Kafka and the Anthropocene

The many explanations of the geological age of the Anthropocene typically feature the question of just how much the Anthropos has already altered the planet's ecosystems and how much future change will result now that “we,” or rather, industrialized humans consumed by fossil fuels and extractivist, plantation economics, have attained the status of a geological force. Such large-scale agency! But collective agency is not always celebrated by the extractivist systems fueling the Anthropocene with visions of a supposedly enlightened individual subject driven by what is claimed to be the rationality of profits and power (Plumwood; Dürbeck et al.). Indeed, let us ask what human agency actually is, considering the fact that Anthropos-industrial activities collectively impinge on the entire planet, thereby erasing the hopes of full-blown individual agency not only for those enhanced by industrial technology and economics, but also for Indigenous and other groups who resist or who are excluded, like much of the Global South, from the much-celebrated benefits (but not the costs) of the fossil-fueled frenzy.

While the Anthropocene is typically considered to have begun in the late eighteenth century with the industrial revolution (this origin story is heavily debated), I look here to Franz Kafka's famous story Die Verwandlung, written when industrial powers were rapidly expanding in the early twentieth century, precisely because its transformation of the human into a cockroach or dung beetle disturbs with bodily materiality the euphoric trajectory of what is often understood as the increasing “freedom” of individual human agency. Similarly, Kafka's “Strafkolonie” portrays how human bodies engage—agentially, willingly?—with the industrial, colonial machinery writ large (and penetratingly). Here we are today, delving again into Kafka's tales of bodily horror, lack of individual agency, and gruesome interactions with machines in order to map out a sense of our bodily fates in the Anthropocene's current mass extinction event, genocidal plantation and agricultural practices, and climate change (Kolbert; Bittman).

In his seminal essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that discussions of “freedom” from the Enlightenment through today fail to acknowledge how the expanded use of fossil fuels, especially oil, enabled our very modern sense of power, freedom, and individuality: “In no discussion of freedom in the period since the Enlightenment was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom […]. The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use” (Chakrabarty 208). In other words, the actuality of increasingly vast and non-individual agency is shrouded by celebratory discourses of individual power. Human agency in the Anthropocene has taken new and ever more Kafkaesque forms. Within this brief essay, I aim to contextualize Kafka's writings in terms of the Anthropocene, but also, and perhaps more relevantly, to contextualize the Anthropocene in terms of Kafka's tales.

Agency in the Anthropocene and in Kafka's works is slippery and twisted: Do industrial human beings now act collectively as a massive geological force (and is that good in a Promethean sense), or are we actually delimited by our energy choices? Are we free to earn capital and knowledge individually, or are we a cockroached body in systems of exploitation? Do we write the Anthropocene, or does it write (on) our bodies? Since this is an ecocritical perspective, I note that human agency is actually a dispersed, collective, and multi-species effort. Certainly, our actions occur within language (that fact should be familiar here) but also within the mesh of our ecological collaborators, human and more-than-human alike. It is an ecological illusion to assume that we act fully individually, and isolated (“free”) from, as Val Plumwood puts it, our “enabling conditions—the body, ecology, and non-human nature” (17). Not only are we infused within the power of language and culture, but we are hybrid beings fully integrated with so many bacteria, viruses, and fungi that we have more bacterial DNA in our bodies than human. The editors of the two-volume work, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, describe how our (now meaning “we” as multicellular organisms) ancient entanglement with other species emerged in the form of “monstrous” liaisons of prokaryotes engulfing each other and becoming eukaryotes: “Ever since, we have muddled along in our mixes and messes. All eukaryotic life is monstrous. Enlightenment Europe, however, tried to banish monsters” (Tsing et al., Monsters 5). Let us therefore feature here the “monsters,” the transformed, the Kafkaesque messes. As Ed Yong describes in I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, recent scientific studies indicate that the bacteria existing in our bodies not only help us digest and fight off other harmful microbes but also appear to impact our moods and shape our fetal development. In short, we humans (and now I do mean all humans) are co-dependent upon microbial lives, on vegetal beings for oxygen, our food, food for animals we eat, wood, cotton, drugs, and caffeine; our monstrous status is not special and our messy agency is a fact of life. And yet, in the Anthropocene, we industrial humans are radically and rather unknowingly changing our fundamental entanglements with other species through industrial pollution, deforestation, climate change, and related cataclysms, and so we are rewriting our own agency and feeling ever more free while actually limiting our options.

Humans also add another set of dependencies to the mix: machines. Helpful here is a quick reference to Donna Haraway's ground-breaking essay from 1985, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” in which she famously delineates how homo sapiens is always already a species of animal with machine, of language and tech, never mind current debates about cellphone addiction and AI. These monstrous, bodily facts of homo sapiens existing with machines, our co-species, and language finds strange yet poignant expression in Kafka's tales. Think of the train whose schedule dictates Samsa's daily rhythms along with the alarm clock that failed to wake him on his fateful day of transformation, and of the “Apparat” writing the mystical bodily answer in the “Strafkolonie.” What monstrousness would emerge were Kafka to feature E-mail? Kafka's narratives of human-machine engagements within labyrinthine institutions, whose goals remain hidden, and whose forces shape human lives and bodies, thereby question the possibility of individual agency as we thought we knew it. Definitions of freedom and agency, in other words, need recalibration broadly, but especially in the Anthropocene. Kafka helps recalibrate.

Reading the Anthropocene guided by Kafka, we note how the forces impacting our bodies, minds, and cultures remain seemingly logically yet also mystically coded and hidden behind institutional systems; we may think that we are still driven primarily by individual choices and yet there are geological-scale forces (and micro-plastic) metamorphosing not only us and our co-species but also the global ecosystems. The industrial-extractivist-plantation economies derive their power from the not-so-quiet metamorphosis of the world into disturbingly contorted forms, into “ungeheuere Ungeziefer” (Kafka 57), while claiming that they enable “our” individual agency and freedom. The real question in the Anthropocene is whether we all have been cockroached, and are passively experiencing the deep, seemingly metaphysical, but actually rather industrial writing across our bodies, or, rather, if we do have the agency to avoid the individualized, Kafkaesque forms of demise while instead enhancing the monstrous and multi-species collaborations undergirding our ecological and cultural existence.