Postmodern Perspectives in Public Administration 141
knowledge through reason, and knowledge thus derived is simply assumed to be
factual and therefore true.
To postmodernists, modern public administration based on Enlightenment
logic is simply misguided. In the fi rst place, facts can neither speak nor write
and cannot, therefore, speak for themselves (Farmer 1995, 18). Facts represent
propositions or hypotheses derived from observation. In the telling of facts,
therefore, the observer is not only an active shaper of the message sent but also
an active shaper of the likely image received. In the second place, “the view that
social science is a matter of cumulative accretion of knowledge through the
work of the human subject neutrally observing the action and interaction of
the objects—letting the facts speak for themselves—is untenable. It is diffi cult
to cling to the view that the mind is some kind of possessive receptor of outside
activities such as impressions or ideas” (Farmer 1995, 18).
Because the observer of facts is the teller of those facts, for postmodernists
the language of that telling is important. Th e social construction of reality is lan-
guage based, and language is at the core of the postmodern argument. Th erefore,
postmodern public administration is all about semantics and, as postmodernists
put it, text. “Hermeneutics (the study of relationship between reason, language,
and knowledge) concerns texts; it is concerned with interpreting, with specifying
signifi cance, with achieving intelligibility. Texts, in this case, can be written texts
or texts in the form of social practices, institutions, or other arrangements, or ac-
tivities” (Farmer 1995, 21).
As we study or textualize our subject, we engage in a pattern of refl exive in-
terpretation, a process of description, either qualitatively or quantitatively, that
interprets reality in the form of refl ex or response between the subject and the one
describing the subject. Th us it is argued that public administration theory is, in
fact, the language of public administration (Farmer 1995). Th e refl ective language
paradigm is, following David John Farmer, “a process of playful and attuned di-
alogs with the underlying content of the language of public bureaucracy . . . an
art that seeks to draw out and use the consequence of hermeneutic, refl exive and
linguistic character of the way in what we should understand and create public
administration phenomenon” (1995, 12).
Postmodernists describe modern life as hyperreality, a blurring of the real
and the unreal. Postmodernists, such as Jean Baudrillard, claim that a funda-
mental break with the modern era has occurred recently. Mass media, informa-
tion systems, and technology are new forms of control that change politics and
life. Boundaries between information and entertainment are imploding, as are
boundaries between images and politics. Indeed, society itself is imploding. Post-
modernity is the process of destroying meaning. Th e ideals of truth, rationality,
certainty, and coherence are over because, for Baudrillard, history has ended.
Postmodernity is characteristic “of a universe where there are no more defi nitions
possible. . . . It has all been done. Th e extreme limit of these possibilities has been
reached. . . . All that remains is to play with the pieces. Playing with pieces—that