Abstract
Once we have placed the blurred distinction between public and private at the heart of the way it works, and see formalities as lying at the center of its practices, it appears neither as an administrative arrangement nor as an institution, let alone an organizational structure, but as a social form of power. We can now focus on understanding the political dynamics that this process induces and of which it is simultaneously the bearer.
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Notes
The link and the convergence of interpretation as regards this question between the two great thinkers is highlighted by several authors, especially Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. On the precise point of universal bureaucratization, Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World: the USSR: Bureaucratic Collectivism, trans. and intro. Adam Westoby (London: Tavistock, 1985; original first published in French in 1939) and
James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution. What is Happening in the World (New York: John Day, 1941) are influenced by the totalitarianism of the 1930s and have a purely repressive, coercive, and totalitarian vision of bureaucracy as a form of social control, both public and private. For the 1960s, see
Henry Jacoby, The Bureaucratization of the World, trans. Eveline L. Kanes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973; first published in German, 1969);
Bengt Abrahamsson, Bureaucracy or Participation. The Logic of Organization (Beverley Hills; London: Sage, 1977); and
Dan Clawson, Bureaucracy and the Labour Process. The Transformation of US Industry, 1860–1920 (New York; London: Monthly Review Press, 1955). These studies emphasize, inter alia, that Taylorism and scientific management were aimed at organizing complete control of the process of capitalist production: control of the workforce, control of costs, and control of labor organization.
Max Weber, “Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany (A Contribution to the Political Critique of Officialdom and Party Politics),” in Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (eds.) Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1978). This is where he describes bureaucracy as the “house of servitude.”
Max Weber, Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1978), on “domination through knowledge,” p. 225.
On the commonplace nature of this analysis and for an overview, see Eugene Kamenka and Alice Erh-Soon Tay, “Freedom, Law and the Bureaucratic State,” in Robert Brown, Eugene Kamenka, Martin Krygier, and Alice Erh-Soontay (eds.), Bureaucracy. The Career of a Concept (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. 112–34.
This is shown by François Fourquet in regard to modern national accountancy: “The real needs a priori to have been normalized, placed under surveillance, fixed and ordered if it is even to be intelligible for the state. There are no totalities other than the totalities of power; social totalities have no other consistency than that which is given to them by formations of power, whose force alone determines the degree of integration, cohesion and regularization of singular and multiple activities. Anything that evades this practical normalization ipso facto evades state knowledge. The matrix of the philosophical theory of knowledge is the state theory of knowledge” (see François Fourquet, Les comptes de la puissance. Histoire de la comptabilité nationale et du plan [Paris: Éditions Encres, 1980]), p. 344).
Arthur L. Stinchcombe, in When Formality Works. Authority and Abstraction in Law and Organizations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), speaks of “government by abstraction” (chapter 2), meaning the existence of mechanisms of governance that assure those who produce the norms that these criteria are satisfied (formal validation, procedures, norms, and protocols).
Cornelius Castoriadis, La Société bureaucratique [no Eng. trans.] (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990); Christophe Premat, “Le phénomène bureaucratique chez Castoriadis.” Tracés (2002) (http://traces.revues.org/4131).
The literature on this is endless. See in particular Nils Brunsson and Bengt Jacobsson et al., A World of Standards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Andrew Barry, Political Machines. Governing a Technological Society (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), on its technozones;
Elizabeth C. Dunn, “Standards and Person-Making in East Central Europe,” in A. Ong and S. J. Collier (eds.), Global Assemblages. Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 173–93;
Marie Benedetto-Meyer and Elodie Raimond, “La relation client ‘2.0’. Favoriser ou contraindre de nouveaux modes d’expression des clients et des salariés?” in M. Benedetto-Meyer, S. Maugeri, and J.-L. Metzger (eds.), L’Emprise de la gestion. La société au risque des violences gestionnaires (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), pp. 245–74. These studies show how customers are controlled through the managerial logic that infiltrates the forums for complaints.
On the principle itself—one that lies at the basis of bureaucracy as a process of rationalization, see Robert Brown, “Bureaucracy. The Utility of a Concept,” in Robert Brown, Eugene Kamenka, Martin Krygier, and Alice Erh-Soontay (eds.), Bureaucracy. The Career of a Concept (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. 135–55, and
Peter M. Blau and Marshall W. Meyer, Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York: Random House, 1971). On the present form assumed by this managerial, at-a-distance control, from among many studies, see
Jean-Pierre Durand, La Chaîne invisible. Travailler aujourd’hui: flux tendu et servitude volontaire (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004).
Albert Ogien, L’Esprit gestionnaire (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1995).
Albert Ogien and Sandra Laugier, Pourquoi désobéir en démocratie? (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).
Cris Shore and Susan Wright (eds.), Anthropology of Policy. Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power (London: Routledge, 1997).
Laurent Thévenot, “Un gouvernement par les normes. Pratiques et politiques des formats d’information,” in B. Conein and L. Thévenot (eds.), Cognition et information en société (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1997), p. 233.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Michael Power, The Audit Explosion (London: Demos, 1994) and The Audit Society. Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Marilyn Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accounting, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000).
Sylvie Trosa, Vers un management post-bureaucratique. La réforme de l’Etat, une réforme de la société (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), p. 46. On academia, see
Jean-François Bayart, Sortir du national-libéralisme? Croquis politiques des années 2008 – 2012 (Paris: Karthala, 2012) and
Hugo Radice, “From Warwick University Ltd to British Universities plc,” Red Pepper (March 2001): 18–21.
Bruno Jobert (ed.), Le Tournant néoliberal en Europe. Idées et recettes dans les pratiques gouvernementales (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994);
L. Rouban, Le Pouvoir anonyme (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1994) and “Les États occidentaux d’une gouverne-mentalité à l’autre,” Critique internationale, 1 (October 1998): 131–49;
Françoise Dreyfus, L’Invention de la bureaucratie. Servir l’Etat en France, en Grande-Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis (XVIIIe–XXe siècle) (Paris: La Découverte, 2000);
Philippe Bezes, Réinventer l’État. Les réformes de l’administration Française (1962–2008) (Paris: PUF, 2009).
See Jean-Pierre Durand, who uses the image of the “cop” “in the flow” in Durand, La Chaîne invisible; Philippe Zarifian, Le Travail et la Compétence. Entre puissance et contrôle (Paris: PUF, 2009), speaks of the “control of subjective commitment.”
T. Bartley, “Certification as a Mode of Social Regulation,” Jerusalem Papers in Regulation and Governance, Working Paper no. 8, May 2010;
Laurent Thévenot, “L’autorité à l’épreuve de la critique. Jusqu’aux oppressions du ‘gouvernement par l’objectif,” in B. Frère (ed.), Quel présent pour la critique sociale? (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 2012).
These are the words of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 308: he is describing the daily practices of domination that play simultaneously on mutual dependencies, on autonomy and on subjects’ desires for emancipation; I have given a detailed analysis of domination as it operates in Tunisia in
Béatrice Hibou, The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011) and, in a comparative perspective in B. Hibou, Anatomie politique de la domination (Paris: La Découverte, 2011).
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitks; Nicolas Rose, Governing the Soul. The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989), and “Governing Advanced’ Liberal Democracies” in
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nicolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason. Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 144–63;
Michael Herzfeld, “Commentaire sur le texte de Zygmunt Bauman,” Anthropologie et Société, 27 (3) (2003): 43–46.
Didier Marshall, “Justice et LOLF, quelle compatibilité?” Revue française de finances publiques no. 103 (September 2008: 15–47);
Gilles Sainati and Ulrich Schalchi, La Décadence sécuritaire (Paris: La Fabrique, 2007).
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003);
Roy Coleman, Reclaiming the Streets. Surveillance, Social Control and the City (Cullompton: Willan, 2004);
Philippe Combessie, Sociologie de la prison (Paris: La Découverte, 2009).
Christian Parenti, Lockdown America. Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 1999);
Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor. The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
Zygmund Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 2003);
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London: Abacus, 1972), and
Carlo Ginzburg, “To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance,” in Carlo Ginzburg (ed.), Wooden Eyes. Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London; New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 157–72;
Enzo Traverso, À Feu et à sang. 1914–1945, la guerre civile européenne (Paris: Stock, 2009).
Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
This converges with John Lonsdale’s subtle analysis of the ambivalence of ethnicity. See J. Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau. Poverty and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought,” in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (eds.), Unhappy Valley. Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Eastern African Studies (London: James Currey, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 315–466.
Apart from the Shoah, analyzed in these terms by the preceding studies, the genocide of the Tutsis of Rwanda has been interpreted in accordance with the same model by Michael Barnett, “The UN Council, Indifference and Genocide in Rwanda,” Cultural Anthropology, 12 (4) (1997): 551–78, while studies on the genocide of the Armenians do not use this reference point but show it in concrete form. See
Ayhan Aktar, “Economic Nationalism in Turkey. The Formative Years, 1912–1925,” Review of Social, Economic and Administrative Studies, Bogazici Journal, 10 (1–2) (1996): 263–90, and “‘Turkification’ Policies in the Early Republican Era,” in
Catharina Dufft (ed.), Turkish Literature and Cultural Memory. “Multiculturalism” as a Literary Theme after 1980 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009), pp. 29–62.
Marilyn Strathern, “Afterword. Accountability … and Ethnography,” in Marilyn Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accounting, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 279–304; Shore and Wright (eds.), Anthropology of Policy.
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man; V. Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich. LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii. A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Bradey (London: Athlone Press, 2000);
J.-P. Faye, Langages totalitaires. Critique de la raison, l’économie narrative (Paris: Hermann, 1972).
Eric Hazan, LQR, la propagande au quotidien (Paris: Raison d’Agir, 2006).
Antoine Picon, “Imaginaires de l’efficacité, pensée technique et rationalisation,” Réseaux, 109 (2001): 18–50;
J. Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency. From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Florence Piron, “La production politique de l’indifférence dans le nouveau management public,” Anthropologie et Sociétés, 27 (3) (2003): 47–71;
Jon Pierre, “La commercialisation de l’Etat. Citoyens, consommateurs et émergence du marché public,” in B. G. Peters and D. J. Savoie (eds.), Les Nouveaux Défis de la gouvernance (Laval: Centre canadien de gestion et Presses de l’Université Laval, 1995), pp. 49–70.
See Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; P. Miller and N. Rose, Governing the Present. Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); Emilie Hache (ed.), “Néolibéralisme et responsabilité,” Raisons politiques, 28 (November 2007): 5–110.
This is the case, for instance, of the United Nations and the OECD: see A. Kemp, “Labor Migration in Israel. An Overview,” Social Policy, Employment and Migration, OECD Working Paper, no. 103, Paris, OECD, 2010.
Marilyn Strathern, “Introduction. New Accountabilities. Anthropological Studies in Audit, Ethics and the Academy,” in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Accounting, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1–18.
Esra Ozyiirek, Nostalgia for the Modern. State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006);
P. Armstrong, “Neoliberalism in Action. Canadian Perspective,” in S. Bradley and M. Luxton (eds.), Neoliberalism and Everyday Life (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), pp. 184–201.
Meg Luxton, “Doing Neoliberalism. Perverse Individualism in Personal Life,” in Susan Bradley and Meg Luxton (eds.), Neoliberalism and Everyday Life (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), pp. 163–83. (The author quotes Margaret Thatcher’s emblematic words, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and then there are families,” p. 175.)
Rukmini B. Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch. The Idea of Indifference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (London: Continuum, 1982), pp. 138–62 and One Dimensional Man.
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; M. Feher, “S’apprécier, ou les aspirations du capital humain,” Raisons politiques, 28 (2007): 11–32.
Hélène Bouchilloux, La Question de la liberté chez Descartes. Libre arbitre, liberté et indifférence (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003).
This is shown in, for example, Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference. American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), in connection with the US war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Alain Gérard Slama, La Société d’indifférence (Paris: Plon, 2009).
Charles E. Scott, Living with Indifference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
Frédéric Lordon, “Finance internationale. Les illusions de la transparence,” Critique internationale, 10 (January 2001): 6–21; see also
David Heald and Christopher Hood (eds.), Transparency. The Key for Better Governance? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Olivier Vallée, La Police morale de l’anticorruption. Cameroun, Nigeria (Paris: Karthala, 2010)
Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram, Disciplining the Poor. Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 2.
For a critical analysis of the mechanisms put in place to combat poverty and promoted by donors, see Boris Samuel, “Les cadres stratégiques de lutte contre la pauvreté et les trajectoires de la planification au Burkina Faso,” Sociétés politiques comparées, 16 (June 2009) (www.fasopo.org/reasopo/nl6/article.pdf); François Egil, “Les éléphants de papier. Réflexions impies pour le cinquième anniversaire des Objectifs de développement du millénaire,” Politique africaine, 99 (October 2005): 97–115; François Giovalucchi and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, “Planification, gestion et politique dans l’aide au dévéloppement. Le cadres logique, outil et miroir des développeurs,” Revue Tiers Monde, 198 (February 2009): 383–406. For the case of Morocco, but—through this case— for the whole set of projects of neoliberal inspiration, see Irene Bono, Cantiere del Regno. Associazioni, sviluppo e stili di governo in Marocco, Doctoral Thesis, Department of Political Studies, University of Turin, 2008 (www.fasopo.org/reasopo/jf/th_bono.pdf); Irene Bono, “Activisme associatif comme marché du travail à El Hajeb. Normalisation sociale et politique par les ‘activités génératrices de revenus’,” Politique africaine, 120 (December 2010): 25–44. For the case of Latin America, see Ricardo Peñafiel, L’événement discursif paupériste. Lutte contre la pauvreté et redéfinition du politique en Amérique latine, Chili, Mexique, Vénézuéla, 1910–2006, Doctoral Thesis in political science, University of Quebec, Montreal, January 2008 (www.fasopo.org/reasopo/jr/these_penafiel_voll et vol2.pdf).
On skills in managerialism, see Jean-Pierre Le Goff La barbarie douce. La modernisation aveugle des entreprises et de l’école (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), which discusses the “logomachia of skills” (p. 28).
Bono, “Activisme associatif”; Béatrice Hibou and Mohamed Tozy, L’INDH entre charité instititonnalisée, réallocation des ressources et fabrique des élites, FASOPO, multigr., Paris, December 2009.
See in particular James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine. “Development,” Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
On the logic of responsibility, see Feher, “S’apprécier, ou les aspirations du capital humain.” On the analysis of the conceptualization of poverty in the neoliberal order, see Béatrice Hibou, “Political Economy of the World Bank’s Discourse. From Economic Catechism to Missionary Deeds (and Misdeeds),” trans. Janet Roitman, Les Etudes du CERI, 39 (March 1998) (http://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/sites/sciencespo.fr.ceri/files/etude39a.pdf); G. Procacci, “La nais sance d’une rationalité moderne de la pauvreté,” in Serge Paugam (ed.), L’exclusion. L’état des savoirs (Paris: La Découverte, 1996), pp. 405–16; Peñafiel, L’événement discursif paupériste, lutte contre la pauvreté et redéfinition du politique en Amérique latine.
Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Times, trans. Rachel Gomme (Berkely; London: University of California Press, 2012), p. 2.
Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile. Violence, Memory and Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
Michel Agier, Gérer les indésirables. Des camps de réfugiés au gouvernement humanitaire (Paris: Flammarion, 2008).
Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; H. Thomas, Les Vulnérables. La démocratie contre les pauvres (Bellecombes-en-Bauges: Éditions du Croquant, 2010).
Arthur C. Helton, The Price of Indifference. Refugees and Humanitarian Actions in the New Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) is the best possible example of a book that, without necessarily wishing to do so, promotes an evermore formalized and bureaucratic development of humanitarian politics.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 29.
Roma Chatterji and Dipaka Mehta, Living with Violence. An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2007); Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch; Scott, Living with Indifference.
Alf Lüdtke, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. A. Lüdtke; trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1995).
This is shown by the Catholic tradition of indifference: Jean-Lydie Goré, La Notion d’indifférence chez Fénelon et ses sources (Paris: PUF, 1956).
Henry Sussman, “Introduction. The Politics of Language-Based Systems,” in H. Sussman and C. Devenney (eds.), Engagement and Indifference. Beckett and the Political (New York: State University of New York, 2001) and
Caria Locatelli, “Unwording Beyond Negation, Erasures and Reticence. Beckett’s Committed Silence,” in Henry Sussman and Christopher Devenney (eds.), Engagement and Indifference. Beckett and the Political (New York: State University of New York, 2001), pp. 1–10 and pp. 19–41 respectively.
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Hibou, B. (2015). Neoliberal Bureaucratic Domination: Diffuse Control and the Production of Indifference. In: The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137495280_5
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