Fwd: NP but Weber

[Mark Kohut]

David Graeber @davidgraeber  9m9 minutes ago

i keep having dreams I'm back in Chicago & Marshall Sahlins has added
a science requirement to graduate & I haven't prepared for the test



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 8:11 AM
Subject: NP but Weber
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>


>From Graeber on Bureaucracy in the Financial Times. Might the Trystero
have been conceived against this (and for other reasons)? We know
Pynchon read his Weber and bureaucracy in GR
is a motif, of course.

One reason it was possible for Weberto describe bureaucracy as the
very embodiment of rational efficiency is that in the Germany of his
day, bureaucratic institutions really did work well. Perhaps the
flagship institution, the pride and joy of the German civil service,
was the post office. In the late 19th century, the German postal
service was considered one of the great wonders of the modern world.
Its efficiency was so legendary that it casts a kind of terrible
shadow across the 20th century. Many of the greatest achievements of
what we now call "high modernism" were inspired by the German post
office. One could indeed make a case that many of the most terrible
woes of that century can also be laid at its feet.

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