Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 250: States of Injury — with Wendy Brown
Speakers: Julia Aoki, Am Johal, Wendy Brown
[theme music]
Julia Aoki 0:03
Hello listeners! I’m Julia Aoki with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Wendy Brown, distinguished American political theorist and Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley. Together they discuss identity politics, performative expressions of sovereignty, and her forthcoming work on expanded notions of democracy that account for the past, future, human and non human. They also discuss the 2024 American presidential race, and as this episode was recorded in May, before President Joe Biden announced that he would not run for re-election, some comments are out of date, though still relevant to larger conversations around electoral politics. Enjoy the episode!
[theme music fades]
Am Johal 0:57
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted you could join us again this week, we have a very special guest, Wendy Brown, joining us. Welcome, Wendy.
Wendy Brown 1:06
It's a pleasure to be here, Am. Thank you for inviting me.
Am Johal 1:09
Yeah, Wendy, I've been meeting to talk with you for a while, and I've been able to use a couple of your books in graduate Liberal Studies courses that I've been doing over the years. So it's wonderful to be able to speak with you. Wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself, a little bit.
Wendy Brown 1:25
I am a retired professor of political science and with a specialty in political theory, from University of California, Berkeley, and after I retired from Berkeley, I took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, where I am a professor in the School of Social Science. It's a research institute, and we work on topical themes of a variety of kinds. And so that's where I am now. I'm speaking to you from Princeton, New Jersey.
Am Johal 1:56
Great. Where you're almost a next door neighbor to our colleague from SFU, Geoff Mann, so.
Wendy Brown 2:01
One of our favorites, yes.
Am Johal 2:04
I wanted to begin with a work of yours from 1995 which, you know, it's almost 30 years—it's 29 years since the book came out. But I think it has amazing staying power, because I think some of the questions and things that came up on that book in 1995 are still highly relevant and contested and in many ways perhaps even more pernicious and polarized than at the time that you took them up. But I'm wondering if you could just share a little bit about that book and context in which it came out of and brought you to write it at that time.
Wendy Brown 2:38
States of Injury did come out of a very specific political historical context, which I'll describe in a second. And yet, you're right that it has endured. And in fact, a press that published it is about to bring out what they call a "classics and political theory" version of it. So I'm old enough now to be a classic, and it's old enough now to be a classic. So what was that context? There are several aspects to it, I think in the early 90s was—which is when I did most of the writing of the book. I think there was a widespread feeling of both defeat and disorientation on the left, notwithstanding the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. The "Another World is Possible" slogan was born there. I think for the most part, it's fair to say that between the tremendous reactions to the social movements and political achievements of the 1960s across the Euro-Atlantic world, the reaction to those that involved rollbacks and worse on everything from women's rights to affirmative action, other aspirations for racial equality, but also a sense of disorientation and defeat on the left that had to do a little bit as well with the fall of the [Berlin] Wall in 1989 the end of the state communist experiment in and through the Soviet Bloc, and the sense of absolute triumphalism in American capitalist liberal democratic views intensified by the emergence of neoliberalism.
So it was a tough time for a left that I would describe as having had more confidence in itself in previous decades. But it was also a time, as we know, of the transformation of social movements like women's liberation, civil rights, what we then called lesbian and gay liberation, LGBTQ, etc, formations, disability rights and so forth. It was a time when those social movements, which had been formed as emancipation movements, began to take a different shape. They began to take a shape that we call, for better, for worse, "identity politics." That meant that many, instead of understanding these as movements that existed as eventually to abolish the identity, took more of a form of enshrining identity, enshrining identity through gender, through sexuality, through race, through ethnicity, through ability, disability, bodily type and a range of other things.
And the book, for me, was written in part to respond to what I understood not as the disaster of identity politics, which is the way that I think you know, many old Marxists regarded identity politics, and even many in the New Left regarded identity politics that—that these things were splintering the left—but rather, I wanted to understand how identity itself had displaced emancipation, how identity had been brought, above all, into law and the state for recognition, as opposed to, to be blunt, abolition. What was the ground of that condition? What were the dynamics of it, and what were the dangers of it? And the book is probably best known for a chapter called "Wounded Attachments," which is a chapter dedicated to, to the problem of being more attached to the wound at the site of identity formation than to its overcoming. So this book was one that was both about the conversion of street politics into legal politics and emancipatory politics into identity politics, and a disoriented left that was angry about all of this, but tended, I thought, to place blame in some of the wrong places.
So one more element of this, it was also a time when new theories that, in my view, were complementary to Marxism and socialism, but different. We called them "post-structuralism." The familiar names are people like Foucault. New theories were also very important in formulating the politics of identity. So there was a tendency on the part of an old left to react to identity politics as part of a problem that they named postmodernism or post structuralism, and to set up Marxism and post structuralism as opposite. So that was another element of the book was, was to try to sift through these theory wars while I was sifting through what I took to be some of the deep problems in the left that I thought could be put on different ground to be resolved.
Am Johal 8:58
Reflecting back on that work now, with almost the passage of 30 years, not quite, how do you look back on that work in terms of how the issues raised in the book have continued to persist in a way, or even become more fragmented or deeper in a sense?
Wendy Brown 8:17
Yeah, yeah. Well, I would say they've intensified in some ways, but also to some degree, the ground has shifted. Only rarely do you get a preoccupation with those theory wars that I just mentioned. They pop up now and then you still get people, you know, blaming the fracturing of the left on the loss of Marx and the adding of Foucault. You still get people blaming the loss of truth on postmodernism, as opposed to other material elements of this world. But I would say the most important thing that that book did not do was theorize white male identity, and that, of course, is front and center today as an identity political formation. So I was picking on left identities for my work on "Wounded Attachments." And if we want to talk wounded attachments today, we need look no further than Trumpers, but also around the world followers of Milei, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Johnson, you name it. Every far right movement is bound up in some way, not exclusively, but in some way, with a wounded identity of the sort that I was theorizing. I won't rehearse the theory here, but of the sort that I was theorizing in that book, and that's just supremely important, and it would probably change the way that I approach the entire issue of wounds and identity, because I, you know, I just wouldn't—the framework and the framing wouldn't be "left," it wouldn't be "right," either it would, it would, it would be ubiquitous, and I would be thinking—I would be driving in on another road.
Am Johal 10:00
Yeah, I wanted to move to a book that I just read this weekend, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty from 2010. I was mentioning to you earlier, I wish I had read this prior to a book I was working on with my friend Matt Hearn on friendship and community, because you in a far more erudite manner than we did, cover off some really important points in the book. I myself lived in Haifa back in 2003, 2004 when the wall was being built along the West Bank and so sort of saw its deployment, and protests happening at sites, and the way the narrative of the state got woven in. And I think you make some really, really interesting points in the book around that, that proliferation of nation state walls coincide with waning sovereignty, and these questions around boundaries, porousness, deficits of political legitimacy that come into play. And, of course, another piece that I thought was really fascinating was your discussion around the theological basis of sovereignty and—but wondering if you could speak to that book and where that, that came from for you in terms of deciding to write it?
Wendy Brown 11:16
Again, there were several sources, both an academic one and a very practical political one. The academic one, which may be of less interest to your audience—but you know, you never know what people are interested in—was that sovereignty had become an utterly preoccupying topic in political theory for the first time in 350 years. I mean, I know that's hard to believe, because we talk about it all the time now, but when I was researching that book, we were having an explosion of preoccupation with sovereignty, and I just wanted to understand why, why had this concept lain so dormant. We had been talking in political theory about states, about equality, about freedom, about power, but not sovereignty. So what was going on? And of course, one answer to that is that it was ebbing. It was waning. And I wanted to think about how and why. What it meant to say it was "waning" or "ebbing." The practical motivation for the book was that in the post '89 period, you recall that the—there was widespread declaration from left to right that the era of walls was over. We were entering a global village. Globalization was about global connection. Boundaries were going to be soft. The EU was being born. Nation states everywhere were presumed to be less and less the important containers of politics and economics, and more and more capital, and labor, and ideas, and religions would just circle the globe in their own flows and ways, without regard to boundaries, to walls, to borders, to fortifications. But in fact, what happened in the post '89 decade was walls were going up everywhere.
And you know, we forget this sometimes in the US, because I think many people, even people who who opposed Trump, somehow got lured into believing that the US-Mexico wall was his invention, when in fact, it was born in, in the 1980s, really took off in the 1990s, and many, many miles of border fortification had been built long before Trump even had a glint in his eye about the presidency. But it wasn't just the US and Mexico. It was also that there, as you say, there's the separation fence or border or wall in the West Bank or lemming the West Bank and Israel, and as importantly, walls were going up everywhere. They were, they were emerging in parts of Europe. They were emerging in sub national ways to surround cities, to prevent, ostensibly prevent migrants from moving into or having incursions in certain neighborhoods. But they were also popping up, as you know, along the India, Pakistan border, along the many borders between African nations, they were continuing to emerge in East Asia.
So, I wanted to make sense of this. On the one hand, waning sovereignty. Sovereignty is being recognized and reckoned as something that is declining. Nation states still exist, but the idea of the absolutely sovereign power of states, which means they could control their space, control their currency, control their economies, control their laws and politics, and above all, control their people and the flows of ideas, or religions, or other things that happen within states—that element of state power was without question, on the decline, and yet we have this expression—seeming expression—of sovereignty, nation state, border fortification. One more element, and I'll wrap this up. It was also the case, as soon as I began studying walls, that the walls had a more performing and theatrical dimension than they did, a serious interdicting dimension. That is, whether walls were being built to keep out migrants or terror or drugs or guns, they weren't doing it. They were changing flows, and they were changing the politics between the two sides of the border that walls delimited, but they were often intensifying the violence, the criminal orders at the border—that is, they were intensifying vigilantism and criminal gang work in smuggling everything from guns and drugs, to migrants, to terror. So now we have this conundrum, and this is what the book is about. What is it that walls are doing if they're not actually preventing the thing that they say they're preventing from, from coming through them. If they're entirely inappropriate to the nature of contemporary power, which is not something you wall out, because most contemporary power is much more liquid and effervescent than something a wall can stop, you know—whether it's virtual and occurs through, you know, the cyber world, or whether it's a form of power that, it, has as much to do with ideology or theology as anything else.
So what the book argues is that the spate of walling was a theatrical political move to mollify populations about something that was actually out of control, which is the problem that waning sovereignty produces when you have nation states that no longer have sovereignty, that no longer have control of their territory, their space, their politics, their economics. Walling produces a nice theatrical gesture that suggests we are in control. And you know, Trump's walling discourse is a perfect expression of that. We know it doesn't change anything. We know the migrants that walling is meant to deter are still migrants that are going to come and or are actually needed by American capital as a labor force. Nothing is cheaper than undocumented labor. America has known that for 250, years, and the same is true in Europe, obviously. So walling, I ended up arguing, is almost always a performance of containment for a people and a performance of externalizing an enmity or an enemy that is actually now structural. It's the problem of lost sovereignty. It's not the problem of the Mexican immigrant. It's not the problem of the Palestinian.
Am Johal 18:15
I wanted to ask you an additional question around sovereignty, because I think you make some very interesting arguments around it that are different than Hardt and Negri or Agamben's notion, or even Carl Schmitt talks about sovereignty and friend and enemy. But I think you carve out a different path in its argument, but wondering if you could share a little bit your thought or approach to sovereignty that's different than some of the theorists you mentioned in the book.
Wendy Brown 18:43
Well, I build on almost all of them.
Am Johal 18:45
Yeah.
Wendy Brown 18:46
I mean, I'm a—my approach theoretically is not to differentiate myself, but, but to pilfer from other theorists and to build and to take what's useful and to think with people. That said, I think the anti sovereignty people—Hardt and Negri and Agamben—you know, it's blowing the way of the wind. You don't need to be anti sovereignty, it's already dying. And I think they're mistaking what I call that sovereign theatricality, that, that, that leftover effect a kind of hyper sovereignty that's not really sovereignty for sovereignty. So they were maybe a little bit less useful to me, except to think with and against.
But I do end up thinking with Schmitt, not the Nazi Schmitt, but the Schmitt who thought really carefully about sovereign power, as he put it, as a secular version of, of God. What he notes is that God is the first sovereign, and God's the ultimate sovereign. And choose your religion here. God is omniscient and omnipresent. God controls everything. There's nothing higher than God. When sovereignty is a secularized political concept when it's installed in states, instead, it loses a little of that absolutism, but the idea remains that there is nothing above it.
So when I say sovereignty is waning, I'm looking at all the things that are now above it. You could pick your favorite: finance capital, transnational organizations that regulate and, and order, the possibilities among nation states, post national constellations like the EU that are sovereign? Not sovereign? So, the notion of sovereignty that I'm working with is is closer to Schmitt's, but takes that idea that sovereignty is always a secularized political concept, and thinks about what it means now, when there are things that are, as it were, above the state or destabilizing states or coursing through their boundaries, whether states like it or not. And capital above all. I mean, globalization is what really challenged sovereignty. And, you know, the globalists knew it. They planned on it. They wanted it. That was the aim. Now, of course, we're in a different game. Everybody's become a new nationalist, whether it's Bernie Sanders or or, you know, to use the US as an example, or the, you know, right wing Republicans. And the same is true throughout the world, you know, Modi, Meloni—I mean, you just, you take your choice. But the point is that, even that, even this new, we could call it a neo-nationalism or a new statism, it's a weak recall of sovereignty that mobilizes people without question. Part of the argument of the book is that when nation state sovereignty wobbles, people feel very insecure. It's the container that, that we count on in an otherwise boundaryless world, and when that container grows thin or porous or destabilized, to switch the metaphor, it's part of what I want to suggest accounts for a right wing turn. You yearn for a world in which sovereignty, the father, God the Father, was all stable and containing and securing and and mooring.
Am Johal 22:12
Yeah, Schmitt has some interesting pieces in some of his work, the—in the Partisan, he even talks about, a short passage around cosmo-pirates and cosmo-partisans, because it's the 60s and the space race. So he's even talking about the assertion of sovereignties in outer space. I wanted to speak a little bit around your work Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, both books that I've used in graduate classes, but obviously neoliberalism sort of hung like a spectre for the past several decades, and the context in which you wrote those works and how you think about the stage of neoliberalism today, in particular, its relationship to formations of political power and threats to democracy.
Wendy Brown 23:01
Yeah, the main thing that motivated my work on neoliberalism was that I wanted to get it into political thinking, political theory, not just economics. And this was not novel in other places in the world. I mean, you know, Chileans and Argentinians fully well knew that it was more than an economic formation. That was also true of Thatcher's England. But in the US, when I first started writing about neoliberalism, which was actually in the early aughts, although I didn't publish a first book about it until—I suppose Walled States had some elements of it, but, but it really became more central to me in Undoing the Demos, which I think was 2015? Yeah (laughs), I can't quite remember. But I wanted to establish the extent to which neoliberalism was more than the dismantling of the welfare state, the unleashing of capital, it's deregulation, reduced taxation, the building of an entrepreneurial society, and all of this at the expense of the working and lower middle class, which would see a real decline in wages, in assets and wealth of every kind, as a result. All that's true, that is part of what neoliberalism does, without question. It also privatizes public industry, makes it impossible to establish things like a genuine national health care system on a public basis, as opposed to a radically privatized one.
But I also wanted to think about what neoliberalism was doing to democratic principles and values. And by that I mean, what was the form of reason that neoliberalism is displacing in democracy? And my argument to be really pithy about it is that it took principles of equality, and freedom, and society, and replaced them with competition winners and losers, freedom reduced utterly to a set of market freedoms, freedom above all, for capital, but also freedom understood really only as freedom in a market sense. And society abolished, in favor of the individual. So, when that happens, when neoliberalism really washes over, not just the political system, but all of our institutions, universities, grade schools, community associations, non profits, hospitals, health care provision, more generally, policing, when all of these institutions are washed by this new form of reason, democratic values and democratic institutions are the casualty. So the book is really about how neoliberalism destroys democracy at a very quiet level, quiet, and that's why I call it a stealth revolution, quiet in the sense that it's simply dismantling what we could call the discourse of democracy. Principles of freedom, understood as political freedom, us representing and governing ourselves together. That kind of freedom. Equality, understood not just as the equal right to compete, but equality understood as sufficient social equality that all can participate in democracy. To participate in democracy, at a minimum, you need to be fed and sheltered and warm.
And we now have American cities in—I happen to come from the Bay Area, where this is extreme, but where one in 20 people does not have that. I mean, they're living on the street, hungry, unsheltered, unwarm. So, and that's only to deal with the extreme. That doesn't even deal with just the ordinary limits to participating that poverty produces. So the aim of that book was really to chart the ways that we were losing very principles of democratic life to a neoliberal way of thought in our universities, in our health care system, in our electoral politics everywhere. And I do it by looking at, you know what—I mean, I actually have chapters on the university. What happens when you neoliberalize the university? I don't need to tell you what happens—the gross inequalities, the ways in which students are converted from people who are future citizens to simply future income earners. What that does to choices about what we feature in our curriculums, what we teach, how students approach our classes. It ramifies throughout the education system. The same happens with health care. The same happens with every other institution. So that book was about that. And then the second one, what many people see as my kind of sequel on neoliberalism, was thinking through why neoliberalism didn't just produce a hollowing out of democracy, but explicitly anti-democratic formations. And the second book was written after, after Trump came to power.
Am Johal 28:26
In some ways, you know, I think we're continuing to live in a time where the relationship between the, let's call it, the progressive left and liberalism, seems to have inherent tensions baked into it. Or the frustrations with the kind of neoliberal hangover, in terms of how it's moved through democratic institutions, have called for reform or change or full criticisms of liberalism. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to where can the progressive left and liberalism have a relationship that can actually be politically productive?
Wendy Brown 29:03
By liberalism, you mean the other kind of liberalism, American liberalism?
Am Johal 29:07
Yeah.
Wendy Brown 29:09
Okay, could you say just a little more?
Am Johal 29:10
Yeah. I think there are aspects of the political left that, you know, they want to overthrow the system, which is fine. They want to raise issues of a system that they view as politically rotten to the core, and in way liberal institutions or democratic institutions of the state, whether it's, you know, separation of powers to various different aspects of what would be part of historical democratic structures, that there seems to be a tension on the, on the on the political left as well, in terms of how to relate to these. Because when they see them turned against them, you know, let's say Roe v Wade being turned around, or the Supreme Court having been gamed in a way that is patently unfair in terms of process and otherwise, that sometimes there will be aspects of the progressive left that will want to change the processes by which they want to change the system.
Wendy Brown 30:11
Yeah, okay, I think I see where you're going. So the tension between what we could call the left liberal and the left left is that liberals are trying to wrestle with existing institutions to keep pushing for progressive achievements, whether it's in health care or women's reproductive rights or LGBT things, but also on foreign policy, on a range of things. And the left says the whole system has just rotten to the core, partly because liberalism is so—liberal democracy is so bound up with capitalism that it will always be corrupted. And also because at this point, the right has so completely conquered really crucial institutions for containing capital's power, and we could add other forms of power—patriarchal power, white supremacist power—that those institutions are irretrievable. Is that? Is that the tension?
Am Johal 31:15
Yes, that's right.
Wendy Brown 31:18
So it's fun to talk about this with you, because I suspect both of us hang out on both parts of the tension, and that's why you're asking.
Am Johal 31:26
Yes, yes.
Wendy Brown 31:27
So, you know, in my bad mood days, I am one of those, you know, "Oh my god. Why are we even trying to tinker with this thing?" Supreme Court's a fine example. You know, either we expand it to 15 and start over essentially, or we give up on imagining that it has anything to do with justice, ever, because it's been conquered. And it's not just been conquered by a non liberal majority, it's been conquered by an extreme right majority and out of sync with the part of the US that is in that extreme right. It's, it's a very small group of people in the US that are that far right, and we have a Supreme Court now monopolized by it. So, you know, the Supreme Court is an extreme example, but we could go to something that's much at the center of my work now. What are the prospects for getting the American state to bring finance capital, especially, but all capital to heal sufficiently to get us on a trajectory where climate disaster is not inevitable. What are the prospects of that? And there, there are many days where I just say there's zero, and that is why we either just give up on the whole damn thing, or we organize seriously for some kind of very unlikely revolution.
But then, you know, I, like you probably have a lot of friends in, who are progressives who just whack away bit by bit at trying to make some of our institutions a little more fair, a little more just, a little more egalitarian, and then also whack away at decarbonization, regulating finance and other things, regulating AI, that's now an important issue, and I'm not unsympathetic to them. I'm not of them, but I'm not unsympathetic to them, unless they denounce us on the left, because I'm willing to entertain the, the idea that, that many of us oscillate between "We do what we can in our everyday life." That's, that's why we recycle, even though we know it's idiotic. I mean, that's, that's, that's why we conduct ourselves in our classrooms with a kind of ethics and politics that is generous and open minded, even though some days we just want to go in and blast away.
I mean, that's why we do that, an impulse to try to make the world a little better right now, even as when we look up, we think, "Oh, my God, this, this is not going to work." And I think we just live that tension politically, because we have to do both. We can't wait for the Messiah, but on the other hand, we can't imagine that, just because we're not sure the Messiah won't come in the form of a revolutionary political movement that could succeed, we can't, therefore say, "Well, the best we can do is just a little." Because, we know the limits of that little. It's brought us to a brink. It's brought us to the brink of crises of democracy, of equality, of maldistribution in the most extreme forms, and of course, today, the brink of so many wars and so many disasters and genocide. So we can't be, in my view, only progressives who try to tinker, and we can't refuse one another, the places where each of us work the best.
Am Johal 35:13
I wanted to speak a bit about the work that you're doing now, if you're willing to share about it, you talked about in our previous conversation around reparative democracy and relationships to community organizing, around the reorientation of ecological damage. And yeah, it'd be great to hear about what you're currently working on.
Wendy Brown 35:35
So I don't have a title for the new book, but it somewhere in the title or subtitle will be this term "reparative democracy." So let me say what I mean by it, and it will unfold the project. I don't mean reparations, though. I'm not excluding them, and I don't mean repairing democracy from its current crisis by restoring or recovering some mythological time when democracy worked. Rather, the premise of the book is that democracy, on the one hand, has always had a promise that we, the people, rule ourselves, rather than being ruled by a part, an individual, a force like capital, a technocracy, or an autocracy, tyrant. So we, the people, rule ourselves. At the same time, democracy was born in the West out of an extremely elite and exclusionary political society, Athens, where 10% of the people were actually citizens—all men, all property owners. Where democracy pertained only to the affairs of the city, not to the affairs of what we could now call the lands, the earth nature. Where democracy excluded from its concerns, what we now call "reproductive work," or "care work," the work of sustaining ourselves, but also sustaining all human life.
So the reparative dimension of democracy that I am trying to put into play has to do with re-formatting or re-founding democracy. And I think many social movements are doing this on a basis in which we enfranchise non-human life, not just human life, and in which we understand that the damage that modernity has done, some call it fossil modernity, the damage that it has done will leave residuals forever on the earth. That is the damage that has set into motion climate change, that has fouled waters and lands, that has released forever chemicals and nanoplastics into every part of our bodies and existences. This means that as does the damage that colonialism and capitalism has done, more generally to the ways that political forms have taken shape on the earth—who has wealth, who's simply a source of extraction, who has some modest stability in life, who has utter precarity—all of those things, I'm suggesting, have to be brought into an orientation by democracy that ceases to be simply about governing "the now" or serving contemporary interests, and instead relates the past, the present, and the future differently. It makes us responsible for, as Democrats, a past that has released onto the earth and into the globe, a set of damages that are constantly before us to repair as we move forward. So what I'm describing is a different temporality for democracy, a different relationship to past and future. We don't forget about the past and we don't ignore the future, which is what democracy does it basically says the past is the past and the future is not ours to worry about. The social contract is about this generation, what it needs, what it wants, what it demands. That has to go. But also the idea that we exclude non human nature from the demos, from democracy, also has to go. We have to refound democracy in what I call "imbricated earthly life," life in which we understand all life to be dependent on other life, no life that can just extract from and live from other lives, without destroying us all.
So it's a big, radical project. It's going to take me a couple more years to finish. I think I mentioned to you that I'm also studying a number of particular sites where I think reparative democracy is emerging, and one of them is an oil refinery that is transitioning in what we call now "just transition" to renewables. And what that entailed from the community, the labor unions, the workers, the owners and others. But another site is cop city in Atlanta, the struggle to hang on to the forest and to prevent carceral institutions of the most extreme sort being continued to be built at the site of low income black neighborhoods. So that's the work. That's what I'm doing.
Am Johal 40:37
One of the questions that come up for me is around the ecological and there's a number of writers have been talking about reimagining democracy as something related to the more than human.
Wendy Brown 40:50
Yes.
Am Johal 40:50
And I'm wondering if you'll be taking that up as well, in terms of how we can maybe reimagine democracy in the context that you're talking about?
Wendy Brown 40:59
Absolutely. That's definitely part of the work, and I've tried out a number of different approaches to it, but it's a thorny one, because if we think of democracy as only for those who have voice and those who can understand one another's voices, we tend to think it can only be about humans. I want to suggest that there's a different kind of listening that we have to do to incorporate non human life. What many people have tried to do is simply extend rights to the non human but we're always in charge of those rights. Humans remain in charge of those rights. So that's a little dicey. You know, when somebody else is in charge of your rights, you're always at risk of losing them or having them compromised. I want to suggest that a democratic ethos that incorporates the non human actually requires a change in the democratic subject. And that's why I'm so interested in forest protectors, in other kinds of environmental activists who have learned to listen differently to non human life, and then aren't simply representing its interests, but representing themselves as life comes along with them when they speak and they act. And that, in my view, is probably our only way forward.
Am Johal 42:19
And the other thing that comes up for me there, of course, is the amazing work that land defenders are doing on the front line of environmental and ecological work. And then you see the kind of neoliberalized, corporatized, big oil versions of this. So in Fort McMurray, Alberta. I remember going there several years ago, and they've restored the parkland, and they've brought bison back as a form of restoration and, and it, of course, you know, when the fires happen up there, it creates all of the, the the other side of it, the, you know, the neoliberalized, corporatized versions,
Wendy Brown 42:53
Yep. No, we've—there's a lot of you know, hapless—they're not even all nefarious. They're just hapless solutions like tree planting, which turns out to be as likely to produce, if it's not done with extraordinary knowledge and care, as likely to produce soil depletion and fires as it is, to produce more possibilities of withdrawing CO2 from the air. So there's a lot of hapless efforts at this kind of thing. Some of it requires better science, but some of it requires what you just identified, getting the corporations out of it, getting big finance out of it, and getting people who really think and know what they're doing at the center.
Am Johal 43:39
And so my final question for you just since we are in 2024 and this episode will come out in September, but, so we'll be in the middle of the American election. In particular, any thoughts you'd like to share in terms of this moment of the political cycle that we're in, and in terms of its impacts on democracy and possibilities of how we can look at it?.
Wendy Brown 44:04
Oh, Am, you know, the thought that this comes out in September and we're sitting here in May, makes this a particularly challenging question. If I can just answer from the perspective of May, you know, right now it looks like Trump could win if he doesn't suffer one form or another of extreme debilitation—financial, legal or physical. I'm very sorry that Biden didn't step aside. I think that was a huge mistake. I think it's a terrifying prospect, not just for the US, but for the world, and certainly for ecological concerns, to have a Trump presidency that said, my, my own view is that electoral politics should never exhaust people's understanding of what is politically possible. That it's very important to treat them as lesser evil politics. That is, politics where you simply pull the lever for the lesser evil. You do not allow your identity, your virtue, your deep beliefs to get into the mix. You just do what you need to do in the same way that you do when, when you know you make certain choices in the grocery store that are not happy choices. You just do what you need to do sometimes. And we could come up with other, better examples, probably than that.
But I'm sorry that a younger generation, which I admire so much, simply for surviving the world we've handed them, but also for their extraordinary politics and activism. The one thing I wish I could get to them on is this issue. Just go, take five minutes, pull the lever, do the lesser evil thing, then go right back to occupying the federal building to shut down the US's arming of Israel to destroy Palestine. Go right back to defending the forest. Go right back to all the other things that you do that are so much more important and powerful. But, just secure this one thing, because if we contain fascism at the electoral level, it makes more space for us to work politically in other ways.
Am Johal 46:16
Wendy, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar, and wonderful to speak with you.
Wendy Brown 46:22
Am, it was really great. Thanks for your really thoughtful conversation.
[theme music]
Julia Aoki 46:29
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Wendy Brown. To find out more about Wendy’s work, head to our show notes. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
[theme music fades]