Bureaucracy is Darkness, from Pascal to Gorz
functional differentiation as the production of (organisational) incoherence and (individual) meaningless) and compulsion through heteronomy
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”.
– Pascal.
The bureau – which has no heart – has its reason, from which reason is annulled.
– interpolating from Gorz
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Last week’s posts left me with at least a few conundrums to continue on with.
I decided to let the morning decide which way it’d go, thinking I might talk go back to Gorz, or slip sideways into Janet Malcolm’s amazing evocation of the world of the New York Freudians (as a way of getting back to drive theory, which: I will!)
For some reason this morning, it was Gorz.
So, to prepare the reader, this is one of those posts where I’m going some thinking-by-writing, so what follows is more a set of sketched calculations, quickly written extrapolations from a close reading of Critique of Economic Reason (CER), rather than a cogent ‘argument’ or polished position I would stand by.
As often with CER, I find the ‘hard flat’ surface of the text is due to the terseness of the summative synthesis Gorz needs to try for to in his attempts to move wide, heavy points through short, narrow passages. Yet these hefty little points (always dense and impacted, yet ‘internally’ very cogent) are also so full of implications that they are highly generative of differentiations – that I then have to work to re-integrate. Which is to say two things.
Firstly, as theory, it’s an amazing piece of work to think with. Secondly, the text itself, in this and the surrounding chapters, is about and elaboration of the socio-political effects of functional differentiation (from 1900s Weber to Habermas’ 80s systems theory) and how we’re left to try to integrate, because the systems can’t. It’s a critique of economic reason insofar as the pursuit of the latter has tended to produce unreason (deraison), incoherence – and nonknowledge.
Thus, boomeranging back to last Friday’s post, there are already reasons in modernity’s basic systems (which evolved beyond human control or intentionality) that might already have led us into a kind of dark cloud of unknowing.
And yes, the Middle Ages were ‘dark’ insofar as we know comparatively little about them (though this is less true than before); whereas, when thinking of the 20C, the darkness of bureaucracy was Weber’s polar night of icy darkness; the gloom around Kafka’s K and the castle, the search for Klamm. The 20C was our dark age, in many ways, not just the age of technological progress – also a century dominated by bureaucracy and all its thrown shadows and imposed darkness (Stasi HQ, Stasi Prison).
And then: these bureaucratic reasons (of which reason grips less and less) can speak to the dark figures amidst the situation we find ourselves in, as I was getting toward last Tuesday: in the classroom with AIs, in (un)safe playgrounds in Mariupol and the US; grappling with the apparent reign of stupidity, incoherence and meaningless – as the old dies and the new struggles to be born (“and what rough beast…”).
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Reflecting on last Tuesday’s post, I’ve remained preoccupied with the ‘environment’ of the ‘system’, more in Luhmann’s terms1: the ‘us’ who are left in the room together by the AIs, unable to really deal with the entity with– with which, with whom within with among? – we are alone together, through and about which-or-whom we must communicate.
Phrased differently, like: what do I do about those of my students who are so disengaged and/or disaffected and/or inattentive that I don’t even know what’s going on enough to govern them administratively? What do I do about this sub-cohort who were already ‘infra-pedagogic’ and have now become ‘infra-administrative’ (yet still enrolled)?
And what do they do; what are they doing; where are they (not in class, not checking2 their email), and; what do they think about the courses they enrolled in (if, indeed, they’re thinking about them)? And what do I do about those who do turn up but, unlike Chat GPT, cannot/will not/do not respond promptly to the prompts given, least of all in a relevant and appropriate way?
Boiled down: even if GPT 3 isn’t stellar amazing as of March ‘23, it’s still outfunctioning an appreciable minority of the human intelligences notionally ‘gathered in the room’ by virtue of having enrolled and (thus) having responsibilities to fulfil, responses to give. This is no different in the context of meetings with work colleagues, mostly because we’re anxious, egocentric, all caught up in our own (sticky, self-referential) jam.
To boil a bit more: ...because we still do have notional responsibilities to one another, implicitly described as functions that differentiate our roles, which we then play, for which some of us then have ‘offices’. As in: when students enrol, they have a list of responsibilities they are supposed to fill (or it is supposed they will fill). And then: when they have enrolled, when I am summonsed with an email, I must respond to it. I turn up on time every week, prepared; they duly submit assessment, which I dutifully assess. In spite of everything and ‘still’, the division of labour effectuates a differentiation of roles and (thus) the integration of society – somehow.
But, then: marking, as per this exquisite essay.
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On Friday’s post, I considered some of the ‘ambient constraints’ on our enlightenment, the quotidian limits of what we can know: including, for Smil, because of implications arising from the division of labour (of which, more in just a moment). I concluded:
how can we think about people’s lived experiences in light of ‘all of the above’, and, moreover, in a world where, as I tried to sketch, the dark figures are multiplying like unsafe playgrounds, whether due to
the complexities of the New Dark Age;
because of a decontextualised (thus meaningless or ‘escaping meaning’) world of “deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness”, or
because we have a superficial understanding of the worlds of production and distribution, because we are just specialists and service workers in global cities, hustling to live and scrolling to relax, tyring to get a leg up into a global job market that rewards ‘data worshippers’.
Let’s push Smil’s point a bit further to bring the post to where I can now proceed a little further. We do we have a superficial understanding of the worlds of production and distribution, (in part) because we are just specialists and service workers in global cities. Or as Smil writes in that same passage, the obverse of specialisation – is ignorance:
“the sweep of our knowledge encourages specialisation, whose obverse is an increasingly shallow understanding, even ignorance – of the basics”
Let’s go further than sweep, and say: the broom of the system, less like early DFW and more like the many brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, they beat our arses toward specialisation. Everything in the Anglocapitalist society of competitive individuals induces us toward becoming a deep-narrow-specialist (then ventouses us out into this world of ‘competitive applicants’ if we’re malingering in the vaginal passages of apprenticeship).
This itself, the division of labour in (the service economies of urban) contemporary society, has already placed limits, constraints, and patterns on what we tend to know – before we created the New Dark age by opening this Pandora’s box of networked ICT powering pervasive computing on smartphones powering surveillance capitalism powering AIs that we have empowered to reprogram themselves to learn (while feigning* interest in our questions by unfailingly replying to our summonses with smooth answers to). Specialisation has done things to our heads, people. It has done things to our heads.
~
It's at this point, with the above in mind, that I can come back to CER. To bring us both back up to speed, to suck us back into the world of Gorzworld, we could play David Byrne, and ask ourselves: how did we get here?
(If you’re interested in how I summarised the wobbles and ellipses of this path, glance back to where it started, here).
Here-and-now, being: a servile service economy of Deliveroo and Deliveree, where the whims of an enfranchised elite minority (shrinking!) compel the precarious labour of the many (growing!), induced to buzz around on e bikes and scooters providing whatever palliative consumption relief the material ‘winners’ see fit to command, before getting back to the further several hours of computer-mediated high wage ‘work’ they’re supposed to be performing (or paying to have algos do for them, if they have access and resources for said algos).
In the global majority’s context of urban life, this ‘calculates out’ a class system where we are accorded our place: notice if you managed to ‘arrive’ as some kind of niche specialist or asset owner, notice if you derive your income from inherited privilege, rents, or wages. Deliverees tend to be insulated from the ‘slings and arrows’ of this societal differentiation-and-integration, via the ability to afford both Deliveroos and the ‘addresses’ to direct them toward. On the flip, Deliveroos, enduring gentrification and the spiralling cost of living, are commuting when they’re not delivering, pushed down train lines to farflung terminii, where they crowd into precarious and overpriced rental digs, and have to cope with delivering piña coladas while being caught in the rain*.
In tracing its emergence, Gorz looked at the invention of modern labour*, how this was parsed as ‘jobs’ (and unemployment) throughout the 200-or-so year utopia of progress of industrial modernity, and where ‘work’ and its entourage of meanings and feelings (and roles and tasks) might fit in all this.
The servile service economy of Deliveroo and Deliveree is the Anglocapitalist involution of the utopia of industrial modernity. We are living in the ruins and the wreckage – renovated (Deliveree), or run down (Deliveroo) – of the postwar ‘American Dream’ that the bare majority managed in the OECD countries in the trentes glorieuse... perhaps.
– and (read the room) this creates its own lighting, its own shadows, own darkness, own atmosphere.
~
If you like piña coladas And gettin' caught in the rain If you're not into yoga If you have half a brain If you like making love at midnight In the dunes on the cape I'm the love that you've looked for Write to me and escape
~
For all this to happen at all, for it to keep happening at the scale of systems and cities, ‘all of the above’ has to retain calculability3: “The conduct of the enterprise can only conform to economic rationality if all spheres of society and even the life of the individual are conducted in a rational, predictable and calculable way”(31).
We can notice the microcrisis that happens at an organisational level to someone like me, in a vestigial profession, when a large percentage of my students are rendered unpredictable and incalculable by virtue of the noncommunicative absences, ie: when they don’t show up and don’t even reply to emails asking them where they might be and what support they might need.
At a cities-and-systems level, however, this already gives rise to a huge knowledge problem – the venerable dark age of administrated modernity that existed well before Bridle’s New Dark Age of ICT.
As Gorz writes,
As the economy, administrative bodies, the state and science become differentiated and give rise to complex apparatuses, their development and functioning demand an increasingly complex division of skills and competences, an increasingly differentiated organization of increasingly specialized functions. The overall working of these apparatuses is beyond the comprehension of the individuals within them and even of the individuals (ministers, managing directors, departmental heads and so on) who (formally) bear institutional responsibility for them” (31-2).
Until the onset of networked ICT in the 70s, the administrative attempts to get on top of this beyond took place with paperwork: this is why IBM could swoop in, in 1967, and offer its solutions to The Paperwork Explosion (directed by Jim Henson, with music by Raymond Scott .
But one could also look back, just a little, to the meticulous, voluminous files of the Stasi, the National Socialists, and the Prussian public service (see Cornelia Visman’s work on this).
Without re-mounting the whole Weberian argument here, this already points us toward the caging of bureaucracy, how and why bureaucracy inclines toward “mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance...” producing “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” – nullity, in a word.
Thus it might already – and for some time – been the nullity at work in modernity that has worked against our ability to know the world.
Again: bureaucracy is darkness. Bureaucracy is darkness. Kafka saw this.
~
Gorz takes these Weberian insights in an interesting direction (beyond the ken of Weber’s Prussian 1900s, with all its furrowed brows, pointy helmets, and schmisse), by noticing that, beyond a certain point or scale, it is no longer possible to rely on the
“agents’ own motivations for accomplishing this task. Their favourable disposition, personal capacities and goodwill are not enough. Their reliability will only be ensured by the formal codification and regulation of their conduct, their duties and their relationships” (32).
In other words, by the time any given university is codifying Student Responsibilities in a dotpointed list (and I suggest these came in around 2010 or so) there is a tacit admission that students themselves cannot be relied upon to remain known, remain reliable.
This is already a bifurcation between the university and the University (and its staff, too), generating the latter as an administrative entity (which I call The Entity) that then tasks itself with inducing the governable the conduct of its cohorts, including by “using a set of techniques beyond the agents’ comprehension, irrespective of their intentions” (32).
Crucially – and so fatefully, for all of us – his ‘tasking’ has an eigendynamic4, as “each step in the differentiation of competences produces an increase in bureaucratization which permits an increase in the differentiation of competences and so on” (32). For those with administrative offices, this eigendynamic narrows officeholders’ fields “of responsibility and scope for initiative”, and “what is more, the coherence and goals of the organization – within which they are more or less consenting cogs – become less and less intelligible” (32). The terminal form of this bifurcation is organisational incoherence, and sprawling heteronomy, a situation where no ‘one’ has mastery over their own actions and decisions, everyone must comply, and the organisation itself becomes incoherent and unsteerable. Again, speaking back to Bridle (or superadding to his framing of the problem visible by the 2010s), the industrial modernity of the 20C already birthed its own dark age.
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What does this heteronomy do to us? How does it feel to have one’s working life carried by organisations that seek to govern our conduct in ways that transcend our very humanity – qua volition, intentionality, agency, spontaneity – by interposing a set of codified functions with which we must all comply?
In a way, I don’t need to tell you, because you’ve dealt with Home Affairs, Centrelink, Medicare, or even the former Stasi still working at some of Berlin’s post offices. You know in your soul how soulcrushing this is; Weber saw it over a century ago, and its fatality (decades before it was married to militarism and nationalism by Stalin, Hitler, and the Allied war economies). Back to Weber:
This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt”
In terms of what determines our work functions and patterns of work – the labour that we tend-to-have-to perform in our ?bullshit? jobs, Deliveroo or Deliveree – Gorz contends that what we end up with is a condition of heteronomy.
Let’s notice this great tragic irony of classical sociology: the rationalisation of the problem (of reproducing integration by compelling task completion in an evermore differentiating division of labour) does not solve the problem, or produce efficiency, productivity and happiness, it produces heteronomy, involuting toward paralysis and bloat.
Curiously, since the time of IBM’s ‘solution’ to The Paperwork Explosion, ICT has been brought in as a way of squaring the circle here – yet, again, it does not solve its own problems, and produces new ones, alongside the net effect of a heteronomised society of hapless specialists who are evermore dependent on evermore incoherent bureaucracies (and now also dealing with the Anthropocene and the New Dark Age).
Adam Curtis is right to notice5 that these systems are cybernetic insofar as they’re always trying to keep the now ‘stable’, trying to integrate, seeking homeostatic equilibrium and control through calculability, compelling compliance by producing and proceduralising functions we have to comply with, then choking on its own overexplicated excrescences as it nullifies us to death with the meaninglessness and disenchantment – and sometimes, faulty arithmetic – of its regulations. Fun times.
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Looking at the word limit creeping up, the time limit creeping down, and the imminent bifurcation in this key bit of Gorz’ argument, I’ll sum up where this post differentiated, in dot points (in honour of bureaucracy), then stop for today, and return to this Friday, or next Tuesday, after a bit of a breather…
What of my students who don’t even reply to emails now... (while Chat GPT shows up)?
...partly this inheres in the division of labour (before any ‘New’ Dark Age)
20C modernity relies on calculability, and this means bureaucracy
…which has sought to govern us all by ‘keeping it rational’, predictable and calculable, but
as it differentiates, it has an eigendynamic that produces individual specialists and organisational incoherence
(thus) a system inducing compliance and oriented toward rationalisation produces
heteronomy, and
at cities and systems scale now, the net effects of we can see (before ICT and the Anthropocene kicked in), are
rampant organisational incoherence,
sprawling heteronomy, and
a situation where no ‘one’ has mastery over their own actions and decisions, yet where
everyone must comply (often with unproductive, stupid and meaningless procedures), even as
the organisation itself becomes incoherent and unsteerable.
Rationalisation was supposed to retain calculability (and thus governability); it also tends to produce heteronomy, with the loss of agency, autonomy, and purpose that implies) (as well as disenchantment, if we follow Weber, and/or as an emmiseration of spirit, if we follow Stiegler).
See you on Friday, during business hours.
Bureaucracy is darkness.
Habermas talked of system/lifeworld, Luhmann of system/environment. I think it’s important to clock that Luhmann’s theory is a critical theory of Habermas’ normative theory of communication (as well as a sociological theory critical of Habermas’ handling of systems theory…) Best if we don’t go down this rabbit hole here…
I mean, ‘checking’ already implies a lot… perhaps they're checking but not replying… the point is that these hover in the Rumsfeldian epistemic murk.
In an adjacent set of theoretical insights, this is part of what Deleuze noticed as control society, comprised of mechanisms capable of “giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant” (7). In a restricted sense, control power is about retaining calculability-and-traceability through a dispersed set of objects in circulation, stored or in motion
I’m trying to popularise the English use of eigen~, work that Heinz von Foerster pioneered in his shift from the ringstrasse to California. Eigen~ means ‘its own’ or ‘one’s own’, as in ‘1913 ringstrasse 4 eva’ of Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (man without it/his-own qualities). Here, the usage indicates an an entity with a dynamic of ‘its own’
“Everyone’s just trying to manage the now and desperately hold it stable, almost like in a permanent present, and not step into the future. And I don’t think that will last very long… Because if you’ve got a story about where you’re going, when catastrophes like 9/11 or covid or the banking crisis hit, they allow you to put them—even though they’re frightening—to put them into a sense of proportion. If you don’t have a story about where you’re going, they seem like terrifying random acts from another universe”. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/adam-curtis-explains-it-all