Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire by Wendy Brown

Author:Wendy Brown [Brown, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-01-09T22:00:00+00:00

TOLERANCE AS DEPOLITICIZATION AND THE DEPOLITICIZATION OF TOLERANCE

The Museum of Tolerance not only promulgates a politics that it dissimulates through the rubric of tolerance, it also promulgates a discourse of depoliticization that is itself a means by which the politics of tolerance—the operations of tolerance as a discourse of normativity and power—are dissimulated. Thus the process is self-reinforcing: tolerance as a moral discourse both works to shroud the specific political investments and positions of the MOT and produces a more generic depoliticization of conflicts and of scenes of inequality and domination.

As chapter 1 argued, there are several strands to the depoliticizing effects achieved by tolerance discourse. First, political conflicts rendered as matters of intolerance reframe inequality or domination as personal prejudice or enmity. The depoliticization occurs both through personalizing a politically produced problem and through attributing cause to attitude. Power disappears as individuals are treated as the agents of the conflict and attitude is treated as its source. The prejudiced individual becomes the cause of and the tolerant one becomes the solution to a variety of social, economic, and political ills.

Second, in this reduction of political conflicts to individuals with attitude, conflict itself is ontologized. History and power analytically vanish as constitutive of the attributes and positioning of those subjects considered to be in need of tolerance. So also do the political and economic orders and the discourses of religion, culture, sex, and gender that generate subordination and marginalization of certain subjects, or that generate antagonism between subjected groups. Thus, for example, the complex social, economic, and political forces securing and reproducing Jim Crow do not appear in the MOT presentation of segregation and the civil rights movement. Rather, segregation appears as attitudinal bigotry backed by law, which is then opposed by a movement of attitudinal equality seeking to become law.

Third, this disappearance of power and history obscures not only the sources of conflict, violence, or subordination but also their subject-making capacity. Tolerance, as the term is used today and circulates in the MOT, casts social differences as natural and humans as naturally responding to difference with diffidence and prejudice. Without a historical, political, and political-economic analysis of how specific identities are produced, and how they become sites of domination and privilege, difference itself appears to engender intolerance, a formulation that also makes difference into something generic. This outcome helps to explain how the MOT can move so promiscuously across fields of identity—gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, culture—and across fields of conflict—Bosnia, homophobic violence, the Los Angeles riots, domestic violence, Rwanda, Ethiopia. An interlocked series of generalizations—difference as the cause of prejudice, prejudice as the cause of injustice, and tolerance as attenuating the dangers of prejudice—permits the gathering of an extraordinary range of phenomena into the same explanatory rubric and the same justice project, as well as the exile of serious political and historical analysis. The explanations are thin to the point of uselessness and the justice project is more of a moral cry than a coherent political program or undertaking.

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