The Repression of the Poetic Function in Modernity: Kafka, Capital, and the Collapse of Ontological Participation

The Repression of the Poetic Function in Modernity: Kafka, Capital, and the Collapse of Ontological Participation

The repression of the poetic function in modernity is inseparable from the historical rise of the isolated subject under technological rationalization and capitalism. What modernity progressively suppresses is not merely poetry as literary genre, but the poetic mode of participation in Being itself.

The poetic function, in its deepest sense, is not decorative language, aesthetic pleasure, or artistic self-expression. It is the capacity for existence to disclose itself prior to reduction into instrumental abstraction. Poetry originally emerges from ontological participation — from a mode of consciousness still immersed within world, atmosphere, ritual, memory, death, landscape, and communal symbolic continuity.

But modernity increasingly reorganizes existence according to:

• utility,

• productivity,

• quantification,

• bureaucratic abstraction,

• technological mediation,

• and economic instrumentalization.

The rise of capitalism intensifies this transformation dramatically because capital requires the progressive abstraction of life into measurable exchange.

Labor becomes quantifiable.
Time becomes mechanized.
Identity becomes administrative.
The body becomes productive apparatus.
Language becomes informational.
Memory becomes archival commodity.
The self becomes economic actor.

The “I” of modernity therefore emerges not as eternal metaphysical truth, but as a historically produced organizational structure required for technological and economic systems of abstraction.

Subjectivity itself becomes functionalized.

The modern subject is compelled to experience itself as isolated proprietor of consciousness — discrete, competitive, economically legible, and administratively accountable. This increasingly suppresses the older poetic relation to Being in which existence remained participatory rather than instrumental.

Thus the repression of the poetic function is simultaneously:

• ontological,

• symbolic,

• economic,

• technological,

• and perceptual.

What is repressed is the continuity between self and world.

This is why modernity increasingly experiences poetry as irrational excess, impracticality, aesthetic luxury, or private interior expression detached from material reality. The poetic mode becomes marginalized precisely because it threatens the abstraction required by technological capitalism.

For poetry continually reopens:

• ambiguity,

• atmosphere,

• symbolic density,

• bodily participation,

• memory,

• death-consciousness,

• and ontological continuity.

It destabilizes the rigid subject-object architecture required for administrative and economic abstraction.

This is where Franz Kafka becomes decisive.

Kafka’s oeuvre functions as one of the most profound registrations of the loss of ontological participation under modern bureaucratic abstraction. His work documents consciousness trapped within systems whose symbolic operations have become severed from lived Being.

In Before the Law, the subject confronts inaccessible authority without ever entering presence. The law no longer discloses meaning; it exists as abstract administrative transcendence. The individual remains permanently excluded from ontological participation. Existence becomes mediated through inaccessible systems of symbolic power whose operations remain opaque, deferred, and infinitely postponed.

The tragedy is not merely political.
It is ontological.

The modern subject stands before structures of meaning that no longer permit direct participation in reality itself.

Likewise, in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa undergoes not merely bodily transformation, but ontological expulsion from symbolic legibility. Once transformed, he can no longer participate within the administrative-economic order that previously constituted his identity. His humanity had already been reduced to economic function before the metamorphosis occurred.

The insect form merely reveals what modernity had already produced:
a consciousness alienated from ontological continuity and valued only through productive utility.

The horror of Kafka arises because the subject remains trapped within systems of abstraction that no longer connect to living Being.

Language persists.
Administration persists.
Law persists.
Economic obligation persists.

But participation collapses.

Kafka therefore registers the moment at which symbolic systems become autonomous from ontology itself.

The bureaucratic world becomes self-referential recursion:
forms referring to forms,
laws referring to laws,
administration referring to administration,
without disclosure of Being beneath them.

This is the culmination of symbolic hypertrophy under modernity.

The poetic function becomes repressed because poetry threatens to reopen contact with what technological abstraction suppresses:
the continuity between organism, death, memory, atmosphere, body, and world.

Thus modern literature increasingly becomes the site where the repression itself is registered.

The modern writer descends into:

• fragmentation,

• absurdity,

• symbolic collapse,

• bodily extremity,

• atmospheric dissolution,

• and linguistic destabilization

because modern consciousness itself has become severed from participatory ontology.

Kafka stands at the center of this descent because his work reveals the transformation of existence into administrative abstraction before the complete collapse of symbolic legitimacy. His worlds still function procedurally, but the ontological ground beneath procedure has disappeared.

The result is existential estrangement at the level of Being itself.

And it is precisely this estrangement which initiates the modern catabasis.

For once symbolic systems become fully detached from participatory existence, consciousness eventually begins seeking continuity beneath abstraction once more. The repression of the poetic function therefore cannot remain total indefinitely. The deeper the separation intensifies, the greater the pressure toward ontological recovery becomes.

Modern literature becomes the historical record of this pressure.

The poetic returns not as ornament, but as the re-emergence of participation after symbolic alienation.