Franz Kafka's short story “A Hunger Artist” describes and defines what the culture industry has come to mean for artistic discipline. Society acts to impose its rules and regulations within the established framework of art and the ways in which the public consumes artistic spectacle. “A Hunger Artist” will serve as a prime example for studying how discipline intersects with political power and control via culture. The main character in Kafka's story is a performer who, by fasting for weeks on end, draws attention to himself as an artist. His art is his discipline, and vice versa. The public is, at first, entranced by his ability to go without nourishment; it is only when the act of self immolation falls out of vogue that the artist's career ends. I will examine first, the reasons why the hunger artist was able to exist in such a space (that is, the limelight created by his self-imposed suffering and confinement); second, the implications of his being marginalized and eventually relegated to the circus.

I find it necessary to first invoke some of Kafka's other work in order to examine “A Hunger Artist” and its connection to the nature of control societies. The characters in Kafka's novels and short stories grapple with their places and roles in society, and how they are to reconcile self-image with the ideals and restraints that law and cultural norms dictate. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explore some of the themes that perpetuate throughout Kafka's work. For Kafka, they argue, “it is less a question of presenting this image of a transcendental and unknowable law than of dissecting the mechanism of an entirely different sort of machine, which needs this image of the law only to align its gears and make them function together” (Deleuze and Guattari 43). “A Hunger Artist” does not relate to or discuss law in the sense of an institution built upon courts, bureaucracy, and an established penal system, as opposed to texts such as The Trial and “In The Penal Colony.” However, “A Hunger Artist” reveals that the laws of culture are indelibly linked with the laws of the government. The intersection between culture and control manifests in two ways in “A Hunger Artist”: first, the artist gains and loses popularity because his audience is so willing to conform; second, the spectacle he provides is, for the public, a glimpse into a prison. The general population is captivated by this artist who exists under conditions not fit for society's most dangerous criminals. To them, he represents those who have been banished to spaces created for isolation and punishment, and yet they can stop and gawk at him in his cage whenever they please. He is the culture criminal rendered impotent: he has broken the most sacred rules of human existence, and yet he poses no physical threat to the public.

The hunger artist is fascinating because he is, by definition, mad. We must study the role of the madman in society before we consider how the hunger artist became a spectacle. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault examines the changing perception and role of madness from the Renaissance forward. According to Foucault, the way in which a society deals with its mental invalids  is indicative of its relationship to moral truths. He begins the chapter “Stultifera Navis” (“Ship of Fools”) by outlining the evolution of spaces of confinement. Spaces once reserved for lepers fell into disrepair in the late Middle Ages, and the insane were sent on ships or to wander in their madness. At the beginning of the Renaissance, however, governments began to confine the insane in asylums or prisons, a practice which proliferates through contemporary times. Foucault explains the transition in practices of confinement as follows:

Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and “deranged minds” would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded as well. (Foucault 7)

If we accept that Western culture as it has existed throughout the twentieth century is largely analogous to Renaissance society, we can apply Foucault's study of madness to “A Hunger Artist.” And we can accept that our culture is so similar because although the structure of Western governments and economies has changed, the intent and purpose — that is, control — has remained static. It is certain that the control society fears madness because the madman alone is capable of falling out of sync with its rules. The madman exists outside of the moral boundaries placed upon him, and so society has no power to control him. Foucault argues that, at the time governments began to intervene and confine the insane, the nature of madness itself experienced a sort of rupture:

Thus madness is no longer considered in its tragic reality, in the absolute laceration that gives access to the other world; but only in the irony of its illusions. It is not a real punishment, but only the image of punishment, thus a pretense; it can be linked only to the appearance of a crime or the illusion of a death. (Foucault 32)

We can now form a clear link between Foucault's explanation of madness and Kafka's hunger artist.

Kafka narrates the story from a third person perspective that focuses on the thoughts and feelings of the hunger artist. It is because of the close narration that we are allowed to experience the character's inner monologue to a certain extent; Kafka has placed us not in the gaping crowed, but somewhere near the private neuroses of his character. The narrator explains that occasionally the hunger artist “reacted with an outburst of fury and to the general alarm began to shake the bars of his cage like a wild animal,” (Kafka 272) presumably when the frustration of being so misunderstood overcame him. His impresario, however, would explain these outbursts away, though to the hunger artist they were hardly worthy of dismissal. “To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible,” (Kafka 273) according to the hunger artist. What is not understood, in this case, is exactly where the hunger artist's discipline lies. To the public, it would seem as though he has learned to transcend his human need for food and comfort. In the artist's view, his life was problematic because “he was never satisfied,” (Kafka 270) and so he continued to fast in an attempt to attain some form of  satisfaction, which I perceive was his desire to be understood.

Further examination of Foucault's theories of madness will carry us to a conclusion as to why the hunger artist held such a grip on his public, despite their lack of understanding. Foucault uses cultural artifacts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as indicators in his discussion of the evolution of madness; he examines chimeric images specifically. In an analysis of a long-necked bird in German lore, he says, “the symbolic man becomes a fantastic bird whose disproportionate neck folds a thousand times upon itself — an insane being, halfway between animal and thing, closer to the charms of an image than to the rigor of meaning” (Foucault 19). Perhaps the hunger artist's audience saw him as such a figure: not a human on whose madness they might ruminate, but a creature that exists beyond the constraints of nature. We can relate Foucault's theory that the madman becomes “image” as opposed to “meaning” to the relationship between signifier and signified; the hunger artist attempts to signify something in the story, but only he knows what is signified. The divorce of the two creates the anxiety of the story, and also the fascination of the public, for whom an ambiguous signifier (the hunger artist) means they might decide for themselves what he signifies.

In Literature and Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan applies the structural linguistic definitions of signifier and signified to elements of literature. He explains that,

In the normal state of affairs, nothing from the unconscious circuit is carried over to the level of the message, of the signified of the Other, which is the sum and module of the significations acquired by the subject in human discourse. The fantasy is not communicated to the message level: it remains separate and unconscious. (Lacan 14)

We can apply this assessment of communication to “A Hunger Artist” if we define the artist as Lacan's “Other.” The signified is lost, relegated to an unconscious level and out of reach of the public. The artist knows only that he is not satisfied, that he can never be, and so he continues his act in a vain attempt to communicate that which is very nearly out of reach even to him. But his attempt to communicate something is what makes him a spectacle; the public knows that he is the Other, and the Other is fascinating.

The hunger artist is confined physically of his own volition, and mentally by the inability of the public to understand him. By setting himself in a cage, he asserts his own madness; he believes that he belongs in a physical prison to mirror the one in his mind. He is punished for madness when the public loses interest and effectively moves him along side the more exotic wild beasts. The animals replace him so easily because they pose the same intellectual challenge — how a creature can exist so far beyond societal norms — and they also represent a physical threat that the artist, in his frailty and passiveness, could never obtain.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno analyze the intersection of cultural phenomena and political power in Dialectic of Enlightenment. We can use their work to further our understanding of why the hunger artist fell out of favor with the public, and we will see the implications of his removal from the public sphere. Kafka begins his story by explaining that “It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one's own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now” (Kafka 268). The circus that renders the hunger artist entirely obsolete serves as a symbol of the culture industry; it is an institution that exists not for the betterment of society but for its own profit, and it subversively enforces the rules. Horkheimer and Adorno explain the function of such institutions as follows:

For the present the technology of the culture industry confines itself to standardization and mass production and sacrifices what once distinguished the logic of the work from that of society. These adverse effects, however, should not be attributed to the internal laws of technology itself but to its function within the economy today. Any need which might escape the central control is repressed by that of individual consciousness. (Horkheimer and Adorno 95)

The popularity of the circus is indicative of society's willingness to accept and devour that which has obvious mass appeal. Kafka illustrates the marginalization of the hunger artist in favor of the circus animals when he describes the behavior of the crowd:

When the public came thronging out in the intervals to see the animals, they could hardly avoid passing the hunger artist's cage and stopping there for a moment, perhaps they might even have stayed longer had not those pressing behind them in the narrow gangway, who did not understand why they should be held up on their way toward the excitements of the menagerie, made it impossible for anyone to stand gazing quietly for any length of time. (Kafka 274)

This long, complicated sentence from the story describes a scene that Horkheimer and Adorno may have predicted. The hunger artist is unique among the other attractions at the circus, and he is a source of some cognitive dissonance for the audience. They have come to see fantastic beasts, and instead they are confronted with this relic of a past when the depth and complexity of the human psyche was, at the very least, entertaining as a curiosity. Those who may have stopped to consider the hunger artist — perhaps one among them would finally have understood him — are tacitly forbidden to do so by the pushing crowd. Here we see a form of control exercised by the culture industry, and it is succeeding: the circus has said unequivocally that the audience will come to see the animals, and so the audience comes to see the animals. Those who would do otherwise, or shift their focus against the direction of the institution, are punished for their reluctance to follow.

With the banishment of the hunger artist, we see a perverse extension of his discipline. Throughout the story, he struggles to make himself understood, and his inertia manifests in a highly disciplined, regimented art form. Though the discipline he practices and the one the public sees are different, both are important for the story because they constitute the signifier and the lost signified. The butchers sent to watch the hunger artist are obsolete enforcers of discipline; they impose rules he has already imposed upon himself and he does not resist. The specific discipline that presents itself for analysis and critique morphs when the circus comes to town. No one is concerned with the discipline of the hunger artist, or enforcing what they believe it might be. Instead, the circus acts to discipline the crowd and bend the desires of the public in the most profitable direction. This is the intersection of artistic discipline and discipline for the purposes of societal control.

Horkheimer and Adorno describe the end result of the culture industry's conditioning. By entertaining the masses with fragments that are remotely relevant to their lives, yet that are placed so prominently and designed to appear entirely relevant, the culture industry successfully blends life, work, and entertainment. They argue that:

The products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction. But each one is a model of the gigantic economic machinery, which, from the first, keeps everyone on their toes, both at work and in the leisure time which resembles it … Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them. (Horkheimer and Adorno 100)

Culture becomes its own form of law, and it wields a power that the judicial system can hardly match in potency. The culture industry need only assert itself in the public sphere minimally; it will seep into the consciousness of the people through their peripheral vision and it will enforce behavioral codes. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, “The more strongly the cultural industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers — producing, controlling, disciplining them; even withdrawing amusement altogether: here, no limits are set to cultural progress” (Horkheimer and Adorno 115). The culture industry is a mysteriously self-perpetuating force; it acts subversively and masks its goals.

We can easily compare Horkheimer's and Adorno's vision of it to Kafka's vision of the literal law. In The Trial and “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka illustrates a form of control that is opaque and closed, beyond the comprehension of both the people it governs and those that serve it. In their reading of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari consider Kafka's treatment of the law, and the relationship his characters have with it. Kafka presents a law devoid of even the possibility of transcendence; according to Deleuze and Guattari:

From the point of view of a supposed transcendence of the law, there must be a certain necessary connection of the law with guilt, with the unknowable, with the sentence or the utterance. Guilt must in fact be the a priori that corresponds to transcendence, for each person or for everyone, guilty or innocent. (Deleuze and Guattari 44)

In Kafka's world, everyone is guilty. We know now that a person need not have broken a written law in order to be guilty of acting outside of the social norms. At the end of “A Hunger Artist,” the artist confesses that he has been fasting merely because there is nothing he likes to eat. His death is given no ceremony, either in the narrative or in the text itself, and the circus promptly replaces him with a panther. The panther is immediately more popular than the hunger artist; it confronts the audience with a striking image of life, as opposed to a pallid tableau of death. The artist, it would seem, was forgotten long before he actually died. His confession, however,  signals the climax of the story, and we will return to Foucault for the reason why:

[The] absence of seriousness does not keep madness from being essential — even more essential than it had been, for if it brings illusion to its climax, it is from this point that illusion is undone. In the madness in which his error has enveloped him, the character involuntarily begins to unravel the web. Accusing himself, he speaks the truth in spite of himself. (Foucault 33)

The artist is guilty of breaking the codes of society, and now he is also guilty of breaking his own code of insanity. No rules have remained sacred in the story; Kafka has only provided a vignette in which all forms of discipline are twisted and almost inverted.

To conclude, let us call to attention that Kafka does not assign a proper name to the hunger artist. He does not capitalize even the moniker, and he leaves us with an image of a man as diminished as can be. It is appropriate that, as the hunger artist himself purveyed a signifier with no signified, so no signifier is designated for him. That Kafka neglects to name his character is indicative as of something darker still: the character with no name becomes every man, every reader. A name delimits, calls to mind that the character is someone other than ourselves. Perhaps Kafka wishes us to see that perhaps he is not. The hunger artist is, at first glance, illustrative of a primordial sort of discipline — that is, he can go for long periods of time without food. Looking deeper we see that his goal in fasting is something unattainable, and we may never know precisely what it is, but he does possess the madman's discipline to persevere without any hope. When he falls out of favor with the public, Kafka calls to attention that discipline the circus and the culture surrounding it enforces, which is to say that they control the desires and movements of the public. Perhaps we are all subjected to so many forms of discipline: those we must exercise for physical and mental health on a personal level, those we exercise for our creative and personal endeavors, and those that are writ upon us by our laws and our cultural dictates.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin S. Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist." Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. Trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. 268-277.

Lacan, Jacques. Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Brooklyn, Spring 2007.

Cultural Studies, Professor Ricardo Brown.

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