Das WEAVE-Projekt „Bürographien“ (Wien, Basel, Friedrichshafen, Köln) fragt nach den Figurationen von Kultur-, Medien- und Schreibtechniken des Verwaltens, die sich im Rahmen der verschiedenen Umbrüche bürokratischer Ordnungen des 20. Jahrhunderts dies- und jenseits formaler Regeln sowie inner- und außerhalb konkreter Büromilieus beobachten lassen. Mit Blick auf die damit einhergehende Frage nach der Relaisfunktion bürokratischer Praktiken zwischen Verwaltungssystem und Umwelt rückt der Workshop eine bislang noch wenig beachtete Kategorie aus Niklas Luhmanns frühen organisationssoziologischen Arbeiten in den ins Zentrum: die „Grenzstellen“. Es wird danach gefragt, wie sich Organisationen an ihren Rändern selbst darstellen und ihre Umweltannahmen preisgeben müssen.
The workshop is part of the WEAVE project “Bureaugraphies: Administration after the Age of Bureaucracy.” The Vienna subproject focuses on Austrian administrative culture—on the bureaucratic apparatus itself, as well as on the personal networks of the “bureaucracy,” which underwent numerous transformations from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century, spanning the Danube Monarchy, the First Republic, and the Second Republic. The project concentrates on the official and unofficial functions of the protocol, in its double meaning as both regulation and record—as behavioral governance and bureaucratic documentation; on the emergence of a protocollary style of thinking (one need only think of the protocol sentence debate in the Vienna Circle); and, in particular, on the development of a protocollary mode of writing in literature (from Kafka and Musil to Albert Drach and the Vienna Group).
This event, held as a reading workshop, focused on paradigmatic investigations of office and bureaucracy in the postwar period. In the 1950s—by thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Arnold Gehlen, or Günther Anders—bureaucracy is interpreted as an imperially expanding threat to human spontaneity. From the 1960s onward, however, observation becomes more differentiated, particularly in Niklas Luhmann’s organizational studies, which reveal the possibilities of contradiction within administrative systems. In contrast to the social-scientific approach, contemporary literary depictions of office life—such as Vilma Link’s Vorzimmer (1979) or Walter E. Richartz’s Büroroman (1976)—shed light on blind spots where organizational structures reach their limits. Literary and sociological perspectives thus complement one another as openings to complexity and—perhaps, as remains to be asked—as abstract models in their own right.