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5 Administration I turn now to examine the administrative mode of the biopolitical production of the People. Administration as a self-conscious enterprise emerges amid the breakdown in the regulatory efficacy of law and institutes a novel strategy in the movement of representation that I will call the internalization of the exclusion. Here, we will need to differentiate between the internalization of the exclusion and conventional techniques of inclusion because, certainly, brutal exclusionary social practices persist in the administrative world. The internalization of the exclusion, then, does not name a particular political effort but an orientation toward the constitutive exclusion at the level of the abstract model-copy relationship that aims to maintain and reproduce the ontology of representation. Consistent with the sedimentary, discontinuous-continuous logic we saw in law and representation more broadly, administration will be seen not to displace the technology of law but to supplement it in a specific fashion to the end of fabricating the People. Administrative practices begin in the traditional terrain of the local yet use these local reforms to suggest a means for national integration or fabrication. Further, public administration makes use of two seemingly contradictory integrative modes of fabrication which, following Camilla Stivers (2000), I will call bureaus and settlements. Stivers argues that the Progressive reform movement out of which a self-conscious public administration emerged was divided substantively between the work of the men of the municipal bureaus and the women of the settlement houses. These two sides of the movement represented rather different approaches to confronting the shame of the cities (p. 16). The bureau men saw the city as a business and emphasized a scienti fic approach to reform with a focus on efficiency, professional expertise, and structural change. Government was a corporation; citizens were stockholders who could call government to account for its actions but did not participate directly in governing (p. 69). In turn, they proposed reforms 120 / Chapter 5 that focused on centralizing executive control, neutralizing the administrative apparatus in the face of the corrupt boss system, and systemizing the budget function. Settlements, by contrast, saw the city as a home and the citizen as neighbor. This sharp difference of metaphor led to reform initiatives that focused more on “improving living conditions” (p. 16) and enriching the relationships among science, politics, administration, and the citizenry. Rather than seeing administrative inefficiency as the source of urban disorder, settlements saw “city government in a new way, as a vehicle for ministering to its population’s basic needs and for enabling people to take part in the process of deciding what to do” (p. 98) in order that larger public purposes could be advanced. In opposing itself to the rough-and-tumble world of politics by attempting to clean up politics morally and otherwise, the reform movement as a whole became “tainted” with femininity. Stivers (2000) writes, “nineteenthcentury electoral politics was a masculine realm. The paradigmatic citizen was the free, white, self-supporting man who joined with his fellows in open-air rallies and saloon gatherings (p. 8). Reform was coded as “women ’s work.” But by summoning the rhetoric of science and its deeply rooted associations with masculinity in Western thought, bureau men “were able to counter and deflect the castigations of machine politics about their de- ficient masculinity” (p. 125). As McSwite (1997b) also suggest, the bureau men won out because of a particular “fit” between the sociohistorical context and the ideology of managerial science. Despite these profound differences, I want to argue here that these two faces of reform, in fact, are not per se contradictory if understood within the biopolitical project of the People and the political ontology of representation . Rather than standing in tension with one another, they tend to resonate with one another, amplifying rather than contesting one another, as they emerge against the shared backdrop of the People and its presumption of harmony and Oneness.To advance this point, I will locate public administration amid a series of other administrative or disciplinary discourses and practices to reframe the conventional understanding of the unique functionality of the administrative state and the object of administrative action. Aside from declarations of public service and the public good, what ends does public administration serve? What is the proper object of the administrative state? How does its logic of internalization interface with other disciplinary , administrative sites and practices? We want to consider, in other [3.17.150.89] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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