Performance Anxieties: Shifting Public Administration from the Relevant to the Real

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Administrative Theory & Praxis Vol. 28, No. 1, 2006: 89–120 R

PERFORMANCE ANXIETIES:SHIFTING PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

FROM THE RELEVANT TO THE REAL

Thomas J. CatlawArizona State University

ABSTRACT

The article demonstrates that public administration is presently con-stituted by an underlying discourse or social bond organizing knowl-edge, affect, and social relations in a specific way. This organizationreinforces relations of domination and the sentiment of dissatisfac-tion, and ultimately frustrates the transformation of self-governmentand evacuates human subjectivity and desire. The demand for “rele-vance” is part of this discourse. This article then presents a frame-work for developing a new realism for public administration thathinges on a fundamental reformulation of the social bond or dis-course. Drawing from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan,this realism abandons the search for establishing public administra-tion on a positive normative or scientific foundation and, instead,rearticulates the field from an ontology of the void or lack, what La-can “the Real.” The article concludes with a sketch of how adminis-tration can shift from a concern with relevance to a differentorientation towards the Real across its academic, pedagogical, andself-governmental relationships. A “struggle for the Real” is centralto the future of governing.

INTRODUCTION: TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS?

There is considerable anxiety on American university campusesthese days. No doubt part of the feeling has its origins in the rising tideof conservative activism in what has been traditionally a foothold ofliberalism; however the deeper, more basic issue may be the implicitchallenge to authority this movement intimates. Under the banner of“diversity” and an academic “Bill of Rights,” conservative studentshave openly challenged professorial authority to select and teach thecontent of their classes (Hebel, 2004; Kronholz, 2004). Indeed the “in-telligent design” controversy smoldering its way through U.S. courtsand school districts can also be seen as a moment in this unorthodox

2006, Public Administration Theory Network


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demand for pluralistic inclusion. This contest to academic independenceand authority proceeds in tandem with a growing sense among someacademics of marginality and irrelevance in shaping the policies andfuture of the American society. In this regard, the situation is not unlikethat of social scientists a century ago (Wiebe, 1967). Frustrated by bothpersonal and professional marginalization and the perceived incompe-tence and corruption of the political system, intellectuals hitched theirdissatisfaction to a faith in historical progress and the legitimizing func-tion of science (Porter, 1995) to produce a Progressive reform move-ment that radically changed the contours, if not the foundation, of thepolitical economy. Over the past thirty years, this “Progressive settle-ment” (Latour, 1993) clearly came unraveled, and, with it, both the in-tellectual infrastructure of public administration and the social status ofsocial science have become uncertain.1 A new search for order appearsto be on.

How did this unraveling happen? Some will criticize the increasinglynarrow and specialized nature of scientific inquiry, whose technical so-phistication and jargon make it inaccessible to the larger communityand irrelevant to that community’s challenges. From this view, socialscience has become “a sterile academic activity, which is undertakenmostly for its own sake and in increasing isolation from a society onwhich it has little effect and from which it gets little appreciation”(Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 166). Many will lay blame firmly at the doorstep of“postmodernism” and point to the “deconstructive” move this con-servative insistence on the incompletion of the scientific record mightexemplify. Indeed like good constructivists, many critics of science nowpoint to the mediated nature of human experience, the social construc-tion of reality, prison house of language, and so on, to force a space forthemselves that is hostile to the enterprise of science (Latour, 2004).

Others, defensively perhaps, will turn the tables and point to theoften theological pretensions of positivistic social engineering and in-strumental rationality as generating their own biblical-scale disasters. Inthis narrative, the aspirations of social control, masquerading as muscle-bound pretensions of scientific prowess, produced a disingenuous, if ul-timately legitimizing, sales pitch that discredited the enterprise of scien-tific inquiry itself. An important dimension to this, further, is theinsistence on critique and antifetishism, the questioning of received wis-dom, categories, and thought of authority and tradition—all integralparts of the Enlightenment project. This critical impulse worked welluntil, quite logically enough, it turned on the facts and marshals of thefacts themselves; those once organized to contest authority and tradi-


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tion—the legacies of Progressivism—had become the new tradition andauthority. As facts and their advocates were found to be ensnarled inthe same problems of power, ideology, and history as their targets,quite reasonably enough, the location of authoritative critique faded.

As some social scientists and intellectuals a century ago were pressedto answer, what is to be done? What can be done both to make scien-tific work meaningful to finding ways of living together and to conceivea response that can confront the fundamentalist tsunami that has ratheringeniously mastered many of its opponent’s critical techniques andrhetoric? The calls for a conservative pluralism hint at the complexdimensions of answering these questions. In this instance, the liberalrhetoric of inclusion and respect is challenged more or less on its ownterms, and the criteria for exclusion are pressed.2 That is, on what ba-sis—if not a simple appeal to authority, which science was allegedly wassupposed to displace—are bodies of thought, value-commitments, orcontrary evidence to be excluded from university instruction? Is thereany sensible choice but to return, even if only temporarily and strategi-cally, to some kind of normative or scientific terra firma, be it throughappeals to the reality before our eyes and the brute facts of the matteror through a nonideologically structured reality?

In my view, this would be an error. Above all, this retreat to whatamounts to countercertainty, no matter its good intentions, is itself hos-tile to the enterprise it seeks to preserve. For what the scientific attitudegenerically teaches is the impossibility of final, complete knowledge or“suture” of the social and, furthermore, the possibility of robust, immi-nent human worlds in spite of it.3 Accepting the position of the humansubject in a closed world of appearances, it dispenses with absolute,transcendental dimensions of the world, yet continues the work of ren-dering our worlds intelligible and meaningful (Caws, 2000). To this, so-cial science poses the complex problem of the human as not only ameaning-giving subject but also as a meaningless object of inquiry(Flyvbjerg, 2001; Foucault, 1970) and at the same time as an object thatis a historically saturated product of human creativity and invention(Caws, 2000).

However, while a certain scientific community may regulate its ownimpossibility and produce a stable, paradigmatic domain for intelligibil-ity, science itself cannot function—if it ever really did—as the authori-tative creator of social and political meaning. While science may beefficient in the domain of exactitude, it does not operate in the humandomain of truth (Leupin, 2004). Thus, a “social science that matters”(Flyvbjerg, 2001), one that is dynamically relevant to the ongoing,



nonteleological construction of society, needs to begin from a recogni-tion of the unraveling of Progressivism, a contemporary Copernicanrevolution, which has decentered—not dismissed—the primacy of theapplication of science from authoritative, ultimately normative, deter-minations of the common good. What is required is a properly scientificsocial science; one denied its implicit privilege for the determinant ofsocial and political intelligibility and, rather, actively engaged withother sense-making domains of the human worlds, fully aware of itsinternal limitations.

At the same moment, a certain decentering of the category of rele-vance, or rather the identification of specific content of the relevant,needs to take place in social science. For the issues that matter, theresearch that is relevant, the category of the useful for society are them-selves not self-evidently given and cannot be self-evidently imposed. In-deed, this internal demand for relevance, like that of certainty,functions essentially as a covert form of control and domination. Theoften-troubling questions about authority, collectivity, and truth thatscientific labor generates, matters that lie beyond the comfort of cer-tainty and focus more precisely on the construction of intelligiblehuman societies, need to be soberly confronted.

Public administration is well-positioned to lead the way in this pro-ject, though it entails the substantive abandonment of whatever discipli-nary coherence it possesses. Paradoxically, its very problems—forexample, legitimacy, paradigmatic immaturity, deep tensions amongforms of practice—give it a sensibility that is much closer to the scien-tific practice required in this new time (McSwite, 1997a). Yet actualizingthis possibility requires a kind of “working through” and basic accept-ance of its own limitations. Indeed these limitations emerge as suchonly against the implicit background of a certain kind of social scienceand the presumption of an a priori determination of the relevant thatimplicitly insists that there is a correct model and representation ofthought (Catlaw, 2005).

In what follows, rather than surveying the empirical content of publicadministration’s various positions, judging their relevance or inade-quacy, and prescribing some remedy—some substantively more authen-tic, scientific, or truly public administration—I want to examine thestructure or form that the problem takes and the way in which this veryform of failure paradoxically “succeeds” in frustrating fundamentaltransformation of governance along the lines of the scientific attitudeoutlined above. I am not interested in evaluating the field’s conversa-tion as much as I am concerned with suggesting what the conversation


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itself reveals, namely a certain kind of underlying structure and patternof affect.

In the language of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, thereis an underlying satisfaction in the field’s stance of self-dissatisfactionthat is characteristic of a specific social relationship called the “dis-course of hysteria.” I want to state clearly at the outset “hysteric” refersto a specific position in a discourse not a gendered, actual person. Thisdissatisfied satisfaction produced in and by this discourse is a functionof an ambivalent attitude towards the world—an ongoing interrogationof its representations, yet one still hitched to a belief in a terra firma, aworld behind appearances that can serve as a fulcrum for definitivejudgment. In advancing this argument, I will also consider the complex-ity of a priori, abstract determinations of the relevant and how the insis-tence on them serves as a subtle mechanism of control. Then, drawingagain from Lacanian theory, I will argue that public administration canorient itself towards a new form of realism, one that places impossibil-ity, what Lacan calls “the Real,” rather than a positive determination ofBeing, at the core of its intellectual, pedagogical, and world-makingpractices.

THE UNHAPPY POSTWAR ORTHODOXY

If one thing has unified the apparently fragmented, amorphous fieldof public administration since the passage of the “high noon of ortho-doxy” (Sayre, 1958) nearly sixty years ago, it may very well be the lowopinion the field has of itself; a distinct pessimism about the state andprospects of the field predominates for much of the last half century.This self-loathing, moreover, transcends the field’s traditional opposi-tions. Laurence Lynn (no author, 2005) reminded us recently that noless an iconic figure than Dwight Waldo, himself initially an outsiderfrom political theory, treated public administration with undisguisedcontempt in The Administrative State—something Waldo later acknowl-edged and regretted (Waldo, 1984, pp. x–xi). However, Waldo washardly alone among this first wave of postwar “new public administra-tion” (Martin, 1952; Smithburg, 1951) to see the field as barely ade-quate, if not downright pathetic. In “The Proverbs of Administration”Herbert Simon (1997/1946) gleefully mocked the “principles of admin-istration” en route to extricating himself from the “intellectual backwa-ter” of public administration. Indeed both the young Waldo and Simonradiated a palpable joy as they dissected and humiliated the stupidityand pretense of the past. Even those striking a more moderate toneduring this period, such as Robert Dahl (1947) and Frederick Mosher



(1956), found the presumptions and scholarship of public administra-tion gravely wanting. Dissatisfaction continued to percolate through the1960s, culminating in the 1968 Minnowbrook Conference and the ad-vent of the equally ambiguous enterprise of the “New Public Adminis-tration,” which was, in fact, the second new public administration.

I want to suggest that, seen in the context of the postwar rejection ofthe “classical” codification4 of public administration, the movement andthe period have more coherence than one might expect. In essence, itwas a generational reprise of the first new public administration thatretained the core assumption about the inadequacy of public adminis-tration scholarship, though perhaps it is fair to say that the criticism ofthe second new public administration widened. Then-existing public ad-ministration was not merely insufficient; it had become irrelevant to im-proving the broader condition of American society, whatever itstechnical or practical merits (Denhardt, 1984, p. 109). This charge ap-pears again and again in Marini’s (1971) edited volume, Towards a NewPublic Administration. Echoing contemporary feelings of marginality,Todd LaPorte (1971) expressed the various dimensions of the problemclearly and succinctly:

Younger students, men [sic] in public affairs at various levels, andmany among us complain that we are not relevant, that the intellec-tual stuff of Public Administration has restricted meaning and lim-ited significance to their experience, that it misses the drama ofsocial change. . .that it misses the point! . . . Most [of our efforts]are neither normatively nor practically relevant. (p. 21)

The field was failing normatively and empirically. It was failing soci-ety and practice and, significantly, the field was failing personally thosewho made it their intellectual home. This pervasive sense of dissatisfac-tion with the field carries over into perhaps the most powerful and so-phisticated indictment of the period, Vincent Ostrom’s (1973) TheIntellectual Crisis of American Public Administration, which, again,linked the perceived failure of American society in conjoined norma-tive and empirical dimensions with the failure of public administration.In his own terms, Ostrom dared to contemplate “the possibility that thecontemporary malaise in American society may have been derived, inpart, from the teachings of public administration” (p. 4) and that “ourteachings include bad medicine” (p. 5). This was a sentiment surely notinconsistent with the agitated humanism of Minnowbrook.

During the last two decades this struggle has been taken up mostvividly in the various legitimacy or relegitimization projects (e.g., Fox &Miller, 1995; King, Stivers, & Collaborators, 1998; McSwite, 1997a;


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Rohr, 1986; Wamsley, Goodsell, Rohr, White & Wolf, 1990) and inliterature on the “research problem” in public administration (e.g., Ad-ams & White, 1994; Bolton & Stolcis, 2003; Box, 1992; Brintnall, 1999;Felbinger, Holzer, & White, 1999; McCurdy & Cleary, 1984; Raad-schelders & Douglas, 2003; Streib, Slotkin, & Rivera, 2001; White, 1986;White, Adams, & Forrester, 1996). One could also identify the newpublic management and the general managerialist “cult of perform-ance” as related aspects of this relegitimization effort. I will return tothe issue of performance later, but suffice here to say that the call forthis symposium in Administrative Theory & Praxis can be read as symp-tomatic of a contemporary, if perhaps invigorated, sense of the field’sfailure to be relevant—defined in whatever terms one chooses to opera-tionalize it. Indeed so dire the field’s straits today that one seniorscholar, perceiving the “ivory-tower” orientation of the contemporaryfield and inventorying the field’s “moral sins,” declared that public ad-ministration can redeem itself best in a prayer for the future (Rabin,2004). Furthermore, in light of the obvious governmental failure of Sep-tember 11, 2001, and now the utter collapse of governmental responseand fraying of American society made unavoidably evident by Hurri-cane Katrina, it is likely that we are poised for a third wave of newpublic administration, the dimensions of which remain to unfold.

From one perspective, nothing here is new in this abridged history ofthe field; nothing is surprising. This is old news (indeed, as suggested inthe introduction, it is a narrative that may be hardly unique to publicadministration). We have known for decades that public administrationsuffers from an identity crisis and related boundary disputes, and thatthe administrative state itself occupies a tenuous, uncertain domain oflegitimacy in American political life. However what I want to call atten-tion to is the particular way in which public administrative thought hasbeen structured for the last fifty or more years around this concern withfailure, dissatisfaction, and inadequacy. First, it is a sentiment or patternof affect that is shared across what have taken to be antagonistic intel-lectual positions. Second, there is also a kind of historical unity. Whilewe can discern three distinct moments of “newness” and perhaps a cor-responding widening of the scope of dissatisfaction, dissatisfaction stilljoins these apparent disjunctures. Postwar public administrativethought, then, is essentially an inventory—or perhaps collection of in-dictments, that is, science/antiscience, relevance, legitimacy—of theparticular way in which the field fails. And, third, we can also see thatthis sense of failure expresses itself on three levels—the personal, thedisciplinary, and the societal. Public administration does not merely fail



academically in terms of its intellectual content, but this failure links tothe general failure of society and the sense of personal dissatisfactionthat scholars in the field (and perhaps academic generally) experience.All three dimensions of this matter require consideration through thelens of dissatisfaction and failure.

LACANIAN THEORY AND DISCOURSE

In their book on Michel Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) raisethe provocative idea that things can succeed by virtue of their failure.They write, “[Reformers] promised normalization and happinessthrough science and law. When they fail, this only justifies more of thesame” (p. 196). Thus, the success served through the failure of law andscience is the continued call for “More law! More science!”5 What ismaintained is the hierarchical regime of biopower that is dependentupon the scientific identification of deviance and anomaly (Dreyfus &Rabinow, 1983, pp. 195–197) in the reproduction of the relations of cap-italism. There is a close analogue in the theory of Lacanian psychoanal-ysis concerning how satisfaction can take the form of dissatisfaction,and this is associated with the clinical structure of hysteria. While thisargument may admit a problematic functionalism, it nevertheless pro-vides an illuminating framework within which to examine public admin-istration. In both instances, what is at stake is a certain structure ordiscourse that is maintained precisely insofar as it fails; success comesunder cover of failure.

I draw this example not only to highlight the constitutive importancefailure can play in maintaining a social relationship or order, but also todraw an important difference in understandings of discourse. In thepsychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, discourse is the general nameof a social bond constituted in and by language (Evans, 1996, p. 44).Lacan provides a typology of four such discourses—the Master, theUniversity, and the Hysteric, and the Analyst—that are “four possibletypes of social bond, four possible articulations of the symbolic networkwhich regulates intersubjective relations” (p. 44). It is important to sayat the outset that the Lacanian notion of discourse is quite differentfrom the way in which the word is used by, for example, MichelFoucault.

Foucault uses discourse and analysis of discourses to trace power re-lations and to understand specifically how one discourse imposes itselfon another (Verhaeghe, 2001, p. 20). Central to Foucault’s thought, forexample, is understanding how medical discourse imposes itself ontoand overwrites the discourse of politics and the human sciences. Fou-


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cault’s work focuses precisely on the content of these discourses and thespecifics of their relationship in terms of power and knowledge(Verhaeghe, 2001).6 However Lacan’s is a formal, structural argumentin that discourse, the social bond or relationship, is antecedent to anyspecific human relationship. Paul Verhaeghe (2001) writes, the four dis-courses are “empty bags with a particular form, which determines thecontent that one puts into them” (p. 21). Lacan (1981) states, “Beforeany experience, before any individual deduction, even before those so-cial needs are inscribed in it, something organizes this field, inscribes itsinitial lines of force. . . . Before strictly human relations are established,certain relations have already been determined” (p. 20). Discourse, thesocial bond, names the formal relations that come before and organizeshuman relationships.

The formalism of Lacan’s theory of discourse can be illustratedthrough a consideration of Denhardt’s (1981) criticism of the ethic ofmodern organization. Writing in the tradition of critical theory, he ar-gues that, as the rational model of organization penetrates further insocial life, contemporary human beings are radically constricted interms of spaces for meaningful action and interaction. The lifeworld iscolonized. Indeed there may be more spaces in terms of quantity butthese spaces are more and more of the same; there is no qualitativedifference. Denhardt writes, “bureaucratic patterns not only mold ourwork life, but also our political and even religious involvements” (p.16). Thus, the changes that we make in our lives are “from business togovernment to labor, we simply move from organization to organiza-tion to organization. The form remains the same; the expectations re-main the same; and in all likelihood our behavior remains the same” (p.60). What Denhardt argues for is fundamental, qualitative change inhow humans relate to one another, a “new concept of action” (p. 72),not a merely cosmetic alteration of the master’s face. Indeed, consistentwith the position I shall argue below, the very manner in which we con-ceive change itself exacerbates the conditions of domination (Denhardt,1981, pp. 66–67).

Lacan gives us a unique way of conceiving this change and the prob-lem of form. He does so, though, less in terms of rationalities than so-cial bonds or discourses. This, in turn, sheds light on the problematicpresumptions of the various forms of scientific and moral objectivitywith regard to social change as well as the question of why peoplechoose to repeat self-destructive practices. Lacan’s theory, however,also complicates significantly the critical-theoretical notion of “libera-tion” and “choice” since it resolutely denies any authoritative position



of judgment “outside” language or any “authentically full” human sub-ject for reasons that will become clear.

Each of Lacan’s discourses has four basic elements; and the differ-ences between each discourse are a function of the shifting position ofthese elements.

A discourse “begins with somebody talking” (Verhaeghe, 2001, p.21). This is the agent. The agent’s speech is directed towards someone,the other. The agent’s speech produces some kind of effect on the other,which Lacan calls the product. The fourth position is truth, specificallythe truth of the unconscious. Truth is the motor of discourse. Consistentwith the psychoanalytic perspective, it is not the agent or ego that is thedriver of the situation, but rather the truth of the unconscious, whichitself cannot be ever fully symbolized in language. Critical here as wellis the notion that something must be left out of language; every dis-course is constituted by a remainder that cannot be symbolized. Lacancalls this “lack.” Each discourse, however, orients the human subjectquite differently towards this lack, and ultimately, social change con-cerns a shift in discourse and the position of the subject with regard tolack.

To understand the discourse of hysteria it is useful to begin with acomparison to another discourse, the discourse of the master. In themaster’s discourse, the master is the agent, represented in Lacan’sterms as the master-signifier. Importantly, the master-signifier posits it-self as one and undivided. It denies the fact that it is a “split subject,”split, that is, between the conscious and unconscious. The master speaksto or interrogates the other. The product of this speech act is the lostobject cause of desire, object a. In the master’s discourse, the humansubject is fundamentally alienated from its desire. So long as the subjectstays in the discourse of the master, it will continually produce lost ob-jects and not get any closer to the truth of the unconscious, or the Real.7

The discourse of hysteria puts unconscious desire at the center as themotor of truth. In the position of agent is the divided subject. Thus, inthe hysteric’s discourse, driven by the truth of desire, the subject inter-rogates the master with the demand to produce the knowledge aboutthe subject’s desire. Verhaeghe (2001) writes, “The questions put to themaster can be very different, but basically they are the same: ‘Tell mewho I am, tell me what my desire is’” (p. 29). The underlying presump-tion is that there is someone who knows the answer. Lacan calls this


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someone, the “subject-supposed-to-know.” The subject-supposed-to-know can take many forms—professor, expert, scientist, priest, etc.;however as the structure of the discourse reveals, all of the subject-supposed-to-know’s answers will come up short. None will produce thetruth of the subject’s desire because, first, all discourses lack, but alsobecause the request misfires. The subject already “knows” the truth ofits desire yet deposits the answer to this apparent enigma in the other;the subject-supposed-to-know can only produce inadequate, furtheralienating representations that short-circuit the subject’s own confron-tation with its lack.

Since it figured prominently in the discussion above, I want to saysomething about the relationship of the hysteric’s discourse and dissat-isfaction. Already we can see how dissatisfaction might figure promi-nently in this discourse. The hysteric’s (and here, again, we are talkingabout a position in a discourse, not a gendered, actual person) demandson the subject-supposed-to-know necessarily come up short. The onlypossible consequence in the long term is dissatisfaction and disappoint-ment on the part of the subject, and, on the other side, diminution ofthe status of the subject-supposed-to-know, on which the hysteric is stilldependent. The potential crisis of the hysterical discourse is evident—asthe hysteric assaults the subject-supposed-to-know with impossible de-mands, the alienation of the subject deepens and the stability of thesubject-supposed-to-know, which is the support of the subject’s identifi-cations, further erodes.

More generally, however, the dissatisfaction turns on the discoveryfrom psychoanalytic practice that, while subjects may arrive for analysisasking for help in easing their pain, they mount considerable resistanceto the effort to accomplish precisely this. “[The] subject resists cure be-cause of the libidinal satisfaction that the symptom affords him or her”(Evans, 1998, p. 18). Thus the particular enjoyment of the subject takesthe form of acute pain and dissatisfaction; the subject is always “en-joying,” but this enjoyment is manifested in painful ways. By extension,while the subject’s demand cannot be met, it is, strictly speaking, a de-mand that the subject does not want to have met. The reason that this isto be associated with hysteria in particular is that this is the relationshipfrom which analysis begins, even in those subjects who are not clinicallyhysterics (Fink, 1997, p. 131). Hysteria is, finally then, characterized bya “desire for an unsatisfied desire” (p. 123). It succeeds precisely insofaras it desires an unsatisfied desire and locates the “source” of satisfactionin the other.



PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & THE DISCOURSEOF HYSTERIA

To understand the discourse of public administration in the Lacanianframework is to inquire into the formal relationship that organizes thefield. Furthermore, to argue that it is characterized by the discourse ofhysteria is to say something specific about the formal way in whichknowledge, relationship, and affect are organized. McSwite (1997a) hascalled attention to this linkage when they write that public administra-tion “enjoys” its legitimacy problem. What follows can be read as anexpansion and substantiation of that claim. I want to focus on the alleg-edly problematic status of public administration as a discipline in socialscience, a status that has been at the center of the deep consternationand satisfaction outlined earlier. In doing so, I will also expand the dis-cussion of hysteria.

A key idea in Lacanian theory is that the subject’s desire is alwaysthe desire of the Other (Lacan, 1981, p. 235). To put it in more everydayterms, what we seem to want is not what we want as subjects. Ratherour experienced desires are those of the Other—we both desire theOther and desire what the Other desires. Desires are artifacts of ouremergence as self-conscious beings into language and complex sociali-zation processes. What we want and who we want to be is producedexternally for us. On one hand, this is inevitable since the advent of thesubject occurs in the movement, or alienation, into the Symbolic orderof language, which is the register of the Other. This world is alwaysalready there. Further, though, Lacan’s demonstrates that somethingresists this entrance into language and this something is singular to thesubject. There is a gap between the signifiers that identify the consciousego (and with which it identifies) and the subject. In fact, the subject“is” the gap itself, which does not belong to the field of the Other orlanguage, yet this kernel of the Real that resists incorporation is non-substantial. It is an empty place or void.

As in the analytical setting, we make powerful efforts to avoid theReal, the real truth of this singularity. The operative move for the sub-ject is the choice it faces about how to position itself with regard to thelack of the Symbolic order of the Other and ineffable drive of its ownsingularity. We can see how the hysterical discourse exacerbates theproblem by interrogating the Other’s representative, the subject-sup-posed-to-know, about the enigma of its desire. However, the subject-supposed-to-know is the emperor with no clothes; its knowledge cannotsolve this riddle. The paradox at the core of all this, insofar as the truthof desire is “outside” the Symbolic order of the Other, is that it will


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always appear as perverse or “illegitimate.” Thus breaking from thefield of the Other and bearing (in both the sense of revealing and carry-ing) one’s desire is a trangressive act.

As suggested above, we can identify a certain affect or sentiment ofhysteria in public administrative thought—the ongoing dissatisfactionwith the state of the field and the endless confrontation with, yet depen-dence on, the authority of the past. However the root problem of theapparent illegitimacy of public administration—as either a governmen-tal or intellectual enterprise—is largely a function of its lingering at-tachment to its own Other(s) or masters, namely two-fold “neutral”domains of the Public Interest (or the People) and Science.8 Public ad-ministration remains hitched to both of these masters. This has tendedto produce the field’s general two-fold approach to legitimizing itself,normative and professional/scientific knowledge, in governance. An-other dimension of this is evident in the “stubborn” politics-administra-tion dichotomy which emphasizes the submission of the public servantto a political or technical master. Thus the field interrogates and deridesitself in its efforts to “resolve” the problems of public administration bydeflecting them via these masters who will ultimately tell public admin-istration who or what it is—who it will serve. Desire, the locus of indi-vidual autonomy from the authority of the symbolic order, is denied.

The discourse of hysteria has direct implications for the everydaypractice of public administration. As others have suggested (e.g. Den-hardt, 1981; Harmon, 1995; Maynard-Mooney & Musheno, 2003)though in quite different ways, this discursive relationship alienates theliving public administrator of his or her singularity, and comports theadministrator towards the field of the Other and its imaginary identifi-cations. The flip side of this is the refusal of government to see thecitizen also as a singular desiring subject and to continue to govern atthe conscious level of interest and demand (McSwain & White, 1993).However, here again, interest and demand emanate from the field ofthe Other; properly speaking, they are not “ours.” From this point ofview, to the extent that citizens’ own demands are made through gov-ernment, society’s generic subject-supposed-to-know, meeting these de-mands, too, will prove impossible. The ongoing (perceived) “failures”of government and the field of public administration to legitimize itselfare, therefore, deeply and inextricably intertwined. Both the public andthe field enjoy in this mode of hysterical dissatisfaction—the so-calledlegitimacy problem has little to do with the content of public adminis-tration, and everything to do with the discursive form of socialrelationship.



One consequence of this is that governing becomes primarily aboutstaging and maintaining fantasy rather than confronting the concrete-ness of the situation. That is, what becomes primary is acting out thedesire of the Other, the imperative of the master, rather than construct-ing a context within which non-alienated desire can circulate. I wouldsuggest that we can see this anxiety clearly evidenced in the contempo-rary drive for “performance,” a demand that is made even though weknow very well that what counts as a result, a good performance, isradically contingent and contextual (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004, pp. 104-142). Indeed it is worthwhile considering the full dramaturgical sense ofthis word. While the rhetoric of performance is, on the one hand, con-cerned with outcomes, it is also is concerned with performing for theOther, about going through the rituals that demonstrate a belief in per-formance itself.

Ultimately, the discourse of hysteria “results” in the Foucauldian callfor “More of the same!” From the public, more accountability and moreresults in the face of successes in the mode of failure. From public ad-ministration, more science, ethics, rigor, and engagement in light ofongoing failures in science, rigor, and ethics legitimize the field. A sec-ond consequence follows from this: a fundamental difficulty of alteringgovernance in a manner that might address some of the pressing issuesof our time. Since success comes in the mode of failure, perceived fail-ure produces calls not for something basically different, some new dis-cursive relationship or social bond, but for more of the same.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF RELEVANCE

The demand for relevance, as it is currently articulated through thediscourse of hysteria, is unlikely to help matters if, as in the demand forrelevance exemplified by LaPorte, we hear a call to address many of themost pressing social problems of the day. As it is now, relevance is anoppositional demand, yet one made in a state of dependence on theOther and, in the same moment, an act of avoidance of the basic discur-sive issue, namely dependence on a master. It’s “more of the same!”

In this section, I will, first, show how the demand for relevance is aradically subjective or local demand that makes its appearance undergeneral, objective cover. This, combined with the conflicting and so-cially determined way in which the relevant is constituted, renders iteffectively useless and irresolvable as a category of judgment, except asa radically local, self-consciously contingent one. As I will argue later,however, it is precisely through this irresolvability that we might recon-struct the category. To this point, I will conclude this section by arguing


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that the core problem is the positing of an a priori determination ofrelevance, a problem consistent with the elevation of fantasy notedabove. The relevant can only be an emergent property. This demand forrelevance in the academy is, finally, simply an exercise of control anddomination of subjectivity that perpetuates the underlying discursiveproblem. In tandem with a political practice that agrees to recognize theforce of desire and singularity, an academic practice is required thatdoes the same.

“Relevance” has a satisfying self-evident appeal.9 No one aspires outloud to be irrelevant, and the mark of relevance conveys significant so-cial power. Yet it can immediately be subjected to a straightforwardinterrogation. We can ask immediately, relevant to whom? Relevant forwhat? At the risk of scholasticism, we can further derive several every-day senses in which the word “relevant” is used.

First, something could be “relevant-to-me.” In the “closest” sense,we might say that relevance concerns a relation of “fit” between a per-son and her world. Ideas, objects, people emerge as relevant to the ex-tent that they illuminate, speak to, or somehow connect or becomeuseful with a person’s world. It is this relevant-for-me that names a cer-tain organization of subjective belief that informs how and when I es-tablish what “objectively-subjectively” appears (Zizek, 1991) relevantto my world. For example, on this point Marshall Alcorn (2002), a lead-ing Lacanian theorist, writes, “facts will not satisfy us unless we havebeen led to want them” (p. 62). Even facts or data are not self-evidentlyrelevant until our own subjectivity renders such a judgment, until I amled to believe that I want them.

In his book on the crisis in Western sociology, Alvin Gouldner (1970)describes important aspects of this mode of relevance:

The crux of the issue is the lack of “fit” between new sentimentsand old theories. It is precisely because of this that certain youngradicals do not simply feel the old theories are ‘wrong’ and shouldbe criticized in detail; their more characteristic response to theolder theories is a feeling of sheer irrelevance. Their inclination isnot to disapprove or argue with the old theories, but to ridicule andavoid them. (p. 7)

Thus, the relevant-for-me speaks to a certain resonance betweensomeone, something and that person’s world; and while the demand forrelevance can be made in a confrontational posture (“Make this rele-vant to me!”), it can also be mixed with an attitude of avoidance andevasion of important issues akin to the attitude of the hysteric.



Relevant-for-me is not, of course, a static configuration. In the class-room, for example, instructors often spend a good deal of time illustrat-ing and persuading students that ideas or tools are, despite their firstapprehension, relevant to their lives and work. Many disciplines at-tempt to answer the student’s general question, “What am I going towith this?” In other words, they attempt to make themselves relevant toa student’s life and future. What we can see even in these brief exam-ples is that making something relevant-to-me entails some element ordegree of confrontation and challenge that alters the fit or resonance.The kind of change, however, is open to question because, like themixed attitudes in the demand for relevance, this confrontation mightoccur in two ways—one essentially accommodates the new to the oldorganization of relevance; another shifts some underlying, or discursive,organization of the world.

A second category is “relevant-to-a-field.” Here I do not mean nec-essarily an academic field of study, though these are by no means ex-cluded. Rather I mean field, partially, in the sense suggested by Millerand Fox’s (2001) “epistemic communities” in which “knowledge ortruth claims make sense only when they fit into some preexisting con-ceptual scheme taken as coherent” (p. 676). Related to this, they (Fox& Miller, 1995) have defined field (in the sense of public energy field)as being “composed of bundles of human intentions, enthusiasms, pur-poses, and motivations” (p. 106). Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu(Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) broadens the idea, in particular the im-portance of the sedimented elements of the past, in his account of“field.” For Bourdieu, a field is a “relational configuration” that is en-dowed with a specific compelling force that all agents and objects thatenter into the given field are subjected to. The particular configurationof the field helps to explain why certain things are more likely to occurthan others, why there is a semipermanence or stability to social order-ing. It is a “structure of probabilities” (p. 18). In a field, relevance canbe thought of as part of this compelling force. It speaks to the way inwhich an idea, object, or person engages a specific constitution of a so-cial field or the various subgroup within it.

The particular nature of this engagement is important.10 Specifically,all participants share a common set of assumptions about the field itself.For while there may be a variety of people or groups contesting theconstruction of the field, Thompson (1991) explains:

All participants must believe in the game they are playing, andwhat is at stake in the struggles they are waging. Hence the conductof struggle within a field, whether a conflict over the distribution of


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wealth or over the worth of a work of art, always presupposes afundamental accord or complicity on the part of those who partici-pate in the struggle. (p. 14)

To refract this slightly through a Lacanian lens, “field” points to twodimensions of belief. First, there is the subjective belief in the field’sgame, but also a belief that is embedded in the structure of the fielditself. In this sense, the field can “believe for us” (Zizek, 1989) so longas we continue to engage in the practices and rhetoric that distinctivelyconstitute it as a field; belief in this noncognitive sense is performative,a point made, too, by Fox and Miller (1995, pp. 87-92) in their linkageof habit and recurrent practices. This additionally suggests why changemust entail more than alteration in the ostensible content of belief or asimple conception of false consciousness; old beliefs can linger in thepractices that remain.

Consider as an example the academic field of public administration.The discourse of hysteria describes the general structure, or fundamen-tal conditions, of public administration’s game. There are furtherdimensions we can identify that influence the particular contents andstruggles in the field. At one level, the field in which public administra-tion operates is the University. From here, there are the traditional divi-sions of the University—arts, sciences, humanities, etc. Within theseuniversity divisions, of course, each of these divisions further fragmentsinto disciplines, disciplines into fields of study, fields into subfields, etc.There are further cleavages along methodological, political, and episte-mological lines that slice up and complicate these pieces. Each of thesecan be considered distinct, though interconnected, fields of contest. Ineach, the question of relevance to the field is posed, if only implicitly,by the particular construction of the field and those who wish to enterinto the field are compelled to submit to its particular forces. Again,this is not a static state; relevance is open to contest, challenge, andchange. Yet certain elements are not, namely the conditions and prac-tices that produce the coherence of the field itself.

Third, there is the matter of a “field’s-relevance-to-another-field.”Many fields in modern societies are, so to speak, “externally oriented”in that their work is oriented towards some sort of provision for orwork in another field. This is particularly true in public administration,and perhaps social science, generally, in a double sense. First, the aca-demic field of public administration is thought to have a responsibilityto the field of the professional public administrator or manager and,more broadly, to serve the Public Interest. The academic field may bethought to produce something relevant for the professional that will im-



prove that work. For example, writing of the “big questions” of publicnetwork management research, Agranoff and McGuire (2001) state,“To be relevant management research must inform action: data fordata’s sake is not useful” (p. 323). I suspect few in public administrationwould substantively dispute the spirit of this assertion, though manywould object to the demand for data defined in narrow quantitativeterms. Perhaps research for the sake of research captures a broader sen-timent. Given this construction of the relevant, academic research—particularly the ambiguously slandered “theory”—is sometimesreproached for being irrelevant to the needs and demands of the pro-fessional field (e.g., Bolton & Stolcis, 2003) and for failing effectively toinform action. In this sense, the field is, in principle, constituted byimagined or fantasized demands of the domain of administrative prac-tice, particularly the figure of “The Practitioner” (Farmer, 2003).

Second, the profession of public administration is oriented towardsactive work in various areas of social life; government is expected to berelevant or at least responsive to the needs and demands of citizens. Ihave discussed some problems associated with the particular construc-tion of this above. Further though, the field allegedly should be rele-vant, then, well beyond the narrow, technical demands of the practicingmanager. It is on this score that the second New Public Administrationcriticized the field, a claim recently echoed by Farmer’s (2005) that pub-lic administration theory link the individual to the totality of socio-po-litical forces. Yet we see that the broader case for relevance andassertion of a different field can be, but perhaps do not need to be, intension with the expectations of the professional field.

Third, we have the explicitly instrumental, teleological, most generaldimension, “relevance-to-an-End.” Clearly this overlaps with other as-pects of the relevant, yet it has primacy over the others. Something canbe relevant to me insofar as it is relevant to the end I think I seek. Aparticular method might be relevant to the disciplinary end of “resolv-ing the research question” in public administration. A hammer is rele-vant to pounding a nail into a piece of wood. Some idea or practicecould be relevant to the ends of social justice. Generally, then, this cate-gory names the everyday understanding that something is relevant if itcan serve as, in some way, an instrument in service of the realization ofsome end, purpose, task, or cause.

However the discussion above complicates this dimension of rele-vance since it is does not have stable, positive content across fields andindividual differences. This is not at all to say that what is relevant isrelative absolutely. Rather, as stated above, given a specific context or


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field, the relevant has an “objective” quality or compelling force givenan identified task, purpose, or end rendered visible by the field or struc-ture of belief. While this does not preclude the possibility of somethingbecoming relevant as fields change and through the very contest of therelevant itself, nor does it confer, perforce, a normative correctness onthat determination; it does mean that relevance-to-an-End cannot be soin an absolute sense, that is, relevant to an End that is itself absolute.David Farmer’s (2003) discussion of the nested nature of the Public In-terest helps to make this point. Farmer writes:

The core objective of PA practice, I take it, is to advance the publicinterest—the top line. But advancing the public interest seems tofunction as a synecdoche for a complex of shifting activities andobjectives. . . . My point is that identifying the objective of PA prac-tice has to accommodate my (and your) own experiences in govern-ments . . . . The objective is not simply to advance the publicinterest. I don’t think it is simply input-output efficiency either, andI don’t think it’s simply getting the most out of assigned resources. Idon’t think it is simply serving the public, for example, and I don’tthink it’s simply serving oneself or one’s boss or one’s boss-of-bosses. I don’t think it’s simply about acting on assigned items(which may or may not include solving problems), for example, andI don’t think it’s simply about “knowing how” in assigned areas.However I wouldn’t rule out any of these candidates, especially astransient objectives. Sometimes it is this or that; many times it isnot. (p. 18)

The central issue here is that the specific content of the relevant can-not be determined in advance except insofar as the dimensions of thespecific field, situation or subject are believed—and, again, this doesnot preclude something shifting in or out of the position of relevant andthis does not necessarily assure an approving final “judgment” on one’saction. Fields themselves are dynamic within limits that constitute themas fields; they are furthermore implicitly hierarchically arranged, as in,perhaps, the relative position of public administration in the social sci-ences and public administration theory in the field itself.

How does this relate to the discussion above of Lacan? There is, first,an important distinction to be made between discourse and field. Dis-courses are primary to fields and structure fields’ internal relations aswell as relations of one field to another to one another. The broad prob-lem a discourse of hysteria poses to the relation among fields is thebasic commitment to a positive domain behind appearance. That is, therelations among fields are basically those of competing authoritativerepresentations of reality, in spite of the noted factors that mitigate



against the plausibility of such claims. The social relationship thatweaves its way through these various fields nevertheless is organized bya common relationship of domination. Disputes about relevance are ul-timately disputes about content. What needs to be considered andchanged is the underlying form that organizes content or the discourse.

RELEVANCE & CONTROL

Given that the demand for relevance can be dissected so easily, whyis the demand continually made? I believe there are two interconnectedreasons—control of subjectivity and maintenance of the underlying dis-cursive relationship. Taken together, we can appreciate that the de-mand for relevance or the command to be relevant puts a certain powerdynamic into play, one that discredits or “disappears” other forms ofsocial relationship. In the case of public administration, it is a play thatdoes not merely attempt to seize control of the substantive, technical,and aesthetic determination of the field, but, by extension, constitutes aparticular figure of the individual public administrator, the appropriatepedagogy and academic pursuits consistent with that pedagogy, and cir-cumscribes particular conceptions of government and action. It is, fur-thermore, an “objective” expression that conceals the multiplicity of“counting-as-relevant.”

Finally, insofar as the matter of relevance is manifested in public ad-ministration, it is symptomatic of a specific discourse or social relation-ship, hysteria, that is dependent on some final reality behindappearances, the alienation of desire, and continuing dependence on amaster. Implicitly, then, the problem of relevance maintains a hierarchi-cal relationship that posits the subject-supposed-to-know and the possi-bility of authoritative judgment. It is an implicit form of social controlthat attempts to discipline the discourse or underlying form of humanrelationship by displacing dispute and contest onto matters of content.The form remains hierarchical, alienating, and desubjectivizing and, assuch, the content consists of varying expressions, imposition, and arrestthat manifest these characteristics without altering the underlyingdiscourse.

I would like to anticipate a possible objection to the argument I haveadvanced here. One might see this as precisely the kind of self-indul-gent “deconstruction” that ignores “real” social problems and contrib-utes to producing a playing field on which, for example, both evolutionand creationism are equal (regardless of what side one chooses). Mypoint, though, is to make evident the contextual, “local” nature of thedeterminations of the relevant and suggest how this contextualism


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stands in deep tension with the implicit objectivism that serves to justifya priori exclusionary determinations of irrelevance, particularly whenrelevance to broad social Ends are at stake. This conditions a dogmatic,fantastic view of the situation and context itself—about what will countand who will be counted as the one who knows.11 But if the structure ofthe interaction, the discourse, resists an open and dynamic determina-tion of the boundary that organizes the relevant, only abstraction andfantasy can rule. Perhaps there are domains of human activity wherethis may not matter, but there is too much at stake in the contemporarylabor of public administration for this to continue to occur.

FROM RELEVANCE TO THE REAL

The paradigmatic uncertainty and disjointedness of and the nature ofthe intellectual debates in public administration have brought the fieldinto close proximity to these matters. In psychoanalytic terms, the hys-tericized subject is in a state in which analysis can begin. It signals themoment when desire becomes loosened from the fixation on a specificobject and begins to move (Fink, 1997, p. 26). So, rather than seeing thefield in terms of deficits, disappointments, and failures, the field’s iden-tity might be oriented around this “failure” as the condition for its re-constitution. Rather than attempting to make public administrationscholarship more relevant, the more productive route is to abandon theconversation about relevance, and conceive a scientific and practicalorientation that places impossibility at its center. This would cease at-tempts to ground the field in a positive (scientific or moral) order ofBeing, as the various attempts to resolve the legitimacy have done, andwould connect itself directly what Lacan called “the Real,” an ontologyof the void or lack. This is a (non)ground consistent with the scientificattitude discussed in the introduction.

What is the Lacanian Real? As suggested above, the Real is the La-canian term for that which resists symbolization. What status is the Realaccorded? Shifting from the relevant to the Real means detaching our-selves from the idea of a world beyond appearance, the realm of theOther, and the necessity for a master. The Other does not exist. Let mefurther elaborate on this shift by using Kant. On one reading, Kant ar-gued a similar position similar to Lacan’s. The world of appearances isforever separated from the world of the noumenon, the Thing-in-itself.We never know the Thing; all we can have are representations, appear-ances. What Kant left was a positive ground for the human world, anexternal position, in the Thing-in-itself, if only as a useful fiction (Vaih-inger, 1935). This Kantianism is evident in the work of scholars like



Herbert Simon, who concede the limits of reason and rationality (i.e.,the idea of bounded rationality) but nevertheless retain a conventionalview of science and displace the internal limitations of discourse, theReal, onto physical and cognitive deficiencies.

For Lacan, though, the Real is not a position or thing outside but thevery experience of the incomplete or opacity of the world. It is the thingthat slips away whenever we try to get a hold on reality. Finally, it alsoentails a discursive movement from the discourse of the hysteric to whatLacan calls the discourse of the analyst (see Catlaw, in press-a). In thisanalytic discourse, the agent is the lost object, object a, which functionsas a position of listening that “obliges the other to take his divided be-ing into account” (Verhaeghe, 2001, p. 31). The motor of the discourseis unconscious truth.

Public administration can shift from the relevant to the Real alongthree dimensions—administrator, educator, and researcher. I cannotprovide a full accounting here of what this entails; however, in whatfollows, I want to try to provide a sketch of what a public administra-tion grounded in realism would entail.12 I begin with David Farmer andhis account of aporia. Farmer (2005, pp. 62, 77) says, the Greek wordaporia can be translated as “with no way out.” There is no final way forthings to be resolved. “Embrace the aporia” (p. 94) he charges. Politicalquestions can be pursued but cannot be resolved. This position, he con-tinues, entails an attitude of hesitation. “Authentic hesitation standsagainst an arrogant ‘I know best’ or ‘my system is right’ on the part ofgoverning bureaucracies and persons in power” (p. 104).13 This aporeticdisposition also means that there is, finally, no transcendental positionof judgment. Rather governing must be conceived in terms of an ongo-ing pursuit or co-seeking. Yet if co-seeking is the pursuit, models of therelevant must be abandoned because models make a demand of replica-tion and re-presentation consistent with the arrogant declaration “Iknow best.” The force of the field is “relevance,” but this is not primaryto the subject’s own “field” of desire.

A different kind of academic relationship also needs to be articu-lated that takes into account the dimensions of the desire of both thestudent and teacher. This implies a collaborative, seeking-together ap-proach to knowledge production. Gilles Deleuze (1994) writes, “Ouronly teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me,’ and are able to emitsigns to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures forus to reproduce” (p. 23). Denhardt’s (2001) discussion of the “develop-mental perspective” in public administration education has providedthe most thorough indication of how a radically subject-oriented educa-


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tion that takes inventory of the singularity of both faculty and studentscould work. A similar attitude is required in the application or puttingto work of scientific knowledge in public administrative contexts. Theuse of expertise and technical knowledge needs to be conceived as animminent part of a collaborative “doing with us” in which science be-comes closer and more deeply embedded in the fabric of self-governing.

Camilla Stivers (2000) has written of precisely this kind of sociallysituated, embedded scientific enterprise. Though resting perhaps on aproblematically atheoretical notion of “experience” (see Miller, 2005c),the settlement movement, in contrast to the use of fact supplied by ad-ministrative experts of the bureaus of municipal research, conceived ofknowledge acquisition and use in three stages:

(1) “social impressionism,” which was a process of “constant listen-ing, feeling, learning”; (2) “interpretation,” that is, “understanding,appreciating, and sympathizing with the surrounding life”; and (3)“action” on the basis of the knowledge that acquired. By lettinglife, not theory, lead the way, settlement residents opened them-selves up to the neighborhood and attempting to see them the waythe neighborhood people did, then translating the results in advo-cacy. They spoke consistently of submitting or surrendering them-selves to the situations they studied. (p. 96)

It is only in this radically local way that what is relevant to living canbe determined—through the collaborative production of a contextwithin which specific content emerges as relevant. The determination ofthe relevant is, like the subject, itself a singularity. It is a mode of inter-action and knowing that peels itself from the models of thought andobjectivity of fields to embrace the constitutive limitation of thought,the Real.14What is overcome in this movement is an a priori impositionof the image or fantasy; the researcher ceases to be the subject-sup-posed-to-know who short-circuits the flow of the subjects’ desire by tell-ing them what they need and that they should do. In this movement, weencounter the Other not as language (i.e., content) as in hysteria butthrough the enigma of its desire.

CONCLUSION: A NEW REALISM

In this time of fundamentalism and the temptations it provokes, anew realism15 rooted in a distinctly different mode of social relationshipis required (Stavrakakis, 1999, pp. 65-70), not competing certainties.16

This realism puts the constitutive lack or Real at the “center” of itsconcern to maintain a dialectic that does not yield to the pretenses of anobjective (morally or scientifically), nonideological claim on reality yet



is “careful to avoid the trap that makes us slide into ideology under theguise of stepping out of it” (Moolenaar, 2004, p. 276). This realism con-fronts the world not in terms of models of re-presentation or a prioricommands for relevance, but, paradoxically, in terms of that which can-not be represented, the Real. In the contemporary moment, now morethan ever what is essential is a realism that fights for this moment ofaporia and resists efforts to seal off the world scientifically or morally.What is needed is not another model of relevance, but a struggle for theReal.

ENDNOTES

1. However, as Miller (2005a) rightly observes, “public administration re-mains engrossed in a futile project: resuscitating the remnants of progressivism”(p. 483). While space does not allow for a further elaboration of this matter, itbears noting this attachment to progressivism has a distinctive class dimensioninsofar as progressivism was predominantly a middle class movement (Hof-stadter, 1955; Wiebe, 1967). Stivers (2002) adds, it was this “progressive” middleclass that “perceived the world as in danger of turning upside down” (p. 51) andturned to professional knowledge and expertise as a way of pacifying and socontrolling both the public as well as their anxiety. Stivers (2000, 2002) has alsodemonstrated the complex gender dynamics at work then and now.

2. For an incisive recent debate of the practical and theoretical matters re-lated to exclusion, see the recent exchange among Kelly Campbell (2005a,2005b), O. C. McSwite (2005), and Hugh Miller (2005b) on citizen engagementand participation.

3. Most basically this is so because, as even the efforts of logical positivismdemonstrated, the fundamental propositions of science are themselves not de-monstrable empirically (Kuhn, 1996; Polkinghorne, 1983). More precisely,though, it is has been demonstrated in set theory after Georg Cantor that thelanguage of science, namely mathematics, “points directly to an irreducible ex-cess beyond ‘objective’ measurement’” (Hallward, 2002, p. 70). There is, there-fore, inevitably a “hole” in the determined mechanistic universe (Verhaeghe,1999). In Lacanian terms, it is this hole or excess, namely the Real, that is the“cause” of this ongoing accumulation and expansion and the real of mathemati-cal measurement itself. For an excellent, concise discussion of the these devel-opments in mathematics, see Hallward (2002, pp. 323-348). For a discussion ofthe logically problematic status of scientific statements in public administration,see Farmer (1995, pp. 70-85).

4. Naturally the stability and coherence of this codification can be con-tested. For a recent example, see Lynn (2001).

5. Waldo (1984) made a related observation about the Progressives in TheAdministrative State. Writing of the ideology of Progress and the groups of re-formers who “remained firm in the old liberal faith in an underlying harmony,


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which by natural and inevitable processes produces the greatest possible goodfor the greatest possible number,” Waldo states that for these people “the curefor democracy is more democracy” (p. 18).

6. Certainly there are texts by Foucault, such as The Archaeology ofKnowledge (1972), that consider forms of speech acts, particularly those seriousspeech acts in the human sciences, in a more general sense, irrespective of thespecific contexts and contents and in light of the conditions of their possibility(episteme). Still, these inquiries into general discursive relations were not aboutsocial relations per se but rather attempts to establish the general rules thatregulated the objects about which could be spoken, which, again, concerns pri-marily the content and object of speech rather than the specific relations amongspeaking subjects—though this may be exaggerating differences at the expenseof recognizing a common project.

7. In what follows, those fluent in the Lacanian idiom will see that I amside-stepping the critical fact that, strictly speaking, desire (though not puredesire) remains in the order of the Symbolic and the field of the Other (Shep-ardson, 1996). Here for reasons of simplicity and space, I am using phrases likethe “truth of desire” or the “truth of the unconscious” as shorthand, admittedlyproblematically, for the singular “knotting” of the subject or “fourth order”that weaves together the three registers, Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, and iscalled sinthome by Lacan (Ragland & Milovanovic, 2004).

8. As I (in press-a) have argued at length elsewhere, the so-called conflictbetween normative and scientific approaches in public administration concealsthe more basic issue of the notion of the representation of a given, positiveobject. This denies the necessity of exclusion in the act of representation.

9. Farmer (2005, pp. 66–69) has a lucid discussion of “what counts as true”that is close in spirit to what follows here.

10. Bourdieu (1986) describes this as a contest over the relative distribu-tion of the various forms of capital—economic, social, cultural, symbolic—where capital is accumulated labor in its materialized or “embodied” form thatenables people “to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or livinglabor” (p. 241).

11. A good example of the dangers in these kinds of decisions appears inMary Schmidt’s (1993) well-known article, “Grout.”

12. I have attempted to provide a formulation of the structure and processof this new discursive relationship grounded in classical and psychoanalyticsources. See Catlaw, “Authority, Representation, and the Contradictions ofPosttraditional Governing” (in press-b)

13. One might dispute Farmer’s assertion, however, that authentic hesita-tion should be motivated by moral principle, moral impulse, or conscience. In-deed Harmon (2005) questions whether it could be. Principled hesitation,further, could be read as a way out, a certain kind of avoidance of the aporia.There does not seem to be good reason—other than an appeal to a must—tobracket terms like justice, principle or even democracy from interrogation. In-



deed there may be very good reasons to subject such sacred terms to interroga-tion. Gilbert Rist (1997), for example, argues that “development” is mythologyinextricably linked with Western domination, social exclusion, and economicdeprivation. To talk about development, he argues, is to simply keep up appear-ances and carry on “as if” this program for “collective happiness” was some-thing other than a sham (pp. 226–231). Slavoj Zizek (2005) argues against thedepoliticized politics of human rights on the grounds that they are alibis formilitary interventions, legitimize the hegemony of the market capitalism, andprovide the ideological basis for the “fundamentalism of political correctness.”Alain Badiou (2002) makes a closely allied argument. For an outline of thecontemporary socio-political factors that, in general, may make Farmer’s posi-tion problematic, see McSwite (1997b). For a discussion of other differenceswith Farmer’s account, particular on the issues of the Socratic gadfly, seeCatlaw (in press-b).

14. The work of Sandra Kensen (2003; Kensen & Tops, 2004) and her col-leagues is, in this regard, exemplary.

15. For a good discussion of the various philosophical usages of “realism,”see Hacking (1983).

16. For discussions concerning the problem of a “metalanguage” that thisraises, see Fink (1995, pp. 138–146), Stavrakakis (1999, pp. 65–70), and Leupin(2004, pp. 38–39).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank Patricia Mooney-Nickel and two anony-mous reviewers for their helpful comments and criticism of this essay.

Thomas J. Catlaw is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs atArizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. His research interests include thehistory of public administration and political and social theory. His work hasappeared, among other places, in Administration & Society, American Reviewof Public Administration (in press), The Public Manager, and Journal for thePsychoanalysis of Culture & Society.

Performance Anxieties: Shifting Public Administration from the Relevant to the Real

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