Miracles of Organization: Chance and Error in Kafka’s The Castle

Kafka’s writings have not only informed our understanding of modern institutions and bureaucratic organizations as forms of domination; they have also knowingly addressed the limits of such understanding, and of theoretical imagination in more general terms. This philosophical essay is situated in the latter mode of thinking with Kafka about the limits of what we assume ‘organization’ to be or to become. It presents a close reading of The Castle as a novel about the miracle of organization. This miracle takes the form of an interruption and temporary suspension of the laws and routines that order and govern the organized world. Yet there is neither a theological higher power nor a mundane organizational power that might save or make use of the miracle (and resolve K.’s predicament). In The Castle, even the miraculous is a matter of mere chance and organizational chaos – a sardonic rebuke to the age-old imaginaries and theologies of rational and hierarchical political organization. More than performing a critique of bureaucracy, The Castle radicalizes the contingency of organizational operations into matters and situations of miraculous chance which, unrecognized by K, leave without a trace.