TUTTLE The paperwork, couldn't stand the paperwork. (indicating the torch) Over to the left please, if you don't mind sir. Hold it there. Yes, there's more bits of paper in Central Services than bits of pipe - read this, fill in that, hand in the other - listen, this old system of yours could be on fire and I couldn't even turn on the kitchen tap without filling in a 27B/6.... Bloody paperwork. SAM (mildly) Well I suppose one has to expect a certain amount TUTTLE Why? I came into this game for adventure - go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone. Now they've got the whole country sectioned of and you can't move without a form. I'm the last of a breed. Ah ha! Found it! (he holds up a small charred gadget) There's your problem.
- Excerpt from Brazil, by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown. Final script found here.
Lists are probably part of the oldest mnemonic devices to have shaped cognitive abilities. “The list is a structure with great ideological flexibility. It requires no internal logical justification or any other explicit criteria of selection and evaluation” (Marvin, 1998: 206). Forms correspond to an altogether different logic. Their “internal logical justification” bestows power on them, and links them to the many other kinds of bureaucratic, legal, economic an political agencies that depend on them. What would any kind of office represent without its reliance on forms ? How could any kind of administration sort, filter, classify, evaluate and exercise its functions if it didn’t use paper or digital forms ?
A visual and cognitive syntax, incarnated in the form of boxes, operators, dividing lines and assigned spaces in pre-formatted grids gives its intelligibility, its authority to a form. Tagging and filtering technologies, in this sense, are far from new, but belong to seemingly prosaic, but very effective, economic strategies of separation and distribution of human, and non-human lives.
