Neoliberalism's Uneven Revolution: Reflections on Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos

Patchen Markell

Theory & Event, Volume 20, Number 2, April 2017, pp. 520-527 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/655784

Access provided by Hunter College Libraries (30 Jul 2018 16:38 GMT) Neoliberalism’s Uneven Revolution: Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos

Patchen Markell

endy Brown’s Undoing the Demos1 tells a big, ambitious, and unfamiliar story about what neoliberalism is, and about Wwhat its ascent means for us. Unlike a lot of lesser books and articles on the subject, its sweep does not come at the cost of being vague, hasty, or gestural. It is, to the contrary, theoretically precise, deliberately paced, and carefully rooted in rich and detailed accounts of our present and our recent past. And, most of all, it is a book that is more than the sum of its individual arguments: to read it is to be drawn into a space and a perspective that will change how you look at the world. In that, I think it is a masterpiece of political theory. The questions and comments posed here about Undoing the Dem- os are meant to be internal to its space—that is, they are meant to be questions and comments of the kind that, on my reading anyway, the book means to provoke or invite. Before posing these questions, then, I need to say something about how I understand Brown’s rhetorical stance in Undoing the Demos, which, if I’m right, may also help avoid a possible misunderstanding of the book. One of the striking features of Undoing the Demos is its deliberate refusal of the rhetorical form of the programmatic political manifesto: as Brown says, the book is “an effort to comprehend the constitutive elements and dynamics of our condition,” which “does not elaborate alternatives to the order it illu- minates and only occasionally identifies possible strategies for resist- ing the developments it charts” (28). Another striking feature of the book, and particularly of its first and last chapters, is its use of language that could be characterized as “totalizing”—though, I hasten to add, that word implies a criticism that I actually mean to deflect rather than to press. Neoliberal rationality, Brown says, configures human be- ings “always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus” (31); neoliberalism is the “rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity” (44); neoliberalism replaces democracy’s unruliness by “a form of governing that is soft and total” (208); neoliberalism “conse- crates” and “deepens” a general “exhaustion and despair in Western civilization” (222).

Theory & Event Vol. 20, No. 2, 520–527 © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press Markell | Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos 521 Someone might respond to these features by charging that they amount to defeatism—that the book forecloses the very possibility of elaborating an alternative precisely because it trades so heavily on the ominousness of its sweeping picture of the present as thoroughly and uniformly colonized by neoliberal rationality.2 But this would be a seri- ous misreading. Not least because such a charge would attend only to a handful of sentences from the framing chapters of the book, while ig- noring the detailed central chapters, which show again and again that Brown knows perfectly well that neoliberalism’s effects are neither seamless nor uniform across a social space riven by, for example, divisions between the advanced capitalist economies of the Euro-Atlantic world and those of the Global South (20), or by gendered divisions of labor (106). Nor would it be right simply to conclude that the book con- tradicts itself, offering sweeping pictures of neoliberalism that are un- dermined by its own acknowledgment that neoliberalism is (as Brown puts it at one point) “inconstant, differentiated, unsystematic, impure” (20). Instead, I take these two characterizations of neoliberalism to be meant to work together in a specific way. The apparently “totalizing” language captures a real tendency in neoliberal rationality’s reconfig- uration of the world; it captures the sense of inescapability that is one of its symptoms (and also one of its instruments); and in provoking the protest that this picture is or must be too simple, the book activates and mobilizes a desire for an alternative that—since Brown refuses the genre of the programmatic manifesto—can only be pursued by attend- ing more carefully to, and following the example of, the detailed inves- tigations Brown offers of neoliberalism in its “inconstancy and plastici- ty” (21). In short, this is not a contradiction: it’s a way of summoning the desire for, and providing some of the rudiments of, an education in our present—an education of the kind Brown so eloquently defends in chapter 6, one that aims less at providing “career bang for the buck” than at cultivating a “people” that is “modestly knowing” about the “enormously complex global constellations and powers” that affect it, that has “capacities of discernment and judgment in relation to what it reads, watches or hears about a range of developments in the world,” and that is “oriented toward common concerns and governing itself” (198–200). If, rather than tell her readers what to do, Brown invites her readers to share the burden of identifying alternatives to or routes out of the neoliberal present, and if she invites us to do so (as indeed she herself does) partly by complicating some of Undoing the Demos’s most sweeping characterizations of that present, then my questions and comments here can be understood as taking up that invitation. I begin with the question of the historical novelty of neoliberalism, understood as a “new form of governmental reason” (9) that has become hegemonic 522 Theory & Event in the Euro-Atlantic world over roughly the last three decades. One of the things about neoliberalism that is decisively new, Brown argues, is that it goes beyond simply reconceiving the proper relationship or re- locating the appropriate boundary between politics and the economy, as earlier forms of liberalism did, but reconceives the nature of both of these in a way that collapses any remaining difference between them. In its classical and liberal versions, the picture of the human being as homo oeconomicus presupposed the parallel existence of homo politicus: Aristotle’s free man ruled over a household whose unfree labor freed him for citizenship; Smith’s agent of commerce was not reducible to his trucking and bartering and remained subject to the sovereignty of a state that was still distinct enough from the economy to intervene in it. But neoliberalism’s version of homo oeconomicus, as an individual subject responsible for maintaining and maximizing its “portfolio value in all domains of its life” (35), is a figure of the human being that no longer presupposes or respects fundamental divisions among those domains. Thus, neoliberalism does not just subordinate politics to economics but refigures it, like every other sphere, in the image of an economics that has itself been newly refigured along neoliberal lines. That erasure of every language, every domain, and every figure of the person that might in some way prove irreducible to and therefore po- tentially “disharmonious with capitalism” (111) is the real tendency the book’s totalizing formulations are rightly meant to capture. But exactly how novel, how distinctive to the neoliberalism of the last three decades, is this tendency? Reading Brown’s analysis of Obama’s 2013 State of the Union, for example, I was convinced by the claim that Obama’s invocations of jobs, skills, competition, invest- ment, stimulus, and so on, were not just moves in a political competition with the GOP, but evidence of “the way that economic growth has become both the end and legitimation of government” and the way that “the state’s table of purposes and priorities has become indistin- guishable from that of modern firms” (26–27). Yet I also heard powerful resonances between that speech and the recasting of growth, prosperity, and consumption as both the substance and the instruments of “freedom” in the American political imaginary of the early Cold War.3 Similarly, as a Berkeley alumnus from late in the era of $600-a-semester tuition and generous-enough Pell Grants, I’ve watched the eviscera- tion of liberal arts education in public universities that Brown traces so powerfully here with acute distress. Yet I also wanted to hear more about the material basis of the public university in its twentieth-century heyday, and also about the conception of education that helped sustain massive state and federal funding for campus construction, research, and teaching, which was not only a conception of education as “a medium for egalitarianism and social mobility” (184), but also a conception of education as a way of providing appropriately creden- Markell | Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos 523 tialed white-collar labor and research for the technocratic amalgama- tion of government agencies and private corporations that made up the wartime and postwar defense-industrial complex.4 (By the same token, a few generations earlier, leaders of West Coast land grant schools like Berkeley had justified the public provision of liberal arts education, as opposed to utilitarian agricultural research, by tying it to the project of opening Far Eastern markets and ruling what they proudly referred to as its racially inferior populations.5) To recall this is not at all to deny the democratic and democratizing accomplishments of public higher education in the liberal arts, but it may be to emphasize, more strongly than Brown does, that these accomplishments have always stood in a fraught, even antagonistic relationship to their institutional and material matrices. Most of all, I wonder what to make of the fact that precisely the kind of claim that Brown makes here—that a new rationality has not only subordinated homo politicus to homo oeconomicus but subsumed one into the other—was already audible among social critics observing an earlier and very different configuration of state, citizen, and economy: not the neoliberal configuration, in which the responsibilized citizen is left alone to maximize his market value in a precarious environ- ment, but the Fordist configuration, in which the deployment of expert knowledge to sustain an ever-growing and ever-more efficient cycle of production and consumption seemed to promise enough prosperity to make political conflict obsolete. One could think here of Hannah Arendt in 1958 on the dystopic scenario of a “society of laborers with- out labor,” which “no longer know[s] of those higher and meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom [from toil] would deserve to be won”;6 or of Sheldon Wolin in 1960 on “the age of organization and the sublimation of politics,” writing, in a gloss of Philip Selznick, that “the organization is the dominant and ubiquitous phenomenon of society, and whether it carries the adjective ‘business’, ‘government’, ‘military’, or ‘educational’ is largely irrelevant.”7 Or think, finally, of Students for a Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement of 1962, in which (to quote its first lines) “people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities” indicted the insti- tutions of their time for foreclosing precisely the sorts of deliberation about common ends and purposes that Brown associates with homo politicus. “All around us,” they wrote, “there is astute grasp of meth- od, technique—the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, the hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image—but, if pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its implicit ideals.” Such inar- ticulacy contributed to the prevailing sense that “there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well.”8 524 Theory & Event Of course the authors of the Port Huron Statement didn’t agree; and their dissent and its effects may constitute one powerful illustra- tion of exactly how much we now stand to lose in the sacrifice of public higher education in the liberal arts (188)—though the Statement itself (understandably but also perhaps too one-sidedly) cast their “profes- sors and administrators” as part of the problem.9 But it is important to notice what these students did say punctured the “complacency” in which they were raised; and the first among the “events too troubling to dismiss” that they list was “the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry.” (The second was the “enclosing fact of the Cold War.”)10 I recall this not to romanticize the SDSers or their racial politics, but simply to draw attention to the fact that in this earlier context, one of the things that could have and sometimes did shatter the sense of the contemporary social scene as a smooth, frictionless, politics-free totality was precisely the existence both of forms of social domination that could not be accounted for within the stylized picture of the postwar world as a well-oiled prosperity machine and of powerful political struggles dedicated to overcoming them. And, by the same token, my larger point in putting a stronger emphasis on the continuities between our moment and this earlier one is not to deny the differences between neoliberalism and its antecedents, but to generate this question: where, today, within our broadly neoliberalized society, can we never- theless see axes of social domination—and political struggles against them—that also cannot be accounted for within the stylized picture of neoliberal power as “soft and total,” and as proceeding through the generalization of the figure of homo oeconomicus as a self-governing portfolio-enhancer, and everything that Brown shows us goes with it? Brown doesn’t ignore this question; far from it. It comes to the fore most vividly in her important discussion of the “gender of homo oeconomicus” (99–107) which brilliantly shows, first, how the subordina- tion of “those positioned as women in the sexual division of labor” is intensified by neoliberalism’s dismantling of the public infrastructure that once helped respond to the unavowed dependence upon others of supposedly autonomous economic man; and, second, how this sub- ordination is transformed as women are intensively incorporated into the neoliberal market of responsible human capitals while remaining burdened with “provisioning care of every sort, in an out of the household”—a burden that, in neoliberal discourse, remains “divested of a place in language, visually and discursively absent from public con- sciousness” (104–107). “With only competing and value-enhancing human capital in the frame,” Brown concludes, “complex and persistent gender inequality is attributed to sexual difference, an effect that neoliberalism takes for a cause. Consequently, an impoverished single mother is framed to fail in the project of becoming a responsibilized Markell | Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos 525 neoliberal subject, especially in the contexts of the kinds of austerities imposed by the budget ‘sequester’ in the United States or by the Euro- pean Union bailouts in Southern Europe” (107). This, though, is a story of how neoliberalism makes its own inconstancy and unevenness invisible. Does it always do so? Would the story become more complicated if we also asked, for example, about the race of homo oeconomicus? Just as that impoverished single mother’s “failure” is naturalized by neoliberal rationality, the chances that her failure will also subject her to discipline, including criminal punishment, are all the greater if she is Black or Latina.11 This is just one unevenness generated at the complicated intersection of neoliberal rationality with the rationality of white supremacy, which does not homogenize all sub- jects as self-maximizing capitals, large and small, but marks out some populations as manipulable and disposable material, fit to be ruled through the often coercive and violent command-and-control tech- niques that neoliberal rationality itself eschews. That does not in itself make this unevenness and its effects visually and discursively present to a national, cross-racial public, though the last three years of activism under the rubric “Black Lives Matter” show how some especially con- spicuous forms of the exercise of this power, like police shootings, can be used by a movement to organize public attention around a larger complex of problems.12 If what neoliberalism ultimately threatens is the very intelligibility of a desire for democracy in the bare sense of not being ruled by others, where better to look for the stubborn persistence of that desire and its expression than in the places where neoliberal rationality as Brown describes it governs least purely? This brings me to one final comment, less about neoliberalism and democracy than about liberalism and democracy. I said earlier, in passing, that I wanted to emphasize that liberal education’s best aspects have always stood in a fraught relation to its institutional and material matrix. Brown sees this too. Her account of the origin and purpose of a liberal arts education begins, after all, by identifying its origin in the ancient world as “the education appropriate to free men, in contrast to that of slaves” (184), and stresses the “radical democratic” transformation of this original conception that was involved in “extending liberal arts education from the elite to the many” (185). But did this transformation only involve making the same education and the same “life of freedom long reserved for the few” available to all (185)? No, because what it was “necessary for free men to know” in a slave society referred at once to their task of collective self-government as a body of free citizens, and their task of ruling the unfree populations whose labor made their leisure possible. Hannah Arendt tells a story in which the conceptual conflation of these tasks within the tradition of political philosophy—the idea that ruling oneself is basically just like ruling others, only with a different arrangement of agents and objects—leaves 526 Theory & Event that tradition unable to distinguish between the practice of political freedom and something like the forms of the soft governance of our- selves whose various iterations Foucault tracks. From this perspective, the radical democratic aspect of the history of liberal education was not just its extension to all, but also the resulting and ongoing struggle over its content and aims, which Brown mentions in a note (265 n. 27), but which is more central to the story than that. As with liberal education, so with liberal democracy. Although Brown regards liberal democracy as limited and anemic, she simulta- neously holds it out as an example of a political form that, since “its emergence in the late eighteenth century,” has “harbor[ed] an ideal in excess of itself” (206), and which at least institutionalized a difference between homo oeconomicus and homo politicus that could be and has been employed to push liberal democracy in more radically democratic directions. Yet, importantly, this description of the history of liberal democracy is retrospective, and perhaps even anachronistic. If Bernard Manin and others are right, then the regimes established in the eighteenth-century revolutions in France and North America were not understood at the time as “liberal democracies,” but as republics or representative governments as opposed to democracies.13 This is not just a terminological point. If we think of liberal democracy as a regime in which the underlying principles are democratic but they are con- strained and contradicted by their form of concrete social expression, and if emancipatory democratic politics has consisted in the mobiliza- tion of these principles against those social constraints, then the pas- sage from liberalism to neoliberalism will look, as it does in Brown’s story, like the catastrophic destruction of the only ground democratic aspirations had on which to stand. But what if these regimes were not just imperfectly realized democracies, but actively antidemocratic, and have only subsequently come to be thought of as varieties of democracy thanks to the occasionally successful struggles of actors to alter them, struggles that couldn’t rely simply on the logic of holding a regime accountable to its own principles, but were sustained by an an- tipathy to being ruled, and perhaps by a fugitive tradition of popular power? At the very least, that alternative story might soften the sharp contrast between a liberalism that was internally fractious enough to harbor political possibilities, and a neoliberalism too smooth to give traction to any alternatives. Of course, that would not leave us any- where other than where Brown’s epilogue does: facing difficult work that “bears no immediate reward and carries no guarantee of success” (222). But there might be something sustaining in the thought that our predicament is not quite as different as we might initially think from those that faced the generations before us. Markell | Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos 527 Notes 1. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: ZONE Books, 2015). This essay is a lightly edited version of comments on Undoing the Demos presented at the 2015 Critical Theory in Critical Times Workshop, sponsored by Northwestern University’s Program in Critical The- ory; I’m grateful to the organizers, Dilip Gaonkar and Cristina Lafont, for the invitation to participate, and to Annie McClanahan, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo, and especially Wendy Brown for a terrific conversation. 2. For a consideration, in another context, of the ways in which the theoreti- cal sweep of a critical diagnosis of the present may “consign political activity to failure even before it has begun,” see Patchen Markell, “The Moment Has Passed: Power After Arendt,” in Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory, ed. Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 132. 3. See e.g. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consump- tion in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 114–129. 4. For a classic account of the changing situation of the postwar university from the President of the University of California system, see Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); for a case study focused on Stanford’s (especially enterpreneurial) construction of a triangular relationship with the state and private enterprise during the Cold War see Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); for a study of the University of Wisconsin in the same period see Matthew Levin, Cold War Uni- versity: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), esp. chap. 1. 5. On Berkeley in this period see Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthy Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chap. 7 and esp. 290–95. 6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5. 7. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 419–20. 8. Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New York: Students for a Democratic Society, 1962), 3–5. 9. Ibid., 5. 10. Ibid., 3. 11. For a rich account of the complex intersection between neoliberalism and the racialized politics of social welfare in America see Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford S. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 12. See Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 13. See e.g. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–3.