O thou enslaved, tied up, sedated giant of hampered might, thou shaven Simson, thou poor Germany - the industrious official dwarves have a strangle on you, handcuffing even the slightest jerk of the muscles with a tight paper string of freshly printed ordinance amendments! The elegies are echoing throughout the country. In a terrified way Germany is registring the registry's power still on the increase. No street sign, no pavement café's sunshade, no new couch in the lower-class housing estates escapes the vigilant eyes of this Argus-Hydra called administration. A visit at the public authorities gives a very good reason for filing away a complete day under debit balance in the file Modern Life - in duplicate, mark you!
Administration paralyzes and keeps in the leading strings; its constitutional employer, the citizen, turns his horrified back from the monstrous child of civilization. There is a certain irony to it - originally the administrative structure promised the opposite: legal protection and freedom from the despotism which characterized any Father of the Land whose mood determined his serves' future. The citizens might have celebrated the gained beginnings of increased security as a milestone on the way to enlightened rationality - but it slipped their attention that authorities and officals also freed the tyrant of his obligation to make casuistic decisions all the time. This means he had to do justice exclusively in the single case, not by comparison - running the risk of greeting the next morning with an axe in his head.
The increasing literalization of the population, just like office system becoming a work of art has contributed to the adminsitration turning into a system of its own. This could only work because it had always been meant to serve a purely executive function. That means, in formal administration has no power - it helps realize it. According to its self-image, it is no autonomous social function system - like economy, politics, religion, art, education, for instance -, but an organizational one - no constitutional end in itself, a means.
And just that is why administration is that indestructible - no matter how paradoxial this might sound. Day by day people compete for power, hectically handing over the relay of guidelines, but putting that into practice is much less attractive. Therefore admninistration remains what and how it is. This explains the stoic image the clients who believe time is money have been attaching to our public servants. So administration has become unnoticed - like any system, regardless what social level it occupies - its own pivot. As a means it is its own end. That is why it will not alter. In so far it is insensitive to the environment. We are always reminded of that whenever we come across a Führer's ordinance still valid, particularly concerning nationality. Or, to be less compromising: No matter if the territorial prince, the German Kaiser, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the FRG or the GDR defined the form of government - there have always been residents' registration offices which were entirely unimpressed by the sometimes dramatic revolutions surrounding them. According to the assumption the more evasive systems control the less evasive ones it is obvious that in the long run administration will regulate itself, legislative representatives may come and go.
What makes administration a rock in the breakers of panicky innovation is one more paradoxy: It is constant just because it permanently innovates. It has not crumbled into dust yet, as it realizes day by day dozens of new decrees, trying to stop more and more tiny loopholes total burocracy inevitably leaves, thus creating new ones to which it can react again by creating new ones and so on. And if there is nothing else on the agenda, it will regulate its own regulations, decree its own decrees - this is an ordinary system procedure, too, called 'reflexivation' - the permanent self-application of an operation. Biological systems practice cell division. Administration applies conferring an application form. It is a particularly interesting specimen for the modern Theory of Social Systems which assumes the self-maintenance of dynamic systems. Accordingly, the administrative structures are so rigid, because their procedural realization is so flowing. Sometimes - probably not too rarely - to such an extent that citizen and, say, revenue officer helplessly look at each other when trying to clarify the latest ordinance. The only difference is the officer recieves the money the citizen is to pay extra. For basically modern distinction of role and person consists of the administrative acievement. Persons are exchangeable - unlike administrative duties. At least only by administrative effort.
Therefore the only way to check the tangled administrative mass is to enact new decrees, to establish new posts to replace the old ones. Even though ancient mythology nowadys can only interest incorrigible idlers, it is replete with a battery of fable figures we can profit by knowing. For that sake there is not only Hercules, but also the above-mentioned Hydra constantly replacing each cut-off head with countless new ones. But whether the desired shrinking following the path of lean management will really serve the common benefit if the police and the refuse collection disappear within the Black Hole of outsourcing remanins a question the administration is not even allowed to answer - after all it is meant to realize what has been conceived, not to conceive on its own.
Administration paralyzes and keeps in the leading strings; its constitutional employer, the citizen, turns his horrified back from the monstrous child of civilization. There is a certain irony to it - originally the administrative structure promised the opposite: legal protection and freedom from the despotism which characterized any Father of the Land whose mood determined his serves' future. The citizens might have celebrated the gained beginnings of increased security as a milestone on the way to enlightened rationality - but it slipped their attention that authorities and officals also freed the tyrant of his obligation to make casuistic decisions all the time. This means he had to do justice exclusively in the single case, not by comparison - running the risk of greeting the next morning with an axe in his head.
The increasing literalization of the population, just like office system becoming a work of art has contributed to the adminsitration turning into a system of its own. This could only work because it had always been meant to serve a purely executive function. That means, in formal administration has no power - it helps realize it. According to its self-image, it is no autonomous social function system - like economy, politics, religion, art, education, for instance -, but an organizational one - no constitutional end in itself, a means.
And just that is why administration is that indestructible - no matter how paradoxial this might sound. Day by day people compete for power, hectically handing over the relay of guidelines, but putting that into practice is much less attractive. Therefore admninistration remains what and how it is. This explains the stoic image the clients who believe time is money have been attaching to our public servants. So administration has become unnoticed - like any system, regardless what social level it occupies - its own pivot. As a means it is its own end. That is why it will not alter. In so far it is insensitive to the environment. We are always reminded of that whenever we come across a Führer's ordinance still valid, particularly concerning nationality. Or, to be less compromising: No matter if the territorial prince, the German Kaiser, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the FRG or the GDR defined the form of government - there have always been residents' registration offices which were entirely unimpressed by the sometimes dramatic revolutions surrounding them. According to the assumption the more evasive systems control the less evasive ones it is obvious that in the long run administration will regulate itself, legislative representatives may come and go.
What makes administration a rock in the breakers of panicky innovation is one more paradoxy: It is constant just because it permanently innovates. It has not crumbled into dust yet, as it realizes day by day dozens of new decrees, trying to stop more and more tiny loopholes total burocracy inevitably leaves, thus creating new ones to which it can react again by creating new ones and so on. And if there is nothing else on the agenda, it will regulate its own regulations, decree its own decrees - this is an ordinary system procedure, too, called 'reflexivation' - the permanent self-application of an operation. Biological systems practice cell division. Administration applies conferring an application form. It is a particularly interesting specimen for the modern Theory of Social Systems which assumes the self-maintenance of dynamic systems. Accordingly, the administrative structures are so rigid, because their procedural realization is so flowing. Sometimes - probably not too rarely - to such an extent that citizen and, say, revenue officer helplessly look at each other when trying to clarify the latest ordinance. The only difference is the officer recieves the money the citizen is to pay extra. For basically modern distinction of role and person consists of the administrative acievement. Persons are exchangeable - unlike administrative duties. At least only by administrative effort.
Therefore the only way to check the tangled administrative mass is to enact new decrees, to establish new posts to replace the old ones. Even though ancient mythology nowadys can only interest incorrigible idlers, it is replete with a battery of fable figures we can profit by knowing. For that sake there is not only Hercules, but also the above-mentioned Hydra constantly replacing each cut-off head with countless new ones. But whether the desired shrinking following the path of lean management will really serve the common benefit if the police and the refuse collection disappear within the Black Hole of outsourcing remanins a question the administration is not even allowed to answer - after all it is meant to realize what has been conceived, not to conceive on its own.
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