ABSTRACT
This chapter just begins a response to the problem posed by the last chapter. If the contemporary is strange, how do we understand it, try to make ourselves at home? That is, to conceive of one’s times as strange to oneself, to recognize that I do not understand, poses an intellectual problem, viz., how can I start to understand? This is only a beginning, of course. This whole book is a response, and it’s not enough. For now, though, I suggest that neither common understandings of bureaucracy nor the rituals of the Bureaucratic University will help us very much.
