ABSTRACT
Bureaucracy is an instrument of power. It sustains inequality between those ruling and those being ruled. The language it uses is ‘indexical’: Meanings are fixed and propositions cannot be questioned by those bound by it. In the film I, Daniel Blake, both the protagonist and his careworker have to follow authority’s rulebook even in cases where consequences are clearly absurd. In dialogic discourse, on the other hand, participants in principle enjoy equal rights. They can question rules, change the meaning and negotiate the implications of what they are told. Dialogic discourse is the foundation of democracy. In the egalitarian tradition of the French Revolution, citizens are the sole sovereign, deciding jointly the fortunes of their compact. Anglo-Saxon heritage, however, tends to favour a notion of citizenship granted by authority on the condition that citizens earn their rights by accepting the obligations imposed on them. It seems that ‘indexical’ discourse is becoming more pervasive in our days, manifesting itself in public and commercial bureaucracy, further abetted by coercing us to interact with unforgiving computer programmes. It is this kind of discourse that endangers a civil society where citizens are free to deal with issues confronting them in unregulated dialogue.
