Selected Unpublished Papers
A second paper in my ongoing examination of the work of Alain Badiou and its possibilities for public administration--and a contribution to and qualification of my interest, too, in love as political concept. The paper describes Badiou's notion of the Event and how love is, distinctively, one kind of Event though which a Truth (a truth-procedure) is produced. I spend a good amount of time with Badiou's discussion of fidelity and the process through which worlds grounded in particular truth-events are generated. I argue from this that Badiou's doesn't help us to understand mundane "ontic" matters like everyday governing but try to extend his work by suggesting that fidelity to political Events and the unfolding of "political sequences" that "incorporates" a political body may be called "governing" (in the governmentality sense of the term, the conduct of conduct). I then locate this approach to ethics in terms of how we proceed in the work of governing.
This paper was delivered as part of a panel of invited commentary on an article by David Rosenbloom and Robert Durant, "The Hollowing Out of American Public Administration." While generally sympathetic to their cause, I raise doubts about whether their approach to the matters is sufficient. In particular I wonder how big their "big tent" approach to the field is and whether their is a place for critical theory, their insistence that academics must delivered "practical" knowledge to practitioners, and their failure to situate their critique of academic research within the broader dynamics of neoliberalization. For 30 years academic public administration has advanced neoliberalization via the new public management and now academics are simply being hoisted on their own petard--sometimes quite happily.
This paper explores "thing theory" (e.g. Graham Harman, Alfonso Lingus) and the human-object divide in the domain of public administration. We suggest that things or objects get short-shrift in public administration scholarship. Positivists do not think about things at all and constructivists end up policing the divide between humans and things. They accept objects only insofar as they are, in their being, for human consciousness. As such the ontological status of objects, their be-ing, is ignored and they become epistemological problems (How do we know them?). We suggest that taking things more seriously in their own right could change how we approach the work of governance.
noAs paper that I always liked but never could find a home for, this manuscript explores the role of emotion and affect in creating intelligible social contexts. It begins from the classical question of "How is society possible?" and the thought of Thomas Hobbes. I explore the nuanced manner in which Hobbes suggested that fear maintained social order and how, later on, this becomes replicated in notions of organizational neutrality, A secondary question is the role of authority in generating fear and maintaining social order. The paper opens into but only hints at the possibility of love as an alternative political affect for generating a different modality of social order--the beginning of my ongoing preoccupation with this theme. This paper was a favorite of Alex Kouzmin and Kym Thorne, whom I miss very much. RIP, comrades.