Sara Ahmed

administrative failure can mean more effort is required by those who make complaints

If to make a complaint is to write a history of complaint, then a complaint folder is a history holder.

Administrative labor is also communicative labor.

To make a complaint you have to keep making that complaint, to give it voice, to give it expression.

A complaint can be experienced as the requirement to become expressive.

If complaints are a “mess of documents,” that mess is hard.

you can imagine that something on paper that looks very linear is actually very circular a lot of the time.

And then her complaint became, in her terms, “a complaint about the complaint itself.”

Complaints are personal as well as institutional. The personal is institutional.

A body can stop functioning. A body can announce a complaint. That body is in a document. And that document is in a file. And that file is in a cabinet.