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LIFE-TIMES OF DISPOSABILITY IN GLOBAL NEOLIBERALISM: CHINA AND THE PHILIPPINES - NEFERTI X. M. TADIAR PROFESSOR OF WOMEN'S STUDIES, BARNARD COLLEGE

Recent scholarly works have described the perceived shift from liberalism to neoliberalism concomitant with globalization in terms of a shift in the logic of constitution of forms of personhood and governmentality from one constructed around rights and property to another constructed around risk and security. Beyond political and economic practice and rationality, this identified shift in global hegemony is seen to produce and issue out of changed structures of lived subjectivity and feeling, social experience and imagination. In this paper I explore the question of disposability and temporal aesthetic s in global neoliberalism as exemplified in the cinematic work of Jia Zhang-Ke and Brillante Mendoza, and therefore in the regional context shared by China and the Philippines. I look at the practices of attention of these filmmakers and the specific forms of rendering what I call “life-times” of disposability, life-producing practices of social experience of surplus populations that are at once the consequence and means of new forms of value-production in the financialized global economy. I consider the aesthetic forms of these works of Asian cinema and the broader economy in which they participate to think about the uneven dynamics of
and differentiated political possibilities within the dominant cultural logic of global neoliberalism.