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Kafka

Published in Vague Terrain

My Inscription of the Girly Man piece was published in the online journal Vaugue Terrain this month (January 2009). The journal included my essay "The Language of Machines."

January, 2009

Narrative-Body

Kafka’s story, “In the Penal Colony”, reverses the narrative of a technological intervention which, in the sphere of justice, renders discourse moot. The explorer in this tale happens upon the penal colony on the day of the last use of an infernal machine–on the day of its destruction and the death of its last remaining proponent. This ironic and perverse inversion acts to emphasize the cruelty of the dawning of an age where a synthesis of bureaucratic method and mechanical execution conspire to radically redefine the meaning and function of not just justice, but of the faculty of judgment itself.

Inscription of the Girly-Man

The work Inscription might be said to have three fathers: Arnold, Franz and Michel. Or, it might be said that the dirty business of conceiving Inscription was the consequence of an even more crowded couch in which these daddies where only the last to deposit their gifts, and that therefore the memories of their conjugal adieus are just easier to re-member. Each stands, in a way, for a category, a body-type, a way of thinking and acting, a story, a function, an example for which their names are only one instantiation. They are archetypes, proto-types, exemplars.