Recording Surface

Wendy Brown, laying out one of the “four lines” along which “the market is the organizing and regulative principle of the state and society,” from her essay “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”: (more…)

Somehow, I beat the rabble to the univerity library I have access to–but don’t accuse me or my blog of being (an) academic!–and was able to be the first to borrow Wendy Brown’s new book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (chapter 1 here). I’m very excited, as I heard her give a talk on this a few years ago–well, half heard her from the hallway as I tried to convince a one and a half year old to content himself with paper clips and string and to not let out any screams that would disrupt the talk–and was impressed. At the time I thought that an exploration of tolerance was needed, as Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” is a little yellow (though still excellent, of course) and because tolerance seems a more apt subject today than Zizek’s fulminations on multiculturalism.

Anyway, I haven’t started it yet, but some of the chapter titles sound promising:

Tolerance as a Discourse of Depoliticization

Tolerance as Governmentality
Faltering Universalism, State Legitimacy, and State Violence

Subjects of Tolerance
Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians

Since I’m perennially behind on my reading, I’m just now getting to the interview with Wendy Brown in the January issue of Contretemps, the one other people were talking about six months ago. (more…)

Here

What I’m talking about is recovering a certain openness that I actually associate with the foundations of radicalism or leftism. This openness often collapses soon after the left or a radical justice project attaches itself to a certain vision, to a certain end or to a certain practice. What we might need to give now, or what we might need to inhabit now, is that founding openness to possibility, to seeing the world differently, to seeing power differently, to seeing the future differently. This involves a brave and humble intellectual and political openness. It also means refusing the dichotomy between the local and the global, the national and the transnational, the intellectual and the practical… I actually think that it’s the only way through or out of the melancholy that has to do with the lost objects and attachments of the left and the despair for the possibility of change. I think that the only way out of that kind of melancholy and that kind of despair is not by darting towards yet another answer but by opening up to a different reading of the present, a different reading of our attachments and possibilities.

Here is where Foucault’s notion of genealogy is so important. It is a way of refiguring the present through a past, telling the present’s story differently. This democratic future that we’re after is actually a future that we will only be able to make by opening the present differently. I think that many of us experience the present as terribly closed—not just closed because certain options have been foreclosed, but also closed because of certain stoppages in progressive history. I think the opening that we have to cultivate is a kind of affective and intellectual opening to political possibility that would help us read the present differently.

I’m leaving on a trip for about a week, and unless I find some unexpected spare time I won’t be posting or reading much in that time. Going to flat, featureless Nebraska, but at least I get to see my family, including my lovely nieces. As a parting shot, here’s an excerpt from Wendy Brown’s “Neoliberalism and The End of Liberal Democracy,” followed by a brief comment, that relates to my post for the Long Sunday democracy thing: (more…)