BUREAUCRACY AS A MACHINE OF JOUISSANCE

Jeremy Irons plays Kafka in Steven Soderbergh's Kafka. © Miramax 1991.

Comrades,

Welcome to the desert of the real.

I am new to Substack, but already feel at home. I can publish what I want, when I want, and communicate directly with you, my readers.

This year, I will endeavour to publish twice a week; politics midweek, culture or bonus obscenities on the weekend.

For the time being, my writing on here will be entirely free. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Socio-psychological experiments definitely have their use when they indicate the historical specificity or even outright falsity of many claims about “natural” human dispositions, so let’s begin with a nice case. David Brooks[1] deployed how we inherently desire to do good, but society’s assumptions of selfishness affect our behaviour; he thereby almost turns around the standard wisdom according to which the invisible hand of the market makes our natural selfishness work for the common good. Two examples from his short essay make his point clear. Six day care centres in Haifa imposed a fine on parents who were late in picking up their kids, but, surprisingly, the share of parents who arrived late doubled – how could this have happened? Before the fine was imposed, the key factor which the parents considered when they had to decide when to pick up their kids was simple consideration to the teachers – they were well aware that being late can ruin their free evening. The introduction of the fine for being late changed the entire frame and made the parents perceive the situation as the one concerning a financial transaction: how much are they ready to pay for the privilege to arrive late for the pick-up? From this new standpoint, many of them decided that paying a little bit of money is worth of gaining an hour or two of additional free time – moral consideration was out, it became irrelevant since the price for being late was fixed in money. The other example: in 2001, the Boston fire commissioner cancelled the policy of unlimited sick days and imposed a limit of 15 days per year – for those who exceeded this limit, a fine was deduced from their salary. The unexpected result of this measure was that the absence from work in the Christmas and New Year period increased by tenfold: again, the ethical stance of serving the city was replaced by a utilitarian paid agreement, and the firefighters simply decided that the price for free holidays was worth paying… In both cases, a financial incentive “prompts people to see their situation through an economic lens”. We have here a clear case of how the utilitarian selfish subject is not a fact of nature but is engendered by the socio-economic frame.

The overall picture is nonetheless not so bright: what Brooks leaves out of consideration is a behavior which, while it is not motivated by egotism, works against the welfare of others even if their welfare is profitable also for me and satisfies my egotist interests. We are talking, of course, about the tremendous power of envy which makes me desire my neighbor’s misfortune even if I have to pay a price for it – better for me to lose a cow than not if I know that my neighbor will lose three cows… A decade or so ago, there was a rebellion of Cuban refugees detained at the Guantanamo base: its direct cause was that one group of refugees received lower quality orange juice than another group. The very trifling character of what triggered the violent uprising is indicative: not a big injustice or large-scale suffering, but a minimal, ridiculous difference, especially for people who just came from Cuba, a country with severe food shortages. Does this not make it clear that the cause immediately triggering a rebellion is, by definition, trifling, a pseudo-cause signaling that what is at stake is the relationship to the Other? However, we should not dismiss such fights as ridiculous. In Poland during German occupation, all Polish sport clubs were officially disbanded, but football (soccer) matches were tolerated by the occupying authority. Especially in the Carcow Governorship, dozens of clubs formed and competed, and every summer a big Championship of Cracow was organized, where in 1943 weird things happened (remember, we are in a country united against the German occupiers whose treatment of the local population was extremely brutal, where starvation was a permanent threat, etc.). During and after the games,

“players, officials and supporters of teams would fight each other - on August 1, 1943, during a game between Łagiewianka and Wisła, a group of Łagiewianka officials and fans entered the pitch to beat up the referee and Wisła players. The game was ended eight minutes before time. A week later, there were disturbances during games Groble - Nadwiślan (in Borek Fałęcki), and Dąbski - Czarni (in Rakowice), and Blue Police had to intervene. Due to those disturbances, on August 10, 1943, all games were cancelled. The decision was changed after the August 15 meeting, but it did not help, as soon afterwards, during the game Rakowiczanka - Cracovia, further riots took place.On Sunday, October 17, 1943, at 3 p.m., final game of the 1943 Kraków Championship took place at Garbarnia Stadium, with some 10,000 spectators. The game between Wisła and Cracovia ended with a gigantic fight between supporters of both teams, after referee Tadeusz Milusiński awarded a penalty kick to Cracovia, after Wisła’s player touched the ball with a hand in the box. In response, Wisła’s Mieczysław Gracz kicked the referee, and Wisła’s players left the pitch, urged by their officials. Fights between angry fans moved on to the streets of Kraków’s district of Podgórze.”[2]

Is there not something of Bataiilean sovereignty in such a stance of momentarily forgetting the big struggle for survival against the brutal foreign enemy and focusing on a trifling competition? Can we imagine the show of Polish soccer fans fighting each other in front of the true enemy (German soldiers) in the public? Was this not a demonstration of inner strength and freedom? Such cases compel us to complicate Marx’s opposition of use value and exchange value. Eric Santner gives a new twist to Marx’s labor theory of value: at its most basic, it is not about abstract value around which the prices of objects oscillate, but about glamour and glory, about the ritual value of object.[3] (Years ago, Lacan already reproached Marx for not taking into account, above use and exchange value, also ritual value.) The “value” that human labor produces above the use value of its products is all that makes a product more than a mere object of utility: its glamour, its aesthetic value, its sacred value, its entire symbolic weight. In this sense, the “value theory of labor” means that the symbolic value of an object is also not a direct property of this object but is generated by our treatment of this object.

Accordingly, the labor that produces ritual value is what is in labor more than the goal-directed activity—this labor itself is a ritualized activity which generates an enjoyment of its own. Let’s take an extreme example: state bureaucracy. Franz Kafka’s genius was to eroticize bureaucracy, the non-erotic entity if there ever was one. In Chile, when a citizen wants to identify himself to the authorities, “the clerk on duty demands that the poor petitioner produce proof that he was born, that he isn’t a criminal, that he paid his taxes, that he registered to vote, and that he’s still alive, because even if he throws a tantrum to prove that he hasn’t died, he is obliged to present a ‘certificate of survival.’ The problem has reached such proportions that the government itself has created an office to combat bureaucracy. Citizens may now complain of being shabbily treated and may file charges against incompetent officials. . . on a form requiring a seal and three copies, of course.”^[4] This is state bureaucracy at its most crazy. Are we aware that this is our only true contact with the divine in our secular times? What can be more “divine” than the traumatic encounter with the bureaucracy at its craziest—when, say, a bureaucrat tells us that, legally, we don’t exist? It is in such encounters that we get the glimpse of another order beyond the mere terrestrial everyday reality. Like God, bureaucracy is simultaneously all-powerful and impenetrable, capricious, omnipresent, and invisible. Kafka was well aware of this deep link between bureaucracy and the divine: it is as if, in his work, Hegel’s thesis on the State as the terrestrial existence of God is “buggered,” given a properly obscene twist. It is only in this sense that Kafka’s works stage a search for the divine in our deserted secular world—more precisely, they not only search for the divine, they find it in state bureaucracy.

There are two memorable scenes in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil which perfectly stage the crazy excess of bureaucratic jouissance perpetuating itself in its auto-circulation. After the hero’s plumbing breaks down and he leaves a message to the official repair service for urgent help, Robert De Niro enters his apartment, a mythical-mysterious criminal whose subversive activity is that he listens on the emergency calls and then immediately goes to the customer, repairing his plumbing for free, bypassing the inefficient state repair service’s paperwork. Indeed, in a bureaucracy caught in his vicious cycle of jouissance, the ultimate crime is to simply and directly do the job one is supposed to do—if a state repair service actually does its job, this is (at the level of its unconscious libidinal economy) considered an unfortunate byproduct, since the bulk of its energy goes into inventing complicated administrative procedures that enable it to invent ever new obstacles and thus postpone indefinitely the work. In a second scene, we meet—in the corridors of a vast government agency—a group of people permanently running around, a leader (big shot bureaucrat) followed by a bunch of lower administrators who shout at him all the time, asking him for a specific opinion or decision, and he nervously spurts out fast, “efficient” replies (“This is to be done by tomorrow latest!” “Check that report!” “No, cancel that appointment!”. . .). The appearance of a nervous hyperactivity is, of course, a staged performance which masks a self-indulgent nonsensical spectacle of imitating, of playing “efficient administration.” Why do they walk around all the time? The leader, whom they follow, is obviously not on the way from one to another meeting—the meaningless fast walk around the corridors is all he does. The hero stumbles from time to time on this group, and the Kafkaesque answer is, of course, that this entire performance is here to attract his gaze, staged for his eyes only. They pretend to be busy, not to be bothered by the hero, but all their activity is here to provoke the hero into addressing a demand to the group’s leader, who then snaps back nervously “Can’t you see how busy I am!” or, occasionally, does the reverse, greets the hero as if he was waiting for him for a long time, mysteriously expecting his plea.

What this example of bureaucracy makes clear is that the very ultimate failure of bureaucratic machinery is what sustains it, what makes it efficient, since this failure opens up the space for the surplus-enjoyment. At the utilitarian level, a bureaucratic apparatus works to regulate things and resolve problems: courts distribute justice, police investigates crimes, and so on. There is, however, always a surplus over this pragmatic function, a bureaucratic machine always gets caught in the vicious cycle of reproducing its own movement, creating problems in order to be able to work on them, and this circularity generates surplus-enjoyment. From the purely utilitarian standpoint, getting caught in this circular movement has to appear as a failure to do the job properly and efficiently, but it is this very failure which generates the excess of enjoyment. A true bureaucrat is busy all the time, achieving nothing, frantically turning in circles and ignoring calls to just do some simple thing that would really help people.

One can also make the same point in the terms of investiture: the proper work of bureaucracy is, among other things, to allocate individuals to job positions, to make them occupy posts for which they are effectively qualified; however, the very failure of such allocations, the fact that people feel out of place at their posts, that they have troubles with their investiture, is what opens up the space for the obscene surplus-enjoyment. If I occupy the post of a judge, the surplus-enjoyment I get from it is that I screw things up precisely while I follow the rules closely, i.e., through my very ultra-efficiency and excessive engagement.

It is at this level that we should also locate the phenomenon of misinterpellation elaborated by James Martel.[5] Misinterpellation works in two directions: a subject recognizes him/herself in an interpellation that wasn’t even effectively enunciated but just imagined by him/her, like the fundamentalist who recognizes himself in a call of god (however, one can argue that this case is universal—does the interpellated subject generally not imagine the big Other [god, country, etc.] which addresses him/her?); and a subject recognizes him/herself in an interpellation which didn’t target him, as in the well-known anecdote about how Che Guevara became minister of economy (at an inner circle meeting immediately after the victory of the revolution, Fidel asked “Is there an economist here among you?” and Che quickly replied “Yes!” confusing “economist” with “Communist”). A more pertinent example here is the interpellation of individuals into subjects of human rights: when black slaves in Haiti recognized themselves as the subjects of human rights declared by the French Revolution, they of course in some sense “missed the point”—the fact that, although universal in their form (“all men”), human rights effectively privileged white men of property; however, this very “misreading” had explosive emancipatory consequences. This is what Hegel’s Cunning of Reason is about: human rights were “really meant” to be accepted only by white men of property, but their universal form was their truth. It was thus the first interpellation which was wrong, but the true interpellation could only actualize itself through the false one, as its secondary misreading.

This inefficiency, of course, sometimes reaches its limit and can no longer be contained through the incorporation of inherent transgressions into the system. We can effectively imagine ideology as an autopoietic system which encounters a problem when external perturbations become so strong that they can no longer be interpreted within its framework—say, the situation in Russia in early 1917 was such that it was no longer possible for the ruling ideology to integrate (or to account for in its terms) the “external” (nondiscursive) perturbations (the costs of a war which was more and more perceived as meaningless; the dissatisfaction of peasants without land). The Bolsheviks imposed a totally different ideological frame which succeeded in integrating and accounting for these prediscursive perturbations. Hitler succeeded in a similar way in early 1930s, imposing a new ideological framework which accounted for nonideological perturbations that affected Germany at that time (economic crisis, moral disintegration, etc.). The lesson of these examples is that, although one should include into analysis external (transideological) perturbations, the crucial factor is how these perturbations will be accounted for (symbolized) by an ideological edifice. In the struggle in Germany, Hitler won over the alternate Communist reading of the crisis; his victory was, of course, also a product of extra-ideological factors (the brute state force was mostly supporting him, he had much greater access to financial resources, etc.), but the crucial moment was achieving ideological hegemony.

---

[1] In “The power of altruism”, International New York Times, July 9-10 2016, p. 9.

[2] Quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_in_occupied_Poland.

[3] See Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

[4] Isabel Allende, “The End of All Roads,” Financial Times, November 15, 2003.

[5] For this notion, see James Martel, “A Misinterpellated Messiah” (paper presented at the conference The Actuality of the Theologico-Political, Birkbeck, University of London, May 24, 2014).