Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image

PART ONE

THE CINEMATIC KAFKA

KAFKA, RUMOUR, EARLY CINEMA: ARCHAIC MOVING PICTURES

PAUL NORTH

I. THE INCIPIENCE OF THE ARCHAIC

Kafka loved archaic things. This is Walter Benjamin’s theory, which takes the form of a technical term invented by him, the unforgotten (1968: 131–4). Now, this technical term has received much less attention than another word, gesture, and there may be reasons for this. Gesture seems to describe so much that is ‘modern’, the reported loss of the fullness of meaning, the alienation of the isolated social actor, and so forth, whereas it is hard to see the value of something that has been unforgotten, simply because it is no longer lost. Yet an archaising impulse is also quite pronounced in Kafka, even if its connection to his own era, or for that matter to ours, is not immediately apparent. The narrator of Kafka’s story ‘Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer’ (‘While Building the Chinese Wall’, 1931) makes the archaic into something of a principle when he says: ‘Battles from our most ancient history are only now being fought, and your neighbour, with a flushed face, stumbles into your house with the news’ (2002b: 353–4; my translation). A lot hangs on how we understand the relationship between the ancient battles and the ‘news’ in this line. One thing is obvious, I think. It does not mean to say that those ancient battles are actually more current than our current battles, as if Kafka were practicing a mode of ideology critique, rolling back the curtains to expose modernity’s hidden truth. Kafka’s interest in the archaic is not exactly a critical interest. The relationship between old and new in this passage also does not mean, though, that the present is a stage in a preexisting historical development, that is, that rivers flowing out of the most distant past discharge their clear waters in the now. Kafka also does not understand the past as leading up to and producing the present.

Kafka loved archaic things – animals, legends, myth, the law, sovereignty – neither because the present is the past in disguise nor because the present is an effect of a chain of past causes. He loved the archaic, I think, in part because it could be so disturbing, so alien to the present, so disconnected, as Benjamin’s formulation ‘unforgotten’ implies; but he also loved certain kinds of archaisms the most – these were, at least it seems to me, the nondetermining ones. Things like the CatLamb or the Jewish Bible offered mixed-up and hard to assimilate inheritances. Their kinds of lineages we can hardly identify with a single hidden truth or conflate with the roots of a tree of which we think we are the ripened fruit. These modes of history are much too orderly, for one thing. Court and castle, the hunter Gracchus, the ape that makes a report – these Kafkan figures gesture toward a past that is harder, not easier, to understand, insofar as it was more, shall we say, free for unholy amalgams of all sorts – as these examples demonstrate.

The new medium of film Kafka mentions occasionally in a letter or an early diary entry, naming a few particular films or planning trips to the cinema. But cinema makes no appearance in his fictions at all. To judge from depictions of the medium or references to films, the cinema had hardly any effect on Kafka’s avocation. If we credit only what is represented by Kafka, however, we would miss entirely many of the forces that moved him. These forces often do not appear as depictions, yet they do appear, not as they are, but in altered form. And this may hint at Kafka’s particular way of approaching contemporary culture. He tends to face his own culture through older doubles: movies in advertising placards, say. Or to take another example, whereas other intellectuals and writers of the time – Thomas Mann or Hermann Cohen; friends like Max Brod and Oskar Baum – addressed the conflicts and contradictions of Judentum and Deutschtum directly, Kafka almost always chose antiquated or primeval reflections, whether these were animals or medieval institutions, an odd spool of thread, a resistant loaf of bread, a benighted salesman, and so on.

Let us then combine these two facts about Kafka – his love for the archaic (and his displacement of current phenomena into out of date doubles) and the perfect absence of the cinema in his fictions¹ – and make a set of hypotheses. First, although cinemas and movies are not represented, other modes of mass communication are, especially from the period in which he was writing Der Prozess (The Trial, 2009a) and afterward. The characteristic traits of Verleumdung, slander – transmission through a conduit of low resistance, high fidelity of reception, wide dissemination – make it a potential double for other, more technological broadcast media. I won’t say it is a predecessor. For Kafka, these are not causal chains that add up to something like progress. Yet archaic modes do allow us to say things about putatively modern ones that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to articulate.

Slander enters Joseph K.’s bedroom at the start of The Trial in the strangest of figures: ‘a man he had never seen in his room came in’ (2009a, 7; translation modified). Like a phantasm of a later age, a stranger steps into Joseph K.’s bedroom and gives him the news. And it slowly dawns on Joseph K., although it takes the entire novel for it to happen, that a vast concealed network of signal relays enabled the stranger to appear there. The Trial, we could say, is an archaic displacement of a system like the television system, which, to be sure, Kafka did not live to experience. In the archaic system, nonetheless, communications are distributed among a geographically dispersed mass yet still function intimately, in an imitation of face-to-face encounters. Moreover, through the movement of slander, stealthy as it is and yet invasive, the law keeps itself distant while exercising its power over isolated individuals in the tightest economy. The network of distribution, the delivery by strangers, invasion of the most private sphere, all this increases rather than decreases the power of the slanderer. Something similar happens over the telephone system in Das Schloss (The Castle, 2009b), although the political configuration is somewhat different. In the later novel the technology is represented directly, but the medium, however modern, follows an archaic protocol. A phone call to the sovereign may or may not be answered, and if it is answered, it is never the sovereign himself on the end of the line. The old protocol is something like revelation, a primitive modality of authority to be sure, and yet the modern medium does nothing to improve its intentionally broken linkages and obviously deceptive tones. In fact the expectation to be able to talk to the one you have called, a telephonic expectation, exposes precisely the archaisms, theological ones, that still plague the modern medium that was supposed to have overcome them with its earthly pulses. And still, those you really want to call are not on the network.

A first hypothesis: modern communications media are addressed through archaic shills in Kafka’s writing, especially after 1915. A second hypothesis: this displacing way of writing can have different objectives. It may show how the fundamental problems that shaped an older form of communication – in the case of the telephone, the archaic double would be prayer – persist in the medium, are intensified by it, or even reach a zenith in the new technological form. Or it may imply that the new medium operates in the very same way as the old, only that the context has been lost and so this, the very new, seems to have been born without purpose, a foundling or a miracle in search of a narrative in which it might become justified. Whatever the precise objective of the Kafkan displacement, as a general rule, whenever he turns to the archaic you can read it as an argument against the idea of progress. ‘Believing in progress does not mean that there has been progress. That wouldn’t be a belief’, Kafka jots in a notebook in 1917 (2002c: 57; my translation). It is this belief – not progress itself, which of course only exists as an object of belief, an ideal or an idea – that he wants to eradicate, and showing the proximity of the most ancient past with the most contemporary present is his way of eradicating it. The proximity implies that, despite our rhetoric, nothing has yet happened. A third hypothesis: Kafka looks for the positive dialectical moments in the archaic forms. They are easier to see there because, looking back, we are not blinded either by the false light of progress or by the accompanying general assumption of the need for progress, in other words the conviction that, at this moment, things couldn’t get any worse. If communications with the sovereign are assumed to be broken, arbitrary, or untrustworthy, even when there is a direct line to the royal chamber or a webcam in the throne room, one has to stop wishing and live with the dead line, the empty image, the blocked wish. And thus, if a phone call comes to be treated like its archaic sibling, like a prayer rather than like a telecommunication, Kafka will have achieved some part of his objective.

The example we haven’t mentioned yet, the case of cinema, stands out from the others both because of the particular problems with communication that it seems to solve and in part to perpetuate, and because of the positive dialectical moment that it offers Kafka. This positive moment film inherits from its archaic double. Thus, a fourth and final hypothesis, a speculation really: cinema, if it appears in Kafka’s fictions at all, appears through the archaic double, rumour, and Kafka treats rumour – a further speculative leap – in order to emphasise a radical political potential that may have been lost along the way, as cinema qua medium was received, its codes codified, its habits institutionalised. Let us note that it is early cinema and proto-cinema, the first instances of moving pictures, that echo in the double, rumour. As a mode of transmission, rumour spreads quickly; it knows really no resistance – the law doesn’t recognise it and so legal measures cannot slow it, as they can and do to slander. Rumour flows through the entire land, and rather than isolating individuals into nodes of a network, it tends to bring them together in one place, into a type of theatre. Around the end of 1914 or the beginning of 1915 Kafka writes a story fragment, ‘Der Dorfschullehrer’ (‘The Village Schoolteacher’), named and published after his death by Max Brod, that centres on a theatre of rumour.² What is playing in this theatre is a rumour about the existence of a giant mole. We should emphasise a crucial point: the story is about the rumour, not about the giant mole, and in order to highlight the benefits of rumour it also goes into great detail about contrasting media and modes of distribution – pedagogical texts, opinion pieces, city gossip, scientific studies – that are not nearly as effective. Rumour it portrays as the quickest, most explosive, epistemically suspect, and for this reason the most creative archaic mass medium for the communication of moving images. Rumour moves in several ways: it animates images, it disseminates them rapidly and widely, and it dynamises audiences politically. Rumour puts the polity into motion.

Perhaps this allowed Kafka, if my speculative hypothesis holds, to think through a few aspects of early cinema, although it leaves other aspects and later developments untouched. It does not allow him, or us, to think about cinema as an art form or even as a development in the history of culture. It does not help us to understand film as a development in ways of seeing, either as a new possibility for self-reflection or as an extension of nineteenth-century techniques for disciplining the senses.³ Rather, in rumour, Kafka finds a phenomenon akin to what Tom Gunning in a well-known article from 1986 called the ‘cinema of attractions’. Attraction means one thing for Gunning, and he is careful to distinguish it from another. It names a place to which people are drawn, an amusement park, an ‘act of showing and exhibition’ (1986: 64), and only secondarily does it imply a psychological state or sense stimulation. That is to say, Gunning’s theory of early cinema as a version of the circus, the vaudeville act, the amusement park, the side show even, is a theory of film as a social or political phenomenon, not as a kind of psychology.

I want to single out, in this influential reading of early film, a Kafkan aspect that Gunning mentions but does not emphasise. While Gunning is focused on drawing a clear line between early moving pictures and later more narratively organised films, to label the mode of early cinema ‘exhibition’ and to identify the subject matter as ‘actuality’ or ‘trick’, he also inadvertently stumbles upon the for-whom of this medium, which we should not be astonished to find corresponds with the for-whom of rumour. Early cinema is for ‘an audience not acculturated to the traditional arts’ (1986: 66). Indeed, it is parasitic on the audience that attended burlesques, which became porn films, and sideshows and amusement parks, and so on, which became the trick film and the ‘actuality’ (1986: 64). The ‘for-whom’ of early cinema is not only a class of people, a political class; the class exhibits a very peculiar type of engagement with the political world and with cultural forms that one could only call apolitical and acultural. What do these uncultured marginal political figures get from cinema? Gunning emphasises the pleasure quotient. Attraction, he says, is ‘direct stimulation’ by sensational images. It may well be the case that the uncultured seek pure or mere sensual stimulation, but direct sense stimulation is, we have to add, as precarious and fleeting in the cinema as in the circus, or in the burlesque house. We should focus not only on the climax, so to speak, but also on the type of collective behaviour that the sensorial stimulation creates. We can imagine the political group drawn to Gunning’s ‘attractions’ as what Kafka might call die Unanständigen, the indecent, immodest, the not respectable, those from whom you can’t get a square deal and those who neither buy into nor benefit from the social contract as they are supposed to. R. W. Paul gives a wonderful illustration of this type of spectator in 1901 in The Countryman and the Cinematograph, although the film survives only in fragments. A ‘yokel’ watches a motion picture for the first time, standing beside a movie screen and reacting to different effects. To a dancer dancing he leaps and laughs and slaps his knees, a train speeds toward him and he throws up his hands ‘stop’ and when it doesn’t he flees off screen, when he returns a romance between two lovers touches his heart, and there the fragment breaks off. The yokel sees the cinema not as art but as a depiction of events to which he ought to respond. Undoubtedly it is not these fairly quotidian events that do this, but the medium itself and its power to astonish, which is largely due to its newness. He reacts because these mundane happenings are depicted in a film. Elsewhere Kafka is fascinated by the way the force of an art form changes, in the moment when its cultural status declines;⁴ here he is similarly fascinated by the effects a cultural form can have at a certain stage in its social life, the ‘temporal character’, we might call it. Film had this power to attract yokels in the moment of astonishment. Yokel or not, spectators became yokels through early film’s ability to make quotidian happenings astonishing. No one is a yokel with respect to moving pictures anymore. To be honest, by 1901, by the time such a clown could be shown on the screen, as he was in Paul’s film, the audience already will have transformed. It was already impossible to be the ‘yokel’, only possible to remember him.

Rumour is a medium, if it is a medium, that maintains the incipience of a new medium. It is always new, untrustworthy, historyless, without support from a tradition or an industry or a regime of truth. Its ‘temporal character’ is to be always newborn, simultaneously needy and threatening, and highly attractive. And thus it is only incipient cinema that can be called rumour’s double. ‘Early cinema’ means a medium that carries rumour’s temporal character, for a brief time, along with its political potential and its dangers. No one ever confused rumour with art. A rumour is effective insofar as no one can come to trust it as a form of truth; in the same way early cinema may cause effects completely out of proportion with its social or epistemic status, and it may draw to it the Unanständigen, the yokels, for the brief moment in which it itself is still indecent and untrustworthy. Who trusts the untrustworthy? Or rather, who is at home in a milieu in which trust is not the prerequisite? These are the figures attracted by this indecent attraction. Here we can quote one of those rare notes about the medium of film. Kafka jotted this in his travel diary in February, 1911: ‘The cinematograph gives the seen object [dem Angeschauten] the restlessness of its movement’ (2002c: 937; my translation).

What was the ‘attraction’ of incipient cinema? Before the ‘actuality’ or the ‘trick’ that Gunning highlights, it was undoubtedly in part at least the new attraction of movement itself, the movement of images, or rather – not to confuse technical details with cinematic experience – the movement of what is shown in images. The Lumières’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, 1895) is obviously ‘about’ locomotion. It exhibits locomotion, you could say, and this caused, or so the legend goes, a reaction in the audience – they reportedly ran away. Kafka is also thinking of movement, of the power to astonish when something suddenly can be moved that has not previously been moved. In this diary entry he records the experience of viewing the moving pictures of a Kaiserpanorama. I quote here only part of a passage that has been discussed before:⁵

Kaiserpanorama. Only amusement in Friedland. […] An old man at a little lighted table reading a volume of the Illustrierte Welt was in charge of everything. After a while he let the Ariston [a music automat] play for me … the pictures more alive than in the cinematograph because they allow the gaze reality’s restfulness. The cinematograph gives the seen object the restlessness of its movement, but rest for the eye seems more important. The smooth floors of the cathedrals before our tongues. Why is there no combination of cinema and stereoscope in this way? (2002c: 937)

Here Kafka is lamenting a loss in the transition from the peepshow type of viewing experience to the cinematic one, from a panorama where the viewpoint is held steady and the images revolve placidly before it, to a different effect on the viewer, which he calls restlessness. At least according to this note, one of the very few about cinematic things, Kafka was not interested in the speed or mechanicity of the projected film, and not even in the depiction of motion that was so ubiquitous in early films – trains arriving, people walking, car accidents, and so forth. His interest lies in the ability or not to rest, which is not so much an aesthetic interest, and certainly not a technical issue alone, but more importantly a social and political interest. Doubtless a change in opinion took place between 1911 and 1915. The movement of the spectator that Kafka in 1911 seems to want to squelch, he reevaluates in the story fragment of 1915 about the rumour of a giant mole, where he finds a political use for the restlessness and unculturedness of the yokel.

II. A BRIEF RUMOUROLOGY

A rumour is a delicate creature, easily suffocated; the wrong kind of attention takes away its breathing room. It depends for its existence on an exact balance of attitudes. It is not precisely belief, the attitude with which one first embraces a rumour – unless you can imagine a belief that does not presume the existence of its object. In the epistemic sense, belief posits the existence of a being or state of affairs and through this posit secures the truth of statements about it. You may of course believe that some set of sentences or images is false, that its objects do not exist as portrayed, but disbelieving something is at the same time an assertion of the truth of that falsity and the assertion of a different state of affairs that could be represented truthfully. Disbelief is a species of