Administrative errors

I've just been reading my brother's blog (www.davethetriffids.wordpress.com). It's strange how talented he is in his own way. It's a bit of a free advert for him because people need to see the odd shit he's coming out with. Somewhere between David Shrigley and Daniel Johnston, with a bit of Kafka mixed in.

I'll be honest, that whole Kafkan element is none more true today than ever before. I remember chatting with a group of people before who weren't those among us who are card carrying lefties (and there are a group of us who range from left-liberal to dyed-in-the-wool Troskyists and Marxist-Leninists) who said that they only understood Marx when they started working. The Marxism-proper of alienation and surplus labour value becomes a lot clearer than when you're a student. Students like to be Marxists because they think it upsets people. Adults are Marxists because it reflects the genuine exploitation that occurs in even the most moderate of jobs.

Anyway, the same can be said of Kafka. If you work in any job that involves admin, then you know what Kafka is writing about. Admin has a basic function; to record. That's it really. What should it do other than that? If you do X, then fill out form X1 to show that you did it so that when a catastrophe strikes, the trail can be traced to show where the error occurred. It makes good sense. Then admin has a bit of symbolic function too- the equivalent of a speech act. If you require X then form X2 stands for permission from the relevant people to allow you get X. So X1 says "I spent some money from our funds; here's a record of it". X2 says "I needed to spend funds, so this guy let me get some; here's a record of it". Again, that has a function of sorts- it provides security. So what do we have so far? Recording and permission and security.

Nowadays admin takes up a massive part of my job. This week I have filled out the following forms:

1) Health insurance form for students
2) Health insuraance form for myself
3) Programme change forms for students
4) Finance virement form
5) Finance paying in form
6) Purchase order requisition form
7) Confirmation of order form
8) Course review document
9) Timetable document
10) Revision timetable ammendment
11) Stationery application form
12) cause for concern form
13) risk assessment form
14) Registers (even for classes that aren't running)
15) Lesson planner
16) Lesson plan

And so on (I have done others)....

There's something more disturbing in all of this. Let's take the ILP and the IFL (see, now you see a job full of useless shit- when things have to be abbreviated and become known by simple letters. Speech starts to sound like a meaningless algorithm) Individual Learning Plans are what you give to a student in order to help them develop and plan their progress. The Institute For Learning is an imposed body that decided to tell us how to improve as individuals, without being associated with professionals themselves- a long story. Both have a good (perceived) goal; on-going reflection and improvement. However, they both take a quite quite useless form. You fill in a book or webpage saying "I have done XYZ" followed by "I think ABC about XYZ" and then "I could probably do MNO about this". That's all. That's all it is, so it does fuck all.

So why do we do it? Because we have to be seen to doing it. Firstly, it provides us with evidence that we are committed to creating independent learners. Secondly, we can show we are committed to our ongoing improvement as professionals. Finally, we can show that we are committed to covering our ass in case everything goes wrong but we can at least say that we did the paperwork. It's jumping through hoops.

This is old news, but it's as true today as it was in Kafka's day; the process becomes more important than the goal of that process. Filling in the forms is more important than improving performance. I think that there is a good reason for this; no one wants to have to try to succeed. Success requires hard work- especially in business, and especially concerning government targets. If I actually had to make sure that 70% of my students got an A or B grade, I'd die. Plus it would be fruitless- it just ain't gonna happen. However, I have the fall back position of not having to try but filling out a load of forms to show that I did the various stages of trying in some form. Likewise, the government and the college can then look at me and say "Well we tried".

There's an old joke about there being two types of economist; those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know. The same goes for every profession and we can't admit it. We don't know, or we don't know we don't know whether or not our projects will fail. In the summer I might get 40 absolute spongs to deal with (it's happened before) and thus my job becomes 2 years of turd polishing. Excuses don't wash, even genuine ones. This means that if I say "Look, none of them were going to pass- they have 2 GCSEs and they're trying to learn about Marcuse's theory of repressive desublimation"- they'll say "but did you refer them for PSD? I don't see a form here". So if everyone fails, but I have paperwork, we can all say "No problem" and everyone is happy- apart from the fucker who should have been told he was on the wrong course. After all, no, I'm not allowed to say that. If they end up doing philosophy and I can sniff that they'll fail within a week, they have to stay on. Case closed. Why? Because the process outweighs the product.

Starting to see similarities with economics? Of course you do. The product doesn't matter; it's cheap, it'll fall apart, it's not meant to last- but we ticked the following boxes and here's the bottom line figure. And now the world is economised which means turning solid reality into a process. It's been said that if you have a computer that's complex enough, perhaps turning into a worldwide network of complexity, that it could have an emerging sentience. Loops in the connections could form a basic self-understanding leading to self-determination. Far fetched, but I can see it happening with paperwork. One day the forms I have to fill in will become self-aware and start producing themselves and filling themselves in. More forms will emerge with even less practical application- existing only to exist.

It's been a long day.