Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays by Tom McCarthy

Author:Tom McCarthy [McCarthy, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681370873
Google: BzfWDAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 35091007
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-04-21T05:00:00+00:00

From Feedback to Reflux

Kafka’s Cybernetics of Revolt

LETTER TO HIS FATHER (the “original” title, the one Max Brod baptized the text with after Kafka’s death, is Brief an den—the, not seinen, his—Vater) was written in 1919. Reading it almost a century later, what most jumps out at me from the opening salvos is an image, a micro-conceit. Explaining to his father that the problem isn’t simply that their relationship has lost its way but that, on top of this, the responsibility for this errancy is laid by his father entirely at his, Franz’s, feet, Kafka sardonically quips: “as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering-wheel, to make everything quite different” (als hätte ich etwa mit einer Steuerdrehung das Ganze anders einrichten können). This is not the only time Kafka invokes this figure. An undated one-page story titled “The Helmsman” (Der Steuermann) presents a dream-like scenario in which the narrator, “standing at the helm in the dark night,” is pushed aside by “a tall, dark man” and reduced to feebly and forlornly crying: “Am I not the helmsman?”—then, less certainly, “Am I the helmsman… ?”

What seems almost uncanny now is that Kafka’s deployment of a specific nautical-navigational syntax anticipates by several decades the one that Norbert Wiener would carry out when naming his new form, or mode, of systems thinking. The term cybernetics, Wiener explains to readers in his 1950 book Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, is derived from kubernetes, Greek for “steersman” or “governor”—the latter of which, by Wiener’s time, denotes not just the political position but also the inbuilt, self-regulatory device that allows steam engines to assess and respond to their own temperature-data, thus preventing breakdown through overheating. Beneath the banner of the term, Wiener elaborates a giant, almost universally applicable vision through which everything from economics to biology, psychology to media or law, can be both mapped and manipulated by being understood as an information or communication system—understood, that is, as a networked mechanism formed of and driven by a set of circuits, relays and, most importantly, feedback loops. Wiener’s vision, its implicit logic, became the core one of the age of information, not to mention digital surveillance, that emerged throughout the late twentieth century and has established itself so forcefully at the outset of the twenty-first. And Kafka, it seems, shared it. We’ve long known that his work anticipates the Nazi terror, Stalinist bureaucracy and corporate capitalism that came in its wake; but it is becoming increasingly clear that it also adumbrates, both in spirit and to the very letter, and even when he seems to be talking about something else entirely, the unsettling world of Google and the NSA in which we live today.

No other writer, even after Wiener’s coinage, let alone before it, has presented a more fundamentally cybernetic aesthetic than Kafka. Think of the hotel in Amerika, which functions (like Karl’s uncle’s desk with its moving panels and its “regulator” dial) as a giant information-relay

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