Stuart Hall’s reworking of Gramsci’s notion of conjuncture is important here because it provides both a conceptual opening into the forces shaping a particular historical moment and a framework for merging theory and strategy.43 Conjuncture in this case refers to a period in which different elements of society come together to produce a unique fusion of the economic, social, political, ideological, and cultural in a relative settlement that becomes hegemonic in defining reality. That fusion is today marked by a neoliberal conjuncture. In this particular historical moment, the notion of conjuncture helps us to address theoretically how state surveillance and repression of free speech and widespread nonviolent protests are largely related to a historically specific neoliberal project that advances vast inequalities in income and wealth, creates the student loan debt bomb, eliminates much-needed social programs, eviscerates the social wage, and privileges profit over people. Youth today live in a period of history marked by an “epochal crisis” in which they are largely considered disposable, relegated to the savage dictates of a survival-of-the fittest society in which they are now considered on their own and governed by a generalized fear of being unemployed or not being able to survive.44
Within the United States especially, the often violent response to nonviolent forms of social protest must also be analyzed within the framework of a mammoth military-industrial state and its commitment to war and the militarization of the entire society.45 The merging of the military-industrial complex, the surveillance state, and unbridled corporate power points to the need for strategies that address what is specific about the current neoliberal warfare state and how different interests, modes of power, social relations, public pedagogies, and economic configurations come together to shape its politics. Thinking in terms of such a conjuncture is invaluable politically in that it provides a theoretical opening for making the practices of the warfare state and the neoliberal revolution visible in order “to give the resistance to its onward march content, focus, and a cutting edge.”46 It also points to the conceptual power of making clear that history remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.47 It is precisely through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open.
I want to argue that the current historical moment or what Stuart Hall called the “long march of the Neoliberal Revolution” is best understood in terms of the growing forms of violence that it deploys and reinforces.48 Such antidemocratic pressures and their relationship to protests in the United States and abroad are evident in the crisis that has emerged through the integration of governance and violence, the growth of the punishing state, and the persistent development of what has been described by Alex Honneth as “a failed sociality.”49 The United States has become addicted to violence, and this dependency is fueled increasingly by its willingness to wage war at home and abroad.
War in this instance is not merely the outgrowth of policies designed to protect the security and well-being of the United States. It is also, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, part of a “military metaphysics”—a complex of forces that includes corporations, defense industries, politicians, financial institutions, and universities.50 War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society. Waging war is also one of the nation’s most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.51 As modern society is increasingly defined by the realities of permanent war, a carceral state, and a national surveillance infrastructure, the social stature of the military and soldiers has risen.52 As Michael Hardt and Tony Negri point out: “In the United States, rising esteem for the military in uniform corresponds to the growing militarization of the society as a whole. All of this despite repeated revelations of the illegality and immorality of the military’s own incarceration systems, from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, whose systematic practices border on if not actually constitute torture.”53 The state of exception in the United States, in particular, has become permanent and promises no end. War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinctions between war and peace, defense and provocation. Increasingly fed by a coordinated moral and political hysteria, warlike values produce and endorse shared fears as the primary register of social relations.
The war on terror, rebranded under Obama as the “Overseas Contingency Operation,” has morphed into a war on democracy. Everyone is now considered a potential terrorist, providing a rationale for both the government and private corporations to spy on anybody, regardless of whether they have yet to be suspected of a crime. Surveillance is supplemented by increasingly militarized police forces that now receive intelligence, weapons, and training from federal authorities like the Department of Homeland Security. Military technologies such as drones, SWAT vehicles, and machine-gun-equipped armored trucks once used exclusively in combat zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan are now being supplied to local police departments across the nation, and not surprisingly “the increase in such weapons is matched by training local police in war zone tactics and strategies.”54
The domestic war against “terrorists” [increasingly a code for those who dare to protest] provides new opportunities for major defense contractors and corporations who “are becoming more a part of our domestic lives.”55 As Glenn Greenwald points out, “Arming domestic police forces with para-military weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil; they will simply find other, increasingly permissive uses for those weapons.”56
Of course, the new domestic paramilitary forces will also undermine free speech and dissent with the threat of force while simultaneously threatening core civil liberties, human rights, and civic responsibilities. Given that “by age 23, almost a third of Americans are arrested for a crime,” it becomes clear that in the new militarized state young people, especially those in communities of color, are viewed as predators and treated as either a threat to corporate governance or a disposable population.57 This siege mentality will only be reinforced by the collaboration of the state with private intelligence and surveillance agencies; the violence such an alliance produces will increase, as will the growth of a punishment state that acts with impunity. Scholars like Michelle Alexander demonstrate that this contemporary violence is in many ways an extension of the state’s application of Jim Crow laws, which themselves extended from the generations of domestic terror that white enslavers institutionalized to control people they had bought, bred, and sold for profit.58
Yet there is more at work here than the prevalence of armed knowledge and a militarized discourse: there is also the emergence of a militarized society that now organizes itself “for the production of violence.”59 America has become a society in which “the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks.”60 War has become normalized and no longer needs to be declared. The targets of war increasingly expand from communities of color and immigrants to youth, low-income women, and unions. War is no longer aimed at restoring peace but sacrificing it, along with any hope for a different future. The endless updating of a machinery of warfare and death has not just become permanent, it has become a booming growth industry. The normalization of permanent war does more than promote a set of unifying symbols that embrace a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, favoring conformity over dissent, the strong over the weak, and fear over responsibility. It also gives rise to what David Graeber has called a “language of command” in which violence becomes the most important element of power and a mediating force in shaping most, if not all, social relationships.61
Permanent War and the Public Pedagogy of Acceptable Ambient Violence
A permanent war state inevitably relies on modes of public pedagogy that influence willing subjects to abide by its values, ideology, and narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation in the United States today is largely provided through