"Things that fail through nothing other than themselves:" Kafka on the maddening persistence of the absurd

"The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy heaven. This is beyond doubt, but doesn't prove anything against heaven, since heaven means, precisely, the impossibility of crows."

I just found this delightfully mysterious quote in Michael Wood's excellent review, in the London Review of Books, of a new volume of Franz Kafka's "office writings."

I haven't read Kafka beyond Metamorphoses, but this essay, entitled "Double Thought," has piqued my curiosity. The above is one of a string of Kafkaisms Wood cites that seem to capture the way I--and I assume other lefties--feel about the persistence of authoritarianism and capitalism in spite of what Marx would call their "inconsistencies." (The crows remind me of some of the commenters' posts at Anarchist news dot org.)

How can such wasteful, unjust, irrational systems persist? I don't think you'll find an answer in Kafka, but Wood makes the case that you will find a forlornly poetic expression of the paradox.

Here are the rest of the quotes from this paragraph, which Wood chose to illustrate a recurring theme, or "structure," which "is everywhere in Kafka, and especially in his most perfectly pitched sentences:"

• To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already happened. That would not be a belief.


• There can be a knowledge of the devilish, but no belief in it, because there is nothing more devilish than what already exists.


• If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been allowed.


• In the battle between yourself and the world, support the world.


• Goodness is in a certain sense comfortless.

Each of these pearls contains the wisdom of a volume of essays on some aspect of how the world preserves seemingly fragile systems of domination. (Unfortunately, Wood doesn't give the citations.) I would like to focus on one aspect in particular.

At least since Marx's didactic proof that capitalism is doomed, some leftists have been like Millerites waiting for the second coming, getting disappointed when it doesn't come on time, then rewriting the prophesy to bring it in line with reality.

I don't share this millenarian vision of change, but I sympathise with idealism's frustration at the stubbornness of unjust systems, at the real world's refusal to yield to democratic logic, or justice. Through Wood's interpretation, I perceive in Kafka's "office writings" a particularly aesthetic expression of this feeling, that there is some mystical or demonic force keeping civilization's dark side in place in spite of its own absurdity and constant attack.

Wood points out that Kafka developed these stories in the context of an office job at the Prague Institute for Workmen’s Accident Insurance. This was his "day job," dealing with government and other bureaucrats. By night, he wrote.

The products of these nocturnal imaginings--famously Byzantine fictional bureaucracies--are uncannily immutable and impervious to logic. The officials populating them are as aware as the protagonist of their sheer absurdity, and even, as one official in The Castle expressed, hope for change. "Like a robber in the woods, the party forces from us sacrifices that we would never have been capable of otherwise... And yet we are happy. How suicidal happiness can be!"

But at this crucial moment, when a loophole in the Castle's ironclad bureaucracy momentarily opens, the protagonist K (the "party" of whom the official spoke) falls asleep, and the status quo is preserved. After this happens, the official waxes philosophic. "Here, everything is full of opportunities. Except that some opportunities are, as it were, too great to be acted upon; there are things that fail through nothing other than themselves." Wood writes,

This is a theory not of repressive tolerance but of social inertia, the dream of a conservative order magically preserved from the attacks it cannot in principle prevent. There are chances of change, tiny cracks in the system's armour; but change never happens, the cracks are only unused opportunities.

Kafka's fictional bureaucracy, created in the context of his work experience, is maintained through a series of accidents, serendipitous from the point of view of the institution, but quite unfortunate from the human perspective. In the words of the official, "It’s certainly an excellent arrangement, always unimaginably excellent, even if in other respects hopeless."

Though any of these accidents, e.g. falling asleep at the wrong moment, could be attributable to dumb luck, they add up to the inevitable persistence of the institution. Wood characterizes this state of affairs as magical.

Of coarse there are real reasons for the persistence of our all-too-real "conservative order," which seems to us radicals upside-down and precarious. We wonder why it doesn't right itself. We try to give it a push. We watch as individuals and great waves of individuals break themselves against it, and our mystification grows at its cruel stability. We must look very deeply to find what holds it in place.

I have a hunch this deep foundation of domination and injustice is somehow endemic to civilization as we have known it (not human nature). I find a strong hint of this notion in some religious teachings (a topic I hope to address in a future post).

Unless we find and understand the foundations of unjust institutions and social orders, their persistence may as well be due to magical forces, and our theories and revolutions will continue to "fail through nothing other than themselves."