Disposable Futures. Brad Evans
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imagining a better future is limited entirely to imagining the privatization of the entire world or, even worse, imagining simply how to survive.
It is within this historical conjuncture and the current savagery of various regimes of neoliberal capitalism that we conceived of the need to develop a critical paradigm that interrogates and resists the intensification of the politics of disposability—the ways in which people, families, and communities are not only increasingly considered excess to be discarded, but also alienated from the millions of similarly oppressed others so as to prevent them from developing the solidarity necessary to successfully challenge the wider political dynamics and circumstances at play against them.28 Such a politics, we argue, normalizes disposability in such a way as to place the burden of social ills on the shoulders of the victims.
Dystopian politics has become mainstream politics as the practice of disposability has intensified, and more and more communities are now considered excess, consigned to “zones of social abandonment,”29 surveillance, and incarceration. The expansive politics of disposability can be seen in the rising numbers of homeless, the growing army of debt-ridden students whose prospects remain bleak, those lacking basic necessities amid widening income disparities, the surveillance of immigrants, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the widespread destruction of the middle class by new forms of debt servitude.30 Citizens, as Gilles Deleuze foresaw,31 are now reduced to data, consumers, and commodities and as such inhabit identities in which they increasingly become unknowables, with no human or civic rights and with no one accountable for their condition.
There is, however, more at stake here than the contemporary plight of those millions forced to live in intolerable conditions. What we will argue throughout this book is that contemporary forms of disposability are so abhorrent precisely because they now shape disposable futures. The future now appears to us as a terrain of endemic catastrophe and disorder from which there is no clear escape except to continue to show allegiance to those predatory formations that put us there in the first place. Devoid of any alternative image of the world, we are requested merely to see the world as predestined and catastrophically fated. Frederic Jameson’s claim, then, that it is easier to “imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism”32 is more than a reflection on the poverty of contemporary imaginations. It is revealing of the nihilism of our times which forces us to accept that the only world conceivable is the one we are currently forced to endure. A world that is brutally reproduced and forces us all to consume its spectacles of violence, and demands we accept that all things are ultimately built to be vulnerable. In this suffocating climate, we are indoctrinated to imagine that the best we can hope for is to be connected to some fragile and precarious life-support system—the neoliberal grid of credit, precarious insurance, and privilege—that may be withdrawn from us at any moment.
Political affirmation is increasingly dissolved into pervasive nihilism as our politics is increasingly reduced to the quest for mere survival. For if there is a clear lesson, as New Yorkers now testify better than most, to living in these times, it is precisely that the lights can go out at any given moment, without any lasting concern for social responsibility. This is simply the natural order of things (so we are told), and we need to adapt our thinking accordingly.
Little wonder that we have seen a revival in these times of all sorts of monstrous fictions. As Jane and Lewis Gordon explain, “Monsters of disaster are special kinds of divine warning. They are harbingers of things we do not want to face, of catastrophes, and we fear they will bring such events upon us by coming to us.”33 Only a decade or so ago, citizens feared the wrath of robots, terminators, and cyborgs who wanted to destroy us—the legacy of a highly rationalized, technocratic culture that eludes human regulation, even comprehension. Now, those who are not part of a technocratic elite appear helpless and adrift, caught in the grip of a society that denies them any alternative sense of agency or hope. This raises some important questions on the advent of monstrosity, not least the fascination in popular culture today with the figure of the zombie, which has its own distinct politics.
The zombie genre can be traced to earlier critiques of capitalism, with the undead in particular appearing at a time when the shopping mall started to become a defining symbol of modernity. Zombies here would become the embodiment of a political form, one that had lost all sense of the past and had no future to speak of. The only performance it knew was the desire for violence, as it was suspended in a state of purgatory that offered no means of escape. To become a zombie was to be devoid of any political, ethical, and social claim or responsibility (including the capacity to show compassion and love) other than the eventual completion of the nihilistic project.34
The marketing of this metaphorical figure in today’s popular culture is most revealing. It speaks to both the nihilistic conditions in which we live, along with the deadly violence of neoliberal regimes of power and the modes of political subjectivity it seeks to authenticate/destroy. It also speaks to a future in which survival fully colonizes the meaning of life, a future that both anticipates and consents to the possibility of extinction. As Keir Milburn and David Harvie have noted:
Neoliberalism no longer “makes sense,” but its logic keeps stumbling on, without conscious direction, like a zombie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. Such is the “unlife” of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. It can only act habitually as it pursues a monomaniacal hunger. Unless there is a dramatic recomposition of society, we face the prospect of decades of drift as the crises we face—economic, social, environmental—remain unresolved. But where will that recomposition come from when we are living in the world of zombie-liberalism?35
One of the most remarkable recent examples of this genre that offers a truly potent exposition of contemporary nihilism is Marc Forster’s World War Z. While the source of the outbreak remains somewhat elusive in the movie, from the outset Forster situates the problem in connection with contemporary concerns of the biosphere and the all too real mutation of viruses capable of destroying a world with little care or responsibility for its social habitat. The movie further amplifies the relevance of this genre for exposing the futility of nation-states, as societies quickly learn that the media are the only message, while emphasizing the biopolitical (life-centric) dimensions to power wherein it is widely accepted today that anybody and anything can become the source of contamination. The movie portrays a world in which nobody is safe and no location might provide sanctuary. Indeed, while the burning of Manhattan offers a provocative screening of potential devastation brought about by widespread human abandonment, it is the zombies’ breach of the walls of Jerusalem that will no doubt unsettle many (for obvious reasons).
However, instead of following the conventional deconstruction of the zombie here as revealing of the death of subjectivities brought about by commodification, on this occasion there is more to be gained by analyzing the survivors. World War Z does not allow the viewer to be under any illusions given its message that the best that can be imagined is pure survival. Indeed, the only way to survive is by engaging in a form of self-harm by using a lethal microbe as a form of “camouflage” so that the health of the body no longer registers, hence the body is no longer a target for the undead. It is further revealing that the eventual fate of the survivors is in no way certain, as the final scenes tell that this is merely the start of a perpetual state of violence that allows for some strategic gains, but remains ultimately a state infested with the decay of a political and social order that might never recover its humanness. The movie as such is perhaps less meditation on the already dead than contemplation of the fate of those who are hoping to survive the ubiquitous war. For they are also denied the possibility of another world, forced to partake instead in a world of personal risk and deadly infection that continually puts into question their destiny as political subjects who are able to transform the world for the better. This is political nihilism taken to the nth degree: the most violent of conditions that renders the will to nothingness the start and ending for all collective actions and viable notions of human togetherness.
Such a vision of the world, mass marketed as entertainment, is actually far more disturbing than the dystopian fables of the twentieth century. Our condition denies us the possibility of better times to come as the imagined and the real collapse in such a way that we are condemned to