Surrealpolitik

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There were 8 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Bureaucracy'.

  1. "It's the era of nice monsters, Käthe, and we must count ourselves among them. They're all nice, Veronica's nice too, Beverloh was nice, he was a regular paragon of niceness..."

    Source: The Safety Net, p. 114
  2. Do the authorities realize what they are asking of their employees in terms of the psyche? Let us assume that a the,porarily suspect person of a vulgar nature, whose telephone is being officially tapped, calls up his equally vulgar sex partner of the moment. Since we live in a free country and may speak openly and frankly with one another, even over the phone, what sort of things may buzz in the ears of some moral, not to say moralistic, individual (regardless of sex) or come fluttering out of the tape? Can this be justified? Is there any provision for psychiatric treatment? What does the Union of Public Services, Transportation, and Communications say to that? There is concern for industrialists, anarchists, bank directors, bank robbers, and bank employees, but who is concerned about our national tape-security forces? Has the Bishops' Conference at Fulda or the Executive Committee of German Catholics no ideas on the subject? Why does the Pope keep silent? Does no one realize all the things that assail innocent ears, ranging from crème brûlée to hardest porn? We see young people being encouraged to enter the civil service -- and to what are they exposed? To moral outcasts of the telephone. Here at last we have an area where church and trade union might cooperate. Surely it should be possible to plan at least some kind of educational program for telephone monitors? History lessons on tape? That shouldn't cost too much.

    Source: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, p. 75
  3. It is these dynamics [rise of statistics and bureaucracy] that structure the discourses of identification at the end of the nineteenth century and accompany the emergence of the figure of an invisible enemy. The rise of statistical knowledge goes hand in hand with a decline of faith in the optical gaze: what is made evident by the production of the image is at the same time suspected of leaving space for further interpretation, or even -- a line of argument to be found both in aesthetic as well as in police discourse -- of systematically concealing some hidden truth underneath.

    From chapter: Hendrik Blumentrath, Enmity and the Archive
    Source: Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, p. 73-74
  4. Kafka was the greatest writer on bureaucracy because he saw that this structure of disavowal was inherent to bureaucracy. The quest to reach the ultimate authority who will finally resolve K's official status can never end, because the big Other cannot be encountered in itself: there are only officials, more or less hostile, engaged in acts of interpretation about...the big Other's intentions. And these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are all that the big Other is.

    Source: Capitalist Realism, p. 49
  5. Rotation in office might be the ostensible theory, in practice the offices oscillated between the henchmen. Tenure might not be a permanent monopoly, but the professional politician was permanent.

    Source: Public Opinion, p. 229
  6. The executive heard lewd laughter, zippers, the thump of shoes, heavy breathing, moans. He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to snigger. He closed the top on his Zippo. 'I hear laughing,' his wife said presently. 'I smell gasoline,' said the efficiency expert. Hand in hand, naked, the two proceeded to the kitchen. 'I was about to do the Buddhist monk thing,' explained the executive. 'Nearly three weeks it takes him,' marvelled the efficiency expert, ' to decide. You know how long it would've taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced.'

    Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 87
  7. The fifth act, entirely an anticlimax, is taken up by the bloodbath Gennaro visits on the court of Squamuglia. Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom'd talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse. At the end of it about the only character left alive in a stage dense with corpses is the colourless administrator, Gennaro.

    Source: The Crying of Lot 49, p. 55
  8. This epistemological shift in police work is not without effect on literary constructions of the corresponding enemy figure, the terrorist...The problematic status of the vanishing figure is not just a motif: it is a structural effect of literature engaging with the question of enmity under conditions of electronic tracing. Narrativizations of terror take place in the immediate vicinity of cultural techniques that operate strictly formally and syntactically, and in an epistemic space characterized not only by the mimetic effects of the sign but by a formation of series and syntactic operations. From the 1970s on, the precarious state of the terrorist figure points to a system of tracing and searching that rests upon a dissolving of mimetic effects into discrete sets of calculi, a system that consequently operates in the realm of the symbolic.

    From chapter: Hendrik Blumentrath, Enmity and the Archive
    Source: Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, p. 81,82