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TWO

THE POLITICS OF DISPOSABILITY

On Human Disposal

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

Bauman’s work continually forces us to consider how the production of “wasted lives” at a systemic level is entirely fitting in the logics of modern societies as they retain their order-making and progressive orientations. Modernity, in fact, is yet another chapter in the story of the production of “disposable 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 of public spheres necessary for the exercise of democracy is part of a larger process of systematic depoliticization, privatization, and militarization. Any semblance of political rights thus becomes suffocated by the weight of what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism.”⁸

Citizens are now reduced to market and surveillance data, consumers, and commodities, and as such inhabit identities in which they increasingly “become unknowables, with no human rights and with no one accountable for their condition.”⁹ Within this political assemblage, not only does ethical blindness and impunity prevail on the part of the financial elite, but the inner worlds of the oppressed are constantly being remade under the force of economic pressures and a culture of anxiety and precariousness. According to João Biehl, as the politics of disposability “comes into sharp visibility, tradition, collective memory, and public spheres are organized as phantasmagoric scenes [that] thrive on the ‘energies of the dead,’ who remain unaccounted for in numbers and law.”¹⁰

Economists such as Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, and Doug Henwood have argued that we are living in a new Gilded Age, one that mimics a time when robber barons and strike-breakers ruled, and the government and economy were controlled by a cabal that was rich, powerful, and ruthless.¹¹ And, of course, communities of color, women, and the working class were told to mind their place in a society controlled by those already enriched. Often missing in these analyses is the fact that what is new in the second Gilded Age is not just the moral sanctioning of greed, the corruption of politics by corporatism, and the ruthlessness of a global capitalist class. What is also unique is the constant reconfiguration of the nation-state in the interests of a market that colonizes collective subjectivity with discourses of risk, insecurity, catastrophe, and inescapable endangerments. The second Gilded Age is then a boom time for elites, but for everyone else it’s what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton rightly calls a “death-saturated age” in which matters of violence, survival, and trauma now infuse everyday life.¹²

Discarded by the corporate state, dispossessed of social provisions, and deprived of the economic, political, and social conditions that enable viable and critical modes of agency, more and more sectors of civilian society find themselves inhabiting what Biehl calls “zones of total social exclusion” marked by deep inequalities in power, wealth, and income. Such zones are sites of rapid disinvestment, places marked by endless spectacles of violence that materialize the neoliberal logics of containment, commodification, surveillance, militarization, cruelty, criminalization, and punishment.¹³ These “zones of hardship” constitute a hallmark and intensification of the neoliberal politics of disposability, which is relentless in the material and symbolic violence it wages against society for the benefit of a financial minority.¹⁴ What has become clear is that capitalist expropriation, dispossession, and disinvestment have reached a point where life has become completely unbearable for many living in the most prosperous of nations.¹⁵ Areas of great affluence can often be found adjacent to, if not surrounded by, zones of great misery inhabited by impoverished immigrants, poor minorities, the homeless, young people living in debt, the long-term unemployed, workers, and the declining middle class, all of whom have been delivered by market forces into criminalized communities of violence, harassment, surveillance, and everyday humiliations and brutality.

Earlier promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom, and political affirmation have not been eliminated; they have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential, and subordinated to a predatory market and a hyper-privatized society. Dispossession and disinvestment have invalidated social enrichment and have turned “progress” into a curse for the marginalized and a blessing for the privileged who constitute the smallest financial minority—the wealthy few. Modernity has thus reneged on its undertaking to fulfill the social contract, however disingenuous or limited, especially with regard to young people. Measuring everything through the metrics of private profit, the ideological and affective spaces of neoliberalism work hard to substitute individual gain for any concern for the public good. The savagery of neoliberalism is also on display in its attempts to fiscally snuff out institutions meant to help families find pathways out of the miseries of impoverishment, undernourishment, underemployment, criminalization, and lack of adequate housing. The social contract and the relations it once embodied are now replaced with unchecked power relations. Long-term social, educational, and ecological planning and the institutional structures that support it are now weakened, if not eliminated, by the urgencies of privatization, deregulation, and the extraction of short-term profits. Social bonds have given way under the collapse of social protections and are further subverted by the neoliberal insistence that there are only “individual solutions to socially produced problems.”¹⁶ One consequence is that neoliberalism has launched what Robert O. Self calls an assault on “the basic architecture of our collective responsibility to ensure that [we all] share in a decent life.”¹⁷ It is also an aggressive counter-force constantly antagonizing the formative cultures and modes of individual and collective agency that engender a connection between the democratic polis and the sustenance of economic, social, and political community.¹⁸

Neoliberalism’s industries of disposability relentlessly enforce unchecked notions of the private that both dissolve social bonds and deter conditions of agency from the civilian landscape of responsibility and ethical considerations. Absorbed into privatized orbits of consumption, commodification, and display, inhabitants of neoliberal societies are entertained by the toxic pleasures of spectacles of violence which cannot be divorced from the parasitic presence of the corporate state, the concentration of power and money in the upper 1 percent of the population, the ongoing militarization of all aspects of society, and the relentless, aggressive depoliticization of the citizenry. In its current historical conjuncture, the nation-state is a nodal point of intersection—something that appears akin to a green zoning of the world, protecting and servicing a handful of billionaires.

The Silent Order of Battle

Governments have often openly extended the narrative of war both to provide a sense of urgency and to appeal to a sense of moral certainty when dealing with political problems.¹⁹ The very act of securitization itself begins as an imperative to act toward the alleviation of unnecessary suffering. While we have become all too familiar with the age-old discourses of war as applied to a range of issues including drugs, poverty, crime, and terror—the former two in particular being integral to the broadening and deepening of the security agenda in “human” terms—in practice, the focus on unnecessary suffering has all too easily shifted the blame onto the shoulders of the global poor. Indeed, while the expanded and seemingly ubiquitous language of warfare has created conditions that have long since dispensed with familiar orthodox demarcations such as friend and enemy, inside and outside, civilian space and battle space, along with times of peace and times of war, the discourse has become beholden to existing power relationships instead of eliciting critical engagement with complex social issues. The language of warfare as such, when internalized, turns emancipation into colonization, as it remains at the service of those who seek to condemn political differences, instead of those in whose name it is marshalled. What therefore appear to be benevolent wars on behalf of the disadvantaged all too easily turn into wars against the disadvantaged, as power inverts its own systemic failures and invests in carceral industries that profit from policing and criminalizing those it abandons. The United States, in particular, has not only made war one of society’s highest ideals, but has reconstituted almost all public spheres as private zones that legitimate violence and militarization as the ultimate arbiter of social relations and problems. Education in disposable communities now often involves as many police as teachers, for schools that once served as pathways to a better life now act as pipelines to prison. In communities of color such as Ferguson, Missouri, the landscape of everyday life is criminalized as local police forces are deployed to civilian protests with military-grade weapons used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. More and more, everyday behaviors are targeted and criminalized, some as trivial as violating a dress code or panhandling in the streets.²⁰

Neoliberal governance has been transformed into an instrument of social war and internal colonization. Violence and fear have become the motivational forces of societies successfully indoctrinated by notions of privatization, which sell competitive private interest at the expense of all else, beginning with such public interest values as community, cooperation, compassion, fairness, honesty, and care for others. It has become increasingly difficult in such self-regarding societies to trust anyone else, let alone raise critical ideas in the public realm.²¹ In the United States, for example, massive inequality resulting from an unprecedented concentration of wealth, power, and money in the hands of the 1 percent has resulted in a culture of cruelty, a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, as well as “the massive intrusion of criminality into political processes [and] a style of politics which by itself is criminal.”²² As public values and social bonds are gutted, there is a retreat from both social responsibility and politics itself. Politics is eviscerated when it supports a market-driven view of society that turns its back on the idea, as expressed by Hannah Arendt, that “Humanity is never acquired in solitude.”²³ That is, neoliberal societies have come undone in terms of the social contract, and in doing so have turned their support away from the public sphere that by definition provides conditions for democracy: free speech, social autonomy, cultural freedom, and political equality. This violence against the social not only hastens the death of the radical imagination, but also mimics a notion of the banality of evil made famous by Arendt who argued that at the root of widespread subjugation was a kind of thoughtlessness, an inability to think, and a type of outrageous ignorance in one’s actions and thought processes in which “there’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing.”²⁴

Under neoliberalism, those considered redundant are now consigned to a veritable wasteland, deprived of the most basic social provisions, and ridiculed by those ruling elites who are responsible at a systemic level for their hardships and suffering. One only has to watch a brief segment of Fox News to experience the ways in which impoverished communities are continually blamed and criminalized for their plight. At the same time, the crisis of ethics, economics, and politics has been matched by a crisis of ideas, as the conditions for critical agency dissolve into the limited pleasures of instant gratification wrought through the use of technologies and consuming practices that deter, if not obliterate, the very possibility of thinking differently. This is immanence of the worst kind, for it abides by the private logics of neoliberal rule. What is particularly distinctive about this historical conjuncture is the way in which a vast number of citizens, especially young people of color in low-income communties, are increasingly denied any place in an already weakened social order and the degree to which supporting young people is no longer seen as central to how the society defines its future and intellectual capital.²⁵

For instance, close to half of all Americans live on or beneath the poverty line, and “more than a million public school students are homeless in the United States; 57 percent of all children are in homes considered to be either low-income or impoverished, and half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years old.”²⁶ At the same time, the 400 richest Americans “have as much wealth as 154 million Americans combined, that’s 50 percent of the entire country, [while] the top economic 1 percent of the U.S. population now has more wealth than 90 percent of the population combined.” ²⁷ Within this system, the civic institutions that advance public interest ethics capable of countering such violence and suffering disappear, while targeted communities lose their privacy, dignity, bodies, housing, and material goods. The fear of losing everything, the horror of an engulfing and crippling precarity, the quest to merely survive, and the promise of violence and catastrophe (individual and collective) are increasingly becoming a “normal” way of life for the majority. As such, the response modeled by those in power toward people’s suffering is anything but one of compassion; contempt, cruelty, surveillance, and incarceration have replaced community, social responsibility, and political courage. Karen Garcia captures well the underlying logic of disposability and its darker roots. She writes:

It’s bad enough in the most drastic epoch of wealth disparity in American history that most people are suffering economically. What makes this particular era so heinous is that the hungry, the homeless, the unemployed, and the underemployed are being kicked when they’re already down. They are being ground into human mulch for dumping in a vast neoliberal landfill. People are not only poor, their poverty and suffering have literally been deemed crimes by the elite class of sociopaths running the place.²⁸

Nowhere is the severity of the consequences of this new era under neoliberalism more apparent than in the disposability of younger populations. In fact, this is the first generation, as Bauman argues, in which the “plight of the outcast may stretch to embrace a whole generation.”²⁹ He rightly argues that today’s youth have been “cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent.”³⁰ Youth no longer occupy a privileged place of possibility that was offered to previous generations. Instead of symbolizing vibrant potential, many youth now represent and internalize a loss of faith in better times to come, echoing the catastrophic narratives in the dominant culture that paint the future as indeterminate, bleak, and insecure. Yet diminished prospects pale next to the normalization of market-driven government policies that have wiped out pensions, eliminated quality health care, raised college tuition, and produced a harsh world of joblessness, while giving billions to banks and the military. Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations have been replaced by dashed hopes and a miasma of onerous debt.³¹

What has changed for an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society’s disinvestment in the future of youth and the prospect of permanent downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by their predecessors. Youth have become a marker for a mode of disposability in which their fate is defined largely through the registers of a society that readily discards resources, goods, and people. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes, surveillance, and stillborn projects.³² The present generation has been born into a society dominated by casino capitalism in which players take a gamble on the unstable market economy with stakes that, for many, translate into life or death. Young people and their futures are viewed increasingly as a suitable wager to be risked and, if necessary, to be disposed of, especially if they do not generate value as workers, consumers, and commodities. In such conditions, young people who speak out about their troubling circumstances are dismissed as either naturally anxious as if by biological design or a source of trouble should they have the temerity to challenge orthodox reasoning. Instead of being viewed as “at risk,” they are perceived as posing a risk to society and are subject to a range of punitive policies.

The structures of neoliberalism do more than disinvest in young people and commodify them; they also transform the protected space of childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty. This is especially true for those young people further marginalized by race and class, who now inhabit a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged either as flawed consumers or as outsiders transgressing the acceptable boundaries of what it means to be a citizen. With no adequate role to play as consumers or citizens, many youth are now forced to inhabit “zones of social abandonment” extending from schools on the margins of financial existence to bulging detention centers to prisons.³³ These are zones where the needs of young people are generally ignored, and where many, especially poor minority youth, often find their appearance alone is sufficient to warrant criminalization. For example, with the hollowing out of the social state, the circuits of state repression, surveillance, and disposability increasingly “link the fate of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, poor whites, and Asian Americans” to a youth-crime complex, which now serves as the default solution to major social problems.³⁴ Impoverished communities and low-income youth are thus viewed as out of step, place, and time; they are defined largely as “pathologies feeding on the body politic” and exiled to spheres of “terminal exclusion.”³⁵

We live in a historical moment in which everything that matters politically, ethically, and culturally is being erased—either ignored, turned into a commodity, or simply falsified. As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is replaced by a culture of brutality and atomization. Within the neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance, accompanied by a systematic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. A generalized anxiety now shapes neoliberal societies—one that thrives on insecurity, dread of punishment, and a perception of constant lurking threats.

Such hysteria not only is politically debilitating but also feeds the growing militarization of society, culture, and everyday life. This trend is evident in the paramilitarizing of the police, who increasingly use high-tech scanners, surveillance cameras, and toxic chemicals on those who engage in peaceful protest against the warfare and corporate state. The war on terror has evolved into a war on democracy as local police are now being militarized with the latest combat-grade equipment imported straight from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of places like Ferguson, Missouri, and numerous other cities. In the United States, military technologies once used exclusively on the battlefield are now being supplied to police departments across the nation. Drones, machine-gun-equipped armored trucks, SWAT vehicles, and tanks now find themselves in the hands of local police and campus security forces, turning them into the normalized symbols of everyday violence that now plague the neoliberal state. Arming domestic police forces, with paramilitary weaponry ensures their systematic use even in the absence of a terrorist attack; moreover, such weapons will produce more aggressive modes of policing, if not violence, against young people, communities of color, and immigrant families. Criminalization and violence now proceed with a colonial vengeance on the part of the power elite, followed by the stigmatizing and humiliation of those considered disposable, beyond the pale of compassion, justice, and ethical concern.³⁶

A state of permanent war requires modes of public pedagogy to form obedient subjects who abide by its values, ideology, and narratives of greed and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through a market-driven culture that advocates for consumerism, militarism, and organized violence, circulated through various registers of popular culture extending from high fashion and Hollywood movies to the creation of violent video games sponsored by the Pentagon. The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, complicit intellectuals obedient to established relations of power and its version of history, and a passive republic of consumers. It also needs compliant subjects who through relentless marketing are cultured both to find pleasure in the spectacle of violence and to divorce its occurrence from political questions raised by personal ethics and social conscience.