The name Kafka is popularly associated with the horrors of a grotesquely impenetrable legal system, but there is another aspect to Kafka, which concerns knowledge. “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque, with its nonsensical rankings and evaluations, market-driven imperatives, and exploding administrative ranks. But Lacan’s term was meant not so much to target the mismanagement of the modern university as to designate a broad shift in the structure of authority, a new kind of social link based on the conjunction of knowledge and power, the establishment of systems of administration operating in the name of reason and technical progress. And this is where Kafka’s dog comes in, to question this new order, to excavate the underside of its supposed neutrality, to propose another way of thinking, even, perhaps, a way out.
Writer Dorian Lynskey put it this way: “Some artists open the door to a new room in the house of music; Bush is one of a handful whose imagination revealed the existence of a whole new wing.”
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I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. My weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/ . Out now: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast.
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