Pedagogies of the Poor: Resisting Resilience in Eastern Europe and Beyond

Abstract

This article illustrates the different ways in which the poor are being put to work, in defence of a global neoliberal order by global economic institutions concerned with constructing them as resilient subjects, as well as by opponents of neoliberalism concerned with galvanizing the revolutionary potentials of poor people. In spite of the apparent gulf between neoliberalism and its revolutionary opponents, the poor find themselves subject to remarkably similar strategies of construction by both proponents and opponents of neoliberalism today. This predicament of the poor is particularly vexed in Eastern Europe where strategies of resilience are fast developing, and critical legal theory has so far offered little resistance to this trend. Turning against this tide, this article considers how we might reimagine poverty and conceive its politics beyond and against clichéd images of the poor as resilient subjects. Through an analysis of the work of the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, it argues for the necessity of images capable of conveying the intolerability of the conditions in which the poor continue to live, as well as the contingency of those conditions; images that serve as interventions on narratives which would reduce the poor to a life of mere resilience.