Alienation, Synchronization, Imitation: Kafka, Then and Now
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsI found the piece to be both thoughtful and thought-provoking in its analysis of Kafka's writing both "then and now." Generally speaking, the approach could be classified as what is sometimes termed "post-hermeneutic" literary analysis, indicating a heightened awareness to those material practices, technologies, and techniques that underlie and first make possible the kind of sense-making that has traditionally been presumed to be the domain of literature. This form of analysis, which is now popular in contemporary English language literary scholarship more widely, was arguably pioneered within the German critical tradition via new readings of Kafka develped by Wolf and Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, and Benno Wagner (among others).
This, I would say, is the red thread that connects the three sections of the essay. The first pushes back against conventions of reading Kafka as an esoteric and hermetic writer, involved in "semi-private" games of intertextual allusion that are difficult for readers to sort out. Instead of reading Kafka's "Besuch im Bergwerk" as a cryptic allusion to an almanac of his publisher's, the essay "takes the story literally," resituating it within the context of Kafka's work with the Austrian Worker's Accident Insurance Agency and a number of contemporary publications and conferences on safety and mining. The end effect of this "data-mining" is not only a new grounding of Kafka's text but also an account of new forms of alienation in technical modernity, in which asymmetries in knowledge and expertise render communication difficult. (This point is made concrete in Kafka's own misuse of a technical term -- a nice reading of a small textual detail, which is a hallmark of this text.)
This provides the bridge to the second section, a reading of Amerika / Der Verschollene with an eye towards the problems of communication that ensue upon the introduction of new forms of telecommunications media. Kafka emerges here as a powerful theorist of signal velocity (or technologically implemented différance, to adopt a popular poststructuralist term) through the mails, the telegraph, and above all the telephone. As the reading of Karl's repeated "trials" in Amerika shows, the acceleration of decision-making processes via these media, or rather the reduction in the lag-time required for reflection, ends up being a problem for justice and reflection in modernity.
Finally, the third piece of the article uses a post-hermeneutic framework to challenge one of the more common "humanist" objections to the emergence of AI: namely, that it relies upon a certain conception of human beings (and above all, human speech) as non-imitative or original. This connection is traced back to its early encounters with automatons in Descartes, then followed through the interactions of Darwinian evolution and technical evolution via Samuel Butler, up to the 'imitation game' of Turing. An inspired final twist links Kafka's well-known problematization of the human-animal distinction from "Report to an Academy" with the technical media of the previous section, as the scene of Rotpeter's introduction into language and society proves to be heavily mediated. Not only does his "mechanical" imitation of human speech mimic that of the gramophone playing in the background, but his first word, a panicked "Hallo!", is the conventional address of the telephone user.
Thus, at the end of this essay, the speaking ape emerges as an organic imitator of mechanical imitations of the voice, and thus as one always-already inhabited or haunted by the very "ghosts" of language use that Kafka's countermedia (trains, planes, automobiles) had sought to exercise. It's a powerful commentary, not just as a reading of Kafka but also upon those who insist that it is only LLMs that "parrot" speech.
My one suggestion would be that it might be useful to give the piece a somewhat more specific title, in order to make it more readily findable amidst the mountains of Kafka scholarship ("data-minable", in the author's terms). Although the significance of "Kafka, Then and Now" for the argument is evident, perhaps a phrase indicating either the general style of post-hermeneutic reading employed or the concern with media technologies would help this essay find its readers. That said, I understand the problems with such a suggestion -- the first section is not concerned with, say, "mechanical imitation" in the way that the final section is. One idea might be simply to use the section headings in the title -- "Alienation, Synchronization, Imitation: Kafka, Then and Now"?
Author Response
You will not be surprised to read that I am very happy about this reviewer's comments. This is a very careful and, in fact, enlightening reading of my article. And I will gladly accept the suggestions for a longer title.
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe essay offers a comprehensive and innovative archeology of today’s digital media culture through the lens of Kafka’s preoccupation with the vicissitudes of letter writing, the typewriter, and telephony/telegraphy. In the course of its argument, the essay uncovers a host of often unknown, but highly insightful documents—historical background studies, evolutionary theory, modern physics, etc. This documentary material helps to contextualize the technological, social, legal, and ethical ramifications of Kafka’s texts—most prominently Der Verschollene, Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, and Ein Besuch im Bergwerk.
The manuscript devotes about a third to a thorough discussion of the latter story in the administrative, legal, and technical context details of the mining industry that Kafka followed keenly. However, these elaboration have little to do with the main topic of the article: Kafka’s interest in media technologies as they relate to our digital culture. I suggest that this first part be either deleted (because of it philological thoroughness, it certainly deserves to be published separately!), or significantly condensed in such a way that its connections with communication media stands out more clearly.
I also wonder of the final, rather sketchy remarks on Large Language Models and other forms of Artificial Intelligence could not be expanded, taking account of some further findings of posthuman theory and digital media studies.
The essay is thoroughly documented, but limits itself mostly to important historical sources. It does not sufficiently take into account more recent scholarship focusing directly and extensively on Kafka’s media technologies and their significance for today. Most notably among these are Wolf Kittler/Gerhard Neumann, Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr, and Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 and Grammophon, Film, Typewriter. These sources, as well as more recent (but also uncited) scholarship drawing on these landmark studies are directly relevant to the present manuscript because they work out the implications between Kafka’s fiction and their affiliations with the material culture of modern communication media.
Author Response
You will also be not so surprised to read that I am not particularly happy with this reviewer's comments. And I will use some of the first reviewer's comments in my response to this review.
I do not think it would be a good idea to shorten or even cancel the first of my article's three parts. The reviewer's suggestion to do just that is based on the following assumption which claims that the "the main topic of the article" is, I quote: "Kafka’s interest in media technologies as they relate to our digital culture." This is simply incorrect. The topic of the volume is "Kafka in the Age of AI," not "Kafka and AI as a form of media technology." The reviewer may not know this, but what we call AI now does not only comprise the Large Language Models that have gotten so much media attention lately, but also a whole set of analytical tools applied to medicine, climatology, chemistry, finance, and many other scientific and commercial fields. The instruments, probes, and gauges on which these analyses are based and on which they feed, are the direct descendants of some of the apparatus which I discussed in my article. And I made clear what has changed since Kafka's time, namely the shift from analog to digital media. In short, I do not think it is the reviewer's job to tell me what the topic of my article is and what it is not. I will leave the first part of my article as it is.
I note a difference between the first and the second reviewer's comments: What the second one calls the "rather sketchy remarks on Large Language Models and other forms of Artificial Intelligence," is deemed "a powerful commentary" by the first one. But in general, I agree, there would be much more to say about artificial intelligence than I did within the framework of my article, but I am not so much an expert in artificial intellince than in Kafka. I did my best, and am certain that other contributors to this volume have much more to say about that.
One final remark on the following critique: "It [my article] does not sufficiently take into account more recent scholarship focusing directly and extensively on Kafka’s media technologies and their significance for today." As one the co-editors of the volume "Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr," which the reviewer quotes explicitly within this context, I can only laugh. Did I really "not sufficiently take [that] into account"? Of course, I understand that kind of criticism. It is not the first time I am confronted with it: Certain readers complain about my exclduive focus on historical material, they need to be referred to the secondary literature with which they are familiar. But speaking of the case in point: I doubt that this reviewer is particularly familiar with the volume "Franz Kafka, Schriftverkehr," which I edited years ago with my dissertation supervisor Gerhard Neuman, otherwise the reviewer would have noticed that my article is written in the exact smae spirit as the articles in that volume, as the first reviewer who quotes my name explicitly certainly did.
