The Bureaucratic Routes and Documentary Temporalities of the Conscript’s Questionnaire at a Human Rights Organisation

Аннотация

The article examines the working mechanisms of a non-profit human rights organisation that helps Russian conscripts and their families with questions concerning military registration. Following the aesthetic approach, described by Matthew Hull, in research into bureaucracy, the author concentrates on the functional elements of the template used by the NPO, the conscript’s questionnaire. The text devotes considerable space to the question of the understanding of documentary time and its organisation in conscription bureaucracy. With the help of an analysis of its internal organisation and of practices of the use of the questionnaire as a formal tool, the text reveals the mechanisms of bureaucratic retemporalisation of the young man’s health and biography in the process of the construction of his “file-self”. Connecting the questionnaire with the other documentary forms used at the human rights organisation, the author demonstrates how they embody the working logic of the institution of conscription, and how the clients of the NPO use their knowledge of the peculiarities of the military medical taxonomies of illness in the process of “translating” particular diagnoses and the overall picture of their health from the “civil” to the “military” medical system. The analysis of the structure of the questionnaire and the papers associated with it allows the author to ask how the temporality established within the text of the document ensures trust in its contents on the part both of the citizen and the state.