![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy: Engaging read from the author of Debt, with lots of interesting observations but no one theme other than the anxieties of late capitalism. Here are some examples I noted, more like a series of theses than anything else: (1) Have you noticed that military officers and police aren’t ever considered “bureaucrats,” even though they mostly manage people/fill out forms? Police aren’t actually involved in dealing directly with most violent crime, but they are major sources of violence (note that this book was published before some of the more well-publicized violence against black American citizens of late); we’re confused about this (we means the largely white, relatively well-off people likely to be reading this book) because police officers are “almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture.” Imaginary police are heroes, and they do spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, not filling out forms. Police are bureaucratic heroes not recognized as bureaucrats.
(2) Graeber argues that the US government took its modern style from big corporations, but that our culture doesn’t let us connect the terrible customer service of Comcast to the critique of “bureaucrats” like we see for the Veterans’ Administration. (3) Modern managers have the idea that they should be in solidarity with shareholders, not with workers; this allows them to collaborate in financialization and degradation of workers. (4) “Whenever someone starts talking about the ‘free market,’ it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He’s never far away.” (5) Markets and bureaucracies are linked, both claiming to create impersonal rules within which freedom of choice can then operate.
(6) Violence communicates, but it also enables an indifference to communication, either as emitter or receiver. The threat of violence communicates, but also “is perhaps the only form of action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative…. [V]iolence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing.” (7) Because of the ways in which bureacracy controls so many of our actions, radical projects face barriers when confronted with large, heavy objects like cars and buildings—which must be owned and maintained according to bureaucratic rules. Once the inspectors arrive, the informal arrangements that worked fine start to fall apart.
(8) There are two kinds of imaginative labor at issue in oppressive capitalist systems: the first is the creative work that the dominant class gets to do because it has leisure and workers in mind-numbing jobs don’t. The second is the imaginative labor of figuring out what people with power might do to you, or want at this moment, etc., and that imaginative labor belongs to the people who surround powerful people—the imaginative work the oppressed do to figure out how to perform in the way that works best for them in front of the oppressor. This imaginative work, Graeber says, belongs to the private/social production sphere. (9) “There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment strategies that furthered labor discipline and social control.” This was capitalist self-preservation. Better Uber, the reasoning goes, then self-sustaining flying cars.
(10) Don’t forget the attractions of bureaucracy: “[W]ho really wants to live in a world where everything is soul? Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor …, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you’re dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having to explain to the librarian why you are so keen to read about homoerotic themes in eighteenth century British verse.” Playfulness isn’t always good—consider how horrific a playful god would be to those on the ground. And he also discusses Jo Freeman’s classic essay on the tyranny of structurelessness http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The problem we must face is that a utopia where everyone plays by the rules is as unattainable as a utopia of absolute free play.
(11) The post office used to be a model for other institutions; it was then crippled in the US “as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn’t really work.” When some workers cracked, their rebellion was always described as “acts of inexplicable individual rage and madness—severed from any consideration of the systematic humiliations that always seem to set them off”—bearing an “uncanny resemblance to the way the nineteenth-century press treated slave revolts.”
(12) The popularity of heroic fantasy is a negation of bureaucracy’s commitment to value-free rule-bound neutrality. “Fantasy worlds create values so absolute it is simply impossible to be value-free.” (There I’m not sure he’s in tune with the grimdark revolution, but ok.) Narratives contrast with bureaucratic rules; fantasy worlds run on secrets, while bureaucracy aims at least in principle to be transparent. Part of the pleasure then is the honesty of the fantasy world, where the secrets are supposed to be secrets, and no bureaucrat will yell at you for filling out a form wrong when you should’ve known better. And yet worlds like D&D also involve the resurgence of rules—standardized characters/races, abilities, etc. (Brandon Sanderson’s rule-based magic would be a good example.) Thus, such games “ultimately reinforce the sense that we live in a universe where accounting procedures define the very fabric of reality.”
(13) (From the last essay, about the last Batman movie--yeah, he didn't try very hard to fit it in.) The modern superhero plot and its conservative values serve as instruction to white boys: imagination and rebellion lead to violence, and violence is a lot of fun but must ultimately be directed back at excessive imagination and rebellion.
(2) Graeber argues that the US government took its modern style from big corporations, but that our culture doesn’t let us connect the terrible customer service of Comcast to the critique of “bureaucrats” like we see for the Veterans’ Administration. (3) Modern managers have the idea that they should be in solidarity with shareholders, not with workers; this allows them to collaborate in financialization and degradation of workers. (4) “Whenever someone starts talking about the ‘free market,’ it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He’s never far away.” (5) Markets and bureaucracies are linked, both claiming to create impersonal rules within which freedom of choice can then operate.
(6) Violence communicates, but it also enables an indifference to communication, either as emitter or receiver. The threat of violence communicates, but also “is perhaps the only form of action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative…. [V]iolence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing.” (7) Because of the ways in which bureacracy controls so many of our actions, radical projects face barriers when confronted with large, heavy objects like cars and buildings—which must be owned and maintained according to bureaucratic rules. Once the inspectors arrive, the informal arrangements that worked fine start to fall apart.
(8) There are two kinds of imaginative labor at issue in oppressive capitalist systems: the first is the creative work that the dominant class gets to do because it has leisure and workers in mind-numbing jobs don’t. The second is the imaginative labor of figuring out what people with power might do to you, or want at this moment, etc., and that imaginative labor belongs to the people who surround powerful people—the imaginative work the oppressed do to figure out how to perform in the way that works best for them in front of the oppressor. This imaginative work, Graeber says, belongs to the private/social production sphere. (9) “There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment strategies that furthered labor discipline and social control.” This was capitalist self-preservation. Better Uber, the reasoning goes, then self-sustaining flying cars.
(10) Don’t forget the attractions of bureaucracy: “[W]ho really wants to live in a world where everything is soul? Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor …, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you’re dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having to explain to the librarian why you are so keen to read about homoerotic themes in eighteenth century British verse.” Playfulness isn’t always good—consider how horrific a playful god would be to those on the ground. And he also discusses Jo Freeman’s classic essay on the tyranny of structurelessness http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The problem we must face is that a utopia where everyone plays by the rules is as unattainable as a utopia of absolute free play.
(11) The post office used to be a model for other institutions; it was then crippled in the US “as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn’t really work.” When some workers cracked, their rebellion was always described as “acts of inexplicable individual rage and madness—severed from any consideration of the systematic humiliations that always seem to set them off”—bearing an “uncanny resemblance to the way the nineteenth-century press treated slave revolts.”
(12) The popularity of heroic fantasy is a negation of bureaucracy’s commitment to value-free rule-bound neutrality. “Fantasy worlds create values so absolute it is simply impossible to be value-free.” (There I’m not sure he’s in tune with the grimdark revolution, but ok.) Narratives contrast with bureaucratic rules; fantasy worlds run on secrets, while bureaucracy aims at least in principle to be transparent. Part of the pleasure then is the honesty of the fantasy world, where the secrets are supposed to be secrets, and no bureaucrat will yell at you for filling out a form wrong when you should’ve known better. And yet worlds like D&D also involve the resurgence of rules—standardized characters/races, abilities, etc. (Brandon Sanderson’s rule-based magic would be a good example.) Thus, such games “ultimately reinforce the sense that we live in a universe where accounting procedures define the very fabric of reality.”
(13) (From the last essay, about the last Batman movie--yeah, he didn't try very hard to fit it in.) The modern superhero plot and its conservative values serve as instruction to white boys: imagination and rebellion lead to violence, and violence is a lot of fun but must ultimately be directed back at excessive imagination and rebellion.
Tags: