Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity

Let me begin with a story about bureaucracy.

In 2006, my mother had a series of strokes. It soon became obvious that she would eventually be incapable of living at home without assistance. Since her insurance would not cover home care, a series of social workers advised us to put in for Medicaid. To qualify for Medicaid, however, one’s total worth can only amount to six thousand dollars. We arranged to transfer her savings — this was, I suppose, technically a scam, though it’s a peculiar sort of scam since the government employs thousands of social workers whose main work seems to involve telling citizens exactly how to perpetuate said scam — but shortly thereafter, she had another, very serious stroke, and found herself in a nursing home undergoing long-term rehabilitation. When she emerged from that, she was definitely going to need home care, but there was a problem: her social security check was being deposited directly, and she was barely able to sign her name, so unless I acquired power of attorney over her account and was thus able to pay her monthly rent bills for her, the money would immediately build up and disqualify her, even after I filled out the enormous raft of Medicaid documents I needed to file to qualify her for pending status.

I went to her bank, picked up the requisite forms, and brought them to the nursing home. The documents needed to be notarized. The nurse on the floor informed me there was an in- house notary, but I needed to make an appointment; she picked up the phone and put me through to a disembodied voice, who then transferred me to the notary. The notary proceeded to inform me I first had to get authorization from the head of social work, and hung up. So I acquired his name and room number and duly took the elevator downstairs and appeared at his office — only to discover that the head of social work was, in fact, the disembodied voice that had referred me to the notary in the first place. The head of social work picked up the phone, said, “Marjorie, that was me, you’re driving this man crazy with this nonsense and you’re driving me crazy, too,” and, after a small apologetic gesture, proceeded to secure me an appointment for early the next week.

The next week the notary duly appeared, accompanied me upstairs, made sure I’d filled out my side of the form (as had been repeatedly emphasized to me), and then, in my mother’s presence, proceeded to fill out her own. I was a little puzzled that she didn’t ask my mother to sign anything, only me, but I figured that she knew what she was doing. The next day I took the document to the bank, where the woman at the desk took one look, asked why my mother hadn’t signed it, and showed it to her manager, who told me to take it back and do it right. It seemed that the notary indeed had no idea what she was doing. So I got new set of forms, duly filled out my side of each, and made a new appointment. On the appointed day the notary appeared, and after a few awkward remarks about how difficult these banks are (why does each bank insist on having its own, completely different power of attorney form?), she took me upstairs. I signed, my mother signed — with some difficulty, she was finding it hard at this point even to prop herself up — and the next day I returned to the bank. Another woman at a different desk examined the forms and asked why I had signed the line where it said to write my name and printed my name on the line where it said to sign.

“I did? Well, I just did exactly what the notary told me to do.” “But it clearly says ‘signature’ here.”

“Oh, yes, it does, doesn’t it? I guess she told me wrong. Again. Well … all the information is still there, isn’t it? It’s just those two bits that are reversed. So is that really a problem? The situation is kind of pressing, and I’d really rather not have to wait to make another appointment.”

“Well, normally we don’t even accept these forms without all the signatories being here in person.”

“My mother had a stroke. She’s bedridden. That’s why I need power of attorney in the first place.”

She said she’d check with the manager, and after ten minutes returned, the manager hanging just within earshot in the background, to announce the bank could not accept the forms in their present state — and in addition, even if they were filled out correctly, I would still need a letter from my mother’s doctor certifying that she was mentally competent to sign such a document.

I pointed out that no one had mentioned any such letter previously.

“What?” the manager suddenly interjected. “Who gave you those forms and didn’t tell you about the letter?”

Since the culprit was one of the more sympathetic bank employees, I dodged the question,[40] noting instead that in the bankbook it was printed, quite clearly, “in trust for David Graeber.” He of course replied that would only matter if she was dead.

As it happened, the whole problem soon became academic: my mother did indeed die a few weeks later.

At the time, I found this experience extremely disconcerting. Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian student existence comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking my friends: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like? Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot? Most were inclined to suspect that this was indeed what life is mostly like. Obviously, the notary was unusually incompetent. Still, I had to spend over a month not long after dealing with the ramifying consequences of the act of whatever anonymous functionary in the New York Department of Motor Vehicles had inscribed my given name as “Daid,” not to mention the Verizon clerk who spelled my surname “Grueber.” Bureaucracies public and private appear — for whatever historical reasons — to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It’s in this sense that I’ve said one can fairly say that bureaucracies are utopian forms of organization. After all, is this not what we always say of utopians: that they have a naïve faith in the perfectibility of human nature and refuse to deal with humans as they actually are? Which is, are we not also told, what leads them to set impossible standards and then blame the individuals for not living up to them?[41] But in fact all bureaucracies do this, insofar as they set demands they insist are reasonable, and then, on discovering that they are not reasonable (since a significant number of people will always be unable to perform as expected), conclude that the problem is not with the demands themselves but with the individual inadequacy of each particular human being who fails to live up to them.

On a purely personal level, probably the most disturbing thing was how dealing with these forms somehow rendered me stupid, too. How could I not have noticed that I was printing my name on the line that said “signature”? It was written right there! I like to think that I am not, ordinarily, a particularly stupid person. In fact I’ve made something of a career out convincing others that I’m smart. Yet I was doing obviously foolish things; and not because I wasn’t paying attention; in fact, I had been investing a great deal of mental and emotional energy in the whole affair. The problem, I realized, was not with the energy spent, but with the fact that most of this energy was being sunk into attempts to try to understand and influence whoever, at any moment, seemed to have some kind of bureaucratic power over me — when, in fact, all that was required was the accurate interpretation of one or two Latin words, and correct performance of certain purely mechanical functions. Spending so much of my time worrying about how not to seem like I was rubbing the notary’s face in her incompetence, or imagining what might make me seem sympathetic to various bank officials, made me less inclined to notice when they told me to do something foolish. It was an obviously misplaced strategy, since insofar as anyone had the power to bend the rules they were usually not the people I was talking to; moreover, if I did encounter someone who did have such power, they would invariably inform me directly or indirectly that if I did complain in any way, even about a purely structural absurdity, the only possible result would be to get some junior functionary in trouble.

As an anthropologist, all this struck me as strangely familiar. We anthropologists have made something of a specialty out of dealing with the ritual surrounding birth, marriage, death, and similar rites of passage. We are particularly concerned with ritual gestures that are socially efficacious: where the mere act of saying or doing something makes it socially true. (Think of phrases like “I apologize,” “I surrender, or “I pronounce you man and wife.”) Humans being the social creatures that they are, birth and death are never mere biological events. It normally takes a great deal of work to turn a newborn baby into a person — someone with a name and social relationships (mother, father …) and a home, towards whom others have responsibilities, who can someday be expected to have responsibilities to them as well. Usually, much of this work is done through ritual. Such rituals, as anthropologists have noted, can vary wildly in form and content: they might involve baptisms, confirmations, fumigations, first haircuts, isolation, declarations, the making and waving and burning and burying of ritual paraphernalia, spells. Death is even more complicated because those same social relationships that one has acquired in life have to be gradually severed, rearranged. It often takes years, repeated burials (even reburials), burning, bleaching and rearranging of bones, feasts, and ceremonies before someone is entirely dead. In most existing societies at this point in history, those rituals may or may not be carried out, but it is precisely paperwork, rather than any other form of ritual, that is socially efficacious in this way, that actually effects the change. My mother, for example, wished to be cremated without ceremony; my main memory of the funeral home though was of the plump, good-natured clerk who walked me through a fourteen-page document he had to file in order to obtain a death certificate, written in ballpoint on carbon paper so it came out in triplicate. “How many hours a day do you spend filling out forms like that?” I asked. He sighed. “It’s all I do,” holding up a hand bandaged from some kind of incipient carpal tunnel syndrome. He had to. Without those forms, neither my mother, nor any of the other people cremated at his establishment, would be legally — hence socially — dead.

Why, then, I wondered, are there not vast ethnographic tomes about American or British rites of passage, with long chapters about forms and paperwork?

There is an obvious answer. Paperwork is boring. One can describe the ritual surrounding it. One can observe how people talk about or react to it. But when it comes to the paperwork itself, there just aren’t that many interesting things one can say about it. How is the form laid out? What about the color scheme? Why did they choose to ask for certain bits of information and not others? Why place of birth and not, say, place where you went to grade school? What’s so important about the signature? But even so, even the most imaginative commentator pretty quickly runs out of questions.

In fact, one could go further. Paperwork is supposed to be boring. And it’s getting more so all the time. Medieval charters were often quite beautiful, full of calligraphy and heraldic embellishments. Even in the nineteenth century some of this remained: I have a copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate, issued in Springfield, Illinois, in 1858, and it’s quite colorful, with Gothic letters, scrolls and little cherubs (it’s also written entirely in German). My father’s, in contrast, issued in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1914, is monochrome and utterly unadorned, just lines and boxes, though they are filled out in a nice florid hand. My own, issued in New York in 1961, lacks even that: it’s typed and stamped and utterly without character. But of course the computer interfaces used for so many forms nowadays are more boring still. It’s as if the creators of these documents were gradually trying to strip them of anything even slightly profound, or remotely symbolic.

It’s hardly surprising that all this might drive an anthropologist to despair. Anthropologists are drawn to areas of density. The interpretative tools we have at our disposal are best suited to wend our way through complex webs of meaning or signification — we seek to understand intricate ritual symbolism, social dramas, poetic forms, or kinship networks. What all these have in common is that they tend to be both infinitely rich, and, at the same time, open-ended. If one sought out to exhaust every meaning, motive, or association packed into a single Romanian harvest ritual, or Zande witchcraft accusation, or Mexican family saga, one could easily spend a lifetime — quite a number of lifetimes, in fact, if one were also out to trace the fan of relations with other elements in the larger social or symbolic fields such work invariably opens up. Paperwork in contrast is designed to be maximally simple and self-contained. Even when forms are complex, even bafflingly complex, it’s by an endless accretion of very simple but apparently contradictory elements, like a maze composed entirely of the endless juxtaposition of two or three very simple geometrical motifs. And like a maze, paperwork doesn’t really open on anything outside itself. As a result, there just isn’t very much to interpret. Clifford Geertz became famous for offering a “thick description” of Balinese cockfights where he tried to demonstrate that, if one were able to unpack everything going on in a given match, one would be able to understand everything about Balinese society: they’re conceptions of the human condition, of society, hierarchy, nature, all the fundamental passions and dilemmas of human existence. This simply would not be possible to do with a mortgage application, no matter how dense the document itself; and even if some defiant soul set out to write such an analysis — just to prove it could be done — it would be even harder to imagine anyone else actually reading it.

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. This is more obvious in some authors (Kafka and Heller, for example) than others, but it almost always seems to be lurking just underneath the surface. What’s more, contemporary stories that are explicitly about violence have a tendency to also become stories about bureaucracy, since, after all, most acts of extreme violence either take place in bureaucratic environments (armies, prisons …) or else, they are almost immediately surrounded by bureaucratic procedures (crime).

Great writers, then, know how to deal with a vacuum. They embrace it. They stare into the abyss until the abyss stares back into them. Social theory, in contrast, abhors a vacuum — or, this is certainly true if its approach to bureaucracy is anything to go on. Stupidity and violence are precisely the elements it is least inclined to talk about.[42]

The lack of critical work is especially odd because on the surface, you would think academics are personally positioned to speak of the absurdities of bureaucratic life. Of course, this is in part because they are bureaucrats — increasingly so. “Administrative responsibilities,” going to committee meetings, filling out forms, reading and writing letters of support, placating the whims of minor deans — all this takes up an ever-expanding portion of the average academic’s time. But academics are also reluctant bureaucrats, in the sense that even when “admin,” as it’s called, ends up becoming most of what a professor actually does, it is always treated as something tacked on — not what they are really qualified for, certainly, and not the work that defines who they really are.[43] They are scholars — people who research, analyze, and interpret things — even if increasingly, they’re really scholarly souls trapped in a bureaucrat’s body. You might think that an academic’s reaction would be to research, analyze, and interpret this very phenomenon: how does it happen that we all end up spending more and more of our time on paperwork? What is the meaning of paperwork anyway? What are the social dynamics behind it? Yet for some reason, this never happens.[44]

It has been my experience that when academics gather around the water cooler (or the academic equivalent of a water cooler, which is usually a coffee machine) they rarely talk about their “real” work but spend almost all their time complaining about administrative responsibilities. But in those ever-shrinking moments where they are allowed to think profound thoughts, this seems to be the last thing they’d wish to think about.

But there is something even deeper going on here, I suspect — something that bears on the very nature of what universities are and why they exist.

Consider, for example, the extraordinary prominence in U.S. social science in the postwar period of two continental theorists: German sociologist Max Weber in the fifties and sixties, and French historian and social philosopher Michel Foucault ever since. Each attained a kind of intellectual hegemony in the United States that they never managed to achieve in their own countries. What made them so appealing to American academics? No doubt their popularity had much to do with the ease with which each could be adopted as a kind of anti-Marx, their theories put forth (usually in crudely simplified form) as ways of arguing that power is not simply or primarily a matter of the control of production but rather a pervasive, multifaceted, and unavoidable feature of any social life.

But I also think that a large part of the appeal was their attitude toward bureaucracy. Indeed, it sometimes seems that these were the only two intelligent human beings in twentieth century history who honestly believed that the power of bureaucracy lies in its effectiveness. That is, that bureaucracy really works. Weber saw bureaucratic forms of organization as the very embodiment of Reason in human affairs, so obviously superior to any alternative form of organization that they threatened to engulf everything, locking humanity in a joyless “iron cage,” bereft of spirit and charisma. Foucault was more subversive, but he was subversive in a way that only endowed bureaucratic power with more effectiveness, not less. In his work on asylums, clinics, prisons, and the rest, absolutely every aspect of human life — health, sexuality, work, morality, our very conceptions of truth — became nothing in and of themselves, but merely products of one or another form of professional or administrative discourse. Through concepts like governmentality and biopower, he argued that state bureaucracies end up shaping the parameters of human existence in ways far more intimate than anything Weber would have imagined. For Foucault, all forms of knowledge became forms of power, shaping our minds and bodies through largely administrative means.

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Weber and Foucault’s popularity owed much to the fact that the American university system during this period had itself increasingly become an institution dedicated to producing functionaries for an imperial administrative apparatus, operating on a global scale. In the immediate wake of World War II, when the United States was first establishing its global administrative apparatus, all this was often fairly explicit. Sociologists like Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils[45] were deeply embedded in the Cold War establishment at Harvard, and the stripped-down version of Weber they created was quickly stripped down even further and adopted by State Department functionaries and the World Bank as “development theory,” and actively promoted as an alternative to Marxist historical materialism in the battleground states of the Global South.

At that time, even anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Clifford Geertz had no compunctions against cooperating closely with the military-intelligence apparatus, or even the CIA.[46] All this changed with the war in Vietnam. During the course of campus mobilizations against the war, this kind of complicity was thrown under a spotlight, and Parsons — and with him, Weber — came to be seen as the very embodiment of everything radicals sought to reject.

With Weber dethroned, it was at first unclear who, if anyone, would replace him. For a while there was a lot of interest in German Marxism: Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Lukacs, Fromm. But the focus eventually shifted to France, where the uprising of May 1968 had produced an efflorescence of extremely creative social theory — in France it was just called “ ’68 thought” — that was simultaneously radical in temperament, and hostile to almost every traditional manifestation of leftist politics, from union organizing to insurrection.[47] Different theorists shifted in and out of fashion, but over the course of the eighties, Foucault managed to establish himself in a way no one — even, really, Weber — has before or since. Or, at least, he did so within those disciplines that considered themselves in any way oppositional. Ultimately, it might be better to speak here of the emergence of a kind of division of academic labor within the American higher education system, with the optimistic side of Weber reinvented (in even more simplified form) for the actual training of bureaucrats under the name of “rational choice theory,” while his pessimistic side was relegated to the Foucauldians. Foucault’s ascendancy in turn was precisely within those fields of academic endeavor that absorbed former campus radicals, or those who identified with them. These disciplines were almost completely divorced from any access to political power, or increasingly, any influence on social movements, as well — a distance that gave Foucault’s emphasis on the “power/knowledge” nexus (the assertion that forms of knowledge are always also forms of social power — indeed, the most important forms of social power) a particular appeal.

No doubt any such pocket historical summary can only be a bit caricaturish and unfair. Still, I believe there is a profound truth here. It is not just that academics are drawn to areas of density, where our skills at interpretation are best deployed. We also have an increasing tendency to identify what’s interesting with what’s important, and to assume that places of density are also places of power. The power of bureaucracy shows just how often exactly the opposite is in fact the case.

But this essay is not just — or not even primarily — about bureaucracy. It is primarily about violence.

What I would like to argue is that situations created by violence — particularly structural violence, by which I mean forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm — invariably tend to create the kinds of willful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures. To put it crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid — though they do do that — but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence. This approach, I think, has the potential to tell us a great deal about both how bureaucracy has come to pervade every aspect of our lives, and why we don’t notice it.

Now, I admit that this emphasis on violence might seem odd. We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as violent institutions — except perhaps in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not abstract. I am not speaking of conceptual violence. I am speaking of violence in the literal sense: the kind that involves, say, one person hitting another over the head with a wooden stick. All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force. “Force” in turn is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence: that is, the ability to call up people dressed in uniforms, willing to threaten to hit others over the head with wooden sticks.

It is curious how rarely citizens in industrial democracies actually think about this fact, or how instinctively we try to discount its importance. This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on that fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required. It’s almost as if the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.

Actually, the very use of the term “structural violence” is an excellent case in point. When I first began working on this essay, I simply took it for granted that the term referred to actual violence that operates in an indirect form. Imagine, if you will, some warlike tribe (let’s call them the Alphas) that sweeps out of the desert and seizes a swath of land inhabited by peaceful farmers (let’s call them the Omegas). But instead of exacting tribute, they appropriate all the fertile land, and arrange for their children to have privileged access to most forms of practical education, at the same time initiating a religious ideology that holds that they are intrinsically superior beings, finer and more beautiful and more intelligent, and that the Omegas, now largely reduced to working on their estates, have been cursed by the divine powers for some terrible sin, and have become stupid, ugly, and base. And perhaps the Omegas internalize their disgrace and come to act as if they believe they really are guilty of something. In a sense perhaps they do believe it. But on a deeper level it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask whether they do or not. The whole arrangement is the fruit of violence and can only be maintained by the continual threat of violence: the fact that the Omegas are quite aware that if anyone directly challenged property arrangements, or access to education, swords would be drawn and people’s heads would almost certainly end up being lopped off. In a case like this, what we talk about in terms of “belief” are simply the psychological techniques people develop to accommodate themselves to this reality. We have no idea how they would act, or what they would think, if the Alphas’ command of the means of violence were to somehow disappear.

This is what I had in mind when I first began using the phrase “structural violence” — structures that could only be created and maintained by the threat of violence, even if in their ordinary, day-to-day workings, no actual physical violence need take place. If one reflects on the matter, the same can be said of most phenomena that are ordinarily referred to as “structural violence” in the literature — racism, sexism, class privilege — even if their actual mode of operation is infinitely more complex.

Here I was probably inspired most by my readings in feminist literature, which often does speak of structural violence in this way.[48] It is widely noted, for instance, that rates of sexual assault increase dramatically at precisely the moments when women begin challenging “gender norms” of work, comportment, or dress. It’s really quite the same as the conquerors suddenly taking out their swords again. But for the most part, academics do not use the term this way. The current usage really harkens back to sixties “Peace Studies,” and it is used it to refer to “structures” that, it is claimed, have the same effects as violence, even though they may not involve physical acts of violence at all.[49] The list of structures is pretty much the same list (racism, sexism, poverty, and the rest), but the implication is there could, for example, exist a system of patriarchy that operated in the total absence of domestic violence or sexual assault, or a system of racism that was in no way backed up by government-enforced property rights — despite the fact that, to my knowledge, no example of either has ever been observed.[50] Once again, it’s puzzling why anyone would make such an argument, unless they were for some reason determined to insist that the physical violence isn’t the essence of the thing, that this isn’t what really needs to be addressed. To pose the question of violence directly would, apparently, mean opening a series of doors that most academics seem to feel would really better be left shut.

Most of these doors lead directly to the problem of what we call “the state” — and the bureaucratic structures through which it actually exercises power. Is the state’s claim to a monopoly of violence ultimately the problem, or is the state an essential part of any possible solution? Is the very practice of laying down rules and then threatening physical harm against anyone who does not follow them itself objectionable, or is it just that the authorities are not deploying such threats in the right way? To talk of racism, sexism, and the rest as a bunch of abstract structures floating about is the best way to dodge such questions entirely.

In many of the rural communities anthropologists are most familiar with, where modern administrative techniques are explicitly seen as alien impositions, things much more resemble my example of the Alphas and Omegas. We are usually dealing with conquered populations of one sort or another — hence, with people who are keenly aware that current arrangements are the fruit of violence. As a result, it would never occur to anyone to deny that the government is a fundamentally coercive institution — even if they might also be perfectly willing to concede that in certain respects, it could also be a benevolent one. In the part of rural Madagascar where I did my fieldwork, for example, everyone took it for granted that states operate primarily by inspiring fear. It was assumed to be just as true of the old Malagasy kingdoms as of the subsequent French colonial regime, or its contemporary Malagasy successor, which was seen as basically a slightly retooled version of the same thing. On the other hand, the fear it inspired was decidedly sporadic, since much of the time, the state, or its representatives, were not really around. Government played almost no role in regulating the minutiae of daily life: there were no building codes, no open container laws, no mandatory licensing and insurance of vehicles, no rules about who could buy or sell or smoke or build or eat or drink what where, where people could play music or tend their animals. Or anyway, if there were such laws, no one knew what they were because it never occurred to anyone, even the police, to enforce them — even in town, and definitely not in the surrounding countryside, where such matters were entirely regulated by custom, deliberation by communal assemblies, or magical taboo. In such contexts, it became all the more apparent that the main business of government bureaucracy was the registration of taxable property, and maintaining the infrastructure that allowed those who collected taxes to show up and take their things away.

This situation actually created some interesting dilemmas for my own research. I had done a good deal of work in the Malagasy national archives before heading out to the countryside. The nineteenth-century Merina kingdom had brought in foreign missionaries to help them train a civil service, and the records were all still there, along with those of the colonial regime. As a result, from about 1875 to 1950, I had quite a wealth of data for the community I was studying: census data, school records, and above all, precise figures about the size of each family and its holdings in land and cattle — and in the earlier period, slaves. But as soon as I arrived I discovered this was precisely what most people assumed an outsider arriving from the capital would be most likely to ask about, and therefore, which they were least inclined to tell them. In fact, people were willing to talk about almost anything else. As a result, I had almost completely different sorts of data for the two historical periods.

As I got to know people better, I slowly realized that it wasn’t just that the government didn’t regulate daily life — in most important respects, the government didn’t do anything at all. State power has a tendency to ebb and flow in Malagasy history, and this was a definite ebb. There were government offices, of course, and people sat in them typing and registering things, but it was mainly just for show — they were barely paid, received no materials (they had to buy their own paper), everyone lied on their tax assessments, and no one really paid the taxes anyway. Police just patrolled the highway and would not go into the countryside at all. Yet everyone would talk about the government as if it actually existed, hoping outsiders wouldn’t notice, which might possibly lead to someone in some office in the capital deciding they might have to do something about the situation. So on one level, bureaucratic power had almost no effect on people. On another, it colored everything.

Part of the reason was the initial impact of conquest nearly a hundred years before. At the time, most inhabitants of the Merina kingdom had been slaveholders, at the heart of a great kingdom. An important thing to remember about slavery is that it is never seen — by anyone really — as a moral relationship, but one of simple arbitrary power: the master can order the slave to do whatever he pleases, and there’s really nothing the slave can do about it.[51] When the French overthrew the Merina kingdom and took over Madagascar in 1895, they simultaneously abolished slavery and imposed a government that similarly did not even pretend to be based on a social contract or the will of the governed, but was simply based on superior firepower. Unsurprisingly, most Malagasy concluded that they had all been effectively turned into slaves. This had profound relations on how people came to deal with one another. Before long, any relation of command — that is, any ongoing relationship between adults where one renders the other a mere extension of his or her will — was

considered morally objectionable, essentially just variations on slavery, or the state. Proper Malagasy people didn’t act this way. So even though the Malagasy government was far away, its shadow was everywhere. In the community I studied, such associations were most likely to come to the fore when people spoke of the great slave-holding families of the nineteenth century, whose children went on to become the core of the colonial-era administration, largely (it was always remarked) by dint of their devotion to education and skill with paperwork, and whose descendants still mostly worked in fancy offices in the capital, far from the worries and responsibilities of rural life. In other contexts, relations of command, particularly in bureaucratic contexts, were linguistically coded: they were firmly identified with French; Malagasy, in contrast, was seen as the language appropriate to deliberation, explanation, and consensus decision-making. Minor functionaries, when they wished to impose arbitrary dictates, would almost invariably switch to French.

I have particularly vivid memories of one occasion when an affable minor official who had had many conversations with me in Malagasy was flustered one day to discover me dropping by at exactly the moment everyone had apparently decided to go home early to watch a football game. (As I mentioned, they weren’t really doing anything in these offices anyway.)

“The office is closed,” he announced, in French, pulling himself up into an uncharacteristically formal pose. “If you have any business at the office you must return tomorrow at eight a.m.”

This puzzled me. He knew English was my native language; he knew I spoke fluent Malagasy; he had no way to know I could even understand spoken French. I pretended confusion and replied, in Malagasy, “Excuse me? I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.”

His response was to pull himself up even taller and just say the same thing again, slightly slower and louder. I once again feigned incomprehension. “I don’t get it,” I said, “why are you speaking to me in a language I don’t even know?” He did it again.

In fact, he proved utterly incapable of repeating the sentence in the vernacular, or, for that matter, of saying anything else at all in Malagasy. I suspected this was because if he had switched to everyday language, he would not feel he could be nearly so abrupt. Others later confirmed this was exactly what was happening: if he were speaking Malagasy, he would at the very least have had to explain why the office had closed at such an unusual time. In literary Malagasy, the French language can actually be referred to as ny teny baiko, “the language of command.” It was characteristic of contexts where explanations, deliberation, and, ultimately, consent, were not required, since such contexts were shaped by the presumption of unequal access to sheer physical force. In this instance, the actual means to deploy such force was no longer present. The official could not in fact call the police, and nor would he want to — he just wanted me to go away, which, after teasing him for a moment with my language games, I did. But he couldn’t even evoke the kind of attitude such power allows one to adopt without calling up the shadow of the colonial state.

In Madagascar, bureaucratic power was somewhat redeemed in most people’s minds by its connection to education, which was held in near-universal esteem. To enter into the world of government, bureaus, and gendarme stations was also to enter into the world of novels, world history, technology, and potential travel overseas. It was not therefore irredeemably bad or intrinsically absurd.

But the Malagasy state was also not particularly violent. Comparative analysis suggests there is a direct relation however between the level of violence employed in a bureaucratic system, and the level of absurdity and ignorance it is seen to produce. Keith Breckenridge, for example, has documented at some length the regimes of “power without knowledge” typical of colonial South Africa,[52] where coercion and paperwork largely substituted for the need for understanding African subjects. The actual installation of apartheid that began in the 1950s, for example, was heralded by a new pass system that was designed to simplify earlier rules that obliged African workers to carry extensive documentation of labor contracts, substituting a single identity booklet, marked with their “names, locale, fingerprints, tax status, and their officially prescribed ‘rights’ to live and work in the towns and cities,” and nothing else.[53] Government functionaries appreciated it for streamlining administration, police for relieving them of the responsibility of having to actually talk to African workers. African workers, for their parts, universally referred to the new document as the “dompas,” or “stupid pass,” for precisely that reason.

Andrew Mathews’s brilliant ethnography of the Mexican forestry service in Oaxaca likewise demonstrates that it is precisely the near-total inequality of power between government officials and local farmers that allows foresters to remain in a kind of ideological bubble, maintaining simple black-and-white ideas about forest fires (for instance) that allow them to remain pretty much the only people in Oaxaca who don’t understand what effects their regulations actually have.[54]

There are traces of the link between coercion and absurdity even in the way we talk about bureaucracy in English: note for example, how most of the colloquial terms that specifically refer to bureaucratic foolishness — SNAFU, Catch-22, and the like — derive from military slang. More generally, political scientists have long observed a “negative correlation,” as David Apter put it,[55] between coercion and information: that is, while relatively democratic regimes tend to be awash in too much information, as everyone bombards political authorities with explanations and demands, the more authoritarian and repressive a regime, the less reason people have to tell it anything — which is why such regimes are forced to rely so heavily on spies, intelligence agencies, and secret police.

Violence’s capacity to allow arbitrary decisions, and thus to avoid the kind of debate, clarification, and renegotiation typical of more egalitarian social relations, is obviously what allows its victims to see procedures created on the basis of violence as stupid or unreasonable. Most of us are capable of getting a superficial sense of what others are thinking or feeling just by observing their tone of voice, or body language — it’s usually not hard to get a sense of people’s immediate intentions and motives, but going beyond that superficial often takes a great deal of work. Much of the everyday business of social life, in fact, consists in trying to decipher others’ motives and perceptions. Let us call this “interpretive labor.” One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally speaking, they do not.

As an anthropologist, I know I am treading perilous ground here. When they do turn their attention to violence, anthropologists tend to emphasize exactly the opposite aspect: the ways that acts of violence are meaningful and communicative — even the ways that they can resembles poetry.[56]

Anyone suggesting otherwise is likely to be instantly accused of a kind of philistinism: “are you honestly suggesting that violence is not symbolically powerful, that bullets and bombs are not meant to communicate something?” So for the record: no, I’m not suggesting that. But I am suggesting that this might not be the most important question. First of all, because it assumes that “violence” refers primarily to acts of violence — actual shovings, punchings, stabbings, or explosions — rather than to the threat of violence, and the kinds of social relations the pervasive threat of violence makes possible.[57] Second of all, because this seems to be one area where anthropologists, and academics more generally, are particularly prone to fall victim to the confusion of interpretive depth and social significance. That is, they automatically assume that what is most interesting about violence is also what’s most important.

Let me take these points one at a time. Is it accurate to say that acts of violence are, generally speaking, also acts of communication? It certainly is. But this is true of pretty much any form of human action. It strikes me that what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative. To be more precise: violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing. In pretty much any other way in which you might try to influence another’s actions, you must at least have some idea about who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities, and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, and all of this becomes irrelevant.

It is true that the effects one can have by disabling or killing someone are very limited. But they are real enough — and critically, it is possible to know in advance exactly what they are going to be. Any alternative form of action cannot, without some sort of appeal to shared meanings or understandings, have any predictable effects at all. What’s more, while attempts to influence others by the threat of violence do require some level of shared understandings, these can be pretty minimal. Most human relations — particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies — are extremely 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. This is what I’ve already referred to as “interpretive labor.” Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind (“cross this line and I will shoot you,” “one more word out of any of you and you’re going to jail”). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.

I do need to introduce one crucial qualification here. Everything, here, depends on the balance of forces. If two parties are engaged in a relatively equal contest of violence — say, generals commanding opposing armies — they have good reason to try to get inside each other’s heads. It is only when one side has an overwhelming advantage in their capacity to cause physical harm that they no longer need to do so. But this has very profound effects, because it means that the most characteristic effect of violence, its ability to obviate the need for “interpretive labor,” becomes most salient when the violence itself is least visible — in fact, where acts of spectacular physical violence are least likely to occur. These are of course precisely what I have just defined as situations of structural violence, systematic inequalities ultimately backed up by the threat of force. For this reason, situations of structural violence invariably produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification.

These effects are often most visible when the structures of inequality take the most deeply internalized forms. Gender is again a classic case in point. For example, in American situation comedies of the 1950s, there was a constant staple: jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes (told, of course, by men) always represented women’s logic as fundamentally alien and incomprehensible. “You have to love them,” the message always seemed to run, “but who can really understand how these creatures think?” One never had the impression the women in question had any trouble understanding men. The reason is obvious. Women had no choice but to understand men. In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved. Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.[58]

This kind of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind appears to be a perennial feature of such patriarchal arrangements. It is usually paired with a sense that, though illogical and inexplicable, women still have access to mysterious, almost mystical wisdom (“women’s intuition”) unavailable to men. And of course something like this happens in any relation of extreme inequality: peasants, for example, are always represented as being both oafishly simple, but somehow, also, mystically wise. Generations of women novelists — Virginia Woolf comes most immediately to mind (To the Lighthouse) — have documented the other side of such arrangements: the constant efforts women end up having to expend in managing, maintaining, and adjusting the egos of oblivious and self-important men, involving the continual work of imaginative identification, or interpretive labor. This work carries over on every level. Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence. A popular exercise among high school creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Usually, a good proportion of the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and are outraged at the suggestion that they should have to think about it.[59]

Nothing I am saying here is particularly new to anyone familiar with Feminist Standpoint Theory or Critical Race Studies. Indeed, I was originally inspired to these broader reflections by a passage by bell hooks:

> Although there has never been any official body of black people in the United States who have gathered as anthropologists and/or ethnographers to study whiteness, black folks have, from slavery on, shared in conversations with one another “special” knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people. Deemed special because it is not a way of knowing that has been recorded fully in written material, its purpose was to help black folks cope and survive in a white supremacist society. For years black domestic servants, working in white homes, acted as informants who brought knowledge back to segregated communities — details, facts, psychoanalytic readings of the white “Other.”[60]

If there is a limitation in the feminist literature, I would say, it’s that it can be if anything a tad too generous, tending to emphasize the insights of the oppressed over the blindness or foolishness of their oppressors.[61]

Could it be possible to develop a general theory of interpretive labor? We’d probably have to begin by recognizing that there are two critical elements here that, while linked, need to be formally distinguished. The first is the process of imaginative identification as a form of knowledge, the fact that within relations of domination, it is generally the subordinates who are effectively relegated the work of understanding how the social relations in question really work. Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant kitchen, for example, knows that if something goes terribly wrong and an angry boss appears to size things up, he is unlikely to carry out a detailed investigation, or even to pay serious attention to the workers all scrambling to explain their version of what happened. He is much more likely to tell them all to shut up and arbitrarily impose a story that allows instant judgment: i.e., “you, Joe, you wouldn’t have made a mistake like that; you, Mark, you’re the new guy, you must have screwed up — if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong so as to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The same thing usually happens with ongoing relations: everyone knows that servants tend to know a great deal about their employers’ families, but the opposite almost never occurs.

The second element is the resultant pattern of sympathetic identification. Curiously, it was Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, who first observed the phenomenon we now refer to as “compassion fatigue.” Human beings, he proposed, are normally inclined not only to imaginatively identify with their fellows, but as a result, to spontaneously feel one another’s joys and sorrows. The poor, however, are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers are simply overwhelmed, and are forced, without realizing it, to blot out their existence entirely. The result is that while those on the bottom of a social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and genuinely caring about, those on the top, it almost never happens the other way around.

Whether one is dealing with masters and servants, men and women, employers and employees, rich and poor, structural inequality — what I’ve been calling structural violence — invariably creates highly lopsided structures of the imagination. Since I think Smith was right to observe that imagination tends to bring with it sympathy, the result is that victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries far more than those beneficiaries care about them. This might well be, after the violence itself, the single most powerful force preserving such relations.

At this point I can return to the question of bureaucracy.

In contemporary industrialized democracies, the legitimate administration of violence is turned over to what is euphemistically referred to as “criminal law enforcement” — particularly, to police officers. I say “euphemistically” because generations of police sociologists have pointed out that only a very small proportion of what police actually do has anything to do with enforcing criminal law — or with criminal matters of any kind. Most of it has to do with regulations, or, to put it slightly more technically, with the scientific application of physical force, or the threat of physical force, to aid in the resolution of administrative problems.[62] In other words they spend most of their time enforcing all those endless rules and regulations about who can buy or smoke or sell or build or eat or drink what where that don’t exist in places like small-town or rural Madagascar.

So: Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

If you think about it, this is a really ingenious trick. Because when most of us think about police, we do not think of them as enforcing regulations. We think of them as fighting crime, and when we think of “crime,” the kind of crime we have in our minds is violent crime.[63] Even though, in fact, what police mostly do is exactly the opposite: they bring the threat of force to bear on situations that would otherwise have nothing to do with it. I find this all the time in public discussions. When trying to come up with a hypothetical example of a situation in which police are likely to be involved, people will almost invariably think of some act of interpersonal violence: a mugging or assault. But even a moment’s reflection should make it clear that, when most real acts of physical assault do occur, even in major cities like Marseille or Montevideo or Minneapolis — domestic violence, gang fights, drunken brawls — the police do not get involved. Police are only likely to be called in if someone dies, or is so seriously hurt they end up in the hospital. But this is because the moment an ambulance is involved, there is also paperwork; if someone is treated in the hospital, there has to be a cause of injury, the circumstances become relevant, police reports have to be filed.

And if someone dies there are all sorts of forms, up to and including municipal statistics. So the only fights which police are sure to get involved in are those that generate some kind of paperwork. The vast majority of muggings or burglaries aren’t reported either, unless there are insurance forms to be filled out, or lost documents that need to be replaced, and which can only be replaced if one files a proper police report. So most violent crime does not end up involving the police.

On the other hand, try driving down the street of any one of those cities in a car without license plates. We all know what’s going to happen. Uniformed officers armed with sticks, guns, and/or tasers will appear on the scene almost immediately, and if you simply refuse to comply with their instructions, violent force will, most definitely, be applied.

Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it’s not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. And these imaginary police do, indeed, spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences.

If nothing else, all this throws an odd wrinkle into Weber’s famous worries about the iron cage: the danger that modern society will become so well organized by faceless technocrats that charismatic heroes, enchantment, and romance will completely disappear.[64] Actually, as it turns out, bureaucratic society does indeed have a tendency to produce its own, unique forms of charismatic hero. These have, since the late nineteenth century, arrived in the form of an endless assortment of mythic detectives, police officers, and spies — all, significantly, figures whose job is to operate precisely where bureaucratic structures for ordering information encounter the actual application of physical violence. Bureaucracy, after all, has been around for thousands of years, and bureaucratic societies, from Sumer and Egypt, to Imperial China, have produced great literature. But modern North Atlantic societies are the very first to have created genres of literature where the heroes themselves are bureaucrats, or operate entirely within bureaucratic environments.[65]

It strikes me that contemplating the role of the police in our society actually allows us some interesting insights into social theory. Now, I must admit that over the course of this essay I have not been especially kind to academics and most of their theoretical habits and predilections. I wouldn’t be surprised if some were inclined to read what I’ve written as an argument that social theory is largely pointless — the self-important fantasies of a cloistered elite who refuse to accept the simple realities of power. But this is not what I’m arguing at all. This essay is itself an exercise in social theory, and if I didn’t think such exercises had the potential to throw important light on areas that would otherwise remain obscure, I would not have written it. The question is what kind, and to what purpose.

Here a comparison of bureaucratic knowledge and theoretical knowledge is revealing. Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence and reducing everything to preconceived mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is always a matter of simplification. Typically, it’s not very different from the boss who walks into the kitchen to make arbitrary snap decisions as to what went wrong: in either case it is a matter of applying very simple pre-existing templates to complex and often ambiguous situations. The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have for some arbitrary reason decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see only 2 percent of what’s in front of them. But surely, something very similar happens in social theory as well. Anthropologists like to describe what they do as “thick description,” but in fact an ethnographic description, even a very good one, captures at best 2 percent of what’s happening in any particular Nuer feud or Balinese cockfight. A theoretical work that draws on ethnographic descriptions will typically focus on only a tiny part of that, plucking perhaps one or two strands out of an endlessly complex fabric of human circumstance, and using them as the basis on which to make generalizations: say, about the dynamics of social conflict, the nature of performance, or the principle of hierarchy.

I am not trying to say there’s anything wrong in this kind of theoretical reduction. To the contrary, I am convinced some such process is necessary if one wishes to say something dramatically new about the world.

Consider the role of structural analysis, of the sort that in the sixties and seventies was

made famous by anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, or classicists like Paul Vernant.

Academic fashion being what it is, structural analysis is currently considered definitively passé, and most anthropology students find Claude Lévi-Strauss’s entire corpus vaguely ridiculous. This strikes me as unfortunate. Certainly insofar as Structuralism claimed to be a single, grandiose theory of the nature of thought, language, and society, providing the key to unlocking all the mysteries of human culture, it was indeed ridiculous and has been justifiably abandoned. But structural analysis wasn’t a theory, it was a technique, and to toss that too out the window, as has largely been done, robs us of one our most ingenious tools. Because the great merit of structural analysis is that it provides a well-nigh foolproof technique for doing what any good theory should do: simplifying and schematizing complex material in such a way as to be able to say something unexpected. This is incidentally how I came up with the point about Weber and heroes of bureaucracy a few paragraphs above. It all came from an experiment demonstrating structural analysis to students at a seminar at Yale.

The basic principle of structural analysis, I was explaining, is that the terms of a symbolic system do not stand in isolation — they are not to be thought of in terms of what they “stand for,” but are defined by their relations to each other. One has to first define the field, and then look for elements in that field that are systematic inversions of each other. Take vampires. First you place them: vampires are stock figures in American horror movies. American horror movies constitute a kind of cosmology, a universe unto themselves. Then you ask: what, within this cosmos, is the opposite of a vampire? The answer is obvious. The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf. On one level they are the same: they are both monsters that can bite you and by biting you, turn you, too, into one of their own kind. In most others ways each is an exact inversion of the other. Vampires are rich. They are typically aristocrats. Werewolves are always poor. Vampires are fixed in space: they have castles or crypts that they have to retreat to during the daytime; werewolves are usually homeless derelicts, travelers, or otherwise on the run. Vampires control other creatures (bats, wolves, humans that they hypnotize or render thralls.) Werewolves can’t control themselves. Yet — and this is really the clincher in this case — each can be destroyed only by its own negation: vampires, by a stake, a simple sharpened stick that peasants use to construct fences; werewolves, by a silver bullet, something literally made from money.

By observing these axes of inversion, we can get a sense of what such symbols are really about: that vampires, for instance, are not necessarily so much about death, or fear, but about power; about the simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion that relations of domination tend to create.

Obviously this is an extremely simple example. What I’ve described is just the initial move, there’s a whole series of more sophisticated ones that normally follow: inversions within inversions, mediating terms, levels of hierarchical encompassment … There’s no need to go into any of that here. My point is just that even by making this initial move, one will almost invariably discover something one would not have thought of otherwise. It’s a way of radically simplifying reality that leads to insights one would almost certainly never have achieved if one had simply attempted to take on the world in its full complexity.

I often used that example when explaining structural analysis to students. Students always liked it. One time, I suggested we try collectively try our hands at another analysis, of a similar pop culture figure, and someone suggested James Bond.

This made sense to me: James Bond is clearly a mythical figure of some kind. But who was his mythic opposite? The answer soon became obvious. James Bond was the structural inversion of Sherlock Holmes. Both are London-based crime-fighters, and both permanent adolescents after their own fashion, even mild sociopaths, but otherwise, they are opposites in almost every way:

> Where Holmes is asexual but fond of cocaine and opium, Bond is oversexed, but uninterested in drugs except for liquor. Holmes is an amateur. Bond is the quintessential professional — he seems to have no life outside his work. Yet Holmes is an amateur who is almost preternaturally disciplined and competent, far more than the professionals at Scotland Yard, while Bond is a professional who is always allowing himself to become distracted, blowing his cover, getting captured, or disobeying direct orders from his boss.[66]

All this, though, really just sets up the key inversion, which is in terms of what they actually do: Sherlock Holmes seeks information about past acts of violence inside his country, while James Bond seeks information about future acts of violence outside it.

It was in mapping out the field that I came to realize that everything here was organized, precisely, around the relation between information and violence — and that Sherlock Holmes and James Bond are, between them, the quintessential charismatic heroes of bureaucracy. The classic TV cop, or hero of any of the literally hundreds of “maverick-cop-who-breaks-all- the-rules” movies that Hollywood has trundled out since the 1960s, is clearly a kind of synthesis of these two figures: crime-fighters who exist within, but are constantly bursting out, of the bureaucratic order, which is nonetheless their entire meaning and existence.[67]

One might object that all this is a simplification of a much richer, more complex and nuanced, tradition of popular culture. Of course it is. That’s the whole point. Structural analysis of this sort makes a virtue of simplification. For my own part, I see Lévi-Strauss as a kind of heroic figure too, a man with the sheer intellectual courage to pursue a few simple principles as far as they would go, no matter how apparently absurd or just plain wrong the results could sometimes be (the story of Oedipus is really about eyes and feet; all social organizations are simply systems for the exchange of women) — or, if you prefer, how much violence he thus did to reality. Because it’s a productive violence. And nobody actually gets hurt.

As long as one remains within the domain of theory, then, I would argue that simplification is not necessarily a form of stupidity — it can be a form of intelligence. Even of brilliance. The problems arise at the moment that violence is no longer metaphorical. Here let me turn from imaginary cops to real ones. Jim Cooper, a former LAPD officer turned sociologist,[68] has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up burglars,” he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple: the one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction from police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts it, “define the situation.” That is, to say “no, this isn’t a possible crime situation, this is a citizen-who-pays-your-salary-walking-his-dog situation, so shove off,” let alone the invariably disastrous, “wait, why are you handcuffing that guy? He didn’t do anything!” It’s “talking back” above all that inspires beat-downs, and that means challenging whatever administrative rubric (an orderly or a disorderly crowd? A properly or improperly registered vehicle?) has been applied by the officer’s discretionary judgment. The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts Jean Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.

This analysis, too, is no doubt a simplification, but it’s a productive one. Let me try to demonstrate this by applying some of these insights to understanding the type of politics that can emerge within a fundamentally bureaucratic society.

One of the central arguments of this essay so far is that structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them — including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top — while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them. That is, the powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labor required to keep society running, they also do most of the interpretive labor as well.

This much seems to be the case wherever one encounters systematic inequality. It was just as true in ancient India or medieval China as it is anywhere today. And it will, presumably, remain true so long as structural inequalities endure. However, our own bureaucratic civilization introduces a further element. Bureaucracies, I’ve suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity — of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence. This is why even if a bureaucracy is created for entirely benevolent reasons, it will still produce absurdities. And this, in turn, is why I began the essay the way I did. I have no reason to believe anyone involved in my mother’s power of attorney drama (even the bank manager) was anything other than well- intentioned. Yet an absurd and apparently endless run-around nonetheless ensued.

Why does this happen? Because even the most benevolent bureaucracies are really just taking the highly schematized, minimal, blinkered perspectives typical of the powerful, turning them into ways of limiting that power or ameliorating its most pernicious effects. Surely, bureaucratic interventions along these lines have done an enormous amount of good in the world. The European social welfare state, with its free education and universal health care, can justly be considered — as Pierre Bourdieu once remarked — one of the greatest achievements of human civilization. But at the same time, in taking forms of willful blindness typical of the powerful and giving them the prestige of science — for instance, by adopting a whole series of assumptions about the meaning of work, family, neighborhood, knowledge, health, happiness, or success that had almost nothing to do with the way poor or working-class people actually lived their lives, let alone what they found meaningful in them — it set itself up for a fall. And fall it did. It was precisely the uneasiness this blindness created even in the minds of its greatest beneficiaries that allowed the Right to mobilize popular support for the policies that have gutted and devastated even the most successful of these programs since the eighties.

And how was this uneasiness expressed? Largely, by the feeling that bureaucratic authority, by its very nature, represented a kind of war against the human imagination. This becomes particularly clear if we look at the youth rebellions from China to Mexico to New York that culminated in the insurrection of May 1968 in Paris. All were rebellions first and foremost against bureaucratic authority; all saw bureaucratic authority as fundamentally stifling of the human spirit, of creativity, conviviality, imagination. The famous slogan “All power to the imagination,” painted on the walls of the Sorbonne, has haunted us ever since — endlessly repeated on posters, buttons, flyers, manifestos, films, and song lyrics, largely because it seems to embody something fundamental, not just to the spirit of sixties rebellion, but to the very essence of what we have come to call “the Left.”

This is important. Actually it could not be more important. Because I think what happened in ’68 reveals a contradiction at the very core of Leftist thought, from its very inception — a contradiction that only fully revealed itself at precisely the high-water mark of its historical success. In the introduction to this volume, I suggested that the contemporary Left suffers from the lack of a coherent critique of bureaucracy. But if you really go back to the beginnings — to the idea that emerged around the time of the French Revolution that the political spectrum can be divided into a right- and left-wing in the first place — it becomes clear that the Left, in its essence, is a critique of bureaucracy, even if it’s one that has, again and again, been forced to accommodate itself in practice to the very bureaucratic structures and mindset it originally arose to oppose.[69]

In this sense, the Left’s current inability to formulate a critique of bureaucracy that actually speaks to its erstwhile constituents is synonymous with the decline of the Left itself.

Without such a critique, radical thought loses its vital center — it collapses into a fragmented scatter of protests and demands.

It seems that every time the Left decides to take a safe, “realistic” course, it just digs itself deeper.

To understand how this happened, let alone what we might be able to do about it, I think it will be necessary to reexamine some very basic assumptions: first and foremost, about what it means to say one is being “realistic” to begin with.

> **Be realistic: demand the impossible.**

>

> (another ’68 slogan)

So far, I have been discussing how structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination and how bureaucracy becomes a way of managing such situations — and the forms of structural blindness and stupidity they inevitably entail. Even at their best, bureaucratic procedures are ways to turn stupidity, as it were, against itself.

Why do movements challenging such structures so often end up creating bureaucracies instead? Normally, they do so as a kind of compromise. One must be realistic and not demand too much. Welfare state reforms seem more realistic than demanding a broad distribution of property; a “transitional” stage of state socialism seems more realistic than jumping immediately to giving power to democratically organized workers’ councils, and so forth. But this raises another question. When we speak of being “realistic,” exactly what reality is it we are referring to?

Here, I think an anecdote about an activist group I was once involved with might prove instructive.

From early 2000 to late 2002, I was working with the New York Direct Action Network — the principal group responsible for organizing mass actions as part of the global justice movement in New York City at that time. I call it a “group,” but technically DAN was not a group at all but a decentralized network, operating on principles of direct democracy according to an elaborate, but quite effective, form of consensus process. It played a central role in ongoing efforts to create new organizational forms. DAN existed in a purely political space. It had no concrete resources — not even a significant treasury — to administer.

Then one day someone gave DAN a car.

The DAN car caused a minor, but ongoing, crisis. We soon discovered that legally, it is impossible for a decentralized network to own a car. Cars can be owned by individuals, or they can be owned by corporations (which are fictive individuals), or by governments. But they cannot be owned by networks. Unless we were willing to incorporate ourselves as a nonprofit corporation (which would have required a complete reorganization and an abandonment of most of our egalitarian principles) the only expedient was to find a volunteer willing to claim to be the legal owner. But then that person was held responsible for all outstanding fines and insurance fees, and had to provide written permission to allow anyone else to drive the car out of state. And, of course, only he could retrieve the car if it were impounded. One courageous activist did agree to undertake the responsibility, but as a result, weekly meetings were overwhelmed by reportbacks about his latest legal problems. Before long the DAN car had become such an endless source of tribulation that we decided to organize a fundraiser, throwing a big party where we provided a sledgehammer to

anyone willing to pay five dollars to take a whack at the thing.

It struck me there was something profound to this story. Why is it that projects like DAN’s — projects aimed at democratizing society — are so often perceived as idle dreams that melt away as soon as they encounter hard material reality? In our case, at least, it had nothing to do with inefficiency: police chiefs across the country had called us the best organized force they’d ever had to deal with. It seems to me that the reality effect (if one may call it that) comes rather from the fact that radical projects tend to founder — or at least become endlessly difficult — the moment they enter into the world of large, heavy objects: buildings, cars, tractors, boats, industrial machinery. This in turn is not because these objects are somehow intrinsically difficult to administer democratically — history is full of communities that successfully engage in the democratic administration of common resources — it’s because, like the DAN car, they are surrounded by endless government regulation, and are effectively impossible to hide from the government’s armed representatives. In America, I have seen endless examples of this dilemma. A squat is legalized after a long struggle; suddenly, building inspectors arrive to announce it will take ten thousand dollars’ worth of repairs to bring it up to code. Organizers are therefore forced to spend the next several years organizing bake sales and soliciting contributions. This means setting up bank accounts, which means, in turn, adhering to legal regulations that specify how any group receiving funds, or dealing with the government, must be organized (again, not as an egalitarian collective). All these regulations are enforced by violence.

True, in ordinary life, police rarely come in swinging billy clubs to enforce building code regulations, but, as anarchists often are often uniquely positioned to find out, if one simply pretends the state and its regulations don’t exist, this will, eventually, happen. The rarity with which the nightsticks actually appear just helps to make the violence harder to see. This in turn makes the effects of all these regulations — regulations that almost always assume that normal relations between individuals are mediated by the market, and that normal groups are organized internally by relations of hierarchy and command — seem to emanate not from the government’s monopoly of the use of force, but from the largeness, solidity, and heaviness of the objects themselves.

When one is asked to be “realistic,” then, the reality one is normally being asked to recognize is not one of natural, material facts, nor some supposed ugly truth about human nature. Being “realistic” usually means taking seriously the effects of the systematic threat of violence. This possibility even threads our language. Why, for example, is a building referred to as “real property,” or “real estate”? The “real” in this usage is not derived from Latin res, or “thing”: it’s from the Spanish real, meaning, “royal,” “belonging to the king.” All land within a sovereign territory ultimately belongs to the sovereign — legally this is still the case. This is why the state has the right to impose its regulations. But sovereignty ultimately comes down to a monopoly on what is euphemistically referred to as “force” — that is, violence. Just as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued that from the perspective of sovereign power, something is alive because you can kill it, so property is “real” because the state can seize or destroy it.

In the same way, when one takes a “realist” position in International Relations, one assumes that states will use whatever capacities they have at their disposal, including force of arms, to pursue their national interests. What “reality” is one recognizing? Certainly not material reality. The idea that nations are humanlike entities with purposes and interests is purely metaphysical. The King of France had purposes and interests. “France” does not. What makes it seem “realistic” to suggest it does is simply that those in control of nation- states have the power to raise armies, launch invasions, and bomb cities, and can otherwise threaten the use of organized violence in the name of what they describe as their “national interests” — and that it would be foolish to ignore that possibility. National interests are real because they can kill you.

The critical term here is “force,” as in “the state’s monopoly on the use of coercive force.” Whenever we hear this word invoked, we find ourselves in the presence of a political ontology in which the power to destroy, to cause others pain or to threaten to break, damage, or mangle others’ bodies (or just lock them in a tiny room for the rest of their lives) is treated as the social equivalent of the very energy that drives the cosmos. Contemplate, if you will, the metaphors and displacements that make it possible to construct the following two sentences:

Scientists investigate the nature of physical laws so as to understand the forces that govern the universe.

Police are experts in the scientific application of physical force in order to enforce the laws that govern society.

This is to my mind the essence of right-wing thought: a political ontology that through such subtle means allows violence to define the very parameters of social existence and common sense.[70]

This is why I say that the Left has always been, in its essential inspiration, antibureaucratic. Because it has always been founded on a different set of assumptions about what is ultimately real — that is, about the very grounds of political being. Obviously Leftists don’t deny the reality of violence. Many Leftist theorists think about it quite a lot. But they don’t tend to give it the same foundational status. Instead, I would argue that Leftist thought is founded on what I will call a “political ontology of the imagination” (though it could also, perhaps just as well, have been called an ontology of creativity or making or invention.) Nowadays, most of us tend to identify this tendency with the legacy of Marx, with his emphasis on social revolution and forces of material production. Marx was ultimately only a man of his time, and his terms emerged from much wider arguments about value, labor, and creativity current in radical circles of his day, whether in the workers’ movement, or for that matter in various strains of Romanticism and bohemian life emerging around him in Paris and London at the time. Marx himself, for all his contempt for the utopian Socialists of his day, never ceased to insist that what makes human beings different from animals is that architects, unlike bees, first raise their structures in the imagination. It was the unique property of humans, for Marx, that they first envision things, and only then bring them into being. It was this process he referred to as “production.”

Around the same time, utopian Socialists like St. Simon were arguing that artists needed to become the avant-garde or “vanguard,” as he put it, of a new social order, providing the grand visions that industry now had the power to bring into being. What at the time might have seemed the fantasy of an eccentric pamphleteer soon became the charter for a sporadic, uncertain, but apparently permanent alliance that endures to this day. If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like “all power to the imagination” expresses the very quintessence of the Left.

From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is — it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?[71] Perhaps the leftist sensibility was expressed in its purest form in the words of Marxist philosopher John Holloway, who once wanted to title a book, “Stop Making Capitalism.”[72] Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn’t have capitalism anymore. This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this — to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?

To this emphasis on forces of creativity and production, the Right tends to reply that revolutionaries systematically neglect the social and historical importance of the “means of destruction”: states, armies, executioners, barbarian invasions, criminals, unruly mobs, and so on. Pretending such things are not there, or can simply be wished away, they argue, has the result of ensuring that left-wing regimes will in fact create far more death and destruction than those that have the wisdom to take a more “realistic” approach.

Obviously, this is something of a simplification, and one could make endless qualifications. The bourgeoisie of Marx’s time, for instance, had an extremely productivist philosophy — one reason Marx could see it as a revolutionary force. Elements of the Right dabbled with the artistic ideal, and twentieth-century Marxist regimes often embraced essentially right-wing theories of power and paid little more than lip service to the determinant nature of production. On the other hand, in their obsession with jailing poets and playwrights whose work they considered threatening, they evinced a profound faith in the power of art and creativity to change the world — those running capitalist regimes rarely bothered, convinced that if they kept a firm hand on the means of productions (and, of course, the army and police), the rest would take care of itself.

One of the reasons it is difficult to see all this is because the word “imagination” can mean so many different things. In most modern definitions imagination is counterposed to reality; “imaginary” things are first and foremost things that aren’t really there. This can cause a great deal of confusion when we speak of imagination in the abstract, because it makes it seem like imagination has much more do with Spenser’s Faerie Queene than with a group of waitresses trying to figure out how to placate the couple at Table 7 before the boss shows up.

Still, this way of thinking about imagination is relatively new, and continues to coexist with much older ones. In the common Ancient and Medieval conception, for example, what we now call “the imagination” was not seen as opposed to reality per se, but as a kind of middle ground, a zone of passage connecting material reality and the rational soul. This was especially true for those who saw Reason as essentially an aspect of God, who felt that thought therefore partook in a divinity which in no way partook of — indeed, was absolutely alien to — material reality. (This became the dominant position in the Christian Middle Ages.) How, then, was it possible for the rational mind to receive sense impressions from nature?

The solution was to propose an intermediary substance, made out of the same material as the stars, the “pneuma,” a kind of circulatory system through which perceptions of the material world could pass, becoming emotionally charged in the process and mixing with all sorts of phantasms, before the rational mind could grasp their significance. Intentions and desires moved in the opposite direction, circulating through the imagination before they could be realized in the world. It’s only after Descartes, really, that the word “imaginary” came to mean, specifically, anything that is not real: imaginary creatures, imaginary places (Narnia, planets in faraway galaxies, the Kingdom of Prester John), imaginary friends. By this definition, a “political ontology of the imagination” could only be a contradiction in terms. The imagination cannot be the basis of reality. It is by definition that which we can think, but which has no reality.

I’ll refer to this latter as “the transcendent notion of the imagination” since it seems to take as its model novels or other works of fiction that create imaginary worlds that presumably remain the same no matter how many times one reads them. Imaginary creatures — elves or unicorns or TV cops — are not affected by the real world. They cannot be, since they don’t exist. In contrast, the kind of imagination I have been developing in this essay is much closer to the old, immanent, conception. Critically, it is in no sense static and free-floating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world, and as such, always changing and adapting. This is equally true whether one is crafting a knife or a piece of jewelry, or trying to make sure one doesn’t hurt a friend’s feelings.

It was precisely in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, which saw the origins of industrial capitalism, modern bureaucratic society, and the political division between right and left, where the new transcendent concept of imagination really came to prominence. For Romantics, in particular, the Imagination came to take the place once held by the soul — rather than mediating between the rational soul and the material world, it was the soul, and the soul was that which was beyond any mere rationality. It’s easy to see how the advent of an impersonal, bureaucratic order of offices, factories, and rational administration would also give rise to this sort of idea. But insofar as the imagination became a residual category, everything that the new order was not, it also was not purely transcendent; in fact, it necessarily became a kind of crazy hodgepodge of what I’ve been calling transcendent and immanent principles. On the one hand, the imagination was seen as the source of art, and all creativity. On the other, it was the basis of human sympathy, and hence morality.[73]

Two hundred and fifty years later, we might do well to begin to sort these matters out. Because honestly, there’s a lot at stake here. To get a sense of just how much, let’s return

for a moment to that ’68 slogan: “All power to the imagination.” Which imagination are we referring to? If one takes this to refer to the transcendent imagination — to an attempt to

impose some sort of prefab utopian vision — the effects can be disastrous. Historically, it has often meant creating some vast bureaucratic machine designed to impose such utopian visions by violence. World-class atrocities are likely to result. On the other hand, in a revolutionary situation, one might by the same token argue that not giving full power to the other, immanent, sort of imagination — the practical common sense imagination of ordinary cooks, nurses, mechanics and gardeners — is likely to end up having exactly the same effects.

This confusion, this jumbling of different conceptions of imagination, runs throughout the history of leftist thought.

One can already see the tension in Marx. There is a strange paradox in his approach to revolution. As I’ve noted, Marx insists that what makes us human is that rather than relying on unconscious instinct like spiders and bees, we first raise structures in our imagination, and then try to bring those visions into being. When a spider weaves her web, she operates on instinct. The architect first draws up a plan, and only then starts building the foundations of his edifice. This is true, Marx insists, in all forms of material production, whether we are building bridges or making boots. Yet when Marx speaks of social creativity, his key example — the only kind of social creativity he ever talks about actually — is always revolution, and when he does that, he suddenly changes gears completely. In fact he reverses himself. The revolutionary should never proceed like the architect; he should never begin by drawing up a plan for an ideal society, then think about how to bring it into being. That would be utopianism. And for utopianism, Marx had nothing but withering contempt. Instead, revolution is the actual immanent practice of the proletariat, which will ultimately bear fruit in ways that we cannot possibly imagine from our current vantage point.

Why the discrepancy? The most generous explanation, I would suggest, is that Marx did understand, at least on some intuitive level, that the imagination worked differently in the domain of material production than it did in social relations; but also, that he lacked an adequate theory as to why. Perhaps, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, long before the rise of feminism, he simply lacked the intellectual tools.[74] Given the considerations already outlined in this essay, I think we can confirm that this is indeed the case. To put it in Marx’s own terms: in both domains one can speak of alienation. But in each, alienation works in profoundly different ways.

To recall the argument so far: structural inequalities always create what I’ve called “lopsided structures of imagination,” that is, divisions between one class of people who end up doing most of the imaginative labor, and others who do not. However, the sphere of factory production that Marx concerned himself with is rather unusual in this respect. It is one of the few contexts where it is the dominant class who end up doing more imaginative labor, not less.

Creativity and desire — what we often reduce, in political economy terms, to “production” and “consumption” — are essentially vehicles of the imagination. Structures of inequality and domination — structural violence, if you will — tend to skew the imagination. Structural violence might create situations where laborers are relegated to mind-numbing, boring, mechanical jobs, and only a small elite is allowed to indulge in imaginative labor, leading to the feeling, on the part of the workers, that they are alienated from their own labor, that their very deeds belong to someone else.

It might also create social situations where kings, politicians, celebrities, or CEOs prance about oblivious to almost everything around them while their wives, servants, staff, and handlers spend all their time engaged in the imaginative work of maintaining them in their fantasies. Most situations of inequality I suspect combine elements of both.

The subjective experience of living inside such lopsided structures of imagination — the warping and shattering of imagination that results — is what we are referring to when we talk about “alienation.”

The tradition of Political Economy, within which Marx was writing, tends to see work in modern societies as divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is always factories, and domestic labor — housework, childcare — relegated mainly to women. The first is seen primarily as a matter of creating and maintaining physical objects. The second is probably best seen as a matter of creating and maintaining people and social relations. The distinction is obviously a bit of a caricature: there has never been a society, not even Engels’s Manchester or Victor Hugo’s Paris, where most men were factory workers and most women worked exclusively as housewives. Still, this frames how we think about such issues today. It also points to the root of Marx’s problem. In the sphere of industry, it is generally those on top that relegate to themselves the more imaginative tasks (i.e., they design the products and organize production), whereas when inequalities emerge in the sphere of social production, it is those on the bottom who end up expected to do the major imaginative work — notably, the bulk of what I’ve called the “labor of interpretation” that keeps life running.[75]

So far I have proposed that bureaucratic procedures, which have an uncanny ability to make even the smartest people act like idiots, are not so much forms of stupidity in themselves, as they are ways of managing situations already stupid because of the effects of structural violence. As a result, such procedures come to partake of the very blindness and foolishness they seek to manage. At their best, they become ways of turning stupidity against itself, much in the same way that revolutionary violence could be said to be. But stupidity in the name of fairness and decency is still stupidity, and violence in the name of human liberation is still violence. It’s no coincidence the two so often seem to arrive together.

For much of the last century, the great revolutionary question has thus been: how does one affect fundamental change in society without setting in train a process that will end with the creation of some new, violent bureaucracy? Is utopianism the problem — the very idea of imagining a better world and then trying to bring it into being? Or is it something in the very nature of social theory Should we thus abandon social theory? Or is the notion of revolution itself fundamentally flawed?

Since the sixties, one common solution has been to start by lowering one’s sights. In the years leading up to May ’68, the Situationists famously argued that it was possible to do this through creative acts of subversion that undermined the logic of what they called “the Spectacle,” which rendered us passive consumers. Through these acts, we could, at least momentarily, recapture our imaginative powers. At the same time, they also felt that all such acts were small-scale dress rehearsals for the great insurrectionary moment to which they would necessarily lead — “the” revolution, properly speaking. This is what’s largely gone today. If the events of May ’68 showed anything, it was that if one does not aim to seize state power, there can be no fundamental, onetime break. As a result, among most contemporary revolutionaries, that millenarian element has almost completely fallen away. No one thinks the skies are about to open any time soon. There is a consolation, though: that as a result, insofar as one actually can come to experiencing genuine revolutionary freedom, one can begin to experience it immediately. Consider the following statement from the Crimethinc collective, probably the most inspiring young anarchist propagandists operating in the Situationist tradition today:

> We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice — and it is up to you to create these situations.

>

> Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution. And those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere — and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not.

What is this but an elegant statement of the logic of direct action: the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free?[76] The obvious question is how this approach can contribute to an overall strategy — one that should lead, perhaps not to a single moment of revolutionary redemption, but to a cumulative movement towards a world without states and capitalism. On this point, no one is completely sure. Most assume the process could only be one of endless improvisation.

Insurrectionary moments there will surely be. Likely as not, quite a few of them. But they will most likely be one element in a far more complex and multifaceted revolutionary process whose outlines could hardly, at this point, be fully anticipated.

In retrospect, what seems strikingly naïve is the old assumption that a single uprising or successful civil war could, as it were, neutralize the entire apparatus of structural violence, at least within a particular national territory — that within that territory, right-wing realities could be simply swept away, to leave the field open for an untrammeled outpouring of revolutionary creativity. But the truly puzzling thing is that, at certain moments of human history, that appeared to be exactly what was happening. It seems to me that if we are to have any chance of grasping the new, emerging conception of revolution, we need to begin by thinking again about the quality of these insurrectionary moments.

One of the most remarkable things about such insurrectionary upheavals is how they can seem to burst out of nowhere — and then, often, dissolve away just as quickly. How is it that the same “public” that two months before say, the Paris Commune, or the Spanish Civil War, had voted in a fairly moderate social democratic regime will suddenly find itself willing to risk their lives for the same ultra-radicals who received a fraction of the actual vote? Or, to return to May ’68, how is it that the same public that seemed to support or at least feel strongly sympathetic toward the student/worker uprising could almost immediately afterwards return to the polls and elect a right-wing government? The most common historical explanations — that the revolutionaries didn’t really represent the public or its interests, but that elements of the public perhaps became caught up in some sort of irrational effervescence — seem obviously inadequate. First of all, they assume that “the public” is an entity with opinions, interests, and allegiances that can be treated as relatively consistent over time. In fact what we call “the public” is created, produced through specific institutions that allow specific forms of action — taking polls, watching television, voting, signing petitions or writing letters to elected officials or attending public hearings — and not others. These frames of action imply certain ways of talking, thinking, arguing, deliberating. The same “public” that may widely indulge in the use of recreational chemicals may also consistently vote to make such indulgences illegal; the same collection of citizens is likely to come to completely different decisions on questions affecting their communities if organized into a parliamentary system, a system of computerized plebiscites, or a nested series of public assemblies. In fact the entire anarchist project of reinventing direct democracy is premised on assuming this is the case.

To illustrate what I mean, consider that in English-speaking nations, the same collection of people referred to in one context as “the public” can in another be referred to as “the workforce.” They become a “workforce,” of course, when they are engaged in different sorts of activity. The “public” does not work — a sentence like “most of the American public works in the service industry” would never appear in a magazine or paper, and if a journalist were to attempt to write such a sentence, her editor would certainly change it to something else. It is especially odd since the public does apparently have to go to work: this is why, as leftist critics often complain, the media will always talk about how, say, a transport strike is likely to inconvenience the public, in their capacity of commuters, but it will never occur to them that those striking are themselves part of the public — or that if they succeed in raising wage levels, this will be a public benefit. And certainly the “public” does not go out into the streets. Its role is as audience to public spectacles, and consumers of public services. When buying or using goods and services privately supplied, the same collection of individuals become something else (“consumers”), just as in other contexts of action they are relabeled a “nation,” “electorate,” or “population.”

All these entities are the product of bureaucracies and institutional practices that, in turn, define certain horizons of possibility. Hence when voting in parliamentary elections one might feel obliged to make a “realistic” choice; in an insurrectionary situation, on the other hand, suddenly anything seems possible.

What “the public,” “the workforce,” “the electorate,” “consumers,” and “the population” all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating. Voting booths, television screens, office cubicles, hospitals, the ritual that surrounds them — one might say these are the very machinery of alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered.

Insurrectionary moments are moments when this bureaucratic apparatus is neutralized. Doing so always seems to have the effect of throwing horizons of possibility wide open, which is only to be expected if one of the main things that that apparatus normally does is to enforce extremely limited horizons. (This is probably why, as Rebecca Solnit has so beautifully observed,[77] people often experience something very similar during natural disasters.) All of this would explain why revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of

view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to re- create and reimagine everything around them.

The question, of course, is how to ensure that those who go through this experience are not immediately reorganized under some new rubric — the people, the proletariat, the multitude, the nation, the ummah, whatever it may be — that then gives way to the construction of a new set of rules, regulations, and bureaucratic institutions around it, which will inevitably come to be enforced by new categories of police. I actually think that here, some progress has been made. A lot of the credit goes to feminism. Since at least the seventies, there has been a self-conscious effort among those seeking radical change to shift the emphasis away from millenarian dreams and onto much more immediate questions about how those “holes cut in the fabric of reality” might actually be organized in a non- bureaucratic fashion, so that at least some of that imaginative power can be sustained over the long term. This was already true of the great Festivals of Resistance organized around trade summits by the Global Justice movement from 1998 to 2003, where the intricate details of the process of democratic planning for the actions was, if anything, more important than the actions themselves, but it became even more true in 2011 with the camps of the Arab Spring, the great assemblies of Greece and Spain, and finally, the Occupy movement in the United States. These were simultaneously direct actions, practical demonstrations of how real democracy could be thrown in the face of power, and experiments in what a genuinely non-bureaucratized social order, based on the power of practical imagination, might look like.

Such is the lesson, I think, for politics. If one resists the reality effect created by pervasive structural violence — the way that bureaucratic regulations seem to disappear into the very mass and solidity of the large heavy objects around us, the buildings, vehicles, large concrete structures, making a world regulated by such principles seem natural and inevitable, and anything else a dreamy fantasy — it is possible to give power to the imagination. But it also requires an enormous amount of work.

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do. Bureaucracies can democratize this sort of power, at least to an extent, but they can’t get rid of it. It becomes forms of institutionalized laziness. Revolutionary change may involve the exhilaration of throwing off imaginative shackles, of suddenly realizing that impossible things are not impossible at all, but it also means most people will have to get over some of this deeply habituated laziness and start engaging in interpretive (imaginative) labor for a very long time to make those realities stick.

I have spent much of the last two decades thinking about how social theory might contribute to this process. As I’ve emphasized, social theory itself could be seen as kind of radical simplification, a form of calculated ignorance, a way of putting on a set of blinkers designed to reveal patterns one could never otherwise be able to see.

What I’ve been trying to do, then, is to put on one set of blinkers that allows us to see another.

That’s why I began the essay as I did, with the paperwork surrounding my mother’s illness and death. I wanted to bring social theory to bear on those places that seem most hostile to it. There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility of interpretive depth that they repel every attempt to give them value or meaning. These are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel the imagination. But I also believe we have a responsibility to confront them, because if we don’t, we risk becoming complicit in the very violence that creates them.

Let me explain what I mean by this. The tendency in existing social theory is to romanticize violence: to treat violent acts above all as ways to send dramatic messages, to play with symbols of absolute power, purification, and terror. Now, I’m not saying this is exactly untrue. Most acts of violence are also, in this sort of very literal sense, acts of terrorism. But I would also insist that focusing on these most dramatic aspects of violence makes it easy to ignore the fact that one of the salient features of violence, and of situations it creates, is that it is very boring. In American prisons, which are extraordinary violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is and does. Yes, sending someone into solitary is a way of sending a message to them, and to other prisoners. But the act consists largely of stifling out the possibility of sending any further messages of any kind.

It is one thing to say that, when a master whips a slave, he is engaging in a form of meaningful, communicative action, conveying the need for unquestioning obedience, and at the same time trying to create a terrifying mythic image of absolute and arbitrary power. All of this is true. It is quite another to insist that that is all that is happening, or all that we need to talk about. After all, if we do not go on to explore what “unquestioning” actually means — the master’s ability to remain completely unaware of the slave’s understanding of any situation, the slave’s inability to say anything even when she becomes aware of some dire practical flaw in the master’s reasoning, the forms of blindness or stupidity that result, the fact these oblige the slave to devote even more energy trying to understand and anticipate the master’s confused perceptions — are we not, in however small a way, doing the same work as the whip? It’s not really about making its victims talk.

Ultimately, it’s about participating in the process that shuts them up.

There is another reason I began with that story about my mother and the notary. As my apparently inexplicable confusion over the signatures makes clear, such dead zones can, temporarily at least, render anybody stupid. Just as, the first time I constructed this argument, I was actually unaware that most of these ideas had already been developed within feminist standpoint theory. That theory itself had been so marginalized I was only vaguely aware of it. These territories present us with a kind of bureaucratic maze of blindness, ignorance, and absurdity, and it is perfectly understandable that decent people seek to avoid them — in fact, that the most effective strategy of political liberation yet discovered lies precisely in avoiding them — but at the same time, it is only at our peril that we simply pretend that they’re not there.

Notes

[44] “Never” is no doubt an overstatement. There are a handful of exceptions. A very small handful. In anthropology Marilyn Strathern’s excellent Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London, Routledge, 2000) is the most notable.

[45] Talcott Parsons & Edward A. Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951).

[46] Eric Ross, “Cold Warriors Without Weapons.” Identities 1998 vol. 4 (3–4): 475–506. Just to give a sense of the connections here, at Harvard, Geertz was a student of Clyde Kluckhohn, who was not only “an important conduit for CIA area studies funds” (Ross, 1998) but had contributed the section on anthropology to Parsons and Shils’s famous Weberian manifesto for the social sciences, Toward a General Theory of Action (1951). Kluckhohn connected Geertz to MIT’s Center for International Studies, then directed by the former CIA Director of Economic Research, which in turn convinced him to work on development in Indonesia.

[47] It is interesting to note here that Foucault was himself a relatively obscure figure in France, prior to ’68, a one-time arch- structuralist who had spent many of his years in exile in Norway, Poland, and Tunisia. After the insurrection, he was, effectively, whisked out of Tunisia and offered the most prestigious position Paris has to offer, a professorship at the College de France.

[48] In anthropology, see for instance Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Carolyn Nordstrom and Joann Martin, The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

[49] The term itself traces back to debates within Peace Studies in the 1960s; it was coined by Johann Galtung (“Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 1969 vol. 6:167–91; Peace: Research, Education, Action, Essays in Peace Research [Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers, Vol. 1, 1982]; Peter Lawler, A Question of Values: Johann Galtung’s Peace Research

[Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1995]), to meet the charge that to define “peace” as the mere absence of acts of physical assault is to overlook the prevalence of much more insidious structures of human exploitation. Galtung felt the term “exploitation” was too loaded owing to its identification with Marxism, and proposed as an alternative “structural violence”: any institutional arrangement that, by its very operation, regularly causes physical or psychological harm to a certain portion of the population, or imposes limits on their freedom. Structural violence could thus be distinguished from both “personal violence” (violence by an identifiable human agent), or “cultural violence” (those beliefs and assumptions about the world that justify the infliction of harm). This is the how the term has mainly been taken up in the anthropological literature as well (e.g., Philippe Bourgois, “The Power of Violence in War and Peace: Post–Cold War Lessons from El Salvador.” Ethnography 2001 vol. 2 [1]: 5–34; Paul Farmer, “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.”

Current Anthropology 2004 vol. 45 [3]:305–25; Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

[Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005]; Arun Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012]).

[50] Given the world as it actually exists, this clearly makes no sense. If, say, there are certain spaces women are excluded from for fear of physical or sexual assault, one cannot make a distinction between that fear, the assumptions that motivate men to carry out such assaults or police to feel the victim “had it coming,” or the resultant feeling on the part of most women that these are not the kind of spaces women really ought to be in. Nor can one distinguish these factors, in turn, from the “economic” consequences of women who cannot be hired for certain jobs as a result. All of this constitutes a single structure of violence.

The ultimate problem with Johann Galtung’s approach, as Catia Confortini notes (“Galtung, Violence, and Gender: The Case for a Peace Studies/Feminism Alliance.” Peace and Change 2006 vol. 31 [3]:333–67), is that it views “structures” as abstract, free-floating entities, when what we are really referring to here are material processes, in which violence, and the threat of violence, play a crucial, constitutive, role. In fact one could argue it’s this very tendency towards abstraction that makes it possible for everyone involved to imagine that the violence upholding the system is somehow not responsible for its violent effects.

[51] It is true that slavery is often framed as a moral relation (the master takes a paternal interest in the slaves’ spiritual welfare, that sort of thing), but as many have observed, such pretenses are never really believed by either masters or slaves; in fact, the ability to force the slaves to play along with such an obviously false ideology is itself a way of establishing the master’s pure, arbitrary power.

[52] Keith Breckenridge, “Power Without Knowledge: Three Colonialisms in South Africa.” (www.history.und.ac.za/Sempapers/Breckenridge2003.pdf)

[53] Keith Breckenridge, “Verwoerd’s Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of Apartheid.” History Workshop Journal 1985, vol. 59:84.

[54] Andrew Mathews, “Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance: Forest Fires and the State in Mexico.” Human Ecology 2005, vol. 33(6): 795–820; Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests, 1926–2011 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

[55] David Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Choice and the Politics of Allocation: A Developmental Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).

[56] “Violent actions, no less than any other kind of behavioral expression, are deeply infused with cultural meaning and are the moment for individual agency within historically embedded patterns of behavior. Individual agency, utilizing extant cultural forms, symbols, and icons, may thus be considered ‘poetic’ for the rule-governed substrate that underlies it, and for

how this substrate is deployed, through which new meanings and forms of cultural expression emerge” (Neil Whitehead, “On the Poetics of Violence,” in Violence, James Currey, ed. [Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2004], pp. 9–10).

[57] In criminal matters, we tend to treat pointing a gun at someone’s head and demanding their money as a violent crime, even though no actual physical contact takes place. However, most liberal definitions of violence avoid defining threats of physical harm as forms of violence in themselves, because of the subversive implications. As a result liberals tend to define violence as acts of nonconsensual harm, and conservatives, acts of nonconsensual harm that have not been approved by legitimate authorities — which of course makes it impossible for the state, or any state they approve of, anyway, to ever engage in “violence” (see C.A.J. Coady, “The Idea of Violence.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 1986 vol. 3 [1]:3–19; also my own Direct Action: An Ethnography [Oakland: AK Press, 2009], pp. 448–49).

[58] Hopefully at this point I do not have to point out that patriarchal arrangements of this sort are prima facie examples of structural violence, their norms sanctioned by threat of physical harm in endless subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

[59] Since first writing this passage I have tried in vain to locate the essay where I first read about these experiments (I first encountered them in a magazine I looked at in the American consulate in Antananarivo while doing my fieldwork around the year 1990, in an article about the movie Tootsie). Often when I tell the story, I am told that the real reason teenage boys object to imagining themselves as girls is simple homophobia, and this is surely true, as far as it goes. But then one has to ask why homophobia is so powerful in the first place, and why homophobia takes this particular form. After all, many teenage girls are equally homophobic, but it does not seem to stop them from taking pleasure in imagining themselves as boys.

[60] bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 165–78.

[61] The key texts on Standpoint Theory, by Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock and others, are collected in a volume edited by Harding (The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies

[London: Routledge, 2004]). I might add that the history of this very essay provides a telling example of the sort of gendered obliviousness I’m describing. When I first framed the problem, I wasn’t even aware of this body of literature, though my argument had clearly been indirectly influenced by it — it was only the intervention of a feminist friend that put me on to where many of these ideas were actually coming from.

[62] Egon Bittner, Aspects of Police Work (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1970); also, “The capacity to use force as the core of the police role.” In Moral Issues in Police Work, Elliston and Feldberg, eds. (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985), pp. 15–26; P. A. Waddington, Policing Citizens: Authority and Rights (London: University College London Press, 1999); Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000).

[63] This paragraph is addressed, of course, largely to those of a certain class status: I have often remarked that the real definition of being “middle class” is whether, when one sees a policeman on the street, one feels more, rather than less, safe. This is why only a very small percentage of the population of, say, Nigeria or India or Brazil feel that they are middle class, though most Danes or white Australians do. In most large cities in Europe or North America race is also a huge factor, though often those who face the most direct and consistent racist violence from police will nonetheless insist that fighting crime is what police are fundamentally about.

[64] I am aware this is not really what Weber said. Even the phrase “iron cage” is apparently a mistranslation for a phrase that meant something more like “shiny metal casing” — not a drab prison but a high-tech wrapping superficially attractive in its own right. Nonetheless, this is how Weber was understood for most of the twentieth century and in a way the popular understanding was more important, and certainly more influential, than the author’s actual meaning.

[65] Ancient Egypt in contrast created whole genres of literature to warn young students against adventurous occupations. They would typically begin by asking whether the reader had ever dreamed of becoming the captain of a ship, or a royal charioteer, then go on to describe just how miserable such an apparently glamorous occupation would likely really turn out

to be. The conclusion was always the same: don’t do it! Become a bureaucrat. You’ll have a prosperous job and all you’ll be able to order around the soldiers and sailors who will treat you like a god.

[66] The real joke in the Bond movies, it seems to me, is that Bond is a terrible spy. Spies are supposed to be discreet and unobtrusive. James Bond is anything but. It’s just that he can get away with being a terrible spy because he’s effortlessly, preternaturally flawless in the performance of any task other than spying. As for his inversions with Holmes, one could multiply these endlessly: Holmes has family history, Bond appears to be an orphan or anyway has no family ties, and further, seems to have constant sex without ever producing offspring. Holmes works with one male partner who does well by their association; Bond with a series of female partners who usually die.

[67] The full argument here would take much more time to make, and this is not really the place for it, but note that cop movies of the “rogue cop breaking all the rules” variety, that now seems the default mode for a Hollywood action movie, did not exist at all until the 1970s. In fact for the first half-century of American cinema there were hardly any movies at all that took a policeman’s point of view. The rogue cop movie appeared at the moment the Western disappeared and is largely a transposition of Western plots into an urban bureaucratic setting. Clint Eastwood famously defined the transition: from Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name (1964, 1965, 1966), to Dirty Harry (1971). As others have observed, the Western plot is typically an effort to contrive a situation where it is justifiable for a basically decent person to do things that in any other situation would be absolutely unjustifiable. Transposing that onto an urban bureaucratic environment has disturbing implications: indeed, one might well argue that Jack Bauer is the logical culmination of the genre.

[68] Marc Cooper, “Dum Da Dum-Dum.” Village Voice April 16, 1991, pp. 28–33.

[69] This might seem to be similar to the fate of liberal or right libertarian free market ideas that oppose government interference but, according to what I’ve called the Iron Law of Liberalism, always produce more bureaucracy anyway. But I don’t think that left-wing ideas always and necessarily create bureaucracy in the same way. Indeed, insurrectionary moments usually begin by eliminating existing bureaucratic structures entirely, and while these structures often creep back, they only do when the revolutionaries begin to operate through government: when they manage to maintain autonomous enclaves like, say, the Zapatistas, this does not take place.

[70] I use the word “ontology” with some hesitation because as a philosophical term, it has recently undergone a great deal of abuse. Technically, ontology is theory about the nature of reality, as opposed to epistemology, which is theory about what we can know about reality. In the social sciences, “ontology” has come to be used merely as a pretentious way to say “philosophy,” “ideology,” or “set of cultural assumptions,” often in ways that philosophers would find outrageous. Here I am using it in the specific sense of “political ontology,” which admittedly is a sense I made up, but refers to a set of assumptions about underlying realities. When one says “let’s be realistic here,” what reality is it we’re referring to? What is the hidden reality, the underlying forces, assumed to be moving below the surface of political events?

[71] Even the rich and powerful will ordinarily concede that the world is a miserable place for most of those who live in it, but still, insist that this is inevitable, or that any attempt to change it will make it worse — not that we actually live in an ideal social order.

[72] Unfortunately he never did. He called it Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010) instead, a far inferior title.

[73] Key texts here are: James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), and Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

[74] I might add that it is a profound reflection on the effects of structural violence on the imagination that feminist theory itself was so quickly sequestered away into its own subfield where it has had almost no impact on the work of most male theorists.

[75] No doubt all this makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor — for example, or most of what we usually think of as women’s work — as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we care about most — our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions — are always other people, and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.

[76] See my book The Democracy Project (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012). My own chosen title for it was, ironically, “As If We Were Already Free,” but in the end, I wasn’t free to dictate my own title.

[77] A Paradise Made in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York, Penguin, 2010).