Disposable Futures. Brad Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ humans,” or what he terms elsewhere “collateral damage,”⁴ which designates both the intentional and arbitrary logic of inequality and exclusion of human societies. Indeed, for Bauman, order-building functions largely to designate those lives that simply don’t belong to the privileged social order as a result of their perceived identities and attributes; moreover, the incessant drive to progress justifies a form of societal assay that allows for the casting aside of people who are registered as such on account of their own failure to have resources worth extracting. As in all other sectors of neoliberal control, public and environmental concerns are perpetually compromised and deferred by the fiscal imperatives of private gain. Significantly, for Bauman, it is the continued production of wasted lives that defines all modern projects regardless of their ideological emblem. In a world where ideas of technological progress continue to provide the benchmark for determining human progress, the task of targeting entire communities for disposal has itself become not only an easier job than ever, but also an increasingly privatized industry alongside so much else in neoliberal societies. Angela Y. Davis and many others have a term for it: the prison-industrial complex.

      Some dispute Bauman’s work for being overly deterministic in terms of the logics of modernity, while also being troubled by the labeling of human subjects as waste.⁵ Such claims regarding the over-determining nature of power are, however, often cited by those who remain uncomfortable with its interrogation in ways that allow us to focus on the real perniciousness of its effects—especially the forms of depoliticization and violence supported by a range of frameworks from the cosmopolitan to the more ideologically fundamentalist. Our reading of Bauman, as of Foucault before him, understands that a critique of power is a theoretical and political necessity, since it is committed to exposing and challenging the normalization of subjugation in all its forms. Confronting this bleak and often disavowed reality unsettles the normalized conditions of our lives in such a way that we can begin to grasp the operations of power evident in the increasing use of violence by the state as it divests from social welfare in favor of corporate welfare and embraces its role as an increasingly oppressive state funded by, beholden to, and in the service of a small financial elite.

      In terms of Bauman’s critics, while some might be uncomfortable with discussing people in terms of “waste,” nowhere in Bauman’s work does he suggest that people, families, communities belong on the scrapheaps of history. His deployment of the term “wasted lives” is a both a provocative intervention and a precise meditation on the scripting of human life by exploitative regimes of contemporary power. It is also a rallying cry both to expand the notion of critique and to recognize the urgency of rethinking politics beyond a neoliberal framework.

      We do nevertheless depart from Bauman’s analysis in two ways. First, despite Bauman’s attentive detail to systems of oppression and the production of subjectivities that have no meaningful place within the order of societies, we are somewhat troubled by the discourse of “waste” insofar as it can be read as the arbitrary outcome of all modern societies. Neoliberalism is never arbitrary in its logic or complex design. It is a political project whose predatory formations take over all life systems, even if to cast aside, contain, or render them a continual source of suspicion and endangerment. Indeed, implied within the discourse of waste is a further arbitrary theory of subjectivity wherein the collateral casualties of the neoliberal wasteland might be deemed simply wasted potential. Our concern then is that the possibility for seeing the production of wasted lives in arbitrary terms might be complicit in absolving regimes of power of intentionality. We prefer instead a discourse of disposability. It centers our attention more on the verb to dispose, thereby moving us beyond the unavoidable production of excess waste to take into account the activity (who and what is being disposed of), the experience (the subjective stakes), and the state of relations (the machinery of disposability) that permit particular forms of wastefulness. In this regard, disposability conveys the violence of human expulsions as it concentrates on the active production of wastefulness, thereby requiring us to take seriously the truly predatory political and economic nature of neoliberalism. Similarly, we recognize the pedagogical nature of neoliberal wastefulness in that it suggests not only the power to dispose economically and politically of those considered excess but also to create those affective and ideological spaces in which the logic of control rooted in economic and governing institutions, is rooted as well in the construction of subjectivity itself.

      Second, while we remain admirers of Bauman’s critique of modernity and the ways in which claims to progress have led to the evisceration of the human, our contention is that neoliberalism today has openly abandoned this claim as it increasingly pitches a dystopian vision of the future. Again, we might point to the doctrine of resilience here, which not only forces us to partake in a world that is presented as fundamentally insecure, but denies us the possibility of even conceiving that there is a world beyond unending catastrophe. Even the most stalwart neoliberal economist now asks that we accept a more austere and tempered imaginary, relegating the dream of unending growth and unlimited human potential to a bygone era. Indeed, if wars and local crises overseas continue to be used as an opportunity for intervention and imposing neoliberal regimes of political rule, back home the neoliberal appropriation of disaster and general insecurities has profoundly shifted the logic of capital such that regression (as crudely presented to be the underside of modernity by political economists since its inception) is the dominant maxim for political rule. Hence, if questions of “sustainability” once emerged in the zones of impoverishment as a way to temper local claims for empowerment, contemporary neoliberalism thrives upon the fact that we are all “going South”! It demands socialism (in terms of state investment as per bailouts and protection as per ongoing militarization of the poor for the rich), while promoting austerity and tempered visions of growth for the rest of us. From terror to weather and everything in between, capital exploitation has industrialized the potential for catastrophe and the profitability of disaster management.⁶ Under neoliberal regimes, the discourse of critique and catastrophe decreasingly gives rise to collective resistance and struggle but increasingly fosters obedience and despair, as neoliberal’s death-march is naturalized and frozen as a moment in history that cannot be changed, only endured.

       The Machinery of Disposability

      Under the regime of neoliberalism, especially in the United States, war has become an extension of politics as almost all spheres of society have been transformed into a combat zone or in some cases a killing zone. One only has to look at Ferguson, Missouri, or the killing of Eric Garner in New York City to see the extent to which this is being played out in communities throughout the United States. When civilians in Ferguson and New York City spontaneously organized to denounce a white policeman’s killing of an unarmed black youth and a defenseless black man, the immediate response was to militarize both areas with combat-style hardware and forces, including snipers. Americans now find themselves living in a society that is constantly under siege as narratives of endangerment and potential threats translate into conditions of intensified civic violation in which almost everyone is spied on and subjected to modes of state and corporate control whose power knows few limits. War as a “state of exception” has become normalized.⁷ Moreover, society as a whole becomes increasingly militarized; political concessions to public interest groups become relics of long abandoned claims to democracy; and the welfare state is hollowed out to serve the interests of global markets. Any collective sense of ethical imagination and social responsibility toward those who are vulnerable or in need of care is now viewed as a scourge or pathology. Within this mindset, interventions that might benefit the disadvantaged are perversely deemed to be irresponsible acts that prevent individuals from learning to deal with their own suffering—even though, as we know, the forces that condition their plight remain beyond their control, let alone their ability to influence them to any degree.

      What has intensified in this new historical conjuncture is the practice of disposability in which more and more individuals and groups are now considered dispensable, consigned to zones of abandonment, containment, surveillance, and incarceration. Moreover, the political maneuvers that target groups as disposable and enact their widespread disappearance cannot be divorced from the evisceration of the public commons more broadly. The collapse СКАЧАТЬ