Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan by Matthew S. Hull

Author:Matthew S. Hull [Hull, Matthew S.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

PARTICULAR PROJECTS AND COLLECTIVE AGENCY

The powerful process through which corporate authority is generated allows particular projects to be collectivized and executed by the organization. Some bureaucrats identify with the passive, constrained, and scrupulous characters they create for themselves in their writings on files. However, in conversation, many bureaucrats portray themselves and others as different sorts of vigorous actors: powerful heroes battling other bureaucrats, politicians, and the system as a whole; venal and corrupt villains undermining the integrity of government; or clever operators outwitting other bureaucrats and artfully playing the game. Beneath the cover of corporate authority and using the corporate agency it enables, such bureaucrats, as individuals or in combinations, attempt to get things done. Bureaucrats increase their influence by diligently cultivating relationships beyond the circulation of paper, with subordinates, superiors, and colleagues well placed elsewhere in the bureaucracy, and patrons in senior political, bureaucratic, and military positions. To be successful in a particular case, however, such work must come to be grounded in files. Influence over the movement and content of files is the most direct way officials exercise power over people and things. Influence over files is itself a sign of power.

When, as in many American offices, emails and memos mediate deliberations and directives, cases are distributed over a dispersed set of artifacts—common servers and individual hard drives, folders, and desks. Such a loose connection between a case and any one of its material elements makes it easy to think of a case as a set of circumstances or facts. But this view of a case is an abstraction from the material practices that sustain it as a particular kind of bureaucratic object. Material documentation is an essential component of the case; we might even say, adapting the quip that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” that a case is a set of circumstances with some material documentation.14 Cases in Pakistan are not unique in being materially enacted. Rather, it is the form of that materiality that interests us: the Pakistan case is enacted through a single file. Though this is a routine fact of bureaucratic process little remarked upon in Islamabad, the consequences of this ontology of the case are far-reaching and perhaps the aspect of cases with the most significance for the functioning of the bureaucracy.

The misrouting or loss of a file shows how much the sociomaterial dispositions of files shape the disposal of cases. When the file is neglected, so is the case, because the file is the only means to grasp the case (in both senses), to distribute work on the case, and even to have work count as being on the case. A languishing case concerning the construction of a church in 1992, for example, shows how the file is both a prompt to and an instrument for dealing with the case. The CDA received a reference on the church from the wafaqi mohtasib (the federal ombudsman), an office established with an Islamic title as part of Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization program.

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