Fragments towards a sociology from below
Illich, Foucault, Burnham, Lasch, Scott, Graeber
I’ve noticed a strain of thinking which connects thinkers across the ideological spectrum, but I haven’t figured out a shorthand way to refer to them.
I see this lineage composed of such figures as Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, James Burnham, James C. Scott, David Graeber, Christopher Lasch — all these thinkers’ work seems to focus on an immanent critique of the modern scientific bureaucracy, in both its objective and subjective effects upon a community.
We might say that this strain of critique unmasks “expertise” or the “expert,” but that would be too narrow. The expert who justifies their judgments with recourse to an authoritative body of knowledge composes only one key component of the much broader analysis of the bureaucratic form.
I still find myself defaulting to Foucault’s term “biopolitics” to describe what thinkers like Illich, Burnham, and Scott are trying to help us see, but I worry that this term is too obscure to use with more general audiences or that it’s shackled to negative perceptions of French theory as meaningless or needlessly confusing.
After recently reading McLuhan’s Understanding Media though, it occurred to me that we might read these thinkers as critics of scientific bureaucracy as a technology, that is, in McLuhan’s words, as an extension of the human.
After all, bureaucracy is a technology — a bureaucracy uses writing, record-keeping, a system of objective policies, and an organized chain of command to order and govern society. In this way, it acts as a prosthesis for human society to extend its capacities for coordination and achievement.
[The Japanese certainly saw bureaucracy as a technology when they looked to China for new and more advanced forms of governance, and this desire to import and adapt Confucian bureaucratic structures played a significant role in their adoption of the Buddhist cultural complex in the 6th century.]
The worry with describing thinkers like Illich and Burnham as critics of bureaucratic technology might be that it takes us too far back in history. All too quickly we find ourselves at the invention of cuneiform in temple complexes in Sumeria or the Chinese civil service examination system which lasted for nearly 1500 years.
However, I think we can mitigate this scope creep by specifying that figures from Foucault to Scott are interested in the peculiar version of bureaucracy which emerged in the modern West, and in particular which used the discourse of science to justify the position of power it was accorded in society.
It’s this process of bureaucracy seizing political, legal, and juridical power which Foucault was exploring in his earliest works, Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and Discipline and Punish. No longer did doctors exclusively heal the sick, but now political authorities accorded them the power to diagnose someone as having this disease or being that type of person. Because of their scientific training, their words came to bear a legal weight, and their testimony came to hold the power to decisively influence whether someone lives or dies.
Foucault took to documenting the early emergence of this system in Europe, while James C. Scott carries this analysis out on a much wider range of places, including his area of speciality, Southeast Asia. Graeber shares with Scott an affinity for anarchism, and they both focus in their work on imagining alternative social arrangements which attempt to supplant bureaucracy with the more ludic and egalitarian elements of human society.
Illich also reads as a theorist within the anarchist tradition, despite never identifying as one (to my knowledge), although he frames his work through the notion of “conviviality,” the art of voluntary, autonomous, and creative intercourse between person and their environment, the sum total of which gives birth to human community.
Illich writes from a perspective inside the modern scientific bureaucracy, both from the historical standpoint of the experiment having enough time under its belt in the West to have started producing fruit by which its merits could be judged, but also as someone who worked closely with the third world where these structures were encountering different cultures. He thus serves to document the symptoms and conflicts produced in more traditional societies as they become territorialized by the modern state and its ideological fantasies.
Burnham and Lasch, on the other hand, embody in their work something of a prophetic voice at different crucial moments in the mutation of bureaucracy in the West. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, Burnham observes the shift of power in private corporations away from the owners of capital to the managers of that capital, a transformation which we can observe today, although with revealing tensions and unresolved conflicts on both sides.
Christopher Lasch serves more as a canary in the coal mine for the elite knowledge workers of American society, trying to raise awareness about the subjective shifts and material effects afoot amongst the managers who Burnham had foreseen were beginning to wrest control of the capital away from the owners. It’s becoming increasingly clear that political power has been seized by an alliance of managers in the private sector who collude with the highly incestuous public sector of government agencies, NGOs, and universities.
I think that all these figures I’ve mentioned should be read together, as composing something of a “sociology from below” which records and unmasks the absurdities and cruelties of the scientific bureaucratic form, but which also celebrates the creative ways that the people who are ostensibly governed by these institutions contest and evade their operation.
Today, Marx needs Foucault. The work of Foucault, Illich, and others endeavors to theorize the so called “knowledge-production” which is the inverse and supplement of material production. The logic of the bureaucrat reigns in both board rooms and the halls of legislation, and this demands a constantly renewed reflection on the strategies of power which shape our subjectivity today.
Would you be interested in a seminar-style course that explores this intellectual lineage which I’m trying to articulate? Would you be drawn to spending some intensive time working through a critique of managerialism and the bureaucratic form? I’ve been mulling over this as an option.
I could see us reading some Foucault, some Illich, looking at selections from Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, selections from Scott’s Seeing like a State and the Art of Not Being Governed, and the essays in Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
If that sounds like something you’d sign up for, let me know in the comments! I would also love to hear about any other theorists who you think contribute to this symphony of voices I’ve identified here.
Your seminar idea is a really good one. I'm instantly entertaining some way of collaborating on that, but of course I am, at the same time, stretched too thin already. Nevertheless, we must talk! For now, I want to add some thinkers. First, I was happy you pointed out the fact that the kind of bureaucracy in question is modern. Because of the ways that word gets used though, which makes even Descartes modern, I especially like Scott's use of "high modern." I also like how you bring McLuhan into this – he is essential!
What really connects all these thinkers for me is that they are all post left or post Marxist. They are radical thinkers who had no home in the old left, and to some extent on the new left either (though much of the new left, at least in theory, was just post leftism maintaining certain old commitments while trying to figure out the new situation). Some of them became thinkers of the new left, whereas others, like Burnham, became key figures in neoconservativism. Andre Gorz remained some kind of left, but he is heavily influenced by Foucault and Ehrenreich, the latter of which is also essential for the PMC critique. (His Farewell to the Working Class is an absolute must for this whole line of thought.) What characterizes the new left, for thinkers like Ehrenreich and Gorz, is that they never gave up on large scale structural emancipation as the goal, while simultaneously becoming thoroughly disenchanted with existing radical movements. The realization that capital and state can no longer be addressed as separate entities, much less set against one another, thanks to the managerial and professional elite apparatuses of control, definitely gets them onto the list here. Perhaps because Ehrenreich and Gorz remained left they felt a need to critique the left more than thinkers like Illich or Burnham who, after a point, really didn't need to. But that makes them all the more useful, at least for me, since leftists are so over-represented in theory circles – whether one identifies as left or not, the presuppositional matrices we think with, which are so easy to take for granted, are only really brought into the light by thinkers who deliberately challenge them.
As for others who belong on the list, Weber, Luhmann, and Bourdieu are essential for thinking bureaucracy and state. Marcuse, D&G, and Baudrillard all have a role to play too (the latter especially for thinking post-Marxian McLuhanism taken to its logical cybernetic control society conclusion). As for what to do about the problem, or as to the Landian question about whether anything human will make it into the near future, I think we need Levinas, Jaspers, and Arendt. All three of whom, as well as Foucault and Bourdieu, wouldn't have achieved what they did without some serious time spent with Heidegger.
My short-hand for grouping all the thinkers has not been sociology from below, because I think "below vs above" is one of those political commitments worth bracketing (along with "revolution vs reform"), but has, since 2020, been something I just call "the post left reader" because I like to imagine someone took essential writings for people burning out on radical leftism and combined all of those divergent yet overlapping currents into a useful anthology! I just don't use that term publicly because it got monopolized by some podcasters who are by all counts anti-intellectual and theoretical dead ends.
Excellent work Matthew, and I think you are right that these thinkers are identifying something that aligns with "biopolitics" as Foucault describes. For me, they are suggesting our world is increasing a Kafka novel like "The Trial" (more than Orwell or Huxley, though obviously there is truth to both), where we are all a Josef K under a system and law that nobody can fully articulate, that has "top-down causal" influence over us all without direct force, and that nobody can directly locate. We might associate it with a system that can "inwardly range us" like Rodrigues is in Silence, as you so brilliantly described in your book. Our rationality, freedom, values...are increasingly "always already" framed on a horizon that sets the range of their possibilities, which gives us a possibility of movement to thus make us feel like we have agency, but that agency is pre-framed. At the same time, humans without "pre-framing" can go mad, but that very truth of the human condition can then legitimacy the Law (of Kafka). This is our tragedy, but what might we see anew if we see it clearly? Anything? Everything? Anyway, great work as always Matthew!