Mediocracy: The Politics of the Extreme Centre

by Alain Deneault

Stop being so passionate: you’ll scare people off.

Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull were among the first to bear witness to the spread of mediocrity throughout an entire system. Their thesis in The Peter Principle, developed in the postwar years, is relentless in its clarity: systemic processes help those who have average levels of competence rise to positions of power, pushing aside both the super-competent and the incompetent.

the “secondary illiterate,” (7) to use a phrase coined by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. This new subject, mass-produced by teaching and research institutions, is proud to possess a store of useful know-ledge that does not lead her to question its ideological underpinnings.

Secondary Illiterates

Enzensberger describes the secondary illiterate as follows: “He considers himself to be well informed, can decode instructions, pictograms, and checks, and moves in a world that seals him off from every challenge to his confidence.”

Since the publication of The Peter Principle, the tendency to banish the non-mediocre has been regularly confirmed, and today, we have reached a point where mediocrity is actually recommended.

Mediocracy, then, is the word for a mediocre order that is set up as a model.

Alexander Zinoviev has described the Soviet regime in terms that bring out its resemblance with our liberal democracies. “It is the mediocre who survive” and “mediocrity has a better chance of succeeding,” as the Dauber reflects in The Yawning Heights, the satirical novel Zinoviev published in defiance of Soviet authorities in 1976. Theorems put forward in the novel by the Neurasthenic and the Careerist include the following:

If an institution begins to work noticeably better than others, it draws attention to itself. If it is officially recognised in this role, it soon turns into a fake or a showplace, which also in time degenerates into a run-of-the-mill fake. (10)

Fake and Cultures

The rule of mediocrity leads people to carry out an imitation of work that produces the illusion of an outcome. Faking it becomes a value in itself. Mediocracy compels us to subordinate our deliberation to arbitrary models promoted by the authorities.

The central figure of mediocracy is, of course, the “expert” with whom the majority of today’s academics identify.

Experts

Professionalization presents itself as an implicit contract between, on the one hand, the various producers of knowledge and discourse, and, on the other, owners of capital.

Mediocracy encourages us in every possible way to doze rather than think, to view as inevitable what is unacceptable and as necessary what is revolting. It makes us into idiots.

Idiots

Whenever we try to probe the reasons behind our collective perils, there they are—cut off from the world, specializing in infinitesimal subfields, having lost the ability to think critically, obsessed with career advancement, and loyal to collegial networks that look exactly like tribes.

Treib

In Empire of Illusion, Hedges insists that there is cause for concern, for “elite universities have banished self-criticism.

“knowledge economy.” Corporations see the university as a publicly funded provider of the personnel and advanced knowledge they need. For $500 million, the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley provides British Petroleum with equipment and researchers’ work.

Knowledge Economy

In the United States and Canada—undoubtedly the idea will soon gain favour in Europe—universities are named after Rockefeller, campus buildings display the name of Monsanto, research chairs bear the name of Texas Instruments, classrooms once identified by a number are now known as the PricewaterhouseCoopers room, and scholarships are known by the imperishable name of their sponsor, Bosch.

undoubtedly play an eminent role at the universities. The predominance of mediocrity is rather due to the laws of human co-operation, especially of the co-operation of several bodies.

Weber

The university sells what it makes of them to its new customers, namely, the corporations and other institutions that fund it. The rector of the Université de Montréal clearly believed he was stating the obvious when he claimed, in the fall of 2011, that “brains must be tailored to business needs.”

True, the university was managed at the time by administrators from the worlds of banking (National Bank), retail pharmacy (Jean

Coutu), industry (SNC-Lavalin), natural gas (Gaz Métro), and the media (Power Corporation and Transcontinental), who sat on its decision-making councils and committees of influence. And yet, the Université de Montréal is still largely funded by the state. Surely it was odd for the business plan of this temple of knowledge to suddenly embody aims that resemble those of ...

and a famous remark made by Patrick Le Lay, CEO of France’s TF1 television network, in 2004: “What we sell to Coca-Co...

Gagné gives the following example: If I invent a way of making square tomatoes, and a company thinks this is great and buys it from me because it’s perfect for a square hamburger, am I contributing to education? No. I’m contributing to the education of the guy who is going to work to make square hamburgers for the company that funded research on tomatoes. (5)

The process of Hegelian inspiration that Simmel describes is no longer conceivable. We have reached full capacity: the road toward the realization of thought is blocked. Productivism and its process of accumulation have carried the day.

There no longer seems to be any point in meditating on what the ancients have done before us in order to add a new piece of work to already existing culture. Instead, we see hordes of scribblers satisfied with taking their turn in producing serial knowledge, without caring about the deeper meaning their work might embody.

Simmel gives the example of a well-known

known philologist putting forward massive amounts of knowledge devoi...

In this way, what could be called superfluous knowledge is accumulating in many areas of scholarship and science.

Binding themselves to big business and institutions of power, holding nothing back, research institutions are not just selling knowledge to their clients. They are also partners in manipulation.

The conceit of knowledge managers leads them to believe that they can dominate language: they think they can reduce it to signals that can easily be manipulated to convince their peers to send money their way. A word that is no longer fashionable will be removed from an application; a reference currently on everyone’s lips will be emphasized, even if they know nothing about it.

In the section of the form where only a limited number of terms can be inserted, they will perform a lexical slalom, careening between hot and cold, angel and devil, venality and ethics, consensus and revolution. And finally, they will assert with a flourish that their attitude will be completely different once the fabled treasure has finally been won.

Of course, my grant proposal is nothing but hot air, but just give me the money and I’...

As if we could be stronger than the words we used to make these deals, and were rulers of language instead of being ruled by it. But we have not read Blanchot—we have sidestepped Derrida—we have...

No sooner have these mercenaries of the word been rewarded for their cowardice than they become harsh and sterile, forgetting critical thinking (on which they have now turned their backs), committed to their business partners as if their life depended on it, and focused on returning favours to their...

The university has been working for decades now to make itself manipulable by anyone who wants to finance it; to some extent, it may have been doing this since its modern foundation. Hans Magnus Enzensberger recalls the distant origins of the problem in his essay “In Praise of the Illiterate”: Making

Importance

the population literate had nothing to do with enlightenment. The philanthropists and priests of culture who championed it were only the accomplices of a capitalist industry that demanded of the state that it make skilled laborers available to it. . . . Quite another type of progress was at stake. It consisted of taming the illiterate, this “lowest class of people,” driving out their imagination and their stubbornness, and from this time on exploiting not only their muscle power and their manual skills but their brains as well. (12)

Academic writing is based on an implicit rule that becomes explicit if anyone breaks it:

Tone is related, first of all, to word choice. It is preferable to use words that sound scientific, if only to suggest that your thoughts are not associated with the here and now. Instead of “money,” for instance, discuss “currency.” Also, you must avoid terms that are charged with emotion as a result of their history: don’t say “political revolts,” but talk about “resilience”; don’t discuss “class,” but analyze social “categories.” Some even turn their noses up at the expression “tax justice,” which is deemed “too political.”

Tine and word

In French, making up nouns based on the gerund is also a sign of moderation: migrance, consultance, survivance, and gouvernance are nouns based on migrating, consulting, surviving, and governing. The gerund is a passive tense referring to a state of fact that is devoid of history; once it becomes a noun, it deals with things in a disembodied manner. And

This mode, or mould, must also be invented, inasmuch as we make it into something plastic that is shaped by the work of writing, at the same time as it determines both the shape and the substance of what we are saying. Deleuze calls on Georges Buffon (biologist and author of a famous treatise on style), who formulated an analogy between the appearance of the text and the morphology of an animal, to create the expression “inner mould.” Form bears witness to what a body or text is capable of.

Mould and elastin term

“agreements of academic gentlemen” exert “manipulative control” over the “insurgent.” (14) The prescribed tone prevents academics who adopt it from moving too far away from the dominant ideology’s boundaries. Today, this tone is used by the professor/entrepreneur whose customers are located in the corporate world and other institutions of power that need research findings, expert pronouncements, and other symbols. Chris Hedges makes the point more crudely:

Co-operation Language

This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and, of course, the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political, and cultural questions. (15)

Ghodsee is annoyed by fads such as the rejection of words ending in -ism, which are now passé and must be replaced by words ending in -ality; this appears to represent some fine distinction. She notes the inflationist tendency of terms based on the suffix of the day—the study of social and political oppression becomes the study of “oppressivities,” while educational reforms become “educativities”—or equally faddish prefixes, with “intereducationality” joining the many terms that begin with bio-, cyber-, hetero-, homo-, or techno-. “Don’t worry if you’re not entirely sure what a term means,” she writes reassuringly. “With the correct combination of prefixes and suffixes, you will most likely arrive at something that at least appears fashionable, if not profound.”

sim or ilty

“Academic writing is rotten.” The author of this disillusioned but honest statement is himself a professor of psychology at Harvard. Steven Pinker, in an article coldly entitled “Why Academics Stink at Writing,” (17) finds in academic texts a wide variety of faults that would lead to their rejection by any editor who was not a complacent member of the academic milieu.

Wrting rotten

professional narcissism (summarizing everything you have been required to read in order to develop a thesis that is actually quite simple, but that you are unable to state in a single paragraph);

(“so to speak,” “to some extent,” “somewhat,” “in part,” “seemingly,” “I would argue”) to mark a subjective distance from a statement that you are not quite willing to stand behind;

No Opinion

Finally, Pinker mentions the writer’s inability to guide the reader by presenting an argument step by step.

public. Yet how many university professors can equal the skill of a writer like Naomi Klein in helping citizens increase their knowledge and deepen their thinking? An academic may look down on the writing of an investigative journalist such as Greg Palast, without reflecting on his own inability to produce anything as incisive and illuminating.

is hardly surprising, then, that professors spend their time writing multimedia slideshows instead of books.

What more can we expect from people who need so many technological crutches to move around? As Franck Frommer noted in his book How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid: The Faulty Causality, Sloppy Logic, Decontextualized Data, and Seductive Showmanship That Have Taken Over Our Thinking, computer slides do not simply accompany acts of communication, they transform them by making them ineffectual.

POwerPoint

As soon as you rely on this crutch, you are virtually obliged to base your teaching on clichés that never go beyond ideological buzzwords, using illustrations of strictly anecdotal value and bullet lists that reduce ideas to a brutal hierarchy of simplistic slogans. Finally, sentences themselves are disappearing from the university along with the logical connections, subtle relations, paradoxes, and nuances they allow. The diagrammatic quality of PowerPoint materials plunges the mind into a tangle of incomprehensible codes. What is the real meaning, for instance, of the boxes in which entire categories of actors are placed, or the arrows of an organizational chart that is supposed to illustrate institutional dynamics? Having observed the panic displayed at conferences by academics who depend on this software, we can only conclude that PowerPoint extinguishes the mind’s autonomy.