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The Dialectics of Middleness: Towards a Political Ontology of Centrism

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The Dialectics of Middleness: Towards a Political Ontology of Centrism THE DIALECTICS OF MIDDLENESS THE DIALECTICS OF MIDDLENESS: TOWARDS A POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF CENTRISM By ANDREW PENDAKIS, BA., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright by Andrew Pendakis, August 2010 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2010) McMaster University (English and Cultural Studies) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: The Dialectics of Middleness: Towards a Political Ontology of Centrism AUTHOR: Andrew Pendakis, B.A. (McMaster University), M.A. (University of Western Ontario) SUPERVISOR: Professor lmre Szeman NUMBER OF PAGES 233 ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the recent history and politics of the formation of the center or middle as the sovereign horizon of contemporary political practice and history. The political center has typically been imagined as the space between the two poles of Left and Right. Rather than beginning with an assumption of the political center's absolute relativity-a history absorbed by infinitely contingent contexts-this thesis understands centrism as itself a political position: a plural, yet relatively stable complex of meanings in urgent need of problematization. Guided methodologically by the work of Michel Foucault and Frederic Jameson, the thesis grounds this analysis in a reading of The Economist magazine between the years 1950-2007. A self-identified advocate of the "extreme center", the magazine functions as a primary archive through which to document shifts in the constitution of an historically-specific centrism, a political position with significant global traces and consequences. In the Introduction the basic theoretical coordinates of the center as a metaphor, concept and political fantasy are unpacked against the backdrop of a broader diagnostics of the present. Chapter 1 addresses itself to the Keynesian centrism prevalent in the years immediately following the war in Britain, one characterized primarily by ideas about balance, consensus, and moderation. Chapter 2 follows the content of this discourse across the break-down of post-war growth and its subsequent identification with "radical" Thatcherism. In Chapter 3, the contradictions accumulated in this shift from a thematics of caution to one emphasizing a radical break with consensus, are examined through the figure of the heretical manager, the pragmatist who presides over the inherently revolutionary fabric of capitalist space and innovation. Finally, the conclusion thinks through the ways in which the radical center functions within a broader cultural sensation of middleness very much a basic part of life in postmodern societies. 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis hummed away for years in the background of a love I won't forget: it owes no small part of its contents to the intelligence, care, and unconditional everyday generosity of Rachel Kwan. Also crucial has been the constant encouragement and friendship of Imre Szeman; he always found (psychologically ingenious) ways to trick me into thinking writing a dissertation was less torture than pleasure. He and Maria have functioned as two of the most consistent, giving and necessary presences in my life. Folk who've sustained me with provocative speech, love and drink for years (or days) all deserve a mention: Timothy Kaposy, my incredible sister Kate, Maria Whiteman, Justin Sully, Wafaa Hasan, Nathan Holmes, Sonal Nalkur, Gabe Boldt, Petra Rethmann, Fahad Razak, Chris Carlson, Omar Dessouki, Cynthia and Enoch Kwan, Justin Armstrong, Elana Commisso, Susie O'Brien, Eugene Kwan, Bill Huizer, Karen Espiritu, Bhavani Konings, Nick Buffo, Nisha Shah, Sean Reichheld, and many more. Edmunda Ferreira and Antionette Somo have both saved my life on numerous occasions and poured out tons of love in my direction. This thesis, as it turns out, is dedicated to my mother: without her I would have never met words. And to my father, whose death during its writing only sharpened my sense for the banality of life under capitalism. The beach he left for road and work remams. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract x Acknowledgements x Introduction: Between, Beyond, Amidst: Radical Centrism and 1 the Antinomies of Middleness The Radical Center: A Profile in Smoothness 6 Centricization: Detections of a Process 16 The Bewitched Between: Apparatus of a Ouandry 24 Chapter 1: A Well-Mixed Balance: Civil Centrism 46 Part 1: On Number Added to Letter 46 Part 2: On Middle Civility 56 Part 3: Radical Incivility 76 Part 4: Liberal Democracy and the Extremity of Consensus 91 Chapter 2: Partisan of the Manifold 99 Part 1: Party of the Center 99 Part 2: Inflationary Stagnation 113 Part 3: From Wooly Indecision to Thatcherite Resolve 128 Chapter 3: On Heretical Managerialism 155 Part 1: Neoliberalism and The End of Middle Tranquility 155 IV a) Quiet Living in the Age of Vulgar Reaganism 155 b) The Punctual Chaos of Finance 179 Part 2: The Drifting Centrist Multitude: Complexity after the 186 Ruins of Politics Part 3: The Heretical Manager: The Radical Center Hegemonized 198 Conclusion: Being-in-the-Middle 208 Part 1: Being Somewhere Together 208 Note for an Escape 214 Works Cited 219 v PhD Thesis-AJ Pendakis-McMaster University-English and Cultural Studies Introduction: Between, Beyond, Amidst: Radical Centrism and the Antinomies of Middleness Believe me, sir, in all changes in the state, moderation is a virtue ... It is a disposing, arranging, conciliating, cementing virtue ...Great powers reside in those who can make great changes. Their own moderation is their only check; and if this virtue is not paramount in their minds, their acts will taste more of their power than of their wisdom, or their benevolence. Whatever they do will be in extremes; it will be crude, harsh, precipitate...This virtue of moderation (which times and situations will clearly distinguish from the counterfeits of pusillanimity and indecision) is the virtue only of superior minds. It requires a deep courage, and full of reflection, to be temperate when the voice of multitudes (the specious mimic of fame and reputation) passes judgment against you. The impetuous desire of an unthinking public will endure no course, but what conducts to splendid and perilous extremes. [Moderation] discovers, in the midst of general levity, a self-possessing and collected character, which, sooner or later, bids fair to attract every thing to it, as to a centre. Edmund Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France ...being at the center of things was always a blast for me. Alan Greenspan, The Age ofTurbulence A trivial image on a page of tight, serious script, its task is little more than a primary injunction to colour, a smear of brightness designed to protect attention from repetition and the threats posed to circulation by boredom. In it, a character straddles theatrically the distance between two strict precipices. Its legs strained thin by the inflexible geography, it minds a stunt of balance the outcome of which is critically unsure. This precarity, however, is not to be confused with the befuddlement or powerlessness of a predicament; there is nothing passive or stunned in this skilled stretch even if its terms exact a gymnast's seriousness. Indeed, the figure's suit here invokes a disciplined charm, a disposition well-stocked in options and connections-in short, a subject fluent in the language and style of institutional power. As is to be expected, its hands--literally--are full. One grasps craftily a rope tied to stakes on each side of the 1 PhD Thesis-AJ Pendakis-McMaster University-English and Cultural Studies divide, organizing and distributing the balance of forces: it is wrapped like a fist and holds the rope as if it were a pool cue or fishing rod-it is in control ofthings, but also responsive to their movements. The other wields a cautious hammer: it knocks into place the stakes which hold the rope, shaping and determining the conditions of the divide itself. That this is an image or allegory for an ideal way of being political becomes clear only at the last instant: from the rope swings a placard and the fragment of a truism: "middle ground", it deadpans. At best, this image serves to accompany the text like an optical pleasantry; a glance suffices before the page is turned and its impulse wholly forgotten. But in this thumbnail exists the shadow of a contemporary shift in the doxa of the political, a process still in motion that has significantly altered the ways in which subjects operating at a whole range of points and scales manage, conceptualize, and anticipate social possibility under the terms arbitrated by transnational capitalism. Gone is every trace of a middleness stupefied by externality and indecision: asserted instead is a thought which draws from inbetweenness a new power of virility and efficacy, the dynamism ofan amidst. I call the subject of this image the extreme or radical center and the process of which it is both a protagonist and consequence centricization. Though this is a process explicitly perceptible in the field of statements and habits we casually organize under the sign of the political--the programmes of parties, the content of government policy, the practices of bureaucrats in central banks, think-tanks, etc--the near universalization of centrist reason extends into the quietest cultural reflex, affecting speech patterns, lines of sight, temporal indexes, even the style of a body's movement through space. It is not only, as Jacques 2 PhD Thesis-AJ Pendakis-McMaster University-English and Cultural Studies Ranciere suggests "a discourse which enters every corner"(?), but really, even in its least determinate mode, a new disposition of existence, what Karl Marx in a different context once called a "definite form of activity" or "mode of life" (42). Centricization should be conceptualized as the reversible historical perfection of conditions optimal to the growth, development and spread of centrisms, all minutely differentiated according to degrees of reflexivity, self-consistency, dynamism, logicity and prestige.
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