Telephones, Narrative, Algorithms: Untimely Meditations on Kafka

Abstract

This essay traces Kafka’s writings as documents of a technological consciousness both a century ago and today. On the one hand, they are historical archives indexing the influence of modern technology in the lifeworld of the early 20th century. On the other hand, however, they also carry a historical index through which they become precise informants of our digital age. With a particular eye on Kafka’s parable “Before the Law”, this essay carves out elements of a narrative order which, as for surprising formal correspondences, can (and perhaps must) be called algorithmic.

1. Untimely Technology

Walter Benjamin once famously stated that Kafka’s literature echoes the forces of a “prehistoric world” (Benjamin 1969, p. 113). There are many reasons to assume that this statement holds as much truth in the 21st century as it held ten years after Kafka’s death. In a broader sense, however, it can be understood only if we take into consideration how Kafka’s peculiar type of realism allows these forces to be integrated into a world that, at least on the surface, has a distinctly modern character. Kafka’s literature often presents a world in which the stories of an archaic order, one that often tends to take the shape of an imminent violent patriarchy, are interwoven with the logic of the explicitly modern world of bureaucracy and its institutions.1 The presence of both archaic and modern elements in Kafka’s literature resolves into what could be called an untimely constellation. Here, two “cosmic epochs [Weltalter]” (Benjamin 1969, p. 114) become interlaced with each other and literally form a configuration of correspondence between what are two or more temporal layers.

Ironically, such untimely constellations can often be traced to Kafka’s treatment of modern technology. One of the most famous (and in many ways symptomatic) examples in Kafka’s writings can be found in his short story “In the Penal Colony”. Here, we follow an “enquiring traveller [Forschungsreisender]” (Kafka 2009a, p. 75) resembling a modern anthropological observer on his journey to a penal colony, where he witnesses what appears to be an archaic scene of punishment. Meeting an “officer” (Kafka 2009a, p. 75) representing an old but ailing system of power and punishment, the traveler follows the scenery from a distant and distinctly modern—or “European” (Kafka 2009a, p. 88)—perspective. He is thereby introduced to what is called “a remarkable apparatus [ein eigentümlicher Apparat]”, standing ready to punish delinquents by inscribing “[t]he commandment that the condemned man has broken” (Kafka 2009a, p. 79) directly on their bodies. The punishment is, at least to the modern eye, scandalously and unjustifiably violent. But on the eve of “some great reversal of things [großer Umschwung]” (Kafka 2009a, p. 94), the rule of the “old commandant” (Kafka 2009a, p. 76) is about to be replaced by what seems a more liberal regime of a “new commandant” (Kafka 2009a, p. 76), in which the outlived system of cruel punishment is about to become obsolete.

The final execution is of the officer himself, who acts as the last and only remaining agent of a dying system and allows us to follow the workings of that “apparatus” in a scene that was not without reason named an “accumulation of sadist phantasy” (Bohrer 2004, p. 207).2 However, as the “apparatus” collapses together with the painfully dying officer himself, the way is paved for what none other than Michel Foucault once called “the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle” (Foucault 1977, p. 7) when tracking the genealogy of a modern punishment regime since the age of enlightenment. For what seems to linger on the horizon in Kafka is a system of “more subtle, more subdued sufferings, deprived of their visible display” (Foucault 1977, p. 8).

At first glance, “In the Penal Colony” thus reads as the allegorical discussion of a moment in history in which an outlived regime of power and punishment collapses and makes room for new forces of rationalization and modernization. This is because almost everything about the archaic mechanism of punishment in the story appears, due to its horrifically inhumane character, illegitimate, as—at least to the modern eye—it eventually generates cases of “outright murder [unmittelbar Mord]” (Kafka 2009a, p. 97). However, dismissing the machine only as a mere remnant of a historically outlived regime seems in many ways an undialectical gesture of simplification. Instead, something uniquely ambivalent is latently present in the fact that the term designating the instrument of punishment—“apparatus”—has a peculiarly modern flavor. Furthermore, the automatization of the punishment process reminds us of the workings of something like an industrial weaving machine, executing its delinquents anonymously. In fact, there seems an element of rather “abstract consciousness” (Foucault 1977, p. 9) at work in the “apparatus”, particularly in its ostensible naturalness; it almost allegorically mimics the workings of explicitly modern institutions and their bureaucratic procedures, for “[b]y operating so silently, the machine almost escaped his notice [[d]urch die stille Arbeit entschwand die Maschine förmlich der Aufmerksamkeit]” (Kafka 2009a, p. 96).

Thus, even in an ostensibly archaic regime like that of the penal colony, something distinctly modern can be found. This fact has a lot to do with Kafka’s technological nomenclature, referring to the device as the “apparatus” and the “machine”. The language thereby echoes the substantial interest that Kafka himself maintained in modern technology, particularly inventions in the field of telecommunication. While recurringly meditating himself about technological innovations in his letters to Felice Bauer,3 devices like telephones or gramophones are also regular guests in the literary worlds Kafka imagines in his writings—a fact that is perhaps most poignantly reflected in The Trial, where we find that K. “had been informed by telephone” (Kafka 2009c, p. 27) of his first hearing and, en route to his destination, witnesses how a gramophone “started up its excruciating noise [begann […] mörderisch zu spielen]” (Kafka 2009c, p. 29).

However, Kafka’s relationship with technology has also an ambiguous character. Often, it comes with a sense of awe for the power of innovation. At the same time, Kafka hesitates to embrace the instruments of modern telecommunication, as he recognizes them as the powerful tools of a modern bureaucracy that, particularly in combination with the spirits of corporatism, generate social environments in which individuals face a new and often disconcerting type of concrete unfreedom.4 For example, in The Man who Disappeared, when “the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann” (Kafka 2012, p. 5) arrives in what appears to be a hyper-modern and hyper-monstrous city of New York, he—as if he was losing his youthful innocence at a single blow—is swiftly introduced to his uncle’s business. There, he witnesses the reality in “a kind of commission and delivery service [eine Art Kommissions- und Speditionsgeschäftes]” (Kafka 2012, p. 34) where “purchases, storage, transport, and sales on a gigantic scale” are being organized, while “precise and continuous connections by telephone and telegraph with its clients [unaufhörliche telephonische und telegraphische Verbindungen mit den Klienten]” (Kafka 2012, p. 35) are being entertained in an accelerated manner. Probably inspired by the description of the Chicago Board of Trade, which Kafka finds in Arthur Holitscher’s Amerika Heute und Morgen (1912), the novel speaks about a “telegraph room”, which “was not small but bigger than the telegraph office in Karl’s home town [war nicht kleiner, sondern größer als das Telegraphenamt der Vaterstadt]”, as well as a gigantic “telephone room [Saal der Telephone]” (Kafka 2012, p. 35). Here, the abstraction of the modern work environment is tangible, both for Karl Rossmann and for the “salaried masses” of Die Angestellten, which only few after Kafka’s death were so pertinently analyzed by Siegfried Kracauer. As if Kafka wanted to present a montage of the crisis of free and self-determined “attention”,5 of which Kracauer speaks in his essay, the novel states how, “wherever you looked, the doors of the telephone booths were opening and closing, and the ringing meant one could not hear oneself think [gingen wohin man schaute die Türen der Telephonzellen auf und zu und das Läuten war sinnverwirrend]” (Kafka 2012, p. 35).

In many ways, the sinnverwirrend telephone is presented as the “apparatus” (Benjamin 2006, p. 48) of which Benjamin once said that its “alarm signal” disturbed “the historical era” (Benjamin 2006, p. 49) in which it appeared. However, it also becomes something like an instrument for the execution of absent power in Kafka’s writings. This is why it is apposite that it rings on various occasions where it functions as an extension of those bureaucratic instances that, from a distance, seem to create the effects of authority, as it does in The Castle. There, it is just after his arrival that K. asks a young man “at the inn [im Wirtshaus]” (Kafka 2009b, p. 5) about his purpose as a “land surveyor [Landvermesser]” when the novel states the following:

“Land surveyor?” he heard someone ask hesitantly behind his back, and then everyone fell silent. But the young man soon pulled himself together and told the landlord, in a tone just muted enough to sound as if he were showing consideration for the sleeping K., but loud enough for him to hear what was said: “I’ll telephone and ask”. Oh, so there was a telephone in this village inn, was there? They were very well equipped here. As a detail that surprised K., but on the whole he had expected this. It turned out that the telephone was installed almost right above his head, but drowsy as he was, he had failed to notice it.

(Kafka 2009b, pp. 6–7)6

The telephone thus takes the place of an almost unnoticeable but nevertheless potent agent within what appears to be an invisible network of power. In the vain struggle for his own recognition, K. is forced to recognize the aura of technology himself, and as “he was powerless against the telephone [dem Telephon gegenüber war er wehrlos]” (Kafka 2009b, p. 22), the authority of the apparatus is established before any progress in the labyrinth of The Castle can ever be made.

The telephone’s power is the result of its apparently magical ability to connect the reality of presence with the reality of an unfathomable but nonetheless powerful force that is radically absent. However, as with “In the Penal Colony”, Kafka carefully places technology not only between spaces but also between times. When messages, for which the telephone becomes a prominent mediator in The Castle, cannot be properly understood, they come in a language spoken in a long-forgotten past. This is why the novel also states that only an archaic “humming, such as K. had never heard on the telephone, emerged from the receiver [ein Summen, wie K. es sonst beim Telephonieren nie gehört hatte]” (Kafka 2009b, p. 21)—a humming that literally speaks from what Benjamin called the “prehistoric world”. As with “In the Penal Colony”, a technological apparatus—this time, it is a telephone—plays an intimate role in orchestrating the correspondence between different layers in time.

While producing undecipherable noises and signs, the telephone thus mediates a literally untimely constellation of things. For it transmits what could be called an unpresent truth—a truth that, if only viewed through the lens of the present, remains unfathomable to K. as much as to his contemporaries. K., while trying to solve the puzzles of the castle’s labyrinth, fails because he can only interpret the signs of the phone as they are in the present. What he is lacking is some sort of historical consciousness, i.e., a consciousness that would allow him to take these signs as they once were or—this perhaps too—as they will be in the future. In other words, K. is lacking a proper historical method.

2. Non-Simultaneity: Kafka’s Method

If we are trying to understand the truth of technology in Kafka’s literature, we need to deviate from K.’s entangled position of deciphering the apparatuses’ signs only within the context of the “here and now”. Instead, we need to look for a method that allows us to think in a somewhat incommensurate and certainly untimely fashion—a method that Kafka’s literature provides itself. There can hardly be any doubt that K.’s inability to make sense of the telephonic voices evokes the theological theme of being excluded from a system of “holy” language that appears to belong only to those who, particularly with regard to the fragments of Jewish tradition in Kafka, were once called the members of an alien community (“fremde Gemeinschaft” (Liska 2012)). However, it also allows us to follow how—if one were to read these undecipherable signs as the ruins of a divine voice in secular times—the “prehistoric” layers adhere to the opposite pole of history: namely modern technological devices, which ask us to identify in them the markers of untimely configurations.

The untimeliness surrounding Kafka’s literary use of technology thereby creates room for a constellation that is of critical importance when asking about the level of historical consciousness reflected in Kafka’s literature. If, on the one hand, the “new” language of the apparatuses is linked to an old and apparently outlived regime of punishment (as in “In the Penal Colony”), while, on the other hand, it echoes the latest signals of a prehistoric past by taking on the shape of something explicitly new (as with the sounds of telephones or gramophones in The Trial or The Castle), then the appearance of technology in Kafka’s writings has something to do with the reflection of what has traditionally been called the “non-simultaneity of the simultaneous”.7 From a methodological point of view, technology in Kafka’s fiction is thus—at least also—to be taken as a medium through which to follow the intimate but certainly critical correspondence between at least two different historical times. In this sense, technological devices can be understood as mediators (if not translators) between those two untimely levels that Benjamin, when he attempted to sketch out the architecture of a “philosophical history” (Benjamin 2019, p. 26) by basing it on the assumptions of an “essential relationship between the later and the earlier” (Bolle 2000, p. 405),8 famously called “fore- and after-history” (Benjamin 2019, p. 25). In other words, the telephones and other apparatuses in Kafka’s work communicate with those historical times to which they themselves do not belong; they are literally falling out of their own time.

Because of their critical function in the correspondence between two non-simultaneous temporal and historical layers, technological devices (such as telephones) provide something like an access point to the inner logic of historical consciousness in Kafka’s writings. Furthermore, their recurring appearance allows us—aside from literally reviving all possible clichés of Kafka’s timelessness9—to trace what we could call this method of reading Kafka. This method is provided by Kafka’s literature itself as it hints at its own intimate relationship with those (long-foregone) times to which it builds bridges. These time bridges, or constellations between “now” and “then”, allow us to imagine their own future reception in which they are, with the passing of time, themselves becoming documents of an increasingly inaccessible past. In a way, Kafka’s writings thus dream of their own reception to come. This also means that they offer themselves to future technologies that will become the instruments by which the echoes of a then “prehistoric” Kafka himself will be heard, even though they might not be immediately understood by us, the later-born readers, anymore.

Our “interpretative desire” (Nägele 1987), which includes something like the phantasy of literally picking up the phone and talking to Kafka in order to make him tell us about the “meaning” of his literature, makes us the K.s of our present. We are encouraged to take on this role as we are legitimatized by the historical consciousness of Kafka’s writings themselves. In this sense, his writings do not only possess a “historical index” (Benjamin 1999, p. 462), but they also speak of themselves as being conscious of having this index—and this they certainly share with other modernist writers, such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Their method consists of calling us and allowing us to search for a non-simultaneous constellation in which, for example, the innovations and “new” instruments of our times suddenly become the entrance gates to a world of an asynchronous correspondence between past and present. Given how Kafka’s treatment of technology shows how his writings have a lot in common with what Benjamin called “dialectical images”, they force us to look out for such entrance gates and therefore search for the realization of a then-made promise, namely “that they attain to legibility only at a particular time” (Benjamin 1999, p. 462). In other words, Kafka’s literature makes us look for the telephones and gramophones of our times.

This latent awareness of its future legibility is a pivotal element of Kafka’s literature, exposing the method of non-simultaneity with which it lends itself to future readings. Following this method, by which Kafka anticipates his untimely reception, his literature keeps the promise alive that at least the future will have the means to extract the meaning, if not the truth, of his writings. All that remains is their being held against the markers of a time they were not yet part of when they were written. As for the voices of the prehistoric past, Kafka’s literature is “an ellipse with foci that lie far apart [weit auseinanderliegende Brennpunkte] and are determined on the one hand by mystical experience (which is above all the experience of tradition) and on the other by the experience of the modern citydweller”.10

But once that untimely correspondence is established, Kafka’s literature also opens itself to a future in which it has become the source of one of these undecipherable voices, which K., stuck in the present, struggles to understand when speaking on the phone in The Castle. In a broader sense, Kafka’s literature even is its own future. For yes, its stories, its characters, its metaphors, its places, its timelines, its dramas, its comedies, its sufferings, and its joys are, on the surface, elements and events of the early 20th century. But Kafka’s method of non-simultaneity also attributes them to a future world from which they do not know anything, aside from the fact that they will, at some point, become something like readings of a new present themselves. As much as they seem to be at first sight only of antique value, all these elements form at the same time an inventory of their future—a future that, a century after Kafka, has become our present today.

3. Algorithms and Narrative

Apart from presenting their themes, characters, and technological objects, something structural with regard to their historical logic is thus at work in Kafka’s stories and their tendency to hint at the problems of a future yet to come. Holding these future problems against the stories in a non-simultaneous constellation or reading and following Kafka’s method itself may therefore reveal a “truth” that cannot be accessed when the problems are only being held against their own historical present.11 Much of this untimely logic of Kafka’s literature, in fact, has to do with what Hannah Arendt once called the “construction of models” (Arendt 1994, p. 76) when speaking about its art of narration. This means that Kafka’s literature, particularly if it is read from the perspective of form and structure, speaks to the future by virtue of narration that—being, for Arendt, a “technique” (Arendt 1994, p. 76) in and of itself—can be linked to the technological realities of our times. Speaking of the role of structures and forms in the present thus implies that we need to discuss the constellation between the operative logic of Kafka’s narratives and reality in the age of ubiquitous computing. Such a discussion, however, does not mean questioning why, these days, hundreds of thousands of young people share their experiences with Kafka’s work on TikTok or elsewhere on social media.12 Instead, an untimely approach would entail discussing the question of whether the “objects” of the lifeworld represented in the narrative order of Kafka’s stories and the structures and configurations of the digital world have something in common. This analysis would also include asking to what extent such an inquiry could illuminate the understanding of our present age through the lens of what in some sense has become our own prehistory, namely, a prehistory to which—after a century of sinking into an increasingly inaccessible past—Kafka belongs.

There is hardly any doubt about the fact that we are living in a time of digital hegemony. Data centers, coding, high-speed data processing, and artificial intelligence are key to understanding the cultural architecture of our digital age. This certainly means that hardly anyone can be found today who is still as much in awe of parlographs, telephones, or any analog instrument of entertainment like the gramophones producing those murderous sounds in The Trial. Modernization today is digital in nature and, as always at first glance, produces something that appears to be unique and entirely new.

No secret phone calls are to be processed from an unknown and unfathomable absence that we can only assume is related to the essence or center of an institution of power that, as in the world of The Castle, might (or might not) work behind the surface. What circulates as the medium of information is neither writing on a delinquent’s body nor—as many of us are about to unlearn the art of having a classical phone conversation—an electric signal in general. Instead, it is electronic data that is today being processed on a large scale—big data. The entirety of digital information, thereby, is all but an amorphous mass. Apart from having a long history in and of itself,13 digital data in our age is continuously expanding, moving, and being reshaped in an environment of endless possibilities of combinations. The fundamental task of our time seems, however, to lie in the question of how data is organized. This has to do with the fact that masses of data need to be collected, processed, connected, and eventually turned into some sort of useful information, i.e., into a body of data that can, in the most general sense, be worked with purposefully. In the world of digitization, this is conducted by using mathematical operations and thus by running those “sequence[s] of instruction so that a computer can implement an activity on data” (Aradau and Blanke 2022, p. 9). In other words, we are talking about the agents of digital coordination: algorithms.

If we now want to follow Kafka’s untimely method in the hope of discovering a truth about our own present, we therefore need to ask at least two critical questions: What do algorithms have to do with Kafka’s literature? And how—following the promise of thinking in non-simultaneous constellations—can this literature from an author who died more than a century ago inform us about our contemporary world, which, after all, has in many ways become a world of “algorithms to live by” (Christian and Griffiths 2016)?

In the contemporary world of computing, algorithms rarely come alone. Instead, they tend to appear in chains. This means that a series of single algorithms wherein each algorithm solves a distinctly defined problem is combined with other algorithms in order to solve new problems. Particularly within the remit of artificial intelligence, these chains of algorithms form a continuously proliferating meshwork of operational tools. However, the information processed by these chains of algorithms is not accessible to the user, at least at the level of everyday computing. This is because the visual representation of what they process is entirely different from the concrete mathematical operations that are at work when processing data. For example, when a search engine (such as Google) personalizes our individual search results according to the principles of algorithmic probability, we are only able to see the results without following the operation behind them. Like Kafka’s K., we live only on the surface of some sort of procedural monster, without having access to what Shoshana Zuboff, in her great analysis of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, metaphorically calls the “shadow texts” which are working behind the screens. What applies, under the conditions of a ubiquitous digital regime, to such numeral texts is that “it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to” (Zuboff 2019, p. 185) them. Digitally, we are thus like K.: institutionalized and locked into a trial as a Proceß that, in the age of algorithms, is—while gradually losing its primarily legal dimension—increasingly turning into what it literally means: mere processing.14

To illustrate this logic of processing in Kafka’s terms, let us turn to the famous parable, “Before the Law”. After first having published it independently, Kafka eventually decided to integrate this piece into The Trial and to make it a key section to follow what under digital conditions has become the algorithmic version of a Proceß. When read in an untimely manner, what keeps the famous “man from the country [Mann vom Lande]” (Kafka 2009c, p. 153) who waits “for days and years [Tage und Jahre]” (Kafka 2009c, p. 154) to be let into the law from reaching his goal is the drama of simply having no access to the “shadow text” formed by invisible algorithms. Standing and waiting before the law in this sense takes on the qualities of a state of innumeracy that today—three decades after John Allen Paulos, in his classic on mathematical illiteracy, defined it as the “inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance” (Paulos 1990, p. 3)—has become the inability to read and understand algorithms as much as the entirety of the concrete effects they have on our lifeworld. This means that those standing “before the law” are, in fact, us who are users of an algorithmically personalized search engine or a social media platform which, remotely echoing the doorkeeper’s role in the parable, keeps both recording and navigating our searches, our clicks and views, and therefore our wishes, hope, and desires. What thus applies to the “man from the country”, who, when asking for entry into the law, is told by the doorkeeper that “he cannot let the man into the Law just now [daß er ihm jetzt den Eintritt nicht gewähren könne]” (Kafka 2009c, p. 153), is also true for us when, for example, asking for access to Google’s or TikTok’s unreadable codes. Like him, we are being rejected and banned to the surface of the user interface, while algorithms “inside”, unfathomable to us, keep working toward a level of total (if not, at times, totalitarian) personalization.15

The “radiance [Glanz]” that, in “Before the Law”, appears “in the dark [im Dunkel]” and “streams, inextinguishable, from the entrance to the Law [unverlöschlich aus der Türe des Gesetzes bricht]” (Kafka 2009c, p. 153) has long been read as a remnant of theology to which a secularizing world has lost access. However, under the conditions of the digital lifeworld, it may merely become the effect of algorithms being set to work. Against convention, according to which it seems plausible to speak of the humanities as an area of study that is different from theology because, among other things, it can be digital, this “radiance” becomes a very rare example of what could be called “digital theology”. However, while radically undoing the idea of linking the divine to the matter of truth, digital theology stands at the very end of a history separating Wahrheit (truth) from Wahrscheinlichkeit (probability). This is because, in what appears to be an act of radical parody, Kafka’s algorithmic reason has turned the fundamental quest of theology, which has always emphatically asked for Wahrheit, into one of mere Wahrscheinlichkeit under the “probabilistic authority of algorithms” (Maschewski and Nosthoff 2024, p. 50).16 In a sense, it has become a radical type of probability, which no one other than Hans Blumenberg, if he had been living in the digital age, would most probably have embraced when reconstructing his famous case for the historical shift “from ‘verisimilitude’ to ‘probability’”.17 For the epistemological position of both ourselves (as digital users in an algorithmic environment) and the “man from the country” remains, under the condition of untimely correspondence, algorithmically truthless. We are both unable to access the truth beneath or beyond the symptomatic layer of sur- and interfaces that—with Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Elon Musk’s X having mutated into its homebases—is increasingly mistaken as true reality itself.18

Both Kafka’s “law” and our “algorithmic reason” thus have their own version of a “shadow text”, a code their readers are unable to trace to its origin and thus unable to read from a truly historical position. However, it is Kafka who—if we are only following his method by legitimately taking his literature (also) as a symptomatic negotiation of the digital age—allows us to follow at least some of the workings of the algorithmic apparatus. Unlike algorithms themselves, which have no intended symbolic value (even if we were to develop “an ‘algorithmic reading’ of the world” (Finn 2017, p. 5) from which we might assume that it has some sort of “algorithmic imagination” (Finn 2017, p. 181)), it is Kafka’s stories that provide some indirect representation of exactly that apparatus. In fact, it is particularly the level of narrative that allows us to access the mechanics of algorithmic reason. The famous first sentence of The Trial—“Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested [Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet]” (Kafka 2009c, p. 5)—presents a narrative formula that resembles exactly our position in relation to the “shadow texts” beneath the surface of computing. K. is immediately captured by an invisible apparatus akin to an endless chain of algorithmic operations, a setting of infinite optimization wherein one problem is solved only for another to appear. When confronted with the digital version of a Proceß in everyday life, we ourselves stand before something about which we can say that it is “impossible to say how long that would last [dessen Dauer unabsehbar]” (Kafka 2009c, p. 95). It is, speaking in the language of the original, literally unabsehbar and thus something that has, at least for those who live on the surface, no beginning, no ground, no origin. It is—in fact, like ideology and its institutions—literally endless.19

However, even more than just tending to be endless might be at stake in Kafka’s stories. For the way in which Kafka’s literature handles narrative in general seems to almost mimic not only the bureaucratic reality of postponed decisions and the apparently infinite circulation of documents, as in The Castle. Being presented by a narrator who, under the truthless regime of mere probability, “has to be seen as in a condition neither of truth nor of error but at once of truth and error” (Corngold 1988, p. 310), narrative itself becomes an endless operation in the most radical sense—it becomes unabsehbar. This is perhaps why Kafka’s novels and many of his novellas only “end” by being violently put on hold when Kafka, as if he was purposefully leaving his digital device in an attempt to escape the regime of algorithmic reason, left them behind as unfinished fragments. For in Kafka’s work, narrative becomes so powerful that it cannot be brought to a meaningful end. In other words, narrative itself has become an algorithmic network.

What, at first glance, appears to only be an associative impression thus ultimately has its roots in the structural kinship of narratives and algorithms. Furthermore, Roman Jakobson’s seminal characterization of prose narrative as an essentially metonymic operation20 is even more accurate for those unabsehbar chains of algorithms that we encounter in our digital environment. With the regime of artificial intelligence as a self-reflexive and self-feeding system of algorithmic perpetuation increasingly coordinating the reality of our lifeworld, it in fact appears at times as if Kafka’s potentially infinite narrative is about to materialize fully in the digital regime(s) of the 21st century—and this might be the best possible illustration for what a non-simultaneous constellation actually is (or might be). Standing and waiting “before the law” while the realization of our hopes, wishes, and certainly desires is continuously deferred as we run from one doorkeeper after another, patiently waiting “for days and years”, clicking us from one “room” (Kafka 2009c, p. 154) to another [“von Saal zu Saal”], and thus from one instance of algorithmic displacement to another, we ourselves have become the digitalized descendants of the “man from the country”. It seems today that the following is the truth of Kafka’s narratives: they do not speak about algorithms nor speak like algorithms—they speak in algorithms and, in fact, are constructed by algorithms themselves.