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    Wendy Brown - States of Injury - Power and Freedom in Late Modernity-Princeton University Press (1995)

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    Cristian Arévalo

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    States of Injury POWER AND FREEDOM IN LATE MODERNITY Wendy Brown PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright © FF by Pact Universi Bes Dal hy Prin Ulaesy Pr 41 Wiha Sees Prison New bre tt Inthe Untet Ran, Prato University Ps, Sis oem. see paper, — ISHN 910K pea i) N fest amee=Pislenephy. 2 Power Sool snes Seat temo teeny. 3, Liberty 1 Tak INSsBEM que ntsc ALA Ho toe hn bec composcl in Bebo ‘neriy eas books reprised. aie paper ano tle pudlngs fo perenne and dara ofthe Coon Prada Gales for Book Longe 9 he Yana we Unita Stas of Ania wn tea 3 ta For Sheldon S. Wolin | | f Contents Preface Acknowledgments Cuarres Ove, Introduction: Freedom and the Plastic Cage Cuarren Two Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations Cuaeren Tune Wounded Accachments Cuseren Four The Mirror of Pornography Cuarten Five Rights and Losses Cuaeren Six Liberalism’s Family Values Cuaeren Seven Finding the Man in che State Index 135, 66, 17 Preface “Tuese stunts consider how certain well-intentioned contemporary po= Ihvcal projects and theoretical postures inadvertently redraw the very configurations and effects of power that they seek co vanquish. The topics explored in the course of this consideration include the liberal, ‘apitalist, and disciplinary origins ofthe force of ressentiment in late mod= ‘em political and theoretical discourse; the gendered characteristics of late ‘modern state power and the paradoxical nature of appeals to the state for ‘gender Justice: the convergences of juridical and diseiplinary power contemporary efforts co procure rights along lines of politicized identity and the gendered sexuality of liberal political discourse, Ifthe immediate provocation for cach essay is a specific problent in| contemporary political thought ar activity, taken cogether these provoca- tions provide an occasion of another sort reflection on the present-day value of some of the last reo centuries’ most compelling theoretical eri tiques of modeen political life. Thus, the chapters on identity and mi ity an contemporary intellectual and political formations critically engage Nietzsche; the chapters on rights and liberalism reconsider Mare’s eri- tigue of hiberalism and Foucault’s critique of regulation through indi ution; the chapters concerned with state power are in dialogue with Weber, Foucault, and liberal thought; and the early Baudrillard is en- gaged to reflect on Catharine MacKinnon’ adaptation of Mars for a the= ory of gender Sach a schema of the book's objectives, however, involves a trick of retrospection that lends coherence to coritingency when, in fact, ike many works written in the dizzying intellectual and politcal pace of the lace ewentieth century, this one starrad and finished as quite different pro- Jets. Conceived in the anid-1980s as a critical feminist theory of late ‘modem state power (now chapter 7), it quickly outgrew the confines, esabished both by gender 2s a governing political concem and by the state as a delimitable domain of politcal power. From the outset, my Interest in developing a feminist critique ofthe state was animated less by intrinsic fascination with the state chan by concern over the potential di lution of emancipatory political aims entailed in ferninism’s turn to the state to adjudicate or redress practices of male dominance. Nor was my ‘worry about such dilution limited to the politics of gender but rath ‘engaged a larger question: What are che perils of pursuing emancipacory political aims within largely repressive, regulatory, and depofitieizing in x Preface srttions shat chemelies cary lements ofthe regime (eg masculine dominance) whose subversion f being sought? Discerning “the man the sae” wast ay to conccntae such» query on the problem of “feminist political reform. "Tre was certain dingenuousnss, however, even to this formulae tion ‘Theoriing the sate 8 1 argely negative domain for democratic polticaltansformaion was not arcumscribd by the sat'sexpresly fendered fexturs, by ts history and gencaogy a5 mieor and accomplice Of male dominance, Nor was esate the only domain of nidemoctae es about schichTchoaght feminists ough tbe wary. Indeed my tn efor 0 “dsconstrvt” the sat, ro avoid the Kind of ceifcaons of that poten tion to which theories ofthe state ae 30 valnerable, r= ‘ale an ensemble of amar powers: the state's “gender” could be traced ins mediations of eps, welts, and mir, a ell tin the spect teal and bureaucrat discourse through hich gi Ton, adjudication, policy execution, and administration trangpre. Bat to argue that ach these dimension of ste power wa problematic for feminist sims not only because wa inscribe! with gender but Beeise anuidemocatie tendencies betrayed both “Temi shaving something of metaphorical operation in my own politcal Weltanschauwoyg. Feminism was being freighted wich 2 strong democratic ambition, with aspirations for radical political free~ dom and equality, while che state was carrying the weight ofall the dis- courses of power against which I imagined radically democratizing possibilities to be arrayed. While some feminists may be radical demo- rats, no ground exists for marking such a politieal posture as either in= digenous or consequent to the diverse attachments traveling under {eminism's name. Similarly, although the state may be an important site ‘of convergence of antidemocratic discourses, it is hardly the only place where they make their appearance, nor always the best lens through which to study them, Discourses of sovereign individuality, or of bu- reaucratic depolitcizaton of gendered class relations, for example, can be discerned in the state but are not limited to operations there. Indeed, one lof the richer sites of radical democratic agitation in the last decade, prac tices gathered under the rubric of “cultural politics,” is premised pre- cisely om the notion that neither domination nor democratic resistance are limited co the venue of the state TThe confining qualities of gender and the state as categories of political analysis did not exhaust the sources undoing the “feminist theory of the state” project. The point of mapping the configurations of power in which contemporary democratic political opposition took shape was t0 tunderstand where and how such opposition might do other than partci= pate in contemporary orders of regulation, discipline, exploitation, and ‘ | { j ! i i i i Preface xi ‘domination—in short, in existing regimes of unfeedom. But to pose the problem as one of negotiating these orders was ¢0 leave uninterrogated. fhe question of the subject doing, the negotiating; indeed, it was to as- sume thar the politically committed subject sufficiently cognizant of the map of power would plot appropriate strategies and tactics given its aim ‘of democratizing political life. Whar such an assumption eschews was the problem of subject formacicn by and chrough the very discourses being, charted as sites and zones of untteedam. Nor was such neglect a minor matter: the viability of a radical demo= cratic alternative to various political discourses of domination in the pre~ sent is not determined only by the organization of institutional forces ‘opposing that alternative but is shaped as well by political subjects’ desire for such an alternative. Even if, for example, feminists could be per= suaded of the antidemocratic character of certain state-centered reforms, would they count this as an objection to such reforms? Even if the in scription of gendered, racial, or sexual identity in legal discourse could be shown to have the effec of reaffirming the historical injuries constitutive fof those identities, thus installing injury as identity in the ahistorical dise course of the law, would proponents of such actions necessarily despair lover this effect? To what extent have the particular antidemocratie powers of our time produced subjects, often working wnder the banner of “progressive politics,” whose taste for substantive political freedom is attenuated by a historically unique form of politcal powerlessness amid Iistorically unprecedented ciscourses of individual liberty? And it this peculiar form of powerlessness is sometimes worn rather straightfor- \wardly as che conservative raiment of despatr, misanthropy, narrow pus suit of interest, or bargains of auronomy for state protection, when does Xe twist into a more dissimulated political discourse of paralyzing re- ‘riminations and toxie resentments parading as radical eritique? To pursue these questions was co shift atention from the conditions faming and facing contemporary political opposition to the constitutive ‘material of the opposition itself, Insofar as this moved the analysis into a ‘more psychological and less institutional line of inquiry, for some the appropriate theorctical consultants at this point might have been Freud or Lacan bene toward history, insedimented with culture, and tethered by {economic and political context. In my own theoretical lexicon, however, this shife entailed moving from che register of Marx and Webet to that of ‘Nietzsche and Foucault. While Marx and Weber trace power as 2 prob- lem of macrophysical social processes, whether those of capital oF oF instrumental rationality instiutionalized as bureaucracy, Nietzsche and Foucault concern themselves with the psychic, social, and moral econ= ‘omies imbricated with such processes. Pur slightly differently, if Marx and Weber delineate forces—capital and rationalization—that can be said si Preface to shape the contours of modern “history” (even as their more teleologi- cal versions of history have been exposed 4s fictions), Nietzsche and Foucault discern the atomic powers of history in microphysical particles, Jn “descriptive” languages, in moral systems, and in thwarted aggression and idals—in short, in the very making of bodily subjects and socio- poleical desire Methodologically, discerning contemporary inhibitions of radical ‘democratic aims in the very material of contemporary subject formation confounds a “subject/world” distincrion in politcal science that takes the Aisciplinary form of infelicitous distinctions between studies of “political psychology” and “political institutions,” as well as between “political behavior” and “political theory.” Politically, this inquiry into the making of contemporary political desie interrupts 2 tendency to externalize po- litical disappomtment by blaming failures on the character of power “oxit there.” being. bound instead to the more sober practice of searching. for politcal disappointment’s “cause” m our own psychic and social ranks. ‘What kind of attachments to untreedomr can be discerned in contempo- rary political formations ostensibly concerned with emancipation? What kinds of injuries enacted by late modesn democracies are recapitulated in the very appositional projects ofits subjects? What conservative political impulses resule from a lost sense of faturity attendant upon the break~ down of progressive narratives of history? ‘This effort to understand the contemporary: preemption of liberatory politics inthe liberators themselves turned still further from the study of political institutions as c turned toward the politics of contemporary the= fry. Could Nietaschean themes of ressentiment, revenge, and a thwarted will to power be found in some of the more troubling stalemates and ___forious debates occupying those on the academic Left, including ac demic feminism? How might certain wounded attachments ad pro= found historical disorientations form the basis for ungrounded persistence in ontological essentialism and epistemological foundational- 'sm, for infelicitous formulations of identity rooted in injury. for li fiousness 25 a way of political life. and for a resurgence of rights discourse among left academics? Could the rhetorical force, the theoreti- cal incoherence, and the politically invidious effects of Catharine Mac- Kinnon’s social theory of gender be understood in terms of broken progressive theoretical and social narratives that leave immediate suffer= ing without a redemptive place in history and without guarantees of po- Iitical redress? Could Patricia Williams's seemingly paradoxical enthusiasm for rights be read not only 2s reaction 10 whice radical dis- courses blithely dismissive of them but also as a desire to resuscitate the fictions of sovereign accountability (despite their depoliticizing effects) 3s, 2 weapon against public irsesponsibility on the one side and ute~ Proface xi ‘owentieth-century deracinations of personhood on the other? And might the effort to. establish stch individual accountability and boundaries through discourses of rights and responsibility conveniently cast the powers of economy and state as relatively benign ata historical moment ‘when both seem ncarly unassailable anyway? Insofar as academic and popular political discourses are neither identi- cal nor distinc, this concern with the polities of theory does not consti- ute a turn away from “the world”; nor, however, is i a direct study of ‘whatever we mes by this bold term. Rather, perhaps these seemingly academic quandaries, in addition to their intrinsic interest, can operate slagnostcally. Perhaps they can serve as atich text for reading aspects of jour historically and culeurally configured fears, anxieties, disor and loss of faith about the fiture. And while there are no guarantees about the use to which such a reading might be put, one possibility is this: that these afictions nor metamorphose unchecked into political x= pression, not have their own indirect way in political fe, but be actively contested with rejuvenated self-consciousness, irony. and passion in the Jifficule labor of the collective self-fashioning that is democratic politics. Acknowledgments Actuoue f work largely in isolation, amt thankfl for those who dis- ‘upted such habits over the years these essays were composed: Nortan ©. Brown, ith Butler, William Connolly, Deuclla Cornel, J. Peter Euben, Carla Freecero, Susan Harding, Valerie Hartouni, Gal Hershae- ter, George Kateb, Robert Meister, Helene Moglen, Joan W. Seat. Leas also fortunate to have in William Connolly, Kathy Ferguson, and Judith Butler thrve superb readers ofthe entire manuscript; my refusil to re- spond to all of their suggestions for improvement is consequent 10 my tn stubbornness, not their lack of perspiciity: Lam grateful 38 sell to the many audiences who engaged with spoken version ofthese thoughts and to several anonymous readers who substantially enriched the wetten sccounts, Two rescatch asistants, Ashley Smith and Maile Picket, par Sued bibliographic details with aplomb, The manuscript was beautifully handled by Ann Himmelberger Wald, political theory editor at Princeton University Press, and much improved bythe artal copyediting of Alice Fal {Lam deeply appreciative of two extraordinary instiutions! At the Unie versity of California, Santa Cruz, my work was supported by the Aca- dlemie Senate Committee on Rescatch, the Division of Humanities, and the Women’s Stadics Program. And the School of Social Science of the Insitute for Advanced Study at Princeton harbored me in its graceful sway while sought to bring this manuscript to completion. ‘Once in afetime or less, one encounters a teacher without whom, i seems, one would not read or think a8 one docs. Ie isto such a eeacher that this volume is dedicated, however insacient a tribute may be to his ovn intclecual offerings Pecmission to reprint material published elsewhere has been granted 36 follows: "Posrmodsen Exposures, Feminist Hositatio dienes 3.1 (Speing 19), revised as chapter 2. ‘Wounded Attachments: Oppositional Poitial Formations in Late Mindeen Democracy,” Paltical Theory 21.3 (August 1993), fora portion of chapter 3 *Fining the Man inthe State." Fawn Sudes 181 (Spring 1992), ceva hapece 2. States of Injury : CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Freedom and the Plastic Cage “The politcal, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not co try’ to berate the individual from the sate. but to liberate us both from the state and from che type of sndividuliation which is Inked to che stat “Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” If men wish tobe fee, itis precisely sovereignty they must renounce Hannah Arend, "What Is Freedom?” “The road to Freedosn for gays and lesbians is paved with lawsuie. il Spokesperson, National Center for Lesbian Rights These sSsavs investigate dimensions of late modern modalities of politi cal power and opposition by engaging, in various combinations, the thinking of Marx, Nietasche, Weber. Foucaule, ana selected contempo~ rary feminist and cultural theorists. They serve in part co reflect upon the present-day value of such thinkers, to measure the capacity of thele ‘thought to apprehend consemporacy formations of power and contribute {o steategies for democratizing those formations. But chese essays have __ another purpose as well. Working heuristically from Foucaul's relatively ~ simple insight that politcal “resistance” is figured by and within rather than externally to the regimnes of power it contests these essays examine ostensibly emancipatory ot democratic political projects for the ways they problematically mirror che mechanisms and configurations of power of which they are an effect and which they purport to oppose. The) : point of such exploration is not the small-minded one of revealing hy- ppocrisy or internal contradictions, nor the stcictly practical ane of expos ing limited political efficacy. While these studies are not exercises in what today traffies under the sign of “normative politcal theory” aed they develop no politics] of even theoretical program, they malke no pretense i at being fece of normative impulses, Rather, they work in the slightly ‘old-fashioned genre of political theoretical critique, a genre neither die rectly accountable to political practicalities on the one hand nor bound to 2 fixed set of political principles on the other. Structured by a set of eares } 4 Chapter and passions making up an amoxphous but insistent vision of an alt uve way’of political life, this vision is itself shaped and textured by the activity of eritcizing the present: inthis regard, the critique and the alter= native it figures never feign independence of one another. ‘The question animating these explorations is bound ro a remnant of | Hegelian-Marxist historiography almost embarrassing to name, given its tattered ontological epistemological, and historical premises. Can some- thing of a persistent desire for human freedom be discerned even in the ‘owisted projects of this aim, even in its flare to realize itself, its failure to have the courage, oF thc knowledge, of its own requisites? Such 2 question nced not assume, with Arendt, that freedom is "the raiow d'ne of polities”! nor, with Marx, that “history” is tethered co the project of history” has.a project at all, or that “ficedam” is the telos| (species) being. Certainly politics. the place where our pro- ponsity to craffc in power iS most explicit, is saturated with countless ims snd motivations other than freedom —from “managing popula- tions.” negotiating conflicting interests, or providing for herman welfare, to the expression of open revenge, aggression sputted by injury, pleasure in domination, or the prestige of power ‘The question, then, snot whether freedom can be discerned as the aim ‘of politics or of history in the politcal projects of the present but 2 more modest, albeit still endentious one, which borrows as much from the evolutionary outlook of Rousseau as from the teleological thinking of | Marx: Might the desite for some degree of collective sellegislation, the desire to participate in shaping the conditions and terms of life, remain a vital clement—if also. an evidently ambivalent and anxious onc—of much agitation under the sign of progressive polities? Equally important, ‘might the realization of substantive democracy continue to require a de- sire for political frcedor, 2 longing to share in power rather than be protected fram its excesses, to generate futures together rather than nave gate or survive them? And have we, 2t the close of the twentieth century, Jost our way in pursuing this desire? With what consequences? In the context of recent “democratizing” developments in the former eastern bloc and Sovier Union, in South Africa, in parts of Latin Amer ica, and in the Middle East, it may scem perverse if not decadent to suggest that Western intellectuals and political acuvists have grown dis- ‘oriented about the meaning and practice of political freedom. Freedom, + Whar s Freedom? Be Past ad Fe: Ein Eves lial Tg (Nes ‘York Viking. 1954. pH ntroduetion (oF course, is an eternally nettlesome political value ay well as a matter of ‘endless theoretical dispute, and it is not my purpose ro reilet here upon its gencalogy or its history as a conecpe. Mather, freedom’ recent predic= ment might be capeured schematically thus: Historically, semiotically, 2nd culturally protean, a5 well as politically: elusive, “freedom” has shown itself to be easily’ appropriated in liberal regimes for the most cynical and unemancipatory political ends. Philosophically vexing throughout modernity for the formulations of will and agency it appears to invoke, it has been rendered utterly paradoxical by poststructuralist formulations of the subject 2° not simply oppressed but broughe ince ‘being by—that is, an effect of subjection ? Yer despite chese assaults 0» its premises, feedom persists as our most compelling way of mark differences between lives whose terms are rarively controlled by their inhabicants and those that are less so, between conditions of coercion and conditions of action. between domination by history and participation in history. between the space for action and its relative absence. If, politi- «ally, ftcedom isa sign—and an effecr—of “democracy,” where democ- "acy signifies not merely elections, rights, or ffce enterprise but a way of constituting and ehus distributing politcal power. then to the extent shat Western intellectuals have grown disoriented abour the project of free- dom, we must be equally bewildered about the meaning and tasks of democratic politica tfe.* Indeed, much of the progressive political agends in recent years has been concerned not with democratiing power but with distributing goods, and especially with pressuring the state £0 bbuteress the rights and increase the entitlements of the socially vulnerable or disadvantaged: people of color. homosexuals, women, endangered animal species, threatened wetlands, ancient forests, the sick, and the homeless. Without dispating the importance of such projects, especialy ‘ecological, ina polial economy fundarnenel and aesthetic hfe. the dream of democtacy-—that humans might govern themselves by governing together—is difficult to discern in the proliers- tion of such claims of rights, protections regulations, and entilements "What the Lets nceds is postindividualist concept of freedom, for it is still over questions of freed and diaieythat the déiiveieSlogical tutes are being waged.” So argues Chantal Moule in response to two 2 Sec Michel ouca Hist of Sota, wl. Ax raat, rans Ruse (Nes York: Vintage. 1) Jad Be, Gener Trae: mini aed eS ry (Neve York: Houle, 198), and Butler's oriconaing work ot “byes,” "On democracy a problem of dibs poe, se Sheidon Woln, Th Peso sf he Paste say ott Se andthe Contin (Bator Joan Hopkins Univers Press 198%, chs. 17 gemony anil New Police Saget: Toward New Concept of Demacac." ‘Marsan a he Inpro ef Calton, 2. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grosser (Ch ‘ager University of Minis Pet. 89) p18 6 Chapter | decades of conservative political and theoretical efforts to define and practice freedom in an individualist, libertarian mode, a phenomenon ‘Stuart Hall calls “the great moving eight show."> Yet as Hall keenly ap- preciates, “concepts” of freedom, posited independently of speci alyses of contemporary modalities of domination, revisit us with the ‘most troubling kind of idealism insofar as they deflect fram the local, historical, and contextual character of freedom. Even for philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, “freedom is everything except an ‘Idea,""® Freedom is neither a philosophical absolute nor a tangible entity but 2 relational and contextual practice that akes shape in opposition to whatever is locally and ideologically conceived as unfrcedom. Thus in slaveholding and male dominant fifth-century Athenian “democracy,” Arendt argues, freedom was concvived as escape from an order of "necessity" inhabited bby women and by saves; what was called Athenian freedom thus entailed a metaphysics of domination and a necessary practice of imperialism, Liberal fecedom, fitted to an economic order in which property and per- sonhood for some entails poverty and deracination fOr others, is con= veyed by rights against arbitrary state power on one side and against anarchic civil society or property theft on the other. AS freedom from ‘encroachment by others and from collective institutions, it entails an at lomistic oncology, a metaphysics of separation, an ethos of defensiveness, and an abstract equality. Rendering either the ancient or liberal forma tions of freedom as “concepts” abstracts them ftom the historical prac- tices in which they are rooted, the institutions against which they are oriented, the domination they are designed to contest, the privileges they ace designed to protect. Treating them as concepts not only prevents appreciation of their local and historical character bur preempts percep= tion of what s denied and suppressed by them, of what kinds of domina- tion are enacted by particular practices of freedom. Je would also appear that the effort to develop a new “postindividual- " concept of freedom responds less to the antidemocratic forces of our time than t0 2 ghostly philosophical standoff between historically 2b- seracted formulations of Marxism and liberalism. In other words, this «effort secks (0 resolve a problem in (a certain) history of ideas rather than a problem in history. Like a bat fying around the owl of Minceva at dusk, it would attempt to formulate 3 philosophy of freedom on the igrave of selected philosophical eaditions rather than to consider freedom in existing configurations of power—economic, social, psychological, political This is nor to say thar the contemporary disorientation about * Sear Hl, The Hid Ral to Rent: hein ad the Ce a ns ‘ers, 1 The pence of Brod, rns. 8, MacDonald (Stanford Statord Univerty Pres. 1995), ptt Introduction 7 fecedom is without theoretical dimensions nor is it to suggest that free dom’s philosophical crisis, about which more shorty, is merely conse {quent 10 a historical or “material” one, 1 want only ¢o register the extent 0 which the problematic of politialtrcedom as it relates to democrati2- ing power, while of profound philosophical interest, cannot be resolve at @ purely philosophical level if itis to be responsive to the particular social forces and institutions —the sites and sources of domination —of a particular age, Buc this opens rather than settles the problem of how to formulate dis~ course of freedom appropriate r0 contesting contemporary antidemocratic configurations of power. One of the ironies of what Nictesche boldly termed the “instinct for freedom lies in is inceptive self-cancellaton, is crossing of iself in its very first impulse. Ineial figurations of freedom are inevitably reactionary in the sense of emerging in reaction {0 per ceived injuries or constraints of a regime from within its own terms. {zals of freedom ordinarily emerge (© vanquish their smagined imme-~ ‘diate enemies, but in this move they Gequently recycle and rcinstate rather than transiorm the terms of domination that generated them. Con- sider exploited workers who dream of a world in which work has been abolished, blacks who imagine a world without whites, feminists who conjure a world either without men oF without sex, or teenagers who Fane ‘asize a world without parents. Such images of freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organisation ofthe activity shrowgh which the sufiving is produced and without addressing the subject ‘constitution that domination ees, thats, the constitution of the social eate~ sgones, “workers,” "blacks,” “women,” of “teenagers.” I would thus appear that itis frecdom's relationship to identity —ies promise to address 2 social injury or marking that is itself constitutive of ‘enrity—ehat yields the paradox in which the Gist imaginings of free- dom are always constrained by and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose. This, [ehink, 8 not only a patently Foucaultian poine but is contained as well in Marx's argument that “political emancipation” within liberalism conceived for ‘mal politcal indifference to civil particularity a liberation because pol cal privilege according to civil particularity appeared as the immediate nature of the domination perpetrated by feudal and Christian monarchy. “True human emancipation” was Marx's formula for escaping the ine nately contextual and historically specific, hence limited, forms of free- dom. Truc human emancipation, achieved at thy end of history, conjured for Marx not simply liberation from particular constraints but freedom thae was both thoroughgoing and permanene, freedom that was neither pantal nor evasive but cemporally and spatially absolute. However, since ‘ruc human emancipation eventually acquited for Marx a negative refer- Chapter 1 cent (capitalism) and positive content (abolition of eapitalism). in time it 290 wold reveal its profoundly historicized and thus limited character. Invoking Marx recalls a second dimension of this paradox in. which frcedom responds to a particular practice of domination whose terms are then often reinstalled in its practice. When institusionalized, freedom premised upon an already vanquished enemy keeps alive, in the manner fof melancholic logic, a threat chat works a8 domination in the form of an absorbing ghostly battle with the past.” sticutionalized, freedom at- rayed against a particular image of unfreedom sustains that image, which dominates political life with its specter long after it has been vanguished and preompts appreciation of new dangers to frcedom posed by instita- tions designed ro hold the past in check. Yer the very institutions that are erected to vanquish the historical ehreat also recuperate it as a form of political anxiety; so, for example, functions the “state of mature” or the arbitrary sovereign” in the liberal political imagination, I may be the extent to which freedom institutionalized transmopgiies| into its opposice that led Foucault ro insist upon understanding liberty as 2 praaice rather thei a state, as that which can “never [be] assured Dy’... institutions and laws” but “must be exercised."® Sheldon Wolin presses 2 similar point in his provocation that "s constitution, in setting Timits to politics, set limits as well to democracy. . .. Democracy thus seems destined to be a2 moment rather than a form." In Jean-Luc Nancy's account, “freedom... is the very thing that prevents itself from being founded.” And a similar concem can be discerned in Hannah Arendr's insistence on the perniiousness of equating freedom with sovereignty, along aid fer counterproposition that freedom as “wirtuosiry” ts defined by the contingency of action, as the place where “the Fewill and che ean coincide” as power.” Recognition of the tension, ifnot the antisomy, between ffeedom and institutionaliztion compounds the difficulties of formulating a politics of freedom in the late ewentieth century, the age of institutions. Not only do we require 2 historically and institutionally specific reading of ron temporary modes of domination, bur Freedom's “actualization” would appear to be a frustratingly indetezmninate matter of ethos, of bearing, toward institutions, ofthe style of political practices, rather 2 This lope drat Frees The Ee a the Bras J Rive. ed J Stachey (Neos York Nort Di) pp 18-1, shoushteaaformed nit allegorical Cl purposes unintended by Freud Space, Knowledge, and Power,” interview by Pas Rabon, The Fru Read cl. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon 1988, p28, ‘Fugitive Demoerae” (paper presented 3 the Foundations of Plc Thane con- ference Democeas ad Difference: Nee Haven. APEL IS py. #28 Expovnc f Fredo, p12 1S Ts Freedom?” pp #58 1 nes, Hee Introduction 9 Of policies, laws, procedures, or organization of political orders. This is not eo say that freedom becomes aesthetic. but rathor that it depends upon a formulation of the political that is richer, more complicated, and alko perhaps more fragile than that circumscribed by institutions, proce dures, and politcal representation. ‘These reflections on the inherently difficult, paradoxical, even delusional features of freedom frame but do not exhaust freedom's contemporary predicament in North America. Why, todsy, do we noe only confront the limited or paradoxical qualities of freedom but appear disorienced with regard to fleedom’s very value? Why, as versions of freedom burst 01 around the globe, arc critical theorists and progressive politcal activists in established liberal eximes disinclined to place freedom on their own political agenda, other than co endorse and extend the rype of "freedom" the regime itself proffers? Certainly this disorientation js partly consequent t0 the conservative political culture ascendent in the United States in ec (98s, 3 culture that further narrowed the meaning of freedom within liberaism’s already narrow account. Throughout that decade, “freedom” was deployed by the Right to justify thuggish mercenaries in Central America, the expen- diture of billions on cold war defense, the deregulation of toxic enter prise, the destruction of unions with “right to work” protection, the importance of saluting —and the blasphemy of burning—the flag. Mean- while, hberal or radical formulations of freedom were smeared by charges of selfishness and irresponsibility —as in women who put their own desires and ambitions on a par with family obligations—or charges of infantilism and deseh—as in repudiations of juvenile past involve- ‘mencs with liberation struggles, oF narratives of the AIDS epidemic in which the "Sexually emancipated” 1970s were placed in a direct causal relation to the plague of death in the 198th"? In the contemporary popu lar refrain, frcedom other than free encceprise Was cast a8 selfish, infan- tile, of killing, and placed in ighominious counterpoise to commitment, maturity, discipline, sacrifice, and sobriety.!? This discourse, ir wich Soe Randy Sis nd the and Played Or (New York: St. Matin’ 1987): a Jon Peles, "The ts On the Beat Goes On” Now York Ta, Febraary 51983, Hel, 2 "© OF ours. fcedon at ee nterpeie aso brgan to emerge as nln and eres sible during thse year nach were the sandals coneringjnk Bonds, der Wading 08 S&L realestate deals Bue the poi hat 5 br et alone radical oman to ficedom ete into aver deste, nuerou progressive pois operator dropped from ther agenda, Even shove poli dens mon rece forged fom Heertion smovement-bsck. min, gay—poresedrlately unremarkable agendas concerned tri ight and minima economic redutibuton daring the 19s, And 30 ab dd eh 10 Chapree 1 “good freedom” was imperialist, individualist, and entrepreneurial, while “bad freedom” was decadent ifnot deadly, was not an casy one for the Left t0 counter. Bat if it was easier to drop freedom from ies own, political lexicon, what was the price of such a disavowal? Contemporary disorientation about frcedom also appears consequent to the Right's programmatic attack on the welfare state since the ‘mid-1970s. This attack incited liberal and let protectiveness toward the state and, for many, rendered critiques ofthe stare tantamount to luxury ‘goods in bad times. This disorientation appears consequent as well to the discredited critique of liberalism contained in the communist ideal: it was abetted too by the stark abandonment of freedom as an clement of the communist project long before its 1989 “fall.” The cumulative effect of these tendencies is that as the powers constituting late modern contigura- tions of capitalism and the state have grown more complex, more perva- sive, and simultaneously more diffuse and difficult to track, both critical analyses oftheir power and a politics rooted in such critique have tended to recede. Indeed, Western leftists have largely forsaken analyses of the liberal sate and capicalism as sites of domination and have focused instead ‘on their implication in political and cconomic inequalities. At the same time, progressives have implicitly assumed the relatively unproblematic instrumental value of the state and capitalism in redressing such inequalities, Thus, a5 che Righe promulgated an increasingly narrow and predomi- nantly economic formulation of freedom and claimed freedom's ground a8 its own, liberals and leftists lined wp behind an equally narrow and predominantly economic formulation of equality. Ia this regard, leftises ceded important ground to liberal doctrine, which generally places ‘equality and freedom on perpendicular axes in inverse relation to each ‘other, casting their relationship 25 something of political philosophy’s Phillip’ curve. While Marxism promised to escape this trade-off by di- vesting both freedom and equality of their economic scarcity and recon ciling them through collective ownership, and thinkers such as Arendt sought co reformulate the problematic of political freedom on fully non ‘economic ground, most Inte-twentieth-century progressives have shied from these alternative formultions of freedom and equality co embrace a vision involving state-administered “economic justice” combined with a ‘adic wings of thee movements direct most of thee appeal to the wate arent by ack onpanizers im Chusgo and Detrt to revive the Black Pane Parey including tactics of olen wre bated on he fre to gee a shee ofthe economic pcs ACT UP lees tngcted gonerens tention to AIDS and AIDS research, The ster “rial sig ofeach of these movements Langly eschewed the projet of freedom i fy anous kind of clurabs al atone er, Aoi, lami. Femi to forth ! 1 i | i 1 t Ineeoduction panoply of private liberties. This would scem co characterize Chantal ‘Moutfe’s call for “postindividuakst liberalism,” of “radical, plural, and libertarian democracy” to “rearticulate ideas of equality and justice,” a5, well as she argument of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gints for “post- liberal democracy” in whieh, oddly, the primary instrament of steugele is “personal rights." Significantly, neither Moufle nor Bowles and Gintis regard their positions 25 2 reetenchment of their commitment £0 raical democracy but rather, through renewed appreciation of individ ual rights and liberties combined with state administered economic redis- tribution, as the fulfillment of that commitment," Yet for all the admirable effort co blend commitments of economic ‘equality with liberal eivil goods, as well as to enfranchise—eheoretically nd politically —a diverse range ofidentiy-based struggles, what is df cult to discern in che work of those who have appropristed the name “radical democrats” in recent years is precisely where the radicalism lcs. What constitutes the ostensible departure trom liberal democracy and from the forms of domination li lism both perpetrates and obscures? Such differentiation is especially faint in their formulation of liberty, ‘which rather taithully replicates that of the sovereign subject of liberal isin whose need for rights is born out of subjection by the state, oue of an ‘economy not necessarily bound to human needs or capacities, and out of sttatifcations within civil society (renamed “social antagonisms” by Er tiesto Laclau and Chantal Moufit), all of which may be attenuated but are at the same time codified by the rights advocated by the “radical democrats.” I's interesting as well that che optimism of the radical (social) demo= cratic vision is fueled by chat dimension of liberalism which presumes social and politica forms to have relative autonomy from economic ones, to be that which can be tinkered with independently of developments in the forces of capitalism." Indced, itis heve that che radical democrats "Hegemony and New Police Subject,” pp. 102, 10% Bowles and Gin, Demory snd Capt: Property, Command the Cantrobtion of Madea Ss Tho (Neve ‘Yorks Basi Booka 196), ® Buh works sck 1 ales s wel dhe recent proiraton af policed Menten er than cis. Moule sctsly memes “democeatzaion’ by the extent of aka iment and ennestion beoween these Menity-tused stgles: "The long the chain qusalences setup between the deme of she nights of oe gtoup and hone of oth ‘foups the deeper wll be che demineratzaton process” Hegemony and New Pica Subjets"p. 1M) Democtatization hee presales oa nol orm of eam tion and cite for prt “la atin to. tana socal subjects feta and workers, we mist retognize the extent of overs and thet pole chancery ‘wonjen and the vous minors ao haves se to equality to lPtmcrmnen "stn Hegemony and Swit Say Landon Vrs, ORS), Esto xin and Chae Monit do ser istoneal reading of "new sal yoni” oot he perestion 12 Chapter 1 ‘become vulnerable to the charge of “idealism,” where idealism marks the ‘promulgation of select politica ideals de-hinked from historical configa- rations of social powers and institutions, much as calling fora "politics of meaning” without addressing the sourecs of meaning’ evisceration from Politics is an idealist response to the problem of vacuity.!” This is not to ‘ay, in a fashion that mistakes positivism for historical materialism, that ‘capitalist economies require liberal political orders nor that collective ‘economic ownership is incompatible with individual rights. Rather. i€ to ask: When do certain political solutions actually codify and entrench existing social relations, when do they mask such relations. and when do they directly contest or transform: them? Against what backdrop of eco~ nomic and political power, for example, are rights caine to health ear housing, privacy, of autonomy? What abrogation of these neds is pre= sumed to inhere in the politcal economy agamst which such rights are asserted? Ifrights are, however useful, a paradoxical form of power inso- far as chey signify something like the permancnt presence of an endal kcring power or violation, if rights thus codify even as they may slightly mitigate certain modalities of subordination or exclusion, it behooves radical democrats not simply to proliferate rights but to explore the his torically and culeurally specific ground of the demand for them. This lack of attention to the historical relationship hetween economic and political formations may be understood somewhat differently by considering the place of capitalism 2s such in contemporary theoretical discourses, a place that has been diminished bot! by Foucault and by other post-Marxist tendencies. Foucaul’s salutary eritique of a mode! of power as an expropriahle and transferable commodity, combined with his concern t0 confound a materialst/idealist antinomy with the notion of discourse—in sum, his quarrels with Marx—resulted in analytically reducing the importance of capitalism itsclf, and not only disputing economistic formulations of capital's power." In fact, by ascribing a for- ‘oF capitan ino bh he domain of common and into more “ajectve” reaches of oc Yer there ss profound drone betwen this Kind of hts reading ne on ‘hat emphaszs the relwionship benween paricalar plc forms and articular “mode of production." Mout ering CB. MacPherson, notes that “democracy” wa rendered hs fa not without Psteagee” and notes aswel cing Ste Hall tat Khe Right taped {hr the 19s co pl bras swat from democracy From ths she condades tha ‘hence soc amagonisns are ondered astral, democracy cn bs rented ay ro Iberia and be made "adel appr” democracy can ined be rade with ‘out copia being substantial) augmented, one cn nly wonder abou he rpmBeance ‘af democracy inthis formulation Scc"Hepemony and New Polite Subic, "expel pie 1 "0 “Hegemony and New Polis Sabet," p, 104 "Thus for example Foocal inclines toward reversals where complenretinking igh have ese ute bi si "hs analy we must proce uth ae we mut Ioroduetion 13 mulation of power as 2 commodity to Marxism, Foucault deprives Marxism of its analysis of the diffusion of domination throughout the production pracess, where it inheres not only inthe extraction of surplus value but in the discourses enabling commodity fetishism, reification, and ideologies of free and equal exchange. Certainly she notion that labor power is expropriable or that surplus value is extracted from labor casts ‘power in the image of a cammodity. Yet its Marx's appreciation of the very perversity and singularity ofthis achievement within capitalism that constiutes the basis of his theory of the soca] activity of labor as power, Indeed, Maes is at pains to explain the process whereby che human activ= ity of labor becomes a commodity wielded aver and against its site of generation, how itis both produced and circulated by capitalist relations such that 1s transformed into something alien ro itself. In other words, for Marx, unlike Foucault perhaps, a commodity is never just a com- modity but, a8 the effect of the complex and dissimulating activity of commodification, always remains itself a social force as wel) 25 the con~ ddonsed site of social forces. Interestingly enough, chs is precisely the way Foucault hiniself speaks of individuals—as “an effect of power, and at the same time... the element of its articulation,” as both constitured by power and “at the same time its vehiele.""” Foucault’s de-emphasis on capital 3s a domain of power and source of domination issues fron a substantially different source than that of con- temporary post-Marxists, nco-Marxists, and “radical democrats.” While thinkers such as Bowles and Ginds, Laclau and Mou, and the analytical Marxism schoo! are certainly critical of capitalism's inequities, they are less concerned with capitalism as a political economy of domination, ex- ploitation, or alienation, precisely those terms by which the problem of freedom is foregrounded as a problem of social and economic power and rnot only a matter of political or legal statutes. is as if che cervible un= freedom and indignities attendant upon “actually existing socialisms” of she last half century persuaded such thinkers that free enterprise really frcer than the alternatives that alienation is inherent i all labor, and that freedom, finaly, is a matter of consumption, choice, and expression: a individual good rather than a social and political practice. Ironically, iti this conceptual move—and not the historical practices it claums eo de- sctibe or decry —that succeeds in finally tendering Marxist as econom= jsm. Indeed, such apparent imperviousness to domination by capital—its mode of constructing and organizing social life and is specific form of produce welth, nod we most proce wah an order to produce wealth nthe ist place” [Two Lecues”m Per Koved. Sle ni’ and Other Writs 1972-1977, 28 (C.Gordon [New York: Pantheon, 1980) pp. 93-98), "hg p98 14 Chupter | subject production, combined with a preoccuption with goods and with private “iberey"—was precisely che nightmare forecast a quarter century ago by Herbere Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse’s anxieties, however, were addressed co dhe consciousness he associated with "ass society”: did he ever imagine that such indifference to freedom would infec let thinking tsel2>" In equating the positive dimensions of socialism with a method for istributive economic justice and equating liberalism swith 4 system of individual liberties and satistictions, socialism is reduced to the status of (nonpolitical) economic practice while liberalism is treated as a (non- ‘economie) politcal practice. Ths rendering, in addition Co eclipsing the social power thar Marx argued was generated in modes of production and constitutive ofa specific political and social archigecture, im addition to resuscitating the very division between civil life and political Infe that he criticized as an ideological split within liberalisin, eros rather than criticizes recent histories of socialism, As Marxism was contorted into bleak and repressive modalivies of stare ownership and distribution in places such as Eastern Europe, liberalism phantasmically figured the dream of sunny pleasures and bberty, whether conceived as freedom of expression, as consumer choice, oF freedom of expression as consumer choice.2! Yee if Marxism had any analytical value for politcal theory, was it not inthe insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared "unpolitical”—that is, aturaliged—in liberal discourse? Was not Marx's very quartel with the wopian socialists based on the insight that the problem of domination in capitalist relations cannor be solved a the level of distribution, no matter haw egaliarian such distribution might be? Is not contemporary clision ofthis insight, in “radical, plural democratic” vision, to jettison the dream of freedom in its social and oconomic—perhaps ts most fundsmental—dimensions? Theoretical retreat from the problem of domination Within capitalist is related to another noteworthy lost abject of critique among those on the Left and among Foucaultians as well: the domination entailed in domestic As Marcuse remit, “donation ha ts i aati, a8 democratic natn fuss democratic aeshein” (Ome Dineen Bawton Beacon, 14, 3). Net ‘nly does the domination inherot a expt ad the ste arg ite ween Geom ‘ost contmporaty eral pital thors, few of them atest 3 comers withthe Kind of hurenati dination fit formulated by Max Weber nd then developed na ict soc tony bythe rast School Ain ea iCal she ac of Fsedor: $Mtondint pon buraoertacdsoietcs war conaned the Ferer soit ts ht utwitatanding Mishel Fouls on thoretion of dcpiry poe —ihe neeaing Srgaicaion of eserything as the pevaive mae of ebjeton sO ge "On ftcaom of expresion a consumer choice, sce Svenks Drs, How te Su ‘ined Comms and Eon Laughed (New York” Nott, 193). | | | | Ieoducion 15 stare power.” As the Right attacked the state for sustaining welfare chis- clers and being larded with bureaucratic ft, liberals and leftists jettisoned two decades of "Marxist theories ofthe state” for a defense of the state as that which affosds individuals "protection against the worst abuses of the market” and other structures of social inequality. In a 1987 essay, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued thar the welfare state empowers individuals by reducing their vulnerability co the impersonal social forces of capitalism and male dominance.» In the course of this defense, they decline to consider the state 25 4 vehicle of domination or to reect on “protection” as 2 technique of domination. This omission is equally stciking in (former Marest) Fred Block’s discovery of the “caretaking. sfate,” as well as in many contemporary appeals t0 the state fOr protee= sion from injures ranging from poverty co pornageaghy to “hare speech." But this response to the Right's attack on the state is perhaps nowhere mote stark thar in The Mean Season: ‘The Auack on the Welfare State, authored by “democratic socialists” Fred Block, Richard Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven. According to the back cover blurb, “our boldest social thinkers... argue for [the welfare state's] real, hard-won accomplishments, More than a defense of she welfare state's economic efficiency and fairness. The Mean Season isa reaffirma- tion of those decent, humane values s0 much under attack in Reagan's, America." Such bold ¢hinkng hardly recalls the critical analyses of state paternalism and state management of capitalism's inequities authored by these same thinkers in an eater era If the state has ceased to be a substantial object of criticism among left socialagists and political activists, so also has it been largely ignored by critical theorists as an object of study in the last decade.” Impugned by ly chatacteration of Focal as ante exchewing the te and apt should ‘be qustied by mento hit eres on “governmental” in The Foul fer Sra (% Covemmestaliy of Granam Barcel, Coli Gordon, and Peter Mier [Chiago: Uni= ‘ey of Chicago Pres, PN). Yer tse learn ae ss fie ed ork Faults ibrar” It noteworthy 38 well ht on withing the fine eye by Govan Proce an Jacque Danaea i he wlume ced above) that make ae ofthese tres. most contemporary appropriations uf Faucale or politcal nays conemue o lide h stork, See for example, te woume Foul an the Cries, John Cup Zin Nk Mousses Bake Pensa Sate University Press, 193-9 whith thet notwttotanding-~the state and capil arly make sppeuancee “The Contemporary Rebet Debate," 8 Fred Mlk ee, The Mra Sessn: Th Amik mth Wale Ste (Sew Vook: Pantheon. 1987), special pp. 95-8 *Reonin State The: sayin Pai ond Ponda (Pbdlp hi: Temple Une senisy Press 98D, Mean Sesom, ack sven ‘vious excptons to shi lim, including curl sheonets ocosng | the United Se, sucha Wao Lubiano, Sere Halland aul “alyng contig sete diac genet, sion, caste, sand cise im poncolomia tater, such 4s M.Jacgut loader and Zaki Pathe Chapter 1 poststructuralist critique for its tendency t0 reify and universalize rather than deconstruct and historically specify the state, the 15s cottage in dustry in Marxist state theory was also derailed by Miche} Foucault's historicalepolitcal argument chat che distinctive feature of the post -monarcical nation-state isthe decentered and decentralized character of political power, We should direst our researches on he mature of powcr Hot toward the jurid- tal edifice of sovereignty, the Sate apparatuses and dhe ideology weich ac company them, but towards deminseonrand the material operators of power, owarde forms of subjection and the inflections and wulizations oF thet bo= caliaed systems, an towards state apparatuses, Me mus eseie the model fof Leviathan the study of power, We mast escape fromthe limited Fisk of tions, and instead base our analysis of juridical soversignty and State is " [power on the study of the feeiques and tates of domain As with hit summary dismisl of paychoaaly ss and of he significance af eaptal in hinory, performed so that he might open ilfirent Kind of Inquty nto sexuality and power, Foucalt appar to Mecr hard away from the stat monde to dp and dpace an atl preoccu- ton withthe ste athe cnet or source ofthe power pring sb Jeers A formelstion af power a productive Taher than reps, 38 Gicurive rather han commodty-ike, as nary socal ena "cape lary" mode rather than residing in pata se or bjet—al of hese require a cetsn snail diminution ofthe state rder vo come no focus, However, m witht dsminal of psychoanalysis, Foucal sh taclyensnared by thi instrumen of thrortical ground leaing iti Amps over hi» 2s ie ansmogrifis from methodologic satgy Co poltia uth The canscquenc that vv of the most ignicarcon- temporary domains of dieplinary powers Burcaverate sie andthe frpanintion of the soci order by captal—ate nether sctiized By Fouctutno tated aesgnin ssa power 8 many of his dc, oacal’s injunction to “cut all che King’s en pita theory actly betrays an aachmnt eo formacon of plies tory come fined by liberalism’ open preoccupation with sovereignty ad a dency to reduce the problem of te sate to one oF legimacy.®* But onctiving the ste—and indvdial—as problems of sovereignty and Tegitimacy i ie diferent matter fom conciving hem a es of onvergevee ot “dense ant point” of ran of power, conesing them mulancousy a real vehi, fet, and legate ani tors of power, Inced ics finaly Fouaut who, hy demanding exes 2 Tso Lectures” pM > -Trth and Powst” in Power Kime, 22 Inueaduction 17 tion, identities kang, state, and law: “I believe that the King remains the ‘central personage in the whole legal edifice of the West” This identi. fication precludes Foucault from including the state asa critical sie in the hhonsovereign, nonrepressive or “productive,” microphysical, and capil lary workings of power to which he ditects eur eecntion. Its precisely when we set aside the problem of sovercignty that the state comes int view as a complex problem of power, as part of the “study ofthe tech niques and tactics of domination” hat Foucaule defines as mose crucial than the state for those interested in power. 4n che study of “governmentality” he undertook near the end of fis life. this dichotomy between state and social power—including bio- power, disciplinary power, and regulatory power of other sork—— appeared t0 loosen in Foucault's thought.2" Indeed, here he seemed to be « least partia} accord with the argument that while the liberal state 8 luccessariy legitimated ehrough the language of sovereignty. its primary fonction has never been sovercigney—its own or that of the peopl Rather, the state rises in import2uce with liberalism precisely theaugh its Provision of essential social repairs, economic problem solving. and the ‘management of & mass population: in short, through thoae very func. ‘ons that standard ideologies of liberalism and capitalism cast os self fenterating in civil society and thus obscure as crucial state activities Ae the social body ts stressed and torn by the seculstizing and atomizing effets of capitalism and as attendant politcal eure of individyating kes and Iiberties, economic, administrative, and legislative forms of Fepaie are requited. Through a variety of agencies and regulations. she hibcral state provides webbing for the social body dismembered bf ligers) individualism and also administers the increasing mumbbc of subjects dis- wnfranchised and deracinated by capitals destruction of social and cou sstaphic bonds.” this kind of administration and regulation is not fnmocent of particular state interests, neither is it to one side of “techs tniques and tacties of domination.” From this perspective, the recent anti-statisn of the Right appears asa late-brcaking and dissimulating development 35 well as a departure from ‘onservauive precedencs with regard ta the state. Traditionally has been left borat, following in the tradition of Mill and Thoreau, who viewed the state asa danger to freedom (conceived as popular sovercignty);, con= 2 Two Lectures” p98 abd, pe 20 See Aa Efi. © Altheagh the Keynesian af the 198s moved this state ncn onto 3 mote open age ast became evidens that thera hidden hoa” norstotal sane cold oe, ‘ide such sca webbing. repulcon,and economic problem sah, elo tte occupied with sovereignty contin to acu fn func 18 Chaprer 1 servative liberals such as Samuel Huntington or Henry Kissinger, fllow= ing Hobbes and Hegel, tended t0 case the state 2s 2 fount of freedom, protector against danger from without and domestic manager of out problematic particularity and atomistic energies. When freedom is ‘equated with stability and order in this way, what is required isthe con- ‘ainment rather than the enlargement of citizen powers, as the infamous 1973 Trilateral Commission Report decrying an “excess of democracy” mad explicit, inthis vein, Sheldon Wolin argues that the Right's 1980s rhetoric about “getting government off our backs” actually masked the steady expansion of state powers and retrenchment of citizen rights achieved through both forcign and domestic policy.*® Stuart Hall reads ‘Thatcherism in a similae way, citing the resuscitation of empire wianifest in the Falklands War combined with the (heavily racialized) emphasis on Jaw and order as evidence of expanded state domination shrouded in 4 discourse of anti-statism.“ If Wolin and Hall are tight, it makes all the more troubling the phe- nomenon of recent progressive theoretical and political indifference to state domination, appeals to expand state benefits, and ever-increas reliance on the site for adjudication of sacial injury. It means that critical theory curned its gaze away from the state at the moment when a dis tinctly late modern form of state domination was being consolidated: when expansion and extension of state power transpired not through centealization bue through der ‘aliging and “contracting out” its activities—in short, through what some have identited as characteristically “postmodern” techniques of power. e Thus fae, Lave suggested that che retreat from a progressive politics of freedom responds to the Right's monopoly on positive discourses of freedom and to the consequent scom recent decades have heaped upon the notion that freedom is 2 credible element of a socialist project. But | have hinted as well that developments in philosophy and in feminist, postcolonial, and cultural theory have eroded freedom’s ground. For ‘many coiling in these domains, "ireedom” has been swept onto the dust- heap of anachronistic, humanistic, androcentric, subject-centered, and “Western” shibboleths. Challenged politically as a token of the bourgeois-individualist modern West, Freedom's valorization has been “Democracy and the Welfte Sut: The olital ad Theortl Connections be- ‘een Siaunson and lirtaadon in Prone af he Bas, pp 171-74 Had oa 9 Rona chap Inwroduction 19 ‘marked 4s ethnocentric and its pursuit as implicitly imperialistic. Chale lenged philosophically as a conceit of Enlightenment humanism, frees ‘dom hhas been cast by some as predicated upon a subjece that docs not exist, upon a fictional “will” chat presumes such a subject, and upon space emptied of power that turns out to be thoroughly cluttered, More over, Foucault’ critique of the “repressive hypothesis” —the teansee dent sel and the world it hypostasizes—would appear to vitiste our ‘capacity to mark cither individuals or political orders as “free” of “ane free.” The death of the essential subject appears to eliminate the pos bility ofthe free subject, as the death of the essential world climinates the possibility of a frce world. Recent politcal thought has also confounded a political theory and practice of freedom in its discovery of disciplinary power, which Foucault takes to be modernity’s most pervasive mode of social power, ‘The disciplinary institutions and discourses generative of obedient, disei~ plined subjects confound the premise of most emancipatory narratives: ‘when discipline becomes the stuff of our desire, we cease to desite free dom. (And when psychoanalytic accounts are added to the picture, we ‘may be seen not simply as lacking the desire tor Freedom, but as desing, four very subjection.) Moreover, Foucault and, under a different rubric, Weber and Marcuse have demonstrated that disciplinary power is ex traordinarily effective in “colonizing” allegedly free subjects, for exam= ple, those highly individuated, selinterested subjects produced by liberal cultures and capitalist political economies, These turn out to be the subjects quintessentially susceprible to disciplinary power: thei indi- viduation and talse autonomy is also their vulnerability: The peoot lies in Bentham, who simultaneously and consistently developed a political the. ‘ory of the self-interested liberal subject on the one hand. andi techniques: for administering the social whole through discipline ind surveillance on the ot In adtion o generic posthemanis assals upon a coherent politics of frecdom recent poliieal thought has spained seve specaclly eae hist thooetal aie about uch poli, Mos amie lay that fesdom ofthe bourgeom variety ts male premised pon snd ad, ‘acing the interests of an autonemons, selected excel ne lated Subject, subjee cally panicked by imimacy, antse to "toni, nd obrsed with indepenenc. According to sje ela ons theonsts (Naney Chodosow), toms developmental povcholor sie (Coro Gilligan. feminine economists (fle Neban, sake Rene feminis (Lac gray), and some North American ctl fominse, women inhabie »eiferont moral, psyehologis, cull, or havent poll aniverse than men, wth werent seniblites snd concn Genel, the normative analogue ofthese acount that women sek 20 Chapter 1 fan intimate, connected, relational. nurturane human order, not nce sarily an order suffused with freedom.>> Feminist charges against che smasculinism of bourgeois ftceslom melide its premise of a starkly auton= fomous subject, es abseract and alienated application, and ity atomistic social ontology.% Albeit issuing from a different epistemological and os tological site than the generic posthumanist eritique of freedom, these charges of masculinism achieve a convergent disintegration of the “universalist” ground and context of Enlightenmene €rmulations of freedom, {A second feminist hesitation abou a politics of freedom queries what kind of freedom is possible or ricaningful for women under conditions of gender inequality, that is, under social relations of male dominance. A liberal formulation of freedom, proffering liberey as individual icense. appears to aggravate the vulnerahliy of the socially weak co the socially privileged, and thereby to fziitate as well a legicimize the exploitation ‘of wage labor by capital, the racially subordinate by the racially domi- ram, and the sexually vulnerable by che sexually exploitative, So, ac- cording to Catharine MacKinnon, “anyone with an ounce of political analysis should know that freedom before equality, fcedom before jus- ‘ice, will only fureher fiberate the power of the powerful and will never fice what is most in need of expression." Ie is in this vein she disdsins as ‘sexual liberals” those feminists who argue for expanding the domain of sexual freedom in their defense of pornography, sadomasochism, and other culturally stigmatized sexualities and sexual practices Albeit from concern svi socia! inequality eather than regulatory sub- jection, MacKinnon thus joins Foucault in disputing the premises of co ‘ventional discourses of liberation: if, she argues, Women are systemat cally and structurally positioned for exploitation by men, then the more formally free the setting, the deeper this vulnerabiligy and the more chat Listen to Jesse: Benen as se pejorative contrat feedon 35 anon secu Fins, ty, ad innaey: "Both the tterion of women's able autonomy an th Same at dadosing dependency» dene tenia hang tht make if wort hing eat sense of sfey of boy ntnacy and ect, of ail and commit chest Which tray have eapeiened 38 the price of revolt” (Shame and Sex Pubs.” ted Pauline Joknaan, "Femina a nage of Autonomy” Reel Play, Samm pte © Certainty the essntbie, curl arrows, ae eid Fenny nhs Yarn of Senvinis as annoyed 36 tany women dha ape, tt only a very fee font ‘ort have struggled tree ater than sdsin ott the ment BAY = {seers isimaey and stonom. relia and independence Joan Teont's Mow! fier (New York, Routledge, 193). and Kay Frgonon’s The Frm Cae ant Parana (Piel: Fee Uniersy Pes, 198) ae efor at such ean Shemini Linnie: Dior av Lik and Lae (Cambridge: Hareard Unie Pass 987). p15 fexeoduction 24 amale social power is masked. Here MacKinnon implies, and many fermie nists tacitly agrec, that women are in greater need of sOcial equality and political protection than of freedom. A similar critique of liberalism is implicit im other identity-based political arguments against freedom and for protection, such a8 those secking legal ar poticy sanctions against “harassment” or “hate speech” targeted at socially marked groups— people of color, Jews, homosexuals, and women. While the effort to replace lberalisn’s abstract formulation of equality with legal recogni tion of injurious social strauficaions is understandable, what such args ments do not query is whether legal “protection” for 2 certain injury forming idencity discursively enerenches the injury-identity comnection it donsunces. Might such protection codify within the law the very pow= erlessness it aims to redeess? Might it discursively collude with the con- version of attribute into identity, of a historical effect of power into a presumed cause of victimization? or some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other nio= dalities of domination, the language of “resistance” has taken up the srround vacated by a more expansive practice of freedoms, For others. itis the discourse of “empowerntent” that carvies the ghost of freedoms val- % Despite he asrwed kinship with Marsa rofering uch an argunins, Mackin von’ wanes about freedom strugales waged by stacarallysordst digesta stp wth Maras Bie hat nach strug snow asaye open prgsene posi Mary speculated hit he achievement of torn eedons ad ua ter ssn nee an inepaliarn condom cr expos the nei of soe conditions, high Ins contains between en and prac, and thereby providing mara or eh twoary consciousness For Mar, ese stage fo esdorn ences tan power and sis ands teen eran ric thes es lew cay ennugh to erie hs psp ts Maes ore Iie apprcion of the ‘otonmentl mits of development the prchologil comeguens oe i hil "calagy soe, or the colonizing Poster of extracaptl for. Sil, Mar ait no the easiosp Between power and ven the mon hited, comtasiny forms Of edn resins « sel disemsion for

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