Apples & Oranges Everywhere, but What of Fruit?

Apples &Oranges Everywhere, but What of Fruit?Author(s): Matthew WittSource: Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp. 574-581Published by: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25610638 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 11:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

M.E. Sharpe, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Administrative Theory&Praxis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.78 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 11:09:49 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mes

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25610638?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


574 Administrative Theory & Praxis Vol. 25, No. 4

Apples & Oranges Everywhere, But What of Fruit?

Matthew Witt

University of La Verne

Human nature itself in America exists on two irreconcilable planes,... stark

theory and... stark business; and in the back of its mind is heaven knows

what world of poetry, hidden away, too inaccessible, too intangible, too unreal in fact ever to be brought into open.

Van Wyck Brooks, 1915 (cited in Lanchner, 1998)1

Michael Spicer's essay explores the notion of negative liberty and its

implications for administrative praxis, notably so as the specter of state encroachments upon our civil liberties looms upon us in a Post-911 world.

Spicer's piece calls renewed attention to enduring fissures in political theory, in particular the contested boundaries of the right and the good existing between communitarian philosophy and constructivist liberalism. For

proponents of negative liberty, from is the preposition necessary to clarify how we should rightfully construe "liberty." For the putative proponents of

"positive" liberty, to is the preferred choice for qualifying liberty's essence.

Spicer's paper is an exhortation that we be mindful that our conceptions of

liberty have enduring and significant implications for PA praxis. Spicer's touchstone is the work of writer Isaiah Berlin, to whom Spicer

attributes the incisive and controversial notion negative liberty. The claim by Berlin that "the necessity of choosing between absolute claims...is an

inescapable characteristic of the human condition [that] gives its value to freedom...as an end in itself (Berlin, 1969, p. 169, as cited in Spicer, this

issue) frames the core of Spicer's exhortation that PA temper what Spicer considers to be a preoccupation with positive liberty, a preoccupation he ascribes to those whom he feels misconstrue liberty with equality and justice, two worthwhile but distinctively different aspirations from liberty. Moreover,

according to Spicer, construing concerns with equality and justice as matters

of liberty imperils all three. The notion that choices we make which bear upon our core values?

decisions made under pressure to honor our "true" selves?are ultimately resolved only through the renunciation of competing claims we face, begs the

question: what sort of individual are we talking about? An assumption is

implied here: that as individuals we seek a certain stasis in the face of

competing claims on our identity. Notably, feminist writers challenge this



Dialogue 575

claim, stressing how the struggle to resolve conflicting claims on our identities does not in the first place (or perhaps ever) compel us to abjure one claim in

preference to another, rather; competing claims compel more hybridization and creative assimilation than this-not-that choice making. The self is not made whole by splitting, as it were (Benhabib, 2002; Bickford, 1995; Disch, 1995).

Besides this, Spicer's claims that negative freedom fosters pluralism face at

their core a paradox: if difference (pluralism) of values is a thing we should be careful not to subordinate to desires for commonality, consensus and the like, then is the argument not tautology? Can we not say that difference is the thing we have in common? Does this not imply some irreducible subset of common

interests? Given this, how shall we insure the continued existence of our common stake in seeing things differently? This is the thrust of the communitarian challenge to the libertarian claims of necessity for negative freedom. As communitarian philosopher Michael Sandel (1996) reminds us:

"[E]ven the liberty to pursue our own ends depends on preserving the freedom of our political community, which depends in turn on the willingness to put the common good above our private interests" (p. 26).

Spicer claims that much of PA theory has sought to elucidate under what conditions people are most likely to realize their "authentic" selves. Beginning with communitarian theorist Charles Taylor, Spicer sizes up and challenges a tradition of normative theory as wide-ranging as the work of Robert Denhardt and Chris Argyris, to the regular contributors to this journal, including Lisa

Zanetti, Adrian Carr, and Eva S0renson. The works of these theorists,

according to Spicer, share in common presumptions about "the good life" that are derivative in the first place of a monist conceit Spicer traces as far back as

Plato, then more recently to social theorist Abraham Maslow. As such, according to Spicer, this literature has an unrepentant urge to forefront unseen

(non-empirical) forces as the true impediments to human freedom. This is what we might term, with Spicer, the "if only" literature: a literature

that has as its fundamental premise (a faith) that "if only" people were made aware of the unseen forces that limit, curb, inhibit the emancipation of their "true selves," they could begin to realize their full potential as human beings. This is the crux of Spicer's alarm over PA theory: that this writing has assimilated concerns from neo-Marxist critical theory and feminist/

psychoanalytic frameworks in a fashion that obscures the nettlesome

propensity of state based domination to emerge at just those moments in

history when people forget that an essential feature of freedom is liberty from doctrinaire claims about what society should (must) embark upon. All totalitarian regimes begin with the impulse to prescribe the good, and in so

doing eclipse the virtues inherent in the categorical right the individual must retain to refuse the good as the majority would have it.




It is very tempting to accept Spicer's cautionary tale about distinguishing

positive from negative liberty at face value. The increasingly zealous

incursion of governmental surveillance into our lives should deeply trouble

public administrators. Moreover, Spicer frames the matter of negative liberty in compelling terms, as when he reminds us of the perils attending over

weaning interpretations of "the good." Still, one struggles with the putative dichotomies Spicer urges we accept. I suspect I feel no more acutely than

many others the need to denounce Tsar Aschroft, thus; I want to make certain I

am doing so on firm ground. As such, I will proceed with the most fervent

argument opposing Spicer (and Berlin) that I can construe (in preparation for

the real deal: Ashcroft himself). Thus I shall proceed as follows: the

fundamental antagonism between "negative" and "positive" liberty as

construed by Berlin, and explicated by Spicer, seems to rest on a straw man

argument on the one hand, and an incoherent claim on the other.

The straw man argument is that writers advocating "positive" liberty (the

liberty to) tend to position normative theory in terms that are correctly construed as oppositional to the "negative" liberty Berlin presumptively argues for. In this I am reminded that, although distinctive, apples and oranges are still fruit, as follows....

Spicer focuses on Eva S0renson's recent speculations (S0renson, 2002) about the uses of "political capital," which S0renson tells us consist in every individual having "access to channels of influence and other resources.. .necessary to affect the political decisions that have impact on their

lives" (p. 712). Moreover, according to S0renson, each individual should

possess "the self confidence, confidence in the system, and political know

how necessary to gain influence in processes of societal governance," and so

on (p. 712). S0renson does claim that these conditions imply forms of

"positive liberty," but no where does she state the ends towards which this

liberty should be directed in any terms that in the least bit contradict Berlin.

Where Berlin believes that individuals can develop only as the result of

struggling with the competing claims on their moral essences, S0renson insists

that politics is rightly construed as a process that enables people to realize their

individual and collective dreams. Had S0renson specified the content those

dreams should consist of, then yes; she would fall neatly in a camp

oppositional to Berlin. But nowhere does S0renson do so. Making the case for

"network governance," S0renson was focused almost exclusively on the form

of democracy, not its content.

In every instance?Argyris, Denhardt, Zanetti, Carr, S0renson or any of the

communitarians or critical theorists?the authors cited by Spicer each posit claims on democratic praxis that bear an essential (though these authors are

not likely to admit) kinship with Berlin. Each insists that democracy requires as its first effect the removal of some form of barrier. For Berlin this barrier is



Dialogue 577

some presumption (embodied by some state based authority) about what individuals need to believe or to feel. For critical theorists, the pertinent barriers individuals face are virtually the same: consisting of received truths which derive their appeal from the conformity to authority they compel. As

such, critical theorists and liberals like Berlin are much more congruent than

oppositional. In this sense, communitarians could claim the mantel of

"negative liberty," or "liberty from (some presumed obstacle to self

realization)." Where liberals fear that power will demand acquiescence, critical theorists fear power's ability to induce the same thing. The difference is one of force on the one hand, seduction on the other.

Spicer believes that Berlin's argument, derived as it is from exhortations

against monism and the impulses such an orientation tends to produce (National Socialism, Soviet and Asian Communism), is of a species that is antithetical to the notion that "false consciousness" exists as a barrier to

"emancipation." But the set of claims each of these arguments make (liberal and communitarian) derives from the premise that the civic sphere (i.e., government) is legitimate only insofar as the individual is not overrun by received truths originating from some source outside herself. Liberals concern themselves with a putative empirical reality. Critical theorists are concerned with pre-potentialities, the realm of psychological phenomena. Liberals claim

history provides lessons. For critical theorists, "history" consists mostly of

epiphenomena. In fact and in essence, the negative and positive (the to and the from) are

mutually constitutive phenomena. Similarly, that which is (empirical) was at some time that which was becoming (metaphysical). Today's fertilized egg is tomorrow's chicken. Theory making (of all claims) often emphasizes egginess to the point of distorting chickeness, and vice versa, a predilection that is both burden and conceit.

Another feature of Berlin's thought, which Spicer makes repeated reference to, is the notion that society necessarily imposes upon us a plurality of demands, and that our psychic resolution of these demands can never be

complete. The imperative we face, according to Berlin, is that one choice

necessarily forecloses others. To be Jewish is not merely a choice, but a refusal of other, competing demands upon our souls (e.g., Moslem or

Christian). Taken in total, these claims suggest Spicer feels that PA theory parlays in

labeling essences that are never revealed. In this sense, Spicer is advocating Lockean (a.k.a. minimalist) liberalism, whose empiricism bears an essential

kinship with Berlin.2 Spicer recounts how the argument negative freedom

presents is not based upon abstract principles but on the (presumptively correct) interpretation of historic "reality." Here I am drawn (as I often am when pondering PA theory) to works of art, for these bend (and blend) the




edges of the theoretic and empirical, the received and the derived, the is and that which might be. In this particular instance, the work of the cubists seems

highly instructive, especially the more didactic, theoretic works of artists

Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Picasso's famous rendering of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica, imposes

upon the viewer the categorical yet at the same time very personal experience that suffering and anguish represent to us. This painting succeeds, like all

lasting artwork, not because of resolved tensions or disavowed perspectives, but through the singular act of contemplating within two dimensions a world that exists through myriad dimensions in our imagination. This act of

transmogrifying space is both invitation and commentary: an invitation to

ponder both the shared and idiosyncratic features of human experience, and a

commentary on the disorienting effects trauma imposes upon the human

psyche. A typical motif of early cubism involves positioning each object within a

composition onto a rectangular field of solid color, thus bestowing each

objective representation its own two dimensional field of reference,

distinctively offset from each other objective representation.3 Here the early work of Braque is particularly instructive, as with Still Life With Guitar, and Violin and Glass. Viewing such depictions of mundane still life, we are struck

by the gesture to dissolve objects of their color, then to reconstitute this color into geonmetric perspective is thus given its own frame, yet taken in total, these frames of color are subverted by the picture frame proper. Which frame,

we are left to ponder, is the "real" frame of the "picture" in view? Of what use

is a frame, of what constancy are borders anyway? What do, should, they mean to us?

In some (though limited) ways like cubist art, critical theory and

feminist/psychoanalytic epistemologies are efforts to challenge what we take to be the phenomenological boundaries?the picture frame?of our world. The foundational premise of critical theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis is

that all action occurs, in one form or another, after the fact of some act of force, some unchallenged display of will by one entity which succeeds over the

objections of others, however such objections may be conveyed. Perhaps

significantly, Spicer does not surface or challenge this premise about power. Can he? Can anyone?

What could be more monist than the presumption, implied by Spicer, that

the / is a thing to be known (as Descartes would assure us, and Locke would

presume); a thing that is, at the very least, not a you! Not stated, but clearly

signaled here, is what Sandel (1996) terms the "voluntarist" assumption of

liberalist thinking: the notion that all action is voluntary, that the big "S" Self

precedes any actions it undertakes.



Dialogue 579

Is this the coherence Berlin exhorts us to recognize? Is this coherence at all? If the choice making capacity of the self is formed prior to the moment of

facing a choice (for how can a choice be faced without capacity?) then how was this capacity formed in the first place? Through fate? Can life be reduced to an epic struggle to manifest one's will in the face of forces compelling stultifying conformity? If we are all so absorbed with manifesting our will to

individuate, then imagine the chirpy exhortation Just do it! followed by the

equally smug chorus Just did it! (followed by Veni, vidi, vici!) Smuggled into this theorizing is the notion that the self is in the first place a "choice maker" in

matters bearing upon its soul. Using as Berlin himself does claims to

empirically categorical "facts," we might ask: are not the lived experiences of countless people matters more the result of choice taking than of choice

making? Dictators do not gain their power as the result of sheer acts of will, true enough. All conventions of power are in some fashion reciprocally generated and validated. Still, this begs the question: where does positive freedom begin and negative freedom end? Is there a neat line dividing Germany pre- and post-1933? Surely no more so than there is a singular vantage point from which to view and interpret Picasso's Guernica.

French cubist Fernand Leger criticized Picasso and Braque for failing to

capture the plasticity existing between traditionalist understandings of space and form and the industrial/machine aesthetic that he believed was remaking human perception and meaning at the time these painters produced their work. But one has only to look at two or three of Leger's paintings to see how burdened they are by the fashion in which the artist superimposes a machine aesthetic onto human and organic forms.4 Why, one wonders, did Leger not work in the opposite direction? That is to say, why did he pre-position the one

(machine) over the other (organic form)? Why did he preposition at all? In reference to his most mature work (generally considered to begin with

his Studio series, spanning the early 1940s through the 50s), Braque would comment:

No object can be tied down to any one sort of reality; a stone may be part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal weapon, a pebble on a beach or

anything else you like... Every thing... is subject to metamorphosis,

everything changes according to circumstance. So when you ask me

whether a particular form in one of my paintings depicts a woman's head, a fish, a vase, or a bird or all four at once, I can't give you a categorical answer, for this "metamorphic" confusion is fundamental to what I am

out to express. (Richardson, 1955, quoted in Golding, 1997, p. 9)

Of poetry, Braque would comment:

Objects do not exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony one

reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence...which makes everything




possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true

poetry, (p. 15)

Perhaps in the end freedom/liberty is not the answer, not a solution, but more usefully pondered as a dilemma, a question unto itself, un-prepossessed by prepositions (to, from, etc.) that distort more than clarify its essential

meaning: Freedom?

Spicer claims that David Farmer's (1998) construct anti-administration

epitomizes PA practiced in terms established by American Constitutionalism: that anti-administration has as its referent the minority viewpoint. I'm not sure

what Farmer would make of so neat a correspondence between his thought and

Constitutionalism. But I doubt Farmer would juxtapose anti-administration to

the proponents of "positive" liberty any more than he would do the same in

regards to "negative liberty." I only know that Farmer's allusions elsewhere to

the "the allure of rhetoric and the truancy of poetry" suggest thought that is not

easily consigned to a particular view on freedom (see Farmer, 2003). Could it

be that Farmer is more compelled by fruit than apples and oranges? After Braque (and Farmer), perhaps we would do better to establish rapport

with "freedom" before assigning to it this or that pre-position. Michael Spicer, thank you for your well-wrought observations and challenge. Ashcroft, are

you listening?

ENDNOTES

1. Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature says this about Brooks: "In 1908 Brooks

published his first book, The Wine of the Puritans, in which he blamed the Puritan

heritage for America's cultural shortcomings. He explored this theme more thoroughly in his first major work, America 's Coming-of-Age (1915), with its thesis that the Puritan

duality separating the spiritual from the material had resulted in a corresponding split in

contemporary American culture between 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow'."

2. Locke crafted his thought within the context of England's "Glorious Revolution,"

the first fully bourgeois revolt in European history. At that time, absolute monarchy

imposed force in an absolute fashion. This enduring concern with manifest (as opposed to latent) force continues to color contemporary liberal thought in a fashion, I believe, that frames its antagonism with critical theory.

3. Objective, in this case, is intended as it has been traditionally used in art, as in not.

figurative, which signifies the depiction of individuals in portraiture. Cubism would

radically alter traditional notions of object and figure, but the terminology

distinguishing the two would remain in tact throughout most of the 20th Century.

4. The Holly Leaf is an excellent representation of Leger's preoccupation with

"plasticity" as he viewed it.



Dialogue 581

REFERENCES

Brooks, V.W. (1915/75). America's coming of age. New York: Octagon Books.

Benhabib, S. (2002). The claims of culture: Equality and diversity in the global era.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bickford, S. (1995). In the presence of others: Arendt and Anzald?a on the paradox of

public appearance. In B. Honig, (Ed.), Re-reading the canon: Feminist

interpretations of Hannah Arendt (pp. 313-336). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Disch, L. J. (1995). On friendship in troubled times. In B. Honig, (Ed.), Re-reading the canon: Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt (pp. 285-312). University Park:

Pennsylvania State University Press.

Farmer, D. (1998). Introduction: Listening to other voices. In D. J. Farmer (Ed.),

Papers on the art of anti-administration (pp. 1-9). Burke, VA: Chatelaine Press.

Farmer, D. J. (2003). The allure of rhetoric and the truancy of poetry. Administrative

Theory & Praxis, 25, 9-36.

Golding, J. (1997). The late paintings, an introduction. In J. Golding, (Ed.), Braque: The late works (pp. 1-14). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

S0renson, E. (2002). Democratic theory and network governance. Administrative

Theory & Praxis, 24, 693-721.

Too Much Negative Liberty? too little positive liberty?

(Or Why Berlin's Idea All Depends on Its Cultural Context)

Richard Stillman

University of Colorado at Denver

I read with interest Michael Spicer's "Masks of Freedom." Like his other

writings such as his recent book, Public Administration and the State (2001), this essay provokes and challenges us to think, think hard about central issues of our field, which I believe is a real plus. Professor Spicer, drawing upon Isaiah Berlin, reminds us that there are two sides to liberty, both negative and

positive sides, and that we in public administration ignore the former at our own peril. As is said, if the art of teaching is the art of repetition, helping us not



Documents

Apples & Oranges Everywhere, but What of Fruit?