{"id":8869,"date":"2012-02-29T12:15:43","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T17:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8869"},"modified":"2013-05-25T22:22:01","modified_gmt":"2013-05-26T03:22:01","slug":"wendy-brown-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/02\/29\/wendy-brown-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"wendy brown interview 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview Wendy Brown<\/a>\u00a0conducted around April 2010<\/p>\n

CPS<\/strong>:\u00a0 You have argued \u2026 that neoliberalism does not simply promote economic policies but to quote you \u201cdisseminates market values into every sphere of human activity.\u201d\u00a0 What distinguishes your perspective here from the despair found in someone like Adorno?\u00a0 What would it require to translate the despair that many people experience in very personal and de-politicized ways into a form of political mobilization?<\/p>\n

Wendy Brown<\/strong>: That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair. I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does. I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism. By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world.<\/p>\n

Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides.<\/span><\/p>\n

It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments \u2013 but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity.\u00a0 Again, I am talking mainly about the Euro-Atlantic world: without providing meaning, it provides direction.\u00a0 So I think it is quite a different order of things from the one that Adorno was describing.<\/p>\n

CPS: [re.] the crisis within the humanities. You were arguing against the way that there is such a specialization and jargonization of what we do \u2013 where it becomes hard to explain what we do to people outside of academia. Do you think this kind of insulation within academia helps feed political ignorance and this divide?<\/p>\n

Wendy Brown<\/strong>: Sure, we\u2019ve really lost the ability \u2013 and I am not blaming us as individuals \u2013 it is really part of a creation of niche industries everywhere in capitalism today. But, we\u2019ve really lost the ability as social and cultural scholars \u2013 I want to say humanists but I am trying to get social scientists in there too \u2013 we\u2019ve lost the ability to be able to talk about what we do and promulgate the knowledge we have in an everyday fashion. I think that happens in the classroom and it is not even just a question of what is outside. More and more, for example, political science educates its undergraduates in the profession of political science, rather than in the study of politics. That means we are cranking out students who may know how to behave like professional political scientists but they don\u2019t really know how to analyze political problems.<\/p>\n

[\u2026] \u00a0I\u2019ve been working for a couple of years on something I hope to finish in the next year, which is a rethinking of Marx\u2019s critique of religion.\u00a0 What I am trying to do there is think about what is often treated as an early and relatively unimportant concern of Marx, one that he is presumed to have dropped once he moves on to full-blown materialism and study of political economy.\u00a0 What I am doing is tracing the ways in which his engagement with Feuerbach and his critique of religion extends all the way through his work right up into\u00a0Das Kapital<\/em>.\u00a0 One of the things that has allowed me to see is the ways in which Marx can contribute to understanding a contemporary problem of ours, which is this: why is it that at the very moment that capitalism seems finally to have painted all the colors of the globe and really has ascended as a global power \u2013 why is that moment coterminous with the resurgence of world religions?<\/span><\/p>\n

Marx is often thought to not be able to help us think that problem at all because Marx is usually thought to be saying that capitalism secularizes and even abolishes religion and that religion is one of the casualties \u2013 in his sense, good casualties \u2013 of capitalism\u2019s desacralization of the world.\u00a0 I think that is a wrong reading.\u00a0 I actually think Marx has a deep understanding of just how religious capital is and how much it requires and entails religion.\u00a0 That is what the re-reading of Marx is for, and I hope that book will be done in another year, but we\u2019ll see.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interview Wendy Brown\u00a0conducted around April 2010 CPS:\u00a0 You have argued \u2026 that neoliberalism does not simply promote economic policies but to quote you \u201cdisseminates market values into every sphere of human activity.\u201d\u00a0 What distinguishes your perspective here from the despair found in someone like Adorno?\u00a0 What would it require to translate the despair that many … Continue reading “wendy brown interview 2010”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,55,90,15],"tags":[137],"class_list":["post-8869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-normative","category-resistance","category-subjectivity","tag-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8869"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8871,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8869\/revisions\/8871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}