The Report Document

A particular type of document is circulating today, making its impact felt far and wide, but strictly within the office. This document, like most documents these days, starts from the office, which is effectively a factory of and for documents. The office is a dominant mode of socializing subjects, and it manages subjects through the circulation of documents. It is the contact with the document, the document-body contact, which is all important. This document we are analyzing is known as 'the report' in general language. Its format, like the format of most documents these days, is flexible, which means that we cannot say much in the way of definition about the report. Rather, it is mostly defined for what it is supposed to do rather than what it is, that is, it is defined in terms of its objectives and goals. This is where we face a problem: the report's given objectives are to facilitate openness and accountability, and in this sense the report is supposedly something dedicated to the public sphere. When one writes a report, it is supposed to clarify one's actions for the general public; it can be accessed by the public, supposedly; it is meant for a presentation to the public. But, in actual fact, the purpose of the report is totally for the private sphere, the report's objective is to facilitate a particular type of enclosure of the office's subjects, from the lowly writer of the report to the boss who reads it. This is an enclosure/imprisonment of all the points along a hierarchy, in a sense, it is the imprisonment of the boss itself within the logic of privacy. With the printer and the computer, we have managed to create the conditions for our own perpetual imprisonment, for the stream of documents is endless...This, however, is a special type of imprisonment. It is not the imprisonment where all prisoners are equal, as in a jail. But it is a hierarchical imprisonment...Additionally, the report has been arranged in its relation to human subjects in such a way that any agency with regards to the document is purely stylistic and not substantive. This is so because the writer of the report is so lowly as to not know the exact workings of the office, so he/she offers up stylistic points for the report. At the other end, the boss is so high up and concentrated upon his/her goals as to offer the report something which cannot be accurately understood by the other workers, in other words, stylistic points only. So, we begin to see how the report is not really a document full of content that relates the office to the public sphere, but rather, it distorts the office in the eyes of the public completely. Most importantly, by implicating all the hierarchical positions of the office together, it solidifies the authority chain in the office, it makes the points in the chain visible as it passes through, and rather than serving at the opening between the public and the private sphere, it is first and foremost totally a private, official thing. But what is the private office, or, what is the difference between the private office and the public sphere? The difference is created by one other document, it is the document known as the contract.