When Homer Simpson won the “First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence,” he revealed that excellence had been formalized into a field in which one could achieve and do so outstandingly. As Readings says, this field is self-referential and contained; it is also a field upon which signification works, to use Readings’ term (although I’m not sure that it’s actually the most proper term to use, I’m going to use it throughout this response), “metaleptically”. Here, “outstanding” can be both juxtaposed to and exemplary of “excellence”, when presumably they are synonymous.
The bizarre fixation on excellence is an allegory of (mis)reading: an allegorical operation, a metonymic slide whereby the figure of “Quality” becomes literalized into “a quality”, a property, and then on to “property” capable of being exchanged. While Readings’ readings of the university’s misreadings are, indeed, excellent, I think that the question isn’t about how standardization fits the heterogeneous into an index of equivalent value, nor is it about the metalepsis whereby “reputation” can count as a part and a whole (471). Rather it’s about the metaleptic aesthetic ideology of excellence itself. The existence of “excellence” as a field of value shows that in the absence of a normative culture, excellence is the only social/political measure of intelligibility. And surveys—Maclean’s, student-customer satisfaction evaluations, alumni association surveys, etc.—are not examples of a problematic index of value, but rather they form and express the broader cultural index of value, that is, what our culture at its most operative and most formal metaleptically produces and deems as valuable. But metalepsis by itself is not necessarily bad or wrong; it’s merely a version of the hermeneutic circle. And it’s a canonized position running from Spenser’s Preface to The Faerie Queene, where “Magnificence” is the virtue that perfects and contains all the rest, on to Jameson’s Introduction to The Political Unconscious, where in the current intellectual marketplace, Marxist criticism is “the untranscendable horizon” that subsumes all the other “antagonistic and incommensurable” critical approaches, preserving them within itself. (For an interesting discussion of this subsumption, see Geoffrey Bennington’s “Aberrations: de Man (and) the Machine”.) The real problem here then isn’t that excellence acts as both particular and general; example and Idea; perception and cognition; exception and law; observation and criterion—all clichés and slogans act this way. Our real object of critical concern must be the epistemic environment which allows for a category error to become an organizing principle.
This undoubtedly occurs when excellence is normalized, surreptitiously becomes synonymous with “normal”, and the uniqueness of a phenomenon Bill and Ted would judge to be “Most Excellent” is reified into a cliché. It’s particularly and unforgivably ironic that this structural model of the cliché takes such hold in the university. Readings’ example of the dean from UCI illuminates this intra-institutional ironic blindness well, but perhaps not as well as the episode from The Simpsons where the writer says to the suits who want to develop the Itchy & Scratchy Show according to a new “proactive paradigm”: “Excuse me, but aren’t ‘proactive’ and ‘paradigm’ just buzzwords that stupid people use to sound important? I’m fired, aren’t I?” What’s unfortunate is that the dean was fired and then made his remarks, when he deserved to be fired for making such stupid remarks. Readings’ most important point is that purely formal concepts lacking any content continue to appear as legible, and so misreading has become the norm, or the excellent way to read. He locates such a misreading in the evaluation form: “In order to permit standardization and integration under a common index of value, administrations push for the introduction of standardized multiple response questions across the board, which will allow the calculation of a quotient of consumer satisfaction, preferably modeled on the consumer survey” (481). Again, description is taken for prescription, fact for value, perception for cognition. This is all reducible to an institutionalized illiteracy, efficiently-administered misreadings, summed up in the slippage from the figure of accountability into too-literal accounting. Despite Readings’ insistence that he is not calling for a return to progress or the Culture that came out of the Enlightenment, the philosophical problem he’s describing is the classic mistaking of perception for cognition that inaugurated the Socratic method, was the dominant aesthetic ideology in Plato’s Cave, and has lasted through the Enlightenment to be criticized by Wittgenstein and de Man to Agamben.
So obviously the solution to this reading problem is, first, teach students and administrators how to read. Then, through the weakened but not yet impotent nation state, institute Informal Logic classes in elementary schools under the alibi that critical thinking skills produce both better corporate citizens in the form of excellent consumers and makes for better civic discourse because politicians and policy makers would then have to be more competitive, to more excellently sophisticate their rhetoric, fallacies, and clichés at least up to a grade 12 or so level. Let’s use the nation state to create a new, non-essential, non-nationalistic volkism that interpellates us as readers—subjects able to know a fallacy when we see one.
Readings draws attention to the fact that savings accrue through sacrifices of all in the University, not just the administration, and, therefore, savings should be channelled back into pedagogy; this is great, but it doesn’t go far enough. And this might be due to his desire to move past Graff’s model of conflict cum consensus into one of dissensus (478), which in turn goes too far. Consensus should not be abandoned but instead reimagined into a new solidarity. Here the nation state can again come in useful. Why do the liberal arts university and the nation have so much trouble resisting the sell out? Both crave the money that corporations give them, but why are they so blind to what they give in return? We have something they want. We’re capital; we’re turned into values all the time, so why can’t we exploit our value? Let’s revitalize the student/university union structure to impose demands on the money we receive. The university can say, “We’ll take your money and pump out more patents for you, but you’re going to fund our arts programs too.” Nations should unionize too and present demands to TNCs saying, “You need a physical place to operate: you can set up here, but you’re going to fund a bunch of social programs in exchange.” The Nation might be a laughably outdated figure or a chillingly creepy one, but it’s in ours and its own interests to resist the privatization of national culture, and so we should figure out how to use it against being trained for the excellence industry.
Of course, this all may be happening already in the form of the PhDs being pumped out into a jobless market (479). Could post-Fordism, via its weirdly Fordist and Taylorized universities—speeding up and overproducing so many smart, hypercritical, useless and thus potentially unexploitable “workers”—be training and professionalizing its own gravediggers? And if we’re not the eventual gravediggers, then why the hell aren’t we, and how do we train to be excellent in that field?
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