"In the Penal Colony": Kafka on the Ends of Political Tradition

Abstract: I provide a reading of Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and argue that Kafka’s image of the officer represents a commentary on the breakdown and limitations of political “tradition.”

What happens when a tradition implodes upon itself?

This is precisely the question which Kafka’s In the Penal Colony seems to instill in the would-be analyst: the trope of tradition, with all its political and social connotations, seems to reach a limit that evades more traditional means and modes of evaluating this elusive principle (or categorical set of principles). For when we speak of tradition, we often do so diachronically: we analyze the clash and ensuing violence between two competing traditions, the internal and often dialectical conflicts that enable tradition to progress and evolve, the assimilation of one tradition into the edifice of yet another tradition, the stockpiling of knowledge through accumulated culture, and so forth—these are the problematic concerns, issues and conceptions that shape the ways in which tradition is addressed and understood throughout political discourse.

And it is with this conventional notion of tradition that Kafka begins his story: an explorer, whose implicit purpose is to document the anthropological customs and rituals of the places he visits, finds himself in a strange penal colony, facing the colony’s dying tradition of executing its “guilty” subjects via a formalistic, dissymmetrical legal system supported by the utilization of an immense, complex and deadly machine. The machine, a remnant of the old regime of a once-influential Commandant, now finds its only supporter in the character of a zealous Officer, whose commitment to the Commandant’s legacy reaches a quasi-religious fanaticism. The story develops as the explorer watches the old tradition unfold under the excited eye of the Officer.

To be sure, the surface of this narrative is strikingly average. On the one hand, we are presented with the perspective of a supposedly cultured, perhaps “European” (and the various ideological and political connotations that title carries) traveler who encounters a rather archaic legal system in a penal colony on the fringe of modernization (the new Commandant, we are told by the Officer, is “always looking for an excuse to attack our old way of doing things” (Kafka; 151)). The Officer, who is to preside over the execution the explorer will witness, is the final advocate of a failing tradition that is desperately attempting to cling to the legacy of the old Commandant. In this sense, we encounter, at least politically, a play of interiority and exteriority: the cohesive, coherent structure of the old Commandant’s regime is threatened from the external pressures of a changing legal, ideological and political environment. Apart from the particularities of the story itself—for example, the profound implications associated with the truly draconian method of legality the Officer and the great machine represent (which is a remarkable marriage between medieval torture and the sheer power and precision of industrial, modern machines)—this notion of tradition stands as perhaps the greatest facet of the narrative’s political symbolism. If the story ended at this point, the usual tools of political criticism would more than suffice; but, of course, Kafka will not permit such pleasantries, and will instead conjure a horrific image that not only begins to disrupt and destabilize any coherent system of ethics, but also any measurable and articulatable perspective of political tradition.

For we can perhaps distill the story down into this: a member of one tradition, threatened by the impending destruction of that tradition from the advent of more modern traditions, seeks to use the testimony of a respected mind—the explorer—in order to reinstate the legitimacy and popularity the old tradition once had; the explorer, in disagreement with the old tradition’s methods (“‘I do not approve of your [the Officer’s] procedure,’ said the explorer then” (Kafka; 159-160)), will not advocate for the machine’s legitimacy; the member of the old tradition fails in the realization of his intended objective. But it is in the moment of failure, this moment of true exceptionality in which the conflict between two competing traditions is to be finally decided, that something emerges from the embers of the great machine that will articulate the death of the very category of coherent tradition: as the Officer removes the prisoner from the machine, it becomes clear that the failure of the Officer’s tradition will be something much more sinister than its overthrow by external forces.

For the true horror of the story arrives with the Officer removing the condemned man from the machine, reprogramming the machine’s complex mechanisms and gears, and placing his own body on the machine’s template. As the machine begins to write its verdict on the Officer—the old Commandant’s greatest law, to “Be Just!” (Kafka; 161)—the metal parts and cogs of the machine begin to fall from its intricate structure: the Officer, destroying himself, destroys the entirety of the machine and the legal tradition of the old Commandant. Metal, body, blood, law—all collapse in on one another, “stacking” their intrinsic relations into an image and aesthetic of terror.

While the details of the machine itself are truly fascinating, and Kafka presents a vivid portrait not only of the machine’s technical genius, but of the ritualistic and ceremonial marking of political and legal “bodies” via the method of literally writing the prisoner’s punishment onto their skin, the details are still grouped under the broader category of the old Commandant’s tradition: what concerns us is not so much the life of that tradition so much as the profound meaning and method of its death. For to speak of the death of tradition is to invoke a series of intersecting analytical methods that are themselves the product of a specific (e.g., European) tradition: the common analysis of tradition holds the death of tradition to usually be a result of conflict, contextualized either internally or externally. What is clear is that this form of conflict-analysis germinates in the shadow of a neo-Schimittian model of a “friend/enemy” dynamic. We understand why traditions succeed and fail, live and die, due to a predetermined notion of an “interiority”—or, the coherence and cohesiveness of the “friend”—and “exteriority”—or, the powers, strategies, practices, technologies and ideologies that stand as the “enemy” of the tradition. Of course, traditions can coexist in mutual harmony, but it is always the presence of another tradition—a tradition “outside” the boundaries and limits of the single tradition—that acts as the constituting “otherness,” the referential seal that thrusts the other into being through a complex dialectic. Even conflicts within one tradition can be broken down in the wake of this understanding, and the techniques of conflict analysis triumphantly emerge as profitable modes and means of critically structuring and ordering our political understanding. But this evaluative system is precisely what Kafka, and Kafka’s imagined Officer, so effectively challenge. The efficacy of Kafka’s dark vision, ingeniously extended into the realm of the “possible” and the “real” via Kafka’s nuanced realist style, discovers such success precisely because it successfully identifies the ways in which this conception of tradition, and the accompanying notion of tradition analysis, are subject to such disruption and deconstruction. Kafka is far closer to a theorist like Marx, therefore, in his ability to identity the “self-gravediggers” embedded in any tradition and which hollows out tradition viz. its own energies and “from the inside out,” so to speak.

In this sense, what the Officer manages to achieve is something beyond the capability of the dialectics and diachronic evaluations of usual conflict analysis to circumscribe in a measurable field of political discourse. The Officer writes the commandments of the tradition upon his body, and by so doing writes himself into the tradition he seeks to uphold. As the efficacy of the tradition is found in the effectiveness of its method and its ability to legitimately reproduce itself, the Officer’s actions signal the ultimate success and the ultimate failure of the tradition itself. The Officer’s religious devotion to the old Commandant—note, for instance, the scripture-like nature of the old Commandant’s complex plans (“The explorer bent so close to the paper [the Commandant’s design of the machine] that the Officer feared he might touch it and drew it further away; the explorer made no remark, yet it was clear that he still could not decipher it” (Kafka; 161)—is it not here that the role of interpreting tradition, and the role of belief, enter the political equation?), or the very fact that, like a God, the Commandant is only an idol to be worshiped, a traced figure that supposedly once existed but is never seen, heard or realized beyond the iron existence of the machine or the reports and interpretations of the Officer—is truly emblematic of the animated life of the old tradition. This religious structure proves, ethically, rather mute: as the explorer notes with all the verve and experience of an educated, “European” critic, “the injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution were undeniable.” (Kafka; 151) But, with the Officer now inflicting a self-mutilation, an act of religious observance that mimics the self-flagellation and autoagressive tendencies of the most corporeal and rigid religious sects, hasn’t justice, under the auspice of a perverted interpretation, been served? With the machine destroying itself, has it not acted justly in order to remove from the world, and from the ideological systems of tradition, its gross, indecent and inhumane method of execution? Self-cruelty and violence veil over a deeper type of kindness and compassion. The paradox here is truly irreducible, and presents the structure of political discourse with a scenario for which it cannot fully account—the act becomes a singularity, something so immense and inundated with such conceptual inertia that “ethics” and “politics” totally fail to effectively explain its veritable significance. It creates, commands and collapses the conditions of its own justice: a type-of self-imposed telos that professes an alien but profound ars moriendi.

And, within the irreducibility of this paradox, we are presented immediately with the impending breakdown of the entire legal structure. The very categories of criminal and legal enforcer—the prisoner and the solider—began to merge and blur, as Kafka elaborates on their playful, humoristic and amiable relationship proceeding the prisoner’s release from the machine: “Perhaps the condemned man found it incumbent upon him to amuse the soldier, who squatted on the ground beating his knees with mirth,” (Kafka; 162) Kafka notes, only to extend this playfulness even further by observing: “So they [the condemned man and the soldier] were wrestling, half in jest.” (Kafka; 163) As the Officer’s final act takes form, all the usual conceptions of the conflict between prisoner and prison-holder seem to disappear, and we are left with a legal system that’s once-cohesive and enforceable repository of meaning has been depleted. A new relationship—which reimagines the “acceptable” or “permissible” interactions between the law and its subjects—begins to materialize in its place. The categories within tradition begin to dissolve in the solvent of an act that signals the very dissolution of tradition itself.

Beyond the immediate ramifications of this action, it is the lingering dimension of the degeneration of the categories of memory and forgetting—categories that prove so vital for the internal/external dichotomy of tradition—that ostensibly challenges the efficacy of political discourse. We must ask a central question: how can we forget the Officer and his machine? The imposition of remembrance upon the explorer and reader is undeniable, as there is a psychological facet of Kafka’s gruesome machination that seems to evade more conventional employments of this dualism that is so central to the conceptual discourse of tradition. One tradition has not conquered another; assimilation and absorption has not occurred; internal conflict, representative of the greater friend/enemy distinction, has lost all its analytical command. The entire internal/external foundation for conflict analysis begins to crumble. And what is left, therefore, in the crumbled pile of the old machine, of the iron spike driven through the forehead of the once-zealous Officer, is not a general example of the political dimension of tradition: rather, what we encounter is precisely that which lies outside of tradition, which threatens the very conceptual basis for any tradition to emerge through the play not of a dialectical construct that merges the internal/external binary into the greater dualistic structure of a dialectic between memory and forgetting (for the very notion of tradition is uncovered at the vortex of this irreducible and permanent tension, and it is politics that circumscribes this entire area of theory), but through the trace of a concept of tradition—a tradition’s dark apparition, its spectral residue, the ghost-like phantasm of its political potentiality that never reached actuality in the discharge of a measurable act of decipherable politics—that exists outside of and beyond the usual play of tradition. As precise and effective as our critical tools might be, we can never fully understand the depth and the complexity of the Commandant’s tradition, and the ways in which it faded away; note how the Commandant’s final resting place (“‘The old man’s buried here [the old teahouse]…the priest wouldn’t let him lie in the churchyard’” (Kafka; 166)), contrary to the best laid schemes of the Officer, must always remain beyond the jurisdiction of the churchyard, and hence beyond the assimilative properties of even the most fundamental and universal tradition.

Unlike Paul, who embodies the notion of conflict in order not to break free from the Hebrew tradition, but to carry it to radically new and profound heights, the Officer in Kafka’s masterpiece ends the very possibility of tradition. We, like the explorer, can only look on, horrified yet beset by an odd empathy, an understanding of why the Officer must do what he does (as we are granted a glimpse of the explorers unusual empathy, Kafka observes: “in his [the Officer’s] place the explorer would not have acted otherwise” (Kafka; 163)): the Officer’s action, as it disintegrates the complex machine, also disintegrates the crucial and ultimately necessary political categories of memory and forgetting—we remember him precisely because the potentiality to forget is no longer a viable action. The Officer manages to destabilize the conditions of memory and forgetting, and hence the conflict inherent in the internal/external binary, by situating the conclusive act of his tradition outside of the ability of the “other” of his tradition—the new Commandant, the explorer, the reader, any and all competing traditions—to fully understand or control. If all memory is based within the ever-presencing possibility of forgetting, if it is threatened by fading into to that twilight-oblivion of forgetfulness at any given moment, and if this is precisely the conditions that determine the relationship between memory and forgetting, Kafka’s horror thrust an impossible memory—a memory that will forever slither beneath the artifice and façade of any political definition of tradition—into the forefront of the political conscience, forever rendering the structure of intelligible memory, and hence intelligible tradition, both inadequate and mute.

It is no longer a question of conflict, of the remembering or forgetting of tradition, of the ways in which the coherence of one tradition breaks down or is reconfigured in light of an external pressure or possible internal conflict. The Officer proves to be neither the “friend” nor the “enemy” of his own tradition, but something in between these categories, something beyond the very discourse of tradition. The Officer’s final act, an act that cannot be forgotten, but cannot be remembered as a “friend” or “enemy” either, opens the possibility of a discourse beyond ethics and tradition alike—a discourse that, in its most essential position, forces the reader to ask, in a hushed and humbled whisper: what comes after tradition—what comes after the conflict that is politics?