Weber’s bureaucratic rationalizers are now read as the paradigm of slowness.

Evidence

An analogous development can also be observed with respect to the second core element of the state, the bureaucracy. The structures and decision-making processes of bureaucratic administration have not only lost their status as the epitome of efficiency and temporal rationality. They are taken to be the paramount example of inefficiency, i.e., of slowness and inflexibility, and indeed precisely because of those principles that Weber once saw as grounding their rationality and speed, such as the basing of all processes on written documents (Aktenmässigkeit), the strict adherence to procedure (“always going through the proper channels”), the unilinear hierarchy of competencies and orders, the formation of fixed work routines, etc. Because bureaucracies have become too slow, the debureaucratization of administrative processes today counts as the royal road to the acceleration of decisions. Therefore, the “crisis of statism” that Castells diagnoses during the last quarter of the twentieth century is above all a crisis of bureaucratic administration. The defeat of state socialism in the face of private-sector-oriented capitalism can be understood as a consequence of the fact that state-based steering reached the limits of its ability to accelerate. The centralized state is too slow and immobile an actor for the time structures of the “network society” created by the new information technologies; it no longer has any dynamizing force of its own to set against the last wave of acceleration in Western capitalist societies. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 548

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of Weber’s own criteria — characteristics once grounding rational speed now render institutions the paramount example of irrational slowness — is a dense, paradigm-flipping point worth sitting with.
• XREF: Directly builds on the earlier chapter claim that rapid change itself produces deep standstill. — connects to: The national state flipped from acceleration engine to braking obstacle. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 547