Ontological Bureaucracy

From Thomas Bernhard, Correction:

"We reject everything having to do with contracts, because we reject bureaucracy in toto, but in fact the world is only held together by a parchwork of contracts.. and in this network of hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions and billions of contracts the trapped human beings are squirming. There's no way to get arounf contracts except by suicide..

To suppose that it is possible to exist without contracts or other written agreements and run away, anywhere at all, is to find ourselves soon caught again in contracts and written agreements, anyone who thinks otherwise is a madman.. It's only in childhood that we don't know what kind of trap it is in which we squirm and despair, [] ignorant that these are the nets of contracts and other written agreements made by the grown-ups, by history. If anyone were to succeed in doing away with all these contracts and other written agreements, all he'd have accomplished would be the end of the whole world.

Our entire being is tied to contracts, written agreements, assessments, no matter who we are. Still we keep trying all our lives to escape from these contracts and other written agreements, efforts as painful as they are senseless.

Bernhard seems to move in this passage from a familiar enough aversion to the impersonality of bureaucracy to a perception that it is 'part of the human condition', and that the impossible struggle against it is both necessary and utterly futile. Bernhard could almost have been describing here, in metaphorical terms, Lacan's notion of the Symbolic Order. And perhaps the impersonal, inescapable structures of the Symbolic Order, or what we might call our ontological bureaucracy, become visible only with the development of bureaucracy proper. Thus, a provisional conclusion: The historical development of Bureaucracy as a form of organisation is a precondition of the perception of a certain ontological bureaucracy. The existence of a bureaucracy, a world where relations between people are always contractually mediated, where people speak and act on behalf of institutions, never 'in thier own voice', where these decisions seem to bear no individual watermark, does all this not alert writers and thinkers to the way in which there was always already a seam of 'bureaucracy' in intersubjective relations and at the core of the self?

Now, in considering this I first thought, as I say, of Lacan. But there was of course a more obvious first port of call, and one I came across, via the intermediary of Google, at Spurious. It is, you've already guessed, Kafka:'Bureaucracy, if I judge it from my own perspective, is closer to original human nature than any other social institution' (Letters, 1922).

I intend to update and develop this post very soon, but am posting it in this notational form in case people want to leave comments and suggestions along these lines.

There are some ineresting reflections on this post here.