Twilight of the Social

Resurgent Politics in an Age of Disposability

Henry A. Giroux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317250043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In The Twilight of the Social, Henry A. Giroux looks at the decline of social spaces which enable grievances to be dealt with and considers new ways in which citizens can create social spaces today. After decades of neoliberalism, today's young people lack a voice and are saddled with economic, political, and social conditions that have rendered them marginalised and ultimately disposable. Giroux covers a broad range of topics - from youth and the promise of new media technologies, the economic Darwinism of globalisation, and the need for a renewed democratic culture. The Twilight of the Social is a compelling account of the erosion in recent decades of the very idea of 'the social' in America and other societies.

1

In the Twilight of the Social State

Rethinking Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History¹

By eviscerating public services and reducing them to a network of farmed-out private providers, we have begun to dismantle the fabric of the state. As for the dust and powder of individuality: it resembles nothing so much as Hobbes’s war of all against all, in which life for many people has once again become solitary, poor and more than a little nasty.

—Tony Judt²

Responding in 1940 to the unfolding catastrophes perpetrated by the rise of fascism in Germany, Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish philosopher and literary critic, wrote his now famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In the Ninth Thesis, Benjamin comments on Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus:

“Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The Angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.³

The meaning and significance of Benjamin’s angel of history has been the subject of varied interpretations by philosophers, literary critics, and others.⁴ Yet, it still offers us a powerful lesson about a set of historical conditions marked by a “catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”⁵ In this instance, catastrophe both undermined any hope of democracy in Europe and gave rise to the dark forces of a brutal authoritarianism and the cool, ruthless homage to efficiency and the industrialization of death. In the midst of such a crisis, Benjamin’s angel is frozen in time, paralyzed by a storm called “progress” that pulls him into the future without being able to “awaken the dead” or mend the catastrophe at his feet.

For Benjamin, the storm of progress was a mode of modernity gone askew and a deceit that made a claim on happiness rather than the horrors of destruction, constituting a set of conditions that unleashed a barrage of unimaginable carnage and suffering in the 1930s and 1940s. The utopian belief in technologically assisted social improvement had given way to a dystopian project of mad violence that would inevitably produce the context for Benjamin to take his own life in 1940. According to Benjamin, the horrors of the past made it difficult to believe in progress as a narrative of the advancement of human civilization. In fact, as Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out, it wasn’t just the overdetermined force of history that was at stake in Benjamin’s narrative, but also the notion that “we are pulled forward by future happiness—[when] in fact, [as Benjamin noted], we are pushed from behind by the horror of destruction we keep perpetrating on the way.”⁶ Undoubtedly, Benjamin’s angel of history would be at home today. And, yet, even in the darkest times, there were people brave enough to struggle for a more open-ended understanding of history and a more promising democratic future, waging that the catastrophes of the past and the false claims of a history propelled by predetermined laws and order-building imperatives could be prevented through a kind of memory work and politics in which such atrocities were acknowledged and condemned as part of a larger project of freedom, collective struggle, and social justice.

Like the angel of history in Benjamin’s rendering of Klee’s painting, the U.S. public is surrounded by another catastrophe of history, inconceivable but manifest in the horrible suffering produced by two unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the current economic recession, exacerbating already high levels of poverty, homelessness, and joblessness now spreading like a poisonous blight across the U.S. landscape. But unlike the forces constricting Benjamin’s angel, the storm that pins the wings of the current diminutive angel of history is more intense, more paralyzing in its hyper-materialistic visions, and more privatizing in its definition of agency. The historical forces producing this storm and its accompanying catastrophes are incorrigibly blind to the emergence of a “pulverized, atomized society spattered with the debris of broken inter-human bonds and their eminently frail and breakable substitutes.”⁷ This is best exemplified in the now infamous and cruel tenets of a harsh neoliberalism stated without apology by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, including the claims that “government is the problem not the solution” and “there is no such thing as society.”

Social progress has ceded the historical stage to individual actions, values, tastes, and personal success, just as any notion of the common and public good that once defined the meaning of progress is rendered as a pathology, the vestige of a kind of socialist nightmare that squelches any possibility of individual freedom and responsibility. If progress even in its mythic register was once associated, however flawed, with lifting the populace from the bondage of necessity, suffering, and exploitation, today it has been stripped of any residual commitment to the collective good and functions largely as a kind of nostalgic relic of a historical period in U.S. history, in which a concept of the social state “was not always a term of opprobrium” or a metaphor for state terrorism.⁸ The language of progress, however false, has been replaced by the discourse and politics of austerity—which is neoliberal code for making the working and middle classes bear the burden of a financial crisis caused by hedge fund operators, banking and investment houses, and the mega-rich.⁹

The catastrophe that marks the current historical moment no longer wraps itself in the mantle of progress. On the contrary, the storm brewing in the United States and other parts of the globe represent a kind of anti-progress, a refusal to think about, invest in, or address the shared responsibilities that come with a viable vision of the future and “the good society.” Composing meaningful visions of the good society that benefit citizens in general rather than a select few is now viewed as “a waste of time, since they are irrelevant to individual happiness and a successful life.”¹⁰ Bounded by the narrow, private worlds that make up their everyday lives, the U.S. public has surrendered to the atomizing consequences of a market-driven morality and society and has replaced the call for communal responsibility with the call to further one’s own interests at all costs. The social and its most significant embodiment—the welfare state—is now viewed as an albatross around the neck of neoliberal notions of accumulation (as opposed to “progress”). Society has become hyper-individualized, trapped by the lure of material success and stripped of any obligation to the other. Zygmunt Bauman argues that in such a society,

individual men and women are now expected, pushed and pulled to seek and find individual solutions to socially created problems and implement those solutions individually using individual skills and resources. This ideology proclaims the futility (indeed, counter productivity) of solidarity: of joining forces and subordinating individual actions to a “common cause.” It derides the principle of communal responsibility for the well-being of its members, decrying it as a recipe for a debilitating “nanny state,” and warning against care for the other leading to an abhorrent and detestable “dependency.”¹¹

Our contemporary angel of history has been transformed into a “swarm of angels of biographies—a crowd of loners”¹² whose wings are stuck in a storm propelled by the hatred of democracy and a contempt for any claim on the future in which the state functions to offer even a modicum of social protection. And although Benjamin’s angel of history rightfully disputes the false claims of an order building progress, he has been replaced by a multitude of privatizing corporate-beholden angels who cede any notion of society and collective vision—reduced to wingless messengers trapped in their own biographies and individual experiences, cut off from any viable notion of society and its fundamental social solidarities. At the same time, the storm that pins the wings of the contemporary angels of history is fueled by an intense disdain for the social state, which Bauman describes in the following manner:

A state is “social” when it promotes the principle of communally endorsed, collective insurance against individual misfortune and its consequences. It is primarily that principle—declared, set in operation and trusted to be in working order—that recast the otherwise abstract idea of “society” into the experience of felt and lived community through replacing the “order of egoism” (to deploy John Dunn’s terms), bound to generate an atmosphere of mutual mistrust and suspicion, with the “order of equality,” inspiring confidence and solidarity. It is the same principle which lifts members of society to the status of citizens, that is, makes them stakeholders in addition to being stockholders: beneficiaries, but also actors—the wardens as much as the wards of the “social benefits” system, individuals with an acute interest in the common good understood as a network of shared institutions that can be trusted, and realistically expected, to guarantee the solidity and reliability of the state-issued “collective insurance policy.”¹³

We no longer live in an age in which history’s “winged messengers” bear witness to the suffering endured by millions and the conditions that allow such suffering to continue. Thinking about past and future has collapsed into a presentism in which the delete button, the utter normalization of a punishing inequality, and the atomizing pleasures of instant gratification come together to erase any notion of historical consciousness and any vestige of social and moral responsibility owed as much to future generations as to the dead. The “winged messengers” have been replaced by a less hallowed breed of anti-public intellectuals, academics, journalists, and artists, who now cater to the demands of the market and further their careers by becoming cheerleaders for neoliberal capitalism. The legacies now left by too many intellectuals have more to do with establishing a corporate friendly brand name than fighting economic and social injustices, translating private into public issues, or creating genuine public spheres that promote critical thought and collective action. Whatever “winged messengers” do exist are either banished to the margins of the institutions that house them or excluded by the dominant media that have now become a mouthpiece for corporate culture and the new global rich.

As history is erased and economics becomes the driving force for all aspects of political, cultural, and social life, those institutional and political forces that hold the reins of power now become the purveyors of social death, comfortably ensconced in a political imaginary that wreaks human misery on the planet as the rich and powerful reap huge financial gains for themselves. The principal players of casino capitalism live in the highly circumscribed time of short-term investments and financial gains and they are more than willing to close their eyes to the carnage and suffering all around them while they are sucked into the black hole of the future. As the social state is eviscerated by an all-embracing market fundamentalism, society increasingly becomes a machine for destroying the power of civic culture and civic life, proliferating the ideologies and technologies of what is increasingly and unequivocally becoming a punishing state. And, paraphrasing Achille Mbembe, politics becomes a form of social death in which “the future is collapsed into the present.”¹⁴

Though helpless to control what he saw, Benjamin’s angel of history recognized that the past, present, and future were inextricably linked in a constellation of ideas, events, social practices, and relations of power that mutually inform each other. History offered no guarantees, and although it could often paralyze and punish, the potentially revolutionary ideal that gave it mythic status was organized around an understanding of social improvement that was partly connected to the unfinished business of human possibility and betterment. Of course, Benjamin rejected such a view. His angel of history is caught up in a storm that paralyzed human agency while putting the myth of the inevitability of progress to rest. But storms pass, and hope as a condition for conceptualizing a future of sustainable progress can offer us both space and time for reflection, for developing modes of individual critique and collective agency capable of addressing and dismantling those sites of agony and wretchedness made visible in the afterglow of historical consciousness. The problems confronting Americans today are very different from what Benjamin faced in the years before his suicide in 1940, but they share with the past a dangerous and threatening element of authoritarianism evident in the force and power of their ability to eliminate from public discussion what Tony Judt has called the social question and what I have referred to as the punishing state.¹⁵

In an age when personal and political rights are undermined by a lack of economic rights, the utter reliance on a stripped-down notion of individual freedom and choice, coupled with a strong emphasis on personal responsibility, turns people away from those...