Critical Inquiry

Summer 2001
Volume 27, Number 4

Excerpt from
In the Electoral Colony: Kafka in Florida
by James Conant
The following might be a precis of a Kafka story. The time has come, in a great land, let's call it Florida, when the citizens of the land must choose a new leader--they call him the president. The citizens are very proud of the manner in which they choose their leader. Every citizen gets one and only one vote, and, after everyone has voted, each vote is counted by an enormous machine. There was once a time when the machine was new and shiny and whirred almost soundlessly, and the mere sight of it filled people with awe. And, at election time, all the citizens of Florida used to gather to watch the machine count the votes. And, as they watched, each citizen knew in his heart that the letter of the law was being carried out and justice was being done. But at the time in which our story is set almost nobody came to watch the machine. The sight of it no longer filled anyone with awe (and even its parts were no longer regularly replaced as they once were). Nevertheless, the citizens continued to have confidence in the machine and to take its proper functioning for granted.
See Also

Geoffrey Galt Harpham: So... What is Enlightenment? An Inquisition into Modernity (Spring 1994)

Lutz P. Koepnick: The Spectacle, the Trauerspiel, and the Politics of Resolution: Benjamin Reading the Baroque Reading Weimar (Winter 1996)

O.K. Werckmeister: Kafka 007 (Winter 1995)

It became old and dirty, and one cog had been ground down so far that it screaked loudly when the machine was running. Some favored abolishing the machine altogether, for it was known that it did not count votes with complete accuracy. The margin of error was, admittedly, very small; until now this slight defect in the machine had not attracted much attention. A few wise men had prophesied that the day would come when the machine's known margin of error would exceed the difference between the numbers of votes that, according to the machine, each of the candidates for president had received. But (the fate of wise men and that of fools being in this regard alike) no one listened to them. And, sure enough, the day came. The vote was too close to call. Justice and Florida law--they both seemed to everyone to point in the same direction, at this early stage in our story--appeared to demand a recount. So the citizens went to work, feeding all of the ballots back into the machine, so that the votes could be recounted mechanically. But after the machine finished its work a second time, the citizens found it difficult to say whether the resulting judgment took them a step closer to or a step further from justice. For the margin of error was just as great as before but the difference in the vote was even less than before. And, soon thereafter, it became difficult to tell what either justice or Florida law demanded of the citizens, or even whether they demanded the same thing. But there must be something that they each demanded, for surely neither justice nor the law would permit a situation to arise in which the citizens of the great land found themselves without a leader. Some of the wise men of the land declared that justice and possibly Florida law demanded that they now count the votes by hand. But others opposed this as blasphemy. Only the machine could dispense justice. For only a machine could arrive at a truly objective judgment. How could mere humans, in all their finitude--in all their fallibility and susceptibility to temptation--ever hope to have any confidence in their interpretation of the judgment to be handed down?

In Kafka's story, "In the Penal Colony," we encounter another enormous machine. What these two machines have in common is that each is the expression of a fantasy of a procedure of (arriving at or acting in accordance with) judgment that does not itself presuppose the exercise of a (merely human) faculty of judgment. In the penal colony, the machine "has the job" not of arriving at the judgment but "of actually carrying out the judgment."3 The difference here is that between the discernment of justice and its dispensation. This difference matters to what our two stories--the one Kafka could have written and the one he did write--are about. The fantasy of the operation of the machine in the story Kafka did write has to do with the achievement of a mechanism that allows not for the absolute legibility of what ought to be decreed, as in the parable of Florida, but rather for the absolute legibility of what has been decreed--once a judgment, however arrived at, has been handed down. In the penal colony, "the commandment that the condemned man has broken is written on his body" by that part of the machine affectionately known, because of its resemblance to a certain farm instrument, as the harrow ("I," p. 197; "IS," p. 103). In these sophisticated times in which we live, we need not wait long to have someone tell us that the harrow is a figure for the authors pen, and the operation of the machine on the condemned man's body is a trope for the relation the sentences of Kafka's punishing story are to bear to their reader.4 But, if so, do we, in our sophistication, also know what commandment it is that we have broken and what sentence it is that this story seeks to inscribe upon us?

3. Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York, 1993), p. 196, hereafter abbreviated "I"; Kafka, "In der Strafkolonie," Sämtliche Erzählungen, ed. Paul Raabe (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), p. 103, hereafter abbreviated "IS."

4. "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us" (Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27 Jan. 1904, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [New York, 1977], p. 16; Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924 [Frankfurt am Main, 1975], p. 27, hereafter abbreviated B).

James Conant is professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

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