28/10/2026
The weekly NEC seminar: "Updating the Paper Machine: Visions of Algorithmic Administration in Bureaucratic Fiction"
Presentation by Alexandra IRIMIA, Ștefan Odobleja Fellow; Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Bonn
Stories about bureaucracy are enjoying a remarkable moment in multiple media, at a time when governance itself seems to be in crisis. Populist attacks on state institutions, deep cuts to public spending, and the prospect of algorithms replacing human clerks in state and private administration have all made bureaucratic infrastructures newly visible, and contemporary popular culture took notice.
This talk introduces the concept of bureaucratic fiction, describes its aesthetic regime, and asks what this corpus can teach us about administration in the digital age. It traces how a long tradition of literary and cinematic officescapes has anticipated a computerized future for administration, including the shift from paper to digital records and from human decision-making processes to algorithmic agency. The analysis begins with two film adaptations of nineteenth century and early twentieth century literary works: Henri Diamant-Berger’s 1959 The Bureaucrats, adapted from Georges Courteline’s Messieurs les ronds-de-cuir (1891-1892) and Orson Welles’s 1962 take on Kafka’s The Trial (1925). Each translates an older satire of bureaucratic process into the visual language of the mid-century office, where mechanization and early computing already begin to reshape the fantasy of the all-powerful administrative apparatus. It then turns to works like David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015), and Apple TV+’s series Severance (2022 – ongoing) as more recent case studies.
Reading contemporary novels, series, and films alongside their 19th and 20th century thematic predecessors, as well as Henry Farrell’s and Marion Fourcade’s recent theoretical work on algorithmic governance, the lecture shows that these narratives enrich the “discourse network” (Kittler) of administration with more than depictions of technological change in the office: they also serve as virtual spaces in which visions of automated bureaucracy emerged and played out well before they became policy.
The presentation draws on The Administrative Imagination in the Digital Age: 21st-Century Bureaucratic Fiction, a project that treats contemporary bureaucratic fiction as a transnational and cross-media form, looking to understand it through affect theory, media studies, and cultural history.
