On Bureaucracy
“The anthropologist Michael Herzleld, drawing on fieldwork in Greece, refers to the stories we tell each other about bureaucracy as ‘secular theodicies,’ that is to say, efforts to explain, and sometimes to explain away, the existence of incompetence, indifference, or corruption of political institutions. We tend to condemn bureaucracy and bureaucrats when better explanations elude us. There is an old saying that a myth is the imaginative or imaginary resolution of real contradictions; the myths of bureaucracy seek not only to resolve paperwork’s contradictions, but also the contradictions in our own thought. We have been unable to reconcile our theories of the state’s power with our experience of its failure.”
Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, p. 10-11. I came across this book some years ago when researching the history of written artefacts in scroll, codex and print. Scholars often forget that bureaucracy has French etymological roots and came to prominence after the French Revolution. “There is no trace of the idea in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Burke, or even Hegel. Yet by the 1850s it was all the rage” (p. 11). Paper power had become tied to the aim to hold accountable the autocratic power of the monarch. It should, therefore, not be surprising to find any person with autocratic tendencies attacking bureaucracy. Because autocracy crosses partisan lines, it is worth listening for this distinction. Whenever I hear people denigrate archivists or even the more simple need for record keeping, generally in the form of meeting agendas and action notes, I hear the murmurs of a tyrant.
This concern was highlighted in Timothy Snyder’s 2017 twenty chapters On Tyranny, which he summarized recently online. The first two are “do not obey in advance” and “defend institutions.” This captures some of the challenges bureaucracy poses, given that bureaucracies themselves have procedures to foster obedience. Hence, cog in the wheel ethical defenses abounded after the second world war. As Hannah Arendt noted, calculating paper trails is not thinking. This is why Snyder also recommends believing in truth and investigating. As Kafka points out, bureaucracy is not simple. His argument in this book is worth reading carefully if only because “paperwork is unpredictable and that this unpredictability is frustrating… modern political thought was both founded and confounded by its encounters with paperwork” (p. 10).
This frustration can be felt in the 2018 film Transit, based on a 1944 Franz Kafka-esque novel by Anna Seghers. The film is set in contemporary France, and revolves around a man trying to escape an occupying government’s crackdown on human beings without the right papers. Camps are created and soon full as the “cleansing” begins. Transit papers ensure he is both visible and has the right to leave and to become invislbe. At one point, the protagonist in the film tries to check into a hotel. “So, I can only stay here if I can prove that I don’t want to stay?” The paradox haunts the entire film.
“That’s the terrible thing. Not that they stare at you, your dirty, tired face, your torn clothing. The terrible thing is that they don’t see you. That you don’t exist in their world.”
