On Critical Pedagogy by Giroux Henry A.;

Author:Giroux, Henry A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

Ophelia is just one of the 200,000 chronically homeless who now use public libraries and other accessible but shrinking public spaces to find shelter.11 Many are sick, addicted to drugs and alcohol, or mentally disabled, and others are close to a nervous breakdown because of the stress, insecurity, and danger they face daily. In this country, as many as 3.5 million human beings experience homelessness each year,12 and they are often treated like criminals — as if punishment is the appropriate civic response to poverty, mental illness, and human suffering. Ophelia’s comments should not be dismissed as the ramblings of a mentally disturbed woman because they point to something much deeper about the current state of American society and its abandonment of entire populations who are now considered the unrecyclable human waste of a neoliberal social order.

Under the ruthless dynamics of predatory capitalism, there has been a shift away from the possibility of getting ahead economically and living a life of dignity toward the much more deadly task of struggling to stay alive. Many now argue that this new form of economic Darwinism is conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception in which, as Achille Mbembe asserts, “vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”13 These disposable populations are increasingly relegated to the frontier zones and removed from public view. Such populations are often warehoused in schools that resemble boot camps,14 dispersed to dank and dangerous workplaces far from the enclaves of the tourist industries, incarcerated in prisons that privilege punishment over rehabilitation, and consigned to the ranks of the permanently unemployed. What Orlando Patterson in his discussion of slavery called “social death” has now become the fate of more and more people as the socially strangulating neoliberal values of hyper-individualism, self-interest, and consumerism become the organizing principles of everyday life.15

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