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