#loic wacquant

[registoetransicoes]

[thelonguepuree]

These castaway categories—unemployed youth left adrift, the beggars and the homeless, aimless nomads and drug addicts, postcolonial immigrants without documents or support—have become salient in public space, their presence undesirable and their doings intolerable, because they are the living and threatening incarnation of the generalized social insecurity produced by the erosion of stable and homogenous wage work (promoted to the rank of paradigm of employment during the decades of Fordist expansion in 1945–75) and by the decomposition of the solidarities of class and culture it underpinned within a clearly circumscribed national framework. Just as national boundaries have been blurred by the hypermobility of capital, the settlement of migration flows, and European integration, the normalization of desocialized labor feeds a powerful current of anxiety in all the societies of the continent.

Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor

[thelonguepuree]

At the lowest rung of the social ladder, incarceration serves to physically neutralize and warehouse the supernumerary fractions of the working class and in particular the dispossessed members of stigmatized groups who persist in entering into 'open rebellion against their social environment'—to recall the provocative definition of crime proposed a century ago by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro. One step higher, the rolling out of the police, judicial, and correctional net of the state fulfills the function, inseparably economic and moral, of imposing the discipline of desocialized wage work among the established fractions of the proletariat and the declining and insecure strata of the middle class, in particular by raising the cost of strategies of escape or resistance that drive young men from the lower class into the illegal sectors of the street economy. Lastly and above all, for the upper class as well as the society as a whole, the endless and boundless activism of the penal institution serves the symbolic mission of reaffirming the authority of the state and the newfound will of political elites to emphasize and enforce the sacred border between commendable citizens and deviant categories, the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor, those who merit being salvaged and 'inserted' (through a mix of sanctions and incentives on both the welfare and crime fronts) into the circuit of unstable wage labor and those who must henceforth be durably blacklisted and banished.

Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor

[bakaity-poetry]

[bakaity-poetry]

The Invention of the ‘Underclass’: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge"

[thelonguepuree]

…the irresistible ascent of the penal state in the United States over the past three decades responds not to the rise in crime—which remained roughly constant overall before sagging at the end of the period—but to the dislocations provoked by the social and urban retrenchment of the state and by the imposition of precarious wage labor as a new norm of citizenship for those trapped at the bottom of the polarizing class structure.

Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

[arquitectura-al-fondo]

El neoliberalismo se caracteriza por la gestión punitiva de sus consecuencias sociales.

Loic Wacquant