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Culture and Admin REVIEWS Culture and admin Béatrice Hibou, La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale, La Découverte, Paris, 2012. 223 pp., €17.00 pb., 978 2 70717 439 0. Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, Zone Books, New York, 2012. 182 pp., £19.95 hb., 978 1 93540 826 0. The ascendancy of neoliberalism was accompanied Burnham, Crozier and Castoriadis, but especially by all sorts of mendacious advertising for the roll- Claude Lefort, who took the rise of bureaucracy not back of the state. Bureaucracy became a byword for as a generic index of rationalization and disenchant- everything oppressive, rigid and inefficient about the ment, but as a feature of capital. More precisely, it is planner-state, everything that marketization promised the optimal social and organizational framework for to dissolve into supple flows and individual solutions. capital accumulation, permitting, in Lefort’s words, an The opposition of market and state is so entrenched ‘immediate socialization of activities and behaviours’. that awareness of the grotesquely bureaucratic char- How, then, can we specify the current conjuncture of acter of neoliberal capital still has some difficulty bureaucratization? in making inroads into our common sense. Yet our First, the public–private (or state–business) parallel- everyday life is in many ways permeated by proce- ism present in Weber has developed into a sui generis dures, interactions and interfaces that are demonstra- hybridization, namely in terms of a hypertrophy in the bly bureaucratic, by what Béatrice Hibou captures as private production of norms. Much of the book provides a ‘normative inflation’. a panorama of contemporary research on this phenom- Hibou begins her helpful survey of the return of enon, from the sociology of quantification to the study neoliberalism’s repressed with the chronicle of a day in of ‘audit cultures’. It is punctuated with discussions the life and work of French nurse Alice, in the absurdist of various fields and agencies at the forefront of this ‘wonderland’ of infinite auditing, relentless form-filling ‘normalization’: credit raters, university evaluators, and automated calls. There is tedium and comedy in promoters of transparency, food standards regulators, these tales, gruellingly familiar as they are. There is transparency NGOs, the International Organization also what Ben Kafka – who delights in recounting for Standardization, border agencies, risk assessors the tragicomedies of bureaucracy that accompanied of all stripes. Though Hibou’s specific references are its revolutionary apotheosis in France – identifies as all tucked away in notes, the commendable effort to a compensatory ‘satisfaction’: the dark pleasure we cover the gamut of bureaucracy’s manifestations, and take in retelling our personal calvary with paperwork, the range of theoretical perspectives on it, suffers from unable as we are to get what we want from the state. In some of the generality and flat prose that plague the methodologically and stylistically divergent ways, both social science literature review. these books are preoccupied with the everyday life Second, and key to Hibou’s stance, is an intensifica- of abstraction, as well as with our misrecognitions of tion of the ‘formal’ character of bureaucracy. As she bureaucracy, and the way in which it parlays ubiquity writes: ‘The process of abstraction and categorization into invisibility, or occupies the deepest recesses of our is so advanced and so generalized that it makes one psyche. Both inevitably begin with epigrams from Max lose the meaning of the mental operations that guide Weber, grave prophet of bureaucracy’s inevitability. Yet it and tends to assimilate coding and formalization to their choices are indicative: where Hibou’s selection reality.’ This passage encapsulates both the promise from Economy and Society underscores the fusion of and the shortcomings of Hibou’s book. To extract bureaucracy and capitalism, Kafka’s draws our atten- bureaucracy from the Weberianism of fools that would tion to the ‘bureaucratic medium’ – the folders, files, see it as a transhistorical fate, and conceive it in the paperwork. terms of the current configuration of capitalist power, A careful synthesizer of a vast range of literatures requires without doubt a theory of abstraction and about the political economy of ‘the rule of desks’, formalization. Unfortunately, Hibou’s penchant for a Hibou takes some inspiration from writers like Rizzi, mental theory of abstraction – which she somewhat 40 Radical Philosophy 182 (November/December 2013) leavens with her advocacy of bureaucratic formali- as a ‘space for political practice and a site for the zations as an effective fiction – blocks the path to enunciation of politics’ – to abandon the iron cage thinking how the proliferation of modes of ranking, and embrace the idea of a multiple, plastic, negotiable commensuration and evaluation relates to the real labyrinth – jars with the moment of denunciation in abstractions of capital. We are closer here to the early Hibou’s critique of bureaucratic abstraction. Marx – for whom bureaucracy was an imaginary state This tonal and political imbalance, between the alongside the real state – than to the critic of political description of strategies of power and the indictment economy. We are also at some distance from some of forms of abstract domination, could be generously of the sociological literatures that Hibou relies on, regarded as a contradiction in the object, as well as which are increasingly concerned with the complex an index of our own everyday ambiguities towards social assemblages and material constructs necessary different strains of bureaucratization. Yet I think it is to reproduce and make efficacious such fictions as also an effect of the profound limitations in Weberian GDP, bond ratings or league tables. Different as their conceptions of abstraction. These incline towards approaches may be, both Marxism and contemporary seeing the logics of capital as a product of epochal economic sociology militate against the idea that processes of rationalization, rather than regarding state abstraction is a reduction of complexity, as Hibou and market bureaucracies as unstable, conjunctural seems to suggest, or that they are ‘in reality nothing responses to shifts in economic imperatives, as well but codes on which people have ended up agreeing at as products of the lucid strategies of determinate a given moment to exchange informations, act, orient capitalist agents (from the Mont Pelerin Society to behaviours, in brief, to govern’ – an exceedingly hedge fund managers). The ‘bureaucratic construction idealistic image of bureaucracy. of markets’ of which Hibou speaks has little to do Perhaps not surprisingly, given its attempt to inte- with a general process of reduction of complexity – the grate such a range of often incompatible approaches, juxtaposition of a three-bedroom house and an asset- The Bureaucratization of the World in the Age of backed derivative might suggest as much – but a lot Neoliberalism can be both theoretically and politically to do with legal, institutional and political-economic eclectic. Thus its humanist critique of bureaucracy as strategems to extract surplus profit at a period in which an imposed abstraction – which finds inspiration in other sources of revenue have dried up. I’m not sure if Marcuse’s intuitions about the production of indiffer- abstraction is the ‘constituent imagination’ of society, ence, and takes the form of a defence of the ethics but it does seem to be both its symbolic tissue and, in of the métier against the domination of homogene- crisis conditions, its real. ity – is accompanied by a rather more fashionably Where Hibou seeks to produce a composite socio- Foucauldian stress on strategies, on power as the logical picture of bureaucracy’s mutations after the conduct of conduct. The prescriptive tenor of the welfare state, Kafka mines the archives and pamphlets former sits uneasily with the descriptive distance of the French Revolution – bureaucracy’s crucible – to of the latter, and with the useful reminder of the illustrate the necessity for theory to tarry with the dialectic between formality and informality, with the psychic and material life of paperwork, instead of one exacerbating the other. Thus, Hibou provides dismissing it, in the style of ‘paranoid’ criticism, as a a persuasive argument for the ways in which the mindless Moloch or a conspiracy. Kafka’s inquisitive capillary diffusion of neoliberal bureaucratic practices and ironic prose certainly enacts the satisfactions he (with their hideous newspeak: ‘benchmarking’, ‘best argues we all draw from recounting our misadventures practice’, ‘poverty governance’, etc.) has enforced an in the world of files. His account of a French clerk’s inegalitarian paradigm and a concomitant discourse hysterical odyssey through the revolutionary state’s of euphemism, where inequality becomes exclusion, proliferating bureaus, of the subtle exculpations of domination unhappiness, injustice suffering and vio- the accused of Thermidor, or of the mythopoiesis of lence trauma. Yet she also wishes to argue that the Labussière – who impaired the Terror by supposedly process of bureaucratization is impelled by ‘popular’ eating exterminatory verdicts, later to find himself demands for security, by a complicity that is built into immortalized in Gance’s Napoléon – are small tri- procedures that already set out the terms in which umphs of historical
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