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The Chronicle Review
May 26, 2015
How to Bash Bureaucracy
By Evan Kindley
"Nowadays, nobody talks much about bureaucracy," writes David Graeber at
the outset of his new book, The Utopia of Rules. In the first half of
the 20th century, he reminds us, the word was on everyone’s lips. In the
wake of the pioneering work of Max Weber, who defined bureaucracy as the
consummate form of modern social organization, interest in the
phenomenon spiked among sociologists like C. Wright Mills, journalists
like William H. Whyte, and novelists like Joseph Heller. Nor has this
tradition died out completely: In the last few years, we’ve had books
from Ben Kafka on the history of paperwork, Nikil Saval on the office,
and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished IRS novel, The Pale King.
Still, Graeber argues that there have been fundamental changes in the
way we talk — or don’t talk — about bureaucracy since the 1960s, when
radical social movements encouraged "rebellions against the bureaucratic
mind-set." For the past 40 years or so it has been mainly the
libertarian and neoliberal right that have talked about bureaucracy,
often as a synonym for "big government."
The right-wing critique of bureaucracy, grounded in the thinking of
neoliberal economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, was
based on a sharp distinction between state administration, held to be
slow-moving, sclerotic, and potentially tyrannical, and free-market
capitalism, viewed as dynamic, efficient, and fundamentally fair.
In practice, Graeber maintains, this distinction doesn’t really hold up;
indeed, as he argued in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House,
2011), markets as we know them today are largely the creation of the
state, and bureaucracy has been driven by the needs of business just as
much as those of government. Nevertheless, "right-wing populists soon
realized that, whatever the realities, making a target of bureaucrats
was almost always effective," Graeber writes.
At the same time, the anti-authoritarian-left critique of bureaucracy
began to wither away as leftists devoted themselves instead to
justifying and reinforcing the institutions of the welfare state. "The
Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy," Graeber writes. "It’s
not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none."
The Utopia of Rules is Graeber’s attempt to revive a left critique of
bureaucracy in our time — an attempt that he, as an anthropologist,
anarchist, and politically engaged public intellectual, is uniquely
placed to make. Graeber first came to broad public attention with Debt
and his simultaneous involvement with Occupy Wall Street.
The Utopia of Rules is a modest volume only in comparison to Debt and
its follow-up, The Democracy Project (which sought to find the roots of
Occupy in the American Revolution). It is less a treatise than a
collection of essays, one that finds room for excursus on topics as
diverse as ATM machines, structuralist theory (by means of which he
demonstrates that vampires are the opposite of werewolves, and Sherlock
Holmes is the opposite of James Bond), the glories of the German post
office, and the finer points of Malagasy grammar. By the time you’ve
arrived at the book’s appendix — a meditation on Christopher Nolan’s The
Dark Knight Rises entitled "Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power"
— you might begin to wonder whether The Utopia of Rules is really a book
about bureaucracy at all.
A better unifying term might have been "imagination." For Graeber,
"bureaucracy" essentially means any hierarchical institution governed by
fixed rules and regulations. Such arrangements, while useful in certain
contexts, are fundamentally hostile to the human values of
improvisation, flexibility, and creativity.
The contrast between bureaucracy and imagination is especially stark,
Graeber holds, in the case of the modern university. "A timid,
bureaucratic spirit has come to suffuse every aspect of intellectual
life," he maintains, and he is particularly dismayed at the amount of
time and energy that present-day academics, who should be inventing
flying cars and constructing ambitious new social theories, are expected
to put into administrative matters like evaluations and grant proposals.
"There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric,
brilliant, and impractical," he writes. "No longer. It is now the domain
of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and
impractical: It would seem society now has no place for them at all."
Imagination, for Graeber, doesn’t just mean creative productivity or
technical innovation; it extends to moral imagination, or what we might
call compassion. He observes that the people who wield bureaucratic
power are not obliged to notice or understand much about the people over
whom their authority is exerted. The authorities have no incentive to be
imaginative, whereas the rest of us expend most of our creative energy
trying to follow an elaborate set of arbitrary rules, which leaves
little time and energy for creative thinking. "Bureaucracies … are not
themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing
stupidity," Graeber writes, "of managing relationships that are already
characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination." They are
thus "dead zones of the imagination," from which nothing really new is
likely to issue.
Graeber himself has plenty of the former kind of imagination — indeed,
his intellectual creativity seems inexhaustible — but is sometimes
lacking in the latter, moral variety, often slipping into polemic or
caricature where others’ ideas and viewpoints are concerned. As in Debt,
he moves quickly over a very large territory, and is prone to dismissing
entire academic disciplines and intellectual movements with a wave of
his hand. Nor does he engage with the substantive tradition of writing
about bureaucracy by post-Weberian sociologists like Robert Merton,
Alvin Gouldner, and Michel Crozier.
Still, you’ve got to admire the sheer range and brio of these essays;
few public intellectuals seem to be having as much fun constructing
their arguments. (Slavoj Zizek, in his more puckish moments, comes
close.) Graeber can be very witty, and on occasion he tosses off
critical insights (like a dialectical interpretation of Dungeons &
Dragons worthy of Adorno) that would keep a cultural-studies seminar
occupied for hours.
It’s unlikely that The Utopia of Rules will do for bureaucracy what
Graeber’s previous work did for debt. As Graeber notes, a serious public
conversation about the costs and benefits of bureaucracy does not yet
exist in this country, and no single book, however brilliant, will be
able to call it into being. But in its quixotic vitality, The Utopia of
Rules makes an implicit claim that feels just as important: that works
of social and political theory can be works of the imagination too.
Evan Kindley is a visiting instructor of literature at Claremont McKenna
College and an editor at large at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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