Wendy Brown - Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution

ZONE BOOKS NEAR FUTURES SERIES

Edited by Wendy Brown and Michel Feher

Reckoning with the epochal nature of the turn that capitalism has taken in the last three decades, the editors of Near Futures seek to assemble a series of books that will illuminate its manifold implicationswith regard to the production of value and values, the missions or disorientations of social and political institutions, the yearnings, reasoning, and conduct expected of individuals. However, the purpose of this project is not only to take stock of what neoliberal reforms and the dictates of finance have wrought: insofar as every mode of government generates resistances specific to its premises and practices, Near Futures also purports to chart some of the new conflicts and forms of activism elicited by the advent of our brave new world.

2015 Wendy Brown

ZONE BOOKS

633 Vanderbilt Street, Brooklyn, New York 11218

All rights reserved.

A version of was previously published as The End of Educated Democracy in Representations, Volume 116 (Fall 2011)

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the Publisher.

Distributed by The MIT Press,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Wendy, 1955

Undoing the demos: neoliberalisms stealth revolution / by Wendy Brown. First edition.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-935408-53-6 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. Neoliberalism. 2. Democracy. 3. Foucault, Michel, 19261984. I. Title.

JC 574. B 766 2015

320.513dc23

2014018378

In a century heavy with political ironies, there may have been none greater than this: at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream pundits hailed democracys global triumph, a new form of governmental reason was being unleashed in the Euro-Atlantic world that would inaugurate democracys conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment. Within thirty years, Western democracy would grow gaunt, ghostly, its future increasingly hedged and improbable.

More than merely saturating the meaning or content of democracy with market values, neoliberalism assaults the principles, practices, cultures, subjects, and institutions of democracy understood as rule by the people. And more than merely cutting away the flesh of liberal democracy, neoliberalism also cauterizes democracys more radical expressions, those erupting episodically across Euro-Atlantic modernity and contending for its future with more robust versions of freedom, equality, and popular rule than democracys liberal iteration is capable of featuring.

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 developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized. In neoliberal reason and in domains governed by it, we are only and everywhere homo oeconomicus, which itself has a historically specific form. Far from Adam Smiths creature propelled by the natural urge to truck, barter, and exchange, todays homo oeconomicus is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues. These are also the mandates, and hence the orientations, contouring the projects of neoliberalized states, large corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, schools, consultancies, museums, countries, scholars, performers, public agencies, students, websites, athletes, sports teams, graduate programs, health providers, banks, and global legal and financial institutions.

What happens when the precepts and principles of democracy are remade by this order of reason and governance? When the commitment to individual and collective self-rule and the institutions supporting it are overwhelmed and then displaced by the encomium to enhance capital value, competitive positioning, and credit ratings? What happens when the practices and principles of speech, deliberation, law, popular sovereignty, participation, education, public goods, and shared power entailed in rule by the people are submitted to economization? These are the questions animating this book.

To pose these questions is already to challenge commonplace notions that democracy is the permanent achievement of the West and therefore cannot be lost; that it consists only of rights, civil liberties, and elections; that it is secured by constitutions combined with unhindered markets; or that it is reducible to a political system maximizing individual freedom in a context of state-provisioned order and security. These questions also challenge the Western liberal democratic conceit that humans have a natural and persistent desire for democracy. They presume instead that democratic self-rule must be consciously valued, cultured, and tended by a people seeking to practice it and that it must vigilantly resist myriad economic, social, and political forces threatening to deform or encroach upon it. They presume the need to educate the many for democracy, a task that grows as the powers and problems to be addressed increase in complexity. Finally, these questions presume that the promise of shared rule by the people is worth the candle, both an end in itself and a potential, though uncertain, means to other possible goods, ranging from human thriving to planetary sustainability. Hardly the only salient political value, and far from insurance against dark trajectories, democracy may yet be more vital to a livable future than is generally acknowledged within Left programs centered on global governance, rule by experts, human rights, anarchism, or undemocratic versions of communism.

None of these contestable presumptions have divine, natural, or philosophical foundations, and none can be established through abstract reasoning or empirical evidence. They are convictions animated by attachment, scholarly contemplation of history and the present, and argument, nothing more.

Undoing the Demos has been richly enabled by colleagues, students, research assistants, loved ones, and strangers, only a few of whom I can acknowledge here. Antonio Vasquez-Arroyo years ago goaded me to specify neoliberalism more closely and more recently insisted that I write this book, rather than the one on Marx that remains unfinished. Many of the ideas in this book are Michel Fehers; others he disagrees with, but were much improved by his critiques and reading suggestions. Robert Meister and Michael MacDonald have been invaluable sources and interlocutors for me on the subject of neoliberalism. The Bruce Initiatives Rethinking Capitalism project, which Meister led, was also fecund for my thinking.