Graham MacPhee on the intellectual implications of Trump's inauguration. I am delighted that Graham has offered this essay to my blog, and I'd encourage any other friends, comrades or interested persons to contact me too, if you are interested in doing likewise.
The inauguration of Donald Trump as the
forty-fifth president of the United States raises immediate questions about the
current state of democracy and the priorities for political action both within
the US and beyond. But it might also cause those of us involved in the academic
discourse of critical theory to reflect on our own theoretical frameworks and
assumptions, not least because of the apparent inability of contemporary
theoretical discourses in the humanities to account for the current
predicament. Is there anything to be learned for our own theoretical endeavors
from the dynamics of social resentment and political disenchantment which
Trump’s campaign was able to harness, exploit, and channel to such effect?
Although
published a year before the election, I’d suggest that Wendy Brown’s recent
book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s
Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015) suggests that there is, even if the nature of the election poses significant challenges to her analysis. But for the purposes
of addressing the theoretical lessons of the Trump’s election, what is
remarkable is the extent of her revision of some of the basic assumptions of
contemporary theory, a revision whose implications, it seems to me, have been
insufficiently acknowledged or thought through.
As Brown makes
clear, and as reviewers have noted, the book uses but also criticizes Michel
Foucault’s account of neoliberalism; but the character and implications of
Brown’s critique are far beyond what we’ve seen in orthodox theory for a long
time. Startlingly, given the extent of her indebtedness to Foucault, Brown
points out that his all-encompassing vision of power is wholly bereft of a
conception of politics or political action: “there is no political body, no demos acting in concert (even episodically) or
expressing aspirational sovereignty; there are few social forces from below and
no shared powers of rule or shared struggles for freedom” (73). Observing that
“homo politicus is not a character in
Foucault’s story” (86), Brown further notes that in constructing his account of
neoliberalism, “Foucault averted his glance from capital itself as a historical
and social force” (75).
Reviewers
(as far as I can see) have tended to regard these insights as tactical adjustments
to a theoretical edifice that remains largely intact. But given the
extraordinary preeminence accorded to Foucault’s notions of governmentality and
biopower in the Anglophone academy, I would suggest they amount to much more
than this. Indeed, in working through the implications of this critique, Undoing the Demos significantly revises
what might be regarded as the network of unacknowledged assumptions that—in the
wake of “critical theory” and the “theory wars”—have coalesced as “theory.”
Most obvious is
Brown’s rehabilitation of the “demos” or “people”—presumably not so far away
from the (non-ethnically defined) people (Volk)
that Hegel had identified as locating any formation of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Equally explicit is her
retrieval of “freedom” as an open and revisable political concept, “precisely
the kind of individual and collaborative freedom associated with homo politicus for self-rule and rule
with others” (110). More obliquely, though unmistakably, Undoing the Demos envisages a subjectivity whose cogency far
exceeds the dispersal of deconstruction and the passivity of “subject
position”: rather, it is “the resource for opposing [neoliberalism] with
another set of claims and another vision
of existence” (87; emphasis added). And at a more technical level, but just
as challenging for contemporary orthodoxy, is her insistence that “capital and
capitalism are not reducible to an order of reason,” and that “capitalism has
drives that no discourse can deny” (75–76).
Together demos,
freedom, and an operative subjectivity allow a critical return to the language
of the Western philosophical tradition, to the language of “city and soul”
(22). The extent of Brown’s rewriting of the last three decades of theory in
the Anglophone academy is surely remarkable: against the dominance of
theoretical anti-humanism, she can write without irony of “human striving” as a
value (11); and against the anti-political language of governmentality, she can
affirm that “moral reflection and association making—these are the qualities
that generate our politicalness” (88).
To
be quite clear, my intention here is not to accuse Wendy Brown of intellectual
bad faith, of dodging between positions without owning up to it: indeed, far
from it. In my view, Undoing the Demos
exhibits a refreshing sense of intellectual responsibility in rethinking a
theoretical orthodoxy that has become manifestly disabling in the face of the
deepening political catastrophe of neoliberal globalization. Her critical
retrieval of the demos, of freedom, of a cogent subjectivity, and of a sense of
the dynamics of capital that exceed discourse, are intellectually honest
responses to a predicament that is growing worse daily. And if reviewers have
not picked up on the profound nature of her book’s challenge to prevailing
orthodoxy, that’s hardly her fault. Brown is quite upfront in her critique of
Foucault, and if she remains tentative about the implications of this critique
for reconceiving subjectivity, history, freedom, and the shape of democracy,
there are perhaps good historical reasons why.
My point is
different. The lesson I take from Undoing
the Demos is that we are enjoined to rethink our theoretical coordinates in
light of the political collapse that confronts us. But in that case, we need to
be attentive both to the changing shape of our unfolding predicament and to the
problems or blockages in our own ways of registering and thinking it. The
recent election of Donald Trump as president (notwithstanding his losing the
popular vote) does not, to my mind, square with Brown’s account of the absolute
subordination of city and soul to the market in neoliberalism. And therefore it
requires us to reexamine even her remarkable revision of the coordinates of
contemporary theory.
For
all its critique of Foucault’s exclusion of subjectivity, intersubjectivity,
and therefore politics, Undoing the Demos
nonetheless reimposes these very same exclusions—but subsequently. While the political experience of subjectivity as homo politicus may once have been
operative, neoliberalism is seen as “a distinctive mode of reason, of the
production of subjects” (21) in which homo
oeconomicus—the register of subjectivity exercised in the market—liquidates
homo politicus, so “undoing the
demos.” Further, homo oeconomicus is
denied the possibility of ever generating a new political response, of ever
resuscitating homo politicus, since
it is now said to have been hollowed out of the interest that traditionally
drove civil society. “With the ascendency of neoliberalism,” Brown writes,
“interest has ceased to anchor or characterize homo oeconomicus” (78): and so, she concludes, “homo oeconomicus today may no longer
have interest at its heart, indeed, may no longer have a heart at all” (84).
Without a heart,
the residual homo oeconomicus is
bereft of the chaotic and nonidentical striving of interest, which means that
there is no difference, no nonidentity, between soul, city, and market. The
economic rationality of “neoliberal reason,” now shorn even of the heart’s
self-love, “configures both soul and city” without remainder, residue, or
nonidentity (27). Which means that the new face of power—neoliberalism as a
mode of rationality—is at once absolute and everywhere, pervading and
dominating subjectivity, city, and market.
Brown’s
reduction of neoliberalism to an abstract “order of normative reason” (30) thus
takes with one hand what it gives with the other. If the city is made identical
with the market, and the soul—excluded from the political—has no heart, then
where is the basis of that “moral reflection and association making” which “are
the qualities that generate our politicalness” (88)?
Whatever
else might be said of the social dynamics capitalized on by Donald Trump, they
cannot be accused of being “heartless” in this sense—of lacking the chaotic and
nonidentical striving of interest and the anger and self-deceit of the heart
(see Arlie Hochschild, “I Spent Five Years with Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans,” Mother Jones, September/October 2016).
Driving the Republicans' massive electoral gains in 2016 (and underpinning the
staggering irony of the Democratic Party’s rejection of Senator Sander’s
candidacy) is a significant divergence between popular sentiment and the
dominant neoliberal accounts of political and economic reality—even if the
neoliberal project is the ultimate beneficiary.
However we are
to characterize the Republican sweep of presidency, Congress, governorships,
and state houses in 2016, Brown’s conception of the subordination of soul and
city to the abstract economic logics of neoliberalism does not work. This
outcome happened precisely because market, soul, and city are not identical; and equally, this
nonidentity could have fostered other outcomes, had the political forces
squared up differently. Brown’s absolutization of power as neoliberal
rationality ignores not only the irrationality of this upsurge but also the
potency of subjectivity and its responsiveness to the dynamics of capital,
elements that are by no means inseparable.
For all its
ironies, Trump’s election urgently points to the need to revise many of
contemporary theory’s orthodoxies and assumptions. Most obviously, the
inability to develop a conception of subjectivity as plural yet cogent has not
only made theory blind to the ways in which the dynamics of subjectivity are
actually unfolding, but has left it unable to defend and develop public
institutions—which emerge through the nonidentity
of city, soul, and market—that might substantiate a vision of freedom and justice.
This connection
was articulated two decades ago by the British philosopher Gillian Rose in her Mourning Becomes Law (Cambridge
University Press, 1996):
The presentation
of power as plural yet total and all pervasive, and of opposition to power . .
. as the anarchic community, unwittingly and unwillingly participates in a
restructuring of power which undermines those semi-autonomous institutions . .
. which alleviate the pressure of the modern state on the individual. The
plural but total way of conceiving power leaves the individual more not less
exposed to the unmitigated power of the state. (21)
Perhaps one lesson we might learn from the
contradictory, often irrational, yet also understandable dynamics that led to
Trump’s election is to recognize how the generalization of difference in
abstract schemas (discourse, language, power/knowledge, or governmentality)
means not only the absolutization of power but also the liquidation of the
nonidentity of social and political experience upon which any alternative politics
relies. As Rose had warned, “when a monolithic [and] plural character is
attributed to power . . . this attribution perpetuates blindness to the
reconfiguration of power which we may be assisting by our unarticulated
characterization of it” (21).
Graham MacPhee is an academic based in
Philadelphia. He is the author of The
Architecture of the Visible (2002) and Postwar
British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2011).
© Graham MacPhee 2017
