The Utopia of Rules

by David Graeber

One might object: but haven’t great novelists often written compelling literature about bureaucracy? Of course they have. But they have managed to do this by embracing the very circularity and emptiness—not to mention idiocy—of bureaucracy, and producing literary works that partake of something like the same mazelike, senseless form. This is why almost all great literature on the subject takes the form of horror-comedy. Franz Kafka’s The Trial is of course the paradigm (as is The Castle), but one can cite any number of others: from Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, which is pretty much straight Kafka, to Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams and José Saramago’s All the Names, to any number of works that might be said to be informed by the bureaucratic spirit, such as much of Italo Calvino or most anything by Borges. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which takes on military bureaucracies, and Something Happened, about corporate bureaucracies, are considered latter-day masterworks in this genre, as is David Foster Wallace’s unfinished The Pale King, an imaginative meditation on the nature of boredom set in a Midwestern office of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. It’s interesting that just about all these works of fiction not only emphasize the comic senselessness of bureaucratic life, but mix it with at least an undertone of violence.