Disposable Futures. Brad Evans
while authors like Steven Pinker cloud our perception by claiming the current era is the least violent era in human history, relying upon crude per capita human death rates etc.,20 it takes only a slightly different angle of vision to see the current social order’s full range of preventable violence: impoverishment, financial predation, malnutrition, mass incarceration, and rapidly accelerating deforestation, ecological degradation, and irreversible biocide. Pinker would do well to acknowledge that political violence is poorly understood if it simply refers to a failure of liberal modernity. Political violence cannot be reduced to such a crude and reductionist metric. Indeed, conventional demarcations between times of war and times of peace, zones of security and zones of crises, friends and enemies, have long since evaporated. We live in complex and radically interconnected societies, whose social morphology has radically altered our sense of the world such that we are taught to accept insecurity as the natural order of things.21 This is fully in keeping with the proliferation of media output, factual and fictional, that bombards us continuously with images of violence and catastrophe for subtle political gain. Indeed, what is new about the current historical conjuncture is not only a commodified popular culture that trades in extreme violence, greed, and narcissism as a source of entertainment, but the emergence of a predatory society in which the suffering and death of others becomes a reason to rejoice rather than mourn. Extreme violence has become not only a commodified spectacle, but one of the few popular resources available through which people can bump up their pleasure quotient.
Our critique begins from the realization that violence has become ubiquitous, “settling like some all-enveloping excremental mist . . . that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now.”22 We cannot escape its spectre. Its presence is everywhere. It is hardwired into the fabric of our digital DNA. Capitalism in fact has always thrived on its consumption. There is, after all, no profit in peace. We are not calling here for the censoring of all representations of violence as if we could retreat into some sheltered protectorate. That would be foolish and intellectually dangerous. Our claim is both that the violence we are exposed to is heavily mediated, and that as such we are witness to various spectacles that serve a distinct political function, especially as they either work to demonize political resistance or simply extract from its occurrence (fictional and actual) any sense of political context and critical insight. Moving beyond the spectacle by making visible the reality of violence in all of its modes is both necessary and politically important. What we need then is an ethical approach to the problem of violence such that its occurrence is intolerable to witness.
Exposing violence is not the same as being exposed to it, though the former too often comes as a result of the latter. The corrupting and punishing forms taken by violence today must be addressed by all people as both the most important element of power and the most vital of forces shaping social relationships under the predatory formation of neoliberalism. Violence is both symbolic and material in its effects and its assaults on all social relations, whereas the mediation of violence coupled with its aesthetic regimes of suffering is a form of violence that takes as its object both memory and thought. It purges the historical record, denying access to the history of a more dignified present, purposefully destroying the ability to connect forms of struggle across the ages. Memory as such is fundamental to any ethics of responsibility. Our critique of violence begins, then, as an ethical imperative. It demands a rigorous questioning of the normalized culture of violence in which we are now immersed. It looks to the past so that we may understand the violence of our present. It looks to the ways that ideas about the future shape the present such that we learn to accept a world that is deemed to be violent by design. This requires a proper critical reading of the way violence is mediated in our contemporary moment; how skewed power relations and propagators of violence are absolved of any wider blame in a pedagogical and political game that permits only winners and losers; how any act of injustice is made permissible in a world that enshrines systemic cruelty.
The Dystopian Imagination
The twentieth century is often termed the “Century of Violence.” And rightly so, given the widespread devastation of an entire continent during the two World Wars; the continued plunder and suppression of former colonial enclaves; the rebirth of extermination camps in the progressive heart of a modern Europe; the appalling experiments in human barbarism that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the torture and symbolic acts of disappearance so widespread in Latin America; the passivity in the face of ongoing acts of genocide; the wars and violence carried out in the name of some deceitful humanitarian principle. This legacy of violence makes it difficult to assess this history without developing profound suspicions about the nature of the human condition and its capacity for evil. One of the particular novelties of this period was the emergence of dystopia literatures and compelling works of art that proved integral to the lasting critique of totalitarian regimes. Indeed, some of the most appealing prose of the times was put forward not by recognized political theorists or radical philosophers, but by the likes of Yevgeny Zamyatin, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley, amongst others, who managed to reveal with incisive flair and public appeal the violence so often hidden beneath the utopian promise of technologically driven progress.23 Dystopia in these discourses embodied a warning and a hope that humankind would address and reverse the dark authoritarian practices that descended on the twentieth century like a thick, choking fog.
Hannah Arendt understood how the authoritarian violence of the twentieth century needed a broader frame of reference.24 The harrowing experimental camps of the colonies would all too quickly blow back into the metropolitan homelands as gulags, death camps, and torture chambers become exportable elements in the production of theaters of cruelty. The utopian promise of the Enlightenment thus contained within it the violence and brutalities embedded in the logic of instrumental rationality and the unchecked appeal to progress and ideological purity, all of which was later rehearsed within the most terrifying fictions and rewritten with the same devastating effect for those expendable millions that made up a veritable continent of suffering we could rightly map as the globally dispossessed.
We live, however, in a different political moment. The state is no longer the center of politics. Neoliberalism has made a bonfire of the sovereign principles embodied in the social contract. Nor can we simply diagnose twenty-first-century forms of oppression and exploitation by relying on well-rehearsed orthodoxies of our recent past. With power and its modalities of violence having entered into the global space of flows—detached from the controlling political interests of the nation-state utilizing technologies far beyond those imagined in the most exaggerating of twentieth-century fictions—the dystopian theorists of yesteryear prove to be of limited use.25 The virtues of political affirmation and confidence appear increasingly to have fallen prey to formations of global capitalism and its engulfing webs of precarity that have reduced human life to the task of merely being able to survive. Individual and collective agencies are not only under siege to a degree unparalleled at any other time in history, but have become depoliticized, overcome by a culture of anxiety, in-security, commodification, and privatization.
More specifically, under neoliberal rule the vast majority are forced to live a barely sustainable precariousness and to accept that our contemporary society is naturally precarious. That the future is a terrain of endemic and unavoidable catastrophe is taken as given in most policy circles. Dystopia, in other words, is no longer the realm of scientific fiction—as suggested, for instance, by increasingly urgent recent climate reports warning that the integrity of the planet’s diversity-sustaining biosphere is collapsing. It is the dominant imaginary for neoliberal governance and its narcissistic reasoning.
If Theodor Adorno was right to argue that the apocalypse already occurred with the realization of the Holocaust and the experience of World War II, what has taken its place is a discourse signaling the normalization of a catastrophic imagination that offers few means for possible escape.26 Despite their relation to “end of times narratives,” as Jacob Taubes once noted,27 there is perhaps something different at work here between the pre-modern apocalyptic movements and the shift toward catastrophic reasoning that has come to define the contemporary moment. For all their nihilism and monotheistic servitude, at least the apocalyptic movements actively imagine a better world than the one they are in. Theirs was and is open to the idea of