The Autonomous Cyclops
Kafka and Homer on The Human Condition
Homer describes the Cyclopses as auto-nomoi, laws unto themselves. With tragic foresight, Homer pits the cunning wit of Odysseus against the self-contained, autonomous giants. Monocularity is the anatomical expression of self-containment.
Kafka defines the human being as essentially riven between the yoke of heaven and the yoke of earth. His characters suffer the opposite fate as the Cyclops. Whereas the self-contained giants are happy in their innocence—until an outsider comes to disturb them—Kafka’s characters are wanderers, unable to reach to home.
Autonomous beings like Homer’s Cyclopses, by contrast, feel no rift. But they also lack depth perception. This makes them vulnerable when they encounter anything outside themselves. “Nobody has blinded me”= “Nothing to see here.” Polyphemus goes down denying any reality outside of himself. The autonomous are condemned to LARP to protect themselves from the reality principle.
This is Baudrillard’s point: existentialism and subjectivism create a void that must be filled by consumerism. Autonomy is unsustainable.
It also is the thesis of Bruno Macaes, who more recently argues that liberalism can only survive if culture becomes a kind of TV melodrama. What binds us? The media narratives we consume. Politics as theater.
We who live in the age of screens have become flattened. We see with one eye. And when the flood waters come we, too, will cry out, “Nobody has blinded me.”
Autonomy and monoculture create a fanaticism that will buck no contradiction from without. But heteronomy is painful. Binocularity means perception is fundamentally conflictual. The Cyclops can’t survive in a globalized world. But will Odysseus ever make it home?
Our great desire for simplicity and homecoming make autonomy an everlasting temptation.
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“Kafka defines the human being as essentially riven between the yoke of heaven and the yoke of earth.”
This resonates deeply for some reason. Perhaps because we seem to love our lives bombarded with two seemingly irreconcilable messages:
“1. You are a meat puppet with no free will. Thinking teleologically about your life is a waste of energy.”
“2. But since you’re here, you really ought to do something about this climate change, and the systemic racism, and maybe stop all these wars. Why?! There you go again…”