Some of Kafka’s 
‘Prescient Observations’ in The Trial
On the Legal ‘Reality’ or ‘Life’ of The Organization 
As a Complex Metaphor for Political Organizations in General

	What caught my interest in this book from pages 59 to 129 was the prescient observations on the reality, as opposed to the ideality, of the workings of a legal system, and, by extension the functions and machinations of all political systems (especially if allowed to functions non-authentically; a concept I have spent many years as a philosopher trying to come to terms with). I have non-chronologically paraphrased a collection of these ‘observations’ in summary form.

1.	The lower echelons are corrupt (in a manner and for reasons quite different from those functionaries of the upper echelons, e.g., for the reason of a lack of pay, inadequate conditions to perform the required services, excessive paperwork, etc.).
2.	An all-pervading, oppressive sense of paranoia that seeps into everything and gives ‘reality’ a cynical or purposeless tinge….
3.	Parallel bodies effectively doing the same work – through a proliferation of parallel organizations (which have a natural tendency ‘to step on each other’).
4.	Cannot plead innocence as you are never aware of what the charge is in all its details or lack of them (as the ‘charge’ could be purely an accusation hunting for evidence and in the process, eventually, manufacturing the same).
5.	There is a temptation to provide a confession with or without a confessional life-history (which could then be used to ‘re-charge’ that individual despite hints by that organization as to how it should be ‘manufactured’).
6.	There is a need for influence to navigate and possibly exit this legal minefield and ‘trap’ although the latter is a rarity if not an impossibility.
7.	Defense is merely tolerated as a sort of growth on the body corporate.
8.	‘Endless progress’ – all rather futile but ‘necessary’ – you mustn’t give up (and confess) – and can turn out complete fruitless with a need to restart all over….
9.	Eventually implicates not just you but all your relatives, friends and associates… you have to clear your name for the sake of their good name being tarnished along with yours.
10.	An enormous expenditure of energy and resources will be consumed in the ‘legal’ process.
11.	No real ‘acquittal’ only ‘apparent acquittal’ or a ‘prolongation’ of the case.
12.	A game of endless interrogations in a variety of forms and formats plus endless paperwork.
13.	The ominous possibility of ‘being arrested’ at any time (especially in the early hours of the morning).
14.	Everyone else is implicated in your case/in legal proceedings/in the organization in some form or other.
15.	Mustn’t rock the system – you will be very effectively bypassed, written out of the equation…!
16.	Everyone is eventually a victim of the system… and guilty thereby.
17.	An all pervasive atmosphere of stuffiness, being suffocated figuratively and literally… a proliferation of rules (hidden regulations?) not necessarily known but trotted out when needed by the organization. A wearing down of the individual…!
18.	A lifetime of experience is necessary but not sufficient to navigate this maze of legal complexities associated with the Organization(s).
19.	Highest powers concerned with your case not known… totally faceless and nameless.
20.	Effectively, no-one in the end can decide your case. You remain a legal question mark!
21.	The further up you go in the legal food-chain the more you have to pay for its ‘services’.

These are some of the details that Kafka spells out in the course of his story. I am sure there are more observations that could be noted by a closer reading of this text and hopefully you can add to this list… in essence, an allegorical tale that depicts the trials and travails of alienation as experienced by the individual, to some degree, in a post-industrial society; a ‘fact’ that might account for our uneasiness when we read this and similar novels…!
						
        Noël Tointon, Sydney, 15.3.03.

Postscript

	After discussing this short paper with some other friends also reading the same section of The Trial I would like to add the following comments.

	I perceive this text, for me, as a fleshing out of inauthenticity and its alienation of the individual. However, the character K could be read in a more complex fashion. E.g., as a heroic figure that struggles against this alienation (even though remaining an outsider?). Then, one might wish to read K as an authentic figure struggling with his inauthentic social environment. I have always treated the existential resolution discovered in the ‘authenticity of the spirit’ as a resistant-less, spontaneous, effortless like state of experience. Now, this might be true for the realization of being authentic from the perspective of that person being authentic (as I have previously argued, through the existential transformation of the inauthentic) but, in facing the inauthentic this effortlessness of ‘selfless’ activity meets with a resistance equivalent to the relative degree of inauthenticity present. Now, some degree of authenticity must be present (as previously argued in this paper) but in meeting the inauthentic we meet a state of alienation to that degree there is this resistance and it is allowed to alienate us! K has a reading that strongly hints that the inauthentic, the trial, etc., is in a state of existence for him because he permits it. It would all go away if he refused to play along with it and ceased to bury himself in its involved minutiae. I don’t think this reading is absolutely tenable but does ask us to ask the question is K being authentic in heroically reflecting upon his situation and endlessly struggling against the endless machinations of the ‘organization’? Or, is he being inauthentic by virtue of this engagement? Then, in the same vein, we must ask is K alone in the world because he engages with the organization or is he alone like everyone else? As a phenomenologist I would argue that we feel alone because we know what it is like to be not alone, that being with others is our natural condition. Only through inauthenticity, alienation, being ground down by the inauthentic, through encrustation of habits… that we then feel alone by virtue of the fact that once, normally, we were ‘never left alone’ by our mothers, relatives, guardians, minders, teachers, etc. Moreover, only through clothes, buildings, seeking for privacy and solitude does this loss of ‘continually being with the other’ become enculturated through habit and therein sedimented psychically. Would an individual living in a densely populated habitation continually surrounded by people feel alone if that is the way they would brought up and the environment was one that continually took care of them, showed a concern for them, positively acknowledged their existence, etc? In this light one might like to argue primary and secondary readings of K with respect to these topics of inauthenticity, alienation, loneliness, etc., but at the same time criticize to what extent his treatment of these topics is phenomenologically misguided, have the potential to deconstruct, are patently inconsistent with the rest of his text, etc. To some extent K has to call everything into question, suspend it, however, rather than finding this reflection giving him insight and enlightenment such a procedure, as conducted by him, appears only to expose a greater degree of institutionalization, alienation, paranoia, cynicism, etc. Perhaps, and I am speculating here, K has to call even his own ego into question and ‘let things be as they are as they are’ and take what delight there is in ‘this freedom to be as you become’ in and through this freedom – finding no fear, etc., in such a state through an ego-less attitude; through this perfection of the suspension that even includes the suspension of the ego (where even the suspension itself is suspended through a suspension of the same, and, wherein the absence of ego is realized therein not as a loss of experience being experienced but as a gaining of true authenticity in experience through its general, closer conformity with reality through the suspension of all our ontological commitments, etc!)!

										     N, 16.3.03.