Listening to the Law: Acoustical Embodiment and Industrial Space in Der Proceß TYLER WHITNEY UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR Die elend dünnen Wände, die den ehrlich tätigen Mann verraten, den Unehrlichen aber decken. Franz Kafka, «Der Nachbar» In a short text composed around the fall of 1922, Franz Kafka drew a striking comparison between the legal court and a disorienting auditory experience. As the text’s protagonist enters what he takes to be an official court building in search of legal representation, he notes the court’s structural similarity to an unlocalizable noise: Über alle Einzelheiten hinweg erinnerte mich am meisten an ein Gericht ein Dröhnen, das unaufhörlich aus der Ferne zu hören war, man konnte nicht sagen aus welcher Richtung es kam, es erfüllte so sehr alle Räume, daß man annehmen konnte, es komme von überall oder, was noch richtiger schien, gerade der Ort, wo man zufällig stand, sei der eigentliche Ort dieses Dröhnens, aber gewiß war das eine Täuschung, denn es kam aus der Ferne. (Die Erzählungen 389) 1 In a single dizzying sentence, the posthumously titled «Fürspecher» illuminates key characteristics of the law, which pervade Kafka’s writings on the topic. 2 According to the acoustic analogy posited in the text, the court is defined by its omnipresence, obscurity, and capacity to obliterate conventional spatial boundaries. The reach of the court passes easily through walls and doorways, filling «alle Räume,» while simultaneously preventing the localization of its source at any single point in space. It remains unlocalizable, oscillating between a diffuse periphery and the exact location «wo man zufällig stand.» It is everywhere and nowhere, unavoidable and inaccessible, or, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari observe in concrete architectural terms, «always in the office next door, or behind the door» (45). Other critics have noted that, for Kafka, the law relies on «die Unsichtbarkeit und gleichzeitige Omnipräsenz der Macht» and «das Fehlen einer verantwortlichen Schaltstelle» (Lubkoll 285, 280). Despite critical recognition of the court’s continuous spatial propagation and, in turn, its rendering of the law as both omnipresent and inaccessible, scholars have overlooked the continuities between Kafka’s account of the law and experiences of sound and space. In his most extensive and perhaps bestknown treatment of the law, the unfinished novel Der Proceß (1914/ 15), Kafka utilizes sound as both a central metaphorical figure and literal channel for legal power in ways that resonate with the acoustical analogy put forth in «Fürsprecher.» Indeed, Der Proceß offers a conception of the law that adheres to what I will be describing as an audio-spatial logic. With this formulation, I seek to denote a particular configuration of sound and space, which insists on the unlocalizability of sound sources and the inherent permeability of spatial boundaries. According to this schema, the legal defendant and protagonist of Der Proceß, Josef K., can be regarded as occupying the figurative position of a lone listener on one side of a wall. From some undefined location on the other side of this wall, «in the office next door, or behind the door,» the court makes itself manifest as ambient noise, which cannot be deciphered in any meaningful way. Crucially, the borders separating the court and the legal subject dictate asymmetrical acoustical relations. If the court disseminates noise through all spaces, by contrast the legal subject is rendered silent and prevented from communicating across the same spatial boundaries. The membrane mediating the subject’s encounter with the court is permeable, but only in one direction. The legal subject of Der Proceß is positioned so as to provoke endless speculation about the contents of the law and its precise origins but left silent and defenseless against the court’s physical and perceptual effects, which are unilaterally communicated through the porous walls by means of noise. My notion of an audio-spatial logic bears resemblance to what Michel Chion, in his classic study of sound in cinema, terms the «acousmêtre,» a sound whose cause or source remains unseen. 3 Similar to the sound of the law in Kafka’s unfinished novel, Chion’s acousmêtre «is everywhere, its voice comes from an immaterial and non-localized body, and it seems that no obstacle can stop it» (24). In addition, the acousmatic voice is invested with the power to command and guide the actions of others. However, several crucial differences should be noted. First, while Chion’s analysis focuses on the voice and enunciation, my interest lies instead in noises devoid of semantic value. Second, although Chion defines the acousmêtre as incapable of being contained spatially, the audio-spatial logic of Kafka’s novel is defined by the perpetual oscillation between omnipresence and localized, subjective experience: in one moment «überall» and the next «gerade der Ort, wo man zufällig stand.» Finally, what I am calling an audio-spatial logic diverges from Chion’s acousmêtre by encompassing the transfer of acoustic properties of permeability to non-auditory domains and the dissolution of conceptual distinctions between subject and object, embodiment and disembodiment. 344 Tyler Whitney This essay analyzes the propagation of noise through permeable acoustic spaces as both a crucial precondition for the legal system’s functionality and an ongoing strategy of control and coercion in Der Proceß. Despite the novel’s numerous allusions to sound and listening, as well as the glaring etymological links between listening and the law, 4 the sonic dimension of Der Proceß has gone virtually unnoticed. 5 My contention is not simply that, because sound plays a crucial role in structuring the novel’s representations of juridical processes, visualist paradigms fail to account for the narrative’s underlying audio-spatial logic. 6 I am interested in how encounters with noise both illuminate the functioning of the legal system by means of analogy and function as sites for the actualization of legal power. For it is not only on a metaphorical level that legal power converges with the ear. Sound and hearing are not only ways for Kafka to talk about the law, providing something like a repository of metaphors for his literary works. Scenes of focused attention to the nuances of sonic experience and the imposition of noise from without are also depictions of the actualization of legal power. The ear becomes both the target and the conduit of legal power, in addition to serving as a symbol of how this power operates. The transformation of the ear into a site of the court’s coercive operations finds its most powerful articulation in a scene in which K. visits the court chambers in the attic of a worker tenement. There, he experiences a bout of vertigo and hallucinates the sound of a siren with no localizable source. During the same period in which Kafka was writing Der Proceß, medical scientists studying the health effects of the factory frequently cited vertigo and subjective noises as related symptoms of overexposure to the cacophony of the workplace, postulating that the cause of such disorders was related to physical damage inside the ear. The industrial soundscape’s capacity to inflict physical and perceptual damage on the ear would have been apparent to Kafka during his frequent visits to factories, a part of his professional duties as an insurance lawyer and advocate for worker safety (Koch and Wagenbach; Rhine), as well as from experiences in the asbestos factory he founded with his brother-in-law in 1911. «Gestern in der Fabrik,» he wrote in a diary entry dated February 1912, «Die Mädchen in ihren an und für sich unerträglich schmutzigen und gelösten Kleidern, mit den wie beim Erwachen zerworfenen Frisuren, mit dem vom unaufhörlichen Lärm der Transmissionen und von der einzelnen zwar automatischen aber unberechenbar stockenden Maschine festgehaltenen Gesichtsausdruck» (Tagebücher 1909 - 1912 32; my emphasis). In another entry recorded two years later as he began work on Der Proceß, Kafka compared the disruptive «Lärm» outside his hotel room to that heard in «einer Maschinenfabrik» (Tagebücher 1914 - 1923 24). In his 345 Listening to the Law professional capacities as an insurance lawyer, Kafka was responsible for helping to introduce a safer and quieter wood-planing machine, which, as he put it, eliminated «jenes Heulen der alten Vierkantwellen [. . .], welches förmlich ihre Gefahr anzeigte» (Amtliche Schriften 201). He additionally warned of the safety risks posed by workers suffering from «Schwindel, Schwerhörigkeit» (489), «Störungen der Sprache, des Gehörs und des Gesichtes» (494), especially after a loosening of safety standards due to the war and the return of traumatized and physically tattered soldiers to the factories. According to his diaries, the period Kafka spent writing the novel between the end of July and December 1914 was filled with regular visits to the factory he owned with his brother-in-law in addition to his office work at the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt. 7 The novel therefore emerges at a time in which Kafka’s everyday life was characterized by an even more intensified intermingling of white-collar bureaucracy and working-class environments than his position as an insurance lawyer would have ordinarily required. Set explicitly in the milieu of a working class tenement building and against the backdrop of a piercing siren, the scene in the court chambers in Der Proceß suggests a superimposition of elements from the industrial soundscape onto the already heterogeneous spaces of the legal court. In addition to the immediately identifiable spaces of white-collar bureaucracy, the novel draws on acoustic experiences characteristic of the factory to portray the trial’s physical effects and growing encroachment upon the body. Subtle allusions to physical trauma internal to the ear are followed by broader concerns about the court’s influence on the defendant’s body: Only moments after hearing the subjective noise of the siren, K. suspects that his body has «revolutionized (revolutionieren)» and is «preparing a new trial for him (ihm einen neuen Proceß bereiten» (Der Proceß 85). Experiences of vertigo and subjective noises give rise to anxieties regarding the increasingly embodied nature of the trial. If the scene in the court chambers begins by intimating an expansion of the court’s power into the spaces of the ear, it concludes by introducing the possibility of a body fully coopted by the court and directed from without. As we will see, the second half of the novel lends credibility to K.’s suspicion of a second embodied trial. In contrast to earlier chapters, those following the episode in the court chambers highlight the trial’s somatic effects, which range from intense fatigue and distraction to further auditory hallucinations and new modes of listening detached from the surrounding environment. The propagation of sound through space provides productive figures of transgression and permeability that underlie the court’s methods of control, 346 Tyler Whitney as Kafka engages experiences of sound as a tool to conceptualize the relations between legal subjects and the court. At the same time, the text’s allusion to otological disorders common among factory workers draws our attention to sound’s materiality and capacity to produce physical effects in listeners. The eruption of subjective noises in K.’s ears exposes a corporeal, physiological foundation that underlines the court’s omnipresence and inaccessibility. The subjective noise consumes K. but remains inaudible to those around him. Similar to the court itself in «Fürsprecher,» the sound cannot be located at any one point in space. It is nowhere and everywhere, remaining inaccessible but capable of affecting the body. The audio-spatial logic that informs Kafka’s depiction of the law and serves as the focus of this essay draws on both the figurative and material dimensions of sound. Der Proceß recounts the story of the bank employee, Josef K., who on the morning of his thirtieth birthday is informed by two agents of the court that he has been charged with an unspecified crime. He is permitted to continue working and to live in his apartment, but his ordinary routines are now regularly interrupted by mandatory visits to court offices housed in unlikely spaces throughout the city. The narrative consists largely of K.’s interactions with various legal officials, lawyers, relatives, and acquaintances, and his efforts to learn more about the law in order to better navigate a seemingly inscrutable legal system. Most relevant to the current discussion is the way in which K.’s attitude toward the trial shifts over the course of the novel. In the first half, he views his case with critical detachment and considers it «nicht sehr wichtig» (52). However, following the episode in the court chambers where he hears the subjective noise of the siren and begins to fear the onset of a second trial, K. comes to realize that «er hatte kaum mehr die Wahl den Proceß anzunehmen oder abzulehnen, er stand mitten darin und mußte sich wehren» (132; my emphasis), as the trial «immer näher an den Leib rückt» (197). The defendant becomes more and more immersed in the details of his case and, in turn, more and more physically exhausted and distracted from his professional duties. Despite the intensity of his efforts, there are no breakthroughs or major insights regarding his case and by the end K. recognizes that his chances of exoneration are nil. In the final chapter, two agents of the court again appear at K.’s door, now on the eve of his thirty-first birthday, and escort him to his execution, which he accepts with little resistance. He is led to a quarry where one man restrains him while the other stabs him in the heart with a knife. In response, K. utters the words, «wie ein Hund,» and the novel comes to a close. 347 Listening to the Law From the novel’s opening pages, K.’s interactions with agents of the court are structured according to an inherent asymmetry, which manifests itself on the level of sound. Already in the first chapter, the aggressive noise produced by agents of the court is contrasted with prohibitions on K.’s audibility. During the initial interrogation in his apartment, the protagonist registers the commands issued by court officials as violent noise that causes pain and involuntary physical responses. As he attempts to process his arrest alone in his room, the silence in the apartment is broken by a guard’s abrasive command, which emanates from an adjacent room: «Da erschreckte ihn ein Zuruf aus dem Nebenzimmer derartig, daß er mit den Zähnen ans Glas schlug. ‹Der Aufseher ruft Sie,› hieß es. Es war nur das Schreien, das ihn erschreckte, dieses kurze abgehackte militärische Schreien, das er dem Wächter Franz gar nicht zugetraut hätte» (17). In accordance with the audio-spatial logic patterning the court’s actions and organization, the guard’s command reaches the protagonist from the next room, passing through the wall while its source remains hidden from view. Moreover, it is the purely sonic dimension of the command and not its content that the protagonist finds jarring, «dieses kurze abgehackte militärische Schreien.» The court directs the subject not with semantically meaningful utterances, but rather alinguistically, merely with the tone of a militarized voice. Thus, already in the opening scene of the novel we are confronted with correspondences between experiences of sound and the court’s defining characteristics of omnipresence, inaccessibility, and disciplinary intent. Not only do sounds issue from unexpected and concealed locations, permeating the whole of a given architecture, but content also becomes unintelligible, i. e., inaccessible, behind the purely acoustic qualities of the voice. Most importantly, sounds inscribe themselves on the physical body, initially changing sensorial structures and functions from without. By contrast, K. is warned not to utter a sound. «Und machen Sie keinen solchen Lärm mit dem Gefühl Ihrer Unschuld,» one of the men cautions him, «es stört den nicht gerade schlechten Eindruck, den Sie im übrigen machen» (20). K.’s desperate plea of innocence is portrayed as an incoherent sound that must be silenced, a disruptive and unwelcome noise that is out of place. According to the court official, K.’s success depends on his ability to remain silent. The audible asymmetries between K. and the court are underscored in the following chapter as the protagonist attempts to reproduce theatrically the morning’s events for his neighbor and romantic interest, Fräulein Bürstner. In the performance, K. draws attention to the volume and aggressive nature of the guard’s voice, which had caused him to hit his teeth against the glass in a moment of violent shock. However, K.’s restaging 348 Tyler Whitney of events, which is intended to expose the absurdity of his arrest, leads only to a reconfirmation of the dangers of his audibility. The performance is interrupted by a sudden knock on the door by another inhabitant of the building who is annoyed by the noise. The sound of the knocking frightens K. «besonders stark» (37) and causes Fräulein Bürstner to turn pale in fear. Rather than providing a cathartic moment of satire, the performance results in a succession of acoustic shocks, which simply reproduce the physical effects of the guard’s voice that the protagonist was attempting to imitate. Moreover, Fräulein Bürstner cautions K. to lower his voice and move to another part of the room so that their conversation will not be overheard by their neighbor, whom she believes to be standing on the other side of the door eavesdropping on their every word. The surrounding environment, K. discovers, is populated by eavesdroppers who regularly exploit the porous walls of offices and apartment buildings in order to monitor his activities and gather incriminating evidence against him. Readers are repeatedly confronted with the possibility that the court is listening in on the defendant’s conversations. «Du sprichst aber zu laut,» K. warns his uncle after arriving at the office, «der Diener steht wahrscheinlich an der Tür und horcht» (98). Later, out on the street in front of the office, K. urgently leads his uncle away from the building towards the din of the traffic, «da der Portier zu horchen schien» (100). Finally, in a meeting with the painter, Titorelli, the two figures are forced to whisper in order to hide the content of their conversation from a group of curious children, who listen in from behind the closed door. Ultimately they too are revealed to be members of the court: «[K.] machte auch jetzt kaum eine Bewegung, als sich der Maler zu ihm niederbeugte und ihm, um draußen nicht gehört zu werden ins Ohr flüsterte: ‹Auch diese Mädchen gehören zum Gericht›» (158). It is important to note that the threat of the eavesdropper remains largely an unfounded anxiety, one that the novel repeatedly encourages only to deny or obfuscate. In a particularly striking performance of this ambiguity, K.’s uncle suddenly leaps to the door during a meeting at his lawyer’s office, expecting to find someone listening from outside (107). Upon opening the door, however, he finds no one there. The ease with which rumors about K.’s trial circulate in the novel certainly lends credibility to suspicions of auditory surveillance. But, as the scene in the lawyer’s office demonstrates, the court exerts its influence by evoking such suspicions and then refusing to corroborate them. This narrative strategy underscores the asymmetry at the center of K.’s relationship with his acoustical surroundings. The court is invested with unprecedented powers to hear everything, while the presence of eavesdroppers on the other side of the wall or door ultimately remains 349 Listening to the Law unsubstantiated but encourages belief in the notion that K.’s success relies on his silence, the self-imposed divestment of his own agency that constitutes his participation in and acceptance of the court’s discipline. Underlying these anxieties of covert listening is the recognition that all spatial borders have been dissolved, rendered acoustically permeable, and that as a result, there is nowhere for K. to hide. Kafka’s novel subverts the etymological roots of legal terms such as «das Verhör» and «das rechtliche Gehör» by depicting a legal system intent on disrupting the chains of communication between the court and its legal subjects. On the one hand, court officials discipline K. into silence and caution him against arguing his innocence to them, describing such attempts as irritating noise (Lärm). Later, when given the opportunity to state his case before a group of judges, K.’s testimony is repeatedly interrupted by members of the audience, who, rather than listening to what he has to say, respond to his remarks with the sounds of «Zischen,» «Sausen» (56), and «Kreischen» (57). Far from facilitating a «hearing» in any meaningful sense of the term, the court either encourages silence on the part of the defendant or, when eventually given the opportunity to argue his case, disrupts his speech with interjections of meaningless noise. On the other hand, court officials are assumed to listen covertly to K.’s every word. In both cases, dialogue is thwarted and replaced by unilateral relations or a volley of noise with no semantic content. In Der Proceß, the court listens, but only secretly from the next room. Contact between the defendant and court officials leads not to the exchange of arguments, testimony, or formal examinations of evidence, but instead provides an occasion for the proliferation of noise. K.’s visit to the court chambers testifies to the centrality of this proliferation in structuring the trial’s unfolding and its effects on the defendant. Here, the experience of noise once again demonstrates the simultaneously omnipresent and inaccessible nature of the court. The sound K. hears «erfüllte [alles]» but its source cannot be located (85). More radically, the noise becomes implicated in the onset of a possible second trial, which, as the protagonist speculates, has been prepared by his own body. In this way, the sound does not simply mirror or solidify a set of preexisting characteristics already operative in the trial. It comprises a shift in the trial’s very nature that «revolutionizes (revolutionieren)» the body and invests that transformed, institutionally coopted body with the power to dictate the terms under which the new trial will occur. Before analyzing K.’s experience of the sound, it is important to note the particular social environment in which Kafka sets the crucial episode of the 350 Tyler Whitney trial’s embodiment. Critics have understandably tended to focus on elements of bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie in their readings of Kafka’s novel. 7 What has been overlooked is the way in which these bourgeois spaces of administration and management are overlaid with images and sounds from a distinctly working-class milieu. When he visits the painter Titorelli to discuss his case, K. describes the immediate environment there as dark, filthy, and poor. On the way up the stairs he encounters a child crying on its stomach, but the grim scene is drowned out «infolge des alles übertönenden Lärms, der aus einer Klempfnerwerkstätte auf der andern Seite des Torganges kam» (147). Similarly, the neighborhood in which the court chambers is located is made up of «hohe graue von armen Leuten bewohnte Miethäuser» (44). Outside, a barefoot man sits on a crate and reads a newspaper, while children play with a handcart or fetch water. Inside, K. catches glimpses of women clutching babies as they cook in their one-window apartments, with other family members sick in bed or merely asleep (46). Although the class identity of the inhabitants is never explicitly discussed, one can assume from the description that we are in a worker tenement, a point that is underscored through K.’s decision to invent a story involving a certain «Tischler Lanz» in order to blend in (46). Thus, the rooms and offices officially designated for court are characterized by the proximity of heterogeneous domestic and juridical spaces, as well as their contiguity with dwellings presumably occupied by members of the working classes. Kafka emphasizes the superimposition of industrial and juridical spaces through allusions to the filth and debris that permeates the spaces housing the trial. Both the courtroom where K. hears the «Sausen,» as well as the attic in which he later hears the siren, are portrayed as filthy, filled with clouds of dust and dirt, which obscure the protagonist’s field of vision. «Der nebelige Dunst im Zimmer war äußerst lästig, er verhinderte sogar eine genauere Beobachtung der Fernerstehenden» (55), while the air in the court chambers is later described as «kaum mehr atembar» (80). During the same period in which Kafka composed Der Proceß, he, along with his colleagues and contemporaries in related fields, identified the fumes, debris, and poor air quality inside factories as a pervasive health concern for workers (Amtliche Schriften 483). Only sentences before commenting on «das starke Geräusch» of the factory, for example, one factory researcher condemned the air quality of a spinning mill contaminated by dust and debris, explaining that prolonged exposure to the air would result in irritations to «die oberen Luftwege der in den Spinnereien beschäftigten Arbeiter» (92). Air quality was a problem for numerous factory professions, ranging from steel and textile workers to flax spinners. Viewed alongside contemporaneous accounts of factory conditions 351 Listening to the Law with which the author was intimately familiar in his work at the AUVA, the dust and dirt that fill the courtrooms of Kafka’s novel can be read as traces of these industrial environments. Upon entering the spaces of the court chambers, K. experiences symptoms of nervous sensitivity. While nervousness, especially as it related to sound, had traditionally been associated with figures of the decadent aristocrat or the bourgeois intellectual (Lessing), Kafka’s unique perspective as an insurance lawyer enabled him to see the proliferation of nervous disorders across the seemingly disparate spheres of the office, the factory, and the modern battlefield. Soon after the outbreak of World War I, which coincided with a period of intensive work on the novel, Kafka noted the presence of traumatized and physically wounded bodies filling the streets. The experience of war, he observed, resulted in the loss of control over one’s own body. Returning soldiers «wurde[n] geführt,» pulled to and fro «in diesen qualvollen Bewegungen» (Amtliche Schriften 494). Crucially, however, Kafka regarded the physical and psychological trauma of the war as continuous with experiences in the factory: «So wie im Frieden der letzten Jahrzehnte der intensive Maschinenbetrieb die Nerven der in ihm Beschäftigten unvergleichlich mehr als jemals früher gefährdete, störte und erkranken ließ, hat auch der ungeheuerlich gesteigerte maschinelle Teil der heutigen Kriegshandlungen schwerste Gefahren und Leiden für die Nerven der Kämpfenden verursacht» (498). Kafka’s emphasis on permeability and the superimposition of conflicting spatial registers and class identities in Der Proceß gives voice to this historical propagation of nervous sensitivity beyond the traditional domains of the bourgeois intellectual, artist, or office worker, and into working-class segments of the population including factory workers and soldiers. In the novel, K.’s sensitivity takes the more specific form of vertigo, a type of spatial disorientation (Der Proceß 81). Importantly, medical scientists regarded vertigo as tied to disturbances to the balancing function of the semicircular canals inside the ear. Physical damage to the ear, scientists realized in the early nineteenth century, was often the main cause for feelings of dizziness and spatial disorientation in patients (Erlmann 165 - 74). As a result, complaints about vertigo were treated as otological problems. Seen in this light, K.’s experience of vertigo signals an expansion of the novel’s audiospatial logic. Even the interior spaces of the body and, in this case, the ear, appear vulnerable to modification and manipulation. No longer limited to architectural structures, the permeability of boundaries that pervades the text extends to the surfaces of the body. 352 Tyler Whitney The atmosphere in the court chambers reduces K. to a state of physical weakness and perceptual disorientation to the point that, «er [konnte] sich nicht aufrechthalten» (Der Proceß 81). However, court employees actively prevent him from pausing to rest and regain his strength because, as they explain, it would interfere with the flow of traffic through the office. «Hier können Sie nicht bleiben,» an official explains to the seated protagonist, «hier stören wir den Verkehr» (80). What is registered as a disruption to the legal system is a kind of spatial blockage that threatens to limit or partially contain the court’s otherwise omnipotent reach. The rooms and hallways of the court are marked by their heterogeneity and dizzying juxtaposition of disparate spatial registers. But they are further distinguished by the perpetual movement they demand from defendants. The scene highlights the court’s insistence on perpetuating the flow of bodies and information through space, epitomizing what Cornelia Vismann describes as «die Verschaltung und Verwaltung des Rechts» (36). K.’s temporary stasis represents an impermissible obstacle to the system of endless circulation, an impervious barrier that temporarily disrupts the spatial propagation on which the court depends. The scene in the court chambers shows the protagonist caught between a paralyzing sense of spatial disorientation and forced movement. With the two officials now supporting and directing him through the chamber, K.’s experience of vertigo merges with images of a rough sea, which are accompanied by the subjective sound of a siren with no identifiable source. In attempting to stand on his own, Er war wie seekrank. Er glaubte auf einem Schiff zu sein, das sich in schwerem Seegang befand. Es war ihm als stürze das Wasser gegen die Holzwände, als komme aus der Tiefe des Ganges ein Brausen her, wie von überschlagendem Wasser, als schaukle der Gang in der Quere und als würden die wartenden Parteien zu beiden Seiten gesenkt und gehoben. Desto unbegreiflicher war die Ruhe des Mädchens und des Mannes, die ihn führten. Er war ihnen ausgeliefert, ließen sie ihn los, so mußte er hinfallen wie ein Brett. Aus ihren kleinen Augen giengen scharfe Blicke hin und her; ihre gleichmäßigen Schritte fühlte K. ohne sie mitzumachen, denn er wurde fast von Schritt zu Schritt getragen. Endlich merkte er, daß sie zu ihm sprachen, aber er verstand sie nicht, er hörte nur den Lärm der alles erfüllte und durch den hindurch ein unveränderlicher hoher Ton wie von einer Sirene zu klingen schien. ‹Lauter,› flüsterte er mit gesenktem Kopf und schämte sich, denn er wußte, daß sie laut genug, wenn auch für ihn unverständlich gesprochen hatten. Da kam endlich, als wäre die Wand vor ihm durchrissen ein frischer Luftzug ihm entgegen und er hörte neben sich sagen: ‹Zuerst will er weg, dann aber kann man ihm hundertmal sagen, daß hier der Ausgang ist und er rührt sich nicht.› (84) 353 Listening to the Law The passage portrays the protagonist as a mere object delivered over to court officials, one that is picked up, carried, and dropped «wie ein Brett.» K. is guided «Schritt zu Schritt» by the two figures, «ohne [. . .] mitzumachen.» Reduced to this state of passivity, the defendant becomes mere cargo to be fed through the court’s labyrinthine passageways and across its variegated thresholds. Central to this articulation of waning self-determination is the figure of the seasick sailor jostled to and fro against his will. While K. continues to have trouble directing his movements or standing on his own, the ground beneath his feet assumes the form of a ship deck bombarded by violent waves from all sides. Extending the metaphor of seafaring into the acoustical register, K. then perceives a sound that he describes as, «wie von einer Sirene,» thereby invoking Odysseus’s encounter with the mythological sea creatures of the same name. 8 Similar to Odysseus, K. sails the figurative sea of the court chambers in a state of disempowerment and passivity, propelled forward under the guidance of others. However, in contrast to Odysseus, who asks his men to render him immobile in order to resist the siren’s song, K.’s immobility is not a choice and in fact facilitates coercion and control from without. At the same time that it gestures towards myth, the figure of the siren carries distinctly modern connotations. During the period in which Kafka composed his novel the siren was undergoing a semantic transformation from the purely mythological to the technological, from a figure of enchantment to a signal of alarm. Around 1913, crank-operated sirens began to be introduced into fire stations and on mobile fire equipment. The aerial bombing campaigns of World War I additionally inspired the creation of air raid sirens, which were installed in numerous European and American cities following the war’s end (Rehding; Prochnik). But the device also became a fixture of the modern European factory. A 1912 novella by the now largely forgotten Swiss writer Jakob Schaffner provides detailed descriptions of the sonic dimension of factory life in the early twentieth century and repeatedly refers to the siren as punctuating the workday. «Dann kam man in die Maschinenhalle,» Schaffner writes, «Die Sirene heulte. Die Transmissionen knickten und rollten in der Höhe» (265). Elsewhere, «die Sirene schrie auf» (271), «sie posaunte und jauchzte» (276), «[signalisierte] den Arbeitsbeginn» (236). As Schaffner’s literary depiction of the factory suggests, by 1912 the siren had become a familiar feature of the industrial soundscape, audible and identifiable amidst the cacophony of machinery and commanding voices. By situating the episode in the court chambers alongside Schaffner’s contemporaneous account of the modern 354 Tyler Whitney factory, we are able to grasp the conflicting associations that the siren would have had at the time. On the one hand, the siren maintained its close connection to myth, a sign of irresistible and life-threatening allurement and spellbound desire. On the other, it denoted entry into an industrial environment pervaded by overwhelming sensory experiences. 9 Already encouraged by multiple allusions to the dust and debris pervading the air of juridical spaces, their overlap with domestic, working-class spaces, and the sound of the siren, a reading of the court chambers as a kind of industrial space finds further support in the implication that the sound is a purely subjective figment of the protagonist’s imagination. 12 No one other than K. reacts to the sound or shows signs of having heard it. The two court officials who escort him through the chambers continue to speak to him as if nothing has happened. «Lauter,» he begs of them, feeling a sense of embarrassment at his inability to understand what they are saying. As K. himself admits, his companions speak at a volume that should be audible to him. Conversely, the two court officials are struck by the defendant’s failure to find the exit despite their repeated instructions. The fact that the two court officials speak to K. as if nothing has happened intimates that the protagonist is the only one able to hear the sound, a subjective noise with no referent beyond the listener’s own body or mind. The concomitant onset of vertigo and subjective noises resonates with contemporaneous medical reports on factory accidents and worker illnesses involving the ear. Due to perpetual exposure to the din of industrial machinery, factory workers commonly experienced symptoms of vertigo and the sudden eruption of subjective noises. In his 1905 essay, «Die Unfallbegutachtung in der Ohrenheilkunde,» one medical scientist, B. Baginsky, recounted multiple cases of factory workers complaining of «Ohrgeräuschen der mannigfachsten Art, zeitweilig und kontinuierlich, Sausen, Rauschen, Klingen,» as well as «Schwindelerscheinungen beim Bücken oder beim Blick in die Höhe» (1171). Another expert asserted that, «Schwindelerscheinungen und Gleichgewichtsstörungen gehören zu den constantesten Symptomen nach Verletzungen des schallempfindenden Apparates,» later recalling a case in which a mechanic suffered from «Schwindelanfälle und persistente subjective Geräusche» due to spending extended periods of time «in einer sehr geräuschvollen Werkstatt» (Passow 165). The industrial researcher, Alfred Peyser, also observed the frequency with which factory workers suffered from subjective noises and drew connections between «langdauernden Hörstörungen» and «Schwindelgefühl und Schwindel» (150). 355 Listening to the Law In depicting K.’s journey through the court chambers as a series of disruptions to the perception of sound and space, Kafka’s novel documents the growing physical impact of the trial, a literalized procedure of discipline, upon the defendant’s body. By situating an experience of vertigo in close proximity to auditory hallucinations, the text invokes a network of effects borrowed from the factory as a crucial context for the corporeal turn that the trial takes, presenting a group of symptoms that were commonly analyzed alongside one another and regarded as commonly rooted in the ear. As if ripped from the pages of a medical study detailing the health risks of the industrial workplace, K. experiences the coercive power of the court as a cluster of corporeal effects elicited by the modern factory. Immediately after regaining his composure, K. expresses anxieties regarding the trial’s infiltration of the body, which he fears is no longer under his control. «Wollte etwa sein Körper revolutionieren und ihm einen neuen Proceß bereiten, da er den alten so mühelos ertrug? » (85). K.’s question is striking in that it attributes agency to the body alone. Not only does the body allegedly possess the ability to «revolutionize,» suggesting a sense of insubordination in the face of the subject’s competing will. It is, in the turn, the body that «prepares» a new trial for the subject. The passage posits a fundamental divide between the subject’s will and that of his body, with the latter guiding the former in violation of the will. 9 In the process of assuming control over the subject, the body itself becomes implicated in the form and direction that this process takes. It is not only that K. loses control over his body, but, more perniciously, that the body operates in concert with the court. The court simultaneously infiltrates and coopts the body. If a closer look at historical medical reports links K.’s symptoms to an infiltration of the ear, the question with which the passage concludes implies an expansion of this corporeal intrusion. The appearance of vertigo, subjective noises, and other forms of acoustical embodiment associated with the factory coincide with growing fears concerning the body’s cooperation with the court. Suspicions of a newly embodied trial are accompanied by an array of somatic effects. If the noise of the siren in the court chambers had been presented as subjective, the second half of the novel portrays the defendant in a state of constant physical exhaustion and distraction, and prone to perceptual misdirection. On the most basic level, the second half of the novel contains instances of mishearing, tied to the protagonist’s growing paranoia and recognition of the severity of his situation. For example, while contemplating whether he should dispense with his lawyer and represent himself before the court, K.’s solitary reflections in his office are disrupted by sounds with no 356 Tyler Whitney identifiable source. «Lange saß er so, ohne zu wissen, was ihm eigentlich Sorgen machte, nur von Zeit zu Zeit blickte er ein wenig erschreckt über die Schulter hinweg zur Vorzimmertür, wo er irrtümlicher Weise ein Geräusch zu hören geglaubt hatte» (Der Prozeß 138). In the scene, the protagonist is repeatedly drawn out of solitary contemplation by distractions in the surrounding environment, which in the end are nothing more than figments of his imagination. Similar to the mysterious audibility of the siren, K. hears things that simply are not there. Further immersion in the trial coincides with casual instances of perceptual error. More radically, the second half of the novel portrays the defendant’s ear as plagued by distraction, seemingly unhinged from any and all aspects of the external auditory environment. This threat is not merely to confuse the ear but, in a sense, to nullify the very possibility of listening to sounds emanating from the external world. While discussing his case with the painter Titorelli, K. struggles to listen despite the fact the man offers him valuable information pertaining to the inner workings of the court and potential strategies for steering the case in his favor. K. must put forth so much effort to keep his ear fixed on his interlocutor’s words that he experiences physical pain. «‹Oja,› sagte K., dem von der Anstrengung mit der er sich zum Zuhören gezwungen hatte der Kopf schmerzte» (170). But it is during K.’s meeting with an industrialist as part of his professional responsibilities that this tendency toward a suspended and unhinged mode of listening finds its clearest expression. The passage begins by highlighting K.’s difficulties in removing himself from the murmurs of an internal monologue and focusing his attention on the sights and sounds of his immediate environment. In the end, both self-reflective immersion and attention to the world around him give way to second-order observation, which takes as its object the functioning and very possibility of listening. K. hatte auch tatsächlich im Anfang die Rede des Fabrikanten gut verfolgt, der Gedanke an das wichtige Geschäft hatte dann auch ihn ergriffen, nur leider nicht für die Dauer, er war bald vom Zuhören abgekommen, hatte dann noch ein Weilchen zu den lauteren Ausrufen des Fabrikanten mit dem Kopf genickt, hatte aber schließlich auch das unterlassen und sich darauf eingeschränkt, den kahlen auf die Papiere hinabgebeugten Kopf anzusehn und sich zu fragen, wann der Fabrikant endlich erkenne werde, daß seine ganze Rede nutzlos sei. Als er nun verstummte, glaubte K. zuerst wirklich, es geschehe dies deshalb, um ihm Gelegenheit zu dem Eingeständnis zu geben, daß er nicht fähig sei zuzuhören. (135; my emphasis) Over the course of the conversation, K.’s attention does not simply drift away from the industrialist’s words in order to dwell on his own internal reflections. The sole object of his reflection becomes his inability to listen. 357 Listening to the Law The passage presents a mode of listening so distracted and disconnected from the temporal and spatial orders of the present that it can take only itself as an object of reflection. The protagonist’s thoughts come to rest in an intermediary space where both perceptions of external phenomena and internal reflection are no longer possible. In their place emerges a mode of listening preoccupied with its own functionality, pursuing questions of how one hears rather than what one hears. K.’s incapacity to focus on the words of his interlocutor illuminates the perceptual endgame of a trial that takes the ear of the defendant as a target and tool of coercion. Both subjective noises from within and auditory interruptions from without are exorcised from the perceptual field and replaced by reflections on the possibility or impossibility of listening. If the grounding of a new trial had depended on an audio-spatial logic that rendered bodies and spaces permeable and open to infiltration by the court, by the end there are few meaningful distinctions left to target or uphold. The threshold between inside and outside, which the trial undermines throughout the novel, loses all relevance. Uncoupled from the perceptual field, the ear is folded back onto itself, immersed in its own operations, limits, and necessary malfunction. Despite their critical neglect, issues of sound and hearing pervade Kafka’s novel and pattern its representations of the court according to what I have called an audio-spatial logic. The asymmetrical permeability of spatial boundaries and the exploitation of that porousness by covert listeners occur against the backdrop of a proliferation of noise. With the eruption of subjective noises in the court chambers, the permeability of spatial structures that allows for the surveillance and discipline of the protagonist extends to the surfaces of the body. Positioned alongside contemporaneous medical studies of factory workers, the spatial disorientation and perceptual confusion K. experiences indicate a common origin inside the ear, which, in turn, implies the body’s increasing vulnerability to penetration by the court’s growing sphere of influence. The expansive noise, «der alles erfüllte,» reinforces conceptions of the court as omnipresent and omnipotent, but it also marks the transfer of permeability from doors and walls to the body. On a perceptual level, the subjective noise of the siren serves to dissolve further traditional binaries between inside and outside by providing a sensory experience that is both deafening to K. and impossible to locate in the outside world. The subjective nature of the sound, the possibility that the sound’s source may be the listener himself, motivates broader concerns regarding a second trial «prepared» by the body in cooperation with the court. K.’s constant state of fatigue and distraction in the second half of the 358 Tyler Whitney novel lends credibility to these suspicions, presenting physical and perceptual effects of the trial absent in the novel prior to his visit to the court chambers. Although no longer bombarded by noise, the ear comes to exist in a state of distraction so severe that the mere task of listening to the words of an interlocutor causes K. physical pain. The integration of the body into the trial produces a listening subject severed from the sounds of the external world and plagued by his own perceptual limitations. Any doubts regarding the trial’s corporeal turn are dissipated in the novel’s final chapter, where agents of the court arrive to escort K. to his execution. Recalling the episode in the court chambers where K. had had to be held up and directed by two court employees due to his spatial and perceptual disorientation, the two men wrap their arms around the defendant’s own, take hold of his hands, stretch him upright between them, and direct him forward. In doing so, the defendant’s body merges with those of his executioners, forming a single entity: «Sie bildeten jetzt alle drei eine solche Einheit, daß wenn man einen von ihnen zerschlagen hätte, alle zerschlagen gewesen wären. Es war eine Einheit, wie sie fast nur Lebloses bilden kann» (237). The second suspected trial prepared by the body both comes to a close and is corroborated as that individual body disappears and is replaced by a seamless amalgamation of the court and the accused. With the distinctions between them dissolved, the union renders the three figures lifeless. An embodied trial ironically concludes with the conversion and fusion of individual living bodies into an inanimate whole. The law and the bodies it interpellates form a machine whose necessary conditions are the bodily subjugation of the accused and the liquidation of subjective perceptual agency. In reading Kafka’s literary treatment of embodiment and the law alongside contemporaneous medical and juridical texts, this essay has pursued questions of how sound studies might be brought to bear on literary history and vice versa. Expanding on recent work by Karin Bijsterveld and Carolyn Birdsall, which highlights the value of literary fiction and the resources of textual analysis in excavating historical soundscapes, I have advocated an approach to sound studies that interrogates literature as a particularly rich and heterogeneous archive of historically specific sonic experiences, but that takes as its primary object of inquiry the continuities and regularities that exist between literary imaginings of sound and its representation within other domains of knowledge such as law and medicine. It is no doubt an imperative that we expand sound studies beyond textual sources and the analytic tools we are accustomed to using in making sense of them. A closer 359 Listening to the Law look at early phonograph recordings would likely yield productive correctives to accounts based largely on textual sources. But this does not imply that the resources of textual archives and literary analysis can be easily abandoned without incurring additional historical and theoretical blind spots. Early phonograph recordings often require recourse to paratexts to decipher and many borrow their forms and motifs from literary sources (Feaster). Moreover, as we know from K.’s episode in the court chambers, not all sounds can be recorded by the phonograph. Hallucinations and subjective noises, for example, are recalcitrant to phonographic inscription but find structural analogies with, and are easily adapted to, the silent page of the text. K.’s hallucination brings into focus the representational capabilities distinct to the literary, invoking longstanding tropes of an originary orality or a text that ‹speaks› directly to readers. At the same time, the hallucinatory noise of the siren subverts hermeneutic fantasies of meaning-making (Kittler; Franzel) by rendering audible not some narrative voice but rather an unlocalizable noise devoid of semantic value and occupying an ambiguous epistemological status between the somatically perceptible and the imaginary. Kafka’s literary account of embodied listening therefore provides us with privileged insights into an elusive and seemingly contradictory class of sounds, which, during the same period, presented seemingly insurmountable challenges to medical scientists. They lamented their ongoing reliance on patient testimony and textual representation as well as the generally obscure nature of subjective noises (Brunner; Lucae), whose origins, one researcher commented, «noch völlig im Dunkeln liegen» (Grünberg 890). As I have argued over the course of this essay, such sounds should not be regarded as somehow less constitutive of the modern soundscape or less worthy of retrospective scholarly attention. Subjective noises are not reducible to mere solipsistic impressions or figments of the literary imagination. The hallucinated sound of the siren in Kafka’s novel illuminates key elements of modern legal subjectivity at the same time that it makes legible historical realities beyond the text; embodied histories of labor and the law, the effects of technological change, scientific management, and an emerging risk society. In addition to offering a medium capable of recording hallucination and narrating embodied experience, I have indicated how the richness of connotative language, metaphor, intertextuality, and superimposition enables works of literary fiction to expose unlikely discursive and institutional couplings that might otherwise go undetected. My reading demonstrates how, on the one hand, a distinct set of questions, concerns, and conceptual resources that has grown up around sound studies might be productively transferred to literary studies in order to motivate new readings of canonical 360 Tyler Whitney literary works. Literary scholars’ inattentiveness to issues of sound and hearing has resulted in critical neglect of Kafka’s imbrication of industrial and juridical spaces and the relevance of auditory space, surveillance, and embodiment for understanding the court’s strategies of coercion and their perceptual and somatic effects. On the other hand, the novel’s foregrounding of sound in its treatment of the law might be mobilized to raise new questions and propel new lines of inquiry within sound studies, which has up to this point remained surprisingly indifferent to the intersection of sound and legal history, otology and insurance, labor and various perceptual disorders related to the ear. A turn to the literary ultimately helps to uncover the layered experience of embodied listening. This, in turn, enables us to write the body back into preexisting narratives of acoustical modernity, which tend to foreground the disembodied voices of acoustic media such as the telephone, phonograph, and radio, and corresponding medical understandings of the ear based on atomization, dissection, and isolation from the living body. Jonathan Sterne, for example, asserts that around 1900, «knowledge of the ear was intimately connected with the physical and analytic abstraction of the human ear from the body» (57). While there is no doubt that medical practices of dissection and abstraction went hand in hand with conceptions of the ear as a mere object, mechanism, or machine, Kafka’s novel and its historical contexts remind us that the same period also produced new objects of inquiry and representational figures that were predicated on embodied experiences of sound. In Kafka’s novel, knowledge about the trial results because the ear remains attached to the defendant’s body, which registers and anticipates his physical incorporation into the court. The ear functions as both an instrument of coercion and the site of knowledge about that coercion. The hallucination of the siren, we know, signals real danger. But that knowledge is ultimately rendered unstable as it is based on a purely subjective, embodied perception of sound. In Der Proceß, an epistemology of the ear arises from embodied, subjective experience that confuses distinctions between objective knowledge and the subjective experience of hallucination. In listening to the law, K. confronts the court’s omnipotence, specifically its capacity to incorporate the body as a site of discipline via perceptual manipulation. Registered as noise, the court is revealed to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, expansive and localized, immaterial and embodied, or, as Kafka would write in «Fürsprecher» almost a decade later, «Es komme von überall oder, was noch richtiger schien, gerade der Ort, wo man zufällig stand, sei der eigentliche Ort dieses Dröhnens, aber gewiß war das eine Täuschung, denn es kam aus der Ferne» (389). 361 Listening to the Law Notes 1 Throughout this essay I retain the spelling and punctuation of Kafka’s original text. 2 The scholarly literature on Kafka and the law is too vast and diverse to summarize here. For an overview of key interpretive approaches to the issue, see Gasché, Lubkoll, Abraham, and Liska. 3 On acousmatic sound see Kane. 4 Here I am thinking of terms such as verhören, Vernehmung, and das rechtliche Gehör, in addition to broader notions of Gehorsam. 5 One exception is Uwe C. Steiner’s overview of tinnitus in modern literature, in which he briefly mentions the appearance of subjective noises in Der Proceß. 6 For ocularcentric approaches to Kafka and the law, which foreground figures of panopticism, theatrical spectatorship, optical inversion, myth and visual mimesis, see Corngold, Sokel, Campe, Corngold, and Wagner. 7 «Nachmittags werde ich in der Fabrik sein müssen» (Tagebücher 543). 8 This connection between myth and the conditions of modern industrial labor brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic reading of the Odysseus myth in their essay, «Begriff der Aufklärung.» According to their interpretation, the oarsmen of the myth anticipate the modern factory worker, who «frisch und konzentriert [. . .] nach vorwärts blicken und liegenlassen, was zur Seite liegt,» and «den Trieb, der zur Ablenkung drängt, [. . .] verbissen in zusätzliche Anstrengung sublimieren [müssen].» Odysseus, on the other hand, resembles the bourgeois landowner. «Er hört, aber ohnmächtig an den Mast gebunden, und je größer die Lockung wird, um so stärker läßt er sich fesseln, so wie nachmals die Bürger auch sich selber das Glück um so hartnäckiger verweigerten, je näher es ihnen mit dem Anwachsen der eigenen Macht rückte» (40). However, by pointing out the ways in which Josef K. simultaneously occupies the position of Odysseus and the modern factory worker, I am arguing for a superimposition of identities in Kafka’s novel that is ultimately incompatible with Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading. See also Kafka’s short text, «Das Schweigen der Sirenen,» composed around the same time, most likely October 1917. 9 For an interpretation of the passage in terms of contemporaneous anxieties surrounding corporate personhood see Andriopoulos 147 - 55. Works Cited Abraham, Ulf. «Kafka und Recht/ Justiz.» Kafka-Handbuch. Ed. Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. 212 - 23. —. «Rechtsspruch und Machtwort: Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsordnung und Ordnungsmacht bei Kafka.» Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr. Ed. Wolf Kittler and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1990. 248 - 78. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1988 (1947). 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Seiltänzer des Paradoxalen: Aufsätze zur ästhetischen Wissenschaft. Munich: Hanser, 2006. Werber, Niels. «Bürokratische Kommunikation: Franz Kafkas Roman Der Proceß.» The Germanic Review 73.4 (1998): 309 - 26. 365 Listening to the Law