Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans

      Introduction

      Henry A. Giroux

      WHAT BRAD EVANS CALLS “The Atrocity Exhibition” no longer hides in the shadows of power and ideological deception. Authoritarianism and the expanding architecture of violence is on the rise not only in countries such as Poland, Hungary, India, and Turkey but also in the United States — a country that, however erratic, has prided itself on its longstanding dream and embrace of democratic rights. Democratic institutions, principles, and passions are under siege not only by the vicious forces of neoliberal capitalism but also by a war culture shaped by resurgent fascism. Unbridled capitalism — with its totalizing belief in market values as a governing template for all social life — inflicts mass misery and unimaginable suffering on its populace as it shifts massive amounts of wealth and resources to the financial elite. At the same time, those in power criminalize an increasing number of social problems — turning, for instance, the war on poverty into a war on the poor, using violence as a tool to address social challenges such as homelessness, school truancy, financial debt, drug addiction, and mental health issues. Atrocity Exhibition underscores that politics in the age of neoliberal fascism has become an extension of war; the latter is the template for shaping all relations while state and non-state violence become the medium for enforcing such dynamics.

      As its welfare function is eviscerated, the state takes on a greater role in using punishment as an organizing tool to shape all aspects of the social order. Democratic practices are now replaced by genuine horrors as the dreams of a better future turn into ever-present nightmares. The endless production of inequality, poverty, and state violence, accompanied by a growing culture of fear, precarity, and cruelty, have unleashed the mobilizing furies of fascism at a social level. Paroxysms of unchecked rage displace criticism of the genuine horrors of capitalism. Neoliberalism increasingly fuels a right-wing populism that willingly indulges the symbols, language, and logic that echoes fascist history.

      As Evans makes clear throughout this book, human beings are now transformed into capital and thus subject to the dictates of privatization, deregulation, commodification, the celebration of self-interests, and a notion of freedom divorced from any sense of social bonds or moral responsibility. All relations are subject to market values and all transactions are wedded to the logic of exchange value and capital accumulation. Such a neoliberal order reduces one’s fate solely to a privatized matter of individual responsibility. In return, this reduction is further diminished to questions of character, individual choice, and a faux notion of resilience. Missing from this discourse is any whiff of injustice or reference to larger structural and systemic forms of oppression. Politics now dissolves into pathology.

      Older narratives tied to the social contract and welfare state are replaced by the new narratives of racial and social cleansing, which exhibit a disdain for democratic notions of solidarity, community, compassion, and empathy. Out of this disgust, if not hatred, for the basic institutions and principles of democracy, a new white nationalist narrative of disposability emerges that embraces symbolic and visceral violence aimed at those considered tainted by blood, soil, religion, race, and ethnicity. Evans understands this attack on democracy, but he also reveals the possibility of a critical and democratic community: he wants to show how the imperatives of power, war, and violence command the visions of society and produce a radically individualized, competitive, and militant subject and what it means to challenge and transform this dystopian imaginary.

      Neoliberal fascism produces a new kind of devastation, particularly in the United States. It is marked by escalating poverty and misery among large sections of the public: relentless violence; an epidemic of social isolation; the opioid crisis; mass shootings; the growing presence of the police in all public spheres; and a culture of fear that strengthens the security state. These atrocities move between two modalities: spectacle and brutality. An aesthetics of depravity and an endless display of captivating spectacles turn hyper-violence into a form of sport, maximizing the pleasure of violence by giving it a fascist edge, while the real and visceral brutalities of unimaginable violence continue — everything from the mass murder of over 2,600 people after the Twin Towers terrorist strike to the murderous attacks on the 43 college students in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, to the endless killing of the innocent women and children as portrayed in the work of Mexican artist Chantal Meza and Gottfried Helnwein.

      Violence no longer shocks; it feeds the news cycles and becomes fodder for Hollywood blockbusters all the while numbing a wider public to the conditions that make its existence and trivialization possible. Atrocities have become routine, normalized in the United States — landscapes of horror on exhibit for a social order that elevates violence to its central organizing principle. Indeed, as Evans observes, violence has moved from a tool of terror and punishment to an exhibition that signals both the loss of historical memory and a flight from reason and ethics. Is it any wonder that notions of collective responsibility have been replaced by a collective numbing that collapses the line between a genuine ethical crisis and the fog of political indifference? As Evans makes clear, this is a violence that is as existential as it is visceral. There is nothing abstract about violence, especially under the leadership of a growing number of authoritarian leaders, with Trump at the front of the line — leaders who both enable and legitimate it.

      Fascism thrives on contradictions that serve the ruthless and powerful. For instance, Trump cages children who are separated from their parents, stripped naked, shackled to chairs, and left in solitary confinement. Yet, he criticizes basketball great LeBron James who builds a public school for at-risk youth. As Charles Blow put it in The New York Times: “Hover over the irony here: the man trying to help at-risk children by opening doors for them was being attacked by the man who has put children at risk by locking them in cages.” Trump claimed he was going to drain the swamp. Instead, he turned it into a toxic waste site filled with corrupt and incompetent political hacks who are ethically tranquilized. His apologists, such as Ann Coulter and Alex Jones, revel in spewing out insults about defenseless children. Right-wing celebrity pundit Coulter shamelessly claimed that youth speaking out against gun violence were child actors, imposters showcasing the slaughter of innocence for fame and self-promotion. Conspiracy theorist, radio host, and ally of Donald Trump Alex Jones went further and claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. This is a small and selected snapshot of the culture of cruelty that accompanies a fascist social order.

      What these snapshots point to is a new political narrative suited to the present moment. Under current historical circumstances, the elements of fascism have reappeared most visibly in the discourse of imperial bravado, unchecked racism, anti-immigrant fervor, a hatred of Muslims, apocalyptic populism, a hyper-masculinity, an unapologetic anti-intellectualism, a contempt for weakness, and a contempt for dissent. This is the atrocity exhibition, the fragments of a dystopian present, which signals a new script