McCarthy 153: "No other writer, even after [Norbert] Wiener's coinage [of the term cybernetics], has presented a more fundamentally cybernetic aesthetic than Kafka"
Hmm. This hinges in part on McCarthy's identification of a "specific nautical-navigational syntax" in Kafka (152), which is not entirely convincing, but McCarthy is on more stable ground I think when he ooks at "the circuitry or system-architecture" of Kafka's great bureaucracies: "organized in such a way as to render any operation that the user [...] might actually want to use it to perform; it induces serial and ineluctable instances of system-failure--while itself (as a bigger, overarching system whose goal is precisely to induce such instances of failure) functioning perfectly"