Democracy and Bad Dreams

Democracy and Bad Dreams Wendy Brown (bio) Two years ago, before a similar audience in a similar room in a similar hotel in a different city, I was reflecting upon changes wreaked in the experience of public space by the phenomenon of the cell phone, and someone in that audience murmured within hearing of a friend of mine: “oh, she’s just never gotten over Wolin.” When it was recounted to me, the implied scorpion tail of this remark — with its presumed implication that an avowed culturally radical postmarxist poststructuralist had been revealed as drinking at an old and abandoned trough — missed its target. Far from stung, I was pleased to my toes, as well as intrigued: what would it mean to “get over Wolin?” What would one be getting over, precisely, and how would such a recovery be an advance for Western political thought, or at least the version of it performed in these sorts of hotel meeting rooms? From time to time since, I have mused on this question. Just what was it in the apparently retrograde character of my thinking that day that could be blamed on Wolin? A certain technophobia or Luddism? No, not only would that have been a misreading of my own remarks, but Wolin never really went for the agrarian and anti-technological strand of radical democratic or communitarian thinking, and he certainly appears as cathected to his computer as the next octagenarian. Was it excessive investment in an idealized version of the Athenian polis? No, Wolin’s romance with the polis as Arendt eulogized it, I would contend, didn’t last past the ‘60s. A radically decentralized and modestly egalitarian distribution of political power remained a political value for him but the precious, elite, immortality-and-disclosure-through-speech-and-deed ideal that Arendt derived from the ancient Athenians was not something he sustained as he focused his attention on the prospects for democratizing the contemporary nation-state and political economy. Was it my seemingly civic republican fetish of public discourse that was at issue? Certainly Habermas would be a better contemporary culprit than Wolin here, and Wolin’s concern with political experience and local control is not exactly equivalent to public sphere discursivity. I think one dimension of my putative Wolin hangover, as it surfaced that particular afternoon, must pertain to the strain of Wolin’s thinking concerned with liberalism’s low standards for democracy and the contribution of contemporary capitalist economic and cultural productions to the further attenuation of democratic practices. Wolin is quite possibly unique among contemporary Anglo-American thinkers in the way that he pries democracy apart from liberal and even social democratic thought, a gesture that at times manages to place him to the left of Marxist legatees such as Laclau and Mouffe, and not only the Princeton-Harvard liberal theory axis.1 1. Liberalism What is the specific quality of liberalism that Wolin perceives as hostile to a practice of democracy that has the power and not merely the inclusion or consent of the people at its heart? Again, we might stipulate the issue through comparison with familiar theses on this point: Is the problem, as Arendt would have it, the invasion of the political by the social, by the concerns of what Arendt terms “mere life”? No, Wolin does not share Arendt’s contempt for mere life nor for the often rough-hewn political cries of the dispossessed who cannot escape for a moment the maw of survival or bodily needs. Unlike Arendt, Wolin does not regard life as adulterating the political and could even be said to embrace the potentially political character of some of the rawer needs of animal, human, and ecological life. If not Arendtian disdain for a political culture based on the model of universal housekeeping, is Wolin’s conviction about the anti-democratic tendencies of liberalism closer to Marx’s, in which liberalism is seen to operate as mere gloss for the political economy it harbors, serves, and legitimates? No, capitalism is exceedingly important to Wolin’s understanding of contemporary forms of political power and prospects of democratic possibility, more so than to most Arendtians, but the problematics of liberalism

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• Democracy on the lam

  Open Access•Jennet Kirkpatrick•Contemporary Political Theory•2012

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