The Demon of Writing : Powers and Failures of Paperwork

A history and theory of the powers, the failures, and even the pleasures of paperwork. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, political thinkers of all kinds-radical and reactionary, professional and amateur-have been complaining about "bureaucracy." But what, exactly, are they complaining about?In The Demon of Writing, Ben Kafka offers a critical history and theory of one of the most ubiquitous, least understood forms of media: paperwork.States rely on records to tax and spend, protect and serve, discipline and punish.But time and again, this paperwork proves to be unreliable.Examining episodes that range from the story of a clerk who lost his job and then his mind in the French Revolution to an account of Roland Barthes's brief stint as a university administrator, Kafka reveals the powers, the failures, and even the pleasures of paperwork.Many of its complexities, he argues, have been obscured by the comic-paranoid style that characterizes much of our criticism of bureaucracy.Kafka proposes a new theory of what Karl Marx called the "bureaucratic medium." Moving from Marx to Freud, he argues that this theory of paperwork must include both a theory of praxis and of parapraxis.