Becoming Non-Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos

Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos is unflinching: to read it is to confront the present in the fullness of its damage. But the book also provides intellectual pleasures: in an era in which academics too often tend to shy away from "grand narratives"—from descriptions of what a sort of old fashioned Marxist like myself still likes to call "the totality"—this book is both admirable and urgently necessary.

I suspect that for reasons either of modesty or of political hesitation, Brown would be reluctant to describe Undoing as a manifesto, but I think it clearly sits within that genre. It does so by insistently and repeatedly posing the Lenin question: What is to Be Done? In Brown's book, provocatively, the answer to this question often comes down to knowledge and to teaching. Refuting the liberal assumption that democracy is a natural condition, Undoing asserts to the contrary that "democratic self-rule must be consciously valued, cultured, and tended" (11). More specifically, it seems powerfully committed to one particular kind of tending, naming teaching. This emphasis has much to do with the book's focus on transformations in higher education. But it's also part of the book's method: Brown describes Undoing's argument that "the many must be educated for democracy" as "animated by attachment, scholarly contemplation of history and the present, and argument"—I am tempted to suspect that it is also animated by Brown's own work as a teacher, by her engagement with the students of a beset public university system (11).

I will return to the What is to Be Done? question, framing it through my own experience learning from the students of a different beset public university system, but for now I turn away from the "Lenin question" of the manifesto and towards its too-often-neglected sibling, what a friend of mine calls "The Marvin Gaye question": namely, What's Goin' On? After all, manifestos are not just prognostic; they are also diagnostic. I begin, then, by unpacking some of Brown's diagnoses. The central premise of her account of what's going on, I posit, is a reversal of the classic Marxist base-superstructure claim. That is, the so-called "vulgar" account might suggest that the economic "base"—transformations in the mode of production, crises of profitability, and so forth—are the cause while the "superstructure"—everything from culture to the state—is mere effect. In Undoing, Brown often implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, reverses that schema: economic conditions are not the origin of contemporary political changes but rather are the consequence of them. Thus, to take one exemplary formulation, "neoliberalism is something other than a set of economic policies" but is instead "a normative order of reason" that has become "a widely and deeply disseminated economic rationality" which "transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor according to a specific image of the economic" (9–10). As the word "image" suggests, "economic" here is not (or at least not primarily) a set of material conditions, policies, or exigencies, or directly profit-seeking enterprise but rather an order of reason, of conduct, and of discourse. Thus, rather than claiming that "neoliberalism" is an economic periodization, Undoing argues that it marks something like the becoming-economic of formerly non-economic realms of life, sociality, and governmentality. Brown concisely defines neoliberalism as "a mode of reason of the production of subjects, a 'conduct of conduct,' and a scheme of valuation" and as a "generalized practice of 'economizing' spheres and activities heretofore governed by other tables of value" (48, 21). Far from being an explicitly economic period, then, neoliberalism is, at various points in the book, a mode of interpellation, an idiom, a form of subjectivity, a reality principle, a set of values, and a change in language and in consciousness.

This is where I want to mark some my own difference from the book's argument. I think Undoing is right to observe the intensification of a certain kind of economic rationality, and to note the application of the language of the economic to spaces...