Content area
Full Text
Interviewed by Volker Eick and Karen J. Winkler1
Volker Eick (VE): Your book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity is the second volume in a trilogy that unravels what you call "the tangled triangular connections between class restructuring, ethnoracial division and state crafting in the era of neoliberal ascendancy" (Wacquant, 2009a: 315). Can you situate it in this broader problematic linking urban marginality, welfare policy, and punishment?
Loïc Wacquant (LW): Think of a triangle with the two-way relationship between class and race forming the base and the state providing the top. The first book, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Wacquant, 2008), explores the base: it takes up the class/race nexus in the dualizing metropolis through a comparison of the sudden collapse of the black American ghetto with the slow disintegration of working-class territories in the Western European city after deindustrialization. I make three main arguments: I disprove the fashionable thesis of the transatlantic convergence of districts of dispossession on the model of the dark ghetto; I trace the making of the African-American "hyperghetto" and of the "anti-ghettos" of Europe in the post-Fordist age to shifts in public policy, arguing that both formations are economically underdetermined and politically overdetermined; and I diagnose the onset of a new regime of urban marginality fueled by the fragmentation of wage labor, the curtailment of the social state, and territorial stigmatization.
The next two books mine the two sides ofthat triangle. Punishing the Poor takes up the class/state nexus on both the social and penal fronts. It charts how public officials have responded to this emerging marginality through punitive containment. It also reveals that the new politics and policy of poverty coupling disciplinary workfare and the neutralizing prison , invented in America over the past three decades , partake of the crafting of the neoliberal state, properly reconceptualized. The third volume, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (Wacquant, in press), dissects the race/state nexus: it shows how ethnoracial division intensifies class decomposition at the bottom, facilitates the shift to workfare, and escalates the rolling out of the penal state; and, conversely, how penalization refurbishes the meaning and workings of race. It sketches a historical and theoretical model of the meshing...