The theory - politics relationship, according to Wendy Brown

Politics, which relentlessly fixes meanings by naturalizing them and generates their consolidation in institution (see p. 122 and p. 134), always tries to justify itself and ground its choices in some state of necessity, resorting to theories that claim to provide an objective representation of how things are, W. Brown writes (in Politics Out of History, Princeton University Press, 2001).

Radical politics is no exception, when the change it pursues and declares to fight for, is seen as entailed by the past and present dynamics of  the historical time, depicted as a movement having a substantially ascending direction (be its course linear and cumulative, like in the ideologies of progress, or circular and through conflicts, like in those of dialectics).

Here we find an idea of  theorical work, which bears the weight of an objective metaphysics, and a view of political action that tends to assume the contours of a sort of mission, as if the consciousness of the agent could detect the presence of a normative content in the very core of the mutable reality.

Objective ideologies (progressive or dialectical, at least when dialectics is of the kind stated above - see p. 166 and p. 168, where the W. Benjamin's alternative definition is quoted and endorsed) push theories towards groundless abstractions, and wreaks havoc with the historical oriented political consciousness that, rather than focusing on the parameters of the present, is lifted out of time and space, treating past, present, and their relations as moments of a narrative written by some Universal Subject.

Only the rupture of these metaphysical commitments, W. Brown says, permits an opening through which, given a new vision of theorical work as well as of the theory-politics relationship, political consciousness can return to the real history , allowing the redemptive powers of hope, dream, and utopian passion a place on the political and historical stage (see p. 160)

The new theory-politics relationship (their significant difference, and their reciprocal communication, since they are not opposites) plays a central role in this rupture.

In a first and simple sense, theory and politics distinguish themselves from each other, because theory abstracts from political life  and holds it up to examination, so it cannot at the same time be identical with or even mirrored by it (in a similar way, theory makes an object of everyday life and practices, divesting in that very gesture those practices of their everydayness, their lived and practical quality - p. 122).

In another sense, theory distinguish itself from politics, because it cannot fix meaning the way politics does. For theory to live, it must keep moving, it must keep critical distance from, and hence undoing, the terms of its objects. As politics does, theory undoes (p. 123). It continuously examines and reworks both the founding principles and powers of a polity. It generates those counterforces that cut through the realm of politics, both to incite its virtues and, in a technocratic age, to derail its slide into a historically unprecedented machinery of domination (p. 134).

Like in the W. Benjamin's conception of history as images, as well as in Nitezsche's or Foucault's genealogy W. Brown refers to, theorical work can never add up to a coherent totality but rather is always "incomplete", mostly fragmented and fragmentary, and so doing it is more attuned to the Real than the objective metaphysics (p. 167).

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Comment:

Wendy  Brown divests politics of its naturalizing attitude, and assigns to  theory the task of mustering the forces able to react against the  tendency politics has, to slide into an unprecedented machinery of  domination.

Intellectual work frees meanings of the ideological lead with which politics fixes them and weights them down.  It undoes what politics does. It opens up a new field of possibilities, and shows the existence of an irreducible variety of pathways,  when only one accessible road was purported  to be there etc.

This certainly is a noble view of the intellectual work, and I'd say heroic, in a time when the Left seems mostly caught in the muddle of the mainstream thought and unable of effective ruptures and significant openings.

What I find less convincing, is the idea that any intellectual work which is not in the deconstructive mode, must necessarily commits itself to the objective metaphysics.

A theory of capitalism built up in Max Weber's style, for instance, would do a constructive job without committing itself to an objective metaphysics.

We are not pushed to adopt a critic attitude against politics, because we are "professional undoers", but because we are in the middle of some difficult situation and are  looking for a way out.