The Necessity of Metaphor in Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka by Andrew Mattison, '98 Written for Contemporary Criticism and Theory English 344, Professor Kane   Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature cannot be seen as a single cohesive argument, because it has no single differentiated subject: it is not about Kafka as a person or a group of texts; the entire work instead is a creation of a new Kafka, which can be defined only in the terms Deleuze and Guattari themselves put forward to define. In other words, they are not stating that such-and-such a thing, which is called Kafka, has such-and such aspects, but rather that this thing that we call Kafka we are defining as such-and-such a thing. The work as a whole is a definition, not only a definition because there are arguments presented within it, but its entirety is an attempt to assign a particular set of constructions to the word "Kafka." Kafka is a literature, a machine, an assemblage, a burrow; all of these share a basic nature in their essential construction out of components rather than out of materials. A literature is not made out of words (e.g., Music as a Literature) but it is necessarily composed of texts; machines and assemblages by their very etymologies imply the coincidental confluence of certain entities toward a unified goal; the material of a burrow is impossible to define, but a burrow is clearly recognizable from its three components: holes, tunnels, and inhabitants. These are necessarily transcendent identifications, for they refer to the ability of a thing to be identifiable as that thing by means of its components, which are only active as identifiers when the thing is entire and functioning. Thus when a burrow is bulldozed, or when a literature is incomprehensible, they are no longer identifiable as the things that they are. Only their materials, insignificant to Deleuze's and Guattari's metaphors, remain. Deleuze and Guattari, however, insist that Kafka is an immanent assemblage, which sounds like an oxymoron. By "immanent," however, they clearly establish that they mean a combination of transcendence and immanence such that the defining borders of immanence are removed: ...the assemblage extends over or penetrates an unlimited field of immanence that makes the segments melt and that liberates desire from all its concretizations and abstractions or, at the very least, fights actively against them in order to dissolve them. (86) So they are using the words "transcendence" and "immanence" to describe a thing that is neither transcendent nor immanent, since it lacks the abstract distance of transcendence and the concrete limits of immanence. They create Kafka, in other words, as a thing that is not categorizable by means of the categories they provide for it. I will argue that the metaphorical nature of Deleuzeís and Guattari's description is needed for their ability to arrive at this description. We have seen that there is a certain level of transcendence intrinsic to the language with which Deleuze and Guattari begin their discussion of Kafka, which is at all points propelled by extended metaphors such as this one: A Kafka-machine is thus constituted by contents and expressions that have been formalized to diverse degrees by unformed materials that enter into it, and leave by passing though all possible states. To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it, these are all still components of the machine itself: these are states of desire, free of all interpretation....Maybe there are several factors that we must take into account: the purely superficial unity of the machine, the way in which men are themselves pieces of the machine, the position of desire (man or animal) in relation to the machine. (7-8) The problem of transcendence and immanence is immediate here. The metaphorical machine is constructed out of events, like any proper machine. These events are identified both collectively and individually (at least by way of example). Collectively they are the formalization of unformed materials, examples of which are "To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, [etc.]." So the formal nature of the machine is that it is composed of individual immanent events without form that are given form by the machine. The form of the machine itself is in doubt, however, since its unity is "purely superficial." We must take a moment to understand the fiercely anti-philosophical notion of this superficially unified form-giver. In Aristotelian terms the unformed material, which is unbounded and infinitely divisible, is given unity in its combination with the transcendent form, so that the thingís immanence, its actual place in the universe, is provided by the transcendence of the form. Here the form is imposed upon the material by a machine that itself lacks form (except superficially). Thus in this metaphor immanence is provided by the individual events that are described as components of the machine, but transcendence is created out of nothing, since it is not present in the machine (since how can something be superficially transcendent?) but the machine imposes it upon other entities. All of the metaphors in the study are caught in a similar state of dubious transcendence. Deleuze and Guattari admit the limits of the relationship of sound and escape, and photography and submission, and every other similar association they provide. They could say that the necessary transcendence is provided by the simple unity of the machine itself--that is, the collective agreement that Kafka is Kafka and that's all there is to it. But they despise this dependence on an external transcendence: they are after instead an internal (or immanent) transcendence. Their first criterion for the judgement of their assemblage is the necessary freedom from externally provided unity: First, to what degree can this or that assemblage do without the mechanism of transcendental law? The less it can do without it, the less it is a real assemblage; the more it is an abstract machine in the first sense of the word, the more it is despotic. (87) So they are not willing to construct an additional assemblage to provide the necessary unity to their Kafka-creation. Kafka's unity must be independent of their unifying power. This desire on their part brings to bear an essential problem of their text. Deleuze and Guattari tend to think in oppositions. The oppositions of major and minor, transcendent and immanent (or abstract and immanent), even, as Paul Kane pointed out to me, the opposition of Deleuze and Guattari, inform every aspect of their work, so that they even make oppositions out of things, like freedom and escape or machine and assemblage, which do not seem intuitively to be opposed. But there is an underlying opposition supporting the entire work: the necessary opposition of the book Kafka with the Kafka assemblage. If Deleuze and Guattari do not wish to interpret, "to say this means that" (7), then the assemblages they describe must have an existence independent of their describing them. As soon as the Deleuze and Guattari-machine becomes part of the unifying machine that makes the events of Kafka's assemblages into transcendent entities, the game is off, for they now provide the "transcendental law" they seek to avoid. The opposition between their work and Kafka must be absolutely cemented and impenetrable. The cement that draws off the opposition is metaphor. From their first paragraph, Deleuze and Guattari begin building the abyss that will eventually become necessary for the conclusion of their agenda. Let us assume for the sake of experiment that every word in the first paragraph of Kafka (3) is objectively true. "Kafka's work," therefore, is "a rhizome, a burrow." It has many entrances and exits, whose very principle prevents the ìintroduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation." If this is the case, then interpretation of Kafka is actually impossible, not just something to be frowned upon. The structure of the burrow itself does not merely encourage experimentation as a mode of criticism, but prevents all other modes of criticism. Since many interpretive works on Kafka exist, it is clear that in order for the metaphor to function "Kafka's work" must be defined as something other than that which is interpretable (which could be argued is the standard definition of that term). It is defined instead and in opposition to the standard definition as a burrow, an object that does not need any justification or participation in order for it to have its own independent formal unity. In other words, it is not a phenomenological burrow, but rather a Platonic burrow, a burrow that is a burrow no matter how it is seen, because it possesses some intrinsic burrowness that no attempt at interpretation (as, say, a group of artworks) can get at. Deleuze and Guattari's formulation of the independent assemblage depends on the paradox between this assumption of metaphorical unity and the antiphilosophical method with which they pose that formulation. The book Kafka is a machine in which the components, the assemblages of Kafka's work, are formalized but which itself has no part in that formalization. The book is an Epicurean god, with some omniscience over the events happening within it but neither interest in those events nor willingness to take part in them. It has the transcendent distance of metaphor and the useless immanence of machine, itself incapable of taking part in the structure it uncovers. Articles are copyrighted by their authors. They may not be redistributed in whole or in part without prior written permission. You may make copies for your own private use, but include this copyright notice and proper attribution to the author.