The Image of Thought on Kafka, or The Second Literary Machine (ca. 1975)

In chapter 2, I concluded with a quotation from Zourabichvili, who defines the rhizome as “the method of an anti-method,” under the guiding principle of experimentation in thought that must be rigorously applied. At this point I will now return chronologically—defined only by year of publication—to the book written with Guattari a year before, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. It is here we first discover that the term “rhizome” appears to determine the particular image of thought in Kafka’s writing, the thought emitted by what they call a “bachelor machine” (machine célibataire), which is proposed in relation to the experimental method of reading Kafka: the method of “anti-interpretation.” Here the apparent contradiction between a method and an anti-method should not concern us too much, because Deleuze and Guattari claim that there is indeed a method determining their approach: expression. “Only expression gives us the method.”1 To quote again the passage by Zourabichvili: “In this respect, the rhizome is the method of the anti-method, and its constitutive ‘principles’ are so many cautionary rules measured against every vestige or reintroduction of the tree and the One in thought.”2 Recalling the four principles outlined in chapter 2, which Zourabichvili refers to here as so many “cautionary rules” against “the One in thought” (i.e., transcendent organization of meaning, or structure), I will offer them again in a more pragmatic formula (mode d’emploi): (1) Identify the One; (2) subtract oneself from the One; (3) enter into an assemblage at any point; and (4) use whatever you have to hand.3

The underlying principle of this method of “anti-interpretation” is that, in the form of the rhizome, thought gives itself over to experimentation, which is to say, it does not know what it is looking for in advance. It is according to this principle that Deleuze and Guattari’s manner of “reading” Kafka is completely opposed to interpretation and is constituted by a number of simple rules that allow this reading machine to work, rules that I will describe later. Of course, we recall that in Proust the process of reading was described as an “interpretation of signs.” Here, the book functions as a different kind of machine, the telescope of impassioned astronomy, made to allow certain signs and impressions to filter through so that they can be “interpreted”—in other words, so that their essences can then be extracted by “the involuntary machine of interpretation.” However, this does not pose a contradiction to Deleuze and Guattari’s own method, given that in this process “intelligence always comes after,” including the intelligence that informs the meaning of these signs and extracts their essences. In Proust, intelligence (or meaning) does not exist beforehand, and in this case certainly does not exist in the mind of the author, Proust himself, since we have already described the nature of this mind above as partly vegetal and partly animal, the mind of a spider. Does a spider know beforehand the essence of the butterfly that will get caught up in his web, that is, before he blindly crawls to the point where it first feels its impression and then drinks its blood? This is the image of the involuntary, based upon an encounter that must first assume the form of a sign (the vibration or signal, the trembling of the web, the small disturbance of the surface of a Body without Organs), before it can become an object of interpretation and open to the play of meaning and sense. Here we might have a vivid example of a situation where intelligence comes after and presupposes nothing beforehand but a certain unconsciousness, even though in the machine itself (the web), there is the presence of an abstract rationality (although this could certainly not be determined by an image of human rationality), a machine that works precisely by allowing what was unconscious, at first, to be developed into a form of intelligence. Thus, what Deleuze calls “signs” in Proust are extremely contracted and tightly involuted states of ideas in pure duration:

There is no more an explicit signification than a clear idea. There are only meanings implicated in signs; and if thought has the power to explicate the sign, to develop it in an Idea, this is because the Idea is already there in the sign, in the enveloped and involuted state, in the obscure state that forces us to think.4

Of course, one might argue that according to standard hermeneutic theories, intelligence also comes afterward in the form of meaning; however, in response to this objection, the problem in this case is that intelligence always assumes, if not the same form, then a relatively finite number of forms that can be reduced to two: the form of significance, the form of sense or meaning. In hermeneutics, intelligence always assumes these forms that are already known in advance, and most importantly, can even exist regardless of their contents. This is why there can be so many interpretations of the same work or author (particularly in the case of Kafka): an existential Kafka, a Marxist Kafka, a psychoanalytic Kafka, a Jewish Kafka, a Christian Kafka, a new historicist Kafka, and a postcolonial Kafka. Despite the fact that all these interpretations vary with regard to the contents, the particular signs or statements that are included as the interpretative matter, the form of significance that concerns the Whole, the image of the work and of the author, or as we say, “the Meaning” as the overall form of intelligence that captures its sense, is relatively similar in all these theories, if not the same. It is ironic to see that Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been received in some literature departments as “yet another interpretation” of Kafka, in the sense that it was strung up on the same tree along with every other major interpretation, an interpretation that moreover has been crucified repeatedly for its bad sense and its misreading of Kafka’s works, for example, for not knowing the German well enough, for failing to pay attention to certain signs, for misunderstanding the word “minor” when everyone knows what Kafka was saying was “small” (kleine). And yet, given the fact that it has been made to “work” like every other interpretation or hermeneutic theory of Kafka historically, one must question whether this is due to the reproductive nature of the tree or to some failure of Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka experiment? This will be the question that I will take up in this chapter.

Following the overall method of experimentation, therefore, let us then pursue the Kafka experiment by first paying close attention to how the process works. In doing so, we will attempt to follow the rules that were outlined in the introduction to Rhizome one year later, which I have earlier on reduced to 2 (or 2 + 1) for the sake of convenience:

1. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor to the multiple, but only presupposes a plane of consistency that constitutes its relative outside and current number of connections.
2. Thought can be connected at any point to any other point in an assemblage and is heterogeneous according to the nature of its signs.

It is important to point out again that Rhizome was written a year after Kafka, the work where they attempted to read Kafka together according to the principle of “anti-interpretation.” Of course, this is just a guess on my part, based on year of publication; Deleuze and Guattari could have written both works at the same time, one work for each pair of hands, and Rhizome would constitute the method (or theory) of their practice of reading in the manner of a laboratory experiment. But this perfectly fits my earlier thesis, as well as the major principles I have already outlined above, because this would mean that the theory (Rhizome) actually comes after the practice (Kafka). Theory always follows practice, which reverses the usual order presupposed in most theoretical models, where the theory comes first and already projects an image of the practice to follow. This is Deleuze and Guattari’s stated critique of all hermeneutic theories, in particular, but also of the image of thought that is presupposed by “Theory,” including Marxist literary theory, psychoanalytic theory, and most importantly, all linguistic theory and theories of language that already presuppose an image of actual statements and signs.

Consequently, if Rhizome is to be understood as the outline of a method that was first invented to read Kafka, then the fact that it appears a year later as an introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, very simply as a description of what they are doing in practice, then we might very well understand this later work as an “applied rhizomatics.” Here, it is most important to realize that this order is inherently logical, in addition to simply following an empirical order of things, as in the logical order in any experimentation. First, you conduct the experiment according to certain rules or presuppositions that are constructed in the process of creating the experiment, and then you describe the outcome and report your findings, which are usually the basis for future experiments that will verify the findings. This is the simple empirical procedure that can also be found to determine the nature of the experimentation that Deleuze and Guattari propose between the Kafka experiment and the findings reported in Rhizome, which forms the condition of the other experiments performed in A Thousand Plateaus according to the same method. Each time, however, or within the instance of each experimental plateau (or milieu), the method will change depending on the number of planes and connections, because each plateau is a multiplicity that is constituted only by the number of connections; to subtract one is to change the nature of the multiplicity.

After defining the conditions of the experiment proper, let us determine then how it begins. As with any experiment, you begin with what is called a hypothesis, which is a theoretical presupposition of a different order than a hermeneutic presupposition. What is the hypothesis proposed as the condition of the Kafka experiment? In reading the first lines, we already find it there in the second sentence: “The work is a rhizome, a burrow.”5 This is the first appearance of the word “rhizome” in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, but again, because this word has already been overdetermined by subsequent readings that have locked in its significance, and in a certain sense have already interpreted this significance for Deleuze and Guattari’s entire body of writings, at this point we must keep in mind that as readers, we do not know what a rhizome is, what it means, or more importantly, how it is to work. In other words, we must pose the question of the rhizome again without presupposing its meaning in order to maintain, even only theoretically, a certain condition of stupidity. At first, this approach might appear like something straight out of Beckett:

To be more precise with our terms, therefore, let us provide the botanical definition of rhizomes, since dictionaries and herbarium manuals existed when Deleuze and Guattari were writing and this would be an allowable move. Here, I offer the following definition from Wikipedia:

Rhizome (from Greek: ῥἱζωμα, rhizoma, “root-stalk”) is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes may also be referred to as creeping rootstalks, or rootstocks. In general, rhizomes have short internodes; they send out roots from the bottom of the nodes and new upward-growing shoots from the top of the nodes. It is a method of asexual reproduction for plants. A stem tuber is a thickened part of a rhizome or stolon that has been enlarged for use as a storage organ. In general, a tuber is high in starch, for example, the common potato, which is a modified stolon. The term tuber is often used imprecisely, and is sometimes applied to plants with rhizomes. Some plants have rhizomes that grow above ground or that lie at the soil surface, including some Iris species, and ferns, whose spreading stems are rhizomes. Plants with underground rhizomes include ginger, bamboo, the Venus Flytrap, Chinese lantern, Western poison-oak, hops, and turmeric, and the weeds Johnson grass, bermuda grass, and purple nut sedge. Rhizomes generally form a single layer, but in Giant Horsetails, can be multi-tiered. Farmers and gardeners who propagate the plants by a process known as vegetative reproduction also use the rhizome. Examples of plants that are propagated this way include hops, asparagus, ginger, irises, Lily of the Valley, Cannas, and sympodial orchids.6

Even though we now know what the term “rhizome” means in botany and agriculture, this will not help us determine what the rhizome means in relation to Kafka, or how it pertains to writing and literature. For this, we will need a second term that established this connection. The second term is “burrow,” which moreover establishes an equivalence or a literal connection: RHIZOME = BURROW. More specifically written, “This work is a Rhizome, a Burrow.” As we know from reading Deleuze and Guattari’s work where similar statements are made, the use of indefinite articles is always important; it implies that they are not speaking of a metaphorical equivalence, or simile, because the work is not said to be “like” by means of resemblance or analogy. Moreover, any reader of Kafka will already recognize this term as belonging to the work itself, particularly in the story “The Burrow,” which is what allows them to establish this literal connection or equivalence, and then already to multiply its associations in referencing other places in Kafka’s body of work and defining them as different kinds of burrows: The Castle, the ship and the hotel in Amerika, the series of rooms found to be adjacent to the courtroom in The Trial; basically, any place in Kafka’s work that is described as having multiple exits and entrances. But the funny thing, which only the experienced reader of Kafka already knows, is that this pretty much describes every place in Kafka’s work, because every room is always described as having doors by which one enters or leaves (or through which one is prevented from leaving) and windows for entering and leaving as well (or for looking through, either in the moment of being watched, like in the beginning and the end of The Trial, or in the dream of jumping out, as in “The Judgment”).

Let us stop this train of associations and immediately call attention to something that occurs in the above equation: rhizome = burrow. Here we might notice that something is different, something not immediately apparent, which is added by the term “rhizome,” and which in some way interprets the animal sign of the burrow to have a vegetable meaning, referring to the asexual manner of its reproduction. Thus, burrows are said to reproduce in Kafka’s writings in the manner of underground rhizomes (e.g., ginger, the Venus Flytrap) or weeds (Johnson’s grass, Bermuda grass). Where does this equivalence come from, since it appears as a forced equivalence or catachresis? This interpretation is not allowed by the machine that Deleuze and Guattari construct; it is a literal equivalence that, moreover, must already be part of the assemblage. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that even though the second term (“a burrow”) is readily apparent in Kafka, the origin of the first term of the equation (“a rhizome”) is difficult to discern. Where does the term come from? As I have already argued, it comes from or is introduced by the description of the literary machine in Proust, and from the final description of the writing machine itself as partly vegetal and partly animal. I recall the following sentence offered in the conclusion of Proust and Signs, which I will return to discuss in greater detail below: “The logos is a huge Animal whose parts unite in a whole and are unified under a principle or a leading idea; but the pathos is a vegetal realm consisting of cellular elements that communicate only indirectly.”7 Thus, according to this reading, in some ways the rhizome can be understood as a foreign idea, or the introduction of a foreign sign that might even belong to another language, concerning a basic presupposition drawn from Deleuze’s earlier understanding of the nature of the literary machine and how it functions. It is a sign plucked from Proust’s web that is introduced into Kafka’s burrow, creating the conditions of a hybrid construction. As we will see, this is not as frivolous as it might appear at first, because the very nature of the literary machine changes by adding a new connection and, thus, a new entrance into Kafka’s work.

By the way, spiders create burrows too, so perhaps the equivalence is not so foreign. In Proust, we recall, the narrator is a spider who emits a spiderweb from his abdomen, the system of writing that determines the nature of the work. This already provides another presupposition: the figure of the narrator in Kafka is more likened to an animal who builds a vast burrow, a network of connecting subterranean passages for refuge and for safety, as well as for flight. The Kafka narrator is an animal that creates a burrow and lives somewhere in the center of it like the spider lives in its web. A burrow is a hole or tunnel dug into the ground by an animal to create a space suitable for habitation or temporary refuge, or as a byproduct of locomotion. Burrows provide a form of shelter against predation and exposure to the elements, so the burrowing way of life is quite popular among these animals. But, I might also say, among writers too! In other words, is this not the best definition of the modern writer: an animal who burrows into language and creates a subterranean system of signs for refuge and safety from external predators? Moreover, is this not the image that Kafka himself gave to his own writing system? In the letters, he escaped from family members and his fiancée, and even talks at some point of burrowing into Felice’s underwear drawer and hiding among her pretty things. In the diaries, he found refuge in this system from how he was determined as an individual by family and society. In the stories and tales, he escaped from the condition of being human; in the novels, he escaped and found temporary refuge in hallways and passages between each chamber and adjoining room. The Castle is described as a giant burrow of passages in which there is no outside; this is one reason why K. cannot get to the Castle by walking across the surface of the earth in a single straight line; he must take the tunnel and enter through the circular labyrinth.

But what happens when a foreign spider is introduced into the web of another spider, when one writing system is combined with another, as in this case? In the first sense, introducing the Proustian spider into the Kafkaesque burrow provides us with two corollary but nevertheless competing images of the system of writing, two different literary machines that are combined in an equivalence: a rhizome, a burrow. This is the basic presupposition of the hypothesis that Kafka’s literary machine must be found to work in some way that is equivalent to Proust’s, but according to a different machinic set of rules that will determine the “style” of each work. Here I recall that in the conclusion of Proust and Signs, Deleuze defines style as precisely as “the unity of the work” that allows it to communicate and makes us communicate with it, by means of the machines that it organizes within each other. This communication is not interpretation and does not take the form of interpretation, which only grasps a meaning that is already there before our communication within the work. Thus, as Deleuze writes, it would be a kind of communication that would not be posited in principle (like the prejudice of “communication” in language), but rather “would result from the operation of machines and their detached parts, their non-communicating fragments.”8

The connection to Proust’s literary machine is important, because it provides an important condition of Deleuze and Guattari’s particular approach to the question “What is literature?” Against those who would oppose this question on the basis of a prejudice concerning either author, or against a notion of modernist literature in general, they would defend themselves by saying that this already is a badly posed question, and that they are speaking only of a particular literary machine, in the same manner that one might refer to a particular “rhizome,” or a particular “burrow.” In any case, such objections are not that critical, because Deleuze and Guattari then go on to test their hypothesis by describing the components of the literary machine that works only in the case of Kafka’s writings. For example, the Kafka machine does work, and it produces something fundamentally different from the Proustian machine, a different experience fabricated by a machinic production of impressions and signs. The first task, therefore, will be to create a diagram of the machine and determine its components. They begin simply, in the milieu of the burrow, Kafka’s literary machine, making connections point by point. Here, we remember the first axiom of the rhizomatic method: any point can be connected to any other point whatsoever. Consequently, as they say, “We’ll start with a modest way” with these two elements: the portrait or photo, and the bent head.

They begin in the exact middle of The Castle (the burrow), but these signs immediately proliferate and connect to other places in Kafka’s work: the portrait of the woman in furs in Gregor’s room in “The Metamorphosis,” the bent head of the father in a porter’s uniform in the same story. The portraits and photos in Kafka’s work multiply, as does the bent head, which is also found in the diaries, the letters, and the novels. For example, in the diary entry that recounts the completion of his very first story, “The Judgment,” Kafka describes himself as suddenly being able to straighten his own posture and sit straight; likewise, in “The Metamorphosis” the sister is finally able to stretch out her young body, to the family’s great joy. Here we have a variation on the bent head posture, which also gives us more information on the subterranean tunnel system, which has low ceilings and is cramped, causing the characters to slouch down as if walking on all fours. Only in a place outside the burrow, which appears infrequently in Kafka’s stories, can the characters stand up on two legs like human beings. Deleuze and Guattari write: “The head that straightens, the head that bursts through the roof or the ceiling, seems an answer to the bent head. We find it everywhere in Kafka.”9

Here we are reminded of one of the principles of Rhizome: use only what is readily available and connect to it. Consequently, it is crucial to note that the “straightened head sign” is not immediately interpreted by Deleuze and Guattari (for example, as transcendence or liberation), because this would suppress the literal meaning and replace it with a symbolic value. There are associations, of course, but this has to do with the feeling of no longer being confined by a cramped space, or of stretching out to a point where the muscles are livened and a feeling of extreme pleasure fills the body with satisfaction, as in the passage from Kafka’s diary about writing all night, hunched over in the writing chair at his desk, and then at the moment of completion, the feeling of raising one’s arms and stretching. This sensation may very well express an intensity that also connects to political liberation; but without the literal connection to the body, its sign loses a specific intensity and becomes too abstract.

As in the case of reading Proust, the second step is to develop these multiple impressions into signs that will contain them and determine their expression. At first Deleuze and Guattari make the following hypothesis: “The straightened head is the form of content, and the musical sound is the form of expression.”10 Thus, the straightened head functions like a musical sound in Kafka’s works, a refrain or ritornello in a Kafka symphony. It expresses something completely different from the bent head-portrait-photo, which functions by means of representation alone. But then, they immediately reject this hypothesis as being “not quite right.” It is not about music as a semiotically formed substance, which would simply turn music into a metaphor. Therefore, “it isn’t a composed and semiotically shaped music that interests Kafka, but rather a pure sonorous material.”11 What do they mean here? This is where most interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka go astray, and this will determine how the concepts they propose of a “minor literature,” or of a “becoming minor,” have become simply representative categories, like portrait-photos or snapshots of literary works that express the bent-head of the minority, ethnic, or postcolonial writer.

In responding to this question, they immediately go on to provide multiple examples of all the sounds they find in Kafka’s writings—I will not list them all here—as if they are trying to classify and illustrate all the sounds an instrument can make without regard to playing a tune or a composition of music. Listen to the instrument itself, they say. What noises does it make? What are the possible sounds that define it? What are the sonorous qualities? Here we discover the question of style in contrast to the Proustian literary machine, which is defined as a telescope for viewing into ourselves; Kafka’s literary machine is a kind of musical instrument and this will define what it produces, as well as the difference in style. Different musical instruments produce distinctive sonorous qualities that will determine their distinctiveness. A guitar or a banjo expresses different sonorous qualities than a violin or a trombone. Is this a good way of defining style in writing as well? Moreover, in listening to Kafka, in trying to determine the distinctive sounds that will characterize this particular writing machine, Deleuze and Guattari find a distinctive sound that appears like a low humming that is “generally monotone and always non-signifying.” It is this sound that one can hear beneath Gregor’s voice and equally in Josephine’s song. “In short,” they write, “sound doesn’t show up here as a form of expression, but as an unformed material of expression, that will act on the other terms.”12 But is this not merely noise, or rather silence, someone might ask? No, because noise already presupposes music, just as silence presupposes language as a semiotically formed substance. Their argument is that in Kafka the material of writing, and perhaps writing alone, is capable of emitting this particular sound as an unformed material of expression, and this sound defines Kafka’s literary machine more than any other characteristic or quality.

Now that we have defined this sound particular to Kafka’s literary machine, the sound of an unformed material of expression, let us now turn to the concept of minor literature to see how this sound turns up there. Here we are not seeking to interpret what the sound means, but simply to test Deleuze and Guattari’s hypothesis that what this sound expresses is essential to their method of reading Kafka. Again, “only expression gives us the method.” In the chapter on the question “What is a minor literature?” we find this sound immediately connected to what they define as “collective assemblages of enunciation.” In a certain manner this connection already makes sense, because the question of minor literature is attached to the expression of a people, that is, to an unformed material of expression (i.e., a collective enunciation that is missing). Here we remember that language is already described as a deterritorialized sound that is then reterritorialized in the form of sense (i.e., semiotically formed expression), which is both physical and abstract (or symbolic). Language shapes the mouth as much as it defines a form of expression as a collective unity of a language. The modern writer enters into this reterritorialized sense in order to discover new means of expression in this relationship. In fact, the entire chapter on minor literature turns out to be a treatise on linguistics, or an anti-linguistic theory, based on what writers actually do in language, and certain writers more than others. Artaud and Céline are given as examples of “minor writers” in the French language. What is it exactly that these writers share with Kafka? What is their method of creating a minor literature, each in his own situation and respective language?

Again we come back to this sound, the sound of an unformed material of expression that is connected to a collective assemblage of enunciation: Artaud’s scream, Céline’s obscenity. If it sounds here like I’m just stringing phrases together, it is only because I am trying to remain on the literal level of the descriptions that are given and not trying to interpret them immediately, saying this sound means that symbol or its equivalent. At this point, however, we must come back to the concrete situation of the writer. What is each writer trying to express, if not a certain need to escape the situation of a major language defined by previous literatures, by a previous generation of writers, to cause the art to progress by means of finding new expression that is invented from unformed materials and sounds (unarticulated blocks of expression and memory alike). In this regard, writers and musicians progress in the same fashion using different materials. In creating new music, musicians seek to deterritorialize previous musical forms, often by introducing what might sound at first like unarticulated blocks of sound. Why would literature progress any differently? Introducing into language what might initially appear as unarticulated blocks of expression into root language, creating new semiotically formed substances. According to Deleuze and Guattari, this is precisely what Kafka did: “He will pull from it the barking of a dog, the cough of an ape, and the bustling of a beetle. He will turn syntax into a cry that will embrace the rigid syntax of this dried up German.”13

Nevertheless, one might ask, “How is this at all revolutionary?” as modern literature is so often assumed to be. In other words, how do we connect these distinctive sounds to the conditions of collective enunciation? If the form of expression alone is revolutionary, as in the case of much modern music or art, this does not immediately lead to a change in the form of content, just as the pure sonorous quality of a “straightened head” does not immediately cause the subject to become liberated. It is for this reason that much of the innovations of modern art and literature appear too abstract, too intellectual, too “modernist,” and the real problem that Deleuze and Guattari are addressing is how to connect these technical and formal innovations to the level of contents and to the collective assemblages of enunciation that determine these contents. This, in fact, is the same question that Sartre asked in “What Is Political Literature?,” although Deleuze and Guattari’s answer will be quite different, as I will show in chapter 4.

The image presupposed by many of the critical representations of modern literature, and presupposed even more today in relation to what is called minority writing, is an image that expresses the relationship between the form of expression and the form of content either as being immanent to a collective subject or as distorting or concealing this immanent relationship, as in much of Marxist criticism of literature. Deleuze and Guattari were not writing in a vacuum and they were certainly aware of these critical representations of modern literature, as well as of certain modern writers such as Kafka in particular. The question they ask is: How do modern literary works communicate, and how do they become “a concern of the people”? The answer they give at first is: not very well. Modernist works, especially, have been trapped by stale and purely formal innovations of expression, regardless of the differences in content. But here is the point: the matter for the writer is to liberate expression, to create new possibilities through unformed material, and not at first to liberate the subject as it is defined elsewhere by collective assemblages of enunciation. There has been an unrealistic demand placed on the modern writer, one that distorts the real situation of writing itself by making it already a transcendent or mythical portrait of the social situation of the subject. They write:

We find ourselves not in front of a structural correspondence between two sorts of forms, forms of content and forms of expression, but rather in front of an expression machine capable of disorganizing its own forms . . . in order to liberate pure contents that mix with expressions in a single intense matter. . . . Since content is presented in a given form of content, one must find, discover, or see the form of expression that goes with it. That which conceptualizes well expresses itself. But a minor, or revolutionary, literature begins by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualize until afterward (“I do not see the word, I invent it”).14

In other words, as in the case of the principle of the rhizome, they begin, not by theorizing the situation of modern literature as a whole, like Marxist theory, but rather by describing literally the components of expression that belong to Kafka’s work, in order to connect form to content, and the literary machine to real collective assemblages of enunciation. When Kafka was writing, the Czech people faced a situation similar to the situation Kafka faced as a writer. A writer faces a real situation that is fundamentally the same as the situation of a people, and this situation cannot be defined by representation. A writer does not seek to “represent” a people; this critical presupposition very much distorts the nature of the literary process, of the writing machine and how it works. Consequently, “living and writing, art and life, are opposed only from the point of view of a major literature.”15 Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, provide another definition of what the writer and the people share—a line of escape. Each, in their own way, and using whatever means that are available to them, whatever means that they can invent, to escape their own situation: the writer attempts to escape the situation in which a previous generation of writers and a previous major literature determines her as a “writer”; a minority seeks to escape the situation of being a collective subject defined by a major form (a nation, a class, a race, etc.). Here, the situation faced by so-called minority writers and by minority peoples is ever more evident, but the means of escape that centers around the invention of a new means of expression in each case is also evident. The situation of “becoming minor” defines both the writer and the people in a mutual effort to escape the definition of a major form. Writers are oppressed by their own major forms, which determine them as writing subjects, no less than a collective subject is oppressed by the major forms that determine its own particular situation as subjects, in yet a different sense and according to a different regime of what Deleuze and Guattari will call “order words” (mots d’ordre). However, these two situations, or two states of being a subject, are not the same; most importantly, one situation should not be taken as a metaphor of the other, as has been done in the history of modern literary interpretation.

Throughout the preceding discussion I have argued that the development (if not evolution) of the concept of the literary machine must be understood as the combination of two specific literary machines: the complex vegetal logos of Proust and the burrow or animal logos of Kafka. Let us now explore a subterranean and common theme that links these two machines together and gives them a social function. The theme is guilt, which is present in both authors’ works to different degrees and according to different subthemes. Nevertheless, for both writers the theme of guilt is only apparent and in some ways hides or conceals a more profound meditation. In other words, in both Kafka and Proust we find only an apparent and statistical guilt of the subject, which has not yet been internalized. In Proust’s case, the apparent guilt of being a homosexual and the statistical guilt of being a member of “an accursed race”; in Kafka, the apparent guilt of being a bachelor and the statistical guilt of being a Jew living in the Hapsburg monarchy. The theme of guilt, however, in both cases is immediately linked to the form of the Law; in one case it is only apparently the Law of the Father that condemns the son and bachelor as a guilty member of the family; in the other case, it appears as a sexual law that condemns the homosexual as guilty of belonging to another species. “In Proust,” Deleuze writes, “the theme of guilt remains superficial, social rather than moral, projected onto other persons by the narrator, rather than internalized within the narrator himself.”16 In Kafka one might find that the opposite is true, but again this is equally superficial and only apparent; Kafka’s narrators often begin in a position of apparent guilt (which, as in the case of Proust, is only statistical and formal guilt) but have yet to internalize its image or its sentence. This progression is evident from the very first story, “The Judgment,” which begins with the apparent guilt of Georg, who is “avoiding the reality of his own dependence and failure” by displacing this onto his imaginary friend, and ends with the Father’s revelation of this self-deception and a sentence of death by drowning. However, in both cases the law appears only in response to a particular problem, of a world devoid of Logos, no reference to the Good, composed only of fragments of a totality that is no longer whole, and so it becomes identified in each case with a process of violently forcing these fragments into place. It is only in this context that the depressive and the schizoid (or paranoid) position of the writer takes on a larger social and political meaning as concrete responses to the condition of the law.

The question we need to answer is why the writer is so often represented subjectively from either a depressive or a paranoid-schizoid position in society, as if to answer the question of why the writer appears strangely apart or separated from the social (the condition of a “bachelor”).17 Returning again to Proust and Signs, Deleuze makes the following claim concerning the relationship of Kafka and Proust:

Modern consciousness of the law assumed a particularly acute form with Kafka: it is in “The Great Wall of China” that we find a fundamental link between the fragmentary character of the wall, the fragmentary mode of its construction, and the unknowable character of the law, its determination identical to the punishment of guilt. In Proust, however, the law presents another figure, because guilt is more like an appearance that conceals a more profound fragmentary reality, instead of being itself this more profound reality to which the detached fragments lead us. The depressive consciousness of the law as it appears in Kafka is countered in this sense by the schizoid consciousness of the law according to Proust.18

Moreover, we will find a similar formulation of this relationship in Anti-Oedipus, written around the same period as the above passage: “In Kleinian terms, it might be said that the depressive position is only a cover-up for a more deeply rooted schizoid position.”19

I have already argued that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the literary machine was historically an amalgamation of two specific literary machines, those of Kafka and Proust. Around the theme of guilt and the law we see the secret affiliation and even the patch of code that connects them together precisely as one machine. Kafka’s machine functions only from an apparent and all-too-visible depressive formation with regard to the fragmentary construction and the unknowable character of the law, that is to say, as a “cover-up” for the more profound reality discovered by Proust—for whom, Deleuze and Guattari write,

the rigors of the law are only an apparent protest of the One, whereas their real object is the absolution of the fragmented universes, in which the law never unites things in a single Whole, but on the contrary maps out the divergences, the dispersions, the exploding into fragments of something that is innocent precisely because its source is madness.20

Therefore, once this secret code is established in place as the interpretation of the literary machine, around the period of Anti-Oedipus and then later on in Kafka, it even appears as if Kafka occupies or produces both positions and emits both the depressive and the schizoid series in relationship to the modern form of the law. Thus, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari write:

The two features that Kafka so forcefully developed [are]: first, the paranoiac-schizoid trait of the law (metonymy) according to which the law governs nontotalizable and nontotalized parts, portioning them off, organizing them as bricks, measuring their distance and forbidding their communication; henceforth acting in the name of a formidable but formal and empty Unity, eminent, distributive and not collective; and second, the maniacal depressive trait (metaphor) according to which the law reveals nothing and has no knowable object, the verdict having no existence prior to the penalty, and the statement of the law having no existence prior to the verdict.21

However, three years later in Kafka, we discover this statement that returns again to the paradigmatic status of “The Great Wall of China,” showing how a paranoid unity ultimately resolves into a schizoid form of unlimited fragments, which is the form of the rhizome:

Paranoid law gives way to schizo-law: immediate resolution gives way to unlimited deferral; the transcendence of duty in the social field gives way to the immanence of desire that wanders all over this field. This is made explicit in “The Grate Wall of China,” without being developed in any way: there are nomads who give evidence of another law, another assemblage, and who sweep everything in their journey from the frontier to the capitol, the emperor and his guards having taken refuge behind the windows and screens. Thus, Kafka no longer operates by means of infinite-limited-discontinuous but by finite-contiguous-continuous-unlimited.22

In commenting on the above passage, let us first recall now that in the last chapter I showed how proper names function in Deleuze and Guattari’s works as signs indicating sometimes their own names or positions. In this case, we see the coupling of the overt depressive position with the covert schizoid position—that is, the machinic coupling of the unconscious positions of Deleuze and Guattari! It is not in the self or the individual, but only in the machine they construct together, that an unconscious position can be produced in this manner, that is, in the same manner that Deleuze earlier describes in terms of the rigorous distribution of the general form of madness between the different characters in Proust’s Recherche. One can only imagine, in Deleuze and Guattari’s case, that this manner of producing the unconscious is liberating with regard to the poles that each one is assigned as an individual or a person: the paranoid-schizoid (Guattari) and the depressive (Deleuze). In this sense we might now understand the Kafka who appears in the works written together several years later, which can be defined precisely as the production of a new Kafka, expressed in the work as a depressive position with a schizoid attitude. (Simply put, they produce this “Kafka” by applying the first principle of the rhizome: “subtract the One.”) This will also be my formula for reading the “becoming-revolutionary” proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: to liberate the modernist writer from his apparent and statistical depressive position by giving him a schizoid attitude. As I will try to show in chapter 4, this formula will have profound implications for contemporary literary machines as well, particularly those of so-called minority writers, and for the interpretation of the concept of a “minor literature,” since it will be necessary to link the schizoid position to the collective image of a people. We need to remember the disjunctive synthesis of the two viewpoints: the depressive viewpoint hides or conceals the schizoid, which always seems to be lurking behind or just underneath the appearance of the first; consequently, the people will be found to occupy this schizoid position as well, just underneath the surface offered by the depressed and individual writer.23

In concluding my reading of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, I would simply suggest that perhaps this is the very precise meaning of “grass” (the rhizome) in their first sentence: “The work is a rhizome, a burrow.” In other words, it is precisely the schizoid element of a Proustian machine that is detached and now mobile—which is the literal meaning of a schiz-flow—by being forcefully connected to the Kafka machine (of infinite debt and guilt) in order to produce a desired effect or product: an a priori innocence in place of a priori guilt. Of course, Deleuze and Guattari can be accused of constantly overstating their case, as in the catachresis of rhizome = burrow, even to the point of intentional misinterpretation; I would call it simply anti-interpretation. In other words, it is simply not true that the entire history of Kafka criticism got Kafka wrong around the themes of infinite or transcendental guilt and even the elements of theology that are certainly present throughout his works. In Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoid version of the depressive Kafka, this often leads to wild and unsupportable reversals and the most bombastic statements, and even the most hysterical accusations against Kafka’s interpreters, as in the case of the blame against Max Brod for organizing the sections of The Trial so that “the Cathedral” appears at the end, followed by the execution of K., rather than in the beginning or as a fitful dream that interrupts K.’s investigation. “Thus,” they write, “we must follow the movement of The Trial at several levels, taking account of objective uncertainty about the supposed last chapter and of the uncertainty of the second-to-last chapter, ‘In the Cathedral’ was more or less poorly placed by Max Brod.”24

As in the example of the passage above, Deleuze and Guattari’s entire reading (I would prefer to call it “production”) could be called patently artificial, mechanistically contrived, a fabrication, a pure construction. As I have tried to demonstrate, if there is any interpretation, it is intimately related to a foreign idea imported into Kafka’s work from the earlier construction of Proust’s literary machine that occurs in Deleuze’s work and also in the many references to Proust that appear in Anti-Oedipus. Moreover, Proust and Kafka are two authors who have little in common, or only apparently have nothing in common, until they are connected together in Kafka in much in the same way that a wasp is connected to the orchid through a transversal and machine dimension in which the two parts combine to produce a whole that nevertheless remains an additional part. In Proust, the fragments are arranged in noncommunicating vessels or blocks, like sections of a spider’s web, and the consciousness of the narrator is produced alongside these fragments in a manner that does not unify them in one vision. The spider is blind and can only feel the entire expanse of the web through its body; it feels the unity of all the fragments it has connected together in its great-expanded body, but this is produced not as a vision of the whole but only as a distinct perception of fragments that come near. The spider-narrator sits in the corner of its web and waits for the next “sign” of its prey, which must then be distinguished from all the other signs that disturb the web and cause it to tremble, like the falling leaves or drops of rain.

In other words, the Proustian narrator is a sedentary being: all the world literally approaches in order to be spun into his web (hence the description of the narrative consciousness as the view from the window of the train in which the landscape forms a whole that is continuous yet made up of noncommunicating posits of view that do not refer to the position of the narrator for their unity). Secondly, the Proustian narrator is immanent to the work and is always producing and adding new parts in the manner in which a spider builds its web, or, according to the vegetal metaphor, in the manner in which grass expands its territory in a constant patchwork. Thus, it seems silly to ask what is the unity of grass in the sense of relating a center to a periphery as in an animal organism; in the same way, it would appear silly to ask what is the unity or central perspective, or episode, that unifies the Recherche.

Let us return again to the key passage from Proust and Signs:

The logos is a huge Animal whose parts unite in a whole and are unified under a principle or leading idea; but pathos is a vegetal realm consisting of cellular elements that communicate only indirectly, only marginally, so that no totalization, no unification, can unite this world of ultimate fragments.25

The image of the vegetal realm in this passage is a perfect description of grass, of the rhizome. Deleuze writes earlier on, “It is no accident that the model of the vegetal in Proust has replaced that of the animal totality, as much in the case of art as in that of sexuality.”26 In Kafka, on the other hand, the vegetal realm of the rhizome is also a “burrow,” which is to say a vegetal realm with the animal-logos concealed inside. Consequently, it is precisely this tension between the construction of the animal-logos as a whole that is unified under a leading image of the Law (as in The Trial, and particularly the fables that appear as episodes in the unfinished novel, such as “The Message from the Emperor” and “In the Cathedral”), and the vegetal image of the rhizome, which in Kafka can describe the infinite succession of blocks or series that are not totalizable by the first principle (as in the example of “The Great Wall of China,” but also in The Castle). This will constitute the specific tension that Deleuze and Guattari will seek to exaggerate and make more evident everywhere in their reading of Kafka writings: the vegetal proliferation of series and blocks to replace the animal-logos and the image of totality, much like the bricks and pieces that compose the unfinished Great Wall of China. However, I think it is crucial to notice that it is Proust, rather than Kafka, who provides the intuition of a method for producing the multiplicity from a Whole that is produced alongside each of the parts, even though a Whole neither totalizes nor unifies all the parts into the One.

Also, it is not by accident that, for example, Deleuze and Guattari very early on seek to discover the positive reality of the child’s relation to the world of partial objects, and that this relation is primarily defined as machinic, or in purely machinic terms, keeping in mind that certain machines function by exploding as much as organizing a flow of energy into a productive continuum. Likewise, it is not by accident that Deleuze and Guattari also find that certain writers choose an intense curiosity with the positive discovery of the power contained in partial objects to reorganize the whole, as if these objects were capable of storing the energy of creation itself. What is Proust’s madeleine, for example, but a partial object of this type, and moreover, a desiring machine that is connected by means of the mouth? Although the very first pages of Anti-Oedipus begin with the example of the partial object derived from Beckett, that of Molloy’s “sucking stones,” it is often completely misunderstood. The relation between the sucking stone and the partial object derived from the mother’s body is even offered up as a joke at the very beginning of the novel (recalling here that Beckett was also analyzed by Melanie Klein). The mother’s breast is dried up—she is either dead or merely desiccated, only her senile head remains—the sexes have been replaced by a series of more primary couples, all of which differ only by a detachment of a chain of associations (Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Moran, etc.). The literary machine often has as its goal the discovery of more primary couples, detached from the parents and even from the secondary sexual couples; thus, as we have also seen in Proust and Kafka, Beckett always discovers behind each couple a more primary couple that is nonfamilial and thus completely innocent. That is to say, innocent a priori before the Law.

The thinker and the writer (and in a certain sense the masochist) are united in their goal of producing a more primary couple, and the problem for each is to construct a mode of the couple in thought without sinking back into the puerile associations and clichéd assertions “about” sexuality, which only construct a way of thinking the couple or even of becoming a couple via castration (separation, sexual division, lack, extrinsic relationship between desire and its object). Thus, throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work there is always this tendency of the writer to begin or to affirm the position of the bachelor, or of the thinker to begin from a depressed position of solitude, just as the masochist must begin from a perverse position at least with regard to the Oedipal organization of sexuality and “human desire.” (Kafka offers us the most unique example of all three positions: depressive, schizophrenic, and the masochist.) But is this any different from those who begin or seek to begin again on the plane composed by their own sexuality, to become thinkers and artists, just as often as they become strangers and refugees (if not perverts and criminals, as in the case of Genet)? And yet, on the basis of the above dialectic, the path via sexuality is never the final answer and more often than not leads to sadness and failure, because the sexual pair always obstructs the more primary couple, and sooner or later becomes an image or simulacrum that blocks any access to this couple, since it is only a superficial path on the way to the primary social division: that of the species and an entire humanity.