Bureaucratic Fiction: Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary World Literature and Film (B-FILES)

B-FILES discusses fictional works engaging with bureaucratic themes and forms as concentrated, multi-layered illustrations of a broader ‘discourse network’ (Kittler) of contemporary administration, characterized by intricate linkages of political and symbolic power, technologies of data storage and encryption, signifying marks, bodies, and affective intensities. It argues that the processes of regulation and systematization that produce flows of paperwork are not without consequence in the production of contemporary aesthetic forms. Conversely, these processes are always already determined by social imaginaries (Castoriadis) and historical narratives (Foucault) via the production and reception of aesthetic forms. Finally, the project is an inquiry into the fictional and metafictional implications of logocentric authority, connecting the administrative force of the written record with its aesthetic potentialities.