On Neoliberalism: "Best Practices" as the Godhead
Abstract: I briefly argue that neoliberalism’s focus on “best practices” is a secularized version of a mythological Godhead, and further that the discourse of “best practices” fails to fully understand or engage the problem of “mastery.”
The concept of “God” and the notion of neoliberal, business-driven “best practices” share a similar conceptual structure and derive from a similar human need/historical source. One might argue that the whole discourse of best practices, when actually applied to the dynamism of our all-too-human world, are not “best” at all, but rather constitute a manner of offloading the time/energy required to actually negotiate living contexts with the application of a tried-and-true rubric: it imposes abstraction upon dynamic materiality, and much is lost, ironically signaling an unaddressed cost of the best-practice model. But beyond this, and faintly echoing Schmitt and Kantorowicz, “best practices” somehow represent the secularized evolution of the Christian godhead. The impulse here is related to, but different in type than, a Nietzschean will-to-knowledge: rather, it is a more encompassing and primordial instinct, a more elemental compulsion to manufacture the ever-youthful myth that “there is a perfect way,” that there needs/ought to be a way beyond the feebleness of our singular understanding.[1] To this end, the discourse of “best practices” falsely grafts an artificial and insecure monism unto an underlying and threatening pluralism[2]; here, too, is the problem of self-trust, where the deficit of perfect knowledge—the permanent zone/valley of doubt/uncertainty that surrounds any and all systems of thought—necessitates the self-made manufacturing of an omniscient lodestar or omnipotent godhead.[3] We might say that there is here not just/only the will to authority of any given agent/subject, but a will which first must forge the very category of “authority” and drape it with specific ornaments, tones and meanings. The problem here does not concern the nature of authority’s justification, what makes it “right” or “just,” but rather why authority need exist in the first place, and what its human value has been and could become. It is from this will that the idea of “best practices” is born, like Kronos sprouting Zeus form his head; that mastery[4], yet-obtained but ever-envisioned, is a possibility—of any and all circumstances, situations, negotiations and affairs—underwrites the existence, relevance and persistence of both systemic phenomena. But is this just to repeat the Nietzschean point that, before man could master anything/anyone, he first needed to invent for himself the conceptual architecture of “mastery”? Surely the great irony here, one that Heidegger attunes us to in his criticism of Nietzsche’s veiled Cartesianism, is that mastery may never be fully mastered.[5]
[1] See Lovejoy, Hofstadter.
[2] See William James and Isiah Berlin on monism and pluralism/negative and positive liberty.
[3] We might here connect Freud’s analysis of psychological instinct to something like Pitkin’s notion of “representation.”
[4] See Bacon, Saint-Simon, Comte
[5] For a pop example of a possible interlocutor for this thread of thought, see, for instance Robert Greene’s Mastery