Hegemony and the Subaltern in Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer”

What is often missed in literary debates regarding meaning or intent is the value of fiction as a tool for understanding social reality, rather than fiction as merely a puzzle to be cracked. While such debates can illuminate a work’s historical or autobiographical context, nailing down a clear and singular meaning is particularly limiting when dealing with texts as enigmatic as those of Franz Kafka. For the purpose of a sociological analysis, one should bear in mind that Kafka’s stories, as Walter Benjamin says, “are not parables, and yet they do not want to be taken at their face value; they lend themselves to quotation and can be told for purposes of clarification.”¹ That is, the rich social dynamics within Kafka’s stories can be used illustratively—and in a larger context—without one falling into such extremes of a single symbolic meaning or mere fantasy devoid of larger consequential content. Kafka’s often nightmarish stories reflect many of the social, political, and cultural dynamics inherent under capitalism. Drawing these elements out of his work helps to enrich not only our appreciation of Kafka, but our understanding of the world we interact with and of which we are an integral part.

Ideology and the Kafkaesque State

In much of Kafka’s work looms a bureaucratic authority that subordinates characters through social, physical, and symbolic means. The power of distinction is essential to this bureaucratic domination. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests: “The state, which produces the official classification, is in one sense the supreme tribunal to which Kafka refers in The Trial, when Block says of the advocate who claims to be one of the ‘great Advocates’: ‘any man can call himself “great,” of course, if he pleases, but in this matter the Court tradition must decide’.… [Official discourse] is, as Kafka saw, an almost divine discourse, which assigns to everyone an identity.”²

The ability to classify is the capacity to construct social and symbolic spaces and set up structural parameters for social interaction. In Kafka’s world, authority, such as the Court, rules in part through the dominance and legitimacy of its social vision and division—how we perceive ourselves and others and how we conceptualize and compartmentalize social reality—which, in turn, informs action and interaction. The power of nomination is an essential, yet often overlooked, superstructural mechanism that functions to legitimize authority and naturalize the prevailing social order. Official and symbolic authorities are often taken for granted due to the fact that, as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels state, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”³ This means that the logic used to assess such powers stems from the ideology of the dominant class to which these authorities belong. As a result, domination goes unnoticed or is considered “natural.” Likewise, the state—as an organ of class rule— dominates the lives and minds of Kafka’s protagonists in subtle and insidious ways. The central means of domination throughout his work is, in the words of Pascale Casanova, “a belief system very deeply rooted in the life of each social agent or, in other words, as a kind of frame of thought governing social organization without the agents being aware of it—a collective unconscious, acting as both an unquestioned assumption and a conviction.”⁴ This core component of Kafka’s work makes many of his stories pedagogical tools for better understanding the role of superstructure in maintaining oppressive or exploitative social organization.

The Alliance of Josephine and the Mouse Folk

In Kafka’s final short story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” there are three distinct classifications comprising the order of social relations: Josephine, the mouse folk, and a perceived external threat that is never explicitly attached to any particular group in the story. As a narrative in which the mouse folk reflect on their relationship with Josephine (with almost no apparent temporal plot), the story focuses heavily on a collective subaltern psyche that contrasts interpretation with reality. It therefore illustrates the tendency for a social order—such as capitalism—to be taken for granted, as well as the truly dynamic social relations on which it rests. Josephine personifies the state working to maintain its legitimacy, and thus reproduction of the underlying social order, through the mouse folk’s recognition and consent. Antonio Gramsci further defines the state as “the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.”⁵ Otherwise occupied by precarity and uncertainty of daily life, the mouse folk timidly, and with admiration, watch Josephine perform. Her songs have mysterious and intoxicating influence on the mouse folk. This should not be taken to mean that the latter are unconditionally and entirely subordinate, as they collectively are afforded some degree of power in the fact that Josephine requires their recognition and support. However, it is this function of subaltern agency, when paired with misrecognition, that ultimately reinforces social relations and structures. The result of applying the cultural and ideological views of the dominant back onto the social structure from which they come is that the latter is seen as natural or inevitable. Indeed, misrecognition on the part of the mouse folk is paramount to reinforcing Josephine’s hegemony.

Josephine is representative of a ruling class actively pursuing its maintenance of power or hegemony. The role of ideology in maintaining relations of power entails a need to have this ideology taken for granted by the masses. In the story, “what Josephine really wants is not what she puts into words…what she wants is public unambiguous, permanent recognition of her art, going beyond any precedent so far known.”⁶ Josephine’s “art” is analogous to the culturally dominant ideology of the ruling class. In order to maintain their position, the dominant must pursue perpetual recognition, not just of themselves, but of their ideology. The dominance of the latter helps to ensure the legitimacy of the former. In either case, power and cohesion require recognition, on the part of the ruled: the mouse folk. With this recognition, Josephine wants “the general struggle for existence” to be “transferred on her behalf to the people as a whole.”⁷ Josephine’s song—or her ideological conception of the world—is her means of obtaining and preserving her dominant position. Without its recognition, she would not have the influence she has over the mouse folk. Upon further scrutiny, Josephine’s voice is indistinguishable from that of anyone else. It is in “making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing” that Josephine gains recognition and influence.⁸ To have a conception of the world is inherent in humanity, rather than being a distinguishing characteristic. However, bourgeois hegemony uses its dominant social vision or worldview to legitimize or obscure its domination so as to enlist the ruled into the acceptance and upkeep of their own condition.

It is this consent that affords Josephine her authority. Her domination over the mouse folk requires the latter’s collective hand of support in order for the social structure over which the former rules to remain upright and intact. While a dominant social vision imposes itself on social agents—therefore influencing action in order to potentially gain the necessary renewal of support—there is potential for some degree of divergence built into the necessity of the consent of the governed. This crack in the seams lets in a beam of light that radiates the potential for hope and repudiates both determinism and fatalism. In spite of the structural constraints they face, the subaltern and the corresponding mouse folk are not mere automatons unconditionally resigned to absolute subordination. “Perhaps as individuals the people may surrender too easily to Josephine, but as a whole they surrender unconditionally to no one, and not to her either.”⁹ That they do not surrender as a whole to Josephine illustrates the contentious nature of authority and legitimacy that stems from the need of the dominant actively to pursue the consent of the dominated. Kafka thus depicts a dynamic world in which the actions of the heterogeneous mouse folk are neither absolutely structurally determined nor autonomous. This non-duality lends itself at times to structural stability and at others to structural transformation. One can therefore find a dialectical seed of destruction in the necessity of agent participation; just as agents (or mouse folk) can pick up these patterns of thought and action they can, under certain circumstances, also transform or even reject the cultural and ideological principles that comprise a dominant worldview and corresponding social order.

From the standpoint of the dominant class that Josephine represents, it is therefore necessary to use their power on an institutional level so as to stabilize their rule. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci points out that while the “State does have to request consent…it also ‘educates’ this consent.”¹⁰ The embodiment of Josephine’s social vision via dominant superstructural institutions thus becomes a core component of prevailing common sense—that is, incoherent or contradictory conceptions that are taken for granted by the majority of society. Josephine’s “art,” or social vision, thus penetrates into the mouse folk both collectively and individually. As the narrating mouse folk state, “there is yet something…that irresistibly makes its way into us from Josephine’s piping…comes almost like a message from the whole people to each individual.”¹¹

The mouse folk are therefore more likely to recognize the legitimacy of Josephine and her vision as the latter’s logic is internalized. From this deeply ingrained position, the social order in question is then externalized through the dispositions and actions of the mouse folk themselves. This “site of the internalization of reality and the externalization of internality” plays a fundamental role in the interactions between Josephine and the mouse folk, as well as in transcending the traditional antagonisms between structuralism and phenomenology (that is, structure and agency).¹² Such institutional influences result in the complicit and active participation of the subaltern in maintaining the relations of power, which characterize their alliance with the ruling class. Josephine is able to preserve her status and dominant position due to the mouse folk’s mystification or misrecognition of the actual content of this “education,” whereby “power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are but in a form that renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder.”¹³

There are several misconceptions that the mouse folk have about their relationship with Josephine. For instance, we are told that it is a common belief among the mouse folk “that [Josephine’s] art is beyond their comprehension” and that many “consider her personality and wishes to lie beyond their jurisdiction”—despite the fact that, upon further analysis, her singing is indistinguishable from that of the mouse folk.¹⁴ The consequence of this is that many of them see Josephine’s dominance as absolute and immutable, which then perpetuates and further legitimizes her dominant position. In using an embodied criterion from Josephine’s own “art,” the mouse folk misperceive this conditional dominance for unconditional and true superiority.

In utilizing Josephine’s worldview as their own, the mouse folk also misperceive the triadic relationship they have with Josephine and real or perceived external threats. We are told that a perceived external threat makes the mouse folk “quieter, more humble, more submissive to Josephine’s domination.”¹⁵ This is largely due to the fact that many of her supporters see Josephine as a source of strength, if not protection, when they are under attack. However, the reality of this triadic relationship is that she is both largely responsible for and furthest from danger. Her “piping” gathers the mouse folk into a huddled mass and draws the attention of their attackers, thereby intensifying the destruction while she is quickly escorted to safety.

A reactionary nationalist worldview serves to promote social cohesion by creating a conditional identity shared by the dominant and segments of the dominated that is in opposition to a foreign Other. In the imperial core, the apparent threat of a foreign Other serves to divide the subaltern along national and racial lines, thereby undermining international working-class solidarity and encouraging the consent of segments of the oppressed in the violent coercion of other segments, typically in the Global South. Just as the mouse folk are taught to view Josephine with a distinguishing reverence, they are also instructed to identify with the latter in opposition to her enemies, whom they then see as their own enemies.

Josephine’s Crisis of Authority and the Hope of a New World

The ability to “educate” consent, while providing essential structural stability, should not be mistaken for absolute and eternal dominance. Despite the strong hold she has on the mouse folk for the majority of the story, Josephine is incapable of obtaining a static hegemony (that is, unconditional consent) due, in part, to the fact that agency is an inherently dynamic factor, capable of reacting toward the objective structures of domination. Such times of rupture stem from the contradictory nature of a composite common sense that contains degrees of both truth and misrepresentation.¹⁶ While the embodiment of a worldview can perpetuate oppressive and exploitative social relations, conditions can arise where the cultural or ideological structures can be seen as arbitrary, alien, and artificial—thereby diminishing their insidious power. Therefore, the mouse folk are neither automatons nor autonomous.

Where consent is no longer produced and the dominant class has to rely solely on coercion, stability is lost in what Gramsci calls a “crisis of authority.” Similarly, Josephine responds to her diminishing influence with apparent coercion in order to maintain her dominance: “Recently she has even intensified her attack; hitherto she has used only words as her weapons but now she is beginning to have recourse to other means, which she thinks will prove more efficacious but which we think will run her into greater dangers. Many believe that Josephine is becoming so insistent because she feels herself growing old and her voice falling off, and so she thinks it high time to wage the last battle for recognition.”¹⁷ The lack of consent necessitates coercion on the part of the state; however, this same effort can cause instability. Which social order follows such a tumultuous period is not predetermined.

Where dominance is not reasserted, a new order must form. Kafka captures this loss of hegemony and implies the creation of a new, yet undisclosed, order in the last paragraphs of the story: “Josephine’s road…must go downhill. The time will soon come when her last notes will sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people.”¹⁸

Rather than being immutable (as she had hoped it to be seen), Josephine’s dominance is conditional and subject to contestation. Similar to Gramsci, Kafka offers the reader a path that diverges from both structural determinism and idealistic subjectivism. It is a reminder of the cracks and seams that comprise, and at times compromise, the reified structure. Between fatalism and blind optimism lies the sober hope of the dogged struggle to establish socialist hegemony based not on mystified alliances of the oppressor and oppressed, but the intraclass alliance of the heterogenous subaltern masses to build a society in their class interests. In addition to the more immediately political and economic transformation, “This revolution also presupposes the formation of a new set of standards, a new psychology, new ways of feeling, thinking and living that must be specific to the working class, that must be created by it, that will become ‘dominant’ when the working class becomes the dominant class.”¹⁹ This requires intellectuals from within the working class—organic intellectuals—who can develop culture and a general conception of the world to counter, and eventually replace, the manipulative piping of Josephine and the bourgeoisie she represents.

Notes

1. ↩ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 122.
2. ↩ Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 22.
3. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (International Publishers, 1970), 64.
4. ↩ Pascale Casanova, Kafka, Angry Poet (London: Seagull Books, 2015), 299.
5. ↩ Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 244.
6. ↩ Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” in The Complete Stories and Parables (New York: Schocken Books, 1935), 372.
7. ↩ Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 371.
8. ↩ Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 361.
9. ↩ Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 371.
10. ↩ Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 259.
11. ↩ Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 367.
12. ↩ Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (London: Sage, 1990), 205.
13. ↩ Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, xxii.
14. ↩ Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 371.
15. ↩ Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 366.
16. ↩ Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 421.
17. ↩ Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 373.
18. ↩ Kafka, “Josephine the Singer,” 376.
19. ↩ Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, 70.