"The Greatest Consideration That the Parties Could Possibly Desire" – Kafka’s Twofold Tie to Bureaucracy

After a brief theoretical introduction, this paper will explore two main reasons why Kafka’s work became synonymous with bureaucracy. The extra-literary one, that Kafka himself was a bureaucrat, will be dealt with in section two and will challenge some of the usual misconceptions by attending to Kafka’s office writings, and the important work being done on those documents by Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner. The second reason, immanent to literature, is that Kafka’s novels and short stories best capture the logic of hypertrophied administration run amok. Corngold and Wagner have insightfully emphasised that it wasn’t only at the level of the content and themes, but also of the narrative form and style, that Kafka’s day job of accident insurance and his bureaucratic know-how were integrally present in his literary writings. In the third section, this paper will connect these insights with Lubomír Doležel's possible-worlds analysis of Kafka’s narratives’ semantic macrostructures. In section four, the question of whether mystification and goal displacement are inevitable for bureaucracies will be explored by using Max Weber’s, Theodor Adorno’s and Claude Lefort’s insights. In attempting to provide an answer, the use will be made of Karl Marx’s conceptualisation of the economic base and the distinction he draws between productive and unproductive labour in capitalism. In conclusion, this line of thought will be brought back to Kafka’s work, and to the thought that troubled him throughout his life and found a most direct expression in his last finished story, “Josefine, the Singer or The Mouse People” – how can an individual justify being an artist before society?