…

As Deleuze-Guattari and Zizek both acknowledge, Kafka is the prophet of the

already-dead God and the double-binding ‘control virus’ (Burroughs) in which it is

instantiated. Eschatology and the Last Judgement are misdirections, teleological

confidence tricks concealing the ‘fatal strategies’ (Baudrillard) through which Control

immanently operates, now. The predicament in which K, as the postmodern subject par excellence, finds himself is not that of someone awaiting judgement, but of

someone enduring ‘indefinite postponement’. The big Other does not exist, it insists

as virtual vampiric structure whenever it lures dupes (us) into endlessly petitioning it

for recognition and/or acquittal. It was in this sense that Orson Welles was perfectly

right to say that K is ‘guilty as hell’. Guilt is the a priori condition for those inserted

into the Control machine, whose lineaments were described with terrifying precision

by Burroughs, Kafka’s real successor. Control precisely does not issue rigid

commands, but complementary yet contradictory injunctions, themselves always

provisional and ‘subject to review’. The coherence of the Control hyper-entity can

only ever be virtual; it doesn’t pre-exist the subject of Control. Very much to the

contrary, it is the very attempt to make sense of the ‘obviously’ incommensurate and

prima facie senseless injunctions it issues that constitute what minimal coherence

Control has. As Kafka’s hapless peitioner discovers, the door is meant only for you.

But behind the door is the metastatic God Over Djinn bad infinity of metanoiac

postponement. Ceaseless seamless bad dream corridors.

mark k-p (March 17, 2005)