Scattered Thoughts on Wendy Brown (or) Ceci n'est pas un monolith

Disclaimer: What follows is a ramshackle summary of Wendy Brown's 1995 work, States of Injury.  Although the summary might be worthless, it helps me arrive at the questions that I'm thinking about in relationship to her work.  And, oh boy, Julianne, I'm hoping you have some insights on all of this, since you're much better versed in political theory and discourses of subjectivity than I...

So here we go: Drawing on Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, and Weber, Wendy Brown's primary goal is to interrogate current definitions of citizenship, processes of identity, and practices of regulation, including those of some feminist reformers, that are associated with liberal bureaucratic states.  At the most general level, Brown's point is that emancipatory politics pursued within depoliticizing and regulatory environments will come to resemble the arenas they intend to subvert.  B's newer move (remember it's 1995 here) is to ask how a sense of woundedness can become the basis for a sense of identity.  She argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography ultimately legitimize the state: "Whether one is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands the heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector's rules." (169).  She tracks many different paths that the state has followed in order to legitimize its own power.  I won't go into detail, but some of those paths I find most interesting include: the expansion of state power through deregulation and privatization (18): the confessional frame of the post-modern liberal state in which feelings confessed acquire the status of truth and therefore enforce ontological essentialism (42); the implementation of Nietzsche's ressentiment to explain how marginalized social groups produce sites of rage to displace hurt (68); and the analysis of Marx's "Jewish Question" to consider how rights emblemize the ghostly sovereignty of the unemancipated individual (110).  

Although B has her Althusserian moments, evident when she claims that the language of resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires within the regime, she still has some fuzzy optimism reserved for the reader.  These, to my mind, remain incredibly vague.  True democracy, she insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not protection.  Sounds great, but when it comes time to get practical, she only prescribes the creation of a "post-modern feminist space" that must be "heterogeneous," "roving," with conversations oriented toward diversity and the common, rather than the individual/self.  Every time I reread "heterogeneous" and "roving," I can't help but conjure up the idea of some sort of feminist circus, moving from town to town. 

Anyways, this book is most useful for me not as an exemplar of political theory, but rather as a sort of methodological warning.  When Brown points out the many dimensions of the modern liberal state and its modes of power, she does so in a way that is much more nuanced than so much of the theory oriented toward identity politics.  As trite or obvious as it may seem to write something like: "the state is not an it, but an ensemble of discourses," (174) it's an important point.  I know that I'm guilty of lapsing into thinking about the state as a monolith--a singular entity whose goal is to sustain itself through means of repression and/or capitalist expansion.

Her analysis of Marx is also provocative.  Since I recently finished Anderson's Imagined Communities, Brown's work has me asking how Anderson's notion of the nation would link up with Marx's "On the Jewish Question." Marx is interested in how the state's "emancipation" of certain subjects operates as a form of political suppression that legitimates state powers and how the process of emancipation itself constitutes the power of the liberal state (you can see why this is nice for Brown).  It seems, then that Anderson's ideas about the necessary "emancipation" from Gods, Kings, and other masters would map on pretty neatly here.