Social Adminstration and Religiosity

In films such as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil—not to mention actually-existing corporate-capitalism and state –socialism—the production of convoluted bureaucratic systems indicates an almost fanatical belief in the constitutive ideologies of the social arrangement in question. No wonder Zizek argues that bureaucracy harbors the final vestige of genuine belief in so-called “secular society”: insofar as “such encounters [offer a] glimpse of another order beyond … everyday reality,” moments of absurd, officious social administration enable the “only true contact with the divine in our secular times.” Indeed, over and against the common position that bureaucracy replaces governmental legitimacy, we should emphasize that, in fact, it ensures such legitimacy. The underlying logic of bureaucracy is akin to the Jewish theological doctrine in which the affirmation of “law over spirit” becomes “spirit in spite of law”: it doesn’t matter how ludicrous the channels of red tape become, the power structures that ensure their implementation will continue to dominate. In fact, all the better if the regulations cease to demonstrate any semblance of intelligence—hegemony only calcifies as bureaucracy lays bare its senselessness.
In this vein, consider Zizek’s example from Pinochet’s Chile in which citizens were actually required to provide “certificates of survival” to bureaucratically substantiate their existence (i.e., it was not enough that you be physically standing in front of a government clerk jumping up and down screaming “I exist”— denied basic social services would be denied unless proper documentation was presented). Is this not proof that amidst hyper-administrated social conditions, veritable rupture occurs when bureaucracy comes to impede the most basic and “reasonable” of daily practices? Or, as Zizek phrases it: “Are we aware that this is our only true contact with the divine in our secular times [since what] can be more ‘divine’ than the traumatic encounter with the bureaucracy at its craziest—when, say, a bureaucrat tells us that legally, we don’t exist” ? Although our first inclination is that the state has no business questioning, e.g., our existential status, the paradox here is that our basis of objection—the fact that existential status is a lofty metaphysical question, not a crude bureaucratic one—is precisely what the absurd bureaucratic intervention guarantees. The properly “divine” dimension of the implicit question, Do you exist?, only becomes clear once bureaucracy attempts to appropriate the question to its own, banal ends; divinity is effectively introduced by the very intervention that underscores it. In other words, we need the bureaucrat to question our existential status in order to enliven us from the nihilistic stupor of contemporary life and thereby realize the truly awesome, divine aspects of life as such.
Was not something of the same logic at play when, in 2007, China decided to mandate that all citizens who wish to be re-incarnated as the Dalai Lama register themselves with the government beforehand? The general response to this maneuver, even more than indignation, was sheer incredulity: Can people possibly be taking this seriously? How did the Chinese government manage this without causing widespread uproar and revolt? Needless to say, the cynical-rationalist reading—that people understood it as an obvious (and unsurprising) power-grab on the government’s part and simply decided to play along (because, hey, that’s how politics works)—missed the point entirely. Did the Chinese state’s mandate bastardize the legitimate spiritual forces at play in the socio-cosmological dynamic of reincarnation? We should, in fact, risk the opposite proposition: that it is only once the government meddles in such an overtly “non-governmental” matter that its divine, other-worldly quality can be restored. Therefore, in some sense, we should welcome the Chinese state’s seemingly ludicrous intervention: far from destroying the sanctity of re-incarnation, the mandated registration program actually re-vitalizes the properly religious dimensions of a practice that had long since become dominated by petty, egotistical power-grabbing. Indeed, might bureaucratic intervention in the processes by which people articulate their religiosity be the only way to ensure that such religiosity not become another site of business-as-usual politicking?