KAFKA’S ACTUALITY EMERGES from the ability of his texts to enlighten, explain, and subvert some of the most pressing issues in our global culture today. Nothing seems to resonate more acutely with today’s culture than Kafka’s persistent questioning of modern technologies of travel (railway, automobile, or airplane), audiovisual reproduction (photography, film, gramophone), and communication (telephone, telegraph).

In a recent paper, Patrick Fortmann has shown how Kafka’s “Little Automobile Story” elucidates the interconnections between modern traffic, circulation, and communication and his own acts of writing. Moreover, Kafka’s texts persistently respond to historic changes in technological media and their impact on collective ways of seeing and communicating in the age of high industrial capitalism and administrative efficiency. In his contribution to the Kafka@125 conference in April 2009 and in this volume, Peter Beicken has explored the intermedial connections between Kafka’s literary writings and visual perception, focusing on how cinematic techniques and photography relate to Kafka’s preoccupation with erotic desire and other psychological predispositions. But instead of merely reproducing the function of other media mimetically (for example, adapting the visual montage technique of film or imitating the ambiguous verisimilitude or distortion of the gramophone’s recorded voice), Kafka cites particularly (stereo)-typical details from these media’s technological apparatuses, reconfiguring their possibilities and limitations through stylistic strategies that range from positivistic description without direct commentary or value judgments to satiric irony, comic exaggeration, and even slapstick. Although the technological media innovations of Kafka’s age become the targets of social and moral critique, they are being employed and exploited foremost as literary material to be freely manipulated within the aesthetic parameters of the writer’s artistic imagination and writing practice.

Kafka interrogates the new media technologies not through abstract theoretical reflection but through imaginary scenarios set in the minutely described hyper-realism of his preferred cities of modernity: Prague, Berlin, Paris, and New York. Here recording machines and telecommunication devices variously facilitate, impede, or manipulate human interactions, but what Kafka seems mostly interested in is the physical impact of the media’s technological apparatus, which inscribes itself directly on people’s psyche and even on the human body itself. By comparison, the content of these media — their processes of signification, their ideologies, and even their truth claims — appears subordinated to the media’s materiality.