Round #3: Reply to Other Responses in This Special IssueAuthor(s): Adrian CarrSource: Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1996), pp. 43-44Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25611140 .

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Adrian Oar I University of Western Sydney, Nepean I

ROUND #3

REPLY TO OTHER RESPONSES

IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE

Administrative Theory & Praxis, 18(1): 43-44, 1996.

The 'response' section in this somewhat discursive format has produced a round of critical reflection on the

original seven papers. Those who sought to address the

position I argued in my original contribution offered a

critique and distortion that was anticipated and largely covered in my response. Thus, I will not keep my reader

long in this final section. One can note, for example, in

the response of Fox and Miller in particular, the

unconscious defense of splitting in the face of unpleasant and fundamentally different views, and, through

projection, a demonizing of my Freudian left position and sympathy for the French socio-psychoanalytic movement. They dismiss it as part of 'modernism' - an

interesting charge in the face of postmodernist claims to

be appropriating insights from both Freud and the

Frankfurt school! To use imagery such as 'tweed-coats'

and the like to try to further paint my position as

conservative says much about the authors' value

assumptions which, they presume, might appeal to the

reader, as well as their proclivity for dichotomy. Their abandonment of the 'rules' of engagement and the

epistemological standards with which they charge others as having to meet was anticipated and responded to in

my last contribution.

These same authors also dispute my assertion that

postmodernism "reifies language." They argue that "the

postmodern denial-of-privilege move fractures the

relationship between signs and signified ..." No doubt

they will have been somewhat further incensed by my additional argument, in the response part of this paper, that a claim of denial-of-privilege is itself but one of the

many self-contradictions in postmodern thinking. If there is no privileged position, on what basis do they mount their critique? If there is no privileged position, why do

they 'feel a need' to engage defense mechanisms such as

splitting? If there is no privileged position, how can they defend a value system where the focus is upon the

hidden, the neglected, and the silent to the neglect of other groups? If there is no privileged position, how can

they defend being party to espousing linguistic determination to the neglect of the social?

One of the major issues that continues to emerge from

those contributions broadly advocating a postmodern position (what I sense is a trend for the immediate future in this arena) is a dilemma over human agency and the

precariousness or diminution of the status of the subject. It is a matter that I hope to be more comprehensively addressing in a separate piece later in the year. For now, I would like to observe that this is a particularly significant issue for fields, like that of public administration, that have an affinity to the broader social 'sciences' and humanities. Rosenau (1992) suggests that, on this issue, the postmodernist community tends to fall

into one of two camps. One camp she describes as being

anti-subject or 'skeptical' and anti-humanistic. The

subject is viewed as merely a fictitious creation. This

group comprises much of the popularist postmodernists like Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Wellmer, etc., and in

my original paper were discussed in relation to the thematic of the death-of-the-subject. A lesser known

group Rosenau labels ' affirmatives' who are, broadly

speaking, trying to return the subject to the text - not the modernist subject but a postmodern alternative. Theorists such as Touraine, Kristeva, and Bourdieu are

discussed in this latter context. I noted in my original paper that the struggle for skeptical postmodernists to

purge themselves of a subject. This struggle has been in

vain, in my view, and has had the effect of undermining any credibility to their broader position, notwithstanding my other criticisms about their 'truth' claims.

In the response section of this special issue, what seems to have emerged more clearly from those

advocating postmodern views is really a reflection of the affirmative camp's struggle to return a subject to the text. It is in this context that the 'what is real' theme of this special issue has become more of a venue or stage for these authors to articulate their version of the

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postmodern subject. The concept of public administration without having a subject would appear absurd as would

any notion of a subjectless social 'science.1 Thus, one

might anticipate that, in the coming years, debates over the possible contribution of postmodernist thought to

public administrative theory and praxis will include, as a central feature, a reconceptualization of the subject. The criteria by which the field is to judge the truth claims of such a variety of reconceptualizations will, themselves, engender an interesting joust. For my part, such reconceptualization needs to have a grounded (i.e.

not a metaphysic) explanatory capacity, acknowledging and giving insight into the broader ideological architecture and freight carried by and within social

arrangements. Postmodernists1 current failure to address the range of political and agency questions that I have raised in this paper implies a liberal pluralism (see Alford, 1994) that I find offensive (read unreal), and its abstraction of the individual and group would appear to

render the emancipatory potential of postmodernism as, at best, somewhat obscure.

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