| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Stefano Harney, State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2002)

STEFANO HARNEY's State Work ends with the observation that the state, as an object of Left/social movement strategy, can no longer be either "quarantined" or smashed. "The state," he says, "is with us, in capitalism or revolution." (188) His book explores the implications of the state's continued presence — and, he would say, growth — at a time when discourses of "reinvention" and "reengineering" claim progress in precisely the opposite direction. His approach is innovative, insightful, and at times incomprehensible, but it has produced what is ultimately an important work. For this reader, the book's contributions are most compelling around issues related to the state's relations with social movements, its boundaries and "effects," and what Harney calls the "specter of government as a workplace."

State Work takes the form of an extended reflection on the author's three-year experience in the Ontario Antiracism Secretariat under Bob Rae's NDP. Harney is an academic and activist who was drawn into government, he says, to defend the antiracism movement. (28) Not surprisingly, his new role as a manager in a social democratic government proved troubling, and the book traces his efforts to explore it, focusing especially on the meaning of his daily work. Harney finds very little in the public administration literature that speaks to him, so he begins a long trek through a variety of postmodern and neo-Marxist approaches, taking in Al Gore's initiatives under the Clinton Administration, cultural touchstones like The X-Files, and theorists like Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, and Nicos Poulantzas.

Strangely, given the influence of Poulantzas, Harney's engagement with state work is largely undifferentiated with respect to class. His problematic is the nature of state work in general, and his arguments are pitched at that level of abstraction. Although there are some ironic asides about "working managers" when Harney's group is briefed by a management consultant (66-70), he never deals satisfactorily with the structural difference between his position and the position of most frontline workers. A central flaw of public administration lies in its propensity to generalize from the position of managers, and Harney tries to escape this tendency by stressing his ongoing links to the antiracism movement. However even a progressive manager with movement credibility can fall back on the coercive power of the bureaucracy. This latent power is not available to most state workers, except (to varying degrees) as a resource to be used against state clients. State Work neglects both the author's relative privilege in this regard, and larger class divisions inside the state bureaucracy. This is an unfortunate evasion, for clearly the Rae government foundered largely on its inability to manage such divisions. Despite the pervasive and poisonous effects of Rae's "social contract," it receives no attention in this book.

Harney is obviously more attached to the antiracism movement than the labour movement, and might be forgiven in privileging race over class. But there is much to be learned in how Poulantzas handles similar questions. The essential point for Poulantzas is that subordinate interests (which in his work are too narrowly class-based) must achieve real representation inside the state in order to be most effectively subordinated. Harney does not make crude claims about achieving victories by "working on the inside" — in fact he continually underlines the artificiality of the inside/outside division. Nonetheless he does claim victory of a sort, despite the absence of all the usual indicators. He says his work "had a real effect on us and others, even though sometimes all we seemed to be doing was talking and acting as if antiracism mattered." (20) Although they were long absorbed in the creation of an antiracism policy that eventually came to naught, the secretariat made theoretical breakthroughs, seeking not the leveling of race and other identities, but "extension of identities as labors of self-creation." (49) His Secretariat and the NDP were demolished in 1995, but by "acting as if social democracy could accommodate the Left," his work helped discover what the Left could actually do. (30)

Such statements are always couched in an elaborate theoretical framework, but all through the book I could not help wondering whether they were the product of sophistication or naïvete. Was Harney engaged in real struggle, or merely striking a pose? Was the state challenged and disturbed, or did it swallow Harney with just a little more fuss than usual? He and his colleagues are not the first activists to have been propelled by social movements onto the rocky shores of the state, and some comparisons would have been useful. The literature on the Greater London Council is touched upon briefly here, but much more is out there, including some fascinating material on the UFO (United Farmers of Ontario) — the only other third party/movement ever to have achieved government in Ontario.

To be fair, the history of the Antiracism Secretariat is really more of a jumping-off point than a central concern for Harney. But his treatment of that experience raises questions that return later, as he places "immaterial labour" at the centre of state work, and reduces the state's role and existence to an "effect." In the latter he follows Timothy Mitchell and Foucault, who question the presumed existence of the state as a distinct entity. For Mitchell, the state is socially constructed, but "certain novel practices ... create the effect of an enduring structure apparently external to those practices." (cited in Harney, 10) For Harney state work is largely a process of "immaterial labour" aimed at creating this effect, or sustaining a somewhat shaky ideological illusion. The state effect is produced by "repeatable practices and techniques that Foucault said can give the impression of a state structure as something solid, even natural." (121)

But like any labour process, this one produces resistance as well as its official product. (53–55) In the case of state work, its "novel" ideological role allows it to sense the possibility of other worlds beyond the status quo, to touch the subterranean streams of "mass intellectuality." (20) And because in this case the immaterial labour process included movement allies as well as state workers, Harney feels that his efforts outlasted both the secretariat and the NDP. (21)

At the centre of this formulation is a very important point: nearly all state work has an ideological function that sets it apart from — but is deeply relevant to — other sorts of work. Consequently there are real possibilities for resistance in this domain that are still largely untapped. Harney's secretariat may very well have pushed the envelope in this regard. However, reducing state work to only this immaterial aspect is simplistic and dangerous — as Harney recognizes in other contexts, but not in his own. It is simplistic because, as he says later in discussing The X-Files, "guns must still be drawn and duty called." (98) It is dangerous because a feature of neoconservative politics since its inception has been the attempt to replace material bribes to workers with symbolic forms of legitimation. Remaining immaterial might be the ultimate form of cooption in this regard.

In highlighting the cultural significance of state work, Harney is on stronger ground. He rightly notes the prevalence of state workers on TV, which seems at odds with their poor reputation in political circles. Granted, those who make prime time are overwhelmingly police, but as Harney shows with reference to The X-Files, even images of this profession can display hints of "mass intellectuality." Agents Mulder and Scully inhabit a world where the boundaries between work and life are blurred, where work is endless and continuously monitored. (94-96) Here TV is helping to naturalize the colonization of life by work — a trend otherwise indicated by longer working hours, increasing stress levels, and so on. But the fictional state work being done here is also making "more and more of the vast interconnectedness of the state, economy, and civil society ... visible." (97) The truth that is out there for Mulder and Scully is, according to Harney, a form of sociality that allows escape from daily life in capitalism. Conspiracies are, according to Frederic Jameson, "evidence of the population's sense of a totality beyond the enforced fragmentation of wage labor under capital." (97)

Harney's perspective also allows for an interesting reconsideration of the meaning of "offloading" — the shedding of state activities into the private sector and the private sphere. The Left has generally approached this tendency as either an abandonment of social responsibilities for the sake of private profit, and/or as an unfair redistribution of the burden of caring work that tends to hit women particularly hard. Both perspectives assume that the work is no longer "state" work once it has been offloaded, but Harney makes the opposite assumption. He sees in this process the growth of a new "regulatory citizenship" which asks people "to finish work that has exhausted the state." (106) Even environmental deregulation, where corporations are left to monitor themselves, shows evidence of "an increase in state activity, but activity increased by the labor of workers outside the state." (118) Like IKEA, which has extended its furniture-making to include customers (who assemble the furniture), the state has spread its labour process to citizens who must improve themselves and help others. This means, according to Harney, that the contradictions inherent in state work will also spread, that more people are now involved not only in making the state, but in undermining it as well. More are engaged in immaterial labour, and so more may glimpse another world.

Elsewhere Harney takes a more conventional case-study approach to spotlight the cracks appearing as state work grows. He has a fascinating explanation of police brutality in New York as basically a coping strategy for frontline cops increasingly detached from the communities they patrol. Leaping out of squad cars to bash heads is the way they reconnect, and "the only labor- saving device capable of reconciling management control with the hunt for numbers." (141) But such brutality has fractured the police force on racial lines, and provoked black cops to restore community policing as an after-hours project. (141)

It is public administration, according to Harney, that is "haunted by the specter of government as workplace, and the workplace as government." (12) But his books shows this workplace may produce utopian dreams as well as nightmares, even at the state's coercive heart. For this it is worth the read.


Greg McElligott McMaster University

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