Affective bureaucratic relations: File practices in a European deportation unit and criminal court

Abstract

Indifference has long been acknowledged as a crucial affect to the continuation of bureaucratic practices. Recently, the production of more diverse and layered affective modes in bureaucratic institutions is increasingly highlighted. However, how affects differ within and between sites saturated with ‘paper work’ remains an understudied terrain. In this paper we focus on the relations that are formed in daily file-work within two state institutions: a Deportation Unit and a Criminal Court. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork in order to show that a) affects are locally produced in the relations that are mobilized in file-work b) these affects are unevenly produced within and between different bureaucratic practices. By comparing two different bureaucratic settings yet related in the subjugation they demand of the bureaucratic referent of their practices, we aim to put forward how differences in bureaucratic practice come with their own specific affective modes, showing that bureaucratic practices are saturated in, and thrive on, diverse affects of varying intensity. Bureaucratic action is a deeply affective practice, within which the relationship between caseworker, casefile, and the file’s referent is carefully calibrated. With this intervention we position ourselves within scholarship that complicates perceived dichotomies between rationality, still often associated with bureaucracy, and affect. Developing sensitivities towards such variety of bureaucratic affect offers nuanced perspectives on file-work and what kind of sovereign power the relations that are made through file-work subsequently allow to be reproduced.

Legal aid amid bureaucracy

“…Further, the routinised rituals of document creation, circulation and archiving work as mechanisms to prevent the loss of institutional knowledge as well as institutional learning (Dery 1998). As dynamic objects that are created, modified, destroyed and circulated amongst bureaucrats at various levels, as well as the citizens who are often the ultimate object of such documentation, paperwork is a manifestation of bureaucratic violence (Allard and Walker 2016;Horton and Heyman 2020;Hull 2012;Reinke 2018;Reinke 2020;Wissink and Van Oorschot 2020).…”

States of Feeling

“…Besides, as a result of the renewal of work on the 'État au guichet' and service administrations, many studies, more or less isolated, have taken as their object the emotions of workers from particular segments of (state-like) administrations, such as migration control officers in Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland (Borrelli and Lindberg 2018), immigration officers in Great Britain (Bosworth 2019) or Sweden (Graham 2003), bureaucrats of a European Deportation Unit and Criminal Court (Wissink and van Oorschot 2021), English nurses of fertility units (Allan 2006), postal workers in France (Jeantet 2003), and those of the Caisses d'allocations familiales (Corcuff 1996). The latter takes up the conceptualisation proposed by Vincent Dubois (2010: 79-80) of the 'two bodies of the frontline bureaucrat': 'On the one hand, the office holders are the embodiment of the state': they have to apply standard cases, abdicate their personality.…”

Making Populations for Deportation: Bureaucratic Knowledge Practices Inside a European Deportation Unit

“…However, this article changes the focus from the actors , whether they are the bureaucrats or documents, to file practices and the relations formed by them (cf. Wissink and Van Oorschot 2020). It is not the experiences of the caseworkers that take center stage.…”

“…But these are insufficient when bureaucrats must use an ever changing collection of lists, boards, and recommendations before choosing one file out of all to‐be‐processed files. The choice that individual bureaucrats make can be random, as with Nancy, but, incited by the materiality of the work, many bureaucrats prefer to work on “fast files” that contain “less documents” (Wissink and Van Oorschot 2020, 1057). When, on rare occasions, procedural rules demand interaction not only with the materiality of the file but also with the person behind it, the situation becomes even more complicated.…”