Kafka’s weather as a morphological architecture at the border

This article critiques the ghastly and wild weather of Franz Kafka’s Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), The Trial and The Castle, developing new understanding of the role that the weather plays in contemporary border practices. Kafka’s fictional characters consistently exercise their power over one another via manipulation of the weather. Indeed, where better to conceal power, to naturalise and autogenerate brutality, than in the secretive, severe, deadly machinery of the weather? Narrated as brutal, provisional yet decisive within the play of power evident in Kafka’s fiction, it is my contention that Kafka’s weather is probed at and produced by the border. This essay hence uses Kafka’s fiction to detail the contemporary border practice of ‘weaponised weather exposure’, a primary security paradigm and technology of disposability. I first argue that the weather is continuous with the power of provisionality, as the basis of the branching administrative architectures of ‘hyper-rationality’ (Muhammad Ali Nasir, 2012). I then move to analyse the morphological architectures of the weather, how it folds sense and conceals truth. Finally, I look at the weather as a medium used to codify actions as life-determinate – the cruelty of the notion that migrant deaths are ever the will of the weather.