Politics as Culture or College Remembered

Recently, I was reading a book that's still important now, but I wish I had read it sooner. It's Regulating Aversion by Wendy Brown, and it's remembered for genealogical insights into the concept of tolerance, on which liberals hang so much, but which means so little definitively. 

I'm not writing to discuss Brown's main ideas, but rather a passage that spoke (at least to me) about changes that have taken place between when the book was written--2004--and now. 

First: the passage from Brown's introduction: Brown says that 21st-century liberal governance promotes the proliferation of identities. While having a certain collective identity might entitle one to particular forms of political representation, but modern ideas of identity, and of "tolerating" those with different identities, do not envision much else in the way of political justice.

Brown points out that modern ideas of identity tend to be essential and static, they do not often illuminate, for example, the way that indigenous or African-American identities are constituted historically by experiences of dispossession that "toleration of difference" does nothing to address.

The discourse of tolerating different identities promotes a false sense of equality and commensurability, but at the same time, if we organize the polity into separate communities of interest, we obscure shared conditions of precarity like climate change, and shared needs, like health care. That these two particular social, biopolitical problems have been minimally addressed is not an accident, but an affect of a political left that with a fairly limited sense of the political. 

I think Brown was critiquing what were the fundamental assumptions of that time- and I say that time, because I think things are different now. In 2004, I wasn't the most cognizant adult, but I did receive a sense of what politics was, particularly radical politics, and I can see it as Brown describes. 

Throughout college, I was on the fringes of what you could call the smart kids. There was a particular group of smart kids intimidated me greatly for two reasons: academic achievement and a cool, angry, and principled politics of refusal. In a place like Boston University, with its bougie image secured by a middling reputation and sky-high price tag, they stood out very self-consciously.

As for political activities, they were the usual campus fare, going to lectures and shouting at anyone who represented or worked for the US government. Mainstream protests, which in 2004 were support for gay marriage and opposition to the Iraq war held little interest, the action, I was told, was in resistance to big science and gentrification, forces eminently represented by the university itself.

What I most remember were the parties. Among vegans who dumpster-dove before it was fashionable, tended not to drink and didn't like conventional furniture, my going was more my trying to borrow some of their virtue.

The entertainment at such events was in decrying various things canonized by college life by calling them decadent or degenerate. The offending items: education, most kinds of sexual relationships, literary fiction-really most all literature-and all but the most avant-garde and trash-based art forms. 

Naturally, I, who wanted to eat chicken wings, drink beer and yell at the presidential debate on the projected screen alongside a few hundred of my classmates, concluded a conscience-based or alternative politics was too rich of my blood.

Do I exaggerate? Quite possibly. Who remembers those days.

I do remember almost everyone in this charmed circles' post-grad plans. Most everyone wanted to work on an organic farm, and a lot of people did. This was before WOOFing became the mainstream gap year plan it is now. The person I spent the most time talking to had a clear vision, as I remember it: an alternative elective community structured around shared values of work, material austerity, and a rough equality that respected tradition, a community that would have no part in the imperialist, consumer-capitalist society perpetrating mass violence and environmental degradation.

I think from Brown's work we can say that what they were talking about was staking an identity, and their radicalism was really just "tolerance" in inverse, seeking distance from a dominant culture they considered immoral. They weren't stereotypical college kids talking about utopian radical transformation; in some ways their hope for an affinitive disciplinary small-scale society composed of people with narrowly similar ideas that what matters most is individual conduct and character, was actually quite conservative in certain ways. They were operating under the assumption that the best we can hope for is to find others like us and stake our own.

Why am I thinking of this? As much as I think Brown's critique stands in many ways, I think that a younger generation, people in college now, say, is seriously questioning individual-cultural-elective kind of politics. The younger left of the political spectrum is now represented by the most improbable BU alum: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Universals: human needs, human rights, are back in currency, and Ocasio-Cortez and the democratic socialists (capital and lower-case) definitively talk about morality and justice. 

It must be a heady time to be a young person, to see so many old hoary conventionalities about technocracy and level-headed liberalisms so completely embarrassed and discredited. If we can't see the king in his underwear, we can see Obama and Clinton walking around clueless. 

This isn't to say I am 100% optimistic. Nor am I uncritical about the new vogue for political materialism on the left; if postcolonialism teaches us anything it is that liberatory universalisms have their own limits of privilege and exclusion: we can't forget to recognize the other and let them speak for themselves.

But what the young people on and off campus are onto is nothing if not ambitious and transformative. And the world needs it. 

I had no idea what radical politics was when I was in college, but when I start seminars by going around the table and asking people to introduce themselves, it's like I can hear I different kind of self-assurance and readiness. In college, I would have introduced myself with some dumb joke about a movie, but I hear something different from them. I'll dramatize it for you.

Whereas in Lenin's time the question was "what is to be done", we ask when and how. We are everywhere stalked by the spirits of reaction and disunity, but we know the fear of our enemies in every comfortable quarter of the world. We are not the specter haunting Europe, comrades, we are the angel of death... So yeah, I'm Macy, a sophomore poli-sci major from Natick, Mass and...

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