Is "Man" Still the Subject of Administration?

Scientific advances are radically changing the relationship between government, knowledge, and citizens, thereby putting into question the content of the central subject/object of public administration—"humans." This article analyzes three interrelated problematizations in order to illuminate important aspects of this issue. The first, antihumanism, calls into question the plausibility of a universal, shared essence of humanity and "Man," Foucault's empirico-transcendental doublet. The second, transhumanism, concerns the question of whether new biotechnologies enable humans to overcome the determinism of their biological inheritance and actively participate in its expression. The third problematization revives Redford's formulation of "Man as the subject of administration." This is justaposed with antihumanism to describe anthropocentric administration, which historically presumed a passive relationship with objects of knowledge and, by extension, a certain mode of relating with citizens. The insights of transhumanism frame the main question: Is Man still the subject of administration? The question is elaborated by describing "entangled government," which is marked by a dynamic, interactive relationship between subjects and objects that complicates familiar modes of governing, knowledge creation, and human-object relationships. The implications of citizen participation in an entangled public administration receive particular attention.