ZO NE BO O KS NEAR FUTURES SERIE S 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 mani- fold implications — with 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 conf licts and forms of activism elicited by the advent of our brave new world. UND OIN G THE DE M OS Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution Wendy Brown near futures © 2015 Wendy Brown Z O NE BO O K S 633 Vanderbilt Street, Brooklyn, New York 11218 All rights reserved. A version of Chapter Six 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.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America. Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Wendy, 1955– Undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution / by Wendy Brown.
Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-935408-53-6 (hardcover: alk.51’3–dc23 2014018378 CONTENTS Preface 9 N E O L I B E R A L R E A S O N A N D P O L I T I CA L L I F E I Undoing Democracy: Neoliberalism’s Remaking of State and Subject 17 II Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics Lectures: Charting Neoliberal Political Rationality 47 III Revising Foucault: Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus 79 D I S S E M I N AT I N G N E O L I B E R A L R E A S O N IV Political Rationality and Governance 115 V Law and Legal Reason 151 VI Educating Human Capital 175 Epilogue: Losing Bare Democracy and the Inversion of Freedom into Sacrifice 201 Notes 223 Index 281 P R E FAC E Undoing the Demos In a century heavy with political ironies, there may have been none greater than this: at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream pun- dits hailed democracy’s global triumph, a new form of governmen- tal reason was being unleashed in the Euro-Atlantic world that would inaugurate democracy’s conceptual unmooring and substantive dis- embowelment. 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 f lesh of liberal democracy, neoliberalism also cauterizes democracy’s more radical expressions, those erupting episodically across Euro-Atlantic moder- nity and contending for its future with more robust versions of free- dom, equality, and popular rule than democracy’s 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 under- standing 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, 9 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 Smith’s creature propelled by the natural urge to “truck, barter, and exchange,” today’s homo oeconomicus is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competi- tive 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, nonprof- its, schools, consultancies, museums, countries, scholars, performers, public agencies, students, websites, athletes, sports teams, gradu- ate 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 commit- ment to individual and collective self-rule and the institutions sup- porting 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, delibera- tion, law, popular sovereignty, participation, education, public goods, and shared power entailed in rule by the people are submitted to econ- omization? 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 unhin- dered markets; or that it is reducible to a political system maximizing 10 U N D O IN G T H E D E M O S 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 threaten- ing 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 pre- sume that the promise of shared rule by the people is worth the can- dle, both an end in itself and a potential, though uncertain, means to other possible goods, ranging from human thriving to planetary sus- tainability. Hardly the only salient political value, and far from insur- ance 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, anar- chism, 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 ani- mated by attachment, scholarly contemplation of history and the pres- ent, 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 unfin- ished. Many of the ideas in this book are Michel Feher’s; others he disagrees with, but were much improved by his critiques and reading P RE FA C E 11 suggestions. Robert Meister and Michael MacDonald have been invalu- able sources and interlocutors for me on the subject of neoliberalism.
The Bruce Initiative’s “Rethinking Capitalism” project, which Meister led, was also fecund for my thinking. The ideas in the book were improved each time I had to expose them to daylight, and I am indebted to hosts and audiences in the many venues where this exposure took place. Julia Elyachar offered excellent commentary on the paper that was my initial foray into this project. Steve Schiffrin generously responded to a version of Chapter 5 with a sheaf of terrific criticisms and references.
I am also grateful to students in two courses where I germinated some of the arguments, first at the 2011 Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School, then in a magical 2012 Berkeley graduate seminar where we read Marx and Foucault together for fourteen luxurious weeks. Several draft chapters were also smartly engaged by members of a workshop organized by Mark Devenny at the University of Brighton. The book benefitted immensely from a small platoon of research assistants and others who lent their labors. Early on, Jack Jackson tracked down sources and instructed me through his own remarkable work and thinking.
In the later stages, Nina Hagel and William Cal- lison went far beyond the usual library runs and endnote completion. Their detailed corrections, queries, and suggestions for reformulations were superb, and their patience, grace, and graciousness made them consistently wonderful to work with. Nina also prepared the index. Derin McCleod kindly loaned his Latin fluency to the task of invent- ing a feminine counterpart to homo oeconomicus.
Sundar Sharma, a talented former Berkeley undergraduate, and Jason Koenig, a former graduate student with a passion for democracy shorn of its imbrication with capitalism, located sources for articles that were the precursors of Chapter 6. At Zone, I had the great luxury of working with Meighan Gale, who smoothed the path of production at every turn, Ramona Naddaff, who gave the final typescript her expert eye and generously 12 U N D O IN G T H E D E M O S consulted on many other aspects of the book, Julie Fry, whose designs are brilliant, and Bud Bynack, copyeditor extraordinaire. In addition to saving one from being a fool on the page, Bud channels his mastery of the art and science of editing into a companionable, often entertaining, and always enlightening tutorial for the author. At home, Judith Butler embodies all the rich interiority, poetry, generosity, and commitment to worldly betterment that neoliberal rea- son turns aside.
She is also a treasured interlocutor and critic. Isaac’s fineness of spirit, extraordinary music, and exuberant openness to life counters my despair about the future. The extended “wolf pack” buoys us all; I am grateful to the dozen of us for the sustaining alternative kinship form we have made. Finally, I had the good fortune to receive institutional support from the Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, and from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
I am especially indebted to Tim Murray for inviting me and to Brett de Bray for hosting me at Cornell’s A. White House, where I spent a splen- did Ithaca autumn completing a draft of the book. P RE FA C E 13 NEOLIBE R AL RE AS O N AND P O LITICAL LIFE CHAPTER ONE Undoing Democracy: Neoliberalism’s Remaking of State and Subject This book is a theoretical consideration of the ways that neoliberal- ism, a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms, is quietly undoing basic elements of democracy. These elements include vocabularies, principles of justice, political cul- tures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries.
My argument is not merely that markets and money are corrupting or degrading democracy, that political institutions and out- comes are increasingly dominated by finance and corporate capital, or that democracy is being replaced by plutocracy — rule by and for the rich. Rather, 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, mean- ing, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones.