Best of Bureaucriticism 2023
Dear Bureaucritics,
We’re happy to add to your files the first issue of this newsletter, freshly stamped and signed from our desks in Cologne and Stockholm!
The world was clearly missing an aggregator for research on bureaucracy in arts and humanities. So we decided to create one, seasoned with thoughts and recommendations on representations of bureaucracy in contemporary art and culture.
It will include the latest and most relevant we can gather in terms of publication alerts, calls for papers and upcoming events.
The point is to cultivate a space for collaboration, circulation, and exchange; therefore, you are invited to send anything you’d like to share to our virtual office at bureaucritics@gmail.com.
Why “bureaucritics”?
It doesn’t stand, as one may think, for “critics of bureaucracy” – though that remains an arguably reasonable impulse.
It does stand for those of us who are, in various official or unofficial capacities, passionate about cultural critique and criticism that discusses contemporary or historical forms engaging with the world of offices, paperwork, and administration.
We’re interested in fiction (in any medium), but also in art, history, sociology, theories and practices of governance, and media studies.
Plus, we thought that “bureaucritics” continues a long lineage of wordplay – “bureaucratics” (Jan Banning), “bureaugraphy” (Burkhardt Wolf) – that goes back to the term “bureaucracy” itself.
This first issue brings a review of 2023, a year which was an uncommonly rich one for Bureaucriticism.
But before we get to our “best of 2023” list, we wish to briefly introduce ourselves.
The undersigned – Alexandra Irimia and Jonathan Foster – met in July 2019 at the Institute for World Literature at Harvard. Both at the beginning of PhD research projects looking at portrayals of clerks and administrative environments (in late 20th-century bureaucratic dystopias, and 19th-century British literature, respectively), we decided to share thoughts, bibliographies, and to embark on a few common projects. We came up with the idea of creating this newsletter to compile resources and open them to anyone who might be interested.
Currently, Jonathan Foster is writing a dissertation about "administrative fiction" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. He is also co-editing the forthcoming volume Irish Writers and State Bureaucracy (LUP).
Alexandra Irimia is completing her dissertation and preparing to launch a research project sponsored by the Humboldt Foundation at the University of Bonn, this coming June. The project is titled Bureaucratic Fiction (B-FILES): Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary World Literature and Film (more details will follow).
The year in which we hatched the idea of producing this newsletter was, not coincidentally, a year full of exciting new work on bureaucracy both in academic contexts and in the cultural landscape at large. We wish to highlight a couple of publications and events that have come to our attention, whilst also giving you a sense of what we have been up to ourselves.
The year began with a conference by Jérémie Ferrer-Bartomeu in discussion with Olivier Poncer on political writing and administrative society in France during the wars of religion (1560 - 1620). More details and a recording are available here (in French).
In February, Jonathan Patterson gave a talk on “Administration, Poetry, Theology: Marguerite de Navarre’s Unusual Trinity,” as a part of a webinar series on “Bureaucracy and Dignity” hosted by Las Casas Institute.
Also in February, in a piece titled Ex Officio for Urban Omnibus, Casey Peterson, Lucas Teixeira Vaqueiro and Judy Park Lee showcased a selection of photos from the Instagram account @publicsectoroffice, which is devoted to documenting “everyday scenes of bureaucratic environments from the poignant to the bizarre”.
Shortly thereafter, it was time for an Authors’ Workshop hosted by Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen, building towards a special issue of the journal Administory on administrative cultures and their aesthetics. The two-day event was a rare opportunity for scholars working in the field of bureaucracy and culture to meet and discuss their papers in preparation for the special issue.
The Seduction of the Bureaucrat, an exhibition signed by art critic and curator Pieter Vermeulen, was on display from March 15 and June 4 at the Cultuur Centrum in Mechelen, Belgium.
July saw the publication of Das Protokoll (J. B. Metzler Berlin, Heidelberg 2023), the second volume in the series AdminiStudies. Formen und Medien der Verwaltung. It gathers 15 contributions co-edited by Peter Plener, Niels Werber and Burkhardt Wolf, and it takes up three main forms of the protocol as an administrative medium: conversation or progress protocols, diplomatic and technical protocols. The book is available in print, but also digitally, in Open Access.
More recently, Alexandra gave a talk on affective economies in contemporary bureaucratic fiction, with a focus on the concept of “administrative grotesque”. The event was part of her short research project during her fellowship at the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies in Cologne.
The 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize was awarded to Liliana Corobca’s novel The Censor’s Notebook, translated by Monica Cure (Seven Stories Press, 2022). This bureaucratic narrative explores the institutional structure and paperwork flows of censorship in communist Romania, focusing on the office work and professional life of a woman censor.
The latest on our watchlist of bureaucratic cinema remain the acclaimed workplace thriller Severance (Apple TV+, 2022), whose second season is currently in production, and Living (dir. Oliver Hermanus), a visually stunning British remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic, Ikiru.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have more to share via the newsletter!
We leave you with a few things to look out for in 2024:
Forthcoming special issue: Administory, vol. 8 - Administrative Cultures and their Aesthetics, co-edited by Jonathan Foster, Alexandra Irimia, Stefan Nellen, and Burkhardt Wolf.
This special issue seeks to unpack aesthetic configurations manifest in literary and artistic works engaging with state administration and related bureaucratic topics and spaces, set in (or against) a variety of historical backgrounds. Contributions written in English and German discuss the ways in which specific narrative or visual strategies and stylistic devices identifiable in these works help to shape a distinct imagery of specific administrations, with their underlying complexities, tensions, and paradoxes.
February 16, 2024: webinar (in French) offered by Jérémie Ferrer-Bartomeu, opening of a longer series of events on the imagery, discourses, and corpora related to administration’s work on itself: Le spectacle de l’arcanes - Le travail de l’administration sur elle-même (images, discours, corpus)
Thank you for reading our first report!
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Bureaucratically,
Alexandra and Jonathan
P.S. Feel free to recommend the newsletter to anyone you think may wish to add it to their records.