Kafka’s Speculative Technologies

Franz Kafka‘s In the Penal Colony is known to be one of his most disturbing stories, and yet it offers solace in the perfect working of a perfect machine. For the most part it consists in the description of the machine that executes the condemned by slowly carving the verdict into their flesh, bringing them to a point of delirious agony where they understand that justice is carried out as the machine carries out its program. Due process or a right to defend oneself are not provided for. In the eyes of a visitor to the penal colony, this disqualifies the machine. For the officer and operator of the complicated apparatus, justice is not a procedural notion but resides in the power of the word, that is, in the verdict being the true name for the crime. This power is revealed as the word and with it the law is laid down. It does not require reading to be understood since it is experienced in the flesh. This archaic conception of the machine as executor of laws and rules, and thus executor of convicts fits the idea of the machine: It determines an outcome in a perfectly transparent manner, it is intelligible – except when it breaks as in the botched attempt of the officer to let the machine take his own life. If one looks for a machine that lacks specification and that is profoundly subversive of meaning and function, Kafka describes such a machine as well.