Everyday Life in the Underbelly of Global Capital(ism)

In their latest stimulating books, Neferti X. M. Tadiar and AbdouMaliq Simone provide new and searing pathways for (re)engaging with the core questions of (everyday) life in the neoliberal moment, while also departing from the conventional ways in which the questions have been posed. Both authors expand the emergent tradition of reflections on the question of life in the context of the dominant, global political economy—what can be described as the paradigm of the politics or political economy of (everyday) life.1 Tadiar and Simone do not merely extend this tradition and the conversation. In fact, in Tadiar's Remaindered Life and Simone's The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture, both authors dialectize in similar but also significantly different ways the question of the ascendant neoliberal modes of life in relation to what it means to live well—or to live at all in the contemporary era. They both reach an altitude of remarkable eloquence in not only piercing through the complex ways in which life and living (including their enabling possibilities for a few and excruciating impoverishment for most people) are enacted in the contemporary era, but also in unfurling the minutiae of everyday life in which millions are predisposed to disposability, dispensability, expendability, valuelessness, and/or death—or to use Tadiar's words, "ordained pain and perdition."2As someone whose research and teaching interests have focused in the last two and a half decades on the core questions raised by these two books,3 I find much to think with there. I come to the question of (the politics/political economy of) everyday life in the context of Africa and beyond—particularly in teaching undergraduate and graduate students—from a liberal-egalitarian (intellectual and practical) tradition. This tradition, in my view, is one that fully embraces the core values of the Enlightenment,4 even while recognizing its historical and contemporary challenges, including its demanding yet almost unending possibilities for expanding human vistas and opening up opportunities for "freedom for all and life more abundant,"5 as well as its limitations and contradictions that led to the violent subversions of the core tenets of the Enlightenment ideals in late modernity. In this piece, I reflect on a few of the dimensions of the deliberations provoked by the two social thinkers by first outlining what I find to be the core arguments of the two and then comparing their perspectives. I then raise a few questions for further reflections on what can be described as a new critical/comparative political economy of life—which the two books elaborate, if not (re)inaugurate.AbdouMalique Simone's project is a daring one. He seeks to explore a phenomenon that can be apprehended and yet remains not totally apprehendable. How do we account for the urban that is "within and beyond capture"? That is, life that, in one sense, is observable and can be analyzed, and in another sense, cannot be fully observed and thus can trespass the grounds between the analyzable and the unanalyzable. In my view this points as much to the inherently ungraspable nature of the social world as to the question of the limitations of the student of society concerning the social conditions which they do not inhabit in the everyday as well as the longue durée. Thus, this book is a critical reflection on "the predominant forms of accumulation and dispossession" that admits of the capacity to provide illumination on the different dimensions of these forms while also recognizing the limitations of the knowing as well as of the knower in the context of extensive and massive suffering, because "there is somethingt/here that eludes coherent narratives of development and prospective future,"6 even though it is necessary to theorize the "range of plural stitching and mutual implications" (ix) of this endeavor. Despite this challenge, Simone renders a powerful and fresh conceptual tool, the surrounds, for understanding emergent forms of life within and beyond "extensive and extended urbanization" (ix). What then is his response to the paradox—and perhaps perplexity of—contemporary urban life, these "disparate forms that are not just a matter of space but one of time, of things coming and going, appearing and disappearing and reappearing again" (4)? It is the concept of the surrounds. For him, although the concept is neither an explanatory context nor a relation of interdependency, neither strictly (or exclusively, though sometimes inclusively so) spatial nor temporary, neither entirely solid nor liquid, yet "in all instances the surrounds are infrastructural in that they entail the possibilities within any event, situation, setting, or project for something incomputable and unanticipated to take (its) place" (5; emphasis added).Simone's theorization of the surrounds is very nuanced, even complex, because of its multidimensionality as well as the multiplicity of the social trajectories it seeks to bring into view (without necessarily bringing them together as a unity of vision). However, as he teases out the multidimensionality and multiplicity of his focus and applies this to specific contexts of potential capacities and capacious potentialities in the context of structural constraints, particularly in the global South, the illumination that this perspective constitutes in "the very formation of urban life" becomes evident—even urgent. I can identify three very valuable ways in which the surrounds helps us have a more critical insight into life in contemporary urban formations.The first is what might be identified as the (nominally) structural. That is, Simone's unique identification of the relationality of location that articulates designated spaces within and beyond their specificity and respective functioning—because they are constantly in flux, subject to multiple, even contradictory uses, not fully captured (or capturable) yet remaining inexhaustible in the range of their potentials. For example, cities have particular "industrial, carceral, administrative, domestic, festive and logistical" spaces (6), yet these spaces comprise elements and uses of these different dimensions in different mixes and at different times, such that, for the denizens on the margins of the city, a domestic space can contain elements of the carceral that occasionally or constantly devastate or devalue their lives. Thus, one distinct circumstance surrounds the other.The second is agential. That is, the articulation of the fact that within and beyond the uncertainty, the indeterminacy of structural contexts, and the forms of agency contingent in them, is also a "left over"—in the operation and logic of structural contexts and contingent agency. This "left over" constitutes "an interstice of momentary possibility" (6). Thus, even for the most dispossessed, disenfranchised, and devalued in the urban context—such as migrant workers, domestic workers, and other low-waged service workers—there is no absolute lack of agency. Life still offers, even if only momentarily, what Simone describes as "a possibility for propositions and the rehearsal of experimental ways of living that circumvent debilitating extraction, surveillance, and capture—for the time being" (6). The form of agency that Simone alerts us to here (this is also true of Tadiar; 330, 331) within the reality of contemporary neoliberalism is not the hackneyed one of (everyday) subtle "resistance" in extant literature. This is so because first, this agency happens in the context of "intensified exposure . . . representing intense precarity of urban lives" (7) in the neoliberal moment, in which, I will add, the existing frameworks of "weapons of the weak"7 and opportunities for "public . . . and hidden transcripts"8 have been superseded; second, (because of the latter) it is no longer possible or sufficient for the radically poor to operate exclusively within specific spaces; they are now forced to embrace "provisional circulations" in different sites, occupations, and households, and with different tools and mentalities in the overall need to—unlike the subjects of Scott's enquiry—"hunt for momentary opportunities" (8) in a context "where life at the moment is staked on the maybe" (14); and third, (as a result of the latter) most of those who live in the underneath of urban areas together now "forge momentary tribes of scavengers, adventurers, mercenaries, and friends in movement" (9). On the basis of these insights, Simone concludes that "the built environment" now "acts as an accompaniment to whatever" people do in the city, given that people, "particularly those on the outskirts of what counts as viable urban life" (18), are now the infrastructures of the city.The third is a combination of the (nominally) structural and the agential—what Simone describes as a "crossing" (18). Here, I take it that Simone encourages us to discern, comprehend (despite the acknowledged obstacles), and explore "everything the resident of urban areas must do to consolidate a coherent or normative performance, to establish themselves in place"—in the light of high stakes and the constantly expanding capacity of neoliberal regimes for cruelty toward the poor. (Although Simone—unlike Tadiar—does not constantly invoke neoliberalism, in my reading, the fundamental background for his explorations of the social conditions in the global South is what he describes as the "overarching logics of capital accumulation or neoliberal rationalities" 4).9 For urban residents, the crossing "is about going where one doesn't belong; showing up without eligibility; taking a chance on everything—all without the prospect of redemption" (18; emphasis added). I suggest that this is one of the most dispassionate, radical insights that the author offers in this book for analyzing the reality of life for most people in the global South—and for those who live under similar conditions in the global North. This argument points neither to facile resistance nor to collaboration with the process of domination, and it exemplifies the critical theorist's capacity to identify with the "devalued population" (32) without false promises about the outcomes of the multidimensional ways in which they have been forced—or have chosen, in some cases—to engage with the debris of late capitalism.These three nodal points of Simone's theorizing of urban social life remaps the means and methods of identifying and analyzing the (everyday) lives of those who are simultaneously included within and excluded from the "value-generating zones of accumulation" in the contemporary era (31). They are included (whether in the margin or in the heart of the city) because, as populations, they constitute a part of the infrastructures of accumulation in the city. At the same time, they are excluded from the fruits of such accumulation and denied any access to the social process "of an incremental progression towards the 'good life'" by being made expendable and dispensable (31). (Tadiar makes a similar but differently articulated point.)Neferti Tadiar expands the radical critique of contemporary global conditions that predispose certain lives to expendability, disposability, and death beyond the global South. She starts out by making her standpoint clear. She is not engaging in explanation but in interpretation (mounting "a perspective and narrative of our global moment") of the workings of the world from "the side of the remaindered life" (xvii). In her comparative analysis of—or what she describes as "an extended meditation" on—the logic of late capital(ism) with its planetary implications, Tadiar casts this moment in history "as the aftermath and perdurance of decolonization" (ix). She constructs what I would describe as the three staging posts of life in the neoliberal moment in its manifestations both in the quotidian and in the longue durée: value, waste, and the remaindered. In my view, all three illuminate the economic, political, and social conditions of the struggle for (and against) what it means to be human. The first is the domain of "valued life" (4) ("life worth living" 6, "life with the capacity to yield value" 93, "the already human" 4). That domain, she argues persuasively, (re)produces the conditions that create and sustain waste in all its ramification, the most crucial of which is the wastage of human lives (particular as "life-times"). Thus, many people around the world are forced to be(come) "disposable life" (6, 12) or "captive life" (71, 232) ("life worth expending" 7, life of "absolute redundancy and superfluity" 92, and one of the "becoming-human" 5). Interposed in the two extremes of contemporary global complex is what she renders as "remaindered life." Even though disposable life is put in the service of creating value by/for "valued life" and is thus treated as "disposable captive life," Tadiar's crucial task in this book is to radically track, account for, and illuminate "the activity and sociality of living that is not exhausted in the expenditure of the life-times of others—left over practices and forms of living that remain superfluous to the production of valued, and even disposable life" (xii). She wants us to appreciate the kinds of life that, though subsumed and/or consumed, still possesses "vitality that surpasses capitalism's own vitalism" (72).She seeks to discover, uncover, and recover the not merely remaining but also remaindered humanity of this life—a life that "remains in most accounts of contemporary globality theoretically and politically diminished, if not altogether dismissed" (xi)—within, beside, and beyond its consumption by capital in order to ensure that it is remade (as fully) human, or re-dehumanized. She invites us not only to ponder but to also imagine this remaindered life as "the very basis of 'global life'" (xi). This, I suggest, constitutes a radical invitation to reimagine the world by questioning the new global political economy of everyday life with which we are confronted.Tadiar links quotidian life with formal, organized social struggles in order to account for the global present of those she describes as "the colonized" in the book's preface. However, as one reads further, it becomes apparent that though her core focus is on the (ex-)"colonized" around the world, she is indeed concerned with the dispossessed and the actually existing conditions of their lives in both the global South and the global North. For Tadiar the global present is, fundamentally, "an era of relentless war" (ix) involving two unequal sides. The war is provoked and waged by "the assumed and would-be inheritors of colonialism's bequest" (valued life), a side that engages in "relentless expropriation of life" (ix) of the other side, that is, devalued life.However, I will suggest that Tadiar's take on the decolonization implied by this notion of global capital/neoliberalism as colonialism is nuanced and therefore analytically separable from that of the current intellectual fad—decolonization, and the decolonial path.10 In my reckoning, she deploys decolonization—"our constant and historical struggle to live against and beyond the bounds set by an imperial, racial capitalist order"—as a pathway for the analysis of "what appears to be a new global political economy of life," rather than as an intellectual contestation of the Enlightenment project, given that "imperial relation of dispossession" is, in itself, a subversion of the core tenets of the Enlightenment (x). But this reading can be contested and thus requires further elaboration in another context. For now, I will concentrate on what she does with her take.In this ambitious and unflinching book, with instances from the global North (particularly the United States) and the global South (e.g., the Philippines) and what we might now call the in-between of global North and South (China), Tadiar (1) interprets the human project in what she casts as a "time of war" with its unabating "strategy of the active wasting of life" (xiii); (2) presents and contextualizes the notion of "life-times" in order to critique a new political economy of life that creates a distinction between life-times of value and life-times of waste; and (3) explores the emergent "Globopolis" that is defined by "tendencies of urban expansion in an emergent global platform economy" (xv). She uses practical examples (everyday urban life, encounters with the police, etc.), structural/institutional processes (bureaucracy, housing, etc.), and aesthetic means (art, film) as discursive and excursive means of interrogating the lives defined by and responding to contemporary reformulations of the relationships among power, value, and humanity.As a social thinker of the present history of capitalism, Tadiar has an expansive imagination; therefore, her remit in this book is extensive. However, I will highlight four important perspectives that I found striking and illuminating for my own reflections on the question and conditions of the quotidian in the neoliberal moment. The first concerns how she provides a fresh, penetrating, and critical angle not merely for understanding the "forms of living and survival among the dispossessed" (ix), but also for identifying and elaborating why and how global capital(ism) (re)produces the condition of dispossession. She pushes this perspective even further. In a very Marxian sense and with theoretical sophistication as well as rich and varied empirical examples from around the world, she identifies the misery of the dispossessed (who can simultaneously, as she shows, also be possessed by those who have capital/power) as the very conditions or the engine of the "good life" of the few, that is, those who are in charge of global resource flows. This is one of the most perceptive contributions of Remaindered Life to our understanding of what we are witnessing and living through. For Tadiar, it is not merely the labor of the dispossessed that is deployed in the service of, and consumed by, those whose lives are valued; it is also what she describes as their "life-time." She argues that "life-making and life organization of the dispossessed . . . are made to serve as machines of production for capital, a life-time which capital neither creates nor pays for yet utilizes and depends upon for its exponential growth and gain" (ix). Despite the attempt at almost total consumption of not only their labor but also their life-time, Tadiar argues that the dispossessed retain a measure of critical agency "in acting beyond the role designated for them within this imperial relation" through "creatively persistent and adaptive practices of sociality," which ensures that they are more than merely "stolen, destroyed, consumed, expended" lives (ix). This is what significantly remains and what makes it possible for the dispossessed to constitute "would-be humans" despite the multiple points of dehumanization from which they suffer. Again, like Simone, she gives us the facility to rethink "resistance" in the context of contemporary realities where the grammar of "resistance" either is insufficient or mischaracterizes the nature of the world of immiseration and the responses to it.Second, she retheorizes "labor-capital relation" (x) as one beyond the consumption of labor and the products of labor by capital, but also as the consumption of the life-times of the laborers—including those so cruelly devalued by the system to the extent that they do not even have the capacity and/or facility to offer their labor, skilled or otherwise. The life-times of "surplus population"—that is, people who are treated as "liquid reserves (soft currency) for speculative maneuvers of the state" and thus are used to "to lubricate, accommodate, and enhance valued life" (xiv–xv; see also part 2)—are sucked up by capital. Thus, capital, in this rendering, not only consumes lives (by, for instance, producing mass death) but also eats the vitality of millions of people.Third, she presents a radical (and counterintuitive?) approach to survival-resistance by arguing that resistance (to devaluation and death) by the "damned of the earth" (x), that is, their means of survival and "perdurance" (i) in the face of the devastations of global capital is not only convertible and converted to resources by capital but directly "shores up" (x) the facilities for the reproduction of capital. In this, I suggest that Tadiar offers a more devastating, or more dismal, view of the human agency of the dispossessed in the face of contemporary global capitalist formation. (Although this is only one part of the total picture of what she accomplishes—to which I will return presently.) Tadiar argues that "circumscribed and proscribed social being shores up the channels of capitalist flows, the inventive adaptive practices of living by people of no account have propelled global forms of innovation, growth, and development that they are not meant to share—that, on the contrary, will see to their repeated privation and expiation" (x; emphasis in original). Thus, most of the different modes of survival by the dispossessed—"highly liquid forms of petty enterprise and livelihood on the part of the people with little to no property, making means of life (money, food) out of means of life (bodies, times, sociality), informal and illicit economic practices" (x)—have become means by which the valued lives of the few are lived, and lived well. There are several implications of this for our subsequent analysis of quotidian life. One immediate question it raises is this: is "resistance" as perdurance futile? (Simone seems to think so.)Fourth (despite the first perspective listed above, and in relation to the second one—that is, in spite of the consumption of their lives and their absorption into the process of the life and living of the privileged), the dispossessed still possess a "life that escapes valorization" (xii), a "left-over" life that she renders as remaindered life. It seems to me that while the first mission of this book is to explore how the creation and sustenance of a "life-time of value" of a few (re)produces and consolidates the creation of a "life-time of waste" (the focus of part 2) for most of the rest of the world, the devasted life of the imperial project retains something that makes it possible for that life to continue to claim its humanity through various pathways—because that life is "never quite fully consumed or exhausted, even at that most painful and seemingly final point of death" (xvi–xvii). For example, the "left-over" is the means by which migrants, who might be suffering inhuman conditions in Los Angeles, Paris, and Abu Dhabi, are able to make provisioning for those left behind in Manila, Bamako, and Lagos.There is a lot to chew on in the generative thought of these two scholars. There also are many grounds for comparison in their related perspectives on the quotidian verities of the neoliberal moment. I am not afforded enough space here to fully engage with most of the fascinating comparative illumination that they both offer. I can only point to a few that I believe would help students of society, particularly those concerned with contemporary everyday life as we continue to rethink the conditions of quotidian life, both globally and locally. While Simone addresses these conditions through a reflection on the question of "Who does the city belong to?" Tadiar expands that to ask: "Who does the world belong to?"In terms of what is at stake in the current global moment, both authors make brilliant efforts not only to see and hear those in the underneath of global processes, but to also illuminate the overarching, as well as the specific, processes that account for their disenfranchisement and dehumanization, even while (re)humanizing them in the very context (or moment) of their dehumanization. They provide poignant ways of articulating the (in)capacitation occasioned and provoked by neoliberal logics that turn human beings into infrastructures (Tadiar, 160, 170) of (urban) capital(ism), the "base of global metropolitan life" (Tadiar, xv) or things (facilities) of capital. This condition, Simone points out, ensures that the surrounds are "infrastructural" (5) and thus imbued with "a prolific possibility, capable of appearing across many different kinds of structural constraints" (5).The two books constitute, in different ways, a devastating critique of global capital and a challenge to the political rationalities of (neo)liberalism (Tadiar is more scathing), and their consequences, including the capture of human vitalities and potentialities within the ascendant political economy of everyday life. While Tadiar uses the concept of the "remaindered life" to analyze this new political economy of everyday life with its "broader immiserative logic that is often overlooked" (92), Simone introduces the concept of the "surrounds" to account for similar (un)observed phenomena (including its "untranslatable specificity," 5) in the era of late capitalism.However, in relation to the above, and in terms of a theory of action, while both authors have lexical interests in the "left-over," Tadiar focuses not only on "left-over spaces" ("where the pools and eddies of excess life-times—the life-time of the urban excess—collect," 141) but also on "left-over" population, that is, those whose life-times are wasted by capital. Simone's focus is on the something that is always "left over" in the operations of the structural and unorganized processes of urban life. For him, this left-over zone that "exceeds definition and coherence" (6) and that is not captured by the all-embracing logics of contemporary urbanity constitutes "an interstice of momentary possibility" (6) for those, pace Tadiar, who constitute "left-over" population. While Simone (6) is concerned with the moments, "the time being," of human agency for disenfranchised urban denizens, moments that (re)humanize them in the face of "debilitating extraction, surveillance, and capture," Tadiar (xi) suggests not moments, but an obstinate "array of forces and resources" (life-making capacities) that remain or subsist in the diminished life after the devastations and devouring by neoliberal formations. Yet where Simone gives an account of the surrounds that "provide momentary elisions of prevailing dominations" (135), Tadiar presents "forms of life that remain . . . and lie just beyond the control of capitalist forms of domination . . . and cannot be fully incorporated in it" (330). Thus, both authors provide a comparable theory of action in the context of urban/global vulnerabilities and structural cruelties, but from different standpoints. Crucially, while both authors have a dismal view of human possibilities in the context of subaltern life, Tadiar concludes that the order of things is "a deeply rapacious, indifferent, pernicious, sad, and brutal state of affairs" (330). On the basis of this, she is desirous of a "new world," one that will "hopefully move us toward each other in ever more generous worlds of mutual being and shared living" (331).Simone, unlike Tadiar, is reticent about a new world, one that "through mobilization and determined planned action, works its way toward fruition" (25), even while examining, for instance, the devastating "anti-Blackness" of the world ("where certain bodies are arbitrarily expendable and extinguishable simply because they are Black," 23). He is more comfortable dealing with this world with all the incompleteness that its brokenness implies and generates. Therefore, what this world demands, for Simone, is "the immediacy of a response or engagement that necessitates a decision, an assessment, and often an improvised intervention utilizing whatever is on hand" (27). In the light of this, where Simone seems more of a realist in reaction to the present history of the world, Tadiar seems more of an idealist. Though the former does not dismiss the idealism represented by thinkers and activists such as the latter, Tadiar recognizes the presence of the realism captured by Simone, but she finds it absolutely insufficient in response to the cruelties of the times. Or perhaps I should say that while Simone appears to present a realist theory of action, Tadiar requests a moral theory of action (given her "tale of indictment and lament," xi). Thus, whereas both thinkers recognize and honor contemporary "collective capacities for endurance" (Simone, 110) or "perdurance" (Tadiar, ix) of the poor and marginalized, in their theory of action, Simone appears dubious about the promises of "betterment, rectification, or redemption" (110), while Tadiar is insistent on such a promise. While Simone can countenance "rebellion without redemption" (116), given his openness to indeterminacy of action (including "outcomes that normative regimes of sense-making and sense-enforcement cannot readily anticipate," 125), Tadiar can only embrace emancipatory (revolutionary?) outcomes, or a different world that "carefully tends to our shared being and living" (333).Simone recognizes, along with Tadiar, that devalued lives can be and are put in the service of different forms of valued lives, including lives representing the "distorted generativity of racial capitalism" (Simone, 86). However, where Tadiar thinks that the wastages are purposeful and willed—in the service of capital and its allied racial and gendered-sexual divisions—Simone argues that lives can be wasted for no purpose, because wastage can be "entirely self-referential . . . simply because they can be, at any time or place" (86). Although Simone does not elaborate along these lines, I will argue that this is a point that sharply captures the cruel indulgences of the ascendant order. What then are the implications of Simone's take on contemporary wastage for wastage's sake in the emanci