SOURCE: Gailus, Andreas. “Lessons of the Cryptograph: Revelation and the Mechanical in Kafka's ‘In the Penal Colony.’” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 2 (April 2001): 295-302.

[In the following essay, Gailus explores Kafka's idea of the law as a “force without significance” as developed through his satire of the law machine in “In the Penal Colony.”]

According to a great Rabbi, Walter Benjamin recalls in his essay on Kafka, the coming Messiah “will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it.”¹ A slight adjustment of the ordinary—this is indeed what happens everywhere in Kafka's texts in which daily objects, made all but invisible through familiarity, are transformed into enigmatic signs. The archetype of the enigmatic object-sign for Kafka is the door, and it is indeed doors that structure the parabolic and mythic space of his narratives. Opened and shut, locked and unlocked, peeped through and barricaded, they cease to be ordinary doors and become instead architectural elements in a theater of the unsayable. This is of course nowhere more true than with those doors that his heroes regularly confront in their search for truth: it happens to K. in The Castle, to Josef K. in The Trial, and, most famously of all, to the man from the country in the parable “Before the Law.” If only they were able to pass through these enigmatic doors and come face to face with what lies behind them, these texts seem to suggest, they would finally be able to grasp the truth they have been seeking, discover the Law of their lives. Kafka's doors, in other words, hold out the promise of revelation.

Kafka's “In the Penal Colony” is a remarkably doorless story. Instead of the crowded attics of The Trial or the tenebrous landscape of The Castle, “In the Penal Colony” takes place in a barren desert valley, under a glare so intense as to prompt the explorer to shelter “his eyes from the sun with one hand.”² It is more than sunlight, however, against which the explorer seeks protection. “With the strongest light,” Kafka writes in an aphorism, “one can dissolve the world. Before weak eyes, it gains in solidity, before weaker ones it develops fists, before even weaker ones it becomes bashful and crushes him who dares to look at it.”³ The light of “In the Penal Colony” is precisely of this nature, yet it dissolves not the world but the image of revelation. Kafka's story takes us to the other side of the door. The irony of this move is that it erases the very topography on which the enigma of the door rests, the locus of the “beyond.” For beyond the door lies not the territory of meaning but an institution that produces the illusion of a door that simultaneously defines and blocks access to this territory. “In the Penal Colony” is Kafka's attempt to traverse the fantasy of revelation by unveiling the mechanical nature of its production.

The passage through the door of revelation takes the form of an epic journey figured as an ethnographic travelogue. The subject of this journey is a European explorer—a representative of Reason and Enlightenment—sent from the mainland of the Empire to a remote island penal colony. This spatial displacement is also a journey back in time. First, because the passage from center to periphery is figured as a passage from civilization to a more primitive society; and second, because the colony itself comprises two disparate temporalities. The colony's present, embodied in the reign of the New Commandant, and its mythic past, associated with the rule of the Old Commandant, the inventor of the machine. The machine, then, is placed at a double remove, distanced from the center of the Empire by a topographical and a temporal frame. To this must be added a third frame, an explicitly narrative one: the description of the glorious working of the machine is given in an embedded narrative through the words of the officer, who was the Old Commandant's assistant in all penal matters, and who seeks to persuade the explorer to join him in his fight against the New Commandant (“IPC” 198). The effect of this triple framing is to bracket the machine's historical character and foreground its fantasmatic nature. The operations of the machine, if not the machine itself, in other words, are part of an institutional fantasy. But whose fantasy is it? Most clearly the officer's, whose fixation on the Old Commandant reveals a resistance to the passing of time as such: that is, to history. From the perspective of his mythical world view, the machine embodies the very idea of justice. As for the explorer, to the extent that he stands outside this mythical framework, he is also unaffected by the officer's institutional fantasy. And in a way, this is indeed the case. The explorer approaches the machine in the manner of a critical historian, judging it, not as an idealized form of justice, but as a brutal and outdated instrument of power. But this historical perspective is itself fantasmatic in that it provides the explorer, under the cover of seemingly impartial observation, with the archaic foil for his own institutional fantasy of a modern, civilized, European legal system which has outgrown the brute violence of its archaic prehistory. Another way of putting this is to say that the fantasy of the explorer is the Enlightenment fantasy of an historical-scientific stance outside any fantasmatic frame, the stance of theoretical objectivity. Kafka's narrative throws into doubt precisely this presumed impartiality, along with the strict opposition between archaic and Enlightenment justice.

At the center of both fantasies stands a common conception of law and justice. According to it, justice depends on two fundamental conditions: first, the symmetry between crime and punishment; and second, the veridical subsumption of the particular case under the universal law. But while within the Enlightenment model these conditions—that is, of symmetry and of veridical subsumption—are regulative ideas that orient the legal system but can never be fully satisfied, the Old Commandant designed a machine that transforms these ideas into physical principles. The judiciary system of the penal settlement radicalizes the Enlightenment conception of justice to the point of crisis. Pushed to its extreme, the symmetry between crime and punishment gives way to identity, and the subsumption of the particular under the universal gives way to a sacrificial logic reducing the individual to a corporeal instantiation of the universal.

The operations of the machine induce a semantic collapse in which the meaning of the elements proper to the conception of justice are obliterated. Consider the officer's articulation of the a priori character of guilt. “My guiding principle is this,” he declares, “Guilt is never to be doubted. Other courts cannot follow that principle, for they consist of several opinions and have higher courts to scrutinize them. This is not the case here …” (“IPC” 198). The officer's principle obscures the semantic difference between Anschuldigung (accusation) and Schuld (guilt): to be angeschuldigt is to be schuldig, to be accused is to be guilty. Consequently, there is no longer any need to prove the connection between crime and criminal. The penal colony's judiciary system does away with all procedures and language games—interrogation, litigation, deliberation, etc.—that characterize the trial as a process of truth-finding. In fact, the system undoes the temporal character of legal procedure, and in so doing erases the nature of the sentence as a logical judgment reached through a process of reasoning. Instead of the gradual subsumption of the particular under the general, we are confronted with the instantaneous identification of the accused individual and the Law. A similar semantic collapse affects the notion of symmetry between crime and punishment, which is pushed to the point where the difference between the two collapses. “Our sentence does not sound severe. Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow. ‘This prisoner, for instance,’—the officer indicated the man—‘will have written on his body: Honor Thy Superiors!’” (“IPC” 197). Where transgression and punishment stand in such exact and predetermined relation to each other, no human weighing need balance the scales of crime and punishment, and no subjective judgment interferes with the working of justice.

From this series of erasures and fusions emerges a Law devoid of any specific meaning. The machine embodies the fantasy of a symbolism without semantic mediation, of a supreme and transcendent language so pure as to be untranslatable into ordinary words. I want to approach the inner logic of this fantasy by way of a short detour through the work of another writer who, one hundred years before Kafka, had dreamed up a similar machine. In his short essay, “On the Marionette Theater,” Heinrich von Kleist, one of Kafka's favorite authors, puts forth the rather surprising proposition that the most graceful movement can be achieved, not by a professional dancer, but by a marionette.⁴ This is so, the character named C. explains, because in human movement there is an unavoidable split between the soul, as the principle of motion, and the body, as its organ. This split is brought about through human desire, which directs the soul toward an external object, thus displacing the body's point of gravity in a way that necessarily fractures the harmony of the body and soul and disrupts the gracefulness of movement. The marionette, on the other hand, due to its complete absence of desire and intentionality, knows no such internal fracture. Guided by a machinist or, in the most advanced form, by a machine that operates according to a set of mathematical rules, the marionette's dance is therefore capable of realizing a perfectly formalized—and in this sense, absolutely beautiful—movement. The dance of the marionette is the fullest expression of grace, the complete fusion, without remainder, of matter and form. But it is also the terrifying image of a pure motion of the soul without soul, and of a pure expression of the body without body.

Where Kleist's marionette-machine seeks the achievement of motion, Kafka's law-machine seeks the achievement of pure meaning. It is no accident that, in their drive towards realization, both systems of formalization encounter the same locus of resistance: the human organism, the life of the body. In Kleist, this threat to the body surfaces most clearly in a short anecdote concerning a mutilated Englishman who, after receiving an artificial leg, was able to achieve a gracefulness of movement vastly superior to his natural-legged countrymen.⁵ As for Kafka, the machine is nothing other than a complex apparatus for the mechanical application of the sacred Law to the body of the accused. The machine does not merely apply the Law to, or inscribe it, onto the body. Rather, it passes the Law through the body by means of registering its letters directly on the prisoner's nervous system. For justice to be revealed, the Law must be deciphered through the pain of a body subjected to mechanical torture.

How exactly does this work? The machine consists of three parts: the Designer, which contains the piece of paper with the sentence, written according to the elaborately ornamental design of the Old Commandant; the Harrow, which engraves “the sentence on the skin of the guilty”; and the Bed, covered with cotton-wool, to which the accused is strapped and which turns slowly to expose his entire body to the writing needles.

Can you follow it? The Harrow is beginning to write; when it finishes the first draft of the inscription on the man's back, the layer of cotton wool begins to roll and slowly turns the body over, to give the Harrow fresh space for writing. Meanwhile the raw part that has been written on lies on the cotton wool, which is specially prepared to staunch the bleeding and so makes all ready for a new deepening of the script. Then these teeth at the edge of the Harrow, as the body turns further round, tear the cotton wool away from the wounds, throw it into the pit, and there is more work for the Harrow. So it keeps on writing deeper and deeper for the whole twelve hours. The first six hours the condemned man stays alive almost as before, he suffers only pain. After two hours, the felt gag is taken away, for he has no longer strength to scream. … But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one's eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. To be sure, that is a hard task; he needs six hours to accomplish it. By that time the harrow has pierced him quite through and casts him into the pit, where he pitches down upon the blood and water and the cotton wool. Then the judgment has been fulfilled, and we, the soldier and I, bury him.

[“IPC” 203-4]

To approach the logic of this passage, recall Althusser's classic essay on interpellation.⁶ The essay stages a little scene in which a man on a street, anonymously hailed by a police officer, responds to this official call by turning around. By responding to the officer's “Hey, you there,” Althusser suggests, the man recognizes himself as the addressee of an institutional call: that is, he identifies his own being in terms defined by the authorities. Kafka's story describes a mechanism that is at once very similar and very different. As with Althusser, it stages a scene of ideological recognition: the moment of transfiguration is the one when the prisoner deciphers, and recognizes himself in, the Law that is being inscribed onto his body. But whereas in Althusser the drama of interpellation takes place on the level of the psyche, this process now works directly on and through the body. Interpellation, in Kafka, occurs through the somatization of ideology; it is a mechanical operation through which the Symbolic is carved into the subject's body.

This is also why what in Althusser's allegorical narrative is a moment of instantaneous capture, in Kafka's story is a process that takes its time. For the Commandment is not just registered on the body, but against the body. Recall again the officer's description:

The Harrow is beginning to write; when it finishes the first draft of the inscription on the back, the layer of cotton-wool begins to roll and slowly turns the body over, to give the Harrow fresh space for writing. Meanwhile the raw part that has been written only lies on the cotton-wool, which is especially prepared to staunch the bleeding and so makes all ready for a new deepening of the script.

[“IPC” 203]

A deepening of the script. The Law is inscribed through a process of repetitive writing that hollows out the body and evacuates its corporeality. The writing of the Law is therefore not, as the officer believes—and wants others to believe—a miraculous fusion of body and meaning. Rather, it is a mechanical operation for extracting the body's vital energies. Thus the radiating image of comprehension on the prisoner's face is the product of a terrifying exchange; it is the chiastic transfer of a meaning whose vitality is brought about through the extraction of life from the body.

The point of intersection between the Symbolic and the somatic, Law and body, is the prisoner's pain. Pain is, according to a long philosophical tradition, the locus of private particularity, the one thing that resists, according to Wittgenstein, verbalization and symbolization.⁷ Initially, this is also the case in Kafka. The prisoner's pain marks the body's resistance to its material interpellation. But the operations of the machine slowly turn this locus of incommunicability into the site of revelation. For the prisoner learns his judgment through his wounds—that is, he deciphers the commandment not by means of a mental reading, but through its encryption onto the nervous system. This is the core of the institutional fantasy: a machine that short-circuits semantic mediation and directly inscribes the Symbolic into the Real of bare life. Ironically, it is precisely through this bypassing of meaning that the machine transforms the prisoner's body into the revelatory site of the master signifier, the pure meaning of Justice. The officer explains that, once the execution began,

No discordant noise spoilt the working of the machine. Many did not care to watch it but lay with closed eyes in the sand; they all knew: Now Justice is being done. … Well, and then came the sixth hour! It was impossible to grant all the requests to be allowed to watch it from near by. … How we all absorbed the look of transfiguration on the face of the sufferer, how we bathed our cheeks in the radiance of that justice, achieved at last and fading so quickly!

[“IPC” 209]

Let me pass over the theological subtext of this passage and focus instead on the fantasmatic and imaginary quality of the scene.⁸ The passage stages a public spectacle of justice centered on a transcendent signifier. The prisoner's tortured body becomes a public locus for the formation of the community's collective body. This collectivizing force radiates from the prisoner's “transfigured” face, which is held to bear the mark of a master signifier—the signifier of justice—whose meaning, due to its other-worldly origin, cannot be uttered in ordinary language but must be revealed through its embodiment. The scene of torture, then, is staged as one of revelation, as the disclosure of divine Law. But note that this revelation does not result from the prisoner's deciphering of his wounds, however, but from the spectator's deciphering of the prisoner's facial expressions. In other words, transfiguration occurs not through the metamorphosis of the body but by means of an interpretation that reads bodily changes in terms of transfiguration. Indeed, so strong is the belief of the spectators in this transfiguration of the body that “[m]any did not care to watch it but lay with closed eyes in the sand; they all knew: Now Justice is being done!” All of this underscores my claim, I believe, that the machine is part of a carefully orchestrated institutional fantasy of encryption and decipherment, it is, in a word, a cryptograph. The meaning of justice is not, as the fantasy wants us to believe, instantiated in a transfigured body; rather, it is the product of a mechanical ritual that stages the sacrifice of the body as a scene of transfiguration. The fantasy of revelation emerges, in short, through the double determination of the private and inaccessible terrain of human pain on the one hand, and its decipherment in the spectacle of public reception on the other. Revelation, in short, is shown to be the removal of a veil that it itself has created. It is not a self-identical truth but a two-sided form, not a transcendent meaning located beyond a door but a complex spectacle that first produces the sense of an inaccessible beyond (the private terrain of pain) in order then to stage its public disclosure (the moment of decipherment).

So much, then, for the institutional fantasy of the Old Commandant. But what about the claim that this fantasy is not restricted to the old order, but is relevant as well to our understanding of both the penal colony and the Empire. To argue this point, I shall, as it were, briefly traverse Kafka's triple framing of the machine in reverse order, arguing first that the operations of the machine epitomize the workings of penal colonies as such; and second that the penal colony is the spatial actualization of a topological dimension immanent to Enlightenment law. As for the first move—from machine to colony—the oppositions between Symbolic and somatic, Law and body, structuring the working of the machine are repeated, at the level of the colony, in the opposition between oppressor and oppressed. Moreover, this analogy holds for the specific dynamic that links these terms. For what, after all, is the disciplinary purpose of a penal colony if not to inscribe into the oppressed, through a series of disciplinary operations, the character of empire? Seen in these terms, the colony too is a kind of semiotic machine akin to the cryptograph, and the reforms of the New Commandant will at best change the specific technologies of encryption, but not the fact of encryption as such.

As for my second claim—the structural connection between colony and empire—the case is more complex and requires a small detour. I want to suggest that the relation between colony and empire is equivalent to the relation between the ordinary course of events and the state of exception. Kierkegaard, whom Kafka admired, once wrote, “the exception explains the universal and himself, and if one really wants to study the universal, one only needs to look around for a legitimate exception. … The exception … thinks the universal with intense passion.”⁹ Recently, Giorgio Agamben, building on the work of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, has pursued this line of thought and developed a theory of power and law predicated on the notion of exception.¹⁰ Every legal order, Agamben claims, is sustained by an element of extralegal violence. This violence brings order into existence in the first place, but persists throughout the law's normal operations, and is visible in the apparatus of law-enforcing institutions, like that of the police, without which no legal order can function. The topological structure of this extralegal violence—at once inside and outside the law—finds its purest embodiment in the figure of the sovereign, who has the power, in moments of exceptional danger, legally to suspend the law in order to preserve the State and its Law. In such moments, the sovereign's word is Law: that is, it carries direct legal authority without the mediation of legal process. Borrowing a phrase from Gershom Scholem (which incidentally was coined to describe the nature of revelation in Kafka) Agamben says that the sovereign's words have the character of “being in force without significance.”¹¹

Being in force without significance. Does this not describe exactly the structure of the Law in Kafka's machine, a Law that is devoid of meaning and semantic depth, and whose terrifying force is unhampered by legal mediation? And is not the Old Commandant, whose word is Law and whose rule is absolute, the figure par excellence of the sovereign? The colony over which he exercised sovereignty, then, is the spatial actualization of a topological dimension immanent to Law. It is the territory of the exception, a space in which the extralegal—and hence meaningless—violence of the Law is rendered both visible and material. And to the extent that the cryptograph is the purest manifestation of this violence, the narrative passage through the triple frame—from empire to colony to machine—is an infernal descent from the apparition of Enlightenment reason to the reified force of a senseless legality.

Notes

1. “Franz Kafka,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. 2. 1927-1934, ed. Michael Jennings et al., trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 811.

2. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 195; hereafter abbreviated “IPC.”

3. Franz Kafka, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1994), 237, my translation. The original reads: “Mit stärkstem Licht kann man die Welt auflösen. Vor schwachen Augen wird sie fest, vor noch schwächeren bekommt sie Fäuste, vor noch schwächeren wird sie schamhaft und zerschmettert den, der sie anzuschauen wagt.”

4. Heinrich von Kleist, “Über das Marionettentheater,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. 2, ed. Helmut Sembdner (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1961), 338-49.

5. Ibid., 341.

6. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmilian Publishing Co., 1989), 244-6; for a discussion of the ways in which physical pain shatters communication itself, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3-27.

8. “In the Penal Colony” seems to be unique among Kafka's texts in that it makes use of a concept of redemption that draws on both Jewish and Christian imagery. The story's emphasis on the public character of redemption is a defining feature of Messianic thought. According to Gershom Scholem, “Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. It is an occurrence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearance” (The Messianic Idea in Judaism, trans. Michael Meyer [New York: Schocken Books, 1972], 1). An even stronger Messianic language is sounded at the end of the story, in the proclamation engraved on the Old Commandant's tomb: “Here rests the Old Commandant. His adherents, who must now be nameless, have dug his grave and set up his stone. There is a prophecy that after a certain number of years the Commandant will rise again and lead his adherents from his house to recover the colony. Have faith and wait” (“IPC” 226). These Messianic references, however, are intermingled with Christological motifs. Not only does the machine's method of torture—the piercing of the body with needles—recall the crucifixion of Christ, but the importance of the sixth hour as the decisive turning point is also borrowed directly from Luke's description of Christ's passion (Luke 23:44). Indeed, the very notion of Justice the story puts forth seems to blend Jewish and Christological elements. On the one hand, the fact that the commandment is written onto the body is in keeping with Jewish thought, which stresses the necessary link between God's justice and its materialization in scripture. Yet on the other hand, the fact that justice is revealed through the transfiguration of the sufferer's face strongly recalls a Christian conception, which breaks with the Judaic link between justice and scripture by claiming, according to Paul, that Christ's tortured body directly manifests “the justice of God without the Law” (Rom. 3:21).

9. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, in Fear and Trembling: Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 227.

10. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).

11. Ibid., 51.

This essay arose out of discussions with Russell Newstadt. I am indebted to him for his many incisive comments and for the title of the essay itself.