Disposable Futures. Brad Evans
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country, [while] the top economic 1 percent of the U.S. population now has more wealth than 90 percent of the population combined.” 27 Within this system, the civic institutions that advance public interest ethics capable of countering such violence and suffering disappear, while targeted communities lose their privacy, dignity, bodies, housing, and material goods. The fear of losing everything, the horror of an engulfing and crippling precarity, the quest to merely survive, and the promise of violence and catastrophe (individual and collective) are increasingly becoming a “normal” way of life for the majority. As such, the response modeled by those in power toward people’s suffering is anything but one of compassion; contempt, cruelty, surveillance, and incarceration have replaced community, social responsibility, and political courage. Karen Garcia captures well the underlying logic of disposability and its darker roots. She writes:
It’s bad enough in the most drastic epoch of wealth disparity in American history that most people are suffering economically. What makes this particular era so heinous is that the hungry, the homeless, the unemployed, and the underemployed are being kicked when they’re already down. They are being ground into human mulch for dumping in a vast neoliberal landfill. People are not only poor, their poverty and suffering have literally been deemed crimes by the elite class of sociopaths running the place.28
Nowhere is the severity of the consequences of this new era under neoliberalism more apparent than in the disposability of younger populations. In fact, this is the first generation, as Bauman argues, in which the “plight of the outcast may stretch to embrace a whole generation.”29 He rightly argues that today’s youth have been “cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.”30 Youth no longer occupy a privileged place of possibility that was offered to previous generations. Instead of symbolizing vibrant potential, many youth now represent and internalize a loss of faith in better times to come, echoing the catastrophic narratives in the dominant culture that paint the future as indeterminate, bleak, and insecure. Yet diminished prospects pale next to the normalization of market-driven government policies that have wiped out pensions, eliminated quality health care, raised college tuition, and produced a harsh world of joblessness, while giving billions to banks and the military. Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes and a miasma of onerous debt.31
What has changed for an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society’s disinvestment in the future of youth and the prospect of permanent downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by their predecessors. Youth have become a marker for a mode of disposability in which their fate is defined largely through the registers of a society that readily discards resources, goods, and people. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes, surveillance, and stillborn projects.32 The present generation has been born into a society dominated by casino capitalism in which players take a gamble on the unstable market economy with stakes that, for many, translate into life or death. Young people and their futures are viewed increasingly as a suitable wager to be risked and, if necessary, to be disposed of, especially if they do not generate value as workers, consumers, and commodities. In such conditions, young people who speak out about their troubling circumstances are dismissed as either naturally anxious as if by biological design or a source of trouble should they have the temerity to challenge orthodox reasoning. Instead of being viewed as “at risk,” they are perceived as posing a risk to society and are subject to a range of punitive policies.
The structures of neoliberalism do more than disinvest in young people and commodify them; they also transform the protected space of childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty. This is especially true for those young people further marginalized by race and class, who now inhabit a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged either as flawed consumers or as outsiders transgressing the acceptable boundaries of what it means to be a citizen. With no adequate role to play as consumers or citizens, many youth are now forced to inhabit “zones of social abandonment” extending from schools on the margins of financial existence to bulging detention centers to prisons.33 These are zones where the needs of young people are generally ignored, and where many, especially poor minority youth, often find their appearance alone is sufficient to warrant criminalization. For example, with the hollowing out of the social state, the circuits of state repression, surveillance, and disposability increasingly “link the fate of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, poor whites, and Asian Americans” to a youth-crime complex, which now serves as the default solution to major social problems.34 Impoverished communities and low-income youth are thus viewed as out of step, place, and time; they are defined largely as “pathologies feeding on the body politic” and exiled to spheres of “terminal exclusion.”35
We live in a historical moment in which everything that matters politically, ethically, and culturally is being erased—either ignored, turned into a commodity, or simply falsified. As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of brutality and atomization. Within the neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance, accompanied by a systematic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. A generalized anxiety now shapes neoliberal societies—one that thrives on insecurity, dread of punishment, and a perception of constant lurking threats.
Such hysteria not only is politically debilitating but also feeds the growing militarization of society, culture, and everyday life. This trend is evident in the paramilitarizing of the police, who increasingly use high-tech scanners, surveillance cameras, and toxic chemicals on those who engage in peaceful protest against the warfare and corporate state. The war on terror has evolved into a war on democracy as local police are now being militarized with the latest combat-grade equipment imported straight from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of places like Ferguson, Missouri, and numerous other cities. In the United States, military technologies once used exclusively on the battlefield are now being supplied to police departments across the nation. Drones, machine-gun-equipped armored trucks, SWAT vehicles, and tanks now find themselves in the hands of local police and campus security forces, turning them into the normalized symbols of everyday violence that now plague the neoliberal state. Arming domestic police forces, with paramilitary weaponry ensures their systematic use even in the absence of a terrorist attack; moreover, such weapons will produce more aggressive modes of policing, if not violence, against young people, communities of color, and immigrant families. Criminalization and violence now proceed with a colonial vengeance on the part of the power elite, followed by the stigmatizing and humiliation of those considered disposable, beyond the pale of compassion, justice, and ethical concern.36
A state of permanent war requires modes of public pedagogy to form obedient subjects who abide by its values, ideology, and narratives of greed and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through a market-driven culture that advocates for consumerism, militarism, and organized violence, circulated through various registers of popular culture extending from high fashion and Hollywood movies to the creation of violent video games sponsored by the Pentagon. The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, complicit intellectuals obedient to established relations of power and its version of history, and a passive republic of consumers. It also needs compliant subjects who through relentless marketing are cultured both to find pleasure in the spectacle of violence and to divorce its occurrence from political questions raised by personal ethics and social conscience.
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