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Beyond Imitation: Kafka's Dog on the Path from Art to Philosophy

Starting as early as the writings of Plato, art (in the broadest possible sense of the word) faces perennial criticism for the distance between it and the “truth.” The accusations abound: art is an imitation of an imitation; it’s a distraction from what’s really important; it teaches falsehoods; sometimes, it even corrupts. Yet art persists. Franz Kafka’s short story, “Investigations of a Dog,” details the power and influence of a piece of performance art on its narrator’s life, suggesting a different way of understanding art’s role in society. The performance he witnesses becomes an integral part of the Dog, launching him into a life of compulsive philosophical inquiry. His memory of the performance – and the way it made him feel – activates and perpetuates his attempts at understanding the world around him. In “Investigations of a Dog,” Kafka constructs art as the catalyst of an individual’s philosophical life – not a distraction from it.

When he witnesses the provocative performance of a troupe of seven dogs, the narrator-Dog experiences defamiliarization. Viktor Shklovsky defines defamiliarization as an artistic technique that seeks “to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself” (2). Using this technique, art opposes the tyranny of habit which turns people, objects, ideas, and feelings into flat, generalized symbols of themselves. In “Investigations of a Dog,” the description of the troupe’s performance defamiliarizes song and dance for the reader by breaking it down into smaller, absurd parts. The Dog faces a similar sensation as the disoriented reader. He proclaims: “[the music] robbed me of my wits, whirled me around in its circles as if I myself were one of the musicians instead of being only their victim” (Kafka 282). The performance defamiliarizes the canine body, the roles of performer and audience, and sound itself for its “victim” – the Dog who cannot help but surrender to this prolonged “process of perception.” The performance further scandalizes the Dog through breaking a taboo: the seven dogs dance on their hind legs, revealing parts of themselves meant to be private, “committing sin and seducing others to the sin of silently regarding them” (284). This brings the Dog’s inquisitive attention not just to their bodies, but to social rules and the culture that forms them, in ways that the Dog might not have otherwise considered. The performance is the Dog’s fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It defamiliarizes culture for the Dog and plunges him into philosophical inquiry, with all of its agonies and ecstasies.

The defamiliarization is permanent – even chronic – in the Dog. The performance marked him in an important and irreversible way. The Dog implies that he had a predisposition to this impact, since “from the very beginning [he] sensed some discrepancy, some little maladjustment” in himself (278). The dancing dogs push him over the edge. His sense of alienation is a direct result of this. His questions and experiments come at the high cost of most, if not all, social involvement. The performance made him both more conscious than ever of “dogness,” yet isolated him from it at the same time. Accordingly, this condition causes him great consternation. The Dog asks “why do I not do as the others: live in harmony with my people and accept in silence whatever disturbs the harmony?” (280). He passed through a portal opened by the performance, and now exists in a space interwoven with, but not identical to, that of most other dogs. In this state, “he discovers that there is [...] a ‘border region’ between air and earth, between physical and metaphysical [...] it is the realm of the Muses” (Leadbeater 113). In the Dog’s life, art does not bring him pleasure or make him happy, but transports him to the “border region,” filled with perils and opportunities that get to the root of what it means to be a dog.

This border region may be lonely and even agonizing for the Dog, but it is also an avenue of escape. Deleuze and Guattari trace routes of escape throughout the various works of Kafka. As they put it, “it isn’t a question of liberty, as against submission, but only a question of a line of escape, or, rather, of a simple way out” (Deleuze and Guattari 6). The Dog finds, through the spectacle of the dancing dogs, his “way out.” This is his ultimate goal, for though he complains about his philosophical compulsions – “which [he] found as wearisome as everybody else” – he cannot imagine a life without them (Kafka 286). Art and philosophy do not guarantee his escape but propel him forward with the hope of it: “everything is directed toward achieving ecstasy, a forgetting and finding again” (290). The Dog’s disgust at the seven dogs for breaking the social rules of their species has another side to it: his admiration of their “courage” (282). The Dog seeks a way out of the perplexing and overwhelming society that he is both a part of and isolated from. In fact, he voices a desire for the escape of all of dogkind from the yoke of tradition and the misdirection of the generations before them, whom he “held [...] responsible for everything” (309). The freedom the Dog has causes him distress, and leads him to make strange choices, such as starving himself for the sake of his experiments; yet, as he himself reminds the reader, this is “nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession” (316).

In the beginning, a piece of performance art opened a door to the metaphysical region of philosophy for the Dog to pass through. It charged the Dog with a quest for truth. The strangeness and discomfort of the experience defamiliarized culture so much for the narrator that he never recovered. In this unrecovered state, he becomes a philosopher or a scientist. This narrative stands in stark contrast to the conception of art as purely imitative, false, distracting, or unphilosophical. In Kafka’s tale, art is, in fact, the genesis of philosophy. Art provokes its audience to pay closer attention, to ask questions, to feel new or unfamiliar emotions – just as the Dog does in response to the troupe’s performance. In this way, it is actually a form of philosophy. The disturbing quality of art makes it valuable to the philosophical project, and offers an inexact but worthy form of freedom.

Works Cited