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1 INTRODUCTION A New Politics of Containment Shelley Feldman, Gayatri A. Menon, and Charles Geisler Over half a century ago, Hannah Arendt, reflecting on the human condition in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, insisted that explanations for it were not to be found by fixating on the extraordinariness of political evil. Instead, she urged us to consider the banality of evil, the everyday practices and normal people who perpetrate the mass destruction of humanity. For Arendt, political evil was located in alienation, the historical dynamic of capitalist modernity, and the substance of its moral economy. This emphasis directs our attention to the myriad ways in which accumulation practices order life, as well as to the insidious conditions of their reproducibility. Yet today, analyses of what is considered “political evil,” the large-scale annihilation of human beings, seems remarkably narrow when the body counts of martial combat appear to be the only bodies that actually count in what is recognized as political evil (Hayden 2007). This narrow conceptualization of acts that deprive humans of life seems remarkable precisely because it is taking place at a moment when we witness the world careening toward a crisis of social reproduction; a crisis, we argue, that takes more lives than do acts of direct violence, and is no less an act of violent politics. There is growing consensus that the world today is in dire social and economic crisis that extends to housing, personal financial debt, and the absence of adequate health care and education, a crisis that finds increasing numbers of people vulnerable to dearth and death as the ability to secure daily life is eroded. Despite this acknowledgment, human security, and indeed homeland security, is increasingly framed by a concern with war and the protection of corporate finance. Moreover, even as more people face morbidity and mortality through 2 • Feldman, Menon, and Geisler deprivation than from battlefield encounters, public concern for security continues to rivet solely on the body counts and body bags from military conflicts, and state leaders seem oblivious to the ongoing processes of dispossession and alienation that renders vast populations materially and politically insecure. Provoked by this acute state of dispossession and alienation, in a colloquium that brought together a range of disciplinary perspectives for a year-long conversation , we examined the relationship between security and insecurity in the contemporary moment. We challenged thinking that conflates security with stockpiled arms, military engagements, and Homeland Security budgets; in its place, we brought into focus the daily lives and human bodies that these martial practices purport to secure. The outcome of our efforts was to re-embed constructions of security and experiences of insecurity within the realm of social reproduction. By social reproduction we reference the historically contingent processes by which we reproduce the conditions and relations of economic and social security. These include not only the technical means of reproducing the physical integrity of our bodies, but also the methods by which we reproduce ourselves as political subjects—that is, the relations of rule that we legitimate. Our aim is to draw attention to the violent conditions of social reproduction in the current moment, a moment marked by dispossession, revanchism, and the penalization and privatization of poverty (Araghi 1995; Smith 2002; Harvey 2003; Mitchell 2003; Passavant 2005; Gilmore 2007; Hayden 2007; Wacquant 2008a). The skewed calculus of violence that now prevails prompted us to ask the following set of questions: What is the relationship between different orders of violence—direct conflict and indirect structural violence? How are certain forms of human degradation normalized, made “banal,” and at what price? How does human welfare come to be equated with the diminution of rights rather than the strengthening and extension of rights? What might we discover about the character of political exclusion and alienation in the contemporary social order if we were to connect an internment camp for farmers deemed antinational by the Thai state, the retraining of prison populations as soldiers in the U.S. Army, a migrant detention facility in Iowa, the surveillance of taxi drivers in New York City, and an export-processing zone in Tijuana? What might these diverse expressions of political exclusion and alienation reveal to us about the contemporary human condition, about the terms through which we recognize another’s status as that of a human being, and about the organization and administration of everyday violence? By rejecting the equation of security with the stockpiling of armaments and embracing instead a notion of...

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