Wendy Brown was a crucial writer for all those who wanted to understand
neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s. I subsequently lost track of her,
mainly because you can't follow everything but also because I began to
perceive her work as an endless critique of the adversary, with no
positive content beyond the appeal to an idealized social-democratic
order. I hope to be wrong in that assessment, but there are some reasons
for it.
For example, the fourth chapter of the "Walled States" book has a very
penetrating read of material walls as supports for a fantasy of
individual sovereignty, and I think the psychosocial analysis there is
profound. But I do not detect either any treatment of the fundamental
problem, which is how you build a social democracy that can protect
people from the present dangers of economic and ecological existence,
while at the same time maintaining the openness of liberal societies. I
want to submit this is a real problem.
The Clintonian neoliberalism of the 1990s turned entirely away from the
question, on the premise that the unleashing of technology, trade and
global finance would supply enough wealth to make it irrelevant. This is
still the implicit answer on the Democratic side, from Soros or Gates to
Obama or Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, more radical discourses from the
post-68 Far Left just call for open borders, but contribute no ideas
about future economic and ecological development, except the pious wish
that people left alone will do their own thing and be fine. I think that
an open border requires a process of codevelopment, so that people do
not flee from one country to the next, but instead interact as
increasingly equal and mutually respecting neighbors. That's the
opposite of the relation we now have with Mexico in particular, where
from Nafta to the heroin trade, gigantic problems are largely (though
not only, of course) created by the US. Then, just as Wendy Brown says,
the illusion of a wall is invoked against the very clear and present
danger of the collapse of the Mexican state, or at least, of that part
of the state which was able to support elements of social democracy.
If you go to Mexico and talk to a relatively wide range of people there,
then you will realize that the danger is no fantasy. The basic
continuity of life for all social classes, from the rural peasants to
the middle classes of Mexico City itself, is now threatened and has been
so increasingly for at least the last decade. And it should be obvious
that major upheavals in a neighboring land which contributes so much to
the US population and economy will have major consequences on the US.
People are going to flee, and some of those people really will be very
dangerous. "Build that Wall" is a horrid and useless response to real
problems of the neoliberal form of codevelopment, that the Left - and I
mean, both the Center and the Far Left - do not even talk about.
I could go further into the question of how the inability to envisage
the future contributes to another clear and present danger, namely the
well-named opioid epidemic, which directly involves heroin from Mexico
but is even more directly caused by the stupidity of our laws and the
criminal avarice of our pharmaceutical industry. However, let that be
enough said for now.
In the essay that Ian brings into the mix, Brown says this:
"A robust language of social power is all that can provide a deep
account of the devastating inequalities and the unfreedom generated by
capitalism along with the legacies of racial and gender subordination.
In turn, a language of society is all that can make addressing these
inequalities and unfreedoms into a demand on us all, rather than the
plaint of interests."
I agree with that, and though it comes at the end of the essay (ie at
the point where no further elaboration will occur) at least it's there
in principle. Is it an appeal for a stronger state? I don't think so, at
least, not so simply. Instead I'd read it as an appeal for a stronger
relation between society and the state, whereby positive proposals,
emanating from society in its many parts, are instantiated by
administrative programs that are continually watched over and guided
from the non-state public realm (which maybe should not be immediately
compressed into the straightjacket of so-called "civil society").
There's the frame of the conversation that we need - at least in my
view, which I'd love to discuss with you all. Otherwise the situation
that currently prevails in Mexico will extend to the US, in a local
variant to be sure. Instead of wondering when your city will be taken
over by narcos and then "taken back" by military forces in collusion
with one or another of the cartels, you will wonder when your town will
be taken over by armed militias, before being taken "back" by something
very new, ie an organized neofascist military state with the full force
of the law. In my view, this not-so-rosy picture will become reality if
we go on evading the basic questions of ecosocial codevelopment in the
twenty-first century.
soberly yours, Brian
On 11/06/2017 11:17 AM, Ian Alan Paul wrote:
Wendy Brown is an indispensable thinker for these times. In addition to
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, her recent short text that explores
the progression from neoliberalism to neofascism is a must-read:
http://www.publicbooks.org/defending-society/ (and for more depth on
this subject, see her latest book "Undoing Demos" from MIT)
On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 11:09 AM, Ivan Knapp <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Not new to anyone here i'm sure, but this thread can't help bringing
to mind Wendy Brown's ever more prescient work on this subject-
especially chapter IV
http://www.tepotech.com/chiapas2015/Brown_Walled_States.pdf
<http://www.tepotech.com/chiapas2015/Brown_Walled_States.pdf>
On 6 November 2017 at 15:44, Brian Holmes
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
On 11/06/2017 05:13 AM, David Garcia wrote:
The success of the slogan ‘Take Back Control” is cruscial to
understand it speaks to the profound loss of agency that so
many of us feel and how for many the capacity to disrupt
politics as usual gave Brexit voters a sense of power.
This is spot on for the United States as well. Alas, in our
country the wording for a very similar sentiment was very
different: "Build That Wall." The many degrees of hatred
condensed in such a statement have made it almost impossible to
have any conversations with core Trump voters, who definitely
want to hang on to their sense of empowerment. However, you can
have conversations with centrist people who simply never would
have spoken to strangers about politics before. Not just the
Republicans, but also the plutocracy, the corrupt Democratic
establishment and sometimes even the police and the military are
critiqued in ways that were formerly taboo. Universal health
care and climate change mitigation are increasingly seen by the
Center Left as urgent needs. But it's tough to get to the three
key questions: How do we restore democratic equality? Who is the
'we'? And is 'restore' the right word?
The Right has presented us with the demand for system change. So
doing, they have responded to a deep and fully justified anxiety
which the Democrats - and to some extent, even the post-68 Left
- could not voice. But it's clear that Trump cannot produce the
change, only its media-driven, hate-drenched simulacrum. The
real thing is so much harder to achieve. It requires a
political, economic, philosophical and even spiritual shift in
each of the people who would be its agents. You cannot get that
from a single leader or a single doctrine, much less a slogan. I
can only speak from my own narrow position in society, among
academics, artists and activists in a Midwestern city. Before we
could successfully argue with Republicans on a train, we would
have to have much deeper conversations among ourselves, while at
the same time becoming much more sensitive to worlds beyond our
enclosing spheres.
Brian
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