Fabricating the People: Politics and Administration in the Biopolitical State

1. Public Administration and Political Ontology: Crisis and Political Ontology

1 Public Administration and Political Ontology Crisis and Political Ontology Over the last thirty years, there has been a rising tide of hostility toward government. During the same period, the field of public administration in the United States has been concerned with its own, perhaps more narrow, crisis of legitimacy. But why? Just as skepticism about and mistrust of government is not a recent phenomenon in American political culture, neither is the question of legitimacy new for the field of public administration . Indeed, the very concept of public administration arguably is defined by its ongoing search for an identity and disciplinary coherence; and skepticism toward government is central to the liberal political tradition. Yet since the late 1960s, the question of legitimacy in both domains has been taken up with an impressive urgency. What is at the root of contemporary antigovernmentalism? Broadly speaking, the field of public administration has offered two explanations for this legitimacy crisis, one normative, the other “performative .”1 The first explanation locates the crisis of government in the absence of the correct value set, be it defined in terms of constitutionally or democratically based values. From this diagnosis, it seeks to alter the consciously held values of the individual public administrator and the field generally from neutrality to an explicit normative position. The latter position conceives of the crisis primarily in terms of government’s failure to perform and deliver effective services to the public and so grounds its remedy in the advancement of professional and/or technical knowledge. Though this is a stylized presentation of these positions, naming differences in emphasis more than in kind, the twin deficits of normativism and performance nevertheless mark the dominant theoretical positions in public administration and orient contemporary efforts to enhance both the efficacy and legitimacy of government. Departing from these poles—indeed, argu- 2 / Chapter 1 ing that these apparent adversaries share everything of any importance— this text makes a rather different kind of argument. It contends that the current crisis of government has its roots in the breakdown of the theoretical plausibility and practical efficacy of a set of foundational assumptions about reality itself. This crisis is caused by the collapse of a distinct ontological conception of human life. The very fabric of the world is coming undone. It may sound strange to talk about a breakdown or failure of an ontology since, in philosophical terms, ontology is the inquiry into, fundamentally, what is—what it means to be, what objects can be said to exist, and what assumptions we make about them and their relations to other entities. Can what is really fail or break down? Can the meaning of being change? Philosophical and theoretical developments, ones that have unfolded and gained prominence during the same period as our legitimacy crises, have challenged radically the simple givenness of objects and our ontological commitments to them.That is, assessing what is can no longer be viewed simply as a matter of common sense, given experience of the world.2 Rather, the basic assumptions we make about the nature of our reality substantively create that reality as well as our subjective and collective experience of it.3 Ontological commitments are the basic ideas or principles by which we make up our worlds. As I will elaborate over the course of this text, the ontological crisis of the current period refers to the breakdown in the plausibility of the supposition that there is an ultimate, given unity behind appearance to which all differences in the final instance reduce. I name this ontology representation. We have come to understand, further, that ontologies are political. Our basic set of commitments and assumptions about the world implies specific ways of organizing politics and specific political forms. According to Adrianna Cavarero (2002), “each political form implies a political approach to the question of ontology. In other words, since politics, however one understands it, concerns itself with human beings, each conception of politics raises the ontological question, or rather, it presupposes a political ontology ” (p. 513).4 Political forms, in other words, imply distinct ontological commitments, and an approach to ontology implies an account of politics, political form, collective life, and what it means to be. Applying this to our own political context, the institutions of representative government and the modern presuppositions of democracy—namely, the idea of a popu- Political Ontology / 3 lar sovereign...