States of Injury by Wendy Brown, Chapter 2 Synopsis: Postmodern Exposures and Feminist Hesitations

See the Chapter 1 synopsis here, and a general overview of the book here.

In this chapter, Brown makes these three basic arguments:

1. Postmodernity is a condition and postmodernism an attempt at describing the current conditions of our time, and it does not necessarily entail any particular political prescriptions with it.
2. Feminists who claim postmodernism (the pointing out of the postmodern conditions we live in) will kill their feminist politics, reveal gaps and hesitations in their own feminism.
3. Feminists do not need Truth (aka Reason, Morality), the Subject, or Identity to be feminists, and postmodernity merely forces us to open new political spaces.
   

I think it suffices to do two things in this summary: a) Summarize what Brown sees as the problems caused by postmodernity, and how feminists can forge a politics amid these problems, and b) Summarize and engage with some of the problems Brown sees feminism as having, some of which are exposed by postmodernism. 
First, Brown wants to redirect our attention from "the academically crumbled foundations of Truth, facticity, or the modernist subject," or from postmodernism, to the greatest impediments to oppositional politics which come from postmodernity:

The first condition she thinks is important is that of "technical reason." Now, she never defines what this means exactly, and google brings up nothing relevant and I must admit I don't have a Marcuse reader standing by, so I had to rely on researching something she says is a similar phenomenon, Weber's "instrumental rationality." (If you actually know something about technical reason, or Habermas' "means-end rationality," please let me know if I'm way off the mark here.) So here's my understanding. Technical reason is a false consciousness in which finding the most efficient way of achieving an ends is favored instinctively and focused on socially, at the expense of any justification or reasoning for the value of the ends itself.

You can see how this would apply to her arguments in the first chapter about identity politics and the failures of the state to empower injured parties (although Brown never spells it out for us this way). The most effective way of disciplining the people and systems that injure might be to go through the state, but nobody stops to ask why discipline for injury should be the end-goal of a politics, and what the consequences of such an ends might be.

The subject-disintegrating powers of technical reason, Brown argues,  are far more powerful than those of postmodernism, but technical reason's hegemony becomes even more noticeable and pervasive when "other legitimating discourses of a culture--political, religious, or scientific--are fractured or discredited, a process that is a defining feature of postmodernity." Technical reason in a context of postmodern power, which flows without the boundaries and rigidities of institutions or discrete spheres of power, makes critical articulations of domination, or oppositional politics, incredibly difficult.

Next, Brown looks at disorientation as a supposed threat to feminism, and she defines the problem of disorientation or "being lost," through Frederic Jameson:

This is bewildering, and I use existential bewilderment in this new postmodern space to make a final diagnosis of the loss of our ability to position ourselves within this space and cognitively map it. This is then projected back on the emergence of a global, multinational culture that is decentered and cannot be visualized, a culture in which one cannot position oneself.

In short, Brown goes on to argue that the postmodern loss of collective identity, has caused the clinging to individual identity, even by people who are generally quite critical of liberalism's individualism. 

Lastly, Brown details the problem of "reactionary foundationalism," or clinging to one representative feature of a modern movement to the extent that it is a fundamentalism. This too is a coping method for a loss of collective identity and disorientation general. Just like the Right clings to "the traditional family," and "the American flag," academics on the Left claim to "feminism" in its modern constructs, as if it is one of the "indispensible threads preserving indisputable good."

There is a hard-hitting section on feminist failures that I think is worth going into in more detail. Brown takes on feminists who say their endeavors are crushed by postmodernism's crumbling of "truth" of "morality" and of "the self." She thinks this is silly, first of all, since feminists themselves have argued that the self is constructed socially, that truth and reason have been used to masculine ends, and aren't really all that objective, and that discourse about morality operates as a power mechanism. Not only that, but she thinks the idea that feminism can't exist outside these modernist idioms is problematic and untrue. She looks at quotes like this one from Nancy Harstock's "Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?":

We need to constitute ourselves as subjects as well as objects of history...We need to be assured that some systematic knwoledge about our world and ourselves is possible...We need a theory of power that recognizes that our practical daily activity contains an understanding of the world.

To which Brown responds: "Harstock does not concern herself with the defensibility or persuasiveness of the narrative out of which these items are torn. She is concerned only with the dubious necessity of rescuing them from the discredited narratives, a rescue waged in order to "preserve" feminism from what she takes to be the disorienting, deblitating, and depoliticizing characteristics of post-modern intellectual maneuvers." Brown calls feminist arguments like that both foundationalist and reactionary. It's like Linda Hirshman's infamous WaPo article about how feminism has become so sidetracked by all these interesectional interests, that feminism (whatever the hell that might be in the absence of intersectional concerns) itself is being lost. If that isn't both foundationalist and reactionary I don't know what is...not to mention another instance of the hegemony of instrumental rationality. 

Here's Brown's best summary of her gripes with feminism in her own words, which sort of proceed out of this critique of Harstock:

I will suggest that feminist wariness about postmodernism may ultimately be coterminous with a wariness about politics, when politics is grasped as a terrain of struggle without fixed or metaphysical referents and a terrain of power's irreducible and pervasive presence in human affairs. Contrary to its insistence that it speaks in the name of the political, much feminist anti-postmodernism betrays a preference for extrapolitical terms and practices: for Truth (unchanging, incontestable) over politics (flux, constest, instability); for certainty and security (safety, immutability, privacy) over freedom (vulnerability, publicity); for discoveries (science) over decisions (judgments); for separable subjects armed with established rights and identities over unwieldy and shifting pluralities adjudicating for themselves and their future on the basis of nothing more than their own habits and arguments.

Among her more specific arguments in this section (there really are too many to summarize, but there are a lot, and I agree with most), Brown is critical of feminists' insistence on treating the production and recognition of individual women's narratives as purveyors of truth, as if discourse when it comes from injured parties has nothing to do with power, as if it isn't rhetoric, like it is when it comes from dominant social positions. It isn't that Brown doesn't think it's important that marginalized voices are heard and that narratives are used in politics, that is, that we actively demonstrate the personal is political. It's simply that she realizes this isn't enough to affect change in a postmodern context, as it clings to naive, modernist notions of truth and of the subject. Producing academia based on women's perspectives is important, but they can't be treated as individual's accounts of truth, any more than we would treat the narratives of wealthy white men as signs of what reality is. Instead they should be taken as collective accounts of the world used to make political arguments. And we need new political spaces to make our feminist arguments political.

Now, this postmodern political space for feminists is not something she focuses on defining too specifically in the chapter, but this is what she tells us she's getting at:

"Postmodernity's dismantling of metaphysical foundations for justice renders us quite vulnerable to domination by technical reason unless we seize the opportunity this erosion also creates to develop democratic processes for formulating collective postepistemological and postontological judgments. Such judgments require learning how to have public conversations with each other, arguing from a vision about the common ("what I want for us") rather than from identity ("who I am"), and from explicitly postulated norms and potential common values rather than from false essentialism or unreconstructed private interest...I am suggesting that political conversation oriented toward diversity and the common, toward world rather than self, and involving conversion of one's knowledge of the world from a situated (subject) position into a public idiom, offers us the greatest possibility of countering postmodern social fragmentations and political disintegrations.

My final point in this very long summary, is just that I like the idea, as a way of getting away from the trap of identity politics discussed in the first chapter, but I just don't know how it would work in such a cynical political society. Vision and ideas for the collective are openly mocked in our political culture. Remember how almost half of the United States thought it was ok to vote for a political party that openly mocked something as rudimentary as community organizers? I guess I just question how politically salient her approach could be. But then again, I guess we won't begin by reaching out to conservative republicans who don't think helping the collective is admirable...we'll have to start with parties who are a little more sympathetic. 

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States of Injury by Wendy Brown, Chapter 1 synopsis: Freedom and the Plastic Cage

I am attempting to summarize and analyze the book chapter by chapter here, as much for your sake as for mine (so I can make sure I actually comprehend and engage with what I've read). However, I do so knowing it will reveal to you how slowly I make it through academic books at this current stage of my life. Please don't judge.

Is it not precisely this form of power that "applies itself to immediate everyday life [to] categorize the individual, mark him by his own individuality, attach him to his own identity, impose a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him?"

Brown, quoting Foucault, p. 29

Brown let's us know in the preface that she's writing a critique and history of the contemporary academic left. So, opening in the first chapter, she gives us just that. In the first chapter Brown makes a point to point argument about the ways in which "freedom" has been conceptualized and sometimes ignored, and how or why this may have happened, by the contemporary left. 

She notes that the Left has pretty much conceded control of the word "freedom" to libertarians and conservatives (which for them means little more than consumer choice and free markets). She also notes that they have abandoned the critiques of the state which were so important among early Marxists. All of these movements away from freedom and critiques of the state have been driven by a simultaneous abandonment of critiques of capital as a source of oppression and increased belief that the state can litigate away inequalities caused primarily by identity category.

So what's the problem with these shifts? Brown looks at it like this: If injured parties look to the state to codify disciplinary actions and to explicitly ban discriminatory behaviors, or to explicitly validate their existence and importance, they have codified the injured party's status as a vulnerable person, and embedded that injured identity in the fabric of the State. She isn't unsympathetic to a desire for protection for injured parties. But she believes looking to the State to make this happen is a flawed strategy. The identity of injury is permanently attached to the injured party, if it is remedied in this way. If the state must be relied on to serve this function, what sort of permanent freedom or "empowerment" is actually achieved for the injured party, especially if, like Michael Hardt and me, you see identity formation as the primary problem-process of capitalism and sexism and racism and most discrimination. 

The state, Brown argues, cannot address identity and its consequences without reproducing its formation. Instead of "protecting" injured parties, or defining freedom in a solely negative way based on whatever is identified as "unfreedom" in a given society, Brown wants to stop legitimating the state.

Just how did the interests of progressives become so transformed in the past half century? Many academics contributed in this welfare statist shift, but Brown isn't shy to note Foucault's enormous influence. He explicitly refocused critiques of power from the State and capital to critiques and accounts of "domination." No, they aren't mutually exclusive, but because Foucault explicitly distinguishes between them, it's easy to assume that he at least thought they were mutually exclusive:

We must escape from the limited field of juridical sovereignty and State institutions, and instead base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination.

Here's how she characterizes the liberal state and responds to Foucault, and I think it's one of the most spot-on things I've read in a long time:

(The state's) primary function has never been sovereignty--its own or that of the people. Rather, the state rises in importance with liberalism precisely through its provision of essential social repairs, economic problem solving, and the management of a mass population: in short, through those very functions that standard ideologies of liberalism and capitalism cast as self-generating in civil society and thus obscure as crucial state activities. As the social body is stressed and torn by the secularizing and atomizing effects of capitalism and its attendant political culture of inviduating rights and liberties, economic, administrative, and legislative forms of repair are required. Through a variety of agencies and regulations, the liberal state provides webbing for the social body dismembered by liberal individualism and also administers the increasing number of subjects disenfranchised and deracinated by capital's destruction of social and geographic bonds. If this kind of administration and regulation is not innocent of particular state interests, neither is it to one side of "techniques and tactics of domination."

The liberal state is made fatter and more legitimate by juridical protections against injury, and the liberal state is little more than a reproducer of capital and its destruction. That's a problem. But couple the Foucaultian view of the state as unimportant with a defensive reaction to libertarian attacks on welfare brought on by the rise of conservatism in the 1980s, and you have a lot of leftists not so interested critiques of the state any more. 

Foucault isn't the only academic she credits for creating this problematic shift in leftist focus. She also talks briefly about the feminist role in this, led by Catharine Mackinnon, who openly disregards freedom and opts for equality (as if one could exist without the other). I'd get into it now, but the second chapter seems to be much more dedicated to feminism's role, so I'll hold off on that until the next synopsis.

One last thing I felt was really important in this chapter, was Brown's critique of some of the stock language used by progressive academics now that they've decided freedom is for libertarians. Instead of talking about freedom, many academics have let the words "empowerment" and "resistance" take its place. Brown isn't so much afraid these are insufficient for revolution because of their dictionary definitions, but is concerned about the way they are used. First of all, she thinks resistance has the same problem liberalism's conception of freedom has. It's always a reaction. It makes the end goal about reacting to power, which sort of presupposes the power will always be there. It doesn't get to anything outside its own historical context, just like freedom (she notes that Marx attempted to come up with a definition of "true essential freedom" that could be universal, but points out that through the course of a century, it has proven to not be so universal after all). Sure, let's "resist" (what exactly?), but what's the light at the end of the tunnel?

And as for "empowerment" (I love this part):

Empowerment registers the possibility of generating one's capacities, one's "self-esteem," one's life course, but without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses of empowerment too often signal an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship with domination insofar as they locate an individual's sense of worth and capacity in the register of individual feelings, a register implicitly located on something of an otherworldly plane vis-a-vis social and political power. In this regard, despite its apparent locution of resistance to subjection, contemporary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of liberal solipsism--the radical decontextualization of the subject characteristic of liberal discourse that iskey to the fictional sovereign individualism of liberalism. Moreover, in its almost exclusive focus on subjects' emotional bearing and self-regard, empowerment is a formulation that converges with a regime's own legitimacy needs in masking the power of the regime.

This is not to suggest that talk of empowerment is always only illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom concerned with action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and economic democracy, contemporary deployments of this notion also draw so heavily on an undeconstructed subjectivity that they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of) empowerment and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political, social, or economic life. 

Ah! Love it. That's exactly why those cries for Girl Power annoy me so much! Claiming to have girl power is one thing, but actually having it would have to include actually influencing and controlling something. 

In the next chapter: Brown takes on "Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations"

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What the mailman delivered today:

Tuesday's conversation about identity and revolution pushed me over the edge on ordering this book. I've been hearing about it from academics I respect for awhile now, and I decided it was time to find out what the hubbub is about. So far I've read the back of the book and the first page of the preface.

Have you read it? Thoughts? Anything I should be looking for in particular?

Here's the back of the book blurb, if you haven't heard anything about it before:

How has injury become the basis for political identity in contemporary life? How have law and other state institutions come to be seen as redressing such injuries rather than as perpetrating them? These questions guide Wendy Brown's critical engagement with modern political theorists, feminist and cultural theorists, and the political effects of late twentieth-century capitalism. Transposing Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power as well as his account of ressentiment onto the contemporary political field, Brown shows how the regulatory demands of the state encourage the formation of political identities not only founded on injury but invested in maintaining an injured status. In the place of a nation of freedom characterized as collective and transformative, contemporary political formations offer versions of "resistance" prefigured and contained by the very power they purport to oppose. The result is a politics in which the desire for freedom devolves into moralizing, and ressentiment takes the place of freedom as a collective project.

Brown weaves this thesis through a series of essays that consider such topics as Catharine MacKinnon's antipornography politics, the recent resurgence of rights discourse on the Left, academic antipathy toward "postmodernism," and the gendered sexuality of classical liberalism, as well as the centrality of the state in feminist politics. Along the way, she suggests how freedom might be rethought and reclaimed for a progressive political vision appropriate to the conditions of late modernity. 

Now please excuse me while I get back to my reading...but not before googling the word "ressentiment."

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