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 lan- guage 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); neolib- eralism 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, divi- sions 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 read- ers 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 sweep- ing 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 val- ue 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 competi- tion 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 power- ful resonances between that speech and the recasting of growth, pros- perity, 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-cen- tury 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 mate- rial matrices.