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.
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