State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality.

Dutil, Patrice A.

By STEFANO HARNEY. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 226, bibliographical references, index.

Written by a one-time member of the Ontario Public Service, this book reminds us that the topic of how the work of the state is interpreted by the people is largely unexplored. One can conclude after reading this book that it remains so.

The author is remarkably uninterested in the topic proclaimed by the title of his book. Instead, he offers an exploration of his own interpretations of some of the writings of Nicos Poulantzas, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (lately the authors of Empire [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000]). It is worth noting that Hardt endorses Harvey's book generously.

The first part of the text is the most interesting as Harney recounts his days in the Ontario government. He came to government as a constitutional policy adviser in 1992, quickly moved to the Ontario Antiracism Secretariat and then joined the political staff of the minister responsible. His career ended with the defeat of the New Democratic Party in Ontario in 1995. Harney then moved to the United States, where he now teaches sociology at City University of New York, College of Staten Island.

It is interesting to follow Harney as he reflects on his love/hate relationship with government work. As he says himself, "I had a lot of ambivalence about working for a social democratic government, about working as a manager in a government bureaucracy and about working generally" (p. 15). He freely admits that there was an inexorable pull to the work and that he derived great pleasure in working with obviously gifted and generous colleagues. The experience also taught him a great deal about the limits of power and about the limits of the state. The key moment for him was the Ontario government's confused reaction to the revival of the American musical Showboat in Toronto.

It is unfortunate that Harney did not pursue the significance of the episode in the rest of his book. Instead, he chose to focus on more recent Marxist notions of the state. The analysis brings him to the media presentation of government employees as something more than faceless bureaucrats, but his exploration is superficial at best. There are dozens of public opinion surveys from which to draw in order for him to build a case for a "cultural study" of the state. They are not used. There is rich material for a discussion of how public servants have been depicted (from traitors to superheroes) in Hollywood, but Harney shies away from a rigorous examination. Surely the link between how the public perceives public servants and the way the latter have been portrayed in film and on television is not immaterial. The picture, moreover, is complex: the popular American production Law and Order, to take one of his examples, presents a version that is different from previous police dramas. Harney chooses not to elaborate. (It is presented, however, as "logocentric and paranoid, authoritarian and potentially destructive subjugation of work" [p. 95].) I just call it good entertainment that has made tremendous strides in introducing a broad public to the often troubling negotiations that take place in determining the value of evidence, guilt and innocence. More importantly, how does Law and Order compare with the earlier Hill Street Blues or Homicide, two other path-breaking dramas? The phenomena of live-government-at-work such as Cops and Profiles from the Front Lines and networks such as Court TV or C-SPAN in the United States and CPAC in Canada (to name but a few!) does not exist in this author's environment.

Harney consistently turns to the "public administration" literature to find clues to explain his reality and--equally consistently--comes up empty: "I have said that state work might be understood as that labour which most knows itself as comparison, unitization and exchange," he writes at one point. "One would expect then, that the commentary on such work would be acutely aware of these operations. But as I will show, labour is consistently absent asa world-making activity in public administration, and in its absence, the state has a metaphysics of presence even stronger in this discourse than in our daily work" (p. 86). I would posit that one of the reasons Harney came up empty is simply because past authors would have had as much trouble in defining public administration as he chose to. That does not necessarily make their work less important. Harney's suspiciously narrow selection of the literature obviously serves his own purposes, and readers looking for Canadian material will be disappointed. This hamfisted technique is as easy for him to use as it is infuriating to the reader: he chooses his own straw men, carefully selects a few obscure quotes from their books, and slays them triumphantly. The product is a philosophical excursion that never reaches its destination, burdened as it is by a packsack heavy with jargon, self-reference and endless streams of broken arguments.

Harney's objective here is not to deepen our understanding of how the masses, in their "intellectuality," have come to interpret the role of the state. In his examination of the Al Gore initiatives to reinvent the federal government in the U.S., Nicos Poulantzas gets the most treatment. There is no new sense of how the state has adapted over the past fifteen years to tremendous political pressures. There is no sense of history or of how economic, social, intellectual, technological and even artistic and religious pressures have changed the work of the state. No attempt is made to distinguish between various government cultures. One is compelled to conclude that Harney considers the administrative culture of Ontario to be identical to that of the United States government. No attempt is made to distinguish between unionized and non-unionized labour, or between labour and management. In fact, there is no solid research underpinning this book. Worse still is the impenetrable style of the author. The concepts he advances are simply not complicated, and no couching of notions in subclauses can hide his obvious desire not to be understood.

Perhaps the oddest clue to the author's intentions comes in his final pages, where he recounts the experience of recently naturalized Haitians who were apparently turned away from voting booths at the conclusion of the U.S. presidential election in November 2000. Harney complains that the issue was not mentioned by either the "corporate press nor Gore or Ralph Nader" (p. 186). Yet he does not bother to explain the story at all, only concluding that "perhaps in walking away from those polling booths, one is walking away with administration itself, giving one's communist consent" (p. 188). I cannot explain what Harney means by that line, but I suspect that if the Haitians had wished to express some sort of "communist consent," they would have aimed their escape from hopelessness a few degrees west to Cuba.

Patrice A. Dutil is with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada.