On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy

Abstract

Drawing on narrative interviews with psychiatrists and health analysts in Britain, the article provides an analysis of debates over the safety of SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac and Seroxat. The focus of the article is on what I describe, drawing on Foucault, Nietzsche, Niklas Luhmann and Michael Power, as a ‘will to ignorance’ within regulatory bureaucracies which works to circumvent a regulator's ability to carry out its explicit aims and goals. After a description of the regulatory processes that have influenced the efforts of patients and practitioners to reach conclusions on the risks and benefits of antidepressants, I conclude by suggesting that the article's analysis of the regulation of SSRIs carries theoretical insights for the study of regulation and bureaucracy in general.

Keywords:

• antidepressants
• regulation
• Nietzsche
• Luhmann
• strategic ignorance

I am grateful to Scott Vrecko and Nicolas Langlitz for their comments and to Nikolas Rose for comments on an early draft and for invaluable support of the doctoral research from which the article is drawn.

Notes

1. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche raises the question of why there has been a historical and theoretical privileging of truth over ignorance: ‘Granted we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? … To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil’ (Nietzsche 1990 [1973]: 33–6).

2. Hannah Arendt, in the essay On Violence describes the repercussions of a culture of non-liability within bureaucracies: ‘Today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such domination: bureaucracy or the rule of intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible. (If, in accord with traditional political thought, we identify tyranny as government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done)’ (1969: 38).

3. I am grateful to Scott Vrecko for helping me expand on this point.

4. With a different focus, Rabinow touches on this point in his 2004 essay on Luhmann.

5. Power, in The Audit Explosion, quotes nicely from Bourdieu on the strategic value of ambiguity: ‘Any practice must have “enough logic for the needs of practical behaviour, neither too much – since a certain vagueness is often indispensable, especially in negotiations – nor too little, since life would then become impossible”’ (Bourdieu 1990: 73, quoted in Power 1994: 54).