Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans
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fascism in the United States and the rise of illiberal democracies abroad. It demands, as Evans writes, that we “rethink historical memory, the meaning of the intolerable, the state sponsored violence,” and the horror of what he calls “disposable futures.”
Evans calls for a comprehensive interrogation of war and violence that is at once historical, relational, systemic, and dialectical, akin to what C. Wright Mills once referred to as the sociological imagination. Consider this book as an invitation to read against the culture of war and violence — a forum for witnessing the unsettling and unspeakable — as a critical engagement with a culture of visceral and symbolic violence. He offers a politics of ethical necessity to confront the anti-democratic forces that threaten the meaning and substance of democracy, politics, and any viable and just future.
At the center of Evans’s work is a meticulous and encompassing attempt to interrogate the historical and multifaceted conditions that create a distinctive and crudely brazen politics. This is dystopian politics marked by a level of self-deceit, moral irresponsibility, and political corruption. At a time when radical and democratic horizons are closing and public spheres are disappearing, Evans highlights how real and symbolic violence turns the language and policies of those in power into weapons of hate and their victims into objects of disposability, social abandonment, and terminal exclusion. The call for walls, militarized borders, increased policing, and mass surveillance makes everyone a suspect and normalizes the culture of terror. The language of blood, purity, and belonging is now fused with expanding machineries of state repression and an attack on dissent. Terror and violence have become the DNA of everyday existence. As Evans observes, “Such violence feels its way into existence. Trusting nobody, fearing everything. That is the real meaning of terror. There is an intimate reality to its appearance.” (Chapter 23, “Painting a State of Terror”)
Unlike many theorists, Evans interrogates violence not only through the overt forces of the state’s repressive apparatuses such as the police, military, and armed thugs, but also through the ideological apparatuses that create the visions and values that fuel right-wing populism and the ideological underpinnings of the financial state. Symbolic and pedagogical repression are crucial for forging neoliberal fascist narratives and a culture of violence. Evans highlights how language is transformed into an endless discourse of dehumanization and scapegoating, broadcast by a massive state-aligned propaganda machine. Evans is particularly insightful in examining how liberals use the language of peace and human rights to legitimate a war culture and new forms of authoritarianism.
Evans makes clear how the retreat from democracy is a betrayal and abandonment of the principles of equality, justice, and freedom. It is precisely this sense of abandonment and betrayal of the vulnerable and the working class in the United States that creates a vacuum for mobilizing the most violent energies of neoliberalism all while promoting the rise of right-wing populist movements.
The emergence of neoliberal fascism and diverse forms of illiberal democracy around the globe points to a terrifying horizon of political repression and violence. Under such circumstances, it has become all the more difficult to theorize a politics that matters, to recover a language that has real meaning, and to develop pedagogical practices that speak to concrete needs and conditions. Atrocity Exhibition is a clarion call to fight against the diverse registers of violence that enable emerging authoritarian regimes and to create a space for individual and collective resistance. Evans employs the language of theory, art, ethnography, and history in order to create a political tapestry; in so doing he elucidates how finance capital, militarism, state violence, and repressive ideological apparatuses work in tandem to shape repressive policies and inflict mass suffering at the level of everyday life.
Evans engages in dialogue with a number of other theorists in this book in a language that not only highlights a range of social problems but also engages in a discourse that is both rigorous and accessible. Evans and his collaborators show how education, language, and art can create radical ways of thinking about critique, dissent, resistance, and the future. Atrocity Exhibition works to create a new language and mode of intervention at a time when violence encourages a culture of forgetting rather than a culture that embraces civic learning and courage. Atrocity Exhibition recognizes that politics bears both the burden and responsibility of changing the collective consciousness so that people might understand and engage the forces that shape their everyday existence. Politics, for Evans, needs a language that allows us to remember the past, enables us not to look away, and confronts a new sense of responsibility in the face of the unspeakable. In sum, this is a call for a new language that encourages people to recognize themselves as agents rather than victims.
As I read these pages, I was reminded of Martin Luther King Jr. who believed in the “fierce urgency of now” and that “in this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.” At the core of Evans’s work is a politics of solidarity and humanity and a strong belief that one cannot escape matters of moral and social responsibility if we are to be bound to each other by something more than the narrow orbits of self-interest and crass consumerism. Evans rejects the collapse of agency into destiny. Like Tony Judt, Zygmunt Bauman, Stuart Hall, James Baldwin, and Edward Said, he believes that intellectuals have, in troubled times, a distinct responsibility to analyze power works and to construct a world that is more just and democratic. For Evans, ethics and responsibility must be placed at the center of agency, politics, and everyday existence, in the belief that current regimes of tyranny can be resisted and that human beings can be moved to imagine possible alternative futures. With these new beliefs, we will make radical change happen.
Author’s Note
Brad Evans
Monday, 23 July 2018
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN struck by the political importance of the literary imagination. Not only does literature allow for a more intimate and compelling insight into the wonder and fragility of the human condition, it also provides critical commentary about those elements of human existence the so-called “social sciences” fail to capture. What is more, it is in the literary field that the spatial and temporal markers of human existence collide in full appreciation of their complex and often blurred lines of articulation. Just as we cannot understand the problem of violence without discussing life’s poetic elements — creativity, passion, and love — so it is impossible to think about the political without journeying back, like some privileged witness already armed with the plot to the final scene, into the dramas of the past, or willfully projecting ourselves into the future anterior in all its hopeful and catastrophic permutations. The person, the political subject that comes to believe in this world, has never been simply determined by reasoning and rationality. Each subject both literally and figuratively navigates the world, endlessly reconceptualizing its modes of being while thinking and feeling its way through the bittersweet vortexes of cohabitation.
This book borrows its title from J. G. Ballard’s classic The Atrocity Exhibition, which offers such an apt description of contemporary life saturated by the onslaught of various media spectacles. Ballard understood better than many “political scientists” the importance of embodied critical thought, and his commentaries on the interplay between the social, the technological, and the all-too-human desire to break open what is inside the body provide us with some of the most sophisticated critiques of violence to date. But what might the title mean today, nearly 50 years after it appeared on the cover of this most wounding and unsettling of texts? Well, simply switch on your “smart” phone (which actively inserts what it means to be “intelligent” into the design of the user’s grasp and simultaneously evacuates the need away for the user’s won intelligence) and open any major news application. As you scroll through the constantly changing and replenishing news updates on the digital feed — a fragmentary world that has seemingly lost any sense of plot — from the comfort of wherever you are, so the contingent and indiscriminate “atrocities” appear, one by one, disaster upon disaster, vertically hierarchized on your screen by selected news-worthiness, yet horizontally flattened in respect to any meaningful contextualization. What is actually the exhibit on such an app? Events of human suffering are being broadcast, exhibited for our full viewing (dis)pleasure. But the gallery has also been logically inverted. We have become the exhibits, walking around in a motionless and seemingly impotent gaze, while the image