This book's focus on paperwork appears relevant to many, especially managers, administrators and civil servants. It also promises insights into the “bureaucratic medium”. It is nicely produced, complete with endnotes and index.
Kafka sets out to explore “paperwork and its contradictions”, defining paperwork as “all those documents produced in response to a demand – real or imagined – by the state”. He argues “that paperwork is unpredictable and that this unpredictability is frustrating” and that myths rather than sound critical theory surround bureaucracy because of theorists' failures to resolve paperwork's contradictions and the inability to reconcile theories of the state's power with experiences of its failures.
Kafka claims inspiration from Derrida, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Mill, Foucault, Furet, Skinner and others. He refers to influences from deconstructionism, intellectual history, book history and psychoanalysis (Freud). He notes that his object of study is “the psychic life of paperwork”. He wants to account for how paperwork “makes everyone, no matter how powerful they may be in reality, feel so powerless”.
The first chapter presents a case study from the French Revolution – the long and unhappy saga of attempts by a Ministry of Finance clerk, Edme-Etienne Morizot, to seek justice from the state after losing his job in September 1788. Kafka analyses the emergence of “a radical new ethics of paperwork […] designed to sustain a state whose legitimacy was founded on the claim to represent […] every member of the nation”. He includes background on French revolutionary political and social history, 1788-1793; he draws on the contemporary political theorist, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, with regard to political representation and paperwork, and paperwork and public accountability/responsibility. Disappointingly, the chapter ends abruptly – Kafka was unable to uncover evidence of what became of the deeply disappointed Morizot after 1793.
Chapter 2 examines “how paperwork worked for and against the national-security state in a time of war” and offers “a first attempt at explaining paperwork's mythopoeic potentials”. Another case study relates how Charles-Hippolyte Labussière, a clerk in the Prisoners Bureau of the Committee of Public Safety in 1794, was reputed to have saved actors and actresses of the Comédie-Française from the guillotine by destroying documents relevant to their prosecution during The Terror. Kafka considers “the conditions under which [individual agency] can emerge” and how the French “invented new myths to resolve the contradictions in those conditions” (p. 54), for example between the mandates of surveillance and administration. There is a conclusion to Labussière's story: he died in a madhouse. Kafka concludes that “France remained vulnerable to paperwork's tedium and unpredictability”, and, crucially, state reliance on paperwork presented opportunities of resistance.
Chapter 3 follows the history of the word “bureaucracy” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because “the story of ‘bureaucracy’ […] is the story of how paperwork, even when it works, fails us. We never get what we want”. It presents one case related by Jean-Baptiste Say of a friend who left Paris for his home region to marry but overlooked crucial paperwork; another from Jacques-Gilbert Ymbert and his early nineteenth-century observations on French administration, including the evolution of the word “bureaucracy” from a neutral term to one of abuse, and the disturbing administrative “tendency toward excess”. There is a section on Balzac's exploration of “the implicit question whether heroism can exist at all within the French administration”, and another on Alexis de Tocqueville's approach to paperwork. Finally, Kafka expresses dissatisfaction that “political theory is […] wanting” with respect to paperwork.
Chapter 4 outlines a theory of paperwork, drawing on Marx, Freud and Barthes, and referring to Karl Marx's 1843 article in the Rheinische Zeitung about a tax dispute between the Prussian administration and Mosel winemakers, a critique of Sigmund Freud's theory by Sebastiano Timpanaro, and a micro-study regarding Freud's visit to an Austrian Post Office Savings Bank to illustrate paperwork errors. Kafka concludes: “we will never gain access to the unconscious fantasies of some […] clerk”, and he uses a Cartier-Bresson portrait of Roland Barthes to provide hints on the experience of writing.
“The Wish-Utensil”, a six-page conclusion, turns to paperwork's future, referring to the paperless office, computers and paperwork, giving detail of a 1967 short film, The Paperwork Explosion, to illustrate “a long history of images of paperwork combusting”, ending with this sentence: “Machines should work, but they frequently don't; people should think, but in this day and age, they seldom have the time”.
Kafka has read widely and no doubt scoured voluminous archives for his case studies. He presents the micro-histories in quite engaging narratives of individual lives within broader canvases (although some fade out in a less than compelling way). However, the book leaves a general sense of dissatisfaction. Kafka outlines his intentions more clearly than he presents the outcomes of research and analysis; for example, he does not clearly encapsulate the paperwork-bureaucracy relationship in the concluding chapter. Nor is there a summary of theory or of the relative importance of the various streams of thought. The book ends “not with a bang, but a whimper”. Many will continue to be curious about paperwork and bureaucracy (was it a coincidence that, in the same week this book arrived for review, I read a review of Ian Sansom's Paper: An Elegy?). There is yet room for the definitive work.
