Kafkaesque, which means that threatening or scary, developed by Franz Kafka. All concepts that are integrated with Kafka can be included in this definition, such as hopelessness, loneliness, desperation, fear, suspicion, crime, doubt and so on. Kafka came out with a draft of utopia, but typical items of dystopian are found in all works of him. Kafkaesque is especially handled in the Trial.
According to Milan Kundera, there is a labyrinth and we always try to find the exit, but we are lost even more. In other words, we will be lost as we move. Besides, there is a file, which is about us and which is held by the government.
We never know what it is, but the file is perfect with being more important than us. Our whole life passes by the effort to reach that file. According to that file, we are punished. Although we know our punishment, we do not know our crime. Also, the stories of Kafka, which contain black humor, deal with many ordinary and unordinary aspects of the modern bureaucracy.
Kafka shows us our inadequacies and he tells us that we created the world we live in. Therefore, we have the power to change the world a better place, according to him.All works of Kafka include the alienation of Marx and the iron cage of Weber, which refer to the social fabric and organizational structure of capitalism. Marx reveals the theory of alienation, which is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense (Bramann, 2009).
According to Max Weber, modernization is a good and necessary thing. We act according to our minds, not according to the eternal verities, We can rationalize life under favor of this. Also, we rationalize the organizations, which are states, companies, institutions we are in as human beings. Thereupon bureaucracy occurs and people are imprisoned in the iron cage of rationalizing. As time progresses, this cage will become even stronger and socialism will be inevitable.
Today we see that Weber’s thoughts about socialism are widely correct.According to Michel Foucault, our bodies are cages and we are trapped in our bodies. His cage is as tight as Weber cannot imagine and we must overcome our bodies.
Foucault deals with concepts of power, panopticon, discipline, bio-power, and surveillance. In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Foucault handle of prison model, called the Panopticon, of Jeremy Bentham. Panopticon means that a prison with cells arranged in a circle, so that the people in them can be seen at all times from the tower in the center. We do not know what the master wants and we live by thinking about this. This prison model is the result of a structure that represents the way in which power operates in modern societies.
However, power is within us and we are the individuals forming the society have been established by the system we have found ourselves, and it is no longer necessary to tell us what to do or how to behave. In other words, we become good citizens and we know what to do for the system to work.
