Disposable Futures. Brad Evans

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 “have as much wealth as 154 million Americans combined, that’s 50 percent of the entire 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 СКАЧАТЬ