1 00:00:05,070 --> 00:00:11,969 Connor, thank you so much for coming to talk today. Um, about, well, an approach to Cafcass. 2 00:00:11,970 --> 00:00:16,890 We've got we've had various people talking about the way Kafka resonates in various international contexts, 3 00:00:17,310 --> 00:00:25,800 um, but also various ways of reading Kafka. And you're interested, I know, in thinking about Kafka in an ecological light. 4 00:00:26,190 --> 00:00:32,730 Uh, can you tell me a little bit about that? Because in a way, it seems, uh, you know, an odd way to go into Kafka. 5 00:00:33,240 --> 00:00:39,480 It was. Yeah. I think, um, for a lot of people, when they hear, uh, ecology or when they think of an ecological writer, 6 00:00:39,870 --> 00:00:43,589 partly what they might think of is, um, is something like nature writing. 7 00:00:43,590 --> 00:00:52,020 So they might think of kind of romantic poets or any form of writing that is trying to show us sort of the joy and the beauty of, of nature. 8 00:00:52,500 --> 00:00:58,860 Um, and anyone who's ever opened a book by Kafka knows that's not the type of ecological writer he is. 9 00:00:58,860 --> 00:01:04,799 Um, you'd be hard pressed to find, um, find a plunked in Kafka in any way that's described in, 10 00:01:04,800 --> 00:01:08,430 you know, in detail, except in a maybe a sort of a vague or abstract way. 11 00:01:09,090 --> 00:01:15,570 Um, so he's certainly not trying to kind of open our eyes to the beauty of the world around us. 12 00:01:16,200 --> 00:01:24,950 Um. But I think that the way in which we can understand Kafka as an ecological writer is actually much more interesting than that. 13 00:01:25,400 --> 00:01:32,760 It's kind of. It's a bit darker and a bit stranger and actually a bit more radical. 14 00:01:32,760 --> 00:01:38,490 What he's doing, um, both for his time and now in our, in our current context. 15 00:01:39,060 --> 00:01:45,870 Um, so I think it maybe helps if we distinguish a term like ecology from a word like the environment. 16 00:01:46,410 --> 00:01:49,530 Um, so if we think of environmental writing or the, 17 00:01:49,860 --> 00:01:55,499 the idea of the environment that actually keeps the separation upheld between us and the world around us. 18 00:01:55,500 --> 00:02:01,770 So kind of in the German Umwelt, you know, the world surrounding us, and it keeps us as humans separate from that. 19 00:02:02,430 --> 00:02:10,559 And the idea of ecology emphasises much more the ways in which we are kind of interconnected with 20 00:02:10,560 --> 00:02:16,350 and tangled up with all the other parts of the the biosphere and all the ways in which our kind of, 21 00:02:16,380 --> 00:02:20,340 um, our categories and our ways of separating creatures from one another. 22 00:02:20,920 --> 00:02:26,069 But, um, you know, when we zoom out or zoom in that they actually start to start to, 23 00:02:26,070 --> 00:02:30,560 um, dissolve, uh, and that's something that I think Kafka's really interested in. 24 00:02:30,570 --> 00:02:36,700 Yeah. So that's, that's the way in which I see him as an ecological writer. Well, I love that point about zooming and zooming out the scale. 25 00:02:36,720 --> 00:02:43,530 So we will come back to that. But I wanted to kind of ask straight away about one of the things that's come up in a number of talks we've had, 26 00:02:43,530 --> 00:02:48,750 which is about animals and the the sort of fascination at the moment with the animal, the creaturely. 27 00:02:48,840 --> 00:02:51,840 Um, and how does that relate to Kafka? Yeah. 28 00:02:51,840 --> 00:02:58,230 I mean, I think that is the main. So if we don't see if we don't see kind of, uh, trees or flowers in Kafka, then we see animals everywhere. 29 00:02:58,680 --> 00:03:03,660 Uh, that's probably the most obvious way in to this topic. 30 00:03:04,360 --> 00:03:11,460 I think what Kafka does with animals is just endlessly fascinating, as I'm sure has kind of come up, um, in the videos up till now. 31 00:03:12,340 --> 00:03:22,420 It points us, I think, in in kind of two different directions, one of which is more sort of, um, conceptual and more philosophical, 32 00:03:23,110 --> 00:03:32,740 and another of which I think is actually more practical, which sounds kind of counterintuitive for Kafka, or more to do with, um, with action. 33 00:03:33,770 --> 00:03:41,020 Um. So if we take this example of, uh, there's a story that I think is a good companion piece to The Metamorphosis, 34 00:03:41,030 --> 00:03:46,850 the one that these videos are focusing on. It's a story called unpolished for an academy, a report to an academy. 35 00:03:47,480 --> 00:03:51,120 And in fact, there's a performance of that as part of the celebrations. 36 00:03:51,160 --> 00:03:57,170 Oh, okay. My show by Tony Mambo. Okay. Oh, it's great that you've mentioned that, like here in Oxford or here in Oxford. 37 00:03:57,380 --> 00:04:00,370 Always thought of it as a metamorphosis story. It is. Yeah. 38 00:04:00,380 --> 00:04:07,340 It's kind of the you know, if we have with the Metamorphosis, we have, um, Craig or the human turning into a bug and in, 39 00:04:07,940 --> 00:04:13,460 in, uh, reports in the academy, we have an ape called Red Peter who is, um, 40 00:04:13,970 --> 00:04:22,490 from the Gold Coast of Africa and is captured as part of a colonial expedition and in response to his captivity on a ship that's bound for for Europe, 41 00:04:23,210 --> 00:04:25,760 he realises that his only way out is to become human. 42 00:04:26,270 --> 00:04:33,830 So he actually he keeps his, you know, he remains an ape in body, but he learns to think and talk like a human. 43 00:04:34,490 --> 00:04:39,680 And so the report that he's meant to give to the Academy is about his his previous life. 44 00:04:40,400 --> 00:04:46,340 Um, except that he finds he can't actually really do that because now he thinks in human language. 45 00:04:46,760 --> 00:04:49,610 So this is kind of part of, um, 46 00:04:49,610 --> 00:04:57,470 a wider strand of German language literature around the turn of the 20th century that we call the dark phase of the crisis of language. 47 00:04:58,400 --> 00:05:02,389 And this is a kind of a, you know, a form of writing Kafka is quite influenced by. 48 00:05:02,390 --> 00:05:06,650 That's. Worried about the idea that language. 49 00:05:06,710 --> 00:05:17,390 Um. Has become a sort of self enclosed system that basically prevents us from gaining any kind of access to the material world, 50 00:05:17,390 --> 00:05:22,400 to bodily experience, and to perspectives other than our own. 51 00:05:22,520 --> 00:05:30,049 Um, including, for instance, the perspective of other species and of course, literally in The Metamorphosis. 52 00:05:30,050 --> 00:05:36,710 Gregor, uh, is still thinking as a human but can't communicate and and is frustrated by that gap. 53 00:05:37,010 --> 00:05:42,260 Uh, mind the gap. You know, this the language crisis is very much about that isn't completely. 54 00:05:42,260 --> 00:05:46,190 Yeah. Yeah, completely. So they're actually almost, um, mirror images of each other, these two stories. 55 00:05:46,700 --> 00:05:52,189 Um, so when Red Peter tries to describe his his existence as an ape, 56 00:05:52,190 --> 00:05:58,190 the only thing he can really say is that he has to sort of reconstructed retrospectively in human terms. 57 00:05:58,820 --> 00:06:05,990 And he says that he, um, he must have made this decision to become human with his belly because apes think with their with their belly. 58 00:06:06,740 --> 00:06:12,230 Uh, and that's the type of philosophical interest that was driving this writing on the one hand. 59 00:06:13,460 --> 00:06:19,460 And on the other hand, um, in a way that I think is kind of where that is very interesting, 60 00:06:19,940 --> 00:06:23,000 just in general, broadly for how we think about ecological writing. 61 00:06:23,630 --> 00:06:30,740 There's a strand to Kafka's writing or an aspect of his work that is actually about action and about how. 62 00:06:31,700 --> 00:06:40,820 The story. The text that we read is supposed to affect us as embodied readers and change our behaviour in the material world. 63 00:06:41,510 --> 00:06:47,750 And I often think of this through the fact that Kafka himself was a devoted vegetarian. 64 00:06:48,230 --> 00:06:53,580 And when we were teaching students about Kafka, of course, one of the first things we do is say, don't reduce things to biography. 65 00:06:53,600 --> 00:06:58,760 That's a way of kind of simplifying the the ambiguity and the mystery of the text. 66 00:06:59,300 --> 00:07:02,270 And that's not at all what I would want to do by making that connection. 67 00:07:03,220 --> 00:07:14,680 But I think that this, this personal decision on Kafka's part links to things that he does in his work and in his authorial statements about his work. 68 00:07:15,250 --> 00:07:20,710 Um, he's very attentive to the relationship between language and bodies. 69 00:07:21,920 --> 00:07:27,320 So there's this, for instance, this authorial statement on Kafka's part that has become a kind of, 70 00:07:27,950 --> 00:07:31,880 uh, sound bite that's been quoted to death on Goodreads and other places online. 71 00:07:32,360 --> 00:07:40,180 Um, from a letter to his friend Oscar Pollock, where he says that books that we should only read, books that that bite and stingless, um, 72 00:07:40,190 --> 00:07:44,659 that books should be the axe for the frozen sea within us and the signs, 73 00:07:44,660 --> 00:07:51,320 because it's not so widely quoted as the science kind of, um, almost twee or cliched or sort of, uh, pseudo poetic. 74 00:07:51,920 --> 00:07:52,489 But actually, 75 00:07:52,490 --> 00:08:01,790 I think that that is quite a radical statement about how we should relate to literature and how we can't expect to read a text like The Metamorphosis, 76 00:08:01,790 --> 00:08:05,510 or we shouldn't expect to read it and emerge unscathed or unchanged. 77 00:08:06,110 --> 00:08:09,679 So in a way, that changes totally. I mean, exactly, yeah. 78 00:08:09,680 --> 00:08:13,100 The biting and the stinging. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating actually, isn't it? 79 00:08:13,110 --> 00:08:19,489 Yeah. So it's kind of a you know, if we think of ecology as partly about constant, uh, forms of exchange, 80 00:08:19,490 --> 00:08:25,910 then in a way readers and texts are also in some sort of symbiotic or symbiotic relationship with one another. 81 00:08:25,910 --> 00:08:30,770 We're in the process of reading. You are supposed to be changed, um, by the text, 82 00:08:30,770 --> 00:08:35,960 and your behaviour afterwards should presumably be somewhat different than if you had never read this text. 83 00:08:36,620 --> 00:08:43,610 Um, so I think, you know, without, uh, going to heavy on Kafka being a vegetarian, 84 00:08:44,120 --> 00:08:48,310 it seems to me that that his his literary texts also do care about action. 85 00:08:48,320 --> 00:08:52,100 There's this lovely story from Max port, uh, about Kafka. 86 00:08:52,100 --> 00:08:59,299 Soon after he's become vegetarian, um, visiting an aquarium in Berlin and saying to the fish, now I can look at you in peace. 87 00:08:59,300 --> 00:09:04,690 Now I don't eat you anymore. Um. And to me, those those two. 88 00:09:04,870 --> 00:09:12,609 Those two strands sort of inform each other when I see things in Kafka's texts that are about the relationship between the story and and the body, 89 00:09:12,610 --> 00:09:17,440 including our bodies as readers. That's that's what I think of. Oh, that's a lovely that's a lovely image, isn't it? 90 00:09:17,450 --> 00:09:17,890 That's great. 91 00:09:18,130 --> 00:09:26,709 I mean, that leads us into thinking a bit more, um, at a sort of structural level about I know some of the things that you're very interested in. 92 00:09:26,710 --> 00:09:33,790 So, for example, action and inaction and, um, denial and perplexity and scale. 93 00:09:33,790 --> 00:09:38,830 So moods or attitudes, in fact, that the reader is confronted with in the text. 94 00:09:39,010 --> 00:09:44,650 Perhaps you could take us through those. I know it's a lot, but perhaps we'd start with this question of action and inaction. 95 00:09:44,980 --> 00:09:50,320 Yeah, completely. So I think this is another reason when I'm when we're talking about this topic 96 00:09:50,320 --> 00:09:54,460 and sort of ecology as another framework in which we can read Kafka's writing, 97 00:09:55,150 --> 00:09:59,740 um, I think we can kind of distinguish between the ways in which it's on a, 98 00:09:59,980 --> 00:10:06,940 in the general sense, interesting for ideas about ecology and in a more, uh, you know, specific sense, 99 00:10:06,940 --> 00:10:14,050 the ways in which his writing now chimes with our specific 21st century context 100 years after his death. 100 00:10:14,800 --> 00:10:22,930 And, um, one of those is, I think, how we are currently responding to the climate and biodiversity crises. 101 00:10:23,560 --> 00:10:30,100 Um, so while, you know, I've said that there's something going on there, 102 00:10:30,100 --> 00:10:34,330 and Coffin's writing about action and about how the texts are meant to affect us and to make us act, 103 00:10:34,990 --> 00:10:39,370 he's also really adept at showing us all the things that thwart our action. 104 00:10:39,430 --> 00:10:47,140 Um, both when problems are too big or too intractable and have more parts of them than we realised. 105 00:10:47,650 --> 00:10:55,810 Um, and just in the guise of our own thinking, our own failure to confront or inability to confront things head on. 106 00:10:56,710 --> 00:10:58,480 So if we think of the metamorphosis. 107 00:10:59,560 --> 00:11:08,170 I mean, to me, that's one of the most vivid and remarkable portrayals of how we can be in a state of denial that we find in literature. 108 00:11:08,200 --> 00:11:16,660 You know, you you start with this really arresting, really shocking opening sentence, this famous line of a man waking up as some type of bug. 109 00:11:18,060 --> 00:11:23,040 And then for pages, we just watch him kind of, uh, you know, 110 00:11:23,040 --> 00:11:27,300 thinking his way around this without actually addressing it and how he's going to get to work. 111 00:11:27,360 --> 00:11:30,890 Yeah. Worrying about. I missed the train. Oh, he must have a cold. 112 00:11:30,900 --> 00:11:38,370 Uh, his job is so stressful and not, you know, confronting the fact that this changes everything. 113 00:11:39,060 --> 00:11:49,380 Um, and I think, again, it's part of what the text is doing is trying to show us our own thinking in order to sort of shock us out of it. 114 00:11:50,130 --> 00:11:52,470 That's a really radical way of of doing it. 115 00:11:53,040 --> 00:12:00,900 And it also is no accident, I think that that, uh kryger, when he wakes up, realises that he's slept through his alarm. 116 00:12:01,530 --> 00:12:05,099 So, you know, we can read this alarm clock in all sorts of ways. 117 00:12:05,100 --> 00:12:08,880 We could, you know, in some ways it's literally about the working conditions in modernity. 118 00:12:09,540 --> 00:12:17,250 Um, but it also captures really well this condition that I think a lot of us now find ourselves in, 119 00:12:18,090 --> 00:12:22,020 of having this nagging feeling that something has gone very wrong, 120 00:12:22,590 --> 00:12:28,800 um, that there's something we're not facing, that, uh, it'll soon be too late or that it's already too late. 121 00:12:29,520 --> 00:12:42,469 Um. I think that that atmosphere of anxiety and that feeling of a problem being to all 122 00:12:42,470 --> 00:12:47,270 encompassing to confront is something that the terms of that current context very strongly. 123 00:12:48,710 --> 00:12:53,300 You're reminding me that some, some of the climate protesters have, you know, banners and slogans, 124 00:12:53,300 --> 00:12:58,640 don't they, about it either being too late or it's not yet too late, but it soon will be. 125 00:12:58,660 --> 00:13:02,120 And this sort of temporality of the anxiety is really interesting. 126 00:13:02,450 --> 00:13:04,400 Um, so that's that's fascinating. 127 00:13:04,820 --> 00:13:12,950 Um, I mean, one of the things that strikes me about that is, is the sort of dual location of the problem, both without and within. 128 00:13:13,220 --> 00:13:16,370 Um, that seems to me to lend itself very much to Kafka. 129 00:13:16,500 --> 00:13:19,790 The simultaneous without and within. 130 00:13:19,820 --> 00:13:25,220 Does that make sense? Yeah. Do you mean like, within the world, outside our heads and in the world inside? 131 00:13:25,250 --> 00:13:28,639 Yes. Yeah. Um, yeah. I think that's spot on. 132 00:13:28,640 --> 00:13:34,870 And this kind of play of inside and outside is something I think is going on all the time in Kafka. 133 00:13:34,880 --> 00:13:45,490 So the. The I mean, on the one hand, something like metamorphosis as well as forward to an Academy is about disrupting inside, 134 00:13:45,490 --> 00:13:50,620 outside in the form of species boundaries. Um, and in that sense, again, you know, 135 00:13:50,620 --> 00:13:59,290 the to read The metamorphosis as an ecological text is is a great antidote to this nature writing idea because it's, 136 00:13:59,980 --> 00:14:08,430 you know, um, it's also gross and creepy. It's not a, it's not some type of charismatic or cute animal that Gregor has been turned into. 137 00:14:08,440 --> 00:14:18,850 It's, um, something that we even as we kind of condemn the behaviour of his family towards him, we can actually understand their revulsion. 138 00:14:18,910 --> 00:14:25,959 Um, it kind of gives you that creepy sensation that you might have at certain moments in, in an Attenborough documentary. 139 00:14:25,960 --> 00:14:34,330 Or, you know, if in the supposedly clean, safe human space of your home, you're confronted with some animal life that's not supposed to be there. 140 00:14:35,080 --> 00:14:43,630 Um, so, you know, if we think of ecology is partly about being disrupting those categories that we set up so that in ecology, you know, 141 00:14:43,900 --> 00:14:51,340 in true ecological thinking, there's really no such thing as a weed or like, how do you define what a weed is as opposed to a desirable flower? 142 00:14:51,970 --> 00:14:56,890 Um, it, it kind of, um, really. 143 00:14:57,920 --> 00:15:04,159 Makes that issue unavoidable for us, that type of thinking. So that's, I suppose, you know, a way of disrupting the boundaries. 144 00:15:04,160 --> 00:15:11,120 But you're right that then the, the problem in the world outside, um, 145 00:15:11,120 --> 00:15:18,790 being reflected in the world in your head or in your thinking processes, that's something that goes on very strongly. 146 00:15:18,800 --> 00:15:25,790 Yeah. And you can kind of, uh, it's certainly not writing that wants to offer us a solution per se. 147 00:15:25,930 --> 00:15:29,520 I think that's important to say. It's not writing that is. Mhm. 148 00:15:30,090 --> 00:15:38,440 Purpose driven or that kind of. Offers us a way out other than to maybe face things that we're not facing. 149 00:15:40,120 --> 00:15:45,490 And when you said it's sort of this zooming in and zooming out and scale, I mean, 150 00:15:45,580 --> 00:15:53,150 obviously at a very literal level, the creature they in metamorphosis, it's not clear of the scale. 151 00:15:53,170 --> 00:16:02,560 At one point, you know, this is a fully adult human, but later this is something that can crawl up the wall or can hide under it, sort of sofa. 152 00:16:02,890 --> 00:16:06,100 Um, and so but that's not, I think, quite what you mean. 153 00:16:06,100 --> 00:16:10,659 Is it by ambivalence of scale or disrupting scale? Um, it's it's related. 154 00:16:10,660 --> 00:16:11,620 I think so, yeah. You're right. 155 00:16:11,620 --> 00:16:19,330 We have also the father who changes size or seems to change size in relation to, um, Craig or which is something that crops up a lot in Kafka. 156 00:16:19,870 --> 00:16:27,909 Um, so I think, I mean, within, uh, thinking about about the climate and biodiversity crisis, 157 00:16:27,910 --> 00:16:33,520 that's something that comes up again and again as a problem for action that we can't seem to we 158 00:16:33,520 --> 00:16:38,650 can't seem to conceive of things on the appropriate scale that a problem that size with so many, 159 00:16:39,280 --> 00:16:42,340 um, components to it. Um. 160 00:16:45,420 --> 00:16:50,010 Sort of thwarts our ability to connect our daily lives to. 161 00:16:51,280 --> 00:16:57,430 You know what is now currently happening on the the Gold Coast in Africa, for instance, or the sort of, you know, 162 00:16:57,880 --> 00:17:04,120 the colonial history that it's caught up in the ways in which the, um, 163 00:17:04,870 --> 00:17:11,620 the problem unfolds on a global scale and is also, um, a problem of all sorts of. 164 00:17:12,600 --> 00:17:13,770 Political institution. 165 00:17:13,780 --> 00:17:24,510 You know, it's kind of a problem with with many extremely complex, um, material, social, political, cultural aspects and I think. 166 00:17:25,520 --> 00:17:30,680 Kafka's work, so maybe not so much The Metamorphosis, although I think it's connected to moving a scale there. 167 00:17:31,010 --> 00:17:38,389 But in other stories, such as so he's got a story called, um, The Great Wall of China or the building of the Great Wall of China by Bonacci. 168 00:17:38,390 --> 00:17:47,240 Decision. MOA that shows this, this kind of semi imagined, um, realm of China on this enormous scale. 169 00:17:47,240 --> 00:17:51,799 That's kind of I think part of what he's interested in is the is the size of this empire 170 00:17:51,800 --> 00:17:55,820 and the ways in which it would be impossible for anyone to have an overview of it. 171 00:17:55,820 --> 00:17:59,930 So it kind of, um, tells us over and over again how many, 172 00:18:00,680 --> 00:18:04,069 how many villages there are in each province and how many provinces there are in the whole thing, 173 00:18:04,070 --> 00:18:07,220 and how many people are in each village, and sort of, um, 174 00:18:08,090 --> 00:18:11,660 those that almost numerical type of thinking where it becomes too big for you to think about. 175 00:18:12,320 --> 00:18:16,430 Um, and again, even when we look at the, the protagonists of his novels, who. 176 00:18:17,360 --> 00:18:25,429 Always bite off more than they can chew. Who think they can confront the authority of the court or of the castle, and then find that this, 177 00:18:25,430 --> 00:18:30,260 um, this institution, this problem is just so much more complex than they realised. 178 00:18:31,040 --> 00:18:35,390 I think that's the sort of flip side of the action thing, is that it just. 179 00:18:36,680 --> 00:18:40,610 He shows us both. In the failures of our own thinking. 180 00:18:40,610 --> 00:18:53,470 How we. You know, struggle to take action, and also how the complexity of the world outside, um, makes that kind of impossible, how the individual um. 181 00:18:54,510 --> 00:19:00,480 Can't quite match up to all the forces that are sort of working on it and pitted against it in some way. 182 00:19:00,930 --> 00:19:05,510 Um, which sounds, I mean, a bit despairing. And I don't mean to be, you know, I think, uh, just precisely. 183 00:19:05,700 --> 00:19:07,290 Yeah. Just leave it. No, no, exactly. 184 00:19:07,300 --> 00:19:15,840 I suppose my question with my last question would be, then does that lead us to a kind of moment of existential and political despair? 185 00:19:16,190 --> 00:19:23,070 And I'm guessing not because cafcass has been very important to, for example, people behind the Iron Curtain or in totalitarian regimes, 186 00:19:23,220 --> 00:19:28,860 or does it inspire us in some way to look, I suppose, for a way to intervene? 187 00:19:30,360 --> 00:19:33,719 Um, you don't need to say it's my instinct. 188 00:19:33,720 --> 00:19:38,790 It's certainly I don't think it leads us to despair. I think part of that is because it's so humorous. 189 00:19:39,150 --> 00:19:44,460 I think that's really important to say with Kafka. He's really funny. And the type of. 190 00:19:45,610 --> 00:19:53,259 Humour that his work set up in the face of seemingly, uh, you know, unbeatable odds is important. 191 00:19:53,260 --> 00:19:55,600 And I think that would be an important part of why it, um, 192 00:19:56,530 --> 00:20:03,100 continued to inspire people behind the Iron Curtain or in all sorts of contexts of, um, of kind of repression and. 193 00:20:04,740 --> 00:20:15,440 Why it can help us face. Problems like the climate and biodiversity crises with in a serious way, but also one that, 194 00:20:16,070 --> 00:20:21,020 you know, the kind of zooms far enough out that the absurdity becomes clear. 195 00:20:21,200 --> 00:20:28,070 That sounds sort of flippant to say, but it feels like that's maybe the only appropriate response to, uh, to something on that scale. 196 00:20:28,760 --> 00:20:35,629 And I do think that that maybe it's in this communion or this interaction or symbiosis 197 00:20:35,630 --> 00:20:39,590 between the text and the reader that he draws our attention to and again and again, 198 00:20:40,460 --> 00:20:49,400 that there has to be some type of hope, maybe not of of a very effective intervention or maybe a recognition that there might be, 199 00:20:49,640 --> 00:20:53,990 um, nothing in the end that we can by ourselves do. 200 00:20:54,290 --> 00:20:58,999 But then I suppose, I mean, part of part of the project that's going on in Oxford at the moment is also about Kafka and community. 201 00:20:59,000 --> 00:21:04,550 So maybe that's an interesting angle on it that I haven't thought enough about how those, you know, 202 00:21:05,060 --> 00:21:14,600 the interaction between text and reader that affects us on an individual level could lead us to some form of, um, you know, collective action. 203 00:21:14,600 --> 00:21:22,250 Maybe that's something that's not 100% there in the texts, but that is a direction that's hinted at that we could maybe take this in. 204 00:21:23,570 --> 00:21:26,600 That sounds really hopeful. Thank you very much. Con me. 205 00:21:26,600 --> 00:21:27,590 Speak to you. Thanks for having me.