{"id":11503,"date":"2014-01-21T12:37:55","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T16:37:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11503"},"modified":"2014-01-21T12:37:55","modified_gmt":"2014-01-21T16:37:55","slug":"death-by-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/death-by-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Death by data:"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Portrait<\/a>…how Kafka\u2019s The Trial prefigured the nightmare of the modern surveillance state<\/h3>\n

We live in a world of covert court decisions and secret bureaucratic procedures and where privacy is being abolished \u2013 all familiar from Kafka\u2019s best-known novel,\u00a0<\/em>The Trial.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Excellent essay on Kafka<\/strong> & the modern surveillance state by Reiner Stach, <\/em>author of a recent Kafka biography<\/a>\u00a0in the New Statesman<\/strong> this week. Opening paras below:<\/p>\n

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\u201cKafkaesque\u201d is a word much used and little understood. It evokes highbrow, sophisticated thought but its soup\u00e7on of irony allows those who use it to avoid being exact about what it means. When the writers of\u00a0Breaking Bad<\/em>\u00a0titled one of their episodes\u00a0Kafkaesque<\/em>, they were sharing a joke about the word\u2019s nebulousness. \u201cSounds kind of Kafkaesque,\u201d says a pretentious therapy group leader when Jesse Pinkman describes his working conditions. \u201cTotally Kafkaesque,\u201d Jesse witlessly replies.<\/p>\n

If the word is widely misused, it is also increasingly valuable. Last year, when the attorney and author John W Whitehead wrote about the US National Security Agency scandal in an article headlined \u201cKafka\u2019s America\u201d, the reference to Kafka clearly made sense:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of Swat police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted. Indeed, this is Kafka\u2019s nightmare and it is slowly becoming America\u2019s reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

We live in a world of covert court decisions and secret bureaucratic procedures and where privacy is being abolished \u2013 all familiar from Kafka\u2019s best-known novel,\u00a0The Trial<\/em>. This year marks the centenary of the book\u2019s composition, though it was not published until after Kafka\u2019s death, in 1925.<\/p>\n

Kafka\u2019s texts age far more slowly than those of almost any other author of his era. In\u00a0The Trial<\/em>, we are drawn so compellingly into a story of pursuit and fear that it seems like a nightmare we all share, even though most people in the postwar west have not been subjected to anything nearly as extreme. Readers under communism, however, pictured a situation that they knew all too well, in which the fundamental rights of the individual had been stripped away. Many gravitated to a political interpretation of Kafka, bolstered by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, who had proclaimed Kafka a prophet. Those in power did not appreciate having a mirror held up to them and attached the label of \u201cbourgeois decadence\u201d to Kafka; his work was banned in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The communist literary scholar and social scientist Georg Luk\u00e1cs was one of Kafka\u2019s strongest critics but after his arrest in 1956 in Budapest, he is said to have admitted, \u201cKafka was a realist after all.\u201d This about-turn was as narrow-minded as his earlier indictment because both missed the point of Kafka\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

[ctd here<\/a>.\u00a0Written for the <\/em>New Statesman, this essay was translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. \u201cKafka: the Decisive Years\u201d by Reiner Stach is published by Princeton\u00a0<\/em>University Press ]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…how Kafka\u2019s The Trial prefigured the nightmare of the modern surveillance state We live in a world of covert court decisions and secret bureaucratic procedures and where privacy is being abolished \u2013 all familiar...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,42],"tags":[328,1473],"class_list":["post-11503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-essays","tag-franz-kafka","tag-reiner-stach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11503"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11508,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11503\/revisions\/11508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}