Benjamin on ... Rivers!

This is almost a bit spooky! I'm going to quote another section of Benjamin's essay on Kafka and here B is talking about K's obssession with 'the question of how life and work are organized in human society'. The really startling bit comes at the end of this passage:

This question increasingly occupied Kafka as it became impenetrable to him. If Napoleon, in his famous conversation with Goethe at Erfurt substituted politics for fate, Kafka in a variation of this statement, could have defined organization as destiny. He faces it not only in the extensive hierarchy of officialdom in The Trial and The Castle, but even more concretely in the difficult and incalculable construction plans whose venerable model he dealt with in The Great Wall of China.

'The wall was to be a protection for centuries; accordingly, the most scrupulous care in the construction, the application of the architectural wisdom of all known ages and peoples, a constant sense of personal responsibility on the part of the builders were indispensable prerequisites for the work. To be sure, for the menial tasks ignorant labourers from the populace, men, women, and children, whoever offered his services for good money, could be used; but for the supervision even of every four day labourers a man trained in the building trade was required ... We - and here I speak in the name of many people - did not really know ourselves until we had carefully scrutinized the decrees of the high command; then we discovered that without this leadership neither our book learning nor our common sense would have sufficed for the humble tasks which we performed in the great whole.' This organization resembles fate. Metchnikoff, who has outlined this in his famous book La Civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques [Civilization and the Great Historical Rivers], uses language that could be Kafka's. 'The great canals of the Yangtze and the dams of the Yellow River,' he writes, 'are in all likelihood the result of the skillfully organized joint labour of ... generations. The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the buttressing of a dam, the least bit of negligence or selfish behaviour on the part of an individual or a group of men in the maintenance of the common hydraulic wealth becomes, under such unusual circumstances, the source of social evils and far-reaching social calamity. Consequently, a life-giving river requires on pain of death a close and permanent solidarity between groups of people that frequently are alien or even hostile to one another; it sentences everyone to labours whose common usefulness is revealed only by time and whose design quite often remains utterly incomprehensible to an ordinary man.'

This focus on the politics of maintaining a river system sounds interesting, I think. I don't know much about Metchnikoff - incidentally, his name is more usually transliterated Mechnikov - but I do know that La Civilisation et les grands fleuves is not a technical history of hydraulics so much as an anarchist thinker's account of how cooperation emerges as a principle in human history. This is a quotation from an article about Mechnikov by James D. White. The article has the title 'Despotism and Anarchy'. I think it gives a flavour of what is going on here:

Mechnikov considered that the first step by which a given people may raise itself on the way to advancement in civilization is to subordinate itself to a despotism. For, he remarks, although there are free peoples in considerable number in various parts of the world, they are without exception no further advanced than the Stone Age as regards science, art and industry, whereas all the advanced nations have at some time experienced despotism. In order to advance materially and culturally a people must combine its efforts and submit to stern discipline. The despot himself, however, is a mere symbol: it is not he who oppresses his subjects, but their own impotence to transform their surroundings individually without the combined effort and the discipline which this involves. In Mechnikov's opinion, it was typical that all the four great civilizations of the ancient world, the Egyptian, the Assyrio-Babylonian, the Hindu and the Chinese, were despotic. All of them, moreover, were associated with great river systems, the utilization of which for irrigation purposes made their high level of culture possible. Mechnikov, however, cautions that he is not propounding any variety of determinism or 'geographical fatalism'. He stresses that:

it is not in the environment itself, but in the relationship between the environment and the aptitude of its inhabitants to provide voluntarily the element of cooperation and solidarity imposed on each by nature that one must look for the raison d 'être of a people's primitive institutions and for their further transformations.

Thus the management of a river system becomes, in some sense, the defining political challenge from which civilization emerges...