new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics

This volume marks the 100th, and 101st issue of New Formations to be published since the journal’s inception in the 1980s. It’s a fitting way to mark that milestone, featuring as it does, work from scholars based on three continents, working across the disciplines of sociology, social theory, political philosophy, cultural studies, media studies and literature. The theme of the collection is one of the characteristic preoccupations of modern (and ‘postmodern’) thought in all these fields: the nature and power of bureaucracy. The subject was originally proposed by Eliane Glaser, who sadly had to drop out of the editorial process for personal reasons, but we would like to thank her for her inspiration and initiative.

One reason for the persistent salience of this topic, in the early twenty-first century, is the apparent contradiction between the anti-bureaucratic rhetoric of neoliberal ideologues, and the evident reality that neoliberal governance has only proliferated the form, power, reach and intrusiveness of bureaucratic mechanisms in many areas of social life. The thought of the early neoliberal thinkers such as Hayek explicitly counterposed itself to the supposed statism and authoritarianism of socialism, social-democracy and ‘embedded liberalism’. Much of the popular appeal of the New Right at the end of the 1970s came from its promise to ‘free’ the people from the overweening, paternalistic authority of the increasingly bureaucratic welfare state. But even as it weakened and dismantled some elements of the apparatus of mid-century social democracy, the neoliberal effort to impose market relations and entrepreneurial ideology across the social sphere could only ever proceed via the proliferation of new mechanisms of surveillance, supervision, reward and punishment. Today, these penetrate the texture of everyday life from the workplace to the social-media platform. Yet still the populist Right in many countries blames ‘bureaucrats’ for social problems, presenting the very rejection of expertise as some kind of democratic solution.

Several contributions to this volume address this issue directly. Peter Fleming’s essay ‘Hayek Shrugged: Why bureaucracy didn’t die under neoliberalism but boomed instead’ sets out to analyse some of the precise mechanisms of neoliberal bureaucracy. Focusing mainly on the writings of Hayek, he argues that economic libertarianism is often contingent on a particular spirit of administration, justification for which can be found in the ‘fine print’ of Hayek among others. Fleming discusses specific mechanisms of neoliberal bureaucratisation before exploring the implications they have for opposing neoliberal hegemony.

In his article, ‘Neoliberal capitalism’s bureaucracies of “governance”’, Oliver Davis draws on a broad range of relevant recent literature to make a [End Page 5] complementary analysis. His article draws together recent critical work by David Graeber, Wendy Brown, William Davies and Pierre Dardot & Christian Laval, which it repositions in relation to Jacques Rancière’s conception of the ‘police order’. According to Davis’ profound and pioneering analysis, neoliberal bureaucracies reconstruct the world as an array of ‘overlapping competitions’, with competitive hierarchisation (‘ranking’) functioning as the key bureaucratic form, or process, in each of these administrative fiefdoms. To this critique he adds a Derridean reflection on the longstanding metaphysical appeal of hierarchy, arguing that bureaucratic organisation is the mundane way in which an anti-democratic commitment to hierarchy becomes naturalised.

Mark Featherstone also draws on Derrida, as well as a range of other thinkers, in his essay, ‘Towards a bureaucracy of the body’. This article explores the evolution of what Beatrice Hibou calls ‘the bureaucratization of the world’, through a cultural history of the idea of bureaucracy in the western canon: taking in readings of Max Weber, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. Following the thought, in particular, of figures such as Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Featherstone argues that the essential problem of bureaucracy relates to the estrangement of body and writing in a state of modern technological abstraction. While Featherstone is largely concerned with technology (and techne) in the most general and abstract sense, his contribution serves as a useful reminder of the perpetual interdependence of political, social, economic and technological processes.

Returning to the theme of neoliberal bureaucracy, a feature of this history that has still received insufficient attention is the deep imbrication of technological with...