Fabricating the People: Politics and Administration in the Biopolitical State

Fabricating the People

Politics and Administration in the Biopolitical State

Thomas J. Catlaw

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2007

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Garamond

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Catlaw, Thomas J. (Thomas Joseph), 1973-

Fabricating the people : politics and administration in the biopolitical state / Thomas J. Catlaw.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1572-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8173-1572-1

ISBN-13 978-0-817-38018-2 (e-book)

1. Legitimacy of governments—United States—Public opinion. 2. Public administration—United States—Public opinion. 3. Political leadership— United States—Public opinion. 4. Public opinion—United States. 5. United States—Politics and government—2001– I. Title.

JK275.C37 2007

320.973—dc22

2006102655

To the many who are, and the many more yet to come

Life itself is neither a good nor an evil:

life is where good or evil find a place,

depending on how you make it for them.

—Michel de Montaigne

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Public Administration and Political Ontology

2. Public Administration and Sovereignty

3. Representation

4. Law

5. Administration

6. Legitimacy and Control

7. A Politics of the Subject

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

A long, rich line of nurturing relationships made possible the composition of this work. It is a pleasure to acknowledge them here.

I am grateful for the many enriching discussions about this project. Thanks, in particular, to Marshall Alcorn, Ami Avitsur, Corey Davis, Michael Dimock, Amy Gignesi, Susan Halebsky-Dimock, Allan Jones, Aaron Kupchik, Elena Kupchik, Victoria Ludwin, Nick Samuels, Brad Snyder, and Andrew Zimmerman.

Of the many colleagues who have offered (and continue to offer) engaging criticisms of my work, I thank Kym Thorne, Louis Howe, Matthew Witt, Patricia Mooney-Nickel, Frank Scott, and Eric Austin. I am also grateful for early discussions about the problem of representation with participants of the 2002 Postmodern Public Administration Study Group of the European Group of Public Administration, specifically Isabel da Costa, Anna Maria Campos, Peter Bogason, and Paul Frissen. David John Farmer and Margaret Stout generously read a draft of the whole manuscript and offered insightful feedback on the text and its structure. I thank H. George Frederickson for his encouragement of this project, and Steven Aufrecht for his early support.

I have been fortunate to have arrived at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University during an exciting, even historic time for the state of Arizona, the university, and the school. There is a palpable optimism about the future and an inspiring sense of possibility. This spirit has certainly found its way into this book. I have been supported by an enviable group of colleagues. I should especially like to thank Laura Peck, Khalid Al-Yahya, Barbara McCabe, Janet Denhardt, Joe Cayer, and Heather Campbell—each has given to the completion of this book considerable time, patience, and energy. I would also like to acknowledge the research assistance of Heidi Spann, who was of great help with chapter 4, and Qian Hu and Greg Jordan, who were invaluable in the final preparation of the manuscript.

I am most grateful to Robert Denhardt for his support of this project and, just as important, for his cultivation of an open, dynamic intellectual environment at ASU as director of the School of Public Affairs. Our school, with the diverse range of methodologies and theoretical approaches it houses, practices precisely the kind of social science of which the world needs more.

At ASU, I have been part of the ongoing dialogue of the TOC group. This venue has proved vital to me in fleshing out many inchoate ideas, and I thank Kelly Campbell, Michael Coyle, Chao Guo, and Heather Stickeler for their discussions and their intellectual and emotional range.

The University of Alabama Press stands as one the important presses in the history of public administration. Publishing many classic works in the field, it continues to support cutting-edge advances in public administration thought. I extend deep appreciation to the staff at Alabama, unfailing advocates of this project; this publication is testament to that advocacy. I am very honored indeed that this book is published under the imprimatur of The University of Alabama Press.

I wish also to acknowledge the kind permission of Sage Publications and Administrative Theory & Praxis to use here portions of previously published materials. Portions of chapters 1, 4, 5, and 7 appeared, respectively, in The Death of the Practitioner, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 28(2) (2006): 190–207; Performance Anxieties: Shifting Public Administration from the Relevant to the Real, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 28(1) (2006): 89-120; Authority, Representation, and the Contradictions of Post-traditional Governing, American Review of Public Administration (2006); Constitution as Executive Order: The Administrative State and the Political Ontology of ‘We the People,’ Administration & Society 37(4) (2005): 445-482.

I give special thanks to Hugh Miller and Camilla Stivers. Hugh and Cam read the manuscript in its entirety with great care and attention. Their critiques and recommendations dramatically improved the final product, and our exchanges about the text exemplified their own remarkable work on discourse and dialogue. I could not have completed this project without them. I owe the deepest of thanks and appreciation to Lori Brainard and Michael Harmon, who serve as invaluable mentors, friends, and intellectual guides. Orion White is a dear friend and sharp critic. He has suffered many iterations of this work and, such is his way, always prompted new thoughts that kept the discourse moving. Words will certainly fail to articulate the manifold ways in which I am grateful to Cynthia McSwain. So I won't try.

My wife, Suzanne, has lived this book with me for many years. Among her many gifts to me, I thank her most for our shared struggle against the insistence of the model.

1

Public Administration and Political Ontology

Crisis and Political Ontology

Over the last thirty years, there has been a rising tide of hostility toward government. During the same period, the field of public administration in the United States has been concerned with its own, perhaps more narrow, crisis of legitimacy. But why? Just as skepticism about and mistrust of government is not a recent phenomenon in American political culture, neither is the question of legitimacy new for the field of public administration. Indeed, the very concept of public administration arguably is defined by its ongoing search for an identity and disciplinary coherence; and skepticism toward government is central to the liberal political tradition. Yet since the late 1960s, the question of legitimacy in both domains has been taken up with an impressive urgency. What is at the root of contemporary antigovernmentalism?

Broadly speaking, the field of public administration has offered two explanations for this legitimacy crisis, one normative, the other performative.¹ The first explanation locates the crisis of government in the absence of the correct value set, be it defined in terms of constitutionally or democratically based values. From this diagnosis, it seeks to alter the consciously held values of the individual public administrator and the field generally from neutrality to an explicit normative position. The latter position conceives of the crisis primarily in terms of government's failure to perform and deliver effective services to the public and so grounds its remedy in the advancement of professional and/or technical knowledge. Though this is a stylized presentation of these positions, naming differences in emphasis more than in kind, the twin deficits of normativism and performance nevertheless mark the dominant theoretical positions in public administration and orient contemporary efforts to enhance both the efficacy and legitimacy of government. Departing from these poles—indeed, arguing that these apparent adversaries share everything of any importance—this text makes a rather different kind of argument. It contends that the current crisis of government has its roots in the breakdown of the theoretical plausibility and practical efficacy of a set of foundational assumptions about reality itself. This crisis is caused by the collapse of a distinct ontological conception of human life. The very fabric of the world is coming undone.

It may sound strange to talk about a breakdown or failure of an ontology since, in philosophical terms, ontology is the inquiry into, fundamentally, what is—what it means to be, what objects can be said to exist, and what assumptions we make about them and their relations to other entities. Can what is really fail or break down? Can the meaning of being change? Philosophical and theoretical developments, ones that have unfolded and gained prominence during the same period as our legitimacy crises, have challenged radically the simple givenness of objects and our ontological commitments to them. That is, assessing what is can no longer be viewed simply as a matter of common sense, given experience of the world.² Rather, the basic assumptions we make about the nature of our reality substantively create that reality as well as our subjective and collective experience of it.³ Ontological commitments are the basic ideas or principles by which we make up our worlds. As I will elaborate over the course of this text, the ontological crisis of the current period refers to the breakdown in the plausibility of the supposition that there is an ultimate, given unity behind appearance to which all differences in the final instance reduce. I name this ontology representation.

We have come to understand, further, that ontologies are political. Our basic set of commitments and assumptions about the world implies specific ways of organizing politics and specific political forms. According to Adrianna Cavarero (2002), each political form implies a political approach to the question of ontology. In other words, since politics, however one understands it, concerns itself with human beings, each conception of politics raises the ontological question, or rather, it presupposes a political ontology (p. 513).⁴ Political forms, in other words, imply distinct ontological commitments, and an approach to ontology implies an account of politics, political form, collective life, and what it means to be. Applying this to our own political context, the institutions of representative government and the modern presuppositions of democracy—namely, the idea of a popular sovereign or People—themselves are linked to a distinct set of ontological commitments. Approaching from the other direction, ontology implies a political form and establishes certain requirements for a theory of knowledge (epistemology) and the organization and constitution of instituted authority.

Much concern has been expressed about social fragmentation and how people appear to be less inclined to sacrifice for the common good. I will argue here, however, that the core problem of the contemporary world is less that we all see the world from our own narrow individual perspective or interests and so fail to work toward a common good (a position sufficiently accommodated by political liberalism and positivist epistemology), but rather that we can now appreciate that we may live in and hold fidelities to the truths of different worlds. The objects that count as real to us, what we can know about them, and what it means to live a meaningful life can vary in fundamental ways that are not simply superficial misunderstandings. These differences are, furthermore, not amenable to empirical or phenomenological resolution since the very terms and criteria of judgment and adjudication of, for example, the good are internal to those worlds (Badiou, 2006/1988; Kuhn, 1996/1962).⁵ Nor can these differences simply be reduced to a humanist presumption about a universally shared, unconstructed trait or characteristic of humanity. In other words, the world can no longer plausibly be thought to exist as a given unity, nor can it be conceived as being something we all have in common. It is not simply the case that the world is so complex that, when aggregated, our particular concepts and consciousness cannot capture the whole (Miller, 2002, p. 62; Simon, 1997/1945). Rather, there simply is not a whole world to represent. Indeed, the world is now presented increasingly in the full force of its multiplicity. In the domain of the political, the unity of the People, the popular sovereign's presumptive We, fragments into proliferating categories of group identity, interest, and enclave—seemingly possessing neither a common cause nor a common adversary.

The breakdown in representation may be thought of as what Karl Weick (1993) calls a cosmology episode. A cosmology episode occurs, Weick writes, when people suddenly and deeply feel that the universe is no longer a rational orderly system. What makes such an episode so shattering is that both the sense of what is occurring and the means to rebuild that sense collapse together (p. 633). Though I would resist pointing to a single traumatic event that ruptured the world of representation, Weick's idea captures something crucial—not only are we struggling to make sense of our worlds and those of others, but both the theoretical assumptions and institutional arrangements we have relied on previously to make up worlds and to create sense itself, such as representative government and the presumptions of popular sovereignty, no longer seem to work (Castells, 2000). They seem less effective in helping us to construct a stable, rationally ordered world. With the eroding efficacy of the presupposition that a single view can represent social, political, or personal reality, political orders that are founded on this ontological commitment, including liberal democratic government, and that have been constructed to reproduce these presuppositions find themselves on ever more tenuous footing.⁶

Consideration of these problems from the perspective of public administration, the field of study today most intimately acquainted with the everyday work of governing and the reproduction of this ontology, reveals an additional dimension of the relationship of political form and ontological commitment, namely, the practical difficulty of disentangling different understandings of ontology. Colin Hay (2006) describes a standard philosophical distinction between two distinct, albeit closely related understandings of ontology.⁷ The first, and more abstract, is concerned with the nature of ‘being’ itself—what is it to exist, whether (and, if so, why) there exists something rather than nothing and whether (and if so, why) there exists one logically contingent actual world. The second sense of the term is concerned with the (specific) set of assumptions made about the nature, essence and characteristics (in short, the reality) of an object or set of objects of analytical inquiry. . . . [P]olitical ontology is a ‘regional ontology’ (p. 80). Hay's lucid account restricts itself to the study and inquiry into, first, the nature of being and, second, a more specific, regional approach to objects or specific domains of objects. Whereas philosophy may concern itself with being in general, he writes, political analysis cannot proceed without making decisions with regard to its assumptions (which may vary considerably) about a set of more narrow matters, for example, the relationship between structure and agency, context and conduct or the nature of the human (political) subject and its behavioral motivations (p. 81).

The everyday work of governing presents a case in which this division of ontological labor will not hold. As Cavarero (2002) suggests, governing implies an answer to the ontological question What does it mean to be? insofar as politics broadly defined can be said to consider the question of the good life (Waldo, 1948). That is, while ontological commitments speak to the nature and scope of entities that can be said to exist (White, 2000), as in the regional ontologies of social science, commitments in the realm of government also answer, even if only implicitly, the question of what it means to be in the world. As critics of technicism and rationalism have long argued, governing cannot be reduced to the status of a science and the manipulation of objects. It cannot be only a regional ontology (or constellation of regional ontologies) precisely because governing provides an answer to the question of what it means to be and, in doing so, itself establishes a general array of objects, relationships, and properties that orient and organize the regional worlds. When we consider in this text, then, the question of the People, we are thinking about both a posited entity and a certain way of being-together in the world, about the status of particular entities as well as how we take them to be in the world, about the status of human entities and how we take ourselves to be in the world.

From this answer to the question of being itself, certain dispositions for order and human existence emerge to inform and guide theories, practices, and techniques of governing. What we will see is that the fundamental commitment of representation is to a unity behind appearance and differences or, in the language of philosophy, that being is One (Badiou, 2006/1988). Our world has been built on this foundation, and this is a foundation now beyond reconstruction. The challenge for administrative thought is to consider the contemporary crises of governing from these densely interwoven dimensions—being, political form, epistemology, and governing practices. The task, in other words, is to illuminate the dimensions, limits, and possibilities of representations political ontology⁸ and to consider how else we ontologically might construct our worlds.

Waldo and the Obstinate Constellation of Public Administration

There are good reasons to begin an inquiry into the contemporary condition of governing from public administration. Public administration's ever-present legitimacy question makes it especially close to the problems at the heart of this breakdown in the political ontology of representation. In addition to its role in reproducing a specific political ontology (a point to be demonstrated in chapter 5), the appearance of the administrative state (or at least a self-conscious public administration⁹) marks a distinct moment in the ontology of representation. The administrative state is a symptom of sorts, and during its history, there has been considerable theoretical development that will assist in formulating the contours of representation. However, public administration has not been fully able to confront the problems and opportunities that this failure of our political ontology poses.

The reasons for this are complex and hinge on the field's self-construction on and within representation itself. A few reasons are clear enough now, though. First, the field's thought has been limited by historical misconceptions and, in no small measure, by a not infrequently defensive posture before more mature academic disciplines (e.g., political science and economics). Second, it has been unnecessarily deferential to an image of the real world of administrative practice (Catlaw, 2006b). Third, and no doubt conditioned by the previous two points, public administration has largely ignored the question of ontology, its fundamental understanding of reality (McSwite, 1997a), viewing such academic or theoretical pursuits as insufficiently practical or useful to the labors of governing.¹⁰ These factors have circumscribed the field's internal critical discourse and theoretical exploration.

Paradoxically, the field's development has been restricted most seriously by the parameters established by perhaps its greatest, certainly most prominent critic, Dwight Waldo. In The Administrative State, Waldo (1948) famously wrote: Any political theory rests upon a metaphysic, a concept of the ultimate nature of reality (p. 21). (We can read the word metaphysic here as ontology [White, 2000, p. 1].) Waldo held that the ontology upon which public administration was founded was a verdict of science. Scholars and practitioners of public administration had uncritically accepted a scientific attitude that, by virtue of its understanding of reality as being governed by fixed, discoverable social laws, conditioned an unhealthy preoccupation with efficiency, technical expertise, neutrality, and the self-evidence of the facts. The articulation of this value-free scientific position, as Waldo noted, in actuality concealed a fully fledged political theory of government. Far from public administration being merely a technical enterprise, its language of technique and neutrality concealed a robustly developed political philosophy. Articulating a position that would be demonstrated ably by others in the following decades, Waldo went on to argue that the insistence on a rigorous distinction between politics and administration was simply untenable.¹¹ His was among the earliest salvos in the ongoing assault on the politics-administration dichotomy.¹² Most important, Waldo's critique exposed the theoretical and historical relationship between the objectivism of modern science and the administrative state. He showed that the administration was not and could not be neutral because it was a product of a distinctive historical period and, more fundamentally, because, normatively, it relied on that verdict of science.

The threshold that Waldo did not cross, however, was to link this verdict and the emergence of administration with the particular form of modern politics, namely, political representation and the problems generated by depositing sovereignty in the People. Whatever critique Waldo mounted, politics remained self-evident and, as I shall suggest here, by necessity, so did public administration. This is not to say that Waldo's own body of work lacks traces of another line of analysis. Waldo raises the question of the foundations upon which American democracy is constructed in his discussion of the nineteenth century's preoccupation with notions of higher or fundamental law. The linkage between a faith in a higher, religious law and scientific law and faith in (a certain kind of) democracy is made clearly: Yet it would be a serious mistake to suppose that American students [of public administration] have escaped the influence of ‘higher law’ notions widely accepted by the American community. Faith in democracy . . . is just such an idea. To the extent that democracy has been thought superior and ultimate as a form of government and way of life, it has itself served as the higher law to which everything else must be referred; we have seldom permitted ourselves to doubt that democracy accords with the moral constitution of the universe (1948, p. 17).

This discussion continues in Waldo's rich examination of what he calls cosmic constitutionalism and its conflation, a fusion and confusion, of the ideas of moral and physical necessity (1948, p. 155).¹³ Many years later, Waldo (1980) asks a more precisely formulated, if seemingly only rhetorical, question: "With regard to democracy the problem of definition is severe. Democracy of course means ‘rule by the people’—but what does that mean? Who are the ‘people'? How and by what means can they ‘rule'? What are the limitations, in principle or practice on their rule? What about the contention that rule by the people is impossible, that the word itself reflects confusion?" (p. 84). Elsewhere, he provocatively notes (Brown & Stillman, 1986, p. 61) that the emergence of the administrative state marked a turn toward democracy and away from the representative republicanism constructed by the Federalist Constitution. Thus, in various places in Waldo's work, there are traces of a different line of analysis. Here, we pick up and follow these traces.¹⁴

Administration, the Suspect Enterprise

Whatever other lines of inquiry Waldo's work adumbrates, in the decades that followed the post-World War II debate on the politics/administration dichotomy and epistemology raged on. Criticized from myriad perspectives and on empirical, normative, historical, and philosophical grounds, the battle-weary dichotomy has died a thousand deaths, by a thousand cuts (Fox & Miller, 1995, p. 3), which need not be rehearsed here. Similarly, the objectivism of science has been exposed thoroughly; the socially constructed (or at least paradigmatically mediated) nature of the facts are well documented in many literatures and even incorporated into mainstream perspectives in the field (e.g., Ostrom 1989/1973). The possibility of simply representing reality has become an increasingly difficult intellectual position to defend. Still, these two elements remain as the essential coordinates of public administration discourse, and the terms of the dichotomy remain the predominant view of public administration among the public and, generally speaking, academics outside of public administration. Having spent the good part of his life criticizing it, in the last years of his career Waldo (1980) himself concluded, I do not believe it is possible to ‘solve’ the problem of relating politics to administration in any way that is systematic and generally acceptable, in and for the United States, under present conditions and in any foreseeable future (p. 77).

Precisely why has it proven so difficult to resolve the matter of the relationship of politics to administration? Many answers have been advanced to account for its durability. The dichotomy is, perhaps, partially accurate as a description of the relationship between career civil servants and elected officials and, arguably, it provides a normative base, rooted in democratic theory, for assessing the appropriateness of [administrative] behavior (Svara, 1985, p. 221). Functionally, the dichotomy may also serve to insulate administrators from the demands of particularistic politics (Montjoy & Watson, 1995), thereby creating both a professional standard and an incentive for administrators to reproduce belief in the dichotomy. No doubt, the dichotomy also has the commonsense appeal of folk wisdom insofar as it appears to map onto everyday dualisms, what Goodnow (1900) called the psychological necessity of formulating and carrying out or deciding and acting. It replicates an everyday notion of the giving and taking of orders. In the style of Waldo's own historical approach, recent intellectual histories of the development of public administration in the United States suggest another set of explanations (e.g., McSwite, 1997b; Stivers, 2000). From these vantages, the dichotomy can be seen as part of the strategy for legitimizing the nascent field of public administration. This legitimizing unfolded through an attachment to the language of scientific neutrality and objectivity and, by extension, its authority. The possibility for administration necessitated the creation of what I shall call in chapter 2 a domain of sovereignty for public administration, and this sovereignty was founded on this verdict of science, regardless of whether we accept weak or strong versions of the dichotomy.

Compelling though these accounts are, they do not address an obvious question. Why was such a strategy and discourse necessary in the first place? In other words, what were the underlying assumptions that produced the dichotomy (even if only in a weak form) as a reasonable solution? What are these conditions to which Waldo alludes? The infamous, insoluble dichotomy—and the concomitant epistemological problems that attend to the questions of values and facts and the possibility or desirability of a science of administration—is a symptom of the deeper dilemma noted above—the legitimacy problem. The very question as to whether administration is either value-free or value-laden and the matter of its relationship to politics emerge only under conditions within which administration is a suspect enterprise and must seek firm ground to justify itself. The legitimacy question, I further suggest, is the portal to the political ontology of representation and to understanding the dynamics of the contemporary world.

So, another question: Why, then, is administration suspect? We will consider this question in depth in chapter 6 but, briefly here, within the liberal democratic American context, administration has been held as suspect insofar as it portends the installation of a powerful, unelected, and ostensibly unaccountable cadre of bureaucrats.¹⁵ This, so it is alleged, constitutes a grave threat to the defining premise of democracy—government according to the will of the sovereign People.¹⁶ Within this form of the political, the administrative state, potentially, is parasitic on the body politic of the People. Interestingly, where this political form is operative, the dichotomy is, in fact, a rather moot point because the question of politics is effectively bracketed. In other words, when squabbling over whether a value-free administration is or is not possible and/or desirable, we do not concern ourselves with the status of the sovereign to whom administration is beholden. The People as the origin of authority and the self-evidence of the representational mechanisms that purport to express the People's will are assumed. The full dimensions of our political ontology are never considered; the field's discourse remains hermetic.

Indeed, when we examine disagreements in public administration, we see that disputes have raged most heatedly (e.g., Friedrich-Finer, Waldo-Simon, new public administration and social equity, the Blacksburg group, the contemporary criticisms of the new public management, etc.) on matters concerning the question of what kind of administration or administrator is best for this liberal democratic People. This is all the terrain of the dichotomy. With partial exceptions to be discussed later, the sovereignty of something out there called the People is simply assumed and, as such, the functional distinction between politics and administration—between expressing the People's will and carrying it out—is always maintained. The dichotomy is unavoidable.

Waldo's Unfinished Project

Waldo's insistence on posing the question of the metaphysic of administration was, in principle, correct, and The Administrative State justly remains an ongoing inspiration for critical discourse in public administration. The overall effect, though, of Waldo's directive—intended or not—to contest the verdict of science and call into question the sovereignty of the facts grounded theoretical development in public administration on something of an epistemological jetty. It turned theoretical development toward regional questions of knowledge and the status of facts, with the implicit or explicit task of demonstrating the political, value-laden dimension of administration, and distracted from the considerations of a general ontology within public administration.

My point is not that Waldo was an inessential moment in the trajectory of the field's development; nor does raising the limitations of Waldo's critique dismiss the turning point it marked. Quite to the contrary. However, this focus on the metaphysics of science and the problem of the dichotomy deflected from an inquiry that would have linked a fundamental conception of reality (ontology) with a specific epistemological position (the verdict of science) with a distinctive form of the political (the People). At the same time, this emphasis deflected from a different historical understanding of the emergence of a self-conscious public administration that would have pointed to precisely such an inquiry.

Modalities of Politics

To appreciate the dimensions of the endgame in which public administration and modern political thought about governing generally landed itself, let us begin by observing the doubling of the term political. There are at least two senses of the political at work in public administration's discourse. First, let us call Politics the process of representing the will of the People, the possibility of which the field takes for granted; and second, there is the question of the political dimension of administrative action, which has been contentious as both a theoretical and practical matter. (There are still other meanings of politics circulating in public administration. I will consider these in the discussion of Frank Goodnow in chapter 2.) The importance of this