High modernism springs from the uneven coexistence of archaic and modern structures.

Evidence

Returning to the idea of the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, of the coexistence of distinct moments of history, what you first notice in reading The Trial is the presence of a modern, well-nigh corporate, workweek and business routine; Joseph K. is a young banker (a “junior executive” or “confidential clerk”) who lives for his work, a bachelor who spends his empty evenings in a tavern and whose Sundays are miserable, when they are not made even more miserable by invitations from business colleagues to intolerable professional social outings. Into this boredom of organized modernity something rather different suddenly comes — and it is precisely that archaic, older legal bureaucracy associated with the Empire’s political structure. So we have here a very striking coexistence: a modern, or at least modernizing, economy, and an old-fashioned political structure, something that Orson Welles’s great film of The Trial captured vividly by way of space itself: Joseph K. lives in the worse kind of faceless anonymous modern housing but visits a court housed in shabby baroque splendor (when not in ancient tenementlike rooms), the interspace being occupied by the empty rubble and vacant lots of urban development to come (he will eventually die in one of those bombed-out spaces). The pleasures of Kafka, the pleasures of the nightmare in Kafka, then come from the way in which the archaic livens up routine and boredom, and an old-fashioned juridical and bureaucratic paranoia enters the empty workweek of the corporate age and makes something at least happen! … There is in Kafka a hunger for the sheer event as such in a situation in which it seems as rare as a miracle; in his language, an avidness to register, in a virtually musical economic notation, the slightest tremors in the life world that might betray the faintest presence of something “taking place.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 673

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of mapping their own cognitive position — this is the kind of periodization claim that must be tested against actual uneven development today. — connects to: Long-standing village institutions function as dynamic hybrids of modern and traditional elements. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 60
• DEFINE: Concretely instantiates ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’ with the Kafka example — useful for explaining the periodization thesis.