1 00:00:15,800 --> 00:00:21,710 Right. Hello, everybody. Um, welcome. Um, very pleased to welcome you here today for this event. 2 00:00:22,280 --> 00:00:28,100 Uh, one of the three parts of the humanities response to Oxford reads Kafka 2024. 3 00:00:28,730 --> 00:00:33,709 Um, one word of housekeeping. Um, in about ten minutes, the front doors of the Western will be shut. 4 00:00:33,710 --> 00:00:40,720 Um, the facilities are still open. Um, uh, and then anybody wanting to leave would have to go out to the Parks Road, uh, 5 00:00:40,730 --> 00:00:43,969 entrance at the side, but you'll be directed at the end, so don't worry about that. 6 00:00:43,970 --> 00:00:52,640 But just anybody that needs to leave early. Um, and let me welcome you then to hunger, artistry, Kafka and the Art of starvation. 7 00:00:53,150 --> 00:00:58,580 Um, in Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I noticed some of you were picking up on the way in, 8 00:00:58,580 --> 00:01:06,380 and some of you already have, um, Gregor, uh, turned into an insect and unable to eat familiar food. 9 00:01:07,070 --> 00:01:08,990 Um, he is music. 10 00:01:09,740 --> 00:01:20,299 And he glimpses the way rotation to the unknown nourishment he longed for after his emaciated body is disposed of at the end of the story, 11 00:01:20,300 --> 00:01:25,910 his stretcher, his sister stretches her young body into the sun full of life and energy. 12 00:01:26,910 --> 00:01:32,190 This is not the only story in which Kafka deals powerfully with hunger, art and change. 13 00:01:33,120 --> 00:01:42,630 The same motifs appear in his 1922 story The Artist, taken up into the collection of stories of the same name in 1924. 14 00:01:43,530 --> 00:01:47,430 It takes its cue from the exhibition fosters, 15 00:01:47,670 --> 00:01:54,870 who until the early years of the 20th century would starve themselves for the entertainment of paying audiences, 16 00:01:54,990 --> 00:01:59,130 and it was really a kind of show business in fairground circuses, 17 00:01:59,340 --> 00:02:10,620 entertainment with, uh, excellent music, counting of the days and watches who would scrutinise to make sure that the one starving hadn't secretly, 18 00:02:10,650 --> 00:02:15,570 uh, eat mistakes happened in 1886, um, to one of the most famous ones. 19 00:02:15,870 --> 00:02:20,969 Um, and ritual weighing and measuring in Kafka story. 20 00:02:20,970 --> 00:02:26,100 After the demise of Kafka's Hunger artist, long after people have forgotten about him, 21 00:02:26,700 --> 00:02:31,710 his filthy cage at the back of the circus is refurbished with a panther. 22 00:02:32,580 --> 00:02:40,080 The keepers bring you the food it relished, and it is filled with a brilliant, 23 00:02:40,080 --> 00:02:48,600 troubling energy and freedom that fascinates all the onlookers and has been read by some as a presentiment of a kind of ugly future. 24 00:02:48,600 --> 00:02:50,730 Vitalism, fascism even. 25 00:02:53,010 --> 00:03:00,149 It seemed to me that this story, like The Metamorphosis, which is the centre of our project this year, and a report to an academy, 26 00:03:00,150 --> 00:03:09,690 the story of an ape apes people to become human and to escape the circus, which we staged a couple of weeks ago here at the old fire station. 27 00:03:09,900 --> 00:03:13,170 All of these are stories of transformation. 28 00:03:13,800 --> 00:03:19,440 All of them question what it is to be human, and all of them are essentially about art. 29 00:03:20,670 --> 00:03:25,170 This story, a younger artist has surprisingly, perhaps given its slightly static nature, 30 00:03:25,170 --> 00:03:31,920 we might talk about that being translated into theatre comic for film animation. 31 00:03:32,160 --> 00:03:39,630 I think we've got a clip here. These are the, uh, from the animation by Tom Gibbons, 2002, which gave us our poster for this event. 32 00:03:40,440 --> 00:03:48,660 Um, and a new ballet which has been commissioned as part of the Oxford Kafka celebrations and which we will hear about more about in a minute. 33 00:03:49,140 --> 00:03:58,020 It's also inspired writers, academics, artists across the world to explore the politics and art of starvation in the 20th century and beyond. 34 00:03:58,710 --> 00:04:04,140 Now, a good reason to discuss it then, and I'm delighted to be able to do that here today with Peter Boxall, 35 00:04:04,290 --> 00:04:09,029 Goldsmiths chair of English, based at New College. Alice Moodie, based at Bard College. 36 00:04:09,030 --> 00:04:17,950 I'm particularly delighted to welcome here Ahere, um, author of the Art of Hunger Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism in 2018, 37 00:04:17,970 --> 00:04:23,220 but also working, I saw on the literature of world hunger, um, and more recent project. 38 00:04:24,450 --> 00:04:27,779 I'm Kim Mukherjee, professor of English and World Literature based at Wadham. 39 00:04:27,780 --> 00:04:35,160 Also dealt with Kafka in her first book, Aesthetic Hysteria The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama, 40 00:04:35,700 --> 00:04:41,130 2007, and Mandip Peters, author of books on dancing, modernist literature, 41 00:04:41,490 --> 00:04:47,610 and embodied cognition in literature and Thought, editorials, Bodies and Abilities in Culture, literature, 42 00:04:47,610 --> 00:04:54,360 and the Arts, and he's also part of the HRC funded Kafka's Transformative Communities Project. 43 00:04:54,870 --> 00:04:59,939 Um, put on the exhibition that you might some of you might have seen, um, next to um, 44 00:04:59,940 --> 00:05:06,629 but has also been working with art of Arthur Pitzer and Ed Watson on a new Ballet of Hunger artist, 45 00:05:06,630 --> 00:05:09,960 which will premiere next week in Oxford Fire Station. 46 00:05:10,800 --> 00:05:15,600 So, um, I'm going to the way it's going to work is each of our guests are going to talk 47 00:05:15,600 --> 00:05:18,570 a little about something that particularly fascinates them about this story, 48 00:05:18,660 --> 00:05:23,220 and then we'll have a bit of a conversation, and then it will open up to questions, which I hope you'll have. 49 00:05:23,610 --> 00:05:29,160 Um, so thankfully, without more ado, you don't want to hear from me. Yes, I, uh. 50 00:05:29,460 --> 00:05:33,730 Yeah. Okay. Well, mine just, I was we wanted very much to talk about the text. 51 00:05:33,760 --> 00:05:38,610 Make sure that the text was there in mind, that you've been poring over it in the last weeks and months. 52 00:05:38,620 --> 00:05:42,240 Uh, as part of the preparations for the ballet, I wondered if you could tell us. 53 00:05:42,270 --> 00:05:46,200 You know, what is so special about this Kafka text? I mean, yeah. 54 00:05:46,200 --> 00:05:49,079 So I'm I'm just going to give you a short summary, 55 00:05:49,080 --> 00:05:56,159 and I hope what's special about it comes comes true through the I mean, it's it's very much a story of decline. 56 00:05:56,160 --> 00:06:05,160 The first sentence in George Crick's, uh, translation is in recent decades, interest in hungry artists has greatly diminished. 57 00:06:05,580 --> 00:06:12,959 It starts off with, uh, with the mom and dad that are still interest and attention to hunger. 58 00:06:12,960 --> 00:06:20,310 Archer's archer's artistry. A hunger artist sits in a cage for 40 days and doesn't eat. 59 00:06:20,640 --> 00:06:28,290 And people are. And they're travelling around. He's travelling around Europe with an impresario, and in different cities he will be 40 days. 60 00:06:28,680 --> 00:06:31,980 Um, there are and people will be fascinated. 61 00:06:32,370 --> 00:06:37,800 So the narrative tells us, uh, there will watch him for hours, days, even on ads. 62 00:06:38,160 --> 00:06:42,300 Um, and at the end of the 40 days, there will be a big ceremony. 63 00:06:42,570 --> 00:06:48,030 The cage will be lined with flowers to be a military band playing to a young women 64 00:06:48,030 --> 00:06:54,060 from the city will be very excited to be allowed to carry him out of the cage. 65 00:06:54,360 --> 00:07:00,150 Um, he will be measured and the measurements will be shouted at the audience. 66 00:07:00,480 --> 00:07:05,940 Um, and then he will sit down, uh, for supper and a toast will be given. 67 00:07:06,480 --> 00:07:14,570 Despite all this success, um, there are two main frustrations that the hunger artist has about his artistry. 68 00:07:14,580 --> 00:07:19,890 One is that people just don't believe that he doesn't eat for 40 days. 69 00:07:20,280 --> 00:07:24,420 Um, there are watchers at nights, butchers funnily. 70 00:07:24,750 --> 00:07:35,250 Um, and and they sometimes they will watch him closely, but most of the time they will actually want to give him some space to actually eat. 71 00:07:35,250 --> 00:07:41,520 But that's his frustration that he wants. He wants to make sure people believe what he's doing. 72 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:49,680 Um, and his second frustration is that he thinks it comes easy to him, and he thinks he can go on much longer than 40 days. 73 00:07:49,890 --> 00:07:58,080 But his impresario, who mainly thinks that people won't pay attention for that long, um, says, no, you have to stop at 40 days. 74 00:07:58,080 --> 00:08:01,620 And sometimes he gets very aggressive, rattles the cage. 75 00:08:01,920 --> 00:08:06,719 Um, and that's for them. Desire is a sign that he's getting weaker. 76 00:08:06,720 --> 00:08:15,960 Finally, and ironically, um, but after a while, the test of audiences changed and The Hunger artist was no longer popular. 77 00:08:16,290 --> 00:08:23,040 So he departs ways with his impresario and signs a contract contract with circus, 78 00:08:23,340 --> 00:08:31,410 where he's put somewhere in the cage and people pass him on on the way to more exciting things such as animals. 79 00:08:31,860 --> 00:08:36,360 Um, and sometimes people will still stop in front of the cage like a man. 80 00:08:36,510 --> 00:08:43,170 All the father who tells his kids of the hey days of, uh, hunger artistry and says, 81 00:08:43,470 --> 00:08:48,210 you know, and tells him, well, you know, when this was still a great art. 82 00:08:48,600 --> 00:08:58,589 Um, it looked much better. Um, basically, um, and then at the end, uh, the some supervisors come to the cage and think, why is this cage empty? 83 00:08:58,590 --> 00:09:03,300 They poke a bit around and find the hunger artist between the straw. 84 00:09:03,840 --> 00:09:07,799 Um, and you ask him why, when will you stop starving? 85 00:09:07,800 --> 00:09:12,060 Because he's actually quite happy there. Because he can starve himself for morning, for today. 86 00:09:12,060 --> 00:09:15,930 So for his sense of artistry, it's also quite good. 87 00:09:16,350 --> 00:09:22,510 And he says, um. His response is that he just wanted to be admired. 88 00:09:22,750 --> 00:09:27,250 And then I say, but. But we do admire you. And he says, well, you shouldn't actually. 89 00:09:27,430 --> 00:09:34,420 Because if I had found food that I liked, um, I wouldn't have been the artist that I am. 90 00:09:35,540 --> 00:09:42,799 And so those are his dying words. And then he gets replaced by a panther, whom, as you said, is impressive. 91 00:09:42,800 --> 00:09:45,820 Vital exudes power. And spell bond. 92 00:09:46,280 --> 00:09:49,400 Spell binds. Um, the audience knew. 93 00:09:50,000 --> 00:09:58,160 So that's kind of their summary. And this lots I think about the tension, about popular culture, but the changing of of, um. 94 00:09:59,130 --> 00:10:04,630 Moods of audiences, of pomp and circumstance, of what is. 95 00:10:04,650 --> 00:10:08,490 What is the artistry in hunger, artistry? 96 00:10:09,180 --> 00:10:12,330 And what's. What's the role of the impresario? 97 00:10:14,330 --> 00:10:19,240 Great questions for Sol. Um, but Anki um, I think it's picking up from that. 98 00:10:19,250 --> 00:10:21,770 What is it then about this text which we've just heard about, 99 00:10:21,770 --> 00:10:29,270 which means that it's something that's been taken up so often, uh, by artists, writers, thinkers since. 100 00:10:31,120 --> 00:10:38,990 Thank you. Years ago, when a brilliant young scholar sought out my supervision to read for a defence on the aesthetics of hunger. 101 00:10:40,440 --> 00:10:47,700 I remember telling her that I'd grown up well-fed in the midst of the poverty and food crises of the Indian subcontinent, 102 00:10:48,390 --> 00:10:52,500 so hunger could never be just a concept metaphor for me. 103 00:10:53,370 --> 00:10:58,290 I urged her to keep that confusion of the literal and figurative in mind, 104 00:10:58,290 --> 00:11:03,689 as she traced the trope from modernism to engagement with embodiment to couture starvation. 105 00:11:03,690 --> 00:11:06,450 Artists in a BuzzFeed South Africa. 106 00:11:07,570 --> 00:11:13,899 Today there is a public exhibition of hunger unfolding in real time, the spectacle of starvation as not an outcome, 107 00:11:13,900 --> 00:11:18,970 but a weapon of war created by the blockade of food and humanitarian aid. 108 00:11:19,510 --> 00:11:28,000 And we are the mindless circus goers in Kafka's A Hunger Artist, with a callous disregard of this unfed and disposed body. 109 00:11:28,660 --> 00:11:32,050 In Rafah, where 1.5 million people have sought shelter. 110 00:11:32,590 --> 00:11:36,880 Men, women and children live hour to hour with malnutrition and starvation. 111 00:11:37,420 --> 00:11:42,340 The entire population of Gaza faces high levels of acute food insecurity. 112 00:11:43,000 --> 00:11:47,500 The IPC, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification rating for Gaza, 113 00:11:47,500 --> 00:11:54,940 is phase three crisis for half the population, and phase five, which is catastrophe and famine for the other half. 114 00:11:55,540 --> 00:12:03,190 A report last month said people in northern Gaza have been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories a day, 115 00:12:03,790 --> 00:12:07,180 less than a 400 gram can of fava beans. 116 00:12:07,720 --> 00:12:13,930 Children are eating animal feed and white wild plants when not dying of starvation. 117 00:12:16,470 --> 00:12:21,200 I have this definition of hunger in mind when I turn to the hunger artist again. 118 00:12:21,210 --> 00:12:28,650 And the first time. First thing I noticed when I read the short story again was that Kafka is using the word hungering, not fasting. 119 00:12:29,310 --> 00:12:33,060 Fasting is abstinence. Hungering is a hankering, a strife. 120 00:12:33,540 --> 00:12:36,959 Peter Waldeck, treating the short story as a study in masochism, 121 00:12:36,960 --> 00:12:42,960 had famously said that the nourishment that the hunger artist seeks is ultimately hunger itself. 122 00:12:43,620 --> 00:12:51,770 Hunger is practice, as Hamsun says in his 1890 novel, A Poetic Force that Makes Me Hunger. 123 00:12:51,780 --> 00:12:59,730 Artistry in Kafka's A Hunger Artist as the indissoluble, of course, from hunger work, the labour that goes into an artistic performance. 124 00:13:00,150 --> 00:13:07,500 And herein lies its trenchant contradiction the instinct to eat is but the blind necessity to live. 125 00:13:07,770 --> 00:13:13,320 But the hunger artist wants to make a living. Through this contract with death. 126 00:13:14,480 --> 00:13:22,610 Hunger. Artists were professional fasters. As Karen has already said, fixtures in late 19th century and early 20th century freak shows and spectacle. 127 00:13:23,000 --> 00:13:31,310 In his wonderful book, The Land of the hunger artists Augustin Near-tum gallant sees hunger artists like the one portrayed in Kafka's short story, 128 00:13:31,670 --> 00:13:40,579 acting as mediators between the human body and the social body, a sight, albeit unstable, of the co-production of knowledge on hunger, 129 00:13:40,580 --> 00:13:49,819 fasting, in addition, and starvation hungry artists in Europe were it inherent, performing in various phases of cages, theatres, 130 00:13:49,820 --> 00:13:59,240 exhibitions, public parks, even streets, and occasionally sealed in the respiration calorimeter metres of physiology laboratories. 131 00:13:59,840 --> 00:14:03,170 As medical orthodoxy is tried to make sense of the phenomenon, 132 00:14:03,410 --> 00:14:11,960 the hungering body synchronising the possible and the impossible in a disappearing borderline was in itself a heterodoxy. 133 00:14:12,650 --> 00:14:18,709 Near to gallon describes hunger artistry as a holistic resistance to reductionist mechanical 134 00:14:18,710 --> 00:14:23,720 understandings of the human body and a form of self surveillance and self-discipline. 135 00:14:25,240 --> 00:14:28,690 That's because hunger, hunger, Ortiz says. I have to hunger. 136 00:14:28,700 --> 00:14:36,759 I cannot do otherwise. In the text, this is related to his deathbed confession that I could not find the food that was to my taste, 137 00:14:36,760 --> 00:14:42,550 which is a partial cancellation of the claims of artistic talent and predilection. 138 00:14:43,510 --> 00:14:51,280 He is a figure of dispossession, and questions of free will and moral choice are complicated in the way the hunger labour is managed. 139 00:14:51,940 --> 00:14:55,780 The hunger artist is cajoled and coerced in his practice of the business, 140 00:14:56,110 --> 00:15:01,569 in his practice by the business impresario accompanies him with his reinforcing of the 141 00:15:01,570 --> 00:15:06,340 40 day duration of the spectacle and by the very limitations of urban entertainment. 142 00:15:06,760 --> 00:15:15,160 The hunger artist has no control over the cultural commodification of the fast or its ending, which is precipitate in The Hunger artists opinion. 143 00:15:15,940 --> 00:15:20,019 So alienated is he made a freak from hunger. 144 00:15:20,020 --> 00:15:22,000 I'm quoting, not Hamsun again, 145 00:15:22,390 --> 00:15:29,920 that the human solicitous ness the watchmen demonstrate these butcher wardens elected by the public to make sure the hunger artist doesn't cheat. 146 00:15:30,220 --> 00:15:33,400 That solicitous ness makes the hunger artist melancholy. 147 00:15:34,410 --> 00:15:43,050 His autonomous performance thrives only when commodified and rendered fully visible by punters with electric flashlights. 148 00:15:44,510 --> 00:15:52,250 When in the circus, the Hunger artist breaks free from civic surveillance and public visibility and is no longer cognisant of time, 149 00:15:52,550 --> 00:15:58,490 symbolised by the striking of the clock, which was the only piece of furniture in his former cage. 150 00:15:58,790 --> 00:16:08,180 This killed him. But in closing, I want to dwell on the affect of the hunger artist labouring honestly at his own materialisation. 151 00:16:09,050 --> 00:16:13,700 In Anthony Maze of Realism, Frederick Jamison compared the differential patterns, 152 00:16:13,970 --> 00:16:18,620 the increase or diminution of intensity associated with affect to art. 153 00:16:19,160 --> 00:16:25,460 The compositional technique that's Wagnerian chromaticism, with its waxing and waning of the scale, 154 00:16:25,810 --> 00:16:29,330 could be called the harmonic vocabulary of effect, he says. 155 00:16:29,630 --> 00:16:31,940 Similarly, Monet's Impressionism, 156 00:16:32,240 --> 00:16:41,870 which momentarily integrates the temporal succession of the shades of passing light on cathedrals into a homogeneity and a temporal unity, 157 00:16:42,470 --> 00:16:46,850 is a handy illustration of the way bodily effect may be orchestrated. 158 00:16:46,850 --> 00:16:53,059 This is also Jameson effect can just as well be about dismemberment and bodily undoing. 159 00:16:53,060 --> 00:16:59,060 As Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Sigsworth, editors of the Aphex theory Reader, 160 00:16:59,390 --> 00:17:06,020 approvingly cite an anecdote where the anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour asked his conference audience, 161 00:17:06,440 --> 00:17:10,460 asked his conference audience to write down the antonym of the word body. 162 00:17:11,540 --> 00:17:17,150 As for answers he received, the most curious to him were unaffected and death. 163 00:17:18,110 --> 00:17:23,600 It's the opposite of a body is dead and there is no life apart from the body. 164 00:17:23,610 --> 00:17:31,909 Then to have a body is to learn to be affected effectuated by time, by business impresarios, by the thronging masses. 165 00:17:31,910 --> 00:17:40,729 At a circus that's quite as likely to have read about Claude Seurat, The Human Skeleton and Giovanni Sochi, the, um, professional, 166 00:17:40,730 --> 00:17:49,250 faster artists who became increasingly deranged in their insistence on fasting for impossible lengths of time in Kafka's clothes. 167 00:17:49,250 --> 00:17:58,310 Mark Anderson has written about Kafka's enthusiasm for burlesque and circus entertainments in Prague, and in the body as an aesthetic surface. 168 00:18:00,030 --> 00:18:09,090 In a younger artist, Kafka confronts the possibility of organic self production without nutrition, companionship, or formal definition. 169 00:18:09,480 --> 00:18:12,690 And here in, I think, lies the secret to its longevity. 170 00:18:13,820 --> 00:18:21,410 Kafka immortalised in a younger artist, the work of being an impediment on the way to the menagerie. 171 00:18:21,680 --> 00:18:34,540 Thank you. Um, your confusion on the body there, I think, leads very nicely, nicely into Peter's thoughts, 172 00:18:34,540 --> 00:18:40,660 which were very much about bodily illness and the animal and questioning the limits of the human, I think. 173 00:18:41,350 --> 00:18:48,490 Yeah. And and your introduction. Sort of touches on where I'm where I'm right starting off from, 174 00:18:48,850 --> 00:18:59,260 which is to think about the hunger artist and report to an academy together, partly because they're both being formed in Oxford this month, 175 00:18:59,980 --> 00:19:03,850 um, and partly because they are both reflections, I think, 176 00:19:03,850 --> 00:19:11,090 on this condition that anchors just talked about so eloquently of what it is to be embodied. 177 00:19:11,110 --> 00:19:18,880 Um, and thinking about what it is to be embodied as it relates to being a human or a non-human animal. 178 00:19:18,910 --> 00:19:22,390 One of Kafka's sexual concerns. Um. 179 00:19:23,330 --> 00:19:27,559 And thinking about report to the Academy. I don't know how many of us have recently read a report to an academy, 180 00:19:27,560 --> 00:19:33,950 but thinking about the report alongside Hunger Artist might be to think about to. 181 00:19:34,320 --> 00:19:37,970 So is it do something quite opposite to one another? 182 00:19:38,150 --> 00:19:46,940 Um, it may be that one is about a man becoming an animal, and the other is about an animal becoming a man. 183 00:19:47,060 --> 00:19:57,710 Um, the ape, as many of us will know in report to an academy, forces himself to become human against all his instincts and inclinations, 184 00:19:57,920 --> 00:20:08,060 his desperate to remain an ape, but he his ferocious with himself in insisting that he should become human for strategic reasons. 185 00:20:08,590 --> 00:20:16,370 There's a line which really sticks out to me in this story, where the ape says this one stands over oneself with a whip. 186 00:20:16,880 --> 00:20:20,660 One flays oneself at the slightest opposition. 187 00:20:21,020 --> 00:20:24,260 So my ape nature flowed out of me. 188 00:20:24,890 --> 00:20:30,000 Um. Yeah. The ape forcing himself no longer to be an ape. 189 00:20:30,270 --> 00:20:35,340 And that rhymes for me with what happens. We've already touched on this a couple of times. 190 00:20:35,760 --> 00:20:44,580 What happens at the end of A Hunger Artist? Uh, when the hunger artist on his death is replaced by the Panther? 191 00:20:44,910 --> 00:20:51,150 And this line rhymes with the whip line for me, at the end of the of a hungry artist, we get this line. 192 00:20:51,540 --> 00:20:54,540 He, the panther, seemed not even to miss his freedom. 193 00:20:55,140 --> 00:21:00,990 His noble body furnished almost a bursting point with all it needed. 194 00:21:01,500 --> 00:21:08,490 Seemed to carry freedom around with it to somewhere in its jewels it seemed to lurk. 195 00:21:09,000 --> 00:21:13,260 And the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat. 196 00:21:13,740 --> 00:21:18,120 But for onlookers it was not easy to stand. The shock of it is something. 197 00:21:19,760 --> 00:21:23,120 Um. So a hunger artist replaces a human with an animal. 198 00:21:23,420 --> 00:21:26,360 Report to an academy. Replaces an animal with a human. 199 00:21:26,720 --> 00:21:34,160 But if this looks like an opposition, I think in fact, it is not so because both stories turn around a zone. 200 00:21:34,430 --> 00:21:42,260 I think that Kafka reaches towards, in his work, a zone of of non-being that he makes briefly thinkable, 201 00:21:42,920 --> 00:21:49,520 and which is neither human nor animal, which does not belong to any typography or regimes of being. 202 00:21:50,030 --> 00:21:52,860 But it's one of the central contradictions of Kafka's work. 203 00:21:52,880 --> 00:22:00,380 I think that this approach to non-being is conducted through his depiction of a brute materiality, 204 00:22:00,380 --> 00:22:07,450 the brute materiality of the body and of the forces that bear down on us as a consequence of being embodied, 205 00:22:07,460 --> 00:22:14,210 that anchors just thought about in relation to Raffa. The special gift of his short fiction in particular, 206 00:22:14,390 --> 00:22:23,780 is to give an almost unbearably intense expression to the fact that being in a body, uh, exposes us to forms of radical unfreedom. 207 00:22:24,650 --> 00:22:32,900 Kafka's creatures learn their unfreedom in their body, and to read Kafka is to feel this unfreedom in our own body. 208 00:22:33,440 --> 00:22:38,780 There is no other writer. I don't think it gives such unmediated expression to this kind of unfreedom. 209 00:22:39,410 --> 00:22:43,640 But there is. And this is what I hope we might discuss a bit today. 210 00:22:43,820 --> 00:22:52,040 A hinge in Kafka's writing, there is a hinge between the revelation of unfreedom that is native to embodiment, 211 00:22:52,490 --> 00:22:59,420 and a kind of release from that condition that is crucially part of the same movement in The Hunger Artist. 212 00:22:59,630 --> 00:23:06,230 This is the sense that fasting is at once an approach to the most intense experience of the body, 213 00:23:06,710 --> 00:23:11,870 and a release from that experience in the most difficult imaginable way. 214 00:23:13,050 --> 00:23:19,200 Fasting and and the mere translation I have translates it as fasting, not hungering, which is a really interesting distinction. 215 00:23:19,530 --> 00:23:31,530 Fasting in this story brings us to some buried junction where the where we see the exposed, the bare place where striving consciousness is fastened, 216 00:23:31,530 --> 00:23:39,180 in Yeats's incredibly grim phrase, to a dying animal consciousness fastened to a dying animal. 217 00:23:39,600 --> 00:23:45,540 Fasting exposes that place. But in a hunger artist, fasting is not only a route towards death, 218 00:23:46,080 --> 00:23:53,820 a kind of negative action in which the biopolitical and socio economic conditions of our survival are laid bare. 219 00:23:54,390 --> 00:24:02,040 It's also a positive action, a kind of inspired artistic activity in which the mind frees itself from 220 00:24:02,040 --> 00:24:07,050 available regimes of being through an approach to their underlying conditions. 221 00:24:07,530 --> 00:24:10,140 This is what the ape feels in report to an Academy, 222 00:24:10,320 --> 00:24:17,430 when he sees that his release from imprisonment is to be found by freeing himself from the basic conditions of his own nature. 223 00:24:18,430 --> 00:24:27,670 But when the ape is caught by the zookeeper, harking back and confined in its tiny cage, the confinement is a reduction also to his bare life. 224 00:24:27,880 --> 00:24:31,959 As an ape, he feels, he says, as he languishes in his cage. 225 00:24:31,960 --> 00:24:37,090 And this is a quote over and above it all, only the one feeling no way out. 226 00:24:37,420 --> 00:24:42,670 As far as hugging back was concerned, the ape thinks the place for apes was in a cage. 227 00:24:42,850 --> 00:24:51,520 Well, then I have to stop being an ape. A fine, clear train of thought which I must have constructed somehow with my belly. 228 00:24:51,880 --> 00:25:00,220 Since apes think with their bellies, it's this fine, clear train of thought that takes the ape past his own nature, 229 00:25:00,580 --> 00:25:03,760 that grants him a way out of the cage of species being. 230 00:25:04,480 --> 00:25:08,710 And it's this same train of thought we find in The Hunger Artist. 231 00:25:09,070 --> 00:25:14,500 This train of thought is a kind of fasting which takes him past the limits of embodiment, 232 00:25:14,770 --> 00:25:23,050 passed the threshold between life and death into some unnamed realm that is the space of Kafka's fiction. 233 00:25:23,590 --> 00:25:31,630 The artist feels he can fast without limit, because fasting does not lead only to death is not simply a negative route towards intention, 234 00:25:31,840 --> 00:25:40,810 but is also a kind of literary thinking which leads to a way out, a way past the place where life is bound to death. 235 00:25:41,500 --> 00:25:46,750 The hunger artist longs for what he calls a, quote, performance beyond human imagination, 236 00:25:46,960 --> 00:25:51,790 because he felt there were no limits to his capacity for fasting. 237 00:25:52,480 --> 00:25:59,049 The hunger artist can fast until he reaches a way out, so that the approach to death leads into the hinge. 238 00:25:59,050 --> 00:26:08,980 In Kafka's work, where a crushing encounter with the death leanness of being meets with a thin, clear exit from its rigour. 239 00:26:09,850 --> 00:26:18,610 Everything that happens in Kafka's writing, I think, and in the writing that follows in his spirit, is conditioned by that hinge that Kafka in place, 240 00:26:18,820 --> 00:26:29,650 where subjection to the grotesquerie of being meets with an exemption from those grotesque, is in a fine, clear line of literary thought. 241 00:26:38,660 --> 00:26:45,680 Thank you very much. Um, and in a sense, coming to those that just worked so well together, those two thoughts. 242 00:26:45,680 --> 00:26:48,799 But we want we're coming back to hunger, which you raised. Thank you as well. 243 00:26:48,800 --> 00:26:55,970 And I know, Alice, um, uh, talking about the art of hungering or fasting, um, 244 00:26:56,300 --> 00:27:01,730 in the context of real world hunger becomes actually quite uncomfortable, I think. 245 00:27:01,970 --> 00:27:08,500 And I wondered if you could shed some light on on that. I'm not 100% sure if that's what I'm doing. 246 00:27:08,650 --> 00:27:12,190 I'm sorry about my voice as well. I had lost it last week. 247 00:27:13,900 --> 00:27:20,770 Okay. Um, so what I, what I wanted to do today was to think about what we learned from. 248 00:27:20,770 --> 00:27:27,790 About hunger, from a hunger artist. Um, I think in some ways, you know, this feels like a very idiosyncratic story. 249 00:27:27,790 --> 00:27:31,750 It feels like something that would be extremely hard to generalise out of and from. 250 00:27:32,170 --> 00:27:35,590 Um, and I guess to kind of like, pre-empt where I'm going. 251 00:27:35,590 --> 00:27:39,760 I think to some extent that's part of what, um, hunger, 252 00:27:39,850 --> 00:27:45,340 what Kafka is kind of thinking about in terms of how hunger functions and what hunger might be. 253 00:27:45,790 --> 00:27:55,869 Um, but in very broad terms, uh, what I'm going to try and do here today is suggest a few ways that, um, Kafka's thinking about hunger, uh, 254 00:27:55,870 --> 00:27:58,120 what what he kind of takes hunger to be, 255 00:27:58,120 --> 00:28:04,509 and then think about how the way that he's thinking about them might help us to think about some of these more real world examples, 256 00:28:04,510 --> 00:28:08,169 whether, um, and, and, you know, I think when I first wrote this paper, 257 00:28:08,170 --> 00:28:15,879 I was predominantly thinking about forms of self starvation, eating disorders, hunger strikes, um, these kinds of things. 258 00:28:15,880 --> 00:28:20,350 But as my colleagues have been talking, I've also been thinking actually about, you know, 259 00:28:20,350 --> 00:28:27,010 RAF or about, um, other forms of hunger that are not necessarily well, and wondering a little, 260 00:28:27,220 --> 00:28:32,980 actually, how hard and fast I want to hold that distinction, which I have tended to hold to, 261 00:28:32,980 --> 00:28:36,130 partly because it's structured and can work in pretty significant ways. 262 00:28:37,470 --> 00:28:43,000 Um, so I want to suggest that for Kafka, hunger is associated with kind of three things. 263 00:28:43,020 --> 00:28:49,770 Not exclusively by any stretch. Um, he's thinking about hunger as a form of passivity, 264 00:28:50,070 --> 00:28:58,590 hunger as something that is fundamentally unobservable and hunger that entails sudden, uh, let's say, problems for sociality. 265 00:28:59,460 --> 00:29:05,280 Um, I'm going to suggest as we go along that many of these are complicated in the way Kafka himself talks about. 266 00:29:06,240 --> 00:29:13,860 Um, but most importantly, I think that these if we think about hunger in these ways, we can learn things that we can then apply elsewhere to first. 267 00:29:14,010 --> 00:29:19,889 I think Kafka's Hunger artist is passive in surprising ways and in some ways. 268 00:29:19,890 --> 00:29:25,740 You know, for those who reading doesn't get beyond the first few pages, one might be surprised by this fact. 269 00:29:26,050 --> 00:29:30,630 Uh, well, in this story, I think we're encouraged to read the hunger out as fast as a kind of heroic feat, 270 00:29:30,900 --> 00:29:35,729 an act of endurance and abstinence that positions him as a figure of admiration. 271 00:29:35,730 --> 00:29:40,080 And that's suddenly how he wants to be seen in the opening, in his kind of like heyday. 272 00:29:40,680 --> 00:29:47,970 Um, but of course, as we've heard, the conclusion of this story makes this framing entirely untenable. 273 00:29:48,210 --> 00:29:52,410 On his deathbed, he insists that we're not to admire him or his fast. 274 00:29:52,740 --> 00:29:56,090 Um, because it's a result simply, um. 275 00:29:56,100 --> 00:29:59,850 And I've always been fascinated by this, by a lack of taste. 276 00:29:59,850 --> 00:30:03,510 The fact that he just couldn't find anything that he wanted to eat. 277 00:30:03,840 --> 00:30:05,970 Um, and he says if he had, he would have just. 278 00:30:06,010 --> 00:30:11,610 I've been reading two different translations, and I don't have precise quotes at anymore from either of them. 279 00:30:11,610 --> 00:30:17,340 But effectively, you know, he would have just stuffed it all down his face and been as happy as everyone else. 280 00:30:17,670 --> 00:30:26,639 Um, so the hunger that is hunger then arises, not as we might be inclined to assume when we're thinking about modes of self starvation, 281 00:30:26,640 --> 00:30:33,450 in particular from an act of, well, but surprisingly, from a kind of absence of desire, 282 00:30:33,780 --> 00:30:37,859 which I think entails a kind of a strange attenuation of subjectivity. 283 00:30:37,860 --> 00:30:42,450 And then, most interestingly to me, a kind of an evacuation of agency. 284 00:30:42,870 --> 00:30:51,449 Um, he to use the term unfreedom. And these are suddenly the terms that I've been thinking about a hunger artist in, um, in my work and more broadly, 285 00:30:51,450 --> 00:30:56,939 a much longer tradition of writers using hunger for thinking about the status of art, 286 00:30:56,940 --> 00:31:07,919 which I think is kind of surprisingly but consistently interested in tying an idea of aesthetic autonomy to forms of embodied, 287 00:31:07,920 --> 00:31:11,640 sometimes political, sometimes social unfreedom. 288 00:31:13,450 --> 00:31:21,750 Um, but again, sorry, for the purposes of this, I think we really see something similar happening. 289 00:31:21,760 --> 00:31:29,980 Um, if we think about eating disorders, for instance, where the question of whether self starvation represents, as is sometimes described, 290 00:31:30,200 --> 00:31:38,649 an act of kind of intense control, right, a desire to fully control one's wild and one subjectivity, uh, on the other hand, 291 00:31:38,650 --> 00:31:46,600 as we might think in terms of its kind of pathologize ation as a form of mental illness, a mark precisely of being out of control, um, 292 00:31:46,810 --> 00:31:51,670 often feels like the kind of the impossible subject position that, um, 293 00:31:51,670 --> 00:31:56,830 anorexics and others with eating disorders are constantly navigating and negotiating. 294 00:31:57,460 --> 00:32:00,160 And I think even something as apparently forceful and, well, 295 00:32:00,160 --> 00:32:07,600 does the hunger strike also likewise gets its power from its passivity, from its dramatisation of hunger as something un chosen. 296 00:32:07,750 --> 00:32:15,640 Something that's been forced upon the starving, uh, protester or activist by the oppressive forces that it seeks to resist. 297 00:32:16,030 --> 00:32:20,860 Um. So first of all, then I think the hunger. 298 00:32:21,370 --> 00:32:28,630 Hunger stages certain kinds of problems about will and agency, especially forms of self starvation. 299 00:32:28,990 --> 00:32:35,580 Um, and this opens them up, I think, in interesting ways, to raise questions about what kind of a subject it is, 300 00:32:35,590 --> 00:32:39,730 who fasts, and what kinds of political problems that then entails. 301 00:32:41,230 --> 00:32:44,380 Secondly, Kafka's hunger out is fast is unobservable. 302 00:32:45,380 --> 00:32:46,910 One of his laments throughout. 303 00:32:46,910 --> 00:32:58,370 Um, and I'm not sure if anyone's discussed this yet, is this amazing line that he is the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast. 304 00:32:59,210 --> 00:33:02,870 None of his watches these people watches for some reason, 305 00:33:02,870 --> 00:33:13,069 who are so fascinated to keep God over him is ever fully able to do this that even his impresario really knows for 306 00:33:13,070 --> 00:33:21,080 absolute certain that he isn't sneaking a little sip of water or a bite of his favourite treats when no one's looking. 307 00:33:21,590 --> 00:33:28,459 Um, but because of this unverified ability of the fast, we effectively end up with a form of art, 308 00:33:28,460 --> 00:33:36,560 a form of performance for which there is no perfect audience and really no satisfactory audience as a performance. 309 00:33:36,560 --> 00:33:41,810 Then it becomes a kind of an art for one entirely self-directed and entirely inward facing. 310 00:33:42,320 --> 00:33:47,780 Um, and again, I want to maybe suggest that we can think about this in broader terms, 311 00:33:48,140 --> 00:33:54,890 in terms of actually the whole history of the way hunger's been discussed with the 20th century in scientific terms, um, 312 00:33:54,890 --> 00:34:02,600 where it has posed a constant problem for definition, there is a kind of an ongoing, um, and suddenly in the 20th century, 313 00:34:02,600 --> 00:34:10,460 very lively debate about how one defines hunger, what it is to hunger, what the line is between starvation and malnutrition. 314 00:34:10,760 --> 00:34:18,620 And these are questions that, on the one hand, can sometimes feel very like pedantic, um, when we look at them in an abstract fashion. 315 00:34:18,620 --> 00:34:23,810 But their political consequences are extremely serious because they determine, for instance, 316 00:34:24,110 --> 00:34:29,360 when we're thinking about someone like Rashford, they determine what it means when we say there is a famine happening somewhere. 317 00:34:29,600 --> 00:34:35,989 And often the question isn't simply a question of all food or no food, but how little food one has. 318 00:34:35,990 --> 00:34:45,830 And these difficulties of how we measure what it is to be hunger, what is to be hungering, what it is to be inadequate in our nutritional, 319 00:34:45,830 --> 00:34:52,850 uh, requirements or our nutrition, in how we're meeting our nutritional needs is, uh, a kind of a major political problem. 320 00:34:53,120 --> 00:35:00,620 And I think it's closely connected, again, to the kind of the difficulty of hunger is something that because it's defined by negativity, 321 00:35:00,620 --> 00:35:06,769 defined by what one doesn't have defined by a lack, therefore becomes something that's unobservable, 322 00:35:06,770 --> 00:35:16,909 unverifiable, and difficult to kind of really turn into a form of shared public knowledge, which is a necessary component for, 323 00:35:16,910 --> 00:35:24,410 I think, any kind of political or social, um, kind of action on that hunger can therefore produce. 324 00:35:25,610 --> 00:35:34,460 Which brings me to my final claim, which is that Hunger's, Kafka's Hunger artist, is engaged in a kind of an anti-social practice, 325 00:35:34,790 --> 00:35:42,320 one that, um, is always defined in a kind of tense and difficult relationship to the social. 326 00:35:42,560 --> 00:35:50,960 So I began claiming that this is a kind of an idiosyncratic story, and I think that this idiosyncrasy is itself a kind of, 327 00:35:51,260 --> 00:35:59,270 um, a significant part of the anti-social ness of the the narrative itself and his practice in particular. 328 00:36:00,020 --> 00:36:02,900 Um, we are running out of time. So I'm going to run through this really quickly. 329 00:36:03,140 --> 00:36:08,810 At the beginning of the story, when the hunger artist is at the height of his powers and his influence, he relates to his public. 330 00:36:09,110 --> 00:36:15,070 Only as a constraint. Dreaming of the day he'd be released from the limitations on his fast that their attention imposes. 331 00:36:15,080 --> 00:36:21,739 Right. We've had this already. Um. He dreams of a form of starvation released from the demands of society and the limitations 332 00:36:21,740 --> 00:36:25,910 that he think that this very unfairly imposes on what would otherwise be his, 333 00:36:25,910 --> 00:36:31,250 like, brilliant fasting. Um, this story is ending, though, I think. 334 00:36:31,580 --> 00:36:35,570 And and maybe I'm not sure that I my reading entirely accords with Peter's here, 335 00:36:35,810 --> 00:36:39,260 but I think that this ending really complicates this anti-social dream. 336 00:36:39,620 --> 00:36:45,830 He ends up wasting away in his cage, the lack of interest from others, allowing his past to continue indefinitely, 337 00:36:46,220 --> 00:36:51,410 but under conditions that seem to make it unintelligible, unnoticed, irrelevant. 338 00:36:52,100 --> 00:36:58,429 In the final pages of the story, it becomes clear, I think, that this social, however imperfect and impossible, 339 00:36:58,430 --> 00:37:04,460 given that no one can ever be satisfied with his vast, is an indispensable component of his art. 340 00:37:04,910 --> 00:37:08,390 Um, that he really needs these unsatisfied spectators. 341 00:37:09,290 --> 00:37:15,470 His ambivalent, unsatisfying repudiation of the social, I think, is built again into the experience of starvation, 342 00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:22,730 which widens the gap between the starving individual and the world, even as it embeds them within it and makes them dependent upon it. 343 00:37:23,270 --> 00:37:30,559 Again, I think this is a really common feature of eating disorders, where isolation and idiosyncrasy coexist with social contagions. 344 00:37:30,560 --> 00:37:36,740 And often I've always found this really fascinating, a kind of intense desire to feed others, to be the host of the dinner party. 345 00:37:37,690 --> 00:37:45,669 Um, hunger strikes, I think, require us to overcome the dissolution of the social and hunger demanding for their success at the hunger strike. 346 00:37:45,670 --> 00:37:50,380 It can be read as a representative of a larger group inscribed with social meaning. 347 00:37:50,920 --> 00:37:58,120 Um, but here I'd really recommend, if you haven't seen already, a film like Steve McQueen's hunger, um, 348 00:37:58,780 --> 00:38:04,329 which is this beautiful portrayal of how even an exemplary hunger hunger striker like Bobby Sands, 349 00:38:04,330 --> 00:38:11,650 it's this really intense portrait of his past might be thrown back on himself, severed from his social experience, 350 00:38:11,980 --> 00:38:17,830 from his social significance, which was obviously tremendous by and through the experience of starvation. 351 00:38:17,830 --> 00:38:21,850 And as the film progresses, we get more and more kind of like, um, 352 00:38:22,390 --> 00:38:30,370 sort of isolated within Bobby's own mind and kind of, you know, kind of intense confrontation with his body. 353 00:38:31,340 --> 00:38:35,270 Um, unless maybe we could stop at that point. That's that's just brilliant. 354 00:38:35,660 --> 00:38:41,080 Uh. Thank you. A brilliant lead in, um, before we go into a kind of broader discussion, 355 00:38:41,280 --> 00:38:48,320 we've come from the minutia of the text hungering and fasting up to kind of contemporary politics. 356 00:38:48,620 --> 00:38:51,890 Um, which is just brilliant from this sort of single lens of the story. 357 00:38:52,250 --> 00:38:57,080 Um, but I want to pick up something you said about the dramatisation of passivity, 358 00:38:57,500 --> 00:39:01,309 because one of the extraordinary things about this story, which is so static, 359 00:39:01,310 --> 00:39:12,710 so inward, so hinged on abstract concepts, is that people come again and again and again to create films, theatre productions and performances of it. 360 00:39:13,010 --> 00:39:15,409 And in fact, what is happening in Oxford now. 361 00:39:15,410 --> 00:39:21,950 And so I'd really like to turn to, to mine that who will give us a bit of an insight into how this is being turned into a ballet, 362 00:39:21,950 --> 00:39:25,250 which is the world premiere is happening next week at the old fire station. 363 00:39:25,580 --> 00:39:29,780 Um, because I think it will also touch on some of those issues that we've raised. 364 00:39:30,170 --> 00:39:30,930 Absolutely. Yeah. 365 00:39:30,930 --> 00:39:43,400 And I don't want to, uh, spend too much time, but I spent the last, uh, few days, um, with the artists working on a hunger artist, uh, of today. 366 00:39:43,790 --> 00:39:47,690 So we have Edward Watson, who's the former principal of the Royal Ballet. 367 00:39:48,050 --> 00:39:53,990 Um, Arthur. Peter, uh, they previously did a notation of the metamorphosis before, and I should also. 368 00:39:53,990 --> 00:40:01,910 And there is, um, uh, miaow miaow, who's an Australian singer and cabaret artist. 369 00:40:02,300 --> 00:40:09,200 And so this is still in the studio and where you can see here the cage that, uh, 370 00:40:09,620 --> 00:40:15,500 will be used, I think from what we've been saying or what my colleagues have been saying, 371 00:40:15,770 --> 00:40:26,060 that idea of passivity and incompatibilities kind of works really well with giving the impresario this big role in the ballet, who kind of. 372 00:40:27,490 --> 00:40:35,410 Tries to communicate, you know, the art of starvation, which cannot be communicated through. 373 00:40:36,620 --> 00:40:40,810 Uh, measuring here. Yeah. 374 00:40:40,990 --> 00:40:48,729 Sorry. Measuring, um, the body and you see the kind of passivity, the not wanting to, um, 375 00:40:48,730 --> 00:40:56,170 perform versus the very outgoing performativity of, um, playing on the very idea of performance here. 376 00:40:56,680 --> 00:41:03,230 Um. And this is, I think, from, you know, thinking about the panther at the end. 377 00:41:03,240 --> 00:41:10,860 And I kind of already I mean. Not to go too far, but the the choreographer told me the metamorphosis. 378 00:41:10,860 --> 00:41:13,889 He was thinking about the prongs of of insect. 379 00:41:13,890 --> 00:41:21,900 And so they use two fingers. And here he was thinking about much more to the power and sort of fists rather than the prongs, 380 00:41:21,900 --> 00:41:30,900 which really makes the entire body move in a very different when you kind of see the musculature tensing up into with resting on the, 381 00:41:31,410 --> 00:41:35,520 um, and we have a, I have a very short clip of about 12 seconds. 382 00:41:35,520 --> 00:41:38,760 Can you start now of, uh. What what? 383 00:41:41,970 --> 00:41:46,620 Some. Of the things like you. 384 00:41:52,040 --> 00:42:00,949 That's just to show it. But I think the cage for me was also such a it's an interesting object in this text because why is the cage there? 385 00:42:00,950 --> 00:42:11,930 What is what is it doing for someone who chooses, you know, even if it's a passivity like, and the clock and all these attributes that kind of, um. 386 00:42:13,230 --> 00:42:18,210 Make it a frame. Frame the artist. Right. So that's just my contribution. 387 00:42:19,360 --> 00:42:23,710 I sympathise with those. I am wonderfully with one of the things that came up in everybody's. 388 00:42:24,830 --> 00:42:28,220 Points which I hadn't expected, which is surveillance. And of course. 389 00:42:28,910 --> 00:42:33,460 The watches, the surveillance, the clock, um, the self surveillance. 390 00:42:33,470 --> 00:42:36,750 Um, can we tease out a bit more about that? Because it. 391 00:42:36,790 --> 00:42:43,700 I was very interested. I mean, you know, a lot of literature at the moment is writing about that, but it wasn't quite the case when Kafka was writing. 392 00:42:43,940 --> 00:42:47,570 Is it something we're drawing out now? Is it intrinsic to the dilemmas? 393 00:42:47,600 --> 00:42:54,259 Um, Peter, you're looking at me. I was as, uh, as we were looking at that clip. 394 00:42:54,260 --> 00:42:58,909 I was thinking, was it David Blaine who was in that glass box for that period of time? 395 00:42:58,910 --> 00:43:02,410 And there is something about watching someone do nothing. 396 00:43:02,410 --> 00:43:10,280 You filming David Beckham asleep? Um, I was thinking about about the the observable unobservable. 397 00:43:10,760 --> 00:43:14,870 Um, and as you were talking, I was thinking about the burrow. 398 00:43:16,380 --> 00:43:22,620 People have read the parallel. Um, and there's a similar kind of play going on that, um. 399 00:43:24,030 --> 00:43:35,070 Where the the creature inside the burrow is, wanting to defend himself from observation by anyone coming from above ground, 400 00:43:35,310 --> 00:43:41,910 which I think is the reader, and by anyone coming from beneath, which is some kind of unconscious threat or something. 401 00:43:42,390 --> 00:43:44,760 And although it's always dangerous to analogise. 402 00:43:45,780 --> 00:43:53,460 But the if the person is trying to get into the burrow and work through the intricate passages, which are also the passages of the text. 403 00:43:54,270 --> 00:43:59,310 Um is the reader and the text is refusing to be read. 404 00:44:00,030 --> 00:44:06,390 Yes it is. So I'm going to put a barrier on top of this burrow so that you you can't get in. 405 00:44:06,750 --> 00:44:10,590 You're going to nose around, and I'm going to make sure you can't get in the borough. 406 00:44:10,590 --> 00:44:15,719 The inside of the barrier is refusing to be observed, just as the fast can't be observed. 407 00:44:15,720 --> 00:44:24,629 And that's a brilliant line. Um, no one is going to be satisfied with my fast apart from me, because this piece of this artwork is entirely sealed. 408 00:44:24,630 --> 00:44:30,470 Entirely hermetically sealed. Um. But the beauty of the borough is that we are reading it. 409 00:44:30,710 --> 00:44:35,420 We're reading it every moment. We're inside the passages, even as we're being ejected. 410 00:44:35,930 --> 00:44:43,879 And the beauty of a hunger artist is that we are observing an unobservable phenomenon which which is, 411 00:44:43,880 --> 00:44:51,890 I suppose, the challenge for you in also for whoever wants to to to enact it, you have to enact something. 412 00:44:51,980 --> 00:44:56,580 You have to touch on. What I was thinking of is a hinge that's at the heart of Kafka's watching. 413 00:44:56,580 --> 00:45:00,320 That's absolutely unique to him, but then becomes a kind of. 414 00:45:01,240 --> 00:45:04,990 Foundational ground for a whole style of literary thinking. 415 00:45:06,640 --> 00:45:10,330 And I can spot Model Men's Hunger Artist, which, you know, 416 00:45:10,330 --> 00:45:16,030 for a while I called Starvation Artist without knowing that they were actually interested in changeable words in the 19th century. 417 00:45:16,180 --> 00:45:19,509 So that's kind of her argument as well about the surveillance that, you know, 418 00:45:19,510 --> 00:45:27,130 you do need the open mouth children and the blanching ladies to not just sustain the performance, but to sustain the performance life. 419 00:45:27,400 --> 00:45:34,660 So, you know, that's that's kind of that's a very interesting bit about the unsocial becoming or having 420 00:45:34,660 --> 00:45:40,630 that sort of a very interesting social framework within which it is operating as the enemy. 421 00:45:42,800 --> 00:45:48,590 I think even the description of this as surveillance is really interesting, right? 422 00:45:48,620 --> 00:45:56,330 I've always thought about this dynamic as one that's precisely about the relationship between artist and audience in certain ways. 423 00:45:56,750 --> 00:46:00,139 Um, and we rarely think of that as a form of surveillance. 424 00:46:00,140 --> 00:46:05,270 But I think that one of the things of this story actually does dramatise, maybe surprisingly, 425 00:46:05,270 --> 00:46:13,430 is the way in which that relationship does function as a as a mode of surveillance and as a kind of a form of power and control. 426 00:46:13,610 --> 00:46:20,360 And actually, I'm also thinking here of Beckett's play catastrophe, something like that, or just thinking of catastrophe as we saw that. 427 00:46:20,400 --> 00:46:24,770 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, that there is this kind of I mean, 428 00:46:24,770 --> 00:46:31,009 this would be a kind of a striking way of thinking about the politics of producing art as a form of 429 00:46:31,010 --> 00:46:39,350 kind of subjection and exposure of the artist and or the text to an audience as a mode of surveillance, 430 00:46:39,350 --> 00:46:42,260 as a mode of an exercise of a certain kind of control. 431 00:46:42,470 --> 00:46:50,209 And I definitely think that within this tradition of writing, that's actually a recurring theme and one that becomes kind of hard to grapple with, 432 00:46:50,210 --> 00:46:54,740 and maybe it's an uncomfortable thing to grapple with because none of us really want to be the, 433 00:46:54,740 --> 00:46:58,940 you know, controlling surveyors when we're reading a text. 434 00:46:58,940 --> 00:47:02,690 And yet and at the end of Beckett's catastrophe, the, the, 435 00:47:03,140 --> 00:47:09,470 the Beckett's version of The hunger artist who's being controlled by the impresario looks up and looks back. 436 00:47:09,950 --> 00:47:15,870 Um. Kind of challenges or refuses the conditions of the performance, but of course it's scripted. 437 00:47:15,870 --> 00:47:20,250 So. So you're you're living in precisely that difficult territory. 438 00:47:20,960 --> 00:47:26,190 Wait wait wait wait. A performance is refusing its own conditions whilst accepting. 439 00:47:27,680 --> 00:47:31,370 And yes, we could talk more about this. Yes, absolutely. 440 00:47:32,460 --> 00:47:36,560 Um, maybe we'll pick up one more thing and then open it out to the public. 441 00:47:36,650 --> 00:47:41,870 I'm sure we'll have, uh, questions. Um, I had a very interesting conversation with Alec about me. 442 00:47:41,870 --> 00:47:47,470 He couldn't be here today. She's in Australia. Um, about Diminution and Kafka at about. 443 00:47:47,480 --> 00:47:55,820 And the word came up several times. And what you were saying about this and of course, it's physical in The Hunger Artist, but also something about, 444 00:47:56,120 --> 00:48:04,640 uh, writers after Kafka following this, uh, this diminution, this, this, uh, attenuated thin line in your words. 445 00:48:05,000 --> 00:48:08,720 Um, and I wondered if we could pick up that because it's not simply a theme, is it? 446 00:48:08,730 --> 00:48:11,750 Or a motif. It's, um, it's a kind of approach. 447 00:48:11,750 --> 00:48:16,970 It's an existential thing for Kafka and for the writers who pick him up. 448 00:48:17,060 --> 00:48:26,090 Um, and key. Um, yes. Thank you. Uh, you know, one of the first, um, questions I had when I read this short story many years ago is why 40 days? 449 00:48:26,090 --> 00:48:31,500 Of course, the the the answer that the story gives you is the impresario thinks that's, 450 00:48:31,520 --> 00:48:35,120 you know, how long people can hold their attention and the spectacle and, 451 00:48:35,120 --> 00:48:41,270 you know, I mean, if if only he had seen this generation, our generation, you know, people 200 50s would be more like it. 452 00:48:41,570 --> 00:48:45,470 Uh, but it's actually it goes back to sort of Jesus's 40 days in the desert. 453 00:48:45,710 --> 00:48:52,250 And I do think that there is something about, you know, that the the diminution is also sort of jogging, 454 00:48:52,250 --> 00:48:57,440 that kind of mythical and also archival and also kind of cultural memory. 455 00:48:57,440 --> 00:49:01,579 It's not it's it's Jesus's emaciated body. It's also Buddha's. 456 00:49:01,580 --> 00:49:09,140 You know, I mean, when I read this, I can't not think about what sort of skeletal body, you know, during one of his, uh, during one of his journeys. 457 00:49:09,320 --> 00:49:16,100 And I do think that that diminution and this kind of vanishing borderline is very much playing on that, that, 458 00:49:16,100 --> 00:49:23,989 that that archive of memory of the body is functioning as this borderline between mortality and what it takes to become immortal. 459 00:49:23,990 --> 00:49:31,280 And, you know, again, that tangible line between the artist and the ascetic, there is work on, uh, the influence of Schopenhauer on Kafka, 460 00:49:31,490 --> 00:49:36,980 which I don't know well enough to actually hold forth on, but I, I did sort of read it at some point, 461 00:49:37,160 --> 00:49:40,850 which deals with exactly that, that on the one hand, he's very influenced by Nietzsche, 462 00:49:40,970 --> 00:49:46,910 but he's also kind of thinking of [INAUDIBLE] show up in Hungary and ideas of what it might be to be sort of like, 463 00:49:46,910 --> 00:49:51,470 you know, to have the, the, the sense, the matter of an ascetic. 464 00:49:51,740 --> 00:49:57,380 And I think the diminution has to be seen as that kind of critical mass of nothing, you know. 465 00:50:00,350 --> 00:50:07,479 No. What are you going to? I was thinking diminution in reduction in terms of nourishment, 466 00:50:07,480 --> 00:50:15,650 which has come up all the way through our discussions that, um, in metamorphosis, you kind of was talking about the line, 467 00:50:15,650 --> 00:50:21,010 the metamorphosis, where, where Gregor is a beetle or cockroach or whatever it is, 468 00:50:21,370 --> 00:50:27,550 whatever he is overhearing his sister playing the violin, saying that was the nourishment that he craved. 469 00:50:28,270 --> 00:50:34,920 Um, but in the in the story, he finds he he can't eat the food that he did. 470 00:50:34,930 --> 00:50:40,930 Like when he was a human. Uh, he can only abject food off milk and disgusting things like that. 471 00:50:41,350 --> 00:50:45,610 Um, and similarly in, in both reports from the Academy and. 472 00:50:46,740 --> 00:50:52,200 A hunger artist. It's about some kind of match between the nourishment that's available to you and the nourishment that you want. 473 00:50:52,500 --> 00:50:55,560 And it's interesting to me that the first thing we hear about the Panther, 474 00:50:56,280 --> 00:51:05,840 which you think of as a as a kind of, uh, uh, an embodiment of fascism or power, who said red by red? 475 00:51:06,060 --> 00:51:10,290 Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. But that's plagiarism. 476 00:51:10,950 --> 00:51:13,980 And the first thing we hear about him is that he gets everything that he needs. 477 00:51:14,880 --> 00:51:23,310 Um, and I think this kind of gap between between the nourishment it's available to you and the nourishment that you crave is something about. 478 00:51:24,330 --> 00:51:28,080 Being not properly embedded in yourself. 479 00:51:29,040 --> 00:51:34,590 Um, and so the diminishment comes, comes from that, that gap which the artwork. 480 00:51:36,130 --> 00:51:41,940 Lives in music in terms of metamorphosis, but minds the gap. 481 00:51:43,140 --> 00:51:47,280 I think at that point I've banked an extra five minutes so we can run over slightly. 482 00:51:47,280 --> 00:51:51,510 Um, so I think we should open up to questions from the audience. 483 00:51:51,960 --> 00:51:55,530 Comments, observations. There is a roving mic at the back there. 484 00:51:55,530 --> 00:52:00,390 So if you raise your hand, um, and uh, if you've got anything to say. 485 00:52:02,060 --> 00:52:08,760 Uh, Sophia, we got two at the front here. If it's not working, you can have this. 486 00:52:12,490 --> 00:52:19,020 No. Yeah. 487 00:52:19,320 --> 00:52:23,700 Um, first of all, I just wanted to say thank you for the immensely fascinating panel discussion. 488 00:52:23,730 --> 00:52:27,930 Um, I'm a big fan of The Hunger Artist, the original short story, also the, uh, 489 00:52:27,930 --> 00:52:31,320 Mod Alman monograph, which obviously takes inspiration from the same title. 490 00:52:31,530 --> 00:52:34,440 So I found the conversation to be immensely rewarding. 491 00:52:34,770 --> 00:52:43,229 Um, something that I picked up kind of from all of the papers was this underlying idea of the act of consumption and conversely, 492 00:52:43,230 --> 00:52:48,030 the act of starvation or hungering as a negotiation of power and agency, 493 00:52:48,330 --> 00:52:57,540 and how that also relates to ideas of spectacle and witnessing, um, the power and agency that's negotiated in consuming or refusing to consume. 494 00:52:57,780 --> 00:53:05,280 But then also the Paradise negotiated in consuming in terms of witnessing an act or refusing to witness an act. 495 00:53:05,610 --> 00:53:11,010 Um, and I was just wondering if any of you or all of you could maybe expand a bit on that relation. 496 00:53:11,340 --> 00:53:17,160 Um, because I think that it's quite rich then also, maybe not as one dimensional as you might think. 497 00:53:17,490 --> 00:53:21,450 Obviously there is the sort of, uh, dominating mode of consumption. 498 00:53:21,690 --> 00:53:26,969 But then, as Jane Bennett sort of advocates for an edible matter, the idea of a collaborative mode of consumption, 499 00:53:26,970 --> 00:53:33,330 as well as these multiple kind of hierarchies or like forms of understanding consumption being advanced. 500 00:53:33,810 --> 00:53:37,070 Um. Did you get that question? 501 00:53:39,370 --> 00:53:45,310 Yeah, yeah. I don't need to repeat it, which is a good job. Um, I'm not going to let everybody answer. 502 00:53:45,610 --> 00:53:50,049 So a couple of people who'd like to answer. Um, sorry. 503 00:53:50,050 --> 00:53:53,800 Can you just repeat the your question? Just the end of your question again? 504 00:53:53,860 --> 00:54:00,339 Uh, yes. So essentially in relation to consumption and then also the refusal to consume, um, 505 00:54:00,340 --> 00:54:07,480 as in negotiation of power and agency, also in relation to spectacle as consuming a certain spectacle. 506 00:54:07,780 --> 00:54:13,000 Um, and how that relates to different ways in which we think about consumption, power and agency, 507 00:54:13,180 --> 00:54:17,470 the kind of dominating mode of consumption versus the collaborative mode of consumption. 508 00:54:17,660 --> 00:54:21,970 Okay. Thank you. Um, yeah. So one I mean, there's so much in that question, 509 00:54:22,210 --> 00:54:31,240 but maybe one thing that I is worth picking up here is the question of the consumption of spectacle, um, and the consumption more broadly. 510 00:54:31,240 --> 00:54:35,170 Right. So someone at the very beginning mentioned that I think maybe Mandar was talking 511 00:54:35,170 --> 00:54:38,890 about the kind of the negotiation with popular culture that's happening here. 512 00:54:39,250 --> 00:54:48,790 Um, and there's this, you know, really fascinating sort of, um, motif, I suppose that runs through a lot of writing in this period that is, um, 513 00:54:48,790 --> 00:54:55,210 extremely dismissive of what's often called digestible culture or digestible art, 514 00:54:55,360 --> 00:55:01,210 something that can be like too readily taken in or consumed or eaten up. 515 00:55:01,510 --> 00:55:08,950 Um, and, you know, like it runs through a wide range of different thoughts across a wide range of political positions, actually. 516 00:55:09,040 --> 00:55:15,730 So communists are really sceptical of it, but so are people who are, like, anxious about mass culture because they don't like the masses. 517 00:55:16,170 --> 00:55:19,430 Um, um, and, 518 00:55:19,700 --> 00:55:26,769 and so I think there's a kind of there's clearly something going on here about an attempt to produce a kind 519 00:55:26,770 --> 00:55:33,160 of spectacle or to think about a kind of spectacle that's precisely not consumable in a kind of ready, 520 00:55:33,190 --> 00:55:36,099 easy, unthinking, and thoughtless way. Right. 521 00:55:36,100 --> 00:55:45,190 So if one is to, you know, quote unquote, consume the hunger artist's art, I think that you have to do it sort of in the manner that this story does. 522 00:55:45,190 --> 00:55:49,170 You have to sort of reflect on it, think about it, turn it over. 523 00:55:49,180 --> 00:55:52,389 It's a very like probing and difficult. 524 00:55:52,390 --> 00:56:00,310 There is a kind of chewing over of the kind of process that's necessary to kind of come to grips with it in any long term way. 525 00:56:00,310 --> 00:56:04,060 And to some extent, one of the things that's going on when he gets, you know, 526 00:56:04,060 --> 00:56:09,010 shunted off to the animal or the passage to the animals, um, towards the end of the story, 527 00:56:09,010 --> 00:56:14,860 is he's being turned into something that can only succeed if it's easy to consume, um, 528 00:56:14,860 --> 00:56:20,410 which, as we see with the Panther, is also something that can itself consume easily. 529 00:56:20,650 --> 00:56:24,610 So these two things seem to go in this story at least, hand in hand together. 530 00:56:24,940 --> 00:56:32,530 Um, and they do develop a whole kind of, um, theory of the relationship between eating and consumption on the one hand, 531 00:56:32,830 --> 00:56:37,840 and the sort of seriousness of the aesthetic project on the other. 532 00:56:38,290 --> 00:56:43,010 Um, that leads to one side, the questions about power. But I might let someone else take them upside. 533 00:56:45,410 --> 00:56:48,890 Do you want to come in there? I just I think that was fantastic. 534 00:56:49,100 --> 00:56:50,360 Well, I said, that's a brilliant question. 535 00:56:50,670 --> 00:57:01,130 The, the line that was in my mind, as both of you were speaking with Henry James, comment on how valid reading novels English people are. 536 00:57:01,970 --> 00:57:09,680 Um, but he says, if, uh, for English readers, a novel is a novel in a way that a pudding is a pudding. 537 00:57:10,050 --> 00:57:13,340 You know, we have to work out is how to consume, how to consume it. 538 00:57:13,610 --> 00:57:17,659 Um, and, and, you know, Kafka does present us with this difficulty. 539 00:57:17,660 --> 00:57:26,030 How, how how you respond to an experience which is profoundly defended against you consuming. 540 00:57:26,420 --> 00:57:31,160 Um. Thank you. Um, so we had another question here. 541 00:57:33,800 --> 00:57:39,050 Okay. Thank you so much. Um, I had a question about hunger as a form of art. 542 00:57:39,050 --> 00:57:48,140 And to go back to the violin in the Metamorphoses for a second, because the dragon is starving and longs after the nourishment of music. 543 00:57:48,140 --> 00:57:52,640 And, uh, sort of made me think about the way the artist in The Hunger Artist is like, 544 00:57:53,330 --> 00:57:58,880 gets nourishment from his own hunger, any satisfaction he knows and hunger, even he is bodily starving. 545 00:57:59,210 --> 00:58:05,390 And that made me think, well, these are not right in his craft and it's almost evocation. 546 00:58:05,390 --> 00:58:11,780 But towards the end it is revealed that he had no chance in a sense is like its own, was doomed to be a hunger artist. 547 00:58:11,780 --> 00:58:16,090 And that seems to me to point towards a very pessimistic view of art. 548 00:58:16,100 --> 00:58:21,790 I don't know if any of you have. Think it's kind of metaphorical. 549 00:58:21,790 --> 00:58:33,100 Reading doesn't really hold. Thank you. So the pool between craft and artistry and the dilemma between them, then the choices, as it were, of art. 550 00:58:33,340 --> 00:58:37,960 Um, my. I mean, can I can say something? Yeah, I think I can, you pointed out. 551 00:58:38,350 --> 00:58:42,280 I mean, it's a I think it's the second sentence where it says it used to be good. 552 00:58:43,870 --> 00:58:49,090 Life used provides you with a good life. I mean, that's the tension there in. 553 00:58:50,230 --> 00:58:56,180 But what's the life that's being given to you if you're in a cage not eating? 554 00:58:58,620 --> 00:59:08,950 Tension there, which I think. Points maybe to just put attention in what's what's actress tree, um, can do for you? 555 00:59:09,900 --> 00:59:15,870 I mean, I think I think one of the tensions and I mean, it's maybe it's just repeating what you've been said before, 556 00:59:15,870 --> 00:59:22,829 but that that in the inability of the actress career, which is so important and so frustrating for him. 557 00:59:22,830 --> 00:59:25,840 Right, I mean, it's. Yeah. 558 00:59:25,850 --> 00:59:32,720 I mean, I think that's I mean, it does feel very frustrating to, to be that artist who, 559 00:59:32,900 --> 00:59:38,570 who can't communicate what it's like to others and maybe not even. 560 00:59:40,040 --> 00:59:47,269 He wants to be admired, but he he also doesn't want to be admired because he can't do anything else. 561 00:59:47,270 --> 00:59:51,049 And I mean, in Kafka about himself writes about that too. 562 00:59:51,050 --> 00:59:58,190 And and searches what is ascetic lifestyle and breaks of relationships to be around so that he, 563 00:59:58,460 --> 01:00:04,010 he feels so strongly that he is, even if he's not publishing that much. 564 01:00:04,430 --> 01:00:10,220 Right. So, I mean, we shouldn't think that he wasn't publishing, you know, even from an early age. 565 01:00:10,490 --> 01:00:15,110 He knew what he wanted, but he was an art was. 566 01:00:18,540 --> 01:00:22,169 And there, because one thing that I was thinking about actually in your paper, 567 01:00:22,170 --> 01:00:31,090 but had struck me when I reread this story for this was there's a line right towards the end where he says very quickly, like he did honest labour. 568 01:00:31,920 --> 01:00:39,149 And I'm like, I mean, I didn't strike me in the past when I read it, but this time it just grabbed me because it's such a weird claim. 569 01:00:39,150 --> 01:00:43,620 Like, what kind of labour is The Hunger artist actually doing, right? 570 01:00:43,650 --> 01:00:47,580 In what sense is this Labour or work? 571 01:00:47,580 --> 01:00:54,299 Right? It doesn't produce anything. It doesn't seem to require any particular effort of him. 572 01:00:54,300 --> 01:00:59,310 In fact, if anything, it seems to be as much about who he is than what he does. 573 01:00:59,490 --> 01:01:03,510 So, I mean, there's lots of different ways that we might define what work and labour are, 574 01:01:03,510 --> 01:01:09,959 but it's hard for me to kind of grasp at first glance like what kind of labour this is. 575 01:01:09,960 --> 01:01:16,230 And I think this connects to what you were saying about, you know, and the question as well about like, what is the craft here? 576 01:01:16,230 --> 01:01:26,970 Right? Like, what's the nature of the artistry, um, at stake in this work that seems to be defined predominantly by not doing anything right, 577 01:01:27,240 --> 01:01:35,219 even eating well, not only does he not eat, he also doesn't excrete the artist and he doesn't actually move out from the cage. 578 01:01:35,220 --> 01:01:39,299 So we went down the rabbit hole reading about the lives of, you know, zero, who I mentioned, 579 01:01:39,300 --> 01:01:48,870 etc. and then step out of the cage to a fencing match, then go back again, go read newspapers and and and I do think that one if it is art, 580 01:01:48,870 --> 01:01:55,440 you know, if it is honest labour, it is one that is not nourished that that does not excrete, 581 01:01:55,710 --> 01:02:00,180 that doesn't coupled in any, uh, you know, that that doesn't even need companionship. 582 01:02:00,180 --> 01:02:05,250 This is what we see in the circus. It doesn't need the impresario. It doesn't need the open mouth children. 583 01:02:05,280 --> 01:02:11,370 So it's a kind of peculiar model of art where the transfer initial circuit is within the body. 584 01:02:11,370 --> 01:02:14,819 This banged up body of the of the hunger artist. 585 01:02:14,820 --> 01:02:17,980 And and I do think we are asked to pause. 586 01:02:18,000 --> 01:02:22,200 That's what I said that that's Kafka's showcasing that, putting that in the cage. 587 01:02:22,200 --> 01:02:25,970 The impediment on the way to the menagerie. This is not vitality. 588 01:02:25,980 --> 01:02:30,959 It's an impediment. It's like [INAUDIBLE]. You know, there's gonna say one thing it does produce. 589 01:02:30,960 --> 01:02:39,540 And if we're thinking about whether it's a pessimistic view of art and as as you are giving your brilliant sort of survey of the story, 590 01:02:40,230 --> 01:02:43,680 everyone in the room was laughing. I mean, it produces laughter. 591 01:02:43,680 --> 01:02:47,430 That's the, um, it's extremely funny, even though sometimes. 592 01:02:48,400 --> 01:02:52,330 You can't see that as well. I think that's a much better place to finish things. 593 01:02:54,340 --> 01:03:03,220 So, um, I think, uh, the panel for that honest labour tonight, I would like to say to everyone, please do go and see, uh, the exhibition next door. 594 01:03:03,970 --> 01:03:09,310 Please do go and see the brilliant new production of Anger Artist at the old fire station. 595 01:03:09,310 --> 01:03:16,180 Uh, next week. Uh, if your tickets available, do come and hear the gala reading of the Metamorphosis on Monday. 596 01:03:16,180 --> 01:03:22,780 The third in the sheldonian. Um, you're about to be led out a little ways through the park's, uh, road entrance. 597 01:03:22,780 --> 01:03:28,120 But let me close by thanking everybody for coming, but particularly to Alice Peter. 598 01:03:28,120 --> 01:03:31,720 And keep in mind that thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.