’s “escapade,” her mini-breakout (she leaves the household and attempts to set up as a farm manager), causes the father blind, impotent fury; and besides, it is—predictably—short-lived, bankrupting itself quickly.
Kafka himself, for reasons we’ve already understood, doesn’t even carry through his own mooted break-out efforts. Faced with his father’s near-global monopoly, he does nonetheless come up with an economic strategy—one that could best be characterized by the term withholding. In another passage that deploys a bookkeeping and liability analogy, he describes his childhood sense of fraudulence—or, more precisely, of defrauding both his teachers and the world in general by advancing from grade to grade despite lacking any worth or merit: “Lessons,” he writes, “and not only lessons but everything round about me, at that decisive age, interested me pretty much as a defaulting bank clerk, still holding his job and trembling at the thought of discovery, is interested in the small current business of the bank, which he still has to deal with as a clerk.” It’s a very telling conceit: the embezzling clerk does, after all, construct a kind of shadow economic territory of his own—not outside or independent of the bank for which he works, but rather in a negative or hidden zone within this; he amasses a perverse profit from the guilty debit of the sum withheld. This is Kafka’s lot: any life capital he has amassed is precisely equivalent to that sum. If he has amassed knowledge, it is (he states, summarizing his father’s argument) because “I have always dodged you and hidden from you, in my room, among my books.” If he has amassed or clawed back any breathing space at all, it is because “I . . . cringed away from you, hid from you . . . ” This motif—of furtive and systematic withholding, of “secretion”—crops up time and again.
Cringed. It’s what insects do when you poke them: they withdraw, with a repulsive quiver, to the shadows. Kafka’s withholding may form part of an elaborate psycho-economic strategy; but it takes place at a simple bodily level too. Here the base material side of things comes into play again: that gross stuff or stuffing, shamefully protruding. Throughout Letter, Kafka presents his own body as (depending on how you count it) both guilty excess and withheld debit. As an adolescent, he claims, “I shot up, tall and lanky, without knowing what to do with my lankiness.” Corporeality is something that is awkward, de trop, and cries out for a hiding place. This impulse is mirrored in the bathing-hut anecdote: here, although the child’s frame as he changes next to his strong-bodied father is small rather than large (“skinny, weakly, slight . . . a miserable specimen”), the sense of shame its mere physical presence gives rise to is the same: “What made me feel best was when you sometimes undressed first and I was able to stay behind in the hut alone and put off the disgrace of showing myself in public until at length you came to see what I was doing and drove me out of the hut.” This scene is itself doubled in the pavlatche episode, in which Kafka the small child whimpering in his bed is dragged out by his father to the apartment building’s semi-public courtyard-balcony (pavlatche), which gives rise to a lifelong (and, for a Prague Jew, ominously prescient) terror that some “huge man” or “ultimate authority” will come and pull him from his hiding place once more.
The tendency of Kafka in these scenes—the urge to stash, “embezzle” his own body from the public realm, dominion of his father—is core to his entire formation; and the prominence, or central role, allotted to his body here provides a material, corporeal base or underpinning to all the other scenes and aspects of his withholding. When “I rushed away from you,” it was “in order to lie down in my room;” “I lazed away more time on the sofa than you in all your life.” The image, cumulatively painted by these lines, is a quite physical one: a body on a sofa, sloth-like, idle, unproductive. And it will, of course, be familiar to any Kafka reader, since it duplicates his most famous creation: insectoid Gregor Samsa laid up wriggling on his back, “curtaining and confining” himself in his room, shamefully failing to emerge, go out to work and earn some money for his family. “But” (you might say) “this is different, since, while Gregor just degenerates, the sofa-dwelling Kafka here is reading books, educating himself, learning how to write.” Yet Kafka is himself at pains to disabuse his father of his earlier illusion that his son’s withdrawal-enclave is a “productive” one, a space of profitable intellectual endeavor. “If you had any real idea,” he tells him, of how “minute” the “total achievement in work done” at home, as at the office, was, “then you would be aghast;” the “total sum” of wisdom he has acquired over the years “is extremely pitiable in comparison with the expenditure of time and money.” The intellectual zone, it seems, zone of the writer, far from being a positive alternative to that of normal labor and production, is a wasteful and profligate space of negative equity, no more auspicious or autonomous than Gregor’s pitiable kingdom. A degenerative logic binds the act of writing to the shameful body, wiring both into the same auto-consumptive feedback loop: Kafka’s surprise at having good digestion causes him to lose it, and the hypochondria that follows gives rise to TB, which is exacerbated by the damp conditions of the apartment he hires in the Schönbornpalais “which, however, I needed only because I believed I needed it for my writing, so even that comes under the same heading.”
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THAT DIGESTIVE PROBLEMS open Kafka’s illness-floodgates seems significant. Letter is full of eating, mouths being fed. At table, the father “ate everything fast, hot and in big mouthfuls,” cracking bones with his teeth, telling his children to “Eat first, talk afterwards . . . Faster, faster, faster.” As a child, Kafka “was so unsure of everything that in fact I possessed only what I actually had in my hands or in my mouth or what was at least on the way there.” Later, when studying law, he feels he is “living, in an intellectual sense, on sawdust, which had, moreover, already been chewed for me in thousands of other people’s mouths,” adding that this is, after all, “to my taste.” Orality is everywhere, a general condition—so much so that its literal stage, the dining table, is like a parliament or (to use Wiener’s term again) governor’s mansion from which an entire territory is administered, the seat where power is consolidated and, perhaps, might also be contested. Noting that his father doesn’t obey his own table rules, Kafka has a vision of the world divided into three parts: “one in which I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me and which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with; then a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of orders and with annoyance about their not being obeyed; and finally a third world where everybody else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey.” Kafka’s political options are thus threefold: either to obey the orders, which is disgraceful “for they applied, after all, only to me”; or to defy them, which is disgraceful too (how dare he?); or to fail to obey through lack of strength and skill and appetite—which is, if anything, still more disgraceful.
These oral battlefields, then, these set-tos of orality, produce no overthrow of power, no outbreaks of what Kafka elsewhere in Letter dismissively calls “violence and revolution.” Rather, they perpetuate disgrace. Not revolution but revolt. They do so at the most visceral level. The father constantly voices his disgust, denounces the food as “uneatable,” calls it “this swill,” claims that “ ‘that brute’ (the cook) had ruined it,” admonishes the children not to make a mess on the floor even as the floor beneath his seat amasses more food scraps than any other spot. This language of disgust extends to other contexts: Irma, placed in the father’s care and employ, is decried by him as “a damned mess to clear up;” Kafka’s short-lived interest in Judaism “ ‘nauseated’ you” (Kafka hammers this term home four lines later with the quasi-repetition “nausea”). From a cybernetic perspective, could nausea—vomiting or reflux—be viewed as a corrective? An emetic, certainly. As Letter draws on, an emetic tendency emerges and grows larger and more urgent, a sense on the part of the father that his oikos needs to be protected from or to reject impurities, infection, “filth.” Advising his son on the sexual disease-preventing benefits of prophylactics as they walk together on the Josefsplatz (“near where the Länderbank is today”), the father wants “to see to it that physically [körperlich] speaking I [the son] should not bring any of the filth home with me . . . you were only protecting yourself, your own household.” The upshot of this exchange is that the father, in remaining “a pure man, exalted above these things,” with “almost no smudge of earthly filth on you at all,” ends up “pushing me, just as though I were pre-destined to it, down into this filth . . . so if the world consisted only of me and you, a notion I was much inclined to have, then this purity of the world came to an end with you and, by virtue of your advice, the filth began with me.”
It’s an astonishing passage, an astonishing exchange—no less so for taking place, as Kafka deliberately points out, next to what both father and son can now recognize as an economic signifier: a spot that would, quite literally, become a bank. Kafka may have earlier expressed a wish, if not “to fly right into the middle of the sun” when founding his own oikos, at least “to crawl into a clean little spot on the earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.” Yet, as he discovers, his destiny is not to find a clean spot but rather to be pushed down into the filthiest, most lowly earth-lair (or burrow) of all. From here on, it’s all worms, and vermin, parasites “which not only sting but, at the same time, suck the blood, too, to sustain their own life.” For “vermin,” Kafka uses Ungeziefer, the same word he’ll use for Gregor lying beneath dirt-streaked walls amidst “balls of dust and filth,” with “fluff and hair and remnants of food . . . on his back and along his sides.” Like Gregor, or like K. running his office or “dirty household” from the squalor of a squatted classroom, Kafka will found his oikos, set up shop, in the filth. It will be a shadow-hearth, a default-or defaulting shop—but it will operate. “Unfit,” as he has his father tell him in Letter’s most vicious feedback-instance, its final, ventriloquized riposte, “for life,” he will nonetheless, perversely, find a way “to settle down in it comfortably.”
And central to that finding, to that operation, to that perverse comfort, will be the practice and act of writing: shameful, negative, degenerate, insect-like—as witness this very letter, in which he reenacts the very parasitism, the bad economic practice, of which he is guilty by accusing his father of it (“you,” Kafka has his father “answer” him, “prove that I have deprived you of all your fitness for life and put it into my pockets” where in fact “you calmly lie down and let yourself be hauled along through life, physically and mentally, by me”). If marrying presents the irresolvable conundrum of the escaping prisoner rebuilding his own prison, writing is no more effective a “leave-taking” from his father’s dominion, since the former merely reproduces the latter, in and as writing: “My writing,” he confesses, “was all about you.” In writing, Kafka is “reminiscent of the worm that, as a foot tramples on the tail end of it, breaks loose with its top end and drags itself aside.” All boys, all sons, have done that to a worm at some point in their lives. What does the worm do next? It burrows down into the earth and sets up its diminished store there once again. Letter is a mise-en-scène of that regressive, quivering movement or moment of burrow-formation, and, as such, catastrophically fuckuptive though it may be, enacts the primal scene and very possibility of a literary body that (with the exception perhaps only of Joyce’s) would turn out to be the most extraordinary—and, ultra-paradoxically, extraordinarily successful—of the twentieth century.
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IN METAMORPHOSIS, it’s not just crumbs and scraps that lie round Gregor’s room and stick to his back; it’s whole meals too, passed through him in unchanged condition. As his sister points out, “The food came out again just as it went in”—undigested. In one vital aspect, Letter is like that food: Kafka prepared it, and delivered it to his mother, who was supposed to play post-lady and forward it to his father. But this never happened; instead, it found its way, unread, to Max Brod, and so on to us. Thus it, too, is, in a way, withheld; rather than being digested by its addressee, its contents processed, broken down, it remains lying around, a shameful object, Stoff unabsorbed by the cybernetic (or enzymatic) architecture of the postal system, comprehension, time. Even a hundred years on—pungent, revolting, and exquisite—it repeats on us.
2015