Notes

[1] Elliot Jacques (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976).

[2] Gordon Tullock (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1965).

[3] Henry Jacoby (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

[4] C. Northcote Parkinson (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1957). “Work in an organization expands to fill the time allotted to do it.”

[5] Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hill (London: Souvenir Press, 1969). The famous work on how those operating in an organization “rise to the level of their incompetence” also became a popular British TV show.

[6] R. T. Fishall (London: Arrow Books, 1982). A now-classic text on how to flummox and discomfit bureaucrats, widely rumored to be by British astronomer and BBC host Sir Patrick Moore.

[7] One could go further. The “acceptable” Left has, as I say, embraced bureaucracy and the market simultaneously. The libertarian Right at least has a critique of bureaucracy. The fascist Right has a critique of the market—generally, they are supporters of social welfare policies; they just want to restrict them to members of their own favored ethnic group.

[8] Owing to a peculiar set of historical circumstances, the word “liberal” no longer has the same meaning in the United States as it does in the rest of the world. The term originally applied to free-market enthusiasts, and in much of the world, it still does. In the United States, it was adopted by social democrats, and as a result, became anathema to the right, and free- market enthusiasts were forced to take the term “libertarian,” originally interchangeable with “anarchist,” used in such terms as “libertarian socialist” or “libertarian communist” to mean the same thing.

[9] In fact, Ludwig von Mises’s position is inherently antidemocratic: at least insofar as it tends to reject state solutions of any kind, while, at the same time, opposing left-wing antistatist positions that propose the creation of forms of democratic self- organization outside it.

[10] In the Durkheimian tradition this has come to be known as “the non-contractual element in contract,” certainly one of the less catchy sociological phrases of all time. The discussion goes back to The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1984 [1893]), p. 162.

[11] Michel Foucault’s essays on neoliberalism insist that this is the difference between the old and new varieties: those promulgating markets now understand that they do not form spontaneously, but must be nurtured and maintained by government intervention. Naissance de la biopolitique, Michel Senellart, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).

[12] “I don’t know how many times I have used the term ‘Government bureaucrat.’ And you will never find a politician using that term that doesn’t have some slightly pejorative connotation. That is, we know taxpayers resent the money they have to pay to the Government, and so we try to get credit by saying we’re being hard on bureaucrats or reducing bureaucrats … But remember, most of those people are just like most of you: They love their children. They get up every day and go to work. They do the very best they can … After what we have been through in this last month, after what I have seen in the eyes of the children of those Government bureaucrats that were serving us on that fateful day in Oklahoma City, or in their parents’ eyes who were serving us when their children were in that daycare center, I will never use that phrase again.” (www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=51382)

[13] From “Bureaucracy,” Max Weber, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 197–98.

[14] In many ways, the United States is a German country that, owing to that same early twentieth century rivalry, refuses to recognize itself as such. Despite the use of the English language there are far more Americans of German descent than English. (Or consider the two quintessentially American foods: the hamburger and the frankfurter). Germany in contrast is a country quite proud of its efficiency in matters bureaucratic, and Russia, to complete the set, might be considered a country where people generally feel they really ought to be better at bureaucracy, and are somewhat ashamed that they are not.

[15] A British bank employee recently explained to me that ordinarily, even those working for the bank effect a kind of knowing doublethink about such matters. In internal communications, they will always speak of regulations as being imposed on them—“The Chancellor has decided to increase ISA allowances”; “The Chancellor has initiated a more liberal pension regime” and so on—even though everyone in fact knows bank executives have just had repeated dinners and meetings with the Chancellor in question lobbying them to bring these laws and regulations about. There is a kind of game where senior executives will feign surprise or even dismay when their own suggestions are enacted.

[16] About the only policies that can’t be referred to as “deregulation” are ones that aim to reverse some other policy that has already been labeled “deregulation,” which means it’s important, in playing the game, to have your policy labeled “deregulation” first.

[17] The phenomenon I am describing is a planetary one, but it began in the United States, and it was U.S. elites who made the most aggressive efforts to export it, so it seems appropriate to begin with what happened in America.

[18] In a way, the famous TV character of Archie Bunker, an uneducated longshoreman who can afford a house in the suburbs and a non-working wife, and who is bigoted, sexist, and completely supportive of the status quo that allows him such secure prosperity, is the very quintessence of the corporatist age.

[19] Though it is notable that it is precisely this sixties radical equation of communism, fascism, and the bureaucratic welfare state that has been taken up by right-wing populists in America today. The Internet is rife with such rhetoric. One need only consider the way that “Obamacare” is continually equated with socialism and Nazism, often, both at the same time.

[20] William Lazonick has done the most work on documenting this shift, noting that it is a shift in business models—the effects of globalization and offshoring really only took off later, in the late nineties and early 2000s. (See, for example, his “Financial Commitment and Economic Performance: Ownership and Control in the American Industrial Corporation,” Business and Economic History, 2nd series, 17 [1988]: 115–28; “The New Economy Business Model and the Crisis of U.S. Capitalism,” Capitalism and Society [2009], 4, 2, Article 4; or “The Financialization of the U.S. Corporation: What Has Been Lost, and How It Can Be Regained,” INET Research Notes, 2012.) A Marxian approach to the same class realignment can be found in Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy’s Capital Resurgent: The Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Effectively, the investor and executive classes became the same—they intermarried—and careers spanning the financial and corporate management worlds became commonplace. Economically, according to Lazonick, the most pernicious effect was the practice of stock buybacks. Back in the fifties and sixties, a corporation spending millions of dollars to purchase its own stock so as to raise that stock’s market value would have likely been considered illegal market manipulation. Since the eighties, as executives’ have increasingly been paid in stock, it has become standard practice, and literally trillions of dollars in corporate revenue that would in an earlier age have been sunk into expanding operations, hiring workers, or research, have instead been redirected to Wall Street.

[21] A popular code word from the eighties onwards was “lifestyle liberal, fiscal conservative.” This referred to those who had internalized the social values of the sixties counterculture, but had come to view the economy with the eyes of investors.

[22] Just to be clear: this is by no means the case of major journalistic venues, newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, or magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or Harper’s. In such institutions, a degree in journalism would probably be counted as a negative. At this point, at least, it’s only true of minor publications. But the general trend is always towards greater credentialism in all fields, never less.

[23] www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/05/college-promise-economy-does-n.... The cited text is in Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 85. It continues, “Why do Americans think this is a good requirement, or at least a necessary one? Because they think so. We’ve left the realm of reason and entered that of faith and mass conformity.”

[24] This was certainly my own personal experience. As one of the few students of working-class origins in my own graduate program, I watched in dismay as professors first explained to me that they considered me the best student in my class— even, perhaps, in the department—and then threw up their hands claiming there was nothing that could be done as I languished with minimal support—or during many years none at all, working multiple jobs, as students whose parents were doctors, lawyers, and professors seemed to automatically mop up all the grants, fellowships, and student funding.

[25] Loans directly from the government are not available for continuing education, so borrowers are forced to take private loans with much higher interest rates.

[26] A friend gives me the example of master’s degrees in library science, which are now required for all public library jobs, despite the fact that the yearlong course of study generally provides no essential information that couldn’t be obtained by a week or two of on-the-job training. The main result is to ensure that for the first decade or two of a new librarian’s career, 20 to 30 percent of his or her income is redirected to repaying loans—in the case of my friend, $1,000 a month, about half of which goes to the university (principal) and half to the loan provider (interest).

[27] This logic of complicity can extend to the most unlikely organizations. One of the premiere left journals in America has, as editor in chief, a billionaire who basically bought herself the position. The first criterion for advancement in the organization is of course willingness to pretend there is some reason, other than money, for her to have the job.

[28] I outlined what happened in an essay called “The Shock of Victory.” Obviously, the planetary bureaucracy remained in place, but policies like IMF-imposed structural adjustment ended, and Argentina’s writing down of its loans in 2002, under intense pressure from social movements, set off a chain of events that effectively ended the Third World debt crisis.

[29] The League of Nations and the UN up until the seventies were basically talking-shops.

[30] In England, for instance, the anti–Corn Law legislation eliminating British tariff protections, which is seen as initiating the liberal age, was introduced by Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, mainly famous for having created the first British police force.

[31] I was reminded of this a few years ago by none other than Julian Assange, when a number of Occupy activists appeared on his TV show The World Tomorrow. Aware that many of us were anarchists, he asked us what he considered a challenging question: say you have a camp, and there are some people playing the drums all night and keeping everyone awake, and they won’t stop, what do you propose to do about it? The implication is that police, or something like them—some impersonal force willing to threaten violence—were simply necessary in such conditions. He was referring to a real incident—there had been some annoying drummers in Zuccotti Park. But in fact, the occupiers who didn’t like the music simply negotiated a compromise with them where they would only drum during certain hours. No threats of violent force were necessary. This brings home the fact that, for the overwhelming majority of humans who have lived in human history, there has simply been nothing remotely like police to call under such circumstances. Yet they worked something out. One seeks in vain for Mesopotamian or Chinese or ancient Peruvian accounts of urban dwellers driven mad by neighbors’ raucous parties.

[32] It is possible that there could be market relations that might not work this way. While impersonal markets have been throughout most of history the creation of states, mostly organized to support military operations, there have been periods where states and markets have drifted apart. Many of the ideas of Adam Smith and other Enlightenment market proponents seem to derive from one such, in the Islamic world of the Middle Ages, where sharia courts allowed commercial contracts to be enforced without direct government intervention, but only through merchants’ reputation (and hence creditworthiness). Any such market will in many key ways operate very differently from those we are used to: for instance, market activity was seen as much more about cooperation than competition (see Debt: The First 5,00 Years [Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011], pp. 271–82). Christendom had a very different tradition where commerce was always more entangled in war, and purely competitive behavior, especially in the absence of prior social ties, requires, pretty much of necessity, something like police to guarantee people keep to the rules.

[33] There is some possibility this has begun to turn around somewhat in recent years. But it has been my own experience that pretty much any time I presented a paper that assumed that some form of social control is ultimately made possible by the state’s monopoly of violence, I would be instantly faced with someone challenging me on Foucauldian, Gramscian, or Althusserian grounds that such an analysis is foolishly outdated: either because “disciplinary systems” no longer work that way, or because we have now realized they never did.

[34] The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 5. Roy P. Basler, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), p. 52. Anthropologist Dimitra Doukas provides a good historical overview of how this transformation worked itself out in small- town upstate New York in Worked Over: The Corporate Sabotage of an American Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). See also E. Paul Durrenberger and Dimitra Doukas, “Gospel of Wealth, Gospel of Work: Counter- hegemony in the U.S. Working Class” American Anthropologist, Vol. 110, Issue 2 (2008), pp. 214–25, on the ongoing conflict between the two perspectives among contemporary American laborers.

[35] It would be interesting to compare this campaign to the similarly well-funded effort to promulgate free-market ideologies starting in the sixties and seventies, which began with the establishment of think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. The latter appears both to have come from a smaller sector of the capitalist classes and to have taken much longer to achieve broad effects on popular opinion—though in the end it was if anything even more successful.

[36] Even the Soviet bureaucracy combined a celebration of labor with a long-term commitment to creating a consumer utopia. It should be noted that when the Reagan administration effectively abandoned antitrust enforcement in the eighties, they did it by shifting the criteria for approval of a merger from whether it operates as a restraint of trade to whether it “benefits the consumer.” The result is that the U.S. economy is in most sectors, from agriculture to book sales, dominated by a few giant bureaucratic monopolies or oligopolies.

[37] Similarly in the Classical world, or that of Medieval Christianity, rationality could hardly be seen as a tool because it was literally the voice of God. I will be discussing these issues in more detail in the third essay.

[38] Total number of civil servants employed in Russia in 1992: 1 million. Total number employed in 2004: 1.26 million. This is especially remarkable considering a lot of this time was marked by economic free-fall, so there was much less activity to administer.

[39] The logic is analogous to Marxian notions of fetishism, where human creations seem to take life, and control their creators rather than the other way around. It is probably best considered a subspecies of the same phenomenon.

[40] This particular tactic is so common that I think there should be a name for it. I propose to call it the “one more word out of you and the kitten gets it!” move. If you complain about a bureaucratic problem, make it clear that the only result will to get some underling in trouble—whether or not that underling had anything to do with creating the initial problem. The complainer will then, unless unusually vindictive and cruel, almost immediately withdraw the complaint. In this case, someone did forget to tell me a key piece of information, but I have had the same move used when complaining about matters where the problem was clearly the fault of the very supervisor I was complaining to.

[41] For example: “We expect everyone to work as hard as possible for the common good without expectation of reward! And if you are not capable of living up to such standards, clearly you are a counterrevolutionary bourgeois individualist parasite, and we’ll have to send you to a gulag.”

[42] Insofar as anthropological studies of bureaucracy do exist—the classic here is Herzfeld’s The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (New York: Berg, 1992)—they almost never describe such arrangements as foolish or idiotic. If it does come up at all, the “bureaucracy as idiocy” perspective tends to be attributed to one’s informants, represented as the naïve folk model, whose existence the anthropologist must explain. Why do Greek villagers, or Mozambiquan shopkeepers, they ask, make so many jokes about local officials in which those officials are represented as clueless idiots? The one answer never considered is that the villagers and shopkeepers are simply describing reality. I suppose I should be careful here. I am not saying that anthropologists, and other social scientists, are entirely unaware that immersion in bureaucratic codes and regulations does, in fact, regularly cause people to act in ways that in any other context would be considered idiotic. Just about anyone is aware from personal experiences that they do. Yet for the purposes of cultural analysis, obvious truths are uninteresting. At best one can expect a “yes, but …”—with the assumption that the “but” introduces everything that’s really important.

[43] To some degree this is in open defiance of the way the institution constantly encourages them to see the world: I recently had to fill out an online “time allocation report” for my university. There were about thirty categories of admin, but no category for “writing books.”

[44] “Never” is no doubt an overstatement. There are a handful of exceptions. A very small handful. In anthropology Marilyn Strathern’s excellent Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London, Routledge, 2000) is the most notable.

[45] Talcott Parsons & Edward A. Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951).

[46] Eric Ross, “Cold Warriors Without Weapons.” Identities 1998 vol. 4 (3–4): 475–506. Just to give a sense of the connections here, at Harvard, Geertz was a student of Clyde Kluckhohn, who was not only “an important conduit for CIA area studies funds” (Ross, 1998) but had contributed the section on anthropology to Parsons and Shils’s famous Weberian manifesto for the social sciences, Toward a General Theory of Action (1951). Kluckhohn connected Geertz to MIT’s Center for International Studies, then directed by the former CIA Director of Economic Research, which in turn convinced him to work on development in Indonesia.

[47] It is interesting to note here that Foucault was himself a relatively obscure figure in France, prior to ’68, a one-time arch- structuralist who had spent many of his years in exile in Norway, Poland, and Tunisia. After the insurrection, he was, effectively, whisked out of Tunisia and offered the most prestigious position Paris has to offer, a professorship at the College de France.

[48] In anthropology, see for instance Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Carolyn Nordstrom and Joann Martin, The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

[49] The term itself traces back to debates within Peace Studies in the 1960s; it was coined by Johann Galtung (“Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 1969 vol. 6:167–91; Peace: Research, Education, Action, Essays in Peace Research [Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers, Vol. 1, 1982]; Peter Lawler, A Question of Values: Johann Galtung’s Peace Research [Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner, 1995]), to meet the charge that to define “peace” as the mere absence of acts of physical assault is to overlook the prevalence of much more insidious structures of human exploitation. Galtung felt the term “exploitation” was too loaded owing to its identification with Marxism, and proposed as an alternative “structural violence”: any institutional arrangement that, by its very operation, regularly causes physical or psychological harm to a certain portion of the population, or imposes limits on their freedom. Structural violence could thus be distinguished from both “personal violence” (violence by an identifiable human agent), or “cultural violence” (those beliefs and assumptions about the world that justify the infliction of harm). This is the how the term has mainly been taken up in the anthropological literature as well (e.g., Philippe Bourgois, “The Power of Violence in War and Peace: Post–Cold War Lessons from El Salvador.” Ethnography 2001 vol. 2 [1]: 5–34; Paul Farmer, “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology 2004 vol. 45 [3]:305–25; Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005]; Arun Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012]).

[50] Given the world as it actually exists, this clearly makes no sense. If, say, there are certain spaces women are excluded from for fear of physical or sexual assault, one cannot make a distinction between that fear, the assumptions that motivate men to carry out such assaults or police to feel the victim “had it coming,” or the resultant feeling on the part of most women that these are not the kind of spaces women really ought to be in. Nor can one distinguish these factors, in turn, from the “economic” consequences of women who cannot be hired for certain jobs as a result. All of this constitutes a single structure of violence. The ultimate problem with Johann Galtung’s approach, as Catia Confortini notes (“Galtung, Violence, and Gender: The Case for a Peace Studies/Feminism Alliance.” Peace and Change 2006 vol. 31 [3]:333–67), is that it views “structures” as abstract, free-floating entities, when what we are really referring to here are material processes, in which violence, and the threat of violence, play a crucial, constitutive, role. In fact one could argue it’s this very tendency towards abstraction that makes it possible for everyone involved to imagine that the violence upholding the system is somehow not responsible for its violent effects.

[51] It is true that slavery is often framed as a moral relation (the master takes a paternal interest in the slaves’ spiritual welfare, that sort of thing), but as many have observed, such pretenses are never really believed by either masters or slaves; in fact, the ability to force the slaves to play along with such an obviously false ideology is itself a way of establishing the master’s pure, arbitrary power.

[52] Keith Breckenridge, “Power Without Knowledge: Three Colonialisms in South Africa.” (www.history.und.ac.za/Sempapers/Breckenridge2003.pdf)

[53] Keith Breckenridge, “Verwoerd’s Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of Apartheid.” History Workshop Journal 1985, vol. 59:84.

[54] Andrew Mathews, “Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance: Forest Fires and the State in Mexico.” Human Ecology 2005, vol. 33(6): 795–820; Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertize, and Power in Mexican Forests, 1926–2011 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

[55] David Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Choice and the Politics of Allocation: A Developmental Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).

[56] “Violent actions, no less than any other kind of behavioral expression, are deeply infused with cultural meaning and are the moment for individual agency within historically embedded patterns of behavior. Individual agency, utilizing extant cultural forms, symbols, and icons, may thus be considered ‘poetic’ for the rule-governed substrate that underlies it, and for how this substrate is deployed, through which new meanings and forms of cultural expression emerge” (Neil Whitehead, “On the Poetics of Violence,” in Violence, James Currey, ed. [Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2004], pp. 9–10).

[57] In criminal matters, we tend to treat pointing a gun at someone’s head and demanding their money as a violent crime, even though no actual physical contact takes place. However, most liberal definitions of violence avoid defining threats of physical harm as forms of violence in themselves, because of the subversive implications. As a result liberals tend to define violence as acts of nonconsensual harm, and conservatives, acts of nonconsensual harm that have not been approved by legitimate authorities—which of course makes it impossible for the state, or any state they approve of, anyway, to ever engage in “violence” (see C.A.J. Coady, “The Idea of Violence.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 1986 vol. 3 [1]:3–19; also my own Direct Action: An Ethnography [Oakland: AK Press, 2009], pp. 448–49).

[58] Hopefully at this point I do not have to point out that patriarchal arrangements of this sort are prima facie examples of structural violence, their norms sanctioned by threat of physical harm in endless subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

[59] Since first writing this passage I have tried in vain to locate the essay where I first read about these experiments (I first encountered them in a magazine I looked at in the American consulate in Antananarivo while doing my fieldwork around the year 1990, in an article about the movie Tootsie). Often when I tell the story, I am told that the real reason teenage boys object to imagining themselves as girls is simple homophobia, and this is surely true, as far as it goes. But then one has to ask why homophobia is so powerful in the first place, and why homophobia takes this particular form. After all, many teenage girls are equally homophobic, but it does not seem to stop them from taking pleasure in imagining themselves as boys.

[60] bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 165–78.

[61] The key texts on Standpoint Theory, by Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock and others, are collected in a volume edited by Harding (The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies [London: Routledge, 2004]). I might add that the history of this very essay provides a telling example of the sort of gendered obliviousness I’m describing. When I first framed the problem, I wasn’t even aware of this body of literature, though my argument had clearly been indirectly influenced by it—it was only the intervention of a feminist friend that put me on to where many of these ideas were actually coming from.

[62] Egon Bittner, Aspects of Police Work (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1970); also, “The capacity to use force as the core of the police role.” In Moral Issues in Police Work, Elliston and Feldberg, eds. (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1985), pp. 15–26; P. A. Waddington, Policing Citizens: Authority and Rights (London: University College London Press, 1999); Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000).

[63] This paragraph is addressed, of course, largely to those of a certain class status: I have often remarked that the real definition of being “middle class” is whether, when one sees a policeman on the street, one feels more, rather than less, safe. This is why only a very small percentage of the population of, say, Nigeria or India or Brazil feel that they are middle class, though most Danes or white Australians do. In most large cities in Europe or North America race is also a huge factor, though often those who face the most direct and consistent racist violence from police will nonetheless insist that fighting crime is what police are fundamentally about.

[64] I am aware this is not really what Weber said. Even the phrase “iron cage” is apparently a mistranslation for a phrase that meant something more like “shiny metal casing”—not a drab prison but a high-tech wrapping superficially attractive in its own right. Nonetheless, this is how Weber was understood for most of the twentieth century and in a way the popular understanding was more important, and certainly more influential, than the author’s actual meaning.

[65] Ancient Egypt in contrast created whole genres of literature to warn young students against adventurous occupations. They would typically begin by asking whether the reader had ever dreamed of becoming the captain of a ship, or a royal charioteer, then go on to describe just how miserable such an apparently glamourous occupation would likely really turn out to be. The conclusion was always the same: don’t do it! Become a bureaucrat. You’ll have a prosperous job and all you’ll be able to order around the soldiers and sailors who will treat you like a god.

[66] The real joke in the Bond movies, it seems to me, is that Bond is a terrible spy. Spies are supposed to be discreet and unobtrusive. James Bond is anything but. It’s just that he can get away with being a terrible spy because he’s effortlessly, preternaturally flawless in the performance of any task other than spying. As for his inversions with Holmes, one could multiply these endlessly: Holmes has family history, Bond appears to be an orphan or anyway has no family ties, and further, seems to have constant sex without ever producing offspring. Holmes works with one male partner who does well by their association; Bond with a series of female partners who usually die.

[67] The full argument here would take much more time to make, and this is not really the place for it, but note that cop movies of the “rogue cop breaking all the rules” variety, that now seems the default mode for a Hollywood action movie, did not exist at all until the 1970s. In fact for the first half-century of American cinema there were hardly any movies at all that took a policeman’s point of view. The rogue cop movie appeared at the moment the Western disappeared and is largely a transposition of Western plots into an urban bureaucratic setting. Clint Eastwood famously defined the transition: from Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name (1964, 1965, 1966), to Dirty Harry (1971). As others have observed, the Western plot is typically an effort to contrive a situation where it is justifiable for a basically decent person to do things that in any other situation would be absolutely unjustifiable. Transposing that onto an urban bureaucratic environment has disturbing implications: indeed, one might well argue that Jack Bauer is the logical culmination of the genre.

[68] Marc Cooper, “Dum Da Dum-Dum.” Village Voice April 16, 1991, pp. 28–33.

[69] This might seem to be similar to the fate of liberal or right libertarian free market ideas that oppose government interference but, according to what I’ve called the Iron Law of Liberalism, always produce more bureaucracy anyway. But I don’t think that left-wing ideas always and necessarily create bureaucracy in the same way. Indeed, insurrectionary moments usually begin by eliminating existing bureaucratic structures entirely, and while these structures often creep back, they only do when the revolutionaries begin to operate through government: when they manage to maintain autonomous enclaves like, say, the Zapatistas, this does not take place.

[70] I use the word “ontology” with some hesitation because as a philosophical term, it has recently undergone a great deal of abuse. Technically, ontology is theory about the nature of reality, as opposed to epistemology, which is theory about what we can know about reality. In the social sciences, “ontology” has come to be used merely as a pretentious way to say “philosophy,” “ideology,” or “set of cultural assumptions,” often in ways that philosophers would find outrageous. Here I am using it in the specific sense of “political ontology,” which admittedly is a sense I made up, but refers to a set of assumptions about underlying realities. When one says “let’s be realistic here,” what reality is it we’re referring to? What is the hidden reality, the underlying forces, assumed to be moving below the surface of political events?

[71] Even the rich and powerful will ordinarily concede that the world is a miserable place for most of those who live in it, but still, insist that this is inevitable, or that any attempt to change it will make it worse—not that we actually live in an ideal social order.

[72] Unfortunately he never did. He called it Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010) instead, a far inferior title.

[73] Key texts here are: James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), and Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

[74] I might add that it is a profound reflection on the effects of structural violence on the imagination that feminist theory itself was so quickly sequestered away into its own subfield where it has had almost no impact on the work of most male theorists.

[75] No doubt all this makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor—for example, or most of what we usually think of as women’s work—as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we care about most—our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions—are always other people, and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.

[76] See my book The Democracy Project (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012). My own chosen title for it was, ironically, “As If We Were Already Free,” but in the end, I wasn’t free to dictate my own title.

[77] A Paradise Made in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York, Penguin, 2010).

[78] Similarly, in 1949 Orwell had placed his futuristic dystopia, 1984, only thirty-five years in the future.

[79] In fact, video telephones had first been debuted in the 1930s by the German post office under the Nazis.

[80] From Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 36–37. The original essay was published in 1984.

[81] The original book, in German, came out as Der Spätkapitalismus in 1972. The first English edition was Late Capitalism (London: Humanities Press, 1975).

[82] Probably the classic statement of this position is Space and the American Imagination, by Howard McCurdy (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1997), but other versions of this sort of rhetoric include: Stephen J. Pyne, “A Third Great Age of discovery,” in Carl Sagan and Stephen J. Pyne, The Scientific and Historical Rationales for Solar System Exploration, SPI 88-1 (Washington, D.C.: Space policy institute, George Washington University, 1988), or Linda Billings, “Ideology, Advocacy, and Spaceflight: Evolution of a Cultural Narrative” in The Societal Impact of Spaceflight, Stephen J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, eds. (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2009).

[83] Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970).

[84] In this case, too, there’s a Soviet equivalent: the Tupolev TU-144, which was actually the first supersonic passenger plane, and which first flew a few months before the Concorde in 1968, but was abandoned for commercial purposes in 1983.

[85] Source: www.foundersfund.com/uploads/ff_manifesto.pdf.

[86] Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980).

[87] Toffler’s own politics are slightly more ambiguous, but not much. Before the success of Future Shock, he had been known mainly as a business journalist, whose greatest claim to fame was probably that he had interviewed Ayn Rand for Playboy. Like most conservatives, he pays lip service to women’s equality as an abstract principle, but never mentions actual feminists or feminist issues except to criticize them: for a typical example, see his Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives, Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler (New York: Doubleday, 2006), pp. 132–33. It is certainly curious that both Toffler and Gilder are so obsessed with the threat to motherhood: it’s as if both are basing their politics on an opposition to the ideas of Shulamith Firestone, long before Firestone herself had actually appeared on the scene.

[88] Eccentric though they were, it’s hard to overestimate the influence of such figures on the Right, because they were considered its creative visionaries. Gilder’s supply-side economic theories, for instance, are widely cited as one of the main inspiration for Reaganomics, and his “technology report” was so widely read that market observers spoke of a “Gilder effect,” where the share values of any company he mentioned approvingly would almost invariably rise in value immediately thereafter.

[89] Win McCormick, for instance, informs me that by the late sixties he was involved in a think tank founded by a former president of the University of Chicago, one of whose main concerns was trying to figure out how to head off the upheavals they assumed would ensue within a generation or so, when machines had completely replaced manual labor.

[90] I have no time to describe in detail some of the actual political conflicts of the early seventies described in the unpublished Zero Work volume that set the stage for the later emergence of the Midnight Notes Collective, but they reveal quite clearly that in many assembly-line industries, wildcat strikes during that period did focus on demands for replacing drudgery with mechanization, and for employers, abandoning factories in the unionized “Rust Belt” became a conscious strategy for sidestepping such demands (e.g., Peter Linebaugh and Bruno Ramirez, “Crisis in the Auto Sector,” originally from Zero Work, published in Midnight Notes, 1992).

[91] The United States sometimes likes to maintain the fantasy that it does not engage in industrial planning, but as critics have long since pointed out, it does. Much of the direct planning, and hence R&D, is carried out through the military.

[92] The project was just called Energia, and it was the reason for the USSR’s development of the gigantic booster rockets that are still the mainstay of the global space program, now that the Space Shuttle is out of commission. News of the project only really broke in the United States in 1987, two years before the Soviet collapse. www.nytimes.com/1987/06/14/world/soviet-studies-satellites-to-convert-so....

[93] This raises an interesting question: how much of this particular mythological world was—at least partially—a Slavic import? Much research would have to be done to resolve this question, however.

[94] Jeff Sharlet informs me these imaginary connections probably run much further than we think. In the fifties and sixties, many prominent Americans, including a significant number of Congressmen, appear to have strongly suspected that the Soviets actually were in contact with space aliens, and that UFOs were either Soviet allies, or actual Soviet craft built with borrowed alien technology (see e.g., Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between [New York: Norton, 2012], pp. 146–48).

[95] As an example, in 368 pages, Judith Barad’s The Ethics of Star Trek (New York: Perennial, 2000) does not mention democracy or issues of collective political decision-making even once.

[96] Other sentences one would never hear are of this sort: “Did you hear that the Vulcan-Bejoran Traditionalist alliance is threatening to pull their support from the ruling coalition and force new elections if their candidate doesn’t get the education portfolio this year?” Note too how in the absence of ideological differences, which have the potential to cross- cut ethnic ones, the only political divisions one can really imagine within the Federation are between species: the Andorians want this, the Betazoids want that. This too resembles what happened in the USSR and under similar regimes, where a combination of a centralized, redistributive system and an insistence on ideological conformity ensured that ethnic differences were the only ones that could find any open political expression—with ultimately disastrous political effects.

[97] Though all ethnic groups seem to be represented in the Federation, I’ve always noticed one curious exception: Jews. It’s all the more striking because both Kirk and Spock, in the original series, were played by Jewish actors—the Vulcan salute, famously, is actually an Orthodox Jewish blessing. But one never sees a Captain Goldberg or Lieutenant Rubinstein; as far as I’m aware not a single Jewish character has ever appeared.

[98] The sequence of events is somewhat hypothetical here as, as I say, the history has not been written. I am certainly not suggesting Michael Moore himself sparked the debate, but rather that his comments gave a flavor for what was being talked about at the time. The Ferengi first appear quite early, in 1987, and the Borg even earlier, but they become much more prominent as contrasting alternatives to the Federation later on. All one has to do is Google (Star Trek creator) “Gene Roddenberry” and “communist” together to get a taste of the kind of ire the issue stirred up in conservative circles.

[99] The term originally derives from “Franks,” which was the generic Arabic term for Crusader. Thus the Ferengi have a curious Medieval heritage: their name is a hostile term Muslims applied to Christians, whom they considered barbarous, impious, and so greedy that they lacked all human decency, and their physical appearance and behavior is an allusion to a hostile image those same Christians applied to Jews, for exactly the same reasons.

[100] Thus for instance a recent study of work in the twenty-first century could begin: “Two broad developments reshaped work at the end of the twentieth century. The first was the implosion of the Soviet Union and the worldwide triumph of market capitalism. The second was the widespread use of computer-based production technologies and management command- and-control systems” (Rick Baldoz, Charles Koeber, Philip Kraft, The Critical Study of Work: Labor, Technology, and Global Production [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001], p. 3).

[101] Its designer, Mikhail Kalashinikov, who is still alive, recently held a press conference where he pointed out that U.S. soldiers in Iraq regularly discard their own weapons in favor of captured AK-47s when they have the opportunity.

[102] And of course just counting university staff is deceptive in itself, since it ignores the burgeoning numbers of administrators employed by foundations, and other grant-giving agencies.

[103] Similarly Don Braben, a physicist at University College London, made headlines in the UK by pointing out that Albert Einstein would never have been able to get funding were he alive today. Others have suggested most of his major works would never even have passed peer review.

[104] Jonathan L. Katz, “Don’t Become a Scientist!” (wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html).

[105] Even worse, as some friends in the industry point out, grant-givers regularly insist it’s the scientists themselves who have to write the applications, progress reports, etc., rather than some subordinate, with the result that even the most successful scientists spend roughly 40 percent of their time doing paperwork.

[106] It is true that certain capitalist firms of the Silicon Valley sort—the ones that consider themselves cutting-edge—will adopt some version of the old Bell Labs blue sky approach and make sure everyone knows that they are doing so. But these efforts always prove, on investigation, to be largely publicity stunts. In Silicon Valley–style firms, innovation is largely outsourced to startups. At present, the most promising research is generally conducted neither in corporate nor in directly government-funded environments but in the nonprofit sector (which includes most universities), but here too, the corporatization of institutional culture ensures more and more time is taken up with grantsmanship.

[107] David Harvie, “Commons and Communities in the University: Some Notes and Some Examples,” The Commoner no. 8, Autumn/Winter 2004. (www.commoner.org.uk/08harvie.pdf)

[108] We cannot know, for instance, whether there really are alternative fuel formulas that have been bought up and placed in safes by oil companies, but it’s widely speculated that there are. A Russian journalist I know told me about her friend, who invented a design for an Internet base station that could provide free wireless for an entire country. The patent was quickly purchased for several million, and suppressed by a major Internet provider. No such stories can by definition be verified, but it’s significant in itself that they exist—that they have the complete aura of believability.

[109] Neal Stephenson, “Innovation Starvation,” World Policy Journal, Fall 2011, pp. 11–16.

[110] It has often occurred to me that Steampunk really represents nostalgia for precisely this state of affairs. I once attended a museum panel on the topic, and it struck me as odd that all the commentators talked exclusively about the “steam” element, but none about the “punk.” Punk rock in the seventies was about the lack of any redemptive future—“no future” was in fact one of its most famous mantras—and it strikes me that the taste for Victorian-era sci-fi futures is more than anything else a nostalgia for the last moment, before the carnage of World War I, when everyone could safely feel a redemptive future was possible.

[111] Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).

[112] Though possibly, this had at least as much to with his libertarian communist political affinities than his devotion to the occult. His wife’s sister, who seems to have been the ringleader in the magical society, eventually left him for L. Ron Hubbard; on leaving NASA, Parsons went on to apply his magic to creating pyrotechnic effects for Hollywood until he finally blew himself up in 1962.

[113] Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966).

[114] I note that Peter Thiel, who agreed with much of the original argument of this essay, has recently come out as an antimarket promonopoly capitalist for precisely the reason that he feels this is the best way to further rapid technological change.

[115] For as long as I can remember, at least since I was in my twenties, I’ve heard at least one person every year or so tell me that a drug that will stop the aging process is approximately three years away.

[116] “Bureaucracy” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 233–34.

[117] As he put it to an American visitor at the time: “My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare” (cited in William Thomas Stead, On the Eve: A Handbook for the General Election [London: Review of Reviews Publishing, 1892], p. 62). The quote is useful to bear in mind since I find that the general point—that the welfare state was largely created to pay off the working class for fear of their becoming revolutionaries—tends to be met with skepticism, and demands for proof that this was the self-conscious intention of the ruling class. But here we have the very first such effort described by its founder quite explicitly as such.

[118] Herodotus, Histories, 8.98.

[119] It’s interesting that in Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson barely mentions this phenomenon, focusing only on newspapers.

[120] This is still true: in the United States right now, a third of government employes are in the military, and a quarter are in the postal service, far and away more than any other branch.

[121] Unfortunately, the essay is lost. (See The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, J. R. LeMaster, James Darrell Wilson, and Christie Graves Hamric, eds. [New York: Routledge, 1993], p. 71; Everett Emerson, Mark Twain, a Literary Life [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000], p. 188.)

[122] Lenin, State and Revolution (London: Penguin, 1992 [1917]), p. 52.

[123] Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchist Communism,” in Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (New York: Dover, 1974), p. 68.

[124] Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford History of the United States) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 478–79.

[125] Indeed, growing up in New York City, I was always struck by the fascinating disparity between the magnificence of public amenities created around the turn of the century, when that very grandeur was seen as reflecting the strength and power of the Republic, and the apparently intentional tawdriness of anything created by the city, for its citizens, since the 1970s. For me, at least, the two greatest exemplars of that earlier age were New York’s monumental Central Post Office, with its sweeping, block-long marble steps and Corinthian columns, and the central branch of New York Public Library (which, incidentally, maintained its own system of pneumatic tubes for sending book requests into the stacks well into the 1980s). I remember once, as a tourist, visiting the summer palace of the Kings of Sweden—the first actual palace I’d ever been inside. My first reaction was: this looks exactly like the New York Public Library!

[126] Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005.

[127] This is beautifully conveyed in the great film The Hollywood Shuffle, featuring a hapless young African American hero willing to endure performing any humiliating racist stereotype in order to make it in the movies—as his grandmother keeps gently reminding him, “There’s always work at the Post Office.”

[128] This pattern actually extends to all sorts of movies: even if the maverick hero is a scientist, for example, the superior in a bureaucratic organization is almost invariably a person of color. The hero may occasionally be a person of color, but is usually white; the boss—at least, if the boss is an officious martinet and not a coconspirator—pretty much never is.

[129] Needless to say, as my comments on the fate of the Internet in the last essay made clear, such poetic technologies have an unfortunate tendency to themselves become bureaucratic ones.

[130] Freud is a fascinating figure for trying to reconcile the two conceptions: rationality (the Ego) no longer represents morality, as it would have in a Medieval conception where reason and morality were the same, but, rather, is pushed and pulled in contradictory directions by the passions (the Id) on the one side, and morality (the Superego) on the other.

[131] One might argue that this is developed most strongly in military bureaucracies, where officers often make it a point of pride to serve whatever civilian leaders political developments throw at them with equal dedication and efficiency, whatever their personal views. But this is just an extension of the bureaucratic mind-set. Armies dominated by, say, aristocratic officer corps behave quite differently.

[132] There is a growing literature now on the social base of the more extreme form of Political Islam, for instance, that reveals that it has a particular appeal for students of engineering and the sciences.

[133] There is a reason Mr. Spock was a fictional character. But of course Spock wasn’t really supposed to be emotionless, he just pretended to be, so in a way he represented the ideal of rationality perfectly.

[134] It is perfectly possible to come up with a logically coherent argument based on delusional premises, or to make a realistic assessment of a problem and then apply completely fallacious logic to its solution. People do both all the time.

[135] I am referring here to the Pythagorean movement and not to its founder, Pythagoras, because Pythagoras’ own role in creating the doctrines that came to be known under his name is currently a matter of some contention. Walter Burkert has suggested that he was really only responsible for the doctrine of reincarnation, and not the mathematical cosmology, which has been variously attributed to later Pythagoreans such as Hippasus, Philolaus, and Archytas, or even, made up retrospectively and attributed to the Pythagoreans by Plato (this latter, however, strikes me as unlikely).

[136] There is a story that such was the political importance of this doctrine that when one later Pythagorean, Hippasus, discovered the irrational number, his fellows drowned him in the sea. Actually, the legend in Antiquity was rather that Hippasus drowned by accident, as punishment from the Gods for his impiety in revealing such matters. Myself, I find more interesting the suggestion, in some sources, that Hippasus held that God was an irrational number: that God, in other words, represented a transcendent principle beyond the immanent rationality of the cosmos. If true, it would have been a major departure from the emerging logic of the “cosmic religion” of Antiquity and it might not be surprising if he thus aroused his comrades’ antipathy. It is intriguing to consider how it relates to the reflections on sovereignty detailed below.

[137] Hans Joas (The Gnostic Religion [Boston: Beacon Press, 1958]) was, to my knowledge, the first to use the term “cosmic religion,” in describing Gnosticism, which rejected the notion of an ideal cosmic order and saw human souls as fundamentally alien to creation, as its explicit negation. Augustinian Christianity actually contains elements of both, bringing together a Manichean dualism with a fundamentally Pagan insistence on the identity of mind and divinity.

[138] It originates with the Stoics, but in Antiquity was not nearly so universal as it became in the European Middle Ages.

[139] Insofar as they do, it’s of course in play.

[140] Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 121.

[141] It might have made better logical sense to see that what set humans apart from animals lay in imagination, but in Medieval terms this was quite inadmissible, because in the commonplace theology of the time, influenced by astrology and Neoplatonism, it corresponded to a lower order—imagination was a mediator between the divine intellect and the material world, just as the astral plane mediates heaven and earth; indeed, many at the time speculated our imaginative faculties were made of astral substance.

[142] From Francis Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 144; originally from Robert Fludd, Meteorologica cosmtca (Frankfort, 1626), p. 8.

[143] Translation from Francis Yates, op cit, p. 119.

[144] And also, of course, on the Church hierarchy that continued to be based in Rome, which did maintain the most elaborate and geographically far-reaching administrative system that existed in Europe at the time.

[145] On proto-bureaucracy, see Hans Nissen et al., Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1993); see also David Wengrow, What Makes a Civilization? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 81–87.

[146] Or in the anthropological record, one might think of the Maori, or the First Nations of the Northwest Coast of North America (often referred to as “potlatch societies,” which were divided into aristocrats and commoners with no centralized system of government or administration), or, for that matter, more egalitarian heroic societies like the Iatmul of Papua New Guinea where all adult males were engaged in constant vainglorious behavior of this sort.

[147] My key text here is David Wengrow’s “ ‘Archival’ and ‘Sacrificial’ Economies in Bronze Age Eurasia: An Interactionist Approach to the Hoarding of Metals,” in Interweaving Worlds: Systemic Interactions in Eurasia, 7th to the 1st Millennia BC, T. C. Wilkinson, S. Sherratt, and J. Bennet, eds. (Oxford: Oxbow, 2011), pp. 135–44. I discuss heroic societies myself in “Culture as Creative Refusal,” Cambridge Anthropology vol. 31 no. 2 (2013), pp. 1–19.

[148] Indeed, I have, in an earlier book, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 129–31.

[149] Attila the Hun, for example, appears as a character in both the Nibelungenlied and Volsunga Saga.

[150] Obviously, “fantasy” can refer to a very wide range of literature, from Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to The Call of Cthulhu, and many critics include science fiction as a subgenre of fantasy as well. Still, Middle Earth style heroic fantasy remains the “unmarked term.”

[151] Elsewhere, I’ve referred to this as “the ugly mirror phenomenon.” See David Graeber, “There Never Was a West: Democracy Emerges from the Spaces in Between,” in Possibilities: Notes on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), p. 343.

[152] The key difference here is no doubt that Medieval carnivals were, in fact, organized largely bottom-up, much unlike Roman circuses.

[153] From a letter to his son written during World War II: “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them …” The letter adds that he feels relations of command are only appropriate within small face-to-face groups, and that the one bright spot in the world is “the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations.” (Letter to Christopher Tolkien, November 29, 1943; in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, ed. [London: Allen & Unwin, 1981], #52.) Others have noted that this insistence that only personal authority is legitimate is a reflection of a lifelong hatred of bureaucracy in all its manifestations (Fascist, Communist, or Welfare State): i.e., John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth [London: HarperCollins, 2011], p. 94, and Mark Home, J.R.R.Tolkien [Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2011], pp. 124–27. The latter observes that “the fluctuation between kings and ‘anarchy’ is not odd for a student of northern European tribal history” (ibid., p. 125) but rather, is typical of what I’ve been referring to as heroic societies.

[154] Douglas Adams fans will recall that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, another of the great midcentury bureaucratic satires, begins with precisely such a scenario, leading to the destruction of the planet.

[155] The noble warrior chief versus evil magician scenario is basically a British colonial trope; colonial officials in Africa almost invariably tried to locate warrior elites, whom they admired, and if they did not find them, would assume they had been displaced by the wiles of “witch doctors” of one sort or another, whom they invariably saw as a maleficent influence. King Solomon’s Mines is the ultimate fictional expression of this myth.

[156] Huizinga actually assumes that play and games are the same thing. Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

[157] And if one is playing a game, the “play” element is the unpredictable element, the degree to which one is not simply enacting rules, but applying skill, or rolling the dice, or otherwise embracing uncertainty.

[158] To take just one typical example: J. Lowell Lewis, “Toward a Unified Theory of Cultural Performance” in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, Graham St. John, ed. (London: Berghahn, 2008), p. 47. But the point is made over and over in the literature. I might add that by this analysis, Dungeons & Dragons and similar role-playing games are so enjoyable because they have achieved the perfect mix of the play and the game principle.

[159] “Alternative Futures,” Times of India, February 10, 2007, in times of india.indiatimes.com/edit-page/Alternative- Futures/articleshow/1586903.cms.

[160] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [1922]). Schmitt’s arguments were used by the Nazis to provide legal justification for concentration camps.

[161] “In Indian cosmology, play is a top down idea. Passages to play and their premises are embedded at a high level of abstraction and generality. The qualities of play resonate and resound throughout the whole. But more than this, qualities of play are integral to the very operation of the cosmos,” D. Handelman, 1992. “Passages to play: Paradox and process” Play and Culture vol 5 no. 1, p. 12. Cited in Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 55.

[162] Sutton-Smith op. cit., pp. 55–60. Bottom-up play, in contrast—the notion of play as intrinsically subversive—has always existed, but only really became our dominant way of thinking about such matters with Romanticism.

[163] Or to be more precise, its representatives are the only people allowed to act violently in a given situation if they are both present and on the job.

[164] During protests against the World Bank in 2002, police in Washington, D.C., decided to surround a public park and arrest everyone inside it. I well remember calling out to the commanding officer asking what we were being arrested for. He answered, “We’ll think of something later.”

[165] It can happen, but it usually has to involve anal penetration with weapons. At least, the two cases that jump most readily to mind are officer Justin Volpe, who sodomized a man he mistakenly thought had earlier thrown a punch at him in a street fight with a broom handle in a precinct bathroom in New York in 1997, and Dennis Krauss, a Georgia police officer, who repeatedly responded to domestic violence calls by extorting sexual favors from the women who called him and in 1999, attempted to sodomize one with a gun. Both were sentenced to prison terms. But it usually takes an assault of that outrageousness for an officer to actually go to jail. For instance, during the Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street, there were repeated cases of police systematically breaking wrists and fingers of nonviolent protesters—often after announcing they would do so—but no police officer was ever so much as charged, let alone convicted of assault.

[166] Notice the complex relation between this and the rationalist view described earlier, where creativity was seen as demonic because it was opposed to the divine or cosmic principle of reason. Here, creativity is seen as demonic because it partakes of the divine or cosmic principle of play!

[167] Some contemporary political theorists are willing to more or less state this outright. I am thinking particularly here of that school of thought that is referred to as Civic Republicanism, as outlined by intellectual historians like Quentin Skinner and philosophers like Philip Pettit, who argue that “freedom” in the classic liberal tradition is not a matter of being able to act without the interference of power, or even threats of violence—since legal systems do threaten those who break the rules with violence—but rather, to act without the interference of arbitrary power. This is not the place to launch into a detailed analysis but the entire formulation thus comes to present a zero-sum view of freedom. “Arbitrary” after all just means “non-determined.” In a system of arbitrary authority, decisions reflect the “will and pleasure” of the despot. But from the perspective of the despot, “arbitrariness” is freedom. So the people are free if the ruler is not. Powerful people have to follow the rules. But since all citizens have a certain degree of power, so does everyone else. Ultimately, since freedom means protection from the arbitrary (non-rule-bound) power of others, and since power is everywhere, the logic provides a charter for the reduction of all aspects of human life into sets of transparent rules. (For the key texts here: Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997]; Quentin Skinner, “Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power,” in Republicanism and Political Theory, Cécile Laborde and John Maynor, eds. [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008].)

[168] Marilyn Strathern, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000).

[169] Not only do they change, they tend to change at a fairly constant rate, regardless of historical circumstances. There is, indeed, a whole science, glottochronology, premised on this fact.

[170] Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” First officially published in The Second Wave (vol. 2, no 1). Reprinted in Quiet Rumors: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader, Dark Star Collective (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2002), pp. 54–61.

[171] note in passing that my analysis here is of mainstream comic book fiction, especially in the first several decades. When my piece first came out it was often critiqued for not taking consideration of the most sophisticated examples of the literature: Frank Knight’s Batman, the Watchmen series, V for Vendetta, and other more explicitly political comic plots. And even mainstream comics have become more explicitly political over time (Lex Luthor, for example, became President!). Still, if one wants to understand the essence of a popular genre, one does not examine its most sophisticated, high-culture variants. If one wants to understand the essence of a popular genre, one looks at schlock.