Book, Ideology of Competence, The (Chaui 3)[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. In the essays gathered here, Marilena Chaui questions the genesis and meaning of the ideology of competence from the moment of Fordist regulation to the neoliberal moment, focusing on the analysis of two institutions: the university and the cultural industry. To the extent that it is adapted by the authoritarian and hierarchical structure of Brazilian society, the ideology of competence, becoming an organizing principle for universities, not only justifies the current social structure, but also contributes to reproducing it without fundamental transformations.. Chaui unmasks the modernizing discourse of neoliberals by showing that, far from promoting the democratization of Brazilian society, they were merely accentuating, under modern guises, the authoritarian technocratic domination that had begun with the “conservative modernization” of the dictatorship.. In her analysis of the cultural industry, Chaui shows how television programming creates narcissistic subjects who are unable to exercise democratic citizenship and build a public space for debates and political actions because they are conditioned to evaluate everything that is public according to the criteria of the private lives of the ruling classes.. Consumer subjects, absorbed in narcissism or depression, entrust competent professionals with the power to decide on politics, culture, professional life, leisure, etc.. In other words, under the image of the “knowledge society”, the contemporary cultural industry establishes a process of control over Internet users and viewers who fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their freedom. By reading the essays, one realizes how the most advanced technoscience and the most stupid mass culture have a common logic that is given to them not only by the interests of the dominant class, but also by the process of social fragmentation that is typical of the decades of “flexible accumulation”.