If modernism concerns the ordinary, the everyday, then how to explain Kafka as modern, or surrealism?
[i.] Dreaming is ordinary, therefore etc.
[ii.] The distortion of Kafka results from the effort to establish the truth of our emotional life in the midst of the ordinariness of family and commercial pressures.
[iii.] The ordinary almost by definition includes nothing strange, but does often include an appearance of strangeness.
[iv.] maybe surrealism and kafka has more to do with postmodernism than with the movement whose epicenters are Proust and Joyce.
[v.] Kafka is extremely geared to ordinariness in every respect (the turn of plot, the psychology and behavior of his characracters) but one: the conceit of his tales.
[vi.] The ordinary is, in fact, bizarre and surreal; it is only our habit of perception that makes them seem otherwise.
If modernism concerns the everyday, concerns today, then post modernism concerns the “right now” within the everyday, the ‘right now’ and ‘right here’ [Generally in the context of — here I am doing the same thing again; now what, again, is this ‘same thing’ I am doing? What can be said about this sameness, this finding myself in this position again] such that, for the artist, the making (the process) and the thing made have become conflated. [If I, as an artist, am concerned with the right now then, insofar as I am an artist, I must right now be in some way engaged with making art.] Is my doing by doing enough or must my doing somehow result in the done? In this conflation, like at the nodes of a sine curve, some have made their artistry that of “an actor on the loose” whiles others, sticking to older less demonstrative forms, seem attuned to how very much a moment can contain.
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