Bureaucracy as violence.

AuthorWeinberg, Jonathan
PositionBook review

THE UTOPIA OF RULES: ON TECHNOLOGY, STUPIDITY, AND THE SECRET JOYS OF BUREAUCRACY. By David Graeber. Brooklyn and London: Melville House. 2015. P. 227. Cloth, $26.95; paper, $16.95.

INTRODUCTION

David Graeber's book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (1) addresses bureaucracy in modern society: how "bureaucratic principles [have been] extended to every aspect of our existence" (p. 27), and how nearly all of us have come to spend most of our time filling out forms. In the first chapter of the book, the author tells a story of his attempts to file paperwork to gain power of attorney over the bank account of his elderly mother, who was in a nursing home following a series of strokes. The experience was frustrating and seemingly never ending. It involved repeated errors--some made by him, some made by the bureaucratic functionaries with whom he was interacting--and every error sent the process back to square one (pp. 45-48). Nor, he concluded, was this experience isolated: we've set up the institutions of everyday life so that we all spend much of our time traversing bureaucratic mazes (pp. 48-52).

A little later in the book, Graeber addresses a seemingly different matter: the role of police in society (pp. 72-75, 80-81). Graeber suggests, though, that the two matters are not so different: policing is public law. Police are line personnel, engaging with the general public, who apply and enforce legal or organizational rules (p. 73). In other words, they are "bureaucrats with weapons." (2) And it would be hard to say that they have wielded those weapons well. In these days of tragedy in Minneapolis and Baton Rouge, in Cleveland and Ferguson, in New York and Chicago--when thirty-eight unarmed black people were killed by police in 20 1 53--we need to ask why those we have armed with day-to-day, street-level power over us have been wielding it so scarily, heartbreakingly, badly.

Part of Graeber's argument in this book is that police shootings and bank bureaucratic runarounds have the same roots. The fundamental structure of our society, he contends, ensures that the exertion of power over the general public by police officers and bank functionaries alike is doomed to be arbitrary and uninformed. (4) The reason, in brief, is that members of both groups exert power over the public that derives not from deliberation, mutual understanding, and consent, but from simple legal coercion. (5) This means that they need not see things from others' point of view (pp. 66-72). And that means that their interactions with the public are likely to be obtuse and ignorant. (6) As Graeber puts it, social structures in which inequality is backed by power--what he terms "structural violence"--have the luxury of being stupid (p. 57).

The Utopia of Rules isn't an obvious choice for a survey of law-related books. For starters, the author isn't a lawyer. Graeber, a leading figure in the Occupy movement (7) and the author of the influential Debt: The First 5,000 Years, (8) is a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. (9) He doesn't reference legal literature, and he doesn't actually approve of law as a framework for social organization.

The book, though, has a good deal to say about public law and its origins, strengths, and limitations, and lawyers can learn by engaging with its arguments. Even where the law-trained reader disagrees with Graeber's book (and there will be many such places), (10) The Utopia of Rules is fun and fascinating, the product of a fertile, sharp-witted, and broadly educated mind spinning out a wide range of ideas. In this Review I will question a variety of the author's arguments, but his point about the stupidity of power, I argue, is both well-founded and deep. We must address it if we are to face the challenges before us.

  1. BUREAUCRACY AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

    The book begins with Graeber's claim that ours is the age of "total bureaucratization" (p. 18). We are constantly filling out forms, struggling with phone trees, jumping through arbitrary, time-consuming, pointless, paperwork-related hoops. It is not merely that we are enmeshed in a web of government regulation, nor that we are stuck in corporate voicemail hell; rather, we find ourselves subject to a bureaucratic blob combining public and private power (pp. 11-28).

    The techniques of corporate middle management and government administration grew up in parallel in this country, Graeber explains, so that for more than a century the United States has been a "profoundly bureaucratic society" (p. 13). Corporate rules and paperwork requirements are shaped by government regulation and the surrounding legal environment, but those rules are themselves the product of industry lobbying and campaign contributions; the end result is "the gradual fusion of public and private power into a single entity" (p. 17).

    Moreover, Graeber stresses what he sees as the increasing role of the financial sector in the culture of corporate America. "Increasingly, corporate profits in America are not derived from commerce or industry at all, but from finance--which means, ultimately, from other people's debts" (p. 24). Much of that is student debt, itself the product of a bureaucratic culture requiring formal educational credentials for an ever-broadening range of jobs (pp. 21-24). And because debt repayment is enforced by law, the legal apparatus has become "the main mechanism for the extraction of corporate profits" (p. 24).

    Finally, the "bureaucratization of everyday life" is intimately bound up with violence (p. 32). Professional police forces, Graeber notes, are a relatively modern invention, a product of the nineteenth century; before then, he tells us, there were "no impersonal bureaucratic [authorities] who were, like the modern police, empowered to impose arbitrary resolutions backed by the threat of force" (p. 32). And that violence, he continues, is crucial to our modern lives. As society provides more elaborate infrastructure to support the market, it employs more bureaucrats and enacts rules subjecting a broader range of social relations to more extensive regulation. That change in the state's role increases the extent to which we are all in our everyday lives subject to the threat of violence--since, after all, "impersonal rules and regulations ... can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force" (p. 32).

    This claim about violence turns out to be central to Graeber's argument. Government rules are enforced via the threat of force: while "in ordinary life, police rarely come in swinging billy clubs to enforce building code regulations, ... if one simply pretends the state and its regulations don't exist, this will, eventually, happen" (p. 86). So are the rules of corporate bureaucracy, to the extent they mediate claims about such matters as consumer debt or rights of exclusion from the corporation's property. Any such claim is part of "a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on ... the ability to call up people dressed in uniforms, willing to threaten" physical violence--and that sort of threat is exactly what will happen if one chooses to ignore, say, a university's right to demand duly stamped and validated ID as a condition of entering its library stacks (p. 58).

    Our government, thus, has to be understood as managing structures of pervasive inequality ultimately created and maintained by the threat of physical violence (even if actual violence is rare). But that fact, Graeber continues, dooms bureaucracy as a form of intelligent social organization. The behavior of actors empowered by this sort of structural violence is inevitably "stupid," and bureaucracies formed to manage those situations cannot help but produce willful blindness and absurdity (p. 57).

    Why should that be? In the everyday business of social life, Graeber urges, we need to do the work of understanding other people's perceptions and motivations, of figuring out "who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation" (p. 68). Human relations are "complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others' points of view" (p. 68). Graeber calls that work "interpretive labor," and describes it as part of the ordinary human condition (p. 68).

    Bureaucrats backed by the threat of violence, on the other hand, can simply issue dictates and threaten physical force against those who fail to comply. In so doing, they need not empathize with or understand their counterparts. Rather than immersing themselves in thick social relationships, they can engage in much simpler relations, such as "cross this line and I will shoot you" (p. 68).

    For this reason, Graeber explains, "situations of structural violence invariably produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification" (p. 69). Ordinary people need to understand those with power over them, but bureaucrats bolstered by the threat of force need not know much about the people they regulate (pp. 66-72). "[T]hose relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretive labor, and thus, generally speaking, they do not" (p. 67). The greater the inequality between regulators and regulated, the easier it is for regulators not to bother trying to understand their public or the effects of their rules (pp. 65-66).

    That's not the end of it. There's a second crucial reason, Graeber continues, why bureaucracy in the modern state offers a way to bypass interpretive labor. "Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization"--it means "ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence and reducing everything to preconceived ... formulae" (p. 75). Bureaucrats apply "very simple pre-existing templates to complex and often ambiguous...

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