What fascinates you about bureaucracy?
Everyone has stories to tell about bureaucracy – these are often experiences of frustration and powerlessness turned into humorous accounts. I remember, not even two years ago, being asked to handwrite a letter, scan it, and email it in order to grant my consent to receive my password for a university account online—an absurd example of the curious hybridities created in the transition from analogue to digital services. Personal encounters with bureaucracy like these showed me that, although it is often written off as dull, tedious, or purely procedural, it shapes, in fact, so much of our lived experience: not just how we organise society, but how we imagine it, narrate it, and feel it. Bureaucracy involves layers of power, regulation, documentation, and affect—it speaks of how people interact with organizational structures, how institutions determine the creation of identity and memory.
How did you get into this field?
My personal experiences with bureaucracy had already developed my interest in its fictional representations, but I first became academically invested in this field during my graduate studies in Comparative Literature at Western University in Canada, where I took Prof. Jonathan Boulter‘s course on the archive in contemporary novels. It opened my eyes to the aesthetic and affective regimes of record-keeping by discussing how archival spaces and practices—often seen as neutral and factual—evoke affects like mourning and melancholia and complicate our relation to the past. This led me to explore the literary figure of the office writer—archivists, scriveners, copyists—across centuries, with a special focus on the second half of the twentieth century.
Many famous authors throughout the centuries have dealt with bureaucracy and administration in their works. Why is this such a rich topic?
Bureaucracy fascinates because it sits at the intersection of everyday life, power, and imagination. Narratives involving public and private institutions often become symbolic of broader crises of representation, of both the political and the artistic kind. At the same time, as Anne-Marie Bijaoui-Baron notes, a kind of “mythology” of bureaucracy has emerged: one that is full of clichés, humor, and caricature, which both simplifies and sustains our collective image of institutions. This tension—between bureaucracy as a terrifying structure of control and as a source of comedy—adds to explaining, I think, why authors across centuries continue to return to it.
What questions, fears, etc. are addressed?
In literature, film, games, or the arts, works engaging with bureaucracy often stage some of our most fundamental anxieties about living within systems beyond our control. They address questions of power—who gets access, who is excluded, and why decision-making often is opaque or seemingly arbitrary. They also reflect fears of depersonalization: for efficient processing, individual cases are often reduced to files, numbers, or artificial categories.
At the same time, these stories take issue with the distance between real-world complexity and model of the “ideal“ bureaucracy: an efficient, rational, impersonal system run in the public interest. While this blueprint sounds desirable in theory, in practice bureaucracies often fall short of these expectations, generating injustice, opacity, redundancies, or outright absurdities. Fiction responds to this discrepancy by dramatizing fears of administrative errors, arbitrariness, or total surveillance; not all of it is gloomy, though: many works play with the comic aspects of bureaucratic systems.
What can we learn from current literary works on issues of bureaucracy?
Contemporary literature shows us that bureaucracy is not a relic of the past but a continually evolving presence in our lives, especially as digital technologies transform how states and institutions interact with individuals. Novels like Helen Phillips’s 2015 The Beautiful Bureaucrat or Moya Costello’s The Office as a Boat (2000) highlight the hybridities between analogue and digital systems. TV series like Severance (2023-2025) problematize the ideal of a work-life balance enforcing a perfect separation between the two. Video games like Papers, Please (2013), The Stanley Parable (2013), and The Darkest Files (2025) teach us to be attentive to individual agency and the human costs of old and new forms of exclusion, precarity, or surveillance.
You deal with an “aesthetics of bureaucracy.” What can we imagine this to be?
This varies from one administrative culture to another, of course, but rhetorical strategies like extended repetition, tautology, and seriality are very common. Office life is often depicted in dusty, muted tones (grey, beige, and brown) to reinforce sensations of dullness, boredom, and dread.
Quite frequently, though, the monotony of the mundane is disrupted by surreal, bizarre, and even magical-realist elements, the absurdity of which echoes arbitrary and ridiculous bureaucratic demands – Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams, or Terry Gilliam’s films are prime examples of that.
Additionally, there is a lot of play on redundancy, indexicality, and self-referentiality already in pop culture creations, like the famous episode in which Asterix and Obelix have to face the hurdles of Roman administration. There is also a rich corpus that speaks about administration with mystical undertones. I find it interesting that the labyrinth, the machinery, and grotesque monsters are three metaphors that keep coming up in descriptions of bureaucracies across various cultures and centuries.
Do you think stories about bureaucracy can influence how we think about real institutions and reforms?
They certainly do. This has been demonstrated time and again, for over half a century, by seminal research granting fictional representations a non-negligible role in studies of administration. It is enough to think of how often we describe situations and procedures as „kafkaesque“ when confronted with seemingly unsolvable administrative obstacles. Bureaucratic fiction is undoubtedly part of our shared understanding of how institutions work (or fail to do so), and has had a significant contribution to both producing and contesting stereotypes regarding the work of public and private administration.
What new themes could shape the next generation of stories about bureaucracy?
The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a boom in office novels questioning various arrangements in the modern workplace – spatial and virtual ones, definitely, but also economic, gendered, racial, post-colonial, to name but a few. They also make room for environmental concerns, global health crises, updated critiques of corporate rhetoric and business ethics. The conversation around the predictable and unpredictable impacts of integrating AI and/or social media into public and private governance, will certainly continue to grow. And, of course, one cannot ignore that a lot of office work is currently done outside of the traditional office and with considerable international mobility, a phenomenon that rewires the paperwork circuitry and engenders new forms of social and economic precarity.
But this is all just guesswork based on current trends. I’m very curious to see how our real bureaucracies and the ones we imagine will continue to feed into one another—showing how cultural representations don’t just reflect these systems but also have the power to quietly reshape how we understand and navigate them in the real world. My intuition tells me that research in this field will become increasingly important.