Waiters

Walser has the most to say about waiters (the activity of waiting not the job). Talking about masters and workers he notes that bosses routinely keep us waiting as it is he/she, the boss, who answers all requests. But Walser offers hope for waiters; after all we are free to think about other things while waiting; but he notes that creative waiting can be a problem for the boss (2 creative waiters are Rokesmith or Jeeves); passive waiting is preferred. Walser's waiting differs to Kafka's: the assistants have to wait; they seem to have no existence before they deliver their message and are condemned to wait, forever, for the next request; certainly no opportunity to reflect-while-waiting exists as it does for Walser. Hence Benjamin defines Kafka's assistants as unfinished and belonging to an in-between world; paradoxically the inability to reflect offers them a form of hope. There is a family of Kafka activities which includes fasting, waiting, passing messages and studying. These activities are related to Gombrowicz's idea of the 'face' ie the grimace'; even if assistants cannot reflect they can use their faces: they can grimace.

canine knowledge

What is the connection between Kafka's animals and his assistants? They are not the same. Assistants do lots of things but reflect little; they are more figures like waiters who hover in the background- America is full of waiters. WB calls the assistants 'unfinished'. By contrast the animals reflect at length; certainly both Kafka's Ape and Dog do so in different ways. But there is a relationship between animals and assistants. First, it does not seem quite right to locate the creatures in a remote non human zone even though they are often, in the main, solipsists; they have no roles like messengers or go betweens. The Dog has an epistemological mission: to define dog knowledge. The scope of the inquiry is limited; in the same way that Kantian thought categories are spatio-temporal, the Dog's are alimentary; instead of 'how is experience possible?' the question is 'how is food possible?'
The Dog comes up with a couple of ideas but is dimly troubled less by getting the wrong answer than by having only one topic: food. This is the predicament of the 'unfinished' like the the builders and workers of the Great Wall of China. No one can remember why it was built. Try to understand why but only up to certain point; then avoid further meditation. The animals, assistants and Chinese do not just have bad memories; it is their job to be unfinished.

Assistants and Messengers

There are no shortage of messengers in history-a noble role; what about assistants? No shortage in Google world: 2 million images of assistants worldwide. There is a literature of assistants including, of course, top-of-the-league Sancho but also the increasingly popular Robert Walser who both was an assistant and wrote a novel on the subject. There is more to this role than being 'one who helps'. Kafka writes about this role at length mainly in The Castle. K is expecting the arrival of his own assistants but they never appear; they are replaced, seamlessly, by 2 local characters who know nothing of surveying; they act more like idiots- almost indistinguishable from the local peasants who follow K everywhere like sheep-hinderers not helpers. Barnabas is a more familiar figure: that of the cryptic messenger. Arthur and Jeremiah carry no messages; they crouch in corners and in other tiny spaces trying to be invisible. Benjamin brackets all these types as 'unfinished' and incomplete; in-between-people, incapable of reflection; their squeezing into tiny spaces and clinging to each other denote this incompleteness. Benjamin further notes that for assistants there is hope; hope through being in an unfinished state Where does that leave Kafka's dogs, moles, mice and apes?

How did the sirens sing?

....following on the Thomas Browne blog there is another question: he inserts a parable-like thought about Achilles and the Sirens in the middle of a discussion about urns and antiquities. How do you tell which is which? Benjamin says something similar about Kafka on 2 occasions; take a piece of empirical description, he says, and you'll find the Kafka stamp on it; he cites a paragraph from Eddington on the physical world and another from Metchnikoff on the canals of the Yangste. Now the latter reference follows some comments of Benjamin on the "Great Wall of China". The story is parable-like; in it Kafka doesen't list facts about canals; he sets out the myth of the Great Wall. The Eddington piece is a bit different; in imagining physical perplexity as imagined by a popularising scientist there is a similarity with Kafka's 'heaviness' that is missing in Metchnikoff.
This quality is not obviously present in Kafka's surviving risk assessment documents that he wrote as an insurance officer explaining to operatives how to avoid severing fingers at work. Maybe the answer is Benjamins's idea of the substitutability of Kafka's prose; ie don't look at each sentence for meaning but find uses for blocks of his text and then insert them where appropriate. So the choice is with the substituter; no one wants to use risk assessment material; it is already pasted on every workplace wall as Health and Safety warnings; so that leaves symbolic activities like myth making, praying, theatre etc.

what song the sirens sang?

...asked Sir Thomas Browne; interesting question! Poe agreed and quoted it at the beginning of the Rue Morgue story. But what sort of answer did Sir Thomas expect? He asks another about the dead in Hades: Agamemnon can predict Ulysses' future but has nothing to say about his own son. It is a mistake to see this as contradictory; Browne's interest is not empirical (eg did Atlantis exist and where?).
Kafka brings up the issue of the sirens and his conclusion gives a clue as to the sort of answer that is required; K's approach is more akin to a parable; while Browne is not writing a parable he is asking questions (occasionally) that fit into a parable. K's answer is that the sirens are silent and Benjamin's explanation of why this is so would have interested Sir Thomas Browne.

pleasure at work

UK Radio 3 ran a show this week about work: there was talk about being 'passionate about work' etc and a literature of work including Melville, Dickens and Grossmith + some research about friends/marriages through work. This literature was narrow and described 'people at work'. The 'Office' has a richer history. Consider Samsa: now an insect his main worry is being late for work; lets stick with the insect theme: Brecht and Benjamin at Svendborg conversed about this and concluded that Kafka saw people at work as antlike separated by their forms of life together. Kundera further develops this idea but adds that Kafka also sees the office as fantastic, a labrynth; writing to Milena he says the office is ' more fantastic than stupid' and that 'he can't drag himself away from it'. K in The Castle will never get a promised job/will wait forever like his cousin in Before the Law and the innumerable other characters whose mission is to 'wait' or like the 10% of staff at Microsoft who are routinely shed each year while the remainder bask in 'pleasure at work'. Any literature of work should start with Kafka and concentrate on his definition of pleasure at work-a place 'he couldn't drag himself away from'

Traces of Poe in the Arcade

There is a literature of 'the trace' beginning with Benjamin (WB) who finds its origins in Poe's Man of the Crowd where all the drapery of the crime vanishes and leaves only a set of traces; thus 'the trace' appears at the time of Second Empire in France. Thereafter, WB notes, traces turn into government's 'multifarious web of registrations' as endlessly discussed by Foucault, Donzelot and Castel. It is a modest step from the man in the crowd to our world of risk management where the individual disappears and is replaced by Castel's ' calculus of probabilities or factors and statistical correlations of heterogeneous elements likely to produce risk (usually a file). Another strand in the history of the trace is the collapsing of heterogeneous laboratory elements (experimental rats) into tractable and portable traces (Latour).