FRANZ KAFKA& ‘Kafkaesque”

Liberal Studies 7005

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FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924)

Jewish, in pre-3rd Reich Austria-Hungary

Three sisters, would die in Nazi death camps

• he died earlier of T.B. Father a successful

businessman: pressed the “literary” Franz into trade.

• worked in Insurance then in a Factory (asbestos)

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Kafka’s Literary Quality

Reluctantly published only a few short story collections (incl.“The Penal Colony” in his lifetime.• asked that his major writings be destroyed at his death, but

instead friends had his novels posthumously published

Kafka had a special gift: the rare ability to create new myth—mythopoeia

Kafka’s myth seems to arise from three sources1.His relationship with a domineering unsympathetic father

2.His work experience in large institutions: white & blue collar

3.His conception of the God of the Jewish scriptures

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Kafka & Bureaucracy In Kafka’s myth, a powerless

individual comes in contact with a bureaucracy.

Often, the contact is initiated by the bureaucracy: the individual is almost a mere random choice by which the bureaucracy can arbitrarily exercise its power.

From then on, the individual has no hope: the bureaucracy has its own rules which are arbitrary, absurd, abusive, and absolute.

Indeed, commonly the individual is not allowed to know what the rules are, or even be certain that a specific set of written rules exist.

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Kafka & Bureaucracy (con’t) Thus, in Kafka’s myth a helpless

and solitary individual is totally alienated from an all-powerful bureaucracy that has developed from the rational & mechanical principles of technology• (The application of technical and

rational principles to organisations and governments is termed ‘technocracy’)

Yet in a paradox, bureaucracy behaves with total irrationality—even open arbitrariness—in destroying the innocent individual.

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“TECHNOCRACY”: RULE BY TECHOLGISTS Techocracy: idea popular from the 1930s

• a.] Scientists and Technical experts in administrative or decision making management and political positions.

• b.] government technical-scientific decision-making.

• c.] rational ordering of human behavior and social conduct—e.g. B.F. Skinner & Behaviorism

German National Socialists and the Soviet Union worked from technocratic principles: i.e. central planning of society and industry

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Technocracy, con’t

Lost social credibility via its advocacy of eugenics.

Carbon Currency a revanchist technocracy idea.

Technocracy: sign on Boundary Road & Kingsway

Website. TechnocracyVan.ca

Nazism was a Technocracy Central Gov’t Planning of

Industry e.g. the Gov’t demanded a

“People’s Car” be produced Holocaust a technocratic

enterprise:• meticulous record keeping

• ‘concentration’ camps, arranged on a railway network

• gas chambers, using an industrial chemical (Zyklon-B)

• ovens were tendered and constructed as factory

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Prophetic Character of Kafka

So, Kafka wrote before the Third Reich, or the present-day Western world.

But his representation of society entirely dominated by machine—in modes of work and in bureaucracy itself—prophesied both of these eventual states of affairs.

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