Monday, May 23, 2005
(9:48 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Kafka, "The Penal Colony"
[Note: This was originally posted last summer on the now-defunct University Without Condition site.]I.
“Is a life’s work such as this”—he indicated the machine—“to be destroyed because of the commandant and the influence his women have over him? Should this be allowed to happen? Even by a stranger who has only come to our island for a few days?” (140)In the Penal Colony is, among many other things, a meditation on the foreigner—the place, or non-place, of the foreigner. What does it mean to be a solitary observer in a foreign land? From the very first paragraph, it is uncertain: he “appeared to have accepted purely out of politeness the commandant’s invitation,” he was “not particularly enthralled,” “he paced back and forth behind the condemned man with almost visible indifference” (125-26, emphasis added). The whole thrust of the proceedings is unclear, a matter of conjecture—the officer works on the apparatus “perhaps because he was a devoted admirer... or because, for whatever other reasons...” (126).
The officer himself is radically out of place, wearing a full-dress military uniform, and we might ask what exactly we are to think of this colony, in what precise sense it is “penal.” Where do the mobs of children come from? How could the “old commandant” become famous (if he ever was famous beyond the officer’s dream world)? And what of the women? The officer has nothing but scorn for the new commandant’s women, but the old commandant had women of his own—women are an easy target for the advocate of a ritual that is clearly sexually charged, involving plenty of male nudity and horseplay, with even the stripping ritualized (“naked of course” [128]).
The colony was a penal colony in the sense of being a society completely devoted to punishment—the liturgy of punishment. Its closest parallel may well be the Aztecs, as described by Bataille: “Consumption loomed just as large in their thinking as production does in ours. They were just as concerned about sacrificing as we are about working.” In a story where the burning sun beats down from overhead, rendering the officer’s full-dress uniform a burden, an irrelevant throw-back, Bataille’s comments on the sun are particularly appropriate: “The sun himself was in their eyes the expression of sacrifice. He was a god resembling man. He had become the sun by hurling himself into the flames of a brazier” (46). I can’t prove philologically that Kafka knew of Aztec culture, but it’s not necessary—the association of the sun with sacrifice seems to be in our bones, as illustrated by the repetition of a driving sun with a meaningless, decadent sacrifice in Camus’s Stranger, an empty gesture, also performed in a tropical colony, hearkening back to when life meant something. For Camus’s protagonist, at least the punishment, voluntarily taken upon oneself, is still meaningful—for the officer, it is completely empty:
II.
“usually it’s some harbor works, it’s always some harbor works!” (146)
So much to do, so many things—how to justify devoting so much energy to public executions? How could one ever choose to maintain an insular community, focussed on the Old Man, when there are harbors to build, commerce to engage in, foreign observers—scholars, even!—to invite? “No longer can I ponder possible developments for the system, I spend all my energy preserving what’s left” (140). The gears are not the only thing that’s squeaking. We are assured that in days of old, the condemned man always learned of his sentence during the second six hours; but now, with the machine in such a dilapidated state, when no one comes to hear the “wheels of justice,” can we be sure that the same will happen? Much less to this doglike, frivolous prisoner? The “exceptional machine” (125) of sovereignty does not work in isolation, and one wonders why the officer never laments the lack of audience in quite the right way, why he never sees that the vast crowds are all incorporated into the apparatus.
But is everyone really as disincorporated as they seem? There are silent supporters all through the island, and in over three months, over a hundred prisoners are executed—close to a prisoner a day. Here, in miniature, we have a clear example of Hardt and Negri’s insight into the “postmodern condition”:
We might say that postmodernism is what you have when the modern theory of social constructivism is taken to the extreme and all subjectivity is recognized as artificial. How is this possible, however, when today, as nearly everyone says, the institutions in question are everywhere in crisis and continually breaking down? ... The omni-crisis of the institutions looks very different in different cases. For example, continually decreasing proportions of the U.S. population are involved in the nuclear family, while steadily increasing proportions are confined to prisons. Both institutions, however, the nuclear family and the prison, are equally in crisis, in the sense that the place of their effectivity is increasingly indeterminate.... In the general breakdown, then, the functioning of the institutions is both more intensive and more extensive. The institutions work even though they are breaking down—and perhaps they work all the better the more they break down. (196-197)If I can take the officer at his word, then it would seem that even more prisoners are being executed now than under the ancien regime (after all, there was a pause of at least a day between executions, enough time to gather a crowd)—perhaps that is what has contributed to its advanced state of dilapidation. The new commandant, a man familiar with commerce, with liberal “European” ideas, gets to distance himself from an unjust system—all the while getting his executions on the cheap!
Good liturgy is expensive, by definition. It takes time. The low-church style of the New Penal Colony gets everything done much more quickly and efficiently, all while maintaining an enlightened appearance, calling in a foreign scholar to denounce the system he has staked his power on. The very definition of decadence—he has become womanly in the Lacanian sense, knowing that there is no hard core of meaning beneath the surface. But you have to become a woman to be cured.
III.
“The traveler wanted to do something, bring the whole machine to a stop if possible, because this was not the exquisite torture the officer had wished for; this was out-and-out murder.” (155)
Do we notice that the traveler never really does anything? The bulk of the story is of course taken up by the officer’s elaborate fantasy of how the traveler will save his precious system, and the officer’s death is brought on by the traveler’s assertion that he will say something that he never in fact says, in a meeting he never in fact attends. Here the virtual has real effects—life and death effects—and all the power is in the hands of the foreigner, the scholar, one with no special expertise in legal matters. In the world of the Old Man, no words were necessary in order for people to know the wheels of justice were turning, but in the new decadent world, where everything is allowed to decay disgustingly, words mean something. Perhaps words only mean something when justice is not self-evident—perhaps the truly just world is the world that is not ruled by the all-powerful father, but by the whispers of the women and the convictions of the foreigners.
We may ask whether the execution was ever anything but out-and-out murder and whether Kafka’s story presages a world in which the obscenity of punishment becomes ever more clear; we may well tremble at the thought that the Old Man will rise from the dead, even as those around us chuckle at the thought; we may ask, further, what the role of the foreigner and the woman is in a time of the decay of sovereignty—and just how much prodding it might take to make the institutions implode.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Vol. 1. New York: Zone, 1991.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Trans. Donna Freed. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996.
