Disposable Futures. Brad Evans
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can often be found adjacent to, if not surrounded by, zones of great misery inhabited by impoverished immigrants, poor minorities, the homeless, young people living in debt, the long-term unemployed, workers, and the declining middle class, all of whom have been delivered by market forces into criminalized communities of violence, harassment, surveillance, and everyday humiliations and brutality.
Earlier promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom, and political affirmation have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential, and subordinated to a predatory market and a hyper-privatized society. Dispossession and disinvestment have invalidated social enrichment and have turned “progress” into a curse for the marginalized and a blessing for the privileged who constitute the smallest financial minority—the wealthy few. Modernity has thus reneged on its undertaking to fulfill the social contract, however disingenuous or limited, especially with regard to young people. Measuring everything through the metrics of private profit, the ideological and affective spaces of neoliberalism work hard to substitute individual gain for any concern for the public good. The savagery of neoliberalism is also on display in its attempts to fiscally snuff out institutions meant to help families find pathways out of the miseries of impoverishment, undernourishment, underemployment, criminalization, and lack of adequate housing. The social contract and the relations it once embodied are now replaced with unchecked power relations. Long-term social, educational, and ecological planning and the institutional structures that support it are now weakened, if not eliminated, by the urgencies of privatization, deregulation, and the extraction of short-term profits. Social bonds have given way under the collapse of social protections and are further subverted by the neoliberal insistence that there are only “individual solutions to socially produced problems.”16 One consequence is that neoliberalism has launched what Robert O. Self calls an assault on “the basic architecture of our collective responsibility to ensure that [we all] share in a decent life.”17 It is also an aggressive counter-force constantly antagonizing the formative cultures and modes of individual and collective agency that engender a connection between the democratic polis and the sustenance of economic, social, and political community.18
Neoliberalism’s industries of disposability relentlessly enforce unchecked notions of the private that both dissolve social bonds and deter conditions of agency from the civilian landscape of responsibility and ethical considerations. Absorbed into privatized orbits of consumption, commodification, and display, inhabitants of neoliberal societies are entertained by the toxic pleasures of spectacles of violence which cannot be divorced from the parasitic presence of the corporate state, the concentration of power and money in the upper 1 percent of the population, the ongoing militarization of all aspects of society, and the relentless, aggressive depoliticization of the citizenry. In its current historical conjuncture, the nation-state is a nodal point of intersection—something that appears akin to a green zoning of the world, protecting and servicing a handful of billionaires.
The Silent Order of Battle
Governments have often openly extended the narrative of war both to provide a sense of urgency and to appeal to a sense of moral certainty when dealing with political problems.19 The very act of securitization itself begins as an imperative to act toward the alleviation of unnecessary suffering. While we have become all too familiar with the age-old discourses of war as applied to a range of issues including drugs, poverty, crime, and terror—the former two in particular being integral to the broadening and deepening of the security agenda in “human” terms—in practice, the focus on unnecessary suffering has all too easily shifted the blame onto the shoulders of the global poor. Indeed, while the expanded and seemingly ubiquitous language of warfare has created conditions that have long since dispensed with familiar orthodox demarcations such as friend and enemy, inside and outside, civilian space and battle space, along with times of peace and times of war, the discourse has become beholden to existing power relationships instead of eliciting critical engagement with complex social issues. The language of warfare as such, when internalized, turns emancipation into colonization, as it remains at the service of those who seek to condemn political differences, instead of those in whose name it is marshalled. What therefore appear to be benevolent wars on behalf of the disadvantaged all too easily turn into wars against the disadvantaged, as power inverts its own systemic failures and invests in carceral industries that profit from policing and criminalizing those it abandons. The United States, in particular, has not only made war one of society’s highest ideals, but has reconstituted almost all public spheres as private zones that legitimate violence and militarization as the ultimate arbiter of social relations and problems. Education in disposable communities now often involves as many police as teachers, for schools that once served as pathways to a better life now act as pipelines to prison. In communities of color such as Ferguson, Missouri, the landscape of everyday life is criminalized as local police forces are deployed to civilian protests with military-grade weapons used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. More and more, everyday behaviors are targeted and criminalized, some as trivial as violating a dress code or panhandling in the streets.20
Neoliberal governance has been transformed into an instrument of social war and internal colonization. Violence and fear have become the motivational forces of societies successfully indoctrinated by notions of privatization, which sell competitive private interest at the expense of all else, beginning with such public interest values as community, cooperation, compassion, fairness, honesty, and care for others. It has become increasingly difficult in such self-regarding societies to trust anyone else, let alone raise critical ideas in the public realm.21 In the United States, for example, massive inequality resulting from an unprecedented concentration of wealth, power, and money in the hands of the 1 percent has resulted in a culture of cruelty, a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, as well as “the massive intrusion of criminality into political processes [and] a style of politics which by itself is criminal.”22 As public values and social bonds are gutted, there is a retreat from both social responsibility and politics itself. Politics is eviscerated when it supports a market-driven view of society that turns its back on the idea, as expressed by Hannah Arendt, that “Humanity is never acquired in solitude.”23 That is, neoliberal societies have come undone in terms of the social contract, and in doing so have turned their support away from the public sphere that by definition provides conditions for democracy: free speech, social autonomy, cultural freedom, and political equality. This violence against the social not only hastens the death of the radical imagination, but also mimics a notion of the banality of evil made famous by Arendt who argued that at the root of widespread subjugation was a kind of thoughtlessness, an inability to think, and a type of outrageous ignorance in one’s actions and thought processes in which “there’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing.”24
Under neoliberalism, those considered redundant are now consigned to a veritable wasteland, deprived of the most basic social provisions, and ridiculed by those ruling elites who are responsible at a systemic level for their hardships and suffering. One only has to watch a brief segment of Fox News to experience the ways in which impoverished communities are continually blamed and criminalized for their plight. At the same time, the crisis of ethics, economics, and politics has been matched by a crisis of ideas, as the conditions for critical agency dissolve into the limited pleasures of instant gratification wrought through the use of technologies and consuming practices that deter, if not obliterate, the very possibility of thinking differently. This is immanence of the worst kind, for it abides by the private logics of neoliberal rule. What is particularly distinctive about this historical conjuncture is the way in which a vast number of citizens, especially young people of color in low-income communties, are increasingly denied any place in an already weakened social order and the degree to which supporting young people is no longer seen as central to how the society defines its future and intellectual capital.25
For instance, close to half of all Americans live on or beneath the poverty line, and “more than a million public school students are homeless in the United States; 57 percent of all children are in homes considered to be either low-income or impoverished, and half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years old.”26 At the same time, the 400 richest Americans