I proposed in my previous piece that The Trial’s Josef K. is the quintessential bureaucratic individual. K. understands himself as a possessor of rights under the framework of the dominant law of the land. What Hannah Arendt takes as Josef K.’s most heroic quality, his individual will to resist the illogical “necessity” of tyrannical power, is based on his mastery of the rules of the Rechtsstaat and its bureaucratic operations. K.’s skill in navigating the social system has resulted in his ascension to a high position. He is the chief financial officer of a major bank, third in the hierarchical order to only the bank president and vice president.
Liberalism, however, is not only about the status of the individual in relation to the state. Its rules and structures govern the everyday relationships between people. This is most clear in the economic sense, and the core of the liberal economic model of capitalism is the contractual relationship. Workers have employment contracts to render services to an employer in return for wages. A contract is drawn up to exchange a piece of property—a house, a car, a business, a commodity. Based on rights and laws, the fundamental social practice of liberal society is the transaction, and the core of this transaction is the abstract value of money. Life as a constant series of legally governed monetary transactions is the essence of modern capitalist existence.
There is a third aspect to the modern order that supplements, and is intertwined with, the system of rights and the practice of monetary transactions: the cultural zone of decorum. Not all interpersonal interactions, of course, are transactional, but these interactions still require some kind of script or protocol. They adhere to a certain structure to preserve and support the social order. In the bourgeois Rechtsstaat, the culture of decorum mirrors the bureaucratic order. It is based on status and hierarchy, spatial boundaries, and clearly articulated roles.
As readers of The Trial, we are immediately confronted with the daily script of bourgeois life—the script of Josef K.’s morning breakfast—at the precise moment it is interrupted by the antagonistic world of the trial. The trial, of course, rejects decorum, just as it rejects the philosophical underpinnings of the Rechsstaat, just as it proves to be stubbornly non-transactional. That the system of the trial rejects, violates, and operates counter to all three levels of the liberal social order—the legal, economic, and cultural—is highly significant. I will attempt to say something about what this means (at least to me) in a future post.
Since I addressed the bureaucratic nature of Josef K.’s bank world in my previous post, I will limit what follows to the topics of transaction and decorum. Josef K. doesn’t simply practice a transactional mode of life, he is thoroughly structured by a transactional understanding of society and human relationships. Josef K. is a 30-year-old bachelor and gets his sexual gratification by paying for sex during weekly visits to a prostitute named Elsa, “who worked at night and late into the morning as a waitress in a wine house, and by day received visitors only in bed.” K. lives in Frau Grubach’s boarding house, but like with Elsa, K. views the relationship with his landlady through a transactional lens. He confides in Fräulein Bürstner, a fellow boarder, “[Frau Grubach’s] beholden to me in another way, too, since she’s borrowed a large sum from me.” When K. is at his first inquiry, he refers to the magistrate’s book as an “account book,” indicating the transactional or financialized way he sees the world. The focus of his long speech at the inquiry is on the arresting guards, who tried to steal his money and belongings, thus breaking liberalism’s fundamental contractual rules.
On the next visit to the location of the trial on the following Sunday, K. meets a chambermaid. K.’s encounter with the chambermaid points to his transactional understanding of relationships. As noted above with the prostitute Elsa, money mediates his sexual life. When money is not the basis for sex, when sex is not a transaction, Josef K. is utterly inept, as his halting and ultimately aggressive encounter with Fräulein Bürstner reveals. The chambermaid, K. learns, is entangled in a complex sexual circle with her husband, a student, and a higher magistrate. K. grows interested in the woman as he begins to understand her as a means of striking back against the world of the trial. He is drawn to the chambermaid, in other words, as an object of perceived value. He reasons to himself, “And there was perhaps no better way to revenge himself upon the examining magistrate and his retinue than taking this woman away from them for himself.” He continues in his possessive fantasy:
Then the time might come when, late one night, after long hours of exhausting labor on his false reports about K., the examining magistrate would find the bed of the woman empty. And empty because she belonged to K., because this woman at the window, this voluptuous, supple, warm body in the dark dress of heavy, coarse material, belonged to K., and K. alone.
It is precisely this exclusive ownership—an entirely capitalist view of people and things—that is foreign to the world of the trial. On the other hand, it is central to the ideology of the bank, which, by definition, defines relationships in transactional terms and must establish clear lines of ownership for assets. At the end of that Sunday, K. issues the following lament (note the language): “…in any case—and here he could advise himself—he would spend his Sunday mornings more profitably than this from now on” (italics mine).
The following chapter brings us to the mysterious events of the storage room, which Michael Maar astutely analyzed in FRANZ. I’ll point to just one moment in the scene. K. attempts to intervene and stop the beating of the two guards by paying the flogger. “‘I’ll reward you well if you let them go,’ said K., taking out his wallet…” The flogger refuses to relent. K. concludes that the flogger is after an even larger bribe. His “negotiations” with the flogger are cut short by his need/desire to flee the scene. The transaction fails. The beating continues.
Josef K.’s transactional understanding of his relationship with his lawyer does the most damage to his standing in the world of the trial. He is dissatisfied with Huld, the lawyer, because the latter can’t demonstrate proof of active work (like filing an initial brief), which could theoretically result in progress in the case. When Josef K. goes to Huld’s office to dismiss him, he runs into another one of Huld’s clients, a merchant named Block. Block has the same basic critique of Huld’s seeming negligence as K has. Block’s answer to the problem of lack of progress in his case is to hire additional “petty lawyers” to advocate for him on multiple levels of the trial process, though none of these strategies results in anything favorable—in fact, they seem to worsen Block’s standing considerably. In Block, K. is confronted with a reflection of his way of thinking, one transported from the legalistic and transactional Rechtsstaat to the world of the trial. Though Huld provides K. (and the reader) with ample discussion concerning the relationship between the person on trial and the court system as well as the role of the lawyer in such cases, K. cannot abandon his core understanding of the client-lawyer relationship. His surprise at Huld’s response to his dismissal captures this misunderstanding. K. thinks, “[Huld] appeared to be a busy lawyer and a rich man as well, so the loss of the fee itself or of one client couldn’t mean that much to him.” In a transactional world, the loss of a case or a client translates to a number on the ledger. To Huld, as a lawyer in the world of the trial, Josef K. is not quantifiable in monetary terms. Josef K.’s “value” is altogether different than money. Since it is not quantifiable, it remains totally beyond the realm of Josef’s K.’s imagination. For K., everything can—must—be reduced to its transactional value.
Capitalism’s transactional nature is made manifest in its culture of decorum. In the world of the transaction, those with money have leverage and power over those who do not. The lender is the dominant party, the borrower or debtor subservient and disempowered. K. pays Elsa for sex and can visit her when he desires. Elsa needs the money and must accept K.’s decision to visit her or not. Never would Elsa visit K. in his office or in his lodgings at Frau Grubach’s boarding house. It is unimaginable that such a profound violation of bourgeois rules of decorum would take place—rules made and enforced precisely to protect a man like Josef K. Likewise, Frau Grubach adheres to a strict set of rules and conventions in the governance of her boarding house. Josef K. can assert himself in the boarding house because he is a paying client, and he can be additionally assertive because he has lent Frau Grubach money and she is in his debt. At the bank, all relationships have rules, all people have roles. Petitioners must wait for Josef K. to call them in to attend to their business. Though some of them wait for many hours, none dares violate the rules of decorum and transgress the spatial boundary of K.’s office. Josef K., on the other hand, can force the petitioners to wait for him, though displays of dominance and authority have their limits. Even the antagonistic relationship between K. and the bank’s vice president can only be enacted within acceptable parameters. The vice president can exploit K.’s shortcomings, but only when K. has violated the rules of correct office behavior, only when K. has violated protocol.
What kind of world, what kind of life, is created by such a transactional existence and its culture of decorum? In Josef K.’s case, it is an isolated and atomistic life. Josef K. finds himself utterly alone, his existence devoid of meaningful relationships. On the quotidian level, all relations are about winning and losing, all interactions based on the dynamics of power. The most intimate engagements are reduced to crass categories of ownership and exchange. Decorum governs behavior, collapsing only at moments when trumped by raw assertions of power by those who possess it, like when Josef K. grabs Fräulein Bürstner by the wrist and “kissed her on the mouth, then all over her face, like a thirsty animal…,” utterly humiliating her in her own room.
There is nothing of a spiritual life in this transactional world. Nothing binds people together that doesn’t involve money, self-interest, and power. Identity itself comes into focus through one’s position in the hierarchical arrangement. There is no past in the novel, just a present and a possible future. The future is defined by scripted progress, like Josef K. moving from bank CFO to vice president or even president. There is no real community, only a sham or pseudo-community stitched together with transactional bonds, social hierarchies, and rules of decorum. This is the world the trial system attacks, violates, and transgresses.
If Josef’s K.’s transactional world sounds familiar to us, it is. It is an early stage of what might be called a hyper-transactionalism—or, as Hannah Arendt might say, its blueprint. In today’s hyper-transactional world, the individual no longer needs to be rooted in liberal individualism. And what is an “individual” anyway if a person is socially meaningful mainly as a site for exchange, a conduit for capital’s flow, and a capsule for the creation and storage of debt? Such, it seems to me, is our post-liberal nightmare.
Quotations of The Trial from Breon Mitchell’s translation (Schocken Books 1998).
Gloomy but likely true.