Exclusionary and Absorptive Spatial Power in Kafka's The Castle and Can Xue's Frontier: Spatial Theory, Subject Position, Modernity

Kafka’s writings have not only informed our understanding of modern institutions and bureaucratic organizations as forms of domination; they have also knowingly addressed the limits of such understanding, and of theoretical imagination in more general terms. This philosophical essay is situated in the latter mode of thinking with Kafka about the limits of what we assume ‘organization’ to be or to become. It presents a close reading of The Castle as a novel about the miracle of organization. This miracle takes the form of an interruption and temporary suspension of the laws and routines that order and govern the organized world. Yet there is neither a theological higher power nor a mundane organizational power that might save or make use of the miracle (and resolve K.’s predicament). In The Castle, even the miraculous is a matter of mere chance and organizational chaos – a sardonic rebuke to the age-old imaginaries and theologies of rational and hierarchical political organization. More than performing a critique of bureaucracy, The Castle radicalizes the contingency of organizational operations into matters and situations of miraculous chance which, unrecognized by K, leave without a trace.

This article asks how Henri Lefebvre’s humanist Marxism can contribute to the foundations of a critical theory of communication. It does so by reflecting on the role of communication in Lefebvre’s books The Production of Space and The Critique of Everyday Life. Lefebvre’s humanist Marxist stress on the role of human production in society is the aspect of his theory that can be most fruitfully integrated into a critical theory of communication. There are also striking parallels between Lefebvre and Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism. Lefebvre also anticipated discussions of the commodification of the communicative commons.

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