THE MODERN PRODUCTION OF MEDIOCRITY

It was the reading of Politique de l’extrême center and La médiocratie⁽¹⁾ that led us to meet Alain Deneault. Philosopher, program director at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, his radical thinking is a precious tool in these dark times, but where a little hope persists. 

Kairos: In the preface to your book, you mention those people who call themselves « left-wing, but… », who are not too much in favor of nationalizations, shorter working hours or higher taxes on business. Next to them, there are « liberals », who recognize the excesses of capitalism « but… ». In both cases, a real confusion is maintained, which is the one we are in now, that is to say that all support a destructive capitalist system, and we no longer find ourselves in it. 

Alain Deneault: We are in a political order that seeks to abolish the left-right axis, in the name of an exclusive discourse, consequently excluding, that shows itself intolerant to all other proposals than its own. This discourse can be summarized in a few points: more money for shareholders, more money for multinationals, more access to tax havens, fewer laws protecting workers, fewer social services and social programs. This approach is shared by political actors who may be labeled left or right and who operate in different countries of the world, and who are subordinated to the oligarchy. And it goes from Tsipras to Trump, with variations on different issues, including moral types, but there will still be from an economic point of view this program that will be adopted. 

In order to give a semblance of political meaning to this program, ideas associated with what I have called the extreme center are being promoted. Extremism in politics has been wrongly associated with the position of the cursor on the left-right axis. Whereas extremism, in the moral sense, refers much more to an attitude that consists in being intolerant to what is not oneself. The extreme center consists of being intolerant of anything that does not fit into this ultimately very narrow setting of the agenda of the oligarchic program I mentioned. It is a center that has little to do with the left-right political axis, in the sense that it is a center that aims less at being on that axis than at abolishing it, and at presenting a vision of things as the only valid one. The extreme center is thus to tolerate nothing else than this discourse that arbitrarily presents itself as belonging to the center. Why the center? Because it will not present itself as radical, destructive, imperialist, basically violent in many ways. But it presents itself instead as balanced, as pragmatic, as normal, as true, as fair, as balanced, as reasonable, as rational and so on. 

While giving the illusion that there would be oppositions between different political characters, who are however always at the same school. 

But less and less. It takes a great deal of sophistication to see a difference between a social liberal in the socialist party and a social gaullist in the LR party. More and more people are trying to put forward a discourse of necessity, exclusive and excluding: « we have no choice ». 

In Mediocracy, you talk about « resisting terms », in this sense, does it still have a meaning to talk about right-left. Is it not the best subterfuge of the power to still make us believe that there is a right and a left? 

Indeed, we have entered a spectacular phase in which we can see that the actors themselves can no longer pretend to believe in a substance that would allow them to define themselves in one camp or the other. That said, if we rigorously define the terms and give them a meaning that is not that of the spectacle, there is still an undeniable relevance to the fact of thinking about the left and the right, but it is still necessary to engage the discourses on the basis of a well-founded and serious dialectic. Let’s start from a phenomenon that is almost anthropological: we can’t not institute the social link. As soon as the social link has been instituted, it is most often done in our modern traditions, in the name of the people. The problems begin there between the left and the right, because from that moment, we must agree that the people are nowhere. It is well to say that it is in the name of the people, of the demos, of the socius, that a public institution is legitimized, this people is never given once for all. And that’s why there is debate: there is debate about what is common to us, there is debate about the fact that there is never a precise, right, scientific and absolute way to define what is shared. The left and the right are different in the sense that being on the left means trying to translate and mediate what is shared, what is common to all, by being as close as possible to these realities. Whereas a right-wing discourse consists of a way of asserting particular interests in the name of what is general. And this is the whole problem of human rights, of liberal democracies… We have passed off as being in the common interest positions that are in fact either oligarchic or bourgeois. 

In this show where we have the swissleaks, luxleaks, footballleaks, in France it’s Fillon, in Belgium Publifin, it’s always convictions that would supposedly be the last scandals, where everything will change, but we never attack the regime, the system itself that creates this. 

We don’t do it, but we may do it. I would perhaps not mix everything, in the sense that the revelations we have had in recent years on the offshoresystemThis phenomenon seems to me to be different from what is happening in France with François Fillon, which is in this case the denunciation of a tartuffe, in a specific electoral context, which is good, but which is something else again. 

What I like about the issue of tax havens is that it raises questions that are difficult to answer on their own. If you are fighting against tax havens, you know, by making public speeches, by intervening in the media, by asking questions, that you have a Trojan Horse in this cause. What is interesting about the question of tax havens is that it triggers a series of questions which, if we have the courage to carry them out, which more and more people do, will lead us to see the failure of the current oligarchic and ideological regime. 

In your book Mediocracy, you explain that on November 28, 2012, a Canadian newspaper reported on the historic order that the Bombardier Group had just received, for aircraft intended mainly for the travel of billionaires. You are surprised that no one seems to be formalized about the symptom that this order represents in regimes of imposed budgetary « rigor ». Do you think that people are no longer formalized or that they don’t have media channels where they can express their indignation? 

The two things go together. Let us start from what is the ideology: the ideology is the speech of the powerful, it is the semantic mortar which makes hold in our heads the institutional arrangement pertaining to big interests. In fact, the ideological discourse that consists in inhabiting our brains, in maintaining the activity of our minds, aims at several things: framing the perspective that we have on the world: « look here rather than elsewhere then smoothing out inequalities and contradictions; naturalizing is TINA, There Is No Alternativethe extreme center I was talking about. We will naturalize the discourse, we will make it compulsory: « You have to know how to sell yourself », « You have to be competitive », « You have to… ». Ideology makes natural a certain number of self-interested proposals by which an oligarchy imposes itself a world and gives itself a world to the measure of its interests. 

The media are obviously part of this enterprise, as is the school. And I would also say: everyone. That’s why it’s difficult to talk about mediocracy, because mediocracy is everyone. One becomes a belt of these ideological discourses, which end up coexisting in this social space. 

You have defined five categories of mediocre. 

Yes, five attitudes with which to respond. When we are faced with an ideological order of a mediocratic type, we are faced with an order that has managed to naturalize positions, articulations and methods, injunctions, orders and command, which are totally questionable, totally arbitrary, totally radical and even sometimes violent and cruel. But this is passed off as the norm, as meaning. And as we are confronted with mediocrity, namely the average in action: an injunction to work at a standard pace, in relation to ideas, to standardized key words, in relation to an attitude that makes us interchangeable, we observe five ways of reacting. 

1. There are those who immediately break down, do not want to go in there. People who, without being politically brave, without being combative, militant, will simply prefer frugality, so as not to have to deal with a world of norms, standards, lies, and pretences.

2. There are those who will be rather the insane, the mediocre in spite of themselves. They are the ones who believe in it, because they were told that it was like that. There is a lot of tautology: « That’s how it is because that’s how it is », « What do you want, that’s life », « Every day has its own punishment »… The norm is placed there, and you have to consider that « there » attitude that is not normal as normal and conform to it.

3. Then we’ll have the zealous mediocrities. They are the worst and the future is theirs, they are the ones who love mediocracy. They are people without convictions, plastic, flexible, with the only concern when they wake up in the morning to see how they will take advantage of the state of things to profit from a situation.

These are the political figures…

In any organization there will be the mediocre, the zealous, who take the lead, who guess what the authorities want from them, who will adopt the discourse of the day, even if it means adopting the opposite discourse five years later if it changes. 

4. This brings us to the fourth character who is the mediocre one out of spite. The mediocre out of spite is the person who understands, to put it bluntly, that he or she is doing something wrong; like his or her work, for example in the pharmaceutical, commercial or financial fields. And to the banality of the evil of which we are aware — and this is what often leads people to join a union, to resist in meetings, to be a bit of an itching powder in an organization — is added the evil of banality, that is to say that the weight of daily life ends up being overwhelming. 

5. The fifth category is the hotheads. They are those who denounce, who speak, without any attachment, in any way, for the forms of social progress. That is to say that by profession of faith, one binds a form of obedience to the life of the spirit, to the thought for itself. This is a purely disinterested criticism. And one can end up like Noam Chomsky or Edward Said, as professors, by, having that kind of dignity, by cultivating that kind of convictions and intellectual autonomy. But one can also end up like Gramsci in prison or like Rosa Luxemburg at the bottom of the sea. It is not true that we will take liberties with the rigor that the thought as an authority, almost as an institution, requires, and it is not true that at a given moment we will say that someone who goes to the theater is a client, it is not true, we refuse it. And we will also refuse to stop quoting Rosa Luxemburg because we are in a university that does not like to discuss these issues, and instead quote the World Bank, which is interested in governance, because that is how we will advance in our careers. No ! One refuses, and because one refuses, one knows that one closes doors and one exposes oneself to a great number of repressions, in the practically physical sense, one is physically repressed in a certain number of places: places of power or institutions. 

The effect of ideology on thought, since the famous « thirty glorious years », on past and present generations, can it not lead to something permanent, definitive. Orwell said of the desire for freedom that it was not something given from the start and that, like cows that could be genetically programmed not to have horns, one could very well create « a new race of men, devoid of any aspiration to freedom »..

By the way, freedom is not the solution, the objective, but the problem. Everything has been based on this notion. If you take, for example, the left-right axis as it is caricaturized in North America, one is either libertarian; American-style liberal, that is to say permissive but not touching the structures; French-style liberal, Tocqueville; or else one is neo-liberal, ultraliberal, libertarian, but in any case on the right-axis, as it evolves in a rather desolate way, the question of liberty is the foundation. We want to be free and we find a way to wish for freedom. 

We don’t talk about constraints… 

Exactly, as long as we do not address on a social level the question of the constraints that we want to impose on ourselves collectively, starting from a position of freedom that is the same for all, as deliberative actors, as long as we do not reach that point, we are finished, because it will always be the freedom of some that will have the upper hand over that of others. As long as we are not capable of coming to the idea that being on the left, for example, means thinking in terms of constraint: « How are we going to constrain those who have more than those who have less so that we tend towards equality? That we are capable of thinking in terms of constraints in order to aspire to more equality and to tend towards a perspective of this nature. If you have someone who presents himself as a leftist but always talks about freedom, you can be sure that he is a liberal: he will always think in terms of freedom as to how powerful people find a freedom to coerce others, because that’s what capital is all about: when you are in a company, all of a sudden all your constitutional rights fall away, it’s still fascinating. 

In this necessity of constraints, there is also a trans-class agreement. We know that the middle and indigent classes will often fight against the tax, in the same way as the more affluent classes. There is a kind of agreement due to the fact that we are not presented well obviously. How to put constraints then? 

This is also where we see how much everything needs to be rethought; we cannot be satisfied with being in a form of political evolution where we only amend, tinker. Because at this stage of the evolution of the law and of the activity of legislators, the least right that is attached is the one that allows a multinational to be hegemonic; in the very terms of the law, it will be the same clauses, the same articles, the same foundations, the same doctrines. And as we are attached to our rights, I would like to say our small rights, we find ourselves defending those of the big ones. This is where we need to stop thinking in terms of freedom, no longer taking into account scales, but to think in terms of constraints and ask « What constraint makes us free? » It is by administering constraints that the members of a community arrive at their freedom. 

Interviewed on February 13, 2017 in Ath, by Alexandre Penasse

Video by Thomas Michel, available here: http: //www.kairospresse.be/article/rencontre-avec-alain-denea