Summary
The four themes that have enlivened and cultivated the contestable terrain of Postmodern Public Administration are: 1. energy fields, 2. empiricism, 3. warrants for discourse, and 4. universalism. Public energy fields mean all the activities, practices, and intentions that insinuate themselves into questions of what to do next. Empiricism is a metanarrative that insists it is not a metanarrative, a politics that insists it is apolitical. Warrants for discourse seemed that some norms and practices had the potential for improving the quality of public discourse, while other norms and practices were an impediment. Cacophony -- and a plethora of energy fields -- is much preferable to any monistic universalism, even a universalism that wraps itself in beguiling terms such as freedom and emancipation. Postmodernism is the refusal to describe humanity's progress as a rational process whose principles can be mastered, as though historical progress, were one more iteration of the laws of science.
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Extract
Redescribing Public Administration
INTRODUCTION
The essays in this symposium have covered a wide swath of commentary and criticisms for and against postmodern thought in general and Postmodern Public Administration in particular. Let me first comment briefly on them.When they position themselves to declare one thing "over," another thing a "failure" and their own thing as the way to "build an alternative world," McSwite teeters on the brink of self-indulgence. But that is all right because theirs is a brilliant essay nonetheless. This remarkably original critique is also piercingly insightful in its analysis of the research problem in the social sciences. Even more focused on research, Burnier's piece seeks to discipline warrants for discourse through empirical measures. Her well-considered research protocol is agnostic with respect to "facts," and wide-open with respect to interpretation. In a transcendental turn, King's essay declines to jump with both feet into the relativistic swimming pool with the rest of us playful anti-foundationalists. She prefers the secure mooring of foundational meaning to the free play of signifiers. While King writes "There is a deep apparent need in American culture for something to believe in and to rely upon as a moral/structural foundation," I expect we are better off interrogating these deep American moral needs rather than fussing over them. The Ventriss essay rehearses an enduring genre of argument that emanates from would-be emancipators and/or rational ethicists who realize, with some degree of disappointment, that postmodern thought does not share the same social-structural assumptions or logocentric postulations, and therefore has a different research agenda as well. The antifoundationalism (hence anti-universalism) of postmodern thought puts it at odds with a wide variety of religions, philosophies, ideologies and-isms.Popes, preachers, and right-wing pundits especially deride the specter of postmodernism, but so do neo-Marxist emanc...See the full content of this document
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