Global Capitalism and the Culture of Mad Violence
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: The concept of “disposability” frequently returns in your writing, whether speaking of youth, politics, the future, etc. Why do you insist on this theme?
Henry Giroux: Global capitalism has taken on a range of characteristics that demand a new language for understanding such shifts along with the effects these economic, political, and pedagogical registers are having in different degrees upon those that bear the weight of its oppressive forces. Not only have we seen a separation of power, which is global, from politics, which is local, but we have seen a full-fledged attack on the social state, the rise of the punishing state, and the emergence of what might be called an authoritarian culture of cruelty. Under such circumstances, I have tried to capture the current savagery of various regimes of neoliberal capitalism by developing a paradigm that focused on the intensification of what I have called the politics of disposability.
Under neoliberalism, politics becomes an extension of war and those populations that do not contribute or buy into the notion that the only value that matters is exchange value are viewed as either useless or a threat to the ruling elites. One consequence is that within this new historical conjuncture, the practice of disposability expands to include more and more individuals and groups who have been considered redundant, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance, and mass incarceration.
Disposability is no longer the exception but the norm. As the reach of disposability has broadened to include a range of groups extending from college youth and poor minorities to the unemployed and members of the middle class who have lost their homes in the financial crisis of 2007, a shift in the radicalness and reach of the machinery of disposability constitutes not only a new mode of authoritarian politics, but also demands a new political vocabulary for understanding how the social contract has virtually disappeared while the mechanisms of expulsion, disposability, and state violence have become more integrated and menacing.
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