Summary
Ilana Feldman’s account of how bureaucratic authority was produced in Gaza under the Mandate and the Egyptian Administration: a circular, self-referential process in which the repetitions of filing procedures, the accumulation of documents and the habits of civil servants produced authority for bureaucracy itself, without conferring legitimacy on the regime (Governing Gaza, PDF p.31-34, p.48-50).
Details
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Authority is best understood not as an objective achievement but as an ongoing process, enacted through practice; Feldman cites Richard Sennett describing it as a process of interpreting power (PDF p.31-32).
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In Gaza a claim to national authenticity could not ground authority, so the most reliable sources were bureaucracy’s own characteristics — the reiterative networks of filing and the repetitive habits of civil servants — while external sources such as the promise of future independence, the benefits of reform or cultural identity were too often undermined (PDF p.32).
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Unlike discursive authority as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler describe it, bureaucratic repetition is not obscured but highlighted: every personnel file needs to look alike, every form needs to fit the mold, and civil servants trumpet mastery of those habits as competence (PDF p.33).
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Filing authority was self-consciously connected to uniformity and regularity: uniformity produced familiarity and grounds for judging a document authoritative by its resemblance to other documents, and regularity managed a document’s placement in the filing network (PDF p.50).
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Chapters 3-4 extend the account from files to personnel: civil servants’ Reflective habit — their contemplation of duty, respectability and good and bad work — was itself part of the formation and consolidation of bureaucratic authority, and habit was operationalised over a career as Bureaucratic competence (PDF p.82-84, p.109 / printed p.65-67, p.92).
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Filing itself is reiterative in its storage practices: culling and retention kept the capacity to keep filing ahead of any particular file, minimised the significance of the loss of particular files, and rendered a file’s systemic location as crucial as its content (PDF p.77 / printed p.60).