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thesis in talking docs
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<div id="content"><h1 id="performing-the-bureaucratic-borderlines">Performing the
Bureaucratic Border(line)s</h1>
<mark><h2 id="introduction">introduction</h2></mark>
<p>This thesis is an assemblage<sup><span class="margin-note"> I live
somewhere in the margins of scattered references, footnotes, citations,
examinations embracing the inconvenience of talking back to myself, to
the reader and to all those people whose ideas gave soul to the text. I
shelter in the borderlands of the pages my fragmented thoughts, flying
words, introspections, voices. Enlightenment and inspiration given by
the text “Dear Science” written by Katherine McKittrick.</span></sup> of
thoughts, experiences, interpretations, intuitive explorations of what
borders are, attempting to unleash a conversation concerning the
entangled relation between material injurious borders and bureaucracy. I
unravel empirically the thread of how borders as entities are manifested
and (de)established. How does the lived experience of crossing multiple
borders change and under what conditions?</p>
<p>The eastern Mediterranean borderland<sup><span class="margin-note"> I
use the word borderland to refer to Greece as a (mostly) transit zone in
the migrants’ and refugees’ route towards Europe.</span></sup>, I
happened to come from, proves to be one of Europe’s deadly borders
towards specific ethnic groups. The embodied experience of borders and
practices of (im)mobility change radically depending on the various
identities of the people crossing them. As I moved to the Netherlands I
started more actively perceiving bureaucracy as another multi-layered
border. I was wondering how this situation is shifted and transformed
moving towards the European North. What is the role of bureaucracy and
how it could be perceived as a mechanism of repulsion for some bodies -
a camouflaged border?</p>
<p>But what is my starting point and where does my precarious body fit
within the borders that I am touching? The language of the
administrative document is rigid and hurtful but myself lies between the
margins of these lines.</p>
<p>This thesis does not consist of an excessive inquiry about the
profoundly complex concepts of borders and bureaucracy. On the contrary,
it is initiated by personal concerns, awareness and my positioning. I
choose to structure my argument and talk through a personal process that
is being unfolded in parallel with the writing period. Accordingly,
these words are dynamically being reshaped due to the material
constraints of the bureaucratic timeline. A more distant approach became
personal and tangible with auto-ethnographical<sup><span
class="margin-note"> I perceive auto-ethnography as a way to place
myself, my lived experiences, my identities, reflections in the
(artistic) research and talk through them about structures and within
the structures of social, cultural, political frameworks.</span></sup>
elements as I was trying to squish myself and my urgencies under these
thresholds and fit the A4 document lines.</p>
<p>I would like at this point to acknowledge and state explicitly my
privilege recognizing the different levels of otherness produced by the
several bordering mechanisms. My European machine-readable passport as a
designed artifact dictates and facilitates the easiness of my mobility.
In other (many) cases the lack of it creates profoundly a severe
barrier<sup><span class="margin-note"> “Passports still function as a
technology to control movement. Technologies like RFID chips and face
recognition are part of a control system for digital state surveillance.
Designing a passport is relative to design a surveillance tool. The
analysis of passport designs rarely looks at the social consequences of
identification, control, and restriction of movement, which can have
violent consequences.” (Ruben Pater, 2021)</span></sup>. I do not intend
in any respect to compare my case to the lived experiences and struggles
of migrants and refugees. I utilize the paperwork interface of my
smaller-scale story in order to unravel and foreground the
aforementioned questions.</p>
<p>This thesis is very much indebted to some text-vehicles that
mobilized my reflections and nourished the writing process. “Illegal
Traveller, an autoethnography of borders” and “Waiting, a Project in
conversation” both written by Shahram Khosravi as well as “The Utopia of
Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy” by
the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber. Graeber initiated his
research utilizing the horrendous prolonged bureaucratic processes he
had to follow in order to place his sick mother in a nursing home. In
parallel, Khosravi’s work is itself the outgrowth of his own ‘embodied
experience of borders’, of ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented
migrants. I found valuable and inspiring in both texts the personal
filter through which they articulate their positioning and develop
critique.</p>
<p>I follow a zoom-in approach in mapping my thoughts beginning from the
large-scale rigid border as entity and ending up at the document as the
smallest designed artifact of the bureaucratic labyrinth.</p>
<p>In the first chapter, I touch the concept of borders in relation to
migration. I begin with a personal inspection and comprehension of
material borders as entities. Alongside, I interweave in the text the
concept of hospitality as a cultural attitude towards ‘strangers’ from
the state’s perspective. Conditional and unconditional. How the document
I hold in my hands reflects positions on the government’s conditional
hospitality and what constraints it dictates.</p>
<p>In the second chapter, I unpack bureaucracy and focus on its
bordering function. From migration ghost bureaucracies to the
educational bureaucracies of my surroundings to even smaller components
of this apparatus. I end up analyzing the document as a unit within this
complex network. Through the “interrogation” of the form as an artifact
are emerging issues related to language, graphic design and
transparency, universality, and underlying violence.</p>
<p>In the third and last chapter, I bridge the written text with the
ongoing project that runs simultaneously as part of my graduation work
in Experimental Publishing, where I mainly speak through my prototypes.
Talking documents(5) are performative bureaucratic text inspections,
vocal and non-vocal, that intend to create temporal public interventions
through performative readings. The intention is to underline how the
vocalization of bureaucracies as a tool can potentially reveal their
territorial exclusive function and provide space for the invisible
vulnerability.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“on the other side is the river<br />
and I cannot cross it<br />
on the other side is the sea<br />
I cannot bridge it”<br />
(Anzaldua, 1987)</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="borders">borders</h2>
<p>How a border is defined? How, as an entity, does it define? How is it
performed? I used to think of borders in a material concrete way, coming
from a country of the European South that constitutes a rigid, violent
border that repulses and kills thousands of migrants and refugees. In
the following chapter, I will attempt to explore the terrain of material
borders in relation to bureaucracy as another multi-layered filter.</p>
<p>What constitutes a border? Is it a wall, a line, a fence, a machine,
a door, an armed body or a wound on the land? When somebody crosses a
border are they consciously aware of the act of crossing? I am crossing
the pedestrian street and walking on the white stripes to reach the
pedestrian route right across. Are the white stripes a border or a
territory to be crossed to reach another situation? Does the way I
perform my walking when I step onto the white stripes change? Is there
any embodied knowledge about what could be classified as border? Under
which circumstances does this knowledge become canonical? I hop over a
fence that separates one garden from another. What if instead of
assuming that the fence is a device or a furniture or a material of
enclosure, it is just part of the same land? The process or act of
jumping a fence can be itself a moment of segregation and a moment of
re-establishing or demonstrating the bordering function of it.</p>
<p>Borders could be considered as devices of both exclusion and
inclusion that filter people and define forms of circulation and
movement in ways no less violent than those applied in repulsive
measures. Closure and exclusion are only one function of the
nation-state borders. Of course, borders are not always that visible or
treated and perceived as borders, as Rumford argues they are “designed
not to look like borders, located in one place but projected in another
entirely” (Rumford, cited by Keshavarz, 2016, p.298)</p>
<p>As institutions, they seem to be much more complex, flexible, or even
penetrable in comparison with the traditional image of a wall as a
bordering device that demonstrates in a way itself. Crossing and borders
are inherently defined in relation to each other. “Where there is a
border, there is also a border crossing, legal as well as illegal”
(Khosravi, 2010).</p>
<h3 id="conditional-hospitality">conditional hospitality</h3>
<p>I started thinking about hospitality as a cultural behavior and as an
inseparable term in the context of borders due to a recent personal
bureaucratic experience. Hospitality can be instrumentalized to describe
an individual’s as well as a nation’s response towards strangers within
their enclosed territory - a property, a home, a land, a country. What
does hospitality mean and how hospitality under specific circumstances
can be a tool in the hands of a state?</p>
<p>I will share a personal story related to hospitality and bureaucracy.
I was recently evicted from my previous house [31/01/2024] due to a
trapping contract situation. My former roommates and I were forced to
terminate our previous contract and sign a new one that further limited
our rights. The bureaucratic free market language of the contract, the
foreign law language barrier, the threats of the agent and the precarity
of being homeless in a foreign country forced us to sign the new rental
agreement which was the main reason for our eviction. Currently, I am
hosted temporarily by friends until I find a more permanent
accommodation. Meanwhile, the government requires me to declare the new
address which I do not have within five days of my moving. Consequently,
I have to follow another bureaucratic path. This involves requesting
permission for a short-term postal address while declaring the addresses
of my current hosts [4/02/2024]. I gathered the required documents, I
processed a 9-page-text and another one with the personal data of my
hosts and myself and answered questions about:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>why don’t I have a house,<br />
who are the people who host me,<br />
what is my relationship with them,<br />
where do I sleep,<br />
where do I store my belongings,<br />
how many people are hosting me and accordingly their personal
data,<br />
for how long,<br />
why I cannot register there,<br />
what days of the week do I stay in the one house and<br />
what days do I stay in the other house,<br />
whether and how am I searching for a permanent place and<br />
what is the tangible proof of my search?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All these questions provoked thinking around the concept of
conditional hospitality as a behavior of the state towards strangers. I
can see that on a smaller scale it is being applied to the hospitality I
receive from my friends in the middle of an emergency. I am wondering,
though, whether is it that important for the government to know on whose
couch I sleep or where I store my belongings. The omnipresent gaze of a
state who has the right to know every small detail about myself while at
the same time questioning people’s hospitality in case of emergency. It
seems that forms of knowledge are inseparably related to forms of power.
It will take 8 weeks for my request to be processed and for the
government to approve or reject if I deserve my friends’
hospitality.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Today as yesterday, her land and her time are stolen, only because
she is told that she has arrived too late. Much too late”<br />
(Khosravi, 2021)</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="waiting">waiting</h3>
<p>Waiting can be considered as a dramaturgical means embedded in
bureaucratic procedures that camouflage power relations through the
manipulation of people’s time. When people are in the middle of a
bureaucratic process and waiting for the government’s decision on their
case or just waiting for their turn. “The neoliberal technologies of
citizenship enacted through keeping people waiting for jobs, education,
housing, health care, social welfare or pensions turn citizens into
patients of the state” (Khosravi, 2021). I waited two weeks for a
response from the municipality only to discover that my request was
rejected [16/02/2024].</p>
<p>Contemporary border practices mirror past colonial practices, as they
exploit migrants’ time by keeping them in prolonged waiting, “like the
way colonial capitalism transformed lands to wastelands to plunder the
wealth underneath” (Khosravi, 2021). The current border regime, known by
extended waiting periods and constant delays, is part of a larger
project aimed at taking away wealth, labor, and time through colonial
accumulation and immediate expulsion.</p>
<p>When someone opens their house to a guest, a stranger, someone in
need, means that they open their property to someone. Hospitality is
interweaved with a sense of ownership over something. Expanding the
concept of hospitality to a nation-scale, we could say that the
nation-building process involves people asserting artificial ownership
over a territory even if they do not own any property within this
land.</p>
<p>Conditional hospitality is tied to a sense of offering back to the
home-land-nation-state-country as a way to win or trade your permission
to enter and enjoy the hospitality of a place. Coming from specific
places in comparison to others, having to offer some special skills or
your labor - if it is asked for - can be possible conditions that may
allow somebody to receive hospitality. I would say that an efficient
check of these conditions is regularly facilitated through bureaucratic
channels. The concept of unconditional-conditional hospitality is
closely related to exchange. When you do not have something to offer
according to the needs or expectations of a “household”, you may not
receive the gift of hospitality.</p>
<p>The notion of hospitality is excessively instrumentalized within the
Greek context portrayed as an “ideal” intertwined with the
nation-building narrative and as a foundational quality - product by the
Greek tourist industry. However, the Greek sea has been an endless
refugee graveyard and the eastern Aegean islands a “warehouse of
souls”<sup><span class="margin-note">For further reading:
https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/</span></sup>
for the last many years. In this case, conditional hospitality applies
primarily to those who invest in and consume.</p>
<p>Hospitality can function as a filtration mechanism that permits
access – lets in – the ones who deserve it, those who have “passports,
valid visas, adequate bank statements, or invitations” (Khosravi, 2010).
By doing this, unproductive hospitality is being avoided due to
sovereign state’s border regulations and checks. Conditional
hospitality, is about worthiness, is directed towards migrants deemed
good and productive – skilled and capable for assimilation- or a tiny
minority of vulnerable and marginalized asylum seekers who lack
representation. Only in a world where the nation-state’s boundaries have
been dismantled and where the undocumented, stateless, non-citizens are
unconditionally accepted, only at this moment, we are able to imagine
the “political and ethical survival of humankind” (Agamben, 2000).
Hospitality does not seem a matter of choice but a profound urgency, if
humanity desires to foster a future together.</p>
<h4 id="the-right-to-have-rights">“the right to have rights”</h4>
<p>(Arendt, as cited by Khosravi, 2010, p.121) What about the crossers
who managed to travel and reach the desirable “there”, the ones who
transcended the borders and the control checks of the ministries of
defense(7), the ones who enter but do not own papers, the paperless?
What does it mean to be documented and what is inefficiently documented
within a territory? They are threatened if they get caught by
authorities and also according to the official narrative, they threaten.
Since the physical mechanisms of bordering did not succeed in repulsing
them, the bureaucratic border appears as an additional layer of
filtration. The undocumented are non-citizens, they might be crossers or
burners(8), both, or even none. “Undocumented migrants and unauthorized
border crossers are polluted and polluting because of their very
unclassifiability” (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). The loss of citizenship,
denaturalisation, makes somebody denaturalised, they are rendered
unnatural. “Citizenship has become the nature of being human” (Koshravi,
2010).</p>
<p>According to Hannah Arendt, the right to have rights and claim
somebody else’s rights is the only human right (Arendt, as cited by
Khosravi, 2010, p. 121). The foundational issue with the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights is its dependence on the nation-state
system. Since human rights are grounded on civil rights, which are
essentially citizens’ rights, human rights are tied to the nation-state
system. Consequently, human rights can be materialized only in a
political community. “Loss of citizenship also means loss of human
rights” (Khosravi, 2010)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“…<sup><span class="margin-note">This is a transcribed recording of
my phone during a protest on migration at Dam Square in Amsterdam. I
insert part of the speech of a Palestinian woman addressing the matter
of undocumentedness. Date and time of the recording 18th of June 2023,
15:05.</span></sup> I am here for the rights of the children which
haven’t be in the taking part in the education since they have
undocumented mothers and they are more than
<em><sup><span class="margin-note">“</em>” means
undecipherable</span></sup> years. I am here to represent mothers who
are looking for a place to have a sense of belonging or how long are you
trying to continue humiliating them and the female gender. I am here to
express my frustration with IND<sup><span
class="margin-note">Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst - Dutch
Immigration and Naturalisation Service</span></sup>. So frustrated. And
I will not stop talking about democracy. Democracy is the rule of law
where everybody feels included. Democracy is a rule of law where
everybody feels * We, undocumented people, we don’t feel a sense of
belonging from the system.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="bureaucracy-as-immaterial-border">bureaucracy as immaterial
border</h2>
<p>Apart from the rigid visible borders, bureaucracy related to
migrants, refugees and asylum seekers can also constitute an in-between
less visible borderland. I used to perceive bureaucracy as an immaterial
and intangible entity. However, now I can claim that this assumption is
not true. Bureaucracy is material and spatial and can be seen as an
apparatus, a machine, a circuitry, an institution, a territory, a
borderland, a body, a zone – a “dead zone of imagination” as Graeber
claims. It can be inscribed on piles of papers, folders, drawers,
booklets, passports, IDs, documents, screens, tapes, bodies, hospital
corridors, offices, permissions to enter, stay, work, travel, exist,
come and go, leave, visit family, bury a friend.</p>
<p>Bureaucratic documents especially those related to migration, can
become territories or should be interpreted “as sites where social
interactions happen, where power relations unfold and are contested”
(Cretton, Geoffrion, 2021). When these bureaucratic objects are used and
manipulated, they can constitute sites of “confrontation, reproduction,
negotiation and performance” (Cretton, Geoffrion, 2021) shaping social
relations and producing meaning.</p>
<p>Bureaucracy related to asylum seekers reveals the profound bordering
nature of these practices, as a continuous process of producing
otherness. Accordingly, I see bureaucracy as a practice that raises
material and symbolic walls for specific groups of people who are
rendered unwanted and unwelcome because they dared to cross the borders
of the Global North. It is as if they could never manage to eventually
arrive and shelter their lives within the desirable “there”<sup><span
class="margin-note">I am referring to the desirable potential
destinations of migrants and refugees corresponding mainly to Global
North countries.</span></sup>. “In these bordering processes, we can
detect the “coloniality of asylum”<sup><span class="margin-note">In this
text they insert the concept of the “coloniality of asylum” introduced
by Picozza, which talks about how asylum systems are intertwined with
colonial legacies and power dynamics. These systems are often colonial
structures reinforcing hierarchies between nations and reproducing
patterns of domination and oppression. In this framework, asylum is not
just about offering protection but also about regulating and managing
populations in a way that reflects colonial relationships.</span></sup>
(Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). Bureaucracies in practice act as filters,
determining who, from an institutional standpoint, deserves to receive
protection and who does not. They operate as systems that classify
non-citizens and place them in a social hierarchy of disproportionate
unequal obligations, lack of rights and access to institutional
support.</p>
<h3 id="higher-educations-expanding-bureaucracy">higher education’s
expanding bureaucracy</h3>
<p>While I had this inherent concern about borders and bureaucratic
structures in relation to migration, I decided to start zooming in and
explore my own bureaucratic surroundings through my personal lens. As a
student, I was eager to understand and dig into the educational
institutions’ bureaucratic mechanisms being driven by smaller-scale
bureaucratic struggles and peers’ narratives, stories and experiences.
How can higher education in a European country reflect policies around
migration and border control less profoundly. How can education filter
and distinguish, how it can reproduce efficiently itself?</p>
<p>I gradually started perceiving the bureaucratic apparatus as an
omnipresent immaterial border - a ghost infrastructure - that one always
encounters but does not really see, a borderland that lies in the gray
zone between visibility and invisibility. Bureaucracy renders us
“stupid” and vulnerable in front of it. It is rarely questioned but it
should be performed efficiently for people to exist properly.</p>
<p>The contradiction embedded in many cultural and educational
institutions lies in the level of unawareness regarding surveillance via
multiple bureaucratic rituals that (re)produce docile behaviors. How
these mechanisms are masked and standing in the margins of the visible
nonvisible sphere.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students
to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring
over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance
of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on that
fact that, had they insisted their right to enter the stacks without
showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been
summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be
required.”<br />
(Graeber, 2015)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The genuine essence of education is not bureaucratic at all, neither
does it have to fit and ground its foundations under a bureaucratic
roof. “The pedagogical process runs counter to the hierarchical,
impersonal qualities of bureaucracy” (Cunningham, 2017). However, people
working in educational institutions acknowledge the fact that entrenched
bureaucratic systems impose their material constraints on teaching
structures and on how these actors in this process interact with each
other.“Students and staff are treated as human capital” (Cunningham,
2017). This determination can dehumanize people involved, like when
“faculty-as-labor” and “students-as-consumers” are marginalized and
treated as just variables.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a
document of barbarism”<br />
Walter Benjamin</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="the-document">the document</h3>
<p>From fences and armed police to nation-state mechanism of
less-material bordering to bureaucracy to the elements of bureaucracy to
the document itself as the minimum unit of an apparatus. Understanding
and unhiding the violence of a form -violence materialized and at the
same time camouflaged by the language structure, the vocabulary, the
graphic design, their ability to render subjectivities that fit and
don’t fit within the controlled territory of the lines of the form. A
language that fragments, classifies, places and un-places. Thus
bureaucratic apparatus is something more than a metaphor it is also a
symbol. It is hard to see that there are many more layers beneath the
purpose it propagates. A metaphor that is so perfectly materialized as
well as naturalized that you cannot even see it.</p>
<h4 id="bureaucracy-as-textual-institution">bureaucracy as textual
institution</h4>
<p>The bureaucratic apparatus can be considered as something more than
an infrastructure that organizes institutions, markets, states, etc. It
can constitute itself an institution, a textual institution. As the
factory generates commodities and sets them within a circuit of motion,
bureaucracy generates documents and sets them throughout a communicative
circuitry (Cunningham, 2017). An institution that organizes and
(infra)structures other institutions and similarly reproduces itself
through text. The materiality of a text document reflects the ideology
of the interconnected institutions and their underlying bureaucratic
systems. Language occupies a dual contradictory role as the foundational
element of bureaucracy. Language can become a shroud to conceal the
violence and reinforce hierarchical structures and simultaneously can be
transformed into the rigid rational cell itself. They shape their own
narratives, they reflect the institutional narratives.</p>
<h4 id="the-myth-of-universality">the myth of universality</h4>
<p>One of the great powers of bureaucracies is their ability to render
themselves transparent. It seems that bureaucracy does not have to say
anything more beyond itself, is self-referential and self-contained. It
is boring or most likely is supposed to be boring. “One can describe the
ritual surrounding it. One can observe how people talk about or react to
it” (Graeber, 2015). The supposed universality of the form which is
carefully constructed can be partly attributed to the individuality and
impersonality of many bureaucratic processes. “Bureaucracies operate
through an assemblage of hierarchy, impersonality, and procedure in
order to complete organizational tasks with maximum efficiency” (Weber,
as cited by Cunningham, 2017, p. 307).</p>
<p>I had to open a discussion with students from non-EEA (non European
Economic Area) countries in order to understand that they have to
conduct tuberculosis x-rays<sup><span class="margin-note">“To keep the
Residence Permit, some non-European students need to visit the Dutch
Public Health Authority (GGD) after they arrived in the Netherlands.
They will undergo a medical test for tuberculosis (TB). This is a
requirement from the IND (Dutch Immigration Office)”. (Introduction
days, 2021)</span></sup> when they arrive in the Netherlands. It seems
that for the Dutch state, their bodies might be more threatening than
bodies coming from a European country. The relativization in the quality
and the quantity of paperwork requested from different “groups” of
applicants in a specific context deconstructs the myth of the
universality of the bureaucratic form.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly the success of bureaucracy is drawn from its efficiency
in relation to schematization as an efficient material quality. “Whether
it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is
always a matter of simplification (Cunningham, 2017)”. Bureaucracies
ignore the social existence of a person and fragment, classify and
define them under specific perspectives. Why do they ask for this
information instead of others? “Why place of birth and not, say, place
where you went to grade school? What’s so important about the
signature?” (Graeber, 2015)</p>
<h4 id="materiality-underlying-violence">materiality-underlying
violence</h4>
<p>There is a great materiality in bureaucracies. Bureaucratic
procedures are often compared to a labyrinth which appears as a
similarly complex structure constituted by simple geometrical shapes
(Weber, as cited by Cunningham, 2017, p.310). Bureaucratic documents can
be complicated and multiple due to this infinite accumulation of really
simple but at the same time contradictory elements. A constant
juxtaposition of letters, symbols, stamps, signatures, paper, ink,
barcodes, QR codes within a circuit of workers, interweaved and
interconnected offices, repetitive performative tasks and rituals.</p>
<p>Underneath every bureaucratic document, there is a good amount of
graphic design labor. What kind of visual strategy is embedded in
administrative objects that the design aspect of these artifacts appears
to be invisible? The material decisions applied as well as the material
constraints attributed to the document can transform or produce
different textual meanings and consequently understandings.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“This does not mean that constraints limit meaning, but on the
contrary, constitute it; meaning cannot appear where freedom is absolute
or nonexistent: the stem of meaning is that of a supervised
freedom”<br />
(Roland Barthes, 1983)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When I encountered the green logo of the municipality of Rotterdam I
did not cultivate any feelings of enthusiasm or even boredom. A big
calligraphic “R” with the flawless green ribbons that penetrate it on
the left corner of a 229x162 mm standardized dimension folder with a
transparent rectangle that reveals my inscribed name and surname from
the inside part. I did not put any aesthetic critique over this but I
rather felt this rush of stress for the expected response to my
objection letter or a fine or a tax to be paid within a specific
timeline cause another fine would come if I did not comply with
this.</p>
<p>One month ago (from the writing present), my friend Chae made for my
birthday this amazing Dutch-government-like biscuit forms, recreating
the entire layout of the document using the interface of a crunchy
biscuit. She used the same color blue scheme and she placed the biscuit
form inside the same standardized dimension folder 229x162 mm with the
same transparent layer that reveals my name and surname. According to
literary critic and theorist Katherine Hayles:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“to alter the physical form of the artifacts is to change the act of
reading and understanding but mostly you transform the metaphoric and
symbolic network that structures the relation of world to world. To
change the material artifacts is to transform the context and
circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably change
the meaning of the word itself. This transformation of meaning is
especially possible when the words interact with the inscription
technologies that produce them”<br />
(Hayles, 2002)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the latter case, the inscription technology used is the sugar blue
paste and the handwriting of Chae. The text in the white-blue government
document forces a different reading from the white-blue biscuit
document, even if they carry the same bits of information. If I do not
read carefully the text in the folder and if I do not act according to
the suggested actions there is a threat. The level of threat varies in
relation to the case, the identities of the holder, the state, the
context, etc. There is no room for negotiation in bureaucracy and this
is the omnipresent underlying violence. The threat of violence shrouded
within its structures and foundations does not permit any questioning
but on the contrary creates “willful blindness” towards them<sup><span
class="margin-note">I am referring to those people subjecting others to
bureaucratic circles shaped by structurally violent situations as well
as people in positions of privilege who deliberately ignore these
facts.</span></sup>. Bureaucracies are not stupid inherently rather they
manage and coerce processes that reproduce docile and stupid
behaviors.</p>
<figure>
<div class="item"><img src="chae_form.jpg"/>
</div>
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">The birthday biscuit that Chae made,
re-creating the Dutch government form</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2 id="vocal-archives-talking-documents">vocal archives-talking
documents</h2>
<p>This chapter is mainly a constellation of some prototypes I created
while writing and coping with personal bureaucratic challenges. I
provided some further space for my anxiety by unpacking and exploring
the material conditions that nourished it within this timeline.</p>
<p>An administrative decision on a case may not seem necessarily hurtful
in linguistic terms. However, it can be injurious and severely
threatening. By performing the bureaucratic archival material of my
interactions with the government, I aim to draw a parallel narrative
highlighting the bordering role of bureaucracy and the concealed
underlying violence it perpetuates.</p>
<p>A bureaucratic text does not just describe a reality, a decision, a
case or an action, but on the contrary, it is capable of changing the
reality or the order of things that is described via these words.
Bureaucratic official documents are inherently performative. These texts
regulate and bring situations into being.</p>
<p>My intention in transforming bureaucratic texts into “playable”
scenarios is to explore how embodying these texts in public through
collective speech<sup><span class="margin-note">I imagine the theatrical
play as a “human microphone”, a low-tech amplification device. A group
of people performs the bureaucratic scenario in chorus, out loud, in the
corridor of the school’s building, in the main hall, at the square right
across, outside of the municipality building. The term is borrowed from
the protests of the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011. People were
gathered around the speaker repeating what the speaker was saying in
order to ensure that everyone could hear the announcements during large
assemblies. Human bodies became a hack in order to replace the forbidden
technology. In New York it is required to ask for permission from
authorities to use “amplified sound” in public space.</span></sup> can
provoke different forms of interpretations and open tiny conceptual
holes. “The meaning of a performative act is to be found in this
apparent coincidence of signifying and enacting” (Butler, 1997). The
performative bureaucratic utterances - the vocal documents - attempt to
bring into existence -by overidentifying, exaggerating, acting- the
discomfort, the threat, the violence which is mainly condemned into
private individual spheres.</p>
<p>How performing a collection of small bureaucratic stories can
function as an instant micro intervention and potentially produce a
public discourse. Where do we perform this speech, where and when does
the “theater” take place? Who is the audience? I am particularly
interested in the site-specificity of these “acts”. How can these
re-enactments be situated in an educational context and examine its
structures? Is it possible for this small-scale publics to provoke the
emergence of temporal spaces of marginal vulnerable voicings? According
to the agonistic approach of the political theorist Chantal Mouffe,
critical art is art that provokes dissensus, that makes visible what the
dominant narrative tends to undermine and displace. “It is constituted
by a multiplicity of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all
those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony”
(Mouffe, 2008).</p>
<p>I started working and engaging more with different bureaucratic
material that my peers and I encountered regularly or appeared in our
(e)mail (in)boxes and are partly related to our identities as foreign
students coming from different places. I chose to start touching and
looking for various bureaucracies that surround me as a personal filter
towards it. From identification documents and application forms to
rental contracts, funding applications, visa applications, quality
assurance questionnaires related to the university, assessment criteria,
supermarket point gathering cards, receipts. A sequence of locked doors
to be unlocked more or less easily via multiple bureaucratic keys. The
methods and tools used to scrutinize the administrative artifacts are
not rigid or distinct. It is mainly a “collection” of small bureaucratic
experiments - closely related to language as well as the performative
“nature” of these texts themselves. I was intrigued by how transforming
the material conditions of a piece of text could influence the potential
understandings and perceptions of its meaning.</p>
<h2 id="prototypes">prototypes</h2>
<h4 id="section">1.</h4>
<p><strong>Title:</strong> “Quality Assurance Questionnaire
Censoring”<br />
<strong>When:</strong> October 2023<br />
<strong>Where:</strong> XPUB studio wall<br />
<strong>Who:</strong> myself</p>
<p><strong>Description:</strong> Some months ago my classmates and I received an email
with a questionnaire aimed at preparing us for the upcoming quality
assurance meeting within the school. Ada and I had a meeting, in an
empty white room with closed doors, with an external collaborator of the
university. The main request was to rate and answer the pre-formulated
questions covering issues about performance, different and multiple
topics related to the course, the teaching staff, the facilities, the
tools provided. The micro linguistic experiment of highlighting,
censoring and annotating this document aimed for an understanding of
what a quality assurance meeting is within an educational
institution.</p>
<p><strong>Reflections-Thoughts:</strong> This experiment was my first attempt to start
interrogating and observing the language and the structure of a
bureaucratic document. How these “desired” standards propagated through
text. What is the role of the student-client in these processes as an
esoteric gaze of control over the course and their teachers? My focus
was to locate and accumulate all the wording related to measurements,
rate, quantity, assessments, statistics. Highlighting the
disproportionate amount of metrics-related vocabulary was enough to
craft the narrative around this process.</p>
<p>These ‘rituals’ are components of a larger “culture of evidence”,
serving as a tool that blurs the distinction between discourse and
reality (Cunningham, 2017). This culture of evidence influences how
people perceive and understand information. The primary purposes of
these metrics are twofold: they play a role in the marketing sphere,
attracting potential students to the university as well as they are
utilized in interactions and negotiations with the government, which
increasingly cuts budgets allocated to universities.</p>
<figure>
<img src="quality.jpg"
alt="The linguistic experiment of the Quality Assurance Questionnaire Document" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">The linguistic experiment of the Quality
Assurance Questionnaire Document</figcaption>
</figure>
<h4 id="section-1">2.</h4>
<p><strong>Title:</strong> “Department of Bureaucracy and Administration
Customs Enforcement”<br />
<strong>When:</strong> November 2023<br />
<strong>Where:</strong> Leeszaal<sup><span class="margin-note">Community
Library in Rotterdam West</span></sup><br />
<strong>Who:</strong> XPUB peers, tutors, friends, alumni</p>
<p><strong>Description: </strong>During the first public moment at Leeszaal, I decided to
embody and enact the traditional role of a bureaucrat in a graphic and
possibly absurd way performing a small “theatrical play”. I prepared a
3-page and a 1-page document incorporating bureaucratic-form aesthetics
and requesting applicants’ fake data and their answers for questions
related to educational bureaucracy. People receiving an applicant number
at the entrance of Leeszaal, queuing to collect their documents from the
administration “office”, filling forms, waiting, receiving stamps,
giving fingerprints and signing, waiting again were the main components
of this act.</p>
<p><strong>Reflections-Thoughts:</strong> Beyond the information gathered through my
bureaucratic-like questionnaires, the most crucial element of this
experiment was the understanding and highlighting of the hidden
performative elements that entrench these “rituals”. It was amazing
seeing the audience becoming instantly actors of the play enacting
willingly a administrative ritualistic scene. The provided context of
this “play” was a social library hosting a masters course public event
on graduation projects. I am wondering whether this asymphony between
the repetitive bureaucratic acts within the space of Leeszaal, where
such acts are not expected to be performed, evoked contradictory
feelings or thoughts. Over-identifying with a role was being
instrumentalized as an “interrogation” of one’s own involvement in the
reproduction of social discourses, power, authority, hegemony.</p>
<figure>
<img src="queue.jpg"
alt="Leeszaal West Rotterdam - November 2023 – People queuingI was thinking of queues as a spatial oppressive tool used often by (bureaucratic) authorities. The naturalized image of bodies-in-a-line waiting for “something” to happen at “some point” under the public gaze in an efficiently defined area. to receive their documents and sign" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">Leeszaal West Rotterdam - November 2023 –
People queuing<sup><span class="margin-note">I was thinking of queues as
a spatial oppressive tool used often by (bureaucratic) authorities. The
naturalized image of bodies-in-a-line waiting for “something” to happen
at “some point” under the public gaze in an efficiently defined
area.</span></sup> to receive their documents and sign</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="mitsi.jpg"
alt="One of the forms that the audience had to fill out during the Lesszaal event" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">One of the forms that the audience had to
fill out during the Lesszaal event</figcaption>
</figure>
<h4 id="section-2">3.</h4>
<p><strong>Title:</strong> “Passport Reading Session”<br />
<strong>When:</strong> January 2024<br />
<strong>Where:</strong> XML – XPUB studio<br />
<strong>Who:</strong> Ada, Aglaia, Stephen, Joseph</p>
<p><strong>Description:</strong> This prototype is a collective passport reading session.
I asked my classmates to bring their passports or IDs and sitting in a
circular set up we attempted to “scan” our documents. Every contributor
took some time to browse, annotate verbally, interpret, understand,
analyze, vocalize their thoughts on these artifacts, approaching them
from various perspectives. The three passports and one ID card were all
coming from European countries.</p>
<p>Reflections-Thoughts: For the first time I observed this object so
closely. The documentation medium was a recording device, Ada’s mobile
phone. The recording was transcribed by vosk<sup><span
class="margin-note">Vosk is an offline open-source speech recognition
toolkit.</span></sup> and myself and a small booklet of our passport
readings was created.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“So the object here is like not by random it comes from the history
of nation-states and how nation-states and nationalities created like a
form of identity. So nation-state is actually a recent invention that
came into existence over the last two hundred fifty years in the form as
we know it nowadays, in the form of democratic capitalism, before like
monarchies and so on and each citizen of such a nation-state got also
kind of a particular identity”,<br />
Joseph says about his ID card.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We read the embedded signs, symbols, categories, texts, magical
numbers in our passports that construct our profiles. Seeing someone’s
passport, ID cards, visas, travel documents might mean that you are able
to understand how easy or not is for them to move, what are their travel
paths, how departure or arrival is smooth or cruel. Are there emotions
along the way? For some people these are documents “that embody power —
minimal or no waiting, peaceful departure, warm and confident arrival”
(Khosravi, 2021).</p>
<p><a href="passport1.png">Part of the A6 booklet of the
transcription of the passport readings session</a></p>
<p><a href="passport2.png"></a></p>
<h4 id="section-3">4.</h4>
<p><strong>Title:</strong> “Postal Address Application Scenario”<br />
<strong>When:</strong> February 2024<br />
<strong>Where:</strong> Room in Wijnhaven Building, 4th floor<br />
<strong>Who:</strong> XPUB 1,2,3, tutors, Leslie</p><br>
<p><strong>Description:</strong> This scenario is the first part of a series of small
episodes that construct a bureaucratic story unfolding the processes of
my communication with the government. The body of the text of the
“theatrical” script is sourced from the original documents as well as
recordings of the conversation I had with the municipality throughout
this process. I preserved the sequence of the given sentences and by
discarding the graphic design of the initial form, I structured and
repurposed the text into a scenario. The main actors were two
bureaucrats vocalizing the questions addressed in the form, in turns and
sometimes speaking simultaneously like a choir, three applicants
answering the questions similarly while a narrator mainly provided the
audience with the context and the storyline constructing the scenery of
the different scenes.</p>
<p>The first and the last moment of the performance was during a
semi-public tryout moment where XPUB peers performed the distributed
scenario in a white room on the 4th floor of the Winjhaven building.
They were seated having as a border a black long-table. A border
furniture between the bureaucrats and the applicants. The narrator was
standing still behind them while they were surrounded by the audience.
The main documentation media of the act were a camera on a tripod, a
recorder in the middle of the table and myself reconstructing the memory
of the re-enactement at that present - 6 days later.</p><br>
<p>Reflections-Thoughts: Vocalizing and embodying the bureaucratic
questions was quite useful in acknowledging the government’s voice and
presence as something tangible rather than a floating, arbitrary entity.
It was interesting observing the bureaucrats performing their role with
confidence and entitlement, contrasting with the applicants who appeared
to be more stressed to respond convincingly and promptly. There is a
notable distinction between performativity and performance. Performing
consciously and theatrically amplifying real bureaucratic texts by
occupying roles and overidentifying with them can constitute a
diffractive moment, a tool itself. From bureaucratic text to
performative text scenarios to speech. The embedded (but rather
unconscious) performativity of “real” bureaucratic rituals establishes
and empowers (bureaucratic) institutions through repetitive acts. These
theatrical moments attempt to highlight the shrouded performative
elements of these processes.</p>
<p><a href="postal.png">A6 booklet of the first chapter of the
“theatrical” scenario created out of the Postal Address Application
documents and performed by XPUB peers</a></p>
<h2 id="conclusion">conclusion</h2>
<h3
id="next-chapters-of-the-case-with-reference-number-a.b.2024.4.03188">next
chapters of the case with reference number A.B.2024.4.03188</h3>
<p>I expanded the “play” by incorporating additional “scenes” sourced
again from the documents accompanying the ongoing “conversation with the
government”. Two weeks after submitting my application for a short-term
postal address [16/02/2024], I received a letter from the municipality
stating their rejection of my request and warning me of potential fines
if I fail to declare a valid address and provide a rental contract.
After extensive communication with the municipality, I decided to
respond to this decision by writing and sending an objection letter
[19/02/2024]. The objections committee received my letter [21/02/2024],
and after some days, they issued a confirmation letter outlining the
following steps of the objection process which involves hearings with
municipality lawyers and further investigation of my case. The textual
components collaged for the next “episodes” are sourced from the
transcribed recordings of my actual conversations with the municipality
clerks, my objection letter, the confirmation documents including the
steps I am required to take.</p>
<p>My case has finished by this time. I withdrew my objection
[7/03/2024] and I de-registered [11/03/2024] after a good amount of
stress and precarity. My bureaucratic literature is meant to be read and
voiced collectively. People’s bureaucratic literatures should be read
and voiced collectively.</p>
<p>My intention is to facilitate a series of collective performative
readings of bureaucratic scenarios or other portable paperwork stories
as a way of publishing and inspecting bureaucratic bordering
infrastructures. The marginal voices of potential applicants are
embodying and performing a role. “The speech does not only describe but
brings things into existence” (Austin, 1975). I would like to stretch
the limits of dramaturgical speech through vocalizing a document in
public with others and turn an individual administrative case into a
public one. How do the inscribed words in the documents are not
descriptive but on the contrary “are instrumentalized in getting things
done” (Butler, 1997). Words as active agents. I am inviting past and
future applicants, traumatized students, injured bearers, bureaucratic
border crossers, stressed expired document holders or just curious
people to share, vocalize, talk through, read out loud, amplify,
(un)name, unplace, dismantle the injurious words of these artifacts.</p>
<p><a href="objection1.png"></a> <a
href="objection2.png"></a></p>
<h4 id="we-didnt-cross-the-border-the-border-crossed-us20">“we didn’t
cross the border, the border crossed us”(20)</h4>
<p>As I sit in the waiting area at the gate B7 in the airport preparing
to come back to the Netherlands, I am writing the last lines of this
text. I am thinking of all these borders and gates that my body was able
to pass through smoothly, carrying my magical object through which I
embody power- at least within this context. However, I yearn for a
reality where we stop looking at those bodies that cross the
multifaceted borders and get crossed and entrenched by them, but on the
contrary we start interrogating and shouting at the contexts and the
frameworks that construct them and render them invisible, natural and
powerful.</p>
<h2 id="references">references</h2>
<p>Agamben, G. (2000) Means without end: Notes on politics. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.</p>
<p>Anzaldua, G. (1987) Borderlands - la Frontera: The new mestiza. 2nd
ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.</p>
<p>Austin, J. L. (1975) “lECTURE VII”, in How to do things with words.
Oxford University Press, pp.83-93.</p>
<p>Barthes, R. (1983) Fashion system. Translated by M. Ward and R.
Howard. Hill &amp; Wang.</p>
<p>Border controls (2017) Defensie.nl. Available at:
https://english.defensie.nl/topics/border-controls</p>
<p>Borelli, C., Poy, A., and Rué, A. (2023). “Governing Asylum without
‘Being There’: Ghost Bureaucracy, Outsourcing, and the Unreachability of
the State.” <em>Social Sciences</em>, 12(3), 169. [DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030169]</p>
<p>Butler, J. (1997) Excitable speech: A politics of the performative.
London, England: Routledge.</p>
<p>Cretton, V., Geoffrion, K. (2021). “Bureaucratic Routes to Migration:
Migrants’ Lived Experience of Paperwork, Clerks and Other Immigration
Intermediaries”, University of Victoria</p>
<p>Cunningham, J. (2017), “Rhetorical Tension in Bureaucratic
University”, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA</p>
<p>Graeber, D. (2015) The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and
the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House
Publishing</p>
<p>Hayles, N. K. (2002) Writing Machines. London, England: MIT
Press.</p>
<p>Introduction days (2021) Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Available at:
https://www.rotterdamuas.com/study-information/practical-information/international-introduction-days/Tuberculosis-test/
(Accessed: April 8, 2024).</p>
<p>Keshavarz, M. (2016) Design-Politics: An Inquiry into Passports,
Camps and Borders. Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society.</p>
<p>Khosravi, S. (2010) “illegal” traveller: An auto-ethnography of
borders. 2010th ed. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.</p>
<p>Khosravi, S. (ed.) (2021) Waiting - A Project in Conversation.
transcript Verlag.</p>
<p>M’charek, A. (2020) “Harraga: Burning borders, navigating
colonialism,” The sociological review, 68(2), pp. 418–434. doi:
10.1177/0038026120905491.</p>
<p>Malichudis, S. (2020) How the Aegean islands became a warehouse of
souls, Solomon. Available at:
https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/
(Accessed: April 7, 2024).</p>
<p>McKittrick, K. (2021) Dear science and other stories. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.</p>
<p>Mouffe, C. (2008) ‘Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic
Internvention’. Open:14 Art as a Public Issue, No.14 (2008), p.4</p>
<p>Pater, R. (2021) Caps lock: How capitalism took hold of graphic
design, and how to escape from it. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Valiz.</p>
<p>Picozza, F. (2021). The coloniality of asylum : mobility, autonomy
and solidarity in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis. London: Rowman
&amp; Littlefield Publishers.</p>
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