Total Quality Management: Academic Lysenkoism

William Plank
Contributing Editor
[MSU-Billings]

"Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebaeren zu koennen."--Nietzsche

Professor Raymond's review of The Quality Professor in this issue deserves to be read thoughtfully and taken seriously. TQM, of course, was invented much earlier in the career of western civilization by Plato who banished the poets and the exaltation of imagination from the Republic, that stultifying and benevolent fascist state presided over by philosopher kings, posturing, contemplative, self-conscious, and passive snobs whom Aristotle later described as the ideal in the Nicomachean Ethics--fellows you would not want to accompany you on a motorcycle trip to the Acton Bar up on the high Broadview Plain.

But the people who disinterred this latest mummy of Greek idealism do not understand the nature of the evolution of organisms and systems or the nature of flux--and they have a view of the cosmos as a political phenomenon, a view of which they are unaware because they are inadequately prepared in the surreptitious projects of western philosophy, and deluded (as Bertrand Russell would say) by Plato, who had the gift of making preposterous things appear reasonable. Modern biologists know that you cannot absolutely define a species because Nature does not work in terms of stable entities, rather she is a squandering of forms (Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously) in an exuberance which would confound the control-freaks and closet fascists who have resurrected the tyrannical metaphysics which still festers in the smirking rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson. Organisms evolve according to the autocatalytic systems of Manfred Eigen (The Laws of the Game), or the palimpsests of Michel Serres (L'Interférence), the self-adaptive systems of Murray Gell-Mann (The Quark and the Jaguar), the autoproductive unconscious of Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia), or the locally maximizing hierarchized energy discharges of Nietzsche's will to power.

I am not ready to clasp to my bosom the ideas of Comesky, who appears to represent the institutions who must "acknowledge...failure." I would prefer to imitate institutions such as MIT, Cal Tech, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, where the acknowledgment of failure as a prerequisite to success would produce a contemptuous indignation and exhibit such an extension of Protestant guilt that even the passionate Luther would have sneered at it. The idea of "building upon previous success," of "group assignments with 'real-world' relevance," reveals what appears to be the most reasonable but is, in fact, the most noxious aspect of the built-in conservatism of a technique which strangles creativity (Jacques Ellul, Technique ou l'enjeu du siècle, and Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, for the conservative and anti-creative aspect of technique).

Change is most certainly not "a gradual, measured process, building upon previous successes," as Comesky claims. It is rather the proliferation of forms and an exuberance of energy which break loose from the past, an idea which led Nietzsche to assert that the cosmos is born anew with every configuration of the will to power (A. Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology for the quickest and best access to this idea). We do not call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens because we preserved the best of Neanderthal.

The political-bureaucratic project of TQM is obvious in its name. "Total...management" indeed! Then one must search for quality by the complementary aberration of "exit assessments!" And so, unsuspecting small colleges and universities in the depths of their conviction of inferiority and failure, administered by non-intellectuals, seek an easy technique for excellence instead of inspired work and concrete reward--they will harvest the small and pitiful corn of this academic Lysenkoism.

Nietzsche understood the nature of change and the possibilities of exuberant success, and he showed his massive ambition for the human race when he took as his motto "Live dangerously." The motto of TQM has to be "Let's appoint a committee."


Contents | Home