Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism

Abstract

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2081112 © 2013 Neferti X. M. Tadiar A number of scholarly works focused on the political and economic transformations known as globalization have described the perceived shift from liberalism to neoliberalism concomitant with these transformations in terms of a shift in the logic of constitution of forms of personhood and governmentality from one constructed around rights and property to another constructed around risk and security. Beyond the domains of political and economic practice and rationality, this identified shift in global hegemony is seen to produce and issue out of changed structures of lived subjectivities and feeling and transformed modalities of social experience and imagination. In this essay, I want to explore in particular the structurings of time in emerging orders of labor and life as a way of understanding certain cultural and philosophical aspects of the project of neoliberalism and the organized divisions and relations among geopolitical populations and their social lifeworlds, which comprise and are presupposed by this new global hegemonic order. Seen in light of broad changes in a shared regional and global political economy, films from China and the Philippines — in particular, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2006) and 24 City (2008) and Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador (2007) and Lola (2009) — are important touchstones for my thinking on this subject. As a spectacular commodity, cinema is not only a principal medium of what Debord calls the “time of the spectacle” — “in the narrow sense, as the time appropriate to the consumption of images, and in the broadest sense, as the image of the consumption of time” — it is also a principal and perhaps paradigmatic medium of the processes of idealization and abstraction that comprise the independent being of value LifeTimes of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism