Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean (born April 9, 1962) is a political philosopher and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.^[1] She has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.^[2]

Biography

Dean received her B.A. in History of Princeton University in 1984. She received her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University in 1992. Before joining the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has held visiting research appointments at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, as well as McGill University in Montreal and Cardiff University in Wales.

Work

Drawing from Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, she has made contributions to contemporary political theory, media theory, and feminist theory, most notably with her theory of communicative capitalism; the online merging of democracy and capitalism into a single neoliberal formation that subverts the democratic impulses of the masses by valuing emotional expression over logical discourse.^[3] She has spoken and lectured in the United States, Canada, Ecuador, Peru, England, Wales, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. She is the co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.^[4]

The Communist Horizon

In the first two provocative chapters of her 2012 book The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean surveys the contemporary political landscape and notes the persistence of anti-communist rhetoric more than twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.^[5] Capitalists, conservatives, liberals, democrats, social democrats, and even “radical democrats” all embrace the idea that 20th century experiments with communism were an unqualified failure, and in doing so, limit the ability to discuss political alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets (a fusion of democracy and capitalism that Dean calls “neoliberalism”).^[6] Dean asserts that when people think of capitalism, they do not think only of its worst excesses (war, imperialism, slavery, robber barons, the Great Depression, the global financial crisis, etc.). The history of capitalism is allowed to be dynamic and nuanced. By contrast, if one utters the word “communism,” there is no dynamism or nuance. A single story emerges, which links the word “communism” with a fixed and simplistic historical narrative.^[7]

Dean argues that “communism” equals the Soviet Union. Communist experiments in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin American are never mentioned. Second, Dean asserts that the entire seventy-year history of the USSR is collapsed into the twenty-six years of Joseph Stalin’s rule. Third, Stalin’s violence – the purges, the great famines, the labor camps – are the only events allowed to represent the ideal of “communism,” ignoring the modernization of the economy, the successes of Soviet science (including the space program) or the general increase in the standard of living for the once predominantly peasant society. Fourth, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets, follows directly from the totalitarian nature of Stalinism and its political and economic rigidity. Thus, the singular experience of Stalinism in the Soviet Union becomes the basis upon which all discussions of alternatives to neoliberalism are silenced. Stalinism serves as the “proof” that communism can never work in practice, because any challenge to the political status quo will inevitably end with purges and the gulag.^[8]

Criticism

Reviewing Dean’s The Communist Horizon in Dissent, an American magazine of the “democratic left” associated with the philosopher Michael Walzer, Jeffery C. Isaac called Dean’s book a “polemic” set on “reviving communism.”^[9] Isaac faults the book for lacking a clear political analysis of contemporary events such as Occupy Wall Street and claims that Dean has ignored the best traditions of 20th century Marxism: “Dean’s communism is fundamentalist. It engages a small, convinced group of intellectuals who take solace in an unadulterated Leninism and largely ignore the best traditions of twentieth-century Marxism—which recognized the pluralistic character of the social formations and political identities, the complexity of the state, and especially the ethical and political importance of democracy.”^[10]

Writing in the International Socialist Review, Shaun Harkin also questions Dean’s unwillingness to engage with the real problems posed by Stalinism for the radical left. The book, he argues, offers “no analysis of the failings and crimes of Stalinism, all committed in the name of Marxism and communism; and no analysis of why, therefore, many who looked toward a radical alternative turned away from communism as it was commonly perceived.”^[11] Harkin concludes that Dean's "contribution to ‘rethink communism today, to critique and learn from the past in order to instantiate something better this time,’ is...deeply marred by her failure to adopt a left or Marxist critique of Stalinism.”^[12]

Books

• Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics (University of California Press 1996)^[13]
• Feminism and the New Democracy: Resisting the Political (editor, Sage 1997)^[14]
• Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Cornell University Press 1998)^[15]
• Political Theory and Cultural Studies (editor, Cornell University Press 2000)
• Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell University Press 2002)^[16]
• Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (co-editor with Paul A. Passavant, Routledge 2004)
• Žižek's Politics (Routledge 2006)^[17]
• Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society (co-editor with Geert Lovink and Jon Anderson, Routledge 2006)
• Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke University Press 2009)^[18]
• Blog Theory (Polity 2010)^[19]
• The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012)^[20]
• Crowds and Party (Verso 2016)^[21]

References

Lectures by Jodi Dean

• Jodi Dean - The Communist Horizon. Public Lecture in Belgrade, June 2015 at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory and the Institut Français de Serbie in cooperation with the Center for Ethics, Law and Applied Philosophy (CELAP), Center for Advanced Studies in Southeastern Europe (CAS – SEE) and the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade (FMK).
• Jodi Dean - The Limits of the Web in an Age of Communicative Capitalism, Public Lecture in Dublin in 2013
• Jodi Dean: Communicative capitalism and the challenge for the left, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, January 2015
• Jodi Dean - 'Complexity as Capture: Neoliberalism and Communicative Capitalism' Public Lecture in 2013