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If you’ve been following my recent dive into Jaspers’ Idea of the University through the lens of platform capitalism and AI, you know I’ve been wrestling with how the neoliberal public university—my daily haunt here in Texas—has become a “state within the platform-state.” Endless dashboards, compliance rituals, and “student success” metrics that promise efficiency but deliver deadening routine. Last time, I triangulated it from my tripartite perch: fresh PhD scholar, classroom teacher, mid-level admin keeping the forms flowing. Now let’s thread in David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules (2015)—the anarchist anthropologist’s scalpel on bureaucracy’s secret allure. It’s like Graeber took Jaspers’ warnings about proliferating “technical faculties” and mapped their structural stupidity onto our metric-saturated campuses.[1][2][3]

Graeber’s Bureaucratic Utopia: A Quick Roadmap

Graeber’s slim book (three essays + appendix) asks: why has bureaucracy exploded since the 1970s, even as we stopped talking about it? Graphs show “paperwork” mentions peaking in ’73, then crashing—while our form-filling hours skyrocketed. His answer: markets require bureaucracy. No red tape reduction ever works; it’s the Iron Law of Liberalism.[2]

• Intro: Iron Law of Liberalism – “Free market” reforms balloon rules and admins. States and corps are symbiotic: violence (cops, courts) enforces property, forms ritualize it. We’re in “total bureaucratization”—digital paper now.[2]
• Ch. 1: Dead Zones of the Imagination – Bureaucracy kills creativity with boredom-by-design. Behind every form? Guns. It’s “structural stupidity”: violence makes us dumb, rules sustain it. Why no ethnographic tomes on DMV rituals? Too empty.[2]
• Ch. 2: Of Flying Cars – No Jetsons tech because R&D went to war/finance bureaucracy, not consumer wonders. Neoliberalism financialized everything—IP lawyers > inventors.[2]
• Ch. 3: Utopia of Rules – We love bureaucracy’s promise: predictable games, no capricious kings. Fantasy (D&D, Hogwarts) rebels against it, proving its grip.[2]
• Appendix: Batman – Superheroes fantasize constituent power (people as sovereign), but reinforce admin order.[2]

Punchy, illustrated, profound. Bureaucracy isn’t broken; it’s utopia for sustaining inequality.

The Technical Faculty as Bureaucratic Dead Zone

Jaspers fretted the “technical faculty” ballooning into skill-shops detached from truth’s “cosmos of knowledge”—an “intellectual department store” sans soul. Graeber shows the endgame: our ed-tech stacks (LMS, analytics, proctor-bots) aren’t tools; they’re dead zones where imagination flatlines.[1][2]

In many admin meetings, we “leverage data” for “efficiency.” Result? More admins, more dashboards. Graeber’s Iron Law in action: every “streamline” pilot spawns compliance subcommittees. As teacher, I watch students reduced to risk icons—red for “likely dropout.” Behind it? Debt enforcers, campus cops. The forms obscure the violence, turning boundary situations (struggle, guilt) into gamified nudges.[3][2]

Queering this: expose the dyads. “Care” vs. control? Surveillance is love in neoliberal drag. Wyrding it: I craft my own thread—off-grid seminars where we dissect the dashboard as ritual, refusing its stupid transparency.

Metric Nobility and the Secret Joys of Rules

Jaspers’ “intellectual aristocracy” (truth-bearers over cliques) gets crushed by Graeber’s metric lords: h-index kings, grant-magnates. Why love it? Bureaucracy’s utopia: rules as fair game, no favoritism—just procedure. Predictable hell beats chaotic freedom.[1][2]

Here at many Texas public universities, KPIs are the grail: retention rates, “engagement” scores. Joy? The secret thrill of checkboxes done right. But Graeber queers the fantasy: rules freeze play into coercion. A D&D campaign thrives on house-ruled chaos; mandated metrics kill it. My praxis: queer the game—teach students to hack their own “constituent power,” wyrding metrics into wyrd threads of peculiar Existenz.[3][2]

No Flying Cars, Just Flying Forms: Neoliberal R&D Trap

Graeber’s flying cars chapter? Gold for Jaspers’ “technical faculty.” Why no AI tutors or VR labs revolutionizing learning? 80% of uni R&D chases grants for compliance tech, not pedagogy. Military-industrial-academic complex starves imagination.[1][2]

My vantage: as scholar, I chase “impact”; admin, I approve vendor RFPs; teacher, I debug glitchy LMS. Iron Law: “innovate” = more bureaucracy. Boundary leap: queering reveals the stupidity (violence-backed IP wars); wyrding crafts convivial alternatives—peer-led, rule-free learning circles echoing Graeber’s direct action anthropology.[3][2]

Triangulating Graeber into My Jaspersian Wyrd

From my three seats:

• Teacher: Bureaucracy’s dead zones entomb loving struggle. Graeber arms my Freirean praxis: problem-pose the forms, turn stupidity into co-Existenz play.[3][2]
• Admin: Iron Law indicts my daily grind—every “efficiency” memo births a task force. Queer it as violence-ritual; wyrd my refusal.
• Scholar: Jaspers’ conscience needs Graeber’s edge. Anarchist anthropology queers neoliberal binaries (market vs. state); wyrds Jaspers’ boundaries into hopeful refusal.

Graeber doesn’t end utopian—he points to constituent power, the people remaking rules. In my platform uni, that’s small publics: queer reading groups dissecting Graeber under the mango tree (nod to Freire), wyrding bureaucracy into something human.[1][3][2]

Jaspers wrote amid rubble; Graeber amid forms. Both call us to leap. Here in Texas neoliberalia, I’m leaping—who will join me?[3][1][2]

SOURCES

[1] K. Jaspers. (1959). Idea of the University. Boston: Beacon Hill Press.

[2] D. Graeber. (2015) The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. New York: Melville House.

[3] K. Brown. (2024). Queer Faith, Wyrd Hope, Loving Struggle. Denton, TX: University of North Texas.-Dissertation.