David Simon’s The Wire is about many things: the intricacies of race in the urban United States; the global war on drugs; economic and social inequality; and the institutional collapse of the neoliberal nation state. With well over one hundred characters on the show, Simon creates a multifaceted and nuanced reflection of the intricacies that permeate the lives of local and global citizens.And while the themes of the series are complex and diverse, Simon’s approach is one that focuses on the very quotidian features of life. Each story the viewer encounters is a human story – stories of birth and loss; grief and longing; love and anger.While The Wire clearly offers structural critiques of rampant inequality in the urban ghetto, it also illuminates the psycho-social and disciplinary effects of a life in racialized poverty. And despite the series’ location in Baltimore, one could imagine the characters living in any urban city from the ghettos of Rio to the slums of Cape Town. Its transportability is reflective of the series’ capacity to lay bare, for its viewers, the effects of violence and the seeming vulnerability of those whose very existence is wrapped up in the racial, economic and gender inequalities endemic to the socalled “game.” It is this capacity to show the twin experiences of violence and vulnerability that makes The Wire an extraordinary text of political theory. For it signals to its audience3 the precarious existence of those who the liberal nation ignores and refuses to protect. At first glance, one could critically dismiss The Wire as reflective of the

banalization of violence, for violence is everywhere: from the spasmodic violence of Black on Black crime depicted in the gang war betweenAvon Barksdale’s crew and the up and coming king-pin Marlo Stanfield to the racialized police violence deployed by Officer Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski against a young African

American teenager at the Franklin Towers.4 In fact, one could argue that violence is the vital catalyst of the series. But it is in this violence that the series conveys the precarious existence of life on the streets. The series begins with the aftermath of the murder of a street player named Snot

Boogie. This iconic scene frames the experience of violence as a banal practice of everyday life – one inherent to “the game.” The series opens with Detective Jimmy McNulty interviewing a young African American male witness while sirens blare and small children watch on. McNulty is investigating the shooting death of Omar Isaiah Betts, better known by the street name Snot Boogie. Snot has been shot for stealing the money pile from an alley craps game. As the interview continues McNulty is informed that this had been the modus operandi of Snot all along. McNulty responds to the young interviewee, “Let me understand you. Every Friday night, you and your boys shoot crap, right? And every Friday night, your pal Snot Boogie… he’d wait till there’s cash on the ground and he’d grab it and run away? You let him do that?” The young man responds to McNulty in the affirmative and then the audience is struck by perhaps the most important framing dialogue of the series. McNulty quizzically asks the man, “I gotta ask you: if every time Snot Boogie would grab the money and run away … why’d you even let him in the game?” After a stumped “what?” from the young man, McNulty asks again, why did they let Snot Boogie play? The response: “Got to. This isAmerica, man.”5 Here the series juxtaposes the language of liberal freedom against the realities of the precarious existence of those who exist on the streets.As The Wire’s creator, David Simon, so clearly shows theAmerica this series portrays is one whose population’s freedom is wrapped up with the experience of violence – a violence that is almost expected from the police and state institutions that surround it. It is telling that as the conversation ends between McNulty and the witness we see a dead and bloodied Snot Boogie lying on the street in view of all around. Kids are watching, a street cop is casually taking notes as blood pools on the ground. Snot is simply one casualty of “the game,” a way of life, where violence is endemic. This opening scene is striking because it is not striking to those who live it. The violent death of Snot Boogie is rendered commonplace and pedantic. It is the quotidian experience of Black urban existence where violence and vulnerability is the framing order of being. Violence permeates the existence of every major character in the series and it is

often the activity that moves the essential storylines forward. From the brutal death of BrandonWright in the first season6 to the torture and killing of Butchie in season 5,7 it is through violence that the characters navigate the darkness that is the urban ghetto. Violence, thus, functions as the background of the practices of everyday life. Yet, this prosaic portrayal of violence does not result in its desensitization. Instead, the brilliance of The Wire is that the extremity of violence, in its various forms and machinations, exposes the very nature of human vulnerability in the context of the modern liberal nation’s decline to protect those it deems unprotectable. In this way, the series develops in its viewers a new perspective on the ways in which vulnerability is the double of violence. By illuminating the human condition of vulnerability the series nudges its viewers to think about the politics of violence and

vulnerability at local, national and international levels. It initiates a conversation about the limits of violence as both institutional mechanisms of control deployed by the state and intersubjective uses of violence used to gain power and money on the streets. And it is through the viewers’ exposure to this violence, to the undoing of the players of the “game,” that we are summoned to understand the precarity of being for many of the characters that make up the fabric of the series. This precarity8 is what Judith Butler defines as, “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”9 This chapter argues that The Wire exposes the complexity of precarity within

“the game.” It asks the question, how do gender, sexuality, and race intersect such that certain lives and bodies become more vulnerable and less recognizable? This question opens us to many others: in what ways do these intersecting demands of identity and inferiority work to perpetuate a logic of urban violence? How do these intersections make the public expression of grief both unrecognizable and targets of danger? How does the state’s inability to recognize this precarity promote more interurban violence? While economics and race are no doubt essential in understanding the endemic violence in the urban ghetto illustrated by The Wire, this chapter looks to the ways in which masculinism (the privileging of masculine traits as ideal) and heteronormativity (the idealization of heterosexuality as naturalized and thus privileged) intersect with the demands of racial identity and poverty to make some lives grievable and others impossible to recognize. It examines the relationship between precarity, violence and vulnerability through an analysis of three essential characters: Omar Little, D’Angelo Barksdale andWallace. It argues that the series is a political text that exposes its audience to the precarity of being endemic to masculinist and heteronormative violence. It does so by arguing that The Wire depicts the ways in which the sociocultural demands of masculinity and heterosexuality in a racialized economic order work to (1) differentially expose some to greater violence and injury and (2) thus, produce normative barriers that limit the capacity to mourn and be recognized publicly. Paying close attention to the physical and normative forms of violence portrayed

in the series, the essay argues that The Wire illuminates the ways in which the intersectional demands of gender, sexuality, race, and economic inequality foster precarious subjects who are erased from communal and political recognition. In this way, The Wire acts as a vehicle for the recognition of the precarious. It exposes the ways in which the performative demands of identity mark some as more vulnerable to violence at multiple levels, but it also offers a critique of state power that renders such identities as both criminal and erasable. Thus, The Wire is a visual text that reveals to a broader audience the precarious life of those who live on the margins. And, further, it is through this exposure of the precarity of life for some that the series acts as a political text that fosters recognition of the unrecognizable and thus helps constitute a communal politics of understanding. In order to make such an argument I turn to Judith Butler’s work on precariousness and the politics of mourning. Butler’s theoretical reflections on the relationship between vulnerability and violence help to elucidate the political consequences of the recognition

of precarity as developed by The Wire. In turn, her critique of violence as an attempt at self-constitution helps us to understand how the series articulates a critique of violence as it exposes its viewers to it in multiple and excessive ways.