Kafka and Totalitarianism: The Problem of Rationality and Repressive Reason

"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the State."

-Tacitus

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from the video above - To Adorno - Kafka's work represents: 

"The smoothing facade of Repressive Reason." And while he'd never want to reduce Kafka's work to only talking about repressive reason, he definitely thought that this was of the class of things that Kafka was pointing to in his work. You know, being someone that was alive during the beginning of the 20th century when all this was building, when Joseph 'K' in the trial for example that we talked about last time. When he is rag-dolled through the court system. When rational procedures have turned his life into a situation where he is constantly disoriented, alienated from what's going on, and then guilty for something where he doesn't even know what he's being accused of. For Adorno, we don't got to think of this as a metaphor, because this is literally what people are going through when they're living in these rationally constrictive systems.

Whenever you use rationality to try to over-coordinate things in people's lives, there's a general arc that you can expect to play out and we can see examples of this arc at all different scales. First there is a well-intentioned beginning. You know, something bad happens, someone gets hurt, some injustice occurs because of the chaos of how reality unfolds. And then well-intentioned smart people want to use rationality to try to make sure it doesn't happen again. Okay, maybe they set up a rule or a procedure. Maybe it's a government agency, doesn't really matter, the point is this is an effort to make the chaos a little more manageable.

But then inevitably, it feels good to be able to simplify reality down like this. And inevitably, bad stuff keeps happening, because there is no perfect set of protocols that can ever predict everything that's ever going to happen.

So the people in charge of these rules and procedures inevitably start adding more rules and procedures. Given enough time, rational systems like this produce rules on top of rules that eventually accomplish three things: Once this gets severe enough people feel guilty all the time even when they aren't doing anything wrong because they're not sure if they're breaking one of the overabundance of rules there are. They feel alienated from the original well-intentioned purpose of whatever it is they started doing the thing for. And this leads to a feeling of disorientation, where it feels like this rational system has removed something about what it is to be a full person that's living through it.

Couple this with the fact that these rational systems attract the kind of person that wants to be the one making rules and procedures. People that often benefit from there being a sort of gatekeeping, where they keep procedures opaque and away from scrutiny. Or how about the fact that it's psychologically easier for someone to follow a rule book than to make a new set of judgments about the world each day provisionally. How about the fact that in the interest of being as efficient as possible in this rational world, people are often reduced to numbers on a page, which then goes on to guide their behavior in big ways."

Hannah Arendt's take on Kafka:

Kafka is giving a real analysis of the underlying structures of modern life and where the lives of people are headed if it keeps going this way. Kafka is living during a time where these things he's writing about are still a bit under the surface... Kafka's books are blueprints that strip our reality down to its core structure in a way that reveals the patterns we start to accept as normal when living in one of these totalitarian setups.

ie - the way bureaucracy is used to control people in the modern world...a "rule by nobody" making the people victims of the "unaccountable procedures" imposed by these bureaucrats. All the commands are framed as being "necessary and automatic"....and administered by "technical administrative experts".

...Now one of the biggest things that Hannah Arendt thinks Kafka's work gives a voice to is something that would become a fundamental condition of the lives of modern people. It gives voice to a deep sense of loneliness, or feeling placeless, or statelessness as she says at other points in her work, being a Jewish refugee living in the United States herself. Cuz think of how 'K' feels when he arrives at that village at the beginning of "The Castle". He's a stranger to everyone there. He's lonely, uprooted, his whole existence is superfluous. She says to everything that's going on around him, his whole life becomes a struggle to prove to the people around him his legitimacy for even being there, to find his rightful place in the world. But he never finds it. Throughout the whole story he just always lives with this constant dull undercurrent of being lonely, and superfluous. Of being the kind of person where he's never capable of fully feeling at home. Hannah Arendt says that totalitarian setups absolutely thrive when there are tons of people in a society that feel this way. It serves them in a number of different ways. She says, "when people feel utterly abandoned they're much more likely to take on some ideology that gives them at least some kind of feeling of community that they can feel a part of". I mean, in a world where you're being flooded with bad information, there's a feeling like, "Well, at least if I go along with the people in power, not only am I on the winning team, but at least there's some sort of tangible reality for me to believe in.

Now more than that, for the underclass of people that are often treated poorly by totalitarians, having people that feel isolated like they can't ask for help from anyone around them or else they're going to be turned into the bureaucracy, this is a perfect place to keep people, if you always wanted them living in a sort of Kafka-esque haze that makes their life miserable. Hannah compares 'K' to the stateless person fighting for recognition in the world. As she says, 'K' "demands no more than the essentials of life. But those essentials are bestowed only at the arbitrary whim of bureaucrats. 'K's struggle is a struggle for The Inalienable Rights of Man."  In a sense what he's missing, you know, as well as many of the refugees Hannah Arendt's talking about during her own time, what he's missing is what she calls "the right to have rights", very famous line by her. 

See, it's popular to think of refugees as people that just need charity from the locals around them, or something. These people just need a little help getting some food, maybe a place to stay for a while. But for Hannah Arendt, it is deeper than that. Much like 'K' in Kafka's novels, what refugees really lack is the basic right to belong to a political community that guarantees any rights for them at all. And Kafka captures this feeling for her, decades before this became such a widespread crisis. 

So bureaucracy and a rule by nobody, necessity and technical administration, and a deep feeling of loneliness that cripples what it means to even be a person, all three of these are things that Hannah Arendt developed strongly in her later work after being inspired by the blueprint Kafka laid out, and the images that he produced in his. And consider how all three of these things can seem from one perspective, like it's just the end-game of Enlightenment and Classical Liberal thinking. You know we'd expect a certain amount of bureaucracy if we were aiming for individual freedom. We'd expect for our world to be governed by Scientific Reality when we place so much more emphasis on it. And of course, a bit of loneliness is to be expected if individual identity is seen as so much more important than group identity. But notice how all three of these things can become weaponized from within a political movement. 

I hope it's clear by this point that there doesn't seem to be a single way to read Kafka, if you were going to pick him up. And honestly, I think he probably would have liked that this is how his work was received. You know, Kafka died in relative obscurity after having written all of his work. I mean, he had some people that knew about him, but essentially this is a guy that died not even knowing the impact his work was going to go on to have on the world after he was gone.