Kafka: Horror of the New Bargain
Today we cannot forget or ignore what all this was leading to. We see the First World War, Nazism, the Second World War, the struggles for independence from imperialism, the millions of dead: starved, burnt or dismembered. We can also see the increasing anonymity of life as the scale grew larger and larger: the anonymity of death by the electric chair (first authorized in 1888), of the skyscraper, of government decisions, of the threat of nuclear war. Kafka, whose formative years were 1900 to 1914, was the prophet of this anonymity. Other artists of the same period -- Munch and the German Expressionists -- sensed the same thing, but only Kafka understood the full horror of the new bargain: the bargain by which in exchange for sustenance a man forgoes the right to have his existence noticed. No god invented by man has ever had the power to exact such punishment.
John Berger, "The Success and Failure of Picasso," 1965
[Note: The best part of this post is its comments, below!]
John Berger, "The Success and Failure of Picasso," 1965
[Note: The best part of this post is its comments, below!]
Labels: individualism, John Berger, Kafka, modernism, quotes, you tube
posted by John E. Uhl at 4:40 PM
7 Comments:
I wonder if the situation is reversing itself (and not necessarily for the better). After all, the increasing anonymity of life also had an emancipatory aspect in that it created spaces for people to shirk the constant moral accountability they would have had to endure in, say, a small farming village where everyone knows everyone else's business. It's these very spaces created by anonymity that social conservatives complain about today: the anonymity affords a level of privacy that allows one to engage in "sexual immorality," drug use, and so forth.
Today, though, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated search technology, camera phones, etc. much of this anonymity appears to be disappearing: we are having our existence noticed (or at least it is noticeable) too much. In a very real sense, the "global village" is just that -- except with none of the benefits of the pre-industrial village.
Nick,
I think you're correct about having our existence noticed more and more and that this is very troubling. I don't know that the trend really represents a decrease in anonymity, however. All these people with blogs and camera phones and nonstop e-mail seem like so much shouting into a well -- who knows if anyone's down there, and even if there is, there's too much echo to distinguish anything coherent. Most of the shouters are in pursuit of a lost cause: trying to establish their individuality in a society where there no longer is any. In the end, they are more anonymous than ever.
In terms of Kafka, he didn't view the modern city as a refuge from moral accountability -- in fact, that's precisely what "The Trial" is all about (a highly recommended book, by the way). Perhaps he only anticipated an aspect of modern life that had yet to reveal itself, but for Kafka, even the most intimate moments came with a sense of being observed and judged, often by total strangers. The irony is that, at the time of his death, Kafka had left his best friend and literary executor explicit instructions to burn "The Trial" -- along with the rest of his unpublished writings. These instructions were never followed and now anyone who wants to can read not only "The Trial," but also Kafka's diary and letters -- in English.
Milan Kundera discusses Kafka, among other subjects, in his book "Testaments Betrayed." He writes in particular of Kafka's sense of shame: "Shame is one of the key notions of the Modern Era, the individualistic period that is imperceptibly receding from us these days; shame: an epidermal instinct to defend one's personal life; to require a curtain over the window; to insist that a letter addressed to A not be read by B." He writes of an "old revolutionary utopia," which he calls "life without secrets" and the surrealist dream of "the glass house, a house without curtains where man lives in full view of the world." "The only successful realization of this dream," he says, "a society totally monitored by the police."
I thought this article in the NYT today bore on this discussion (in your favor):
“A week ago, no one knew who I was — now my name has been on every news and talk show,” Mr. Schleichkorn said. “I don’t care that it’s for something stupid. I was on Fox News cracking jokes. Maury Povich called me today.
“So I’m known as the fence-plowing kid,” he added. “At least I’m known.”
Yeah, this kind of attention-getting misbehavior is typical of children who are being ignored -- although it's unsettling that the "fence-plowing kid" is actually 25 years old.
Certainly the sense of anonymity embodied by the web, at least in this case, has none of the emancipatory aspects you spoke of the modern city once having: whatever rush of "freedom" comes with fence-plowing or posting a clip of a peer getting beat up on YouTube is quickly undermined by the fact that these kids are being monitored by the police. (And who knows which covert branch of the CIA or FBI or whatever-else has been charged with filing through web sites and blogs, like this one, for "suspicious thinking"? HEY YOU, WITH THE BINOCULARS, ARE YOU GETTING ALL THIS DOWN???)
I wonder ... is there any way to find an emancipatory anonymity online? Was there ever?
Also, thinking back to your comment about spaces in which to shirk moral accountability: "It's these very spaces created by anonymity that social conservatives complain about today." Is it the anonymity that the conservatives are objecting to? By insisting on transparency and by giving greater leeway to the police, it's true that the emancipatory aspects of anonymity are eliminated -- but only at the cost of turning the populace into a cabinet of police files. A society no longer composed of individuals, but of social security numbers. What could be more anonymous?
I'm not trying to belabor my point, but you've raised an interesting question as to how precisely we should characterize the particular anxiety of our age. If Kafka's fear was of the process through which his deepest insecurities, his most private feelings and intimate moments were made public (a fear that, as I mentioned, in some sense came true), our fear seems to be the opposite: of not being noticed, of losing our humanity to a mechanism through which our age may finally be forgotten altogether.
"So I'm known as the fence-plowing kid. ... At least I’m known."
The fence-plowing kid is a great example, and of course it certainly doesn't stop there with adults exhibiting behavior that as John said is usually witnessed in ignored children.
But what of the other end of the spectrum? What of those people who seem to relish in this age of anonimity? I know at least one person who has few friends, doesn't go out much, and spends a significant amount of time bidding on ebay auctions for nick-nacks that fill her house to a gawdy level. People like this seem to love the fact that they don't have to deal with human interaction, and settle nicely into their solitary and often highly eccentric existence.
So what does this mean? Are we separating into behavioral extremes? Perhaps the fact that we no longer have a real "village" or community atmosphere to keep us in check allos people to grow up into these selfish tendencies, without teaching some restraint.
Or is it the other side of the coin? Is this age of light-speed rumor-spreading and sensationalism via internet and blood-thirsty media simply allowing us to see how widespread these troubling behaviors are that were previously hidden within the village?
Andy,
I think your metaphor of a two-sided coin is a good place to start thinking about this -- with the desire for solitude on one side and the desire to be noticed on the other. The need for fulfillment of both desires, as you've suggested, can be seen as somehow representative of our age -- which seems to gratify and deny each of these impulses at the same time. This is precisely why we must try not to think of solitude and public recognition as an either/or choice. I misspoke earlier, when I stated that our fear of not being noticed was somehow opposite of the fear expressed by Kafka. Kafka describes a world in which his protagonists struggle --unsuccessfully -- for public recognition, even as they are at the same time stripped of their privacy. The public life and the private become so interwoven as to no longer be distinguishable. The coin, then, still has two sides, but they are both the same. On one side, where there was once solitude, there is only loneliness -- as well as the impossibility of ever really being alone (whether on the subway or someone's MySpace page or even placing a bid on Ebay, we are never alone in the sense of a premodern man or woman alone in the woods ). On the other side, where there was once recognition and acknowledgement, there is now the anonymity of the city dweller beneath the skyscraper and the web surfer at sea, lost among an ocean of screen names and web logs and 1s and 0s -- again the feeling of being alone *precisely because* you are overwhelmingly not. This is the paradox of modern life.
I would hesitate to call your friend's ebay habit selfish -- no more so than fence-plowing, at least. Rather, both activities seem like misguided attempts to reconcile this paradox -- neither of which is likely to accomplish anything but to increase it. For the teenager who posts a clip of himself fence-plowing or pulling some other prank on YouTube proves, not that he is an individual, but only that he is a member of the herd. And the adult who spends his or her whole life online -- whether as a refuge from loneliness or from humanity itself -- is no less alienated simply because the people he or she engages with are on the other side of a screen.
Of course, I may be quite wrong about this. Perhaps one day the Internet will be seen as a space that ultimately satisfies both sides of the contradictory human yearning for intimacy and distance. That seems to be its ambition, at least. For the moment, however, I primarily see it as an exemplification and amplification of a longstanding, if no less troubling, paradox.
This is my first visit to John's blog, and, lo, the conversation is fascinating. I am in a discipline that focuses on how the individual affects the village, rather than how the village affects the individual. Specifically, political scientists worry that the modern age has eroded interpersonal bonds and depleted resources that we call, collectively, "social capital." And social capital makes democracy work. (Thank you, Robert Putnam.) Norms of trust, the moral accountability referenced above, civic skills, and group consciousness all promote responsible political participation.
[I should note, though, that the parochial nature of the village has its drawbacks . . . for a nice "pro and con" discussion of social capital and civic engagement, see Skocpol and Fiorina's "Civic Engagement in American Democracy.]
We have yet to resolve the question of whether the the web of electronic communication created by internet communities can take the place of the brick-and-mortar village. I tend to think the answer is "no." Internet communities are ephemeral and unreliable (is lonelygirl15 real? will the person you played online euchre with yesterday be on that site ever again? is your online crush a 25-year-old coed or a 58-year-old dude with a storage unit filled with 50-gallon drums?). It strikes me that norms of trust are unlikely to develop in a medium that makes deception so simple.
So, even if the internet can reconcile "the contradictory human yearning for intimacy and distance," healing the individual, I doubt that it will mend the village.
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