Lindsey McCarthy reviews Craig Willse’s monograph The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States (University of Minnesota Press 2015).
Craig Willse’s book The Value of Homelessness confronts the everyday, taken-for-granted, and accepted wisdoms surrounding housing insecurity and deprivation in the United States. It confronts us too, as well as forcing us to confront those from whom we frequently turn away. From the stark book title and cover image to the powerful prose and theory, The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States inspires us to ask different questions about housing deprivation. The term “surplus life”—a darker, Foucauldian variation of the Marxist notion of surplus labour—directs our attention to the parallels between those intentionally kept out of the labour market to drive up competition for low-wage jobs under capitalism and those assigned to the category “homeless,” who are made into economically and socially productive matter. For Willse, housing deprivation is not an unintended consequence of but a way to make room for the “urban consumer economies of neoliberal capital” (page 11).
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