Abstract
Were it not enough for an assistant professor of media studies to be named “Kafka,” and to write eloquently about the constraining powers of bureaucratic paperwork and the thinking that goes with it, the author of this intriguing study also drew high praise from Robert Darnton, dean of historical literacy studies, in The New York Review of Books (Darnton 2012). Additional reviews in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, and elsewhere did not hurt, either. Such a professional launching is the stuff of Hollywoodized dreams. And yet one wonders, given the tone which sounds throughout The Demon of Writing, if Ben Kafka will “enjoy” his youthful notoriety as much as less favored scholars might. For he is troubled by what he uncovered by means of archival work, partly perhaps due to his own ongoing psychoanalytic training, a discipline which does not accept or forgive humanity’s capacity for self-deception. Almost magically Kafka found kindred souls in eighteenth- century France who already then knew enough about the state’s power to observe, for instance, that “The prolixity of the government’s correspondence and orders is a sign of its inertia…The demon of writing is waging war against us; we are unable to govern” (pp. 54–55). As Darnton remarks, this is a “little known passage from a key speech by Saint-Just on October 10, 1793” (Darnton: 33), and like all good cultural historians with a strong message, Kafka makes the most of it.
The book wisely opens with a recognizable epigram from Weber about “files” and office management (p. 9), but shortly thereafter Kafka avers that his book “is not intended to overturn Weber, Tilly, Foucault, or any other ‘master narrative’ of state formation” (p. 17). His “modest” hope for the book is that it will become a useful ancillary to these larger tales, and if busy scholars can find the time to consume it, Kafka’s wish should be granted. As he realizes, the best thing about classical theories—particularly those anchored in historical specificity like Marx, Weber, or Sombart—is their utility in reminding today’s young and old readers that “modern” humans have carried out similar tasks in dissimilar ways for centuries, yet with ever more paperwork legitimating their actions. The “new” wrinkle he explores, with help from Barthes, Freud, Judith Butler, and others, concerns paperwork’s frightening power to create societal madness where before there was only traditional confusion. He recounts the story made famous in Abel Gance’s monumental film, Napoleon, of Charles-Hippolyte Latussière’s heroic action in June 1794 that saved the lives of actors and actresses from the Comédie-Française who otherwise would have met the guillotine. He stole the death warrants, moistened them in a bathroom until they decomposed, and threw the remnants into the nearby Seine (pp. 51ff). Without proper death warrants, they could not be killed, because the Revolutionary bureaucracy of the Terror believed only in the most orderly guillotining, and that required the proper forms in hand.
Kafka’s work is most unusual in that his study of the French Revolution produced credible data that are almost indistinguishable in tone and substance from the worst offences of office madness chronicled in Dilbert, or issuing constantly from official Washington today. To this he adds “a first attempt at explaining paperwork’s mythopoetic potentials” (p. 17) in Chapter Two, followed by a history of the world “bureaucracy” in Chapter Three—surely a natural addendum to Weber’s short treatment of bureaucracy in Economy and Society—then concluding with a chapter that joins Marx, Freud, and Barthes “to outline a theory of paperwork that is attentive to both praxis and parapraxis” (p. 18). Not all of this will appeal to sociologists, but there is more than enough in this slim book to justify reading it, if not purely for professional edification, then for sheer fun.