Introduction: Ordinary Life on High Alert

ORANGE ALARMS. It regulates. It highlights bodies and spaces for oversight. It demands constant vigilance. Orange polarizes. It marks some for protection and others for scrutiny. It is the color of risk management, of infrastructural failure, and of rising global terror, pandemic, and environmental threat. It is a temporary sign of hazard that now hangs permanently. Orange scandalizes. It scams. It misdirects. Nothing rhymes with orange.

This book uses the color orange as an interpretive key for theorizing the uneven distribution of safety and care in the twenty-first-century U.S. social landscape. It examines the institutional history and social politics of one hue in particular: the color “Safety Orange” (also known as “Blaze Orange,” “OSHA Orange,” and “Hunter Orange”), which has in recent decades become omnipresent in American public life. Today, it is most visible in the contexts of traffic control, work safety, and mass incarceration.

If the U.S. cultural present were a color, it would be Safety Orange. The hue first emerged in the 1950s as a bureaucratic color standard for conveying warning in U.S. technical manuals and federal regulations; it was chosen for its effectiveness in setting objects apart from their natural environment, particularly against blue sky.1 Around the same time, a separate panel of experts determined that fluorescent orange was the most visible color for the most people under the widest variety of conditions. Safety Orange’s high visibility has to do with how molecules absorb energy when they are exposed to certain wavelengths of light: UV-reactive fluorescence emits light in the presence of UV radiation, causing a boost in our color perception and making fluorescent colors like Safety Orange appear bolder and brighter to our brains. By the 1960s, the color had been adopted by states across the United States as the mandatory color standard for hunters’ safety gear. The color was found to be useful for hunters precisely because it is so unmistakably manmade, “so startlingly vivid and unnatural that it dispels all notion that you are looking at a deer, or anything else occurring in nature.”2

But these days safety is the last thing we associate with Safety Orange, which despite its name now invokes a state of generalized alarm. Today, the color is ubiquitous—a result of developments in advanced liberal or “neoliberal” forms of governance (the shrinking of the state mandate and divestment from national infrastructure and an emphasis on personal choice and self-management), security strategies (defined by the expansion of militarized regimes of control and surveillance at home and abroad), and unsustainable economic growth (the rise of a culture of cheaply produced and highly disposable consumer goods). A relic from the post-9/11 state of exception turned permanent fixture in an era of responsibilization3 and expanding precarization, orange is the environmental and semiotic expression of these developments in the American public sphere. The color marks the extremes of both state oversight and abandonment, both capitalist excess and dereliction. Safety Orange designates certain bodies for safeguarding (it is used for hazard cones, high-visibility vests, and life jackets) and others as threats (it marks certain prisoners for particular supervision).4 The U.S. contemporary landscape is saturated in orange, which allows the tracking of bodies, neighborhoods, and infrastructures coded as worthy of care—and of those deemed expendable, and thereby subject to heightened risk of social and ecological death and debility.5 As such, the color is an exemplary marker of the racial logics behind narratives of “public safety” used to legitimize U.S. militarized policing and securitization.6 Safety Orange speaks in two registers of neoliberal administration: the soft power of state withdrawal, which intones Please proceed with caution, and the hard power of the militarized state of exception, which grunts Keep moving, there is nothing here to see! The significance of Safety Orange for the current moment lies in the paradoxical effects of its hypervisibility under racial and commodity capitalism: its capacity to both attract and repel makes it a useful material index for a phenomenology of neoliberal attention.

Safety Orange is the visual distillation of the excesses of the twenty-first-century U.S. attention economy.7 The now-famously doomed Fyre Festival was marketed to millennials on Instagram using the empty, contentless signifier of the orange tile. The neon orange block is what social media marketing experts refer to as a “stopper,” a visual tactic for disrupting the mindless scrolling habituated by social media.8 In a crowded marketplace vying for clicks and views, Safety Orange is not simply attention in its purest form but also in its crudest form—a cheap marketing shortcut befitting the capitalist aesthetic category of the gimmick, which does almost no real work yet attracts consumer attention.9 Orange was the color of the Twitter presidency, the racialization of hypercapitalism, a white supremacist marker of fake tan exceptionalism.10 (A senior White House official once claimed that Trump’s carrot-tinged glow was not the result of countless hours spent self-tanning, but rather, invoking racial eugenics, a sign of good health caused by “good genes.”11) No shade better captures the garish toxicity of the Trump years, as suggested by protest slogans like “Orange is the New Nixon,” “Impeach the Orange!,” and “Not My Cheeto.”12 If Twitter is the “fast food” of political communication, orange is authoritarian capitalism’s instantaneous delivery system.13 Orange condenses the perceived abandonment and racist entitlement of Trump’s white working-class base (the fluorescent orange “Guns Save Lives” stickers sported by gun rights rallyists and hunter caps worn by rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol). Brian Massumi’s argument about Reagan’s turn as an unlikely political idol also applies to Trump: in an image- and information-based age, even an idiotic and incompetent president can be a powerful ideologue when he telegraphs an affective intensity that can be harnessed to jingoistic ends. Trump’s most valuable political commodity is thus his amorphous intensity—the affect invoked by orange.14 If only partly through its association with Trump, Safety Orange has come to signal both conspicuous consumption and extreme poverty, the color of a nation glutted on misinformation, cheap entertainment, and artificial coloring.

It’s not surprising that Safety Orange, remarkable for its usefulness in standing out against the natural environment, is often artificial: chemical-laden and highly processed. But what is less obvious are the toxic ecological and biopolitical effects of its attention-getting material properties. Foods like Cheetos and Fanta get their trademark eye-popping color from Yellow 6 (Sunset Yellow FCF), a petroleum-derived artificial coloring15 that is one of the three most commonly used synthetic additives in the United States.16 “Dyes add no benefits whatsoever to foods, other than making them more ‘eye-catching’ to increase sales”; indeed, these almost uniquely American dyes are actively harmful, linked to cancer, allergic reactions, and hyperactivity in children.17 Startlingly, the very synthetic dye used to capture children’s attention (Yellow 6) is believed to intensify the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.18 In this irony, we already glimpse the curious work of Safety Orange: its contradictory imperative both to pay attention and to not pay attention.19

While the color is in principle designed to motivate actors to take (sometimes costly) protective measures, it also has the opposite effect: its very ubiquity dulls our vigilance against threats and normalizes catastrophic fallout as inevitable. Safety Orange is the “new normal” of the abnormal, the exception—of life lived in unsustainable conditions. It is the lurid warning label for a superlatively bad moment in which U.S. politics is a three-ring circus, the world is on fire, and each passing year qualifies as “the worst year ever.” It is the cry for attention of the Age of Perpetual Crisis, the Era of Emergency, “times in which impossible things happen.”20

There is much to be alarmed about in this near-apocalyptic orange epoch. Humanitarian struggle. Climate catastrophe. Coronavirus pandemic. Species extinction. White supremacist terrorism. Rising authoritarianism. Institutionalized corruption. Corporate monopolization. Extreme poverty. Mental health crisis. These crises (among countless others) are the fodder for a relentless siege of fear and outrage, stoked by social media networks and nonstop news outlets. But this “awareness campaign” often does not invite meaningful action. Instead, we are faced with the depreciated currency of attention: the deadening of our public discourse, the dulling of our cognitive capacities, the narrowing of our emotional bandwidths. Orange’s blank intensity is a “stopper” in more ways than one: it conveys constant mass-mediatic stimulation while ensuring mass inaction, warnings sounded but unheeded. In a field of mounting threats, orange at once flashes too much and too little alarm.

In this book, I examine the structural logic that marries the “new abnormal” of Safety Orange—its equivocation, its ambivalence, its contradictory nature, visible in its protection and endangerment of bodies, its direction and misdirection of attention, its raising and normalizing of alarm. Orange tenses, it enervates. But despite its appearance of urgency, Safety Orange is oddly unspecific. It is informational without being informative. The color shows up again and again to signal and mediate the dangers of twenty-first-century capitalism. It exemplifies what Joseph Masco has called the “theater of operations”: orange is the abstract vehicle by which “fear and terror have been domesticated as a primary national resource and projected out globally as a twenty-first century American project.”21 It is the chromatic indicator of the U.S. counterterror state’s speculative (rather than factual) and generalized (rather than specific) theater of alarm—its expansion “of a world without borders, generating threats without limit.”22

Orange bridges the projects of U.S. state violence at home and abroad; it makes visible the continuity between the global humanitarian crises, so-called wars on terror, and domestic policing and imprisonment campaigns that disproportionately target racialized and (im)migrant communities. The color lifts into view the state’s hyperinvestment in security infrastructures and its concomitant broad divestment from the health, media, legal, environmental, and public infrastructures that support the well-being of its citizens. By tracking the color as an object of study—by following how it encodes subjects, objects, affects, and events—the book charts a study of risk, threat, and security in contemporary visual culture; it provides a method for investigating the representational logic of neoliberalism’s intensifying impact through ordinary and diffuse phenomena, which often escape our view precisely because they are so commonplace and familiar. Safety Orange binds together phenomena often perceived as unrelated: information networks, climate crisis, securitization, necropolitics, neoliberal policy, Black aesthetic practice, and socially engaged art; a study of orange intersects disciplines and fields including media studies, cultural studies, visual culture, the environmental humanities, security studies, studies of risk, and contemporary art history.

Safety Orange is such a powerful signifier precisely because it is so multiple and diffuse in its signification. The color is curiously dual—it warns of and creates crisis, signifies health and toxicity, stands in for both Black and white, both endangered and dangerous, both local and global; this duality encodes and obscures the uneven distribution of safety and attention in an era of mass privatization, mass consumption, and mass incarceration. Indeed, I argue that Safety Orange is defined by its slipperiness—its tendency to flip its referent and to contradict its own meaning. Moreover, it is its constitutive deniability (as when it perpetuates risk while calling it safety) that has made the color such a useful tool for furthering neoliberal market logics. To speak of orange is to make multiple, even seemingly contradictory statements about it as a historical object, a process with effects, and an interpretive key and analytic framework. The aim of this book is thus to examine the range and registers of Safety Orange’s affective and semiotic effects.

On its face, the color standard is a straightforward visual tool by which the state directs public attention to risk by spectacularizing objects and bodies, indexing threat, and interpellating subjects as responsible for their safety. But as I show here, the color purportedly designed to ensure safety has increasingly taken on antithetical effects: targeting rather than protecting, dulling rather than focusing attention, normalizing the exception, and replacing action with diffuse alarm. This shift is paradigmatic of the ever-expanding field of advanced liberal governance, for its logics now suffuse the infrastructures of everyday life. The uses of the color foretell the instrumentalization of crisis to install deeper structures of oppression, as T. J. Demos warns in Beyond the World’s End: he sees “a ‘coming barbarism’ in our cards, where dominant capitalist political forces . . . instrumentalize the very threat of the end of the world to support their own financial interests.”23 The book examines the color standard’s new visibility in the following areas of American neoliberalism: the rise of the security state, the public communication of pandemic and climate risk, the federal divestment from public works, and the expansion of carceral capitalism. Across all of these sites, Safety Orange installs a distinctly neoliberal logic of risk: a warning that is in principle intended to be temporary, specific, and aimed at the public good, but that has in practice been made increasingly permanent, general, and outsourced to individuals. As the social safety net recedes, orange fills in the gap.

With so many warning signs of social, economic, and biological collapse, how have we found ourselves so woefully unprepared? It is not that Safety Orange does not draw attention to structural issues; certainly, it does. But in a subtle sleight of hand, Safety Orange leverages the aesthetics of state management and emergency preparedness to condition citizens to a “new normal” of depreciated life under neoliberal, racial, and carbon-based global capitalism. When state and corporate actors use Safety Orange to mark out—draw public attention to—incipient, inconspicuous, or invisible dangers, such as greenhouse gases, COVID-19, or urban blight, they also betray their own divestment from structural change, drawing attention to the gaps and lacks that they refuse to fill. My argument—that Safety Orange serves as a stopgap warning for the systemic failure to address racial and carbon-based capitalism—finds its lay translation in the popular joke about the mechanic who says to the customer: “I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.”24 Through its warning, the traffic cone draws attention to the pothole; but it also performs an act of misdirection. The trappings of safety make citizens responsible for avoiding the now-visible risk, further normalizing a neoliberal order of state nonintervention in public crises, with care instead automated, privatized, and outsourced to citizens. It then lays the blame for the outcomes of systemic harms on the most vulnerable, marking out and scapegoating low-income, racialized individuals and communities marked as “high risk.”

This book asks: How are citizens encouraged to accept risk as a sustainable fact of American life (chapter 1)? In the face of a world so obviously imperiled, how does public risk communication normalize crisis as business as usual (chapter 2)? What aesthetic and rhetorical techniques enable the state’s withdrawal from social responsibility (chapter 3)? How is orange used as a means of abstracting (and thus disavowing) state racism (chapter 4)? Safety Orange is the catastrophe that is already upon us—the tangerine plumes of burning wildfires brought on by unprecedented heat and winds, the orange alert that forestalls the code red. It spectacularizes crisis and impedes action. It is a sublime fetishization of the status quo. But this is not the end of the story; orange can also have other meanings. This book not only traces the new forms of neoliberal governance that orange installs and the violence it conceals. But its final chapter also explores: What possibilities and limitations does the color hold for facilitating new forms of solidarity? How has it been taken up by artists who seek to counter the racist politics that subtend the orange state’s neoliberal and carceral power (chapter 5)?

Ultimately, Safety Orange is a complicated symbol of the U.S. present. But rather than surrender to the uses to which it is put by neoliberal management, this book ponders how we might imagine and design more just and effective mediatic, rhetorical, and semiotic systems of warning and care for a moment of great urgency.