Disposable Futures. Brad Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ indifferent while witnessing the perpetration of violence is taking a position, even if we neither intervene nor walk away. And yet, on occasions, the trauma can immobilize us. Silence in this context can often bespeak terror in the moment that one is faced with aggression. Such silence sometimes speaks louder than our words as language fails us. How many of us were utterly speechless and immobilized as we witnessed those planes fly into the Twin Towers that fateful autumn morning in 2001? How many suffer in silence, too afraid of the consequences to speak out against the injustices they and others face on a daily basis? And how many simply prefer to walk on by instead of confronting the realities of the slow structural violence we often encounter on our city streets? Such silences often reveal the real horror and difficulties of bearing witness and the complexities of our responses. As Berel Lang has noted with respect to horrors witnessed during the Holocaust of World War II, “silence arguably remains a criterion for all discourse, a constant if phantom presence that stipulates that whatever is written ought to be justifiable as more probative, more incisive, more revealing, than its absence or, more cruelly, its erasure.”⁸⁰ Primo Levi understood the ethical stakes better than anyone. As he once wrote on his experience of surviving the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz, “Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last—the power to refuse our consent.”⁸¹

      When dealing with the vexing ethical dimensions of what it means to witness aggression today, it is worth bearing in mind that there is no such thing as a “random act” of political violence. A defining characteristic of such violence is its public display—the spectacle of its occurrence that through its very performance makes a metaphysical claim such that the individual act relates to a broader historical narrative. Being a witness as such means that we need to understand more fully how the justification of violence is presented as a matter of rational choice and the broader historical narrative in which this reasoning must be situated. Violence is never unitary. There is always a process.

      The images produced from the victimization and the trauma it fosters resonate far beyond the initial acts perpetrated. The spectacle of violence is therefore more than a mere aftereffect of the original act of violation. Violence continues to occur in the imagination of the victims who have been removed from “the realm of moral subjects.”⁸² It haunts the victim, forcing conformity to its modes of suffocation and despair. What is more, the cycle continues through the imposition of uncontroversial claims that sanction violence as retribution. This unending process offers no way out of the dialectical tragedy. Indeed, as Fanon understood, the dialectic arrangement is absolutely integral to the normalization of the violence and perpetuates the (non)value of the lives that are all too easily forgotten as the detritus and excess of such violence. So how might we emancipate ourselves from the daily spectacles of violence we are forced to endure so that we don’t shamefully compromise with the oppressive forms of power?

      Theodor Adorno once infamously stated that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” While some have read this to mean that the poetics of art have nothing to offer in response to catastrophe, we maintain that a different interpretation of Adorno is required. Art must be examined, not destroyed or shunned, and its critical/ethical potential restored by those who refuse to limit art’s purpose to mere aesthetic pleasure or entertainment. Hence, while we are troubled somewhat by Adorno’s positions on the political potential of art, we argue that contained within his critique is the call to constructively produce a new radical imagination that could serve as a bridge to inform the ethical imagination and layers of suffering, a bridge that, contra Adorno, recognizes the role of affect and art in supporting the ethical intellect. Under such circumstances, art has the capacity to reveal the ethical grammar of suffering and create a multiplicity of ruptures that opens up new political spaces between our spectacularized present and a different future. In this regard, instead of condemning poetry or suggesting that all representations of violence are complicit in its banalization and the numbing of the human response, we wish to highlight more the ethical problem of representation providing a meaningful cultural critique of a political atrocity. In other words, how might we respond with ethical care and dignity once these exact principles are denied?

      As Adorno himself later qualified, unimaginable “suffering . . . also demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids.”⁸³ Indeed, as he further wrote: “When even genocide becomes cultural property in committed literature, it becomes easier to continue complying with the culture that gave rise to the murder.”⁸⁴ So it is not a question as to whether violent atrocities are unrepresentable or unspeakable. What is at stake is precisely how one responds, by rethinking the art of political engagement. Adorno’s call then, as we choose to hear it, is both to take seriously the ethical subject of violence, to bear witness to that which appears “intolerable,” not only to human suffering but also to the power of critique in transforming the modes of subjectivities that violence produces. This is as much a pedagogical as a political call for a new “imagination”—one that declares an open conflict with violence in all its forms, such that non-violence becomes a real and lived possibility. At stake here is a call to make visible those subjectivities that are both discarded and unrecognized while contesting those zones of abandonment that accelerate the domestic machinery of human disposability. Spectacles of violence thrive on the “accelerated death of the unwanted” and must be addressed through the educative nature of politics, a politics that makes subjectivity the material force of collective resistance and provides the disposable with a chance both to be heard and to transform their symbolic relation to the world into action.⁸⁵ It might seem impossible for us today to break away from the daily spectacles of violence that serve to reinforce the catastrophic political imaginary of our times. Such a sense of impossibility makes the task all the more urgent and necessary.

      TWO

      THE POLITICS OF DISPOSABILITY

       On Human Disposal

      Contemporary neoliberal societies are increasingly defined by their waste. Their productive outputs are complemented by what Zygmunt Bauman identifies as “waste management” for a social order that has been cultured to obey the planned obsolescence of everything, including people and communities. In a social fabric disordered by market-driven imperatives in which politics is beholden to money and removed from any sense of civic and ethical considerations, there is a strong tendency to view the vast majority of society as dead weight, disposable just like anything that gets hauled off and dumped in a landfill.¹ These others removed from ethical calculations and the grammar of suffering are rendered both obsolete and overwhelmed by machineries of social death, to the point where they become unknowable. Bauman’s work is significant here, for not only does he show how the categories of waste are integral to the logics of modernist systems, but in doing so he also asks us to consider the human stakes. As he writes, we live in “liquid” times characterized by a “civilization of excess, redundancy, waste, and waste disposal.”² Rather than seeing waste as politically useless, Bauman affirms that the production of wasted lives shores up the productivity of the whole system, as the very idea of progress requires the setting aside of those who don’t or are unable to perform in a way that would appear meaningful. Criminalization, for example, performs a vital task by providing scapegoats for the various types of race-and class-based insecurities; such scapegoats offer an “easy target for unloading anxieties prompted by the widespread fears of social redundancy.”³ These “others” are integral to fear-based societies and the carceral industries of violence and punishment that profit immensely from their management.

      Bauman’s work continually forces us to consider how the production of “wasted lives” at a systemic level is entirely fitting in the logics of modern societies as they retain their order-making and progressive orientations. Modernity, in fact, is yet another СКАЧАТЬ