An Interview with Wendy Brown: Redoing the Demos?

Question 1: In Undoing the Demos (2015), you address the impossibility of radical or emancipatory politics whilst the market is the only source of ‘verification’ and its fiction, the Homo Oeconomicus, is the last figure standing. In order to grasp this problem, you develop an interesting triangular space between Foucault, Marx and democracy, which proves to be fruitful, yet also finds opponents in each corner. Could you elaborate further on this theoretical space you have created? Why is it important, and how can we best tackle the critiques arising in each corner?

Brown: From Marx, we learn to think about political economy, and more specifically about capitalism as fundamental in the making of contemporary human existence. Of course, we had to do some updating of Marx to grasp first Keynesian and then, more recently, neoliberal capitalism and now finance capitalism. But from Marx we learn to think about our world in terms of the organization of the mode of production and what some have now called ‘the mode of prediction’ (that is, finance capital). We learn to think about political economy in the broadest and deepest sense as the location of power, domination and exploitation, as well as points of resistance.

From Foucault, we learn to think about how we are governed by orders of reason, and what he later came to call forms of ‘governing rationality’ or ‘governmental reason’. Unlike for Marx, these orders of reason cannot be reduced to modes of production or political economy. Rather they are normative rationalities through which we are produced as subjects and which give rise to and legitimate techniques through which we are governed as subjects. So, Foucault teaches us to keep our eye on the principles of common sense that any particular order of governing rationality generates and to think about how to resist or oppose those: how to develop alternative principles, alternative discourses, but also how to think about recrafting the subject that these modes produce.

Both thinkers are very powerful and very important in thinking about political resistance, yet neither one is much interested in ‘democracy’, its institutions or its imaginary. Why care about this? Because neoliberalism produces what Foucault would call a ‘governing rationality’ that comprehensively assaults the institutions and practices of democracy. It has turned democracies into plutonomies and plutocracies, but above all challenged, all but destroying, the political imaginaries that democracy and radical democratic rebellions count on.

So, as you say, I’ve had to add a third angle to the map of our co-ordinates for theorizing our condition and possible points of resistance. That said, I think effective left political action may sometimes lean toward one corner and sometimes another of this triangle. It might be protesting assaults on democracy; it might be protesting particularly hyper-exploitative or colonizing effects of capital – whether by banks, factories, states, the IMF or the EU; or it might be challenging the very mode of reason by which, for example, public universities are being destroyed, a mode that reconfigures them as businesses (horribly run, mostly) and students as indebted self-investors.

Certainly we might try to have all those going at once – revealing to populations what kind of subjects they’ve become, what reality principles they are living by, and what alternatives there might be, while at the same time revealing the workings of current modes of capitalism and the devastations of democratic institutions and imaginaries. But you do what you can – or better, what’s most appropriate or effective – in any particular political conjuncture or political moment. At different times, you’re challenging governing modes of power in different ways and addressing different kinds of audiences. We need to avoid remonstrating with political actions or actors for this, which is part of the variegated landscape and complex temporalities of political life.

Question 2: As you demonstrate in Undoing the Demos (2015), neoliberalism has changed the nature of law, education, and state governance. However, with the recent rise of neoconservatism, the role of the state is surely the more urgent of these, and you have found disturbing convergences between the operations of neoliberalism and fascism (2015: 219). Could you elaborate further on these convergences? Does the affinity between neoliberalism and fascism, for instance, help us in any way to understand the rise of President Trump?

Brown: Many people are inclined to see Trump’s election, Brexit and the emergence of either neo-fascist parties or just extreme right parties – the Front National in France, the Alternative For Germany in Germany – as the end of neoliberalism because they’re nationalist, opposing global free trade policies, premised on exclusion, barricades, protectionism.

I think it’s a mistake to see these as counters to neoliberalism, although they are a certain form of reaction to it. Neoliberalism has produced the conditions in which we are, among other things, witnessing an enormous rage from a predominantly white population that has had its economic and social sense of entitlement dethroned by neoliberal capitalism. What we are seeing is not just reactions to immigrants, but also reactions to declining standards of living, lost jobs, lost pensions, declines in neighbourhoods, disintegrating infrastructure – all the things brought to us by four decades of neoliberalism’s global race to the bottom in wages, taxes, the social state and other things that made working-class and middle-class life bearable (especially in the Global North where we are focused in this conversation).

So, part of what I would argue we are witnessing right now is a reaction to not just economic devastation of middle- and working-class existence, but white entitlement and white supremacy that itself has been savaged by the effects of neoliberalism which has moved jobs to other parts of the world, moved inexpensive labour forces into countries and neighbourhoods and cities that were a little bit more homogenous in the past.

That said, this reaction takes place under a rubric of freedom, one shaped heavily by neoliberal discourse itself. Rightist calls for authoritarian and strong states shouldn’t distract us from the extent to which most extreme right parties also are claiming to be the parties of freedom: freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, and importantly, freedom to claim your country or neighbourhood as ethnically ‘owned’. So, a very specific notion of freedom is operating here – freedom as ownership, freedom as resting in what Hayek called the ‘extension of the personal, private sphere’ which, in neoliberal reason, is legitimately protected against political incursion. So there is a notion of freedom here that is extending the claims of the private to the figure of the nation itself. ‘France for the French’ and ‘America First’ may be read as ‘we are the people who have the free right to make a claim on behalf of our owned nation’. And that notion of freedom came directly out of neoliberalism. One of the things I’m working on now is trying to map the genealogies that have brought neoliberalism to this turn.

I’ll say one last thing here. I am not suggesting that the original neoliberals who formulated this particular set of ideas – Hayek, Friedman, Ordoliberals and so forth – had in mind the neo-fascist or authoritarian developments we are seeing today. Quite the opposite: these were thinkers who developed their ideas in the shadow of European fascism and totalitarianism, and understood themselves to be making a world that would be secure from fascism. I am suggesting, however, that what’s emerging is a kind of neoliberal Frankenstein: a monster – a creation – that was not in the design of neoliberalism, but is now quite obviously one of its effects.

Question 3: One of the campaign slogans for the so-called ‘pink tide’ nations (initiated by Chavez when he was elected in 1999) was ‘The Return of the State’. When compared to the ‘withdrawal’ of the state in the 1990s, this was meant to indicate the strengthening of democratic institutions in order to establish mechanisms for economic redistribution and increased political participation. Some authors (e.g. Sader, 2008; Borón, 2014) therefore saw in this ‘return of the state’ an indicator of post-neoliberalism yet, as you point out in Undoing the Demos (2015), the state did not wither under neoliberalism, but simply operated under a different rationality. What is your position on ‘the return of the state’ as an anti-neoliberal gesture? What are your thoughts on claims that we are now moving towards a post-neoliberal era in these spaces of the Global South?

Brown: We have to be careful in our thinking about ‘the’ state here. One of the great mistakes of Marxist and neo-Marxist theory in the 60 s and 70 s, which aimed to develop a theory of ‘the’ capitalist state, was imagining that capitalist states of any particular era had one form and also that the state itself was a unified and coherent entity. Foucault helps challenge this with his genealogies of states and with his rejection of the modern state as the centre of power and governance, i.e. with his notions of biopolitics and of power as irrigating throughout society. And in his Collège lectures on neoliberalism, he further challenges the Marxist account with his appreciation of the extent to which states are remade by the intellectual-political project of neoliberalism. But some of those old Marxist state theorists are also arriving at more nuanced accounts of capitalist states – here I’m thinking of Streeck, Offe, and so forth.

We need to think about states in their specificity. Which is to say – to stay in the Global North for a second before moving south – there is obviously a difference between the Keynesian or social welfare or social democratic states and the neoliberal state. It’s not that one is bigger than another or that one is the real capitalist state and one is not; they perform different kinds of functions, including different kinds of legitimation functions, and they feature different kinds of state powers. Neoliberalism is a heavily statist project, even as it challenges many aspects of the social democratic and even liberal democratic state. Neoliberalism reorients and remakes the state; it does not reduce its powers or importance.

With Chavez, I appreciate the rhetorical effect of talking about ‘the return of the state’ for purposes of redistribution, egalitarianism, and socializing industry. But it’s a rhetorical gesture because, as we know too well from contemporary Venezuela, that same state can be deployed to other functions: police functions, military functions, administrative functions, corrupt functions, etc. So, I don’t think it’s a question of ‘yes or no?’ to the state. The question for the Left today, including in the Global South, is: how to deal politically with efforts to challenge neoliberal globalization at a local level, without concentrating power – all kinds of forms of power – in states that end up being anti-democratic in their operation and in their mission?

This is not a simple problem to solve. States remain an important venue through which nations and subpowers within them either comport with or resist the forces of a neoliberalized global order. The question of how to organize a Left project – whether it’s national or subnational – requires figuring out what Foucault referred to as ‘a form of political rationality’ that is democratic, emancipatory, and not only anti-neoliberal. This is difficult but essential for the Left – North and South – to be addressing.

Question 4: Confronting a new political context in 2017, it seems that there may be a need to re-diagnose the state of the Left today. In the face of new (post-) feminisms, anti-fascist and anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter, international solidarities, and the election in some places of ostensibly Left-wing politicians, we perhaps need to revisit the question of ‘leftist melancholia’ as being attached to ungrievable losses that create political impotence, rage and righteous moralism. Is it still fair to criticize leftist politics as possessing a slave morality, or a ‘stubborn clinging to a certain equation of truth with powerlessness or as acting out of an injured will’ (2001: 23), as you did in Politics Out of History (2001)? What’s more, should we continue describing the Left’s relationship with power as largely defensive – as one of a ‘siege mentality’ (2001: 39) – or are there more affirmative forms of politics beginning to rise to the fore?

Brown: When I was theorizing wounded attachments on the Left and Left melancholia – a certain commitment to a status of innocence, purity, goodness, truth, and beauty with all the evil arrayed on the other side – I was concerned with certain historically specific tendencies on the Left that debilitated it and limited its powers and vision. But these theories were not intended as totalizing accounts of the Left, accounts that would condemn it or explain everything about it. Those tendencies may not be our main problem today but they’re still there, and we have to be wary of them. Still, I think there is something more important before us right now.

It has been very challenging for the Left, in the aftermath of the failed socialist and communist experiments in the 20th century, to answer the question: What is our vision of an emancipatory, modestly egalitarian, sustainable form of political economy, and democratic politics, in an unprecedentedly connected yet complex and diverse world? Would this form be regional? national? global? How does it accommodate difference? How does it deal with the range of powers, other than class, that neither Marx nor communism sufficiently attended to – race, gender, sexuality, etc., but also powers of political and psychic life that won’t simply disintegrate with the end of private property? In short, what kind of genuinely compelling vision of human political, social and economic arrangements do we have that stands for us in opposition to this nightmarish world of ours? That’s a tall order, but it cannot be dodged.

This is related to a second challenge, which is: how to engage in resistance or opposition – whether to the plundering of the planet or neo-fascist regimes or human rights abuses – while featuring a vision of alternative arrangements? How to have a politics that extends beyond ‘this violence is terrible’, ‘this regime is awful’, ‘this oppresses us’ or ‘this species or topography is being destroyed’ and instead struggles against these wrongs while offering a vision of deep transformation? An order in which these nightmares would not be possible? How to move beyond critique and resistance?

There are many forms of political action today making efforts in this direction. There are all kinds of experiments with ‘prefigurative politics’ and oppositional efforts that are coalitional, multi-dimensional, open, and pluralistic – efforts that are trying to be transformative as they resist. At the same time, some of the problems that I’ve spent my life calling out in Left politics are things we still need to watch out for. Left melancholia is still a danger as are Left projects that don’t take on the challenges of a globalized world, the challenges of difference and challenges of political – not only economic and social – power. Leftists are also still prone to believe that ‘we are the righteous, the true, the innocent’ – which is unhelpful in coming to terms with difficulties inside a Left politics and uncompelling to those not on the Left. And the Left is still short of a widely shared, intelligent and intelligible, alternative to global capitalism.

So yes, I agree with you that some of the youth-built Left projects today are extremely exciting, and full of the kind of energies needed to make links and coalitions, as well as prefigurative politics. Yet, we still face the challenge of a globally-integrated, finance-dominated capitalism that will literally bring life to an end, soon, if we don’t replace it with something else. How to affirm existing Left projects, fight back the dark, and fashion a substantive alternative to the current order of things? How to fight locally and globally? How to have courage, humility, irony, openness and indefatigability? These are our challenges.

Question 5: In the epilogue of Undoing the Demos (2015), you propose the idea of ‘bare democracy’ that cannot be part of any governmentality because ‘it features no continuous or consistent account of why people ought to rule, only the negative one that we should not be ruled by others’ (2015: 203). Could you elaborate further on this idea of ‘bare democracy’? Can there be such a thing as a positive, productive part of democracy in the Foucauldian sense or, as it were, a ‘democratic governmental rationality’?

Brown: By ‘bare democracy’ I was simply referring to the thinnest possible meaning that one could attach to the notion of democracy, and really I was returning us to its etymological dimensions – demos kratia, rule by the people – which differs from ‘rule by the one’, ‘rule by the few’, ‘rule by the corporations’, ‘rule by technocrats’, ‘rule by algorithm’, ‘rule by capital’. Rule by the people is bare democracy in the sense that it is the barest possible meaning democracy can have.

After you’ve said the people should rule, everything remains to be thought and done. How do the people rule? Do they rule through the election of representatives? Marx and others remind us that that’s not really rule by the people, that’s handing off your capacity to rule yourself to someone else. Do we rule directly? How? Are you still ruling yourself if you’re in the minority that finds yourself ruled or governed by a majority? Do we rule by legislating or do we rule by dictate? Do we govern ourselves, as Marx would have it, by collectively owning and controlling the means of production? Is that how rule by the people really happens? Or, as some political theorists suggest, does it happen through giving ourselves the basic principles, the basic laws by which we live? Is that political project, as Rousseau suggested, separate from the one of collectively owning and controlling our means of subsistence?

What I was trying to suggest is that to be committed to democracy is not to be committed to one form or another – bourgeois, radical, direct, liberal, constitutional, social or any other form. Democracy is itself, in other words, a contestable, debatable, notion and practice and historically it is given shape and content by different cultural, political-economic, religious material. So ‘bare democracy’ simply expresses the idea that we haven’t given up on the idea of ruling ourselves. Neoliberalism has given up on it when it says, ‘far better to be ruled by markets than to be ruled by people’. The European Union has given up on it, when it says, ‘better to be ruled by technocracy, algorithm, experts’. And of course, the new authoritarian regimes are giving up on it.

More than just fighting for equality or freedom from oppression, I think the Left must fight for an order in which the people really do rule themselves. That’s the only hope we have of keeping the planet alive and protecting the great variety of life, including the great variety of human life, within it. So my concern with democracy, far from a retreat from radical Left politics, ups the demands on it: social and political equality, yes; sustainable production for people and planetary species, yes; freedom from exploitation and instrumentalization, yes; but also collective self-rule.