The Engineers' Plot

“ “Alas,” said The Mouse, 

“The World is growing smaller every day. 

At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” 

“You only need to change your direction,” 

said The Cat, and ate it up. “

For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny. 

Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. 

This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released. 

The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it—to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name Who for the interrogative pronoun who, and so on. And we all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling of not so much boredom as offense, as if something has been blasphemed. 

This is a lot like the teacher’s feelings at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad critical analysis—plot to chart, symbols to decode, themes to exfoliate, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty. Franz Kafka, after all, is the story writer whose “Poseidon” imagines a sea god so overwhelmed with administrative paperwork that he never gets to sail or swim, and whose “In the Penal Colony” conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grâce is a spike through the forehead.

Another handicap, even for gifted students, is that—unlike, say, those of Joyce or Pound—the exformative associations that Kafka’s work creates are not intertextual or even historical. Kafka’s evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sort of sub-archetypal, the primordial little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories ‘nightmarish’ rather than ‘surreal’. The exformative associations in Kafka are also both simple and extremely rich, often just about impossible to be discursive about: imagine, for instance, asking a student to unpack and organize the various signification networks behind mouse, world, running, walls, narrowed, chamber, trap, cat, and cat eats mouse.

“Those That Ran The Soviet Union believed that they could plan, and manage 

A New Kind of Socialist Society.

They had discovered that it was impossible to control and predict everything — 

and The Plan had run out of control.

But rather than reveal that reveal this, The Technocrats decided to pretend that everything was still going according to The Plan.

And what emerged instead was 

A Fake Version of The Society.

The Soviet Union became a Society where EVERYONE knew what their leaders said was   

Not-Real, because everyone could see with their own eyes that The Economy was falling apart —

But Everybody Had to Play Along, 

and pretend that it was Real — Because No-One Could Imagine an Alternative.

One Soviet writer called it HYPERNORMALISATION —You were so much a part of The System that it became impossible to see beyond it :

The Fakeness was HyperNormal

The Engineers' Plot

This episode details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialize and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. 

The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings.

Aleksei Gastev used Social Engineering, including a 

Social Engineering Machine, to make people more rational. 

Gastev founded the Central Institute of Labour (TsIT), Soviet think tank dedicated to the improvement of industrial efficiency.

But Bolshevik politicians and bourgeois engineers came into conflict. Lenin said: 

"The Communists are not directing anything, they are being directed." 

Stalin arrested 2000 engineers in 1930, eight of whom were convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. 

Engineering schools gave those loyal to the party only limited training in engineering, to minimize their potential political influence. 

Industrialized America was used as a template to develop the Soviet Union. 

Magnitogorsk was built to closely replicate the steel mill city Gary, Indiana. A former worker describes how they went so far as to create metal trees since trees could not grow on the steppe.

By the late 1930s, Stalin faithful engineers like Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khrushchev grew in influence, due to Stalin eliminating many earlier Bolshevik engineers. They aimed to use engineering in line with Stalin's policies to plan the entire country. At Gosplan, the head institution of central planning, engineers predicted future rational needs. 

Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, describes the level of detail as absurd: 

"Even the KGB was told the quota of arrests to be made and the prisons to be used. The demand for coffins, novels and movies was all planned." 

The seemingly rational benchmarks began to have unexpected results. When the plan measured tonnes carried per kilometers, trains went long distances just to meet the quota. Sofas and chandeliers increased in size to meet measurements of material usage.

When Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin he tried to make improvements, including considering prices in the plan. 

The Head of the USSR State Committee for Organization and Methodology of Price Creation is shown with a tall stack of price logbooks declaring that 

"This shows quite clearly that The System is Rational." 

Academician Victor Glushkov proposed the use of cybernetics to control people as a remedy for the problems of planning. 

In the 60s computers began being used to process economic data. Consumer demand was calculated by computers from data gathered by surveys. But the time delay in the system meant that items were no longer in demand by the time they had been produced.

When Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin took over in the mid 60s, the economy of the Soviet Union was stagnating. By 1978 the country was in full economic crisis. Production had devolved to "pointless, elaborate ritual" and endeavours to improve the plan had been abandoned. 

"What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a Rational Society ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people".