EXCELLENCE

The substantive form of the familiar adjective “excellent,” meaning “of the highest quality,” and, more specifically, “surpassing related or adjacent members of the relevant class.” As a noun, the term designates the state of being “better than” other persons, places, or things. Interestingly, while it permits the conveyance of this sense, the term never requires that the surpassing of the broader field be specified: from a grammatical perspective, the comparative or competitive implications of the word are sublimated. Excellence is the basic objective of most modern human activity in developed societies. Within the expansive culture of neoliberalism, excellence functions a little like money: everyone needs to pursue it; the pursuit of it is considered not only the pursuit of a fundamental good, but also a fundamentally good pursuit, one that has the capacity virtuously to organize and to motivate both individual and collective life. Within academic settings, the pursuit of excellence—by persons and institutions—is essentially the unique “absolute good” upon which there seems to be unanimous consensus. The resulting distortions of human experience are difficult to summarize concisely, but might be said to include: compulsive competition; pervasive hyper-specialization; a ubiquitous capitulation to mechanomorphic ideals (both in the realms of thought and those of the body); want of textured appreciation of the diversity and vicissitudes of life itself; and a widespread and barely concealed disdain for weakness, failure, doomed gestures, tragedy, paralysis, fragility, mediocrity, and the ordinary in all its forms (this despite there being excellent evidence that this litany epitomizes much that is essential to human being).