Comments on Freedom and Escape in Kafka through Walter Benjamin
“I remember,” [Max] Brod writes, “a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. ‘We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,’ Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. ‘Oh no,’ said Kafka, ‘our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.’ ‘Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.’ He smiled. ‘Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.’
These words provide a bridge to those extremely strange figures in Kafka, the only ones who have escaped from the family circle and for whom there may be hope... The ‘assistants’...are outside this circle.
[...] In Indian mythology there are the gandharvas, celestial creatures, beings in an unfinished state. Kafka’s assistants are of that kind: neither members of, nor strangers to, any of the other groups of figures, but, rather, messengers from one to the other. Kafka tells us that they resemble Barnabas, who is a messenger. They have not yet been completely released from the womb of nature, and that is why they have ‘settled down on two old women’s skirts on the floor in a corner. It was . . . their ambition . . . to use up as little space as possible. To that end they kept making various experiments, folding their arms and legs, huddling close together; in the darkness all one could see in their corner was one big ball.’ It is for them and their kind, the unfinished and the bunglers, that there is hope.
[...] Kafka’s Sirens are silent. Perhaps because for Kafka music and singing are an expression or at least a token of escape, a token of hope which comes to us from that intermediate world—at once unfinished and commonplace, comforting and silly—in which the assistants are at home.” (From ‘Illuminations,’ trans. 1968, pp 224–228. Emphasis added.)
So very much to ‘unpack’ here. Briefly, Kafka isn’t “rebelling against the family” in the way that it is fashionable to do now (whether that fashion has merit or not I don’t know). The family unit for Kafka represents eternal, trans-circumstantial paternal (or paternalistic/patriarchal/primordial) domination. Much of Kafka is difficult or puzzling because Kafka’s (hopeful) focus on the intermediary, the in-between...limbo.
In some ways like in Kant, the real hope for freedom exists, for Kafka, in the intermediary or “liminal” space between pure practical reason and spontaneity. Neither secure freedom themselves: pure practical reason, followed as duty, plays out as fate. Pure spontaneity is the probabilistic, the impenetrably random and thereby determined. Pure rational moral responsibility is a condemnation; pure determinism is an effacement of the self (and thus of agency) and a rational mechanism in itself to abdicate all responsibilities to the Other. “Someone else is gonna be the vulture if I’m not.”
The role of the messenger mediates between the instrumental rationality of time, schedules, routines and orders on the one hand; and the pathological absurdity of the Message on the other. But this is only their incidental social role, and Kafka I believe had bigger metaphorical aspirations for this type. His wild insight here seems to be that because their role is in-between, intermediary, they enjoy a freedom (expressed as ‘hope’) unavailable entirely to full agents.
It suggests that Kafka was not particularly taken by the causal-mechanical accounts of freedom and determinism, compatibilism and incompatibilism, that concern many philosophers on the topic. Rather, his sense of the meaning of freedom was ineluctably embedded in the conditions of existence in the modern world. “Responsibility” in Kafka, the watchword in analytic action theory, is never taken as a given—it is a known mark of Kafka’s work that his characters stumble over material and temporal obstacles in their own life-worlds that are so inextricable that they take on a metaphysical gloss.
Take a particularly minimalist and often overlooked short parable-story, “A Common Confusion.” It tells the banal story of a failed attempt to hold an ambiguous business meeting. But in the course of the story, the relevant characters—reduced to alphanumeric characters rather than names, underpinning the indifference to their agency *as agents* in the ordinary sense—manage to miss one another ineluctably. Time contracts and expands such that the two never see one another: the meeting was never possible in any world.
This could be taken as a simple experiment in the absurd, but its uniquely steely miserablism is just one hint among many that Kafka uses the surreality of expanded and contracted time as a device for conveying what he sees to be the real unfreedom that confronts the worker, the “modern man,” the bureaucratic and capitalist subject. That is to say, the presence, sometimes the omnipresence, of real and unremitting obstacles to the achievement of ends that are embedded into capitalist life as expectations. Expected by whom? By the figures of authority in Kafka, who run downstream from the Father but who are alike in their rational irrationality: in other words, in the schematic, orderly way in which they issue irrational demands—or sometimes, refuse to issue such demands and expect impossible obedience nonetheless.
Where the assistants come in. They are hybrid figures: premodern, in a sense. Modern to the extent that they are required to be to traverse the world for discrete, singular purposes. Remember they “have not yet been completely released from the womb of nature”—as liminal figures, they enjoy a freedom that is unavailable, for Kafka, to the modern bureaucratic-capitalist subject. That is to say, they are able to effect direct communication, which Kafka’s works—especially his novels—largely prohibit for the modern subject, for whom the built apparatus with which he must attempt to communicate, to paraphrase Marx, “confronts him as alien and hostile.”
The assistants are not merely figments of Kafka’s world, but in some sense, can model the way we live in ours (which is not so unlike Kafka’s—hence Kafka’s continuous prescience and relevance). In their being “incomplete,” they do not face the condemnation, the confinement that comes with being a fully “whole,” reified, interpolated, bureaucratized “subject.” The assistant figures thus predict, in these strange but quite strong ways, the existentialist, or at least the Nietzschean figure perpetually in a state of “Becoming,” unfettered by the confining ontology structurally built into religious thinking. Theology posits “Being” as its fundamental substratum—sin is coterminous with lack, and thus with the incomplete. By conceiving ourselves as works in progress, and taking Life seriously as a process of continual Becoming, we may position ourselves to resist the “objectifying” (and therefore instrumentalizing) process of the new theology: capitalist exploitation.
A final comment: Benjamin’s analysis of music in Kafka presented here is illuminating. “...music and singing,” he writes, “are an expression or at least a token of escape, a token of hope which comes to us from that intermediate world.” Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno (both of whom I’ll be blogging about soon, stay tuned) both conceive of art, and in Adorno’s case especially music, in its “utopian” or “liberatory” potential. But what is also especially interesting is the way “escape” is used here.
A commonsense on the Left is to eschew “escapism.” But Kafka means real escape from real confinement. In the context of the modern world Kafka offers to us, “escape” is of course the ideal state. And neither is it selfish: it is a “token of hope which comes to us from that intermediate world.” We may yet learn about the outsize powers of art, of the invitation to escape, mutually, collaboratively, en masse, from Kafka, an unlikely source indeed.
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