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Introduction

Henry A. Giroux

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

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

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

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

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

Violence no longer shocks; it feeds the news cycles and becomes fodder for Hollywood blockbusters all the while numbing a wider public to the conditions that make its existence and trivialization possible. Atrocities have become routine, normalized in the United States — landscapes of horror on exhibit for a social order that elevates violence to its central organizing principle. Indeed, as Evans observes, violence has moved from a tool of terror and punishment to an exhibition that signals both the loss of historical memory and a flight from reason and ethics. Is it any wonder that notions of collective responsibility have been replaced by a collective numbing that collapses the line between a genuine ethical crisis and the fog of political indifference? As Evans makes clear, this is a violence that is as existential as it is visceral. There is nothing abstract about violence, especially under the leadership of a growing number of authoritarian leaders, with Trump at the front of the line — leaders who both enable and legitimate it.

Fascism thrives on contradictions that serve the ruthless and powerful. For instance, Trump cages children who are separated from their parents, stripped naked, shackled to chairs, and left in solitary confinement. Yet, he criticizes basketball great LeBron James who builds a public school for at-risk youth. As Charles Blow put it in The New York Times: “Hover over the irony here: the man trying to help at-risk children by opening doors for them was being attacked by the man who has put children at risk by locking them in cages.” Trump claimed he was going to drain the swamp. Instead, he turned it into a toxic waste site filled with corrupt and incompetent political hacks who are ethically tranquilized. His apologists, such as Ann Coulter and Alex Jones, revel in spewing out insults about defenseless children. Right-wing celebrity pundit Coulter shamelessly claimed that youth speaking out against gun violence were child actors, imposters showcasing the slaughter of innocence for fame and self-promotion. Conspiracy theorist, radio host, and ally of Donald Trump Alex Jones went further and claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. This is a small and selected snapshot of the culture of cruelty that accompanies a fascist social order.

What these snapshots point to is a new political narrative suited to the present moment. Under current historical circumstances, the elements of fascism have reappeared most visibly in the discourse of imperial bravado, unchecked racism, anti-immigrant fervor, a hatred of Muslims, apocalyptic populism, a hyper-masculinity, an unapologetic anti-intellectualism, a contempt for weakness, and a contempt for dissent. This is the atrocity exhibition, the fragments of a dystopian present, which signals a new script for the mass, everyday violence that accompanies the rise of neoliberal fascism in the United States and the rise of illiberal democracies abroad. It demands, as Evans writes, that we “rethink historical memory, the meaning of the intolerable, the state sponsored violence,” and the horror of what he calls “disposable futures.”

Evans calls for a comprehensive interrogation of war and violence that is at once historical, relational, systemic, and dialectical, akin to what C. Wright Mills once referred to as the sociological imagination. Consider this book as an invitation to read against the culture of war and violence — a forum for witnessing the unsettling and unspeakable — as a critical engagement with a culture of visceral and symbolic violence. He offers a politics of ethical necessity to confront the anti-democratic forces that threaten the meaning and substance of democracy, politics, and any viable and just future.

At the center of Evans’s work is a meticulous and encompassing attempt to interrogate the historical and multifaceted conditions that create a distinctive and crudely brazen politics. This is dystopian politics marked by a level of self-deceit, moral irresponsibility, and political corruption. At a time when radical and democratic horizons are closing and public spheres are disappearing, Evans highlights how real and symbolic violence turns the language and policies of those in power into weapons of hate and their victims into objects of disposability, social abandonment, and terminal exclusion. The call for walls, militarized borders, increased policing, and mass surveillance makes everyone a suspect and normalizes the culture of terror. The language of blood, purity, and belonging is now fused with expanding machineries of state repression and an attack on dissent. Terror and violence have become the DNA of everyday existence. As Evans observes, “Such violence feels its way into existence. Trusting nobody, fearing everything. That is the real meaning of terror. There is an intimate reality to its appearance.” (Chapter 23, “Painting a State of Terror”)

Unlike many theorists, Evans interrogates violence not only through the overt forces of the state’s repressive apparatuses such as the police, military, and armed thugs, but also through the ideological apparatuses that create the visions and values that fuel right-wing populism and the ideological underpinnings of the financial state. Symbolic and pedagogical repression are crucial for forging neoliberal fascist narratives and a culture of violence. Evans highlights how language is transformed into an endless discourse of dehumanization and scapegoating, broadcast by a massive state-aligned propaganda machine. Evans is particularly insightful in examining how liberals use the language of peace and human rights to legitimate a war culture and new forms of authoritarianism.

Evans makes clear how the retreat from democracy is a betrayal and abandonment of the principles of equality, justice, and freedom. It is precisely this sense of abandonment and betrayal of the vulnerable and the working class in the United States that creates a vacuum for mobilizing the most violent energies of neoliberalism all while promoting the rise of right-wing populist movements.

The emergence of neoliberal fascism and diverse forms of illiberal democracy around the globe points to a terrifying horizon of political repression and violence. Under such circumstances, it has become all the more difficult to theorize a politics that matters, to recover a language that has real meaning, and to develop pedagogical practices that speak to concrete needs and conditions. Atrocity Exhibition is a clarion call to fight against the diverse registers of violence that enable emerging authoritarian regimes and to create a space for individual and collective resistance. Evans employs the language of theory, art, ethnography, and history in order to create a political tapestry; in so doing he elucidates how finance capital, militarism, state violence, and repressive ideological apparatuses work in tandem to shape repressive policies and inflict mass suffering at the level of everyday life.

Evans engages in dialogue with a number of other theorists in this book in a language that not only highlights a range of social problems but also engages in a discourse that is both rigorous and accessible. Evans and his collaborators show how education, language, and art can create radical ways of thinking about critique, dissent, resistance, and the future. Atrocity Exhibition works to create a new language and mode of intervention at a time when violence encourages a culture of forgetting rather than a culture that embraces civic learning and courage. Atrocity Exhibition recognizes that politics bears both the burden and responsibility of changing the collective consciousness so that people might understand and engage the forces that shape their everyday existence. Politics, for Evans, needs a language that allows us to remember the past, enables us not to look away, and confronts a new sense of responsibility in the face of the unspeakable. In sum, this is a call for a new language that encourages people to recognize themselves as agents rather than victims.

As I read these pages, I was reminded of Martin Luther King Jr. who believed in the “fierce urgency of now” and that “in this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.” At the core of Evans’s work is a politics of solidarity and humanity and a strong belief that one cannot escape matters of moral and social responsibility if we are to be bound to each other by something more than the narrow orbits of self-interest and crass consumerism. Evans rejects the collapse of agency into destiny. Like Tony Judt, Zygmunt Bauman, Stuart Hall, James Baldwin, and Edward Said, he believes that intellectuals have, in troubled times, a distinct responsibility to analyze power works and to construct a world that is more just and democratic. For Evans, ethics and responsibility must be placed at the center of agency, politics, and everyday existence, in the belief that current regimes of tyranny can be resisted and that human beings can be moved to imagine possible alternative futures. With these new beliefs, we will make radical change happen.