
Kafka: An End or a Beginning? - lermontov
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/kafka-end-beginning/
======
Cidan
My initial thought before reading the article was "Well, Spotify did just move
off of it..."

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maxaf
For those of us who have positioned their residences underneath rocks: is
there a link to this?

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4d7XJlq9Y1C7
[https://labs.spotify.com/2016/03/03/spotifys-event-
delivery-...](https://labs.spotify.com/2016/03/03/spotifys-event-delivery-the-
road-to-the-cloud-part-ii/)

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foota
Queues have both a front and end.

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andrewclunn
I find that Kafka loses his zeal when the uncertainty of an unformed
epistemology is removed. It's in the circular questioning of subjectivity and
post modernism that his work takes hold. Move beyond that and what was once
existential horror in his writing becomes trivial nuisance.

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apocalypstyx
My problem with shunting Kafka into post-modernism is it becomes too much a
grab bag. Just like they try to vacuum up Cervantes and Sterne, aswell. Kakfa
died 40 years before post-modernism; (and Cervantes 343 and Sterne 191).

But it brings to my mind a broader point: McHale's notion:

    
    
       intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain 
       point ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological 
       questions far enough and they "tip over" into ontological questions.
       

(I personally prefer the epistemological/ontological definition of
modernism/post-modernism, especially here where we have Kakfa who could best
be define (if anything) as a modernist writer being shoved into post-modern
space.)

So is the shunting of a collective and ancient epistemological and ontological
uncertainty an attempt to neutralize its implications? A question I think
partly arises from something about your use of 'uncertainty' and 'unformed'
here, which keeps occurring to me in terms of the excess of its vital
substance and becoming: too much certainty/too much form tipping over into no
certainty at all/formlessness. Just as defining the question (and no matter
what anyone else argues Hitchhiker's Guide is my favorite example of this in
fiction) for the answer of '42' as 'How many roads must a man walk down?'
provides a solution, is it any more than a placebo affect? that at its core
highlights the instability of our epistemological and ontological positions
more intensely than a blank answer would have (and thereby beats us all over
the head with a teleological hammer).

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baldeagle
The author, not the streaming product.

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ltbarcly3
I was looking for an article about the Kafka queue system. Is this hackernews
or unemployed philosopher news?

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dang
Please don't post this sort of swipe. It's fine if you're uninterested in
(Franz) Kafka; plenty of the rest of us are, and the submission is perfectly
on topic.

It's in HN's DNA (not to mention the opening paragraph of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))
that it covers a wide range of topics, far beyond just computing, tech, and
startups and definitely including arts and letters, among other things.

Acting like the rarer species should be wiped out is a lame way to treat this
site.

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StevePerkins
On the other hand, when a title is _going_ to mislead and confuse most
readers, it would be courteous to extend or clarify the title such as:

" _(Franz) Kafka: An End or a Beginning?_ "

That is, unless the _goal_ is to mislead and feel smug about it.

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zellyn
On my screen, it shows up as "Kafka: An End or a Beginning?
(lareviewofbooks.org)" which was all the information I needed to determine
that it related to the Author before clicking through.

