What You See Isn't What You Get: Bureaucracy as Spectacle

Bureaucracy as a Moral Problem, Pt. 3

Bureaucracy puts on a good show, obscuring the ordinary ways which really sustain the world. You can revisit the first and second parts of this series before reading this.

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Why You Never See Bureaucracy

As I’ve mentioned before, anthropologist David Graeber noted that the things which anthropologists study aren’t always the things which are most important about a culture, but the things they wish were most important: it’s much cooler to study sex and violence, but not so much housing patterns¹. Accordingly, the most important thing about most societies—and modernized societies in general—, he says, is their paperwork.

“Paperwork” is a stand-in for a structured way of approaching the world in which everything is in its right place, a series of mental habits of categorizing the world which places everything in order to extract from everything the most value and the most efficiency. And importantly, no one will travel to your part of the world to gawk at the bays and bays of filing cabinets, or marvel at the army of grey flannel suits.

But what bureaucracy makes possible? That, people are amazed by, for better or worse. Complaints about labyrinthian processes for filing insurance claims and the Washington Monument; waiting on hold for an hour with the house alarm company and the Coliseum at Rome: these are evil twins. Or at least, one cool twin and one twin practicing his sousaphone.

Consider the following: the form that bureaucracy takes—if we are to keep it from being noticed, cannot be the most obvious form. If it takes the form of being the most obvious—a long line of people waiting to fill out forms—we see bureaucracy for what it is: an organizing mechanism which is, at its best, anti-human, reducing persons within it to numerical values isolated from the texture of their personhood. Everyone hates the DMV; Google forms are banal.

But, if somehow the same mechanisms can be occluded into a much more eye-catching, exhilerating form, we might not just learn to tolerate the systems, but learn to love them.² The aesthetic nature of pedagogy is underrated: the spell-binding orator model of teaching worked when it did because it was employed in cultures which saw the great orator not just as skilled, but as praise-worthy and beautiful, worthy of being emulated.³

Photo by Andrés Dallimonti on Unsplash

Behold! The Beautiful and the Bureaucratic!

In Exodus 1, after the death of Joseph, a new Pharoah arises within Egypt, and all is downhill for Israel. It’s a pattern which recurs endlessly in the Old Testament: the subjugation of the people by bearers of others gods, and Egypt is the prototype which all other tyrants will aspire to. In the last edition, we looked at the ways in which Genesis offers an origin story of bureaucracy, and we have here in the first chapter more of the same: Egypt rises precisely to the degree that it becomes a bureaucracy-as-country.

The first signs of this, as we saw last time, come in Genesis 41 through Egypt’s grain administration: the more grain it stored and distributed, the greater it grew in power, wealth, and the esteem of the world around it. But this, again, is the equivalent of the DMV: you come to Egypt for the food, but there’s nothing about the grain distribution mechanism that will keep you there.

The development from Genesis 41 to Exodus 1 is that this mechanism is now not only the organizing feature of grain, but of people as well. In v. 1-7, the emphasis is on the proliferating Israel—mentioned are the family tribes, but nothing is said of their productivity, their output, or their accomplishments. What they are doing is “filling the land”: one cannot but hear overtones of Genesis’ call to fill the earth, a people fecund and faithful⁴. The contrast of Egypt’s response is all the more telling: people are a problem to be managed (v. 9-10), and specifically, to be categorized according to their labor capacities (v. 11).

The problem for bureaucracy, it seems, is life. In fact, these two competing principles of human organization—labor bureaucracy and birth—are put into contrast with one another, in no small part because people being born is one of the key problems with any bureaucratic system. The naming of the children of Jacob, the celebrating of their families—all of this runs headlong into a very different principle of human organization for the sake of efficiency and accomplishment.

In case we see these two principles as simply ancient competitors, consider, for example, that health insurance is an iron-clad arrangement unless their is a life-event, typically consisting of either 1) losing one’s job status, or 2) gaining or losing a family member. Or that altering one’s name due to marital status requires not celebration by the community, but multiple meetings rife with forms, attestations, and different offices.

But Egypt cleverly hides the process—by having the Israelite labor take the form of public works programs. The bureaucratic takes the form of new buildings, new habitations, and possibly, a new spectacle for the world to see. It is unlikely that the labor specified here in Exodus is the same which enabled the building of the pyramids, but the idea is the same, and on a larger scale: bureaucracy channels the spectacle of life itself into something stable—the spectacle of Egyptian architecture⁵.

The Bureaucratic versus the Living

If, in the beginning, bureaucracy provides an origin story of how the world is meant to be, then life itself becomes not the way that bureaucracy persists, but life becomes a problem to be solved.

But it solves it through presenting a beautiful vision of what happens when human lives are sublated: behold, look what happens when we trade family lines for productive organization! Look what can happen when we come together in such powerful ways! None of this is to deny the effectiveness of group solidarity, but to say that the two visions of how this occurs are decidedly different.

I do not wish at this point to opine more about “the Machine”⁶, but to simply note this: alternatives to “the Machine” can themselves be as mechanical as their tyrant, aesthetic visions which obscure the need for a different life entirely. That fecundity is pictured here not as the problem, but as the form of beauty—a marvel of God—is a point worth tarrying with, for it is in this, I think, that we begin to see our way out.

1. Just go read this book: it’s fantastic.

2. We are beings, as one more than one writer has noted, who learn to love things through their appearances: it’s why the scandal of the incarnation is such a scandal—there was little (as 1 Peter 2 reminds us) to draw us to Jesus in his appearance, or frankly, the smoothness of his teaching. This is one reason among many why it drives me nuts when people boils Jesus down to someone who just told everyone to love each other—have you seen the way that Jesus baffles people, including his own friends?

3. It’s worth considering the interrelationship between beauty and how we learn to love what is good. Another time, but this is a good starting place.

4. One of my favorite pieces of literature in the world is Annie Dillard’s chapter “Fecundity” in Pilgrim at Tinkers’ Creek, which treats the proliferation of life in the natural world as a terrible wonder. The chapters is well worth your time. Just go read the whole book.

5. That the laborers of the pyramids did so for pay and out of reverence for the Pharoah, as is now thought, doesn’t diminish the point, but enhance it: in life and death, the workers are remembered only through their being laborers, and not, as Exodus contrasts it, being the member of this or that household.

6.

“Machine” and its critiques feel increasingly, as the kids say, like a vibe, an aesthetic.