Bureaucratic documentation – ruptures in the fabrication of sense

In a new project with the tentative name ‘Bureaucratic documentation – ruptures in the fabrication of sense’ I wish to explore further the practices of the Danish civil service. The project departs form the observation, that one of the most central handicrafts and modes of cultural expression in contemporary Northern European societies is the crafting of documents whether virtually displayed on the internet or in databases or displayed in physical printing. Rather than taking a traditional discursive approach to the study of documents, in this project I will in accordance with the key-theme of distortion explore how a particular materiality (the bureaucratic document) create non-linear and absurd connections between things, ideas, and people. Professor of Law and Anthropology, Annelise Riles from Cornell University has confirmed her interest in assisting the development of such a project. At this stage I propose the research themes of the study to be:
A mongrel handicraft – ‘evidence-based policy-making’: Empirically a new research project will focus on the crafting of a particular kind of bureaucratic document – those crafted as part of the efforts to make evidence-based policy. This will bring together two types of handicraft traditionally kept apart: that of policy-making and the art of political compromises and that of scientific research. The efforts to make evidence-based policy entail a much more active involvement of the civil service in the production of ‘knowledge’ or ‘evidence’ on which to base political interventions. This includes for instance the commissioning and interpretation of scientific research or the planning and execution of controlled trials and other projects based on advanced methodologies from the scientific community. The efforts to produced evidence-based policy have been problematized extensively in both the British House of Commons (House of Commons 2006) and by the research community (Boden & Epstein 2006). The critique from both parties question the assumption that science and politics are compatible handicrafts – the first ideally being driven by curiosity, method and a dedication to ‘facts’ of various kinds while the latter tend to be driven by the need to strike agreements and to compromise, to secure political backing and by a commitment to the constitution and the government program. The project aims to explore this new mongrel handicraft which I term ‘mongrel’ due to its mixed heritage. I will do so by looking at the production of documents involved in the efforts – such as research reviews, project descriptions, journal entries, and preparatory work for new laws or action plans. The project thereby inserts itself within the empirical framework of a recent trend in anthropology which takes the written document as the subject of research and analyses while exploring the practices of fabricating authoritative knowledge (e.g. Latour 2010, Mosse 2005, Riles 2006, Strathern 2006).
The document – a materialization of rupture: Following the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1929) which allows a theorization of shape-giving as necessarily involving rejection and – in continuation thereof – the object-oriented-ontology of Graham Harman (2011) which regards any relationship as characterized by its inability to exhaust its constitutive parts I will in this project explore the policy documents as material expressions of rupture. These ruptures might be between intention and outcome; between the actual and the possible; between the chosen and the ground from which is chosen; between the shape given and the shapeable. Thus the project will trace analytically the crafting of the documents by following the various attempts to capture what ‘knowledge’ is or to carve out what is ‘sensible’ information while paying attention to what is rejected as irrelevant or ‘difficult’ information or knowledge. This approach will give an insight into not only the instability of the material form but also of the relationship between figure and ground.