Wendy Brown - States of Injury

States of Injury

States of Injury

POWER AND FREEDOM IN
LATE MODERNITY

Wendy Brown

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 1995 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Wendy.

States of injury : power and freedom in late modernity /

Wendy Brown.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-691-02990-3 (cloth : acid-free paper). ISBN 0-691-02989-X

eISBN: 978-0-691-20139-9

(pbk. : acid-free paper)

1. Political sciencePhilosophy. 2. Power (Social sciences).

3. Culture. 4. Feminist theory. 5. Liberty. I. Title.

JA74.B724 1995 303.3dc20 94-24068

R0

For Sheldon S. Wolin

ix

xv

THESE STUDIES consider how certain well-intentioned contemporary political projects and theoretical postures inadvertently redraw the very configurations and effects of power that they seek to vanquish. The topics explored in the course of this consideration include the liberal, capitalist, and disciplinary origins of the force of ressentiment in late modern political and theoretical discourse; the gendered characteristics of late modern state power and the paradoxical nature of appeals to the state for gender justice; the convergences of juridical and disciplinary power in contemporary efforts to procure rights along lines of politicized identity; and the gendered sexuality of liberal political discourse.

If the immediate provocation for each essay is a specific problem in contemporary political thought or activity, taken together these provocations provide an occasion of another sort: reflection on the present-day value of some of the last two centuries most compelling theoretical critiques of modern political life. Thus, the chapters on identity and morality in contemporary intellectual and political formations critically engage Nietzsche; the chapters on rights and liberalism reconsider Marxs critique of liberalism and Foucaults critique of regulation through individuation; the chapters concerned with state power are in dialogue with Weber, Foucault, and liberal thought; and the early Baudrillard is engaged to reflect on Catharine MacKinnons adaptation of Marx for a theory of gender.

Such a schema of the books objectives, however, involves a trick of retrospection that lends coherence to contingency when, in fact, like many works written in the dizzying intellectual and political pace of the late twentieth century, this one started and finished as quite different projects. Conceived in the mid-1980s as a critical feminist theory of late modern state power (now ), it quickly outgrew the confines established both by gender as a governing political concern and by the state as a delimitable domain of political power. From the outset, my interest in developing a feminist critique of the state was animated less by intrinsic fascination with the state than by concern over the potential dilution of emancipatory political aims entailed in feminisms turn to the state to adjudicate or redress practices of male dominance. Nor was my worry about such dilution limited to the politics of gender but rather engaged a larger question: What are the perils of pursuing emancipatory political aims within largely repressive, regulatory, and depoliticizing institutions that themselves carry elements of the regime (e.g., masculine dominance) whose subversion is being sought? Discerning the man in the state was thus a way to concentrate such a query on the problem of feminist political reform.

There was a certain disingenuousness, however, even to this formulation. Theorizing the state as a largely negative domain for democratic political transformation was not circumscribed by the states expressly gendered features, by its history and genealogy as mirror and accomplice of male dominance. Nor was the state the only domain of antidemocratic powers about which I thought feminists ought to be wary. Indeed, my own effort to deconstruct the state, to avoid the kind of reifications of that potent fiction to which theories of the state are so vulnerable, revealed an ensemble of familiar powers: the states gender could be traced in its mediations of capitalism, welfarism, and militarism, as well as in the specific liberal and bureaucratic discourses through which legislation, adjudication, policy execution, and administration transpire. But to argue that each of these dimensions of state power was problematic for feminist aims not only because it was inscribed with gender but because it carried generically antidemocratic tendencies betrayed both feminism and the state as having something of a metaphorical operation in my own political Weltanschauung. Feminism was being freighted with a strong democratic ambition, with aspirations for radical political freedom and equality, while the state was carrying the weight of all the discourses of power against which I imagined radically democratizing possibilities to be arrayed. While some feminists may be radical democrats, no ground exists for marking such a political posture as either indigenous or consequent to the diverse attachments traveling under feminisms name. Similarly, although the state may be an important site of convergence of antidemocratic discourses, it is hardly the only place where they make their appearance, nor always the best lens through which to study them. Discourses of sovereign individuality, or of bureaucratic depoliticization of gendered class relations, for example, can be discerned in the state but are not limited to operations there. Indeed, one of the richer sites of radical democratic agitation in the last decade, practices gathered under the rubric of cultural politics, is premised precisely on the notion that neither domination nor democratic resistance are limited to the venue of the state.

The confining qualities of gender and the state as categories of political analysis did not exhaust the sources undoing the feminist theory of the state project. The point of mapping the configurations of power in which contemporary democratic political opposition took shape was to understand where and how such opposition might do other than participate in contemporary orders of regulation, discipline, exploitation, and dominationin short, in existing regimes of unfreedom. But to pose the problem as one of negotiating these orders was to leave uninterrogated the question of the subject doing the negotiating; indeed, it was to assume that the politically committed subject sufficiently cognizant of the map of power would plot appropriate strategies and tactics given its aim of democratizing political life. What such an assumption eschews was the problem of subject formation by and through the very discourses being charted as sites and zones of unfreedom.

Nor was such neglect a minor matter: the viability of a radical democratic alternative to various political discourses of domination in the present is not determined only by the organization of institutional forces opposing that alternative but is shaped as well by political subjects desire for such an alternative. Even if, for example, feminists could be persuaded of the antidemocratic character of certain state-centered reforms, would they count this as an objection to such reforms? Even if the inscription of gendered, racial, or sexual identity in legal discourse could be shown to have the effect of reaffirming the historical injuries constitutive of those identities, thus installing injury as identity in the ahistorical discourse of the law, would proponents of such actions necessarily despair over this effect? To what extent have the particular antidemocratic powers of our time produced subjects, often working under the banner of progressive politics, whose taste for substantive political freedom is attenuated by a historically unique form of political powerlessness amid historically unprecedented discourses of individual liberty? And if this peculiar form of powerlessness is sometimes worn rather straightforwardly as the conservative raiment of despair, misanthropy, narrow pursuit of interest, or bargains of autonomy for state protection, when does it twist into a more dissimulated political discourse of paralyzing recriminations and toxic resentments parading as radical critique?