This special issue of Administory focuses on the relationship between different traditions of literature or art, on the one hand, and of state administration, on the other. By highlighting the "story" in Administory, it seeks to unpack aesthetic configurations manifest in literary and artistic works engaging with bureaucratic topics and spaces, set in (or against) a variety of historical backgrounds. Drawing on literature, but also on film or other arts to highlight different administrative cultural contexts and then contrasting them in their specificity is the goal of the edition. We, therefore, welcome contributions discussing the ways in which specific narrative or visual strategies and stylistic devices identifiable in these works help to shape a distinct imagery of specific administrations, with their underlying complexities, tensions, and paradoxes. In short, the issue deals with the aesthetics of specific administrative cultures.
To what extent and under what auspices does the rhetoric of monotony, repetition, impersonality, and colorlessness constitute the defining trait of “bureaucratic ambiance”? How do particularly literary discourses integrate, reproduce, or subvert administrative writing practices by borrowing from their textual forms and formulations? Looking at the materiality and the corporeality of officialdom, in the spirit of Jan Banning’s seminal photographic exhibition Bureaucratics, how do photographs or paintings capture or reflect the diverse aesthetic properties of administrative cultures at various levels, in diverse epochs and in different regions? Ideally, these inquiries will inform a wider conversation on inventories of bureaucratic objects and the identity of bureaucratic subjects, charting the circulation of affective, textual, and pictorial flows within administrative apparatuses.
Historical and sociological studies of state administration have emphasized the importance of the “look” of bureaucracy. In literary scholarship, as well as in film studies and art history, there is a rich tradition of exploring the administrative intricacies deployed in works of fiction, in poetry and drama, or in movies and in paintings. By spotlighting literary, artistic, and cinematographic responses to or reflections of administrative forms and designs, setups, and workflows, this issue seeks to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the interplay between artistic and administrative forms. Exploring bureaucracy’s influence on aesthetics, this special issue is inspired, amongst others, by Dean de la Motte’s analysis of modern French literature’s celebration and narrativization of the “accretion of writing, circularity, stasis, re-production, rewriting, postponement.” Another highly productive framework for the study of public administration and literature is proposed by Ceri Sullivan’s exploration of the “aesthetic problems” produced by bureaucracy, or by Kerstin Stüssel’s concept of “mitschriften”.