Jajuna

I just finished reading Loic Wacquant’s new book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. The book accompanies two other recent books by Wacquant (professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley) that explore similar themes: Urban Outcasts and Prisons of Poverty. Punishing the Poor is a detailed sociological analysis of the material and symbolic mechanisms and historical coordinates intertwining the simultaneous retreat of social welfarism and the advancement of new modes of social inequality, the precaritization of labor, and mass incarceration. While these trends have been shared in varying degrees across Western democratic states, Wacquant roots much of his analysis in the “penalization of poverty” in the United States, making the claim that U.S. post-welfare logics have provided the dominant frames guiding contemporary realignments of European governance and social policy restructuring.

There isn’t much here not already widely accepted by social scientists. Wacquant’s primary argument, echoing his mentor Pierre Bourdieu, is that “the downsizing of the social welfare sector of the state and concurrent upsizing of its penal arm are functionally linked, forming, as it were, two sides of the same coin of state restructuring in the nether regions of urban space in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (43). In other words, as the conjoined narratives and structural practices of deregulation and moral responsibility have produced new forms of social insecurity, cultural approbation, and punitive “workfarist” policies for low-income and racialized populations—i.e. those populations left most precarious in the hyper-mobile and flexible circuits of the global economy—the state has expanded its control, surveillance, and punishment functions. Wacquant thus describes the neoliberal state as a “centaur state, guided by a liberal head mounted on an authoritarian body, that applies the doctrine of “laissez-faire” upstream, when it comes to social inequalities and the mechanisms that generate them (the free play of capital, deregulation of labor law and deregulation of employment, retraction or removal of collective protections), but it turns out to be brutally paternalistic and punitive downstream, when it comes to coping with their consequences on a daily level” (43).

A central point in Wacquant’s analysis is that the rise in the penal arm of the neoliberal state serves a variety of key political functions in the government of social insecurity:

The renewed utility of the penal apparatus in the post-Keynesian era of insecure employment is threefold: (1) it works to bend the fractions of the working class recalcitrant to the discipline of the new fragmented service wage-labor by increasing the cost of strategies of exit into the informal economy of the street; (2) it neutralizes and warehouses its most disruptive elements, or those rendered wholly superfluous by the recomposition of the demand for labor; and (3) it reaffirms the authority of the state in daily life within the restrictive domain henceforth assigned to it. The canonization of “the right to security,” correlative to the dereliction of the “right to employment” in its old form (that is, full-time and with full benefits, for an indefinite period, and for a living wage enabling one to reproduce oneself socially and to project oneself into the future), and the increased interest in, and resources granted to the enforcement of order as just the right time to shore up the deficit of legitimacy suffered by political-decision makers, owing to the very fact that they have abjured the established missions of the state of the social and economic front” (7).

Like his other books, Punishing the Poor assembles an incredibly rich and rigorous collection of data to back up its major claims. Armed with a mountain of statistical evidence and acute attention to historical detail, the book pulls no punches as it surveys the intersection of social insecurity and punishment within the neoliberal state across the vectors of political economy and culture. For those interested in the politics of poverty and the law under neoliberalism the book is definitely worth checking out. In particular, Wacquant is very adept at approaching these issues from a variety of different theoretical standpoints while distilling his prose into clever, punchy, and insightful polemical figures. What I see as the fundamental weakness of Wacquant’s work is that it doesn’t delve deeply into questions of agency, resistance, and/or democratic alternatives to the neoliberal juggernaut. Perhaps no other contemporary sociologist has more advanced our understanding of the relations between the post-industrial prison and inner-city poverty, spatial stigmatization, and enclosure. However, Wacquant doesn’t give us much to work with in terms of thinking beyond these relations. Admittedly, in Urban Outcasts he does do an excellent job of dispelling the myths of the contemporary ghetto as a site of total dysfunction, highlighting how such narratives serve to reproduce in both popular and scholarly discourses racist stereotypes while missing the objective conditions of the highly complex social systems and norms that structure daily life in the most dispossessed and disenfranchised spaces of the urban. In my view, however, this doesn’t go far enough in thinking about alternative democratic movements.

While I think Wacquant could do more on this front, he nonetheless does conclude with a brief section on “how to escape the law and order state”. “To avoid getting locked into a penal escalation without end or exit, it is indispensable to renconnect the debate on crime with the paramount social question of the new century, which it now screens from view: the advent of desocialized wage labor, vector of social insecurity, and of increasing material, familial, educational, health, and even mental precariousness. For one can no longer order one’s perception of the social world and conceive of the future when the present is obstructed and turns into a struggle for day to day survival” (281). Wacquant proceeds to offer a series of brief suggestions for re-thinking the economic and cultural valences of insecurity and crime. Unfortunately, these recommendations including “defending the left arm of the state” (a valid and important task to be sure!) are not offered with nearly the depth or theoretical precision as the critique, and can be seen as offering not much more than social democratic reformism as opposed to a more forward looking project of fundamental transformation.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Books, Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.