Read an Excerpt
STATE WORK
Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality
By Stefano Harney Duke University Press
Copyright © 2002 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-2880-3
Chapter One
YES, MINISTER: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ONTARIO ANTIRACISM SECRETARIAT
It may well be that a thorough analysis of the state would demonstrate its difference from government and define it in relation to the agencies of capital.-Michael E. Brown, The Production of Society
If the popular images of conspiracy suggest there is more to government work than meets the eye, and if the muteness of those same images direct the investigator to disciplines that might say more, those disciplines do their part to fan the embers of suspicion. Whatever is lurking in daily government work seems to invite investigation, but such investigation soon takes on the atmosphere of the conspiracy images that prompted it. If there is a socialism hidden in government quotidian, no one, it soon turns out, is going to make it easy to unveil. This is nowhere more evident than in the discipline supposed to be about daily labor in the government.
The discipline of public administration has spent a century distinguishing itself from other bodies of knowledge and practices. Many scholars have worked hard in recent years to justify this separation by building the discipline's theoretical integrity. Yet for all this, public administration is neither about government, a topic left to political science with dire consequences, or labor, a topic once relegated to industrial sociology and then more recently to labor process theory. Asking public administration to explain what in government work generates such popular dreaming therefore yields no answer. But the investigator is left with a good lead: Why is public administration not what it appears to be? Why does it claim to be about government labor when as this book will show, its presence ensures that government and labor will be treated not just elsewhere but separately? Hunches swirl around this lead. Could there be something to hide in the combination of government and labor? Could there be some connection between this separation and several other notorious separations in scholarship? At the same time, such an investigation cannot help but begin quixotically. After all, are not government and labor old windmills on the landscape of globalization? Do not both finance capital and new social movements hurl past these history-bound edifices in a blur? If so, it would be hard to find a more quixotic place to start than the socialist government of Ontario, Canada in the 1990s-and a more quixotic figure than me.
WORKING IN THE GOVERNMENT
In 1992, I had completed my doctoral dissertation on Caribbean nationalism and converted it into a book manuscript as evidence of my labor power. I was living at home in Toronto again after a peripatetic path of graduate training, preparing to compete with a reserve army of academic wageworkers in selling this labor power, when I received an offer of work in the Ontario Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs. In 1990, the New Democratic Party (NDP) of Ontario had won an unexpected majority in the province's parliament-a province that is the most populous and prosperous in Canada. Most of Canada's welfare state is administered at the provincial level, by a system of civil service based like most in the empire on the Whitehall model. Now this province and its welfare state were in the hands of a party that called itself democratic socialist, even if once in office it would refer to itself as social democratic. The change in signifier was not unimportant but either way it could be argued that it was the most genuinely Left-oriented government to hold an industrial and financial center in North America any time in the last fifty years. The year 1990 was another cold one for parliamentary social democracy around the world and an especially harsh one for the Left in general, with the "collapse of the Soviet Union" already commonly narrated as a "foundational image" in a story about somebody else. In this context, the NDP victory carried a kind of popular front appeal, not least because the party itself offered such repetitions of difference in its daily life. It was good news, and like most good news, it was the goodness and not the news that got most of the attention. If it was not much remarked in the United States, Canada's Left was quick to recognize its own exceptionalism in this moment.
PLEASURES OF THE MONDAY MORNING MEETING
I spent over three years working for the NDP government. I began as a policy analyst on constitutional issues and finished as a campaign manager for one of the parliamentary candidates in the government's bid for reelection, moving from the civil service to the party proper in this last position. In the middle, I rose as far as manager in the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, within the Ontario Antiracism Secretariat, and most of my experience during these three years was as a bureaucrat officially without party affiliation. I had a lot of ambivalence about working for a social democratic government, about working as a manager in a government bureaucracy, and about working generally. It was not so much the limits of social democracy or problems of state power that preoccupied me, however, but the more immediate and everyday experience of my work. I wanted to understand it better, especially its mysterious pleasure.
An account of my experience begins in the countless professional development seminars, retreats, and workshops where I sat thinking about why I was working in government, my preempted career as an academic, and the growing difficulties my friends in the NDP seemed to be having. And I thought about why I was sitting through all those sessions listening and talking about what we were supposed to be doing and how we should arrange ourselves to do it. At the same time, I enjoyed the sessions, even looked forward to them. This entire book comes out of this moment, in a way, sitting enjoying something I felt was completely unsatisfactory. At the superficial level, the sessions were enjoyable because they broke the routine, and unsatisfactory because they used private sector language and models to talk about my work. But if I had stopped the analysis there I would probably have been moved to write a book about labor relations in the state or privatization. This book is not interested in either of those terms as they have been handed down.
Rather, I suspected that my conflicting feelings hinted at a deeper question of what it meant to work for the government and perhaps even what it meant to labor with others in general. I do not mean by this suspicion that I take labor to be a kind of common denominator through which a universal language is possible for an ideal-type organization to emerge. I am speaking instead of a socialized labor that "brings people together without dictating what they do with their togetherness," as Randy Martin puts it. And since labor is not an identity category but "an activity that confronts its own conditions of production," it must confront them within the categories of difference that constitute social life. That I was able to turn this suspicion to productive use by writing this study I owe completely to my coworkers and not because this is the gracious beginning of a book but because they recognized the specificity of struggle in difference that socialized labor made possible. Although there are many kinds of antiracism, many of my coworkers seemed to be under the impression that this social democratic government was actually interested in the anticapitalist kind. It was lucky for me that they had this impression, even as it may have kept the minister up nights. Something was generated by these workers as they tried to realize antiracism work in the government. That something, I only later suspected, was the state itself. It changed the way I understood our labor as well as the state I experienced through government.
MANAGERS LIKE ME
It also changed what I was looking for when I went in search of books and articles written about working in government to help me understand my condition. As I read public administration, public management, public policy, organizational theory, and related political science literature, my first impressions were that they were oddly uninterested in what it meant to work in government. This is not to say that I was not hailed by this literature. In fact, today especially there is a growing body of work dedicated specifically to my managerial importance, from the reinventing government project to the public management discourse. Mark H. Moore, the leading authority on public management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, claims that managers like me should be "seen as explorers who, with others, seek to discover, define, and produce public value." In this view, I was supposed to "look out to the value" of what I was producing "as well as down to the efficacy and propriety" of the means of production. I would "engage the politics surrounding [my] organization to help define public value as well as engineer how [my] organization operates." I would be at my best, suggests Ralph P. Hummel, another authority on public bureaucracy, when I "convoke the political community to formulate public values that do not yet exist." To do this, I would have to mix a historical knowledge of the bureaucratic paradigm with postbureaucratic ideas as tools to "deliberate about the relationships between results citizens value and the work done," according to the often-cited book Breaking through Bureaucracy. All of these contemporary formulations seemed to be addressing my question.
As early as 1987, British economist Robin Murray placed these formulations in a more theoretical and political context when he began to speak of post-Fordist public bureaucracies where workers would be freed to produce more value as private sector workers had been in some European industries. The politics of Murray's work suggested that value might stay with the government worker, or be hers or his to give in a process of cooperation that could run ahead of capital's efforts to reduce it. Yet unlike Murray's prescient work, the literature on public management hides as much as it unveils, as I will try to show in chapter 4. What is posited as government value and created as the citizenry's values, and the unity of public value supposed to result largely through public managerial initiative, sets up a fetish of struggle. These are the public management scholar's state effects as much as the public manager's. The fetish of struggle for common value within and between the naturalized categories of government and public conceals the production of naturalizing categories like government, state, public, and citizen, where the real struggles take place behind the back of society. The term public value masks a double extraction based on exploitation. People are simultaneously asked to accept a wage and citizenship. Both are a reduction and extraction of what they have produced. For the state worker-and I will show that this category is ever expanding-this double reduction/extraction is thoroughly conflated and simultaneously most conscious of itself as a specific kind of abstraction, named in public management literature as public value. Public value cannot help looking like a lot less than what went into it under these circumstances. Public value to the state worker, who does nothing but put effort into it, can appear pretty shaky-a system of equivalency and exchangeability that comes at an intimately high price. Hence, any crisis of difference in state work is also a crisis of this kind of abstraction, a crisis of capitalism, at its hegemonic base, in its very categories of false promise. It is something to dream about. In this sense, the new public management literature follows the same line as the public administration literature I sought out.
Many public administration writers seemed in general to view themselves as neutral experts trying to improve a system whose meaning was already apparent. As state workers, they seem not to have questioned the price, despite my assertion above about the power their questions could carry. Thus, in Nicholas Henry's leading textbook in the field, Public Administration and Public Affairs, he takes the occasion of the seventh reprinting to conclude that "one can learn the techniques of management science, the notions of organization theory, and the intricacies of policy formulation and implementation, but ultimately public administration is a field of thought and practice in which personal ethical choices are made." These choices should serve "the prime directive of management," which "is to look after the system." But if the prime directive is already set as systems maintenance, then ethics seems to be unnecessary, or else it seems to be simply something produced by the system itself. Even Star Trek's crew might balk at this prime directive. Perhaps they encountered enough Alterity to question the notion of a system maintained by ethics. The exemplary state workers of the future Star Trek crew operate less as managers of systems, for all their retro-colonial frontier making, than as new subjects of intergalactic cooperation forever constrained by a federation (and an audience) that wants only motion, novelty, and immediate value. Hence, none of our trekking crew can ever hold onto love or friendship beyond the ship. Duty to the federation made the series possible, but this serialization also robbed them of something deeper.
Just like Star Trek's Data or Seven of Nine, I knew it was no longer being human that made government workers valuable, yet there was little exploration of these workers as brain machines embodying state practices. That would require asking what government was, how it was different from or the same as the state, and where it began and ended, not just out there but in us. My experience was that people did not act in many instances like these borders were commonly agreed on, or even knowable in them or out there. In his essay comparing public and private management, Graham T. Allison takes up the famous formulation of one of the field's pioneers, Wallace Sayre, who helped set up Cornell University's groundbreaking School of Business and Public Administration. Allison reports that Sayre then "left for Columbia with this aphorism: public and private management are fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects." In his public managerialist update of this theme, Sayre does not seem to be troubled by the century-long pervasiveness of management techniques across public and private sectors. He takes it as his task to distinguish for a new generation two kinds of management on the naturalized terrain of state and economy. I wanted a literature that would start at the other end with the subjectivities that produced such distinctions.
Instead, I ran into accounts of subjects made up of the prime directive. Barbara Koremenos and Laurence Lynn Jr., for example, asked me to consider game theoretical models as a way to understand my work as a manager in government. Lynn is the discipline's leading advocate for a renewed positivism. The authors contended that game theory could give some rigor to the growing web of network analysis in public administration. But by this point in my preliminary readings, I did not want to understand only how we labored; I also wanted to understand why there was so much emphasis on such explanations. A social theory like game theory that could give an account of my reasons for action, but not an account of its own was already disappointing. I realized at the end of my cursory tour that I would need public administration because my experiences raised questions and did not provide answers, but my relationship to this discourse would have to be one of suspicion. I will come back to it again in this book, building a history of it as well as a history of suspicion around it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from STATE WORK by Stefano Harney Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
