Managed normlessness: How racial capitalism governs through fragmentation and instability

Abstract

This article develops managed normlessness as a framework for understanding how instability is not merely tolerated but institutionally reproduced as a mode of governance under racial capitalism. Using the crises of Flint, Michigan, and Ferguson, Missouri, as heuristic anchors, it challenges accounts that frame disorder as institutional failure. Flint shows how austerity and infrastructural neglect produced toxic exposure, while Ferguson demonstrates how municipal finance and fines-and-fees regimes institutionalized fiscal extraction. Together, these cases reveal how instability is cyclically produced, contested, and recalibrated rather than simply endured. The framework theorizes instability as a patterned outcome generated through oscillations between abandonment and coercive regulation. Managed normlessness explains how budget cuts, regulatory churn, and infrastructural neglect become codified and usable to the state, yielding fiscal, political, and administrative payoff. Without presuming centralized intent, it shows how dispersed bureaucratic routines create instability that later becomes governable once institutionalized. By clarifying coercion as contingent rather than constitutive, it refines adjacent frameworks of organized abandonment, carceral capitalism, necropolitics, and structural violence. Identifying instability as a governed, racialized condition, it offers a falsifiable, midrange tool for analyzing how states govern not despite instability but through it.