Invitation to Public Administration 9781315703244, 9780765609144

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INVITATION

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION TO

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INVITATION

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION TO

O.C. McSwite

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2002 by M.E. Sharpe Published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compound s, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McSwite, O.C. Invitation to public administration / O.C. McSwite. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7656-0914-2 (alk. paper) 1. Public administration. I. Title. JF1351 .M2598 2002 351—dc21

2001049783

ISBN 13: 9780765609151 (pbk) ISBN 13: 9780765609144 (hbk)

To my students Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught. —George Savile, Marquis of Halifax

v

There was a man named Zusya who, just before he died, had a revelation. “In the world to come, I shall not be asked: ‘Why were you not more like Moses?’ I shall be asked: ‘Why were you not more like Zusya?’” —Jewish Folktale

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

ix xv

1. The Delicate Connection of Work to Person 2. A Letter from Prague: Kafka’s Insight 3. A Second Letter from Prague: Existential Crisis on Ostrovni Street 4. Back in D.C. in a New Millennium Appendix. What Is at Stake?

3 25 43 66 101

Bibliography About the Authors

115 119

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Preface

In one of the universities where I worked, I managed something called the Masters Degree in Public Administration Internship Seminar Program. This was a series of seminars for second-year students who had completed their course work and were now in professional internships. It was my job to set the topics for the seminars and find resource people to present them. Given that one of my interests is organizational psychology, I decided to have a seminar on Eric Berne’s transactional analysis psychology (TA), which was quite in vogue at the time. One of the most powerful ideas of TA is that of “script.” This is the concept that people live out narrative plots (“scripts”) that unconsciously orient every aspect of their lives. These scripts dominate their lives. The purpose of TA is to help people free themselves from this domination. Scripts can be rather benign or they can be tragic, causing one to waste one’s life and live in psychological pain. People who are caught in tragic scripts are designated by TA as “losers”—people who are playing to lose, living their lives so as to produce painful outcomes for themselves because this is what their scripts dictate. The pain they experience is the primary source of meaning in their lives. I contracted with a famous expert in TA to present the M.P.A. seminar, and I told him that what we wanted was an overview of the key concepts in TA theory and a suggestion of how these concepts could be applied to improving the performance of agencies and organizations. He agreed, and then he asked me a long list of questions about the students, their jobs, career plans, the M.P.A. ix

x PREFACE

degree, and so on. I noticed that, as he did this, his voice took on an oddly grave tone, as if he were coming to a diagnosis of something, and the prognosis was not favorable. This was, in fact, just what he was doing. At the seminar he did as I asked and presented an overview of key TA concepts with a special emphasis on the idea of script. Then he said he was going to show how this idea, script, could help one understand things that were going on in an organization that would otherwise be misunderstood. He engaged the students in an extended question and answer session about the jobs that they held in public agencies. As he proceeded, it became clear that his pedagogical objective was to get the students to have the insight that anyone who would take a job as a public bureaucrat in a government agency was a loser. Public administrative careers, in his view, were good examples of tragic scripts. By the end he came very close to saying outright that working in a public service job was a tragic dead end, an impossible thing to do while having a sensible, happy life. His well-intended therapeutic purpose was to help them see this, supposedly so that they would be able to go into another line of work. I was left quite conflicted by this man’s talk. On the one hand he had a point. Many people do go into bureaucratic jobs out of a kind of depressed, security-seeking motive: “This is the best I am going to be able to do.” They often do their work in a way that embroils them constantly in conflict, bad feeling, and failure. Such motives, and the organizational cultures they spawn, are often what create the bureaucratic conditions that critics decry. These people surely could be trapped in a tragic script and would benefit from realizing it. On the other hand, though, I thought the man was completely wrong. In my opinion, working in public bureaucracies was the best way I knew legitimately to gain the feeling of being a winner at all levels of life, from the personal to the social. Public administrative jobs are the best places for achieving a sense of personal development and a sense of contributing to society and humanity generally. After the seminar ended, I told the presenter my reactions. He asked me to explain my second reaction, about how public jobs

PREFACE xi

could be performed in a “winning” mode, but it was clear that I did not convince him. He simply listened and smiled back at me with a certain bemused look. Probably, I thought, he had diagnosed me as a loser because I had chosen to become a public administration academic. One way of describing this book is as a response to the ambivalent reaction I had to that seminar. My entire professional life has been devoted to the field of public administration to one degree or another, either as an academic in a university or as a practitioner in a government agency. This is in spite of the fact that I never consciously intended to pursue such a career! So as time has passed, I have regularly pondered how it is that I got into public administration and why I have continued with it. The core of the book, chapters 2 and 3, were originally open letters written by Orion White in 1994 to the community of graduate students and faculty at the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech University. Orion White and Cynthia McSwain (the two authors who write as O.C. McSwite) were on sabbatical, working in Europe that year. The period just before the sabbatical was fraught with overwork, tensions about arrangements for the leave, and frantic travel planning. All of this was simultaneous with the intellectual dissension that accompanied the introduction of the postmodern perspective into the field; Orion was doing research that placed him in the middle of this controversy. The cumulative effect of these things was that Orion began to question how he ever came to be associated with the field of academic public administration and with the public service generally. He began asking how he had ever let himself become involved with “bureaucracy.” This question settled on his psyche and stayed with him for many months of the sabbatical. He really had no choice but to let the issue play itself out in his heart and mind and come to its own resolution. These two chapters, or letters, document the course of this process and report the conclusion to which it brought him. The letters were never intended for publication. Over the years

xii PREFACE

since Orion wrote them, however, they have been circulated through a number of public administration programs around the country. Numerous people who encountered them have remarked that they were of considerable interest and help to them in sorting out their own careers and life directions. Eventually a number of colleagues in the field suggested that I, O.C. McSwite, publish the letters in one form or another. It is from these suggestions that the idea of creating this book arose. Although Orion wrote the initial draft of two chapters, the authorship and voice of this book is fully mine, O.C. McSwite’s. The production of a reflective book, like that of a reflective life, is always, at its heart, the result of sustained caring, interaction, and commitment—in short, of relationship. After making the rather daunting decision to publish Orion’s letters, I decided that the best way to achieve the purpose of the project was to leave them largely in their original form and do only minor editing to them. This would, I concluded, preserve as much as possible of their original capacity to induce reflection in the reader. They did need context, though, particularly the contemporary context of the field, the issues that it faces, and the world that surrounds it. So I wrote the accompanying chapters to address this need for contextualization. Chapter 1 situates the letters in my own life and describes the way in which the field of public administration has shaped my development. Chapter 4 is a more straightforward intellectual discussion of the current condition of the field and the challenges we collectively face as members of it. It is with considerable trepidation that I expose these letters to a public audience, especially an academic one. I understand the academic aversion to self-exposure in print. I am aware that this dislike persists—despite the current popularity of memoir writing. I am able to overcome my hesitancy primarily because of the testimony I have been given by students that reading about Orion’s process of sorting out the meaning of public administration and service in his life has been useful to them. Secondly, I am motivated by my own positive and direct experience in using these letters in my classroom as a vehicle for inducing students to reflect about the meaning of the field.

PREFACE xiii

In the end, the book is aimed at students who, for whatever reason, come into contact with the academic field of public administration, become intrigued by it, and want to consider making it the focus of their career identity. It is also aimed at people in general who want to consider a public administration, or as I like to put it, public service career in government as their vocation. I see very little difference between the academic and the professional sides of the question. The purpose of this book is to model a certain type of reflection —or, more accurately, meditation—on the meaning of involving one’s self with the street-level side of government. This is the part responsible not so much for deciding as for doing, or, more accurately, the part that must decide while in the midst of the process of doing. In this sense, “Invitation” in the title is somewhat misleading. I have no interest in “hype-ing” or persuading the reader to commit to the study or practice of public administration by making objective claims that it is extraordinarily exciting, personally rewarding, and so on. It may be all or some of this, but I am not going to claim so here. My purpose is to set off an inner process, one with a depth and a texture that give it a certain degree of autonomy in the way that it proceeds and resolves. This, I believe, is the only kind of process that yields true personal meaning. It should be the primary inspiration guiding practical decision making about how one wants to live out one’s life. It is a process, though, that in my opinion is occurring with less and less frequency. This mode of reflection seems to have become almost unavailable to people at the moment. The United States, arguably the least overtly ideological regime in the history of civilization, is a prototype of the social conditions that have produced this. The United States has been overtaken by its shadow, its deeply embedded ideological side. Never before has it been so dominated by an ideological hegemony. The hegemony I mean, of course, is free market capitalism in its late capitalist incarnation, the leading edge of economic globalization.The emphasis on an economic calculus as the frame for life decisions that has emanated from this dominant social theory has virtually eliminated other modes

xiv PREFACE

of engaging the choices that one faces.Young people now choose their partners, their homes, and surely their careers, according to a market logic that is a direct extrapolation of the logic of selecting toothpaste or shoes. In such a context, considering a personal commitment to public service, whether studying and teaching it or professionally practicing it, is a marginally legitimate enterprise at best. It simply doesn’t offer the highest yield. This situation is further complicated by the fact that dominant ideologies tend to create ideological counter-reactions, reactions that block or impair the process of finding a personally meaningful direction for life. Thus, even to resist the logic of the market is to be trapped in an ideological counter-position. An open process of reflection leading to a sense of who one is and what one wants is very difficult to sustain. In the face of this, and knowing how important it has been to me over the course of my own life to be led into personal reflection by others, I offer the meditations on the pages of this book. My apologies in advance to any and all who may be made uncomfortable by them. I assure you that I present them only in the hope that they may be of use in legitimating such reflections in a world hostile to them, and perhaps in helping others to initiate some similar process of their own that will lead to the same conclusion—the discovery of one’s own desire. I was told long ago, and the lesson stuck, that an unexamined life is not worth living. I hope that I have taken a step toward repaying those who taught me this by offering some of my own examinations into the meaning of the career endeavor that, it turns out, I have pursued for the full extent of my adult life so far.

Acknowledgments

The development of this book has a somewhat peculiar and protracted history. What enabled me to bring it to completion was the opportunity of a sabbatical leave from The George Washington University for Cynthia McSwain and a research leave from Virginia Tech University for Orion White. I am very grateful to both universities. I lived during this leave period in beautiful, wonderful Quebec City, Canada. My friends and colleagues, Lucie Rouillard and Denis Proulx, of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration Publique at the University of Quebec provided me with invaluable professional and personal support. The happy time I had in Quebec with Lucie and Denis no doubt contributed to the tone of enthusiasm and joy that I hope I have given the manuscript. In this same vein Fran Emory and Ed Banas, true friends and colleagues always, helped me to manage the final stages of the writing. To them I say thank you again! As far as I know, there is no book exactly like this one in the field of public administration, and it was somewhat difficult for me, as a rather reclusive introvert, to make the leap of personal revelation involved in writing it. I could not have done it without the encouragement and support of my colleagues at the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech University and the Department of Public Administration at George Washington University. Gary Wamsley read sections of the manuscript a number of times and gave me encouraging feedback. His deep commitment to the public service life and the field of public administration was an inspiration to me. Michael Harmon did the same; his xv

xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

support and the perspective he provided was crucial in convincing me that publishing these reflections could make a contribution to the field. Special thanks go to David Farmer for offering to publish these words in an edited volume if I was not going to do so—thereby finally convincing me that I should take the leap—and to Camilla Stivers, for encouraging me and for bringing me to the attention of Harry Briggs and M.E. Sharpe. Harry has been a wonderful, facilitative editor and an effective supporter in moving the project to completion. Finally this book is dedicated to all of my students over the many years in which I have been fortunate enough to be their teacher. I hope they will see some of what they have taught me in these pages. For me this book is a small gift in the face of my great indebtedness to them. Cover Art The cover shows a reproduction of a mural painted on the walls of the Siena, Italy, City Hall, entitled The Benefits of Good Government in the City. It depicts scenes of orderly commerce, genial human relationship, and diligent work being carried on as the result of the civil order emanating from a well functioning public service. When good government is in place, the relationship of the individual to the collective is resolved, and the aims of each are rendered compatible.

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PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION TO

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1 • The Delicate Connection of Work to Person

Today the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting. —W.H. Auden

The Situation Then Each generation seems to produce some defining epithet. Mine is called the “silent generation.” When I read this, I am puzzled. Officially it seems to refer to the fact that my generation has not produced many great leaders, social or institutional innovations, or dramatic shifts in fashion or style. We apparently have simply chugged along through our lives, maintaining the status quo, low profile all the way. Sometimes I feel defensive about this, but mostly I try to understand what silenced us, what sent us into the background of society. The best explanation I have come up with has to do with the war, World War II, which we lived through as children and then suffered the aftermath of as adolescents and young adults. The main thing about seeing the war from my point of view as a child was that it scared me witless. The saving grace of being a child (if you are lucky enough to be put in such grace by your parents, and I was) is that you are made to feel precious. This feeling feeds off into a specific attitude of loving and treasuring 3

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your little body—which is mostly the whole identity that you have to yourself—and a general attitude of thinking that all human beings are valuable (because, to begin with, you are). Being alive is good. Observing war directly undermines this central attitude. So, when I watched war movies (and I saw plenty of them) that showed Nazis setting up machine guns to mow people down as they disembarked from the cattle cars in which they had been shipped to death camps, it was a horrible shock. The explanation that it was due to anti-Semitism did not help; this was far too abstract to me. In my hometown, while there must certainly have been anti-Semitism, Jews were high-status people, valued members of the community. This complicated matters even more. The world as depicted in the war movies did not make sense to my little child’s eyes no matter what I was told. I now realize that, to some extent, this was the case for everybody, adults and children alike. (Adults simply have more resources with which to contextualize their experience.) It was necessary for everybody to believe that the world (and thus the war) did make sense. Since we were fighting the war, we had, perforce, to regard it as a just war. There was certainly propaganda enough presented to us to make it easy to adopt this perspective and make us think that we really believed it. But I actually did not, because I could not. I suspect that this was true for many of my generation. The term “just war” was what I, as an adult, have now learned to label an oxymoron. The tension of having to render the inconceivable defensible produced a deep-seated psychological double bind and induced a certain kind of passivity in people; at least it did in me. Whether I knew it or not, I, and I think others, gave up troubling over the question of whether the broader framework of life—society, nation, inter-nation relations—could ever be truly sensible. I noticed that after the war the adults around me and in the movies I watched adopted a strangely ambivalent attitude toward social and political life. There was probably never a time before this when the American people were clearer about what defined good and evil, but at the same time, they did not want to talk openly about such things. It was as if discussing the issues raised by the war experi-

THE DELICATE CONNECTION 5

ence would reveal the fundamental inconsistency of life and irreparably damage people’s abilities to maintain their images of themselves as virtuous and their image of their society as moral. An implicit deemphasis on all sorts of ideological talk was in effect. There were still too many unresolved tensions at the philosophical and emotional levels, and these translated into profound uncertainty at the personal level. Even people who were appalled at what Hitler had done to the Jews had to admit that they actually did not like Jews themselves. For instance, just after the war was over, the people in my town built a country club and then voted not to admit Jews to it. Also, a lot of people had made a lot of money on the war; everyone knew it, but no one mentioned it. The result was that people wanted to turn away from considering the moral conundrums of collective existence and to define the core of life as private, as life at home. Work, a job, was just a way to make money to support private family life. People had a weak sense of the idea of career anyway; few believed in it then. A lot of people had been exposed to the reality of career and of large bureaucratic organizations through the military, but they had not liked what they had seen. The more popularly accurate image of life was captured by Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. This was widely read and made into a movie. It told the story of a man who rejected a corporate career in favor of facing and attending to his more immediate moral responsibility to family—one member of which was an illegitimate child he had fathered in Italy during the war. This was regarded as the heroic and honorable choice. Everything in the 1950s became personal and concrete. The workplace was where a person labored with other people whom one hoped would become friends. The pain of work was offset by the pleasures of association, of being in the same boat with others. Also, most of the work was “real” work, work that had something directly to do with meeting the necessities of life. People either made things or fixed things that had been made before. There were few services or other such abstract products. The only service workers that most people did business with were physicians and

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nurses, and they were regarded as considerably more exotic than they are today. What this kind of social context unknowingly created in me was a profound naivete about the relation between work and life, one so profound that I did not gain perspective on it until I had completed graduate school and become a professor. I would later characterize my early sensibility as a basic innocence about the fundamental relation between me in my career and me as a person. This innocence did not stem from an insulated, protected youth in which I never had to work for money. I had, in fact, had many jobs in my life before going to graduate school, even one as a fulltime, professional public administrator, but none of them marked a genuine separation from the world of my growing up. As an undergraduate I had worked in a bookstore, a job that entailed a surprising amount of physical labor created by the process of shipping in and selling and then buying back and reselling thousands of copies of textbooks each semester. This kind of work balanced the abstraction of my university courses and made a nice transitional linkage back to my days as a summertime physical laborer. Then for two years after I finished my undergraduate degree I worked in my first public administration job as an administrative assistant for the city manager in my hometown. Although undeniably professional, the job came to me via straightforward patronage: My father was a close friend to the city manager’s staff. At the time I took the job as a summer intern, I had only the most fragmentary sense of public administration as a distinct area of activity. I had been raised in this region and working for the city seemed rather like a return to and extension of my high school days. I was thrust into the oddly unenviable position of being the primary assistant to a new city manager after the firing, on the day I started, of the former manager. I had planned to go directly to graduate school in the fall, but my new boss convinced me to stay and help him learn about “my city.” Interestingly enough, I found I knew as little about it as he did, and my work seemed mostly like enhancing the social skills my parents had taught me and broadening my existing social networks. I tended to refer all issues and

THE DELICATE CONNECTION 7

questions to the context of my family and local community, rather than to any more abstract standards of profession or organization. I dressed the same as I had throughout college, kept roughly the same schedule, and associated with the same people in my off hours. I began, though, to experience a serious disconnection between who I thought myself to be and the burgeoning demands of my job identity. I never seemed to do any “real” work, and I noticed a level of anxiety about performance and status in the people around me that I had not experienced before. I began to feel alienated from myself—as if I were unsure of who I really was. It was as if I were becoming a different person, some new person—at work. I didn’t really have to face this at all, though, as my new city manager mentor was fired himself after eighteen months, and I finally went on to graduate school. It was in graduate school that the real separation between the person I had grown up as at home and my new professional work identity occurred. During that period I was awarded a research assistantship and was sent one summer to work in Washington, D.C. Living alone in a city like that was culture shock enough, but the psychological confrontation that was more difficult for me to come to terms with was the work I was doing. Each day I “dressed up” and made my way to the offices of what was then the Civil Aeronautics Board, where I was carrying out my research. After a round of preliminary interviews and an orientation session arranged by my supervising professor, I settled down to do the work. This consisted of sitting in the library and reading the transcripts of the congressional hearings that made up the legislative history of the Civil Aeronautics Act. I read, and I made notes on what I read. All day. At first I did this enthusiastically with a kind of physical zeal. Then I noticed that I began to watch the clock and anticipate my breaks for coffee and lunch in the cafeteria on the ground floor. As the summer wore on, definite boredom set in. The hearings testimony was repetitive and, after a while, completely predictable. My mind went on autopilot for the purpose of reading and making the notes, and the reflective part of me began to marvel at the job itself.

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I regarded myself with my mind’s eye as I sat there and turned the pages. I felt genuine amazement at the realization that this was all there was to this kind of work. I was being paid “good money” to sit and read. I didn’t even have to manage the interpersonal relationships of a standard office or store. At one point I calculated how many pages I read each day, and how much I earned for reading each page. It was a strange new world. Having started out taking the reading with utmost seriousness, I now looked at it as something I had mastered and could do with my “hands behind my back,” so as to speak. I began to attend, to an unacademic degree, to my physical appearance. I began to spend more on coffee breaks and lunch than I could afford. Garnering the gazes of others on the elevator began to be important to me, and I secretly tallied up how much attention I gained each time. I would notice with painful envy the expensive leather briefcases of the lawyers who came and went, doing airline business. I took protracted coffee breaks and lunches. Such encounters, the contents of the daily Washington Post, the odd bits of agency gossip I picked up, and my own personal image became the focus of my daily work life. I was becoming professional. This episode of naïve encounter with an alien professional world was repeated many times in a variety of ways as I slowly made the transition from graduate student to professional academic. The most important part of the transition was unconscious. One of the best examples of how the unconscious dimension of this transition operated on me was the time I spent working for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington (again) after getting my M.P.A. My days were filled largely with boredom, as we were both overstaffed and directed to contract out the bulk of what had previously been our tasks. My office colleagues were largely demoralized and disaffected from the irrational bureaucracy that surrounded us. The sense of mission that had infused the earlier days of the agency had diminished, and those at headquarters were really quite distant from the outcomes of the programs they directed. My coworkers compensated by focusing their attention on personal hobbies and daily

THE DELICATE CONNECTION 9

routines designed to create a sense of purposeful activity. I, however, still took my job seriously and couldn’t seem to figure out productive ways to spend the time. I found myself becoming irresponsible, arriving late and devising excuses to leave early. I didn’t want to be there; I didn’t like the quality of relationships I had with my coworkers and the constant gossip that passed for conversation. Most of all I didn’t understand why the world of organizations and careers was set up as it was. Why was it necessary for people to conform to roles that made them unhappy and to pretend to do work that they felt was unnecessary? I was “dressing the part” each day but finding it increasingly difficult to “act the part.” Within months my unconscious mind created a physical symptom in the form of severe abdominal pains that caused me ultimately to quit my job and return to the impoverished but safer container of graduate school and doctoral work. Miraculously my physical symptoms disappeared. It was clearly a necessary retreat from the professional world but one that prepared me for the biggest lessons to come—those that would finally destroy my naivete about the relation of work to self. These lessons were repeated time and again as I slowly learned my career as an academic. One notable repetition came about three years after I had taken my first job as a university professor. I developed my courses and settled in during my first couple of years and then hunkered down to face the long-term grind of life as an academic. When I turned this corner, a pervasive mood of quiet desperation began to overtake me. It seemed clear to me that academic life was dry and bloodless, an intuition that had come to me many times during my student days but one that I had quickly suppressed, caught up as I was in the melodrama of making grades, negotiating my way through the interpersonal politics of a large academic department, and playing out the social life of shabby psuedo-bohemianism that is the lot of graduate students in the social sciences. Of course, I also desperately wanted this life to be different from that which I had experienced in government practice. If I had not been so young and full of the energy that comes to those who have been released

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from prison (in my case the penitentiary of bureaucracy and graduate school), I would have become outright depressed. As it was, I came close enough. I didn’t really become conscious, though, of how naïve I was until I had been a professor for several years. I found that I had become pervasively anxious about what kind of human being I was turning into as a result of having become a university professor. About the same time that I was experiencing this swelling anxiety, I noticed that my father had taken up painting. He had had a varied work career, including being a businessman and an oil well survey engineer, but none of these had affected him in the way that his present career as a union organizer had. He found that when he was in the middle of a campaign, he could not get the work off of his mind. This was new for him, and given his generational disposition toward work, he saw it as seriously wrong. He experimented with various types of reading and then hit upon painting as the device that was most effective for taking his mind away from work. It was not that he did not enjoy his work—he absolutely reveled in it and was successful at it. He just saw it as a matter of principle that work should not take over one’s life. He painted so as to refuse the domination of work and to subordinate his work to his life. When we discussed this, I realized that the same thing was happening to me (work was beginning to take over my mind completely), but I, unlike him, was not doing anything about it. My awareness of my dilemma was heightened, and I was able to put an intellectual frame around it, when I encountered Ivan Illich’s book, Tools for Conviviality. Illich was a radical Catholic priest in Latin America who wrote critiques of modern society and advocated for more intermediate scale in social organization. In this book, he discussed the social psychology of the interaction between tools and workers. His idea was that the various relations workers have to tools constitute the workers themselves in correspondingly various ways. Where the tool is of a scale that requires that the worker be fitted to its processes, as is the case with most manufacturing, laborers are created. In this instance, the body is taken over and dominated by the tool, for example, a shovel. Where

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the tool does the work, but requires human direction, as is the case more and more these days, the worker is created as an operator. This is what we know as professional work. The distinctive aspect of being a professional is that while it appears that one is free of the tool and acting autonomously so as to be in charge of the tool and directing it, in order to do this, one must actually give oneself over to the tool entirely. While the worker is dominated in body, the professional is dominated body, mind, and, eventually, soul, as professional ethics take over the capacity for moral choice. Most fearsome of all in this respect is the fact that professional roles increasingly involve mostly conceptual tools, and these are grounded in set specifications about the use of language: what and how things are to be said and written. This evacuates the human person in perniciously invisible ways. I was deeply affected by reading this book, and it provoked intense reflection in me on my own situation and ways of relating to it. I remembered a photograph of great pathos I had once seen. It was of a very young boy who was a child laborer in an American textile factory. His face was sad and awesomely tired, and seeing it evoked pain in me. I asked myself what makes it so clearly tragic when children are forced to work. The answer is that this does not allow them the time to play and to learn. I imagined the little boy during his eating break playing with a toy car on the floor of the factory. This would be fun for him, I knew, no matter how serious his having to work made him. His fantasy stream would certainly have stayed alive. The tragedy of child labor is that this precious aspect of human life is denied. But then, why is it not also tragic that adults must give up this part of themselves as part of becoming adult and moving into the world of grown-ups? It seems clear that this is tragic, too. I realized that my father was preserving the little boy aspect of himself that insisted on having a life of its own. Look at the situation I am in, I thought. All around me were people who talked of their “lifelong research programs” and posed questions of what the best “career strategies” were, given the changes currently taking place in academics. I participated in such conversations, and I knew the game fairly well, but I wasn’t really

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interested in it. So when I discussed the “academic game” (i.e., our careers) with people who took it quite seriously, I felt like an imposter. Despite this feeling, however, I moved along in my university employment, changing jobs (i.e., “making career moves,” etc.) with an eye to increasing my salary and prestige. I began to understand more, but the psychological situation only worsened. I realized I was repeating the pattern of graduate school. The opportunity to study for a Ph.D. had been presented to me, I had seized it even though I was intending to do something else, and then, when I found myself in the academic game, it became a high-stakes struggle that I could not relinquish. I was playing a game that I had stumbled into and was caught up in, but I could not make sense of my increasing ambivalence about it. The problem was that time was passing ever more rapidly, and the stake on the table was my life. I found cold comfort in an article I came across, titled “Careers as Idiosyncratic Predicates.” It was written by a social psychologist, Karl Weick, and the argument was that what people actually do in their work lives proceeds in the manner of a steel ball moving down a pinball table. They bump along in this direction, then that, then another, in a pattern that is, at bottom, determined by random forces. The true meaning of the idea of career, Weick argued, is that periodically people look back on the random paths they have followed and make sense of them retrospectively. Instead of seeing that the reason they went from point A to point B was that they hit a bumper post, and it happenstantially knocked them over there, they imagine a sensible reason for having made such a change and conclude that the move was part of an overall career plan. Then, when they are far enough along the way to have sufficient perspective, they create an entire “career strategy” that they have been following that is consistent with the original “career plan” they claim to have initiated. Even though I found this article quite descriptive of my own career life and of what I had observed of the career lives of many others, it was actually terrifying, and for two reasons. One was the

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obvious one: All the meaning of career, and by implication of life itself, was a product of retrospective sense making. Reduced to a bumper sticker, it meant “You’re born, you kid yourself, and then you die.” Worse than this, though, was the realization that the reason people conned themselves, went to such great lengths to convince themselves that their work life was following a meaningful pattern, was that such fictions were the only distinctive identities that people could muster for themselves. This realization came as a great shock to me. It was a threat to the deepest sense I had of myself because that sense had heretofore been entirely private. Now I was aware that I, and most everyone else, was faced each day with a new, pervasive sense of self captured by the words “Your job is you!” My grandfather and my father would have laughed at this. “Whoever told you that doesn’t know how to live, doesn’t know what life is about,” they would have said. I gained little solace from this thought about them, however. While I could imagine their saying it, and I could understand it, I, nonetheless, did not really know what it meant. There was a tangible sense of life that I had acquired as I grew up when and where I did, but I had lost so much of it that I could no longer find it in myself and use it as a point of reference. Times had certainly changed. The ethos of my current adult world was: work is what you are; your career is who you are. There was little or no other acceptable way for me or anyone else to think. It struck me that the validity of this model of identity depended critically on the existence of a certain kind of context, and so I began to examine the context in which my professional life had developed. My professional cohorts and I entered the academic world at the cusp of major institutional change. World War II had been won, it seemed, by the exercise of brain power applied to the problems of the physical and the social world—the atomic bomb and a new understanding of leadership were two prime illustrations of this. In the subsequent two decades, universities had turned away from their traditional orientation of self-paced intellectual study to an agenda of hyperactive research focused on specific problems and practical topics. The carrot that was held out as an

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enticement for taking this new direction was the government and foundation research grant. The new emphasis was on doing research and publishing the results. The expectation that professors would write, especially books, has always been traditional to universities, but this norm now took a new form. The objective became to publish, to compile a curriculum vita with a long list of research articles, research monographs, and books. Part of this process was obtaining government and foundation research grants, allocations of money that always contained a significant subvention to university administrations for overhead expenses. Among young assistant professors a status game developed wherein any demonstration of cleverness in compiling research publications scored points. One young sociologist of my acquaintance was famous for having wheedled no less than eight significant or major journal articles out of various parts of the single research project he did for his dissertation! As this ethos developed, the texture of social relationships in university departments changed. Probably the primary reason I had been able to become a university professor was that I had been carefully mentored by various teachers. I had become accustomed to referring my professional issues to them by asking myself “What would [. . .] do or want me to do in this situation?” My orientation toward my faculty role leaned heavily in the direction of learning how to speak and write the discourse that was traditional to these mentors and to universities as they had experienced them, to assume the task of preserving and carrying forward this style of mind into the future. These mentors shared a sense of the university as a social institution, and of the context of the United States as a society that was, at present—in the midst of the Vietnam War—fast degrading. Their identities were grounded not in the idea of career, but rather in a broader context. Success to them was something that was awarded by fair and rational processes of institutional and social recognition. Success when it came was like a state of grace. One could never, in the final analysis, earn it; it was given partly on the basis of skilled and correct action, but also on the basis of

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something intrinsic to the person. The reasonable angels of institutions never regarded one solely on the basis of role performance; they looked for something more important and essentially personal as well. Given this, my professors of the prior generation could fully commit to the role of university faculty (and they certainly did!) but at the same time not lose themselves in it because they had a sense of something, a context, that transcended all specific roles. They saw themselves, I think, as a cobbled together combination of their original little boys and the highly performing faculty members they had become. Their scholarly work was an extension of this sense of personal identity. Now I found myself being called away from this orientation by my peer group. The talk there often denigrated our predecessors. They had not published much themselves but now stood over us as judges of our publication records. The work they had published was pedantic, puerile, passé, and so on. We new researchers developed a community devoted to the idea of rejecting the past in favor of shaping a new future for our discipline. This had an odd feel to it. We had clearly defined what we were against, but we had not, in the process, gained a sense of being for each other. In fact, it soon became clear that we were casting ourselves against each other. By breaking the ties to our predecessors, we were gaining the pyrrhic freedom to compete, to beat each other out in a new kind of status acquisition game. The name of this game was Successful Career — that was clear enough. What was not clear was what the rules were, how the score was kept, and where the goal line was. This new situation I found myself in was uncomfortably open, to say the least. It was at the opposite end of the continuum from the idea of shaping myself along the contours of traditional institutional models. I found the new situation not at all to my liking and in many ways downright distasteful. Coupled with my deep ambivalence and anxiety about the relationship between my sense of self and my career, this competitive game fundamentally disoriented me. What I did in response was to begin flailing about—there is no fairer way to describe it. I looked for any directional cue I could

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find and responded to it. A colleague at another university suggested to me that my having taken my first job at (or as he put it “gone back to”) the university and department where I had been a graduate student at one time was going to be regarded as a weak career move, one that would cast a pall of doubt on any success I ever gained. This comment hit me rather hard, and became the core of a motive to change universities as quickly as I could. I had other reasons for wanting to leave as well—conscious and unconscious. The conscious ones had mostly to do with the brutal interpersonal climate that had developed as a result of the rebellion of the young faculty against the traditional keepers of the institution, a climate heated all the more by the context of the Vietnam protests in universities. I grew to not like what I now saw as my arrogant and frequently silly young colleagues, and I was liking myself less and less, experiencing serious moral tensions around the fact that in appearance, if not in fact, I had mangled the hands that had fed, protected, and helped me. Overall, an awareness that I had passed through a door began to arise in me. It was dim, but it was steadily brightening into consciousness, and I was finding it quietly terrifying. My personal identity had largely become my professional identity, and I had moved from a context of institutional community into the marketplace of personal career. I saw that now I was on my own and that I had to start regarding virtually every moment as a potential choice point that would advance or retard my progress along the hazardladen road to career success. This same thing had happened to my other young colleagues at the university where I worked and, I began to notice, all over the nation. We had entered the brave new world of careers and were “looking out for Number One,” capable no longer of collegial friendship, only of alliance. As a result, I moved on in two years to take a position at another university. The same thing happened to the several other junior faculty who had been hired with me. We moved on, marketing ourselves and advancing our careers, increasing our publications lists and our visibility. The responsibility for this was more than purely personal, though. At the most general, and therefore the deepest, level it

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was produced by the dynamics of the historical moment in which we were living. In my opinion, the Vietnam War provided an ultimate case illustration of how quickly personal careerism can corrode even stable institutional community into nothing. I had made a mess of my vocational life (although my career had moved along well), but my president and my country had made a mess of our community life (although our economy had moved along well). This excuses none of us, as in such situations the only way out is for everyone involved to assume complete responsibility. It does suggest, though, that there is a vital connection between the personal and the furthest reaches of the collective. To recall a phrase of the era: the personal is the political. Historical moments like these teach how it is that when things go so pervasively wrong as to call the symbolic order itself into question, the most effective line of remedy is personal action. There is, perhaps, a lesson here for us all since it seems that the times ahead, even more than these times past, will challenge the integrity of the symbolic order and will raise critical personal choices of action. The Situation Now The Civil Aeronautics Board project, which brought me to Washington, D.C., and was an important part of the process of my professionalization, also provided a superb venue for encountering the world of governmental institutions that I believed was traditional to the U.S. constitutional system. I was taught that the United States is neither an authoritative “state” nor a “free market.” Rather, I was told that ours is a “mixed system” of government intervention into the commercial market through the devices of administrative regulation. The old Civil Aeronautics Board epitomized this. It was set up for the purpose of maximizing the benefits of the competitive marketplace while at the same time, through the exercise of considered judgment in regulatory decisions, avoiding the caprices, inefficiencies, and failures that can result from leaving social policy to open market processes. It had been rather successful at establishing itself, I thought, as an arena for an effec-

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tive and continually improving national discourse aimed at setting a policy for the kind of experience that Americans wanted to have when they traveled via airplanes. That was then; this is now. The CAB is gone, disestablished, and air travel is now governed almost entirely by the principle of market competition. This ethos, of “The Market,” has become hegemonic. The new “Global Economy,” toward which the world is slouching so steadily, is the dominant theme of public conversation and media discourse. The market is in; government is out. The prevailing view is that as capitalism defeated the planned economies of socialism, so it also defeated the idea that government itself is essential. The high-water moment of the sentiment counter to this one— in modern times the famous John Kennedy speech that exhorted, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”—has receded so far as to be lost in the mist. Ironically, it was not Kennedy’s idea itself that was so compelling anyway, as one can easily imagine Ronald Reagan issuing the same line with great conviction. Rather, it was the overarching social context that gave Kennedy’s words such power. As a young and otherwise “different” president (the first Catholic to be elected to the office, an Ivy League–educated, prize-winning book author, etc.), Kennedy represented a turning point and the potential for something new. He had the symbolic power to infuse the always tenuous American collective sensibility with new enthusiasm. When people saw or heard him, they felt themselves connected to a palpably re-energized ethos or moral context, not only in America but in the whole “free world.” Kennedy’s power to inspire was grounded in the fact that this new context had indeed come into being. Virtually everything he said called people to join and act out of the new context. His power had the interpellative force that is created when a political figure is able to tap into an archetypal feeling of human community and call people to do something together in their own name. This sensibility has long faded from the collective scene. Now, it has deteriorated so far as to begin becoming its opposite. In the

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present context of an overweening emphasis on the ethos of the market, the possibility for people to have a sense of collective identity has drastically diminished. When George W. Bush, the first United States president in the twenty-first century, issued a call for a renewed sense of civic responsibility, he was urging something very different from Kennedy’s exhortation forty years earlier. Bush’s call was for an invigorated citizenship whose hallmark was active participation in a healthy market economy. Kennedy’s call was for a revitalized commitment to civic life through work in government, as public servants. In doing so, he was evoking a sense of vocation, defining working for the government as a high calling in the most venerable sense of the term. This idea of vocation as a model for work life was also discussed by Ivan Illich as a third way of relating to tools in the book I mentioned earlier. Illich saw having a vocation as fundamentally different from having a profession or from laboring. The professional appears to operate a tool but is, in fact, mentally dominated by it. The laborer is dominated outright by the tool. The person who possesses a sense of vocation, however, enjoys a reflexive relationship to the tools employed. The tool is transformed by its use, and it, in turn, through its application in work, transforms the worker. Illich designates the worker with vocation as the craftsman. This label is indeed appropriate, as history suggests that crafts have the potential to achieve the status of art and transform the craftspersons who create them into artists. The original concept of vocation derives from the institutional setting of religion and entails the idea that a vocation is a calling to a specific line of work to which one can devote one’s self and which functions as a connection to a transcendent level. It is a powerful and broadly meaningful idea, one that it is possible and useful to extend beyond the purview of religion. The idea of a vocation fits the tradition of public service quite well. For example, historically, working for the government has been seen as entailing motives other than the usual ones that cluster around getting ahead. Certainly some of these motives have been derided as being ones of avoiding the competitive pressures of private employ-

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ment, trading off the potential gains of such for the supposed security and low stress of routine government work. However, government service is most often seen (particularly by those M.P.A. students entering it) as offering opportunities to work for others and for the general good—while sacrificing, to some extent, the ego gratification that private career success affords. The distinctive aspect of the idea of vocation, though, its defining trait, is that it takes for granted that ethos, or collective psychological connection between people, is real. Critics of Illich’s usage of the term are wont to charge that to have a vocation one must be “called.” This, of course, poses the question of who, other than God in the religious context, is there to do the calling? Illich seems to be suggesting, and I would agree, that the work itself, and/or the context that develops around the work, can possess a kind of semiotic power that can call people to participate in it. Engagement with sports provides a good illustration of this. The idea of everyone celebrating the making of new sports records (even by opponents) is based on the belief that the entire game or activity is advanced by the individual breaking of the record. All of our actual and potential performances in the sport are enhanced. In this sense, the idea of “The Game” stands for what I have been referring to as ethos or context. To sports fans, The Game has a kind of metaphysical reality that goes beyond the specific games or performances that compose it; it has a being, a kind of ontological existence, that can comprise that which composes it. In statistical theory there is a proof known, eponymously, as Stein’s Paradox. What Stein showed, using the principles of Bayesian statistics, is that our usual model of inductive causality does not hold water, and he used baseball to illustrate the point. Classical induction holds that the best predictor of the future is the past. This means that the best way to predict a baseball player’s batting average at the end of the season is to make a straight-line projection of his batting performance up to that point—say, at mid-season. What Stein was able to demonstrate, using actual baseball batting average statistics, is that a better way to estimate a batter’s endof-the-season average is to relate it to the average of all batters

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for that season. An individual batter’s average will more closely approximate the average of all other batting performances in a season than it will his or her own past batting average for that season. There are various explanations for this phenomenon. Some say that standard variations in the manufacture of baseballs account for it. The idea is that the baseballs used in a given season may affect the performances of all batters in a systematic way. The romantic view, the view that true baseball fans have, I believe, is that Stein’s findings demonstrate that there is a collective reality to baseball, that it is indeed a Game in the metaphysical sense of the term. Individual baseball batters are participating in this larger containing reality, and it is the condition, and the development, of the overall context of baseball itself that affects and sets the boundaries of individual performances. John Updike has captured this point in a beautiful short story, “The Slump.” It is about a star baseball batter who has ceased being able to get a hit. The story gives an account of all the diagnoses of his condition and suggestions for its remedy that various coaches, friends, and relatives have presented to him. None of these have worked, though, and pitchers have come to view him with a certain degree of impudence. In the final line of the story, the batter himself delivers the ultimate, accurate insight into what his problem is and why nothing has been able to remedy it: “It’s that when I am up there at the plate, none of it, the fans, the stadium, the score, the averages is really there. It’s just me, and that’s not enough.” What he is saying, of course, is that he has lost his sense of the Game, his feeling that he is participating in and contributing to something larger than himself that endows his individual effort with the level of meaning required to inspire him to perform. Some say that this problem is becoming endemic to the high-dollar world of present-day professional sports. Players more and more appear to fans as careerists who play only for money and restrain their performance in order to protect themselves, increase their playability, and thus maximize the dollar value of their lifetime career earning potential. This means that contemporary players have lost their sense of sport as a vocation and have become careerists.

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Perhaps this is the case in the world of professional sports, but it is also true in the world of government. It is a commonplace observation that issues like campaign financing and the breakdown of civility in the legislative process have made politics something of an embarrassment to the principle of democracy. The bitterly contested nature of the United States’ presidential election in 2000 and the resulting polarization may well give new meaning to political stalemate and gridlock. In a similar manner, the penetration of politics into the world of government administration, coupled paradoxically with images of out-of-control, runaway functionaries committing mal- and misfeasances, has made it appear that we are losing rather than gaining ground in creating institutions of good administrative government in the United States. My own assessment of our current situation is that it is likely to worsen until we understand what is producing it. The infrastructure of our institutions has not significantly changed. It appears rather that new, negative practices have developed within the spaces allowed by the logical tensions and ambiguities inhering in our founding concepts. These practices, in turn, are the result of a new orientation toward the meaning of public service, founded in the idea of the free market. The traditional plea to make government more like business—which can, unfortunately enough, legitimately find a grounding in our Constitution—is now producing tranforming effects in the realms of both politics and government administration. These effects have eroded traditional institutional practices to the point that even the intellectual principles by which our system of government is structured have been rendered ambiguous and are in need of redefinition. Ours, it seems uncontroversial to say, is a system that operates by money, media reputation, and the devices of egoist careerism, and it is the careerism that has called the others into play. The challenge we face, then, is not in the nature of convening a new constitutional convention. Indeed, the very conditions that create the sense that such is required make this a dangerous, if not impossible, proposal. Our internal system is not, after all, under attack; we weathered the challenges in 2000 to our electoral and

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transitional processes with great stability. The problem is instead that our system has degraded under the corrosive influences of personal egoism and the careerism that goes with it. This kind of problem must be answered at the same level, the level of personal action, but with a strategy conceived from a higher conceptual plane. Human social order requires both explicit structure (law) and ethos (civil social relationship) in order to function. Things must be written down, but they must also be discussed on a continuing basis. Revolutions occur when law fails and a desire arises to replace it with other law. Ethos fails, social meaninglessness begins to set in, and civil discourse becomes impaired when narcissism and egoistic posturing become the orientation and style of institutional actors and consequently of citizens. Our present problem is of this latter sort. We are losing our sense of the Game, it is becoming more and more difficult to get a hit, and the Game—our collective weal as a community—is not being advanced. What is there to do in such a circumstance? The response must begin like charity, at home. If the problem is the erosion of a sense that there is something to which one can refer one’s experience so as to find or create meaning around it, the solution lies first in laying claim to one’s experience. It may be fair to argue that the problem of Updike’s batter started at the other end, that it is a lack of respect for the Game born in the greed of club owners that is ruining baseball; despite this, the ultimate answer to it must begin with the batter. The thrust of postwar change that produced me and my orientation to my own life and career also generated the economic hegemony of the United States, which found its footing in the fact that it was the only standing industrial system in the world after the war. The U.S. position of domination also led us to develop the kind of precarious social and political condition that we find ourselves in now and that we label as “postmodernism.” This line of development is going to continue, and our institutions will erode further under its impact. I think we can begin to address this issue in the context of public administrative institutions, because I see these institutions as the critical ones for initiating a response to the

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problem that will have the potential to permeate all sectors of society. My interest is to show how, using my own meager efforts with my own life, it is possible to begin this process with oneself. The task we face is not one of rediscovering, refurbishing, or reasserting a lost sense of social context. Something new has to be built, a new ethos has to be created. Its distinctive aspect must be that it is built from the ground up, and of seemingly insignificant bricks laid by ordinary individuals in lowly as well as in high roles. Heroes will get in the way of this process. Public administration operates along two closely related yet antagonistic venues: academic institutions that carry out the research and education of the people who do the work of government; and the official governmental institutions, the agencies, where this work is accomplished. Both of these venues are currently morphing into unprecedented forms. This is occurring first as a result of the degrading of the traditional ethos of each sector—the main subject of this essay—and is being facilitated by the development of new hard and soft technologies. These collective forms, I believe, have a more powerful potential for twisting people into evacuated, alienated shapes than did the process of professionalization that happened to me. To save ourselves from this, we must turn our attention to ourselves and our life experience so far and find reference points for a new sense of personal meaning to emerge there. As we do this, and connect with others through a similar process, a fundamentally new ethos, born of the wildly chaotic winds set in motion by the decline of the modern era, will emerge. It is not given to me, at my age, to know exactly what it will look like. I am constituted by the professional discourse of modernity. But I am certain that it will be personally grounded. We can be confident of this because if the record of human experience teaches anything, it is that the human principle has survived because it has been carried, protected, and furthered through personally grounded social concern. This is the heart of the context available to those of us, like me, who found that they have a public administration vocation. It is this sense, finally, that reinforced my own choice and reassured me.

2 • A Letter from Prague: Kafka’s Insight (January 1994)

Marriage is closed to me, for there you rule. —Franz Kafka

I am not a poet; I am a poem being written. —Jacques Lacan

Introduction: Some Synchronous Events There is a famous writer here in Prague, Bohumil Hrabal, who hangs out at U Zlatheo Tygra bar (The Golden Tiger), a place where Cynthia and I go to drink the excellent local beer for as long as we can stand the cigarette smoke. Hrabal wrote a story about a Prague tram driver and his streetcar. It goes like this: At the end of the tram route to which the driver was assigned, there was a turnaround area, a large circle of track that the tram traveled around so that it could head back in the other direction on the route. It occurred to the driver one day that, at the beginning of the circle turnaround, he could disembark and go have a coffee while the tram slowly moved around the circle, empty, by itself. When it returned to the beginning place, he could reboard and take control of the tram for the return route. Things went fine until one day when, as he was having his refreshment and the tram was moving around the circle, he saw it suddenly speed up and rocket past him 25

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onto the return part of the line. He ran after it but to no avail; the tram got away and began driving itself through the city. Then, as it approached a pub, it jumped off its tracks, crashed through the front door, rolled up to the bar, and ordered itself a drink. Shortly after I encountered this story, a strange event happened on the London subway system. While stopped at a station, a driver got out of the cab of the engine to manually inspect a balky passenger car door. Suddenly, the subway train started up on its own and began to race down the track, full of passengers, but driverless. (Imagine the passengers’ thoughts as they raced past the driver standing on the platform!) The train drove itself at breakneck speed through the next two stations and then stopped. At the time I read about this event, no account was available of how the train was able to take off on its own, or why it stopped when it did. When I saw the story, I said to myself: “It’s obvious what happened; it wanted a drink, but then couldn’t find a pub anywhere in the tunnel.” London comedians began to make light of the event on the BBC. One I saw joked that he had heard that another train had broken away and entered the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to audition for the part of Hamlet, mouthing the words by opening and closing its doors. At about this same time I traveled to Berlin, a city I had never visited before. While there, two other experiences gripped my consciousness quite powerfully. One was simply an encounter with a lithograph by the artist Fabius von Eugel. It depicts, in the lower left-hand corner, a lump of coal-iron ore that has been passed through (leaving a hole of its exact shape) an artist’s canvas mounted on a makeshift easel. The lump then moves through a large looping arc in the air, described by a series of iterations of the coal lump figure. On one of these the words “Berne” and “Zurich” are written beside dots, as if on a map. As it moves through this arc, the shape of the coal lump changes, first into a flying bat, and then into a spoked, steel wheel. On one of the wheels, a woman’s stick figure kind of face is drawn, and this wheel serves as the head of a puppet-like, mechanical female in a large hooped dress. Around her small waist a shining metal band is suspended,

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encircling but not touching it. A square tunnel is cut out of the middle of the dress, and through this a train (formed by the further transformation of the steel spoked wheels) moves with great dynamism and energy. The dominant image of the picture is formed by the engine of this train in the lower right-hand quadrant. It is an engine in the style of the early, coal-burning, steam locomotive. However, it has shed its drive wheels, which lie broken in a heap to one side, and in their place, it has sprouted powerful horse’s legs and hooves—which emerge from a now-hairy underbelly of the engine. Around the smokestack a thin ribbon is tied that leads back to the left hand of the mechanical puppet woman. Her right hand and arm are pointing, with index finger extended, toward the canvas with the hole from which the engine had its genesis. Back in the middle of the train, in the passenger cars, a small, pale figure of a man is leaning from a car window with arms outstretched overhead and screaming in helpless exasperation, apparently at being swept along with the train, unable to get off. Below on the ground, two other figures, one in a morning coat and top hat, look up to observe and hear him. Two powerful details complete the scene. When one looks closely, two eyes appear under the flange of the engine’s smokestack, eyes that give the impression of power. The eyes also show some confusion or lack of intelligence, but they, nonetheless, emanate a sense of great purpose. The engine is definitely going to be off doing something in the next moment. The other detail is this: the ribbon, “rein,” going to the woman’s hand has snapped, leaving the engine free of any control. While the art of the lithograph was unmoving to me, I found the semiotics of this picture completely gripping, at least as I constructed them. By my reading the picture tells a story of transformation gone amuck. The woman in the center of the piece is a key symbol: she is an anima, for men the guide of the conscious mind to the resources of the unconscious. She has been rendered subordinate to consciousness in this case, perhaps through the institution of marriage, as indicated by the wedding ring–like metal band around her waist. Hence she is a mechanical anima, from whom an inspiration for a specific purpose is demanded. As such, the

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picture indicates that its subject is what Jung called an “overassertion of the conscious attitude.” This is an attempt by consciousness to control the infinite unconscious. Such acts can bring about very creative work. In this case, the lump of coal, as it is passed through the imagination, transforms into a steel train. However, we are also told that something has gone wrong in this. Too much assertion of control by the conscious mind has resulted in an eruption from the unconscious, indicated by the fact that sinister bat shapes begin to appear. Even though the anima figure points to the canvas, as if to say to her invention, the steam engine, “Remember, I am your creator; I made you, and you are to do my bidding,” the engine has broken its fragile rein (the hold of consciousness on the unconscious is always tenuous), freed itself from its given purpose of following the tracks laid down for it, and is about to set off on its own path with its own new, powerful horse legs. The thin ribbon tether by which the anima figure holds the engine suggests a fourteenth-century Italian painting St. George and the Dragon, which shows St. George, mounted on a white horse, in full armor and with lance in attack pose, confronting a dragon that stands between him and a beautiful maiden. Barely noticeable in the picture is a tiny string that goes from one of the maiden’s hands to the neck of the dragon. It is clear that the woman controls the dragon by this rein, and that St. George is not only taking an unnecessary, but indeed a wrong, action in fighting the dragon-unconscious. The victim of the gone-wrong transformation of the steam engine is, of course, the “Everyman” figure screaming helplessly from the train car. He is like a victim being taken to a concentration camp. The summary effect of the picture is to evoke in the viewer an identification with this character. In the midst of my fascination with this von Eugel lithograph, I visited the famous Brandenburg Gate, the very symbol of Berlin itself. Here I encountered another remarkable image. At one end of the gate, at street curb level, I came upon a statue about the size of a man of average height. It was entirely black, and presented a figure dressed in a robe, like that of a judge. The head, though, was that of a wild pig, with its mouth partly open, showing two

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huge lower incisors or fangs. It was a horrific statue of a creature attempting to appear to be a normal part of the crowd who was unable to hide a tremendous menace at the center of his character. The title of the statue was Cogito. A small crowd had gathered around it, obviously as gripped by it as I was. They were peering intently at it and at the inscription at its base. I struck up a conversation with a young German man. He told me that he and the people there were quite surprised and somewhat puzzled by the presence of the statue at the gate. Apparently it had just been installed a month or two ago; no one could recall its being there before then. When I asked him about the meaning of it, he told me that in his opinion it, no doubt, derived from a German saying that “Within every person there is a pig.” The implication, he said, is that when people put on the robes of authority and reason, they are apt to do piggish things. He said that the exact meaning of the idea of the “pig within each person” was untranslatable into English. It seemed clear to me, however, that the statue was presenting the theme of a beast appearing unexpectedly in the context of “rational” conscious intention. All of these events occurred in close temporal juxtaposition and seemed to have some sort of connection. They were “synchronous” in the Jungian sense—events that occur closely together in the outer world and carry a message of inner meaning for the person to whom or around whom they happen. I wondered what their meaning might be for me. Considerably to my surprise, my reflections quickly led me to an image of Franz Kafka. I was surprised because never during the process of Cynthia’s and my deciding to spend our sabbatical in Prague, nor at any time thereafter, did I make the connection of Prague to Kafka—a connection that is, of course, entirely obvious. Then, I wondered: What connection does Kafka and being in Prague have to the synchronous events I had just experienced? Is there some key in Kafka as to their meaning? We had decided to come to Prague on an impulse. Was there a message in these events about the reason beneath this impulse— the unconscious intention? I have a long history with Kafka. When I was an undergraduate

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literature student, I found myself exceptionally taken with his stories, even though I did not gain the kind of pleasure from reading him that I did from most other authors. For reasons I did not completely understand, I was especially fascinated by his story “The Hunger Artist.” I also liked “In the Penal Colony,” because I saw this as one of his best statements about the psychological dynamics of bureaucracy. Another reason I liked the “Penal Colony” was that it presented an image, at least implicitly, of what a good administrator would be like and how such a manager would run an organization. In those days (the sixties) the vogue was to be critical of bureaucracy, and I was fully involved with this in my research and teaching. However, I was, after all, a professor of public administration, preparing people to work in bureaucracies. I felt that the first responsibility of my job was to suggest how they might come to terms with the “evils” of bureaucracy and make a personal contribution to the larger society despite them. I recall, though, that this part of my message was not attended to with a great deal of interest. Students seemed mostly to want to focus on the negative aspects of bureaucracy. This is, of course, what most people primarily associate with Kafka—an uncompromising indictment of bureaucracy and everything associated with it. I have always believed that this was an inaccurate assessment of Kafka’s message. After all, although he had one bad experience working for a large insurance bureaucracy, he spent most of his life in Prague working happily in another. During that time, the rapid growth of machine production was causing the worker accident rate to climb dramatically. The Workers Accident Insurance Company of the Kingdom of Bohemia, where Kafka was employed as a clerk, was a dynamic institution working at the center of this major, complex, legal, economic, and human problem. Kafka found, in this bureaucracy, expert, educated, even cultured people who were fervently committed to the cause of worker insurance. His direct boss was a Goethe enthusiast, a part-time university lecturer who also pursued an interest in the philosophy of Nietzsche. He and Kafka on occasion read poetry together at the office. While Kafka considered himself first to be a writer, his bureau-

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cratic work was always of great importance to him. He applied his literary talents as diligently to his insurance reports, articles, and lectures as he did to his art. He got on famously with the management of the firm, and they entrusted him with the responsibility for a new accident prevention program, into which he threw himself with great commitment. Being the sensitive man that he was, Kafka experienced the pain of the human suffering caused by industrial accidents; his involvement in his program to prevent them was passionate. He pioneered the progressive idea that accidents were a statistical inevitability, and workers should not be blamed for them. Rather, systemic changes should be made through the prevention program so as to reduce the probability of their occurring. He also extended his bureaucratic role into the realm of social policy. He wrote against the exploitation of quarry workers by their bosses, who induced them to alcoholism as a way of increasing profits in the pubs they also owned. When changed reporting requirements revealed the unfair wages industrial workers were being paid, he wrote a series of articles against this injustice. He was a creative man, but he was also conscientious and responsible. Furthermore, he was successful, as eventually he was selected for the post of secretary of the firm just before his death. Even in the most routine clerical jobs, he found purpose and meaning. He was described by his contemporaries as one of the most important figures of the Czech insurance world. In all ways, he was an exemplary bureaucrat. It seems silly, in light of the sort of thing I have just been describing, to characterize Kafka’s message about bureaucracy as simply a blanket condemnation. Yet all over the world, with apparently increasing intensity, people associate his name with the severest of indictments of bureaucratic organizations—an indictment that depicts them as beset with the darkest of pathologies and insanity. Surely there must be some truth to this sentiment, which is to say that there must be some sense in which this sentiment is true. This interpretation could not be completely a misunderstanding or distortion of his perspective. It is unlikely that so many people, over so long a time, could all be incorrect. What

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then, did Kafka mean by the dark picture he painted of bureaucracy? What does the powerful and universally employed adjective “Kafkaesque” really mean that has caused people over the decades to resonate to it so strongly? Kafka’s Insight I recall that one of my literature professors (my favorite one, in fact) disappointed me one day when Kafka came up in a classroom discussion. “‘Daddy hates me!’ That’s all Kafka had to say,” my professor told the class. I said nothing in response, but the comment evoked confusion in me. It is, of course, true that Kafka is famous for his father complex, his “father problem.” When I first came into Prague on a dark, misty night and looked across the Vltava River up to the eerie green glow of the Prague Castle, I was virtually overwhelmed by the symbolic power of this scene. Never had I seen, nor could I imagine, an architectural configuration that better captured the idea and feeling of patriarchal authority, with the copper oxide green of its domes and the sharp points of its Gothic towers rising high on a hill over the feminine, misty river and the city below. I certainly could see how living in the midst of this view would put one in touch with one’s father complex, and hence how this had come to be a dominant motif in Kafka’s work. In my view, it was Kafka’s father complex that provided him with the special insight he had into the negative potentials of bureaucracies. I remember that when I was looking at the pig statue near the Brandenburg Gate, it occurred to me that in transactional analysis psychology, the term given to those who commit destructive parenting behavior is “pig parent.” Within a Jungian theoretical framework, also, the idea of the sculpture is axiomatic. To Jung, every attempt to assert the conscious attitude, like donning the robes of reasoned authority, constellates and energizes an opposite tendency in the unconscious, a tendency that is highly likely to work its way into the outside world in the form of what my new German acquaintance called “piggish behavior.”

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It is Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity, though, that best clarifies how this occurs in the context of the authoritative control that is characteristic of bureaucracies. The heart of Lacan’s theory of the human subject is his revealing of the connection between the universal and fundamental issue of the narcissistic refusal to grow up (in colloquial terms) and assume the burden of human desire, and the acceptance of mortality. In Lacan’s linguistic theory of subjectivity, desire is created when the child accepts or “comes under” a generic negation that Lacan called “the Name of the Father.” This fundamental limit, which the child experiences as a denial of access to the mother, is the prototype of all limits on life and pleasure. As such it is the first encounter with the principle of Thanatos or death. The genesis of desire is in realizing that life can only be a deferral of death; it is intrinsically filled with longing. The longing can be made pleasurable, but it can never be resolved or avoided. Lacan’s analysis shows that committing oneself to life and living it, barging ahead into life experience and playing the hand one has been dealt, entails, necessarily, a desire for death. The movement through life is toward thanatos and away from eros. The lust for life becomes a lust for death. In this view, then, the central issue of life is assuming and bearing one’s desire, a desire that can never be fulfilled in life because of its involvement with death. All one can do is accept life as the mixed blessing that it is, a deferral, and “play” with it in the way that human beings, distinctively, do. Lacan’s way of arguing this is an enormously complex matter, and I would not even pretend to suggest it here. The reason I am writing all this is in order to introduce the centrally important idea of desire. This is necessary to my story here because what I want to say about Kafka is that his father complex provided him a kind of Lacanian prescience, a special insight that enabled him to see through to the truth. A key implication deriving from Lacan’s theory is that things go best when the burden of desire—which means the burden of living only to die—is assumed by individual people. Just as we each have our own deaths, so we each have our own lives leading to that death. No one can die for

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us, and no one can live for us. This fundamental logic means that, in the structure of human fate, we are each located in what I prefer to call a sacred space that is our own. Anything that violates this space upsets the structural distribution of desire and sets off a complex chain reaction of compensating events that block the exercise of rational human intention. There are many ways in which one person can violate the sacred space of another, ranging from the minor, relatively harmless and irritating, to the major and tragic. Kafka’s insight was that human desire circulates through a completely closed, even hermetically sealed, economy. This economy operates inexorably and cannot be manipulated. Kafka saw, perhaps through his family experience with his father, that the position of one in authority is highly dangerous, especially when the authority is configured by an institutional structure (apparently like the one that was operative in his family) into a pattern that is inconsistent with mutual relationship. The idea of authority itself is not intrinsically incompatible with mutual relationship, but role designs can prescribe the use of authority in ways that violate relationships. Some role designs do not allow for genuine relationship at all; others require the breaking of mutual relationship in only specified circumstances. In any case, the person exercising authority, even with the best of conscious intentions, is likely to violate the sacred space of the other. Kafka apparently saw in the marriage role of husband a necessity to rule or act in a way that made such intrusions on the others in the family. He wanted no part of it. He recognized the numerous negative consequences that result from these violations within the family. I want to discuss the consequences for those in positions of authority and for the institutions that provide the roles from which such violations occur. An act of authority taken outside mutual relationship has the effect of cutting off the subject at whom the act is directed from a part of her or his desire—in the Lacanian sense. When I, as an authority figure, use my authority to run your life, which is to say, to dictate to or otherwise control you into behaving by my sense of what is best for you, I am interfering in the way you are seeking to organize the burden of your desire.

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What I have done is step in and negate your acceptance of the original negation (the Name of the Father). This “negation of the negation” creates a free-floating unit of desire in the psychic space of both of us. Understanding just how and why this occurs is a complex matter which starts from Lacan’s locating human subjectivity not in the concrete person, but in the realm of signification (especially language) such that desire is not a personal thing as much as it is the product of one’s participation as a subject in the signifying chain. One highly approximate metaphor for understanding this is to think of a unit of software in a complex, closed network of interacting computers. One computer can deactivate a part of another’s software, but it can only do this by appropriating the part to itself and following whatever commands exist in the software it has appropriated. This is why it is important to understand Kafka’s point of view through Lacan’s idea of desire, or, alternatively, how Lacan enhances our ability to understand what Kafka meant. Rationally conceived authoritative institutions, because they do not attend to the kind of thing we are discussing here, are oblivious to the psychological dangers that are created by the organization of authority into institutional roles. The surplus desire that circulates toward the top of bureaucratic organizations of the sort we are discussing finds expression unconsciously, and in a number of different ways, all of which have serious consequences. One way that appropriated desire finds expression is through unconscious sadism. The bureaucratic world in which we live, composed of institutions that have innocently accumulated forfeited desire in their upper reaches, is literally full of such sadism. This sadism is only rarely, of course, actually made manifest in a physical or directly psychological sense. More often it comes out as an edge or an overtone to the way in which the everyday business of the organization is carried out. When violence is necessarily involved (as in a police department), it seems that the organization objectively and rationally circumscribes it by setting specific limits and standards. Ironically this often enhances a sadistic element. There are many well-known examples. The Ro-

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mans carefully set down the required procedure to be followed in carrying out a crucifixion; the Nazis elaborately planned the “Final Solution” (Hitler had the garroting of his enemies painstakingly documented on film—though cameraman after cameraman fainted); the Los Angeles Police Department (like all other modern ones) prescribes in detail the exact procedure for beating resistive people who are being arrested. So, too, do many modern bureaucracies objectively prescribe standard operating procedures for violent acts. By establishing such limits dispassionately, they seem to set the stage for, in one way or the other, an element of pleasure appearing in the administering of the painful procedures that they are required to inflict on people. A second way in which surplus desire emerges in bureaucracies is as corruption—usually involving money or sex. It has always amazed me that top-level bureaucrats (organizational leaders) so frequently fall prey to the pettiest of sexual and monetary temptations, leading them to abuse their offices and, when discovered, to lose their careers. They somehow feel that what they did was okay in some broad sense of the situation, almost as if it had somehow been deserved. Frequently, what they gained from their misdeeds was so trivial as to make others wonder at their possible motivation. From a Lacanian point of view, such acts may well have been energized by motivations that were outside the usual rational constructions of self or identity by which most people consciously characterize themselves. Finally, free-floating desire in bureaucracies can find expression as contradictions of the bureaucratic persona. We are all familiar with examples of this; they have been documented and parodied in many novels and films. These contradictions are also documented in the research literature of organizational sociology. We know that sometimes bureaucracies lose sight of goals and focus instead on means only. We know that the many devices of bureaucracies, like professionalization, rule making, formal record keeping, and so forth, produce negative consequences as well as positive benefits. We further know, from personal experience mostly, that it is usual for people to accept such contradictions with a certain resignation

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and for bureaucrats to evidence a certain amount of pleasurable resignation at the fact that the “system” works in this way. They utter aphorisms like “There’s two ways to do things: the right way and the ‘Navy way.’” We can summarize this image of bureaucracy through the lenses of Kafka and Lacan with the concept of “bureaucratic feudalism.” It differs from traditional feudalism in a critically important way. Traditional feudalism was a system that, for all its negative aspects, had a certain symmetry and logic to it. The feudal lord had the power of life and death over serfs, but he had to respect their social place. He rarely violated it. Just as the serf owed loyalty and the performance of certain duties to the lord, so the lord held a certain responsibility to the serf. It was a system of strict hierarchical power, but in principle, at least, it kept the rule discussed earlier of each party’s not violating the space of the other by providing a noncontingent status (technically, this means simply a social position or place) to all parties, intact. In bureaucratic feudalism, however, responsibility runs only one way. The position that one holds in bureaucracies is highly contingent on one’s meeting a performance contract, made as a condition of entry into the organization. As subjects of such bureaucracies, we must keep our contracts with them, be loyal to them, and perform for them; they, in turn, do not think that they owe us much of anything beyond the minimum of legal requirements. What has always astounded me about many bureaucratic leaders is how they accept this as legitimate and in so doing unabashedly and casually commit sadism, corruption, and inconsistency in their dealings with people. For example, with respect to sadism, I have known a number of bureaucratic leaders who feel, in general, that they must be objective (unemotional), fair, and follow due process in their dealings with their subordinates. However, if they happen to personally dislike someone or become angry at him or her, they feel equally that they are quite justified in using their authority to inflict pain on the person, usually psychologically or economically. As for corruption, virtually all bureaucratic leaders I have known,

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inside and outside government, have overworked. In fact, most were probably workaholics. As a compensation for having to overwork, some felt that casual sexual exploitation of women, especially ones in the lower organizational ranks, was a perquisite of their jobs. They also thought that the use of their organization’s resources for their own personal comfort was entirely justified, even in cases where it clearly was not. The point here is not to report that these sorts of things occur so much as to note the feeling undertone that is connected to them— a feeling that might be characterized as a kind of condescension or self-justification. It is important to note that this feeling is usually not conscious. Most leaders I have known are unaware that they possess or display such an attitude; it is completely unconscious. To my mind it is the very unconsciousness of this attitude that energizes the nothing less than stupid acts of sadism and corruption that bureaucrats commit. There is enormous destructive potential implicit in this feudal attitude. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, the BBC presented an hours-long retrospective on the Kennedy years and JFK’s death. Part of this was a brief monologue by the writer Gore Vidal, who was a friend and relative of the Kennedy clan. I personally found him and much of what he said quite distasteful. However, one point he made struck me hard. Vidal commented that Kennedy, as anyone who gets to be president knows, realized that in order to go down in history as a truly great president, he would have to lead the nation during a war. The Bay of Pigs was a fiasco and Cuba was out as a possibility for this, but Vietnam was a definite prospect. So, Vidal said, Kennedy looked at the Vietnam situation and knew “he had his war.” The implication was that part of Kennedy’s motivation for escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam was his own personal desire to go down in history as a “Great President.” I do not know this, of course, and I certainly do not believe it simply because Gore Vidal reported it. The truth or falsity of the assertion is not what I want to discuss. What I want to focus on rather is that this attitude, of allowing personal ego or career motive to influence an action in office as

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grave as going to war, is an accepted part of the ethos of our governmental institutions. At the time of Kennedy’s presidency, I recall a number of conversations, all with professional political scientists, who said exactly what Gore Vidal said, and approved of it by accepting it as “part of the way the game is played.” It is, of course, easy to deny or to discount the importance of what I am calling here the attitude that creates bureaucratic feudalism. One could say that the emphasis I give to it comes from the fact that my professional specialty is the micro level of institutional process where nuances of attitude, culture, language dynamics, and so forth, are the entire focus of attention. This is true, but it is precisely why I do give nuances of attitude so much emphasis; I have so often seen at first hand how powerful they are in creating negative and positive consequences. As a consultant, virtually all that I do is to help bureaucrats repair the problems that are caused by the violations of sacred space that have occurred in their organizations. Speaking at this level of practicality, what does the message about people in organizations not violating each other’s interpersonal space mean? Does it mean we are back to making a blanket condemnation of all bureaucracies? Does it mean that all authority is bad, that hierarchy is intrinsically wrong, and that we must do away with it? Must we never attempt to control anyone, even when it is clear that he or she is doing something wrong or destructive? Am I saying (as I have been charged with in the past) that all people, even though they work for a bureaucracy, be allowed to do as they please, to run free and wild, even at work? When I have heard this charge in the past, what I have always felt is a sense of puzzlement and dismay, accompanied by the thought that such an idea is so obviously absurd that it is difficult to conceive how it could occur to anyone with enough sense to make it into a university classroom. I tend now to see it in a different light, revealed by the Lacanian image of the complexities of the human subject. The tendency to parody the critique I have just made (let us call it the critique of bureaucratic feudalism) into an absurdity is probably a defensive reaction marshaled by that part

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of us that is energized by the forfeited desire of others whom we have invaded through our bureaucratic roles. My surmise is that we all carry a load of surplus desire. It may be small or large, but it is there as a de facto result of our playing the institutional roles that we do. This part of our identity, the part that is enjoying the sadism, corruption, and inconsistencies that we get to work on our victims, the people in roles less powerful than ours, does not want to be exposed. So it reacts strongly when the light is turned on it. Turning on just such a light is what Kafka wanted to do in his writings about bureaucracies. His focus was specifically on the penumbra of the bureaucrat’s role, the “dark Eros” that he saw as so much present in bureaucratic institutions. He painted a picture of bureaucracy as infused with desire, with erotic goings-on, with gluttony, with sadistic arbitrariness, but all of this operated at the edge, the periphery, carried out as the result of something in the background. This is what, I think, he would mean by “Kafkaesque.” It is an adjective describing an institution that sees itself doing its business clearly, openly, consciously, and fairly and yet does everything with an edge of dark motive, shaped by obscure reasonings, and serving intentions even it does not understand, intentions that contradict its stated purposes. Is there anything to be done about this, or must we simply condemn bureaucracies as intrinsically this way? This is where I become a different kind of critic. I have frequently been taken to task by my friends for always ending essays with a Pollyannaish suggestion that things can be made better and here is how we could start. It is better, they have told me, just to let critique stand as it is. I still disagree with this position. In my view, we can figure out the parts of the structure and functioning of bureaucracies that tend to invade interpersonal space and that circulate the surplus desire that energizes bureaucratic feudalism. We already know a good deal about this. For example, it is clear that performance evaluation and merit pay systems create the kind of personal invasion that I discussed earlier. It is just as clear that the functioning of bureaucracies would be improved if we did away with such devices. Feudalism is not the inevitable ethos of the bureaucratic .

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form of organization itself; it is simply the ethos that gets created in bureaucracies when the kind of invasive interpersonal relationships I have described here become prevalent. Kafka himself does not seem to have worked under an ethos of bureaucratic feudalism at the Workers Accident Company, though he probably did at the first company that employed him, the Assicurazioni Generali. I believe that we can learn a key lesson from his career and work to create bureaucracies that are not feudal. This critique does not imply a kind of universal anarchy. Rather, it implies that we establish mutual relationship in bureaucracies, and let it control events. Right lines of action are to be found between people, in discourse grounded in relationship. If we do not do this, we may be facing an even worse prospect than bureaucratic feudalism. Things are changing, and people are less and less willing to suffer feudalism any more. Sadism in organizations is being more and more exposed. Women and other oppressed groups are refusing to be exploited and discriminated against, and people in general are resisting the inconsistencies and the contradictions that bureaucracies commit. Those carrying surplus desire are not able to express it as easily as they have been in the past. If we do not work to create valid relationships in our bureaucratic organizations, what will happen as instances of bureaucratic feudalism are less and less tolerated is that desire will move on, will again circulate to whatever position it can find that will give it expression. This is a frightening and increasingly dangerous prospect in a global world of vast disparities. The genius of Lacan’s theory of subjectivity is that it shows us that desire is a product of signification. As such, it can move anywhere. It can, for example, be projected onto systems in just the way that Kafka showed the commandant of the penal colony doing with the punishment machine. If the bureaucratic leaders who are frustrated at no longer being able to manage the subjects of bureaucracy in the traditional feudal manner simply turn over the business of bureaucracies to codes, systems, and technologies, we will find ourselves victimized by an even worse brand of sadism, corruption, and contradiction than we have experienced at the hands

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of human bureaucratic feudal lords. This is, of course, already beginning, as we struggle through the technological colonization of our organizational lives. Domination by our global electronic world suggests dramatic new venues for surplus desire. This brings us back to where we began, to the train that turns into a wild horse and carries its passengers off, and Hrabal’s tram that runs away and goes to order itself a drink. The Czech people seem to possess a kind of fine, baroque sense of irony about controllers and those who like to control. Throughout history they have found their position in the center of Europe to be an invitation to invaders of all sorts. There is bitterness about this, but Czechs also know that the last laugh is on the dominators. Ultimately the tendency is for all of us, dominators and subjects of domination alike, to be controlled by forces outside our view. The more we assert control, the more we lose it in just this way. This is the dominant motif of beautiful Prague. Its central metaphor is the puppet show and the black theater (where people dressed in black control figures on the stage). On a hill above the city, there is actually a giant metronome, said to provide the beat by which all the little puppet figures below, in Prague, are to live. If our feudal tram drivers simply abdicate and go drink coffee, their trams will gladly appropriate their desire and begin to run the tram lines for their own pleasure. The other alternative is for our bureaucratic leaders, and us along with them, to work toward making bureaucracies places of mutual relationship, where, as Kafka did, we might read each other poetry and become the unfolding poems that each of us is.

3 • A Second Letter from Prague: Existential Crisis on Ostrovni Street (March 1994)

Do what you will this life’s a fiction And is made up of contradiction. —William Blake

Introduction: The Prague Blues It is clear to me after only a few weeks here that someone should declare the Old City of Prague (Prague 1, where Cynthia and I are currently living on Ostrovni Street) a world historical treasure. The architectural views, the way the various urban spaces so definitely configure intense feelings, the elegant street scenes . . . all make for a place that must be unique in the world. It is simply a beautiful old city. I just hope it lasts, is able to survive the impact of marketization—evidence of which is already plentiful. To me, it is a city of great symbolic power. The most used adjective I have seen attached to Prague is magical. I think that people feel this way about it because they pick up on the heavy sense of the unconscious that this place evokes, especially at night. It is very dimly lit with small brown lights, and in the Old City there are not many cars around. The dominant experience is of isolated people walking in dark places, coming and going from pubs and cafes for which there are virtually no signs out on the street. For a deeply introverted person like me, to be in the Old City at night is 43

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to be in the collective unconscious. You may think you can simply look at the Old City, but the truth of it is, the Old City is watching you. You can’t see all the statuary glaring down at you from the top edges of buildings the way you can during daylight, but you can feel the eyes everywhere on you. Also, as in the unconscious, everything connects to everything else. There are little dark passageways everywhere, linking every place to every other. We have walked through passages here that I would not go into in the United States, even accompanied by a pair of armed policemen. In Prague, though, everyone does. There are plenty of dangers here, and you think about them, but somehow the sense of apprehension that attaches to them is not so present. It’s like the birds and the rats along the river. Walking along the sidewalk by the Vltava at night, you see thousands of beautiful water birds flying and roosting, then you look down and see the huge river rats scurrying along to whatever business is involved in their making a living. Somehow, in Prague, your reaction is flat: they are both just there. There is a tension between the consciously designed baroque grandeur of the daytime and the palpable, unconscious mystery of the night. This definite presence of the unconscious creates a feeling that neutralizes the opposition of beautiful-ugly just as it does all oppositions. I think what people mean when they call Prague magical is that here they get a sense of the real, a sense of depth and transcendence from which they are rather completely cut off in their lives elsewhere. A place like Prague, especially when you wish to make contact with it, can invade you. What the city requires, as does any mode of acknowledging the unconscious, is that we embrace both ends of the oppositions that we all have been taught to use as a way of making sense of life. In our conscious worlds, we create meaning by valuing one side of an opposition and denying or shunning the other. In Prague, this commonplace task is not so easy to accomplish. It’s quite a burden to live in the midst of such dramatic contradictions; lately I have been feeling some strain from the way this city presses that task on me. As one way of keeping ourselves whole, Cynthia and I joined the fitness club at the Atrium Hotel—a big new American type of

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place adjacent to the Old City. I had an experience in cross-cultural communication there the other day. I was in the sauna with a big Finnish guy—a three hundred pounder at least. He was a nice fellow, very friendly and outgoing. We talked about the changes in Finland’s political system. He said they were shifting to a new system that was a hybrid of the American and the British governments and that this had caused the party structure to fragment. I was interested in the fact that he was very careful to speak in a politically correct way to me—“when he or she gets elected to office,” and so on. As I was leaving (he outlasted me in the sauna, of course) he pointed to my swimsuit and asked, “Did they issue you that ‘swimmy’ at the desk out there?” I told him that no, it was mine, I had brought it from home. “Well,” he responded, “my balls are so small I think I can go without one, anyway.” Not knowing exactly what he meant, but somewhat charmed by what I took to be his modesty, I simply gave him a thumbs up and said, “Hey, go for it.” About ten minutes later, after I had my plunge and was sitting by the pool next to an American woman, out he came—as they say in Texas, “Introducing Mr. Buck Nekid.” Apparently he thought that as a member of the club, I knew the rules and had told him it was okay for him to go swimming in the nude. He walked right past the American woman, who audibly gasped, and belly flopped into the pool with a tremendous splash. The pool is separated from the lobby area by a glass wall, so anyone walking by got a full view of the show. He went in and out of the pool several times, always making a big splash. The woman did not leave, though, nor did anyone else; we all just acted nonchalant. Such encounters have been small diversions from the heavy mood I have fallen into here. The downside of Prague is dirt, pollution, and cigarette smoke, and it presses in on us relentlessly. I have developed a chronic sinus congestion–bronchitis problem for which the sauna only provides temporary relief. Also the people here eat a very unhealthy diet. In general, they do not seem all that happy. So, back to the contradictions of Prague: the beauty, and in a sense, the serenity of the city closely linked with social problems and human distress.

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Our living arrangement epitomizes this. We did not understand the situation at first. Traveling for days, arriving here at night, being flustered, rushed, and happy to get settled anywhere, the place looked great. In a sense, it is great. It is what is called here an “urban villa.” The fact that we have a large living room with a baby grand piano in it provides an idea of the scale of it. There are two studies—one for each of us—a huge bedroom, a kitchen, and a large bath. No coal is burned—a key item here. It is, of course, baroque and a little run down, but for Eastern Europe, it is top of the line. By the scale of Prague rents, it costs a fortune; by our scale, it was just about what we were paying in Holland. So it was acceptable and even highly desirable because it is in the Old City. Since places in the Old City are almost impossible to find, when the opportunity presented itself we thought we would be delighted with it. We were, until we figured out what was really going on. The people who are our “landlords” are, in fact, the regular occupants of this apartment. What they did was to move into one tiny room that is actually in our apartment, in what would normally be the foyer. There is not even a door that separates their room from the actual entry, just a curtain. There are three of them— husband, wife, and thirteen-year-old daughter. They have no kitchen or refrigerator. The bath they use is down the hall. They are wonderful people, professional symphony musicians, and we have become friends with them—speaking our only mutual language, French. We realized that they are doing this because they want the money, especially the Western currency. We have to pay in actual greenback American dollars. We are happy to pay them the money, but it is a terribly wrenching experience to be living in their big apartment while they are crammed into that little room. Their circumstance is directly attributable to the end of the Cold War and the flood of Western capital into the newly constituted Czech Republic. Symphonic musicians, well subsidized under the Communist regime, find themselves in need of the proverbial day jobs (or some other source of substitute income) under late capitalism. It is clear that it is not easy for them to do this, eating cold

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food, giving piano lessons and practicing the French horn (muted) with everybody in one room and so on. They clearly are under a certain amount of stress. To top it all off, their cat, Adan, who apparently has not been properly apprised of the rental contract, takes every chance he can get to run from their little room into our apartment—which he, of course, considers to be his home. We know people who arrange vacation experiences living with other people in their homes in the context of different cultures. We, however, were not looking for that kind of experience (we are here to work), and anyway, the conditions under which such things are done are not like the ones here. What we are faced with, looking at them through their curtain, is something like most of the contradictions of globalization rolled up into one little situation. The main reason, though, that I have fallen into this “existential crisis” is because we have just returned from Poland, specifically from Krakow and a day-long trip to the Auschwitz concentration camp. We rode the train into Poland. We had been warned about a community of refugees from the Serbo-Croatian war who were living at the main train station in Prague. There are men, women, and children, and they have no place to stay. Also, they are not allowed to work and hence must live by begging or stealing. It was remarkable to see them, confined to a little roped-off area where they are allowed to sleep. During the rest of the day, they have free run of the station. In the United States the situation in the former Yugoslavia has only a television reality. Here, though, people are directly suffering; these people, miserable though they are, are probably better off than their fellow countrymen. Again, Prague was putting something right in my face. The train ride into Poland was an education in the reality of ecology. The burning of soft coal and the resulting acid rain have devastated the place and even part of the northern Czech Republic. It looked like a wasteland. Also, there seemed to be a nuclear power plant every few miles ominously pouring out smoke or steam. I have never seen such a pall of pollution, hanging close to the ground, out in the countryside like that. Again, I have read about all this, but seeing it was something else. People who resist

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environmental regulation should be required to tour here. The next day we took an early train to Oswiecim, the small city closest to Auschwitz. It was a local train, filled with people heading to their workdays. Once in Oswiecim, we caught a local bus to the closest stop to the camp and walked the rest of the way. It was a bleak, cold January day, and when we arrived, the only other visitor was a young Japanese woman. The entire camp was practically empty with only a minimum staff to meet the odd mid-winter visitor. We hired a guide, as we had been advised to do, and invited the Japanese woman to join us. Our guide was a woman about my age. Her father, an engineer in Poland before the Nazis, had been incarcerated at Auschwitz and was killed there. The original purpose of the camp was to imprison Polish intellectuals considered a threat to the Nazis, and her father had said or written something that they did not like. He was among the first prisoners brought in. She told us that for years she could not go anywhere near Auschwitz. She grew up, was educated outside of Poland as an engineer herself, and pursued a successful career internationally. Eventually, when she retired, she felt compelled to make contact with her father’s experience. So here she was now, a guide at the place where he died, where his shaved-head picture is on the wall. She told us of the history and mode of operation of the camp very flatly, very professionally. She let the physical presence of the camp speak for itself, and it did. We were supposed to see a movie first, but it was going to be an hour before it came on, so we all went on into the camp in order to use up the hour. The weeping started when we got to the “hair room”—a room that contains the hair that was shaved off dead people’s heads after the gassing. There was an enormous amount of it in the room, and most of it appeared to be women’s hair, long hair that was obviously beautiful in life, a lot of it still done up in big, loose braids. It had all been stained the same color by the gas that had killed the people it came from. Cynthia and the young Japanese woman were terribly shaken by the sight of it and wept openly. Feeling I had to keep up my gender’s reputation for being able to suppress emotion or feel-

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ing under any conditions, I sat on myself—but the tears were there nonetheless. By the time we had made it through the infamous Block 11, the prison-within-the-prison, I found myself thinking I wanted to go see the movie, that I had enough of the real thing. Block 11 is where the Nazis got started on their career of murder at Auschwitz. They had to develop a system for mass killing, and the first test they ran was on six hundred Russian prisoners of war that they happened also to have in the camp. They put them in the basement of Block 11 and ran in the Cyclon B gas to see what would happen. The experiment was successful, so then they began to build the actual gas chambers, the first one in an old underground munitions storage area. Auschwitz was originally a Polish army military camp. The guide showed us the variety of other ways they had of killing people. It was never explained why they wanted to have so many different methods of execution. They sentenced people to die by injecting poison directly into their hearts, by starvation, by suffocating them in a closed room, by exhausting them by making them stand up incessantly, by shooting, and by hanging. I thought of the garroting that Hitler had ordered carried out on the members of the conspiracy against him (I mentioned this in my last letter). The Nazis seemed to be big on depriving people of air— which, symbolically, of course, is spirit. I recalled reading an article once on Wagnerian opera. It mentioned that the mood that Wagner wanted to create on the stage was of characters moving around in an environment where there was no air. Interestingly, Hitler’s favorite opera was Wagner’s Rienzi. He was supposed to have listened to it forty times. Sometimes the Nazis killed individual prisoners in their cells or in other parts of the building, but most of the time prisoners to be executed for rules infractions were told to undress in a changing room (one for men, one for women). They were then marched into a courtyard area to stand, naked, facing a killing wall. This was a ten-foot section of a brick wall that had been lined with a kind of coarse pressed-fiber material, designed to absorb some of the sound

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of the gunshots. There was no firing squad; one guy just unceremoniously shot the person in the back of the head. It is documented, we were told, that a young woman, with her infant child in arms (who was also killed), was executed in this manner. There was also a little wheeled portable gallows, used for hanging one person at a time, off to one side. Standing there, where the people stood who were killed, configured a feeling in me that I am not quite able to articulate. Finally, it was time for the movie. It showed material (mass graves, emaciated prisoners, etc.) that has been shown widely before and emphasized how the Russians had “liberated” the camp. This is actually not quite true. The night before the Russians got there, the Nazi staff attempted, unsuccessfully, to blow up the gas chambers and set fire to other evidence like the clothes, hair, and shoe storage rooms. They then ran off. The next morning the prisoners themselves began to emerge, and the townspeople from Oswiecim came out to help them. Then the Russians showed up. After the film, I felt a little better, a little more normal. Auschwitz was back in place as something that I had experienced in movies and newsreels, something that had happened far, far away. I needed this defense, because virtually my entire childhood had been dominated by terror about the Nazis. I had lived on my maternal grandparents’ farm in South Texas during most of World War II. My father was in the U.S. Navy, serving in the Pacific, and my mother lived a lot of the time in San Diego, waiting for him when he came into port. I felt cut off from them, and right down the road about a mile from my grandparents’ house was a German POW camp. We used to sit in the front yard and watch the trains go by with the German prisoners in their green uniforms, on their way to the camp. The main thing that created the terror in me was the image of Nazis that I had seen in so many war movies. My little boy head was filled with incomprehensible pictures of these Nazi soldiers brutally and wantonly killing people. I simply could not understand how this was possible. I had recently, in Prague, had an experience that reminded me of these childhood feelings. When we toured the old Jewish grave-

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yard (which, by the way, is one of the more unforgettable sights one can see in Europe, I think), we went through the adjacent museum. At that time, it contained a collection of pictures made by Jewish children in the internment camp, Terezin. Each child artist was identified by name, age, and condition at the end of the war. Almost all of them were sent to Auschwitz and died there. I was struck by the colors in the pictures. Every one of the children used strong, deep colors, very unlike the variety of styles one would normally see in an exhibition of children’s art. When I was a child, I was famous at school for coloring in just this way, pressing hard, to make deep colors with my crayons. I had the thought that the war must have configured an extremely intense baseline of feeling in children, an intensity that came out when they did something like color a picture. This must have been especially true for these children. I felt an affinity with them. This is how I explained to myself the disassociation defense that I felt kick in—and it did help, it did enable me to deal with the remainder of the tour. After the movie, we walked past the area where a famous special execution at the camp had taken place, a hanging. The Nazis had quickly constructed a mass gallows at the end of an open parade ground–type area by planting three big railroad tie beams in the ground and placing two pieces of steel train rail on top of them. This is where they hanged a dozen men at one time, members of a survey team who worked outside the fence (probably laying out Auschwitz II, the Birkenau camp). They had been suspected of establishing and maintaining a communication link with the people in Oswiecim and of using this to engineer the escape of a prisoner (who was later recaptured). I had read, in an article about Gustav Mahler in one of the Prague English-language newspapers, that Mahler’s niece, a brilliant musician and violin virtuoso, had conducted the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz. They were supposed to have played at this execution. The niece died at Auschwitz. As our guide described all of this to us, she became uncharacteristically agitated. She clearly thought that this event was a special kind of horror, exceptionally malicious in some way. She put emphasis on the fact that all the men who died had been in the

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camp for years. “They had learned how to survive,” she said, “they would have made it till the end!” She looked at the ground and shook her head. “So senseless,” she said. I wondered to myself: “Was her father one of the men hanged at this execution? Is she talking about him? It would make sense, in that he was an engineer—it would be natural for him to be on a survey team.” I did not ask her, though. We went on then to the gas chambers and looked at the crematory ovens. By now I was pretty much not there, psychologically. I did feel myself very present, though, when we came to the part about Rudolf Hess, the camp commandant. He lived at Auschwitz with his wife and children. Their house was just outside the fence no more than fifty yards from the entrance to the gas chamber, a nice two-story number with a pleasant-looking backyard that overlooked the death chamber. After the Poles convicted Hess at their special court proceedings, they brought him back to Auschwitz and hanged him. They constructed a small, crude gallows, not unlike the portable one the Nazis had wheeled around for hanging people in various places. It was bigger than that one, but still not very tall, probably not high enough to break his neck when he fell through the trapdoor. The gallows is just outside the door of the gas chamber, directly between it and the back door of his house. This was the only thing I saw that day that, in its way, made sense. As we walked back into town to catch the return train, we looked at all of the people there going about their daily lives. Cynthia became obsessed with the fact that the townspeople, who at the time of Auschwitz clearly knew what was going on there, had not organized an attack and overrun the camp. She could not fathom how they could have lived with the knowledge that something like Auschwitz existed alongside their everyday life. Hours later, back in elegant Krakow just after dark, we were perusing the beautiful pastries in a lovely old bakery. Cynthia began to weep, imagining herself buying bread there each evening as the ashes, described to us by our guide, blew across the city from the crematorium to the west. As I listened to her, I thought of a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where we had worked earlier in the fall.

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He taught a popular course entitled “Social Control.” The assignment for the students who take the course is always the same. Each student must secretly choose another student to spy on intensively for a period of two weeks, documenting every possible thing about the subject’s life. Of course, at the same time, the student spy is also the subject of another student spy. Students had to submit a journal of their surveillance findings and a paper discussing how the whole experience had made them feel. I had come by a set of the reading material the professor assigned for the course, and, being curious about the subject, I read it. He had included some writings by Michel Foucault on the idea of the panopticon. The panopticon was an architectural design, created by Jeremy Bentham, for a prison building that would allow all inmates to be observed from one central point, and, of course, for the central point to be observed as well. Foucault’s notion was that, in the present time (the present “episteme,” to use his term), human subjectivity is being constituted essentially as the experience of being seen—and, consequently, held responsible. Though he never gave an account of how history moved from one episteme to the next, he saw Jean-Paul Sartre and other humanists as propagating a pernicious ethic of individual responsibility based on being seen by others. This is why he called Sartre a terrorist at one point. I found even more interesting a section of a book that discussed how the Nazis had planned to organize and control the communities in the countries that they conquered. They felt that such control would be a hugely difficult task, given that there would be so few of them and so many of the local people. It would, therefore, be essential for them to develop a network of indigenous informants who could provide information and help the Nazis stay ahead of resistance plots. The book reported that, when they began to take over the communities, the Nazis were astounded at the magnitude of spontaneous informing that began to occur. People were ready and willing to accuse and inform on their neighbors at the slightest opportunity. The problem for the occupiers became having too much information. This reminded me of something Cynthia and I had learned when

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we were working in Karachi, Pakistan. At that time, there was civil violence on a continuing basis. In Karachi, there are a number of “rent-a-gun” services, we were told, where one could rent a gun, use it to shoot someone, and then turn it back in for the deposit, no questions asked. According to what we were told, when civil disruption occurred for political reasons, people would rent guns and go out and kill their personal enemies over business disputes or personal vendettas under the cover, so to speak, of the political violence. People had to make major investments in personal security. In the United States, one of the axioms of urban public administration is that the city government administration does not have to worry about policing home remodeling. Within a day after someone drives the first nail on an addition to his or her home, one of the neighbors will have reported it to the city. The building inspectors will know even if no permit has been applied for. Does all this mean that Foucault is correct, that people’s very experience of themselves is as something to be watched, to be checked up on to see if they are conforming to the rules? His theory implies that people want to be watched because the best feeling they can have about themselves is that they are living up to the watchers’ expectations, that they are gaining the watchers’ approval. If this is true, then what the Nazis stumbled onto inadvertently was a gold mine of social control. The SS, the Gestapo, Hitler, were ideal watchers. They had a totalizing philosophy from which they derived an absolutely clear program, complete with unequivocal rules and regulations enforced with swift, violent punishment. Who better to complete, to fulfill, the world view of the panoptic consciousness of this episteme? It certainly is one way of apprehending how it is that the general population not only tolerated, but apparently were willing to involve themselves actually with, the Nazi police apparatus. On the train back to Krakow, I kept thinking about our guide and the quiet, effective way she had constructed the text of our experience. The central theme, the emphasis, that stood out in my reflections was the role that bureaucracy and bureaucratic think-

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ing played in the business of the camp. Repeatedly the guide would point out in various glass cases the documents and records that were kept at the camp. “Look at this,” she said at one point, “six handwritten copies of the documents and records for each prisoner, just so each administrator could have one. WHY? What bureaucrats!” She drew our attention to the systematic program that the Nazis had followed in their medical and other horrendous experiments to find the most efficient methods of racial extermination. She showed us a report to the central command that contained the results of heart poison injection experiments; the research indicated that a doctor and two nurse assistants could kill one thousand people per day in this manner. Over and over, she associated, in her discussion, the ideas of bureaucracy, systemization, and efficiency with evil. My mind went to Hannah Arendt’s famous essay on the Eichmann trial, subtitled, “The Banality of Evil.” I recalled myself as having written something in the past that employed the idea, playing on Arendt’s, of the evil of banality. So here we are again: the main business that has occupied my professional life— bureaucratic organizations, the bureaucratic mentality and so on— defined as the essence of everything that is most wrong with the world. I fell off then into a meditation on the question of how I ever became associated with bureaucracy. What did it mean about me that I did so, especially given that my turn toward public administration was such a radical change in the course of my educational career? Maybe this is why I like process psychologies, like Lacan’s, which depict people as not having identities (“. . . a poem being written”) namely because they help me avoid facing that, at the bottom of my character, in my true identity, I am a bureaucrat. It was my cousins, if not brothers, who ran Auschwitz so effectively, just following orders and doing what they were told to do efficiently. My Life with Political Scientists I was told the other day by a Czech that the word Praha (Prague in Czech) originally meant gate, gateway, or door. If this is true, it

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might help to explain why my unconscious had called me to Prague. Doors and gates constellate the archetype of Janus, the two-faced mythological character. He looks in opposite directions, where you have been and where you are going. Janus is an archetype of transformation or passage. I found myself on the train reflecting on the two identities I have always felt caught between after I decided to become involved with the field of public administration. As an undergraduate, I studied literature, literary criticism, and philosophy. I did not really have a clear career plan or even intention. Then, as graduation approached and reality loomed, I hit on the idea of obtaining an M.P.A. degree, getting a nice job with the government doing some kind of good work in the public interest that was not too demanding, and using the free energy it afforded me to write a novel. This required my going back and, in effect, doing another major in the field of government—now called political science. From the beginning of my career in political science, I encountered prejudice against the field of public administration. The M.P.A. students were lower-class citizens in the Department of Government, third in line behind the Ph.D. students and the M.A. students in political science. This was made clear to us in numerous informal ways, not the least of which was a constant referral to us as “manhole cover counters.” This was a reference to the founding days of the field, when the good government PA reformers would go out and measure the length of the city streets that the political bosses claimed to have paved, as a way of stopping corruption. Then, after I had decided to go on for a Ph.D. in political science and one of my professors had recommended me for a special arts and sciences fellowship, I was told that I was not eligible because public administration, which I declared as my special area of study, was not considered part of arts, sciences, humanities, or social studies. It was, rather, professional. My professor, Emmette Redford, was furious, but my application was not considered. During my doctoral program, I became involved in the behavioral revolution in political science and studied mostly methodol-

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ogy and the then-new skill of computer data processing. This led me into the camp of students that surrounded Charles Hyneman, a famous political scientist in the field of American political behavior. I worked a lot with him and his protégés, and he was to chair my dissertation. Ultimately, though, I found myself drawn back toward the field of public administration. The sixties were beginning to happen, and the humanistic revolution in organization theory, though inchoate at that point, was percolating enough to catch my attention. I found that the issues of social process that gripped me were better explored from within organizations than from study of macropolitical processes. So, I dumped Hyneman as my dissertation chair and decided to do a nonquantitative, nonbehavioral dissertation with William Siffin, a comparative public administrationist. After I had changed dissertation chairs, I remember attending a seminar in which Hyneman was discussing the emerging behavioral revolution. He paused to issue the comment, “I don’t know what those in the field of public administration will do in order to get in on the behavioral movement. I guess they’ll be going out to measure the chi square of sewer workers’ assholes.” A reference, of course to the manhole cover counter stereotype. When I became a young faculty member at my first job, I experienced the tension in my identity in a different way. As chance would have it, I joined a newly hired group of young professors who openly held public administration in disdain. They often kidded me about my public administration identity and attempted to proselytize me away from it. Hence, my primary peer group pressured me to identify more with political science than with public administration. My response was always to split my teaching load between courses in American politics and courses in public administration, and to behave as much unlike a manhole cover counter as I could. As the sixties heated up, it became more and more difficult to be identified with the field of public administration. The air was heavy with attacks on bureaucracies and bureaucrats. Even my best intellectual friend in those days, the great sociologist Gideon

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Sjoberg, persistently urged me to adopt the view that the only respectable intellectual stance toward bureaucracy was to be critical. On the train from Auschwitz, in fact, I thought of the time Gideon told me that I simply had to read Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. He argued that I could not have a proper perspective on the bureaucratic mentality until I had done so. I have a number of professional faculty friends who teach in public administration programs but who disavow as much as possible a connection to the field. They refuse to tell strangers that they teach public administration. They seem to be beset with an intense ambivalence or even dislike of being identified with bureaucracies in any way. They tell me that they see it as a bastard field and that they do not even like to say its name. I remember having lunch with one of the chairpersons with whom I worked in a university political science department. At that point I had become committed to teaching exclusively in the department’s M.P.A. program, and he saw this as a rather ominous sign. This is what he said to me: “You have excellent training in political science, and you have a theoretical turn of mind—how can you be interested in teaching people how to hold down a job?” I asked him what he meant, and he replied, “You know, I’ve had a couple of PA courses. It’s all just nuts and bolts—manhole cover counting. And I don’t understand all the normative hype about the public interest taught in PA. You yourself teach about ‘technicism,’ but you are training people to be evangelical bureaucratic technocrats.” The part of this conversation that has always stood out to me was that he saw PA as: teaching people how to hold down a job (something, he implied, that any normal person did not need to be taught how to do, certainly not at a university) by filling them with nuts and bolts and hyping them (into thinking that they were doing something beyond holding down a job). The Essence of the Issue The one thing I can say about my friend, the department chair’s, characterization of PA is that it confronted me with a stark carica-

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ture of my field, one that my mind has returned to frequently and to which it returned as I wallowed in my existential crisis on the train back from Auschwitz. As a child, I had always wanted to be a marine biologist—like the character in a number of John Steinbeck’s stories—and live at the beach. How did I go from this to studying literature to ending up in a field like PA, which even some of the people in it resent because of its apparent connections to intellectual banality and a fascist mentality? After all, a man that PA has claimed as one of its own heroes, Herbert Simon, referred to public administration as an “intellectual backwater.” Also, I personally heard Aaron Wildavsky, another PA hero, express disdain for the intellectual worth of the field. As I struggled with this question, I kept going back to the contrast between the political science attitude—which is really just a special case of what one might call the social science attitude. I thought of all the people whom I have known who have embodied this attitude for me. What were they really, at bottom, saying about the difference between their brand of intellectualism and the one that they associate with public administration? It seems to me that the difference has to do with an intellectualism that is purely contemplative or reflective versus one that seeks to address problems, to tie itself to action. The people I know who have sought to argue me out of PA or who have put it down as a field seemed to share an aversion to the idea that there are workable solutions to anything. I remember a long talk I had with a well-known political scientist —whose work I respect and like—one night when he was visiting my university. We were discussing some social issue, and I kept throwing out ideas for policies that would address it. He kept rebutting them, whether they were left, right, or radical, politically. I was surprised. He seemed to have no program, nothing that he wanted to do. Finally, I said, with implicit anger that I did not hear until it came out, “Yeah, I guess that’s the problem with anything you would try to do about this—nothing will work.” The idea that these folks seem to have of what we, in universities, are supposed to do is carry out studies describing how the social world works and then offer critiques of any lines of action

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designed to address the various conditions that we want to change. This, however, is not quite it, at least for PA and the issue I am describing. It seems that it is okay for universities and social scientists to get involved in policy matters if the involvement is at a high enough level, if the issues are large and important enough, and if the positions that are advocated are within the conventional frame of policy reference. There are lots of examples of this. One political scientist friend told me the story of a time he had been assaulted at an anti–Vietnam demonstration and then ran into one of his colleagues, a man on the faculty of an Ivy League university. As he nursed his injuries the man told him, “That’s what happens to you when you don’t stick to value-free political science.” Then his friend got into a taxi to go to the airport to catch a plane to Washington, D.C., where he was consulting for the Central Intelligence Agency. The issue with PA is not our involvement in the world of action per se, but rather the way in which we are willing to get involved. This is the nuts and bolts stereotype problem. We in PA are held in disdain for being willing to involve ourselves with the mundane, with the problem of getting the garbage picked up, mailing out the social security checks, and making sure the water doesn’t make people sick. This is why we are held in disdain. It is not clear how such mundane matters could be respectably intellectualized. What about running the railroad could involve the higher levels of the human mind? What goes on in PA must not be truly intellectual. Much the same could be said about the matter of the “normative stuff” and “hype” to which my department chair referred. The idea of the public interest is not mundane to him in the same way that making a city budget is, but it is intellectually low. It has no real content; it is all mood, tone, emotion, hectoring invocation. The idea of the public interest is just words that create moral illusions. Our critics see things in a way that depicts the mundane as beneath their intellectual powers. They see normative theory as vacuous hype. Because they hold a perspective like this, the people who disdain PA apparently think that it is best to keep one’s mind in the realm of contemplation, to avoid bothering with action. This

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stance prevents the intellect from becoming tainted or misused and keeps it in its proper role of critique. The thing that puzzles me about this position is that the people I know who represent it are very concerned that the mundane aspects of their lives go easily and well. They want the garbage picked up on time; they want the restaurants they go to to have good service and excellent food; and they want the hospitals they use, when they have to use them, to be perfect in their hygiene. Yet apparently they feel that this should all be accomplished without anyone of their caliber having to become involved with the nuts and bolts and hype involved in something like organization management. Is learning how to create and manage well-worked-out systems that function effectively being bureaucratic? If so, then I guess I am bureaucratic. The Nazis, of course, were good bureaucrats, effective at both nuts and bolts and hype, and they certainly carried their ideas out of the realm of contemplation and into the world of action. As I reflected on it, though, it occurred to me that both they, and the detractors of PA, profoundly misunderstand the nature of nuts and bolts (the mundane), hype (the symbolic), and the way these relate to the living of life. Their sense of it seems very different from mine, and I think that it is the way I have come to see such matters that has steadily pushed me more and more solidly into the field of public administration. One thing that both the Nazis and the detractors do not realize is that the mundane is not just important as a means to an end, as a device for achieving efficiency, but is directly implicated with the sublime. As such, it is an end in itself. In most of the traditions of ancient wisdom, there is no separation of ends and means, no instrumentalism. The path and the way are themselves also the destination of the journey. I am fond of quoting a famous Zen parable that states this quite well, I think. A student, frustrated at not yet having achieved enlightenment, said to his Master: “Oh Master, please just tell me what is my own true self.” The Master replied, “Have you finished with eating your breakfast?” To which the student replied that he had just done so. “Then,” the Master said, “go

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and wash your dishes.” A few years ago a book was published that popularized this venerable lesson; it was titled Chop Wood, Carry Water. The idea is that the highest attainment possible in life is to be found in involving oneself with the lowliest activities. Hence, efficiency, effectiveness, or all things good that we want to come out of our activities, result not from the exercise of control over the mundane, but are emergent from the serious practice of it. The famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made this point well, but we, as a culture, do not seem to have taken it very seriously. The mistake the Nazis made (at least as far as their attitude toward technique went) was to see the mundane, the devices of efficiency, as something to be bent to their conscious will instead of as a means of finding enlightenment for their social order. When people do this—create an abstraction and then willfully bend the mundane to the task of fulfilling the abstraction—they frequently find that the idea they wanted to bring into reality was not all that desirable after all. We will see this problem crop up again, in truly horrific form, when we, as a species, get into the business of designing and engineering human beings through genetic technologies. Our friends, the detractors, do not make this error. They seek to avoid it by having nothing to do with the mundane. The Nazis made a similar error with hype, with the symbolic. They understood the symbolic rather well at the level of technique, but they did not see the limited nature of the mortal human mind. They made the mistake of the sorcerer’s apprentice. They learned just enough magic to get the genie out of the bottle, and then they found they could not control it. The people they wanted to eliminate, the Jews, have a famous legend, the legend of the golem—a Frankenstein-monster-like figure—that is meant to warn people of just such a hazard. The legend has its source here in Prague, as Rabbi Low, who made the golem, and the golem himself are supposedly buried in the old Jewish cemetery. The symbolic, and its surrogate symbols like the public interest, are not ours to go out and achieve. The symbolic will appear on its own in our affairs when we stick to the mundane and achieve quality there. When

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we do a good job for the people we serve and they do a good job as they serve us, we are all carrying out a kind of ritual that can evoke the sublime in our collective affairs. None of this can be controlled, determined, guaranteed, or predicted, though, and that is the important thing to remember. The 1960s movie Little Big Man has a scene in it that I think captures this point. In the film, which is about a white man who ends up living with an Indian tribe, an old Indian chief tells the white man (Little Big Man) that he has grown tired and has decided to die. He wants Little Big Man to help in carrying out the death ritual. They go to the top of a nearby mountain, build a funeral pyre, and make preparations for the death. Finally, the old chief goes into his death song, asking the Great Spirit to take him. On and on the impressive chant goes, and the tension builds. Then, suddenly, the chief stops the song, turns to Little Big Man, and says, “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Let’s go down to the village and get something to eat.” For me, this becomes the saving attitude for those of us interested in public administration. If we look at what we do as allegorical work, designed to create quality at the level of mundane detail and evoke the sublime at the level of the symbolic, public administration is the very opposite of what its detractors accuse it of being. We should learn our nuts and bolts well as we take our M.P.A. and our other degrees, and we should submit to the mundane tasks that make up most of public service. It seems just as clear to me that the other part of the lesson is that we must not arrogate to ourselves the task of achieving great purposes defined through great acts of leadership. The way we must follow is more difficult than this; we must learn how to evoke purpose through the process of doing, as the people whom I see as our founding philosophers, the pragmatists, advocated. I trust the regulative processes of cooperation to prevent the excesses that large institutions are so clearly capable of committing. The tone I am adopting here is that of a preachment, of course. I hope it is clear that I am preaching to myself about my own existential issue with the field of public administration. Happily,

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my preaching works for me. Another thing is very clear to me at this point, though. If I saw no way of making public administrative bureaucracies places where people could cooperate and collaborate, I would not want to have anything to do with them or with the academic field that represents them. I have always felt that perhaps the most distinctive thing about public administrative institutions is that they, being public and official, do play a significant role in constituting people, in creating the sense of self that is possible for people to have in a society. This is true not just for people inside the institutions, but for the public, generally, as well. The Nazis apparently helped constitute people as things to be watched, things whose purpose or role was to live up to the expectations set by others. I do not want to be implicated with institutions that constitute people in this way. If this were the only possibility, I would resolve my existential crisis in the other direction. As it is, though, I do feel that bureaucracies can be places where people treat each other as human beings, not things to be watched but agents who can decide together what they want to do next. Where I come down on the split between the intellectualism of contemplation and the intellectualism of action is on the side of action. In pure contemplation, cut off from the realm of new possibilities, human beings, their societies, even life itself, can easily and maybe inevitably begin to appear ridiculous, absurd, and a grand contradiction. When we move to the question of action— that is, to the question of what to do about the various messes we have made in society—we perforce adopt another mood. Action, even the most tentative, iterative form of it (the kind I favor) requires hope and demands that we contact our fellow human beings. When we act toward improving things we refuse our ridiculousness; when we act collectively, as we do in public administration, we refuse our alienation from each other. The detractors say that such an attitude toward action is romantic and produces nothing but a kind of collective melodrama. We moan and groan, seek to change things, and nothing works so we continue to moan and groan. I believe that just the reverse is true. To me, it is the grand world of politics and the study of it that is

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implicated with melodramatic narratives. In politics, and the commentary on it, there is a lot of melodrama. Some characters are good guys; some are bad guys. Dramatic moves can be made and grand schemes worked to create winners and losers with whom we can then identify. The film director Jim Jarmusch is noted for the way in which he draws the attention of the audience to the narrative devices of film itself. A primary such device is the cut. When the dramatic action in a scene reaches a concluding point, the film cuts away to the next portion of the narrative, moving the story along without bothering with what occurs between the cuts. Jarmusch exposes the storytelling artifice of this technique and in the process confronts the audience with its tendency toward escapism. So, for example, after the scene in a motel is over and one character leaves, we are shown the mundane things that the one left behind must accomplish while the other one is away. Public administration is not allowed the neat little device of the cut. The narrative we struggle with is the narrative of the real and the whole. It is not melodramatic. All people are human beings. It is insufficient to label some winners and some losers and forget about the latter. Public administration has to worry about the whole system, the lifeboat in which we are all floating. Further, we are not allowed to cut away from the nitty-gritty details. It all has to be attended to. I, for one, like this. I would rather struggle with figuring out how to include people than to calculate how I can win over them so I won’t have to bother with them. I do not like the game of winners and losers when we are talking about human beings and their lives. I suppose that I also prefer the mundane and the day to day to a series of melodramatic highlights. This is what public administration is to me. It is a way of being real and being engaged. I guess it is better than living on the beach after all.

4 • Back in D.C. in a New Millennium

The best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment. —Kafka

Introduction: Anomie and the Failure of Social Context I am back in D.C. now, and much has happened since Prague. It has been seven years, it is now fall 2000, and the world and I seem very different. The first big set of events upon my return was the final work leading up to the publication of the book I was writing while in Europe. This was a momentous event for me, and when the reviews began to come in, I was gratified to see that they were largely favorable. There was even some contention and challenge, leading to several discussions in journals that engaged me a great deal. Despite all of this, though, the invigoration faded quickly, and life resumed its more normal pattern, each year regulated by the university calendar, the creation of syllabi, and the return of ever-younger students. Of course the world around me had shifted in some momentous ways. In the last seven years we have witnessed astonishing changes. The effects of some of these we have not yet even begun to imagine. Indeed the last several fall semesters have been so rich in collective political events that my students have begun to wonder what I might have had to talk about in class if Dolly had not 66

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made cloning a reality, if the president had not been facing potential impeachment, if the full mapping of the human genome had not opened up the possibility of “who knows what,” or if the presidential election had not been potentially creating a constitutional crisis. This leaves out the amazing technological changes in computers and communication that these years have produced and the immediate practical challenges with which universities are confronted as a result. It has been a busy time. Somehow, though, a strange feeling of anomie has crept over me. I mean anomie not in the sense of “failure of social structure” but rather as a full absence of social connection—at least in the public world—although I must admit that my private world of friends seems to have suffered as well. Part of this is attributable to some residual feelings I have about the overall level of response to my book. I remind myself of a character in one of Wallace Shawn’s plays. Even though Shawn was the son of William Shawn, the legendary, longtime editor of the New Yorker magazine and had every reasonable prospect for a successful literary career, he found himself having to work in a photocopy shop in Manhattan while writing his plays. One of his characters reveals Shawn’s feelings (and mine, I am somewhat ashamed to admit) when he says, with genuine revelatory surprise, “You write plays and nobody puts them on!” I know that it is typical for academic authors to feel this way. So few people read any academic book, and most of us (especially those of us in the social sciences) secretly fear that we are largely irrelevant to broader social discourses anyway. My problem was not the typical one of being narcissistic and self-obsessed, although I certainly am capable of both and that is the source of my shame at admitting these easily misunderstood feelings. I am not angry or depressed and desperate for readers; indeed I have found myself appreciative of those who have read the book, whether they were large in number or agreed with me or not. I also do not consider the book to be so wonderful and perfectly insightful that all should read it. It is rather that writing a book is an important thing to do; it is a birth of sorts. And births, like deaths—all of them— ought to be noticed. This is, though, a hopeless thought. Such no-

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tice, such caring, requires a social context. Given how our world is increasingly organized, the scale of the social setting within which our lives are lived, our emotions and our expectations cannot be structured in such a personal way. My problem, I discovered, was that the book I wrote was aimed at revealing this problem of social relationship, or the lack thereof, in contemporary society. For me, its publication did just that in my own life. I became increasingly and profoundly aware of how impoverished our professional and social human contexts have become. When I returned from sabbatical, I became very interested in the then-burgeoning literature on civil society. I started publishing articles related to this topic and to the currents of postmodern social thought that were generating controversy within public administration. I attended numerous conferences and presented papers. Perhaps it was the fact that the book provided me sufficient space to make clear some of my more implicit assumptions, thereby exposing more fully my intellectual position. Perhaps it was the intensity and vigor with which I extended this position using postmodern critiques and the practical lessons of civil society initiatives. For whatever reasons, I felt myself isolated from many of my colleagues who had perhaps identified me as belonging to their intellectual fraternity but now no longer thought so. Despite the fact that I see myself as arguing, in my approach to discourse theory and my advocacy of collaborative pragmatism, for venerated, traditional American ideas, I was seen as crossing some invisible line. In their eyes, I had become too critical, too alienated, too nihilistic, and thus was too far from the central identity of public administration. Since I am nearing the end of my career as an academic, this was particularly disheartening. Naturally I wished that the texture of connection among public administration academics was thick enough to allow us to engage any set of ideas, no matter how critical or threatening they were perceived to be. More than this personal discontent, though, are the implications that I see in my own situation for the larger context and identity of the field to which I have given so much of my life and energy. When I look around me

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now, years after my time in Eastern Europe, I feel a sense of melancholy about my chosen field, a rather palpable sadness. The argument made in the book was that there was a dominant orthodoxy hidden in the identity of public administration that blocked our discussing certain things. Most notably, we are unable to consider critically any legitimate position for public administrators in the process of governance other than that dictated by the requirement for ultimate adjudication and decision making based on reasoned expertise. The argument was that this bias derives directly from the core of modern consciousness, reason itself. What was at stake in discussing this problem openly was the foundation of our identity as academics and the legitimacy of our institutions as practitioners. Curiously, though, it seems to me that when we hang on to this image of ourselves, we are tenaciously clinging to the very ideas that represent our undoing in the contemporary world. We are, indeed, our own worst enemy. It was this realization that produced my sense of anomie. The current moment, the beginning of this new millennium, I see as characterized by several distinctive, but related, phenomena that bear directly on public administration. The intellectual climate is, to quote my friend David Farmer, one of “post-isms.” We are “postfeminist,” “postpositivist,” “postcolonial,” and so forth. All of these are related, of course, to the impact of the multiple intellectual and social movements, loosely identified as postmodernism. I would even say that we are now post-postmodern. Despite the demise of an official postmodern era and the absence of meaningful responses, especially within public administration, there remains a significant consequence of postmodern critiques in the social and political contexts developing in much of the world, including the United States. Given my psychoanalytic turn of mind, the most important aspect of this has been a dramatic erosion of the symbolic order and the fundamental social bond. Interestingly enough, though, intellectual and political climates, like everything else, are being overwritten by the triumph of what is referred to as globalization, which really means the hegemonic domination of market capitalism. It seems unquestionable to me that the market

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has trumped government as our dominant collective institution. Certainly these are daunting shifts that have the potential to undermine all of what we in public administration have considered to be our basic position and identity. I think of these shifts as pushing us to see ourselves in a radically different way, but only if we can face who we have been and talk together about where we wish to go. This kind of talk requires a context that we do not seem to have. It seems to me to be an opportunity that may be slipping away from us. My life, though, has shown me that it is often at just such moments that the greatest and most exciting possibilities arise. The Postmodern Moment The period of my richest intellectual growth was undoubtedly the turbulent sixties. It was a period when an intellectual “revolution” began to occur in universities. While the term postmodernism was already in vogue in French intellectual circles by the 1960s, it would be another decade before it entered the American intellectual lexicon. However, the tumult of the sixties certainly introduced and laid the foundation for what would become one of postmodernism’s central issues. A main point of reference for this was the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I—and countless others—was stunned by the radical implications of Kuhn’s work. His undercutting of the traditional concept of scientific progress along with his assertion that, historically, scientists have worked out of mutually incommensurable paradigms was breathtaking to me. It opened what had been to my 1950s mind the almost sacred realm of scientific inquiry to political considerations. Another book, having a similar effect but grounded in interpretivist sociology, was Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality. It, too, upended conventional social philosophy. A “new” movement (e.g., the New Political Science, the New Sociology, the New History) sprouted up in virtually all the social sciences and humanities. The issue around which all this developed was, as it was called, epistemological and ethical relativism. I have always seen this as

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a misconstruction of what the debate was about, but it is a handy way of referring to it that gets at least the tone of it across. The question was whether there was a basis for calling anything True in a sense that transcends all context. The political dimension of the matter involves whether there can be any objective basis for the exercise of authority and, therefore, for regarding authoritative institutions as objectively legitimate. The vehement debates on this issue throughout the 1960s and 1970s, fueled in the world of American politics by the Vietnam War, provided a backdrop against which a new perspective on the whole controversy emerged in the form of the idea of “postmodernism.” One of the most eloquent statements of what would subsequently be called postmodern social theory in the United States was a powerful critique issued by an American philosopher, Richard Rorty. His influential book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, functioned as a kind of coup de grace to the debate over what Rorty called “big T truth.” While Rorty provided critique, the main intellectual substance of the new orientation was carried forward from an unusual place: the humanities, especially the field of literary studies. That this happened, though, was natural enough because the new angle from which the debate came to be framed involved the indeterminacy of language itself. The concepts and tools for casting the issue had been around a long time, in the form of ideas from the field of semiotics, especially those of the American pragmatist C.S. Peirce and the Belgian linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. It was only when these ideas were employed by a group of social theorists in France, though, and then were brought to the United States, that they caught hold. Perhaps the main French theorists of this era were Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, both clever, imaginative, graceful writers even in translation and, say what you will, brilliant minds. Derrida is often charged with being the ultimate relativist. This is because his methodology of deconstruction not only undercuts any specific claim to “big T truth” but also gainsays the potential for establishing a coherent sense of subjectivity itself as well as any possibility for stable meaning.

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The advent of so-called French theory in the United States, especially insofar as it entered through the venue of the humanities —the traditional keepers of the Enlightenment canon that was the core of liberal education—completed the transition into the subphase of history referred to as “late capitalism” or “postmodernism.” This change was accompanied by a reaction from those identified with the “traditional” modernist position. They attempted to characterize it as potentially bringing about a condition of anchorless social dynamism, where shifting vogues became the norm. The stereotypical specter of relativism, now multiplied by a large factor, was the primary “bloody shirt” symbol employed in this resistance. The dire portents of social rootlessness imagined by the defenders of modernism, though, have not been realized. Rather, a reverse condition has occurred. Instead of everything changing, it seems that everything is staying the same, with the emphasis on everything. The distinctive thing about postmodern social conditions is that they have created a context in which everything has become legitimate. For any realm of social taste, interest, or opinion there is an established niche or arena of discourse that accords it some degree of legitimacy. These days one can find a specialized web page or chat room, for example, to explore any inclination or disposition, from the sexual to the political. What this validates is that the original culprit of relativism was modernism itself. It was when the wild and rootless secularism of science replaced the traditional order of religion that the world took the first step onto the slippery slope of relativism. One needs only to think here of the trial of Galileo to see this point. There is a supplemental counterdynamic at work, though, that ensures that this condition will not endure. Postmodernism, as its name suggests, is not itself a discrete moment in history. It is merely a time “just after just now” (the formal definition of “post”) and simply marks the point at which history will move into some truly new epoch. This new time will be given its identity by the main truth that eventually will be realized as emerging from modernism: the rational, scientific worldview cannot serve alone as the

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framework for maintaining human existence. This insight into the true nature of the scientific commitment has been opening for some time now, as the necessary pretension that science does produce stable truths and the practical answers that are implied by them begins to fail. What seems to be happening is that, as the era of postmodernism closes, we find ourselves in a phase where we attempt to hold on to a commitment to the modernist ethos, while the very infrastructure that we have created using the kind of knowledge it produces fails. The Current Intellectual Climate It seems obvious that the debate about postmodernism has died down. Postmodernism as a set of intellectual enterprises is over. I am dismayed over how little we seem to have learned from it. Much of the critique of postmodernism that was put into print is either an hysterical polemic designed to appeal to cheap common sense or a flat rejection on normative political grounds. It is difficult to find serious critiques—ones that address the major postmodernist writers at the specific level of their arguments, in the field of public administration for sure. What I kept wishing for as the encounter with postmodernism unfolded is that people in public administration would seriously read and respond, critically or otherwise, to its literature. My surmise was that if this happened, some fundamental philosophical issues and commitments that are usually kept hidden would come out into the open and be discussed, a mutual-understanding kind of standoff would result, and the field of PA would have the benefit of added dimension and openness. What seems to have happened instead is that the advent of postmodernism created a broad sense of threat among those at the center of the field. I probably should not have been dismayed at this at all. A central line of postmodern critiques has been directed at revealing implicit structures of authority and privilege. All discourses give advantage to particular terms and positions, and university professors stand at the apogee of many such discourses. In

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any case, postmodernism is over, definitely over. I hear panelists at conferences make flat, passing declarations such as “We’ve seen that postmodernism is not an alternative. . . .” I cannot tell what this means except that no genuine debate or greater sense of openness has occurred or will occur as a result of public administration’s encounter with postmodern thought. In addition, reaction has set in. Frank Scott notes that the most recent edition of a widely used text warns its student readers against the “postmodernists and interpretivists” of public administration. The text’s author sees these people as promoting a therapeutic state whose “aspiring chief therapists” are concerned more with the subjective unconscious than with the actual life issues that citizens face. This is upsetting, since it is such a direct assault on any position other than the most conventional. In fact, to me, interpretivism is squarely mainstream; characterizing it as problematic or dangerous moves my own current interest in psychoanalysis into an even more marginal place. I have always worked from a marginal position, right from the beginning of my career. When I started out thirty years ago, though, marginal positions were more comfortable to be in than they are now. The dominant mode of discourse, which I refer to using a term borrowed from Lacan, “the discourse of the university,” was clearly hegemonic, and those enacting it felt entirely secure. Given this, they were rather delighted to have heterodox perspectives like mine around. They engaged with me genuinely, understood me, and even granted the possibility that I might be onto something. Nowadays, there is insecurity and threat in the air. The traditional university itself is under siege from market-oriented alternatives like the University of Phoenix, with its huge numbers of students and distance learning programs. Higher education is being talked about as a growth industry for venture capitalists with the largest market potential of any sector in the new economy. I heard a story of a university provost who led his department heads and deans in the chant, “I am the CEO of a major industry,” so as to socialize them to their new role orientation. University build-

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ings are intentionally being given a corporate rather than an academic ambience. The emphasis is on market exploitation and effective competition. Private companies are selling videotapes with “great teachers” presenting standard university core courses. The president of my own university is being quoted as saying that there will be only thirty traditional research universities left standing after the current episode of change is played out. University leaders are urging faculty to develop a brand for their work and to turn their efforts to the kind of projects that look useful and can be identified with their brands. The idea is that these can be marketed to the outside world and can be used in the public relations advertising spots that are shown at the halftime of televised collegiate football games. This is no time for a faculty person to be offbeat, critical, or marginal, and we know it. Faculties are scrambling to look good by the new criteria. They want to represent that they can produce real knowledge, things that can be applied in the practical world, that clearly have dollar value. Under conditions such as these, it is no wonder that critique is simply being ignored and forgotten or rejected out of hand. After all, university faculties are made up of people holding down jobs like anybody else. They want prestige and the rewards that come with it, most notably security and respect. The way to get this is to play to the common image of professors—that they are the ones who know and who are finding out more. This is an especially problematic situation for the field of public administration. One of the long-standing, generally accepted axioms of the field is that the problems, issues, situations, and so on that public administrators have to cope with are too complex and changeable to be comprehended in any synoptic or even stable manner. This is due to our cherished connection to practical action, and it is why we were historically called administration, not management. That is why Wallace Sayre’s old saw about public administration and private management being exactly alike “in all unimportant respects” is so often invoked. There is something in it that goes beyond cliché and reaches the core of our experience.

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While we have never been able to say we know anything much for certain in public administration, this has not been seen as a major problem until now. The ambiguity and conflict that the role of administrator presented was always a source of excitement and challenge to those of us involved with the field; our students fed off of this. As I have said, though, things are different now. Responses to this situation have varied. One has been a fair and sincere effort to enhance the credentials of the field and make it more respectable within the university context. A recent review of a prize-winning public administration book rather severely attacked the authors for not meeting accepted standards of scholarly argument. I believe such a review would not have been written even a few years ago. Instead, the book would have been celebrated as an unqualified success. The real point of the review, and certainly its actual effect, was to show the world that we, in public administration, have scholarly standards and police each other in adhering to them. Indeed, the person who wrote this review appeared at a conference recently representing the perspective that the field should attempt to be more scholarly because it would be nice to be more broadly respected in the university during promotion and tenure proceedings. This kind of appeal is harmless enough, and it has the positive effect of fostering real discussion of the basic issues that compose the life of the mind. Others, though, go further than this and demand that the more broadly respected empirical research (so to speak) be the predominant model for the field. This has been an insistent call, of course, for a long time. It recently has been given added defensive stridency by the threat to the university that I described, and by the damage that postmodern and earlier critiques have done to the position of empiricism. My students tell me that they hear from other students when they attend conferences that “If you want a job in a university, you had better go out [sic] as quantitative and empirical.” The sense I have of the current mood in the field is that the feelings generated by the traditional theoretical cleavages are turning personal. It seems that those who represent the broad middle

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of the field are now disposed to ally themselves with the causal explanation empiricists and circle their wagons against what they see as an increasingly hostile environment both within and outside the university. “It is time to start showing people that we know something for certain, that what we do adds cash value to the world! We can’t afford to waste time on things like interpretivism, postmodernism, and the like!” Under conditions like these you can only be considered part of the solution or part of the problem. People in the field are becoming too insecure and afraid to be interested in anything unconventional or different. It is no wonder, then, that someone like me is seeing things in melancholy tones and feels dismayed. I would not feel honest joining the ones circling the wagons, even though I do have the training and background required to do the kind of work they think would give the field a better image and protect it from its attackers. The difference between us is not that I reject the work they do. Rather, it is our disagreement over the broader professional identity of the field and how it should be related to the social and governmental world. They want to be experts and tell the people who are running the government how best to do their jobs. I want to use my position (and the field to use its position) in the university to foster a collaborative approach to government, where experts are simply part of a cooperative process in which they have no superior role. What I hear back when I say this, though, is something like “But we have to defer to experts—after all, they are the ones who know.” Then I ponder, “How can this response be engaged, being as deeply embedded as it is in our technocratic culture?” This thought, in turn, brings me to the problem of how the scene in the broader social and political world bears on the situation in our field. Social and Political Conditions: The Erosion of the Symbolic Order The current mood in Washington, D.C., where I live, is a curious one. Despite persistent official invocations of the need for rein-

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vigorated moral standards, the distinctive thing about the current ethos is that, just as with issues of personal taste, heterodox political opinions are accommodated with ease. A kind of pseudosocial and political democracy (actually a genuine realization of the potential implicit in the Constitution) has been achieved where all opinions and ways of life are coming to be, at least unofficially, accepted. This is occurring because there is only one viable direction in which social development is going to proceed. Our social and political world is already far beyond even what we might call hyperpluralism. No single faction is going to have an actual impact on policy, so no single ideology need be feared. Let people say and do pretty much what they wish; nothing is going to be seriously affected. The movement toward market efficiencies is the only policy principle now in effect. Since it is hegemonic, and more importantly, since moral openness is, in fact, consistent with it, social heterodoxy is quite acceptable, despite official disclaimers. It seems at the surface that our current condition is the very realization of the ideal of democracy. Social life and discourse have become as open as, it would seem, anyone could reasonably expect. The real direction of society has become a settled matter; we are leading the world into a global economy and homogenous sociocultural world. The only legitimate venues for moral sentiment are attempts at preachment and persuasion. Certainly such attempts abound. I am surrounded by appeals to reinvigorate values. But, in the end, these yield to the demands of an increasingly diverse market calculus. While it has become commonplace to joke about the phantasmic quality of market theory, economics, nonetheless, enjoys a place of special privilege in the minds of public policy makers and the literate public. Economic analysis (in spite of the fact that at any moment an economist can be found who will support any prediction) is somehow viewed as reflecting better than any other socially oriented theory the hard realities of the human situation. Even the creating of law, we have shown ourselves over the last several presidential terms, can be no more than a matter of incremental adjustment, made in light of economic requirements. (These days in D.C., the joke is that it doesn’t

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really matter who is president; the country is actually run by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.) What this condition marks is nothing less than the degrading of the covering symbolic order of society and the emergence of an incipient social crisis. What we do not see is that when “God is dead,” or when moral discourse has become no more than harangue, it is not the case, as the father Karamazov declared, that “everything is permitted.” Rather, the obverse is the case—nothing is permitted. Both traditional and modern forms of society are organized on models of restriction and prescription. In traditional society, these are explicitly normative, based on definitions of right and wrong provided originally by a transcendent source (“God”) and enforced by a more local authority, typically a master of some sort, like a monarch or a priest. In modern society, these essentially religious foundations of social organization are supplanted by the scientific. Modern life is regulated, not by transcendent moral principles, but by the empirical realities of life, as these are defined by science. Under this symbolic order, the characteristics of good and evil are attached to phenomena using the rule of neutral necessity. That which is necessary for our continued existence is good; that which threatens us is necessarily bad. This, by the way, reveals the true nature of science. It is, in fact, a modern form of religion. Science, though, has also become subject to the requirements of the market as modernism has moved into its “after” phase, postmodernism. One need only study the history of the mapping of the human genome and look ahead to its future uses to see how this has become so. The entire genome project was driven by economic competition (interestingly enough between a government agency and a private biotechnical firm), based on the vast potential for marketing the projected technological applications. Questions of the normative implications (the goodness or badness) of the project were left to an ethical board whose budget was so minuscule, given the overall cost of the project, that one could only conclude that its formation was purely a token gesture. It would seem that science, as our modernist religion, has now

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moved into a postmodern incarnation, one in which its functioning as a symbolic order has degraded. The purely instrumental aims of the market have become the only sources of guidance, and the market permits anything, denies nothing, so long as it has some utility to someone. As a result, we find ourselves at a critical juncture. Our social history so far shows us that if social life is to yield meaning, there must be some arbiter—be it “God” or science— and “he” must deny and permit (without denial there can be no permission). Allowing everything is actually the ultimate denial; it eviscerates the possibility for all meaning. Pleasure, after all, comes only from either doing what is permitted or doing what is not permitted. The same is true of pain. And the tension of pleasure against pain is the only definition of meaning that is possible given the present oppositional model of the symbolic order. In our current postmodern condition, the only arbiter of social life has become the market. Anything is theoretically possible. The only constraints are technical. The case of cloning is a wonderful example of our current situation. While there is much talk about limiting the application of cloning technology on moral grounds, the fact that it may soon be an available and apparently simple technical process seems to render its usage inevitable. Despite the moral arguments, few believe that there is any possibility that its extension to human beings is going to be prevented. Ironically, the attainment of such infinite potential has evacuated the very foundation that would make it meaningful. Something of the fundamentally human seems left behind or dissolved when the only relevant questions are “how?” and “how efficiently?” This is the generic flaw of thinking about life, as the economic mode of thought tends to do, solely in terms of attaining gratification through material and psychological conditions. Where is it possible, then, for things to go from here? Perhaps human beings will attempt to reinstall some more familiar symbolic order by creating conditions (most likely by default) that will infuse it with a new vitality. This can probably be done most effectively by allowing a set of lethally threatening conditions to

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develop internationally. Some argue that we are well on the way toward this, either through the proliferation of various terrorist activities or through the increased probability of major ecological or health-related disasters. With enough such crises, the elusive line between what is good and what is evil, between what is permitted and what is prohibited, will come again into sharper focus, and a “normal” symbolic order will be revitalized and begin functioning. If this is how it goes, the expense will be great. We will, in effect, create a new “enemy at the gate.” We will find an “other” to serve as our evil so that we can be our good. We will follow the well-worn path of crusades and wars. The tensions among religious ideologies will be tied, even more directly than in the past, to foreign and ecological threats and will exacerbate the new conflicts. This has been the typical human pattern. It is a costly way to find meaning in life. And the contemporary context in which this might occur will be far different from what has gone before. Nothing in the past can show us the deficits inherent in making and implementing social policy against the dire threats that the future, if we allow it to unfold as it is going, seems to hold. These threats are ominous to a degree beyond dire; they will entail the life or death of the entire world as we know it. The alternative is to create, which is to say build together, a new framework for finding meaning. The characteristic that must distinguish any such new orientation is that it avoids depending on definable categories of good and evil. To say such a thing seems absurd on the face of it. In fact, though, the idea of seeking a form of social life based on acceptance of the intrinsic wholeness of life, the inseparability and inevitable coexistence of life and death, good and evil, has always been present as a counter-theme and antidote to the moralism of the dominant view. The roots of this paradox can be found in the style of conceptualization (or philosophy, if you will) that we have developed, especially in the West, and in the corollary type of social relations that this modality of thinking has created. Based on Aristotelian logic, which founds all thinking on the principle of sepa-

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rateness, thought in the Western tradition is essentially an interplay of categories that attain meaning by contrast with one another. This is acceptable enough, since language itself functions in this manner. The problem is that Aristotle’s logic, since it requires that all definitions be discrete, sets up the expectation that the terms in an argument or discourse can be given definitive meanings at the level of language itself. The expectation is that words will carry stable, clear meaning. Everyday experience teaches, though, that linguistic meaning can only be achieved through reference to context. Context is sufficient for grounding meaning so long as its inherent openness is acceptable. With ultimate categories such as good and evil, however, openness is intolerable. Human beings, once they have been exposed to the ideas of good and evil, want to know what they mean—for certain. The result is that human discourse must be pressed to the level of objective appearance. This operational method, as one might call it, is the only way that definite, objective meaning can be established. Eventually, though, even meanings established in this manner begin to lose their force. New rules, reflecting an ever more refined sense of good and bad, must be propagated in order to revitalize the sense of the categories they define. The history of rules surrounding so-called political correctness issues provides an excellent illustration of this dynamic. In order to be able to continue believing that some behaviors can be definitively labeled as correct (good) and others as not correct (evil) when all prohibitions are vague or controversial, more and more rules have to be propagated, and in more and more detail. At the level of social relations, this process produces a serious side effect. Since meaning has been externalized into rules about appearances and behavior, other people can be accorded meaning —goodness or badness—through a process of objectification. People are related to as things, treated in accord with their value as determined by the application of objective categories and standards of assessment. The emergence of this process of the social production of meaning initially was subtle and, to some extent unnoticed, because it was so congruent with the style of social

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judgment that was characteristic of traditional society. The difference is that in the traditional world people were judged on their inner appearances, on the presumed condition in which they appeared to keep their souls. Modernism shifted the focus of judgment to externals, from moral character to what might be called approved, learned behavior. The judgmental way of thinking about social life has become so natural to us as modern people, of course, that we have difficulty imagining that it could be any other way. The Navajo Indian manner of regarding and dealing with, for instance, a dangerously mentally ill person (simply avoid her until the ill wind that is in her passes on) seems bizarre. We are willing to accept the implications of our way, such as our institutionalized killing of human beings through the device of capital punishment, even though they potentially place us (society) in the bad category of killers ourselves and thus force us to live with contradictions between our beliefs and our actions. The movement into the postmodern social condition has complicated the process, though. It has heightened the objectification of social relations and increased the social contradictions with which we must live. One of the vestiges of traditional society that carried over into modernism and became a central paradox was the maintenance of a boundary around aspects of personal life as a way of protecting against objectifying judgments. With the advent of the hyperpluralism of postmodernism, a degree of social openness has developed that makes this impossible. This is not openness in any positive sense, but the radical social exposure that is exemplified in television talk shows, where the most intimate forms of personal behavior become fodder for voyeuristic dissection. The ubiquity of electronic linkages such as the Internet have also largely eliminated private spaces and are the focus of much anxiety and concern over potential invasiveness. One of the consequences of this radical openness has been to alter the quality that social judgment and objectification take. The postmodern human subject does not judge his or her fellows in the sense of making approving or disapproving conclusions about so-

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cial acceptability. Such simple moral feelings are anachronistic. They are the stuff of the 1950s world in which I grew up where the approval and acceptance of the people in my small town meant everything to me. The contemporary postmodern issue involves, rather, the practical question of whether other people are worth (in something like an economic cost–benefit sense) associating with in given ways. Are they, in other words, a net benefit or a net cost? Such calculation is rampant among my young students, even in their most intimate decisions. For me, for example, love was genuinely blind, especially to rational deliberation. I didn’t choose someone to marry, much less analyze the other’s suitability. I fell in love and that settled the matter. My younger relatives, students, and friends, while certainly susceptible to feelings, are consciously analytical about the objects of their affections. They talk quite openly about potential partners, assessing the relative merits and advantages each might offer in a way that is decidedly foreign to me. It seems obvious that this kind of reification and rectification of social relationships is required by the elaboration of capitalism into the advanced stage that characterizes it as we enter the twentyfirst century. It also seems rather obvious that rational economic calculation is extending into our civic life to a degree that will produce fundamental changes there as well. If citizens are to be able to make the kind of contact with each other that is required in order to create and sustain a social and political ethos, they must have the capacity to care for each other. Further, the more they can care in (paradoxically) an objective or accepting manner, the better. It is far preferable, for example, to be able to accept or to understand than to tolerate. Objectively appreciating the irreducibility of difference is, it has been argued, the only position from which genuinely ethical caring is possible. Postmodernism has been very helpful to this. It marks a movement away from the personalistic, moralistic style of caring that was described above as characteristic of modernism. In this way it is an improvement and an aid to the development of renewed civic ethos. It has at least brought about a diminishment of the punish-

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ing moralism often characteristic of modernism. On the whole, though, it is a definite detriment, if not an absolute block, to the possibility for a caring social sensibility. This is so because any true alternative to the (non)ethos that is developing now must begin from a rejection of the dogmatic skepticism and corresponding strange secular religiosity that has become the hallmark of our contemporary social world. When the attitude of skepticism extends into the realm of morality and social practice, it produces a hard-edged, but logically conflicted, attitude of moralism that ultimately blocks the possibility for caring moral discourse. Radical skepticism applied to the world of social policy and process produces a dogmatic certainty that we know what evil is, what is right, and what is wrong. These truths are not put in moralistic terms, of course; they are couched in terms of scientific facts. A gesture is made toward moral discourse by surrounding the scientistic enterprise with various institutions having the purpose of addressing the ethical questions that attach to scientistic research. The dogmatism of scientism, though, is not moral, but empirical. The huge questions posed by the emerging possibilities of genetic engineering, for example, will be answered we can be sure, not by boards of ethicists, but by the inevitable empirical desirability of a certain form of human body—disease and deformity free, highly intelligent, and so on. The ethicists will only endorse and legitimate this choice. However, this is the ultimate form of objectification, and it reveals that postmodernism is a false promise, a pseudo-development that gets us only back to where we were. There is no one version of God and religious mythology acceptable to all people; there is no one version of the human body that all people will accept as the ideal. Even at the level of the empirical, the question of good and evil cannot be settled. Neither science nor religion is now able to provide direction and context. Where, then, to look for guidance? This is actually no longer a question. Given the default of both science and religion on the big questions of social theory, we have chosen to finesse the problem by disaggregating the issue to the level of individual decision. The

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device for accomplishing this process of decentralization is, of course, the market. Market theory has become the discourse that provides the final answer to the moral issues of our day. Government in a Market World The dominant fact of the world right now, it seems clear, is that free market capitalism has reached a position of hegemony. Many are raising and discussing the question of whether government is needed at all. I feel apprehensive about this situation. The essay (actually it was originally a speech) contained in the appendix to this book presents a fairly complete exposition of why. In essence, it seems to me that people do not understand that market theory is based on an impersonal logic that assumes too much and ignores human beings too far. The market is nothing more than a way of organizing the process of transforming raw materials into products. Its ultimate objective is to make this process as efficient as possible as measured by the lowest price. The theory assumes that people rationally trade what is seen as the pain of work for the pleasure that their wages and salaries can buy. It sounds simple and seems to make sense, but it is profoundly wrong, as even many economists are now acknowledging. The problem is that in attaining ultimate efficiency, the market eventually must bend everything and everyone to its purposes. It must colonize people’s minds and control their bodies to the point that they become nothing more than producers and consumers. Already we are eating to the efficient rhythms set by franchise fast food stands and restaurants, paying for our purchases with efficient credit cards that befuddle us about our debts, performing unpaid labor (the ultimate efficiency technique) as gasoline pumpers and grocery baggers, and using private moments in our cars to transact business on cell phones and faxes. Worst of all, our minds are taken over with mass media advertising appended to numbing, silly narratives, alternately melodramatic, horrifically violent and frightening, or stupidly humorous. All this is required if efficiency is to be achieved. In addition, it

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is necessary to finesse controversy over value positions and cultural differences among people by allowing everything. After all, lifestyles and the tastes that they produce are the source of market demands. Everything that is short of being outright destructive must be allowed so that the services and products that attach to these demands can be produced and sold. This yields an interesting potential paradox: the market requires stability for its operation, but the diversity that it fosters tends to produce social tensions. The meaning of these patterns is becoming clear. Already there is a certain flatness and boredom to life, even as it is becoming more hazardous and stressful. If one considers the personal costs of such developments, their negative impact on the social capacity required for managing an effective collective life cannot be ignored. What about government in all this? From one viewpoint, the only viable role for government is to provide certain services that the market might not be disposed or able to provide. Traditionally these were thought to be facilities such as prisons and services such as refuse collection. Both of these areas are now subject to government contracting-out processes. The actual realm of services that the market is unwilling or unable to provide has dramatically shrunk, despite the fact that we are no longer really sure if it is the same thing when purchased from a private supplier. The famous “Yellow Pages” test touted by a well-known city manager—if the service can be found in the Yellow Pages, then government should not be providing it—has gained in prominence as a guide for decision making on this score. A few areas have remained the apparent purview of the public sector, most notably public security—police, fire, and the military. Even here, though, major shifts are under way that promise to enhance the role of the private sector. The emphasis in the future will, no doubt, be on attaining security and control through technical devices—especially prevention through surveillance and design of secured environments. Already the private sector is far and away the leader in developing these technologies. Government agencies that used to be leaders in technological development no longer have capacity for technological absorption, much less innovation.

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Within existing government organizations, the trend toward marketization has proceeded apace. It began with the reinvention movement of the Clinton-Gore administration, a movement that could be said to be the culmination of a process of attack on the national bureaucracy mounted by the Carter administration and that has continued with every administration since. Bureaucrats are definitely out. The services that government does deliver must be efficient. Its executives are being paid bonuses for gains in productivity made by their agencies. Bureaucrats are being urged to think like private sector executives and managers. Curiously, this is occurring at a time when broader social conditions are arising that seem to demand a stable collective venue. Diversity problems seem as acute as ever at the level of actual day-to-day process. Deregulation seems to be upping the stress and anxiety of life, not only in things like the poor performance of airlines, but in the proliferation of choices (even over what natural gas or electricity provider to choose) as well. The implications of profound technical innovations like the Internet and genetic engineering of organisms and food have barely been examined, even at the surface. Just as government wanes, the need for it waxes. At the same time, paradoxically, political pressures and attempts to impose control are increasing. The double-bind demand for efficiency and political responsiveness has always been the central issue for government agencies, and now it has worsened. One reason that the demand for public agencies to be more like private sector companies is not only impossible to achieve but also undesirable is that, as people in the field of public administration know, the very people who make this demand (politicians) block it from happening. What public agencies do bears directly on the stakes and careers of people in the political sector of government, so it would be irrational for them to make agencies independent of political controls. The result is that the business processes of public agencies are constrained by a mountain of institutional regulations aimed not only at preventing waste, fraud, and abuse, but also at ensuring that political actors have the right to examine and have a say in all aspects of agency business. The reason that

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congresspersons spend as much time and effort as they do in carrying out casework (inquiring into and attempting to influence agency business on behalf of constituents) is that such work is critical to their career success. Ironically, when a privatization effort is mounted and agencies are made freer, it makes the political sector nervous. Political actors then attempt to control agency actions even more directly than before. A second reason that agencies cannot be more like corporations is because they do not have access to the kind of capital that corporations have. All of the agencies I know anything about are, in private sector terms, undercapitalized. The cumbersome, abstract public budgeting process will never be able to match the flexibility and sensitivity of the market process in channeling capital to those places where it will result in the greatest increment in satisfaction. This point, though, is just a corollary to the first one, since budget controls are devices of political control. If the general public realized how lavishly corporations spend money—on executive salaries, consulting help, employee perquisites, facilities, and so forth, and how much waste, fraud, and abuse is committed in such corporations, they would hardly be considered paragons of efficiency. All of this is hidden under what the public sees as the iron law of profit, though. The public fails to realize how indefinite and mutable the concept of profit is, and how approximate the competitive process is in motivating firms to maximize profits. Then there is the fact that the mission of firms is to produce concrete satisfactions by providing goods and services that either generate pleasures or relieve pains. Given the power of advertising and product identification, firms are able to get by with supplying only the illusion of effectiveness, an imaginary pleasure or a placebo pain relief. Public agencies, on the other hand, are given impossible, abstract missions defined by what can only be called simplistic policies. The policies agencies must implement are naïve because the framework by which they are developed is rationalistic. It, by necessity, defines policy issues as discrete, unconnected problems, and assumes people to be either (1) rational in the economic sense, (2) malsocialized, or (3) mentally ill. This ontology

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makes three lines of action possible: (1) providing new and different incentives; (2) providing normative re-education; or (3) providing various therapies. Add to this the fact that action choices are further constrained by public attitudes, and one can begin to see how difficult it is to make programs work. Social problems like substance abuse and teen pregnancy are defined as discrete issues, and actions like providing clean needles, free condoms, and education in how to use them are refused in favor of “just say no” and abstinence programs. This is not simply because citizens are ignorant or unconcerned. Most social issues whose resolution falls to public agencies or publicly funded programs are, in fact, so complex and interrelated in their causes and effects that citizens feel helpless in approaching them. Homelessness is an excellent example. Most citizens feel terrible about the plight of the homeless in their community, but they still do not know how to respond effectively to the homeless person living on the heating grate near their offices. So it is left to the public sector, for example through police services, public housing initiatives, publicly funded aid programs such as shelters or soup kitchens and so on, to address the incredibly complex set of problems that produce the homeless person right outside the door. There are certainly problems within agencies, lots of them, but they begin with agency leadership, which is normally political rather than administrative. The consequence of this is that leaders perform their roles with an eye turned to their own career stakes and personal ambitions. This gives them a strong incentive to make special requests for staff work that helps them pursue their career objectives. In this same vein, they may feel the need to regularly shift the emphasis in agency mission priorities so as to better conform to current events and vogues. The result is that the normal routines of agency business, the processes by which the work gets done, are disrupted, sometimes seriously. The same pattern holds true, perhaps to a lesser degree, even for professional agency leaders, such as those in the politicized upper ranks of the civil service, like the Senior Executive Service in the federal government.

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Beyond direct political controls and politically inspired institutional regulations, naïve policy, undercapitalization, and the work disruptions instigated by agency leadership, there is little room left for efficiency. The strange thing is, everyone knows this. Nothing I have said here is not widely known both inside and outside the government. Furthermore, it is generally considered that this is right and proper. We think that, at some level, a legitimate aspect of our governmental formula is that public agencies should operate with their hands tied and that people should have the right to complain about the result. Beginning with the Reagan presidential administration, government started being out, and it has been pushed further and further out ever since. Now, with the advent of the new electronic and global economy, the idea that the market represents the best logic for organizing and operating the world has become hegemonic. As a result, public administration is beginning to appear as completely irrelevant to the emerging future. The current mantra seems to be, “Even if you want to go to work for the government— and why would you—wouldn’t you be better off getting an M.B.A. or a law degree?” After all, the whole game now is effective management, and this is the forte of the private sector. Why would anyone want, these days, to identify themselves with the public sector and public service? I have found myself pondering this question more and more lately. In answer to his query about what I was working on these days, I recently told a long-time professional friend from another university that I was writing a book with the title Invitation to Public Administration. I then asked him, on an intuition that he had a reaction, whether he thought it was moral to invite people into public administration at this point, given how things are going. He replied, with a quiet emphasis, “No.” I was surprised, given that he had spent most of his adult life working in the field, but I had to acknowledge that many would agree with him. There is a strong current of opinion that the field will not survive, just as few universities will continue in their present form after the effects of global commercialization have played out. How can

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one honestly invite people for a ride on a dying horse? I have struggled with this question long and hard. Indeed, this struggle has manifested itself in the writing of this chapter. I have been struck at how different it has been writing about my connection to public administration in the mood of the current times as opposed to how the writing felt when I carried out a similar reflection in Prague all those years ago. I come down, though, in the same place. For one thing, we are not talking about a dying horse. Government is generic, and as long as there is human society it is going to be there. The only question, in the long run, is whether it is going to be government operated by people or by machines. Looking at it from this angle, I must disagree with my friend. What would not be moral is to not challenge young people to engage the question of the role of government and their role in it. It is after all their and their children’s future we are talking about. Also, the issue is not inefficient human government versus efficient inhuman government (ultimately, as I said, by machines). The best way to achieve efficiency, it seems clear to me, is not through management control but through broad human involvement in the task. In the speech contained in the Appendix, I conclude by suggesting that government cannot be efficient in the manner being demanded of it because government contains and must express all the tensions and contradictions that our national personality contains. The traditional demand for efficiency is that it be achieved in a manner that ignores and covers over these tensions and contradictions. The alternative way (in my opinion the only way) to achieve more efficiency is to address and continue to work at resolving these conflicts and contradictions. How to address this job is already fairly well known; the question is whether we can commit ourselves to the task. The issue entailed in making this commitment, in turn, involves whether we can develop a certain sense of life. The demand for attaining efficiency through management reform, at least in a democratic government, must ultimately be grounded in a sense of life that denies its wholeness, complexity, irony, paradox, and contra-

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diction. It seeks efficiency, defined as clear resolutions to specific problems. This is efficiency seen as pleasure gained by trading off a specific, minimal, amount of pain. It is my belief that real life is not like this. The “attain pleasure minimize pain” logic on which the calculus of management efficiency is based does not fit the reality of the human condition as I know it personally. In addition, I have studied a number of clinical psychological theories that, by definition, must aim at some right attitude toward life to which they seek to bring people. I see a pattern underlying all of these approaches to psychological health, and that pattern is not being happy in the conventional, trite sense. The sense of life that I see in all these systems of thought boils down to these maxims: (1) You have to get to the point where you can own your life. This means that, no matter what has been done to you, you have to take responsibility for the consequences of it in you, and if need be, do something about it. Blaming others for the way your life is going, no matter how justified it might seem or in fact be, is not going to get you anywhere. You have to accept the hard maxim, “You get basically what you arrange.” (2) You have to emotionally separate from and be independent of your parents. This mainly means forgiving them, ceasing to live your life to please them while at the same time becoming closer to them. The last aspect is perhaps the most obscure. It means that breaking off from your parents is the wrong thing to do, the opposite of becoming independent. Separating, standing on your own, is best achieved by developing the capacity to be yourself while closely relating to the other. This is most of all true in the case of parents. At the deepest level what this requirement is about is facing and accepting your own mortality. People who have had both their parents die after a long life know how this feels: There is no longer anyone between you and “It.”

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(3) You have to let go of your fantasy desires and find out instead what you really want, the things that will truly develop you, and realize that these are personal, concrete, and close to home. Development tends to operate by a dialectical logic. Fantasy desires are most effective when they are unattainable. As such, they help us to avoid facing the hard tasks of our development. “If only I had . . . , then I could face. . . .” Just as with any dialectical process, they also configure their opposite. We get what we wanted in our fantasy, and then find it did not yield the pure pleasure it promised and its attainment paradoxically left a melancholy emptiness in our lives. What really develops us is not the achievement of a fantasy but, proverbially, learning to love what we already have (and are). The sense of life that emerges when these maxims are operative is not a familiar and easy one. There is a certain hard flatness to it, but at the same time, it is not depressing. Rather, it creates a deep, transcendent sense of satisfaction with living. One of the most striking brief encounters I have had in my life came one day when I ran into a young woman just as she was walking off a tennis court at the faculty tennis club. I knew her only casually as the wife of a university colleague of mine and the mother of two wonderful children. I did not know her well, but on that day, I was most struck by the enormous joy that I saw on her face—it radiated far too intensely to have been the result of a great tennis experience. She paused and we chatted for a moment, during which she told me quite calmly, in response to an inane remark on my part about how happy she looked, that she recently had been diagnosed with a terminal disease. It was okay, though, she said; she had made her peace with it and was making every day count. The quiet, joyful serenity she had on her face as she told me this is indescribable. You had to see it. But it took me over like a huge sea wave. She said “making every day count” in a manner that caused a flash of envy in me. My main ambition was to live in such a way.

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Then I realized that she had bought this centeredness and serenity at the cost of having to face her imminent death. And then I thought, “but we are all dying and we are all going to die.” The profound emotional confusion that resulted from this moment stayed with me for a long, long time. I had had a concrete encounter with the fact that life entails death, and it is death that gives meaning to life. I had only known this profundity as a dry abstraction until that point. I count the progress I have made along the way, however little it might be, toward the sense of life that characterized this young woman as my most cherished accomplishment. That is why, when I ask myself if I would do this all over again if I had the chance, that is, use my life working in the field of the public service, I answer yes. I was once invited to address a group of public servants on the topic of the meaning of public service careers. I had just returned from a second time of studying at the Jung Institute, outside of Zurich, Switzerland. One of the lectures I heard during my weeks there referred to Jung’s teaching that “All neurosis is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.” The lecturer used U.S. culture as a case in point. His conclusion was that the United States was an exemplar of cultural neurosis because our constitutional heritage taught us that people had a right to happiness, and Americans had bought this idea. The result, he said, is that we refuse to accept that suffering is the normal condition of life. What the Jungians mean by suffering is simply living in the circumstances of the young woman I described above, and nonetheless engaging the struggle to develop ourselves as full human beings—to individuate, the Jungians call it. Rather than suffer, the speaker said, Americans engage in avoidance behaviors such as alcoholism, compulsive sexuality, abusing drugs, overworking, and so forth. Accepting suffering as the essence of the human life experience was depicted as the path to Jungian nirvana. After discussing the (always) problematic, and in some cases impossible, conditions faced by public servants in the contemporary setting, I told my audience about the lecture I had heard in Zurich. As I spoke the words, I noticed reactions of disapproval

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occurring in the audience, especially when I described the lecturer’s critique of American culture. I inwardly chastised myself for choosing to make such an obviously foolish speech. “How could I be saying this!” I thought. “I’m an American, I should have known how this kind of talk would go over.” The point that I was leading up to was that public servants should regard the impossible conditions they faced in doing their jobs as an opportunity. It provided the conditions, I said, where they could develop a most highly evolved sense of life and of themselves, where they could make every day count. “No other career that I know of,” I said in conclusion, “provides a better opportunity for suffering on a daily basis.” By the time I reached this point, though, I had intimidated myself, and I consequently gave the talk a weak ending. I considered it a failure, and when questions were called for, there were none. The audience simply stared at me in silence. Even though, at the time, I thought those words foolish, I did mean them, and I feel even more this way now than I did then. Although it may seem that I am advocating public service on the grounds that it is a great way to suffer (!), the actual point I am trying to make is more profound. I believe I followed the happenstantial path that I did into public administration because even as a naïve young person, I had some inchoate sense of how I now understand life. To adolescents of my generation, one was better off dead than living a phony life. It must have been that this was a cultural meme that got into me and stayed. I am certain I have been phony in about as many ways as possible in my life, but I have never lost the desire, at least, to find a meaningful path and stay on it. I am confident that this has been a major part of why I moved into public administration. It is at present a confused or even lost academic field, and as a career choice, it is inescapably identified with the neurotically obsessive approach to life that is meant by “bureaucracy.” I believe that the reason the field is so crazy, though, is that it faces so directly the central contradiction posed to human beings by collective life: the dual, conflicting necessities of control and freedom. The official identity of the field has been cen-

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tered in control, but there has always been a strong counter-theme arising from the intuition that there is a way to reconcile human freedom with the requirements of control. This brings us back to the matter of the sense of life required if we are to avoid the specter of totalitarian, technological control. Finding joy and meaning by studying, teaching about, or making a career working in public bureaucracies poses a contradiction every bit as deep as the contradiction of control and freedom. Indeed, it is precisely like reconciling life and death into a dialectical balance where the meaning of one is given by the other. This is the challenge that public service holds out to those who engage it. Public service presents, every day and in every large and small way, the absurdity of the human condition, and demands at the same time that it be accepted and dealt with— effectively. The payoff for meeting this challenge—this is my testimony— is a meaningful life, a sense that you have learned something, and that you are better off in heart and soul at the end than you were in the beginning. These are the personal benefits, the ones that accrue directly to people who achieve the sense of life I am describing. There is, though, another result from such work, a positive consequence that works at the level of social relations. The more people there are who can achieve the sense of life I am describing, the closer we will come to being able to form a different kind of social bond. Right now the only way we have of thinking about our ties with other people in society is through sectarian connections such as religion and other value ties, or through the symbiotic contracts by which the business of acquiring, spending, and survival are organized. There is, though, another way. I had a dramatically vivid encounter with this other way one time when, again, I had a friend who was in the last stages of a terminal disease. She was the wife of a professor friend of mine, and I had known her a long time. When she relinquished treatment and hope of a cure, she decided that she would spend her last months in contemplation and conversation. She simply stayed home with

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her husband and reflected on her life. She had an intellectual turn of mind, so she also was inspired to call together friends for “salons.” These were conversation groups, though with no given topic, that would meet at her home. They would meet regularly in the evening, and very quickly, a most distinctive thing occurred. Owing no doubt to the fact that she was dying and so had nothing to lose, an ethos of caring openness developed in the group. There, one could say anything in any way, express any thought or feeling as one wished, and have it received no matter how much others might disagree with it. We talked about everything, from the personal to the political, and the talk ranged from the technical to the intellectual, to the silly and uproariously funny, to the intimately personal, and so on. We were held together by a different kind of bond, one grounded, I thought, simply in our humanity, in the fact that we all were going to face eventually what she was facing now. I offer this humble example of the kind of social bond that I believe only people concerned with the public service and the collective weal have the opportunity to begin building. Public service is service, and as such must always be seen in personal terms. I know of a public administration professor who has students work for a while in a soup kitchen for homeless people to give them a sense of this. I believe it is an entirely appropriate lesson plan, one applicable to any level of administrative position, no matter how high. Public servants are in the best position for expressing the sense of life I described above, and it is this sense of life that will demand that a new kind of social bond be found. Only this new bond will enable us to begin choosing how we will live together and, by so doing, avoid locking our lives into a system of technical controls that will, necessarily, consider itself more important than those it controls. This is what public administration means to me, looking back on it from the exit door I am about to pass through. It is a venue, probably unmatched, for carrying out the kind of meaningful suffering that is the only path along which personal human development can proceed. As a corollary, it poses the hope, based on

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the work of those who enter it, that human beings can create a different relation to each other, one that resolves the painful, destructive tensions that now exist between the requirements of society and the need for personal expression. This is the vocation that public service offers, and it is to involvement with this that I invite you.

Only the shallow know themselves. —Oscar Wilde

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Appendix • What Is at Stake?

Introduction Government is never going to go away, but let us suppose that it does. Let us imagine what America will become if the current movement toward the extension of market logic and devices broadens and gains momentum. We would expect in that case that the ethos of the market would become hegemonic and would alter the shape of America as a civilization. What would such an America be like? I want to begin by drawing a picture of this America, one where the ethos of government, the civil ethos, has been supplanted, and citizens have come to see themselves as nothing more than consumers—customers not only of firms but indeed of their own government. In doing this, a great deal of speculation is not required, as this trend has already progressed so far as to suggest rather directly what a future that follows the present path is going to produce. It is necessary before moving directly into this sketching, though, to set a backdrop, make a stipulation, of what my own normative attitudes are toward the market—so that you can see precisely the import of what I am going to say. My general point is: I view the market as a social institution quite favorably. Indeed, I believe it is fair to say that I am even less critical of market theory than numerous of my colleagues in the field of public administration. I do not Lecture originally delivered at Virginia Commonwealth University, February 1999. 101

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see the market as a cold, heartless institutional device that runs off human greed and cares nothing for actual human beings. On the contrary, I see it as possessing quite a specific ethic and a wellworked-out methodology for achieving that ethic. The ethic of the market is a form of utilitarianism—the greatest happiness for the greatest number as measured by the lowest price. Market theory sees human beings as having the best and broadest chance for happiness when each of us has been allocated, by market processes, to a job that maximizes the utilization of our talents, and where we are paid for our work at a level that is consistent with the most efficient production of the goods and services that our work is aimed at creating. (The hit movie You’ve Got Mail carries just this message. The plot revolves around a love relationship between a male corporate executive who is opening a chain bookstore in New York and a female owner of the small children’s bookshop around the corner. The opening of the chain bookstore threatens to drive the independent children’s bookstore out of business. Indeed, the smaller shop is forced to close, but the love affair works out anyway because the chain store can offer a better selection of children’s books, at better prices, and the owner of the local shop, an expert in children’s literature, was underemployed anyway. She moves on to a position as an author at a publishing house. An increase in economic efficiency is achieved, and love wins, too.) In such a case, prices for everything will be as low as possible, meaning that the production and distribution process is absolutely as efficient as it can be made. Market proponents believe that it is in such a situation that we are able to maximize our chance of being happy. This is a laudable, high ideal, is it not? We should remember also that the market is not an institution devoid of any sense of community. It believes in community and valid social relationship. This is covered in the idea of transaction costs, the principle holding that overall market efficiency can only be achieved when the cost of the buyer’s being assured that the price of something is appropriate (as when you want to buy a new car, for example) is as low as possible. The best way to lower transaction costs is to develop trusting relationships among people.

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If I trust my auto dealer (Sure, when there is a rip in the fabric of time!) I will believe him when he tells me that the price he is asking is fair, I won’t have to do a lot of costly shopping around, and the transaction can proceed efficiently. Such trust, when it exists, functions as a kind of capital, social capital. It is essential to well-functioning markets. To the market, a sense of community carries a dollar value. What higher esteem could the market give it? If there is a downside to the idea of the market, it is that, de facto, what it really ends up pursuing, as its true, actual motive or teleology, is the efficient exploitation of all the resources of the Earth. As such, I am afraid that it must function like a parasite who cannot help using its benefactor so severely that it kills it. But this might not happen. Some believe that the market provides the most efficient means for protecting the Earth. Another deficit of market theory is that it depends to a naïve extent on the rationality of individuals. It does not recognize enough that people engage in behaviors, and continue to engage in them, even though they really and truly do not want to—such as smoking, for example. Also, many people participate in the market in ways that they themselves would rather not—some prostitutes, for example—and indeed in ways that they feel should not be allowed. These are controversial flaws, however, and those who theorize the market are working to acknowledge and correct for them. Nothing is perfect, after all. All in all, the market is a powerful and effective institutional device for performing what the theorist Talcott Parsons called the allocation function in society, the transformation of raw materials into values usable to people. My assessment of it, in sum, is rather precisely like the one that Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, the great political and economic theorists, made in their excellent, classic book, Politics, Economics, and Welfare. They assert that the market is best for making certain kinds of decisions that, in fact, no other institutional sector—namely politics and government administration—can make as well. In order to function, though, as Dahl and Lindblom describe, the market must be set within a context of civil society, a contain-

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ing matrix of effectively functioning human relationships that can give it a sense of direction by providing a point of view or a collective identity for the entire social order. This has historically been done in societies by a network of social and familial institutions interrelated at the collective level through the public processes of governance. At present we seem to be so exaggerating the efficacy of the market as a device for social decision and action that it is starting to take the place of all other civil, social relationships. We are beginning to think that it can be applied as a universal and ubiquitous principle by which everything can be organized and done, even government. It is the consequences of this overextension of the market principle that I wish now to describe, a circumstance in which the market replaces government, or reduces its traditional shape and function to such a degree that the market becomes the sole source of our very culture. I want to talk about what the role of government might be under such conditions, what daily life would be like, what social relationships might be, and finally, how the market will constitute human beings—what kind of people it will make us all into. Government in a Market World Government, in a market world, will, of course, be minimized. The market abhors abstraction; it attains the efficiency it seeks by decentralizing, broadly dispersing, and concretizing choice. The very stuff of government is abstraction: making policy at high levels and designing and carrying out complex broad-scale implementation procedures. This is a fundamental incompatibility. So we can expect that the present infatuation with privatization in all its various forms will be carried forward: voucher systems, contract prisons, contract police, even—if we follow the lead of the Commonwealth of Virginia—contract private toll roads. It will be a world of contract everything. Deregulation is the natural companion to this move, and it could well be carried out as far as libertarians want it to. So, for example, medical care could be de-

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regulated, and one would be able to offer and purchase any service or drug one wished. (We could expect that initially, many will incorrectly self-medicate, but then they will all be dead, thus solving that problem and leaving the more prudent, rational ones behind to use their market freedom properly.) Since, as we can already clearly tell, advanced capitalist markets, in producing the maximum amount of social wealth, find it necessary to distribute it differentially, strict social class segregation will develop. Present-day walled and gated communities, with their own utility and security services, are a harbinger of this. We will be living among our socioeconomic equals, and most of us will not be very well off. The Washington Post recently reported that Bill Gates owns as much wealth as 50 percent of the American people put together (could any monarch, emperor, or sultan of yore have been as wealthy, even in relative terms?). That does not leave much for the remainder of us. Already, the richest one-fifth represent 86 percent of all private consumption. Government, though, will not be in the business of ameliorating these differences through the provision of public goods. In the realm of daily life, work, and leisure, we can expect a corollary pattern to develop. Since the métier of the market is efficiency, this will be the reference point for all of life, every day and every minute. (The great market theorist Joseph Schumpeter long ago predicted, accurately, that the birthrate in market societies would decline because people, having learned to use market logic in their private lives, would consider that a large number of children offers diminishing returns on investment.) The pattern of efficient daily life under market hegemony has been well sketched already by George Ritzer in his widely selling book The McDonaldization of America. The idea is to extend the basic principle of fast food to everything. Zoom down the private toll road after work (finessing the toll booth with your Smart Tag transponder), pull into the Exxon station where you quickly pump gas into your vehicle from the self-charge fuel dispensing pump, pop into the McDonald’s to consume (the dining-room environment is semiotically programmed to get you in and out in nineteen

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minutes) a low-priced, satisfying (in the “salt and fat fix” sense) meal, so that you can then move quickly on to the twenty-screen cineplex to watch a powerful action movie with sound and visual effects that knock you back in your seat and leave little spirals in your eyes. Soon, supermarkets are going to make a major leap forward in efficiency, allowing you to check yourself out, charge yourself, and bag your own groceries, all while watching advertising entertainments on a strategically placed television. Recently I was impressed with such an increment in the efficiency of golf courses, where a major problem is getting players quickly through the round. Some courses are now equipped with satellite-linked golf carts that tell the player precisely where she or he is on the fairway, and how far away the pin is on the green—no more having to bother discussing such matters with one’s fellow players. In order to fit into this world, your life is going to have to be really well organized. Commodities that aid in personal organization are already a substantial industry, and this industry is growing rapidly on the service side. There is already a National Organization of Professional Organizers (it was founded in 1985), with over 800 member firms. U.S. News and World Report has declared personal organizing to be one of the twenty hottest job tracks for the next two decades. Moving on to the level of interpersonal relationships, we find a rather clear pattern, one for which the culture has already produced a vivid icon in the form of the TV show Seinfeld. A huge popular success, the show presents a message about where America is as a society with respect to relationships. Entertainment Weekly called it “the defining sitcom of our age.” What is its message? Those producing the show were clear about this: They called it “the show about nothing,” because it had no real narrative content and certainly no message. As one critic put it, “Seinfeld has perfected a form in which anything can be invoked—masturbation, death, faked orgasms, Salman Rushdie—without assuming the burden of saying anything about it.” As for the kind of interpersonal relationships it models for us, we can turn back to the point about the market theory of transaction costs. We develop valid

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relationship to the point that it helps us pursue our own goals efficiently. Relationships are matters of convenience. Again, listen to a commentator about the show: “There is a tacit contract that at no point will Seinfeld and friends break down and testify to how much they like one another. It’s clear that each thinks he really could have done better in the way of friends, but happens to be stuck with these ones [for now].” This theme is carried to the next level in the movie, The Truman Show, about a man whose life, unbeknownst to him, is a television show. All the people he knows, including his wife, relate to him on the basis of a contract (made behind the scenes, of course) and come and go from his life as their contract negotiations dictate. The audience, for its part, simply consumes his life as an entertainment. It is the ultimate commodification of human relationships. The irony of the narrative is that when the protagonist finally realizes what is going on and leaves, he escapes into a world precisely like the one he is fleeing. In a similar vein, welfare workers already report that it is a regularly occurring event that parents adopting children seek to return the children or exchange them for children they like better. This kind of calculation of and seeking to maximize the payoffs of one’s personal and work relationships has, as you well know, spawned a huge industry of publication and training aimed at making one more effective in getting what one wants from other people. This is being carried to a new extreme in the area of cosmetic surgery, which is a long-standing means of increasing one’s negotiating power at the personal level. Male lawyers and CEO types are having botulism toxins injected into their faces so as to paralyze some facial muscles, creating a poker-face effect that they consider to be an advantage in business dealings because people cannot read what they are thinking. They also feel the poker face appears more positive and self-assured. What might we say is the new market culture doing to people as individuals—to the level of personality and character? We have all been made familiar with the transience of the modern-day workplace and career by Gary Trudeau’s critically humorous depic-

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tions of it in his Doonesbury comic strip. The social theorist Richard Sennett argues in his recent book, The Corrosion of Character, that this fluid type of career has the effect of undercutting the traits of loyalty, commitment, and long-term thinking on which our past sense of career was founded. People nowadays have little or no idea where they will be or what they will be doing in ten years, and in such a context, an interest in and sense of commitment to civic affairs seems silly and pointless. Ours truly has become a “look out for Number One” world. Mobility of the work force, though, is essential if we are to achieve efficient allocation of human resources to the production process. If we believe recent research, people are being made isolated and lonely by the time they spend on the Internet (and this is only going to increase), and the increasing sharpness of invidious income and status distinctions are further damaging to our health. A remarkable study in Britain by Richard Wilkinson suggests that each pay and promotion increase an employee achieves adds time to his or her life. Interestingly, it is not absolute status that counts, it is status differential. Even the rich suffer from this effect if they live in the midst of those who are richer. At the same time that more and more service workers are being required to behave in a friendly manner toward increasingly surly customers, the phenomenon of road rage is growing at the remarkable rate of 7 percent a year—to the point where there is now an International Association of Road Rage Experts. Could there be a correlation here? And could the trend toward extreme entertainments such as no-rules fighting among human beings in cages, and videos and documentaries depicting actual horrendous injury and death, reflect the development of a new collective personality? It would seem that as we lose the traditional sense of social meaning and people’s sense of their lives moves more and more toward getting and spending, we are being evacuated as human beings. A recent article in the Washington Post is evocative on this point. It featured a twenty-six-year-old man, a multimillionaire made rich by an Internet pornography business and the sale of videos showing celebrities having sex. He remarked in the inter-

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view that he had little interest in pornography himself. What motivated him was “watching money come in.” His picture showed him as blank, expressionless, bored—a persona that struck me as quite consistent with his statement. All in all, the picture is not a happy one, at least as compared to a traditional framework. The market is giving us economic efficiency and all the benefits that go with it, but we may be in the unhappy position warned against by the old adage: Be careful what you wish for, as you just might get it. The Potential for Public Administration What are we to say about public administration in light of the social context just described? I want to set out the thesis that government agencies—that is, the people who work for government agencies—are our best hope for slowing, denying, and reversing the cultural trends and patterns I have just been describing. I would expect that your first response to this assertion is “Ridiculous! How could you even say that?” Government workers, after all, have come to be seen as virtually synonymous with the faceless bureaucrats that Max Weber described so poignantly. It is they who have paved the pathway for the market’s triumphal march by fostering inhumane, insensitive governmental processes and thus an evacuated public life. In response, first let me say that I am suggesting only that government administration is our best hope. It may not be a great hope, for there may actually be little chance that the hegemony of the market ethos will be stopped from going its full course. My argument begins with the following seeming paradox. The cultural pattern we have been discussing is consistent with bureaucracy. After all, its foundation rests on regarding efficiency as the preeminent social value. The paradox is that it is actually firms, not government administrations, that are truly efficient and bureaucratic. It is additionally ironic that governmental agencies have been criticized vigorously on just this point: their lack of bureaucratic efficiency. My friend, the great sociologist Gideon Sjoberg,

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is writing the last book of his career about this. He wants to demonstrate that the world we are living in is a world of late capitalist corporate bureaucracy rather than one of government bureaucracy and politics. What do people say who work in the private sector? “You go to work; you do your job; if you don’t, you get fired.” They are self-described cogs in a machine. They do not realize this, because they are relatively well-oiled cogs, and the machine is efficient. Firms are technical entities, bureaucratic systems par excellence. It is the new corporate state, a society dominated by firms, that is going to turn us into the pod people depicted menacingly in science fiction thrillers like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Remember how you could tell the aliens by the dead way they looked and talked (they eventually fixed the crooked little finger)? Listen to how people talk who work in McDonald’s or at Jiffy Lube, which is to say, in words and phrases specifically prescribed by the company, just like the pod people. And remember, the invasion of the body snatchers is not about a takeover of government; it is about a takeover of culture. What about government agencies? What do people who work in them say about it? “You go to work; you can’t do your job; nobody ever gets fired.” On the whole, they do do a good job, as Charles Goodsell has documented in his fine book, The Case for Bureaucracy; but relatively speaking they are not so efficient. And why so? The answer is because, as public agencies, organizations that we all own, they reflect all of us, and all of the conflicts and contradictions that we as a people contain. We as a social system do not deal with our differences well, and the result is that they are expressed in irrationalities such as the proliferation of politically inspired controls that seriously impair effective operations in public agencies. It seems clear that, to the extent that public agencies operate inefficiently, the primary reason for this is political penetration. Political entities want to and do control administrative agencies far past a degree consistent with effective administration. The truth of this is given testimony in the January–February 1999 issue of the Public Administration Review.

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The lead article by Moshe Maor reports research showing that, even in cases where governments seek to “reinvent” agencies to make them conform to the private sector model, political control entities refuse agency administrators the operating leeway necessary for effective reform. The result is an increase in political interference and a consequent further disinvestment in the institutional capital represented in effective public agencies. Government agencies reflect life, and life is not efficient in an economic sense. Life gains its dynamism from opposition. Biologists have traditionally puzzled about why sexual differentiation exists in nature, since other methods for reproduction, like parthenogenesis, are much more efficient. The current understanding is that it is through the opposition of sexual differentiation in reproduction that lethal mutations are minimized. Biologists are tending more and more to the idea that nature is not organized around the principle of competition but instead operates on the basis of a kind of cooperation that is achieved through opposition. This is quite consistent with Mary Parker Follett’s idea that cooperation, finding the law of the situation, always entails struggle across differences. Life itself is like this; it entails differentiation and conflict and resolution of differences. And these are the everyday stuff of public business. These are the things that we in public administration study that people in business programs do not. This is how life creates dynamism, through the back and forth that the essential alterities of nature create. This is what makes public administration dynamic. This is also why the current movement to bring business values into government, often referred to as the new public management, is so wrongheaded. Despite its adherents’ claims that effectiveness, not simple efficiency, is the criterion, the logic of economics is the core logic that underpins it. And government is not amenable to this logic. Government is fundamentally not like business in just the ways I have been describing. Government is about far more than the provision of goods and services. This is why it can only be judged against a criterion of efficiency that transcends the economic definition of it.

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So what am I getting at here? What I am saying is that if we are to avoid letting an infatuation with market theory commit us to a devastatingly antihuman culture, it is going to be because we continue to express and engage each other through our differences. And the best chance we have for doing this is for public administrators to come to see their role not as efficient service providers (the market can do that better) but as providing the venue for our working out among ourselves how we want to live together. The key to making this change, in turn, is changing how we understand society. Traditionally, social theorists have provided two large theoretical perspectives for understanding how society is held together. One, put forth by people like Emile Durkheim, argues that the glue of society is norms, which is to say, values. This view holds that societies are collections of people who hold the same normative commitments. The other theory, set out by people like Schumpeter, sees society as held together through economic symbiosis. Society persists because people, being rational, see that they need what they can each provide in order to survive. Social process is economic process, a means for the orderly trading back and forth of the essentials of life. My view is that while each of these theories is true in certain contexts, neither fits the reality we are currently facing. The idea of society as normative order fits traditional society, and the idea of society as economic order fits modern society, but we are currently a postmodern society. The possibility for coherent, pansocial, normative belief is over; diversity and contingency of meaning of every sort is the norm. Also, technology has moved us beyond the condition of immediate need that makes economic symbiosis seem a sensible basis for social order. Society, if it is to be held together in the human form we have known, will be achieved by our finding ways that people can come to understand and appreciate personal and moral worlds different from their own, both at the level of individuals and groups. As Michael Ignatieff said of the work of Isaiah Berlin, “People are not held together by any kind of moral consensus. They are held together because of their capacity to

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understand moral worlds different from their own.” This, by the way, is the genius of David Farmer’s treatment of alterity in his ground-breaking book, The Language of Public Administration. Postmodern society is mediational society, held together by mediators. Who can serve best in this role? Third sector organizations have always served somewhat in this capacity. In this sense, they provide a baseline foundation. But they are not in a properly in-between, mediational position to do the whole job. Indeed, in many cases they are the locus of the positions that require mediation. What about firms? The answer is simple: this is not their business because their business is business. What about political processes? In principle, mediation is the stuff of politics, but the form our political process has taken has brought it into the role of being an adjunct to the market process. Politics is run by money, as an entertainment and a device for working out market issues. This leaves public agencies at all levels of government, and in all venues of program, to do the job. They are in precisely the position best suited for providing the space and the process for working out understanding across lines of difference. This is how we would hope we can and will reformulate the role of the public administrator once we understand what truly is at stake in the present historical moment. When we do realize what is at stake, and how the jeopardy we are in is being brought about, we will perhaps see that our present efforts to bring the logic of the market to government administration are profoundly wrongheaded. Public administration, properly construed, is not about efficient service as much as it is about building and maintaining an inclusive sense of social relationship—relationship between people, between people and institutions, between groups, and between groups and institutions. Where such relationship is achieved, concerns with efficiency recede into the background, where they take care of themselves.

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Bibliography

The books and articles to which I refer in the text are listed below by chapter. In addition, I have occasionally mentioned other related works that readers might find interesting and of use. Preface On Transactional Analysis Berne, Eric.1961. Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1964. Games People Play. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1972. What Do You Say After You Say Hello? New York: Grove Press. ———. 1976. Beyond Games and Scripts. New York: Grove Press.

Chapter One Illich, Ivan. 1974. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper Collins. Updike, John. 1972. “The Slump.” In Museums and Women. New York: Knopf. Weick, Karl. 1976. “Careers as Idiosyncratic Predicates.” Executive 2, no. 2: 6–10 Wilson, Sloan. 1956. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. London: Cassell.

Chapter Two Kafka, Franz. 1995. The Complete Stories. Edited by N.N. Glatzer and Arthur Samuelson. New York: Schocken Books. On Jungian Psychology Edinger, Edward F. 1972. Ego and Archetype. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Jung, C.G. 1966. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, in Collected Works, vol. 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 115

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———. 1968. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, in Collected Works, vol. 9. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moore, Thomas. 1990. Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism. Dallas, TX: Spring. Progoff, Ira. 1973. Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny. New York: Dell. Whitmont, Edward C. The Symbolic Quest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

On Lacanian Psychoanalysis Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1981. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W.W. Norton. ———.1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1993. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W.W. Norton.

Chapter Three Arendt, Hannah. 1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking. Fields, Rick, Rich Ingrasci, Rex Wyler, Peggy Taylor. 1985. Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life. New York: Putnam. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Hilberg, Raul. 1961. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle. Pirsig, Robert. 1974. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: William Morrow.

Chapter Four Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1957. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Signet. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maor, Moshe. 1999. “The Paradox of Managerialism.” Public Administration Review 59, no. 1: 5–18.

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McSwite, O.C. 1997. Legitimacy in Public Administration: A Discourse Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, Frank E. 2001. “Reconsidering a Therapeutic Role for the State: AntiModernist Governance and the Reunification of the Self.” Administrative Theory and Praxis 23, no. 2: 230–242.

On Peirce and Pragmatism Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1991. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Edited by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon. Menand, Louis. 2001.The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931. Collected Papers: Vols. I-VIII. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Scheffler, Israel. 1986. Four Pragmatists: A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

On the Lacanian Theory of the Discourses Bracher, Mark. 1993. Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bracher, Mark, Marshall Alcorn, Ronald Corthell, and Francoise MassardierKenney, eds. 1994. Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society. New York: New York University Press.

Appendix Dahl, Robert A., and Charles E. Lindblom. 1953. Politics, Economics and Welfare. New York: Harper Brothers. Farmer, David. 1995. The Language of Public Administration. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Follett, Mary Parker. 1918. The New State: Group Organization and the Solution of Popular Government. New York: Longmans, Green. ———. 1940. Dynamic Administration. Edited by Henry C. Metcalf and Lyndall F. Urwick. New York: Harper and Bros. Goodsell, Charles. 1994. The Case for Bureaucracy. 3d ed. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.

118 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Noonan, David. 1998. “The Power of Self-Loathing.” The New York Times Magazine, April 12, 26–29. Ritzer, George. 1995. The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1950. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 3d edition. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton. Shales, Tom. 1998. “So Long, ‘Seinfeld.’ Let Me Show You to the Door.” The Washington Post, April 6, Style Section, B1/B7. Wilkinson, Richard G. 1996. Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality. London: Routledge.

About the Authors

O.C. McSwite is the pseudonym for Orion F. White Jr. and Cynthia J. McSwain. They have been writing and consulting under this name for ten years. Their most recent book is entitled Legitimacy in Public Administration: A Discourse Analysis. Orion F. White Jr. is currently professor of public administration and policy at Virginia Tech University. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Texas, the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of research include social and psychoanalytic theory, management, and organizational change. He is the author of numerous articles and books and has worked extensively as an organizational consultant. Cynthia J. McSwain is currently professor of public administration at The George Washington University. Prior to joining GWU, she was on the faculty of the University of Southern California. Her research interests include social and psychoanalytic theory and organization development. She has published widely in these areas as well as working extensively as an organizational consultant nationally and internationally. McSwain was the recipient of the prestigious NASPAA Elmer B. Staats Public Service Career Award in 2001.