Bureaucratie

La raison ne peut pas nous dire ce que nous devons vouloir. Elle peut seulement nous indiquer la meilleure façon de l'obtenir.

Dans les films d'action, avec une étrange régularité, le supérieur attaché au respect des règles qui s'emporte contre le héros franc-tireur est presque invariablement un Noir.

Pendant une grande partie du XXe siècle, le bureau de poste a représenté, aux yeux des populations ouvrières afro-américaines, le type même de l'emploi non seulement stable et sûr, mais aussi respectable et au service de la collectivité. Après Reagan, on l'a décrit comme l'illustration de toute la dépravation, la violence, la toxicomanie et l'inefficacité que l'on prêtait à un Etat-providence perçu dans une optique profondément raciste.

Dans les années 1960, les forces politiques conservatrices ont pris peur face aux effets sociaux perturbateurs du progrès technique, qu’elles rendaient responsable de l’agitation sociale de l’époque, et les employeurs ont commencé à s’inquiéter des retombées économiques de la mécanisation. Le refus de la menace soviétique a permis une réorientation massive des ressources dans des directions qui paraissaient moins dangereuses pour l’ordre social et économique en place – et, finalement, dans des domaines pouvant servir de point d’appui à une campagne pour annuler totalement les avantages acquis par les mouvements sociaux progressistes depuis les années 1940, et remporter ainsi une victoire décisive dans ce que les élites américaines voyaient bel et bien comme une lutte des classes mondiales.

Toute réforme du marché – tout initiative gouvernementale conçue pour réduire les pesanteurs administratives et promouvoir les forces du marché – aura pour effet d’accroître le nombre total de réglementations, le volume total de paperasse et l’effectif total des agents de l’État.

The English, American, and French revolutionaries changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty--declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity that they called "the people." This created an immediate logical problem, because "the people" are by definition a group of individuals united by the fact that they are, in fact, bound by a certain set of laws. So in what sense can they have created those laws? When this questions was first posed in the wake of the British, American, and French revolutions, the answer seemed obvious: through those revolutions themselves. But this created a further problem. Revolutions are acts of law-breaking. It is completely illegal to rise up in arms, overthrow a government, and create a new political order. In fact, nothing could possibly be more illegal. Cromwell, Jefferson, or Danton were all clearly guilty of treason, according to the laws under which they grew up, just as much as they would have been had they tried to do the same thing again under the new regimes they created, say, twenty years later.
So laws emerge from illegal activity. (p. 214)

Over the last thirty or forty years, anti-authoritarians around the world have been working on creating new, and more effective, modes of direct democracy--ones that might operate without any need for a bureaucracy of violence to enforce them. I've written about these efforts extensively elsewhere. A lot of progress has been made. But those working on such projects often find themselves having to deal with exactly this sort of horror of "arbitrary" power. Part of the work of developing new forms of consensus process, for example, is to create institutional forms that encourage, rather than inhibit, improvisation and creativity. As activists sometimes put it: in most circumstances, if you bring together a crowd of people, that crowd will, as a groupe, behave less intelligently, and less creatively, than any single member of the crowd is likely to do if on their own. Activist decision-making process is, instead, designed to make that crowd smarter and more imaginative than any individual participant. (p. 201)

people, everywhere, are prone to two completely contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, a tendency to be playfully creative just for the sake of it; on the other, a tendency to agree with anyone who tells them that they really shouldn't act that way. This latter is what makes the game-ification of institutional life possible. Because if you take the latter tendency to its logical conclusion, all freedom becomes arbitrariness, and all arbitrariness, a form of dangerous, subversive power. It is just one further step to argue that true freedom is to live in an utterly predictable world that is free from freedom of this sort. (p. 201)

Why is it that languages always change? It's easy enough to see why we need to have common agreements on grammar and vocabulary in order to be able to talk to one other. But if that's all that we need language for, one would think that, once a given set of speakers found a grammar and vocabulary that suited their purposes, they'd simply stick with it, perhaps changing the vocabulary around if there was some new thing to talk about--a new trend or invention, an imported vegetable--but otherwise, leaving well enough alone. In fact, this never happens. We don't know of a single recorded example of a language that, over the course of, say, a century, did not change both in sound and structure. This is true even of the languages of the most "traditional" societies; it happens even where elaborate institutional structures have been created--like grammar schools, or the Académie Française--to ensure that it does not. No doubt some of this is the result of sheer rebelliousness (young people trying to set themselves off from elders, for example) but it's hard to escape the conclusion that ultimately, what we are really confronting here is the play principle in its purest form. Human beings, whether they speak Arapesh, Hopi, or Norwegian, just find it boring to say things the same way all the time. They're always going to play around at least a little. And this playing around will always have cumulative effects. (p. 200)

It's worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, rules are by their nature constraining. Speech codes, rules of etiquette, and grammatical rules, all have the effect of limiting what we can and cannot say. It is not for nothing that we all have the pictures of the schoolmarm rapping a child across the knuckles for some grammatical error as one of our primordial images of oppression. But at the same time, if there were no shared conventions of any kind--no semantics, syntax, phonemics--we'd all just be babbling incoherently and wouldn't be able to communicate with each other at all. Obviously in such circumstances none of us would be free to do much of anything. So at some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it's impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating. And this is what linguists always observe. There is no language without grammar. But there is also no language in which everything, including grammar, is not constantly changing all the time. (p. 200)