The DMV was packed. As the registered owner of five motorcycles (one of which actually runs), four cars (two running) and two trailers, I knew the drill. I stood in line to get a number, which put me in the sitting line. My number was S37. The monitors read
Now Serving:
B34
P181
R211
R209
T88
B33
I took a seat and assumed the position—that posture you settle into when you know not what will befall you, nor when. I have developed my own practice for the DMV, inspired by the ancient wisdom of the East: surrender. When I set out for the DMV twenty minutes ago, my ego-self was still caught up in its own attachments, its plans and projects for the day. Foolish man.
The inscrutable numerology of the queue surely serves some purpose internal to the DMV. I suspect the HR department has quotas and schedules for tasks that fall into different categories: a straightforward registration renewal for someone who has his documents in order probably serves as a breather, a respite from the miasmic cases that require the higher-level wisdom of a senior court mandarin. According to the tenets of industrial psychology, the easy cases need to be metered out in a way that motivates and soothes. Soothes the employees, that is.
But for we who sit in the fixed plastic chairs, the unknowable quality of the queue seems designed to induce deep resignation to the apparent arbitrariness of a bureaucratic logic that above all tends its own internal conveniences. Going to the DMV is a civic education in submission to a type of authority that relies on unintelligibility to insulate itself, much as the airlines rely on concepts like “system error” to suggest that the consequences of management’s decisions lie beyond human knowing.
In this we see the revival of what is really a premodern form of authority. We take ourselves to be ultramodern, but the peculiar quality of institutional life in the United States would seem to be taking us in the opposite direction, damaging citizens’ faith in the power of logic to make sense of the world. What is at issue is our readiness to make an effort of understanding, and trust in our own powers of comprehension. These are features of the republican personality as articulated by various Enlightenment figures, but they are not what is wanted by the systems that administer us. In the following chapters, we’re going to get into this.