Best practices constitute a form of antipolitics that images politics itself as backwardness.

Evidence

The contemporary ubiquitousness and promiscuity of best practices thus simultaneously indexes and facilitates neoliberal economization of heretofore nonmarketized spheres and activities. Public educational, artistic, civic, and other kinds of human endeavor are dissolved into a marketized medium through the circulation of best practices across private and public sectors. Consequently, many public and nonprofit institutions, from charities to universities, find themselves in a kind of mission drift today, disoriented by practices adopted from the profit sector that subtly recalibrate their goals and constituencies, along with their structures and processes. Mission drift, however, is only one way in which governance through best practices has altered public entities and public life. As I suggested at the beginning of this discussion, best practices stand for value-free technical knowledge validated by experience and consensus, where the alternative is not only tradition or mandate, but partisanship and contestation over purposes, values, and ends. Best practices connote both expertise and neutrality; they emerge from and cite research, as well as frame it. Their authority and legitimacy is corroborated through replacing rigid rules and top-down commands with organically gestated procedures validated by experience and success. In all of these ways, they are not merely claiming to be unpolitical, but constitute an antipolitics and thereby construct a particular image of the political. … From the epistemological standpoint of best practices, politics appears as a combination of dicta or commands where there should be expertise, as particular interests or debate about ends where there should be teamwork for a goal, as partisanship where there should be neutrality and objectivity in both knowledge and practice, as provincialism where there should be the open doors and the lingua franca of the market. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 268

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘antipolitics’ as best practices’ construction of a specific image of the political — politics as command, partisanship, provincialism.
• XREF: Echoes Weber’s disenchantment and later critiques of technocratic governance; connects to Brown’s overall thesis of economization of politics. — connects to: Best practices exemplify neoliberal governance’s soft power and antipolitics — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 262; Best practices absorb political concerns into markets, eliminating the need for state interference. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 271; Citizens’ anti-politics posturing serves right-wing policy goals. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 933

Broader Connections

• Best practices exemplify neoliberal governance’s soft power and antipolitics #corroborates (0.95) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 262
• Best practices absorb political concerns into markets, eliminating the need for state interference. #expands (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 271