In the Penal colony | Franz Kafka

On The Traces of ‘Penal Colony’ | Director’s Note

Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ was written in 1919. One could say that it presents phenomena which left a scar in the historical memory of the 20th century, such as the Goulag, Auschwitz, Guantanamo, the white cells, the islands of exile for political prisoners etc, before these even appeared. In one sense, then, the political significance of the text, as a denunciation of the phenomenon of totalitarianism, becomes clear from the very first moment. Without ignoring the importance of this political approach, it is worth exploring what lies beyond this level, the meta-political, and what echoes or memories convey this other.

In exploring the meta-political landscape with Kafka’s text as a starting point, the focus of our research is on the incarceration of modern man within his own existence, within the cogwheels of his own social body. In the next section, we look more closely at this question.

The human body constrained within the limits of modern alienated and at the same time oppressive society, is itself transformed into a potential punishment machine. This machine embodies the socially institutionalized necessity of repression; it inscribes on the mass of human existence the moral commands and values that are imposed from without. Kafka sees man imprisoned in his own body, being castrated psychologically and spiritually, until his total mechanization is achieved. He sees the existence of man imprisoned in mechanical, socially accepted behavior.

The impossibility of revolt against this social incarceration and against society itself by a body already castrated by society defines the limits of the potential of the profoundly personal power of the individual. Henceforth, we shall speak of man as a machine of consumption, man as commodity. We perceive the scale of human existence within the pre-determined, secure and wholly conventional limits of the social reality of a supermarket.

The repressive/alienating mechanisms, inscribe on the structure of the individual certain predetermined behavioral codes, certain moral dictates and values, obliging people to function according to a pseudo-naturalness, with a pre-defined and therefore safe spontaneity. The social machine of the Penal Colony tolerates no deviation. Each individual is obliged to be completely devoted to his/her particular, imposed, pattern of behavior. Every aspect of behavior that surpasses these limits must be immediately suppressed.

The individual suffers painfully, at first hand, the repressive moral codes and values and the laws that he violates. Even the slightest difference or deviation from the pre-determined, institutionalized norms cannot be allowed. The above bring forth the ideal behavior of modern societies: an army of homogenous human objects, with all possibility of even the slightest differentiation excluded, with the same needs, desires, ideas and behavior.

The question then is: who is revolting, or rather: where does the possibility of revolt lie? The landscape is bleak. It’s difficult to identify the possibilities. The potential for revolt seems to be present, but the question is where this potential lies and how it will develop. The cloned human beings may lack consciousness, and may have destroyed the possibility of the process of thought and action. However, they cannot by their very structure be swallowed up by the social mechanism. The potential (and force) of the phenomenon of life itself, revolts, clashes with and breaks the limits of any kind of imprisonment. In Kafka we won’t find either conscious or committed revolutionary forces however we do find the revolt of life itself. This vital impulse that inhabits the core of human existence (even when it is mechanized) reacts, revolts and finally leads the individual unwillingly to deviant behavior. In the Penal Colony, the Soldier, who later becomes the Convict, falls asleep during sentry duty, reacting subconsciously to the military protocol that obliges him to remain standing day-and-night outside the Captain’s door. When the Captain reprimands him, the soldier, while still half-asleep, attacks him, something he would never consciously allow himself to do.

Therefore reactions like the above are not conscious in the conventional sense of the term. Perhaps they stem from the depths of human existence, from an instinct for life or from a force that resists assimilation and ‘robotisation’. Perhaps we are dealing with a form of embodied/expanded consciousness, a channel for destructive/creative human potential, not strictly entrenched within the limits of rational and manipulative reasoning, but, on the contrary, as the expression of the mental and simultaneously psychosomatic (existential) desire. Perhaps this life-force, with all its innate tendencies for destruction and creation, is where the last hope of man for his survival on the planet lies.

Hence the social mechanism reacts; it expands by attempting to repress and to assimilate even the slightest deviation of behavior. It cannot, however, be ubiquitous. Despite the cancerous growth of the power of control and repression, human existence appears to be vindicated through the cracks of social being, since it is impossible for any repressive, suffocating structure to contain and limit human potential in its entirety.

Thus the mechanism is stuffed to capacity, it short circuits, it collapses and takes with it its own operators. Life explodes; it expresses itself in the most dynamic way, as it must go on! All the limits that have been imposed and that repress the living are destroyed from within. No oppressive mechanism can survive forever. Everyone and everything is a medium for the death of oppression! Without expecting paradise on earth, life itself has the potential to impose, in the most unforeseen way, its relentless force, its will to survive.

Savvas Stroumpos

Κριτικές: ”Στη σωφρονιστική αποικία” του Φραντς Κάφκα. Του Δημήτρη Φοινίτση. “Απ’την πλευρά του θεατή”. Της Μαρώ Τριανταφύλλου. Εφημερίδα Εποχή. Φραντς Κάφκα, Στη σωφρονιστική αποικία. ΤουΔημήτρη Τσατσούλη. Περιοδικό Νέα Εστία Απο το blog “ΘΕΑΤΡΟ”

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