PRAISE FOR DISPOSABLE FUTURES
“Beginning with Primo Levi and ending with Deleuze, Evans and Giroux map the radical transformation that has affected the representation of cruelty between the 20th and the 21st century: from ‘exceptional’ status, associated with the ultimate figures of state sovereignty, it has passed to ‘routinized’ object of communication, consumption and manipulation. This is not to say that everything is visible, only that the protocols of visibility have been appropriated by a different form of economy, where humans are completely disposable. To counter this violence in the second degree, and preserve our capacity to face the intolerable, a new aesthetics and politics of imagination is required. This powerful, committed, exciting book does more than just evoke its urgency. It already practices it.” —Étienne Balibar, author of Violence and Civility
“Disposable Futures confronts a key conundrum of our times: How is it that, given the capacity and abundance of resources to address the critical needs of all, so many are having their futures radically discounted while the privileged few dramatically increase their wealth and power? Brad Evans and Henry Giroux have written a trenchant analysis of the logic of late capitalism that has rendered it normal to dispose of any who do not service the powerful. A searing indictment of the socio-technics of destruction and the decisions of their deployability. Anyone concerned with trying to comprehend these driving dynamics of our time would be well served by taking up this compelling book.” —David Theo Goldberg, author of The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism
“Brad Evans and Henry Giroux offer a trenchant analysis of neoliberalism’s ills: its violence, its dystopian vision, its intrusiveness, and its attempt to eradicate all critical consciousness and with it all hope. They diagnose our exposure to disposability in an era marked by the collapse of a vision of a viable future. In doing so, they have laid out the challenge before us. The only question left is, do we have the will, as the authors suggest, to fabricate a nonviolent response to it?” —Todd May, Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities, Clemson University
“Disposable Futures poses, and answers, the pressing question of our times: How is it that in this post-Fascist, post–Cold War era of peace and prosperity we are saddled with more war, violence, inequality, and poverty than ever? The neoliberal era, Evans and Giroux brilliantly reveal, is defined by violence, by drone strikes, ‘smart’ bombs, militarized police, Black lives taken, prison expansion, corporatized education, surveillance, the raw violence of racism, patriarchy, starvation, and want. The authors show how the neoliberal regime normalizes violence, renders its victims disposable, commodifies the spectacle of relentless violence and sells it to us as entertainment, and tries to contain cultures of resistance. If you’re not afraid of the truth in these dark times, then read this book. It is a beacon of light.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Disposable Futures is an utterly spellbinding analysis of violence in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. It strikes me as a new breed of street-smart intellectualism moving through broad-ranging theoretical influences of Adorno, Arendt, Bauman, Deleuze, Foucault, Žižek, Marcuse, and Reich. I especially appreciated the discussion of representation and how it functions within a broader logics of power; the descriptions and analyses of violence mediating the social field and fracturing it through paralyzing fear and anxiety; the colonization of bodies and pleasures; and the nuanced discussion of how state violence, surveillance, and disposability connect. Big ideas explained using a fresh, straightforward voice.” —Adrian Parr, author of The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics
DISPOSABLE
FUTURES
THE SEDUCTION OF VIOLENCE IN THE AGE OF SPECTACLE
BRAD EVANS AND HENRY A. GIROUX
Open Media Series | City Lights Books
Copyright © 2015 by Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux
All Rights Reserved
Open Media Series Editor: Greg Ruggiero
Front cover art: Isaac Cordal
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Evans, Brad, 1968-
Disposable futures : the seduction of violence in the age of spectacle / Brad
Evans and Henry A. Giroux.
pages cm. — (City lights open media)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-87286-658-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-87286-659-1 (e-book)
1. Violence. 2. Violence—Political aspects. I. Giroux, Henry A. II. Title.
HM886.E93 2015
303.6—dc23
2015004112
City Lights Books
Open Media Series
CONTENTS
For Tony Penna, my mentor and lost friend.
HENRY GIROUX
For Amelie, my beautiful little girl
BRAD EVANS
PREFACE
THE DROWNING
Writing one of the most important personal testimonies on the extreme horrors of the twentieth centry, Primo Levi observes: “Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality;