Kafka’s unfinished final novel,/The Castle,/can be read as a parable
about the misrecognition of power. In the course of trying to discover
if he has, or has not, been appointed as a land surveyor by the local
authorities, the protagonist K. becomes obsessed with the authorities
themselves, the officials of the great castle whose shadow looms over
the village below. Its bureaucrats cut nearly superhuman figures,
working tirelessly day and night on countless cases while keeping track
of innumerable files with an otherworldly zeal that overawes K. and the
villagers, who respect and even revere them. Over the course of the
narrative, though, it becomes evident that all this strenuous
paper-pushing might be completely pointless, directed to tasks they may
never complete, involving problems and questions that cannot be resolved
or perhaps never existed in the first place—including, probably, K.’s
appointment. The officials might very well have no idea what they are
doing, or they might be useless drones, working themselves to death
toiling away in busy work that never goes anywhere. But for K. this is
unthinkable. For their prestige flows from the impersonal rule of the
mechanism, the calcified, methodical, formal procedures that, as in a
cage, enfold and dominate the officials and the villagers alike. K.
deploys his own formidable powers of reasoning to penetrate their
mysteries in his quest to gain permission to enter the castle. But the
more he learns, the more he calmly reasons and deduces the state of
affairs with impeccable logic, the more transfixed he is by the
officials’ cabbalistic aura, the more entangled he becomes in their
byzantine networks of influence, and the more he effectively dominates
himself.
Kafka’s paradoxical presentation of modern power dramatizes the motif of
alienation: something unintentionally created by people that takes on a
life of its own and, in turn, dominates them. In Kafka, the governing
authorities are not the source, but more like the confused custodians of
this obscure power, which comes from elsewhere—perhaps only from the
imagination of K. and the villagers. Yet K. cannot resist attributing
quasi-divine qualities to the authorities themselves. He cannot help
fetishizing them, investing them with the superordinate knowledge to
decide his fate. The bureaucrats appear to be avatars of technical
control, when in fact they, like K., are subordinated to the same system
of rational irrationality.
/The Castle/was published in 1926, around the same time another
ambivalent theorist of official authority, John Maynard Keynes, was
developing the ideas that would eventually coalesce in a new language of
capitalist governance. Like K., Keynes took it as an article of faith
that state functionaries could govern in the serene name of reason,
floating above the messy conflicts of the market economy in order to
manage it for the good of the “national community.” Also like K., Keynes
looked to rational authority for salvation, specifically to a
scientifically-trained state bureaucracy equipped with a theory which,
if competently practiced, would optimize economic growth and more
equally distribute its fruits. If all went well, the villagers would be
happy.
https://brooklynrail.org/2021/02/field-notes/The-Money-Theory-of-the-State-Reflections-on-Modern-Monetary-Theory
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