(Originally published on Kiltr three months ago)
As I awoke, in the wee sma’ hours of Friday morning, from uneasy dreams broken by partial seizures, I found myself transformed on my couch into a gigantic insect. ‘What has happened to me?’, I thought, not unlike Gregor Samsa before and countless others simultaneously metamorphosised, in a place and among a people irrevocably changed overnight. It was no dream.
My room, a regular human living room, only rather more claustrophobic now than its dimensions had always been want to suggest, lay almost quiet between the four familiar walls. Almost quiet save for the demands of voices tweetering and woofing incomprehensible from my chest, where my tablet lay fallen. Slowly I remembered, cognition beckoning with implied threat.
My eyes turned next, if briefly only to avoid inevitability, to the window and the overcast sky. Heavy rain beat against the window gutter reinforcing the overwhelming sense of melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting about all this nonsense, I thought, but could it be done? Surely even the tightening of seizures, the fear and panic between which they would bring, in ever darkening complicity, even they would be better than this, better than the waking world I'd returned to?
A strident voice cut clear through the reverie, no longer lost in the morass of sound my ailing neurology had reduced it to. I had been following the results of the vote as they came in, switching between sites and channels, searching for a sanity other than the faint hope offered by a polity which had showed a clear distinction from its neighbours, from the country which abutted it in insidious perfidy. There were contortions in the voice, in its questioning, as if Bernard Ponsonby's amateur psephologist shoes were far too tight, ill-fitting but try to walk in them he would nonetheless.
'...it would take a brave First Minister, would it not, to call a second Scottish Independence Referendum in the light of these numbers coming in, which seem to indicate a sizeable percentage of that much lauded surge in membership have chosen to vote against her advice and have in fact voted to Leave?'. Blatantly casting aside all other, perhaps far more significant, figures this was how the results were being framed, the narrative driven by media to fit that of an almost predetermined story arc.
But we did Bernard, get a brave First Minister, a sad but determined and brave First Minister. And like so many others, I needed that. As a disabled man from a working class community, I needed that. As manager of a social enterprise representing other people with disabilities, mitigating the worst the UK establishment has had to throw at them and all the social and economic fallout that entails, I needed that. As an academic doing research vital to and funded by that enterprise, I needed that. As a Scot who believes in the principles and safeguards of European partnership. I needed that. Fuck it, as a European, I needed that Bernard, didn't you? I didn't need the yawning chasm of necessary time, the futility, before that hope has even the faintest chance of becoming reality. I didn’t need the now all too real threat of becoming a footnote in a right wing columnist’s finger point at the next other, the next easy scapegoat; I’d been that, for myself and for my clients, been the easy target and grew weary of standing up again, unwilling to take it.
This time, in this moment, in facing the magnitude, the futility of false revolt and irrevocable choices, this time however, in my present condition, no matter how forcefully, wilfully or violently I tried I could not turn myself over, could not stand, a gigantic insect flailing on his back, closing his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs. I only desisted when the dull ache encompassed my entire being.
There was another all encompassing, overwhelming theme here though, which had been there right from the moment the starting gun fired in the most insular and divisive of political campaigns to don the sheep's clothing of demagoguery these islands have ever seen, absurdity. An absurdity I knew was only likely to become ever more Kafkaesque as the consequences of the result bit hard and deep into the social fabric of the places we call home.
Kafkaesque? Surely for those who had voted in anger, for the dispossessed with nothing to lose, even the word was a cliched, overused and abused token of the elitism they had just reacted against, but I could think of no more apt or fitting description.
Adjectives are derived from great writer’s names to encapsulate a mode of expression or sometimes an entire philosophy. Clearly I raise this point not to extol the virtues or mark the demerits of the Joycean, the Shakespearean or the Homeric. No, in light of recent days' events and for all that is to come, I do so to underline the appropriateness of much more dark and stifling visions the adjectivised use of which is likely to increase sharply and in short measure too. There should be no smirks or sighs, raised eyebrows or brushes aside and the value of their currency should not decrease with further use; here can surely be no more fitting descriptions for a just barely still United Kingdom, for the present and immediately foreseeable future, as Orwellian and Kafkaesque.
Whilst we await the final ridiculous, utterly self absorbed and protracted outcomes of the Conservative Party leadership fight, and face its consequences, we know the UK will almost inevitably lurch further right still in a post Brexit political wasteland decimated by the political 'capital' gained from their referendum tactics. Both the visions of Orwell and Kafka seem set to become ever more accurate in their prescience.
Orwellian may indeed be a fitting descriptor for what will inevitably become an increasingly invasive and draconian state with a particularly British fascistic stamp on its modes of governance, once these increasingly reactive and prohibitive measures take deeper root (and I sincerely hope they don't; if you haven't seen them yet Paul Mason, as always talks a lot of preventative sense for the dark days to come, here https://medium.com/@paulmasonnews and here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/britain-rainy-fascist-island-progrexit-brexit/ , whilst Robin McAlpine does his best, measured, home grown initial assessment of the tasks at hand here http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2016/06/24/the-three-tasks/ ), and the reactions of the angry, dispossessed swathes of what used to be easily defined as working class people but are now a growing percentage of a nebulous precariat, come to serve the will of political and financial elites they railed against, the futility of not being heard will only deepen. In post truth politics the votes of the precariat serve only to manufacture consent for bureaucracies of elite power to entrench it further.
The EU may have drifted into unrepresentative austerity as a consequence of neoliberal agendas, ultimately transferring wealth further from the rich to the poor, but it has done so only over a matter of a few decades, quickening in the few long years since the financial crash of 2008. The British establishment has been doing something similar since at least the reinstatement of (an unwritten) constitutional monarchy and parliament post Interregnum, having hundreds of years to become more insidious and layer more complex deceit into its instruments. For all of those times you may have described pen pushing or form filling bureaucracy as Kafkaesque before, consider now the futility of working class revolt which enables the very bureaucracies, the elites it has reacted against. How perfectly does it encapsulate the visions of Kafka?
Perhaps you've avoided the works of Kafka even though you've used the adjective once or twice, maybe even eschewing it along with all the other pretentious moody Lit student adjectives which ring so empty and hollow when set against sharp and stinging reality, allowing them to slip the way of existentialism and postmodernist possibly, and sometimes, somewhere, justifiably so. So, maybe now, if that is your position, (even if its not, there's a short journey still worth taking) as the political, economic, social and inevitably cultural tectonic plates shift beneath us, take a brief departure here for a little Kafka priming. The first of the following short films is from Alain de Botton's excellent School of Life series, which tries to render philosophies, philosophers and writers into bitesize, easily comprehensible chunks, and concentrates on Kafka himself. The second, the payload for our purposes here, by Noah Tavlin, focuses on appropriate, and inappropriate, adjectival use of the term Kafkaesque.
Across the UK we are about to be reminded further too, as if we needed it, just what an example of arcane bureaucracies and bewildering mechanisms of power its governance holds. Just as exemplified by Kafka's 'The Trial', they have become self perpetuating, entrenching and operate independently of those supposedly in power, whether they claim to have given you your country, your control back or not.
Throughout the process of a wholly insular and reactionary Brexit, I see the dark, tragicomic, absurdist humour which permeates even the bleakest of Kafka's visions. A 'wholly sovereign', anachronistic, isolationist UK government and its ubiquitous attendant civil service will still rely on increasingly convoluted systems of administration and those angry, dispossessed working class people who just wanted to be heard, will still be ruled over by people they can't see, according to rules they don't know, want to or fully understand, provoking at best a more profound anxiety, psychological distress and societal malaise than that which was reacted against in the first place. Where Tavlin describes Kafka's attention to the absurd which 'reflects our shortcomings back at ourselves', he further defines the Kafkaesque world as accurately as a post Brexit vote one as 'the world we live in is the world we created'.
For many Scots, as it is for people in other areas, across London, in Northern Ireland, in communities, in families and homes over the UK, we may feel we contributed less to creating that Kafkaesque nightmare world of the immediate future but must also face the full force of deepening ironies in mass Bregret and a bewilderment at the second most web searched subject UK wide in the days after the vote being 'What is the EU?'. And this before and during a growing futility facing the prospect of a full blooded and unleashed Tory right, aided and abetted by their working class entryists in an emboldened UKIP.
It is perhaps worthwhile remembering then, for all those without even the timescales of hope offered now to Scots, that Kafka never fully denies his protagonists freedom of choice, even if they frequently have no idea what it is they are choosing between and why. From where I find myself now, the UK has never looked so Kafkaesque and for a while, it seems, all of us, the ordinary people, the young who voted in hope, the angry, the dispossessed, those who voted against futility, those who voted in fear, those who didn't vote at all, we all face the prospect of waking up of a morning, any morning, to find we too are the othered and have been turned into cockroaches.
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