The Read: Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I like Wendy Brown’s work. I have been thinking a lot lately about liberalism and neoliberalism and I could see that this book was going to be useful for thinking about neoliberalism’s broader implications. I also came across a couple of discussions on social media that brought up this book.
Also, I really like the books in this Zone Books series, both in terms of subject matter and book design.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes! Though I didn’t find the two chapters focused on Foucault all that interesting. I feel as if I’ve personally gotten everything out of Foucault that is useful to me; thinking through Foucault in many domains feels to me complicatedly like a long detour. It’s an important part of Brown’s route to the second half of the book, and I appreciate that—if nothing else, to get us to an account of how neoliberalism is inside our subjectivity and how we do the work of reassembling its forms of normative reason, to get away from those sorts of critiques that have neoliberalism being the ideology of some “them” who are instrumentally deploying it on some “us”.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Working it into writing immediately. I would definitely put it into a course on neoliberalism’s meanings and history—a “maybe course” that I might post at some point. (An alternative “maybe course” I’ve been thinking of is a biography of “homo economicus” and this book would belong there as well.)
Quotes
“The claim that neoliberalism is profoundly destructive to the fiber and future of democracy in any form is premised on an understanding of neoliberalism as something other than a set of economic policies, an ideology, or a resetting of the relation between state and economy. Rather, as a normative order of reason over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavour, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic.”
“Neoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones.”
“As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values, resources and future trajectories. This persistence of politics amid the destruction of public life and especially educated public life, combined with the marketization of the political sphere, is part of what makes contemporary politics peculiarly unappealing and toxic—full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media.”
“The new form of power orchestrating the conduct of subjects—and the importance of governance in activating this power—is apparent in the grammar used to describe and enact it. The ugly words ‘flexibilization’ and ‘responsibilization’ have their roots in human capacities associated with modest autonomy…When the act of being responsible is linguistically converted into the administered condition of being responsibilized, it departs from the domain of agency and instead governs the subject through an external moral injunction—through demands emanating from an invisible elsewhere.”
“The Left’s difficulties are compounded by the seduction of such surrender to the overwhelmingly large, fast, complex, contingently imbricated and seemingly unharnessable powers organizing the world today. Tasked with the already difficult project of puncturing common neoliberal sense and with developing a
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
If nothing else, it provides a good review analysis of a very wide body of relevant literature in political philosophy, political science, public commentary, anthropology, critical theory, political economy, etc. It’s a 2015 publication date, so there’s some things to add to the list of works she surveys, but I’d still say that anyone trying to keep up with the conversation about “neoliberalism” would benefit a lot from just cribbing off her bibliography.
As a result of that review, she lays out pretty clearly how many things “neoliberalism” has come to mean and some of the reasons why its usage is so broad and at times contentious. I’m with Brown in thinking that talking about neoliberalism as only a economic doctrine or a set of governmental policies really misses the point. I like the thought she lays out early in the book that whereas classical liberalism did not understand all human life as economic, or understand all human subjectivity as that of homo economicus, neoliberalism does exactly that. I think of how hard it has become to walk into any deliberation or institutional discussion in my own professional life and suggest that we do something because it would be fun or beautiful or interesting. Any time I’ve tried, the inevitable rejoinder is going to be confused looks and then “yeah, but is that a good use of time and money?” I suggested on several occasions that we could build a front-end discovery interface for combing through a century and a half of curricular data (course descriptions, course titles, prerequisites, maybe redacted enrollment numbers, etc.) and every time the basic question has been “and what would people do with that?” My answer has been, “I don’t know! That’s the point! I don’t know what people are going to do with a library or an archive either—you build these things in appreciation of how people other than yourself might use them in ways you could never imagine to discover or learn or claim something that makes the world a more interesting, a more truthful, a more fraught and complex place.” That’s the sort of proposition that I think the initial era of social democracy and the building public goods allowed: make huge projects! build big parks! build libraries and gardens! build institutions! Why? Because people like them, people will use them, they make human life better or more possible or more interesting. As Brown points out (echoing many others), we’re now given over to thinking about people themselves in terms of value, as “human capital”, as a resource to “retain”. Neoliberalism, whatever it is, insists on a precise budget where the quid and the quo line up. It wants to know how this is going to make more money (perhaps by spending less of it) and it assumes that everything that we want as human beings is ultimately expressible in terms of its economic value to us. No wonder the word neoliberalism has to do so much work, because it’s trying to get us to pay attention to something that’s in the air we breath, wherever we go and whatever we do. Trying to get people to understand that once upon a time there were other ways to value and imagine what we were doing as citizens, humans, even as workers, takes so much work because you’re up against a form of common sense that has seeped into every pore of our being.
Chapter Four and Five are really useful to me. They helped me understand why some of the words and conceptual frames so common across a wide span of managerial thought in so many different kinds of institutions are so irritating or provocative—flexible, adaptable, responsible (and “responsible employee”), even ideas whose basic moral proposition or intent I support like “bystander training”. Or why the pervasiveness of legal reasoning about risk and liability is so alarming. But trying to object to any of this in the ordinary course of professional life or any other kind of activity makes you sound like a crank—people react as if you bear them personal animus, because what you’re reacting to is so pervasive and embedded and impossible to unthink in how it imagines individuals, social relations, governance, and so on. The best you can do is a light kind of self-deprecating irony in the presence of some of this kind of discourse, which in the end helps this way of thinking become even more powerful, because you end up signaling that there’s no serious issue or problem with any of it.
I need to spend more time with the epilogue, which uses Agamben’s “bare life” to conceptualize something Brown calls “bare democracy”. My answer to how to contest “civilizational despair” has been developing this year in a manuscript I’m working on that I think is likely painfully naive and unsophisticated in many ways alongside the kind of analysis that Brown is pursuing, but I harken at least to her description of the challenge we’re facing.
Interesting. I don’t really want to read in this mode anymore, but almost you convince me to give it a try.
I think you could jump in on Ch. 4-5 and ignore the rest, but some of it at least is "in the water, in the air" of progressive critique, so to speak.