This essay is good for my KPIs: on bureaucracy and the politics of imagination

BACKGROUND This work is located within the field of literary nonfiction practice: in particular, the personal essay. It sits within a mode of playful, reflexive political critique that has been advanced within the personal essay by writers including Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace and Geoff Dyer. Such work asks how the meta-subjective self of the writer can be deployed as an experimental probe through which to address matters of concern (Latour). This work forms part of a series of performative experiments in first-person nonfiction narration by Carlin that argue for a nuanced cross-threading of form, affect and argument. CONTRIBUTION This work contributes, through the genre of the personal essay, to contemporary debates about the politics of imagination: how imagination is viewed, restricted and applied within institutional settings and public discourse. The essay offers a close reading of anthropologist David Graeber's book The Utopia of Rules, examining his critique of bureaucratic violence within the context of Australian political activities and the everyday. It investigates how binaries of imagination/reality and rational/irrational are constructed and deployed by various actors to different ends, teases out distinctions between games and play, and argues for a re-imagining of the uses of imagination. SIGNIFICANCE This work was commissioned by Griffith REVIEW's Founding Editor Julianne Schultz and published in Imagining the Future, a special edition of Australia's leading literary journal, Griffith REVIEW. Imagining the Future was widely reviewed in Australia and New Zealand, received national radio coverage on multiple occasions, and featured in public events in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane.