Abstract
The health of any given society can be understood through an examination of the attitudes, challenges, and realities that confront its youth on a daily basis. When young people in the United States are increasingly subject to forces that commodify them, criminalize them, and deem them unworthy of receiving a critical and laudable education, it bodes very ill for the nation as a whole. While it is important to explore the particular problems facing youth as a result of state and institutional policy and misrepresentation in the dominant media, this approach does not go far enough. What is emerging is a new global order in which the neoliberal logic of consuming and disposability reigns supreme, in spite of the current financial crisis. The issues of global democracy and universal access to quality education must be made central to any effort to address the plight of young people. At the same time, the issues facing youth are crucial to any conceptualization and future reality of global democracy. Young people—as a concrete embodiment and symptomatic reflection of the abstract forces that govern the social sphere—are one of the most significant modalities through which to understand and launch an effective resistance to neoliberalism as a political, economic, and social movement. Indeed, no rigorous attempt to examine the meaning, implications, and consequences of neoliberalism can do without a methodological approach that connects the particular, concrete realities of people’s lives to the general phenomena governing the state and social structure, which although not visible to the eye, are no less real as they bear down on everyday existence.
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Notes
Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006).
I have taken the term “torture factories” from Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 50.
For an extensive treatment of this issue, see Michael McHugh, The econd Gilded Age: The Great Reaction in the United States, 1973–2001 (Boulder: University Press, 2006).
Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds., Evil Paradises (New York: The New Press, 2007)
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2007).
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861–1901 (reprint) (New York: Harcourt, 2001).
For an extensive analysis of the First and Second Gilded Ages, see McHugh, The Second Gilded Age. While all of these factors connect the old and new Gilded Ages, one cannot but acknowledge the fact that both share a deep-seated racism, a Supreme Court deeply implicated in maintaining racist patterns of segregation, and a degree of poverty, violence, exclusion, and human suffering partly caused by the workings of a racist state. One important analysis between the Gilded Age and racism can be found in Susan Searls Giroux, “Race, Rhetoric, and the Contest Over Civic Education,” in Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 129–167.
As Lawrence Grossberg points out, neoliberalism “describes a political-economic project” whose “supporters are bound together by their fundamental opposition to Keynesian demand-side fiscal policy and to government regulation of business. Second, many neoliberals support laissez-faire and define the free economy as the absence of any regulation or control... neoliberals tend to believe that, since the free market is the most rational and democratic system of choice, every domain of human life should be open to the forces of the marketplace. At the very least, that means that the government should stop providing services that would be better delivered by opening them up to the marketplace. Third, neoliberals believe that economic freedom is the necessary precondition for political freedom (democracy); they often act as if democracy were nothing but economic freedom or the freedom to choose. Finally neoliberals are radical individualists. Any appeal to larger groups (e.g., gender, racial, ethnic, or class groups) as if they functioned as agents or had rights, or to society itself, is not only meaningless but also a step toward socialism and totalitarianism.” Lawrence Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future (Boulder: Paradigm, 2005), p. 112.
Alain Touraine, Beyond Neoliberalism (London: Polity Press, 2001)
Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003)
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)
Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston, eds., Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader (London: Pluto Press, 2005)
Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005)
Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)
Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)
Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Beyond the Politics of Greed (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008).
See, especially, Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Alfred Knopf Canada, 2007).
Kenneth J. Saltman, Capitalizingon Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007)
Kenneth J. Saltman, ed., Schooling and the Politics of Disaster (New York: Routledge, 2007)
Lewis Gordon and Jane Gordon, On Divine Warning: Disaster in the Modern Age (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008).
Luis E. Carcamo-Huechante, “Milton Friedman: Knowledge, Public Culture, and Market Economy in the Chile of Pinochet,” Public Culture 18:2 (Spring 2006), p. 414.
Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” Rethinking Marxism 14:3 (Fall 2002), p. 52.
Ibid., p. 50. On the issue of governmentality, see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” trans. Rosi Braidotti and revised by Colin Gordon in The Foucault Effect: Studiesin Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 87–104
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and the Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
Michel Foucault, “Security, Territory and Population,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 67–71.
Thomas Lemke, “A Zone of Indistinction: A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics,” Outlines: Critical Social Studies 7:1 (2005), p. 12.
See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003)
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (London: Polity Press, 2001), p. 9.
Catherine Needham, “Customer-Focused Government,” Soundings 26 (Spring 2004), p. 80.
On the biopolitics of disposability, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15:1 (2003), pp. 11–40
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (London: Polity Press, 2004)
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004)
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows (New York: Picador, 2002), p. 21.
I want to make it clear that I am not arguing that state sovereignty in the past represented some ideal or “good” form of sovereignty. State sovereignty is inscribed in a damaged legacy of social, economic, and racial exclusion. But this should not suggest that state sovereignty does not function differently in various historical conjunctures, sometimes more and sometimes less on the side of justice. Nor should my comments suggest that sovereignty is not worth fighting over, even if it means gaining incremental modes of justice while refusing to embrace liberal social democratic aims. When sovereignty is connected with the concept of democracy, it contains the possibility of being contested. Corporate and state sovereignty under neoliberalism seem incapable of questioning and contesting themselves and close off matters of debate, reform, and transformation, if not politics itself, through endless hegemonic claims “that presuppose [their] own perfectability, and thus [their] own historicity.” The quote is from Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 121.
Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (London: Polity Press, 2005), p. 76.
Bauman, Wasted Lives (London: Polity Press, 2004), p. 131.
Dollars and Sense and United for a Fair Economy, eds., The Wealth Inequality Reader, 2nd edition (Chicago: Dollars and Sense, 2008).
I take up this issue in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007).
Nick Couldry, “Reality TV, or the Secret Theater of Neoliberalism,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30:1 (January–March 2008), pp. 3–13.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Polity Press, 2007), p. 28.
Some of the most brilliant work on racist exclusion can be found in David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1993)
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009).
Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (London: Polity Press, 2007), p. 65.
Ewa Ponowska Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1 (Winter 2008), p. 90.
Mika Ojakangas, “Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault,” Foucault Studies 2 (May 2005), pp. 5–6.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 4.
See, especially, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2002)
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003).
For an extensive elaboration of Agamben’s notion of the camp as the nomos of society, see Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten, The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp (New York: Routledge, 2005).
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (London: Polity Press, 2003), p. 133.
Catherine Mills, “Agamben’s Messianic Biopolitics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004), p. 47.
Jean Comaroff, “Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order,” Public Culture 19:1 (Winter 2007), p. 209.
The following section draws from Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder: Paradigm, 2006).
Of course, the social contract largely excluded black populations in the United States. See David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).
Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
Nikhil Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105:1 (Winter 2006), pp. 83–84.
Southern Poverty Law Center, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programsin the United States (Montgomery, AL: The Southern Poverty Law Center, 2007). Online: http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/ SPLCguest-worker.pdf.
Mitchell Dean, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5 (December 2004), p. 17.
Ernesto Laclau, “Bare Life or Social Indeterminancy?” in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calauco and Steven De Caroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 13–14.
Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, trans. Helen Arnold (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 47.
Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory: From Vocation to Invocation,” in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 3.
In addition to works cited above by Foucault and Agamben, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
See Michel Foucault, “Afterword,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), especially pp. 208–226.
Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” Political Theory 21:2 (May 1993), pp. 203–204.
I am drawing from a number of works by Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Times; Liquid Fear (London: Polity Press, 2006)
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (London: Polity Press, 2003), p. 138.
Michael Dillon, “’sovereignty and Governmentality’: From the Problematics of the ‘New World Order’ to the Ethical Problematic of the World Order,” Alternatives 20 (1995), p. 330.
See Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 2007).
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (orig. 1916) (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays by Max Horkheimer (New York: Continuum, 1999), pp. xi–xxi.
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927).
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 241.
Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976), p. 162.
See, especially, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edition, revised (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968)
John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (orig. 1935) (New York: Prometheus Press, 1999).
See, especially, Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 81–123.
Roger I. Simon, The Touch of the Past (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 117.
Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 14.
Nick Couldry, “In Place of a Common Culture, What?” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 26:1 (2004), p. 15.
Ian Angus, Emergent Publics (Winnipeg, Canada: Arbeiter Ring, 2001).
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© 2009 Henry A. Giroux
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Giroux, H.A. (2009). In the Shadow of the Gilded Age: Biopolitics in the Age of Disposability. In: Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_5
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