Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans

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      Introduction

      Henry A. Giroux

      WHAT BRAD EVANS CALLS “The Atrocity Exhibition” no longer hides in the shadows of power and ideological deception. Authoritarianism and the expanding architecture of violence is on the rise not only in countries such as Poland, Hungary, India, and Turkey but also in the United States — a country that, however erratic, has prided itself on its longstanding dream and embrace of democratic rights. Democratic institutions, principles, and passions are under siege not only by the vicious forces of neoliberal capitalism but also by a war culture shaped by resurgent fascism. Unbridled capitalism — with its totalizing belief in market values as a governing template for all social life — inflicts mass misery and unimaginable suffering on its populace as it shifts massive amounts of wealth and resources to the financial elite. At the same time, those in power criminalize an increasing number of social problems — turning, for instance, the war on poverty into a war on the poor, using violence as a tool to address social challenges such as homelessness, school truancy, financial debt, drug addiction, and mental health issues. Atrocity Exhibition underscores that politics in the age of neoliberal fascism has become an extension of war; the latter is the template for shaping all relations while state and non-state violence become the medium for enforcing such dynamics.

      As its welfare function is eviscerated, the state takes on a greater role in using punishment as an organizing tool to shape all aspects of the social order. Democratic practices are now replaced by genuine horrors as the dreams of a better future turn into ever-present nightmares. The endless production of inequality, poverty, and state violence, accompanied by a growing culture of fear, precarity, and cruelty, have unleashed the mobilizing furies of fascism at a social level. Paroxysms of unchecked rage displace criticism of the genuine horrors of capitalism. Neoliberalism increasingly fuels a right-wing populism that willingly indulges the symbols, language, and logic that echoes fascist history.

      As Evans makes clear throughout this book, human beings are now transformed into capital and thus subject to the dictates of privatization, deregulation, commodification, the celebration of self-interests, and a notion of freedom divorced from any sense of social bonds or moral responsibility. All relations are subject to market values and all transactions are wedded to the logic of exchange value and capital accumulation. Such a neoliberal order reduces one’s fate solely to a privatized matter of individual responsibility. In return, this reduction is further diminished to questions of character, individual choice, and a faux notion of resilience. Missing from this discourse is any whiff of injustice or reference to larger structural and systemic forms of oppression. Politics now dissolves into pathology.

      Older narratives tied to the social contract and welfare state are replaced by the new narratives of racial and social cleansing, which exhibit a disdain for democratic notions of solidarity, community, compassion, and empathy. Out of this disgust, if not hatred, for the basic institutions and principles of democracy, a new white nationalist narrative of disposability emerges that embraces symbolic and visceral violence aimed at those considered tainted by blood, soil, religion, race, and ethnicity. Evans understands this attack on democracy, but he also reveals the possibility of a critical and democratic community: he wants to show how the imperatives of power, war, and violence command the visions of society and produce a radically individualized, competitive, and militant subject and what it means to challenge and transform this dystopian imaginary.

      Neoliberal fascism produces a new kind of devastation, particularly in the United States. It is marked by escalating poverty and misery among large sections of the public: relentless violence; an epidemic of social isolation; the opioid crisis; mass shootings; the growing presence of the police in all public spheres; and a culture of fear that strengthens the security state. These atrocities move between two modalities: spectacle and brutality. An aesthetics of depravity and an endless display of captivating spectacles turn hyper-violence into a form of sport, maximizing the pleasure of violence by giving it a fascist edge, while the real and visceral brutalities of unimaginable violence continue — everything from the mass murder of over 2,600 people after the Twin Towers terrorist strike to the murderous attacks on the 43 college students in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, to the endless killing of the innocent women and children as portrayed in the work of Mexican artist Chantal Meza and Gottfried Helnwein.

      Violence no longer shocks; it feeds the news cycles and becomes fodder for Hollywood blockbusters all the while numbing a wider public to the conditions that make its existence and trivialization possible. Atrocities have become routine, normalized in the United States — landscapes of horror on exhibit for a social order that elevates violence to its СКАЧАТЬ