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Bureaucracy. Is there a person alive capable of singing its virtues? Many have trumpeted its vices. Franz Kafka and George Orwell made careers of weaving this single dark theme into solemn, minor-chord masterpieces of operatic impact. Valkyries flew never so briskly nor The Flying Dutchman so ponderously as to match bureaucracy’s abiding menace.

In Little Dorrit Charles Dickens presents this menace as primarily appetitive. The über-bureaucratic “Circumlocution Office” looms as a ravenous maw gobbling up every unfortunate referred to it. “Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship … in motion,” he writes.

Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions, that extinguished him. It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn’t get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn’t get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap of the Circumlocution Office.

As Bob Dylan famously sang, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” The single mission of bureaucracy is to be that somebody — to everybody.

In their characteristically impenetrable way, that dynamic duo of theoretic dipsy-doodles, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, take a discursive stab at bureaucracy’s dark heart. Offering a consideration of Kafka, they find in his work not “a desire for bureaucracy” or a will “to repress or to be repressed.” Rather, they identify “the bureaucracy as desire [emphasis added], out of which flow “[t]he divisions of oppressor and oppressed, repressor and repressed.” Bureaucracies come into existence, in other words, because most people cannot deal with their desire in its most immediate form, which for Deleuze and Guattari is invariably excessive, ecstatic, polymorphous, impersonal yet deeply intimate — crowned Anarchy’s reign of a thousand years.

Bureaucracy, like everything else under the sun, will be miniaturized and digitized, so you can take it with you wherever you go.

Utopia bereft of desire gives way to bureaucracy, the former’s creaking, mechanical facsimile. The fact neither capitalist and socialist socioeconomic orders, in all their guises and permutations, ever once managed to escape the need for bureaucracy only reinforces the idea that humanity must get its libidinal act together if it’s ever to get together its political. This seems a tall order, however, especially considering the present power configurations in the United States and just about everywhere else; and the auguries of history do not favor humanity.

One theorist who manages to distill the essence of bureaucracies is the avowed deleuzoguattarian Manuel De Landa. Riffing on themes developed by his forebears, De Landa characterizes bureaucracy as a force of nearly geological inevitability. “Bureaucracies have always arisen to effect planned extraction of energy surpluses (taxes, tribute, rents, forced labor),” he writes in his 2000 book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, “and they expand in proportion to their ability to control and process those energy flows.” Whether this energy is ultimately libidinal, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, remains only of secondary importance. The larger question that begs asking is, whither the impulse to extract surplus energy? That an elaborate apparatus like a bureaucracy hulks into existence in order to meet this need only attests to the urgency with which the need is felt. At the back of it you can’t help feeling that there are dogs in the manger, denying others more sustenance than they themselves could ever consume, and to such an extent that the frisson that comes with denying others the full fruits of their efforts far surpasses the feeling that comes with satiety honestly achieved. Bureaucracy, if I read Deleuze and Guattari correctly, is the psychopathology of sadism elevated to the level of institution.

This realization as to the true nature of bureaucracy leaves you wondering just to what extent its evil pervades the social body. As Situationist paterfamilias Guy Debord observes in The Society of the Spectacle, bureaucracy’s “ultimate function” involves “continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of market society,” and this essence is none other than “commodified labor.” Revolutionary slogans become mere phonemes when sent through bureaucracy’s wringer. In fact, bureaucracy’s birth signals progress’s death, if for no other reason than progress lapses into simply the legitimizing pretext for the continued existence and function of bureaucracy, whose true raison d’être is simply its own continued existence and function. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. And if it requires harrowing heaven to do so, so mote it be.

Requisite to bureaucracy’s monolithic totality is a little accumulation of a most primitive sort. “Wherever separate power replaces the independent action of the masses,” Debord writes elsewhere,

hence wherever bureaucracy seizes administration of all aspects of social life, it attacks language and reduces poetry to the ordinary prose of its information. It takes language for its own use, like everything else, and imposes it on the masses…. That language is above all a means of communication between men is ignored by bureaucracy. Since all communication passes through it, men no longer even need speak of it: above all they must accept their role as receivers, that is, receivers of orders to be carried out in the information-based communication network to which all of society is being reduced.

If at the time of Debord’s writing this concern about the unidirectional, jussive character of language conquered by bureaucracy remained more imagined than real, today the situation is precisely the opposite. The various technological doo-dads flooding the market these days — Androids, iPads, Kindles, Blackberries — do they truly represent the means of our liberation from or our more thorough enthrallment to the top-down power relations of which bureaucracy is so telling an instance? Next time you peer into your personal entertainment device’s innocuous little touch screen, imagine for a moment that you’re clutching something from the deepest, darkest recesses of Kafka’s imagination (Odradek, if you will, or something of the sort). Does not that little machine, with all the DRM semi-sabotage it harbors within it, represent merely a means of extracting surplus energy, which today takes the form of the innumerable digitized artifacts of the general intellect, for the purpose of expanding in proportion the ability of its maker (Google, Apple, Amazon, Research In Motion) to control and process those energy flows?

Voltaire once wrote that if God didn’t exist, He would have to be invented. Apparently the same can be said for bureaucracy — and for the rent-seekers who manipulate its levers. You need only loosen up your conception of bureaucracy. The “take a number and we’ll be right with you, but first make sure you have completed the following forms” model of bureaucracy? That’s so “old economy.” In the world to come, bureaucracy, like everything else under the sun, will be miniaturized and digitized, so you can take it with you wherever you go. Now that’s convenience.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.