Bureaucracy and Institutions

People think that bureaucracy is only about the resolution (or constitution) of power in hierarchy. Bureaucracy, essentially is an institutional by-production. In the process of institutionalization, systems are set, with checkpoints at various levels. These systems leverage human intellectual intervention and allow a so called consistency of decision-making. In bureaucratic processes, humans become monitors rather than decision-makers, therefore taking away their agency to feel a part of the process. The disposal of human beings out from a highly bureaucratic system does not feel impedimental to an institution, because the essential aspects of intervention are now vested into the non-human system - a protocol that must be followed objectively. Here, human being just becomes a place holder to merely execute the operations of a place

But bureaucracy also has one more tact. Firstly, all workers within the bureaucratic system are expected to speak in the language of the protocol. When bureaucratic system produces redundancies or unexpected level of productivity, the system is collectively questioned and a weak link is identified to be replaced, repaired or removed. The in-flexibility of a bureaucratic system automatically begins to highlight the different modal operations of individual people running the system. Here, the people who do not align to the defined system begin to feel a double separation - one is from the system itself, and second is from the peers or people who have seemingly manged to forego their agency to the power of the system.

Bureaucratic systems - in a manner of corollary - are not necessarily designed through collective identification of strengths. They are designed by a single source of power to maximise efficiency and productivity. Here, the person in power automatically gets the final say on who appears to be the weak link. This weak link in the chain of delivery is identified based on his/her non-alignment, and therefore poor contribution. We must take not here, how the weakness of the individual is now identified in reference to the system, and not in terms of his individual capacity - a capacity that may be able to offer value to an institution in much varied and other critical ways. This individual is a double victim (of institutional reprimand, and internal self-doubt)

But bureaucratic system take the burden of blame from individuals and transfer on the system. Vice versa, the system speaks its own language to communicate to the individual how they may not "fit in" or "non-contributors" to the system. This is quickly labelled as non-performance, and annotated as a failure for the productive engine of the institution. Bureaucratic apparatuses compel people to speak in languages that must not take individual names, and to the bettering of this engine - which is yet a flat line, to which others must align. The degree of alignment shall suggest your growth in this system. 

At another time and place, I had gotten very interested in articulating how institutions are predominantly heteronormative. In thinking so, I believe that bureaucratization of an institutional apparatus is not only done to streamline its operations, but it also maintains a certain power, status quo and the longevity project. The queer imagination of institutional foundation would not necessarily be oriented towards maintaining legacy, rather making the present better and worthy of survival. A lot needs to be thought and studied about this claim, but I fundamentally feel that queer futures - or futures imagined through queer bodies do not have teleological trajectories and are necessarily multivalent and pluriversal. Therefore, their struggle is to create broader fields of accommodation rather than sharper projects of what i understand as patriarchy.

I wanted to articulate through this post the relative experience of an individual vis-a-vis a bureaucratic apparatus, the way bureaucracies affect languages and relational experiences, and lastly their translation into the institutional imagination. I also understand that this must be written as a much longer post to elaborate upon each of these aspects, that seem to be rather impressionistic here.