Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City Lights Open Media)
Brad Evans
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0872866580
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"This is a must-read book for anyone ready to transcend fear and imagine a new reality."--Tikkun
Disposable Futures makes the case that we have not just become desensitized to violence, but rather, that we are being taught to desire it.
From movies and other commercial entertainment to "extreme" weather and acts of terror, authors Brad Evans and Henry Giroux examine how a contemporary politics of spectacle--and disposability--curates what is seen and what is not, what is represented and what is ignored, and ultimately, whose lives matter and whose do not.
Disposable Futures explores the connections between a range of contemporary phenomena: mass surveillance, the militarization of police, the impact of violence in film and video games, increasing disparities in wealth, and representations of ISIS and the ongoing terror wars. Throughout, Evans and Giroux champion the significance of public education, social movements and ideas that rebel against the status quo in order render violence intolerable.
"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 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
"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, Zizek, Marcuse, and Reich. I especially appreciated a number of things, including: 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
Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux are internationally renowned educators, authors, and intellectuals. Together, they curate a forum for Truthout.com that explores the theme of "Disposable Futures." Evans is director of histories of violence project at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Giroux holds McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy.
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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
without law and ethics—do not inhabit a separate world but are deeply embedded in the structures of contemporary popular culture, and within the legal and ethical framework of modern democratic societies.” Indeed, for Silverman, the subtlety and ethical care for the subject of violence evident in Haneke’s work allows for a disturbing revelation: What is perhaps truly shocking here is the way in which we do not recognize the links between everyday life and the violent disposing of lives, the way
instantaneousness of action demands an instantaneous response. One inevitable danger here is the birth of a new global vigilantism which, as the Kony episode suggested, holds the possibility for legitimating violence through the displacement of the ballot by the arbitrariness of the “like” button. Spectacle upon spectacle, violence upon violence, fashioned to render the only thing that remains of the “public” no more than a shared sense of vulnerability. Rituals of Humiliation Judith Butler’s
individual succumbs to the charisma of vitalistic power.”19 There is an important point to be made here: fascism is better understood not through the lens of political ideology, but as an economy of power that suffocates the political in the most narcissistic yet publicly celebrated fashions. How else do people come to desire their own oppression if not through this micro-specific play of emotions which taps directly into personal anxieties to normalize violence? Inglorious Bastards Toward the
alternative sense of agency or hope. This raises some important questions on the advent of monstrosity, not least the fascination in popular culture today with the figure of the zombie, which has its own distinct politics. The zombie genre can be traced to earlier critiques of capitalism, with the undead in particular appearing at a time when the shopping mall started to become a defining symbol of modernity. Zombies here would become the embodiment of a political form, one that had lost all
