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ONE

CULTURES OF CRUELTY

Critique of Violence

Imagine a world where spectacles of violence have become so ubiquitous that it is no longer possible to identify any clear civic, social, or ethical qualities in the enforced social order. Imagine a world where those who live on the margins of such a social order are condemned for their plight, while those who control the political processes prosper from those very policies that bring about social abandonment and human destruction. Imagine a world where the technological promise of human connectivity is supplanted by forms of surveillance that encourage citizens to actively participate in their own inescapable oppression. Imagine a world that proclaims an end to the brutality of colonialism, all the while continuing to consciously vilify, target, incarcerate, and kill those of a different color. Imagine a world where the forces of militarism have become so ingrained that they are inseparable from the daily functioning of civic life. Imagine a world where the institutions tasked with producing the most brilliant and publicly engaged minds are put to the service of an uncompromising war machine. And imagine a world that has lost all faith in its ability to envisage—let alone create—better futures, condemning its citizens instead to a desolate terrain of inevitable catastrophe. The great tragedy of the current historical moment is that we can imagine this world all too easily, for it is the picture of the world that dominates the realities of our present condition. It is a world most people experience on a daily basis—a world that has become normalized and for which there is no immediate alternative—a world we understand as neoliberalism.

Neoliberal power is unmediated in its effects on people as it operates throughout the global space of unregulated flows. Whereas in an earlier industrial period capital was largely rooted and peoples migrated, for the most part today capital flows while peoples are contained. What becomes of sovereignty in this economically driven environment is a military and policing protectorate put to the service of global capital in ways that work by condemning the already condemned. At the same time, neoliberal ideology, policies, and modes of governing are normalized as if there is no outside or alternative to capitalism. As corporate power replaces political sovereignty, politics becomes an extension of war and all public spaces are transformed into battle zones. Not only are all vestiges of the social contract, the safety net, and institutions of democracy under siege, but so too are all public spheres that support non-market values such as trust, critical dialogue, and solidarity. How else to explain Heartland Institute President Joseph Best denouncing public schools as “socialist regimes.” Paul Buchheit is right in arguing that “privatizers believe that any form of working together as a community is anti-American. To them, individual achievement is all that matters. They’re now applying their winner-take-all profit motive to our children.” They are also punishing those individuals, groups, and institutions that refuse the individualized and cut throat values of a market-driven casino capitalism.

At the same time, under the interlocking regimes of neoliberal power, violence appears so arbitrary and thoughtless that it lacks the need for any justification, let alone claims to justice and accountability. It is truly as limitless as it appears banal. All that matters instead is to re-create the very conditions to further and deepen the crises of neoliberal rule. Violence, with its ever-present economy of uncertainty, fear, and terror, is no longer merely a side effect of police brutality, war, or criminal behavior; it has become fundamental to neoliberalism as a particularly savage facet of capitalism. And in doing so it has turned out to be central to legitimating those social relations in which the political and pedagogical are redefined in order to undercut possibilities for authentic democracy. Under such circumstances, the social becomes retrograde, emptied of any democratic values, and organized around a culture of shared anxieties rather than shared responsibilities. The contemporary world, then—the world of neoliberalism—creates the most monstrous of illusions, one that functions by hiding things in plain sight. We see this most troublingly played out as its simulated spectacles of destruction are scripted in such a way as to support the narrative that violence itself is enjoying a veritable decline as a result of liberal influence and pacification. Howard Zinn understood this perversion better than most:

I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the supposition that we don’t have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside down.¹

There is no greater task today than to develop a critique of violence adequate to our deeply unjust, inequitable, and violent times. Only then might we grasp the magnitude and depths of suffering endured on a daily basis by many of the world’s citizens. Only then might we move beyond the conceit of a neoliberal project, which has normalized violence such that its worst manifestations become part of our cultural “pastimes.” And only then might we reignite a radical imagination that is capable of diagnosing the violence of the present in such a manner that we have the confidence to rethink the meaning of global citizenship in the twenty-first century.

Following on from the enduring legacy and inspiration of Zinn and other cautionary voices of political concern such as Paulo Freire, our critique begins from the supposition that mass violence today must be understood by comprehending the ways in which systemic cruelty is transformed into questions of individual pathology. What is more, with the burden of guilt placed on the shoulders of the already condemned, those whose lives are rendered disposable, we must question more rigorously the imaginaries of violence, which instigate a forced partaking in a system that encourages the subjugated to embrace their oppression as though it were their liberation. Nowhere is this more apparent today than in the doctrine of “resilience” which, as critiqued elsewhere, forces us to accept our vulnerabilities without providing us with the tools for genuine transformation of those systematic processes that render us insecure in the first place.² Neoliberalism’s culture of violence is reinforced by what Zsuza Ferge calls the “individualization of the social,”³ in which all traces of the broader structural forces producing a range of social problems such as widening inequality and mass poverty disappear. Under the regime of neoliberalism, individual responsibility becomes the only politics that matters and serves to blame those who are susceptible to larger systemic forces. Even though such problems are not of their own making, neoliberalism’s discourse insists that the fate of the vulnerable is a product of personal issues ranging from weak character to bad choices or simply moral deficiencies. This makes it easier for its advocates to argue that “poverty is a deserved condition.”⁴

Systematic violence has never been “exceptional” in the history of capitalistic development. How might we explain David Harvey’s apt description of capitalist expansion as “accumulation by dispossession,”⁵ if the rise of capitalism did not signal the advent of a truly predatory social formation? Indeed, even the contemporary advocates of neoliberal markets recognize that their notion of a “just world” depends on coercion and violence as a way to enforce capitalism’s uneven distribution of wealth and impoverishment. As the Oxford economic historian Avner Offer explained to Chris Hedges, “those who suffer deserve to suffer.”⁶ The neoliberal model is, after all, “a warrant for inflicting pain.”⁷ The regime of neoliberalism is precisely organized for the production of violence. Such violence is more than symbolic. Instead of waging a war on poverty it wages a war on the poor—and does so removed from any concern for social costs or ethical violations. Such a brutal diagnosis argues in favor of a neoliberal model despite its perverse outcomes: “It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society that elevates freedom to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one of the very largest penal systems in the world relative to its population. It also inflicts violence all over the world. It tolerates a great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes large numbers of people.”⁸ Its effects in the United States are evident in the incarceration of more than 2.3 million people, mostly people of color. Not only are 77 percent of all inmates people of color, but, as Michelle Alexander has pointed out, as of 2012 “more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.”⁹ The necropolitics of neoliberal policies is evident in the unnecessary deaths of up to 17,000 more Americans each year because partisan ideologues opted out of the expansion of the Medicare program offered by the Obama administration.¹⁰ Across the globe, violence creeps into almost all of the commanding institutions of public life, extending from public schools to health care apparatuses. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano knew the impacts of neoliberalism’s theater of cruelty better than most: “Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others—the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.”¹¹

Zygmunt Bauman has taken this further by showing us how the most appalling acts of mass slaughter have been perfectly in keeping with the modern compulsion to destroy lives for more progressive times to come.¹² Acts of non-violence, in fact, are the exceptional moments of our more recent history. They also confirm Hannah Arendt’s insistence that power and violence are qualitatively different.¹³ There is no doubt something truly powerful, truly exceptional, to the examples set by Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, and indigenous movements such as the Zapatistas of Mexico, whose choice of non-violence as an insurgent strategy reveals more fully the violence of oppressive contemporary regimes. Violence easily deals with violence on its own terms. Carlos Marighella was wrong to suggest otherwise.¹⁴ What violence, however, cannot deal with, except by issuing more violence, remains the power of a dignified response and movements of collective resistance by those who refuse to get caught up in a cycle of cruelty that corrupts every good intention. Frantz Fanon was most clear in this respect.¹⁵ Who are the “wretched,” after all, if not those who fail to see that their recourse to violence only produces a mirror image of that which was once deemed intolerable?

Our history—the history of our present—is a history of violence. Beneath the surface of every semblance of peace, it is possible to identify all too easily the scars of sacrifice and the bloodshed of victims whose only error was often to be born in a cruel age. There are many ways in which we could try to make sense of this burden of sacrificial history. Why do so many continue to die for the sake of the living? Why do we continue to protect inhuman conditions through the endless wars fought in the name of humanity? Why is killing so often presented as necessary? How is it that the police in the United States can kill blacks at a rate twenty-one times higher than whites and not only act with impunity but respond to protests by the larger public almost exclusively with massive militarized responses, as if the use of violence is the only legitimate form of mediation to any problem that emerges in the larger society? While all these questions are important, it is precisely the spectacle that most perturbs us here. For it is through the spectacle of violence that we begin to uncover the abilities to strip life of any political, ethical, and human claim. Violence seeks to curate who and what is human even though the physical body might still be in existence. When violence becomes normalized and decentered, the disposability of entire populations becomes integral to the functioning, the profiteering, and the entrenchment of the prevailing rationalities of the dominant culture. Such violence, in other words, offers the most potent diagnosis of any political project by revealing what is deemed culturally acceptable and socially normalized.

There is an important point to stress here regarding the logics of brutality. Violence is easily condemned when it appears exceptional. This also unfortunately precludes more searching and uncomfortable questions. Normalized violence, by contrast, represents a more formidable challenge, requiring a more sophisticated and learned response. Exposing more fully how these normalized cultures of cruelty shape the historic moment is the main purpose of this work, as it is integral to the critical imagination and those forms of political agency necessary for successfully living in a nonviolent and civilian future.

Our motivation for writing this book is driven by a commitment to the value of critical pedagogy in countering mechanisms of dehumanization and domination at play in neoliberal societies and beyond. We have no time whatsoever for those who reason that violence may be studied in an “objective” or “rational” way. There are no neutral pedagogies indifferent to matters of politics, power, and ideology. Pedagogy is, in part, always about both struggle and vision—struggles over identities, modes of agency, values, desires, and visions of the possible. Not only does the apologetics of neutrality lead to the most remiss intellectualism when the personal experience of violence is reduced to emotionless inquiry, but it also announces complicity in the rationalizations of violence that depend upon the degradation of those qualities that constitute what is essential to the human condition. Thus, education is by definition a form of political intervention. It is always disentangling itself from particular regimes of power that attempt to authenticate and disqualify certain ways of perceiving and thinking about the world. The larger issue is that not only is education central to politics, but the educative nature of politics begins with the assumption that how people think, critically engage the world, and are self-reflective about the shaping of their own experiences and relations to others marks the beginning of a viable and oppositional politics.

We dare to perceive and think differently from both neo-liberal rule and the increasingly stagnant and redundant left, which does little to counter it. The world that we inhabit is systematically oppressive and tolerates the most banal and ritualistic forms of violence. It educates us of the need for warfare; it prizes, above all, the values of militarism and its conceptual apparatus of “civic soldierology.” It sanctions and openly celebrates killings as if they are necessary to prove our civilization’s credentials. It takes pride, if not pleasure, in punishing peoples of distinct racial and class profiles, all in the name of better securing society. It promotes those within that order with characteristics that in other situations would be both criminalized and deemed pathological.¹⁶ And it invests significantly in all manner of cultural productions so that we develop a taste for violence, and even learn to appreciate aesthetics of violence, as the normal and necessary price of being entertained.

This book inevitably draws upon a number of critical visionaries whose fight for dignity cannot be divorced from their intellectual concerns. The spirit of the late Paulo Freire in particular is impressed upon each of these pages.¹⁷ His critical pedagogy was unashamedly tasked with liberating both the oppressed and their oppressors from the self-perpetuating dynamics of subjugation. Freire’s prose echoed the humanizing call for a more just, literate, and tolerant world. He remains a strong influence in the field of education and in other areas of practice that require thinking about the possibility of an ethics of difference that resists violence in all its forms.

The power and forcefulness of Freire’s works are to be found in the tensions, conflicts, poetry, and politics that make it a project for thinking about (non)violence meaningfully. Siding with the disempowered of history—those at the raw ends of tyranny—Freire’s work calls for a more poetic image of thought that is a way of reclaiming power by reimagining the space and practice of cultural and political resistance. His work thus represents a textual borderland where poetry slips into liberation politics, and solidarity becomes a song for the present begun in the past while waiting to be heard in the future. Freire, no less trenchant in his critique of illegitimate rule, refuses to dwell in hopelessness. His resistance is empowering because it is infused with a fearless belief in people’s abilities and finds reasons to rejoice in the transformative possibilities of living:

The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.¹⁸

Freire is not only our source of inspiration. Nearly a century ago Walter Benjamin responded to the tyranny of his times by writing his famous “Critique of Violence.”¹⁹ Ours is a different age. And yet the need for a critique adequate to our times is as pressing as ever. We are not lacking in knowledge of our own oppression. Let’s be sure of that. Oppressive power reveals enough of its violent traces for even a casual cartographer to expose its deceptions or else retreat into conspiracy. What we do lack is a rigorous critique of the historical moment and its varied modes of imaginative resistance. Such modes of artistic imagination are as important as contemporary sources of oppression are in mediating suffering in the service of established contemporary power. This requires a critique of violence that once again encourages us to think beyond its necessity, so as to make clear that in a world in which violence is normalized, it once again becomes possible to imagine the unimaginable, particularly the notion that collective resistance not only is possible but can transform the world with confidence.

Hence, while authors like Steven Pinker cloud our perception by claiming the current era is the least violent era in human history, relying upon crude per capita human death rates etc.,²⁰ it takes only a slightly different angle of vision to see the current social order’s full range of preventable violence: impoverishment, financial predation, malnutrition, mass incarceration, and rapidly accelerating deforestation, ecological degradation, and irreversible biocide. Pinker would do well to acknowledge that political violence is poorly understood if it simply refers to a failure of liberal modernity. Political violence cannot be reduced to such a crude and reductionist metric. Indeed, conventional demarcations between times of war and times of peace, zones of security and zones of crises, friends and enemies, have long since evaporated. We live in complex and radically interconnected societies, whose social morphology has radically altered our sense of the world such that we are taught to accept insecurity as the natural order of things.²¹ This is fully in keeping with the proliferation of media output, factual and fictional, that bombards us continuously with images of violence and catastrophe for subtle political gain. Indeed, what is new about the current historical conjuncture is not only a commodified popular culture that trades in extreme violence, greed, and narcissism as a source of entertainment, but the emergence of a predatory society in which the suffering and death of others becomes a reason to rejoice rather than mourn. Extreme violence has become not only a commodified spectacle, but one of the few popular resources available through which people can bump up their pleasure quotient.

Our critique begins from the realization that violence has become ubiquitous, “settling like some all-enveloping excremental mist . . . that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now.”²² We cannot escape its spectre. Its presence is everywhere. It is hardwired into the fabric of our digital DNA. Capitalism in fact has always thrived on its consumption. There is, after all, no profit in peace. We are not calling here for the censoring of all representations of violence as if we could retreat into some sheltered protectorate. That would be foolish and intellectually dangerous. Our claim is both that the violence we are exposed to is heavily mediated, and that as such we are witness to various spectacles that serve a distinct political function, especially as they either work to demonize political resistance or simply extract from its occurrence (fictional and actual) any sense of political context and critical insight. Moving beyond the spectacle by making visible the reality of violence in all of its modes is both necessary and politically important. What we need then is an ethical approach to the problem of violence such that its occurrence is intolerable to witness.

Exposing violence is not the same as being exposed to it, though the former too often comes as a result of the latter. The corrupting and punishing forms taken by violence today must be addressed by all people as both the most important element of power and the most vital of forces shaping social relationships under the predatory formation of neoliberalism. Violence is both symbolic and material in its effects and its assaults on all social relations, whereas the mediation of violence coupled with its aesthetic regimes of suffering is a form of violence that takes as its object both memory and thought. It purges the historical record, denying access to the history of a more dignified present, purposefully destroying the ability to connect forms of struggle across the ages. Memory as such is fundamental to any ethics of responsibility. Our critique of violence begins, then, as an ethical imperative. It demands a rigorous questioning of the normalized culture of violence in which we are now immersed. It looks to the past so that we may understand the violence of our present. It looks to the ways that ideas about the future shape the present such that we learn to accept a world that is deemed to be violent by design. This requires a proper critical reading of the way violence is mediated in our contemporary moment; how skewed power relations and propagators of violence are absolved of any wider blame in a pedagogical and political game that permits only winners and losers; how any act of injustice is made permissible in a world that enshrines systemic cruelty.

The Dystopian Imagination

The twentieth century is often termed the “Century of Violence.” And rightly so, given the widespread devastation of an entire continent during the two World Wars; the continued plunder and suppression of former colonial enclaves; the rebirth of extermination camps in the progressive heart of a modern Europe; the appalling experiments in human barbarism that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the torture and symbolic acts of disappearance so widespread in Latin America; the passivity in the face of ongoing acts of genocide; the wars and violence carried out in the name of some deceitful humanitarian principle. This legacy of violence makes it difficult to assess this history without developing profound suspicions about the nature of the human condition and its capacity for evil. One of the particular novelties of this period was the emergence of dystopia literatures and compelling works of art that proved integral to the lasting critique of totalitarian regimes. Indeed, some of the most appealing prose of the times was put forward not by recognized political theorists or radical philosophers, but by the likes of Yevgeny Zamyatin, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley, amongst others, who managed to reveal with incisive flair and public appeal the violence so often hidden beneath the utopian promise of technologically driven progress.²³ Dystopia in these discourses embodied a warning and a hope that humankind would address and reverse the dark authoritarian practices that descended on the twentieth century like a thick, choking fog.

Hannah Arendt understood how the authoritarian violence of the twentieth century needed a broader frame of reference.²⁴ The harrowing experimental camps of the colonies would all too quickly blow back into the metropolitan homelands as gulags, death camps, and torture chambers become exportable elements in the production of theaters of cruelty. The utopian promise of the Enlightenment thus contained within it the violence and brutalities embedded in the logic of instrumental rationality and the unchecked appeal to progress and ideological purity, all of which was later rehearsed within the most terrifying fictions and rewritten with the same devastating effect for those expendable millions that made up a veritable continent of suffering we could rightly map as the globally dispossessed.

We live, however, in a different political moment. The state is no longer the center of politics. Neoliberalism has made a bonfire of the sovereign principles embodied in the social contract. Nor can we simply diagnose twenty-first-century forms of oppression and exploitation by relying on well-rehearsed orthodoxies of our recent past. With power and its modalities of violence having entered into the global space of flows—detached from the controlling political interests of the nation-state utilizing technologies far beyond those imagined in the most exaggerating of twentieth-century fictions—the dystopian theorists of yesteryear prove to be of limited use.²⁵ The virtues of political affirmation and confidence appear increasingly to have fallen prey to formations of global capitalism and its engulfing webs of precarity that have reduced human life to the task of merely being able to survive. Individual and collective agencies are not only under siege to a degree unparalleled at any other time in history, but have become depoliticized, overcome by a culture of anxiety, in-security, commodification, and privatization.

More specifically, under neoliberal rule the vast majority are forced to live a barely sustainable precariousness and to accept that our contemporary society is naturally precarious. That the future is a terrain of endemic and unavoidable catastrophe is taken as given in most policy circles. Dystopia, in other words, is no longer the realm of scientific fiction—as suggested, for instance, by increasingly urgent recent climate reports warning that the integrity of the planet’s diversity-sustaining biosphere is collapsing. It is the dominant imaginary for neoliberal governance and its narcissistic reasoning.

If Theodor Adorno was right to argue that the apocalypse already occurred with the realization of the Holocaust and the experience of World War II, what has taken its place is a discourse signaling the normalization of a catastrophic imagination that offers few means for possible escape.²⁶ Despite their relation to “end of times narratives,” as Jacob Taubes once noted,²⁷ there is perhaps something different at work here between the pre-modern apocalyptic movements and the shift toward catastrophic reasoning that has come to define the contemporary moment. For all their nihilism and monotheistic servitude, at least the apocalyptic movements actively imagine a better world than the one they are in. Theirs was and is open to the idea of a different time-to-come. Under neoliberalism, imagining a better future is limited entirely to imagining the privatization of the entire world or, even worse, imagining simply how to survive.

It is within this historical conjuncture and the current savagery of various regimes of neoliberal capitalism that we conceived of the need to develop a critical paradigm that interrogates and resists the intensification of the politics of disposability—the ways in which people, families, and communities are not only increasingly considered excess to be discarded, but also alienated from the millions of similarly oppressed others so as to prevent them from developing the solidarity necessary to successfully challenge the wider political dynamics and circumstances at play against them.²⁸ Such a politics, we argue, normalizes disposability in such a way as to place the burden of social ills on the shoulders of the victims.

Dystopian politics has become mainstream politics as the practice of disposability has intensified, and more and more communities are now considered excess, consigned to “zones of social abandonment,”²⁹ surveillance, and incarceration. The expansive politics of disposability can be seen in the rising numbers of homeless, the growing army of debt-ridden students whose prospects remain bleak, those lacking basic necessities amid widening income disparities, the surveillance of immigrants, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the widespread destruction of the middle class by new forms of debt servitude.³⁰ Citizens, as Gilles Deleuze foresaw,³¹ are now reduced to data, consumers, and commodities and as such inhabit identities in which they increasingly become unknowables, with no human or civic rights and with no one accountable for their condition.

There is, however, more at stake here than the contemporary plight of those millions forced to live in intolerable conditions. What we will argue throughout this book is that contemporary forms of disposability are so abhorrent precisely because they now shape disposable futures. The future now appears to us as a terrain of endemic catastrophe and disorder from which there is no clear escape except to continue to show allegiance to those predatory formations that put us there in the first place. Devoid of any alternative image of the world, we are requested merely to see the world as predestined and catastrophically fated. Frederic Jameson’s claim, then, that it is easier to “imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism”³² is more than a reflection on the poverty of contemporary imaginations. It is revealing of the nihilism of our times which forces us to accept that the only world conceivable is the one we are currently forced to endure. A world that is brutally reproduced and forces us all to consume its spectacles of violence, and demands we accept that all things are ultimately built to be vulnerable. In this suffocating climate, we are indoctrinated to imagine that the best we can hope for is to be connected to some fragile and precarious life-support system—the neoliberal grid of credit, precarious insurance, and privilege—that may be withdrawn from us at any moment.

Political affirmation is increasingly dissolved into pervasive nihilism as our politics is increasingly reduced to the quest for mere survival. For if there is a clear lesson, as New Yorkers now testify better than most, to living in these times, it is precisely that the lights can go out at any given moment, without any lasting concern for social responsibility. This is simply the natural order of things (so we are told), and we need to adapt our thinking accordingly.

Little wonder that we have seen a revival in these times of all sorts of monstrous fictions. As Jane and Lewis Gordon explain, “Monsters of disaster are special kinds of divine warning. They are harbingers of things we do not want to face, of catastrophes, and we fear they will bring such events upon us by coming to us.”³³ Only a decade or so ago, citizens feared the wrath of robots, terminators, and cyborgs who wanted to destroy us—the legacy of a highly rationalized, technocratic culture that eludes human regulation, even comprehension. Now, those who are not part of a technocratic elite appear helpless and adrift, caught in the grip of a society that denies them any alternative sense of agency or hope. This raises some important questions on the advent of monstrosity, not least the fascination in popular culture today with the figure of the zombie, which has its own distinct politics.

The zombie genre can be traced to earlier critiques of capitalism, with the undead in particular appearing at a time when the shopping mall started to become a defining symbol of modernity. Zombies here would become the embodiment of a political form, one that had lost all sense of the past and had no future to speak of. The only performance it knew was the desire for violence, as it was suspended in a state of purgatory that offered no means of escape. To become a zombie was to be devoid of any political, ethical, and social claim or responsibility (including the capacity to show compassion and love) other than the eventual completion of the nihilistic project.³⁴

The marketing of this metaphorical figure in today’s popular culture is most revealing. It speaks to both the nihilistic conditions in which we live, along with the deadly violence of neoliberal regimes of power and the modes of political subjectivity it seeks to authenticate/destroy. It also speaks to a future in which survival fully colonizes the meaning of life, a future that both anticipates and consents to the possibility of extinction. As Keir Milburn and David Harvie have noted:

Neoliberalism no longer “makes sense,” but its logic keeps stumbling on, without conscious direction, like a zombie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. Such is the “unlife” of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. It can only act habitually as it pursues a monomaniacal hunger. Unless there is a dramatic recomposition of society, we face the prospect of decades of drift as the crises we face—economic, social, environmental—remain unresolved. But where will that recomposition come from when we are living in the world of zombie-liberalism?³⁵

One of the most remarkable recent examples of this genre that offers a truly potent exposition of contemporary nihilism is Marc Forster’s World War Z. While the source of the outbreak remains somewhat elusive in the movie, from the outset Forster situates the problem in connection with contemporary concerns of the biosphere and the all too real mutation of viruses capable of destroying a world with little care or responsibility for its social habitat. The movie further amplifies the relevance of this genre for exposing the futility of nation-states, as societies quickly learn that the media are the only message, while emphasizing the biopolitical (life-centric) dimensions to power wherein it is widely accepted today that anybody and anything can become the source of contamination. The movie portrays a world in which nobody is safe and no location might provide sanctuary. Indeed, while the burning of Manhattan offers a provocative screening of potential devastation brought about by widespread human abandonment, it is the zombies’ breach of the walls of Jerusalem that will no doubt unsettle many (for obvious reasons).

However, instead of following the conventional deconstruction of the zombie here as revealing of the death of subjectivities brought about by commodification, on this occasion there is more to be gained by analyzing the survivors. World War Z does not allow the viewer to be under any illusions given its message that the best that can be imagined is pure survival. Indeed, the only way to survive is by engaging in a form of self-harm by using a lethal microbe as a form of “camouflage” so that the health of the body no longer registers, hence the body is no longer a target for the undead. It is further revealing that the eventual fate of the survivors is in no way certain, as the final scenes tell that this is merely the start of a perpetual state of violence that allows for some strategic gains, but remains ultimately a state infested with the decay of a political and social order that might never recover its humanness. The movie as such is perhaps less meditation on the already dead than contemplation of the fate of those who are hoping to survive the ubiquitous war. For they are also denied the possibility of another world, forced to partake instead in a world of personal risk and deadly infection that continually puts into question their destiny as political subjects who are able to transform the world for the better. This is political nihilism taken to the nth degree: the most violent of conditions that renders the will to nothingness the start and ending for all collective actions and viable notions of human togetherness.

Such a vision of the world, mass marketed as entertainment, is actually far more disturbing than the dystopian fables of the twentieth century. Our condition denies us the possibility of better times to come as the imagined and the real collapse in such a way that we are condemned to already be living amongst the ruins of the future. All we can seemingly imagine is a world filled with unavoidable catastrophes, the source of which, we are told, remains beyond our grasp, thereby denying us any possibility for genuine systemic transformation in the order of things. How do we explain the current fetish for the doctrine of resilience if not through the need to adapt to the inevitability of catastrophe, and to simply partake in a world that is deemed to be “insecure by design”?³⁶ Such adaptation both forces us to accept narratives of vulnerability as the authentic basis of political subjectivity, regardless of the oppressive conditions that produce vulnerable subjects, and neutralizes all meaningful qualitative differences in class, race, and gender.

The Seductions of Violence

Wilhelm Reich profoundly altered our understanding of oppression by drawing attention to its mass psychology.³⁷ Focusing on the nature of twentieth-century fascism, he explained how predatory political and economic formations promote the disposability of entire populations as they indoctrinate the disadvantaged to desire what is patently oppressive. Reich showed how micro-specific questions of agency were intimately bound to imaginaries of threat and survivability such that the masses end up willfully accepting a suffocating and depoliticizing embrace. Notions of endangerment thus operate here affectively by appealing to concerns of the everyday.³⁸ As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would explain, “Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under certain conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”³⁹ Hence, as Reich understood, it is misguided to simply blame a handful of individuals for the “abuse of power” and their privilege. Rather than recoil in horror or exempt ourselves from deeper reflection, we must ask more searching questions about the normalization of violence and how it relates to the prevailing rationalities of the times. And we must do so while reflecting upon on our own shameful compromises, acknowledging the ways we are all being openly recruited into everyday forms of passivity, inactivism, subjugation, intolerance, and a denial of our humanity. Violence under such conditions becomes central to understanding a politics of desire and the production of subjectivities in the interest of their own oppression, but also how that politics functions as part of a struggle over agency itself.

It is impossible to comprehend the mass psychology of violence in the contemporary period without recognizing the centrality of commercial media that underpins its seductive potency.⁴⁰ No longer peripheral to public life, constantly evolving, increasing mobile media technologies such as smart phones, tablets, and wearable devices have enacted a structural transformation of everyday life by fusing sophisticated networking technologies with a ubiquitous screen culture, while simultaneously expanding the range of cultural producers and recipients of information and images.⁴¹ The accelerating evolution of personal media technologies enables modes of spectatorship that seem to resist bundling users into a monolithic mass. Such technologies deploy unheard-of powers in the shaping of time, space, knowledge, values, identities, and social relations. They not only transform the relationships between the specificity of an event and its public display by making events accessible to a global audience, they also usher in an era of increasing awareness—the age of the spectacle—in which screen culture and visual politics create spectacular events just as much as they record them.⁴² Given that screen culture now dominates much of everyday life in privileged populations across the globe, the “audio-visual mode has become our primary way of coming in contact with the world and at the same time being detached (safe) from it.”⁴³

Individuals’ capacity to create and globally distribute imagery, first-person accounts, and live video streams, however, are continually transforming relationships between politics, spectacular violence, and possibilities for community resistance to oppression, as has been the case in Ferguson, Missouri.

While individual and community access to state, national, and global audiences does open new vistas for organizing resistance, the same technology is also used by authorities to increase surveillance, and for employers to keep employees working all the time. As Brian Massumi has argued, such technology all too often can increase social control and act as “a workstation in the mass production line of fear.”⁴⁴

While the association between mid-century fascism and aesthetics, and by implication its fetishistic spectacles, has been the subject of sustained critical analysis, the most promising work on the politics of the spectacle has been organized around its relationship with neoliberalism. Not, of course, to buy into the conceit here that fascism has been somehow defeated by neoliberal “conquerors,” or for that matter that neoliberalism is immune to fascistic ways of manipulating desires for political ends. Fascism remains as diverse as power. Indeed, as we shall explain, while philosophers and cultural critics have recognized in a prescient fashion the emergence of a new era of the spectacle under neoliberalism, and how such spectacles have wielded the potential to utterly transform the social order, what is particularly novel about the historical conjuncture in which we live is the ability to secure mass consent by shattering the familiar demarcations between inside/outside, friend/enemy, private/public, times of war/peace, that hallmark of ideological fascism in the twentieth century.

In our contemporary moment, we owe it to thinkers such as Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, François Debrix, and Douglas Kellner, among others, who have greatly extended our knowledge of how the spectacle has become a dominant mode of indoctrination that reinforces the foreclosure of civic agency once available to individuals and communities within capitalistic regimes of power. They have raised crucial questions about how the concepts and practices associated with the spectacle can lead to genuine civic advances and defiant acts of radical imagination, the very thought of which are increasingly considered with alarm by authorities who treat such non-market values as insurrectional, and see public displays of disobedience as gateways to crime and terrorism. That national anti-terrorism resources were marshalled to assist the surveillance and repression of the Occupy movement, leading to more than 7,000 arrests, is evidence of just how threatened the neoliberal order feels, and how drastically it reacts when sectors of society begins behaving off-message from the privatized grid of finance that dominates all aspects of society, culture, politics, and law.

Guy Debord’s pioneering work in The Society of the Spectacle⁴⁵ provides a number of important theoretical insights for critically understanding the transformation of the spectacle and its role today. According to Debord, the spectacle that has emerged represents a new form of social control that is quite different from, but contains the political traces of, earlier forms of spectacle that were instrumental to fascism. Debord views the spectacle as a product of the market and a new form of cultural politics. He argues that the spectacle represents a “new stage in the accumulation of capital [in which] more and more facets of human activity and elements of everyday life were being brought under the control of the market.”⁴⁶ The spectacle, in other words, is no longer put to use for the creation of a mythical unity of superior beings. It now operates for its own purpose—complete commercialization, commodification, and marketization. Indeed, in its willful manipulation of desires through the sophisticated deployment of mechanisms that prompt people to tolerate conditions that ordinarily would appear politically oppressive, the spectacle is in fact, a predatory strategy and politically fascistic. Such mechanisms resonate with Reich’s concerns about the ability to manipulate large sectors of society by inducing a form of mass psychosis of consent that manipulates reasoning and conscience and thus normalizes the most abhorrent form of subjugation and violence.

Under late capitalism, the spectacle has been reforged in the crucible of mass consumption and the mass media, producing new modes for power to advantage itself through the domination of everyday life. Although the spectacle is often viewed by the public as mere entertainment, disconnected from power and politics, Debord insists that “the spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence.”⁴⁷ For Debord, new technological developments in communications now establish the mode of information as a category as important for reproducing social life as labor had been for Marx. Moreover, for Debord, the society of the spectacle is not a discrete element of social existence; it has become a constituting activity that refigures the very nature of common sense and social relations.

According to Debord, the “whole of life [now] presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”⁴⁸ The educational force of the culture, whether it be “news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment” has been transformed into a spectacle, which “epitomizes the prevailing model of social life.”⁴⁹ Debord rightly recognizes that the dynamics of domination under late capitalism can no longer be explained exclusively within the primacy of the economic sphere and its exploitative mode and relations of production. Rejecting conventional Marxist notions of social reproduction, Debord follows the lead of Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and other neo-Marxist theorists arguing that domination is secured increasingly through “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,”⁵⁰ and that capitalism has successfully employed an image industry to transform commodities into appearances and history into staged events. Under such circumstances, the “society of the spectacle” “proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance.”⁵¹ The degree to which society permits visual mediation—screen culture—to become its primary mode of education, self-understanding, and socializing is the degree to which it opens the door for spectacle to dominate as a depoliticizing substitute for unmediated social formations, thinking, and creativity. Thus, according to Debord, “any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle’s essential character must expose it as a visible negation of life—and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.”

In Debord’s theory, media have become the quintessential tool of contemporary capitalism, and consumerism is its legitimating ideology. Or, to cite Debord’s famous quip, “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”⁵² What is crucial about Debord’s theory is that it connects the state’s investment in social reproduction to its commitment to, “and control of, the field of images—the alternative world conjured up by the new battery of ‘perpetual emotion machines’ of which TV was the dim pioneer and which now beckons the citizen every waking minute.”⁵³ Not only is the world of images a structural necessity for capitalism, it affirms the primacy of the pedagogical as a crucial element of the political. It enforces “the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity . . . to the deadly solicitation (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.”⁵⁴

By exposing how the spectacle colonizes everyday life, Debord shows how power operates through a merger of state and corporate forces that seek both to control the media through which society experiences itself and to completely depoliticize and redefine the agency of citizenry in terms of prefabricated choices of consumerism and the status of ownership. Under contemporary capitalism, state-sanctioned violence makes its mark through the prisons, courts, police surveillance, and other criminalizing forces; it also wages a form of symbolic warfare mediated by a regime of consumer-based images and staged events that narrow individual and social agency to the dictates of the marketplace, reducing the capacity for human aspirations and desires to needs embodied in the appearance of the commodity. In Debord’s terms, “the spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep.”⁵⁵

Contemporary culture has long become a society organized around a vast array of commodities, various image-making technologies used to promote them, and numerous sites from which to circulate them that leaves no spaces for contemplating that other worlds are possible. For Debord, our “society of the spectacle” is a form of soft violence that perpetually cultures the conformity, inactivism, and passivity necessary to repress critical engagement and resistance by relentlessly privatizing, marginalizing, or openly criminalizing educational and liberatory forces.

Debord’s notion of the spectacle makes a significant contribution in mapping a new form of social control associated with the accumulation of capital. He makes clear that the whole industry of leisure, consumption, entertainment, advertising, fantasy, and other pedagogical apparatuses of media culture has become a crucial element of life, and thus a primary condition of politics. Debord does not argue that commodities were the source of domination. As Eugene L. Arva points out, Debord insists that “the system of mediation by representation (the world of the spectacle, if you wish) has come to bear more relevance than commodities themselves.”⁵⁶ Participation in commodity culture and its symbolic networks, rather than simple ownership of commodities, has become an essential feature of social status and belonging. Debord thus furthers our understanding that domination has to be analyzed as part of a politics of consent in which all aspects of social life are increasingly shaped by the communication technologies under the control of corporate forces.

Although Debord has been accused of overestimating the all-encompassing power of the spectacle, media, and other control mechanisms of late capitalism (“a permanent opium war”),⁵⁷ he never harbors the often politically crippling pessimism of the Frankfurt School. His Society of the Spectacle “reads, rather, as a warning against the paralysis of the senses, the lethargy of the mind, and the political inertia with which a primarily visually determined, visually accessible, and most visually livable reality threatens” any viable notion of the autonomous subject.⁵⁸ He militates against the dystopian notion of the totally administered society and begins advancing forms of political rupture and cultural insurgency that connect individual and collective agency to historical critique and creative social transformation. For Debord, the struggle for collective freedom was impossible without self-emancipation.

Yet the enormous analytic challenge facing Debord reveals itself in precisely that which, in a globalizing post-9/11 world, his theory cannot sufficiently explain. As Lutz Koepnick points out, we now live in a culture “characterized by hybrid multimedia aggregates and diversified strategies of consumption.”⁵⁹ Within this new era, technology and media merge, resulting in a massive cultural reorganization involving the production, distribution, and consumption of information and images. Not only has the old model of a monolithic system of media control and cultural reproduction been undermined by Internet-driven media and technologies, but entirely new configurations of communication relations have emerged and continue to evolve. Although dependent on corporate infrastructure and software and wide open to state surveillance and tracking, the production and dissemination of content have become radically more accessible to massive non-market sectors of society—the public—with enormous consequences on business, law enforcement, politics, education, and culture.⁶⁰ At the same time, Internet-driven media are shaping new types of individual agency and social formations that are actively co-evolving with the unprecedented speed, immediacy, and global reach of increasingly accessible personal communication technology.

Past assumptions about time and space being homogeneous and fixed are no longer applicable. Digital networks have stretched and compressed the relationships among time, space, and place. Technology is constantly accelerating the speed with which we can publish information, disseminate images, and communicate with large networks of people around the planet. Just as new forms of social media and cultural representation make possible highly individualized modes of symbolic expression, the undiversified masses have given way to a diverse globalized public far removed from the homogeneous community of viewers and producers that was characteristic of the older broadcasting age of media.

Of course, we are not suggesting here that new media and technological developments have ushered in structural changes amounting to a more democratic society. This perspective is as inaccurate as it is overly romantic, especially in light of the way in which the Internet and social media are exploited for government surveillance and corporate data collection and marketing. At the same time, any analysis of the reconfiguration of public culture by neoliberal forces must take into account the unprecedented effects of evolving media technologies—including the speed, distances, rhythms of information and communication, real-time images, and differential modes of control associated with consumption. Stuart Hall understood this better than most:

Neoliberalism’s victory has depended on the boldness and ambition of global capital, on its confidence that it can now govern not just the economy but the whole of social life. On the back of a revamped liberal political and economic theory, its champions have constructed a vision and a new common sense that have permeated society. Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. They have thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state, with painful consequences for socially vulnerable groups such as women, old people, the young and ethnic minorities.⁶¹

Mark Poster suggests that as communication technologies today surpass the first media era in which “a small number of producers” in control of “film, radio, and television sent information to a larger number of consumers, an entirely new configuration of communication relations has emerged.”⁶² The second age of media, which Poster argues has developed in the last few decades, not only generates new modes of appropriation and production, but also radicalizes the conditions for creating critical forms of social agency and resistance. This has resulted in calls for more democratic and ethical use of knowledge, information, and images. New modes of communication, organizing, disruption, and resistance based on wireless technologies are on full display in the spontaneous emergence of social movements like Occupy, the global impact of whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, the advance of citizens holding corporate and government powers more accountable through online reporting, and the sudden street protests that can unexpectedly erupt when a smart phone video circulates documenting state violence against civilians, as is increasingly the case of police brutality and killings of unarmed civilians in communities of color.⁶³

As Stanley Aronowitz points out: “The excluded can use image-making as a weapon for laying hold and grasping cultural apparatuses . . . Placing old forms in new frameworks changes their significance.”⁶⁴ In analyzing the opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, for example, James Castonguay underscores the subversive potential of these new modes of agency. He writes: “Newer media of the Internet and the Web not only have afforded mainstream media such as WB and CNN new modes of representation but have also provided new opportunities for the expression of dissent, new avenues of distribution for audio and video, and alternative representations of war unavailable during previous major U.S. conflicts.”⁶⁵ Multiple identities, values, desires, and knowledge are now formed through globally accessible imagery, offering up new modes of agency and possibilities for critique, resistance, and networking. While arguments suggesting that technologies such as the Internet constitute a new democratic public sphere may be vastly optimistic, the emerging media have not entirely defaulted on their potential both to multiply sites of cultural production and to offer “resources for challenging the state’s coordination of mass culture.”⁶⁶

While we are no closer to the revolutionary liberation of everyday life that he imagined is both possible and necessary, Debord did not anticipate either the evolution of media along its current trajectories, with its multiple producers, distributors, and access, or the degree to which the forces of militarization would dominate all aspects of society, especially in the United States, where obsession with law enforcement, surveillance, and repression of dissent has at least equaled cultural emphasis on commercialization from 9/11 forward.⁶⁷ The economic, political, and social safeguards of a past era, however limited, along with traditional spatial and temporal coordinates of experience, have been blown apart in the “second media age,” as the spectacularization of anxiety and fear and the increasing militarization of everyday life have become the principal cultural experiences shaping identities, values, and social relations.⁶⁸ Debrix’s incisive commentary on the production of emergency cultures captures the mood of this shift perfectly:

A generalized, illogical, and often unspecified sense of panic is facilitated in this postmodern environment where all scenarios can [be] and often are played out. This generalized panic is no longer akin to the centralized fear which emanates from the power of the sovereign in the modern era. Rather, it is an evanescent sentiment that anything can happen anywhere to anybody at any time. This postmodern fear is not capable of yielding logical, reasonable outcomes. All it does instead is accelerate the spiralling vortex of media-produced information. All it does is give way to emergencies (which will only last until the next panic is unleashed). This panic, I believe, is the paroxysmic achievement of media power.⁶⁹

Building on Debord’s pioneering critique, a number of theorists have developed a better understanding of how the spectacle itself has changed, particularly in light of the emergence of new mass and image-based media technologies.⁷⁰ Douglas Kellner, in particular, has written extensively on the notion of the spectacle and concludes, in agreement with Debord, that the spectacle of late capitalism has essentially taken over the social order.⁷¹ Building on these important interventions, what concerns us today are the ways in which mainstream media and popular culture typically sensationalize violence (from the large-scale catastrophe to individual assault) in a way that drains from such events any viable ethical and political substance. It is precisely the alienating cultural, social, and political climate achieved through spectacle that normalizes violence, terror, and insecurity, while editing out the human realities of suffering in order to cauterize social conscience and incapacitate political responses that are in any way off-message from the ever-narrowing grid of tolerable responses to authority and its enforcement. This understanding of the problematic allows us to propose the following critical definition that will inform the rest of the book:

The spectacle of violence represents more than the public enactment and witnessing of human violation. It points to a highly mediated regime of suffering and misery, which brings together the discursive and the aesthetic such that the performative nature of the imagery functions in a politically contrived way. In the process of occluding and depoliticizing complex narratives of any given situation, it assaults our senses in order to hide things in plain sight. The spectacle works by turning human suffering into a spectacle, framing and editing the realities of violence, and in doing so renders some lives meaningful while dismissing others as disposable. It operates through a hidden structure of politics that colonizes the imagination, denies critical engagement, and preemptively represses alternative narratives. The spectacle harvests and sells our attention, while denying us the ability for properly engaged political reflection. It engages agency as a pedagogical practice in order to destroy its capacity for self-determination, autonomy, and self-reflection. It works precisely at the level of subjectivity by manipulating our desires such that we become cultured to consume and enjoy productions of violence, becoming entertained by the ways in which it is packaged, which divorce domination and suffering from ethical considerations, historical understanding and political contextualization. The spectacle immerses us, encouraging us to experience violence as pleasure such that we become positively invested in its occurrence, while attempting to render us incapable of either challenging the actual atrocities being perpetrated by the same system or steering our collective future in a different direction.

We must do more than concentrate on how the spectacle works to culture disillusionment, domination, and depoliticization. There is a need to specifically recognize the question of agency in ways that force us to look at the more uncomfortable issues of human desire and our own shameful compromises and complicity with the system. What is more, we must also be concerned with the internal contradictions that characterize spectacles, how to identify and sustain oppositional moments, and how to develop successful strategies for creative resistance and rethinking what the political might actually mean for us going forward.

All networks of power retain a capacity for resistance. Without this counter-force to domination, as Michel Foucault understood all too well, there would be no power relationship. Power by definition is relational, and thus is constituted by the capacity to resist. It is never totalizing. Having said this, we cannot stress enough how the intersection of violence, subjugation, and the media has produced yet another complicated twist in the drama of the spectacle—one that offers a distinctively different set of political registers for grasping its effects on both the contemporary and future shape of media and the broader global public sphere. Interrogating the spectacle of violence in our dystopian times demands a new pedagogical awareness that must open new lines of thinking that gesture beyond its normalization.

Voyeurs of Suffering

Spectacles of violence are powerful modes of public pedagogy that function, in part, to fragment and alienate an active and engaged citizenry, transforming it into a passive audience. Who is targeted tells us a great deal about the strategic ambitions and rational underpinnings of the violence. Contemporary neoliberal societies deal with spectacles of violence in a particularly novel way. Unlike previous totalitarian systems that relied upon the terror of secrecy, modern neoliberal societies bring most things into the open. They continually expose us to that which threatens the fabric of the everyday. Even the violent excesses of neoliberal societies—which past generations would surely have viewed as pathologically deranged—are all too easily repackaged for acceptable public consumption. While serial murder, excessive torture, cruel and unusual punishment, secret detentions, and the violation of civil liberties are deeply ingrained in the history of Western imperial domination, in the contemporary moment they no longer elicit condemnation, disgust, and shame. Rather, they have become normalized—celebrated even—in both popular culture and state policy. A lack of public outcry in response to both reports of government torture and its legimation by high-ranking government officials such as former vice president Dick Cheney are surely linked to an explosion of coldblooded portrayals of torture in the mainstream media, extending from the documentaries and news that provide graphic detail of the activities of serial killers to more highbrow fare such the highly acclaimed television drama 24, or the Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty, with their depictions of utterly unscrupulous characters as admirable, almost heroic, figures. Whereas popular representations of torture prior to 2001 were typically presented as acts of atrocity, the post-9/11 climate has accepted such representations as common fare, even those depictions of blatant human rights violations designed to elicit the audience’s respect. Today’s screen culture thus contains within it “an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence.”⁷²

Consider in this context the justification offered by director Kathryn Bigelow for the depiction of torture in her film Zero Dark Thirty: “Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”⁷³ There is no doubt some truth to what Bigelow points out here. It is incumbent upon the arts to waken us out of our dogmatic slumber. If art has any purpose, surely it is to disrupt what we take for granted, and thereby dignify voices and affirm differences that are customarily dismissed. Art in this regard is not simply communication. It is inseparable from the fight for the articulation of new sensibilities that by their very nature reveal and challenge the violence of the contemporary moment. Or else it merely becomes product or the worst type of sentimentality. What Bigelow’s statement fails to grasp, though, is the manner in which her movies (including The Hurt Locker) actively celebrate the militarization of entertainment while lacking any critical edge whatsoever in terms of their representations or a broader narrative. Not only does she fail to offer any meaningful rupture of mainstream representational narratives that continue to normalize the use of torture and indefinite detention, but she becomes complicit in her rendering of such atrocities as legal, useful, and necessary acts “of our time.” While she depicts violence as ubiquitous and inevitable, it is surely the absences in her films that define their overarching messages. Indeed, in The Hurt Locker, the voices of disposable “Arabs” are almost fully written out of the movie’s dialogue, while those who are killed in action (including the British mercenaries) are shown as having more rational and compassionate qualities. Also written out of her script is the fact that torture often does not even work in securing vital information. More often than not, it prompts its victim to say anything in order to get the torture to cease. Not only does the film make the false claim that the use of torture on the part of the CIA led to Bin Laden’s killing, it also, as Naomi Wolf points out, “makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race—something that has historical precedent.”⁷⁴ A desire for violence, it seems, is the surest guarantee of survivability throughout Bigelow’s movie scores.

A case against artistic neutrality is likewise stressed by Slavoj Žižek: “Imagine a documentary that depicts the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistical operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators.”⁷⁵ Hence, for Žižek, Bigelow’s claim to political neutrality is not only absurd in light of the subject matter, which is by nature deeply political, it is a mockery of the art of cinema, which cannot be divorced from the political content it consciously chooses to screen:

One doesn’t need to be a moralist, or naïve about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict its neutrality—that is, to neutralize or sanitize this shattering dimension—is already a kind of endorsement. . . . This is normalization at its purest and most efficient—there is a little unease, but it is more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, and the job has to be done.⁷⁶

Indeed, it would appear that the spectacle of violence now mimics a new kind of—to quote Susan Sontag—“fascinating fascism” that overtly politicizes representations of violence and discredits critically engaged aesthetics.⁷⁷ Torturing people is now a mainstay of what might be called the “carnival of cruelty” designed to entertain and exhilarate on the screen, while in real life torture is militantly sanctioned as a security necessity. At the same time, mainstream entertainment programming is flooded with endless representations of individuals, government officials, and the police operating outside of the law as a legitimate way to seek revenge, implement vigilante justice, and rewrite the rationales for human rights and domestic law. Television programs such as Dexter and Game of Thrones, as well as a spate of blockbuster Hollywood films such as Oldboy, have provided a spectacle of violence unchecked by ethical considerations. Any action, no matter how cruel, is justified by the pursuit of ends that claim to provide greater security and often result in a retrenchment of uncontested power. In the actions of the surveillance state and its turn toward vigilante violence, we see these entertainment narratives writ large. This invariably has political and ethical implications for our societies, especially when the use of force and disregard for democratic accountability become familiar but comfortable entertainment themes—ones we can easily connect to. It is clear that the line between fiction and material reality, along with any distinction between the cultural sphere and the traditional sphere of politics and governance, has blurred to the point where it is now difficult to determine one from the other. If this perspectival and moral confusion has become characteristic of our daily experiences, it is likewise the case that forms of violence and violations of civil rights that should be routinely critiqued as unacceptable are now lauded as necessary and effective tactics in the maintenance of power, so rarely are they subjected to critical interrogation.

It is not merely traditional film and broadcast media that normalize a culture of cruelty and the inevitability of the contemporary crises of chronic social disparities and political domination. As already indicated, people are increasingly socializing—and publishing—through ever-evolving Internet-centered technologies. At the cutting edge of this is Google’s remarkable “Earth” platform. Acquired in 2004, it maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained by satellite imagery, aerial photography, and GIS 3-D modeling. Many people no doubt begin their use of this site by walking down various streets where they may have previously lived, harmlessly reminiscing about their childhood. They may even dwell on the corners of the streets where various misdemeanors of youth took place. Google Earth, however, has a more sinister dimension that reworks the voyeuristic terrain. Increasingly, media stories and news articles about high crime–rate areas are using various stills from the site as a safe and effective way to produce visual images. Camden, New Jersey—tragically anointed “most dangerous place in the United States”—frequently suffers from such digital representations. Camden is often described as a “no-go” area, not only for strangers and outsiders but also for the local police force, which is increasingly suffering casualties and deaths. And yet through Google Earth, we are continually reminded that it is possible to walk these dangerous streets. It is possible to venture down the back alleys. It is possible to view the boarded-up houses. It is possible to really see the impoverishment and abandonment. And it is possible to glide past groups of young men on the street corners—precisely those whom we are taught to fear. Except that in this corporate-owned space we can walk through the worst of Camden’s blight while remaining invisible. With the faces of those who live there edited out by Google, they are stripped of political agency and relegated to voicelessness in a medium that offers them up as much for data for as entertainment. Through the corporate gaze of the Internet we engage in reality touring of the most voyeuristic and ethically compromised kind. Such a window into the structural violence experienced by others is justified in terms of technological progress, but reflects a disturbing culture of cruelty that reinforces that the misery of others can be packaged and presented as fodder for an oppressive consumer gaze long trained to spectate uncritically, and then move on to something else.

All this has contributed to the veritable glut of images of suffering that is having disastrous effects on its real occurrences. The sheer ubiquity of violence as a consciously produced and mediated spectacle has contributed to a closure of conscience, compassion, and sensitivity to otherness. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the commercialization of new video game systems that openly market violence as a form of fun. Nick Robinson observes that “games have been important in embedding support for militarization through the operation of the so-called ‘military–entertainment complex,’ which has seen close collaboration between the military and videogames industry, the widespread development of military games, and the spread of the military into the production of commercial games.”⁷⁸ Such interactivity, which eradicates the lines between “virtual” and “realities” continues to infuse everyday life with a militaristic experience in ways that are deeply troubling. As war photographer Ashley Gilbertson notes regarding the request to “embed himself” in the recently released PS4 game The Last of Us Re-mastered, a post-civilizational drama that allows the user to “freeze the game and lets players shoot, edit, and share photographs of their achievements”:

None of the game’s characters show distress, and that to me was bizarre—it’s a post-apocalyptic scenario, with a few remaining humans fighting for the survival of their race! To be successful, a player must be the perpetrator of extreme, and highly graphic, violence. I’m interested in a more emotionally engaged type of photography, where the human reaction to a scene is what brings a story to life. That was tough inside this game. Occasionally the characters show anger, though generally they’re nonchalant about the situation they’ve found themselves in. In the end, their emotions mimicked that of the zombies they were killing. By the time I finished this assignment, watching the carnage had become easier. Yet I left the experience with a sense that familiarizing and desensitizing ourselves to violence like this can turn us into zombies. Our lack of empathy and unwillingness to engage with those involved in tragedy stems from our comfort with the trauma those people are experiencing.⁷⁹

Violence as a subject is seldom broached with ethical care or duty of thought in terms of its political or cultural merit. Little wonder that people evidence a certain desensitization, as it appears almost impossible to differentiate between the various forms of violence-laden entertainment, most of which is stripped of all meaningful content for the purpose of sales and marketing. Driven by a corporate agenda whose only guiding principle is the commodification and privatization of everything, daily spectacles of violence are now tolerated more than any due care for the subject, as the power of finance dictates a political agenda that profits from their stripped-down, media-packaged productions. Let’s be clear here: there is no such thing as a cultural “pastime” that would allow us to separate or parcel aspects of our existence into neatly marked boxes for intellectual consideration. Every cultural production impacts the attitudes and ideas of its viewing audience, even if only to promote indifference and the numbing of critical thought. How we reintroduce the political into these cultural regimes is therefore of the gravest importance, for it is integral to the experience of everyday life as socially aware citizens aspiring toward a better collective future.

The Ethical Subject of Violence

Jacques Rancière provides an important intervention into the politics of aesthetics by asking how we might move toward a more emancipated conception of the spectator. Or, to put it in more pedagogical terms, how might we give the subject of violence the proper ethical consideration it deserves? For his part, Rancière takes direct aim at the theatrical nature of the spectacle. Such theater, Rancière notes, is politically debilitating, as it strips the audience of any chance to partake in the world on display; for while there is no theater without spectators, our gaze constitutes a “looking without knowing,” in that the order of the appearance is simply taken as given and not opened up to critical interrogation. “He or she who looks at the spectacle,” Rancière explains, “remains motionless on his or her seat, without any power of intervention.” This passivity implies that the spectator is doubly debilitated, separated from the ability to know the conditions of the performance as well as from the ability to act in order to change the performance itself. It therefore forbids us from acting with any degree of knowledge. Passivity works by rendering the audience catatonic and incapable of grasping the magnitude of what just happened. Such passivity thus denies us the ability to act, except in ways that are coded into and prompted by the program. What therefore is required is the creation of counter-cultures that don’t simply retreat into some pacifistic purity avoiding violence altogether, but engage the subject of violence with the ethical care and consideration its representation and diagnosis demand.

We might begin by arguing that there is no such thing as an impartial bystander to traumas of violence. Doing nothing or remaining 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.