Reclaiming Democracy: An Interview with Wendy Brown on Occupy, Sovereignty, and Secularism

Wendy Brown is a Pro­fessor of Polit­ical Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Cali­for­nia in Berke­ley and is the author of, amongst many oth­ers, Walled States, Wan­ing Sov­er­eignty (Zone Books 2010)

Celikates & Jansen (‘C&J’): Let us start with a gen­eral ques­tion about the cur­rent state of demo­cracy. In your con­tri­bu­tion to the book Demo­cracy in What State you write: ‘Ber­lusconi and Bush, Der­rida and Balibar, Italian com­mun­ists and Hamas — we are all demo­crats now’. There seem to be two pos­sible responses to this dia­gnosis of an exal­ted dis­course of demo­cracy that seems to accom­pany, and even to be func­tion­ally inter­twined with, the mul­tiple pro­cesses of de-​democratization that you also describe in this art­icle that we wit­ness in our soci­ety: either we could give up the word demo­cracy because, being hijacked by its enemies, it no longer func­tions as a crit­ical and eman­cip­at­ory altern­at­ive, (it has become a ‘neo­lib­eral fantasy’ as Jodi Dean has argued), and to look for other con­cepts, e.g. com­mun­ism. So that’s one pos­sible reac­tion. The other reac­tion would be to fight for the word and to insist on the gap between a rad­ical under­stand­ing of demo­cracy and its lib­eral demo­cratic, low-​intensity state-​form mani­fest­a­tions, and to emphas­ize how demo­cracy is inter­twined with rup­ture, oppos­i­tion, res­ist­ance. Could you sketch your pos­i­tion in this debate?

Brown: Well you can prob­ably guess that I am in favour of try­ing to rehab­il­it­ate the term, give it sub­stance, reawaken its poten­tial, not only for eman­cip­a­tion and equal­ity but also for a notion of pop­u­lar sov­er­eignty. Whatever pop­u­lar sov­er­eignty might mean in con­tem­por­ary national and post-​national polit­ics the link between demo­cracy and pop­u­lar sov­er­eignty is one we just can’t give up. There are many reas­ons that I don’t favour the idea of sur­ren­der­ing the term. One of them is that polit­ical terms are always re-​signifiable and con­test­able, even as they carry sed­i­men­ted his­tor­ies that make some re-​signification very dif­fi­cult. ‘Com­mun­ism’ cer­tainly doesn’t come with any less dif­fi­culty in terms of its his­tor­ies, its instan­ti­ations, its pos­sible form­a­tions, than demo­cracy does — it just hap­pens to be a dif­fer­ent set of dif­fi­culties. Could we get com­mun­ism to sig­nify demo­cracy today? That’s a chal­lenge. It might work this way for ser­i­ous stu­dents of Marx, but apart from that, the Cold War leg­acy of a dis­curs­ive oppos­i­tion between free­dom and com­mun­ism is a power­ful one. I’m not simply say­ing that state com­mun­ism estab­lished the oppos­i­tion, I’m say­ing that Cold War dis­course did and that we will be recov­er­ing from that for a long time. So that’s one reason. But the second reason has to do with the con­tested nature of demo­cracy itself. I don’t accept that it has been conquered for a neo­lib­eral fantasy, I think that the ques­tion of its mean­ing is at the centre of left-​right polit­ics today in the Euro-​Atlantic world. I think that the aspir­a­tion for the prom­ises that it holds out is the reason that the Arab Spring took place under the sign of demo­cracy. It wasn’t so that they could have more neo­lib­er­al­ism, it was so that they could have a mod­est say in who gov­erns and how they’re gov­erned. It was to gain a mod­est pur­chase on what lib­eral demo­cracy has long prom­ised, namely uni­ver­sal rights, rep­res­ent­a­tion, equal­ity before the law, etc. Now if those prom­ises have never been fully real­ized, the very inter­val between the prom­ise and the real­iz­a­tion holds out the pos­sib­il­ity for demo­cratic work. So when I give a sum­mary of char­ac­ters who all claim to be demo­crats, and obvi­ously are not all on the same team, my point is really that it has become very easy at this point in his­tory to call demo­cracy any­thing where even min­imal elec­tions com­bined with the free mar­ket appear. That’s obvi­ously a ter­ribly hollowed-​out and ter­ribly lim­ited mean­ing, and it has noth­ing to do with demo­cracy in the most basic ety­mo­lo­gical and philo­lo­gical sense: demos/​cracy, the people rule. Elec­tions and the free mar­ket have noth­ing to do with the people ruling.

But as I said at the begin­ning, given that polit­ical terms always are re-​signifiable, that they’re always por­ous, that they’re always float­ing, we can’t say that this is a wrong use of demo­cracy, we can only say that it’s a thin, a lim­ited, and an une­man­cip­at­ory one. But I do think the term can be reclaimed polit­ic­ally, because I already think it’s con­tested today. I don’t think there’s been some kind of tri­umphant con­quest of the term. That’s pre­cisely what the Greek elec­tions yes­ter­day were about, whether demo­cracy was to be equated with neo­lib­er­al­ism or some­thing else. That’s pre­cisely what the Arab Spring was about, and that’s what cur­rent struggles rep­res­en­ted by groups like Occupy are about. In each case, there’s an effort to reclaim demo­cracy as some­thing that has to do with more equal­ity than it has been used to sig­nify in recent neo­lib­eral dec­ades, and also more con­trol by the people.

C&J: With regard to the return of com­mun­ism in left­ist dis­course, you poin­ted to a stra­tegic prob­lem — the fact that this dis­course also comes with its own set of prob­lems, its own assump­tions, his­tor­ical bag­gage, etc. Would you also say that it suf­fers from a cer­tain obli­vi­ous­ness to some­thing that a Fou­caul­dian might want to insist on, namely the social con­di­tions and fram­ings of polit­ical prac­tices? Some­times the return to com­mun­ism has a some­what decision­istic and even heroic under­tone to it, which insists on the autonomy of the polit­ical act, that is strangely obli­vi­ous of these power rela­tions and how they frame and limit polit­ics. I was won­der­ing how you would frame this prob­lem with the discourse.

Brown: Fou­cault had one way of nam­ing this prob­lem, which was to sug­gest that com­mun­ism, Marx­ism more gen­er­ally, never developed what he called a polit­ical ration­al­ity of its own and as a res­ult was ter­ribly avail­able to other polit­ical ration­al­it­ies, any­thing from abso­lut­ism to lib­er­al­ism. Long before Fou­cault, oth­ers have poin­ted out that there’s a very thin the­ory of polit­ics in Marx, not only in his cri­tique, but also in the very brief ima­gin­ary he gives us of com­mun­ism, one that’s entirely focused on the organ­iz­a­tion of pro­duc­tion and the eman­cip­a­tion that the organ­iz­a­tion of pro­duc­tion, owned and con­trolled col­lect­ively, would offer indi­vidu­als and the whole. I think you’re right that even today when people speak of com­mun­ism as an altern­at­ive they are elid­ing the fun­da­mental ques­tion of who con­trols, who rules, who gov­erns, what the appar­at­uses are and what the com­pat­ib­il­ity or incom­pat­ib­il­ity is of com­mun­ism with dir­ect demo­cracy. And briefly I would say that in very, very small scale it is per­fectly pos­sible to ima­gine the rela­tion of com­mun­ism to dir­ect demo­cracy as being a very good one, e.g. in work­ers’ cooper­at­ives or other kinds of col­lect­ives — but at the level of the nation-​state, let alone the world? It’s impossible to ima­gine that. And that’s where we have to do our think­ing. It’s unreal­istic, but on the other hand that doesn’t mean we want to say, as some­body like Sla­voj Žižek does, that yes of course we must have the viol­ent and the bru­tal arm of the state at the level of the lar­ger polit­ical eco­nomy, because that’s the only solu­tion. I’m giv­ing a crude ver­sion of his account, but he would be happy with it, I think. I am not sug­gest­ing that we give up on com­mun­ist ideals, but that we need to do a great deal of work to think about its viab­il­ity in a glob­al­ized twenty-​first cen­tury and we need to think through the prob­lem of politics.

C&J: In your con­tri­bu­tion to Demo­cracy in What State, you also point to ‘the panoply of social powers and dis­courses con­struct­ing and con­duct­ing us’ that seem to pose a limit to demo­cratic con­trol; to the fact that ‘we and the social world are relent­lessly con­struc­ted by powers bey­ond our ken and con­trol’, which seems to under­mine notions of sov­er­eignty, accord­ing to which the address­ees of social norms should be their authors, and self-​legislation at the heart of the mod­ern idea of demo­cracy, and to make it neces­sary to rethink demo­cracy more in terms of its being embed­ded in forms of gov­ernance and sub­jectiv­a­tion (or cit­izen­iz­a­tion). What would a Fou­caul­dian notion of demo­cracy look like that takes such power rela­tions into account? What are the the­or­et­ical resources and the prac­tical pos­sib­il­it­ies of such a notion of democracy?

Brown: I don’t think it is pos­sible to think demo­cracy from a Fou­caul­dian per­spect­ive for sev­eral reas­ons, and I think it’s telling that Fou­cault him­self seemed utterly unin­ter­ested in the ques­tion of demo­cracy. I don’t mean he was an anti-​democrat. He became inter­ested in the ques­tion of counter-​conducts, indi­vidual efforts at craft­ing the self, to sub­vert, inter­rupt or vivi­sect forces gov­ern­ing or con­struct­ing us, but that’s very dif­fer­ent from attend­ing to the ques­tion of demo­cracy. I want to say one other thing here before I then dir­ectly answer your ques­tion. I’ve lately been reread­ing his lec­tures on neo­lib­er­al­ism and one thing I’m very struck by is that there is an absent fig­ure in Foucault’s own for­mu­la­tion of mod­ern­ity, when he offers us the pic­ture of homo eco­nomicus and homo jur­i­di­cus as the two sides of gov­ernance and the human being in mod­ern­ity. Fou­cault just says you’ve got on the one hand the sub­ject of interest, homo eco­nomicus and on the other hand homo jur­i­di­cus, the deriv­at­ive from sov­er­eignty, the creature who’s lim­it­ing sov­er­eignty. But for Fou­cault there’s no homo polit­i­cus, there’s no sub­ject of the demos, there’s no demo­crat, there’s only a creature of rights and a creature of interest. It’s an extremely indi­vidu­ally ori­ented for­mu­la­tion of what the mod­ern order is. There’s the state, there’s the eco­nomy and then there’s the sub­ject ori­ented to the eco­nomy by interests and toward the state by rights. But isn’t it strik­ing for a French thinker that there’s no demo­cratic sub­ject, no sub­ject ori­ented, as part of the demos, toward the ques­tion of sov­er­eignty by or for the people? Here Fou­cault may have for­got­ten to cut off the king’s head in polit­ical the­ory! There are just no demo­cratic ener­gies in Foucault.

So one of the reas­ons one can’t think demo­cracy with Fou­cault has to do with his own inab­il­ity to think it. The other reason has to do with the extent to which he has given us such a thick the­or­et­ical and empir­ical account of the powers con­struct­ing and con­duct­ing us — there’s no way we can demo­crat­ize all of those powers. So I think there one has to accept that if demo­cracy has a mean­ing for the left today, it’s going to have to do with mod­est con­trol of the powers that gov­ern us overtly, rather than that of power tout court. So it’s going to be a com­bin­a­tion of the lib­eral prom­ise and the old Marx­ist claim about the neces­sary con­di­tions of demo­cracy. It’s going to be at some level a real­iz­a­tion of the Marx­ist cri­tique of the lib­eral prom­ise. We have to have some con­trol over what and how things are pro­duced, we have to have some con­trol over the ques­tion of who we are as a people, what we stand for, what we think should be done, what should not be done, what levels of equal­ity should we have, what liber­ties mat­ter, and so forth. It will not be able to reach to those Fou­caul­dian depths of the con­duct of con­duct at every level. The dream of demo­cracy prob­ably has to come to terms with that lim­it­a­tion. If we can, we will be able to stop gen­er­at­ing for­mu­la­tions of res­ist­ance that have to do with indi­vidual con­duct and eth­ics. In other words, I think that the way Fou­caul­dian, Der­ridean, Lev­inas­ian and Deleuzian think­ing has derailed demo­cratic think­ing is that it has pushed it off onto a path of think­ing about how I con­duct myself, what is my rela­tion to the other, what is my ethos or ori­ent­a­tion toward those who are dif­fer­ent from me — and all that’s fine, but it’s not demo­cracy in the sense of power shar­ing. It’s an eth­ics, and maybe even a demo­cratic eth­ics. But an eth­ics is not going to get us to polit­ical and eco­nomic orders that are more demo­cratic than those we have now. The danger of the­ory that has too much emphas­ized the ques­tion of the self’s rela­tion­ship to itself, or to micro­powers, as use­ful as it has been for much of our work, is that it has derailed left demo­cratic think­ing into a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with ethics.

C&J: In your recent book Walled States; Wan­ing Sov­er­eignty, you argue that the walls that are increas­ingly being built all over the Euro-​Atlantic world to keep migrants out are irra­tional: walls are the sym­bols of sov­er­eignty at the time of its defin­it­ive wan­ing, while not being effect­ive in re-​establishing sov­er­eignty in prac­tice. If we look at it from a gov­ern­ment­al­ity per­spect­ive, walls do have a cer­tain prac­tical effectiv­ity in con­nec­tion to other bor­der­ing prac­tices such as deten­tion and deport­a­tion. In the European Union, for instance, there is def­in­itely no Fort­ress Europe, but there is pop­u­la­tion reg­u­la­tion. There is both empir­ical reg­u­la­tion, and also reg­u­la­tion of what we con­sider desir­able future cit­izens and selves: formal cit­izen­ship makes way for the selec­tion of per­sons on the basis of eth­ni­city, reli­gion, poverty, edu­ca­tion. What is your view of those developments?

Brown: There is a dif­fer­ence between bor­der con­trol and walls. What hap­pens at immig­ra­tion, at the air­port, is extremely effect­ive in determ­in­ing who gets in and who gets out. You don’t get in without a pass­port. But walls are much less effect­ive at this. So the reason I was spe­cific­ally deal­ing with walls and not bor­der con­trols is to under­stand why walls have arisen at a time when those kinds of secur­ity and immig­ra­tion tech­no­lo­gies, check­points, bor­der con­trols, are so avail­able and effect­ive. My ques­tion was, why pour bil­lions of dol­lars into these par­tic­u­lar edi­fices that are crude, that are sur­mount­able, that can be tunneled under, that can be cir­cum­ven­ted in many ways?

And yet, my claim is not that walls are ‘merely’ sym­bolic and have no effects. That’s already an impov­er­ished under­stand­ing of the sym­bolic. Walls in many cases are shor­ing up an image of nation-​state sov­er­eignty that is weak­en­ing as sov­er­eignty, that is detach­ing from states them­selves. I’m not say­ing that state sov­er­eignty is fin­ished, I’m not say­ing that there’s no such thing as states, I’m not mak­ing the claim that all we have are transna­tional powers now. I also accept the for­mu­la­tion that one of the things we have in nation-​states are new forms of gov­ern­ment­al­ity pro­du­cing who the ‘we’ is: who’s in, who’s out, who’s needed, who’s not needed, iden­tit­ies that are racial­ized, eth­ni­cized, and ‘reli­gion­ized,’ some­times in inco­her­ent yet con­sequen­tial ways. For example, in US post-​911 dis­course, there is a con­stant inter­change­ab­il­ity between the dark, the Islamic, the Arab and the Middle East­ern that scrambles who people actu­ally are. So yes, there are these new forms of gov­ern­ment­al­ity and secur­it­iz­a­tion, and there is an inter­sec­tion between what hap­pens at the bor­ders and what hap­pens within. There are forms of poli­cing, secur­it­iz­ing, cat­egor­iz­ing and identity-​making that sat­ur­ate the internal lives of nations engaged in them, and that do not just hap­pen at their bor­ders. All this is very important.

But I was writ­ing a dif­fer­ent book. It was focused on just one ques­tion: coun­try after coun­try today is build­ing walls — con­crete, iron, barbed wire, brick, plexi­glass walls. Lit­eral, obdur­ate objects. For the most part, they are not very effect­ive as part of this gov­ern­ment­al­ity that you have described. In many cases, they actu­ally make the pro­cess more dif­fi­cult, because they make it more dif­fi­cult to see, to mon­itor, to check, and to clas­sify and cat­egor­ize what’s on the other side or try­ing to get in. They are also pro­du­cing more and more crimin­al­ity at the bor­ders that they limn. They intensify organ­ized crime to smuggle in people, goods, drugs and weapons. So my ques­tion was this: dur­ing a period in which we have a gov­ern­ment­al­ity of secur­it­iz­a­tion that also inter­sects with neo­lib­eral reg­u­la­tion of labour, why these walls?

The other ques­tion in the book is: what does it mean to say that nation-​state sov­er­eignty is wan­ing? Where are we? What is the post-​Westphalian polit­ical form­a­tion that both refers to and bey­ond the nation-​state? We have nas­cent and strug­gling post-​national con­stel­la­tions, e.g. the EU. We have import­ant transna­tional insti­tu­tions, the IMF, World Bank, World Court, and so forth. But we are still nation-​state cent­ric, even as state sov­er­eignty is being weakened by glob­al­iz­a­tion itself, by the flow of ideas, reli­gions, labour, cap­ital, polit­ical move­ments, across bor­ders. Neo­lib­eral ration­al­ity is also weak­en­ing state sov­er­eignty. Now can this help us under­stand why these walls are being built? Walls which are not fun­da­ment­ally abet­ting the gov­ern­ment­al­ity you describe — they’re hugely expens­ive and often pro­duce more and worse ver­sions of the prob­lem that they would pur­portedly address as they intensify viol­ence and crime, and make more expens­ive the immig­ra­tion and smug­gling they aim to inter­dict. Are these walls resur­rect­ing an imago of the nation and the sov­er­eignty of the state even as both recede mater­i­ally? And does this in turn gen­er­ate a cer­tain polit­ical ima­gin­ary with which we (the­or­ists and act­iv­ists) need to reckon today?

C&J: One inter­pret­a­tion could be that your under­stand­ing of walls would help us explain why phe­nom­ena such as deport­a­tion and deten­tion are tak­ing place.

Brown: Part of what I’m sug­gest­ing is that what walls do is help to estab­lish the ‘us’ and the ‘them,’ the threat of the out­side to the sup­posed pur­ity and integ­rity of the inside. Cer­tainly this facil­it­ates deten­tion, deport­ing, and very harsh forms of gov­ern­mental reg­u­la­tion. Yet again I was try­ing to isol­ate some­thing about walling that was dif­fer­ent from the whole panoply of bor­der con­trol on the one hand, and gov­ern­ment­al­ity and man­aging mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism on the other. Maybe it’s less acute here in Europe pre­cisely because most of this is hap­pen­ing in the absence of actual walls. Here you have the imago of ‘fort­ress Europe’, and the argu­ments about ‘fort­ress Europe,’ without the actual fort­ress. Whereas what we’re look­ing at in the United States is now 650 miles of wall (out of a planned 2,000). The con­crete por­tions are not quite as tall as the sep­ar­a­tion bar­rier in Israel, but they are mam­moth. It costs $21 mil­lion per mile to build and will cost another estim­ated $7 bil­lion to oper­ate and main­tain over the next 20 years. Do you grasp these num­bers? And the Bor­der Pro­tec­tion Agency had to repair more than 4,000 breaches in the wall in 2010 alone. The wall is not stop­ping a thing, but it is hav­ing a tre­mend­ous effect on the Amer­ican polit­ical imaginary.

C&J: What do you think of inter­pret­a­tions like those of Wil­liam Wal­ters, who stresses that there is also some res­ist­ant agency within the walling, for example by the organ­isa­tions that fill water tanks on the U.S.-Mexican bor­der? Counter-​conduct takes place through­out dif­fer­ent levels of soci­ety, by squat­ters, but also by lower-​level gov­ern­ments, churches, bor­der per­son­nel, NGOs, med­ical per­son­nel, and, not to for­get, irreg­u­lar­ized migrants them­selves. Given what you were say­ing before regard­ing the indi­vidu­al­ist per­spect­ive on res­ist­ance, how do you see their con­tri­bu­tion to the form­a­tion of com­plexly layered iden­tit­ies from ‘within’, par­tic­u­larly in con­trast to the highly secur­it­ized, reac­tion­ary ones that you high­light in your book?

Brown: Yes, but that said, let me be clear, I think these more indi­vidual or smal­ler efforts of res­ist­ance mat­ter, both because some­times you’re lit­er­ally sav­ing a life, and also to the extent that they can be part of a broader polit­ics of res­ist­ance. We, like you, are hav­ing a big struggle over the ques­tion of who we are and what the place of so-​called ‘new’ immig­rants is in the ‘we’. This is a huge struggle, and a com­plic­ated one in the US about belong­ing, about health­care, about edu­ca­tion, about the price of labour. It touches everything. Okay, so here’s how it plays out in the desert bor­der­lands. There are self-​designated ‘Angels’ who leave bottled water and maps out in the desert where the immig­rants cross, try­ing just to help them stay alive dur­ing their cross­ing that the wall has made more dif­fi­cult. On the other side, there are organ­ized groups who go and pick up those bottles of water, or replace them with foul bottles of water, to actu­ally poison and kill the migrants, or pick up the maps that the ‘Angels’ leave and replace them with maps that lead nowhere, that is, to their death. There’s a very con­crete polit­ical struggle going on there between non-​state agents. To the extent that this struggle is known, to the extent that it’s pub­li­cized, to the extent that it gains a polit­ical face, it’s not noth­ing. So, on the one hand, there’s a moral side to the story, try­ing to save a life. On the other hand, there is a polit­ical battle going on between two cit­izen groups, with big sym­bolic things at stake. And to the extent that it gets into the lar­ger polit­ical dis­course, it’s doing a lot of work.

C&J: The bad thing is that we can’t say res­ist­ance is just on the side of the NGOs provid­ing the water.

Brown: No. The ‘Minute­men’ who I talk about are the ones who are gal­lop­ing through the desert and pick­ing up the clean water and repla­cing it with foul water, and pick­ing up the maps and repla­cing them and so forth. So they are engaged in res­ist­ance, right? Even if it’s res­ist­ance to the fail­ure of the state to per­se­cute illegal entrants.

C&J: We would be inter­ested to know more about the struggle over the ‘we,’ and how it’s linked to recent protests, res­ist­ance move­ments. One thing that was much debated within and around the Occupy Wall Street move­ment, and that you also have been emphas­iz­ing in your com­ments on it, is that one of the suc­cesses seems to be in show­ing the pos­sib­il­ity of a new sense of col­lectiv­ity. Some people think that this is already a huge achieve­ment, because this mode of ‘we’ as a pro­gress­ive col­lectiv­ity didn’t seem pos­sible. Could you say a bit more about this col­lectiv­ity, and, more con­cretely, about where from today you see the pos­sib­il­it­ies and lim­it­a­tions of the Occupy move­ment and how it frames this kind of col­lectiv­ity or polit­ical action?

Brown: The Occupy move­ment was excit­ing when it erup­ted in the US. I’m going to speak from the per­spect­ive of the US, because it is every­where, but the one I know best is there. It was excit­ing for the reas­ons you just described, the re-​emergence of the demos. What was telling was that it emerged not as a set of labour uni­ons, stu­dents, con­sumers, etc. but as a kind of mass that I want to sug­gest is the effect, in part, of the neo­lib­eral destruc­tion of solid­ar­it­ies, the destruc­tion of uni­ons, the destruc­tion of sep­ar­ate groups or forces within the demos. (Those destruc­tions have been very lit­eral at the level of law in the US over the past ten years) So one thing that was inter­est­ing about the emer­gence of the 99% was that it was an emer­gence as a mass of indi­vidu­als com­ing together, not as vari­ous kinds of groups mak­ing an alli­ance. This is partly the effect of the neo­lib­eral break­down of the demos into indi­vidu­als rather than group solid­ar­it­ies, and Occupy is the first major left expres­sion of this recon­fig­ur­a­tion. The second thing I’d note is that Occupy has been suc­cess­ful, in the US, in chan­ging the con­ver­sa­tion about equal­ity and inequal­ity. No mat­ter whether Occupy re-​emerges in a massive way and becomes the future of left social organ­iz­ing or not, it has still suc­ceeded in an extraordin­ary and unanti­cip­ated way in mak­ing it pos­sible, in a way that wasn’t the case just two years ago, to cri­ti­cize the deeply ineg­al­it­arian effects of the neo­lib­eral order. It has also rein­tro­duced into main­stream lib­eral dis­course the idea of the value of pub­lic goods. You can see Obama make the shift. You can see the Regents of the Uni­ver­sity of Cali­for­nia make the shift in the wake of Occupy. They don’t credit it expressly, but you can see the shift in the dis­course. Those are two things — legit­im­ate extreme inequal­ity and the destruc­tion of pub­lic goods — that I thought neo­lib­er­al­ism was just going to pro­duce so suc­cess­fully that we would not be able to recover, we wouldn’t be able to get them back into our con­ver­sa­tions. I think there have been tre­mend­ous effects of Occupy in this regard.

The beauty of Occupy and the dif­fi­culty for Occupy was its attach­ment to hori­zont­al­ism. As we were say­ing in the begin­ning of this inter­view, it is one thing to have the com­mit­ment to dir­ect demo­cracy, and abso­lute par­ti­cip­a­tion in every decision, in a group of twelve, or even fifty. It’s another thing to do that across thou­sands and still another to do that across mil­lions, and in an ongo­ing way. It’s not pos­sible. So what do we do with that? I think many people in Occupy are ask­ing this ques­tion. It raises a whole other set of issues, about the dif­fer­ence between lead­ers and rulers, the dif­fer­ence between par­ti­cip­a­tion and voice on the one hand and abso­lute shared decision-​making on the other. It raises ques­tions that rad­ical demo­cratic the­ory has asked for a long time, but hasn’t had to answer imme­di­ately. So it’s time to do that work and I think many people involved with Occupy want to do that work. I think even the die-​hards got worn out by the ten-​hour gen­eral assembly that pro­duced one decision about tomorrow’s action. And you will not get ordin­ary people to do that work. So that’s one big issue facing Occupy.

The other thing I want to talk about is the prob­lem of Oed­ip­al­iz­a­tion in polit­ics, and what it means to get your tar­get right. What is beau­ti­ful about Occupy is the focus on the destruc­tion of pub­lic goods, the pro­duc­tion of a debt and deriv­at­ives eco­nomy that drives most people down while con­sol­id­at­ing wealth for the few, and the import­ance of recov­er­ing decision-​making and demo­cratic rule for the people — those are all won­der­ful things to affirm. But the dif­fi­culty is that many times attach­ments to tents or skir­mishes with the police derail that lar­ger agenda. The police, the state, the one-​on-​one col­li­sions with what was taken to be the face of power, became dis­tract­ing to the point of absorp­tion, which I want to call a cer­tain Oed­ip­al­iz­a­tion, and a per­son­i­fic­a­tion of power in the father, the state, the cops, or the chan­cel­lor of a uni­ver­sity. Once you do that, you’ve lost the big pic­ture and lost the big agenda. So some of the occu­pa­tions I’ve seen or been a part of have run aground here. When the focus becomes ‘Will we be able to keep our tents here? What are the police going to do next? Why didn’t the mayor or the chan­cel­lor pro­tect our occu­pa­tion?,’ then you’re just hav­ing an ordin­ary kind of scrap over prop­erty rights, police power and hier­archy. At that point, the big and splen­did agenda of Occupy gets lost. This prob­lem is espe­cially acute in stu­dent politics.

C&J: One chal­lenge seems to be insti­tu­tion­al­iz­a­tion without repro­du­cing the prob­lems of formal forms of polit­ical parties, polit­ical organ­iz­a­tions, etc; another prob­lem is what you’ve described as Oed­ip­al­iz­a­tion, some­times a mil­it­ant infant­il­ism that one can’t con­front state power dir­ectly. Yet another prob­lem seems to be with the effectiv­ity of largely sym­bolic protest. I can’t help going back to Marcuse’s idea of repress­ive tol­er­ance in terms of how the state reacts to protests. It’s always a double strategy, it seems. Accept nice forms of protests that are eas­ily con­trol­lable, that might still be rad­ical in some sense, but do not really pose a chal­lenge, even cel­eb­rate them. For instance, in Ger­many, every major politi­cian seemed to be in favour of Occupy. The chan­cel­lor, Merkel, the oppos­i­tion, every­one. ‘It’s great that those young people bring up these import­ant ques­tions. Even in this unortho­dox way, that’s really nice. That’s what our demo­cracy is about.’ So on a sym­bolic level, the protest was imme­di­ately san­it­ized, intro­duced into the polit­ical cycle, etc. And of course, this one strategy of answer­ing goes hand in hand with the crim­in­al­iz­a­tion of forms of protest that do not as eas­ily lend them­selves to this first kind of response. This is a prob­lem that all kinds of civil dis­obedi­ence or protests in that tra­di­tion seem to face. You can’t go down the mil­it­ant road, because that ends up with a fet­ish­ized idea of attack­ing the state on the street, but on the other hand sym­bolic protests also seem to run into real prob­lems con­cern­ing their effectivity.

Brown: These dangers though don’t can­cel the import­ance of protests. The Civil Rights Move­ment, for example, faced both of those dangers, as did other groups that fol­lowed in the civil rights frame, and still I think we can say there was suc­cess. But of course: those are social reform move­ments. With Occupy, we’re talk­ing about the fun­da­mental restruc­tur­ing of the eco­nomy. And here, the double dilemma that Mar­cuse out­lined and that you just reprised so well is very apt. That said, I don’t think there are many altern­at­ives. The thing about dilem­mas in polit­ics, and about para­doxes in polit­ics, is that you often just have to nav­ig­ate them. You can’t just say ‘Oh well, there must be some purer form’. Polit­ics is such an impure field, and you have to have a stom­ach for that impur­ity, as Weber reminds us in ‘Polit­ics as a Voca­tion.’ Polit­ics is fun­da­ment­ally impure and para­dox­ical, which is why so many people make the turn to eth­ics. It feels like it will be cleaner, and you’ll be able to execute a com­plete and coher­ent sen­tence in eth­ics. You’ll be able to say, ‘this is what my eth­ical con­duct should be, this is what it will be, and this is what it is.’ Polit­ics does not oper­ate like that. It fea­tures unpre­dict­able gaps between inten­tions, actions and effects. It fea­tures a medium in which ‘prin­ciple’ can back­fire or simply be irrelevant.

I do think you’re right about the response in most of the Euro-​Atlantic world to Occupy, being ‘This is good, and in fact we’ll even make a space for this as long as it doesn’t take a very mil­it­ant form.’ Unfor­tu­nately, I think this leads some act­iv­ists to think that mil­it­ancy must be the next step. That means viol­ence, or tangling with the police, or occupy­ing a build­ing they will not let us occupy. We’re then ‘in the game’, as Fou­cault would put it, that the admin­is­trat­ors have organ­ized, where this is okay and that’s not okay and there­fore you go for what’s not okay. But where is the agenda, where’s the polit­ical point? An example of this con­tain­ment happened at the Uni­ver­sity of Cali­for­nia. It was very funny. The pres­id­ent of the uni­ver­sity com­bined with the dean of the law school and someone from pub­lic rela­tions to have a forum called ‘How should we handle the next Occupy?’ And it was all about devel­op­ing ‘best prac­tices,’ for preevent plan­ning, and for civil­ian watch, and for mon­it­or­ing; best prac­tices should cer­tain things erupt. It was all about fit­ting this whole thing into a neo­lib­eral gov­ernance lan­guage that every­body was sup­posed to par­ti­cip­ate in: all the ‘stake­hold­ers’. So the cops, and the stu­dents and the staff and the fac­ulty and the admin­is­trat­ors were sup­posed to show up as stake­hold­ers and plan the next Occupy together, to estab­lish what would and would not be best prac­tices for par­ti­cipants, police, etc. It was almost a com­edy ver­sion of neo­lib­eral ‘buy-​in’ and con­sensus, except the Admin­is­tra­tion was very ser­i­ous about it.

C&J: How do you con­sider your own role, and that of left­ist intel­lec­tu­als, in think­ing about Occupy and other move­ments and changes at the moment? What can the polit­ical the­or­ist do when on the one hand, we seem to have become teach­ers in a kind of factory-​like edu­ca­tional envir­on­ment, and on the other hand, the clas­sical role of the pub­lic intel­lec­tual is no longer unprob­lem­at­ic­ally there. On the one hand, the chan­ging media envir­on­ment has seemed to dis­lo­cate the clas­sical fig­ure of the pub­lic intel­lec­tual, on the other hand, it seems to also have been bound up with a set of pretty prob­lem­atic, epi­stem­o­lo­gical, social under­stand­ings, quasi-​paternalistic author­it­arian in some respects. There are obvi­ously many dif­fer­ences between pub­lic cul­tures which frame the pub­lic intel­lec­tual in very dif­fer­ent ways, and which plays a very dif­fer­ent his­tor­ical role in the US, in France, in Ger­many, in the Neth­er­lands, etc. But we were won­der­ing what you thought about the self-​understanding of crit­ical the­or­ists today.

Brown: I find the fet­ish­ism of ‘the’ pub­lic intel­lec­tual par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing today, so let me instead say some­thing about what crit­ical the­ory can offer, or how it artic­u­lates, with these polit­ical move­ments. On the one hand, I con­tinue to think that the most import­ant way that aca­dem­ics can con­trib­ute to what I’m going to call roughly a ‘left agenda’ (recon­ceiv­ing demo­cracy in a more sub­stant­ive and ser­i­ous way, address­ing the organ­iz­a­tion of life by cap­ital, re-​establishing the value of pub­lic goods). The most import­ant thing that we can do is be good teach­ers. By that, I don’t mean teach­ing those issues; I mean teach stu­dents to think well. Whatever we are teach­ing, whether it’s Plato or Marx, eco­nomic the­ory or social the­ory, Niet­z­sche or Adorno, we need to be teach­ing them how to read care­fully, think hard, ask deep ques­tions, make good argu­ments. And the reason this is so import­ant is that the most sub­stant­ive cas­u­al­ties of neo­lib­er­al­ism today are deep, inde­pend­ent thought, the mak­ing of cit­izens, and lib­eral arts edu­ca­tion as opposed to voca­tional and tech­nical train­ing. We fac­ulty still have our classrooms as places to do what we think is valu­able in those classrooms, which for me is not about preach­ing a polit­ical line, but teach­ing stu­dents that think­ing is fun­da­mental to being human and is increas­ingly deval­ued except as a tech­nical prac­tice. This is an old claim, from the Frank­furt School, but it’s on ster­oids now. So I believe our most import­ant work as aca­dem­ics is teach­ing stu­dents to think deeply and well. Our books come and go.

On the issues of the day, the blo­go­sphere and its rel­at­ives actu­ally have a pretty big impact. So when crit­ical the­or­ists do speak intel­li­gently about some­thing cur­rent, and that speak­ing is cap­tured and dis­sem­in­ated through social media, it can be sig­ni­fic­ant. So maybe we dif­fer a little on the ques­tion of what the media has done to the pub­lic intel­lec­tual. If the pon­ti­fic­at­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tual in Le Monde is on the wane, I do think she or he is on the rise in these other places. Maybe I’m encour­aged in this area because in the US we’ve always had a dearth of intel­lec­tual life in most of our media until now. When we talk about pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, we’re talk­ing about a tiny group who read the New Yorker or The Nation, which is about .0001 per­cent of our pop­u­la­tion. By con­trast, the new media has made it pos­sible for ser­i­ous ana­lysis to cir­cu­late in all kinds of ways. Crit­ical the­ory should take advant­age of this. It affords a rela­tion between polit­ics and the academy not just through books or classroom lec­tures but through epis­odic interventions.

C&J: You have recently writ­ten crit­ic­ally about sec­u­lar­ism. In France and else­where, we have seen that crit­ical reflec­tion on sec­u­lar­ism has been taken up — and stim­u­lated and politi­cized — by right-​wing, con­ser­vat­ive and/​or anti-​emancipatory organ­iz­a­tions. Appar­ently one has to be very care­ful when being crit­ical about sec­u­lar­ism. Per­haps it’s import­ant to stress that there are dif­fer­ent ver­sions of sec­u­lar­ism and that we need to think crit­ic­ally about these vari­ous ver­sions. Or if one cri­ti­cizes sec­u­lar­ism more or less gen­er­ic­ally, it seems import­ant to for­mu­late the aspects we do want to save, in terms of basic rights, for instance. What’s your view on that?

Brown: In a way, we’re back to the demo­cracy ques­tion. Do we hang on to the term, sec­u­lar­ism, and try to give it some new shape, or aban­don it? I say we hang onto it. But you’re also pos­ing the prob­lem of right-​wing appro­pri­ations of left-​critiques. There is always a danger that one’s internal cri­tiques of left or lib­eral dis­course will be appro­pri­ated by the right. That’s the peril of doing those kinds of cri­tiques, whether it’s a cri­tique of iden­tity polit­ics or cer­tain aspects of fem­in­ism, or Oed­ip­al­iz­a­tion in protest polit­ics. Now the con­tem­por­ary Amer­ican right, of course, has its own inde­pend­ent source of anti-​secularism. They accuse lib­er­als and left­ists of ‘secular-​humanist nihil­ism,’ which means we’ve emp­tied out the world of mean­ing. That said, the right also backed two wars that took place under the sign of ‘they’re fun­da­ment­al­ists, we’re sec­u­lar,’ ‘we’re tol­er­ant, they’re intol­er­ant.’ So things are all mixed up here.

Now, to your ques­tion: what is to be saved? I don’t think we can answer it gen­er­ic­ally, because I think there are dis­tinct form­a­tions of sec­u­lar­ism, vari­et­ies of sec­u­lar­ism, so we have to ask it in the con­text of the sec­u­lar dis­course in each soci­ety that sec­u­lar­ism gov­erns. What I am com­mit­ted to try­ing to save in the US con­text is the import­ant dis­tinc­tion between church and state, a dis­tinc­tion that aims to secure a religion-​free pub­lic realm and per­sonal reli­gious free­dom. It doesn’t do either com­pletely, of course, but one then has to fig­ure out how to extend sec­u­lar­ism bey­ond its Christian-​Protestant roots, so that it can make good on its prom­ises. One also has to give up the idea that there is some neut­ral, sec­u­lar space. So it’s a ques­tion of mak­ing these prob­lem­atic con­ceits part of our lived work on secularism.

If we leave the ter­rain of sec­u­lar­ism for a moment, this might become clearer. We used to have these debates about whether universalism’s absurd or use­less, whether there’s always a con­stitutive out­side. Well of course, there’s always a con­stitutive out­side, noth­ing is truly uni­ver­sal, but that the same time one doesn’t want to give up on the notion of uni­ver­sal inclu­sion of all human­ity into the Kan­tian idea of the dig­nity of humans, or the idea that every­one is entitled to sur­vival as well as thriv­ing bey­ond sur­vival. But one has to know at the same time that there will always be a con­stitutive out­side, that the uni­ver­sal will never truly be uni­ver­sal. There will always be some humans who are ‘not human enough’ to be included. Just as with sec­u­lar­ism, it will never achieve the neut­ral­ity it pre­tends to have. We must always be push­ing it toward a greater neut­ral­ity, know­ing that it won’t achieve it, that it will always be oper­at­ing from a stand­point, and it will always be a reli­gious stand­point. Sim­il­arly, know­ing that sec­u­lar­ism doesn’t simply address reli­gion but defines it, we can become attent­ive to what it’s defin­ing. What is it say­ing reli­gion is? What counts as reli­gion, and what does it cast as good reli­gion and bad reli­gion? These become things for us to work on, polit­ic­ally, in the cul­ture but also in law. This is how we might save some­thing like sec­u­lar­ism. Instead of say­ing ‘Don’t attack it, it’s all we’ve got to pre­vent the oppos­ite’ where the oppos­ite is ima­gined as theo­cracy or fun­da­ment­al­ism, I think sec­u­lar­ism becomes strengthened by becom­ing more self-​critical and avail­able to revi­sion. I think it’s an eman­cip­at­ory and inclus­ive mod­al­ity for all polit­ical cul­tures, but it unfolds in dif­fer­ent ways in India, Tur­key, Egypt, Ger­many. And it will also be weapon­ized in dif­fer­ent ways in each place. So we ‘save’ it pre­cisely by work­ing on its false con­ceits, and attempt­ing to remake sec­u­lar law and sec­u­lar debates; rather than by bury­ing these con­ceits, or simply defend­ing sec­u­lar­ism as bet­ter than the alternatives.

Robin Celikates teaches polit­ical and social philo­sophy at the Uni­ver­sity of Ams­ter­dam. He is the vice-​director of ASCA and a co-​editor of Krisis.

Yolande Jansen is a Researcher at the Ams­ter­dam Cen­ter for Glob­al­isa­tion Stud­ies (ACGS) of the Uni­ver­sity of Amsterdam.

We [the inter­view­ers] would like to thank Wendy Brown for hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion with us in Giessen, at the con­fer­ence Demo­cracy and Res­ist­ance (June 18 – 20, 2012), as well as Julien Kloeg and Nina Hagel for assist­ance in tran­scrib­ing the interview.

(CC) Krisis, 2012, Issue 3
www​.krisis​.eu

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