Round #2: Response to Other Papers in the Special Issue of ATPAuthor(s): Adrian CarrSource: Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1996), pp. 57-59Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25611147 .

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Adrian Carr I University of Western Sydney, Nepean I

ROUND #2

RESPONSE TO OTHER PAPERS IN THE SPECIAL ISSUE OF ATP

Administrative Theory & Praxis, 18(1): 57-59, 1996.

In reading the contributions to this special issue, I find I have a great deal of empathy for the paper by

Goodsell. One the one hand, he accuses postmodernism as 'wallowing in despair* which is very similar to the view that I raised from Madsen's work, namely that

postmodernism engenders an 'ideology of resignation' and indeed masks the real authorship of social

arrangements.1 On the other hand, Goodsell wishes to

reject the positivistic, cognitive emphasis and the economic metaphors/language that seems to plague our

field. Goodsell's solution for rescue from the

postmodernist pretensions and positivist proclivity is one

that places the emotion of passion as the major touchstone for what is to count as being real. It is at this

point I part company with his thesis.

Organizations are clearly domains of emotion. The emotions of greed, passion, fear, love, hate, etc. are

ever-present and are often dressed down in the drab

clothing that is presented as rationality while at the same time they maybe used in the dramaturgy of presenting the 'rationality.' Organization structures seem to elicit a

surface sanity that belies passion. Society adds to this

complexity in that 'acceptable' displays of passion are

culturally mediated. This said, to elevate passion in the manner advocated by Goodsell is not going to help us in the quest for what is 'real' because emotion itself as both a feeling and display is an outcome of a range of

psychodynamic processes that serve to distort, conceal, and manipulate 'reality.' Moreover, at another level, the unconscious psychodynamics that are involved here can be triggered and manipulated by 'invisible hands.' These last two sentences perhaps need some amplification.

In our efforts to deal with anxiety and potentially anxiety producing situations, psychoanalytic theory gives us to understand that we may engage a variety of defense mechanisms such as repression (a defense that

accompanies most other defense mechanisms),

regression, rationalization, denial, sublimation,

projection, displacement, reaction formation, etc. These

largely unconscious defenses are employed to

fundamentally avoid what would otherwise constitute,

psychodynamically, a danger situation and they act to

conceal, distort, and obscure each person's reality. Psychoanalysis seeks to discover these repressed 'memories' through its techniques of free association, dream analysis, etc. for it is argued that these memories are still 'active' in the unconscious in the sense that they may continue to influence the individual's behavior. Some of these defenses work through a distortion of

reality. One of the most primitive defenses is one that Melanie Klein and others termed 'splitting,' where individuals dichotomize the world into 'good' and 'bad'

objects ?

idealizing the good and, through projection, demonizing the bad. In the arena of public administration such splitting is hardly conducive to

reflective, measured consideration and a willingness to confront unpleasant issues but more to the establishment of a 'them' and 'us' mentality where what is real, let alone ~ dare I say

? 'fact,' is problematic.

At another level, a distortion can be installed through the introjection of what Marcuse called 'false needs' ? a

matter discussed in my paper. The ideologies that seek to manipulate and piggy-back upon the realm of

psychodynamic processes again gives us a false lead to what this emotion really represents. We become

entrapped in what others would like us to believe is the

necessary reality ? their real world. In my free

association with this last sentence, I am reminded of the old saying that 'schizophrenics build castles in the air and psychiatrists play in them.' In whose castles are we

being let 'loose' to play?

The paper by Fox and Miller has also struck a

responsive chord with the line of argument I have advanced in highlighting some of the shortcomings of

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postmodernist claims. I do however feel a little uneasy by the real-hyperreal dichotomy they are advancing. This

Baudrillard-type of dichotomy reminds me also of Ricoeur's pseudodichotomy between psychical reality and material reality. My unease, I think, stems from the

precarious status of ideology in such dichotomizing, almost giving it a bicameral and artificial nature. There

again, perhaps my unease is contaminated by their swift

advocacy of constructionism.

The umbrella of constructivism that includes

intuitionism, finitism, and formalism has, of course, its heartland in mathematics, but its very phenomenological essence that commends it to the social 'sciences' obscures the primacy and potency of ideology. The social relations that they seek to understand are of a contrived nature that have become sedimented in the

psyche. The construction that is being advocated must be

recognized as itself being a mediated construction, mediated in large degree by language, even if the venue is the internals of our head. This language is infected by and a vehicle of ideology which, as one of my

colleagues and I have previously argued, can be countered if one were to adopt a reflexive cross-cultural and historically situated perspective (see Carr &

Leivesley, 1995). Without such a perspective, we

continue to fall into the trap of conceiving the present arrangements as permanent arrangements.

Farmer's paper advocates we use Derrida's

introspective activity of deconstruction to construct

oppositional realities. Derrida's 'play of difference' in the case of Farmer involves the juxtaposition of administration against anti-administration, using this as a kind of heuristic device. I believe such an approach fundamentally does not advance our cause. Briefly, the

sport of deconstruction that Farmer equates with good reading and this clash of opposites leaves us with a

number of paradoxes and conceptual difficulties. In a

world with texts and no referents, with signifiers but

obscured or doubtful subjects, what vantage-point is to

guide our choices, even more so when the language of our field itself has contested or multiple meanings and

would admit multiple alternatives in the assemblage of

the clash of opposites? Language games may conceal

and divert us from recognizing the ideological architecture and freight carried through the choice and

assemblage of language itself. At the same time, the

psychodynamics that may also be at play here, e.g.

splitting, are left unacknowledged let alone examined for

their effects. At risk also is the possibilities of a

misreading of an aspect of a text when its context is

ignored for it is the relational context that may give a

proposed meaning to a word or action. Headlines in

newspapers are a classic example of 'non-sense* when not seen in the context of the article and of the

prevailing commonsense knowledges.

McSwite's contribution to the debate is to seek somewhat to recast it along other lines by asking us to

initially consider the role of the idea of the real in

creating our sense of reality. This is to take the debate

away from the dichotomy of modern-postmodern, a view with which I have great sympathy. In a recent International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of

Organizations debate, conducted via the internet on the

topic of chaos theory, I argued at some length that the human condition appears to be such that we display a

proclivity to remove uncertainty from our lives, to try to become all-knowing and to see ourselves collectively to be in control. The creation of labels such as fuzzy logic, chaos theory, and so on seems to appease this need, as does our creation of metaphorical fictions such as the 'mind.' There appears to be a need to have an answer,

whether that be in a 'fantasy' or theory, grounded fact or whatever. A danger that arises in such a process is that of reductionism where some become intent upon trying to stuff our conceptual, intellectual, epistemological forebears into two by two matrices and then to regard their work forevermore as a part of that

quadrant. It is in this context that the debate over ' What

is real' might be adjourned to reconsider what is included in the postmodern and modern condition.

McSwite is seeking to withdraw from the field to let others continue to carry on a debate on a playing field that we may also not like to play on! In my case, for

example, the work of the Frankfurt school and the

enriching insights from depth psychology with which I have a strong affinity, does not fit neatly into a

postmodern-modern dichotomy as far as I am concerned. This may be the reason why I keep returning to my familiar territory for it seems to have been overlooked or obscured in a world of 'splitting' that would label

such territory as modernism.

McSwite's instrumentalist approach to the debate asks us to consider our field as being divided on the question of the purpose and responsibility of public administration. From such a consideration it is suggested that there are two opposing camps which take a different view on the sense of the real. These views are labeled as

an 'authoritative real' and/or a 'tentative real.' I have

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already discussed the difficulty with such dichotomies

and this appears to be a variation on that theme. My major concern continues to be the lack of consideration of an invisible hand in social relations or any backstage

prompting for these received views of public administration. Ideology becomes only tangentially addressed.

In developing my critique to other paper in this

special edition, I adopted a methodology of reading each

paper and then responding with my electronic pencil before moving on to read and respond to the next paper. In reading the paper by Marshall I found a similar

mixture of resonance and discordance with the ideas I have already canvassed. The resonance comes in the

form of both the denouncing of logical positivism and

the issue of Cartesian anxiety. The discordance comes in

the form of Marshall's advocacy of language and

textuality as our focus for analysis and in particular the call for us to use the 'analytical strategy' of deconstruction. A work of Herbert Simon is given the deconstruction 'treatment' but this very example really only serves to highlight the inadequacy of the analytical and methodological approach that Marshall is

advocating.

Simon's Administrative Behavior, when it is taken as a whole, is an excellent example of pseudo-knowledge, entrapped in and enriching a structural functionalist

approach to administration that became part of an

advocacy of a technical notion of administration (see Carr, 1989). The human relations movement that

preceded Simon' s work was similarly ideological in its

myopia, focusing as it did upon the individual and

diverting our eyes from the need for institutional change. The theoretical and ideological continuity that Simon' s work represents is masked or overlooked in the minutiae of problematic 'truths' gleaned from deconstruction. So,

NOTE

1 Indeed, in preparing this manuscript it strikes me that

the current tension over globalization has much in common with some elements of a postmodern world, but, here again, we encounter an ideology of resignation inasmuch as economic imperatives and determinism seems to negate agency.

too, a consideration of how the very tool of analysis, deconstruction, itself may have some kinship to a

broader ideology. It also seems somewhat of a paradox or ironic that the postmodern fetish with signs is still

largely devoid of a coherent explanation of how these

signs gain meaning!

I suppose the lack of self reflectiveness on the part of

postmodernism generally continues to be my major irritation. I know I am not alone in this discomfort.

Rosenau (1992, Chapter 9), for example, similarly seems

to share my concern and raises a number of contradictions in postmodern thinking that are consistent with the broader position taken in this critique. Some of these contradictions can be briefly summarized as

including (1) postmodernist denounce logic and reason

yet they themselves engage in deconstruction which is itself a logical and reasoned instrument; (2) they denounce theory in its relationship to truth but in so

doing use a theory to perform such an undertaking; (3) in a world of different, non-privileged interpretations, how can the postmodernist defend their concentration

upon what they regard as the hidden, the neglected, and the silent? ~ surely this reflects a value system in favor of one group to the neglect of others; (4) if the

postmodernist view is superior to that of Enlightenment, then that judgment puts their view as a privileged position; (5) while denouncing the inconsistencies that

appear within modernism, postmodernists resist any

requirement to consistency norms; and (6)

postmodernists argue that their utterances and writing is but a local narrative, "very few postmodernists entirely relinquish the truth claims of what they write" (Rosenau, 1992, p. 177). These self-contradictions might actually be a useful start for postmodernists to reconsider their own epistemological, ontological and ideological assumptions.

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