(Abstract zum Vortrag »In-between; a bit of Shannon« zur Tagung »Files, Forms, Fictions«, 16./17.10.25, Universität Bonn)
»Literature is an administrative technology that experimentally creates, organises and disorganises the world. This is the small, even cunning freedom of literary systems, of literary mappings, that they, equipped with administrative technologies, create worlds, organise them, make them coherent and at the same time point out the breaking points.« (J. Vogl) – if we drive this thesis back into the heart of darkness, into literature, with official instructions, office regulations, schematisms, business divisions, processes and decision-making requirements as well as cultural and media techniques of administration, we can make astonishing findings and mutually read and extract information: suddenly Kafka and Musil – academic clerks as ›impaling stakeholders‹ – are writing plain text on their office desks and machines, quoting administrative writings, personnel and manuals, providing concrete insights into files; Stoker recognisably reproduces his own administrative textbook and has the vampires and bloody heads of the 19th century put on media-technically advanced feet by the New Employee and her skills; in this way, Melville’s (another clerk) cetological disassembly line becomes the Fordist assembly line of a process architecture of the administrative Taylorists (in other words: the Bartleby paradigm [Melville 1853], cf. Schüttpelz 2025, p. 41f., is replaced by the Mina Harker paradigm [Stoker 1897]); the Weber brothers‘ talk of administrative »machines« and »apparatuses« merges with the means of automation support into the »Black box bureaucracy« (Luhmann) of the new algorithmic frenzy, where every homunculus is projected into an AI in an undaunted anthropomorphising manner, while Latour and Luhmann are still arranging their card indexes. Leibniz’s State-Taffles and 0|1-models will invade literature in the course of a few centuries and help to pull up Weber’s steel-hard cases as well as enabling them to be heaped into sandcastles.
∀ – A … The rest is Silence / Silicon / Silentium.
In other words, the shape of public services and their organisation changes with the processing media and techniques (also: second order techniques) that are introduced, while the basic business processes, including decisions, remain comparable. At the latest with the introduction of punch card systems and tabulating machines, at the same time as the emergence of new private-sector work, accounting and profit models, and soon thereafter considerably differently layered and stratified social systems, public administrations and their central offices come under massive pressure, which only typewriters, mainframe computers, personal computers, electronic files and artificial intelligence are expected to compensate for. Some literatures – indicated above as examples – are able to make this observable.
