From Walter Benjamin, with Illumination
In the chapter titled ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’ within Walter Benjamin’s book Illuminations, the author rightly argues that Franz Kafka experienced at an individual level what society was going to experience en masse shortly. What exactly this experience or constellation of experiences are, is not elucidated by Benjamin. But he tells us that this experience is found in the impossibly tedious encounter of everyday reality from the standpoint of modern physics, where every flow of air, pressure of touch, and weight of object must be accounted for in precision. They are also found in modern warfare where thousands are killed with efficiency every day. They are found in the feelings of dealing with immense rational bureaucracies managing our world. These experience(s) are probably the ones that are colloquially called ‘Kafkaesque’. Benjamin says, “The experiences which correspond to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become accessible to the masses until they are being done away with”(Benjamin 1969: 143). I am not sure if such time has come when masses, in general, are indiscriminately being done away with, but some nuanced experiences of Kafka’s protagonists have certainly become more general.
In this essay, I will discuss how Kafka’s works throw light on what I strongly believe is one such general experience of people in the modern world where government and bureaucracy have become unavoidable forces. This experience is an eerie combination of anger, frustration and helplessness. Or rather, it’s an experience where one moves to and fro between the feelings of anger, frustration, and helplessness continuously with no end in sight. The modern world places unjust restrictions on our being or fails to keep its promises based on which we have built our lives. This causes anger. Yet there is no fitting entity to project this anger towards. Nobody seems to be at fault. Otherwise, the entity at fault seems too immense to mentally grasp and therefore be angry at. With no one good enough to point fingers at, there is no one good enough to seek restitution from. We are in pain, but there is no one we can shout at, no one we can beat up, no one we can force to give us what we want. There seems to be nothing we can do. A sense of frustration seeps in. Some of us feel that we might be at fault. Some of us search for and find scapegoats. Regardless, it doesn’t work out. The pain doesn’t numb, nor does it go away. We take refuge in docility and conformity. We move into the territory of hopelessness, only to be angered by another round of pain and once again feeling frustrated by our inability to act effectively.
While perfection is an impossibility in the field of caging experiences and feelings into the boxes of language, the following paragraphs, dotted with the tales of Kafka and those of mundane experiences of the modern world, will hopefully provide a rough understanding of this experience. Some of Walter Benjamin’s words are also illuminating in this respect. In the chapter titled ‘Kafka’ in ‘Illuminations’, Walter Benjamin tells us about the fathers in Kafka’s works who seem to be angry at their sons’ existence. They force their sons to act in particular ways and they also rage at and punish their sons for acting in those ways. They accuse their sons of an ‘original sin’, which is only the ‘complaint unceasingly made by man that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin’. Benjamin asks, ‘But who is accused of this inherited sin- the sin of having produced an heir- if not the father by the son?’ (Benjamin 1969: 114) The modern human finds herself in a similar condition quite often. We are both the father and the son. We rage at things we are supposed to love, things we created. We are also victims of rage and anger by father-like entities which are supposed to love us and take care of us. We face injustice and accuse an amorphous other of being unjust while feeling that it is only ourselves who are to blame. While being victims of an original sin we go on committing it.
From Kafka, with Nausea
Josef K. in ‘The Trial’ faces a debilitating event in the morning after ringing his breakfast bell. A few officers from the court invade his flat to let him know that he is under arrest for an unknown offence. Immediately, his freedom is constricted, his daily routine is disturbed, he is humiliated in front of his acquaintances, and he is put under surveillance. As the story unfolds, we see that the trial affects each corner of his life. It becomes impossible for him to continue his professional work as before, maintain his relations, or even keep his general mental peace. The event is a harsh blow to the otherwise seemingly comfortable life of the protagonist, and it seems to have come from nowhere. K for a moment wonders if the whole affair is only a joke (Kafka 2009, The Trial).
This, I think, is a quintessential modern experience. Our lives go on comfortably, under the auspicious blessings of modern amenities, until under a rude shock everything is broken. That this can be best understood through a rather profane discussion is unfortunate. We all are very used to and very happy with modern plumbing infrastructure. We wake up every morning and the kitchen and the washroom with faucets of eternal water flows are our prime destinations. Some of us occasionally wonder how such an immense system of pipes, pumps and water reservoirs, a large number of trained people, intricate scientific laws and science-based machinery must work in tandem to make this water flow, but there is no reason to worry about it. That is, until one day something we are probably all familiar with happens. The water, for an unknown reason, stops flowing from the faucets! We can’t brush, we can’t bath, we can’t go to our workplaces, we can’t start our days. We scramble for stored water in our homes, we have to beg from neighbours we hate. Confusion and chaos reign supreme. Just like K’s life was turned upside down one random morning, our lives halt suddenly every time the modern amenities we depend on refuse to carry out their orders. When the metro or bus doesn’t arrive, when the electricity or internet refuses to come back, or when the plumbing fails, we realize that while we individually never decided to be so, we have become completely dependent on powerful alien forces, forces similar to the judiciary in ‘The Trial’. These forces can obstruct our private lives and routines any time they want with terrible rudeness and cause immense damage.
But interruptions to routine have been a part of human lives throughout history. Fires, floods, deaths and wars have always rudely interrupted lives. The speciality of modern rude interruptions lies in a different aspect- that there is no one to blame. The officials who came to arrest K informed him that they didn’t know what the case against him was. They don’t know what will happen next. They don’t know when the court has summoned him. There are meagre officers of a low grade. They are merely following orders. K too sees them as lowly. One almost feels bad for them. A group of men have invaded another man’s room and have abused him. But no one is at fault. Everyone is only dutifully following their orders. Isn’t ‘Sorry but there is an order from above’ one of the primary excuses for treachery in our modern world? Orders from above close busy roads. Orders from above bulldoze people’s homes every day. Orders from above cut trees and clear forests regularly. The tree cutter, the bulldozer operator, the lowly police official- how can one blame them? They are forced to do horrible things. They will lose their jobs if they don’t follow orders. We don’t want that, do we? My bathroom plumbing might not work because the plumbers are on strike. Well, more power to them! Public transportation might be defunct because there has been an accident somewhere. How selfish to think of my little problem of missing an office when someone might be injured or dead! Electricity might be off due to a mild storm. Who could have seen that coming?
Kafka’s characters repeatedly face this predicament. K in the Castle is led astray and into his home instead of the castle by the messenger Barnabas, but only because of a silly misunderstanding. He learns that his summon to be a land surveyor in the village is a result of slight bureaucratic mismanagement, although everyone was working in good faith. The villagers annoy him constantly by trying to overhear him, but only because they are innocent childlike creatures who find him interesting. His condition is dire, but he finds no one to blame for it (Kafka 2009, The Castle). And the anger stays within. This is the anger of a man in a hurry stuck in traffic for hours. The simmering anger finds no rational excuse to come out. The only smart thing to do is to sit quietly and wait. While waiting, the mind wanders.
Is there no one to blame? What has caused this traffic? What has forced me to take a car instead of the metro? What made me dependent on modern plumbing? Who is providing these orders from above? What is this ‘above’? There indeed are answers. There are too many answers, all rolling into and mixing. As a result, there are no clear answers. The traffic is caused because there are too many cars and too few roads. Road building is the government’s job. But to build roads it needs taxes, and I don’t want to pay taxes. On the other hand, buying a car was my decision. Maybe a decision supported by the marketing campaigns of car companies. But without advertising campaigns, cars won’t sell and if cars don’t sell my friend who works in a car factory will lose his job. Public transport maybe? Only buses instead of cars. But buses still run. I don’t take them because they are crowded and sweaty. Population density might be the problem. But forcible sterilization is countered by human rights claims. God. Almighty God is the problem. He is to blame. But alas! God is dead and we killed him.
Kafka’s stories help us understand these vain attempts to find the cause of our suffering. In The Trial, the power which causes K’s trouble is the judiciary. The order giving ‘above’ at first sight seems to be clear. Yet, as K learns in time, the judiciary is an infinite entity both in width and depth. It has offices in the alleyways of random slums. Its officials administer justice in the forgotten rooms of his office. Nobody knows who the head of the judiciary is. Nobody knows who is and who isn’t a judicial officer. The laws and procedures are hidden from the public yet they can see them in action (Kafka 2009, The Trial). The Trial’s judiciary, like the many social structures and institutions which exercise power over us, is therefore an immense entity shrouded in mystery- empirical, yet ungraspable. For example, we know our endless desire for consumer goods is partly driven by corporations selling those goods. They work through billboards, television, radio, mobile phones, regular conversations, and endless other things. The functioning of these large corporations is opaque. We know they have strong connections with our governments, our banks and our leaders. Aren’t we as people desiring those goods and vouching for their merits working for these corporations too? How many people do they employ? We soon realize that like Kafka’s judiciary, the modern corporate pushing consumerism is also an enigma. In ‘The Castle’ too, K fails to reach inside the castle. No one knows what goes on inside the castle. The castle rules with an iron fist however through officials like Klamm and Sordini who themselves are hardly ever seen. The castle with its mysterious officials is almost a mythical entity which is present everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Representatives of the castle, like Klamm, are only visible through a keyhole, and even then his sight is hard to bear. Sordini never comes down to the village. All communication happens through files and letters and even the village mayor has never met him (Kafka 2009, The Castle).
Isn’t this the case with us and the powers that impinge on us in our modern world too? Let’s take the case of modern digital technology which affects all aspects of our lives. The makers and controllers of the technology we use, say the people who decide how the user interface of our phone looks, are immeasurably distant from us. We can only tell them what we like through emails, and online reviews if they want to consider our views at all. As and when they wish, the interface of my phone changes. I might have slowly become used to and gotten comfortable with certain features, certain apps, and certain systems. But the bosses think it is not mining enough attention, so all of it changes one morning as my phone gets updated. Who do I shout at even in my dreams when the entity responsible are giant corporations who are saying they did what they did to improve my digital experience? When the powers above us are so distant, it is hard to direct anger against them. The powers responsible might also be abstract and amorphous, like the idea of family or nation. A nuanced modern understanding tells me that it is not this or that community but the rising sense of nationalism among the general public that has reduced the scope of free speech. How am I to be angry at nationalism? Our diagnosis regarding our suffering might also make us point at entities so immensely powerful and omnipresent, that the idea of being angry at them might seem absurd. The growing corpus of social scientific knowledge teaches us how gendered everything is, how power hides behind every discourse, and how all actions are only performances. Who do I blame for the comment which is misogynistic when deconstructed and spewed by my female friend under the spell of patriarchal discourses who might only be performing her version of femininity by demeaning women in general2?
The result of this is profound frustration. This is the frustration of K in ‘The Castle’ when he can’t meet Klamm despite putting in all possible efforts (Kafka 2009, The Castle). This is the frustration of K in ‘The Trial’ when he fails to learn even after doing all he could what he is accused of or what the judicial procedure is (Kafka 2009, The Trial). This frustration is felt when the entity which we think is responsible for our misery is too distant, vast, complex and totalising for us to properly conceptualize it. As a result, we are unable to blame it for our condition, direct our anger towards it, and we can’t even think of demanding restitution from it. The rise of modern mass bureaucracies, all-invading governments, all-seeing surveillance states, giant corporations with immense control over what we consume and also what we desire and has led to the creation of these entities. There has also been the advancement of knowledge regarding the forces that have oppressed us throughout history. As a result the grandeur of the treacherous social forces, be it kinship, patriarchy, racism, wealth inequality, etc. has become clearer to us. The adventures to space have made humans realize how the earth is only a small dot in the infinity of space. The adventures into knowledge of their social worlds have made humans realize how within that planet, they are insects constantly being crushed by power, only to be revived again and again to work for power. On the other hand, blaming God for our suffering is becoming harder as our faith in him reduces. Even those for whom it is intact agree that God works through humans and therefore through man-made horrific bureaucracies. In any case, God’s ways themselves are mysterious and beyond human understanding.
Under such circumstances, striving towards resistance as communities become hard. In the village under the castle, everyone has an almost religious reverence for the castle and its officials. If God works through mysterious bureaucracies which have God-like power, aren’t the bureaucracies divine too? The people in the village largely submit to the despotism of the castle officials willingly. K tried to showcase the mindlessness of the situation to the villagers but failed. Nobody dreams of fighting the castle (Kafka 2009, The Castle). Similarly in ‘The Trial’, the opaqueness of the judiciary seems to only add to its reverence. Nobody dares to disrespect it and the surety of its endless powers is ingrained in people’s minds. In both cases, it is not the castle or the judicial officials but the common people whose actions in reverence of power manifest power in its immensity. The people seem to have internalized their oppression and organizing them for resistance seems extremely difficult (Kafka 2009, The Trial). K’s attempts are as vain as trying to convince the urban dwellers of our modern world to abandon the internet en masse. We all know our privacy is being violated through the internet, it is being used to farm our attention for money, and we know it’s addictive and has negative health impacts. But we depend on the internet, we are too used to its benefits, we love it and we would never want to give it up. Collective resistance also becomes difficult due to this factor of dependence. The oppressive forces are often patronizing. The court sets dates of trial as per K’s convenience. The officials of the Castle and the Court seem polite in written communication. The castle bears K’s costs in the beginning. It organizes festivals for the villagers (Kafka 2009, The Trial) (Kafka 2009, The Castle). People become dependent on this patronage. It adds to the respectability of oppression, making resistance largely impossible.
This difficulty of even envisioning a successful resistance leads one to hopelessness. We know we are oppressed but we can’t understand the entities oppressing us and can’t grasp the methods of oppression. The scant understanding, we have makes us feel all attempts to fight back are worthless. Some people around us seem to be happy with the oppression, while others deepen our realization of how hopeless resistance is. Kafka shows us what happens next. K in The Trial thinks he can escape the court by ignoring it at first, but soon he is engulfed by matters of the Trial completely. Life as usual becomes impossible. Almost all energy goes to finding ways to defend oneself in court. Finally, K decides to embark on the impossibly mammoth task of writing about his entire life in detail, explaining the motive behind every significant action, thereby trying to prove his innocence (Kafka 2009, The Trial). K in the Castle also meets a similar fate. Although he tries to challenge the authority of the Castle in the beginning, in time he becomes obsessed with it. All his energies are wasted in trying to get a meeting with the Castle officer Klamm and trying to prove that he has indeed been officially summoned as a land surveyor by the castle. In this relentless pursuit of the castle’s affairs and officers, he neglects his lover and loses her (Kafka 2009, The Castle). Hopelessness leads us to docility. We allow ourselves to be chained by the powers causing our suffering. Faced with the immense power of the authority, like K, we are forced to submit and conform. How many dreams of a revolution completely uproot the modern state in our times? Which non-delusional person believes she can bring a completely egalitarian world into existence? Even the hopes of reversing environmental degradation have been lost. The consensus seems to be that suffering will remain. The world might become relatively better or worse depending on an innumerable number of factors but suffering will persist in some form or another. All else are meaningless utopias which can never be achieved.
But the problem of undirected anger remains. Frustration and hopelessness don’t necessarily kill it. In ‘The Castle’, K hits Jeremias, one of his assistants for no clear reason (Kafka 2009, The Castle). In ‘The Trial’, K hits another accused man waiting in the court premises for no reason (Kafka 2009, The Trial). In both instances, the simmering anger built while dealing with the oppressive bureaucracy comes out as further oppression of someone lower in the hierarchy. This is a reflection of our world where we are constantly searching for and creating scapegoats- religious and racial minorities, immigrants, transpersons, the homeless, the list goes on. Unable to be angry at our real oppressors, we direct our rage at whoever we find conveniently placed to receive it. We become the father in Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of the father punishing his son for existing while he brought him into existence. Sometimes we make up good reasons as to why we hurt innocent scapegoats. Again, nobody is at fault. The mob killed a man because the politicians directed them, the media incited them, the police enabled them, they are poor and of course, many of them have childhood traumas.
Kafka points towards one other way in which this anger finds expression. We find its hints in the final two lines of The Trial. As two men connected to the judiciary murder K, he says ‘Like a dog!’. Kafka says, ‘It seemed as if his shame would live on after him’ (Kafka 2009, The Trial). K is ashamed of himself when he realizes that despite all his efforts he is being killed like a dog. He is ashamed of his failure. His sense of being wrong, his anger, his passion with which he delivers the speech in the courtroom, and then his obsession to understand the judicial system and his feverish attempts to defend himself have all ricocheted back to haunt him with shame. With the realization that all his attempts have been futile, his anger, frustration and hopelessness have forced him to demean himself, to see himself as a lesser being. I think this subtle but profound tragedy occurs with many of us beings of the modern world too. Realizing that it is most probably beyond our capabilities to resist capitalism, state oppression, or the many treacherous bureaucracies, we contend ourselves with imagining ourselves as consumerist, individualistic and dependent upon state and corporate-provided facilities. We tell ourselves that we can’t possibly live without our oppression and in the process demean ourselves. Since we can’t become humans, why not live as insects after all?
Conclusion
Kafka indeed felt what society at large would feel in the subsequent centuries (Benjamin 1969, Pg- 143). His experiences, finding expression through his characters help us analyze our predicaments as a society. Reading Kafka therefore becomes important in our times. I have heard complaints about the disorienting and nauseating feelings that his texts sometimes produce in his readers. While the complaints might be justified, I think it is necessary to endure those feelings to realize how our real world is also disorienting and nauseating. With time, we have learnt to ignore these effects of our modern world. That, however, doesn’t solve the problem. The anger simmers within, and with it does the frustration and hopelessness. Kafka of course is no prophet and he doesn’t show us any way to emancipation. He helps us recognize our suffering, which might regardless be a step in the right direction.
Notes
- Considering the ongoing wars, the recent pandemic possibly caused by humans, the ongoing environmental degradation, etc. it seems that at least some of the masses are certainly being done away with. We can’t however be sure if that is the case for all.
- Here I am thinking of popular comments like those which say that male friendships or friends are qualitatively better than female friendships or friends.
References:
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Trans. by Harry John. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, Schocken Books. New York.
Kafka, Franz. 2009. The Trial. Oxford World’s ClassicsTrans. By Mike Mitchell. Oxford University Press, New York.
Kafka, Franz. 2009. The Castle. Oxford World’s ClassicsTrans. By Anthea Bell. Oxford University Press, New York.
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Sohom Roy is pursuing an MA in the Department of Sociology, South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi.