The scholar I became approaches Kafka less directly now (as opposed to then, in Spain, 1965).

Although the term Magic Realism spread around the world and found an especially receptive cultural climate in Latin America, another term for the new mode — Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) — introduced by Gustav Hartlaub for an exhibition mounted in 1925 — became the preferred phrase in Germany (Guenther, 34).  As with Magic Realism, New Objectivity or New Sobriety involved an approach to things — not so much raw material “objects,” the translators point out, but Sache, thing as fact or as fallen under a category or classification.  Here is the chief relevance to the focus on a categorial (metaphysical) image.  Things in their categories have become uncanny in the epochal transition from literacy to electracy. “The goal of this post-World War I art was a new definition of the object, clinically dissected, coldly accentuated, microscopically delineated.  Over-exposed, isolated, rendered from an uncustomary angle, the familiar became unusual, endowed with an Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) which elicited fear and wonder.  The juxtaposition of ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ reflected far more the monstrous and marvelous Unheimlichkeit within human beings and inherent in their modern technological surroundings of which both Freud and de Chirico wrote” (36).

This “wrestling with the uncanny in the real” expresses a new sense of space and time that Anthony Vidler has called “warped space” (space measured to include subjectivity).  In the context of the electrate apparatus, the uncanniness of objects is a symptom of a shift not only in technology and institutional practices but also of identity experience:  “spirit” (the ghost-in-me of psyche) is moving again, from the confines of the individual body into the produced environment of object and image (what Scott Bukatman calls “terminal identity”).

On the Set of Nightmares

The name of the experience that is an intuition of the emerging electrate subject is the uncanny.  It is the opening of avatar. That Franz Kafka is associated with this German context makes a direct link from the problematic of the object to learning how to map a chora (image category).  The link is Deleuze and Guattari’s study of Kafka and their reading of his “new sobriety” as a “cartography.”

The Castle brings about another sort of progress by breaking away from that which was too spatial in The Trial in order to bring out what was already there but still too covered up by spatial figures: the series becomes intensive, the journey reveals itself as an intensity, the map is a map of intensities, and the moving frontiers are themselves thresholds (blocks of intensity).  The whole first chapter of The Castle works in this mode, from threshold to threshold, from low intensities to high ones and vice versa, part of a cartography that is certainly not interior or subjective but that has  definitely ceased to be spatial.  The low intensity of the bent head, the high intensity of the head that straightens and the sound that takes flight, a passage from one scene to another by thresholds:  a language that has become intense makes its contents take flight in place on this new map (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986:  78).

The artist works neither subjectively nor objectively in the established sense of these terms, but “machinically”:  As a “bachelor machine,” gathering an assemblage, forming connections, not as “impressions” or “expressions” of a “self” but as a vehicle or channel for a group, a collective, a community.  The egents of the EmerAgency learn to map intensities in this way, in an attunement that is categorial (combining the personal and the collective).  Is it possible for a collective subject to have an epiphany? The methods include the juxtaposition or superimposition of “blocks” (rather than “memories”), especially of a childhood block operating simultaneously in adult conduct (an updating of “transference”).  “Memory yells ‘Father! Mother!’ but the childhood block is elsewhere, in the highest intensities that the child constructs with his sisters, his pal, his projects and his toys, and all the nonparental figures through which he deterritorializes his parents every chance he gets” (79).  Such blocks help overcome impasses paralyzing or fixating adult conduct and set desire moving again along a line of flight, a pathic dimension of intensities.  The lesson of this theory is that an egent is a “minor consultant,” channeling the very dimension of discourse in which values are circulated among the parties to a group subject.

What Lies, Beneath

Here is a rationale for figure, with Kafka mediating and providing the alignment, attuning my decision in Spain with the Superfund disaster in Gainesville.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-23, Edited by Max Brod, purchased in Madrid, Spain, 1965, when I was twenty, still imagining how to become  a writer.  Here is the very copy in my hands now, with the pencil marks selecting certain passages.  Kafka’s ambivalence about his plans to marry Felice Bauer crystallized a general dilemma, an aporia at the center of life that Sartre later formulated as:  live or tell.  Entries dated 1913 inventory reasons for and against the marriage.  The choice seems to be between Felice and Writing.  Several times he wonders if the only solution is to throw himself out a window, not without his gallows humor.  “I have come to believe that there are possibilities in my ever-increasing inner decisiveness and conviction which may enable me to pass the test of marriage in spite of everything… Of course, to certain extent this is a belief that I grasp at when I am already on the window sill.”

Her name was Happiness

Kafka articulated how the world is, or was to me then:  two realms, two dimensions, two realities, with no connection between them, with me as a potential movement between if not for being rooted or chained to the spot.  I did not understand Stimmung at the time, that I was in a Mood, it was not in me, an attunement shared by the culture collectively, thematized in the forensic atmospheres of film noir and the paralysis of cities evoked in modernist poetry.  The cliché or commonplace human condition of alienation I experienced as a personal and private anxiety of indecision, specific to me.  Sanford Kwinter, commenting on Metamorphosis, describes the interface of Dasein and the Outside that I could not identify in 1965.  It is the conditions of a threshold, a boundary zone.

Thus the break with time is often also inseparable from a negation of worldliness and a collapsing of space.  The moment of waking reproduces these same border or limit conditions.  One world continues indifferently, unmoved and unchanged, while another spills into it, filling all the cracks and chinks between objects with the swirling indefiniteness of a wanton becoming.  Though the dream-time of sleep has come quietly to an end, somehow the pure virtuality that animates it has burst its barrier and invaded the real, depositing there precisely what had always been anathema to it:  the so-called untimely, or the irreducible, absolute, and incontrovertibly new.  We are assured now that this grotesque inmixing (and this is developed in the narrative as a befouling and as a pollution in every possible sense) is in every manner real (Kwinter, Architectures of Time).

[ An experience emerges here, in the manner of a figure to be explored:  an isotopy aligning Spain Decision/ Superfund disaster/ Trace.  Nachtraglichkeit.  Replication.  It is felt now]

During the first few weeks I was in Madrid, still working on the language and not yet acquainted with many people, I went to a bookstore.

Attractor

There were two Spains, equally real at the time:  one for my body, and the other for my imagination. What was I thinking, when I entered that store?  An inventory of the attractors governing my life trajectory must begin with the book, books as such, in any case.  From the bedtime stories read to me by my father to my choice of major in college (English) was one continuous development.  Before I could read I loved to look at the little illustrations in dictionaries.

Image Rising

The book I bought that day (which I still possess) was a copy of the diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-23, edited by Max Brod.  The store had a large section of books in English.  Why choose this one?  I was imagining myself as a writer, without having written anything.  On the back cover there was this description.

Kafka’s diaries reveal to us the extraordinary inner world in which he lived.  Here he describes, perhaps to relieve the pain which they caused him, his fear, isolation, and frustration, his feelings of guilt and his sense of being an outcast.  In between come quick glimpses of the real world,  of the father he worshipped, and of the woman he could not bring himself to marry.  And throughout this personal journal Kafka the writer is experimenting, searching for his true mode of expression.

I opened the fat volume at random, and happened upon one of the most striking passages of all:

To be pulled in through the ground-floor window of a house by a rope tied around one’s neck and to be yanked up, bloody and ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture, walls, and attics, without consideration, as if by a person who is paying no attention, until the empty noose, dropping the last fragments of me when it breaks through the roof tiles, is seen on the roof.

That passage gave me the idea that a journal could be literature, that one could apprentice oneself to Kafka’s diaries, and explore in this way a possible vocation, to become writer.  My next stop was a papeleria to get a notebook.  This choice determined a certain mood, attunement, filtering my encounter with the Spain of 1965-66.

The parable “Before the Law,” introduced as a mise-en abyme in The Trial, suggests the problematic nature of Gateway.  The man from the country comes to the city and encounters the law as a gateway guarded by a doorkeeper (a threshold guardian, a daimon).

Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper.  He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body.  The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.”  “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?”  The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you.  I’m going now to close it. (Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” Trans. Ian Johnston).

Crossing Over

The ambiguous lesson is kairotic:  kairos.  The Trial and The Castle both treat this theme of the moment, and the fear of missing it, the missed encounter. In both stories the protagonist comes very close to the bridge, to the moment that would open the link between the two realms (whatever they might be –- the hearth and the uncanny).  The paradox of revelation in Kafka’s vision is that the closer one is to illumination, the weaker one becomes, to the point of exhaustion or sleep, so that the Augenblick never occurs.  The reader, however, is given to understand what is possible. “Awakening, the bodhi that is continually spoken of in Indian thought from the Vedas to the Buddha, is something that happens during wakefulness, an invisible shift, a sudden change in distances and in the mental pace, thanks to which consciousness is able to observe itself—and is therefore able to observe itself in its typical role as observer.  The most effective metaphor for this event is the awakening from sleep, the passage from dream to wakefulness” (Roberto Calasso, 226).

Franz Kafka is our guide to Daimon as an experience:  limit.  We saw it with Socrates, at the beginning of Western metaphysics.  Two trials. Socrates consults his daimonion at his doorway, before leaving for his trial for corrupting the young, and hears nothing, meaning that his decision to cooperate with the court was just.  Aristotle, thereafter, uses the term for “indictment” (Kategory) to name the new classification system of literacy. The arc nears completion with Kafka’s The Trial, dramatizing the saturation of experience by “indictment” (to be under arrest).  We expect modernity to drop the allegories and personifications of experience, so that, whatever Daimon personified in reality, we now name conceptually.  Limit, border, boundary, edge, dividing inside/outside.  The whole structure of avatar as Western experience (and its ruin) –descent, striving, return–is condensed in one of Kafka’s aphorisms (apologues).

“He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.  At the same time he is a free and secure citizen of heaven because he is also attached to a similar heavenly chain.  If he wants to go to earth, the heavenly manacles will throttle him, if he wants to go to heaven, the earthly manacles will.  But for all that, all possibilities are open to him, as he is well aware, yes, he even refuses to believe the whole  thing is predicated on a mistake going back to th time of his first enchainment” (The Zurau Aphorisms).

Brand (Kavka)

Pavlatche

How to glimpse my disposition, with a first-person angle? Kafka is one relay, articulating an approach through language.  He describes here the problem of expression.

“*1) Is it possible to think something unconsoling? Or, rather, something unconsoling without the breath of consolation? A way out [Ausweg] would seem to lie in the fact that recognition as such is consolation. 2) And so one might well think: You must put yourself aside, and yet one might maintain oneself, without falsifying this recognition, by the consciousness of having recognized it. 3) That, then , really means having pulled oneself out of the swamp by one’s own pigtail. 4) What is ridiculous in the physical world is possible in the spiritual world. There there is no law of gravity (the angels do not fly, they have not overcome any force of gravity, it is only we observers in the terrestrial world who cannot imagine it in any better way than that), which is, of course, beyond our power of conception, or at any rate conceivable only on a very high level. 5) How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. (Evening). Why? There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer wordld. At least descriptive psychology is probably, taken as a whole, a form of anthropomorphism, a nibbling at our own limits. The inner world can only be experienced, not described. 6) Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestrial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestrial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.”

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 14.

*Numbers added (see comment).