Power: Contemporary & Neoliberal w/ Dr. Wendy Brown

We could use more for codian appreciation of all the ways that we are all as it were taken up by produced by fashioned by and set into motion by forms of power that aren't sovereign aren't aren't contained aren't commodified that are circulating including through our bodies through our psyches through our language To us and our relations in every way Welcome to the Social Science Republic good podcast a project at the Virginia Tech Institute for policy and governance and VT publishing In this series we attempt to make social science theory available and accessible for social change practitioners Such as activists non-profit leaders and government officials my name is Brad Stevens and I'm Yugasha Bakshi We report PhD students in the planning governance and globalization program in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech interested in the question of how to build a better world Welcome back everyone So we've covered quite a lot of ground here. We've talked about about four theories by now And we've also had the pleasure of understanding a little bit more about feminist accounts of power What do you think Brad? It's been fascinating. I feel like our understanding can talk about power much more co-genely now than I could before but I hope you're enjoying it as well Yes, I am I am I was also thinking about some of the conversations that we had last week and how we briefly touched on the asset aspect of Financialization of the economy and how that has been affecting power structures and that left me craving for more discussion on how some of these Conceptions of power stand in today's world the neoliberal world Do you think with financialization deregulation and increased privatization building an understanding of the working of power is more challenging? I don't know about more challenging, but I think it's it's it's changing so that again, you know I think that's part of what we've come to understand across all these episodes is that power is dynamic and so that if you understood power in the 80s It doesn't mean you understand power now and that so I think that this neoliberal frame we're operating in what we have to think about power differently And I think maybe even if we were to consider this late neoliberalism hopefully It's probably even different than early neoliberalism was a power for move, but how about how about you is there? Do you have any thoughts about how this is different in this in this state? I do think there are there is a push to do certain things which probably wasn't there in the 70s and 80s And this is going back to something that Professor Max had also mentioned about you know turning public management into private management So we are seeing more actors on the field now more stakeholders which you know leads to more management and a little more or better understanding of What kind of role everyone is playing and we've also briefly talked about how the nonprofit sector sits in the whole you know this whole scene Are they are they serving the market are they serving the public so there are interesting questions for sure and I think it does become a little challenging, but I agree with you that it has it is changing for sure But yeah, interesting nonetheless So for today's episode we will be looking a little deeper into this question of how do we understand the working of power in the neoliberal world? I excited about this I am fascinated by how we understand neoliberalism and the frame we operate in at the moment so looking very much forward to this great To help us think about this we've got Dr. Oventy Brown to share her expertise Dr. Brown is a distinguished American political theorist and professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley Dr. Brown's fields of interest include the history of political theory feminist theory contemporary critical theories of law 19th and 20th century continental theory and contemporary American political culture She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt, school theorists, Foucault and contemporary continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power political identity citizenship and political subjectivity in temporary liberal democracies In recent years her scholarship has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations to which it gives rise Welcome Dr. Brown. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me What you've written widely about power is as it was understood by Foucault and Marx And the need to look beyond it. Can you start us off by sharing how you became interested in this subject and Why it continues to be of such great interest to you? Well In part the answer is that I actually had a very formative teacher who was interested in power shells and wool and And One of the things I learned early on from him that has continued to be useful for me is that power is Something that comes in many many forms in the human species and It's unfortunate in English that we have a relatively limited vocabulary for it I mean we have the terms power for domination, etc but One might say usefully that We we need the the the range of terms for power That the innoetzer said to have for snow That is when we talk about for example the power of solidarity or the power of labor It's a very different thing than when we talk about the power of the state the power of finance the power of structural racism the power of patriarchy these things are It would be a mistake to assimilate them all to a common notion of power and So one thing I've actually been interested in throughout my writing life is Trying to specify more closely what kind of power I'm talking about at any particular moment whether it's the power to construct a neoliberal subject or the power to remake a University in a neoliberal frame or whether it's carceral power police power That works unevenly across racialized and class societies It's important in my understanding to be able to Distinguish and theorize the operations of power at every turn and even when we talk about You know our familiar mantra today gender race class sexuality Each of those are brought into being as Identities as subject formations through very different kinds of power the history for example in the US of slavery followed by Jim Crow followed by other iterations of racialized civil social economic and state power makes race very differently than for example the patriarchal family and Gendered political economy makes gender so I I always with students and colleagues When we start to throw the term power around I always want to know what kind are we talking about what effects do we imagine it has? And how and where is it operating is it is it operating from a single site a state a boss slave master or is it circulating irrigating moving through society and through the bodies of subjects within it? I've just Opened up the question, but I imagine we can talk about many things within that frame Absolutely, I really appreciate that way of thinking about it that I'm wondering you know We use this this one-term power here. Although as you mentioned we break it down into domination and empowerment and these other kind of frame Solidarity is there do you still find the term power useful as a collective term or does it does a need to be? Define more more closely to be useful in any context It's a great question Brad. I do think power almost always needs modifications adjectives For us to understand it richly and at the same time I never want to give up the term for the simple reason that Ordinary ideologies of liberalism and capitalism are among other things Exercises in the disavowal of power that is to say say, the fundamental feature of liberalism, classical liberalism, not left-right liberalism, just constitutional democracy. The fundamental feature of it is an identification of individuals as free to do and say what they want as long as they don't hurt anybody and as equal in so far as they're protected by the state in that freedom. What that formulation, just basic constitutional liberalism, what that formulation disavows are all the powers stratifying and constraining various kinds of subjects in society, not only by race and class and sexuality and gender, but also in all kinds of ordinary ways in everyday life, all the impediments to, as it were, being free or exercising our freedom and all the limitations on that formal equality that stratifies. So the reason, I think it's really important to continue using the term power at every turn is because it's always the beginning of a critique of that kind of disavowal that liberalism entails and that basic defenses of capitalism as free in tail. I mean that notion that capitalism frees us all, frees labor, frees capital, frees us all to do whatever we want, however we want to do it, also disavowals the powers, including the power of labor exploitation, but also the power to plunder the earth and destroy habitats for human and non-human species alike, that power is what has to be surfaced. So you can tell already in this discussion, I've surfaced several kinds of powers, stratifications, exploitations, plunder, domination, those should not all be pushed together, and we haven't even gotten to the most crucial turn that Foucault invites us to take, which is to appreciate the productive dimension of power, not just the repressive or the destructive dimensions. Thank you, Dr. Brach, because you've really opened up the discussion to the nature of power, and I really appreciate that. I'm going to quote from your influential paper that was published back in '96, Power Without Marks, where you had written that contemporary left intellectuals, critical race theorists and feminist theorists are generally uncertain about how to think about the nature of power, even as they are often preoccupied with power's effects. Do you still believe that we are more invested in understanding the effects of power rather than the nature of power, and how would you urge the current generation to think about this? Great, I have not thought about this problem since '96, I suppose, so that's quite a while, but your final question in your formulation actually helps me bring it into the contemporary period. Yes, I think it is important both to understand power as having effects, and effects as a beginning way to decode power. I think, we start from its effects to work our way back to what power is, but at the same time, I think it's very easy to end up in what Marks taught us to understand as re-effications of power, that is ways in which certain effects become the kind of congealed qualities of powers, productions that keep us blind to the nature of power itself. So how does that work in contemporary practice? It seems to me that one way to understand some of the limitations today of let's just loosely call it left organizing or left political consciousness is precisely that it's absorbed with certain kinds of effects. This is, I think, what gets called "wokeism." Certain kinds of effects in the form of speech acts or even microaggressions and so forth and keeps us from seeing what some of the deeper forces, structures, cauldrons of power are and reaching for those rather than scolding one another for embodying those effects or expressing those effects. And that's, that's, you know, a common complaint these days, what I've just expressed, but you gave me the chance to explain it or register the complaint through the distinction between powers effects and a rich analysis of power that allows us to reach a little more for the trunk of the tree rather than for the twigs. Now there's nothing wrong with also studying effects and responding to effects. I'm not saying that, for example, me too or the subject that initially promulgated Black Lives Matter, namely unequal police brutality and incarceration practices vis-à-vis Black Lives, those effects are absolutely crucial. But then we need a good analysis of where's it coming from? How's it reproduced? What are its tentacles? What are its, what are its widely ways? And not just what are the statistics or what's the discourse? Well, you know, I love this the way you're where you're taking us here. And I'm intrigued, you know, we talked a little bit about this when we talk more about Foucaultian approach, but I think there's a there's an understanding in Foucault that you know that we are all subjects of power and that we are this is everywhere and it makes it somewhat difficult when we're used to an understanding of power where we say that elite up there or that person that entity that has power is enacting it over me when we're thinking about there's a much bigger picture beyond all of that. And we're seeing that become more and more complex if I'm just thinking about an earlier conversation. Dr. Luke's pointed us to Shoshana Zuboff's conversation about power and you know these new kind of understandings of power that are emerging all the time. When those happen are the the the ways that we mobilize and and we seek to promote promulgate change have to move as the as we understand power differently. So I'm wondering can you talk a little bit about how we might those of us that are seeking to engage in promoting justice or or such in the world can can try to should we focus on analyzing power and how should we think about doing so in a world where that is becoming increasingly difficult and complex over time. Maybe not becoming increasingly difficult but it's our tools for analysis are making allowing us to look deeper and deeper. Yeah. Let me first go a little bit behind your question to talk about Foucault. I know you've had other guests who who've done so but I just want to underscore something that Foucault taught us to be alert to that sometimes I think gets misconstrued. The caricature sometimes of Foucault's understanding of power is that power is everywhere and we're all in it and we need to stop thinking about you know the powerful and the non-powerful and so forth and just understand it as everywhere and certainly Foucault did say power is everywhere but what did he mean? What Foucault was alert to and I don't think he invented this theory of power. I actually think theorists like Weber and Marx are important antecedents to this theory but what he was alert to was the extent to which we late moderns still tend to talk about power as if it's held by an individual or an institution and wielded or used over those without it and that it is a substance or as he put it a commodity and that's that's one view of power that he wanted to take apart and then another view of power that he wanted to take apart was the idea that power simply represses that it simply holds us down and then if you get rid of it you're free and put together what he was challenging was the idea of what he rightly called sovereign power the idea that you get from Hobbes, that you get from Schmidt, that you get from the other great power theorists in the tradition of political theory and international relations theory. And there the idea is that power is held by one and transferable to another or it's contained in institutions and also that it is simply used to hold things down or repress or extinguish or destroy even. And what's important before we get to Foucault's critique of that is to appreciate that Foucault wasn't saying no power works like that. He understands there are moments when power works like that. Police power sometimes works like that. State power sometimes works like that. Putin's power sometimes works like that. But what he was trying to get us to pay attention to is that there's a whole lot of power in the modern and late modern world but doesn't work like that. That works through what he called rationality forms of reason that works through what he called governmentality that is what he called the governing of our conduct not necessarily by a government. But by all kinds of things ranging from the organization of space to forms of reason, norms, etc. And that power understood as circulating as irrigating through forms of political reason, through discourse, through governmentality will allow us to understand how subjects come into being and are conducted by power without the state or the police ever pointing a finger or threatening their lives. And I think this is approaching your question now that there is a tendency on the left to acknowledge this on the one hand because that's how the left talks about white privilege and male privilege and so forth. It doesn't talk about it as happening at the point of a gun. But on the other hand to disavow it when it comes to major struggle, to continue to imagine that there are the powerful and the powerless, that there is the state and the people, that there is the the the the the the the there's capital and labor period end of story rather than the work that many of us have been engaged in understanding something like neoliberalism as bringing into being subjects who do not need to be threatened overtly at all to become perfect neoliberal operators to self-invest, to self-enhanced their value, to imagine that what they have to do in life is nothing but continue to try to keep their value up or keep it from depleting and to treat everybody else in the same way. And that is not a a subjectivity, a way of being that occurs because something is threatening them overtly. And that's where I think we could use more Fukodian appreciation of all the ways that we are all as it were taken up by produced by, fashioned by and set into motion by forms of power that aren't sovereign, aren't aren't contained, aren't commodified, but are circulating including through our bodies, through our psyches, through our language, through us and our relations in every way. And I'm not saying that left activists or left policymakers all need to become political theorists. That's not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that I think a deeper appreciation of some of what political and social theory has discovered about power. It's circulatory effects. It's its ways of producing us and not simply repressing, exploiting or oppressing us could be very valuable to left organizing and left policy making. Dr. Paniwola, you've already pointed this out, but the general understanding of power is also something that people believe that it is consolidated within the upper class or the financially affluent members of the society. And neoliberalism plays a huge role in that kind of consolidation, that kind of wealth consolidation and in turn power consolidation. Can you help us make sense of neoliberalism and how it is changing our conceptualization of power? That's a big question, you gotcha. I don't know that I can do it in two minutes, but I would say that there are several big shifts between what we might call a pre-neoliberal and a neoliberal era. And there's lots of debate today about whether we're leaving neoliberalism behind. I'll just mark that debate by saying, I think in many ways, there are states and major actors that are searching for ways to leave it behind, but I think our societies are pretty thoroughly neoliberalized. Our institutions are pretty thoroughly neoliberalized. That is, they've been entrepreneurialized, they've been taken apart as public agencies and institutions for the public good. They've been set on their own little financial feet to scramble and and survive. And they've made every actor within them in that image. So even if neoliberalism is, as it were technically coming to some kind of end or maybe just dubiousness on the part of certain state actors and certain others, some of the damage is pretty thoroughly done. And it's going to take a lot of work to start reconstructing our institutions and our subjectivities in non-neoliberal ways. So that started with the end of the story. Let's start with the beginning. I think that the biggest change in neoliberalized societies that we would want to mark in a conversation that focuses on power is precisely what we've already discussed a little bit, namely that as opposed to thinking about themselves as citizens or as workers or as professionals or as capitalists, what neoliberal society invites us all to think of ourselves as is little entrepreneurs or little investors. Investors in ourselves, investors in our families, investors in our children, if we have them. And it invites us, and I think quite successfully manages to corral us into thinking of ourselves as creatures who have to monitor or tend their own value, whether on Instagram or as a intern starting out from college, tend your own value to maximize the possibility that others will want to invest in you. That others will want to be what we'll want as it were to be a part of you and thus your own value will be enhanced. And that fundamental dynamic of neoliberalism is one that intersects with financialization and it's too long to go into that here, but it's important to understand that the particular form that neoliberalism took once it assaulted the idea of a society, of a working class, of public goods, of progressive taxation, of a social state, the particular form that it took was one that cohabited with a financialized understanding of value. I mentioned that only because early on the neoliberalism and even Foucault's analysis of neoliberalism emphasized an entrepreneurial subject as opposed to a financialized subject. So it's worth just tossing that in to think about it some later point. But to wrap up, I think that the most important thing that neoliberalism has done with power as it were is usher in a way of thinking, what Foucault called an order of reason or a form of political reason in which everything is about enhancing its value and of course in a monetized way but also in a non-profit. monetized way and that that's the end the beginning and the middle of life and that that is what states have to do, what universities have to do, what programs have to do, what journals have to do, what you individual academics have to do and that's what all of our rankings and ratings and each factors and Google scholar counts and all of the rest of that are all about. Thank you for calling us out on our entrepreneurial endeavors. We're all in it. I hope for high rankings and ratings for your podcast. Thank you. Thank you. You've written extensively about the threat that neoliberalism plays in some of our institutions, particularly about the threat to democracy and so I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit about a democratic framing of power, why we still look to it as an aspirational goal and kind of how you see neoliberalism undermining that at this point in time. Great. Democracy is fundamentally about power sharing. It's fundamentally about sharing a peculiar form of power, a name-wide political power and there are different obviously different titrations of democracy, different modulations of this, more or less power sharing and it's most radical and extreme. All people in a certain polity share power equally at its most attenuated or thin democracy is simply about power sharing at the moment of electing representatives or even Azar. But it fundamentally has to be about sharing the capacity to govern ourselves as a principle. And to do that, we also have to have some sense of a life in common. It doesn't have to be communalism, let alone communism, but to have any concern with sharing a life in common, we have to have a notion of the common, beyond just an aggregation of bodies because there's no reason for an aggregation of bodies to care about sharing power at all. But if we have a notion of the common in which we are each part of the common, then we have the beginning of that notion of a demos, a people engaged in kratia, a rule of itself. So what does neoliberalism do to this? It breaks us into bits. It breaks us into pieces that, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, do not exist as society, her famous line, there's no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families. If there's no such thing as society, if there's nothing in common, if we have nothing in common and have no reason to rule in common, then we've gotten rid of a fundamental pillar of democracy. Second, democracy in the modern age because we have large societies requires institutions that carry out the people's understanding of what we should be, what we should do in common. We call those states, we could call them other kinds of institutions, they exist at all levels of society. But these institutions not only also have to be concerned with life in common, they have to be valued as emblems of democracy. They have to be valued as expressions of democracy. What does neoliberalism have to say about that? It says no, no, no. The state exists for one reason. I'm referring back to the classic neoliberalist. That is to promulgate economic growth and produce conditions for maximizing the well-being of a free enterprise economy. It does not and should not, according to the classical neoliberals, engage in anything else, including social legislation, legislation about the good for the people beyond producing the maximum conditions for the economy. In fact, neoliberals like Hayak go so far as to suggest that any legislation for social purposes is, as he put it, on the road to Serfdom or tyranny. It's that any legislation of the social kind is essentially tyrannical or at some points he even implies totalitarian. So what does neoliberalism done? It's discredited the people as an acting body and it's discredited their institutions as legitimate ways to enact the future of the common through social legislation. And of course, this is exactly what we see in many states over the last 40 or 50 years. An absolutely refusal to treat social legislation of any kind as anything other than the totalitarian will of the few. This is a right wing cry today. And it's become easier and easier to dismiss all such legislation whether about education, welfare, childcare, progressive taxation, dealing with homelessness or anything else as totalitarian nonsense. So those are some of the ways in which neoliberal reason has assaulted the very foundations of democracy. At the level of thought and practice. Now what's happened, of course, in the past 15 years is that there has also been a we could call it a non-neoliberal dimension of right wing reaction to disintegrating societies and to globalization that has kind of fused with this neoliberal form of reason to produce the usual. The desantis, Trump, Maloney, the rest of them so that what you have now is a kind of what I've called at times a Frankenstein creature combining hard right, neo-fascist, formulations of politics with plenty of ethnic nationalism and Christian nationalism and the rest of it mixed in with neoliberal language and policy and legitimated to some degree by that neoliberal language and policy. What I'm not saying is that the original neoliberal, the classical neoliberal, the founders, the Montpelloran society had this in mind. I think it's really important to see that most of them were responding to fascism and seeking to counter it in their own way. Not a way I would agree with but they were not themselves neo-fascists. They were anti-democrats, they were pure hardcore liberals, many of them, and they were certainly capitalists but they were not neo-fascists. But what we have today is that blend of neo-fascism and neoliberalism that is scaring the hell out of all of us. What you've talked to us so far about the different forms of Obama and I put it a good power, social power, corporate power. In your opinion is it possible to democratize these different forms of power? I have a couple of responses on the democratizing power question. On the one hand, I'm wary. When somebody says let's democratize finance, I get pretty skeptical. Finance was not designed to be democratized, finance was not designed for democracy and finance has nothing to offer it. Finance is basically an important predatory phase of late capitalism that is neither available to democratization nor would be in my view useful to it. Can radical democratic organizations make use of finance here and there? Perhaps, but the power is always going to be a raid on the other side. That's the nature of everything from private equity to asset management and the rest. It's about consolidating investors to extract as much as possible from available entities, practices, peoples, needs whether housing or energy crises or other things. So democratizing finance makes no sense to me. On the other hand, I think you're also asking, is it possible to democratize the power? For example, a constitutive of gender and race stratification and domination. It has to be. That is to say, it has to be possible to both imagine a world and bring into being a world in which gender is not a power. We made it a power. It is historically a power. It has to be possible for it not to be. It is not going to happen through pointing it out as it were. It is going to happen through remaking the conditions and the understandings that go into everything from the reproduction of life and care work as we often talk about it to the constructions of so-called civilization and war. But yes, I think it is possible to democratize those powers. But here the Marxist rather than the Foucaultian in me will come out. Democritizing those kinds of powers means revolutionizing the conditions of gender, of race. It means going beyond anti-colonialism and post-colonialism to a world in which we have finally repaired the legacies of colonialism. That is a long hard difficult set of practices. Marx made it sound relatively easy on the subject of capital. We would just finally seize the means of production and seize the state. At that point we would have revolutionized the conditions bringing class into being. Wonderful. I don't think that is actually how revolutionizing power works. It certainly doesn't work that way in some of these other domains. I was going to ask a completely different question. Now you have got me thinking about imagination in terms of, you know, it seems to me and we talk a lot about this. I suppose this idea that to get to these places where that revolutionary potential is possible, we haven't figured it out clearly. But we're still here. It requires us to have an imagination about a future that is different from now. I guess in some ways to put that Marx's perspective and conversation with that Foucaultian perspective where the power is keeping us in limiting that imaginative capacity that we have. How do social actors that want to propagate that world in which gender is no longer power? How do they go about imagining and building the capacity to think of a different world? Great. Brad, I think it's always a question of how we practice it now and illuminate it in the future through those practices. There are many words for this, what I'm describing, but I think, you know, if we stay with gender for the moment, I don't think it makes sense to wait for a time when we finally have a gender revolution. I think what we do with orders of power that produce and reproduce gender, and there are many different orders of power even there. There's the world of care work. There's the world of sexualization and commodification still of women's bodies. There's the world of gender power from the top, the order in which white men still run the world and most of the major institutions within it. Those powers, care work, sexualization, language and control of resources, those powers all have to be addressed as it were to bring in to being a new order in which, as we put it a little bit ago, gender doesn't matter. But that's not something that we'll do all in a day or all in a revolutionary moment. Those practices have been underway throughout, I would say, the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries with some serious setbacks and back lashes. But these are things that we have been unfolding and resisting, let me put that another way. These have been things that groups of activists, policymakers, lawyers, various kinds of non-profits have been addressing and will continue to address in their daily practices. And from that, I think we can become more imaginative. I think what people often worry about is, "Oh, those things are reforms. They constrain our imagination." But once you see women in power and powerful women at the heads of various organizations and doing various things and punished sometimes for that power, it can incite the imagination rather than co-opt it. And that's where I would disagree with those who divide the world into reform and revolutionary acts. How would you suggest we think about the generation of power and how it moves around today? I think the most important thing to appreciate about power, in some ways, we're concluding where we started, is how many forms it takes. I mean, we have just in this conversation talked about financialization, which is an extraordinarily ethereal, liquid, barely visible, and yet unprecedentedly potent form of economic power. It rules the world. It rules nation states. It rules humans who think they are ruling it. It has, of course, created gigantic amounts of wealth and tremendous amounts of poverty and destitution. And yet, it's very hard to grab hold of or bring into view. That is, in some ways, profoundly different from the ordinary, we could say, by comparison, power struggles today between capital and labor that are happening in hotels, at star bucks, at Amazon. Yes, financialization is back there in the back, but these are overt struggles for wages and conditions to not drive trucks in paralyzing heat, to have decent wages, to have decent benefits, to not have bullshit benefits, the kind that Starbucks offers where you get a pretend college education from an online university that no longer exists. These things, that is a different kind of power than even financial power. And then we've talked about all kinds of other things, gender power, race power, political, economic, social power in households, ordinary households. And I'm not just going to say it's one kind of power in households. But the classical political theorist all understood that the household was a miniature training ground essentially for the state and the citizens because of the amount of power in it. And Freud understood that in a completely different way. So I just think the most important thing about power today is to understand its enormous variety, its depths, its complexity, the inverse relationship sometimes between its manifest character and its potency. That's why I started with financial power saying you can't see it, but it's incredibly potent. And then of course there is no greater power today. We haven't talked about this at all. And then the power of fossil fuels to destroy a habitable planet. And yes, you can kind of see that, but you can't see all the intricate links between the extraction of the fossil fuels, the production of the fossil fuels, the political economy of the fossil fuels, the state investments in them, the difficulty of getting a hold of the problem when you have a world that is divided into sovereign states and divided into capitalist entities, the difficulty of getting hold of this enormous power that is destroying us. That's very different from all the other powers we've talked about. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Brown. Are there for those of our listeners that are interested in reading further on this? Well, clearly linked to some of your works in the description here. Are there other resources that you would point them to for them to learn and engage further in these conversations? You know, there's a world full of great literatures on all the subjects that we've talked about, and we couldn't begin to list them. So let me just thank you for your terrific questions and a really rich conversation. Thank you Dr. Brown. Thank you for this illuminating conversation. Is there anything else that you would like to add to the Holy Rapples? Nope. Thank you both. Very thought provoking conversation for me, Brad. How did you think? Completely agree. And my head is spinning a little bit because I feel like we touched on so many different things here. And it was all felt appropriate and she moved so adroitly between everything, really powerful. And it builds on all of our previous conversations, I think, and it's so much to dig into here. But any first thoughts for you? Well, to begin with, I think the way she defined power was very, very interesting. And like somebody who called out the complexity of power, not that other guests have not done that, but in terms of saying that there is limited vocabulary that can be used to define power. And we need to understand the range of, you know, range of phrases or range of words that can, they can be used to define power, they can be used to describe power, the different dimensions of it. It's not only stratification or domination or productive or destructive. It can be a bit of both. It can be, I don't know, two or five, six terms that we can use to define power. So I think that was a great way to not only start the conversation, but also not that we're coming slightly closer to the end of this, to kind of think back on some of the things that we've already discussed. Some of the theories that we've already learned, how they tended to focus on, let's say, two out of these dimensions and maybe a single dimension of power, but here it made a lot of sense for me. I completely agree. And I think that was her starting there was such a powerful place. So it took me right back to our conversation with Dr. Hart to start this all off and his discomfort with understanding and calling everything power. I think she did recognize that everything, it is a useful monocritic putover top of everything, but that in terms of analysis, we need to think more deeply. And I think back to Dr. Hart, his discomfort of calling resistance and revolutionary movements, their power the same as the power of the neoliberal establishment. So I think it's just thinking that way and thinking that power and a typology of power is really compelling and something that I think I would love to dig into further here. So what were some of the key takeaways for you, Brad? I know you were really excited about talking a bit more about neoliberalism and power in the neoliberal world. How did that go for you? Again, I think it went really well in the way she laid out neoliberalism. And I think what I find most compelling about her work is kind of that, you know, we, those of us that work in the social sciences talk about neoliberalism all the time. You know, in the back of our highlights, we know that this is deregulation. It means market comes before everything. It means privatization of many public goods. But for her, like putting her emphasis on how we understand that in terms of how it is invaded all of our personal lives as well. And so I think, you know, I would love to have her back to ask this of her. But I think about, you know, more due in his social capital framework since that, even that or even though I think he would very much not appreciate being put in neoliberal frame, the idea of having our relationships referred to as capital and having, you know, thinking about everything that we do in terms of eternal investment and things like this and how pervasive that is, is it really helpful when thinking about how neoliberalism is atomized or so? Right. Right. I thought so too. It was helpful to understand why we think what we think, you know, for me, definitely, like I said, very thought provoking. Another thing that I found very thoughtful in the way that Dr. Brown framed it was how it has to be possible to democratize different forms of power, the different forms that we've talked about and how that would involve, you know, revolutionizing conditions of gender, race, going after the colonial structures and repairing legacies of colonialism, any additional thoughts over here? Yeah, I think I appreciate her thoughts on this as well. And I think I particularly appreciated her weariness of certain kinds of power, you know, her understanding that financial power may not be something that can be democratized. And so I think, so it's a case by case, faces each power to be, to be shared, which that was for me one of the big takeaways is this idea of democracy as power sharing is so powerful. And so that's idea if we want to democratize, if we want to share that power, certain kinds that cannot be shared. And so we need to figure out how to approach those things. And so thinking about power that is based on personal characteristics, you know, whether that's race or otherwise, that power perhaps needs to be eliminated more than democratized. And so it's an interesting question in kind of my mind how we move forward with democratizing power in general, using that little p and then how we deal with each of the big p's underneath of that becomes an interesting question. I agree. I also appreciated the way, I think I, you know, I'm new to you understanding US politics, but it was really helpful for me to understand the way she framed the left's way of thinking and the right's way of thinking that even though, you know, we tend to believe that, you know, there are a certain mindset, but at the same time, not doing enough to kind of call out those issues properly definitely adds on to the current problems that we are facing in the country. Thinking about in terms of social change practitioners, what were your key takeaways over there? Yes, I think I'll piggyback from your previous comment there and suggest that it may be helpful. And now that I'm suggesting this, this perhaps means that I need to do it, which is I don't have time to do this, but hopefully someone else will. But, you know, this idea of kind of creating a rubric for the different kinds of power that are being enacted in any given situation. So you can look at a situation and say, how is financial power impacting this? How is gender-based power impacting this? How is race-based? How are political power? All these different kinds of, how is this an example of stratification versus plunder? You know, how are these different kinds of powers being enacted here? And then I think taking a moment to analyze how we, in our activism or in our nonprofit work, nonprofit work in particular here thinking about all the different kinds of forms of power that we're reinforcing and that and how comfortable are we with those things. You know, we, in most nonprofit work, we are not seeking to undo the capitalist power that has led to massive injustices. We're trying to put band-aids over those gaps and so we're allowing that power to continue to exist in some ways. And so those are ethical questions that I think we all need to grapple with as we think about these different kinds of power and how we, even in our movements, our powerful movements, opposing injustice can still uphold other forms of power that are unjust as well. So that's kind of where I wound up thinking about this. And again, someone that wants to create that rubric, let me know. We can talk about it, but how about you? Any, any takeaways that you think of for practitioners? Well, something that we've already discussed a couple of times by now, but still needs to, needs to be said that it is important to research the political structures, the power structures to understand where it is coming from and how it is being produced are all important questions that need to be answered before we can jump onto the ground and try to fix things. So yeah, anything else? Yeah, I think just an awareness at the end of the day of what neoliberalism is doing to us is so powerful here in terms of the way it's encouraging us all to think here in this framing around economics and stuff. I'm not stating this very well, but I think it's just such a powerful and pervasive. I did that if we start to unpack how we operate in that space, it can do a world of good for how we understand our own actions as well as those around us. That is a great way to end the episode here, but we'll be back to talk more about power and practice and how we have come to see it and realize it in the cities. So, thank you. Thank you, Grasha, looking forward to seeing where we're going to. Thank you, bud. [MUSIC]