"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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another kind of freedom
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January 11, 2006
Another kind of freedom, as articulated by Wendy Brown in an interview in Contretemps, is outlined below. I'd read her book States of Injury many years ago and thought it to be good. Brown says:
It is the powers that circulate through the social--whether they are for Marx 'capital', or for Foucault 'discipline' or other forms of 'biopower'---that have to be transformed in order to produce something other than freedom from one another, freedom from the state, or freedom from something that makes you miserable. It is Marx's notion of freedom with others that is compelling. Of course, Marx gets this from Aristotle, but he does a lot to it, and Rousseau also develops this in quite beautiful, if finally limited, ways....there is no such thing as individual freedom, that human freedom is finally, always a project of making a world with others. ..... It is also a Spinozist theme. You can, of course, get a limited form of liberty through liberal formulations of freedom, but because of our interdependence and relationality, not only in labour, but in a whole other set of media, we can't find freedom against one another---it finally will be with.
This claim is set up against Hegel's individualist conception of freedom---'Where Hegel has an individual consciousness, making its way through history, making its way toward freedom'. This ignores the role of the corporations as a bridge from the individualism and atomism of civil society to the universal ethical life of the state. For Hegel in the corporations, as in the family, the individual learns to subordinate their self-interest to the whole. The family and corporations are those forms of ethical life by which the atomism of civil society is transcended and individuals begin to orientate themselves to a whole that transcends their private self-interest.
Liberals would now go on about Hegel's totalitarianism at this point but swap 'association' for 'corporation' in civil society and the point remains: the countervailing power to the atomism of civil soceity comes from civil society and is not imposed from without by the totaliatarin state.
So Hegel gives an account of how Brown's shift of 'freedom from others' to 'freedom with others' can take place. Tis a plausible account of how citizenship is formed; and citizenship is a subject on which Marx did not have much to say. Neither does Brown.
She acknowledges the flaw in Marx:
To return again to Marx, I think he made it too simple, since the whole project of freedom with others was allowed to come to rest in labour, rather than in what we have come to understand as a multiplicity of other activities where difference actually has a more persistent rather than resolvable quality. That is the burr under the saddle of the project. On the other hand, I don’t think that difference stymies or overthrows it. Difference complicates it. The project of freedom with others means not only beginning to look to some sort of sharing of power or collective engagement with the powers that condition our lives, but requires reckoning with the unknowable, the enigmatic, the uncomfortable, without then ceding to a radical libertarian 'let us all go off with our
differences' as if they were natural and ahistorical.
The categories of state and citizenship kinda disappear in her account The distinction between civil society and state (and between bourgeois and citoyen) that was so crucial for Hegel, has been forgotten. Nor do they return when Brown discusses liberalism in its social form and its impoverished conception of power. She seems to have become disconnected from the civil republic tradition which reverberates through, and underpins Hegel's distinctions.
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