What Is Happening to Us: Remedios Zafra and “Bureaucratic Sadness”

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Andreu Navarra

In her latest book (El informe. Trabajo intelectual y tristeza burocrática, Anagrama, 2024), Remedios Zafra asks how those she calls “workers of the word” are to live and be employed today. The premise of the essay could not be simpler—nor more brilliant. Zafra herself needs to request a laptop from her university, and the administrator reviewing her application asks her to submit a report detailing various items related to her professional and personal goals. Zafra writes the report—but in doing so, she far exceeds the meagre frame of yet another bureaucratic file: what she sets out is her life story, and the story of thousands upon thousands of word-workers who make up the cognitariat of this country and of the West at large. What she delivers is both a literary essay and a powerful critique of the working conditions that wear down the health of feminised and creative labour.

What are the mechanisms of control and technosurveillance that depress us and push us towards disaffection? Zafra asks: “What potential does intellectual work hold for the future of labour? What is at stake if intellectual work fails to resist and instead succumbs to this disaffection—a mode of obedient, bureaucratised, hyperproductive doing, carried out anyhow, by any means? Who will unsettle others in order to remind them they are people? Who will strive to turn pessimism into critique, resignation into connection with others? Who will remind us that in our numbness, we serve all the better the inertia of a world tilted in favour of the already privileged? Who will write the poems, the books, the works capable of breaking down the barriers of a spirit hardened by dehumanising forces now made ordinary? Who will discover the solutions to the ailments and afflictions that beset us?”

That is exactly it—and it could hardly be better expressed: they are trying to dehumanise teaching so that people forget they are entitled to be human. The aim is to destroy minds—plainly, without theatricality. The siliconised world will no doubt keep generating simulations to replace all of this—of course, without success. A humanity stripped of its humanity cancels its own future. The poems, the books, the automated lessons will be left only for the poor, for those cast out of humanity and civil rights. For the faceless.

“No worker and no labour can withstand the naturalisation of meaningless doing”, Zafra writes. Indeed. The erasure of culture is integral to the dehumanising project, which already shapes the juridical landscape of posthumanism: “One might understand that culture is crucial to society when people are set adrift by a reactionary nihilism that leads to resignation, or to the conviction that ‘nothing—apart from oneself—matters’. It is urgent to reposition intellectual work and reclaim the social value it deserves. For it is evident that the denigration of culture has helped push it towards bureaucratic overexposure, leaving it to wither among forms and requirements that extinguish and neutralise it”. The result is a non-place, where non-classes are delivered, preparing pupils for non-lives.

Teaching is intellectual work. And yet our political leaders are working to disable it, aligning themselves with siliconian interests. If education is suffocated by bureaucracy, it is so that it may vanish—making way for the Automated Simulacrum, the submission device. A minister or secretary of education ought to aim at emancipation, not subjugation. At heart, it is the same old praetorian anti-intellectualism, now clad in updated, seductive, seemingly fair garb: everyone levelled down, everyone siliconised, standardised, competency-moulded. No one creating. No one researching. That is now the business of elites—and of the Californian Vatican, governing on our behalf.

To teach is to resist; to learn is to resist twice over. Pedagogism is praetorianism of the mind—a form of symbolic violence that hollows out our profession, draining it of meaning. Siliconisation is not Progress. Nor is it a progressive movement. It is the founding of an Empire. And its ambition is to marginalise teachers, replacing them with mute, one-way apps. If teaching ceases to be intellectual labour and is reduced to bureaucratic accompaniment, our work is no longer human. It becomes something halfway between prison warden and cruise-ship entertainer. Someone who enforces protocols and administers mandatory siliconisation is not a teacher, but an automated agent—a thing.

And things obey. They raise no questions. That is what official pedagogism wants: drive for control, need to subjugate, prediction, ordering, domination. But this is the very opposite of what should happen in a classroom—where culture and curiosity, dialogue and life ought to move freely, beyond aggressive Competencies and dead files. School cannot become a graveyard of classified obedience, a charnel house of fragmented individualities. It must be the site of human emancipation, where living cultures are passed on and the communities of tomorrow are shaped.

If the intellectual labour of teaching is reduced to the automatic fulfilment of prescribed competencies—who, then, will remind students that they are human? And what it truly means to be human, in a democracy that remains worth living in?

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons