Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics) 3030881733, 9783030881733

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, CULTURE AND ECONOMICS

Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present Edited by Michiel Rys · Bart Philipsen

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics Series Editors Paul Crosthwaite School of Literatures, Languages & Culture University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK Peter Knight Department of English and American Studies University of Manchester Manchester, UK Nicky Marsh Department of English University of Southampton Southampton, UK

This series showcases some of the most intellectually adventurous work being done in the broad field of the economic humanities, putting it in dialogue with developments in heterodox economic theory, economic sociology, critical finance studies and the history of capitalism. It starts from the conviction that literary and cultural studies can provide vital theoretical insights into economics. The series will include historical studies as well as contemporary ones, as a much-needed counterweight to the tendency within economics to concentrate solely on the present and to ignore potential lessons from history. The series also recognizes that the poetics of economics and finance is an increasingly central concern across a wide range of fields of literary study, from Shakespeare to Dickens to the financial thriller. In doing so it builds on the scholarship that has been identified as the ‘new economic criticism’, but moves beyond it by bringing a more politically and historically sharpened focus to that earlier work. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15745

Michiel Rys  •  Bart Philipsen Editors

Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present

Editors Michiel Rys University of Leuven Leuven, Belgium

Bart Philipsen University of Leuven Leuven, Belgium

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics ISBN 978-3-030-88173-3    ISBN 978-3-030-88174-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Most of the essays collected in this volume were presented during an online conference entitled “The Poetics of Precarity. Literature, Art, and the Precarious Condition” (2–4 December 2020). We would like to thank all presenters and participants for their valuable input which certainly has improved both the quality and the coherence of this book project. A special thanks goes to Iannis Goerlandt, who has meticulously translated the interviews with Kathrin Röggla and Heike Geißler from German. Finally, we would also like to thank the FWO Flanders and the Research Unit Literary Studies of the University of Leuven for their financial support to the conference and this book volume. Leuven, 6 July 2021

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Contents

1 Introduction: Poetics and Precarity—Literary Representations of Precarious Work, Past and Present  1 Michiel Rys and Bart Philipsen Part I Figurations of Precarious Work: Prehistories  21 2 Precarity and Privilege in State-of-the-Nation Novels: Anatomy of a Fragmented Body Politic 23 Alice Borrego 3 Crossing Borders: The Semiotics of a Christian Poetics of Precarity in Late-­Nineteenth-­Century Germany 41 Michiel Rys 4 Slums, the Lumpenproletariat, and Precarity: Literary Representations of the Urban Precarious in Egon Erwin Kisch and Ilija Trojanow’s Reportages 57 Christoph Schaub 5 The Impossibility of Protest: Precarity in Maria Leitner’s Reportage Novel Hotel Amerika 73 Stephanie Marx

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6 Precarity, Working-Class Literature, and the Written Presence of Objects: A Material Reading of Lucien Bourgeois’ L’Ascension (1925) 89 Samia Myers Part II Precarity, Materiality and Authorship 109 7 At Home on the Stage: Toward an Affective Geography of Gentrification and Eviction in U.S. Cities111 Cynthia Stretch 8 Common Language: Academics Against Networking and the Poetics of Precarity129 Sarah Bernstein and Patricia Malone 9 Writing the Voices of Precarity in Contemporary French Literature145 Alex Demeulenaere 10 Working Oneself to Death. Interview with Heike Geißler About Seasonal Associate (2014)159 Hannelore Roth 11 “The Side-By-Side Existence of Total Catastrophe and Everyday Life Is the Real.” Interview with Kathrin Röggla About Precarity and the Grammar of Catastrophes177 Jan Ceuppens and Hilde Keteleer 12 Precarious Authorship in the Digital Society. Literary Value Chains and Kathrin Röggla’s “Essenpoetik”193 Thomas Ernst

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Part III Figurations of Precarious Work in Contemporary Literature 211 13 Toward a Poetics of Precarity. Labor Spheres in Contemporary European Fiction213 Roswitha Böhm 14 The Character of Risk233 Emily J. Hogg 15 To Be or Not to Be a Laborer. Three Swedish Novels About Young Adults, Temporary Employment, and the Precariat’s Consciousness249 Åsa Arping 16 Neighboring with the Roofless. Imagin(in)g Homeless Others271 Agnieszka Pantuchowicz 17 In Real Time. Phenomenologies of Precarity in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet287 Benjamin Kohlmann 18 Coda: Narrating Precarity in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic305 Stijn De Cauwer Index319

Notes on Contributors

Åsa Arping  is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her main research interests revolve around the connection between literature and society, with special focus on nineteenth-­ century fiction and gender, and contemporary literature depicting class. She is the co-editor of Swedish Women’s Writing on Export: Tracing Transnational Reception in the Nineteenth Century (2019). Her forthcoming book is called Doing Class: Intersectional Encounters in Swedish Contemporary Fiction. Sarah Bernstein  is Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in English at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on aesthetic and affective difficulty and the commons. She has published articles on writers like Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark. Her novel The Coming Bad Days is published by Daunt Books. Roswitha Böhm  was appointed university Professor for French Literature and Cultural Studies at the Institute for Romance Studies at TU Dresden in 2014. She is founding director of the Centre France | Francophonie (CFF) and spokesperson (with Dominik Schrage) of the German-French graduate school “Thinking Differences. Narratives—Media—Practices.” From 2015 to 2020 she was Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies, from 2019 to 2020 Senator, and since 2020 she has been Vice-Rector of University Culture at TU Dresden. Her academic work focuses on seventeenth- and twentieth/twenty-­ first-­ century French and Spanish literature and culture, narrative theory and xi

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fictionality, gender studies, collective memory, intermediatic approaches, and poetics of precarity. Alice Borrego  is a PhD candidate at Paul Valéry University, Montpellier 3 under the supervision of Christine Reynier. She is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Her research focuses on the correlation between the aesthetics of fragmentation and the notion of responsibility in state-of-the-nation novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, E-Rea, and Otherness Studies. Jan Ceuppens  is a lecturer at University of Leuven. His research topics include modern and contemporary German literature (Kafka, W.G. Sebald), translation and cultural transfer, especially between Dutch and German communities. He has translated work by Silke Scheuermann, Marica Bodrožič, and Thomas Meineke into Dutch. Stijn  De  Cauwer  is a postdoctoral researcher in cultural studies at the University of Leuven. He is the editor of Critical Theory at a Crossroads: Conversations on Resistance in Times of Crisis (2018), editor of Critical Image Configurations: The Work of Georges Didi-Huberman (2019), co-­ editor of 50 Key Terms in Contemporary Cultural Theory (2017), and author of A Diagnosis of Modern Life: Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a Critical-Utopian Project (2012). Furthermore, his articles have appeared in Angelaki, Configurations, Symposium, Italian Studies, Neophilologus, Orbis Litterarum, and various other journals. Alex  Demeulenaere  is Interim Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Kiel University. He has published works on (post)colonial and (post)national literatures in francophone cultures (France, Belgium, Africa, Canada), translation studies, travel narrative, and literary theory (Said, de Certeau). In his dissertation (University of Leuven, 2007), he used the framework of discourse analysis and enunciation studies to analyze the narrative ethos and the construction of scientific credibility in French colonial travel narratives. As a member of the IRTG “Diversity,” his postdoctoral research project (University of Trier, 2019) was based on the same framework (i.e., posture) which enables a diachronic case study of national and post-national Quebec literature. Thomas Ernst  is teaching Modern German Literature and Digital Cultures at the University of Antwerp. He holds a PhD from the University of Trier

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and a venia legendi in German Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Duisburg-Essen. His research focuses on the digital transformation of media and its effects on culture and literature, on experimental and subversive Austrian and German literatures in the twentieth and twentyfirst century, the literary construction of identities and images of Germany and Europe, and multilinguality and transcultural spaces in literature from Belgium, Germany, and Luxembourg. His publications include books on “Literatur und Subversion” (2013) and “Netzliteraturwissenschaft” (2021–22). Heike Geißler  is a fiction writer from Leipzig, Germany. She published the novel Rosa, the novella Nichts was tragisch wäre, and a children’s book, Emma & Pferd Beere. Her non-fiction novel Saisonarbeit was published in 2014 and translated into several languages. She is the editor of the zine “Lücken kann man lesen” and often works in collaborations. Emily  J.  Hogg is Associate Professor of Contemporary Anglophone Literature at the Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark. She is the co-editor, with Peter Simonsen, of Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (2021) and her work has appeared in Criticism, Textual Practice, English Studies and other venues. Hilde  Keteleer  is a Belgian author and translator. She has published prose (Puinvrouw in Berlijn, 2009; Omheind, 2014), poetry (Al wat winter is en waar, 2001; Deuren, 2004; Weg van de tijd, 2019), and essays. She has translated work from German (of Julia Franck, Katja Lange-­ Müller, and Juli Zeh) and French (of Arthur Rimbaud, Olivier Rolin, Jean-Luc Outers, and Carl Norac) into Dutch. Benjamin  Kohlmann teaches British literature at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He is the author of Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (2014) and British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States (2021). His articles have appeared in PMLA, ELH, Novel, and other journals. With Matthew Taunton, he is co-editing a new essay collection, The People: Exclusion, Belonging, and Democracy, for Cambridge University Press. Patricia Malone  is Early Career Research and Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Edinburgh. She is writing a book, Reality Hunger: Image and Appetite in Twenty-First-Century Literature, that offers an account of the contemporary through the modalities of the “age of

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image.” Essays arising from this work have been published in Textual Practice, Contemporary Women’s Writing, C21 and elsewhere. Stephanie  Marx  is a university assistant in the Department of German Studies at the University of Vienna. She studied German language and literature and philosophy in Vienna and Berlin. Her dissertation, with the working title “Literature in the Truth Crisis,” is set against the background of current debates on post-factuality and focuses on the relationship between truth and politics in the literature of the New Objectivity. Her research interests are literary theory, narrative theory, and twentiethcentury literature. Samia Myers  is a third-year doctoral student in French Literature at the University of Strasbourg, France. She holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Edinburgh and an MA degree in French literature from l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and l’ENS (Ulm). Her research, supervised by Prof. Corinne Grenouillet, focuses on French workers’ literary writings from the first half of the twentieth century. It aims to explore the ways in which working women and men have written about labor and worlds of labor in specific literary forms ranging from autobiography to poetry. Agnieszka  Pantuchowicz is an Associate Professor at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland, where she teaches translation and literary studies. Her research interests are translation theory and cultural studies, comparative literature, and feminist criticism. She has published numerous articles and edited volumes on literary criticism, theoretical aspects of translation, as well as on cultural and ideological dimensions of translation in the Polish context. Bart  Philipsen is Full Professor of German Literature and Theater Studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium. His research is situated at the crossroads of literature, politics, and philosophy, and is especially focused on the afterlife of Idealism and Romanticism. He has published extensively on German literature, politics, and theater. Kathrin Röggla  is an Austrian author of prose books, theater and radio plays, and essays. She has received numerous awards for her works, such as the Solothurner Literaturpreis, the Anton-Wildgans-Preis, and the Nestroy-Theaterpreis. Among her most important works are really ground zero. 11. september und folgendes (2001), Wir schlafen nicht (2004; Engl.

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We never sleep, 2009), besser wäre: keine (2013), Die Unvermeidlichen (2011), and Nachtsendung (2016). She has lived in Berlin since 1992. Hannelore  Roth is a literary scholar at the Research Unit German Literature, University of Leuven, where she obtained her PhD in 2019 about the imaginations of Prussia in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature. Her research interests include German literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century, politics and literature, gender (in particular, men’s studies), and pop culture. She is working on a postdoctoral project entitled “Smoldering Narratives. The Literary Afterlife of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) in Twenty-First-­ Century German Culture.” Michiel  Rys  is a postdoctoral researcher of the FWO Flanders at the University of Leuven, Belgium. While his doctoral project unearthed figurations of Maximilien Robespierre in German literature, his current research project focuses on literary representations of precarity, activist literature, and the memory culture of the German labor movement (1848–1914). Christoph Schaub  teaches German literature and cultural studies at the University of Vechta and previously taught at Columbia University and Duke University. He is the author of Proletarische Welten: Internationalistische Weltliteratur in der Weimarer Republik (De Gruyter, 2019). His articles on the literature and culture of the labor movement, literature and globalization, urban culture, and Afro-diasporic popular music have appeared in journals such as German Studies Review, Modernism/modernity, New German Critique, Weimarer Beiträge, and Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik. Cynthia  Stretch is Professor of American Literature at Southern Connecticut State University. Her research interests usually steer her toward the intersection of art and activism, from representations of strikes in turn-of-the-century fiction to spoken word and slam poetry about gentrification and eviction. She is a member of the research team of the project “Troubling Houses: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature” supported by the Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigación Científica y Técnica de Excelencia.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Poetics and Precarity—Literary Representations of Precarious Work, Past and Present Michiel Rys and Bart Philipsen

In her seminal essay The State of Insecurity (2015), Isabell Lorey argues that “[i]f we fail to understand precarisation, then we understand neither the politics nor the economy of the present” (1). Parallel to a series of protest movements such as May Day, Indignados, Occupy, Precarias, and the Yellow Vests, critical theory has foregrounded the concept of precarity as a new vocabulary to describe how, to what extent, and with what consequences macroeconomic shifts have reshaped the social fabric of Western capitalist societies through the concept of labor, on which they are built. Although the concept of precarity cannot be totally isolated from the earlier concept of precariousness, and the ambiguous entanglement of those concepts will reappear and be discussed in some essays in this volume, it is nevertheless essential to distinguish between them. The notion of

M. Rys (*) • B. Philipsen University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_1

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precariousness, as it was developed by Judith Butler, refers to an encompassing socio-ontological form of vulnerability, paradoxically constitutive of life (cf. Butler 2004, Butler 2009a, b; Lorey 2015; Korte and Regard 2014). However, this basic existential precariousness “cannot be understood apart from social and political conditions” (Lorey 2015, 18); precarity is the result of this embedding in social, political, and legal structures; it refers more specifically to a range of experiences that are all somehow the outcome of capitalism’s neoliberal mutation. Since the 1970s, precarity has obtained a central place in academic and public, intellectual and critical, theoretical and artistic discourses. Nevertheless, it was not until the early twenty-first century that it became an equally widely discussed topic in the humanities. Whereas its exact definition varies (also from national context to context), precarity in any case refers to a condition of life and work marked by increased exposure to socioeconomic insecurity. This is in contrast to how work and life were organized in the Fordist welfare state, where this exposure was reduced to a minimum by virtue of social security and legal protection policies, which ensured that employees had long-term jobs and protection in the case of job loss. Indeed, it is this latent pact between capital and labor that has been increasingly put under pressure by reform policies aimed at the deregulation and flexibilization of the labor market, and the dismantlement of social security infrastructures. Budget cuts and austerity measures have downsized social protection and health care funds that are used to provide safety nets for those in precarious positions. As a consequence of these encompassing reforms, work and earnings have become increasingly temporary, discontinuous, and fragmented. Stable, long-term career perspectives have become the exception rather than the norm, not only in low-skilled and low-waged jobs such as ‘hamburger jobs,’ seasonal labor in Amazon warehouses, or on-demand services such as Deliveroo and Uber (often unprotected forms of work that are frequently supported by digital technologies and platforms; see Precarity Lab 2020). These trends are also visible in sectors of creative, high-skilled, well-paid work that have traditionally been regarded as more secure, such as academia and government. The fragmentation of labor and the diminishment of unions’ power have made it increasingly difficult for protestors to organize and fight against what they view as a growing form of social injustice. Precarity is a deficient analytical category because it lacks a sense of accuracy, and incorrectly glosses over the complex reality of social

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fragmentation. Notwithstanding, this notion unmistakably evokes specific semantics to shed light on objective and subjective experiences of work as a “point of departure” to articulate and test “political propositions” rather than “a final solution” to the current proliferation of labor uncertainty (Casas-Cortés 2014, 221). Indeed, precarity helps to break down “mainstream understandings of exploitation and exclusion” (ibid., 222). The contributions in this volume take the imaginative potentials and toolbox-­ like qualities as the starting point to show that these conceptual reconsiderations of work are in fact part of a broader discursive turn in which literary representations of precarious work partake as well. This volume explores how literature has not only reflected and registered these transformations of the concept and very nature of labor, but has also partly been co-constitutive of a social imaginary that perceives work in terms of increasing insecurity and fragmentation. Oliver Nachtwey, a central voice in the sociological debate on precarity in Germany, asserts that the literature has fulfilled the role of a “sensitive seismograph” for the accelerating transformations of the labor market in the past few decades. The chapters of this volume, however, discuss texts from various Western pieces of literature that are far more than just passive, seismographic-like registrations of a labor market wound up in accelerating processes of transformation (Nachtwey 2018, 2–3). In contrast, the literary texts under discussion in this volume are performative in the sense that they are co-constitutive of a shared socioeconomic imaginary, which allows one not merely to speak about precarity, but to act (against it); an imaginary that on the one hand re-enacts and resonates, or, on the other hand, disrupts and interferes with normalized understandings of precarious labor. One way to approach these performatives—in the true sense a ‘poetic’ (i.e., reality-producing) dimension of literary representations of precarious work—is by examining them as ‘figurations.’ In another context, Bruno Latour has suggested that individual and collective behavioral norms are embedded in accounts ranging from the abstract to the concrete, which lay out the models of normal or abnormal action and agency. These figurations, including those that shape our understanding of work, are inscribed in “[n]ovels, plays, and films from classical tragedy to comics” and “provide a vast playground to rehearse accounts of what makes us act.” According to Latour, culture not only reflects or registers, but also provides a multitude of “repertoires of action” (Latour 2005, 54–55). These tentative characterizations of the imaginative—and even interventional— potential of literature raise a series of poetic, historical questions that this

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book addresses from multiple angles. The contributions gathered in this volume, by looking at case studies from different national and cultural contexts and various timeframes, shed light on the poetics or representations of precarious work as construed within, and via, literary media. They will inevitably touch upon other urgent issues of our contemporary world that deal with race, class, and gender. In doing so, this volume will generate a detailed understanding of how modern precarious working conditions have become an eminent, multi-faceted object of literary figuration (see also Korte and Regard 2014; Böhm and Kovacshazy 2015; Hogg and Simonsen 2021) while also critically examining the way these figurations are embedded in longer traditions of representing social insecurity and labor. Looking at these questions from a historical angle opens up a different path to examine  precarity—a path we must take to obtain a fuller understanding of (to borrow Lorey’s phrasing)—“the politics and economy of the present” (2015, 1).

 A Short History of the Contemporary Precarious Flex-worker It is important to keep in mind that precarious work was originally a practice of resistance and critique against the Fordist system. Autonomist Marxists in Italy applauded the figure of the precario bello, who deliberately withdrew from the compulsive (male, white) model of waged chain labor in the factory. Hence, they understood precarity as an act of liberation and a positive alternative for an economic model marked by rigid, monotonous working rhythms. However, while precarious living conditions at the margins of society in the early 1970s were still an exceptional choice of the few, precarity has since gradually become institutionalized and normalized. The figure of the precario bello, who was willing to accept extreme contingency as the price of a self-chosen, liberated life, was increasingly assimilated by the model of the homo economicus. This liberal persona refers to the (working) subject, who is willing to take on responsibility to design his/her individual life in accordance with market principles, always working on his/her own skills and competencies while searching for and seizing opportunities in the labor market. In other words, the subversive, precarious position at the margins of the economy has increasingly moved toward its center in the guise of the contemporary flex-worker (see de Bloois and Jansen 2013, 41–56). Notwithstanding,

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the ideas of autonomy and individual freedom, which still linked the precario bello to the ‘entrepreneur of the self’ (Foucault), turned out to be a treacherous illusion in the new neoliberal world. Neoliberal governmentalization can be regarded as a result of the fact that the call for flexibilization has been normalized, assimilated as a generalized system of economic domination and exploitation; it only ‘allows’ the flex-worker the ‘freedom’ to manage himself/herself to avoid the risk of falling out. One question these dynamics bring to the fore is what it means for acts of ‘artistic critique’ to be against the welfare state, such that the former margins and center have become indistinguishable. This question also refers to the changed nature of work. The transformation of the labor market, outlined in the previous section, went hand in hand with new developments that also changed the nature of work, which has, in our current knowledge and service industry, increasingly (but not exclusively)1 come to center around so-called “immaterial labor” (i.e., creative, social, linguistic, academic, and cultural work); traditionally, it was not a major economic sector. As a result, writers, artists, and academics—who together form a heterogeneous stratum that Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi famously coined the “cognitariat” (a.o. Berardi 2013)—have in many ways come to be the prototypical precarious workers who have been even more intensely exposed to cuts in public funding schemes and the rules of market competition (cf. Lazzarato 2017). The intricate ways in which culture has become structurally implicated (and victimized) in neoliberalist economics raise crucial questions about its ability to formulate a critique of the system of normalized precarity, especially given that critique is, as Foucault argued, only possible from the margins or outside of the criticized object (Foucault 2015, 50; cf. de Bloois and Jansen 2013, 41–56). The contributions of this volume present a sample sheet of these complex entanglements of culture, critique, and economics. Indeed, in reaction to these trends, artists and authors have been attempting to position themselves anew to perform and/or voice critiques of precarious working conditions. While some figurations 1  As Tim Christiaens and Stijn De Cauwer rightly point out, “post-Fordist immaterial labor always went together with deskilled, precarious labor” (2020, 118–119). In other words, the transformation of the labor market has to be understood in terms of diversification, whereby the cognitive, immaterial labor of highly educated workers has not only obtained a place beside traditional labor but has even come to rely on various new “deskilled jobs [that] post-­ Fordism has also generated in Western countries: warehouse workers, Deliveroo couriers, truckers, and so on” (ibid., 122).

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of precarious work are designed as explicit social critiques, others operate through irony and pastiche as micropolitical acts of subversion. While some figurations give a concrete voice and face to specific precarious groups and subjects in order to elicit readers’ affect (i.e., sympathy, anger, disapproval, abhorrence), others present ideal, normative models of agency that are more in line with neoliberal values of self-accomplishment and responsibility. In general, however, all literary figurations under examination in the contributions to this volume foreground specific aspects of precarious working conditions that can all in one way or another be traced back to a single overarching feature: its in-betweenness or intermediary character (which furthermore distinguishes it from other kinds of socioeconomic insecurity, such as absolute poverty). Much like the contributions in this volume show, the ‘precarity intermediary’ manifests at the affective-temporal and institutional-linguistic levels.



Affect and Time

Precarity, above all, refers to the dynamics of downward social mobility, and foregrounds the idea that the boundaries between social strata have to be imagined as permeable. As such, precarity refers to a heightened risk of social regression experienced by subjects in the twilight zone between typical employment and unemployment. Accordingly, sociological and literary figurations of precarity foreground the material and affective backlash of this ambivalent position, since precarity is, as Judith Butler claims, “a structure of affect” resulting from “a heightened sense of expendability or disposability that is differentially distributed throughout society” (2011, 13; cf. Trott 2013, 4). As Lauren Berlant has claimed in Cruel Optimism, subjects in precarious positions often adhere to the dream of obtaining a normal job that provides the means to live a normal, good life. The specific cruelty of the precarious condition lies in the fact that these visions have become increasingly elusive and out of reach—a fact that, however evident, reveals that the dissolving assurances and unattainability of conventional good-life fantasies are nevertheless an action-inspiring vision of upward social mobility and job security (Berlant 2011, 2–3). In other words, precarity is all about normative biographical models that, while they no longer match the current economic reality, still inform our habits of acting and thinking; they are informed by a temporal logic centered on the idea of loss (the “not anymore”) and the foreclosure of a future (the “forever not yet”).

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From an experiential angle, precarity means facing an almost insurmountable tension between the aspiration to live up to societal expectations or standards and the barriers to actually do so given limiting working conditions, social barriers, and the discontinuous, intermittent character of labor across social strata. In other words, precarious working conditions frustrate exactly those ambitions of upward social mobility that shaped much of the post-War, Fordist social imaginary. While social ascent still remains the norm to which workers orient their behavior, the organization of labor and the structures of social security have waned, which has drastically impacted how our personal biographies (our “curricula vitae”) can be told; they are no longer conceivable as narratives about us successfully and progressively ascending the career ladder. Instead, the loss of a clear job pattern has become normalized; as sociological surveys point out, there is a general sense of purposelessness and disorientation, as well as uncertainty and anxiety about the means to provide for a future that is at least as equally good as in previous generations, especially that of the boomers (cf. Nachtwey 2018). Indeed, figurations of precarity revolve around negative affects and “ugly” feelings such as anxiety, stress, anger, frustration, and alienation, all immediate responses to this lack of perspective (cf. Standing 2011, 33–41; Ngai 2005). However, as symptomatic affective responses to the impossibility of reaching a more secure position or projecting a stable future in the long run, they signal the shrinkage of experience to the present moment, a phenomenon that Fredric Jameson has described as a “reduction to the body” and which he has analyzed as a typical feature of late capitalist living and working conditions2 (2015, 101–132). Such a reductive experience of precarity is characterized by a specific temporal regime in which the future is unattainable and foreclosed. Because precarious work is temporary, workers are constantly looking for new (short-term) contracts, forcing them to focus on direct material and bodily needs in the present. The constant need to adapt to the immediate requirements of the labor market generates stress that one cannot keep up with the rest, misses opportunities in the present, or fails to take risks that may (or may not) open up new career paths. Affect has indeed become a driving force of the late capitalist economy (cf. Ngai 2005, 4). Indeed, the “narrowing and 2  “To be precaritised is to be subject of the pressures and experiences […] of living in the present, without a secure identity or sense of development achieved through work and lifestyle” (Standing 2011, 16).

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the urgency of the time frame” has “come to be deeply intertwined with the way we live our own individual and collective futures generally” (Jameson 2003, 704). Further, these “new rhythms are transmitted to cultural production in the form of the narratives we consume and the stories we tell ourselves, about our history fully as much as about our individual experience” (ibid.). In other words, the experience of being trapped in the present, as a temporal intermediary between a lost stable past and an uncertainly fluctuating future, is an intrinsic part of precarious phenomenology and hence also of its literary representations. This volume looks at how authors try to catch up with the experience whereby one’s career can no longer be narrated as a story of continuous progress, as was the case in the traditional bildungsroman (cf. Rosa 2015, 224–250). While some authors reconfigure these paradigmatic, linear narratives in light of contemporary temporal and affective regimes (see, for instance, Chaps. 14 and 15 in this volume), other authors such as Heike Geißler (see Chap. 9) look for new poetic devices and templates that make this sense of disorientation and powerlessness tangible for readers.

Institutions and Languages Representations of precarious work counteract precarity’s tendency to remain invisible,—a trend that is enforced by statistical models to measure collective and individual wealth. As Nachtwey shows, the general lowering of wages conceals a growing gap between high and low wages, which can be traced back to the difference between secure and insecure work. Only recently have sociologists been more focused on new measurement tools to come to terms with work practices that waver between the poles of traditional paid—unpaid labor.3 While Western economies exhibit a general increase in wealth (despite casual setbacks and crises), most of the generated wealth does not flow back to workers, except in cases where unions have been able to bargain and protect workers’ share of the economic pie. However, the precise power of those unions has been radically diminished, most notoriously in the Anglo-Saxon world, where Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the miners’ unions in the 1980s has become the ultimate symbol of the unions’ demise and loss of influence over social 3  For example, see the European research project “Researching Precariousness across the Paid/Unpaid Work Continuum” under direction of Valeria Pulignano (https://soc.kuleuven.be/ceso/wo/erlm/respectme).

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regulations. Both from the level of statistics and from the level of traditional, political institutional representation, precarity—as a phenomenon of growing inequality—seems to have been expelled (Nachtwey 2018; Sassen 2014; see also Friedrichs 2021). Notwithstanding, this has inspired new forms of reclaiming a voice that makes itself heard apart from traditional representational models, which has not only sparked new kinds of protest, but also debates revolving around how socially engaged cultural and literary practices can be reinvented to address precarity. In reaction to the spread of precarity, new forms of protest have arisen, which in some cases take explicit recourse to the notion of precarity. As Maribel Casas-Cortés outlines in her genealogy of the concept, there is a generational rift that divides older and younger generations in their assessment of precarious working realities. Former generations have known a previous state of security and—with a nostalgic yearning that is often also the object of criticism (see Traverso 2016)—try to recuperate what has been lost through traditional unionist protest. In contrast, new generations of activists have left the rigid model of the welfare state behind, along with its elaborate social security programs. They have never experienced it in real life, being born in a context where flexicurity is already the norm. Because of this, they remain open to the positive sides of what is now still too much a strategy of socioeconomic exploitation. Accordingly, these “unemployed collectives pushed the imagination to embrace a different state of economic affairs, where wage labor would not be the only form of living and where other economic transactions would be possible” (Casas-Cortés 2014, 209). The strategies to reclaim some parts of the (partially) privatized welfare state, its services and infrastructure, and to liberate the (hidden) potentials of precarious work, consist of micropolitical acts of resistance. A small example here is the Belgian Collective Sans Ticket movement, which urged travelers not to pay for their ticket when taking the train. This small act of civil disobedience was an attempt to reclaim the entitlement to free public transit that is equally accessible to all social strata.4 Other examples are protest movements that wish to embrace precarity as “an attractive point of departure for daily lives and struggles.” This was, for example, the goal set by Les Intermittents in France, a heterogeneous group of precarious workers who argued that “if temporary 4  There is a clear link with critical theory that foregrounds the notion of ‘the common’—a strand of theory that finds inspiration in the aforementioned Italian workerist movement (e.g., Negri & Hardt, Esposito…).

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contracts are becoming not an exception to the rule but a widespread practice, a distinct labor regime of duties and rights should be implemented, thus raising a series of cutting-edge political propositions: basic income, flexicurity, and commonfare” (Casas-Cortés 2014, 212). Activists, as well as artists and literary authors, have demonstrated themselves resilient by inventing “new ways of engaging with politics through art” after the progressive dismantlement of the social infrastructures that supported the cultural sector, an “aesthetic resilience” that takes on different forms. It is no coincidence that the precarious subject, as the author representing (or better, performing, reiterating, and transforming) the specific precarity of its own artistic or academic existence, has appeared more frequently on the literary stage. Hence, “the arts take on a formative role in regard to building up civil and political capacities” that help to recover from, or act against, precarity and precarization (cf. Ieven et al. 2020, 3). One strategy consists of retrieving precarity’s visibility, bringing to light precarious “situations and experiences, which often remain invisible” and tending to evade the realm of representation (Lorey 2015, 8–9; cf. Böhm and Kovacshazy 2015, 9–21). While precarity “has developed as a proposition that does not order the real into precise and static identities but that realigns multiple realities into unstable formations” (Casas-Cortés 2014, 207), it has also inspired the development of new modes of aesthetic and literary representation that grasp its dispersed, heterogeneous nature. This has resulted in a new aesthetic to capture working realities, an aesthetic that crosses the boundaries between theoretical discourse, activist resistance, and cultural expression, entangling all of these subfields through the notion of precarity (Böhm and Kovacshazy 2015, 9–21). These emerging corpora and forms of engaged writing are at the center of the contributions collected in this volume. To reveal what remains otherwise invisible is at the heart of all literary figurations of precarity. They create a language to visualize and recognize precarious realities and can be regarded as redistributions of sensible data in attempts to reshuffle “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (Rancière 2014, 7). Acknowledging precarity by allowing it to enter the framework of what can be the object of (literary) representation is the first step in recognizing it as an ethical problem that can be faced and approached (Butler 2009a). Resilience and resistance against precarity can not only be achieved by giving a face to ‘anonymous’ economic processes by showing prototypical

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members of the precariat (the flex-worker, the artist, the academic, etc.) and their histories; it can also mean developing a poetics of precarity that urges readers to critically reflect on precarity as depicted in the text and experienced in real life. As the contributions of Sarah Bernstein and Patricia Malone show in Chap. 7, one way of doing this is to use normalized discourses about networking (which enforce social isolation in academia and going against the grain) through a gesture of microlinguistic subversion (a gesture with roots in punk). While an individual can perform resistance by claiming a literary voice or by the act of writing itself, other forms of socially engaged writing are looking for more systemic critiques of precarity. An example in this regard is Bernd Stegemann’s plea for a revival of Brechtian aesthetics of estrangement to disclose the structures that produce precarity (Stegemann 2015). This volume provides a sample sheet of the broad spectrum of poetic modes developed to figure fundamental aspects of today’s proliferation of socioeconomic insecurity in literary discourse.

Historicizing Figurations of Precarity With regard to the intermediary character, contemporary imaginations and conceptualizations of precarious work have an ambivalent relationship with past traditions to bespeak the social question. While adjective-like ‘precarious’ and derivative concepts such as precarity, precarization, and precariat are associated with contemporary social conditions, they also actualize a vocabulary evoking images and sentiments of class. This is especially the case in Guy Standing’s use of the term “precariat.” While Standing foregrounds the disparate, heterogeneous composition (and interests) of this allegedly new social actor,5 consisting of both low-wage workers and employees in the service and business sectors, he also speaks of a “new dangerous class” or “a class-in-the-making, if not yet a class-for-­ itself” (Standing 2011, 11–12). These very terms frame contemporary forms of resistance against capitalist exploitation as heirs of a nineteenth-­ century struggle for social justice, which was a struggle between labor and capital. The attempt to pinpoint the (dis)continuities of the latest “transformation of the social question” has become an intrinsic part of 5  To grasp the diversity and fragmentation of the precariat, Standing refers to Negri and Hardt’s notion of the “multitude,” which is foundational to precarity figurations (Negri and Hardt 2004).

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present-­day debates on precarity. While the context and content of contemporary labor have drastically altered (also due to technological and digital developments in an increasingly automated, deindustrialized global market), the ongoing flexibilization and deregulation of labor, as well as the ensuing normalization of a state of insecurity, mark in some regards a return to “ordinary capitalism” characterized by social regression, growing inequality, crises, fewer economic opportunities, and, accordingly, “fewer sources of security for most people laboring” (Lorey 2015; Schram 2015, 11). As Eloisa Betti claims in a critical revision of contemporary scholarship on precarity, “forms of precarious work have characterized the entire history of industrial capitalism” on a global scale, the welfare state being an exclusively European and North American model of social provision (2018, 274). Indeed, precarious work has manifested differently through time and space. Yet only the fact that Western male breadwinners in traditional industrial sectors started to be affected by the demise of the welfare state and the withdrawal of social protection, has generated awareness for the re-emergence of “[p]roblems that were long seen as overcome,” even though new strata and social struggles “do not present themselves today as they did in the late nineteenth century.” Nachtwey does not see a straightforward “repeat of the traditional class struggle” in Western economies (2018, 6). Nevertheless, it is possible to understand the current phase in capitalist history at least partly as “modernity going into reverse” or an “inverse movement” in comparison to the institutionalization of wage labor in the late nineteenth century (ibid.; see also Eiden-Offe 2017). The categories by which we make sense of precarity as a new normal at least implicitly6 draw upon those traditions: “people […] cannot escape the force of history and inevitably are affected by it when seeking to act collectively to change things”: The past informs our understanding of the present (Schram 2015, 12). Contemporary theorizations of the social question invite us to reconsider the current state of capitalist production in light of its continuities and discontinuities with regard to previous phases. Concepts and their content, reviving a previous framework to bespeak ‘the social question,’ urge us to reflect on the forgotten prehistories of our sociopolitical imaginaries to look for the languages and semiotic models that were used to 6  In a recent bestseller, journalist Julia Friedrichs uncompromisingly revived the concept of ‘working class’ in her critique of contemporary working conditions and ensuing plea for worthy jobs (Friedrichs 2021).

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structure, represent, reflect, and experience that reality. This volume shows that this connection between the historical and contemporary imaginations of socioeconomic precarity can be understood in an even more complex and two-directional way. On the one hand, contemporary genres, poetics, and styles are informed by the past in that they are embedded in diverse, changing traditions of imagining and bespeaking precarious work beyond the normal, typical forms of contractual wage labor. On the other hand, contemporary theorizations that have shifted their focus away from traditional wage labor to insecure working conditions (e.g., seasonal labor, temporary jobs, immaterial work, labor in the informal sector, etc.) can help to shed more nuanced light again on the history of social insecurity (and its figurations in literature). Such an approach would set forth the project initialized by Jacques Rancière (La nuit des prolétaires, 1981/2012) to retrieve voices in the archives of workers’ literature that were previously neglected, but which resonate with our contemporary attentiveness to social insecurity and regression. This also means finding representations articulated by those who wanted to shed light on social insecurity from an external perspective, such as outsiders or eye witnesses. In this regard, this volume explicitly reconstructs the historical continuities and discontinuities in the models to capture precarity by meticulously retracing the historical development of representative genres (e.g., state-of-the-nation novels, the social reportage) and/or metaphors of paradigmatic precarious realities (e.g., slums, hotels).

The Structure of This Book The contributions collected in this volume are grouped into three clusters that approach the literary figurations of precarity from a variety of diachronic and synchronic angles, with close attention to the entanglement of material realities and the authorship of thematic and textual-poetic innovations. A first series of essays examines to what extent contemporary figurations of precarity are embedded in long-standing traditions. To unearth these prehistories, the contributions shed new light on formerly neglected corpora through the prism of present-day critical theory. In her contribution to the development of British state-of-the-nation novels, Alice Borrego examines how the latest manifestations of the genre— which show the growing social divisions in post-Thatcherite Britain by way of zooming in on exemplary families—are part of a longer history with roots in the nineteenth century. The choice to depict families as a

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metaphor of society at large, as well as the technique of figures crossing boundaries between privileged and precarious strata (that plead for a more equal striation of precariousness), are identified as two essential genre characteristics. Indeed, downward social mobility and the crossing of class boundaries are inherent to precarious living conditions. Crossing boundaries has been one of the essential tropes to frame and narrate precarity since the nineteenth century, especially in social reportages such as those under consideration in the contributions of Michiel Rys and Christoph Schaub. While Rys analyzes Paul Göhre’s Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche (1891), the first social reportage in Germany, as an attempt to forge an interdiscursive, Christian semiotic system to acknowledge precarity, Schaub explores the dis/continuities between Egon Erwin Kisch’s (1920s) and Ilija Trojanow’s (2001, 2010, 2011) reportages about slum life. By foregrounding on the diversity and heterogeneity of the working class, rather than the alleged homogeneity implicit in traditional concepts of class agency, these reportages prefigure contemporary views of the precariat as a diverse, non-unified group of workers facing social regression, often from an outsider’s (i.e., postcolonial) perspective. While Schaub illustrates that this diversity can become the object of romanticized and highly idealized figurations of the precarious, Stephanie Marx’s chapter zeroes in on Maria Leitner’s reportage Hotel Amerika (1930) to demonstrate how the precariat’s composition of workers, with divergent personal interests, can also be an obstacle to fight structural conditions. Marx shows that precarious employment has been a reality for certain segments of the work force, especially for women and migrants. Accordingly, Marx convincingly reads Hotel Amerika as an early representation of the governmental precarization that, according to Isabell Lorey, would increasingly become the norm from the 1970s onward. In doing so, Leitner makes innovative use of the hotel as a metaphor of society as a whole while revealing the difficulties of organizing (hotel) workers and creating class solidarity. As is the case in many early figurations of precarious work, the class struggle of a unified labor force against capital remains the horizon of Leitner’s remarkable text. Samia Myers reaches the same conclusion in her analysis of Lucien Bourgeois’ stories about commodities in L’Ascension (1925), by means of which he wanted to counter the invisibility of his own labor as a temporary, unskilled worker more at risk for social regression than his proletarian colleagues, who strongly identified

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with their jobs. For Bourgeois, writing about his own social visibility was a means to reclaim a public voice. This raises many questions about the entanglement between precarity as a material reality and authorship, which the contributions in the second section of the book approach from various angles and with regard to different (national) contexts. In her essay about spoken word poetry in the United States, Cynthia Stretch describes how the subsequent economic crises and the simultaneous dynamics of gentrification and hypercommodification of housing have resulted in waves of eviction that have especially impacted vulnerable (non-white) families. Stretch indicates how spoken word poetry has been a means to occupy a space and reclaim a (lyrical) voice on the public stage. Raising one’s voice is a form of agency of reasserting one’s stance as an agent in a community. Another way of establishing a community as a reaction against a rationale of economic exploitation is described in Sarah Bernstein and Patricia Malone, who argue that academic work has gradually been transformed according to a business logic of competition and precarity. This logic is in part supported by the language of networking, which has been criticized in Academics Against Networking, a zine that, in a punk-feminist fashion, has been “using the language of the institution against the institutional logics.” Zines—media that have always been used to overturn usual distinctions between author and audience—give a glimpse of a different kind of (academic) community in which contributors and readers are involved in a shared project. Nevertheless, poetic language is often also contested as a means to voice precarity. This is certainly the case in the works of Didier Eribon, Edouard Louis, and Nicolas Mathieu, whom Alex Demeulenaere discusses. These three French authors all escaped their former working-class backgrounds; this is also a central theme in their autobiographically inspired novels, which develop a new form of realist (i.e., naturalist poetics). This style distinguishes itself from previous realist depictions of working-­class voices, in all three cases, with a hybrid authorial position resulting in a “permanent linguistic clash between recognizable literary writing and the working-class voice opposed to it.” Moreover, Eribon and Louis further complicate the image of precarized working-class life by showing that they could not perform their actual gender identity in their original working-class contexts and had to take on hypermasculine roles— a behavior that is, furthermore (more or less explicitly), explained by Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.

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The tension between theory and narration, reality and fiction, experience and distance is an element recurrent throughout discussions about literary representations of precarious work. This also comes to the fore in the two interviews included in this section, which shed light on the entanglement of materiality and authorship from the angle of production aesthetics. Heike Geißler, who worked as a seasonal worker in the Leipzig Amazon warehouse, published Saisonarbeit (2014), a widely acclaimed novel in which she has processed her own traumatic precarious working conditions, also with regard to the transversal gender theme. Her critique against precarity often takes the form of an ironic subversion of the language that engenders precarization processes, a technique that also characterizes Kathrin Röggla’s oeuvre, which is embedded in a tradition of Austrian literature and language critique. In his chapter about net literature, Thomas Ernst investigates how Röggla develops a poetic model that productively reacts to her own precarious position as an author forced to work on/with online media subjected to the logics of a platform economy. Ernst’s contribution points to the concern of the essays included in the third section of this volume, which examines the intricacies of contemporary figurations of precarious work in various (national) contexts. Roswitha Böhm’s chapter provides a broad overview of the semantic-discursive field of precarity, which not only comes forward as a central theme of contemporary French and Spanish literature but also inspires authors to develop new poetic models to acknowledge contemporary labor spheres. That some fundamental dimensions of precarity experience have also informed literary innovation on a microtextual level is what Emily Hogg demonstrates in her chapter to the category of risk in British novels by Robert McLiam Wilson (Ripley Bogle, 1989) and Alan Warner (Morvern Callar, 1995). These two novels strategically use techniques such as emplotment and the tension between the fictional characters’ affect-driven relatability and their textual constructedness to invite readers to immerse themselves in the story world, to worry about the protagonists who embark on risky endeavors, and to question the way neoliberalism transposes risk to individual subjects and families altogether. While contemporary figurations of precarity deploy specific poetic devices, they also individualize abstract economic processes by means of prototypical characters of precarious life. In her chapter about contemporary Swedish fiction, Åsa Arping discusses how three novels follow three young adults who, as newcomers in the labor market, embark on three

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different trajectories. These convey three different notions of labor and (first) jobs as a formative experience that leaves lasting impressions on the personal and professional development of young adults. The novels question how the competitional model of neoliberal economics interferes with solidarity between coworkers and, on a more general level, resistance against socioeconomic exploitation. Another prototypical figure of precarity is the migrant, who enjoys less protection under the law and is thus more vulnerable to social insecurity. Agnieszka Pantuchowicz reconstructs how the migrant’s specific precarity can be best understood metaphorically as a spatial and architectural problem through unequal access to shelter—a metaphorical paradigm that has, however, been appropriated by conservatives to ward off migrants, as Donald Trump’s obsession with wall-building most notably illustrates. However, it is possible to create an alternative trajectory to think about the relationship between precariousness and rooflessness, one that embraces our shared precariousness as an ontological vulnerability and is rooted in a humanist tradition in which Judith Butler’s elaborations on precarious life are one of the more recent examples. Pantochowicz’s analysis of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland illustrates how fiction opens up a pathway to imagine “a kind of neighboring of the roofless away from the precarities of various, also ideological, domestic construction industries.” Nevertheless, these poetics of precarity are problematized in Benjamin Kohlmann’s chapter on Ali Smith’s timely novel series Seasonal Quartet. With the help of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s work on the fragmentation of precarious work, Kohlmann argues that Smith’s novels are an exemplary case of how literature has acknowledged precarity by framing it as a collection of juxtaposed, analogous individual experiences and “in terms of the specific affects and psychopathologies to which it gives rise (e.g., fear, uncertainty, depression, panic)” and by seeking out “new solidarities […] under the current regime of systemically produced socioeconomic vulnerability.” Kohlmann shows how these new agents of change—which Smith’s novel presents as a non-unified “collective subjectivity” composed of “irreducible singularities”—are only thinkable inside the sphere of poetic symbolism. The contributions in this book have been written during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that has put the themes of precarity and precariousness back on the agenda. While it remains to be seen what the socioeconomic, political, and cultural impact of this pandemic will actually look like, Stijn De Cauwer’s coda to this volume not only provides us with a

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summarizing overview of the public debate about (precarious) labor, social (in-)security, and health in times of COVID-19, and of the literary projects inspired by this period of continuous lockdown; it also gives a glimpse of discussions to come.

Bibliography Berardi, Franco. 2013. What does Cognitariat Mean? Work, Desire and Depression. Cultural Studies Review 11 (2): 57–63. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr. v11i2.3656. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP. Betti, Eloisa. 2018. Historicizing Precarious Work: Forty Years of Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities. International Review of Social History 63: 273–319. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859018000329. Böhm, Roswitha, and Cécile Kovacshazy, eds. 2015. Précarité. Littérature et cinéma de la crise au XXIe siècle. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London, New York: Verso. ———. 2009a. Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London, New York: Verso. ———. 2009b. Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics. AIBR.  Reviste de Antropologia Iberoamericana. https://doi.org/10.11156/aibr.040306. ———. 2011. For and Against Precarity. Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy 1: 12–13. Casas-Cortés, Maribel. 2014. A Genealogy of Precarity. A Toolbox for Rearticulating Fragmented Social Realities in and out of the Workplace. Rethinking Marxism 26 (2): 206–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/0893569 6.2014.888849. De Bloois, Joost, and Monika Jansen. 2013. De marge is overal. Precariteit en de cultuur- en literatuurwetenschap: het geval Italië. Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap 5: 41–56. De Cauwer, Stijn, and Tim Christiaens. 2020. The Multitude Divided: Biopolitical Production during the Coronavirus Pandemic. In Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Vincent Lyon-Callo, Yahya Madra, Ceren Özselçuk, Jared Randall, Malihi Safri, and Chizo Sato, 118–127. Brighton: ReMarx Books. Eiden-Offe, Patrick. 2017. Die Poesie der Klasse. Romantischer Antikapitalismus und die Erfindung des Proletariats. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Verlag. Foucault, Michel. 2015. Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivie de La culture de soi. Paris: Vrin. Friedrichs, Julia. 2021. Working Class. Warum wir Arbeit brauchen, von der wir leben können. Berlin, München: Berlin Verlag.

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Hogg, Emily, and Peter Simonsen, eds. 2021. Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury. Ieven, Bram, Eliza Steinbock, and Marijke de Valck, eds. 2020. Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis. New York: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 2003. The End of Temporality. Critical Inquiry 29 (4): 695–718. https://doi.org/10.1086/377726. ———. 2015. The Aesthetics of Singularity. New Left Review 92: 101–132. Korte, Barbara, and Frédéric Regard, eds. 2014. Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain. Berlin: de Gruyter. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory. Oxford, New York: OUP. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2017. Experimental Politics. Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age. Translated by A. Bove, J. Gilbert, A. Goffney, M. Hayward, J. Read, and A. Toscano. Cumberland: MIT Press. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity. Government of the Precarious. London, New York: Verso. Nachtwey, Oliver. 2018. Germany’s Hidden Crisis. Social Decline in the Heart of Europe. London, New York: Verso. Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt. 2004. Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin Books. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Precarity Lab. 2020. Technoprecarious. London: Goldsmiths. Rancière, Jacques. 2012. Proletarian Nights. The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-­ Century France. London, New York: Verso. ———. 2014. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by. G.  Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury. Rosa, Hartmut. 2015. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Translated by J. Trejo-Mathys. New York: Columbia UP. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Schram, Stanford. 2015. The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy. Oxford: Oxford UP. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Stegemann, Bernd. 2015. Lob des Realismus. Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Traverso, Enzo. 2016. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia UP. Trott, Ben. 2013. From the Precariat to the Multitude. Global Discourse 3 (3–4): 406–425. https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2013.876714.

PART I

Figurations of Precarious Work: Prehistories

CHAPTER 2

Precarity and Privilege in State-of-the-Nation Novels: Anatomy of a Fragmented Body Politic Alice Borrego

This chapter proposes to understand the tensions between precarity and privilege in the context of English state-of-the-nation novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a genre that has been particularly prominent in the last three decades. In order to give a detailed account of the genre’s depiction of class relations, I chose to focus on six particular novels: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936), Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949), Angus Wilson’s No Laughing Matter (1967), Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994) and John Lanchester’s Capital (2012). Though “BrexLit” novels (Day 2017) could have been included in the selection, the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union cast a new light on class challenges, whose depth and complexity must be addressed on their own. A

A. Borrego (*) EMMA EA741, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_2

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diachronic approach of previous state-of-the-nation novels like the present one can, hopefully, fuel further discussion on this added social and political dimension of the genre. This study aims at showing how the very structure of the English body politic is responsible for its own fragmentation. I will see to what extent the genre and its aesthetic devices simultaneously reflect and question oppressive social structures, while wondering whether such novels actually manage to give a voice to the precarious. The prime opposition in the title of this chapter, “precarity and privilege,” stems from recent research in social philosophy and ethics studies. A clear distinction needs to be reasserted here, before detailing the history of state-of-the-nation novels: this chapter aims to address precarity, rather than precariousness. In Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009), Judith Butler distinguishes the existential conception of “precariousness” and the more specific political notion of “precarity” (2009, 2). While ontological precariousness lies in the inherent vulnerability of the human body (which is universally shared), precarity entails relations of power, which leads to, as Isabell Lorey perfectly underlines in State of Insecurity, “the hierarchization of being” which “covers naturalized relations of domination” (Lorey 2012, 12). Ontological precariousness becomes a tool of power and subjectivation, destined to control and undermine those who do not comply with the normative frame. In Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, French philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc contends that [the descent into precarity] results from a history and not from a condition. This history is always, by any means, the history of a social curse which severs bounds, transforms injustice into shame, and thus achieves the destitution of the precarious, the mutilation of their mental life which is now branded. (Le Blanc 2007, 14, [my translation])

Following Butler, Le Blanc sees precarity as a social construct which subdues the individual for the benefit of a larger, dominant group. The precarious therefore enters a descent into “poverty, marginality and social scorn” (ibid., 79). Keeping in mind that sociological precarity is made possible by ontological precariousness, this chapter chooses to follow Le Blanc’s theorization of the “social curse” and Lorey’s “hierarchization” of society, for it has been the topic of condition-of-England or state-of-the-­ nation novels since the nineteenth century.

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Benjamin Disraeli’s words in his 1845 novel Sybil or The Two Nations are still well-known today, and highlight the divisions of nineteenth-­ century England: Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws […] THE RICH AND THE POOR. (67)

Sybil is part of what has been called “Condition-of-England” novels, in the wake of Thomas Carlyle’s (1795–1881) essay “Chartism” (1839) and his book Past and Present (1843). “Condition-of-England” novels such as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) or Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854) pointed out the mistreatment of the poor and the raging inequalities within England. This growing consciousness of the precarious—enabled by the concomitant development of the Chartist movement (spearheaded by Carlyle) which managed to enlarge suffrage, and of the genre which also drew attention to the working classes—led to the construction of a more egalitarian and more democratic society under the reign of “the Peacemaker” King Edward VII. This political and social evolution changed the industrial nature of Condition-of-England novels, which therefore came to be characterized as “state-of-the-nation novels,” so as to make a clear distinction from their nineteenth-century counterparts. E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is certainly the most emblematic novel of the genre at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like Disraeli’s two nations, Howards End stages two socially opposite families, the rich capitalist Wilcoxes and the impoverished Basts. But the similarities end here: the Schlegels, who entertain a friendly relationship with the Wilcoxes, take upon themselves to help the lower-class Basts. This intermediary family changes the perspective of the inevitable social stratification evidenced in previous Condition-of-England novels and is emblematic of the hope brought about by the Edwardian era, as Margaret Schlegel calls to “Only connect! […] Live in fragments no longer” (Forster 1910, 133). Jean-Michel Ganteau accounts for this evolution of the genre and sees

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in such an invitation [to connect] the essence of the contemporary state-of-­ the-nation novel: it has moved away from its originally industrial context and provides a broader ethical and political vision, adapting to the various milieus and contexts to which its authors are confronted. (Ganteau 2015, 162)

Ganteau’s observation draws on a social, ethical and political interconnectedness which goes further than sole class divisions. Margaret’s call to connect indeed proposes to bridge divisions to ensure the nation’s stability and viability: the child her sister Helen eventually has with Leonard Bast symbolizes such a desire for unification. Christine Reynier astutely explains the ideological and symbolical purport of Howard Ends, while shedding light on its ties and departures from Condition-of-England novels: The central question asked in the Condition of England novel, ‘can marriage unify the nation?,’ is taken up in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) while some displacements and additional elements are introduced that mark the shift from the Condition to the State of England novel: the North-­ South division is transformed into a threefold one between London, the suburbs and the country; Gaskell’s scepticism about the healing power of marriage is turned into a utopian ending where Leonard Bast’s and Helen Schlegel’s child, the fruit of the illegitimate union of the lower and upper classes, inherits England, an England where the English Henry Wilcox can marry the half-German Margaret Schlegel. (Reynier 2015)

The utopian ending of Howards End glosses over divisions and proposes an alternative social system, where the precarious can access property. However, as Linda Shires demonstrates, the metonymic unification of the country only partakes in “[smoothing] over aesthetically” the “ideological opposition between self and society” (Shires 2005, 71)—an approach which no longer holds after the devastating experience of the First World War. The state-of-the-nation novels which emerged during and long after the conflict reveal a fragmentation of the English body politic that seems impossible to mend. In this regard, Forsterian unity is but oneiric: as Tom Nairn observes in The Break Up of Britain, the contradiction between the form of the United Kingdom state and any would-be English nationalism can be resumed in a word: class. This is a state which has intimately depended upon a hierarchical and élite social forma-

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tion: as many recent studies have demonstrated, that dependence has been modified but never abolished. (Nairn 1982, 298)

Nairn makes it clear that English society can only be, and has always been, a highly divisive and divided nation. His remarks shed light on the tension between precarity and privilege, as status and wealth determine who is part of the nation and who is left out. Howards End therefore illustrates a possible “modification” of the social formation of England, but later novels of the genre do reveal the persistence of an oppressive social structure fragmenting the nation, for fragmentation is a “process. […] the unfolding of a break that happens either once or over and over again” (Regier 2010, 7). The novels chosen for this chapter all describe how precarity and privilege interact at key historic moments, from the First World War to the 2008 credit crunch: their concomitant analysis aims at deciphering how the precarious is continuously “branded” by the dominant class, resulting in the progressive deterioration of the English body politic. First of all, if class is primarily understood as an economic category, historians and critics have emphasized its symbolic and ideological tenets (Cannadine 1998; Head 2002). I propose to analyze how state-of-the-­ nation novels stage “symbolic and material insecurities” (Lorey 2012, 21), as a comment on the social distribution of England. Analyzing the (fictional) structure of English society will then lead to an inquiry on the liminal state of the precarious, since, as Le Blanc contends, precarity is at the same time tolerated and proscribed. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries “modes of governing” (Lorey 2012, 13) create a paradox, where the condition of precarity is made both inevitable and intolerable, leaving the precarious simultaneously inside and outside of society. This will eventually raise the question of the novels’ ethical “interstice” (Bhabha [1994] 2004, 2), which seems to question social binarism and to reinject ethical values in an otherwise corrupted body politic, therefore supplementing Butler’s claim for “a critical reflection on those exclusionary norms by which fields of recognizability are constituted” (Butler 2009, 36).

Status and Stratification In History in Our Time, David Cannadine retraces the origin of “class obsession” in British society:

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[…] despite the best efforts of many of today’s historians to take class out of the 19th century, the fact remains that the Victorians were obsessed with it—or at least, with something very like it. Read any contemporary novel, newspaper, or parliamentary debate, and the preoccupation is immediately apparent—not with class in the Marxist sense of collective and conflicting relations to the means of production, but with those finely graded distinctions of prestige ranking to which sociologists give the name status. […] Here, surely, is the origin of the British obsession, not so much with collective class, but with such individual matters as titles, honours, accent, deportment and dress, which does so much to determine how one person is regarded and categorised by another […]. (Cannadine 1998, 186)

Cannadine argues that the English body politic is structured by symbolic elements: “distinction,” “ranking,” and “category” are all markers of this stratification which finds its mode of expression in normative and normalized behaviors. While insisting on the Victorian period, Cannadine offers a similar view as Nairn: if class distinction has been taking different shapes throughout the centuries, it nonetheless remains a determining social factor in British society. Angus Wilson’s family saga No Laughing Matter (1967) could be considered as the fictional counterpart of Cannadine’s analysis, as it draws the portrait of the Matthew family, from the First World War to the author’s contemporary society, allowing the reader to become thoroughly acquainted with the “Anglo-Saxon attitudes” of the twentieth century. The novel can be defined as a story of abuse: Clara and William Matthews (respectively, nicknamed the Countess and Billy Pop) are forever aspiring to be part of the upper middle class and are leading extravagant lives, which results in the neglect of their six children. Their bourgeois and frugal lifestyle is notably made possible by their housemaid, Regan, who comes from “lowly origins” (Wilson 1967, 10). The hierarchization of origins transforms her into a risible character in the eyes of the Matthews (“What would we do without our Stoker and her constant scrapes to keep us laughing […]” [ibid.]). The reproduction of her Cockney accent throughout the novel (shown for instance in the elision of the initial ‘h’ in the pronouns ‘her,’ ‘he’ or the verb ‘have,’ or in the wrong conjugation of the auxiliary ‘be’: “Em and I was talking about it only last time I see er.” [ibid., 31]) makes her stand out on the page, in comparison with the Matthews parents’ desire to resemble the upper layers of society. The stigmatization of Regan through language and physical behavior (which often verges on the slapstick tradition) accentuates the stratification of the Matthew family, which is itself a metonymy of

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the nation as a whole.1 Regan’s precarity is used as a foil for social and ethical distinction, always reminding her employers and their children of their superiority. The most prominent example of this process is Regan’s relationship with Sukey, one of the twin daughters of Clara and William Matthew. Sukey cannot but feel disgust toward her (“The physical sense of being Regan disgusted her.” [ibid., 45]) and considers “the drunken, the dirty old Regan” to be “on the scrapheap, in the dustbins” (ibid.). Sukey’s thoughts actually echo Le Blanc’s definition of the precarious as individuals prone to social scorn (here through disgust), poverty (symbolized by the dustbins) and marginality (the “scrapheap” suggesting that Regan is no more than refuse that needs to be discarded). Sukey’s rejection of Regan is emblematic of the stratification of English society, for her disgust only reinforces her desire to become part of the gentility (which she will achieve later on in the novel) and to leave any reminder of squalor and impropriety behind. This phenomenon is even more striking as Regan enters a process of “depersonalization” (Le Blanc) which is symptomatic of social precarity:2 not only is she referred to as a “poor, dreadful old thing” (ibid., 44) which emphasizes her objectification and dehumanization, but she also informs the reader that her name is in fact “Henrietta” (ibid.). The replacement of her real name by one created by the Matthews “threatens to cancel” all of her “individual potentials” (Le Blanc 2007, 70). Henrietta only exists through her job as housemaid and through her Cockney origin, which both serve as catalysts of an oppressive social hierarchy. Modes of behavior and speech become a tool for “forms of domination” (Butler 2009, 31), resulting in what Lorey called “processes of othering” (2012, 12): Henrietta acquires, and is circumscribed by, the status of the precarious through discourse and social behavior. Though it could be argued that No Laughing Matter’s depiction of class strata is limited to the individual case of the selfish and satirical Matthews, other state-of-the-nation novels depict this societal stratification, such as Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949), therefore suggesting a deep-rooted institutionalization of the precarious. 1  Patrick Parrinder contends in Nation and Novel (2006) that “Family genealogies in the English novel are often loaded with cultural meaning, conveying a hint—and sometimes far more than a hint—of national allegory […] In general, the more prominently the genealogy is stated at the outset, the more clearly is family identity linked to national identity” (33). 2  “Social precarity is equivalent to a process of social depersonalisation in life […] In reality, the precarious is constrained by precarity” (Le Blanc 2007, 70 [my translation]).

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Celia, the protagonist of Smith’s novel, grapples with the instability of the British nation after the Second World War and at the beginning of decolonization. Her self-indeterminacy echoes that of the country, while revealing the unshakeable social structure of English society. Hoping to be alone to reflect on her relationships and on the ethical state of Britain, she is interrupted by a maid and declares that she “detest[s] the servant class” (Wilson 1967, 115). Smith goes one step further than Wilson here: not only is the precarious, just as in No Laughing Matter, defined by her job but it even becomes a social strata per se. “The servant class” suggests that precarity is a particular category of the body politic, one that allows Celia, the epitome of privilege, to dismiss this portion of society completely. This institutionalization of status is even dual: the precarious is defined by a line of work considered to be a commodity for the upper classes. By creating the “servant class,” Celia actually institutionalizes both precarity and privilege. She goes even further as she talks to the maid: “How dare you come in and touch the window when I am in here without asking my permission?” (ibid.). The precarious here intrudes into the sphere of privilege (as the preposition “in” suggests), forcing Celia to reassert her authority on the servant who needs “permission” to act. Status and stratification are therefore the frame defining the interactions between precarity and privilege, where the former is submitted to the latter. Power dynamics codify the body politic up to the point where the movements and actions of the precarious (be it the servant in The Holiday or Henrietta’s “scrapes”) are submitted to the law of privilege. The status of the precarious is created and ruled by the discourse and behavior of the dominant group: the stratification of English society therefore raises the question of the legitimization of such practices, as the precarious enters a liminal state, oscillating between rejection and consideration.

Liminality of Precarity Angus Wilson’s and Stevie Smith’s novels focus on a rather private scale, shedding light on the relationship between the upper classes and their domestic workers. If the metonymic structure of state-of-the-nation novels shows that the private sphere is a reflection of the public one, authors of the genre have also elected to depict the operation of local and national government so as to reveal the depth of their society’s ethical corruption. In South Riding (1936), Winifred Holtby explores the different layers of

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the fictional South Riding county3 and more precisely the impact of the County Council on the life of its inhabitants. At the beginning of the novel, the reader becomes acquainted with the geography of the county, thanks to a map drawn by the author. The South Riding is itself a representation of precarity and privilege, as parts of the county enclose either one of these social categories: “Two miles south of Kiplington, between the cliffs and the road to Maythorpe, stood a group of dwellings known locally as the Shacks. […] A war raged between Kiplington Urban District Council and the South Riding County Council over the tolerated existence of the Shacks” (Holtby 1936, 30). The antonomasia on the name “shacks” illustrates the process of legitimization and institutionalization of precarity. This very part of the county is defined by its sordid conditions which are “tolerated,” meaning that both councils are enabling the existence of poverty and squalor rather than improving the quality of life at the Shacks. Throughout the novel, the precarious are opposed to “the respectable villagers” (ibid., 389) who define themselves as highly moral and respectable, suggesting that the “destitute” (ibid., 294) do not correspond to local values. In her dialogue with Gayatri C.  Spivak in Who Sings the Nation State? Language, Politics, Belongings, Judith Butler analyzes the compliance between nation and state when it comes to dealing with “national minorities”: In other words, the nation-state assumes that the nation expresses a certain national identity, is founded through the concerted consensus of a nation, and that a certain correspondence exists between the state and the nation. The nation, in this view, is singular and homogeneous, or at least, it becomes so in order to comply with the requirements of the state. The state derives its legitimacy from the nation, which means that those national minorities who do not qualify for “national belonging” are regarded as “illegitimate inhabitants.” (Butler and Spivak 2007, 30–31)

As “local government was an epitome of national government” (Holtby 1936, 3), South Riding and its County Council seem to conform to the same rules as the state and the nation. If Butler originally talks about “the category of the stateless” (ibid., 12–13), the residents of the Shacks are indeed considered as “illegitimate inhabitants” and even as “pariah[s]” 3  Holtby’s novel is based on the real Yorkshire East Riding, of which her mother was county alderman. South Riding includes a prefatory letter to Holtby’s mother, explaining how her work both stems and differs from real events.

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(ibid., 301). The all-powerful County Council follows the values of a community which disavows a section of its members, resulting in the “humiliation” (ibid., 294) of the precarious candidates to the Public Assistance Committees and its Means Test, who are left begging for vital allowances. Precarity becomes institutionalized, while privilege infiltrates the very public organizations supposed to help the precarious. As Le Blanc suggests, “the precarious are not excluded but rather dispossessed of themselves by the society which creates them by keeping them afloat with one step inside, one step outside and by generating the reserve force capitalism needs to limitlessly prosper” (Le Blanc 2007, 19–20). The precarious is therefore a liminal figure: neither part nor out of society, the precarious is the result of a fragmented and fragmenting body politic which seeks to exploit the most vulnerable. Stanley Dollan, a candidate for the election to the County Council, condemns the development of precarity which he considers to be the result of capitalist greed: Mr Dollan talked grandly about local government, about the people’s rights and real Democracy. It appeared from his speeches that the landowners had ground the faces of the poor for their own advantages. The unrepaired cottages, the inadequate water supply, the disgrace of rural slums like the Shacks […] were due to the iron hand of obstruction. (Holtby 1936, 405)

Capitalism appears as a defining force in the power dynamics between precarity and privilege: the poor are voluntarily kept in disgraceful conditions so as to benefit the most fortunate. It should be noted that one of the most prominent members of the County Council, Alderman Snaith, is deliberately playing with the fate of the most vulnerable individuals of the South Riding for his personal gain. Holtby’s criticism of the capitalist system and its process of precarization finds its echo in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, written almost sixty years later (1994). The concomitant analysis of these two novels allows for a comprehensive overview of the different “modes of governing since the formation of industrial capitalist conditions” (Lorey 2012, 13). In fact, in this famous state-of-the-nation novel, the Winshaw family embodies the Thatcher government and its tenets during the 1980s in the United Kingdom. Each child is set to represent one aspect of Thatcherism, from the government to the media. Henry Winshaw, a dedicated Thatcherite MP, explains to his sister Dorothy (a mogul of the food industry) how the government uses the lower classes

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for its own political and economic gain—curiously recalling Dollan’s accusation: Put it this way: did you know that over the next five years we were planning to scrap free school meals for more than half a million children?’ ‘Not calculated to be a popular move, I wouldn’t have thought.’ ‘Well, there’ll be an outcry, of course, but then it’ll die down and something else will come along for people to get annoyed about. The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate everyday. Which means, in the end, that they’ll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower.’ Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. ‘Oh, yes,’ he assured her. ‘A diet high in sugars leads to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.’ He smiled. ‘As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy.’ (Coe [1994] 2016, 254)

Henry, supposed to represent the will of the people, here ignores the well-­ being of the population. The fact that his cabinet’s decision to go against the demos (not a “popular move”) reveals how the precarious is but another political tool to assert Thatcherite power. This scheme resembles the process of precarization defined by Le Blanc: working-class families are slowly but painfully dispossessed of themselves and their capacities (“physically weaker and mentally slower”). He even uses military metaphors, turning the precarious into both an enemy and an ally (“a reserve force” as Le Blanc calls it), for their very dispossession ensures the political and economic prosperity of an annihilating government. Coe’s novel echoes Holtby’s, as the fate of the Thatcherite nation resembles that of the Shacks. Both illustrate the different scales on which state-of-the-nation novels operate. Their similarities do shed light on “the descent into precarity” as a “[result] from a history and not from a condition,” but the two novels take separate roads in the outcome of this process: while Holtby advocates for hope and unity (even allowing one of her most precarious characters, Lydia Holly, to aspire to a better future), Coe is much more cynical when it comes to the future of the United Kingdom.4 Nonetheless, South Riding 4  Dominic Head perfectly accounts for this evolution: “As an encompassing social vision has become increasingly difficult to sustain in the post-consensus era, there has been a shift of focus, a recalibration of the typical point of view in political fiction. The impressive technical efforts of Coe […] to resurrect the collective also indicate that the alternative option, the

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and What a Carve Up! both reveal the ethical failure of public institutions which fall prey to the stratification of society, leaving no real place for the precarious and legitimizing the hegemony of privilege. Their indictment of corrupt policies and government officials discloses a not-so “hidden ‘it should be otherwise’” (Adorno [1974] 1977, 194). The in-betweenness of the precarious, who remains both in and out of society, is exposed and questioned: the representation of this liminality in state-of-the-nation novels gives way to an ethical interstice that allows for a reconsideration of political and social structures and proposes to question the normative frames through which we envisage precarity.

The Ethical “Interstice” The binarism of precarity and privilege, as well as the liminality of the precarious, call for an exploration of what Homi Bhabha defines as the “interstice”: What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘inbetween’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. (Bhabha [1994] 2004, 2)

Bhabha calls to explore what lies beyond binary narratives such as class or gender, so as to notice the emergence of new cultural values. State-of-the-­ nation novels can be considered as the locus of an “overlap” of cultural differences: they offer multiple accounts of the society they depict, therefore challenging a traditional “us versus them” narrative. The confrontation of precarity and privilege gives way not only to the expression of cultural difference but also to the exposure of corrupted ethical focus on marginal and dispossessed figures, is more natural, because more representative of prevailing social changes. Indeed, the political novel since the 1980s has invariably had recourse to this approach, with its tacit acknowledgement of social fragmentation, or even the suggestion of social collapse” (Head 2002, 38).

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considerations. Following Le Blanc’s and Lorey’s historical perspective on the precarious, I propose to consider two novels, respectively written at the beginning of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst, in order to offer a diachronic perspective on the literary aperture of the ethical interstice. Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) is one of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon. Jenny Baldry, the narrator, is confronted with the return of her cousin Chris from the war, as he suffers from shell-shock. Having forgotten the last fifteen years of his life, Chris cannot recall being married to his upper-class wife Kitty, nor having lost touch with his former lover Margaret. His return to Baldry Court is made even more difficult as Chris demands Margaret’s presence. Contrasting with the “costly life” (West 1918, 50) of the Baldrys, Margaret “was not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty” (ibid., 61). Jenny constantly opposes Kitty and Margaret throughout the novel, especially emphasizing their physical appearance and their attires, as they respectively embody privilege and precarity. Though the story is told through Jenny’s eyes, West finds in Margaret her ethical interstice: her poverty is the counterpart of highly moral and ethical values, which supersede those of the Baldry women. She is “an intercessory being” (ibid., 68) that has eased the sufferings of Chris, while the doctors and the Baldry women have failed to do so. When Dr Anderson—the last doctor to visit Chris—discovers that Kitty and Chris had lost a son before the start of the war (whose existence was not mentioned by Kitty), Margaret takes upon herself to bring Chris’s memory back by showing him the baby’s clothing (here embodying Bhabha’s “site of collaboration”). Her sense of responsibility is underlined by Jenny, who “did not wonder that she was feeling bleak, since in a few moments she was to go out and say the words that would end all her happiness, that would destroy all the gifts her generosity had so difficultly amassed” (ibid., 74). By empowering the ex-centric, the outsider in such a way, West opposes Jenny’s and Kitty’s stigmatization of poverty to Margaret’s ethical “generosity”—offering an alternative to the binary dialogue of precarity and privilege. Nevertheless, Christine Reynier rightly points out that: The tragic irony of the story lies in the fact that Margaret’s successful efforts to make Chris recover his memory by working against the double repression of his feelings (his love for her and for his son) end up in sending him back to Kitty—the guardian of the repressive ways of her class—(and to the

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front). Chris is saved from repression to better go back to a world advocating self-control and repressive feelings. (Reynier 2015)

Margaret’s and Chris’s relationship appears as a temporary exploration of “what could be” without the strictures of an oppressive social system. Through Margaret, West counteracts what she considered to be the “constant abuse of the working-class mother” (West 1913, 199) by “capitalists,” who saw in such figures the incarnation of child neglect and ignorance. By turning Margaret into Chris’s godsend savior (for Jenny compares her to a “patron saint” [ibid., 68]), West subverts the dual narrative of precarity and privilege and reasserts the working-class mother’s position in society. West’s ethical interstice offers a shift of perspective which challenges class and gender normative frames. Her novel beautifully responds to Butler’s plea to overcome state-induced processes of othering, by acknowledging the fact that “precarity cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence” (Butler 2009, 32). A diachronic approach to state-of-the-nation novels fosters the exploration of this multi-faceted precarity: while West focuses on women’s condition in the wake of the New Woman movement which had been overshadowed by the war, the social and political context of the beginning of the twenty-first century offers another decentralization of normative frames, which focuses on ethnic and religious minorities. In Capital (2012), John Lanchester explores the lives of the inhabitants of Pepys Road, London before and after the 2008 financial crash. The novel is divided into 107 chapters and successively follows the residents of the very expensive houses as they receive strange postcards of their homes branded with the slogan “We Want What You Have.” This campaign is the main and only thread linking all the inhabitants: their lives only brush against one another during two meetings with the local police, as they try to determine who is behind the mysterious postcards. Usman Kamal, the perpetrator of “We Want What You Have,” is part of the only immigrant working-class family of Pepys Road.5 His older brother Ahmed and his wife Rohinka run a shop, above which the whole Kamal family lives. Before his other brother, Shahid, is wrongly accused of terrorism, Usman is first described as a devout Muslim who despises Londoners’ display of wealth 5  Other immigrant characters in the novel are part of the working class as well, but do not live on Pepys Road. They only work there as nannies, construction workers and so on.

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and moral dubiousness. Usman’s campaign can be seen as what Bhabha calls an “innovative site of confrontation”: his cultural hybridity, as a Pakistani Muslim working-class man, challenges the white upper-class hegemony of the City and allows for a reassessment of the cultural and ethical values of society. His slogan points out the economic and social disparities between the residents of Pepys Road and precarious individuals, through the double meaning of the verb ‘want’ (meaning both to desire and to lack). However, when his brother Shahid understands that he was the one behind the campaign, Usman laments its lack of effect: You make a point about Western obliviousness and they think it’s about property prices. You tell them they’re in a condition of complete moral unconsciousness and they worry about whether their house is still worth two million quid! (Lanchester 2012, 554–555)

The two meetings devoted to the inquiry on the postcards are indeed marked by the owners’ outcry, who fear that their two-million-pound houses will suffer from the campaign. None of them actually questions the meaning behind the slogan nor their unethical behavior. The “overlap” of Usman’s cultural and ethical ideals with that of the residents reveals how the English body politic is defined by the monetization of daily life, which is responsible for the fragmentation of the community. The postcards can therefore be considered as an ethical “interstice” through which appears the responsibility of the writer: Lanchester sheds light on the necessity of a redefinition of cultural and ethical values through his more precarious character. From a different cultural, religious and ethnic background, Usman challenges the dominant ideology of neoliberalism. He indeed questions the political, economic and social system “from within,” while offering a new perspective and a redefinition of ethical values. In her analysis of Lanchester’s novel, Barbara Korte argues that while “the egotism and unchecked desire displayed by characters in the finance world are gauged against the sense of civic ethics that Lanchester locates in his migrant characters” (Korte 2017, 500), the author fails to address the “resentment they face in contemporary Britain” (ibid., 502). However, I would argue that this absence actually reinforces the hegemony of the banking world: rather than a moral oversight, the dominance of Roger Yount, an upper-middle class banker, sadistically invisibilizes the struggle of the immigrants in the novel (he even goes so far as comparing himself to people being bombed in Iraq when he fails to obtain his million-pound

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bonus). In fact, the ethical interstice of state-of-the-nation novels is only open for a brief moment: both in Capital and The Return of the Soldier, the ethical values displayed by the precarious are eventually dismissed by the dominant ideology (be it individualist neoliberalism or class division and patriarchy) which insidiously defines the characters’ behavior—and by extension, the actual English body politic. The opening of the ethical interstice is short-lived and, as the concomitant analyses of West’s and Lanchester’s novels suggest, less and less visible: while the elliptic end of The Return of the Soldier superbly suggests that Chris comes back as “every inch a soldier” (West [1918] 2004, 82) rather than as a man, husband or father, Capital’s ending on Roger’s thwarted ethical growth (“I can change, I can change, I promise I can change change change” [Lanchester 2012, 577]), illustrating both empty promises and the hegemony of cash) recalls Lanchester’s cutting remark in his economics popularization book, Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay: “The rich are always listened to more than the poor” (2010, 13). Precarity and privilege form an inescapable duality in which the characters are caught up: the role of state-of-the-nation novels thus appears to be offering a third way through the representation of multiple experiences that question the system from the inside, for, as Butler argues, “it is only by challenging the dominant media that certain kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness” (2009, 51). * * * The English body politic fits into a “us versus them” social pattern which is responsible for the fragmentation of society. If this study primarily focuses on precarity and privilege through class ideology, this binarism extends to other relationships defined by race or gender, as evidenced in the last section. Social distinction “severs bounds” between individuals of the same nation: the “imagined community” of Benedict Anderson is one defined by stigma and hierarchy. In this regard, state-of-the-nation novels both reflect and question this oppressive social structure. As they rely on the use of metonymy to illustrate “the way we live now,” they aim at debunking the inherited traditions of class division, ethnocentrism and male-dominated narratives. They offer a voice to the precarious who challenge dominant ideologies and social practices, even though some of the state-of-the-nation novels studied here have been criticized for their lack

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of a clear moral outcome.6 They do open—even briefly—an ethical interstice destined to challenge totalizing narratives of history and national identity, which “places expectations on the writer” (Head 2002, 37) and on his/her social and ethical responsibility to debunk asymmetrical relationships of power.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. (1974) 1977. Commitment In Aesthetics and Politics, eds. Theodor Adorno et al, 177–195. London: Verso. Bhabha, Homi. (1994) 2004. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London, New York: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London, New York: Verso. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri C. Spivak. 2007. Who Sings the Nation State? Language, Politics, Belongings. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Cannadine, David. 1998. History in Our Time. New Haven: Yale University Press. Carlyle, Thomas. (1839) 1840. Condition of England Question. In Chartism, 1–8. London: James Fraser. ———. (1843) 1890. Midas. In Past and Present, 5–10. Chicago, New  York: Belford, Clarke & Co. Coe, Jonathan. (1994) 2016. What a Carve Up! London: Penguin. Day, Jon. 2017. BrexLit: The New Landscape of British Fiction. Financial Times, July 27. Disraeli, Benjamin. (1845) 1934. Sybil or The Two Nations. London: Oxford University Press. Forster, Edward M. (1910) 2006. Howards End. London: Penguin Classics. Ganteau, Jean Michel. 2015. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. New York: Routledge. Head, Dominic. 2002. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holtby, Winifred. (1936) 2010. South Riding. London: Virago Press. Korte, Barbara. 2017. John Lanchester’s Capital: Financial Risk and its Counterpoints. Textual Practice 31 (3): 491–504. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0950236X.2017.1294894. Lanchester, John. 2010. Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. London: Penguin. ———. (2012) 2013. Capital. London: Faber and Faber. Le Blanc, Guillaume. 2007. Vies ordinaires, vies précaires. Paris: Seuil.  See Barbara Korte (2017) and J. Russell Perkins (2017).

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Lorey, Isabell. 2012. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Translated by Aileen Derieg. London, New York: Verso. Nairn, Tom. 1982. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neonationalism. London, New York: Verso. Parrinder, Patrick. 2006. Nation and Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perkins, J. Russell. 2017. John Lanchester’s Capital: A Dickensian Examination of the Condition of England. Journal of Modern Literature 41 (1): 100–117. Regier, Alexander. 2010. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynier, Christine. 2015. Exploring the Modernist State of England Novel by Women Novelists: Rebecca West, Radclyffe Hall and Winifred Holtby. Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines 49. https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.2635. Shires, Linda M. (2001) 2005. The Aesthetics of the Victorian Novel: Form, Subjectivity, Ideology. In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. David Deirdre, 61–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Stevie. (1949) 1979. The Holiday.London: Virago Modern Classics. West, Rebecca. 1913. Mother or Capitalist? What the World Asks of Women. The Clarion, September 19. In The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911–1917, ed. Jane Marcus, 199–202. New York: Viking Press. ———. (1918) 2004. The Return of the Soldier. New York: The Modern Library. Wilson, Angus. (1967) 1969. No Laughing Matter. London: Penguin.

CHAPTER 3

Crossing Borders: The Semiotics of a Christian Poetics of Precarity in Late-­Nineteenth-­Century Germany Michiel Rys

In the past few decades, the concept of precarity has helped us rethink phenomena of socio-economic insecurity. While traditional, orthodox Marxist concepts, especially class, presuppose that capitalism’s crisis-­ plagued history leads to the gradual reinforcement of the antagonistic conflict between capital and labor, precarity as well as its derivative terms like precarization and precariat, in contrast, suggest the image of a more fragmented social realm, a reality marked by multiple dynamics and experiences of social regression and loss of old entitlements and certainties that do not necessarily engender class formation. As a term that grasps the plurality of the social realm, ‘precarity’ refers to a semantic field that urges us to critically reflect upon the connections between sign and life; it prompts the question of how semiotics structure and mediate our (shared)

M. Rys (*) University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_3

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images and understanding of precarious realities. This not only goes for contemporary society, but also helps us understand previous phases in our economic history, like late-nineteenth-century capitalist society, in a new way. As this contribution will show, the fuzziness of the social realm has left traces in socio-political discourses which cannot be subsumed under the traditional (i.e., binary) semiotics of class to acknowledge precarity. Against this background, the development of a Christian semiotics and poetics of precarity in Germany provides a showcase example to illuminate the discursive strategies by which ideologies, including marginal ones, try to assert themselves  in an already quite saturated market of competing discourses claiming precarity, or, as it was called, the ‘social question.’ A useful starting point to explicate the link between precarity and discourse, that is life and sign, is Yuri Lotman’s concept of the “semiosphere” or “semiotic space” (2005, 205–229). Lotman, inspired by Vladimir Verndadsky’s concept of the biosphere (which denotes that life can only emerge from life and that this life consists of the entirety of “physico-­ chemical systems”), argues that the meaning of symbols and texts can only be interpreted if they are part of an encompassing “semiotic space of the culture in question”—a space he calls “the semiosphere.” In general, this term helps us understand culture as a prolific, constantly expanding archive of signs and texts that, in heterogeneous ways, substantiate and actualize existing sign systems which together form semiospheres that allow for communication to successfully occur. By describing these constellations in spatial terms, Lotman is able to distinguish between central and peripheral semiotic structures. Accordingly, a semiotic space has to be understood as a hierarchical continuum of, on the one hand, seemingly self-evident, unquestionable sign systems at the center and, on the other hand, non-­ evident and innovative ones at its margins.1 The periphery of a semiosphere is the place where transfer between different semiotic systems is negotiated and where unorthodox cross-overs with other semiotic systems occur. While marginal, these instances of exchange challenge the center and can gradually (or explosively) become dominant (Lotman et al. 1978, 211–232; cf. Koschorke 2013, 116–137). Moreover, Lotman understands these positions on the spectrum of center-periphery as symptom of the semiotic systems’ connection to power. He conceives “the entire system for preserving and 1  A semiosphere, according to Yuri Lotman, is “a specific semiotic continuum, which is filled with multi-variant semiotic models situated at a range of hierarchical levels” (2005, 206).

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communicating human experience […] as a concentric system in the cent[er] of which are located the most obvious and logical structures, that is, the most structural ones” (Lotman et al. 1978, 213). Central semiotic systems are normal, structured by traditions, rules and regulations; they express (and doing so also support) existing power relations that seek stability and attempt to maintain themselves. Accordingly, semiotic systems related to the center are static and are characterized by constancy and unchangeability. These central systems are highly routinized; because of that, they are normalized in the sense that they set out the coordinates of what and how subjects can speak in neutral terms about phenomena like the social question. In contrast, the periphery is a space of exchange and dispute, where the boundaries of the semiotic system are transgressed and where the system itself is renewed, transformed and innovated. The peripheral systems distinguish themselves from these normal patterns; they are often less organized and/or still in the process of being formed. Exactly because they perform divergent textual structures and produce other kinds of meanings, the peripheral systems challenge dominant models, thereby often renewing the reservoir of figures, narratives and symbols which shape the processes of giving meaning to real, that is socio-political phenomena like precarity. Lotman’s theoretical elaborations provide a methodological framework to describe and analyze the synchronous complexity and gradual diversification and change of the central and peripheral semiotics of precarious life and work. In late-nineteenth-century Germany, two semiotic models had developed into the two gravitational, central sign systems to bespeak the social question: liberalism and socialism. While the hegemonic liberal and conservative ideologies (in their various concrete forms) not only framed the social situation of the laborers as a normal one, they also held them accountable for any personal (miss-) fortunes and deplorable living conditions. In opposition to this, socialists of diverse backgrounds understood all forms of precarity as moments of the same social struggle against capitalist exploitation. As culture and counter-culture, these two central semiotic models formed each other’s counterparts. They were both widely recognized as dominant  narratives, but mostly circulated within the boundaries of the two main social strata in industrialized capitalist society. Indeed, these symbolic antagonisms were reflected in real, especially urban topological oppositions, in the sense that the boundaries between bourgeois and working-class spaces were delineated to the extent that the boundaries between the places where the ruling classes and the working

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classes lived, broadly (to simplify things for the sake of argument) matched those of the two virulent semiotic systems. From another point of view, these semiotic constellations can also be further delineated by drawing on Jacques Rancière’s notion of distribution of the sensible. This means that every ordering of reality presupposes its own aesthetic “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (Rancière 2004, 12). In this system, individual bodies are assigned to specific places, social roles in a community are attributed and identify who is an authorized subject to take part in which language games. It defines who can appear, whose voice can be recognized and whose activity can take a share in what a community has in common. On the other end of the spectrum, a distribution of the sensible determines who is excluded from spaces of visibility and thus remains unnoticed because of the space and (professional) activity they occupy in it. This pertains not only to the realm of political representation and access to decision-making processes, but also sets standards for artistic and literary practices. A distribution on the sensible delimits what can be narrated, what kind of characters can appear in fiction and in what literary paradigms. Thinking of late-nineteenth-century German society, the distributions of sensible data again seems evident: a capitalist elite understands itself as the bearer of economy and culture. This elite excludes all otherness to stabilize (and legitimate) its hegemony. This project is translated in a.o. the genre of the realist Bildungsroman, of which Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (1855; trans. Debit and Credit) is a prototypical example. Although Freytag claimed to truthfully represent the German people doing their primary activity—working—this novel generates an idealized image of capitalist production. Instead, the novel foregrounds the poetics of trade, while the figure of the exploited (factory) worker is completely marginalized, if not entirely removed from the picture.2 Indeed, the working class is externalized and imagined as a threat to bourgeois identity. Obviously, the opposite trend occurred in the socialist conceptualization of the proletariat as a stable and homogenous entity comprised of all the victims of its antagonistic ‘other.’ Accordingly, in exemplary socialist novels like Johann Baptist von Schweitzer’s Lucinde, oder Capital und Arbeit 2  As Rindisbacher points out, “issues of class and alienated labor […] do not surface in Freytag’s novel” (2002, 186–187).

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(1863–1864; Lucinde, or Capital and Labor) the precarious subject is not only introduced as a worthy bearer of (fictional) plots but also as a member of the class in an antagonistic relation to capital. By the early 1890s, the Christian discourse on social problems was a rather marginal phenomenon in a German context, where especially socialists and liberals had developed the authoritative frames to talk about socio-­ economic issues, like capitalist production, industrialization and pauperization. But Christians tried to compete with liberals and socialists to represent working-class interests, also on an institutional, social and political level. Christian labor organizations and unions would start to emerge not until the 1880s. Hence the first Protestant workers’ association was founded in 1882, its first Catholic counterpart in 1884. But religion, as a master narrative, would remain in a difficult position in this semiosphere. While orthodox (i.e., Marxist) socialists, materialists, of course rejected religion as superstructure legitimating exploitation by projecting salvation only in the afterlife, Bismarck’s socio-economic policies capitalized a distrust against Catholics. Immediately after the German unification and still years before he would implement the infamous Anti-­ Socialist Laws, he ignited a cultural war (German Kulturkampf ) against Catholic influence in Prussia, especially in the realm of education and politics. Protestant ethics, in contrast, matched well with the liberal values of obedience, self-control, self-responsibility and industriousness. All this did not withhold Catholics like Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler or Pope Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum) and—for the Protestant side—Friedrich Naumann to pursue a social redefinition of Christianity. In 1896, Naumann founded a party, Nationalsozialer Verein, which was based on a dialectical reconciliation and integration of Christian, social, liberal and also nationalist views. Some of its more famous members were, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, Gustav Stresemann and, temporarily, Paul Göhre.3 While this project was not able to find popular acclaim (it was resolved after an electoral defeat in 1903), its attempt to forge a new semiotic center crystallized in a body of texts, ranging from factual to fictional genres. These texts give insight into the intertextual strategies deployed to assert this model as an authoritative and legitimate discourse to bespeak working-class precarity. In 1891, Paul Göhre, a Protestant theologian, also involved in the Nationalsozialer Verein, published a remarkable documentary entitled 3  See Euchner et al. (2000) for a complete overview and discussion of the development of Christian forms of social(ist) thought in the longue durée.

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Drei Monate Fabriksarbeiter und Handwerkbursche. Eine praktische Studie. In this text, which is the first of its kind and can be regarded as an early precursor of the modern social reportage,4 the author gives an account of working-class life from an unconventional point of view. In order to get first-hand information about the living and working conditions of the laborers, he submerged in their culture by taking up the role of a real factory worker in Sachsen. Göhre’s reportage—and this is what truly makes it a remarkable document—intentionally seeks out and transgresses the boundaries between the two dominant semiospheres, understood as literal and metaphorical semiotic spaces. On the one hand, he literally crosses class boundaries by adopting an undercover working-class identity. This position as an eye-witness produces a feeling of authenticity that allows him to project an aura of trustworthiness and to pierce through clichéd images about working-class life, still largely unknown to his (bourgeois) readership. This way, Göhre strategically claims an authoritative voice to question routinized images and narratives of precarity as embodied by the working class. On the other hand, Göhre does not simply dismiss existing semiotic models. On the contrary, he tries to engage a dialogue between them and, by doing so, he inscribes his Christian project of reconciliation into the reportage’s intertextual texture. Completely in line with Lotman’s observation that semiotic innovation occurs in the liminal zones at the margins of semiotic systems, Göhre’s reportage deliberately upsets and disrupts the structures of the semiosphere, in order to make readers perceive the social question and the precarious working and living condition from his own, Christian point of view (cf. Sinjen 2015, 298–305). Both aspects deserve more scrutiny. First, Göhre’s reportage confronts the precarious working and living conditions with existing semiotic models, which have “too little knowledge of reality, the actual situation” [“zu geringe Kenntnis der Wirklichkeit, der thatsächlichen Lage”] of laborers (1891, 1). This attempt to disclose the disjunction between existing sign systems and precarious life is a first step to validate an alternative Christian poetics of precarity which claims accuracy, being the “full truth about the inclination of the working classes, their material aspirations, their spiritual, moral and religious nature” [“volle Wahrheit über die Gesinnung der arbeitenden Klassen, ihre 4  Reading Göhre’s study, one is indeed reminded of the comparable, documentary-poetic techniques of the later German ‘Dortmunder Gruppe 61,’ whose members like Günter Wallraff dressed up in order to critically reveal social abuse and exploitation of labor.

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materiellen Wünsche, ihren geistigen, sittlichen, religiösen Charakter”] (ibid., 2). Yet already on the first pages, the project of exposing clichés and stereotypical representations of the proletarian worker is decisively jeopardized. By small, seemingly meaningless remarks like that he put on “an adventurous costume” [“einen abenteuerlichen Anzug”], Göhre inscribes his reportage in a tradition of sensation-driven adventure-seeking, known from both factual and fictional discourses that presented the proletariat as a social entity that had to be educated and administered by the ruling class (ibid., 1). Indeed, while factories actually became touristic attractions for middle-class adventurers (Mysliwietz-Fleiß 2018, 185–189), the trope of travel in the exotic ‘jungle’ had become a popular model to represent proletarian life from a bourgeois point of view in fiction at least since Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (Bogdal 1978). This tension between factual to fictional and objective to subjective “story-telling” [“Erzählung”] can be traced back to the outsider perspective Göhre is unable to fully surmount (Göhre 1891, 4). For instance, his worker-performance is not entirely successful. Unable to find a job by himself, he finds himself necessitated to reveal his true identity to a factory owner who employs him. The choice not only limits the scope of his reportage to the one of already more privileged workers with more stable living conditions. It compromises the objectivity and authenticity of his testimony that he subsequently constantly feels he has to explicitly accentuate. In a second move, Göhre’s text disrupts the traditional social diagnosis that the workers’ dependency from wage labor and factory owners has pushed all of them in an inhuman, unlivable state of being. In contrast to what he presents as such false generalizations and mutual class-prejudices, Göhre, thanks to his unique position between classes, is able to collect stories from workers in different situations. He admits that factory workers are entirely dependent of the good-will of employers for their wages, but argues “that the working class does not know poverty at all” [“dass von Not unter dieser Arbeiterklasse nicht die Rede sein kann”] (Göhre 1891, 14). He stresses that the problems of worker families’ problems are always unique, because of which their situation could not be explained by or subsumed under a single, encompassing theory like socialism. Indeed, Göhre argues that he tries to refute homogenizing class concepts in order to disclose the many faces of the worker. While acknowledging that socialist ideology has replaced the place of religion as “a new Gospel” [“ein neues Evangelium”] (ibid., 109), he also refutes the common (bourgeois)

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prejudice that the working class is by nature a violent mob prone to rioting, revolution and bloodshed: After all this, one should not think of the workers among whom I worked, as one uniform, singular and unitary mass with regard to their political and social views. Rather, they should be considered, to use a single image, as one colossal pyramid, strongly united by the mortar of social democratic agitation. On top we find the aforementioned elite social democrats. From these leaders, however, and a small group of their trustees, it gradually breaks down in ever wider parts, way down to the chaotic masses consisting of those who are social democrats because they vote […] for one of their own, a worker-candidate during elections. Nach alledem darf man sich die Arbeiterschaft, unter der ich lebte, in Hinsicht auf ihre politischen und sozialen Gesinnungen nicht als eine uniforme, gleichmäßige und gleichwertige Masse vorstellen, sondern vielmehr—in einem Bilde—als einen gewaltigen pyramidalen Bau, zu dem sie durch den Mörtel der sozialdemokratischen Agitation fest und wuchtig genug zusammengefügt ist. Ihre Spitze bilden die oben vielgenannten Elitesozialdemokraten. Aber von diesen, den Führern, und der kleinen Schar ihrer Getreusten geht es allmählich in immer breitern Absätzen bis zu der chaotischen Masse aller derer hinab, die nur deshalb Sozialdemokraten sind, weil sie […] bei den Wahlen einem von “ihresgleichen”, einem Arbeiterkandidaten, einem Sozialdemokraten ihre Stimme geben. (Göhre 1891, 142)

Arguing that the working class is a heterogenous entity whose members are looking for representatives in whom they can recognize themselves, Göhre disentangles precarity from socialist ideology. Against that background, he puts great effort in emphasizing the factory workers’ positive qualities, morality, patriotism and industriousness, all values which correspond to the normative ideology as well as to his own Christian frame of reference. Suggesting an intrinsic affinity between the working subject and Christian mentality, Göhre not only implicitly appeals to the workers’ desire to be recognized, but also indirectly suggests that priest figures are authentic representatives to voice working-class interests. Göhre further underscores this strand of argumentation by presenting the factory as a modern church—“the construction was reminiscent of the interior of a church” [“der Bau erinnerte […] an das Innere einer Kirche”] (ibid., 42)—and factory work as a quasi-religious practice during which every individual is an unreplaceable element in a bigger chain. At times, his

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image of factory life seems almost apologetic. He does not reject the work rhythm of modern industry, but acknowledges its poetic qualities: like there can be order in chaos, in factory work one can observe… the poetry of a magnificent, complex activity deploying itself without rest and yet in equal movement, the nobility of human labor pursued here on this location, by over hundred men as part of the struggle for bread, life and joy, day after day. die Poesie eines grandiosen in einander greifenden Getriebes, das hier ruhelos und doch in gleichmäßiger Bewegung sich auswirkte, der Adel menschlicher Arbeit, die hier an einer einzigen Stelle von mehr als hundert Menschen im Kampfe ums Brot, um Leben und Genuß tagaus tagein gethan wird. (Göhre 1891, 43–44)

Passages like these instruct the reader to see this poetic splendor; they are lessons in perception of social reality and make it possible to positively relate to the modern experience of labor. Moreover, Göhre actualizes the literary tropes of “Poesie” and “Prosa” as analytic categories to describe modern conditions of life (see Eiden-Offe 2017, 11–17). This refers to an influential trope which originates in G.W.F. Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Hegel argues that the gradual rise of modern (economic) life has brought about a “prosaic state of affairs” [“prosaischer Weltzustand”] (Hegel 1986/1, 253). The aspect characteristic to the prosaic order of modern society is the loss of totality and the dissolution of the harmonious bond between subject and object, one of the consequences of secularization, industrialization and capitalism.)5 This situation was given an adequate expression in the (upcoming) genre of the novel, which thematized the “conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of social relations” [“Konflikt zwischen der Poesie des Herzens und der entgegenstehenden Prosa der Verhältnisse”] (Hegel 1986/III, 393). These tropes, which connect social and literary criticism, were further canonized by one of Hegel’s students, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who in his Ästhetik 5  The imagination of modernity as prosaic state of affairs would remain a dominant narrative until the first half of the twentieth century, when Georg Lukacs famously defined the novel as “the epic poem of an era for which the extensive totality of life is no longer an actual experience” [“die Epopöe eines Zeitalters, für das die extensive Totalität des Lebens nicht mehr sinnfällig gegeben ist”] (Lukacs 1916, 245). See Theisohn (2001, 20–53) for a detailed discussion. Göhre is writing against this dominant trope and tries to develop a form of prose that can reassert the poetic splendor of modern life.

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regarded the defining aspect of the “prosaische Einrichtung der Dinge in der Welt” as… the disconnection of the affairs of the state from those of individuality; the norms of office, which the individual subject only serves out of duty; the division of labor along with its uncommon multiplication, because of which the extent of physical exercise is divided from its actual unity with moral virtues that lives in the hero; the chilling of manners; the general tendency to mechanize technical products, ornament etc.; the refinement of enjoyments. die Lösung der Staatstätigkeiten von der unmittelbaren Individualität die Amtsnormen, denen der Einzelne nur pflichtmäßig dient, die Teilung der Arbeit zugleich mit ihrer ungemeinen Vervielfältigung, wodurch der Umfang physischer Übungen aus der lebendigen Vereinigung mit sittlichen Tugenden, die im Heroen lebte, sich scheidet, die Erkältung der Umgangsformen, den allgemeinen Zug der Mechanisierung der technischen Produkte, des Schmucks usw., die Raffinierung der Genüsse. (Vischer 1857, 168)

In contrast, by singling out the “poetic” aspects of modern life in a new form of prosaic writing, Göhre projects a modern experience of totality. This vision sets him apart from many other contemporaries, not in the least protestants. Some were drawn to a Romantic nostalgia and saw the solution of the social question in the reversal of modernity and the return to a lost harmonious state in which religion still held a dominant position. Others referred the solution for the working class’s suffering to the realms of afterlife and God, urging the subject to accept the situation as it was. In contrast to this, Göhre understands the project of modernity—especially in its socio-economic form—as unfinished. This also sheds light on his relation with socialist thought. Still, Göhre complements his affirmative and poetic understanding of modern industry with a socialist critique of capitalist production in order to identify the place where his own brand of social Christianity should intervene. To do this, he adopts the socialist notion of the “division of labor” [“Arbeitsteilung”] to describe how capital alienates workers, destroying the “organic totality” or “unity” [“organisches Ganze”] of labor and product (Göhre 1891, 51, 55). In complete harmony with the leaders of the Socialist Party, he foregrounds the image that repetitive chain labor and the precarious living conditions make it hard for workers

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to develop their talents, feel pride or a connection to others.6 In Göhre’s account, however, the scope of the analysis of precarious life shifts from a material to a cultural and moral level: The opposite of all stability, a constant flux that does not allow the life of these people to follow a steady course—this is the general rule to which they are subjected; the power of the moment has taken the place of old and powerful habit. Der Gegensatz aller Stätigkeit, ein fortwährendes Hin- und Herfluten, der das Leben dieser Menschen zu keinem gleichmäßigen Gange kommen läßt, ist das maßgebende Gesetz, dem sie unterworfen sind; die Macht des Augenblicks ist an die Stelle der alten kraftvollen Sitte getreten. (Göhre 1891, 150)

In line with his affirmation of modernity, he redefines the Christian project not as a narrative of return to a lost paradise, but as one of gradual progression toward a harmonious, “organic” community (or to use Tönnies’ influential concept, “Gemeinschaft”), in which “Sitte” is restored on all levels of society, work and private life. According to Göhre, the way to fulfill the project of modernity is to add Christian spirit to the socialist answer to the social question. Göhre blames socialist education for being too selective and reductive and only offering “defective education” [“Halbbildung”] (Göhre 1891, 215). Whereas he downplays the workers’ material needs, he recognizes their intellectual capacity and suggests that socialism does not fulfill their needs. To reconnect workers with the organic community, he appeals to their feeling of lack and the ensuing desire to be treated as “sovereign […] in the realm of thoughts” [“souverän […] im Reiche der Gedanken”] (ibid., 152). He presents his idea of an alternative, Christian education as an adequate solution for their moral and intellectual exclusion, but also describes this as a realistic opportunity for Christianity to reassert itself in a changed social reality under capitalism. Göhre proves the fact that laborers are susceptible to this project, with literal transcripts of conversations in which he persuaded laborers of the value of Christianity. Furthermore, he also calls for the establishment of a “popular literature” [“Volksliteratur”], based on a strand of socialist theory that must be “educated, elevated and sanctified” [“erzogen, geadelt 6  For an outline of the socialists’ material and affective critique of capitalism, see for example August Bebel’s famous pamphlet Unsere Ziele (first published in 1872, revised and republished and widely circulated until 1900).

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und geheiligt”] (ibid., 215). His goal—the total unity of socialism and Christianity in a worldview which allows “a social-democrat [to] be Christian and vice versa” [“ein Sozialdemokrat Christ und ein Christ Sozialdemokrat sein kann”] (ibid., 216)—fits the Christian narrative of harmonization between societal strata and is based on an intertextual poetics of precarity, which recodes the socialist semiotics of precarity from a protestant point of view. This unconventional reintegration of semiotic models and their characteristic key terms may be marked by rhetorical tensions and theoretical blind spots, but it nevertheless attempted to reframe the discourse on the social question in such a manner that it would appeal to theologians, priests, conservatives, workers, socialists and the capitalist-­ liberal elite alike. In other words, the project of a re-poetization of society is mirrored in the intertextual poetics itself, as the material text performs the message it carries out. Despite (i.e., by virtue of) the limits and rhetorical tensions—materialist and religious narratives are by definition mutually exclusive—Göhre’s reportage meant a decisive step to put forward a Christian poetics of precarity in an ideologically saturated semiosphere. Both the strategy to rewrite dominant narratives in the light of Christian values and the construction of Christian worker-like figures who crossed the boundaries between social spaces, would become vital techniques in the development of Christian social fiction. Indeed, a body of novels shares Göhre’s assessment of modern life as a “prosaic order” in need of poetization as the starting point for a project of literature. Both protestant as well as Catholic writers like Artur Brausewetter and Pawel Rzeznik contributed to a “Volksliteratur,” which would elaborate a variant of Christian social thought written into affect-driven, suspenseful narratives. Rzeznik published his novel Pfarrer Krul in 1902. Brausewetter published under the pseudonym Arthur Sewett and was an evangelic theologian based in the small town of Stettin. As son of a businessman who emigrated from France, he was able to complete his studies in Berlin. In 1911, he became archdeacon in Danzig, before moving to Zoppot and Heidelberg, where he died in 1945. Brausewetter was a literary critic and published several novels himself, his debut being the Der Armenpastor in 1898. Der Armenpastor has a simple story line, in which a young, arduously motivated priest is relocated to a working-class district in a small city. In this new environment, he finds himself in the middle of a social conflict. The factory owners live in luxury and want the church to legitimate their social position and power, while the workers who live in deplorable

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conditions, are often jobless, refute the priest’s moral support and are recruited by socialism. Precisely because the protagonist moves between these two classes and their spaces, the novel can show him as force of reconciliation who can overcome (class) antagonism. The novel deploys conventional literary strategies to heighten the potential for identification with the protagonists. An omniscient narrator takes a strong hold on the moral message and the binary characterization of the novel’s figures. The factory owners are portrayed as villains who put personal gain and power over all else. They intentionally ignore the human costs of their economic pursuit and decadent lifestyle, and understand religion merely as a tool to intimidate laborers into a state of complete obedience. The factory workers are depicted as individual, tragic victims of capital’s strife to relentless profit maximization. Because of their suffering, they are driven into the arms of misleading violent socialists and revolutionaries. The priest negotiating between these antagonists is portrayed as a selfless hero who not only embodies Christian values, but also other paradigmatic heroic features like trustworthiness, authenticity, vigor and perseverance. Brausewetter’s protagonist is not coincidentally named “Werder,” which quite literally makes him a figure of becoming whose marginal position between the two factions is seen as the only viable, future-oriented option to surpass class struggle. He is explicitly called a “man of the grand future” [“Mann der großen Zukunft”] (Brausewetter 1899, 162), a figure of movement, dynamism, energy and power. But Brausewetter also opted for a name that at least implicitly evokes  a key concept of popular vitalist thought around 1900, which has to be seen as an attempt to show that social Christianity, as embodied by his protagonist, lives in accordance with the organic development of nature. Werder is described as a strong man, a figure of life and energy in those moments when he defends his social and Christian position: In these traits, which appeared to be changed in the art of an instant, all lived and moved. All was strength and an encompassing, masculine fire. In diesen Zügen, die ihm durch die Kunst eines Augenblicks wie umgewandelt erschienen, lebte und bewegte sich alles. Alles war Kraft und alles ein einziges, männliches Feuer. (Brausewetter 1899, 5)

Because of his “muscular appearance” [“muskulöse Gestalt”], “masculine power” [“männlicher Kraft”], and “arduous will” [“dasselbe heiße Wollen”], the socially inspired priest much resembles of Nietzsche’s

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will-driven figure of the Superhuman, albeit in a Christian version that is incompatible with vitalist and/or Nietzschean thought (ibid.). The novel shares Göhre’s view on the social question. It redefines the traditional antagonism of labor versus capital in terms of those who do and do not feel sympathy in sight of the suffering of the working class. The novel draws upon a strong connection between the precarious position of the factory workers and the priests, who show that they sincerely listen to their grief and have a “heart” [“Herz”] for them. The laborers only follow those who sincerely share their heart-felt concerns, also in terms of a sober lifestyle. The heart is a leitmotif in Brausewetter’s novel, just like the gaze, through which affects can be transferred from one subject to another. These motifs are consequently used to capture the mutual understanding between workers and priest, as well as to demonstrate that the capitalist elite is unable to understand Werder. Different from Göhre, however, factories are depicted as signs of hubris, a disgrace for nature [“ein Hohn auf die feiernde Natur”] (Brausewetter 1899, 45) and their chimneys emit polluting smoke like “two violent arms against the majestic sky full of stars, as if they threatened with a struggle on life and death” [“zwei gewaltige Arme gegen den majestätischen Sternenhimmel, als drohten sie ihm Kampf auf Leben und Tod”] (ibid.). With these clear textual markers, the working class is discursively constructed as a figure that, like the priest, is in touch with nature, history, truth and the future. On the level of narration, the authenticity of the image of the working class and indirectly also the willingness to recognize the voice of the precarious are reflected in the use of dialect. The narrator, however, insists on the importance of authority for the masses, who can easily be misled and are in need of a sincere and vitalist ‘grand homme’ who leads them to truth, morality and the future. To put it differently, the political imaginary of the text fully subscribes to the traditional idea and practice of (Christian) pastoral power as described by Foucault.7 At the end of Brausewetter’s novel, capitalist hubris is punished with ruin. The novel still hints at the possibility of reconciliation, as the daughter of the factory owner at the end of the novel accepts and truly understands the Christian values of a more moderate 7  See Foucault (1986, 5–35) for a definition of this governmental practice, whereby power is exerted over the individual in order to secure the well-being and salvation of the collective. This form of power is based on the subject’s internalization of behavioral norms. Foucault argues that this Christian conceptualization of the relation between individual and the collective (i.e. flock) is genealogically linked with (neo)liberal modes of subjectivation.

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economic progress, which fosters humanism, altruism and love. The novel does not simply reject class society but pleads for a moral reform of capitalism and change of mind-set in the light of Christian values. Hence the novel reactivates topoi that are meant to show the tempestuous, dangerous nature of the working class, especially when they are worked up by socialist activists; the ‘masses’ need guidance of a figure that is both intellectual and sincere—the socially engaged priest, the hero of the story, is the only figure capable of fulfilling that role. * * * In summary, writers attempting to forge a Christian poetics of precarity simultaneously deconstruct and construct existing semiotic models to bespeak the social question. Yet exactly this foregrounds the rhetoricity of their own texts with regard to the living and working conditions of precarious workers. An analysis in the light of Lotman’s semiotic theories shows how the Christian poetics of precarity as developed in the 1890s uses a transgressive intertextual strategy in order to appeal to readers from different backgrounds. Indeed, by putting themselves in a voluntary state of precarity, by combining key concepts taken from divergent semiotic systems and by overwriting their meaning in accordance to Christian (evangelic) values, writers like Göhre and Brausewetter attempted to assert a new model to represent and acknowledge the social question in a semiosphere already crowded by deeply rooted, popular ideologies and semiotics of the social question.

Bibliography Bebel, August. 1872. Unsere Ziele. Leipzig: Verlag der Expedition des Volksstaat. Bogdal, Klaus-Michael. 1978. Schaurige Bilder. Der Arbeiter im Blick des Bürgers am Beispiel des Naturalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat. Brausewetter, Artur. 1899. Der Armenpastor. Dresden: Reissner. Eiden-Offe, Patrick. 2017. Die Poesie der Klasse. Romantischer Antikapitalismus und die Erfindung des Proletariats. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Euchner, Walter, et  al. 2000. Geschichte der sozialen Ideen in Deutschland. Essen: Klartext. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Omnes et singulatim: Vers une critique de la raison politique. Le Débat 41 (4): 5–36. Freytag, Gustav. 1855. Soll und Haben. Leipzig: Hesse & Becker.

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Göhre, Paul. 1891. Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche: Eine praktische Studie. Leipzig: Grunow. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1986. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, 3 Bände. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Koschorke, Albrecht. 2013. Wahrheit und Erfindung: Grundzüge einer Allgemeinen Erzähltheorie. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Lotman, Yuri. 2005. On the Semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 33 (1): 205–229. Lotman, Yuri, B.  Uspensky, and George Mihaychuk. 1978. On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture. New Literary History 9 (2): 211–213. Lukacs, Georg. 1916. Die Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11 (3): 225–271. Mysliwietz-Fleiß, Daniela. 2018. “Geschäftiges Leben und Treiben allüberall in den hohen Arbeitssälen!” Repräsentationen von Arbeit als Objekt der touristischen Neugier im späten 19. Jahrhundert. In Repräsentationen der Arbeit: Bilder—Erzählungen—Darstellungen, ed. Knud Andresen, Michaela Kuhnhenne, Jürgen Mittag, and Stefan Müller, 165–189. Bonn: Dietz. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum. Rindisbacher, Hans. 2002. From National Task to Individual Pursuit: The Poetics of Work in Freytag, Stifter, and Raabe. In A Companion to German Realism, ed. Todd Kontje, 183–222. New York: Camden. Rzeznik, Pawel. 1902. Pfarrer Krul. Berlin: Verlag des Arbeiters. Schweitzer, Johann Baptist von. 1863–1864. Lucinde, oder Capital und Arbeit: 3 Bände. Frankfurt am Main: Schweitzer Verlag. Sinjen, Beke. 2015. Prosa der Verhältnisse: Die Entdeckung der Erzählliteratur durch die Arbeiterbewegung. Essen: Klartext. Theisohn, Philipp. 2001. Totalität des Mangels: Carl Spitteler und die Geburt des modernen Epos aus der Anschauung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor. 1857. Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen. Bd. 3.2.5: Die Dichtkunst. Stuttgart: Carl Mäcken.

CHAPTER 4

Slums, the Lumpenproletariat, and Precarity: Literary Representations of the Urban Precarious in Egon Erwin Kisch and Ilija Trojanow’s Reportages Christoph Schaub

I Under conditions of neoliberal globalization, the term ‘slum’ has made a remarkable comeback. It has been prominently placed, for example, in the “Cities without Slums Action Plan” by the Cities Alliance, founded in 1999 and hosted by the UNOPS, and has also been used by Mike Davis in his widely read Planet of Slums (2007). While the term had first come into wider usage in attempts to describe poverty in nineteenth-century English industrial cities and had later been “effectively banned from the social sciences,” it is today used in many different languages (Pike 2016, 198–199). The term also circulates in contemporary German literature (Schaub

C. Schaub (*) University of Vechta, Vechta, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_4

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2020). Slums can be seen as paradigmatic urban spaces of socio-economic precarity. They are often characterized by poor access to infrastructures, hazardous ecological and health conditions, as well as insecure housing, living, and working conditions. At the same time, differences among slums exist as well, for example in terms of architecture, population structure, and location (Davis 2007). As the construct of a discourse revolving around the urban poor and precarious, and as an actual urban formation, the ‘slum’ attests to the long history of precarious lives within and without the West. This history precedes the current usage of the term ‘precarity’ for describing and analyzing recent processes of economic precarization, as well as its mobilization for politically organizing in the context of such conditions (Kasmir 2018). From the slum’s cultural invention in the nineteenth century to our present, homogenizing and pathologizing imaginaries of slums and the urban precarious have been predominating: “Too many observers […] apply the term slum with broad strokes; it embraces any place that is problematic and any group of people that lives there is automatically included. […] All slums are bad and everyone living in them must suffer from the debilitating subculture that slum life produces” (Gilbert 2007, 704). Imaginaries of slums then combine representations of socio-economic precarity and cultural othering. This logic can be traced back to Europe’s parallel invention of others within and without in the contexts of colonialism and the formation of the proletariat in Europe’s big cities during the nineteenth century: The application of images of the ‘jungle’ and the ‘dark continent’ to proletarian slums and Africa alike may be one of the most striking examples of this process (Brantlinger 1985; Poore 2000; Lindner 2004; Kleeberg 2011). This kind of representations of slums dwellers can be used to exemplify Isabell Lorey’s argument that precarity functions “as a category of order that denotes social positionings of insecurity and hierarchization, which accompanies processes of Othering” (Puar 2012, 165). However, more ambivalent and even positive imaginaries of the urban precarious have existed as well. Contributing to the analysis of the literary history of alternative representations of slums, I look in this chapter at the reportage writings of two left-wing authors writing in German in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Egon Erwin Kisch and Ilija Trojanow. Approaching slums around the world through the mode of travel writing, Kisch and Trojanow break with historically predominant imaginaries: They represent the urban precarious in terms of diversity, cultural

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production, social self-organization, and at times even position them as agents of progressive political agendas.1 The works of Kisch and Trojanow are separated by more than half a century. Born in 1885 in Prague, Egon Erwin Kisch has often been considered one, if not the, inventor of the literary reportage and was a world-­ literary author of the labor movement from the mid-1920s to his death in March 1948. His thousands of pages of reportages are global in outlook, spanning from Europe through the Soviet Union and the United States to East Asia and Australia. Ilija Trojanow was born in Bulgaria in 1965 and has lived in Kenya, India, South Africa, and Germany, and now resides in Austria. He is known for his bestselling and award-wining historical novel Der Weltensammler (2006; The Collector of Worlds) about Richard Francis Burton, his climate change novel EisTau (2011; The Lamentations of Zeno), and, to a lesser extent, his many collections of travel writing. Considered a prominent author of transnational and postcolonial literature in German, he is an outspoken public intellectual, advocating for political and cultural cosmopolitanism and criticizing precarious living conditions (Trojanow 2012, 2015). The most obvious reason for reading both writers comparatively is the fact that Trojanow has not only edited a volume of Kisch’s texts (Kisch 2008), but has also situated himself in a tradition of reportage writing that has originated with Kisch among others, that is, a kind of reportage writing that is politically engaged, advocates for the poor, and includes reflections on the representation of reality (Trojanow 2008, 2010a). Yet there are more reasons to discuss both writers together: Their reportages represent slums in a global context and deconstruct pathologizing representations of the urban precarious, while both authors also position their writing in the context of two different transnational left-wing projects that revolve around communist internationalism and cosmopolitanism, respectively. Analyzing reportages written by Kisch and Trojanow together may then also allow to trace how visions for progressive change have changed from emphasizing class in the first half of the twentieth century to emphasizing culture in the early twenty-first century within a broadly conceived leftist literary tradition (although class obviously returns in Trojanow’s writings under the name of the precariat).

1  This chapter draws on some materials and arguments first presented in German in Schaub (2019, 2020). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are mine.

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For writers of the Left, engaging with the populations of slums often means engaging with the figure of the lumpenproletariat as well, or at least with its specter. The figure is ubiquitous in Kisch’s texts, and naturally so, one may suspect, for a communist writer; but it also appears in discussions of the precariat by Trojanow, who has occasionally identified as an anarchist (Gerstenberger 2018, 51–52). The term lumpenproletariat was likely first used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, while its semantics and attached affects are older (Bussard 1987). For Marx and Engels, the lumpenproletariat “was a propertyless social group […] which carried on a degrading, destructive mode of life” and “had no group consciousness (or potential thereof)” (ibid., 683). In their writings, the lumpenproletariat functions as a counter-image to the heroic (industrial) proletariat and encompasses groups such as tramps, beggars, scavengers, petty thieves, and prostitutes. According to Robert L. Bussard, “[d]rawing upon a long tradition of negative, upper-class attitudes towards the lower classes […], Marx and Engels developed the idea of the lumpenproletariat as a tool to explain what they saw as the existence of a non-revolutionary—or even counterrevolutionary—group within the lower strata of society” (ibid., 687). This depiction of the lumpenproletariat has largely prevailed in the history of the term within the socialist and communist movements despite the fact that, in the first volume of Das Kapital (Capital), Marx developed a more technical understanding of this population as belonging to the realm of pauperism and the industrial reserve army (Marx 1979, 673). Importantly, the lumpenproletariat is conceived of by Marx and Engels as a predominately, yet probably not exclusively, urban figure (Bussard 1987, 10, 12–13). There have been more positive evaluations of the lumpenproletariat within left-wing traditions as well. Prominently, Marx and Engels’s contemporary, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, “[e]ntirely rejected the negative connotations of the term” and “declared that the lumpenproletariat was the vanguard of the revolutionary movement” (ibid., 691; Ingram 2018, 101–102), thus locating progressive political agency in the lumpenproletariat. David Ingram has put this tension succinctly: “In the long debate between Marxism and anarchism, the question of the lumpenproletariat has most often been understood as a choice of revolutionary subject: those constituted by the movement of capital or those cast off by it, the industrial working class or the wretched of the earth” (ibid., 102). Whether the lumpenproletariat and the precariat name similar populations and social conditions has been a contested question. While Ingram

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suggests similarities (ibid., 102–103), Guy Standing is more skeptical (2011, 9). In any case, in Kisch and Trojanows’s reportages, representations of the urban precarious go along with reevaluations of the figure of the lumpenproletariat that are closer to Bakunin’s positive view of this heterogenous population than to Marx and Engels’s largely negative assessment. This is more obvious in Kisch’s writings that still employ the term itself. But such a positive reevaluation is also present in texts by Trojanow, who, after all, understands the precariat as a more current name for the lumpenproletariat and links slums to precarity and precarization.

II In his reportage collections, Egon Erwin Kisch composes a transnational geography of the poor and precarious that extends from Europe to Asia and the United States. Its nodal points are slums that are often located in harbor cities, that is, in places of travel, migration, and commodity circulation. London, New York, and Shanghai thus figure prominently in Kisch’s texts. His reportages depict what Isabell Lorey has called “the heterogeneous precarious” (2015, 8) who are diverse by occupation, origin, and political and cultural orientation. The following passage from the reportage “Gässchen der Unterröcke” (1926; “Petticoat Lane”) evokes a coming-­together of this diverse population at the Petticoat Lane Market in London’s Whitechapel district: The true prospective buyers make their pilgrimage on foot from the workers’ houses in Shadwell, from the docks in Bromley, from the sailors’ homes in Blackwell, from the Chinese stoker-quarters in Limehouse, from the greasy Gypsy-dens in Millwall, from the workshops of “sweated work” = tailors in the Minories, from the cellars of the cobblers in Shoreditch, from the piers in Poplar, the Irish come from their self-contained colonies in Riche Street, packers, unloaders, and casual laborers. And miserable hoodlums and even more miserable prostitutes. (Kisch 1978a, 361)

The poetics of enumeration in this passage represents the urban precarious in a non-hierarchized manner. The reporter perceives the crowd as internally differentiated, and thus not as a homogenous, or amorphous, mass. He also refrains from politically, or morally, evaluating these different proletarian groups, which, in this passage, encompass both figures that have

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been thought of as wage-laborers in Marxism and the labor movement as well as figures associated with the lumpenproletariat. The adjective ‘miserable’ describes the hoodlums and prostitutes not in the sense of a value judgment, but refers to their social situation. The passage illustrates two aspects that are characteristic for Kisch’s literary representation of slums and the precarious. First, his approach toward these people and places is driven by a rather open and inclusive conception of the proletarian condition attentive to, and expressing solidarity with, precarious people who fall outside normative definitions of the (male, industrial, urban) worker as the revolutionary subject. Such a conception can be traced back to the literature of Vormärz, that is, roughly the time between 1830 and 1848/9  in German history (Eiden-Offe 2017), and also originates from the writing of such contemporaneous figures as Jack London, who was a major influence for Kisch and other writers at the time such as Franz Jung (Jung 1924; Kisch 1973a). Secondly, Kisch differs from Marx and Engels’s emotional attitude toward the lumpenproletariat—and from that of a labor movement tradition following in their footsteps—insofar as his reportages do not “betray […] an attitude of condescension, combined with aversion and even fear, towards certain elements of the lower classes” (Bussard 1987, 687). While Kisch’s reportages stage a dialogic relationship between the reporter and proletarians (Schaub 2019, 203–214), the reporter nevertheless encounters slums as an outsider. Like numerous writers before him, Kisch uses the form of the travel narrative to represent the urban precarious and narrates the excursion of a reporter to an, for him, unknown place about which he then reports to a spatially and socially distanced public. However, in contrast to the writers of German naturalism, for example, who found during their journeys into slums something allegedly different to civilization, an other associated with either positively or (more often) negatively coded naturalness and wildness (Bogdal 1978, 56–58), Kisch sees a world organized by economy-driven rules that affect all strata of society in- and outside of slums. In “Unter den Obdachlosen von Whitechapel” (“Among the Homeless of Whitechapel”), which opens Kisch’s most famous reportage collection Der Rasende Reporter (1925; The Raging Reporter), the first-person narrator journeys into the “Lumpenquartiere” and “Schlammdistrikte” of East London (Kisch 1978b, 7). The first term is a compound noun of “rags” and “accommodation,” evoking the habitations of the lumpenproletariat. The second term translates as ‘mud district,’ or ‘slime district,’

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thus evoking widespread associations between the poor, dirt, and mud (Bogdal 1978, 85–116). It also plays on the vaguely similar sound of ‘slum’ and the German ‘Schlamm.’ But the term may as well simply be a telling mistranslation of ‘slum district’ by Kisch. The narrator’s choice of words thus seems to evoke the traditional connection between the slum and the lumpenproletariat. Yet his perspective on slum dwellers is one guided by social analysis: “And these most miserable of the miserable are still divided into different social strata; differences in wealth exist even among the homeless” (Kisch 1978b, 7). The slum population’s diversity, detailed by the narrator in the subsequent paragraphs, appears as an effect of a capitalist regime that governs the lives of the precarious. Additionally, the narrator refers to some of the slum dwellers as “desperados of all parts of the world” (ibid., 8), betraying a positively coded fascination, maybe even romanticization. Insofar as the narrator describes how he “climbs down the steps to the underworld” where he encounters a “converted polyphemus” (ibid., 8, 9), he also likens the place and the people he meets to the epic, thus imagining them in terms of a literary genre in which lower social strata were traditionally largely invisible, if not excluded at all. The representation of slums then oscillates between social analysis, an invocation of the literary tradition, and fascination. We find a more political reimagination of the urban precarious along the lines of left-wing internationalism in texts that appeared after Kisch’s self-identification as a communist writer in the mid-1920s. “Tagebuch vom New Yorker Hafen” (1930; “Diary of the New York Harbor”) provides a detailed report on the working conditions and cultural practices of proletarian populations in New York’s harbor districts, and the reportage does so against the background of a class divide between the rich and the poor that characterizes the city. Importantly, the narrator stresses that not just those people he calls the “lumpenproletariat of the ocean” (Kisch 1973b, 46) are subject to a precarious life, but even dockworkers organized in unions, something that the narrator sees exacerbated by the specific working conditions in the United States (ibid., 37–38). In Kisch, precarity then signifies the proletarian condition more broadly, and it does not function as a category that may be used to distinguish ‘workers’ from the lumpenproletariat. The latter is understood here as a group that cannot find opportunities for work and also has no access to decent accommodation, but, significantly, is not understood in negatively coded moral or political terms (ibid., 46–47). In other words, the lumpenproletariat

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appears as a group within the proletariat whose position is the most precarious. In the slums of the “East Side of New York where hunger and dirt have their residences, where the disappointed of all corners of the earth run ashore anew” (Kisch 1973c, 49), the “lumpenproletariat of the ocean” lives next to, but “not knowing of” (Kisch 1973b, 46), an infrastructure connected to the labor movement. Here, Kisch’s reportage inserts into the spaces of the urban precarious “organization, conscious political agency and theoretical […] and cultural production” that have often been made invisible in representations of slums (Bogdal 1978, 58): The IWW (International Workers of the World) have their harbor pub on Coentis Slip; a long room with books, posters, and propaganda literature, mostly in English and Esperanto. At the International Seamen’s Club, at 26 South Street, the atmosphere is more cosmopolitan and lively, like at a discussion evening; we also find black people here, who are reading their revolutionary paper “Negro Champion”, we also find dockers and other transport workers of the harbor here, Chinese and Europeans, we find more youth here than in the parochial and national homes, and it appears that politics has a greater attraction here than expensive staircase railings with the names of their donors on it. (Kisch 1973b, 46)

In the slums of New  York, the narrator encounters a vibrant, inclusive, diverse, and politically progressive, even revolutionary environment. The passage now envisions in explicitly internationalist terms the heterogeneity of a multilingual and transnational precariat, which the reporter has come across before at the Petticoat Lane Market. Rather than commodity circulation, as in the reportage “Petticoat Lane,” the narrator suggests that it is the politics of the labor movement that draws these diverse people. That the narrator highlights exactly this also means that slums are represented here in terms of Kisch’s own internationalist political positioning.

III When Kisch reported about the precarious in slums during the interwar period, he referred to them by the term ‘proletarian’ and variants thereof like lumpenproletariat. In the 2000s, Ilija Trojanow, in contrast, writes about slums and precarity at a time when the term ‘proletarian’ has largely fallen out of favor, both politically and analytically. Yet Trojanow insists on

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similarities between, if not the identity of, those populations that have been historically termed lumpenproletariat and those that are now referred to as the precariat: “In the language of sociologists, the new class of those who vegetate in the front yard of being superfluous is termed the precariat (in the past, they were called the lumpenproletariat)” (Trojanow 2015, 32). He sees the precarious as the “long-term unemployed” as well as “those who are subject to precarious working conditions,” and all those who are “victims of the comprehensive restructuring of the labor market” (ibid., 32). Observing the “growth of the precariat” on “the global stage” (ibid., 71), he also remarks: “While slums grow in cities, the number of secure jobs in production decreases” (ibid., 8). Like Kisch, Trojanow thus situates himself with respect to the tradition emerging in the nineteenth century that locates the lumpenproletariat, now named the precariat, in slums as paradigmatic spaces of precarious lives. The slum is a recurring topic in Trojanow’s travel writing on East Africa and India, and his reportages respond to literary and political discourses about slums that he considers problematic, as do other contemporary authors’ writing in German, such as Thomas Meinecke and Yoko Tawada (Schaub 2020). For example, Trojanow deconstructs the imaginary of slums in Günter Grass’s travel book Zunge zeigen (1988; Showing Tongue) about the future Nobel laureate’s stay in Calcutta. In Trojanow’s damning analysis, the text is characterized by Grass’s disinterest in life in India, his self-distancing from Indian people, his “superficial gaze,” and his attitude of “the Western intellectual who believes he is allowed to evaluate and comment on everything, without having the slightest clue of the material” (Trojanow 2001, 154, 157). In Grass, slums, just like India as a whole, become spaces of an abject other, for which “the omnipresent feces” (ibid., 154) in the text are symptomatic. While slums and its inhabitants are depicted by Grass through the familiar pattern of a pathologizing discourse about the urban poor, Trojanow makes explicit how this class-­ based and Eurocentric perspective renders invisible what he himself perceives as the complex reality of slum life: “[…] the slum dweller who toils and labors to be able to put a satellite dish on his ribbed roof, and who actually moved from the province to Bombay or Calcutta because here he saw the opportunity to come closer to the world of consumption, even if only through small steps, which Grass is not able to perceive” (ibid., 159–160). Writing, like Grass and Kisch, in the mode of travel writing, Trojanow is interested—as Kisch had been before him—in providing an alternative representation of the urban precarious that breaks with the

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continuity of a problematic discourse about slum dwellers still found in Grass. For the same purpose, Trojanow takes aim at what he perceives as the simultaneously homogenizing and othering discourse about slums among transnational elites: S-L-U-M, four letters with whose help the life of most of Bombay’s inhabitants is reduced to a deceptive, completely unclear common denominator. Slum—at times, the word conjures up horrible images of dirt, poverty and illness; at times, it points with a simultaneously outraged and resigned finger to half-famished, shabby victims who are vegetating without protection and are powerless. The frequent usage of the term has created a virtual reality, as has been the case with few other words. Slum conjures up an uniformity that the discourse of globalism expects of its categories—slum is a statistical measure. (Trojanow 2010b, 67)

The discourse about slums appears here as an effect of neoliberal globalization, which creates a slum’s “uniformity” as “virtual reality.” As an implicit consequence of these interventions by Trojanow, his own literary representation of slums is staged as a more accurate depiction of reality. For the narrator of Trojanow’s reportages, the most striking feature of slums is their “diversity” (Trojanow 2011, 145). In “Im Slum” (Trojanow 2001; “In the Slum”), a text about Nairobi and Kampala, such diversity is both the effect of individual ways of struggling with precarity and of the economic forces that organize life in slums that differentiate the accommodations of different social strata within the slum: Most noticeable about the slum is the diversity. I am expecting monotony, hardship, grey in grey, and I encounter diversity. In the slum, everybody is fighting for survival in their own way. Solid houses made from concrete, wooden huts, and patched-up sheds constructed from garbage and remnants of any kind make obvious that even slums are governed by social differences. Because one can still make money even with the most miserable dwellings. (Trojanow 2011, 145)

In Mumbai, the narrator encounters a similar diversity, one here rooted in the industriousness and creativity of slum dwellers: “Yet even the eclectically constructed huts are different from each other. Each family has used their inventiveness to find a solution for the specifics of their place’s smallness” (Trojanow 2010b, 71). Although his reportages at times seem to

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betray a romanticizing gaze on such places, it is important to note that Trojanow represents slums as sites of cultural production and social organization. The positive evaluation of the urban precarious in such reportages works by showing how they participate in the foundational work of culture and society even under conditions of extreme precarity. In this regard, Trojanow’s texts, like Kisch’s, contrast with a literary tradition that imagines the urban precarious, if it codes them positively, in terms of ‘noble savages,’ thereby relegating them to the realm of nature and effectively excluding them from political intelligibility and agency (Bogdal 1978, 67–72). If Trojanow’s representation of slums is organized by the assumption of each slum’s diversity, the author also notes differences between slums insofar as they exhibit, for example, different degrees of precarity: “There are differences even among slums, some are more, some are less fit for a dignified human life” (Trojanow 2011, 146). But the differences between slums also concern how they are politically coded. Among the metropolises represented in Trojanow’s writing, Mumbai is the city where slums are perceived in terms of the author’s own politics. While “Die Abschaffung der Armut” (2004; “The Abolition of Poverty”) represents the spaces of the rich as isolated from reality and as exclusionary, Mumbai’s slums become spaces where people of different religious identity, education, and social position live together on an everyday basis within spaces so narrow that self-isolation would not be a viable option, building an attractive sense of community that keeps people to stay in the area (similar to how internationalist politics draw people to certain spaces in Kisch): In the slum, we find temples, mosques, and churches. Skilled and unskilled workers, academics and illiterates, Muslims and Hindus, untouchables and members of the higher castes live next to each other and with each other in the most narrow space. Those who attain some wealth often stay because of the community in the district. (Trojanow 2010b, 71)

In the slums of Mumbai, the narrator encounters a cosmopolitan everyday culture and positions the urban precarious as its agents. While the passage certainly mobilizes the imaginary of Bombay as a cosmopolitan city (Prakash 2010, 117–157), it projects this imaginary exclusively on slums (and not onto the spaces of the rich). Simultaneously, the passage denotes Mumbai’s slums in terms of Trojanow’s own politics that foreground the importance of cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization: “I am

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convinced that we, as individuals, and also as humanity, have no other choice than to be cosmopolites if we want to thrive in a global world and survive as a community on this depleted earth” (Trojanow 2012, 33).

IV How then to critically understand Egon Erwin Kisch and Ilija Trojanow’s literary representations of the urban precarious? Separated by more than half a century, but connected through a line of literary influence, their reportages about slums show remarkable similarities. In the writings of both authors, slums are urban formations found around the globe, although—different than Kisch—Trojanow does no longer seem to find them in Western cities. In contrast to predominant homogenizing and stereotyping, even pathologizing, representations of the urban precarious that extend from the nineteenth century to the present, they perceive cultural production as well as political and social organization as integral parts of the life in slums. Moreover, for them, diversity as well as social differences and stratifications are characteristic for slums. Importantly, the attitude expressed in these authors’ texts toward the urban precarious is one of empathy, fascination, curiosity, solidarity, and, at times, also romanticization. Through the travels of an outsider into the slums, whom readers are meant to associate with the text’s author, negative connotations and affects like backwardness, disgust, moral and political denunciation, or condescension, which the term lumpenproletariat carries in the tradition stemming from Marx and Engels, are suspended. In fact, similarly to Bakunin’s thinking, the urban precarious at times become bearers of the progressive politics the authors themselves identify with: a class-based internationalism in line with Kisch’s political engagement within the communist labor movement and a political cosmopolitanism influenced by debates about cultural exchange and hybridization to which Trojanow himself contributes. One way to critically understand Kisch and Trojanow’s literary representations of the urban precarious may be to suggest that the pattern of these representations can be usefully described by its oscillation between perspectives that have been termed the “tourist gaze” and the “postcolonial gaze,” respectively. This thesis appears to be plausible not least so because these texts are travel narratives by writers who are not slum dwellers and must be assumed to approach slums with particular interests and implicit biases (just like Marx, Engels, and Bakunin), rather than being

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literary self-representations of slum dwellers. According to John Urry and Jonas Larsen, the tourist gaze seeks “what is visually out-of-ordinary,” but finds mostly what has been expected and hoped for by the viewer in the first place (Urry and Larsen 2011, 14). It may be distinguished from what Paul Michael Lützeler has termed the “postcolonial gaze,” that is, an “open, inquisitive, solidary, and still critical postcolonial gaze” (Lützeler 1997, 29). That these texts turn slum dwellers at times into bearers of their authors’ own political beliefs—which, on the whole, seems to go a bit more for Trojanow than for Kisch—attests to the political situatedness of these reportages’ insights into the extratextual reality of slums. While these authors certainly bring to the fore something new about slums, something that has not often been recognized often before, and that also runs contrary to the expectations of dominant social groups about social others—as a postcolonial gaze would do—, they also find in slums—just like the tourist gaze would do—exactly that what they might have been looking for. To be unambiguous here, my line of argument is not meant to negate that there were and are internationalist politics and cosmopolitan cultures in slums. What I instead want to highlight is that what is foregrounded in Kisch and Trojanow’s reportages likely betrays what these authors might have been particularly interested in finding among the urban precarious in the first place, namely subaltern agents of progressive politics.

Bibliography Bogdal, Klaus-Michael. 1978. “Schaurige Bilder”: Der Arbeiter im Blick des Bürgers am Beispiel des deutschen Naturalismus. Frankfurt a. M: Syndikat. Brantlinger, Patrick. 1985. Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent. Critical Inquiry 12: 166–203. Bussard, Robert L. 1987. The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the Lumpenproletariat. History of European Ideas 8 (6): 675–692. Davis, Mike. 2007. Planet of Slums. London, New York: Verso. Eiden-Offe, Patrick. 2017. Die Poesie der Klasse: Romantischer Antikapitalismus und die Erfindung des Proletariats. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Gerstenberger, Katharina. 2018. Political Engagement in Ilija Trojanow’s EisTau (2011) und Der überflüssige Mensch (2013). In Protest und Verweigerung/ Protest and Refusal: Neue Tendenzen in der deutschen Literatur seit 1989/New Trends in German Literature since 1989, ed. Hans Adler and Sonja Klocke, 45–61. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink.

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Gilbert, Alan. 2007. The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31 (4): 697–713. Ingram, James. 2018. Lumpenproletariat. Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 2: 100–104. Accessed April 06, 2021. https://archive.krisis.eu/ lumpenproletariat/. Jung, Franz. 1924. Jack London, ein Dichter der Arbeiterklasse. Wien: Verlag für Literatur und Politik. Kasmir, Sharryn. 2018. Precarity. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Felix Stein, Sian Lazar, Matei Candea, Hildegard Diemberger, Joel Robbins, Andrew Sanchez, and Rupert Stasch. https://doi.org/10.29164/18precarity. Kisch, Egon Erwin. 1973a. Als Leichtmatrose nach Kalifornien. In Egon Erwin Kisch: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, vol. 4. Paradies Amerika/Landung in Australien, ed. Bodo Uhse and Gisela Kisch, 67–109. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. ———. 1973b. Tagebuch vom New  Yorker Hafen. In Egon Erwin Kisch: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, vol. 4. Paradies Amerika/Landung in Australien, ed. Bodo Uhse and Gisela Kisch, 36–48. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. ———. 1973c. Harlem—Fegefeuer der Neger. In Egon Erwin Kisch: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, vol. 4. Paradies Amerika/Landung in Australien, ed. Bodo Uhse and Gisela Kisch, 49–54. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. ———. 1978a. Gässchen der Unterröcke. In Egon Erwin Kisch: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, vol. 5. Der rasende Reporter/Hetzjagd durch die Zeit/ Wagnisse in aller Welt/Kriminalistisches Reisebuch, ed. Bodo Uhse and Gisela Kisch, 360–364. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. ———. 1978b. Unter den Obdachlosen von Whitechapel. In Egon Erwin Kisch: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, vol. 5. Der rasende Reporter/Hetzjagd durch die Zeit/Wagnisse in aller Welt/Kriminalistisches Reisebuch, ed. Bodo Uhse and Gisela Kisch, 7–12. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. ———. 2008. Die schönsten Geschichten und Reportagen. Edited and with an afterword by Ilija Trojanow. Berlin: Aufbau. Kleeberg, Bernhard. 2011. Reisen in den Kontinent der Armut: Ethnographie des Sozialen im 19. Jahrhundert. In Magie der Geschichten: Weltverkehr, Literatur und Anthropologie in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Michael Neumann and Kerstin Stüssel, 29–52. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. Lindner, Rolf. 2004. Walks on the Wild Side: Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung. Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London, New York: Verso. Lützeler, Paul Michael. 1997. Einleitung: Der postkoloniale Blick. In Der postkoloniale Blick: Deutsche Schriftsteller berichten aus der Dritten Welt, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, 7–33. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

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Marx, Karl. 1979. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie: Erster Band: Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 23, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED. Berlin: Dietz. Pike, David L. 2016. Slum. In A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L.  Walkowitz, 198–213. New  York: Columbia University Press. Poore, Carole. 2000. The Bonds of Labor: German Journeys to the Working World, 1890–1990. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Prakash, Gyan. 2010. Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Puar, Jasbir. 2012. Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović. TDR/The Drama Review 56 (4): 163–177. Schaub, Christoph. 2019. Proletarische Welten: Internationalistische Weltliteratur in der Weimarer Republik. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. ———. 2020. Heterogene Stadträume der Globalisierung: Slums bei Meinecke, Tawada und Trojanow. Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 11 (1): 83–99. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Trojanow, Ilija. 2001. Auf den Spuren von Günter Grass: Zunge zeigen in Kalkutta. In Der Sadhu an der Teufelswand: Reportagen aus einem anderen Indien, 152–160. München: Malik National Geographic. ———. 2008. Hommage an einen Rastlosen. In Egon Erwin Kisch: Die schönsten Geschichten und Reportagen. Edited and with an afterword by Ilija Trojanow, 299–306. Berlin: Aufbau. ———. 2010a. Die Wahrheit der verwischten Faken. In Der entfesselte Globus. Reportagen, 186–191. München: dtv. ———. 2010b. Die Abschaffung der Armut. In Der entfesselte Globus: Reportagen, 65–75. München: dtv. ———. 2011. Im Slum. In Die Versuchungen der Fremde: Unterwegs in Arabien, Indien und Afrika, 144–149. München: Malik. ———. 2012. Weltbürgertum heute: Rede zu einer kosmopolitischen Kultur/ What Being a Citizen of the World Means Today: On Cosmopolitan Culture. Translated by Seiriol Dafydd. In Ilija Trojanow, ed. Julian Preece. Bern: Peter Lang. ———. 2015. Der überflüssige Mensch. München: dtv. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage.

CHAPTER 5

The Impossibility of Protest: Precarity in Maria Leitner’s Reportage Novel Hotel Amerika Stephanie Marx

Hotel Society When at a hotel, people expect privacy. After all, this is what they pay for: the opportunity to go about their business undisturbed, not having to worry about the inquisitiveness of others. The way in which Maria Leitner’s (1892–1942) Hotel Amerika (1930) describes the occupied rooms of a large luxury hotel seems therefore rather indiscreet. In one room, there is “a veritable battery of medicinal bottles [eine[] wahre[] Batterie von Arzneiflaschen]” and a note giving “exact instructions on when to take what number of drops [“genaue[n] Anweisungen über die Zahl der

S. Marx (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_5

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einzunehmenden Tropfen mit genauer Zeitangabe”] (ibid., 67).1 In another room, “whiskey bottles lie in the bathtub, broken glasses cover the table, cigar ash is scattered in all corners” [“in der Badewanne liegen Whiskeyflaschen, zerbrochene Gläser bedecken den Tisch, Zigarrenasche ist in alle Ecken verstreut”] (ibid., 68–69). The indiscretion of this passage is not primarily a matter of revealing the neurotic or excessive habits of the guests, though. Indeed, the narration is not about the guests at all but follows the gaze of two chambermaids, Celestina and Ingrid, who inspect the rooms they have to clean. Here, the attention is on those who are usually silent and invisible in the hotel but whose constant presence ensures the convenience and well-being of its guests. Chambermaids and bellboys, waiters and kitchen staff, charwomen and night porters—they and their everyday working lives take center stage in the reportage novel Hotel Amerika. Leitner thus focuses on a literary setting that appears time and again in the German-language literature of the time—think of Joseph Roth’s Hotel Savoy (1924), Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else (1924), or Vicky Baum’s Menschen im Hotel (1929). Reflecting the invisibility of actual hotel workers, these novels usually concentrate on the guests. In Hotel Amerika, by contrast, the hotel is looked at from below.2 The book describes a day in the life of the workers at the eponymous Hotel Amerika in 1920s New  York. These workers toil for meager wages, with many of them even having to live in the hotel for lack of an abode they could call their own. Their poor living conditions—the miserable food and the overcrowded, barely furnished dormitories—are in sharp contrast to the comfort the guests enjoy. It is not surprising, then, that in the course of the novel two uprisings occur. In fact, the question of protest and resistance is constantly present in Hotel Amerika. The characters continually emphasize the need for change and long for an improvement of their situation. In the end, however, nothing of the sort happens, as all their efforts fail. My reading of Hotel Amerika centers precisely on this failure of resistance, thus echoing the considerable attention paid in the book to the difficulties of effective protest. As its focus on workers already suggests, Hotel Amerika can be considered part of the literature of left-wing  All translations from Hotel Amerika are my own.  “Luxushotel von unten gesehen” is the title of Siegfried Kracauer’s review of Leitner’s reportage novel, published on December 28th, 1930, in the Frankfurter Zeitung (Kracauer 2011). 1 2

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proletarian culture, which has a strong and autonomous presence within the literary field of the Weimar Republic (Becker 2018, 94ff.). Indeed, Leitner’s reportage novel was published by a well-known left-wing publishing house, the Neuer Deutscher Verlag.3 However, the hotel employees portrayed in Hotel Amerika differ from the usual cast of characters of this kind of literature. Their working and living conditions are, in fact, familiar from the novels of the New Objectivity. Indeed, it is fair to say that Leitner’s reportage novel belongs to this genre. It is written in a documentary manner and takes up popular themes and subjects, such as the hotel as a setting, living conditions in the United States, and urban life. The narrator recounts in reportage style, and the considerable use of free indirect speech and direct speech produces an effect of immediacy. To put it briefly, Leitner uses styles and subjects typical of the literature of the New Objectivity but tackles them from a politically engaged perspective. This twofold classification can be applied to her work as a whole.4 In Hotel Amerika, however, these two aspects do not merge seamlessly. Rather, there is a tension between the cultural-political agenda and what the novel actually describes. The book makes an emphatic case for the organization of the workers and the development of class-consciousness, but these pleas cannot provide a proper strategy for resistance. I argue that the absence of effective protest in Hotel Amerika is a consequence of precarious conditions and cannot be resolved in terms of class struggle. The term precarity, which has been in prominent use since the beginning of the 2000s, describes the socio-economic changes under post-Fordism— namely, the increasing insecurity and individualization of working and living conditions. Because precarity is currently expanding and affecting ever more areas of life and work, it goes along with a transformation of the entire social fabric.5 The structure of this chapter is as follows. First, I analyze the two uprisings in Hotel Amerika. I show that the spatial arrangement of the 3  The Neuer Deutscher Verlag was part of the media enterprises of the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe led by Willi Münzenberg. Further initiatives of this kind range from the proletarian-revolutionary literature and initiatives linked to the Communist Party, such as the Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller, to the works of Bert Brecht (Becker 2018, 78–123; Fähnders 1995; Fähnders and Safranski 1995). 4  Preece highlights that this subverting of “accepted forms and filling [of] popular formats with progressive content” is peculiar to Leitner’s work (Preece 2014, 245). 5  Mona Motakef (2015) provides a detailed summary of the current state of research and the main positions on this subject.

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hotel—its transitory and fragmenting character—has a profound impact on the workers and conditions the failure of their uprisings. Second, and with regard to the representation of Hotel Amerika as a microcosm, I discuss the structural preconditions of successful protest that the analysis of the uprisings has brought to the fore. I show that in the reportage novel there is a contradiction between what is shown and what is claimed. Drawing on research on precarity, I offer both structural and historical insights. My point is that with its detailed description of how workers fare, Hotel Amerika shows that already in the 1920s precarious forms of employment are commonplace for certain groups of workers. However, Hotel Amerika goes beyond merely depicting their particular social situation. The reportage novel presents precarity as a form of governance that has serious consequences for the possibility of political organization and resistance. The reason all this comes to the fore is that Leitner exceeds contemporary literary conventions, thereby providing a thoughtful response to some pressing problems of the Weimar Republic.

Failed Uprisings in Hotel Amerika The main character of Leitner’s reportage novel is Shirley O’Brien, who has been working as a Wäsche-Mädchen in the hotel for six years. She desires nothing more than to escape her dreary life, and when she meets Mr. Fish, one of the guests, she believes herself on the verge of fulfilling this wish. In truth, Mr. Fish is a penniless vagabond trying to blackmail the powerful and unscrupulous media mogul W.H. Strong. In the end, however, his plans come to naught, leaving both Shirley’s and his own dreams of a better life shattered. This fairly simple plot is peppered with detailed descriptions of the hotel staff. The rendering of the workers’ lives is, by and large, authentic. Leitner was familiar with the conditions under which they labored, having spent some time as an employee in a large New York hotel. She describes her experiences in a piece of reportage entitled Als Scheuerfrau im größten Hotel der Welt (1925).6 The two uprisings

6  Leitner traveled to the United States for the Ullstein magazine UHU and stayed there from 1925 to 1928. During the course of her stay, she took on more than 80 different jobs and wrote about her experiences in a variety of reportages. In 1932, she published a selection of these reportages titled Eine Frau reist durch die Welt. For further information about Leitner’s trips to the United States, see Schwarz (2017).

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described in the book, however, reflect not so much Leitner’s own experiences as contemporary political debates. The scene of the first uprising in Hotel Amerika is the canteen of the lowest female workers. There is a tumult because the women are served rotten potatoes for lunch. The noise they make soon arouses curiosity, and not before long more workers stream into the canteen: “The dining room is crowded now. One sees arms flailing, mouths wide open, groups discussing” [“Der Speiseraum ist jetzt gedrängt voll. Man sieht fuchtelnde Arme, aufgerissene Münder, diskutierende Gruppen”] (Leitner 1930, 156). Soon, however, the personnel director arrives, knowing exactly how to put an end to the riot: “Who did not like the potatoes? Come here and show them to me” [“Wem haben die Kartoffeln nicht geschmeckt? Der soll doch herkommen und sie mir zeigen”] (ibid., 163). Crucially, he insists that each person come forward individually. The workers, however, are afraid to step up as individuals and thus risk dismissal. And when, finally, the security guards enter the canteen, the crowd quickly dissipates. The German trade unionist Fritz, having his first day of work at the hotel, quickly realizes “that the unorganized, disparate mass cannot succeed with such spontaneous action” [“daß die vollkommen unorganisierte, uneinheitliche Masse mit solchem spontanen Vorgehen keinen Erfolg davontragen kann”] (ibid., 170). In addition to the call for (trade union) organization that is implied here, the novel asks why the workers do not unite. One of the characters attributes this to the fact that they understand their own situation as only provisional: When it comes to making them [the workers, StM] understand that only through perseverance and organization something can be achieved, they simply withdraw. That’s because we all live so provisionally, even if we do one and the same thing for fifty years. Wenn es darauf ankommt, ihnen begreiflich zu machen, daß nur durch Ausdauer und Organisation etwas zu erreichen ist, rücken sie einfach aus. Das kommt davon, weil wir hier alle so provisorisch leben und wenn wir auch fünfzig Jahre ein und dasselbe tun. (ibid., 156)

The living and working situation is repeatedly described in the novel as provisional, either in connection with the workers’ desire for advancement or with regard to their fear of relegation. Shirley, for instance, does not seek to improve her situation but to escape it, placing her hopes in her

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relationship with Mr. Fish. Similarly, the waiter Alex wants to quit at Hotel Amerika as soon as he has saved enough money to open a speakeasy. The maid Ingrid, on the other hand, constantly experiences the “fear of not knowing whether tomorrow you will be allowed to continue to work or will be forced to look for a job again” [“Angst, wirst du auch morgen weiterarbeiten dürfen oder mußt du nun wieder auf die Arbeitsuche gehen”] (ibid., 76). It is important to note here that since many of the workers at Hotel Amerika do unskilled work that requires neither training nor special skills, they can easily be replaced. The situation of the workers corresponds to the characteristics of (literary) hotels. Hotels are passageways where no stay is permanent. It is precisely this designation as a space of transit and something provisional that makes the hotel a popular setting in the literature of the Weimar Republic, as it exemplifies the contemporary notion of living in a time of transition (Matthias 2006). Like the guests, the workers do not truly arrive at Hotel Amerika and think of their situation as temporary—the consequence being that they do not try to improve it. “But one day, when it comes to a real fight, all of us will participate” [“Einmal aber, wenn es zu einem richtigen Kampf kommt, machen wir alle mit”] (Leitner 1930, 306), Bellboy Salvatore lets his colleague Ingrid know. One day—but not now, and not when it is the hotel workers who start the fight. The second uprising described in Hotel Amerika is initiated by a group of waiters. Again, it is the poor quality of the food that causes the workers to revolt. This uprising, however, turns out differently. The men quickly appoint a spokesperson and formulate concrete demands. Also, because they are supposed to wait at a big wedding ceremony, they are strategically in a better position than the lowest workers. The waiters know that if they refuse to work, the opulent wedding will not take place. The supervisor, to whom they address their demands, realizes that he is under considerable pressure: “He gives a speech to the waiters, his voice flatters, his voice implores, and he makes promises, every promise that is required” [“Er hält eine Rede an die Kellner, seine Stimme schmeichelt, seine Stimme beschwört, und er macht Versprechungen, jede Versprechung, die man nur von ihm verlangt”] (Leitner 1930, 273). The waiters are immediately paid a supplement, and at first glance their revolt seems a success. This at least is how Patrick Pfannkuche (2009) understands Leitner’ reportage novel. He contrasts the two uprisings in Hotel Amerika, interpreting the first as an example of a failed political protest and the second as an example of a successful one. In fact, the novel

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supports this interpretation, presenting the waiters’ revolt as a sort of best-­ practice example. On closer inspection, however, their uprising cannot be considered a paradigm that the hotel staff as a whole could follow. What causes the supervisor to relent is not only the timing of the uprising but the fact that it is carried out by skilled workers. For as concerns the upcoming wedding, “unskilled workers would be of no help to him today” [“Mit ungelernten Kräften wäre ihm heute nicht geholfen”] (Leitner 1930, 269). The working conditions of the waiters differ markedly from the majority of the workers, and though the uprising changes the former’s circumstances for the better, it has no consequences whatsoever for the latter. Diverging working and living conditions and the heterogeneity of the hotel staff are central themes in Hotel Amerika. The book details the many ways in which existing differences among the workers are emphasized to draw them further apart. One example of this is their different uniforms. Another is the spatial segregation defining the places where no work is actually done. Depending on their gender, race, and position, the workers have to sleep in different dormitories and eat in different canteens. The novel describes at least six types of canteens, each offering different standards of comfort. While the management employees are served the same food as the hotel guests, the canteen of the lowest workers is “filled with an undefinable smell of sweat and garbage, dishwater and bad food” [“ist erfüllt von einem undefinierbaren Geruch von Schweiß und Müll, Spülwasser und schlechten Lebensmitteln”] (Leitner 1930, 148–149). Current hotel novels, too, highlight the phenomenon of fragmentation. In hotels, numerous people share the same limited space, and yet they go about their affairs separately, behind the doors of their respective rooms. This is usually reflected by means of episodic storytelling, as, for example, in Baum’s Menschen im Hotel. In Hotel Amerika, the detailed description of the segregated and stratified workforce provides an explanation of why there is no sense of unity or solidarity among the workers. Also, and more significantly, Leitner’s reportage novel makes clear that different working conditions imply different opportunities for political protest. Because they are more likely to be dismissed, unskilled workers have more at stake in the event of an uprising than the waiters, for example. And of course all the workers fear unemployment. Even though they may earn only a meager wage, “these few dollars mean life for them, bare existence” [“diese wenigen Dollars bedeuten für sie das Leben, die nackte Existenz”] (Leitner 1930, 163–164).

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To sum up, the uprisings in Hotel Amerika do not fail due to violent crackdowns but because of a diffuse form of power that is constantly in play in Hotel Amerika.7 Following the political didactics of the novel, only the development of class consciousness and the organization of the workforce can lead to an improvement of the workers’ situation. However, as a closer look at the uprisings shows, the spatial arrangement of the hotel has a profound impact on the workforce. That is to say, not individual decisions but structural conditions determine the workers’ conduct within the hotel.

The Representation of Precarity In Hotel Amerika, Leitner seeks to bring to the fore conditions that characterize society as a whole. To do so, she makes use of a well-known contemporary motif, depicting Hotel Amerika as a microcosm. Since the hotel assembles a wide range of people from diverse national and social backgrounds, it serves as a metonym for society at large. In this vein, Bellboy Salvatore describes Hotel Amerika as “an enormous zoological garden where one can find all sorts of people, the newest Noah’s Ark” [“ein ungeheurer Zoologischer Garten, in dem man einfach alle Arten von Menschen entdecken kann, die neueste Arche Noah”] (Leitner 1930, 230). The narrator further expands on this view of Hotel Amerika as a microcosm, explaining that there are “people of all classes and from every part of the world, the rich and the poor, the happy and the miserable. Here, everything is gathered together, hell and heaven, grief and happiness, illness and euphoria” [“Menschen aus allen Klassen und aus allen Teilen der Welt, Reiche und Arme, Glückliche und Elende. Hier ist alles angehäuft, Hölle und Himmel, Trauer und Glück, Krankheit und Übermut”] (ibid., 306). This juxtaposition of opposites suggests that society is seen as fundamentally divided: into the rich and the poor, guests and employees, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The novel’s description of the workforce shows, however, that the microcosm of Hotel Amerika is structured in a way that differs from what the narrator claims it to be. There is no such thing as a homogeneous proletariat; instead, the workforce is characterized by heterogeneity and hierarchical segmentation, both of which hamper the possibility of 7  Julian Preece notes this point as well, contrasting this constellation with Sandkorn im Sturm (1929), another novella by Leitner (Preece 2014, 259).

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collective action. Furthermore, the insecurity of employment and the desire to advance determine the workers’ self-perception and, accordingly, their behavior. Research on precarity has shown that such conditions must be understood as subtle forms of governance. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, investigates the loss of agency and the waning solidarity among workers under precarious conditions (Bourdieu 1998). He emphasizes that these problems are systematically exploited by precarization strategies. In her study State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (2015), Isabell Lorey extends this approach. Drawing on Michel Foucault, she conceptualizes what she calls “governmental precarization” as a form of governance that relies on self-government rather than constraint.8 Lorey points out that the maintenance of precarious conditions depends on “a conformist self-development, a conformist self-determination enabling extraordinary governability” (2015, 14). Hotel Amerika, in this sense, depicts not so much class society as precarious working and living conditions. That is to say, precarity structures the hotel society more profoundly than class antagonism does—which has far-reaching consequences for the possibilities and preconditions of resistance. Leitner’s reportage novel makes a plea for the workers’ identification with the proletariat, the emergence of class-consciousness, and the organization of the workforce. There is widespread agreement in current research on precarity, however, that appeals to people’s belongingness to ‘the precariat’ or the assumption of preexisting shared interests and concerns will not do the trick. As Lorey argues, under precarious conditions, a common ground is not a given but something that must be established through political practices: “Like precariousness, what is in common is not something that has always already existed, to which recourse can be had; rather, it is something first produced in political action” (Lorey 2015, 100). She goes on to argue that, by implication, traditional concepts of representation fail to do justice to the diversity of those affected by precariousness.

8  Lorey distinguishes between three different dimensions of precarity, connecting philosophy, sociology, and political theory: First, and with recourse to Judith Butler, she describes the socio-ontological dimension of “precariousness,” which refers to a vulnerability common to all human beings. Second, she advances the concept of “precarity” as indicating a certain social position. Because people are affected by precarity in different ways, this dimension implies inequality. And finally, there is what she terms “governmental precarization”—that is, precarity as a form of governance (Lorey 2015, 10–14).

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Seen from this perspective, the failure of resistance in Hotel Amerika is first and foremost a failure of the political strategies proposed. Indeed, the reportage novel itself makes clear, if only implicitly, that these strategies cannot take hold under the conditions it depicts. Within the hotel, social change is not an option; instead, Hotel Amerika ends with the dismissal of its main character, Shirley. Rather than being desperate, however, she departs in a hopeful spirit: “[I] will read many books and learn everything I do not yet know” [“[I]ch werde viele Bücher lesen und alles erfahren, was ich jetzt noch nicht weiß”] (Leitner 1930, 313), she tells her colleagues as she leaves the hotel, referring primarily to the literature by and about the workers’ movement. According to the narrative logic of the novel, political engagement may only develop once the hotel has been left. In addition to offering structural insights, research on precarity also enriches the reading of Hotel Amerika from a historical perspective. That the hotel is a proper place for the representation of precarity has to do not only with its spatial structure but also with the make-up of the staff. Even though the concept of precarity refers to current socio-economic changes, these are, in fact, by no means new for the entire workforce. Certain groups of workers, such as women or migrants, have long been familiar with precarious employment (Motakef 2015, 7–9). Thus, as a marginal phenomenon and an ‘atypical’ form of employment, precarity has a long history. From a socio-historical perspective, it stands to reason that the workers in Hotel Amerika live and work under precarious conditions, for it is precisely the groups just mentioned that make up the biggest part of the workforce. The majority of the staff are immigrants, and the employees are as international as the hotel’s guests: “A scholar of linguistics could find here all the dialects of the Slavs but also hear Hindustani and Armenian, Greek and Japanese languages” [“Ein Sprachforscher könnte hier alle Dialekte der Slawen entdecken, aber auch hindostanische und armenische, griechische und japanische Sprachen vernehmen”] (Leitner 1930, 12). The novel also says a great deal about the situation of people of color, “who do the most difficult, the dirtiest labor, who are repeatedly reminded of their inferiority by means of prohibition signs” [“die die schwierigsten, die schmutzigsten Arbeiten verrichten, die durch Verbotstafeln immer wieder auf ihre Inferiorität aufmerksam gemacht werden”] (ibid., 50). In addition, a considerable number of women work in Hotel Amerika, most of them doing unskilled work. The reportage novel thus echoes what Käthe Leichter describes in 1930 as the problem of working women as a

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whole: “The skilled female worker is more and more replaced by a type of female worker who is constantly in a profession but not at home in any profession” (Leichter 1979, 340, my translation). The working conditions of these marginalized groups of workers differ significantly from what is considered typical in the interwar period, the paradigmatic type being the male factory worker. This shift, however, has no consequences for the political strategies proposed. As the analysis of the waiters’ uprising makes evident, these are still oriented toward the male skilled worker. In this sense, the fact that the strategies put forward in Hotel America fail is also due to their being geared toward the wrong addressee. Though not inappropriate per se, practices that revolve around representation and traditional forms of (trade union) organization are of no use to certain groups of workers—due to their reliance on particular working conditions. This also means that adherence to these practices leads to the exclusion of these very groups from the political struggle. These observations are highly relevant to the interwar period. Indeed, the descriptions of Hotel Amerika are neither specifically American nor limited to hotels in general. Instead, Leitner triggers the reader’s reflection on problems that affect the Weimar Republic. Because Hotel Amerika functions as a microcosm, the situation of the hotel staff is generalized, and the distinction between what is considered typical and atypical is turned upside down. By describing a society that is increasingly differentiated and characterized by insecurity, the book captures contemporary developments as if through a magnifying glass: the successive erosion of social classes, the heterogenization and individualization of labor, and the transformation of forms of employment (Winkler 2005, 285–305). The considerable number of publications on the newly emerging class of salaried employees, on working women, and on youth workers is a testament to how challenging these social changes are in the interwar period.9 And it is not surprising that they are also dealt with in the literary realm—think of the large number of novels that focus on female employees, for example. For the workers’ movement, the question of whether and how to mobilize marginalized groups for the political struggle is of

9  See, for example, Emil Lederer and Jacob Marschak’s analysis Der Neue Mittelstand (1926), Siegfried Kracauer’s Die Angestellten (1930), the trade union broschure Die weiblichen Angestellten (1930), or Lisbeth Franzen-Hellersberg’s study Die jugendliche Arbeiterin. Ihre Arbeitsweise und Lebensform (1932).

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particular importance.10 Leiter’s Hotel Amerika answers this question in a perceptive way. It addresses the precarious working conditions in the hotel in terms of class struggle, while at the same time suggesting that the failure of this struggle is an effect of precarious governance. Hotel Amerika succeeds in bringing into relief the interdependence of working and living conditions and the (im)possibilities of protest. At the same time, it makes clear that what is needed in order for all workers to become involved in the struggle for a more just society is alternative political strategies.

Reading Political Literature To this day, Maria Leitner’s work has received only little attention in literary studies. Even in the comprehensive monographs on literary hotels in the interwar period (Matthias 2006; Seger 2004; Wilhelmer 2015), Hotel Amerika is hardly ever mentioned.11 One reason for this could be that it is not easy to classify Leitner’s writing according to the existing categories of literary history.12 In Hotel Amerika, Leitner focuses on an extraordinary group of workers—namely, hotel employees—and thus expands the range of characters that appear in the literature of left-wing proletarian culture. At the same time, she confronts the types and settings that predominate in the literature of the New Objectivity with the question of collective resistance. By intertwining these two threads, Leitner goes beyond both literary movements, making obvious their respective shortcomings. This also makes evident how innovatively she deals with contemporary literary conventions.

10  The way the left dealt with salaried employees and changing working conditions was very diverse, indeed. In the proletarian-revolutionary literature, for example, the characters were taken mainly from the industrial proletariat (Hein 1991). The media enterprises of the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, by contrast, sought to address salaried employees, the (impoverished) petty bourgeoisie, and women (Surmann 1982). Siegfried Kracauer illustrates the problems and limitations of these different approaches in Die Angestellten. He attends to both the skepticism of the workers toward the Stehkragenproletariat and the strong desire of salaried employees to differentiate themselves from the proletariat (Kracauer 2013, 84–86). 11  Apart from the essay by Pfannkuche, Hotel Amerika is, if at all, only briefly discussed in overviews of Leitner’s works (Delabar 2015; Killet 2015; Preece 2014; Unterberger 2019). 12  In fact, Leitner’s texts have not yet been included in literary-historical accounts of the New Objectivity (Becker 2000, 2003; Lethen 2000; Fähnders 2007). Also, Leitner is hardly ever mentioned in studies on proletarian left-wing culture (Hein 1991; Surmann 1982; Fähnders 1977; Fähnders and Rector 1974).

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Another reason why Leitner’s texts have been mostly ignored might be that they explicitly take a political stance. Indeed, as Preece observes, there is “an enduring prejudice against literature which could be called ‘didactic’ or ‘functional’” (Preece 2014, 254). This prompts the question of how literary studies should deal with texts that support political causes. By bringing Leitner’s book into dialog with the concept of precarity, I have pointed out problems and contradictions that go beyond the more obvious political agenda of Hotel Amerika. As I see it, the political appeals the book makes are an irreducible narrative component of the text but do not force interpretation into a particular direction. This approach to Hotel Amerika is reflected in the reportage novel itself. Leitner’s focus on the difficulties of effective resistance leaves room for ambivalence, not falling for simplistic solutions. She documents the situation of ‘atypical’ workers with the same determination and dedication that she pursues her political agenda. And by bringing them together, she turns the novel into a field of experimentation. Thus, not only do political reflections enter into literature, but literature itself provides a crucial commentary on political debates. In the end, the failure of resistance in Hotel Amerika points to the difficulty of responding to the social changes of the Weimar Republic with existing political concepts and categories. By rendering visible the consequences of precarious working and living conditions, Hotel Amerika draws attention to phenomena that research has only begun to conceptualize in the past twenty years.13

Bibliography Becker, Sabina. 2000. Neue Sachlichkeit: Die Ästhetik der neusachlichen Literatur (1920–1933). Vol. 1. Köln, Wien: Böhlau. ———. 2003. “…zu den Problemen der Realität zugelassen“. Autorinnen in der Neuen Sach-lichkeit. In Autorinnen der Weimarer Republik, ed. Walter Fähnders and Helga Karrenbrock, 187–213. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. 13  I have developed the ideas presented in this chapter while planning, together with Veronika Helfert and Anna Wieder, an interdisciplinary panel on “Precarity and the (Im-) Possibility of Political Resistance” at the conference Poetics of Precarity. Due to the coronavirus-related postponement of the conference, the panel could not take place as planned. I thank both my colleagues for the productive and lively debates, especially on the possibilities and limits of historicizing precarity. I also thank the participants of the conference for the insightful discussions, and Michiel Rys and Bart Philipsen for their helpful advice. Finally, I thank Florian Pistrol for his careful proofreading of the chapter.

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———. 2018. Experiment Weimar: Eine Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1918–1933. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Prekarität ist überall. In Gegenfeuer: Wortmeldungen im Dienste des Widerstands gegen die neoliberale Invasion, ed. Franz Schultheis and Louis Pinto, 96–102. Konstanz: UVK. Delabar, Walter. 2015. Die Schatten der Moderne: Maria Leitner ist ein guter Name in der Literatur der Weimarer Republik. JUNI: Magazin für Literatur und Politik 49 (50): 352–357. Fähnders, Walter. 1977. Proletarisch-revolutionäre Literatur der Weimarer Republik. Stuttgart: Metzler. ———. 1995. Literatur zwischen Linksradikalismus, Anarchismus und Avantgarde. In Literatur der Weimarer Republik: 1918–1933, ed. Bernhard Weyergraf, 160–173. München, Wien: Hanser. ———. 2007. „Linkskunst“ oder „reaktionäre Angelegenheit“? Zur Tatsachenpoetik der Neuen Sachlichkeit“. In Literatur und Kultur im Österreich der Zwanziger Jahre: Vorschläge zu einem transdisziplinären Epochenprofil, ed. Primus-Heinz Kucher, 83–102. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Fähnders, Walter, and Martin Rector. 1974. Linksradikalismus und Literatur: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der sozialistischen Literatur in der Weimarer Republik. Vol. 2. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Fähnders, Walter, and Rüdiger Safranski. 1995. Proletarisch-revolutionäre Literatur. In Literatur der Weimarer Republik: 1918–1933, ed. Bernhard Weyergraf, 174–231. München, Wien: Hanser. Hein, Christoph. 1991. Der „Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller Deutschland“: Biographie eines kulturpolitischen Experiments in der Weimarer Republik. Hamburg: Lit. Killet, Julia. 2015. Maria Leitner (1892–1942). Die vergessene Revolutionärin aus Ungarn. In Wechselwirkungen in Südosteuropa: Fallbeispiele aus der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. András Balogh, 301–320. Klausenburg: Mega. Kracauer, Siegfried. 2011. Luxushotel von unten gesehen. In Siegfried Kracauer. Werke: Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen. 1928–1931, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, 400–401. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2013. Die Angestellten. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Leichter, Käthe. 1979. Die Frauenarbeit in der Gegenwart. In Frauenarbeit und Beruf, ed. Gisela Brinkler-Gabler, 339–345. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. Leitner, Maria. 1930. Hotel Amerika. Ein Reportage-Roman. Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag. Lethen, Helmut. 2000. Neue Sachlichkeit 1924–1932: Studien zur Literatur des „Weissen Sozialismus“ (2nd ed.). Stuttgart: Metzler. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Translated by Aileen Derieg. London, New York: Verso.

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Matthias, Bettina. 2006. The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature: Checking In to Tell a Story. Rochester, New  York: Camden House. Motakef, Mona. 2015. Prekarisierung. Bielefeld: transcript. Pfannkuche, Patrick. 2009. Individuum und ‚Masse‘ in Maria Leitners Roman Hotel Amerika (1930). In Massenfeste: Ritualisierte Öffentlichkeiten in der mittelosteuropäischen Moderne, ed. Károly Csúri, Magdolna Orosz, and Zoltán Szendi, 149–166. Frankfurt/Main [et al.]: Peter Lang. Preece, Julian. 2014. The Literary Inventions of a Radical Writer Journalist Maria Leitner (1892–1942). In Discovering Women’s History: German-Speaking Journalists (1900–1950), ed. Christa Spreizer, 245–264. Bern: Peter Lang. Schwarz, Helga. 2017. Nachwort: Meine lange Suche nach Maria—Puzzleteile für eine Lebensmosaik. In Amerikanische Abenteuer: Eine Dokumentation. Originaltexte von 1925 bis 1935. Episoden, Reportagen und der Urwald-Roman „Wehr dich, Akato!, ed. Helga und Wilfried Schwarz, 372–393. Berlin: NoRa. Seger, Cordula. 2004. Grand Hotel: Schauplatz der Literatur. Köln: Böhlau. Surmann, Rolf. 1982. Die Münzenberg-Legende: Zur Publizistik der revolutionären deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1921–1933. Köln: Prometh. Unterberger, Rebecca. 2019. „Gegen den Verdummungsfeldzug der Reaktion…“: Zu Leben und Werk von Maria Leitner (1892–1942). Transdisziplinäre Konstellationen in der österreichischen Literatur, Kunst und Kultur der Zwischenkriegszeit. Accessed 09 April 2021. https://litkult1920er.aau.at/ portraets/leitner-­maria/. Wilhelmer, Lars. 2015. Transit-Orte in der Literatur: Eisenbahn – Hotel – Hafen – Flughafen. Bielefeld: transcript. Winkler, Heinrich. August 2005. Weimar 1918–1933. Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (4th rev. ed.). München: C. H. Beck.

CHAPTER 6

Precarity, Working-Class Literature, and the Written Presence of Objects: A Material Reading of Lucien Bourgeois’ L’Ascension (1925) Samia Myers

Introduction In the context of a diachronically situated research into a ‘poetics of precarity,’ this chapter will present a case-study about a French working-class author active mainly during the interwar years. Lucien Bourgeois (1882–1947) was an unskilled manual worker as well as a published writer of prose,1 short stories,2 and poetry,3 and a member of Henry Poulaille’s  L’Ascension (Bourgeois [1925] 1980); Midi à XIV heures (Bourgeois [1932] 2016).  Faubourgs (Bourgeois [1931] 2015). 3  Poèmes des faubourgs et d’ailleurs (collected posthumously in 2015). 1 2

S. Myers (*) Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_6

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Proletarian Literature group.4 Most of his writing depicts the living and working conditions of the unskilled urban working class in Paris and the Parisian suburbs in the first decades of the twentieth century. What interests me particularly in this body of writing is the way Bourgeois repeatedly draws attention to the work itself. He describes both the activity and the products (i.e., various material objects or parts of objects) of precarious labor. In giving precise accounts of the temporary and poorly paid jobs that he occupied in different factories or workshops, he contributes to publishing—making public—forms of labor that lack recognition, and hence visibility, elsewhere. In doing so, he resists the social invisibility of this type of labor and produces an act of writing which challenges an important aspect of precarity, namely, the social isolation of unskilled workers. In order to demonstrate this, I will follow a material approach and focus specifically on the written presence of objects—the written presence of the products of precarious labor—in Bourgeois’ autobiography, L’Ascension. In many ways L’Ascension, which was first published by the Éditions Rieder5 in 1925, is the autobiography of a precarious life. Unlike most works by French proletarian or working-class writers during this period, who tend to ground their narratives in specific labor spheres (such as the mining, building, metal or car industries), L’Ascension recounts Bourgeois’ highly fluctuating professional trajectory. The autobiographical narrator goes from job to job, some of which are short-lived and others which he carries out for several years.6 Bourgeois never had time to learn a specific trade; because of this, he struggled to find secure employment and worked many arduous, underpaid and impermanent jobs. “I knew no trade,” he writes early on in the text, “I had no experience in life […]. I had to do ‘anything and everything’ to earn my living, and I would not wish on 4  Henry Poulaille (1896–1980) was a highly active promoter of working-class literature in interwar France. He created the ‘Proletarian group’ [École Prolétarienne] as well as several journals devoted to the publication of Proletarian works. On this subject see for instance Chapman (1992). 5  Directed by Albert Crémieux from 1918 to 1932, the Parisian Éditions Rieder promoted several left-wing and pacifist authors in the 1920s (see Marie-Cécile Bouju 1997; and Albert’s Crémieux biography on the Online Maitron Dictionary (https://maitron.fr/spip. php?article21064). 6  This is also the case in Georges Navel’s Travaux (1945), though with a significant difference: Navel did learn a trade (he was a fitter) allowing him to find employment in a specific industry but refused to spend his entire life carrying out the same job. He chose instead to explore many different occupations.

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anyone to have to endure such a terrible fate” [“J’étais sans état, sans expérience de la vie […] je devais faire ‘n’importe quoi’ pour gagner mon pain, et je ne souhaite à personne de connaître cette affreuse destinée”].7 Thus Bourgeois lived in uncertainty, and his situation can be described as precarious. Indeed, according to Klaus Dörre, “the term ‘precarity’ refers to unstable and insecure conditions of work, employment, and life in general” (Dörre 2014, 70). Of course, in this case the use of the concept of ‘precarity’ is somewhat anachronistic. In recent works of social sciences (Le Blanc 2007, 2009; Butler 2009; Dörre 2014; Lorey 2015) ‘precarity’ denotes contemporary conditions of existence resulting from neoliberal politics. According to these theories, the proliferation of impermanent employment and the decline of social welfare since the 1980s have caused many workers to experience irregular wages, long-term instability and lack of security with regards to both insurance and conditions of labor. Thus precarity is often considered a novel condition” associated with “the late-twentieth century transformation of work from stable, full-time jobs toward a flexible labor regime” (Kasmyr 2018). Bourgeois’ experience of labor, on the other hand, is anterior to the dismantling of European welfare states and precedes even the instauration of welfare policies dating from the end of the Second World War.8 This means that he was not exposed to the gradual weakening of protective systems, the generalization of unstable employment and the decline of living standards in the way that contemporary workers are. Rather, he lived in a time where such protective measures either did not exist, or did so in a limited way. Nevertheless, several aspects of the living and working conditions described by Bourgeois resemble those experienced by precarious workers today. To begin with, his employment conditions were unstable. Being an unskilled worker, he had little guarantee of finding—and keeping—a job in a particular sector: because he lacked official professional expertise, he would always be a replaceable employee. Hence he often recounts his “hunts for jobs” [“la chasse aux emplois”] (Bourgeois [1925] 1980, 124) in the course of which he wanders across the city for several days in search of employment.9 Financial insecurity is also a recurring problem: on s­ everal  All translations are mine.  See Castel (1995). 9  It would be interesting in this respect to compare Bourgeois’ writings to those of Irish working-class writer Patrick Mac Gill, particularly his autobiographical novel, Children of the 7 8

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occasions, even when he had actually found employment and worked long hours every day, he mentions a feeling of ‘anxiety’ related to “constant financial worry” [“le ‘perpétuel souci d’argent dans lequel vivaient nos familles”] (ibid., 108). Moreover, he suffers from lack of protection: first, because he is not supported by any insurance system and secondly, because his working conditions are  often  dangerous. For instance, when he acquires a job as a warehouse worker in the railway, he is asked to sign a paper relinquishing his rights to financial aid in the case of an accident (ibid., 100). Concerning his working conditions, he is subject to danger and fatigue in the course of the work itself: while working in the railway, he falls sick from exhaustion, and during his time spent straightening skeins of wirein an iron workshop, he suffers from severe wounds in his hands (ibid., 100, 108). These elements echo Judith Butler’s and Isabell Lorey’s definitions of precarity, both of whom argue that the unequal degree of exposure to uncertainty and danger in different social groups is a key element for understanding situations of precarity. They distinguish between the notion of ‘precariousness’—a shared ontological condition of vulnerability—and that of ‘precarity,’ which “designates the 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” (Butler 2009, 25). Hence precarity, as Isabell Lorey puts it, is “the segmentation, the categorization of shared precariousness” (2015, 21). It is clear, from the biographical details and examples above, that Bourgeois belonged to those groups who are unsupported by “social and economic networks” and whose share of “symbolic and material insecurities” (ibid.) is greater than others. It seems, then, that the category of ‘precarity’ constitutes a framework through which Bourgeois’ experience may be understood. However, ‘precarity’ is a multi-faceted concept, and I wish to focus on the question of labor, and more specifically on the ways in which Bourgeois, by drawing attention to the activity and experience of precarious forms of labor, writes against its social invisibility as well as against the social isolation of precarious workers themselves. The question of labor and forms of labor is essential: it is precisely because he is an unskilled worker that Bourgeois can be considered to be a precarious working-class writer among working-class Dead End (1914). Dermod Flynn, the novel’s main character and first-person narrator, leads, as Ian Haywood has put it, the “disaffiliated, rootless existence of the migrant unskilled worker” (1997, 34) and is often seen wandering “out on the long road” (Mac Gill 1999, 153).

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writers. His experience effectively appears to be more precarious than that of most proletarian or working-class authors from this period, many of whom had learned a trade within a specific branch.10 Although this by no means signifies that they did not experience poverty and arduous working conditions, it allowed them to benefit from a certain degree of stability and to put forth a distinct professional identity. Bourgeois, on the other hand, exercised jobs that were not associated with specific professional knowledge and hence his work lacked social value and visibility. It is in this sense that I refer to the social invisibility of certain types of labor. As Klaus Dörre observes with regard to contemporary precarious employment: “Employment of this kind does indeed discriminate, because it does not allow employees to realize their potential at work, it is not gainful employment, and it is disregarded by society” (2014, 73). This ‘social disregard’ of the actual labor that is carried out by certain groups of workers appears to be a crucial aspect of the experience of precarity, since it entails that unskilled workers receive little (or no) acknowledgement for their labor and hence acquire no recognition of their specific roles in society. Both of these are central to philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc’s definition of ‘social invisibility,’ which he describes as “a process of which the ultimate consequence is the impossibility of participating in public life” (2009, 2). Social invisibility of unskilled labor seems, then, to lead to a more general form of social isolation. Another way in which the social invisibility of unskilled labor has to do with forms of social isolation is the potential exclusion of unskilled workers from traditional working-class modes of representation, such as strikes and protests, both of which rely on strong professional identities. These are the main ways in which labor can (and did, especially in the years about which Bourgeois is writing)11 acquire visibility in the public sphere. Yet Bourgeois’ constant change of occupation meant that he did not belong 10  For instance, Constant Malva (1903–1969) was a miner; René Bonnet (1905–1988) a carpenter; Marguerite Audoux (1863–1937) a seamstress; André Philippe (1906–1965) a founder; Georges Navel (1904–1993) a fitter. 11  Particularly in the spring of 1906, in the wake of the mining accident in Courrières (in Northern France) which led to a miners’ strike followed by a general strike on May 1st (on this subject see for instance Michelle Zancarini-Fournel 2016). By way of comparison, it is interesting to note that these events, whereas they do not appear in L’Ascension, are recounted in detail in Henry Poulaille’s Proletarian novel, Le Pain quotidien (1931). Poulaille particularly insists on the stage of the movement when different Parisian corporations rejoined the miner’s strike in solidarity.

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to any such distinct professional group, and his replaceability in the labor sphere meant that his position was probably too fragile for him to risk joining strikes or protests. Indeed, in spite of his growing political convictions and feeling of class consciousness, he mentions no such events in his autobiography, even though strong social movements—such as the 1906 miners’ strike and subsequent general strike—occurred during this period. Thinking, then, of Bourgeois’ situation in terms of precarity, and particularly in terms of precarious labor, allows one to realize that he belonged to a social group, that of urban unskilled workers, which even at this early stage of capitalism was relatively marginalized—a situation which may call into question the idea that ‘precarity’ is an entirely new phenomenon (Kasmyr 2018). This is why I chose to focus on the means by which Bourgeois makes precarious labor visible in his writing, particularly on his way of drawing attention to the actual products—objects—of precarious labor and the ways in which they are fabricated. I believe that such objects, because they carry no trace of the labor that went into them and no trace of the precarious context in which they were fabricated, embody the social invisibility of labor and the social isolation of unskilled workers. In L’Ascension, Bourgeois does not only tell the story of his precarious trajectory from one job to another, and the story of how he began to write and develop an acute class consciousness (it is this, and not social betterment, which constitutes what he calls his ‘ascent’). He also constructs detailed narratives of different sorts of manual labor and precise depictions of the type of material goods he produced when employed in various jobs. Rather than elaborating further on the different precarious elements in Bourgeois’ life, I chose to examine the place and role of these material goods in order to suggest that by writing such objects in(to) his autobiography, by telling stories of how a certain type of commodities are made, Bourgeois makes temporary, unstable labor visible and readable. Writing labor and narrating commodities are the means by which Bourgeois creates a space within which precarious employment may be perceived. By using an ‘aesthetic practice’ (Rancière 2004, 13) to establish conditions of visibility for that which is invisible elsewhere, Bourgeois realizes an act of writing that modifies existing modes of perception; he operates, as Jacques Rancière would put it, a new ‘distribution of the sensible’12 (ibid.). 12  “The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed. Having a particular ‘occupation’ thereby determines the ability or inability to take

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The Status of Objects in Working-Class Literature The question of the social invisibility of manual labor in relation to the status of the products of labor was already noted by Marx in the first volume of the Capital, when he remarked that “in the finished product the labor by means of which it has acquired its useful qualities is not palpable, has apparently vanished” (Marx 1967, 183). Indeed objects produced by workers inside factories and workshops—be they cars, foods, or iron wire—do not, once they have entered the exchange market and thus become commodities, bear the name of their makers, nor do they display the time it took to make them or refer back to the people whose time was spent making them. In this sense, not only is there no trace of the actual work to be found upon the commodities that consumers buy and make use of, but the individual workers are themselves rendered invisible. This means that as well as undergoing the hardships of material precarity in the form of arduous manual labor, underpaid work, and lack of employment stability, unskilled workers—even more so than skilled workers, whose labor and professional knowledge is recognized—are in some sense denied a direct relationship with the objects that they have made or contributed to make.13 Works of literature, on the other hand, are different sorts of products. They are marked with the name of their author and point toward the intellectual and verbal labor that went into them. What, then, of literary texts written by unskilled workers who tell stories of how specific objects— understood here in the most general meaning of the term, as materials goods responding to one or more functions14—came to be? Such a situation can be found in Lucien Bourgeois’ L’Ascension. I propose to observe charge of what is common to the community; it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc. Thus there is an aesthetics at the core of politics […] It is on the basis of this primary aesthetics that it is possible to raise the question of ‘aesthetic practices,’ the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to a community. Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (Rancière 2004, 12–13). 13  Such a complex and multifold experience of precarity confirms the idea that “definitions of precarity can include not just structural criteria but also the subjective modes of processing insecure living and working conditions” (Dörre 2014, 73). 14  For the purpose of this chapter, the complex distinctions between ‘object,’ ‘thing’ and ‘artifact’ will not be further discussed here, though they are a crucial topic within Material Culture research. See for instance Appadurai (1986), Brown (2001), Freedgood (2006).

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the ways in which Bourgeois uses autobiographical writing to create a narrative of precarious labor, and more specifically to compose stories about how commodities are made and about those who make them. In order to do so, I will pay attention to one specific object—iron-wire “destined to flower makers and toy makers” (Bourgeois [1925] 1980, 104)— which, at a certain time in his life, Bourgeois produced daily in order to earn a living. I wish to suggest that individual stories of commodities not only depict but also defy the social invisibility of labor and the social isolation of unskilled workers. By inserting commodities into narrative forms as well as narrative time, space, and voice, Bourgeois makes visible the different stages, the huge effort, but also the various social interactions encapsulated within material goods. Working-class writers are not the first to have written books in which objects play an important part, as is shown by the growing interest in Material Culture15 theories manifested by literary scholars in recent years. However, objects in working-class literature acquire a specific narrative status, since their authors’ and/or narrators’ main occupation is precisely to bring such objects into existence. Hence, to use a distinction formulated by Elaine Freedgood, the question here is that of the production of ‘commodities’ rather than of the ‘pleasurable’ consumption of ‘things’ (Freedgood 2006, 61).16 Bourgeois’ situation meant that he had to accept any kind of job and working conditions, usually in factories or workshops. These involved producing material goods, that is, producing objects or parts of objects which would then become commodities. In this sense, objects occupied an important portion of his daily routine and indeed of his life. It follows that they appear frequently in his autobiography: but unlike other, more famous literary renditions of objects, Bourgeois’ objects do not constitute a simple background or setting to the story, as they would in Realist literature,  See for instance: Brown (2001), Watson (2004), Freedgood (2006), Mills (2008).  This is by no means meant to contradict the idea that working-class characters in (working-­class) literature may consume, and hence possess and/or make use of ‘things’ of their own. As Victoria Mills suggests in her introduction to an issue of 19. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century entitled “Victorian Fiction and the Material Imagination,” “it is important […] that we attend to what is in danger of being excluded by the ‘material turn.’ Despite sporadic attempts to theorize working-class things, there is an inclination to focus on the representation of middle-class experience and exclude the working-­class who simply don’t have as much stuff” (Mills 2008, 10). Paying attention, then, to “working-class possessions” (ibid.), could constitute another way of studying the status of objects within working-class literature. 15 16

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nor do they metaphorically embody specific aspects of character or plot.17 Rather, they are what the book’s character and autodiegetic narrator have to make, have to create, in order to survive; in order to subsist as a character and as narrator. Such a relationship between character/narrator on the one hand and material objects on the other endows the latter with significant narrative status. It suggests that special attention should be paid to Bourgeois’—and indeed, other working-class writers’—objects in writing. The type of attention that may be given to objects in Bourgeois’ text has a lot to gain from a branch of Cultural Anthropology interested in what has been coined ‘object biography.’ According to its main theorists (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Bonnot 2015), an object should be understood as a ‘process’ and has to be submitted to a series of questions allowing it to reveal its ‘biography’ and thus make visible the different human subjects involved in its making, buying, trading or use. Even though their work is concerned with ‘real’ objects rather than with textual ones, ‘object biography’ theorists—much like literary theorists—are interested in the workings of narrative, since they intend to reconstruct the ‘life-stories’ of specific objects. The methods elaborated by these anthropologists offer rich theoretical grounding for an excursion into the literary stories of commodities written by workers, especially as these are often autobiographical and hence the objects are usually referential. ‘Object biography’ helps to frame the sort of questions which may be asked about these objects’ trajectory,18 such as “where does the thing come from and who made it?” (Kopytoff 1986, 66); or “how and where was the object made?” (Bonnot 2015, 173). To these, one might add: In what circumstances was the object fabricated? What sort of place was it made in? What type of effort went into it? Was it made slowly or in haste? Was it made in silence or in song? What did the making of it feel like? I believe the answers to such questions can contribute to making labor, and those who labor in precarious conditions, (more) visible and audible and thus “make salient what would otherwise remain obscure” (Kopytoff 1986, 67).

17  On the different statuses and functions—political and historical, for instance—of objects in literature, and the reconsideration of the ‘Realist’ and the ‘metaphorical’ paradigms, see Freedgood (2006), Caraion (2007), Lyon-Caen (2019). 18  Only the first set of questions posed by ‘object biography’ theorists, the ones concerned with the ‘production’ phase of the object, will be made reference to here; since these theorists then go on to explore the evolution of the object’s use, of its financial and symbolic value, and so on.

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Biography of the Iron-wire: Place, Time, and Voice I propose to apply such questions to one specific type of object which Bourgeois describes at length: the sticks of iron wire he fabricated while working in an iron factory in the early twentieth century. The job itself “consisted of stretching out, so that they would become straight and may be of use to flower makers and toy makers, skeins of iron wire” [“Notre emploi […] consistait à allonger, pour qu’ils devinssent droits et susceptibles de servir aux fabricants de fleurs et de jouets, des écheveaux de fil de fer recruit”] (Bourgeois [1925] 1980, 104). One of the things this sentence tells us is that once Bourgeois and his colleagues had done their work, the straightened wire would be used to produce other, very different sets of objects: toys or artificial flowers. Highly inspiring here is Arjun Appadurai’s advice to “follow the thing itself” (Appadurai 1986, 5) as well as Elaine Freedgood’s “strong metonymic” method for the analysis of textual objects, which also consists in “following [the object]” but this time, “beyond the covers of the text” (Freedgood 2006, 5). Indeed, if one decides to “follow” the trail of Bourgeois’ iron wire outside of the text, one will have to find out more about another set of objects—artificial flowers. In doing so, one may, as Freedgood puts it, capture something of “the fugitive meaning” of an “apparently non-symbolic object” (ibid., 4) and hence enhance our understanding of the critical and political aspect of Bourgeois’ work. One can decide, for instance, to find out more about the use and production of artificial flowers in the early twentieth century since, according to the chronology of the book, the events in the iron factory occurred sometime between 1907 and 1914.19 At the time, most of the workers involved in the making of artificial flowers—a specifically Parisian industry—were women. 20 The flowers themselves served mainly as ornaments for hats21 and the iron wire was used for their branches and stems. This operation is described in Madame Celnart’ 1901 Manuel du fleuriste artificiel:

19  As confirmed once again by Dominique Cottel’s work on Lucien Bourgeois’ biography (2016, vi). 20  See Claire Lemercier’s conference “La fabrique des fleurs artificielles” on March 10th, 2016 at the Paris Archives, as part of the Cycle entitled “Les arts du superflu, un luxe indispensable?” (available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLF6W_oI7Q0). 21  See again Claire Lemercier’s conference (cf. supra).

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The use of the iron wire does not vary: in every workshop it is used to prepare the branches and the stems. […] There are very few flowers in which these metallic stems are not to be found; therefore the iron wire, covered with cotton fabric, is considered the basis of the stem. L’emploi des fils de fer ne varie pas: dans chaque atelier ils servent à préparer les branches et tiges […] il est bien peu de fleurs où ces tiges métalliques ne se rencontrent pas; aussi regarde-t-on le fil de fer garni de coton comme la base des tiges[.] (1901, 62, 69)

It is probable, then, that the type of wire Bourgeois produced in the workshop would be made into artificial flower stems, which would then serve as ornaments for women’s hats. Yet neither the hats nor the wire would bear the name of a worker in Bourgeois’ position, nor refer to the work that went into them. Furthermore, since, according to Madame Celnart, the stems would be ‘covered’ in cotton fabric, the type of wire straightened by Bourgeois would not only be anonymously created but also invisible. By situating these sticks of wire within a narrative, then, and furthermore within a first-person narrative, Bourgeois constructs a space where the wire, and with it, the work and the workers, can be perceived. He forces them back into the perceptual categories of space, time and voice. Indeed, narrative can be defined as a succession of different events unfolding in time and space, involving a narrator, and a voice that tells the story. Precisely because he chooses to narrate the process of the objects’ making, Bourgeois makes visible their trajectory and in doing so, recomposes the density of the workers’ experience. Space Bourgeois gives a detailed description of the workspace in which the skeins of wire are straightened, and hence answers the question ‘where was the object made?’. Throughout his autobiography, the themes of obscurity and isolation pervade the description of the workspace. In this sense, Bourgeois both provides information about the context in which the sticks of wire are produced, and, by focusing on the social invisibility of this specific job, denounces the wider social isolation of unskilled workers. This can be seen clearly in the following excerpt:

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Our workshop was a kind of pit whose three openings, including the door which was elevated by a couple of steps, gave out onto an uneven courtyard enclosed by similar buildings. The corner which we occupied, L. and I, the “wire workshop,” was twenty meters long, including a section of the wall, and five meters wide, and it had another window, adorned with bars just like prison windows. The window gave out onto a smelter’s workshop, where we would go to read the time, for our boss had left no clock for us, and we were too poor, both L. and I, to acquire one. Empty boxes separated us from our companions and from the rest of the workshop which was occupied by a blacksmith as well as by drilling machines, cutting blades and metal workbenches; large quantities of metal bars cluttered up the floor and expanded and rose in various piles while up above, full of the smoke coming from the smelter, was a sort of large balcony converted into an attic, where a woman worked, making hair pins. Notre atelier était une espèce de fosse dont trois ouvertures, y compris la porte élevée de plusieurs marches, donnait sur une cour irrégulière, enclose de bâtiments semblables. Le coin que nous occupions, L… et moi, ‘a dresserie’, était de la longueur de vingt mètres, dont un pan du mur, et large de cinq, avec une autre fenêtre garnie de barreaux comme celles des prisons. Cette fenêtre donnait sur un atelier de fondeur où nous allions lire l’heure à une horloge, car notre patron n’en avait pas mis pour nous, et nous étions trop misérables, L… et moi, pour être possesseurs, même à deux, d’une montre. Des caisses vides nous séparaient de nos autres camarades et du restant de l’atelier où se trouvaient encore: une forge, des perceuses, des découpoirs et des établis d’ouvriers en fer; une grande quantité de métal en barres encombrait le sol, et s’allongeait et s’élevait en tas, cependant qu’en haut, recevant les fumées de la forge, était une espèce de large balcon aménagé en soupente, une femme travaillait à faire des épingles à friser. (Bourgeois [1925] 1980, 103–104)

The feeling of invisibility is conveyed here through the use of specific imagery. Since the work and the workers leave no trace upon the objects, they are presented as working in the dark, hidden away and living in utter isolation. Indeed Bourgeois and L. work inside a ‘pit’—in other words, inside a hole, or even a grave, invisible to passers-by. They are ‘enclosed’ by other buildings and have access to only one, barred-up, prison-like window. Working in a ‘corner,’ ‘separated’ from the others and surrounded by ‘smoke,’ excluded from the shared social convention of time (since the workspace has no clock), they seem to be irrevocably closed off from their colleagues. That the workspace is described so negatively has also to do with the physical arduousness of the job and the long-term effects it has

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on the workers’ bodies. This will eventually lead Bourgeois to give it up: “I lived in such a way for many years,” he writes, “until the day I began coughing up blood because of the continual shocks we gave to our bodies and was forced to seek another occupation” [“J’ai vécu de cette sorte pendant plusieurs années, jusqu’au jour où des crachements de sang, occasionnés par les secousses que nous donnions continuellement à nos corps, m’obligèrent à chercher une autre occupation”] (ibid., 105). The social invisibility of labor, then, appears to be an important theme in Bourgeois’ writing—and yet, at the same time, it is challenged by the amount of detail and information that is given about the atmosphere in which the wire is produced. Indeed, reading Bourgeois, while attempting to ‘follow’ the object, tells us the following: that the wire found inside artificial flower stems was probably straightened by men who felt as though they were imprisoned and whose bodies suffered a great deal; but also, that it was made alongside other objects, such as those fashioned by the smelter, the blacksmith, and the hair pin maker. The furtive presence of the woman making hair pins, here, may also point toward other laboring women, also involved in making objects to do with female fashion, such as the artificial flower makers. Time Having observed the ways in which Bourgeois both depicts the workspace and inscribes it within the object itself, I now propose to examine the question of time, which is crucial when entering into a narrative of labor. That commodities appear as if they had no story, means that they also appear to have no past. In this sense, they seem to be withdrawn from the perceptual field of time. Narratives, on the other hand, can be defined as a succession of events unfolding through time; they imply, even if they often deviate from it, a linear flow of time. In the following passage, Bourgeois contradicts the idea of the timelessness of commodities by inserting the ones that he had to produce into a linear temporality: In the morning we would set off, with our food packed into a bag; along the way, we always had some topic of conversation which we had not exhausted the previous day. […] Our task was simple; it consisted of stretching out—so that they would become straight and may be of use to flower makers and toy makers—skeins of iron wire. We would unwind the skeins onto a wheel, while walking between two hooks that were fixed upon the wall; once we

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had extended several lengths of a dozen meters each, we would ‘straighten’ them out with a lever, by pushing sharply against it with our hips and by stretching out our arms. […] We used steel rollers for the lighter wire, by pulling the wire through their slot with a clamp […]; seeing us both of bent double in this way, one could have thought we were hauling a boat down a river. Everything about this method was primitive and harassing; we walked for days on end, much like two poor rope makers, singing at the height of our voices in order to defeat exhaustion as well as the monotony of our labor. Le matin nous partions, nos aliments enfermés dans un sac; nous avions toujours, pour faire route, quelque chose sujet de conversation non épuisé la vielle. […] Notre emploi était simple; il consistait à allonger, pour qu’ils devinssent droits et susceptibles de servir aux fabricants de fleurs et de jouets, des écheveaux de fil de fer recuit. Nous dévidions les bottes sur des tournettes, tout en marchant entre deux crochets fixés à la muraille; quand nous avions étendu plusieurs longueurs d’une dizaine de mètres chacune, nous les ‘dressions’ au levier, d’un brusque coup de reins, en tendant les bras. […] On se servait, pour les fils clairs, de galets d’acier, en tirant avec une pince le fil passé entre eux dans leur rainure et dans un œil; courbés en deux, on eût dit que nous halions un bateau sur un fleuve. Tout cela était primitif comme moyen et harassant’; nous marchions des journées entières, pareils à deux pauvres cordiers, chantant à pleine voix pour vaincre la fatigue et la monotonie de notre besogne. (Bourgeois [1925] 1980, 102, 104–105)

Bourgeois recounts every single step of the process of straightening iron wire: first ‘unwinding,’ then ‘extending,’ and finally ‘straightening’ with a strong push of the hip. One can see that the job is described as a process because Bourgeois uses temporal indicators such as ‘once’ and ‘while.’ He narrates the different steps of the job in the order in which they occur every day; and he uses the iterative mode to convey the feeling of an endless routine. In doing so, he not only tells the story of these objects’ past, but also reminds his readers that objects—any objects—are composed of specific experiences of time; they are composed of the different ways in which time was experienced by the people who produced them. For instance, when Bourgeois writes that he and L. “walked for days on end,” he depicts the way that the fabrication process of these wires made Bourgeois and his friend feel in relation to time: they felt as if they never stopped walking, as though time was endlessly extended into one long effort, as though the work never stopped.

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Voice From the opening lines of the book, Bourgeois makes clear that he is writing to recount not just his own experience, but the collective experience of the working class, or ‘proletariat,’ which he feels he belongs to strongly. From the start, then, Bourgeois writes the group of unskilled, precarious workers into ‘the proletariat’ and elaborates a collective voice, inclusive of all types of workers. “This little book,” he writes, “is the autobiography of a self-educated worker”: The story of a man’s life is good and valuable for the reader only so long as it is sincerely told, and I have nothing to keep quiet about mine, nor to conceal: it is the joyless life that proletarians lead, it is our struggles, our daily humiliations that are to be found here, as well as the near religious hope of the close coming of our reign; and if someone can say then that I have an exaggerated notion of our role in the world, he will be wrong. L’histoire de la vie d’un homme n’est bonne et valable pour le lecteur qu’autant qu’elle est sincèrement racontée, et je n’ai rien à taire sur la mienne, ni à dissimuler: c’est celle, sans joie, que mènent les prolétaires, ce sont nos misères, nos humiliations quotidiennes que l’on trouvera ici, avec l’espérance presque religieuse de l’avènement prochain de notre règne; et si quelqu’un peut dire ensuite que j’ai un sentiment exagéré de notre rôle dans le monde, il se trompera. ([1925] 1980, 17)

By declaring from the start that the ‘story’ about to unfold is that of the ‘struggles’ and ‘daily humiliations’ of the ‘proletariat,’ Bourgeois asserts the sociological, political, and aesthetic singularity of his life-writing practice. The story will be one of the social and moral hardships of the working class, and it is as a member of that class that he is writing. Furthermore, he firmly situates his work within the literary genre of the autobiography by putting forth a strong ‘pact’22 of authenticity: the story cannot be but ‘sincerely told’ since the ‘struggles’ are both his own and those of the social class he belongs to. In doing so, he establishes the experience of working-class precarity—as well as the urgent desire to challenge some of its implications—not only as the topic of his writing but also as the place from which it originates.

22   On the ‘autobiographical pact’ between author and reader in life-writing, see Lejeune (1975).

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This idea of class and collectivity can be observed in Bourgeois’ depiction of the iron wire. As well as constituting a spatial and temporal frame within which the sticks of wire may be perceived, Bourgeois inscribes his presence, and his colleagues’ presence, back into the object. This becomes apparent if one pays attention to questions of voice—understood both as narrative voice and as the concrete use of voice through talking or singing—in the passage cited above. To begin with, it is striking to note that this passage is entirely written in the plural first person, although L’Ascension is an autobiography, a genre which usually focuses on the individual subject (Lejeune 1975). Bourgeois’ narrative not only provides information about the narrator’s own role in the making of the wire but presents the sticks of wire as a joint creation. Every single action in this passage is achieved collectively: not only every physical step of the work process, such as ‘unwinding,’ ‘walking,’ or ‘extending,’ but also every mental action. For instance, the comparison between the two workers and ‘two poor rope makers’ is formulated using the pronoun ‘we,’ as if it had been uttered—or thought of—simultaneously by Bourgeois and by L. It follows that these sticks of iron wire, instead of remaining anonymous and invisible, are made to tell a story of comradeship. Furthermore, both comparisons used in the text—when Bourgeois compares L. and himself, first to boat haulers, and then to ‘rope makers’—serve to extend this particular experience of labor to a network of invisible workers across the city, that is, to the urban working class. In this sense, the first-person narrative not only serves to assert the presence and the singularity of the narrator as the creator of specific objects, but it also underlines the fact that the fabrication of these objects relied on strong interactions and interpersonal relations and was accompanied by a feeling a class-consciousness—a class which, it is notable to mention, is (discretely) inclusive of women, since they also appear as workers, as those who produce commodities. The choice of the plural pronoun, then, within a text that firmly presents itself as an autobiography, reveals something important about the way Bourgeois experienced labor and about the way he wishes it to be remembered. Secondly, Bourgeois’ narrative works toward establishing the following: even though commodities have no voice to recount their own stories, they are not necessarily produced in silence. The iron wire fabricated by Bourgeois and by L. is marked with their voices, with specific uses of their voices. According to Bourgeois’ narrative, the two men have engaging conversations every day on their way to work—engaging enough that the

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topics cannot be ‘exhausted’ in a single day. Potentially, then, every piece of iron wire was produced in the midst of these conversations. Moreover, the work is accompanied by singing; the wire is produced in song. Bourgeois does not mention the title of the songs but specifies that they are sung “at the height of [their] voices.” This, again, reveals something of the circumstances in which the object was made: it was made alongside words, both spoken and sung. Bourgeois reminds us that manual labor, even precarious, unskilled labor, also involves words. In this sense one can suggest that these sticks of iron wire, and perhaps even the flowers and the hats that they served to make, contain voices—conversations and songs for instance—and that these voices are part of their (hi)story.23

Conclusion This chapter proposed a material reading of the autobiographical writing of a French working-class author from the first decades of the twentieth century whose living and working conditions were particularly precarious. Paying close attention to objects within a narrative of precarity—analyzing stories of commodities fabricated in the context of precarious labor (temporary, underpaid, and socially invisible labor)—allows us to reveal the critical and political impact of the act of writing precarious labor. By working toward the irruption of the invisible into the field of the visible (Rancière 1998, 2004), the irruption of the unheard into voice, and of the untold into story, such an act may challenge the social invisibility of precarious labor as well as certain aspects of social exclusion. I attempted to demonstrate this by following the trajectory of an object produced in precarious working conditions, both inside Bourgeois’ autobiography and sometimes beyond the confines of the text. Objects have stories; they have pasts. Working-class literature often tells these stories, and in doing so tells stories about the people—the subjects— who made them. Having read texts such as these, we as readers are given access to the words, voices, and emotions that objects necessarily carry with them. Hence Bourgeois somehow transgresses the social invisibility and the lack of social recognition which constituted (and constitutes still) the experience of precarious labor. By drawing attention to the written 23  And indeed there are other mentions of these iron-wire songs in Bourgeois’ literary works: he refers to them in two other texts—a poem (‘Malvina, la polisseuse’) and a short story (‘Souvenir de la dresserie’).

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presence of objects in Bourgeois’ autobiography, I hoped to show that a material approach may be of interest within the context of a collective examination of a ‘poetics of precarity’ across different historical periods and locations.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonnot, Thierry. 2015. La biographie d’objets: une proposition de synthèse. Cultures et musées 25: 165–183. Bouju, Marie-Cécile. 1997. Albert Crémieux et les éditions Rieder, 1913–1932. Lendemains 86–87: 99–109. Bourgeois, Lucien. (1925) 1980. L’Ascension. Bassac: Plein Chant. ———. (1931) 2015. Faubourgs. Bassac: Plein Chant. ———. 2015. Poèmes des faubourgs et d’ailleurs. Bassac: Plein Chant. ———. (1932) 2016. Midi à XIV heures. Plein Chant Documents 85: 44–76. Brown, Bill. 2001. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Caraion, Marta. 2007. Objets en littérature au XIXe siècle. Images Re-vues 4: 1–20. Castel, Robert. (1995) 2017. From Manual Workers to Wage Labourers: Transformation of the Social Question. London: Routledge. Celnart (Madame). 1901. Nouveau manuel complet du fleuriste artificiel et du feuillagiste ou l’Art d’imiter d’après nature toute espèce de fleurs. Paris: Roret. Chapman, Rosemary. 1992. Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature, 1920–1939. Amsterdam, Atlanta: GA Rodopi. Cottel, Dominique. 2016. Repères Biographiques. In Lucien Bourgeois, ed. Plein Chant, vol. 85, iii–x. Bassac: Plein Chant. Dörre, Klaus. 2014. Precarity and Social Disintegration: A Relational Concept. Journal für Entwicklungspolitik 30 (4): 69–89. Freedgood, Elaine. 2006. The Ideas in Things. Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Haywood, Ian. 1997. Working-class fiction: From Chartism to Trainspotting. Plymouth: Northcote House. Kasmyr, Sharryn. 2018. Precarity. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Accessed July 1, 2017. https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ precarity. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. Commodities in Cultural Perspective: Commoditization as Process. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Le Blanc, Guillaume. 2007. Vies ordinaires, vies précaires. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2009. L’Invisibilité sociale. Paris: PUF. Lejeune, Philippe. 1975. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil. Lorey, Isabel. 2015. State of Insecurity: The Government of the Precarious. London: Verso. Lyon-Caen, Judith. 2019. La Griffe du temps: Ce que l’histoire peut dire de la littérature. Paris: Gallimard. Mac Gill, Patrick. (1914) 1999. Children of the Dead End. Edinburgh: Birlinn Limited. Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. New-York: International Publishers Co., Inc. Mills, Victoria. 2008. Introduction: Victorian Fiction and the Material Imagination. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century (6). https://doi. org/10.16995/ntn.468. Rancière, Jacques. 1998. Disagreement. Politics and philosophy. Minneaopolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. New-York and London: Continuum. Watson, Janell. 2004. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle. 2016. Les luttes et les rêves: Une histoire populaire de la France de 1685 à nos jours. Paris: La Découverte.

PART II

Precarity, Materiality and Authorship

CHAPTER 7

At Home on the Stage: Toward an Affective Geography of Gentrification and Eviction in U.S. Cities Cynthia Stretch

As urban planner Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden remind us in In Defense of Housing, housing has always been in crisis for the poor, and in important ways the shelter poverty, accelerating eviction rates, and literal homelessness that we point to as “crises” are in fact “not a result of the system breaking down but of the system working as intended” (Marcuse and Madden 2016, 10). In 2016—the last year for which we have comprehensive data—2.3 million people in the United States lived in households that received an eviction notice; half of those notices resulted in people being unhoused through the auspices of the state (e.g., sheriffs, housing court). To give a sense of proportion: at the height of the financial crisis in 2010, estimates suggest that there had been approximately

C. Stretch (*) Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_7

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one million foreclosures on U.S. homeowners. That number has been matched every year for at least the last ten years by the number of renters who were successfully evicted from their homes.1 Some of these pre-­ pandemic evictions were surely a result of demographic shifts: the tech booms of the late 90s, and then from 2011 on, intensified the redevelopment and resettlement of city centers by upwardly mobile professionals in many cities. But the gentrification and hyper-commodification of housing that accompanied those tech booms can’t be reduced to them. Although it is too soon to tell at the time of this writing in early 2021 exactly how capital will respond to the COVID crisis, it is becoming clear that in the United States there will be another land grab made possible by shuttered businesses, massive (endemic) unemployment, and Trump-era tax breaks for corporations that will be difficult for the Biden administration to unwind—assuming that they want to. The stays on foreclosures and evictions, an uneven patchwork of policies enacted by federal and local authorities, are due to expire in spring of 2021, at which point unpaid rent will be due. According to the U.S.  Census Bureau, at least nine million Americans were behind on rent in November 2020, and a study by the Aspen Institute projected that when expanded unemployment aid and moratoria end, 30–40 million Americans will be at risk of eviction.2 Without sustained, coordinated activism, real estate development will likely accelerate as a preferred means of investing and parking capital.3 1  These data come from the Eviction Lab, an online clearing house of housing data run by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). Desmond’s team acknowledges that their data are incomplete. Although respected long-time housing activists like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project take issue with the Eviction Lab’s methodology—critiques that are valid and important—I am citing Desmond here because his work has brought the rates of eviction into the mainstream U.S. media. 2  Jobs with Justice Education Fund and Private Equity Stakeholder Project 2021. https:// www.jwj.org/our-work/research/taxpayer-subsidized-evictions. 3  Mapping the extent of the financialization of rental housing in the U.S. is beyond the scope of this project. However, the Jobs with Justice Education Fund and Private Equity Stakeholder Project provide insight into the magnitude of the situation. In January 2021, they found that just “nineteen corporate landlords that rent apartments, each having more than 50,000 units, control nearly 1.2 million apartments together; while the top 5 corporate landlords renting single family homes control more than 200,000 housing units. These large corporate landlords are more likely than smaller landlords to evict their tenants, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Board of Atlanta. These giant players have all prospered, not only from the fire-sale prices at which these properties were acquired, but from rents that

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Much recent press has been devoted to the commercial real estate market’s supposed “collapse,” as white-collar professionals choose to continue to work from their suburban homes rather than return to small(ish) apartments and long commutes post-pandemic. This might lead to speculation about the viability of gentrification efforts in urban centers in the near- or even medium-term. However, challenges faced by activists attempting to move those properties out of developers’ hands and convert them to social housing, for instance, suggest that capital, sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of “dry powder” (excess funds held for opportunistic investment), will not leave the real estate market any time soon.4 Moreover, financialization of corporate property ownership has made those developments increasingly difficult to track. Outrageously complex financial instruments shield speculators and investors from public scrutiny as they decimate households and communities with impunity. Eviction is the most legible mechanism whereby tenants are literally displaced, but as Rowland Atkinson writes, even those tenants who manage to stay put in gentrifying neighborhoods feel “a sense of instability and that the place was no longer a place that they recognized or felt at home within” (Atkinson 2015, 384). Marcuse and Madden argue that “If we want to understand the consequences of the hyper-commodification of housing, we need to understand the alienated psychosocial experience— the fear, stress, anxiety, and disempowerment—that the current housing system produces” (Marcuse and Madden 2016, 56). Although scholars of American literature have been increasingly attentive to the “psychosocial experience” of domestic space and its ideological valences, very few have focused on the housing system per se, on the places where the political economy of housing precarity intersects with literary representation. This chapter explores one small corner of that intersection by shifting the focus from “literature” to “literary culture.” Attuned to the distinction drawn by Maria Damon between a “cultural politics and cultural politics, with the former being effective and the latter being diversionary” (Damon 1998, 327–28), I examine how people in communities struggling with housing precarity find resources for their activism in the live performance of poetry, not just as poets but as audience members as well. have increased faster than inflation over the last decade, taking an ever-greater cut of workers’ paychecks” (Jobs with Justice 6). 4  See for instance, Konrad Putzier and Peter Grant (2020), Gianpaolo Baiocchi and H. Jacob Carlson (2021).

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One battle in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” of the 1970s resulted in the development in many states and cities of specialized housing courts meant to protect tenants from landlords who allowed properties to fall into disrepair. But, as a recent New York Times investigative report put it, in the context of neoliberal deregulation, “housing court has been weaponized” against the poor and has become a very effective “eviction machine”  (Barker et  al. 2018). In a system where it only costs $45 to file an eviction proceeding and where increasing numbers of housing units are owned by corporate entities, there are incentives to bring as many eviction cases before the court as possible. Increasing the volume of cases consequently becomes key to the profits of a network of lawyers, property management companies, and even the people who get paid to serve the required legal notices to the tenants. An untold number of people are evicted informally—the landlord withholds repairs, harasses tenants with construction, or threatens them with eviction and they leave. But even among those who are formally served eviction notices, the majority never see their day in court. They receive “default judgments” for failure to appear. The landlord can send a representative to court but the tenant cannot; the tenant must take days off work, often on short notice, to appear in person; child care is a challenge; and in most states, tenants have no right to legal counsel in housing court.5 All are massive impediments to fighting the eviction. The unavoidable and overwhelming bureaucracy experienced by those who are subject to eviction manifests the complicity of the state in this wave of precarization that radical housing activists deem “racialized dispossession.” The everyday interactions of housing insecure people with and within the hyper-commodified housing market generate identities—deadbeat, bad mom, welfare baby, loser. Being unhoused operates as a kind of habitus, inflecting, informing, and de-legitimizing the identity of parent, wage-earner, provider, adult. Because a legal eviction comes with a court record, landlords can screen for recent evictions. Sociologist Matthew Desmond sums up the effects in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City: “From thousands of yes/no [screening] decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones. Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided 5  Much of the activism around housing insecurity in the U.S. is aimed at passing legislation requiring the state to provide legal counsel to tenants in housing court.

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who got to live where” (Desmond 2017, 89). The discourses of free market capitalism and of the legal system built to protect the right to private property amplify one another to produce subjects whose attempts to “stay put” (either through choice or lack of alternatives) can be criminalized. Might spoken word poetry produce subjects otherwise? Spoken word is, broadly, poetry intended for performance before a live audience. Like the twentieth-century performance poets that came before them (e.g. the Beats, Black Arts poets), today’s spoken word poets “gather at nontraditional venues, express attitudes of political resistance, exercise ideals of nationhood and democracy, and proclaim marginality from dominant and official verse cultures [largely] through the performance of identity” (Somers-Willett 2009, 67). According to Nancy B.  A. Somers-Willett, whose analyses in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry I draw on here, spoken word and slam performances assume (and in some cases enforce) a complicated autobiographical lyric mode. In performance, poets are often judged—literally, in the case of slam—on the “authenticity” of their expression, by the extent to which they communicate the truth not just of an experience, but of their personal experience. The rules of slam competitions stipulate that the performer must be the author of the poem; the generic conventions shape poems that are presented and received as autobiographical.6 Somers-Willett provides a careful analysis of the sometimes problematic ways that slam in particular has come to depend on visual and vocal markers of race and, to a lesser extent sexuality and class, in its judgments regarding authenticity.7 I will take up this issue in more detail below, but it is important to note that spoken word poems are almost always presented as acts of self-proclamation before a literal audience, where attention to the speaking body is intensified through the physical demands of live performance (Wheeler 2008, 151). Consider then, the rhetorical situation presented by the spoken word poet addressing the lived reality of housing insecurity. Within the housing system, the speaker’s interlocutor is most often a property manager, a bureaucrat, or a judge who gathers details of the speaker’s life, reduces them to data points, and enters them in a high-stakes and asymmetrical decision-making process to determine whether she “qualifies” for 6  Somers-Willett includes the rules for slam competitions in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (2009),141–48. 7  See Somers-Willett (2014).

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housing. At a spoken word performance or slam competition, the audience is a “gathered crowd ready for aural pleasure” as Maria Damon puts it (Damon 1998, 324). And, crucially, the performer who takes the stage—even at an open mic event where anyone can sign up to perform— assumes the identity of “poet” for an audience who have little interest in maintaining the academic distinction between the poem’s “speaker” and its “author.” As Damon explains, slams and open mic readings “offer an important venue for grassroots poetic activity that rewrites the privatistic lyric scene into a site for public discourse” (ibid., 326).8 For Damon, “the world of poetry slams and open-mike readings, while not directly politically interventionist, perhaps, creates a public sphere that is healthily contestatory” (ibid., 327). Nancy Fraser’s elaboration of “subaltern counterpublics” provides a more politically nuanced lens through which to read the space of spoken word performance as an arena for the formation and enactment of social identities because it recognizes the “ways in which social inequality taints deliberation within publics in late capitalist societies” (Fraser 1990, 27). For Fraser, subaltern counterpublics are spaces “where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses… to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (ibid., 67). In “From Slam to Def Poetry Jam: Spoken Word Poetry and its Counterpublics,” Somers-Willett locates “counterpublic potential” in the “exchange of sociopolitical values between slam poets and audiences.” She has found that slams in particular are “organized by a shared value of difference expressed primarily through identity performance and its reception,” not necessarily by a shared experience of marginalization (Somers-­ Willett 2014, 3). In my analyses of three performances, I argue that the “counterpublic potential” of spoken word and slam may be further elaborated using the lens of “affective geography.” In his Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture, Thomas Heise makes the connection between material and discursive spaces, and posits that U.S. fiction is a site where “geographical uneven development is narrated and subjectivity, in turn, is spatialized” (Heise 2011, 53). Prose narratives of the urban “underworld” encode “abstract processes of capitalist 8  Somers-Willett (2009) and Maria Damon (1998) both trace the extent to which this identity as poet is oppositional vis a post-Romantic “inner-directed lyric tradition” and the academy-as-arbiter of quality and decorum.

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development as dramatic stories of embattled communities that are struggling to redefine themselves” against “discourses that have tended to treat spatially marginalized groups as incapable of organized, rational, and sustained positive agency” (ibid., 10). Heise reads the underworld narratives’ focus on bodies and the spaces between them “back into a critique of urban political economy itself” (ibid., 7). Although scholars from a range of fields have elaborated concepts of “affective geography,” Heise’s application of the concept to literary representations of urban underworlds is especially useful for my analysis of spoken word performance as a response to gentrification and the threat of eviction. The framing brings into relief both the ways in which “expert” discourses like those of technocrats and developers produce “spatially marginalized” people, and the sociality of affect where affects are generated and experienced between and among people in the shared space of performance. Denice Frohman, a well-known spoken word poet and slam champion, put it more simply: spoken word poetry, she said in a recent interview, “allows connections to be made in real-time. I think it helps us view each other as fully human. In other words, rather than interacting with issues … we are interacting with people … To say the thing that has been boiling inside of us. To give it a home” (Frohman 2014, emphasis mine). In Utopia in Performance, Jill Dolan reads the audience as a “temporary community” with the “potential for intersubjectivity” among themselves as well as with the performer (Dolan 2005, 10). In the video recordings of each of the performances I examine here, you can hear the audience speaking back to and encouraging the poet. Some performance spaces—especially those of slam poetry outside of tournament competition—are far rowdier and not always complimentary. In all cases, the quiet veneration of the academic or high-culture audience is dashed. Because gentrification and eviction are bound so tightly to the lived experience of space, of “place making” and, especially in the case of gentrification, of belonging, the content of the poems provides added resonance: the poems are about space; the performances take space. The audiences share that space, and perhaps make it a place that feels like home. In “Gentrification in 5 Parts: A Play on the Senses,” A Scribe Called Quess? a.k.a. Michael Moore, an educator/activist/poet from New Orleans, signals his intention to appeal to our senses—to help his audience imaginatively enter the experience of gentrification—but also to play on our senses, to mess with them, to disorient in order to agitate  (Moore 2016). Almost immediately, the sound of domesticity—coffee being

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ground—merges with the sound of new construction. The grind of gentrification has begun and it is difficult to distinguish between the sound of a barista proffering an absurdly overwrought beverage with a hipster view (the “cappuccino-vanilla-mocha-urban-sunset-over-Cypress-Hill latte”) and the sound of a woman with children being turned away from a rental property (“Sorry, ma’am, but we don’t have any vacancies for occupants of three or more”). Early in the poem, Quess lingers appreciatively on images of his community: the smell of furniture polish, the “scraggly-­ headed hopefuls” popping wheelies on bicycles, the old brown woman on her porch, “your mama’s favorite dish.” But those images are interrupted by the “rigid white girl’s jawbones” and the glistening paint on the refurbished building. In these juxtapositions, we can “understand displacement as a form of symbolic dislocation and defamiliarization” (Atkinson 2015, 385).9 In spite of the fact that the speaker has not (yet) been displaced literally, the loss associated with gentrification is registered through a barrage of sensory experience. The formal structure of the poem provides the audience with a means to experience the dislocation at a linguistic/syntactic level. We begin with the interrogative “What”: what is the unnamed tenor for the extended simile’s vehicle? What smells like ___, sounds like___, looks like___, tastes like___, and feels like___ all of the sensory images that follow? The answer to the question that structures the poem is provided in its title: Gentrification. But the interrogative is never repeated; the verbs representing the senses begin to operate as assertions framing sections of the poem: “Tastes like / Nothing…” It is as if the poet assumes that the role of the audience is not to answer the question, but rather to agree that yes, (gentrification) does taste like “Too much of everything you never asked for / And when you got it, it didn’t even apply to you.” The structuring use of similes is also telling here. Throughout the poem, Quess seems unable to locate the thing he is describing. The poem doesn’t follow a logic of substitution (i.e., gentrification is X). Rather the poet is grasping, using approximation, explicit comparison, to put the beast before us. For those being displaced, gentrification feels “like an 9  Atkinson is amplifying geographer Mark Davidson’s argument that the attempts of geographers and economists to “count” the number of people who are literally displaced from “abstract and commodified space” during processes of gentrification obfuscates “the social relations bound up in (urban) space and, importantly, the vital role these play in the attempt to create place and dwell” (Mark Davidson 2009, 232).

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eerie sense of something ain’t quite right.” How, the poet asks, is he to “identify what keeps disappearing” Like a floorboard slipped from under your feet Then, the whole room Then, the whole house Then all of a sudden brand-new floor board, brand-new house, but no more You.

In this section of the poem, Quess has been toggling between the first and what seems to be the generic second person. But he explicitly includes members of the audience in the community threatened with symbolic, if not literal displacement when he gestures to the crowd as he says “You.” The audience acknowledges the gesture with scattered applause and a collective moan. The people in the room seem to feel the affective weight of the interpellation, and to feel it in common. In the first half of the poem, Quess has evoked community through images of shared, culturally resonant sensory experiences that develop the contours of the home place that is disappearing. Halfway through the poem he shifts—briefly and viscerally—to the first person: “Feels like colonization in a velvet glove / Like I think I’m getting fucked but I’m not quite sure.”10 Here he establishes the historical framework for the poem, both text and performance. When he says that (gentrification) “Feels like never getting to come out the kitchen when company comes,” Quess evokes and repudiates the servile infantilization that we recognize as an identity produced by colonization as it clears a path for spatial dispossession. Then, in a tonal and textual shift, Quess inhabits and narrates the experience of a specific individual—the speaker—being fired from a real job in that literal and figurative kitchen. The effect is as if the speaker was both overwhelmed at the time and infuriated in the telling. The rapid-fire repetition of what “they”—unspecified and yet totally understood—“told me” leaves no room for the speaker to interject, to answer back, to assert his own subject position, to say “I.” At the end of the list, “they” seem to be assuaging their own guilt by perpetuating the fiction of opportunity 10  In one of the available video recordings of this poem, this section incorporates a reference to the toxic residue left in the wake of Katrina: “Feels like a slow burn that only melts all your skin off ten years after the fact / Like colonization with a velvet glove.” A Scribe Called Quess, “Gentrification in 5 Parts: A Play on the Senses,” YouTube video, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvL2nYZrb2I.

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promulgated by developers: “told me go apply at the shop ‘round the corner / Only wasn’t no shop around the corner.” Here, the audience reacts audibly to Quess’s rendering of what they recognize as politicians’ empty promises to deliver jobs as compensation for lost communities and affordable housing. The violence of that compensatory gesture is driven home when Quess shifts perspective to ventriloquize “them”—the capitalist/technocrat/ politician, vocally coded as white—and says, “Your kids can stay.” Here the poem draws on the specific history of post-Katrina New Orleans where nearly the entire public school system was placed under state control, and the “reform agenda” that followed opened the doors of the schools to corporations and “education entrepreneurs.”11 When Quess adopts the vocal register of “them,” he introduces an element of what Somers-Willett describes as an “ironic performance” where “all of the physical and vocal markers of identity [the poet] embodies” operate as a foil for the persona (Somers-Willett 2014, 7). In the voice of the persona, Quess emphasizes that the neighborhood children can stay, but he refers to them as “Your kids.” The second person feels plural. The audience, already addressed as those who are “disappearing,” are called forth again, this time as parents whose children will be subjected to an educational system that, in service to the same forces gentrifying the community, will erase their own history in favor of the colonizers’ history. Still voicing the capitalist/technocrat/ politician at the end of the poem, Quess insists that the children educated in the shiny schools will “know” who has the power to dispossess them. The repetition of “always” seems to give the colonizers the last word, projecting their power into an infinite future. But the ironic embodiment draws attention to the exchange of sociopolitical values that for Somers-­ Willett is the slam’s most important “extraliterary aspect, one that galvanizes its counterpublic potential” (ibid., 3). In the non-deliberative, shared space of stage and audience and in the shared time of the performance itself, Quess is an embodied and self-proclaimed member of a community being displaced. With and for his critically engaged audience, he is also a poet whose work contributes to a culture that will not be eradicated. “Your children” will “know” their oppressors, and will also

11  American Federation of Teachers, Introduction to “The Track Record of the New Orleans Schools after Katrina,” https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/wysiwyg/no_ intro.pdf; Gary Sernovitz (2018).

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learn to recognize them as such in the territorial politics whereby precarity is both produced and normalized. Slam and spoken word poet Roya Marsh also employs personae in “Gentry-Phi-Cation” to enact the identities that are produced by and against the forces of gentrification. But instead of ventriloquizing the developers—coded white and male for Quess—Marsh incorporates distinctly African-American cultural forms—step (or drill) and the spiritual— to suggest a kind of evasiveness and resilience rooted firmly in the African-American community. Like Quess, Marsh stages a conflict between white developers and Black residents; however, the layering of personae incorporates the internal struggles faced by those for whom the displacement of gentrification is aligned with other forms of violent dispossession, dislocation, and death. Marsh performed “Gentry-Phi-Cation” at the Women of the World Poetry Slam (WoWPS) in 2015, where she won second place. The performance begins and ends with Marsh singing “I’m Buildin’ Me a Home,” a song whose lyrics introduce the question of housing that will organize Marsh’s interrogation of white supremacy in contemporary America. Because the song is a traditional spiritual, Marsh also evokes the complex history of African-American spirituality as an overdetermined site of cultural assimilation as well as a powerful source of personal and communal resilience. This latter tangle of meaning may have been reinforced by the song’s inclusion in the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze. As suggested by Taryn Finley, in her HuffPost review of Marsh’s WoWPS performance, Marsh saw the film’s story of a group of students at a historically Black college who struggle to reconcile their political commitments with inherited forms of internalized oppression as an analogue of sorts to “the fight black people in these gentrifying communities face of whether to stand up against it or become a product of it” (Finley 2015). In the context of the performance, the song asks whether the residents of the gentrifying community need to put their hopes for a stable, earthly homeplace on hold—in hopes that they will find their heavenly home in the hereafter—and also registers the rage that the question itself provokes. Marsh’s resonant alto gives way abruptly to the cadence of a step drill being shouted: “Gentry, Gentri-Phi- / Gentry-Phi-Cation.” The connections to African-American Greek traditions continue when Marsh, taking on the presentation style of a pledge to a sorority, addresses an imagined interlocutor whose title, following the conventions of the form, is hyperbolic in content and tone. “Goooood Evening,” the pledge cries. But

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Marsh tucks the critique and the question into the honorific: “Goooood Evening, All-Mighty / Big Sister, Uncle Tom, Ma’am!” What comes next is the pledge itself, still in cadence, where the persona takes on the role of an Uncle Tom, promising to further the interests of the white ruling class. Efforts to repair “deteriorated urban property,” to make a home that is safe and comfortable, play into the hands of developers whose practices sustain structures of racial and class oppression. But her invocation of Uncle Tom also undercuts the seeming enthusiasm of the step team’s “Gentry, Gentry-Phi, Gentry-Phi-Cation!” When she swears to “uphold the mission” of gentrification, her audience reads a kind of minstrelsy performed as such, as if to say, “Here is the developers’ fantasy: unhoused black people performing sanitized blackness and looking for their home in heaven.” The shift in voice and tone that follows suggests that Marsh herself has other ideas. She turns on her imagined interlocutor and produces a set of accusations that connect the commodification of housing directly to the drug wars and racial profiling. The racial tensions that Quess marked with the “rigid white girl’s jawbones” surface here when “some hipsters in coke-bottle glasses and chewed-up Converse / double-clutch their purse when I walk by / tighter than a church mother holds her Bible.” Marsh identifies the process of gentrification as it is happening. Relegated to urban centers far from decent jobs through redlining and other forms of de facto and de jure racial segregation, African Americans have been cut off from opportunities to build wealth through property ownership.12 The sign that those same urban neighborhoods are targets for (re)investment are the “hipsters” whose “chewed-up Converse”—in sharp contrast an African-American sneaker culture that values the display of expensive and pristine shoes—contribute to a performance of bohemian poverty belied by the fact that the hipsters can afford the rising rents. Riffing on the use of the word “projects” to designate social housing developments in popular speech, Marsh recognizes that gentrification is in fact a project, “an enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.” For the project of “white-washing” her own neighborhood, Marsh says, the developers earn the highest mark, an “A+.” “And yeah, my people push crack rock,” she says to an imagined interlocutor, as if anticipating the technocratic invocation of the crack epidemic 12  For a comprehensive overview of the active role of government in racial segregation in the United States, see Richard Rothstein (2017).

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as a justification for the destruction of so-called “blighted” neighborhoods through urban renewal. She acknowledges the drug’s devastation but points out that “that rock landed on us.” The riff on ownership and identity that follows—“We don’t own any planes. / We don’t own any names”—ends by naming the white police officer who shot Michael Brown in 2014. She ties that event to the long history of police shootings of Black people but ends the section with a tone of defiance. “No [officer], I will not sell loosies on corners,” she promises. But then with the next breath, she reconsiders: “Fuck it, I will not not sell loosies on the corners.” The force of the expletive here reads two ways. On one hand, she seems to be saying that selling loose joints is both a means of economic survival and an assertion of her right to the space of her own neighborhood. On the other hand, she knows that as a Black person, any infraction real or imagined, can get her killed, so “Fuck it,” what difference does it make? “Either way, [she] might die.” Marsh’s “I” may be evicted, harassed, incarcerated, or killed—outcomes that she makes clear are available to the state in service to capital eager to “white-wash the ‘hood’.” This accusatory voice seems positioned structurally and tonally as Marsh’s autobiographical “I.” For the audience of the WoWPS, the analysis of exploitation and the expression of rage, especially along axes of race and gender, would not be a surprise. Quite the contrary. When she returns to the voice of the seemingly obsequious acolyte thankful for upscale bistros and frozen yogurt, the segue is death. “Speaking of death, / thank you for replacing that Crown Fried Chicken / With a bistro with overpriced craft beers.” At this point, the speaker’s sarcasm is overt. She is not thankful. She recognizes that the cultural goods have been stolen, replaced by brand names like Starbucks and Fro-Yo. One of the lines that calls forth the most vocal response from the audience follows: “Fuck yeah, I signed that petition to stop the construction of Starbucks / …with a fake name.” While her poem in performance calls out the crimes, it also notes the evasive practices that she has developed to mitigate the real dangers of being Black and poor in the United States. In the comments posted to the YouTube video of her performance, a secondary audience of sorts weighs in, interacting not just with the poem, but with each other as well. The appreciations of this line generated the most “likes.” One viewer, commiserating from Brixton about “neighborhoods… full of history and personality” being taken over by Starbucks, elicited a response from another viewer who pointed him toward a Facebook group of anti-eviction activists. Two of the commenters clearly

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identified with the practice of signing a petition with a fake name; one added “I died when she said that #ilovemypeople.” The acolyte persona at the end, again chanting in cadence, this time shortening “gentrification” into call letters “G Phi C” like the Greek letters of a sorority, pledges to “make a home of stolen goods.” This persona is a foil for the autobiographical I, but in Marsh’s poem, the persona is strategic and evasive as well as oppositional. The final refrain, again from the gospel song, now carries a clearer political valence—closer to the spirituals sung by enslaved people, evidence of the creativity born of exploitation, calling forth and embodying resilience. The final performance I want to examine, “1034 Lincoln Pl.” by Nick Petrie, broadens the range of subject positions that spoken word might take up and take on as it functions as or in a counterpublic sphere.13 Here, the poet’s project is in large measure to call attention to the fact that he is not subaltern, that he speaks from a position of privilege. Petrie’s use of irony is squarely aimed at his audience of progressive college students steeped in social media who value self-awareness, but who are at the same time hyper-aware of the fact that they are supposed to value self-awareness. Set in a laundromat in a gentrifying neighborhood, the poem seems to be in conversation with the poems by Quess and Marsh given its attention to the same markers of change. The subject is still gentrification, but the difference in perspective is clear; this time the speaker is the hipster with the coke-bottle glasses listening as his white friends at the cookout complain about the wave of gentrifiers following them: “Fuck these hipsters / You know when we moved in / We were the only white people on the whole block” (Petrie 2012b). Of the three performances I have attended to here, this last is the one that best represents the role of the audience in a poetry slam. The audience is raucous and vocal, and, as Petrie is taking the stage, they are taunting him good-naturedly: “Stay hydrated!” they shout, and “You’ve got the team on your back,” reminding all that this is a competition. As the contours of the poem’s work become clearer, the comments and snaps suggest that the audience appreciates Petrie’s analogy comparing gentrification to colonization and conquest. When he makes explicit the will-to-­ colonize in the friends’ conversation asking, “[D]id Pizzaro claim he knew the ‘Real Peru’?” the crowd erupts in snaps, laughs, and at least one “oh, shit!” (Petrie 2012a). We can witness what Somers-Willett would call the  The title of the poem is an address, with the abbreviation “Pl.” for “Place.”

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“open critique and debate about a poem and its subject matter” where the “attitude of resistance and tension helps to construct and define the people’s culture [the performance] claims to celebrate” (Somers-Willett 2009, 41). However, Petrie’s project is not to call out others’ bad actions, but rather to recognize the extent to which he is implicated. With a not-so-­ subtle nod toward his relatively privileged audience, he describes the gentrifiers “Shrouded in artist, / radical / self-aware,” and acknowledges that he is “their scout.” He knows he’s part of the problem, but can’t figure out how to respect the history of the oppressed without repeating it while hiding “behind the harmonica rollick / Of someone else’s blues.” He insists that “This is not about guilt” because alone guilt “paralyzes and does nothing.” He is concerned about where he can put his privileged, white, male body. The poem ends after the insight that no matter where the poet puts his individual body, “the rent goes up.” We are left with the “vain hope” of laundering the history of Western Civilization. But the insight about the rent holds promise: Self-awareness matters, but the question that has to be answered is why does the rent go up? Elsewhere, I have focused on the disappearance of the landlord in twentieth-century U.S. fiction as a formal attempt by authors to account for increased economic abstraction.14 In that context, the spoken word poets’ name-dropping of Starbucks and Whole Foods, along with Christopher Columbus—what seem to be tropes in spoken word and slam about gentrification—can be read as attempts to find the antagonist behind the digital wall of finance capital. As easy as they are to hate, those cappuccino-­ vanilla-mocha-urban-sunset-over-Cypress-Hill lattes bear only a metonymic relation to the speculators; they mark the trail but don’t themselves cause the hyper-commodification of housing that drives gentrification that drives eviction that unhouses and disrupts the “homeplaces” where resistance might be nurtured (hooks 1990, 42). Perhaps this elision suggests the limits of spoken word considered as a textual form. However, my work so far convinces me that spoken word performance can be a productive mode of the sort called for by Mark Purcell in “Our New Arms.” Citing as exempla the Occupy and indignados movements of the last ten years, Purcell urges us to “wean ourselves off of our ressentiment and move 14  Stretch, Cynthia. Forthcoming. “Maybe There’s Nobody to Shoot”: The Disappearing Landlord in 20th-Century U.S. Fiction. In American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire, eds. Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez. Leiden: Brill.

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beyond our debilitating obsession with negating neoliberalism” (Purcell 2016, 620) in order to discover “[w]ho we are capable of becoming, together” (ibid., 613). To be sure, spoken word and slam poets call out the racialized dispossession and symbolic violence of gentrification, of neoliberal un-homing. But on stage, the poets also occupy space in order to use it—to stand up as and for themselves as they wish to be and in so doing find an audience through which to make connections in real time, to reconstitute or locate a stance as agent and/in community.

Bibliography American Federation of Teachers, Introduction to “The Track Record of the New Orleans Schools after Katrina”. Accessed December 11, 2020. aft.org/sites/ default/files/wysiwyg/no_intro.pdf. Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Accessed January 19, 2019. antievictionmap. com/about. Atkinson, Rowland. 2015. Losing One’s Place: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change, Market Injustice and Symbolic Displacement. Housing, Theory and Society 32 (4): 373–388. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, and H.  Jacob Carlson. 2021. What Happens When 10 Million Tenants Can’t Make Rent? New York Times, March 3. Accessed March 3, 2021. nytimes.com/2021/03/03/opinion/affordable-­housing-­federal-­ agency.html. Barker, Kim, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Grace Ashford, and Sarah Cohen. 2018. The Eviction Machine Churning Through New  York City. New York Times, May 20. Accessed May 20, 2018. nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/20/ nyregion/nyc-­affordable-­housing.html. Damon, Maria. 1998. Was That ‘Different,’ ‘Dissident’ or ‘Dissonant’? Poetry (n) the Public Spear: Slams, Open Readings, and Dissident Traditions. In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein, 324–342. Oxford: Oxford Press. Davidson, Mark. 2009. Displacement, Space and Dwelling: Placing Gentrification Debate. Ethics, Place and Environment 12 (2): 219–234. Desmond, Matthew. 2017. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Broadway Books. The Eviction Lab. Accessed December 11, 2020. evictionlab.org/. Dolan, Jill. 2005. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press. Finley, Taryn. 2015. Poet Breaks Down Gentrification and Its Ripple Effects on Black Communities. HuffPost.com, September 9. Accessed December 11, 2020. huffpost.com/entry/poet-­breaks-­down-­gentrification-­and-­its-­ripple-­ effect-­on-­black-­lives_n_55f04df3e4b03784e2774f33.

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Fraser, Nancy. 1990. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text 26 (25): 56–80. Frohman, Denice. 2014. Denice Frohman Slams Down Oppression with Survival Poetry. Interview by Adrian, Autostraddle, April 14. Accessed January 31, 2021. autostraddle.com/national-­poetry-­month-­denice-­frohman-­slams-­down-­ oppression-­with-­survival-­poetry-­233592/. Heise, Thomas. 2011. Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. hooks, bell. 1990. Homeplace (A Site of Resistance). In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 41–49. Boston: South End Press. Jobs with Justice Education Fund and Private Equity Stakeholder Project. 2021. Taxpayer-Subsidized Evictions: Corporate Landlords Pocket Sweetheart Deals, Subsidies and Tax Breaks While Evicting Struggling Families. Accessed January 31, 2021. jwj.org/our-­work/research/taxpayer-­subsidized-­evictions. Marcuse, Peter, and David Madden. 2016. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. New York: Verso. Marsh, Roya. 2015. Gentry-Phi-Cation. Accessed January 2, 2019. youtube. com/watch?v=flLPGFZ8tgg. Moore, Michael. 2016. Gentrification in 5 Parts: A Play on the Senses. Accessed January 2, 2019. youtube.com/watch?v=St3xywSeS5E. Petrie, Nick. 2012a. 1034 Lincoln Pl. Accessed January 2, 2019. youtube.com/ watch?v=yhTjjm59E2s&list=PLQmdkI71hA3pdLySaMmk00MQXsPi74D8k &index=24&t=0s. ———. 2012b. 1034 Lincoln Pl. Reprinted in Loud Noise from Impact: An Auto-­ Ethnographic Exploration of the New  York City Slam Poetry Community. Wesleyan University, Honors Thesis. Purcell, Mark. 2016. Our New Arms. In The Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy, 613–622. London: Routledge Press. Putzier, Konrad, and Peter Grant. 2020. Real-Estate Investors Eye Potential Bonanza in Distressed Sales. Wall Street Journal, April 7. wsj.com/articles/ real-­estate-­investors-­eye-­potential-­bonanza-­in-­distressed-­sales-­11586260801. Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Norton. Sernovitz, Gary. 2018. What New Orleans Tells Us About the Perils of Putting Schools on the Free Market. The New Yorker, July 30. Accessed December 11, 2020. newyorker.com/business/currency/what-­new-­orleans-­tells-­us-­about-­the-­ perils-­of-­putting-­schools-­on-­the-­free-­market. Somers-Willett, Susan B.A. 2009. The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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———. 2014. From Slam to Def Poetry Jam: Spoken Word Poetry and its Counterpublics. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 10 (3–4): 1–24. Stretch, Cynthia. Forthcoming. “Maybe There’s Nobody to Shoot”: The Disappearing Landlord in 20th-Century U.S.  Fiction. In American Houses: Literary Spaces of Resistance and Desire, eds. Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez. Leiden: Brill. Wheeler, Lesley. 2008. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Common Language: Academics Against Networking and the Poetics of Precarity Sarah Bernstein and Patricia Malone

In her introduction to Issue #1 of the zine Academics Against Networking (AAN), Nell Osborne writes that the project “was conceived as a creative and critical response to the ongoing institutionalization of Networking Culture within academia; as a site of resistance to the banal perversion of language & knowledge that it enforces” (Osborne 2019, 3). AAN ran for two issues in 2019–2020; it was put together by Osborne and Hilary White, then U.K.-based PhD researchers working on experimental writing by women, and circulated for the cost of postage. The issues comprise lyric essays, poetry, prose, Tweets, images, and combinations thereof that respond in some way to the provocation of the title. The contributions take a wide variety of formal approaches, but they share much in common: each writes against networking’s instrumentalization of grammar, against its impoverished modes of thought, and against the debased sense of subjectivity and community the logic of such a grammar engenders. The

S. Bernstein (*) • P. Malone University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_8

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question underpinning the innovative writing in these issues asks, as Osborne puts it, “What are the costs of narrating oneself as an academic commodity with these depleted words?” (ibid., 3). In this chapter, we read the vital contributions in AAN as articulating a poetics against and in spite of the market logics of the contemporary academy. In its form, and in its methods of production and circulation, the zine models a poetics and a praxis geared instead towards ‘the commons,’ which we define as what is shared: space, resources, and knowledges. Our foundational suggestion here, then, is that the poetics of precarity, which we trace back specifically through the neoliberalization of the academy, has a much longer history insofar as poetic language has always expressed meaning in excess of the law, whether that language be in poetry or prose. What we want to explore here is how this excess does or might constitute a seizing of the means of production inasmuch as we recognize that language itself is a means of producing reality. What we want to suggest, then, is that the poetics of precarity as modelled by AAN constitutes a new grounds for the perception and creation of realities. In this account, we address this as against the ‘business language’ of the neoliberal academy, but in a wider sense we draw upon theorists such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde to acknowledge the necessity of removing hierarchies (whilst still recognizing expertise) and in treating language seriously as a perceptual tool.

3 Chords and a Guitar AAN is rooted in a punk-feminist DIY (‘Do-It-Yourself’) tradition and, like riot grrrl before it, operates according to an ethos and an aesthetic of spontaneity, community, and autodidacticism. Punk seeks to “disrupt or counter dominant capitalist networks of exchange and in doing so disrupt the ideology of value” (Malone 2021). As such, we find it more useful to consider ‘punk’ as a processual term or mode of practice (praxis) and so to see it as a means of refusing that “crisis of confidence in the future” Lee Konstantinou outlines as the definitive feature of the 1970s punk movement, which is markedly different in character and ambition to that future-­ building punk mode that emerged in the 1980s and after, particularly although not only in the United States (Konstantinou 2016, 106). Inspiration for riot grrrl praxis is often attributed to Kathy Acker, who famously told the young Kathleen Hanna that she should start a band rather than continuing as a writer or practitioner of spoken word; the

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reason given was that musicians enjoy a greater sense of community (see, e.g. Konstantinou 2016; Malone 2021). As community is central to the poetics of precarity we outline in this chapter, it is worth taking a moment to consider the full meaning of Acker’s suggestion here. Acker may have employed a radical poststructuralist practice (and an ‘amateur’ aesthetic that many have struggled to reconcile with her deeply theoretical engagement with literary criticism) but she came to it by way of modernism and the myth of tradition and her own dis/placement within it. Acker wrote out of tradition and wrote herself into it by so doing; she wrote to “present the human heart naked so that our world, for a second, explodes into flames. The human heart is not only the individual heart: the American literary tradition of Thoreau, Emerson, even Miller, presents the individual and communal heart as a unity. Any appearance of the individual heart is a political occurrence” (Acker 1989, 31). Thus Konstantinou’s account of Acker—his suggestion that the author wanted “reception without understanding, production and circulation without consumption” (Konstantinou 2016, 139), and that this exemplifies ‘punk’ modalities—requires some adjustment. Acker did not write to be read; she wrote to be writing. It is those writers she names above (and Ballard, Poe, Burroughs, de Sade, anyone who writes despicable books) amongst whom Acker sought to circulate, with whom she sought to commune. Acker’s texts quite simply do not care about their readers or rather, do not imagine the reader as the Other of the text. When Acker calls writing a ‘scam’ she means that the commodity form of the book is a scam, or that the transformation of the act of writing into a saleable object (and the ‘professionalization’ of authorship that goes with this) is a scam, whereby both writer and reader are conned. Thus the ‘amateur’ aesthetic of Acker’s textual assemblages is quite different to those literary forms of riot grrrl, most notably the zine form which draws closely and self-consciously on epistolary and diaristic forms (see Malone 2021; Spiers 2018). The zine is a communicative form designed to create community in its circulation, which stands in stark opposition to those commodity forms that circulate to create ‘value’ under the logic of capital.1 Despite the association between riot grrrl and the 1  This is not to say that certain forms of social capital did not inflect the circulation of these objects; Mimi thi Nguyen (2012) addresses the ‘commodification of craziness’ at length, as well as offering numerous other criticisms of the failures of intersectional practice within the 1990s riot grrrl scene.

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wider Olympia music scene, where faux-naïf stylings of K Records founder attracted no small amount of scepticism (see Michael Azerrad 2001), riot grrrl was a very different project. Within this project or process a spontaneous and self-generating community was created and sustained through the circulation of cultural materials that were autobiographical without being personal, as Lauren Berlant put it in her preface to The Female Complaint (2008, vii). Where Berlant posited “women’s texts” as “gendering machines” the specific basis of the riot grrrl project reformulates such understanding (ibid., 35). riot grrrl zines sought to build a community based in large part of the shared experience of gender-based violence and oppression, and here the debt to the second-wave feminist model of consciousness-raising is apparent. Even the term ‘grrrl’ offers a mode of thinking the female without assuming limiting definitions of ‘womanhood,’ although the aesthetic of riot grrrl zines was often based on a reclamation of reviled markers of girlhood (hearts, stars, ornate calligraphy, etc.). In this sense, the zine form within riot grrrl praxis can be seen as a means by which members of a certain ‘folk’ community might address each other without interpellation. Although Greil Marcus’ account of the folk community might not be entirely accurate in describing riot grrrl as political praxis, his suggestion of folk communities as those in which “artist and audience are indistinguishable” is important here (Marcus 2000, 750). Part of the reason for the lack of distance between ‘artist’ and ‘audience’ in riot grrrl is its political function: the use of shared experiences of systemic oppression, discrimination, and violence as the basis for a protest community.2 That the individual experience of these forms of harm is autobiographical, but that their effects are widespread and generalizable (i.e. connected to structural abuses of power, systemic inequities, and wider socio-economic and legal states of inequality) is at the centre of the ironic use of ‘personal’ forms (the diaristic, the epistolary, the poetic) as fugitive forms (after Fred Moten and Stefano Harney 2013) through which officially prohibited knowledges may be circulated, and, through their circulation, establish a politically powerful community whose protest actions are conducted outside the ‘formal’ sphere of the political. This process is a necessary reaction to the fundamental failures of ‘mainstream’ 2  As above, the lack of reckoning with intersectional experiences of oppression, discrimination, and violence was a grave failure that speaks to the limitations of consciousness-raising during the 1990s.

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political modes of representation and redress. The DIY ethos of post1970s punk from which riot grrrl took its impetus also relied quite crucially on independent distribution ‘networks,’ a pre-internet model of long-distance connection often traced back to seminal hardcore band Black Flag, whose guitarist Greg Ginn set up the SST record label in 1978, drawing on his own entrepreneurial expertise in the world of ham radio to use business models of networked distribution to circumvent corporate record labels and to release music, tour live shows, and promote artists. Others quickly followed suit, with Alternative Tentacles adopting a similar approach the following year and labels such as Kill Rock Stars, K, and Dischord becoming essential to the countercultural punk scene in the United States (see Azerrad 2001 for more). What is most significant about this model is that it demonstrated how the DIY ethos of punk—all you need is three chords and a guitar—could be transferred to other fields and could allow the circulation of countercultural materials without the interference of capitalistic organizations. In a sense, this model used business practice against capitalism, and, although the total success of these efforts is questionable (with the possible exception of Dischord Records), we might extend this logic to suggest that riot grrrl used punk against punk in forming a ‘minority’ protest community within these structures and practices. In a similar vein, we discuss below the way in which AAN makes use of the ‘resources’ of the university to exploit precarity or rather to see the liberatory possibilities in existing without the institution, which is to say, not being institutionalized. Thus AAN seeks to establish a community, which is a network form, against the rationalities of networking, often using the language of the institution against the institutional logics. In thinking about the formal capacities/ construction of the zine, then, the idea of appropriated or wilfully misdirected ‘resources’ is an important one, which might also remind us of the link between this textual form and Audre Lorde’s writing on self-care, which involves the redirecting of ‘resources’ (emotional, psychological, material) towards oneself in service of thriving rather than merely surviving. So too might we trace a certain mode of fugitive action, per Moten and Harney, in the liberation of knowledge that ‘belongs’ to the university through its translation into praxis in the form of zines. This draws from riot grrrl a politics of play(ing) that bemused as many as it delighted, as is documented in the review Molly Neuman reads over the intro to ‘Thurston Hearts The Who’ which scathingly asserts that ‘Bikini Kill are activists, not musicians,’ to which one might reply, ‘Isn’t that the point?’

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A Word of Warning Mimi thi Nguyen discusses at length the legacies of white supremacist thinking in riot grrrl, where she describes riot grrrl culture as built on “an aesthetic of access” and demonstrates the need to be careful that critique drawing on one’s own subject position (which is to say, a critical mode in which experience is allowed as a form of expertise, i.e. a testimonial critique) does not result in adjustments to the self rather than attention to systemic structures of oppression (Nguyen 2012, 174). This mode of ‘adjustment’ is likely familiar to many working within precarity (in the university ‘sector’ and elsewhere) and follows Sara Ahmed’s work on complaint; to name the problem is to become the problem, and so you can either adjust your attitude or face disciplinary action. While we seek to make plain that the use of the autobiographical mode beyond or outwith the personal is a core feature of the poetics of precarity as seen in AAN, it is still necessary to think through the difficulties that might arise through the re-registering of structural critique as individual distress, a logic upon which the institution of the university crucially depends to discredit and dismiss detractors. This story will no doubt be familiar to precariously employed readers who have found themselves seeking to combat issues of sexual predation, structural discrimination, or any of the other myriad abuses that proliferate in the atomized and atomizing academic system of the twenty-first century. Although any systemic built on ideas of singular genius, mentorship, and exceptionalism contains within itself the possibility of abuses of power (is practically built to enable such abuses, even), the situation in contemporary academia is distinct from earlier iterations of the system. There are a number of reasons for this, including the increase of fees (which, let us remind you, were set at a maximum of £9k—just as speed limits indicate the maximum speed at which it is safe to drive, not the speed at which one must drive, universities were not obligated to increase their fees); removal of the student cap (resulting in ever-larger class sizes); and the wilful mistreatment of skilled administrative staff that has seen many leave the ‘sector’ altogether, only to be replaced by precarious workers on a much lower pay scale. This leaves academics with more administrative work to do—which many of us are not very good at, given that we spent a decade or so training to be scholars rather than administrators— which is built into the role without acknowledgement of this lack of skill or ability. Even ‘permanent’ staff are made precarious, then, by being

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asked to do work they’re not good at; of course this impacts one’s sense of ability and dignity in work. Indeed, this generalized precarity goes further too. The myth of scarcity created by the ruthless over-recruitment of doctoral students in the post-2008 period has allowed hiring panels to standardize the exceptional, with a published monograph or book contract now considered a basic requirement for a permanent post. This increased ‘ask’ is also evident in the privileging of experience by hiring panels, which is itself a discriminatory practice drawn from business logics rather than scholarly ones: the ability to get a job has little to do with one’s scholarly aptitude, and while it is true that the ‘job’ of being a university lecturer requires no particular brilliance, the work of scholarship is quite different. This system disadvantages those who labour under precarious terms, disproportionately women and non-gender conforming folk, peoples from the global majority, those with disabilities, caring responsibilities, and other ‘real life’ circumstances that impede the smooth movement from one stage of study to the next. It also means that many precarious early career staff have publication records and teaching experience that would (and do) put securely employed staff to shame, which creates a gulf between academic generations, as those in secure employment (ever less secure as the latest round of redundancies shows) come to fear the general brilliance of those for whom the ladders have been well and truly pulled up. So precarious staff are asked to be extraordinary and to continually demonstrate their exceptionality, not least through laboring without the basic dignity of secure employment. Permanent staff are made to distrust younger colleagues by these demonstrations as well as fearing and resenting new modes of scholarship that might ‘expose’ their own inability to keep pace with innovations within their field (for instance, early career scholars tend to have a much more interdisciplinary approach due to the scope of their teaching, which often falls outside of their field of expertise). The myth of scarcity and the tactical destabilization of security through the use of redundancy and other managerial tools also means that permanently employed staff will often take jobs very far from their primary place of residence. This further damages morale and splinters any sense of academic community. And if anyone should complain? Well, aren’t they lucky to have a job? What we want to suggest here is that the zine form acts as an ideal textual vehicle by which to circulate complaints that reveal structural inequities without individualizing these complaints (the ‘tyranny of intimacy,’

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per Nguyen). In utilizing a form in which the reader is always kept in mind—because the text is designed to circulate but is not a commodity object—collected material can address the reader, which is to say, re-­ interpellate them with a hailing that does not force them into any particular position: the reader is acknowledged, but not assumed. Not a reader but a creator—a thinking-with that is also a call to action, not a passing on of knowledge but an invitation—or provocation—to do it yourself, make a zine, complain, put your ideas out into the world without the gate-­ keeping of peer review, torturous publication schedules, or nepotistic school-tie bonds. Further, where the cut up form that more properly describes Acker’s work draws directly on deconstructive practice (advancing the work of montage and collage often associated with modernist artistic practice), the zine—AAN in particular—relies on putting things together, on making common: this is, as stated above, a collective praxis through which fugitive knowledges about the academy may circulate without intentionality (without use). Nguyen calls zines minor objects, a term by which she also describes her understanding of punk: By way of a minor object, exclusion and normativity might be laid bare (though perhaps in no straightforward manner), and the contingent quality of knowledge or other claims fold under scrutiny. Punk as one such minor object saved my life (as the saying goes), because it gave me words and gestures for once inchoate feelings about the cluster of promises (the state and capital are on your side! the ring on your finger is a sign of love and protection!) that constitute what Lauren Berlant calls a cruel optimism. The good life, fuck that! (Nguyen 2015, 12)

Here we come to the crux of that ‘poetics of precarity’ we seek to outline in this chapter. Language, as we discuss below, is a tool by which we name reality and in doing so, create it. One of the reasons for the attention that has been paid to Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism” is that the term (if not its theorization exactly) seemed to give shape to a certain lack of imaginative futurity widely felt after the financial crash of 2008 (Fisher 2009). Sitting somewhere between the ‘popular’ and the ‘academic,’ as well as the ‘personal’ and the ‘political,’ Fisher was among the first to edge towards a new language of critique, or a more precise theoretical vocabulary for our moment of lived experience. We argue here that the poetics of precarity offers a way to liberate such critique from the normative

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strictures of the academy, namely by using the language by which the university re-presents itself as a business rather than a scholarly institution against its own normative grammars (here, that of ‘networking’). A poetics of precarity offers a mode of critical praxis by which a scholarly community may be created (and creative) against the network; a space where one both knows and does not know; and a site of connection despite that which would see us divided and conquered. A poetics of precarity might, we suggest, be empowering for readers and writers; might even allow us to smuggle this critique into parts of the academy where it seems it cannot go. Who knows?

Against Networking The epigraph to Issue #2 of AAN offers the following definition for networking: “(noun): the action or process of interacting with others to exchange and develop professional or social contacts; to experience a sudden taste of metal in one’s mouth” (2020, n.pag.). Networking is a noun: it is the process by which interaction becomes objectified, by which people become ‘contacts,’ sized up for potential use value. The curious grammar of networking also works to void agency: networking is not something one does (it is not a verb); rather it describes the process by which one might become the object of action. As Joey Frances writes in AAN #2, “Everything becomes the ways I have networked and been networked”: like ideology, the language of networking interpellates individuals into specific ways of being in the world. In an academic context, networking is the process of assigning a use value to those parts of academic culture that otherwise threaten to destabilize or even disprove the business ontology of the neoliberal university (Frances 2020, n.pag.). What Osborne calls networking’s “bad grammar” has an attendant structure of feeling, a way of being in the world: “the process of seeing is also the process of saying,” to gloss Gertrude Stein’s ‘Poetry and Grammar’ (Bernstein 2021, 213). In other words, one’s perception of the world is bound up with the language of its articulation. Dana Cairns Watson, in discussing how Stein’s difficult grammar ‘dishabituates’ readers to language, suggests that, “By writing the way she does, Stein conditions her readers to understand words differently than they have before. Once we hear differently, we can see differently. We then treat words differently, altering how others can hear” (Watson 2005, 7). Stein does this, Watson argues, in an effort to “change the ways Americans articulate their thoughts in speech, making

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room for thoughts that evade the binary pollster lingo of yes or no, approve or disapprove, guilt or not guilty” (ibid., 10). Unfortunately, as Hilary White’s piece in AAN #1 (2019) suggests, this process can also be used as a way of foreclosing meaning, of making meaningful social interaction impossible. White’s piece, entitled ‘Networking Event,’ highlights how the insidious grammar of networking conscripts those exposed to it into a specific structure of feeling. The poem imagines a two-day-long team-building gathering at which the speaker (a collective ‘we’) is trapped by a sinister ‘they,’ who make a series of demands that begin with the merely “off-­ putting”—“You must introduce yourselves with a list of achievements”—and end with those calculated to humiliate: “Tell us your biggest fears!… Now perform them in front of the crowd!” (White 2019, n.pag.). At first, the speaker(s) resist these injunctions, telling ‘they’: “That’s not going to work for us” (ibid.). By the poem’s conclusion, however, the speaker(s) “could only concede.” The space in between explores the process by which networking’s business language—its grammar—filters into and alters the structures of feeling of its subject. White’s speaker lays bare these operations in one of the poem’s final stanzas: “You are having so much fun, / I can see it! They had recalibrated our language to suit them. / Fun, we repeated and nodded” (emphasis in original). Here, the speaker connects the ‘recalibration’ of language ‘they’ have undertaken directly to a recalibration of feeling, via the medium of perception (“I can see it!”): saying becomes seeing, which becomes someone else’s reality. The language of ‘they’ in the poem is limited to single-clause imperative statements that reflect the tautology of what Nick-e Melville has called “Imperative Commands”: a kind of “institutional instructional language” that instrumentalizes both language and relation (Melville 2018, 6). Drawing on Althusser, Melville suggests that such language “closely conforms to the illustration of interpellation as getting hailed by an authoritative voice” (ibid., 62). That networking’s grammar is successful in recruiting the speaker by the end of the poem has partly to do with the way the imperative grammatical mood ‘interpellates’ its subject. Melville explains that the imperative has no subject: “having no pronominal subject makes [the imperative] applicable to all subjects who encounter” it (ibid., 68). In encountering these imperatives, the poem’s speaker(s) interpellate themselves: as Althusser suggests, we are always already subjects. White’s speaker(s) sense this when they admit that “By the end, we blamed ourselves / … / We wanted nothing more than to strengthen our network”

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(White 2019, n.pag.). Also characteristic of the imperative mood is its ‘tenseless phrases.’ Per Melville, tenseless here “means the infinitive is used with no specific tense assigned: it can be present and future at once” (Melville 2018, 68). The temporality of networking is, to be sure, so amorphous as to encompass and envelop both present and future. The final lines of White’s poem are: “We knew then it was about the process. We could never / stop forming the network” (White 2019, n.pag.). The network here becomes the horizon of the future: there is no beyond networking. And yet, the poem’s appropriation of the language of networking creates a kind of irony, in that in their repetition, these statements come to say one thing and mean another. The effect of this is “to have official language say something else in its own words, to have it say something that ‘reflects our real conditions of existence’” (Melville 2018, 19). This is Melville’s own project in his Imperative Commands: empty institutional imperatives are repurposed and reassigned meaning in subversive ways— among other things, the move highlights language’s instability. Melville’s is an approach also taken by many of the contributors to AAN, and it is one of the strategies by which AAN makes use of the ‘resources’ of the university (insofar as such a poverty of expression can be considered a resource). In identifying and turning the language and the logic of the university against itself, the pieces in AAN resist institutionalization. In being in but not of the institution (to paraphrase Moten and Harney), they gesture towards the liberatory possibilities in existing without the institution. Helen Charman’s ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,’ for instance, explores the widespread, but typically unacknowledged, problem of sexual misconduct in universities, in which senior colleagues (usually men) use their influence, authority, and prestige to engage in sexual relationships with students and/or precariously employed junior colleagues (usually women). Charman’s poem highlights the crucial role that institutional language plays in making this kind of predatory behaviour possible. More specifically, she highlights the way the absurd logics of this language are the grounds by which predatory behaviour can be hidden in plain sight, pivoting on the instability of language in order to create an atmosphere of plausible deniability. The piece juxtaposes the vocabulary of a university’s Dignity at Work statement with the copy for another kind of networking event: academic speed dating. In so doing, Charman’s piece highlights the vacuity of such institutional documents, and the incongruity of claims of

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commitment to the welfare and dignity of “the brightest and best” by institutions whose continued success depends on the subjection and silencing of its most vulnerable workers (Charman 2019, n.pag.). Charman’s piece is comprised of eight sections, with a final section subtitled ‘N.B.’ The poem’s opening section contrasts two passages of similar length: the first reads “Personal relationships between students and staff, where a member of staff has a professional responsibility for a student, should be avoided” (ibid., n.pag.). This same phrasing, or slight variations on it, is used in institutional Codes of Conduct in universities across the United Kingdom. Our own institution’s version of it differs very little. It is language that, in its institutional repetition, is supposed to be unexceptionable, and yet, in Charman’s appropriation of it here, the statement is qualified in a series of declensions that make its intention far from clear. This, coupled with the passive tense of the central verb (“should be avoided”), also defers the question of accountability. In an equation that is ostensibly highlighting an unequal power dynamic and attempting to set parameters to mitigate abuse of this dynamic, the formulation obscures responsibility and rolls back, even while it articulates, its own code of ‘best practice.’ The statement ends not with a full stop, but with a comma, and, after a stanza break, rolls into the following announcement: “I am pleased to send you further details of the second Research Leadership workshop: Academic Speed Dating, which will focus on how to network effectively in an academic context” (ibid., n.pag., emphasis in original). There is a clear irony in that what is supposed to be prohibited (using one’s professional relationship as a cover for an inappropriate personal relationship, often referred to, equally euphemistically, as sexual misconduct) is repackaged by the ‘Leadership workshop’ into something desirable. In Charman’s piece, academic speed dating pairs up an “early career researcher with a senior academic,” who will assist the former “to build positive professional relationships … critical to career success,” as we learn in the poem’s second section. The linguistic elisions evident here create the grey area that makes predatory behaviour possible: the proximity of supervision and the social, academia and dating, even the “hotel room opportunity”— which refers, we assume, to the longstanding practice of holding interviews in hotel rooms at international conferences like the Modern Language Association (MLA). These are not options: they are, like the imperative commands in White’s poem, injunctions to participate, to engage, and to subjectify oneself. After all, in academic speed dating, activities are “chosen at the senior academic’s discretion—.” This section,

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the poem’s seventh, ends on this em dash, a punctuation mark usually employed to mark a break in a sentence or to separate off additional information. This suggests there is something unspoken, something unacknowledged about the nature of this senior academic’s discretion. The word discretion has a dual meaning in the poem: it means both the power to decide or to act and the quality of being discreet. To have discretion here is to outline the rules of the game while also embodying them. In this poem, as indeed in life, the casualty of this enforced discretion is an unnamed ‘she’: “I think she left under a cloud,” one standalone line reads; “She’s always so upset about everything now,” reads another that opens the poem’s sixth section. These accusations levelled at her assign blame according to the rules of discretion: she was indiscreet (left under a cloud); she was out of control (always so angry); she was out of her depth. The poem’s title, which refers to the 1969 film starring Jane Fonda, burlesques the pyramid-scheme/scarcity model of academia while also providing a solution for what to do with people who cannot or will not abide by the codes of discretion. They shoot horses, don’t they is uttered by the character played by Michael Sarazzin when he is questioned by police about his motive for shooting Jane Fonda’s character, Gloria—the implication being: even a horse gets put out of its misery. The way the poem frames its subject—predatory sexual behaviour—in the language of the institution highlights the failure of the institution to reckon with its own investment in maintaining inequitable power relationships. Section Two opens: “The form is the content—,” which suggests that the content (the old story) will carry on repeating itself if the form (inequitable structures of power) does not change. The institution is “of course committed to maintaining Dignity at Work for the brightest and best,” a statement which tells us all we need to know about whose “dignity,” whose security, whose body will be protected.

Poetics in Commons What the pieces by White and Charman gesture towards is not a simple matter of laying bare, of uncovering the bad grammar of networking and its pernicious social logics in order to ‘raise awareness’ about the particularities of precarious employment in the contemporary academy. Instead, in using the language of networking against itself, White and Charman acknowledge language as a means of producing reality, and gesture towards the attendant possibility of perceiving and creating new realities via the

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medium of literature. We have asked elsewhere what a poetics would look like that “can challenge the logic of enclosure,” that is, challenge a logic of scarcity, privatization, and individualization; we called this imagined poetics a literature in commons (Bernstein 2020, 221). We suggest that AAN is an example of a literature in commons, both, as we have shown, in the way individual pieces treat language—as a resource to be re-­ appropriated, to be shared, and to be transformed—and also in the methods of its circulation—open to contributions, distributed for the cost of postage, printed on the university’s paper, using the university’s ink and stapled together with the university’s staples. We might read zine’s fugitive production and distribution, and its linguistic appropriations, as an example of what goes on in what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) call the ‘undercommons.’ The undercommons is the place of the “subversive intellectual” who recognizes both “that it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment” (Moten and Harney 2013, 26). The path of the subversive intellectual is to acknowledge that “In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of” (ibid.). To return to our definition of the commons (following Raymond Williams) as shared resources, spaces, and knowledges, then the undercommons is what is shared undercover, against and in spite of, in but not of systems that seek simultaneously to interpellate and to deny its ways of thinking and of being. AAN makes poetry in common; it dips into and renews repositories of language and form and, more than this, insists on a capacious mode of production. It makes space, in that it models ways of making that in turn help to ensure the conditions of reproduction for other fugitive art of this kind. AAN’s existence is also a set of strategies for future or alternative collaborations. The temporality suggested here aligns with a key aspect of ‘commoning’ (doing or being in common), as outlined by Stavros Stavrides (2016): “ongoingness,” or what Gertrude Stein (1925) describes as “A beginning again and again within a very small thing” (n.pag.). As an example of a poetics in commons, AAN signals a world-in-the-making rather than a world ready-made.

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Bibliography Acker, Kathy. 1989. A Few Notes on Two of My Books. Review of Contemporary Fiction 9 (3): 31–36. Azerrad, Michael. 2001. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991. New York: Little, Brown. Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke UP. Bernstein, Sarah. 2020. After the Good Life: Squatting and the Politics of the Commons in The Good Terrorist. Studia Neophilologica 92 (2): 209–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2020.1751701. ———. 2021. The Coming Bad Days. London: Daunt Books. Charman, Helen. 2019. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In Academics Against Networking #1, ed. Nell Osborne and Hilary White. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books. Frances, Joey. 2020. Joys’ Shadow, Dangled & Denied. In Academics Against Networking #2, ed. Nell Osborne and Hilary White. Konstantinou, Lee. 2016. Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction. Boston: Harvard UP. Malone, Patricia. 2021. Kurt, Kathleen ‘n’ Kathy: Cut-and-paste and the Art of Being for Real. In Lit-Rock: Literary Capital in Popular Music, ed. Ryan Hibbet. London: Bloomsbury. Marcus, Greil. 2000. Comment on Mark Mazullo, ‘The man whom the world sold’. The Musical Quarterly 84 (4): 750–753. Melville, Nick-e. 2018. The Imperative Commands: The Poetics of Imperatives and Assertions in Everyday Life. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2012. Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22 (2–3): 173–196. ———. 2015. Minor Threats. Radical History Review 122: 11–24. https://doi. org/10.1215/01636545-­2849495. Osborne, Nell. 2019. Introduction. In Academics Against Networking #1, ed. Nell Osborne and Hilary White. Spiers, Emily. 2018. Pop-feminist Narratives. Oxford: Oxford UP. Stavrides, Stavros. 2016. Common Space: The City as Commons. London: Zed Books. Stein, Gertrude. 1925. Composition as Explanation. Poetry Foundation. Watson, Dana Cairns. 2005. Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens. Nashville: U of Vanderbilt P. White, Hilary. 2019. Networking Event. In Academics Against Networking #1, ed. Nell Osborne and Hilary White.

CHAPTER 9

Writing the Voices of Precarity in Contemporary French Literature Alex Demeulenaere

Introduction “@EmmanuelMacron, my book rebels against what you are and what you do. Refrain from trying to use me to mask the violence you embody and practise. I write to shame you. I write to arm those who fight you.” [“@ EmmanuelMacron, mon livre s’insurge contre ce que vous êtes et ce que vous faites. Abstenez-vous d’essayer de m’utiliser pour masquer la violence que vous incarnez et exercez. J’écris pour vous faire honte. J’écris pour donner des armes à celles et ceux qui vous combattent.”]1 It was with this tweet that the writer Edouard Louis attacked the French president, after the latter’s reference to Qui a tué mon père, a novel by Louis published in May 2018. Edouard Louis, whose real name is Eddy Bellegueule, thus 1

 All translations are mine.

A. Demeulenaere (*) Kiel University, Kiel, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_9

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attacked the Elysée’s attempts to understand the crisis of the yellow vests movement, by referring to the literary work of a writer from the working class who has never made a secret of his sympathy for the movement. While the tweet may seem anecdotal and has mainly been used by the media to personalize the conflict, it nevertheless raises important questions: why is the Elysée turning to literature to try to understand and respond to one of the most profound and most violent movements of social unrest in France in the last half-century? Why does literature seem to be able to offer some answers where scholarly, journalistic and political discourse is struggling to see clearly? The answer to this question is obviously complex, and I do not pretend to answer it in its entirety. While Michel Houellebecq is the obvious reference when it comes to putting into discourse and images the unease that haunts French society (Vacca 2019),2 I will examine three other important contemporary writers who share the fact that they all come from working-­ class backgrounds marked by precariousness and try to come to terms with this in their literary work. I have already mentioned Edouard Louis, whose three novels, En finir avec Eddy Belleguele, Histoire de la violence and Qui a tué mon père, have a considerable impact, to the point of putting Louis at the center of the controversy being discussed. Louis has repeatedly stressed the important influence, both personal and intellectual, of Retour à Reims, published in 2009 by the second author Didier Eribon, a journalist and biographer of Michel Foucault. In this autobiography, he recounts his difficult and poor childhood and adolescence in eastern France, the parcours du combattant that enabled him to flee this environment and settle in Paris, but also the return to this past after the death of his father. Finally, I will also include Nicolas Mathieu’s Leurs enfants après eux, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2018 and describes the difficult trajectories of several characters in a Moselle valley in eastern France who are affected by the economic crisis and the resulting social uncertainties. Three aspects appear essential to understanding the narrative force and fascination for these novels right up to the Elysée Palace itself. On the level of narration, there is a fusion, a polyphonic clash between an elaborate 2  The reason I do not examine Houellebecq’s oeuvre here is that, similar to Louis-­ Ferdinand Céline, he writes about this social unease he has described since the 1990s in a very personal nihilistic stylization with increasingly religious accents. The movements of polyphony and double inclusion and exclusion I describe in this text thus do not apply to his work.

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writing style, worthy of the Goncourt, and a common, precarious voice in working-class speech. On the sociological level, two additional perspectives open up. A position of double belonging, working-class origin and artistic recognition, evolves toward double exclusion. On the meta-level, a sociological mise en abyme reflects this position through the use in fiction of concepts generated by Bourdieu’s sociology.

Voice Versus Writing The idea of integrating working-class speech into (French) literature is not new, even if it has been contested from the outset. In modern times, the French author who conceived the most radical aesthetic of working-class speech was Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961), whose unbridled syntax and exuberant vocabulary had an explosive effect on the literary landscape of the twentieth century (Vitoux 1989). Many critics remarked on the spoken nature of Celine’s writing, so much so that actor Fabrice Luchini staged a performance based on the reading aloud of Céline’s texts, thus allowing the working-class speech to achieve its spoken aesthetic (Jacquot and Luchini 1988). Even though Céline’s novels are of great importance, they are problematic. Obviously because of the writer’s later fascist leanings, but also because Céline’s venture remains mainly aesthetic. It does not necessarily want to give an account of the violence, the precariousness inherent to the working-class word, but much more, as becomes clear in Luchini’s readings, to construct what Céline called his “little music” (Donley 2000). The result is a monological and idealized working-class speech, a perfected tool for Céline’s literary delirium, who captures this voice to create his personal style (Larochelle 2008). Eribon, Louis and Mathieu, however, do want to give a voice to those who are barely audible in the public space, which is determined in their eyes, by a standardized, polished and above all written, codified French language. Paradoxically, they can only represent this working-class language because they frame it, and inscribe it in codified writing. The result is not a modernized, updated “little music” à la Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but a permanent linguistic clash between recognizable literary writing and the working class voice opposed to it. When Eribon describes the difficult return to his native region after the death of his father in order to renew the contact with his mother, this linguistic clash still takes the rather traditional form of indirect discourse. Reconstructing his past consists not only

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of letting his mother speak, but also the ghosts of the past who return in the evocation of the words of his youth. Since everything that happened seemed to have been decided by the powers that be (‘it’s all intentional’), the invocation of ‘revolution,’ of which one never wondered where, when or how it might break out, seemed to be the only recourse—one myth against another—opposable to the evil forces— the right, the ‘richards,’ the ‘big shots’—that caused so much misfortune in the lives of the ‘people who have nothing,’ ‘people like us.’ Puisque tout ce qui arrivait semblait avoir été décidé par des puissances (‘tout ça, c’est voulu’), l’invocation de la ‘révolution,’ dont on se demandait jamais ni où, ni quand, ni comment elle pourrait bien éclater, apparaissait comme le seul recours—un mythe contre un autre—opposable aux forces maléfiques—la droite, les ‘richards,’ les ‘gros bonnets’—qui provoquaient tant de malheurs dans la vie des ‘gens qui n’ont rien.’ des ‘gens comme nous.’ (Eribon 2018, 44)

Because of his working-class origin, Eribon also manages to identify and singularize the elements of speech that belong to the dominant discourse, which in its lexical choices and syntactic turns is just as marked as the popular speech and constructs a line of opposition between the dominant and the dominated. How many times in my later life as a ‘cultured’ person have I seen, through an exhibition or a concert or opera performance, how people who engage in the highest cultural practices seem to derive a sense of superiority from these activities, which is reflected in the discreet smile they never leave. […] Learning to speak again was just as necessary: forgetting wrong pronunciations and turns of phrase, regional idioms, correcting the Northeastern accent and the common accent at the same time, acquiring a sophisticated vocabulary, constructing more adequate grammatical sequences … in short, constantly checking my language and elocution. Combien de fois, au cours de ma vie ultérieure de personne ‘cultivée,’ ai-je constaté en visitant une exposition ou en assistant à un concert ou à une représentation d’opéra à quel point les gens qui s’adonnent aux pratiques culturelles les plus ‘hautes’ semblent tirer de ces activités un sentiment de supériorité se lisant dans le discret sourire dont ils ne se départent jamais. […] Réapprendre à parler fut tout autant nécessaire: oublier les prononciations et les tournures de phrase fautives, les idiomatismes régionaux, corriger l’accent du Nord-Est et l’accent populaire en même temps, acquérir un vocabulaire sophistiqué, construire des séquences grammaticales plus

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a­ déquates … bref, contrôler en permanence mon langage et mon élocution. (Eribon 2018, 108)

In Louis’ case, the mechanism of indirect speech is similar, but receives a structural importance. If Eribon tries to integrate dominated popular speech and its dominant alter ego into an autobiography with a sociological perspective, and if therefore the academic perspective ultimately tends to classify the sociolinguistic varieties detected, the clash between writing and speech is more violent and more direct in Louis’ work. In En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, an autobiographical novel that traces the author’s difficult childhood in Picardy at the turn of the millennium, the author, who has by then become a student at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, presents a return to the macho, racist, anti-gay language he was exposed to during his childhood. This confrontation is not only about opposing world views, but also about writing and speech coming into conflict. This conflict is marked by the opposition of writing in normal print and the working-class speech, the words of his mother in this case, in italics. Louis thus manages to reconstruct, from the outside, the hostile linguistic environment of his family, his village and his class. I wouldn’t see the two boys anymore. My mother couldn’t hide her irritation when I told her I wanted to drop out of school at the age of sixteen. I’m warning you that you’re going to go to school, because if you don’t go, they’re going to cut my child benefit, and I can’t afford that. Je ne verrais plus les deux garçons. Ma mère ne pouvait masquer son irritation quand je lui faisais part de mon désir de me déscolariser dès l’âge de seize ans. Je te préviens que tu vas y filer à l’école, parce que, si t’y vas plus, on va me sucrer les allocations familiales, et çà je peux pas me le permettre. (Louis 2018, 64)

The linguistic clash takes on an even greater importance in Louis’ second novel, Histoire de la violence. In it, Louis describes the rape he suffered on Christmas Eve in retrospect and in a fragmented way. This central fact is narrated in several ways, but the fundamental opposition is that of the perspective of Louis as a victim, a writer, a normalien and the way his sister tells her version of the events to her husband, not knowing that Louis can hear what she is saying in the room next door. It is by contrasting his sister’s speech, in normal print this time, marked by a working-class lexicon and syntax, and his stream of consciousness listening to her words, in

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italics, which testify to the careful and codified writing of a normalien, that the conflict between two worlds becomes visible. Not only does the interpretation of the facts differ, but also above all, the way in which they are given form. And I knew I had changed my mind. Definitely. ‘He knew he would go home. Now it was for sure. He spoke with Reda about his Arab origins (she was wrong, he wasn’t Arab) and that’s when he understood that the part of him that resisted her had disappeared. That she was dead. At least that’s what he thought, and I’m telling you all this as if they had walked together three days but they were so close, they did what? five hundred metres together (and even less knowing that I had walked fifty metres alone after I’d parked my bike and before Reda came to talk to me).’ Et j’ai su que j’avais changé d’avis. Définitivement. ‘Il a su qu’il irait chez lui. Maintenant c’était certain. Il parlait avec Reda de ses origines arabes (elle se trompe, il n’était pas arabe) et c’est là qu’il avait compris que la part de lui qui résistait elle avait disparu. Qu’elle était morte. Enfin du moins c’est ce qu’il pensait, et moi je te dis tout ça comme si qu’ils avaient marché trois jours ensemble mais ils étaient tout près, ils ont fait quoi? cinq cents mètres ensemble (et même moins sachant que j’avais fait cinquante mètres seul après que j’avais garé mon vélo et avant que Reda ne vienne me parler).’ (Louis 2017, 79)

If narrative polyphony (Todorov and Bahtin 1981) makes the tension between two worlds visible, it also leads to misunderstanding in the literal sense of the word. Even if the narrator masters both codes, at some point he becomes incomprehensible to those close to him, whether it be his sister or his father in Qui a tué mon père, a narrative essay in which he pays homage to the character he criticized in En finir avec Eddy Belleguele. The question then becomes how this structural but problematic polyphony translates in the place these authors occupy within the literary field and what the positioning logic is that underlies it.

A Double Exteriority As such, popular literature, or proletarian literature if one uses the notions that were fashionable in the previous century, is not new. It was even a major aspect of the configuration of the French literary field in the interwar period. In his excellent article on this subject, Jean-Marie Peru uses an analytical framework inspired by Bourdieu to study the position of

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working-class writers such as Henri Poullaille (1896–1980), the most prominent author of the proletarian literature movement. Those authors were often associated with leftist political positions, which tended to have negative effects on their status as recognized writers in the literary field (Péru 1991). While the dominant/dominated dichotomy continues to play a key role in the way Mathieu, Louis and Eribon view and represent society, the dynamics of their positioning within the literary field and their interaction with the wider social field is different from that of the 1930s. While there are similarities and affinities between the authors being examined, they do not claim to have established a recognized proletarian literary group. What brings them together is rather a hybrid, difficult position characterized initially by a double rejection. This rejection is a logical consequence of the flight from their milieu of origin. By choosing first the path of academic excellence and then that of a literary career, Eribon, Louis and Mathieu seek to flee a milieu to which they no longer want to belong. The figure of the writer, with its high symbolic capital, is a lifeline that embodies all that their milieu of origin does not offer: culture, refined language, intellectual recognition and, in the case of Eribon and Louis, an acceptance of their homosexuality that was denied them in their youth marked by a culture of masculinity violently opposed to homosexuality. This flight leads to violent rejection and incomprehension by those close to them, who see them as traitors and class defectors. No one passed it in the family, almost no one in the village except for the children of teachers, the mayor or the grocery shop manager. I told my mother about it: she barely knew what it was about (now he’s going to take the baccalaureate, the family’s nerd). Personne ne le passait dans la famille, presque personne dans le village si ce n’est les enfants d’instituteurs, du maire ou de la gérante de l’épicerie. J’en ai parlé à ma mère: elle savait à peine de quoi il s’agissait (Maintenant il va passer le bac l’intello de la famille). (Louis 2018, 190) When I was 18 or 20, my mother didn’t yet see me as one of ‘those people like you,’ but she still looked at me with increasing astonishment. I was confusing her. And I didn’t care much, since I had detached myself from her, from them, from their world. Quand j’avais 18 ou 20 ans, ma mère ne me percevait pas encore comme un de ‘ces gens comme toi,’ mais elle me regardait néanmoins avec un

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étonnement croissant. Je la déroutais. Et je ne m’en souciais guère, puisque je m’étais détaché d’elle, d’eux de leur monde. (Eribon 2018, 93)

But once on the other side, writers of working-class origin face an equally violent rejection by those for whom access to refined language, culture, symbolic and economic capital seems given (Bourdieu 1979). Eribon, Mathieu and Louis realize how much this difference, a source of rejection, leads to a feeling of not belonging as soon as they enter high school. After high school, this exclusion, both intellectual and literary, is perpetuated, and the resulting sense of being an outsider is described in terms of social practices, professional careers and even dress codes. I’m wearing my jacket bought especially for my start in high school. Red and bright yellow, Airness brand. I was so proud when I bought it, my mother had said proud too. It’s your high school present, it’s expensive, we made sacrifices to buy it for you. But as soon as I arrived at the school, I saw that it didn’t correspond to the people here, that nobody dressed like that, the boys wore men’s coats or woollen jackets, like the hippies. My jacket caused smiles. Three days later, full of shame, I put it in a public rubbish bin. My mother cries when I lie to her (I’ve lost her). Je porte ma veste achetée spécialement pour mon entrée au lycée. Rouge et jaune criard, de marque Airness. J’étais si fier en l’achetant, ma mère avait dit fière elle aussi. C’est ton cadeau de lycée, ça voûte cher, on fait des sacrifices pour te l’acheter. Mais sitôt arrivé au lycée, j’ai vu qu’elle ne correspondait pas aux gens ici, que personne ne s’habillait comme ça, les garçons portaient des manteaux de monsieur ou des vestes de laine, comme les hippies. Ma veste faisait sourire. Trois jours plus tard je la mets dans une poubelle publique, plein de honte. Ma mère pleure quand je lui mens (je l’ai perdue). (Louis 2018, 203)

The flight from a social situation in which these authors felt alienated thus results in a new experience of not belonging to the new, self-chosen environment either. Suddenly, their notion of a writer’s identity which drove them to this new context in the first place, risks being nothing more than an illusion. However, the diagnosis of double exteriority creates a second movement of double belonging, as Eribon, Louis and Mathieu turn their writer’s gaze toward their original backgrounds. This “return” may be inspired by purely economic reasons, linked to the impoverishment of the writer as described by Mathieu on several occasions in interviews, but it may also be due to personal motives: the death of the father in Eribon’s

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case, or the physical decline of the father in Louis’ case. Once they have returned, they see their original environment from the outside through scholarly and aesthetic glasses, and are thus able to understand and describe it. This way, they manage to give a voice to an impoverished, precarious France. A question had begun to obsess me some time earlier, since I had taken the step of returning to Reims. It was going to be formulated even more clearly and precisely in the days that followed that afternoon spent looking at photos with my mother, the day after my father’s funeral: ‘Why, I who felt so much social shame, the shame of the milieu where I came from when, once settled in Paris, I met people who came from social backgrounds so different from mine, to whom I often lied more or less about my class origins, or in front of whom I felt deeply embarrassed to confess these origins, why then did I never have the idea of tackling this problem in a book or an article?’ Une question avait commencé de m’obséder quelques temps plus tôt, depuis le pas franchi du retour à Reims. Elle allait se formuler de façon plus nette et plus précise encore dans les jours qui suivaient cet après-midi passé à regarder des photos avec ma mère, au lendemain des obsèques de mon père: ‘Pourquoi, moi qui ai tant éprouvé la honte sociale, la honte du milieu où je venais quand, une fois installé à Paris, j’ai connu des gens qui venaient de milieux sociaux si différents du mien, à qui souvent je mentais plus ou moins sur mes origines de classe, ou devant lesquels je me sentais profondément gêné d’avouer ces origines, pourquoi donc n’ai-je jamais eu l’idée d’aborder ce problème dans un livre ou un article?’ (Eribon 2018, 21)

Paradoxically, this description of their original backgrounds finally earned these authors the intellectual and literary recognition they had been lacking. For Eribon, the positive reception of Retour à Reims helped him to reenter university, for Louis, the social and homophobic violence described in a unique style earned him international recognition, while Mathieu received the Goncourt Prize for his description of an impoverished and disillusioned France.

A Naturalist Revival Bourdieu’s positional logic does not only allow us to read the interplay between the social and literary fields, but it also comes back in a sociological mise en abyme, reminiscent of naturalistic poetics. Just as Zola developed naturalist poetics on the basis of the scientific doctrines of Bernard in

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order to illustrate social determinism, Eribon and Louis apply fundamental notions of Bourdieu’s sociology in their literary narratives, such as social reproduction within schools (Bourdieu 1971), or habitus as a principle of individual social functioning (Bourdieu 2015). Eribon is the most explicit on this subject, pointing out the extent to which Bourdieu and Foucault not only gave direction to his critical thinking but also to his self-­ image. Entire passages of his Retour à Reims apply the principle of social reproduction to the lives of the authors. Explicitly in Eribon’s case and more implicitly in Louis’ and Mathieu’s, their novels can be read as works of applied sociology. It is on this point, moreover, that the poetics of a writer such as Louis is most criticized, and while his use of polyphony is widely appreciated, the deterministic perspective that he develops in his novels can be seen as contrary to the desire to give voice to those who lack it. Nevertheless, the awareness of their double exclusion influences the dynamics of writing. As Louis, Eribon and Mathieu portray and master the discourse of both the dominant and the dominated, they not only manage to stage them in the polyphony I have developed above, but also to show the different forms of violence (physical, professional, linguistic, etc.) that result from it. The mixture of lived experience and scientific analytical notions results in a new form of realism. Mathieu defines this new realism as a combination of writing styles learned by fleeing the original environment, and the fact of having returned to this same environment, and considers it the very reason for his writing. For years, I tried to write about a world that wasn’t mine, that happened in large flats … And then one day I found myself through my work managing social plans in factories, and there I recognised the people I knew, they had the same hands as my father, and I said to myself, that’s what you know, these guys who lose their jobs before your eyes. And that’s when something started happening in me, and I decided to write about the world I knew, I found what I was capable of. Pendant des années, j’ai essayé d’écrire sur un monde qui n’était pas le mien, ça se passait dans des grands appartements … Et puis un jour je me suis retrouvé par mon travail à gérer des plans sociaux dans des usines, et là j’ai reconnu les gens que je connaissais, ils avaient les mêmes mains que mon père, et je me suis dit, c’est ça que tu connais, ces types qui perdent leur job devant tes yeux. Et là quelque chose s’est mis en marche en moi, et j’ai décidé d’écrire sur le monde que je connaissais, j’ai trouvé ce dont j’étais capable. (Mathieu 2020)

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The combination of literature and sociology does not necessarily lead to impersonal academic writing. Beyond the social diagnosis, it is the brutal, poignant representation of violence that is at the heart of the novels discussed here. Whether it is the verbal and physical violence against homosexuality and intellectualism, or the symbolic, linguistic and social violence of the dominant classes, the combination of polyphony and scientific insight constructs writing that can account for it. The framework of sociological analysis is by no means an attempt to close itself off in a neutral and impersonal scientific ivory tower. On the contrary, this new realism, based on a double paradoxical movement of flight from and a return to the original environment, leads to a new type of literary engagement.

Conclusion By way of conclusion, I would first like to return to the dichotomy between the dominated and the dominant at the center of the difficult position, objectively and subjectively, of the authors examined in this chapter. Eribon, Louis and Mathieu have the feeling of being stuck between two chairs; as they all sought to flee their original milieu and also succeeded in fleeing from it, they have neither the ambition nor the desire to incorporate a dominant discourse. On the contrary, their public interventions demonstrate a fierce opposition to any kind of recuperation of their work. In other words, an analysis of their position and discourse in terms of the dominant and the dominated, or even victim and perpetrator, is flawed, as it would ignore the enunciative and ethical complexity manifested in their novels. Michael Rothberg offers an opportunity to transcend such dichotomies (Rothberg 2019). A specialist on the Holocaust and American slavery, Rothberg proposes concepts that transcend the victim/culprit opposition, which appears problematic from a historical point of view. What is the present responsibility of an American Jew paying taxes to the American state in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Or the responsibility of the present generation in a social situation that has emerged from centuries-old slavery? As these questions cannot be solved by the overly simplistic, too legalistic victim/culprit dichotomy, Rothberg argues for an involved historical awareness of the contemporary subject, that without guilt, can be implicated by a current situation that is the result of historical traumas such as slavery, the Holocaust and others.

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From this perspective, the difficult enunciative position of Louis, Mathieu and Eribon should not be read as an insoluble conflict between a dominated and dominant discourse but in contrast as a privileged implication. If their writings have had such an impact in France, it is not because they reflect a partisan discourse, even if there are, as we have seen, attempts to put them in this or that camp. Their interest stems from their involved nature, from the awareness of the paradoxical mechanisms that have enabled them to become the writers they are, enabling them to take a different look at their original environments, but at the same time to bear witness to the violence, both symbolic and real, that has shaped them. The second conclusion that can be drawn concerns the genre of the novel, or the descriptive essay: why is the interest of society in general, and of politicians in particular, once again focused on a genre that is under pressure in a culture increasingly dominated by the visual media? There are several possible answers to this question, but the works of Eribon, Louis and Mathieu all combine the different durées: through the youth and current life of protagonists such as Anthony in Mathieu’s novel, or Edouard Louis himself, a generational history emerges. Through the setbacks of young people, it are the disillusionment and struggles of their parents that become visible. Northern and eastern France are not only the contemporary places where their complicated lives are played out, but they are also places of memory (Nora 1992) which bear witness to a de-­ industrialization and deeper impoverishment. The courte durée of their current existences is influenced by a longue durée that goes beyond them and which explains the title of Mathieu’s novel: Leurs enfants après eux (Their children after them). With the media, by definition interested in the short term, and sociology and historiography tending to favor the long term, it is in the superimposition of the two that their writing finds its raison d’être. Or, as Mathieu puts it: I do not claim to make a novel with a message or a committed novel, nor to tell a definitive truth about the world, but to achieve through the grace of writing, a form of understanding that makes the world more habitable. The world becomes tolerable because we understand it better. Je ne prétends pas faire de roman à message ou de roman engagé, ni dire une vérité définitive sur le monde, mais atteindre par la grâce de l’écriture, une forme de compréhension qui rende le monde plus habitable. Le monde devient tolérable parce qu’on le comprend mieux. (Mathieu 2020)

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Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. 1971. Reproduction Culturelle Et Reproduction Sociale. Social  Science Information 10 (2): 45–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 053901847101000203. ———. 1979. La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Editions de Minuit. ———. 2015. Esquisse D’une Théorie De La Pratique: Précédé De Trois Études D’ethnologie Kabyle. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Donley, Michael. 2000. Céline Musicien: La Vraie Grandeur De Sa “Petite Musique” : Suivi De Deux Lettres Inédites À Théophile Briant / Michael Donley. Saint-Genouph: Librairie Nizet. Eribon, Didier. 2018. Retour À Reims. Paris: Flammarion. Jacquot, Benoit, and Fabrice Luchini. 1988. Voyage Au Bout De La Nuit. Paris: INA. Larochelle, Marie-Hélène. 2008. Poétique De L’invective Romanesque. Montréal: XYZ éditeur. Louis, Édouard. 2017. Histoire De La Violence. Paris: Editions du Seuil. ———. 2018. En Finir Avec Eddy Bellegueule: Roman. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Mathieu, Nicolas. 2018. Leurs Enfants Après Eux. Arles: Actes sud. ———. 2020. Ecrire, c’est faire la guerre au monde. L’Orient littéraire 166. https://www.lorientlitteraire.com/article_details.php?cid=31&nid=7403. Nora, Pierre. 1992. Les Lieux De Mémoire: De L’archive À L’emblème. Paris: Gallimard. Péru, Jean-Michel. 1991. Une Crise Du Champ Littéraire Français [Le Débat Sur La “Littérature Prolétarienne”, 1925–1935]. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 89 (1): 47–65. https://doi.org/10.3406/arss.1991.2987. Rothberg, Michael. 2019. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan, and Mihail Mihailovič Bahtin. 1981. Mikhaïl Bakhtine, le principe dialogique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Vacca, Paul. 2019. Michel Houellebecq, Phénomène Littéraire. Paris: Robert Laffont. Vitoux, Frédéric. 1989. Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Misère Et Parole. Paris: Gallimard.

CHAPTER 10

Working Oneself to Death. Interview with Heike Geißler About Seasonal Associate (2014) Hannelore Roth

Introduction “Saisonarbeit is not a revelatory book. I do recommend that you buy it nevertheless. Do not, however, buy it at thingybob.” These are the words Heike Geißler uses to recommend her book Saisonarbeit (2014; translated into English as Seasonal Associate in 2018) to those visiting her homepage. In this, you can detect a tone similar to that of Seasonal Associate and similar also to the tone in this interview: Heike Geißler and her literary alter ego are sensitive when it comes to language, not open to compromise and, at the same time, very funny. It is true that Seasonal Associate is not a revelatory book in the sense of those written by Günter Wallraff or other undercover authors. The book keeps a balance between literature and

H. Roth (*) University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_10

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essay, fiction and non-fiction, accusation and appeal. With this hybrid form, it has avoided the capitalist logic of exploitation. It is not voyeuristic curiosity but financial need that, during the Christmas period of 2010, forced an author who had been awarded the Alfred Döblin-Preis to take on a temporary job at Amazon in Leipzig. Seasonal Associate is the literary expression of Geißler’s experience with this deadly working environment where she is “nothing but a placeholder for machines that have already been invented but aren’t yet profitable enough to permanently replace you and your workmates, who are very low-cost.”1 In this ‘flat hierarchy,’ this de-individualizing world of products, however, there is no solidarity— if anything, co-workers are “gagging for an adversary” (Geißler 2018, 206), even if this adversary has to be the products themselves: “Workers have to treat the products like a slave-driver treats slaves. After all, you’re working here in a multilayered and complex system of dominances, and you always have to decide who you want to be. The question for every day is: Do you want the products to lead you around by the nose?” (ibid., 73). The absence of a form of collectivity does not only trigger questions concerning agency and protest but also aesthetic ones regarding representation: how to represent a mass which, strictly speaking, is not a mass but an accumulation of heterogeneous individuals without a collective identity; whose most important shared characteristic maybe is the collective absence of an identity? By changing between the first and the second person singular, Heike Geißler has written a nuanced and daunting literary report on the mental damage done to human beings as a basic condition of work when working for global companies such as Amazon. This situation, however, can be transferred to many other forms of work.

Writing Precarity: Forms of Linguistic Resistance HR: In Seasonal Associate, you split your female protagonist into an ‘I’ and into a formal ‘you’ (‘Sie’). The experienced ‘I,’ who has stopped working at Amazon, directly speaks to her naïve, former self working in the Amazon warehouse. Where did this idea come from? HG: This idea is connected with the troubled story of the book’s publication. In an earlier version, it was rejected by five different publishers, 1  Geißler, Heike. 2014. Saisonarbeit. Leipzig: Spector Books, 165; Geißler, Heike. 2018. Seasonal Associate. Trans. Katy Derbyshire. Cambridge, MA/London: Semiotext(e), 137. From here onward, page numbers refer to Katy Derbyshire’s English translation.

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sometimes without reasons being given. I always find it very bad if you are in a position where people can just say no to you. As a consequence, I wanted to regain control over the text, in a non-commercial project that felt protected, because as soon as the text is on the market, it is not my text any longer. I decided on an audio format and planned one chapter per week, which I intended to make available online afterward. It was in the context of that idea of the spoken form that I thought of the formal address, ‘Sie.’ The informal address, ‘Du,’ was not an option for me; it is too intrusive. After all, there are many texts written in the second person singular which actually are an ‘I.’ I always have a feeling of unease caused by that intimacy. Moreover, I wanted to really address people, and to explain to them why working at amazon is ‘deadly,’ so to speak, in a way that kills everything. Using the formal address also has something of a speech. I want to attract attention to what I want to say or prove. HR: What is the relationship between the I and the you? HG: The text is an auto-fictional one. It tells readers about me and about what I went through as a seasonal worker at Amazon. Of course, the dramaturgy of the text required reordering and compressing. Ultimately, everything serves the idea of proving something, of explaining why things are the way they are. This was why I wanted a character I could guide completely, and control; a character that follows a plan at every single moment. The ‘Sie’ does not work like other characters in a text who can do whatever they like and who undergo a development. In this context, I left the ‘I’ as much leeway as possible—and that is exactly what is so beautiful when you write a text: it just appears, unplanned, it develops, and maybe you follow that. The ‘I’ is still able to escape from the perfidious structure of wage work at Amazon and can just stop being a seasonal worker there, which is, of course, the logical consequence. HR: This splitting of the main character does not only remind us of the Marxist concept of alienation; it is also a genuinely literary motif (that of the doppelgänger). As an author or artist, what poetic devices are available when you want to represent work in the twenty-first century? Do literature and art have a potential that non-fictional genres haven’t got? For instance, there are also many journalistic undercover reports about Amazon, or testimonies given by workers on YouTube. HG: This question is linked to the question regarding the function of literature or art. Is it acceptable for literature or art to be functionalist or to have a purpose? I think I support both views. Having said that, there are times when I find it very annoying to be politicized. Sometimes I wish

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for a life and for a text that are not permanently terminated by this horrible reality. In my opinion, the main reason why literary texts are different is because they are able to insist on something. In a literary text, I can amplify something more easily than in a non-fiction text, be it explicitly or implicitly. I can, for example, do this by using repetition, variation or associative analogies. I often use fairy tales, because I think that they are extremely useful to describe the present, at least if you leave out the happy ending. The sadness, the lack of perspective, all those lives focused toward retirement, only to then receive too low a pension, which is what will happen to my generation—that is an element of our times that can be narrated through fairy tales very well. Literature can counteract this wear-and-tear effect of reality in an excellent way. Hearing every day the same news desensitize us, or we desensitize ourselves—partly, this happens because we need to protect ourselves—and this is where literature can find ways to make things get through to us nevertheless. Sometimes this happens against my own intentions: I will write something, and the original meaning will be conveyed; all of a sudden, it is there. Linking things with something that was repressed, maybe also with something in your subconscious, is more easily possible in literary texts than in non-fictional ones, which need to make everything explicit. Maybe what I am talking about here is a psychological effect. If you like, you can also call it a cathartic effect. My next book will be about the current tendency toward populism and right-wing conservativism, using Germany as an example. Just telling this in a matter-of-fact way is not enough. As a writer, I only start on a level on which I have already processed the subject one way or the other: as a politics of nightmares, of the monstrous, of the idiotic. In a best-case scenario, literature is one step ahead in dealing with things compared to non-­ fictional texts: literature will show another form of intensity, some sort of quintessence, which potentially looks ahead as well as backwards, in many directions, and also toward other times and other text genres. HR: To me, Seasonal Associate is also a very playful text, in spite of its daunting content. Is playing (with language) another element that distinguishes literary texts from non-fiction? HG: Most definitely. I have been interested in the so-called Situationists for a while, a leftist group of European artists and intellectuals from the late fifties and sixties, which Guy Debord was part of. I was fascinated by the situationist, anti-capitalist concepts of alienation and of détournement,

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the re-use of a fixed set of semiotic material, which is being ‘hijacked’ and put into a new context. As a consequence, meanings can be transformed, twisted or voided. This is where I see a possibility beyond Situationism: as a writer, I can regard the assumed reality as material that is there to be used, and I can try to make comparisons or to explore connections. Of course these are not my surgeon’s instruments; I am certainly linked with them on an emotional level, and in some cases, there are forms of dependency. However, if you have the luxury of not being that emotionally entangled in it anymore—if you have the luxury of time and the luxury of financial security, which even creates this distance in the first place—fun starts to play a role as well. This is when desperation may create exaggeration—that is part of the game, too. For instance, I like elements of the hysterical. Or, to be more precise, a very competently used, almost sovereign hysteria, which is of course no hysteria any longer but something potentially transgressive, something that tries to escape and keeps bumping into its limits while, at the same time, exploring them: how absurd, how destroyed, how horrible is reality if I look at it in detail? HR: Just like Amazon turns the employee into “one item on the list” (Geißler 2018, 38), its language is being reduced to an “employee language” (ibid., 57): it is formulaic, full of imperatives, normed and often unintelligible: a mere instrument of power. The protagonist, however, defamiliarizes ingrained habits of speech and, with this, also habits of thinking by playfully taking apart common words such as ‘doable,’ ‘employer’ and ‘employee,’ or jargon such as ‘tote’ or problem-solver (“Problemer” in German). Do you see language criticism as a possibility to question relations of dominance that seem to be a given? HG: Indeed. It makes absolute sense to take that step back and to look at what our language contains and how people speak to each other. All those fragments of communication that are being used so unquestioningly in all those conversations you might have with service centers or maybe also with employers or commissioners, which are immediately something sacred, meaning that you neither question them nor look at them in detail anymore … These fragments of communication have been introduced by being used once in the news or in articles, and they have been directly verified through repetition. In most cases, they are actually very abstract terms, which initially are partly meaningless but which nevertheless can still contain specks of cruelty directed at human beings. Moreover, we live in a society of turbo capitalism and of global capitalism where meanings keep getting stolen or turned around, we live in a

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‘burnout society’ (Byung-Chul Han), where demands are immediately turned into products and where our way of life is part of a cycle consisting of billions of products. Where human beings are nothing but replaceable items on a list, communication is irrelevant. At Amazon, the only aim is to get a mass through the working day in a controlled way, and to emit products. And of course people have mocked the Amazon jargon and regarded it as an imposition to not be able to just call a box a ‘box’ but to have to call it a ‘tote.’ However, this first, more naïve level of language criticism is immediately confronted with the imperative: Amazon jargon is Amazon jargon, full stop. Which suggests: you could be working anywhere. It is the task of literature to deal with language in a conscious way. In the best-case scenario, each book would be an act of language criticism of such meaningless or intrusive expressions that twist perspectives, change claims and mask demands. It would be good if we were able to at least scratch at the surface of such language caking and clotting (‘Sprachverkleisterung -und Verwirrung’). However, to be able to do this, you need to obtain a certain degree of awareness, which takes time, and both things are rare goods in those areas of work. HR: Books play an important role in Seasonal Associate. The protagonist breathes a sigh of relief when she can ‘receive’2 books instead of lamps or rubber ducks. Why is this so important to her? HG: I grew up in a household that was not very literary. We had, however, many children’s books. This children’s literature was actually pretty good; it was the children’s literature of the GDR.  At the same time, it must be mentioned that this literature had also undergone considerable censorship. Nevertheless, there were a lot of texts situated in reality. The GDR was a country of reading (‘Leseland’). At the same time, there was a lack of books. I learned from my mother, who did not belong to a social class where education was valued, that books are something special, something precious, not only because they suggest a certain level of education but also as a form of individual possession. I have got something like a trust in books; I like them as objects and I like spending time with them. The books in the Amazon warehouse gave me the feeling not to be exposed that much to the world of products, which is the symbol of superfluity per se. Of course, these days, writing is 2  This basic English verb has been used by Amazon as a technical term which is used in warehouses across the globe and in different languages.

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also part of a lifestyle movement; you can see this, for example, when you look at those really beautiful notebooks. HR: Would it also be possible to see the attraction the protagonist feels toward books and toward art in general as a mechanism of self-protection and distantiation? The protagonist regards the training at Amazon (which is unpaid) as a theater play, the test work as a “well-practiced choreography,” a “piling dance,” a “box-counting dance” (Geißler 2018, 31). HG: It certainly is a protective mechanism. While I was attending the training , I obviously did not think of the drama on stage. Instead, I just thought it was horrible which methods were used to teach people. The idea to make something out of this, the inspiration to write this book only happened when I had my feet back on safe ground, when I had a desk to write at and some money in my account so that I could reflect on things in peace. At the beginning, I was curious, too, but I lost this curiosity as I got tired and exhausted. In the early stages, I wanted to know a lot; at the end, there was nothing but suffering. And hatred, a very specific hatred toward those on the higher levels. This is also what makes it so hard to describe work in a critical manner, or to describe it at all: where do you take the strength from if you really work and you want to write about it? This, to me, seems a great problem. HR: In one of her daydreams, the protagonist considers founding a writing group, to encourage the employees to document their experiences at Amazon or to collect stories herself. According to the protagonist, this would be “the only real benefit” (Geißler 2018, 141) of working at Amazon. What were important motivations for you, Ms. Geißler, to write this book? HG: I think writing groups are brilliant, I am convinced that writing can be empowering. This was of course also inspired by the ‘Bitterfelder Weg’ movement, that GDR program using the motto ‘Greif zur Feder, Kumpel’ (‘Pick up your pen, mate’) to get employees in the various companies to write, and to send writers to the factories. Of course, this program was also strongly influenced by ideology, because it was meant to serve the progression of ‘Real Socialism.’ As with many of my texts, an important motivation for this book was to find out something about myself I had not known before. Why was it, actually, that I hated this job so much? And why did it feel like a failure when I left my job as a seasonal worker before it officially ended? There is a biographical component in all these questions. I grew up with a narrative

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that I, who attempted so many degree courses, typically never finish anything, that it is, after all, necessary to work hard, eight hours a day or forty hours per week, and that retirement is something you look forward to. During the writing process, I realized that this is not about me failing but that it is inherent to people to degrade others, to damage and to exhaust them. The damage you experience is factored in, so to speak. This means that I had to write this book in order to liberate myself from certain ways of narrating and from certain narrative threads, probably those of my father. I was always told that this was how things went: it was a given that you had a boss who could just fire people and who, because of that, decided what happened in someone’s life, a boss whose orders you had to accept and to execute, and so on. I grew up in a dictatorship, and because of that, there is quite a lot of obedience inside me. I am trying to shake off this obedience bit by bit, and to question it; that was the first step of this book. My father, however, needed that narrative, because no other world had opened up for him. I, however, had got to know other worlds, which did not seem to correspond to that view of oneself. HR: During working hours, it are not only the thoughts of the ‘you’ that keep digressing. The narrating I, too, permits itself digressions: associative reminiscences, memories and anecdotes that do not seem to contribute anything to the plot (if it is at all possible to refer to a plot in this context). HG: This is linked to a certain line of argument. In the writing process alleged causalities and connections will offer themselves. These are also based on linguistic conventions: one word gives the other, and it seems plausible to write this. These are the moments when I like to interrupt the flow, to check things: who is writing here, who is thinking, who is doing the narrating? On the surface, it is myself doing this, as the narrator— however, this is just not true; there is a whole history of ideas involved here, my father with his postulate saying that nothing changes and so on, maybe even a whole world population saying ‘Stop making such a fuss, we are dying here.’ And this is the point when I like to drop things and ask: what is going on in my head at this very moment, what is going on in this text, and where do I want to go? This is when it often makes sense to digress, and I do not necessarily control that move. In this concrete case, it was of course about the narrative of the world of work. At the end of their forty-year working life, people expect something and call it their ‘life achievement.’ However, what kind of life achievement is it if it is possible to damage it that easily by sacking a

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person? This term has been completely taken over by the world of work, and it is necessary to redefine, to reprocess it. There are other, more binding life achievements. And this is where it is necessary for me to digress. I can also refer to this as a deficit, as a lack of concentration. It is, however, a fundamental decision: to distrust what the world or what convention suggests to me. They often lead you directly into problems rather than guiding you out of them. So, what I always want is to see things better, I want to see things with greater clarity. HR: A lot of work in the twenty-first century has not only become non-­ transparent but even invisible. This, to me, seems a great challenge for literature and art. Companies like Amazon conjure up products with one click of the mouse and hide the work or the employees that are behind this. As an author, how do you deal with this problem of representation or representability? HG: This question is linked to another one: what do I allow into the text, and what do I not allow in, and how do I deal with this on the language level? Firstly, I would say that I make visible what more or less jumps at me in a certain moment. However, there are groups of people finding themselves in situations that are so non-transparent or monstrous to me that I cannot address them, for example the situation at the outer borders of the EU. This is also the case because they would disrupt the boundaries of any text. I have no idea at all how I should link this situation with my life, and, as a consequence, with my writing. Looking at things, however, is a task for each individual. I am deeply disturbed by the fact that this invisibility exists, because everything is so visible, even though Amazon, for instance, only shows the most beautiful employees in their advertising campaigns. Maybe a compendium should be written to list all the visible cruelties. At times, there is also an aesthetic problem for writers, and this is something I find extremely regrettable. I do not want to create invisibility for purely aesthetic reasons. I am thinking of a quote by Heiner Müller here: “If somebody uses language to say that a minister is incompetent, this does not make him a writer. However deciding not to use language to call an incompetent minister incompetent, does not make him a writer either” (Müller 2019, 177). I do not want to leave out a certain person, group or situation only because it sounds strange or creates an imagery that does not go together with the imagery presented in my text. That cannot be a criterion; if it happens, I have to look for possibilities to still say it. Co-operations with graphic artists can, for example, help you express

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things which do not seem to be available at first glance when you are using the common possibilities of a textual document.

Deadly Work HR: Your book does not only describe the precarious working conditions at Amazon where everyone can be fired at any time; it is about many more forms of work. Just to mention a few more aspects: the invisible cleaning lady at PriceWaterhouseCoopers; the protagonist’s mother, who is unfit for work and of whom the pensions office demands that she still starts a new part-time job; the unemployed neighbor who is asked to work in an unpaid job as a cleaning lady as part of a measure of the employment agency; guards in the museum, who have a good education but are badly paid; the freelance writer and translator whose professional life is (only seemingly) guided by her own choices but, at the same time, is financially precarious. The protagonist comes to the conclusion “that something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten” (Geißler 2018, 13), and “that your trouble and suffering (…) is astonishingly generic” (ibid., 13–14). A rather daunting thought … HG: There certainly are differences, and this already starts with your personal evaluation of the situation. There are also people at Amazon who are very happy with their job, who came there after leaving a worse job that was physically more demanding, and I can live with that. At the same time, I am able to say that Amazon is a nasty, really evil company. What is also important is how the concept of work is presented to us, and this is something that already starts at school. Not only are professions presented to children in a certain way, children are also introduced to a very specific world of work that is characterized by the hierarchical structure of bosses and employees. I would like to allocate the label ‘deadly’ to forms of work that do not succeed in enabling people to distance themselves from their work, to regenerate, to form new ideas, to have time to look at the world, and to have the chance to consider changes and to put things in relation to each other. This, too, is something that already starts at school. It goes without saying that not every job is bad. It can, however, become bad; it is enough if we forget that it involves people who have a right to develop, to give feedback. A working environment where there is no active involvement, no questioning of things, no cooperation and no compassion simply cannot be a good working environment. In big

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companies, it would also be possible to try such forms of cooperation based more on the concept of equality—meaning that a real exchange takes place, that people act together, which is, again, also a question of communication. However, this more democratic form of engagement that is more geared toward equality is too new for some; it scares people, because these structures of masters and servants are still deeply rooted in all of us. HR: Is it even justifiable that we are sitting here talking about precarious working circumstances? Both of us are white women with a good education. As a writer and as an academic, we may have chosen a non-­ secure job which is still dominated by men, but we did have the privilege of choosing as such, and the privilege of working in a job we love. HG: That is a good question, and I do not know the answer for sure. To not talk about precarity does, however, not seem possible for me at all, because we all live in precarious times, in very different ways. Precarity is a prospect, too. I see the world as an extremely fragile one, and I do not believe that I will be able to control everything in a way that will allow me to escape precarious conditions in the future. At any rate, I find it fascinating to reflect on one’s position, and on what you are allowed to say and how you are allowed to say it. What I believe is important is to address the right people. I do not try to talk about the lives of others per se, nor do I try to speak on their behalf. My demands are not directed at people like my parents, to make them finally understand what is so horrible about their lives. At the same time, it would definitely be among my demands that such conditions of work and consuming should not exist, that the concept of the ‘welfare state’ lives up to its own claims, that many things are recalibrated and that money is distributed in a fairer way. I was always very happy when I learned that union members had read the book and liked it. There is a form of belonging, my biography implies that this is, somehow, where I come from, but I am more than that. Now I am simply a writer, and I am looking from the outside, so to speak. HR: In Seasonal Associate, the protagonist maneuvers between the position of an insider and that of an outsider. She does “see the ridiculous side of reflexive consumption so clearly” (Geißler 2018, 97) before her. At the same time, however, she is not immune to it herself. “[T]he superego is a thing made up of things” (ibid., 99), as you write. In this dystopia of products, there seems to be no free will at all.

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HG: On some level, this really seems to be the case. Of course, capitalism is structured in a way that will permanently create needs that do not actually exist. And this is what capitalism does in a perfidious way, because, while looking as if it worked in our favor, the dictatorship of needing goods actually works against us. Germans consume sixty-two items of clothing per year, and each item of clothing is worn 1.7 times. Why? What is wrong with clothes showing evidence of wear and tear? This concept of the immaculate has been inscribed in us as a society, and this also affects concepts of the body. The act of consuming seems to bring this into focus. At the same time, there are more and more different schemes such as those where you rent out items of clothing, but consuming is so natural and so inevitable. We should, however, be aware of the fact that this has not always been the case; capitalism, after all, is an invention, too. Firstly, this means that these conditions of consuming are reversible and changeable, and secondly, it means that other narratives can be told. This is the question of our times: which other great narratives could be developed? We need to rethink this on a massive scale. We need, for instance, a better international solidarity, we must reconsider the concept of nation states. There are many different ways of approaching the present, but just like in the case of consuming, they would need to be linked with our happiness hormone. How can we link the moments of working, thinking and living in solidarity with our serotonin levels?

Affect: Anxiety, Boredom, and Anger HR: The protagonist is not only permanently exhausted, she is also permanently worried and in a state of mild panic. A quote from the first chapter: “Something inside you is essentially unsettled and will never calm down again, even though you do get the job” (Geißler 2018, 29). Is feeling unsettled the characteristic feeling of working in the twenty-first century? HG: Yes, that could be right. In a company like Amazon, it starts with employers making sure that there is a feeling of being unsettled instead of stability. It is impressed on the employees that the branch can simply be closed if certain conditions are not fulfilled by the commune or the state. This lack of stability is perhaps also linked to the concept of extreme mobility, not least the mobility of biographies, which is evaluated in a positive way, even though this is wrong. People are expected to have lived in as many different places as possible. This is, after all, the same in academia:

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you are expected to have studied as well as taught on an international level. At the same time, these days, there is a tendency to settle down: many people are buying houses now, moving to the countryside. In my opinion, this is also an expression of our general state of being unsettled. This self-made pacification is nothing but an illusion, though, because we normally pay for it by taking out mortgages. In the imperative of permanent economic growth, there is no room for calmness. This is why we need a completely different political concept. In New Zealand, for example, they do not only use financial indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product to describe the welfare state with regard to statistics. Since 2019, the so-called Wellbeing Budget is used in addition to this in order to evaluate how well the inhabitants really are. It is absolutely necessary to introduce such initiatives on a political level. After all, what do statistics such as a low rate of employment tell us? People who work beyond their retirement age have to collect returnable bottles to make a pittance. The official statistics do not mirror this. HR: Cultural-studies scholar Sianne Ngai (2005, 6–7) calls moods such as feeling unsettled or vexed ‘ugly feelings’ or ‘minor affects.’ According to her, those small negative feelings are characterized by ‘flatness’ and ‘ongoingness.’ In contrast to emotions such as anger or fear that erupt suddenly, those ongoing little feelings do not have a cathartic effect. Ngai claims that they are characteristic of late capitalism and that there is a political dimension to them as they erode any potential for action and keep up the existing circumstances. To me, your book almost seems to be a literary transposition of this theory. HG: Indeed. Anger and fear also play a role in Seasonal Associate, albeit not yet in such an explicit way. It is rather like with domesticated animals: an extreme form of being civilized and industrious; anger and fear remain controlled, do not dare to come out, which is also the case because they do not know the cause or their adversaries yet. I can also recognize these flat and ongoing feelings in everyday life in the form of permanent attention. What I mean is the continuous look at where something comes from, what applies to me, what I have to expect. This means that there is also an alertness, a state of alarm, which, being permanent, can obviously not take place on a very high level. Still, we can be certain that it causes a heightened level of stress. We can assume that strength is needed in order to become angry or to concretely express one’s fear, and we probably also need a certain level of desperation, a feeling that there is no way out. A dramatization, if you like.

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At the same time, there is a form of acquired boredom these days, of the inability to deal with emptiness, with space and time that are available. And this is exactly the devil’s blind spot, the blind spot that can be taken over by consuming, by TV and streaming services, by social media, et cetera, or by addictions such as alcoholism. During that very time, you could hold on to feelings of anger, though, or you could find reasons that explain why being scared is now exactly appropriate. However, those feelings of anger and fear are being redirected into these constant and therefore horribly stressful smaller feelings; into reservations, meaningless conversation, gossip, into small resignations or into xenophobia. All this instead of just saying that we are scared of not being able to buy our juice or pay our rent when we are old. HR: Another dominant feeling in Seasonal Associate is that of boredom. “Most of the products are really dull as soon as you take a look; it doesn’t even have to be that close a look” (Geißler 2018, 98), the protagonist states. While some cultural studies scholars claim that there is a subversive potential in boredom if it proceeds a phase of creativity, innovation and transformation, my impression is that, in your book, boredom is mainly paralyzing and making you conform. Maybe it is even used as an instrument of power. HG: This is something I totally agree with. The kind of boredom that is culturally interesting seems almost a thing of the past to me, because we live in a time of maximum distraction. Everything is somehow there to take us from somewhere to somewhere else where we do not even want to go. The boredom at Amazon is first and foremost that of a monotonous working task. At the same time, it is incredibly exhausting if you are exposed to bullying and you do not know exactly what is going on. And actually, these acts of bullying are absolutely boring as well; they are easy to see through and easy to understand. And the employers have no interest in entertaining me, no interest in having me present as a human being with a certain potential; they want me there as a machine. I am reduced to a being that moves things back and forth and that does some counting on top of that. A challenging task, there is no doubt about that, but there is more. This is about it not being desirable to make suggestions as to how things could be improved. It is not desirable that people have fun now and then; it is not desirable that people break out or break open anything.

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The products are also extraordinarily boring, and this is, I think, exactly because they all try so hard to be interesting. Think of facemasks with rhinestone ornaments, for example: I find these acts of trying to get attention so incredibly tiring. It is just not interesting and stimulating because all those products are actors, lame actors. These products want to keep me in exactly the dependence I find myself in, by investing the money I just earned in a boring product that only pretends to be interesting.

Agency: Sabotage, Vulnerability, and Care HR: “We’re not leaving this book until you’ve taken action” (Geißler 2018, 170). At the end of the book, the ‘I’ is not that sure anymore: “Have you taken action or not?” (ibid., 211). Has she? HG: No, I do not think she has. First of all, there is the question what the necessary action would have been. The actions that take place, after all, are firstly those corresponding to the tasks, to what the employee has to do. At the same time, there is no action that could be called activist in any way. This is what seems the only possible action to me: to leave, to just stop working, to not join in any more. That, however, it is a very luxurious action only very few of us can afford. At that point, I could not necessarily afford it either, but at least I did not have the job center breathing down my neck, unlike many of my colleagues back then. While working as a seasonal laborer, I of course also felt the urge to destroy things or to use them in a way different from their original purpose, but there are sanctions regarding all this, and at the same time, it is a way of life that does not suit me at all. And this is exactly why I could not let the characters do that either, even though we would obviously like to see David triumph over Goliath. At any rate, it is just morally wrong for such a kind of work to exist in the twenty-first century. This is where states have to get involved. HR: These small sabotaging interventions in the system mainly take place in the protagonist’s imagination. The narrating ‘I’ invents a ‘you’ that is much more courageous than the ‘I.’ While the ‘I’ keeps biting her tongue each time she is being treated in an unfair way, the ‘you’ opens her mouth and talks back. Does this mean that one’s imagination is ultimately the only possible space or even the space where resistance becomes possible?

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HG: At least it is the first space for resistance, and it is absolutely necessary to defend it. At the same time, I always find it really annoying when people claim that thought is free. That is not true. On a potential level, it might be, but we are exposed to so many conventions and other patterns of thought and retrace structures of dominance in our heads without actually believing in them. At the same time, our imagination could certainly be something like our greatest treasure, where we can negotiate and develop everything, and where we can produce desires that are outside of the world of goods. This is why it is so worrying that there are conditions of work that destroy exactly this imaginary space, that turn it into an impossibility. What is being achieved is nothing but a state of maximum physical exhaustion, and there is no longer a chance to let your thoughts run free. Your thoughts are being reduced to everyday worries such as ‘I still need to go shopping’ or ‘there is that bill I still need to pay’. HR: There is another form of resistance that lies exactly in the protagonist’s vulnerability. She must learn to see her “sensitivity” (Geißler 2018, 12) as a “form of potential” (ibid.), the ‘I’ says, because this “vulnerability harbors all kinds of options” (ibid.). To what extent is vulnerability or showing one’s vulnerability not a weakness but a strength? HG: Here, too, there is a strong biographical component I had to liberate myself from. I grew up with instructions such as ‘don’t make such a fuss’ or ‘there is no need to cry.’ When my own children show that they are hurt or overwhelmed, my instinctive reaction is rejection, almost anger; I do not want to be in such moving, emotionally touching settings. However, as I am aware of this, I can, at the same time, understand my emotions and act differently. Of course it is pointless to demonstratively claim ‘this is hurting me.’ Meanwhile—and maybe that is something we should be upset about—, it has become an empty phrase. However, if you ask yourself why you feel that hurt and degraded, why you actually want to cry, and then you decide that it is not right or not appropriate that these feelings are stimulated, then, I think, there is a political component in this. What is important is the moment when we become aware of the fact that damage is being caused, where it is being caused, who is doing the damaging and who is being damaged, and not to cause confusion in this context but to name it very precisely. The introvert model needs this introspection in order to be able to act. Of course emotions can also be potentially subversive; if you feel very clearly overwhelmed or hurt and handle it in an expressive way—this is

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something I admire very much. There are people who can turn their emotional hurt immediately into something that can, for example, paralyze structures, but those are people that are being taken out of the world of work with its extremely tight schedule, people nobody has any consideration for, which means that their potential of action is equally exhausted as that of those who deal with the suffering in themselves in a more introvert way. HR: The artist Johanna Hedva regards the concept of ‘care’ as the form of anti-capitalist protest: “The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to take care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it” (Hedva 2016). The ‘I’ also cares for the ‘you’; when she is ill she wraps lukewarm cloths around her legs. What do you think about this hypothesis? HG: I think that a lot of it is true, but at the same time I notice a reflex in myself that wants to protest against this hypothesis. First there is the fact that part of this concept of taking care presupposes self-care: taking care of oneself; this is, of course, absolutely right, but at the same time, it is linked to the whole capitalist conglomerate of care complexes, which directly take on the form of products, or of activities such as going to the gym, or meditating, things you do not only do to reach a state of calm but for example also to be part of the crowd. The other thing is that the concept of care only seems to serve the maintaining or regaining of strength, which includes the workforce. But are there not also things we might want to explore? What about new things? How can we learn to look for something, to look for it with greater involvement, so to speak? In addition to this, it is not right if care only is limited to your closest family members. The world is to be understood as one society. However, if I look around in the area I live in, there is no concept of care; instead, there is a concept of compartmentalizing and of rigid social distinctions. Some people live in industrialized apartment blocks, the others live in stately mansions; rich people live among rich people, poor people live among poor people. In the context of all these separations which are, in parts, intended, care is something that is extremely individualized, and it is wrongly equated to self-optimizing or to optimizing one’s family. Also, care remains a skill you would rather attribute to women, just look at the quote by Johanna Hedva. I would like us to acknowledge that men also demonstrate care, and that they have long internalized those

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concepts of care, and I would want everyone in our society to relearn this. This is not an easy task. You have to be incredibly wise, because this world is so complex and sometimes so perfidiously organized that what pretends to be care often actually is no care at all but rather something done to make people depend on others or to keep them down. However, such an emancipating, activist, searching and explored care (I do not want to call it educated) would be a model or rather an attitude I could imagine very well.

Bibliography Geißler, Heike. 2014. Saisonarbeit. Leipzig: Spector Books. ———. 2018. Seasonal Associate. Trans. Katy Derbyshire. Cambridge, MA/ London: Semiotext(e). Hedva, Johanna. 2016. Sick Women Theory. The Not Again Issue, Mask Magazine #24. http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-­again/struggle/sick-­ woman-­theory. Accessed 10 Feb 2021. Müller, Heiner. 2019. Für alle reicht es nicht. Texte zum Kapitalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

CHAPTER 11

“The Side-By-Side Existence of Total Catastrophe and Everyday Life Is the Real.” Interview with Kathrin Röggla About Precarity and the Grammar of Catastrophes Jan Ceuppens and Hilde Keteleer

Introduction Kathrin Röggla was born in Salzburg in 1971. Her work includes narrative prose, essays, dramas, and radio plays. She gained wider recognition based on the processing of her stay in New York on 9/11 in a literary text, really ground zero, as well as through her prose book We Never Sleep (2004; also as a play). In We Never Sleep, Röggla presents a montage of interviews with representatives of the New Economy. These books demonstrate how social

J. Ceuppens (*) University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] H. Keteleer SchrijversAcademie of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_11

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and economic power structures are reflected in narrative as well as linguistic features. These power structures manifest themselves in the use of jargon-specific commonplaces, narrative clichés and unintended comical elements. Röggla also often uses the conditional mood, a device questioning the possibility of authenticity. Röggla’s approach to authentic material  is close to authors like Alexander Kluge or—due to the strong ethnological interest demonstrated in both authors’ texts—Hubert Fichte: they too are in parts stimulated by an impetus of language criticism. This closeness is also discernible in Röggla’s essays (e.g. in besser wäre: keine [“none would be a better option”], 2013 and in Die falsche Frage. Theater, Politik und die Kunst, das Fürchten nicht zu verlernen [“The wrong question: theater, politics and the art of preserving one’s sense of fear”], 2015), which mainly address questions regarding the presentation of reality in a world ruled by neoliberalism and doomsday scenarios. Key reference points in this context are Hollywood films built on clichés showing the self-referentiality of modern feelings of fear. Precarity is a topic Röggla deals with from various perspectives: as a problem of humanity, albeit undergoing a domestication process in the aforementioned doomsday scenarios, but also as a problem of specific social classes, for example of those earning an ‘average’ salary, whose hunt for success makes them blind to the real consequences of the money economy (as  in Normalverdiener [“Average earners”], 2016), or people in so-called service jobs, who often do not come to official notice, which means that they are at risk of falling out of reality (e.g. interpreters in Die Unvermeidlichen [“The Unavoidables”], 2010), or for the representatives of the 24/7 economy, who ultimately exploit themselves as presented in We Never Sleep. At present, Röggla is working on texts about the trial that took place between 2013 and 2018 against the so-called National Socialist Underground (NSU), a terrorist group responsible for a series of racially motivated terror attacks between 2000 and 2007. We Never Sleep was translated into Italian (2005), French (2005) and English (2009); Nachtsendung [“Night Show”], a collection of narrative prose (2016), is now available in Dutch. Röggla currently lectures at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. JC: Let’s start with the present cliché question: how are you, given the current circumstances? KR: I am in a strange state, just like all of us. What we are experiencing now is a strange intertwining of the private and the public, a form of work that has been remodeled and reshaped in every respect by digital tools and

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that forces us into an online existence. At the same time, it forces us to exist between hygiene policies and a structure of fear. For myself, however, something elementary has changed. During the first wave, I was a freelancing author who depended on events, and of course that was quite catastrophic at the beginning. However, before this first wave was over, I already knew I would be able to take on my current job in Cologne, which meant I would have a guaranteed basic income, and this is very important with regard to precarity. Having said that, there is a new development now, and I am sure this is even worse in Belgium: more and more people in one’s own environment are falling ill, we start getting confronted with the situation as carers as well, and there is the permanent presence of tasks that cannot be solved. JC: It could be assumed that new forms of precarity are being created in this crisis: professions that have always led an invisible existence, often characterized by precarity, are now being discussed more and more often and are coming to the fore. Do you see a shift in perception there, a stronger respect for these professions? KR: During the first wave, in spring, I had the feeling that there was at least some new visibility all of a sudden, that these professions were becoming more visible, especially the seasonal workers with jobs in agriculture but also those working in the meat industry, and that it also became more obvious what is actually going on there. With regard to this second wave, however, I would have to say no, because it is only an aggravation of an already dire situation. Ultimately, this whole pandemic situation acts as some sort of catalyst, or a booster for divisions in society, and these are being aggravated at the moment. Of course there is gratitude toward the delivery people, or the hospital staff, who are also exposed to unimaginable things. When one thinks of this, it is obvious, but at the same time it is now perceived less and less. After all, we are no longer clapping for the medical staff like we did before. These days, it is expected that things just go on somehow, and it has to be said that this is a rather extreme situation. Things need to change fundamentally in this respect—and fundamentally also means financially: it is not only about our view of things, it is about the general conditions changing, and it does not look like this at the moment, or if it does, only with regard to hygiene measures. What is needed is that long-term funds be made available somewhere at some point, or that financial support be provided at short notice. However, I fear that the situation is more likely to get worse instead. At this stage, none of us know what the future will bring. What is also new is that people

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have become very careful when it comes to making predictions, and to some extent, I think the element of precarity innate to all social structures has now become visible—precarity as in ‘We don’t know what the future holds, we don’t know whether the measures will work, we keep having to reorient ourselves, we have got no security systems, or these security systems are being eroded.’ There is a structural level that affects all of us. Also, below this, there is of course what we actually call living in precarity, there are those that are exposed to it, without having any additional options. These are two different kettles of fish. JC: Those people who exist in a state of precarity normally go unnoticed. With this, however, comes the question of how to represent them, or, more precisely: how is it (still) possible to talk about such social groups in an authentic way? Would it be right to go back to older concepts of workers’ literature or maybe to documentary concepts, or is this no longer appropriate in our day and age? In your essays, you often address this question. KR: The authentic is a tricky concept when literature is concerned. On the one hand, as soon as something is turned into a text or given a certain form, it is no longer authentic. What has been authenticated, the mere quote, would no longer be authentic either, because it was given a different framing. However, there are of course authentic effects in writing, where you are still aware of the original sound, where the material becomes visible. When asking questions about that, you immediately reach the point of dealing with the translation of reality, which means that you get to the question of realism. And that means that this is not about the document, about the authentic, but about the question: is it possible to represent or translate the world? What kind of material do we preserve in the texts, which layers can you make visible, in the broadest sense? You can never escape the question of constellation and of the quote bound in its framing. And this means that you are confronted with conditions of power relations, with a constellation, and with a certain perspective. JC: To go back to an older example: would you for instance consider investigative journalism as performed by Günter Wallraff as a form of representation acceptable on a literary level? KR: To me, this is a very exciting practice when things are done like that, and therefore also a very important form, because at first instance you share experiences and you simply take them in. In this context, ‘appropriate’ is a category of making claims. Does the text do justice to what I intended to do, and does it also do justice to the world, to the person

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opposite me? With regard to Wallraff, I feel very little inclination to say whether it is literature or not … JC: It is just that I noticed you do not mention any such forms as examples of representation of the precarious anywhere. Could this be because it is just not appropriate for our times anymore? KR: Well, there is that book about Amazon written by Heike Geißler,1 which I liked a lot … JC: A book my colleague Hannelore Roth has just translated into Dutch … KR: However, that is something different. Günter Wallraff always carries out his projects with a rather journalistic and provocative air. I have always been drawn to Hubert Fichte2 and Alexander Kluge,3 which means that I chose a very aesthetic framing. Günter Wallraff, however, is also interested in a direct effect; there is that idea of ‘I am writing a text because I want things to change.’ And this is an intentional move that ultimately goes beyond the literary realm—if you wanted to make such a distinction at all. The effect of literature can also contribute toward what Günter Wallraff wants to achieve, but when this effect becomes the main concern and a text becomes single-minded, it no longer belongs to literature. JC: Let’s add another aspect to the topic: this question of authenticity is also linked with the appropriation of voices that are not one’s own. And this, for instance, is a criticism that could be directed at texts like We Never

1  Geißler, Heike. 2014. Saisonarbeit. Leipzig: Spector Books. Engl.: 2018. Seasonal Associate. Transl. Katy Derbyshire. New York: Semiotext(e). Dutch: Geißler, Heike. 2020. Seizoenarbeid. Transl. Hannelore Roth. Gent: Het Balanseer. See also Hannelore Roth’s interview with Heike Geißler in this volume. 2  German writer Hubert Fichte (1935–1986) labeled his semi-documentary texts as “ethnopoetry.” In them, the ethnologic gaze was not only directed toward ‘foreign’ cultures but also toward what belongs to one’s own culture. The collection of texts Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit [“The History of Sensitivity”] is considered his most important work. 3  With his socio-critical intentions, Alexander Kluge (born in Halberstadt in 1932), a writer and essayist also doing productions for TV and cinema, can be placed in the proximity of the Frankfurt School and its leading thinkers Adorno and Habermas. In his work, which is multi-faceted as well as original, Kluge presents montages of authentic documents, real and invented testimonies and visual material that form panoramas of contemporary history. The German past that has not yet been dealt with sufficiently and the phenomenon of alienation in the modern world of work are at the center of Kluge’s oeuvre. The two volumes of Chronik der Gefühle [“Chronicle of Feelings”] (2000) contain most of his most important texts.

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Sleep, where you present a montage of the utterances of others, where you manipulate them—this, too, could be described as appropriation. KR: And that is what it certainly is. I could say that it is about getting to know people’s way of speaking, and this is exhibited through my writing, so to speak, or it is reshaped. However, there is a much more substantial point to this: if I had written the same book while working at Amazon, I would have been in trouble. This is because there is a question of power. The people appearing in We Never Sleep are people in high places, even if they are only interns. They are agents of a structure of power. I have no problem with using this material. At the same time, I had done a theater play about excessive personal indebtedness, about personal bankruptcy, and in this context, I went to see a Hartz IV4 granny. She invited me to a meeting of her debtors’ self-help group, and it really seemed to confirm all the clichés you might have about these people. I found it very difficult to use what she told me because the imbalance of power between us is so obvious. I am the one who ‘talks about her’—completely different strategies are needed for this. This is always a question of aesthetics. This question of appropriation is always linked with the question of who it is I am looking at and who I am talking to, and about the positions in the dialogue. JC: If this is the case, what is your perspective on more conventional, so-to-speak realistic representations of precarity, for example those you find in Thomas Melle’s novel 3000 Euro?5 KR: That is a very good book. I was a member of the jury which awarded the Kleiner Kunstpreis of the Academy of Arts in Berlin to Thomas Melle for it. This was also partly linked to the person of Thomas Melle, and I was happy that there was somebody who zoomed in on lives in precarious circumstances and who tried to describe such situations, because there are not that many writers of German-language contemporary literature dealing with this social level. Annett Gröschner for example, she does that, too, in Walpurgistag [“Walpurgis Day”].6 This book goes 4  Hartz IV is the name of a form of basic security benefits intended to enable those without a job or with a low income to live a life in dignity. On a practical level, however, Hartz IV has caused a state of poverty or of permanent uncertainty for many, especially as there is the threat of sanctions if people do not adhere to the strict rules of the Hartz IV system. Its name goes back to the commission led by former Volkswagen chairman Peter Hartz, which designed a fundamental labor-market reform in 2002 and 2003, when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder headed a coalition government of Social Democrats and the Green Party. 5  Melle, Thomas. 2014. 3000 Euro. Berlin: Rowohlt. 6  Gröschner, Annett. 2011. Walpurgistag. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt.

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back to 2011, but I can really recommend it. She organized a poster campaign, and she asked via newspapers and via the radio: what were you doing on 30 April? This got her hundreds of replies which formed the basis of a kind of burlesque revolutionary novel. She is involved with all sorts of people, she is politically engaged, and that is fantastic—I have lived in Berlin Neukölln myself, and I know the people she speaks of, many of them also have to live on Hartz IV. This is another book of that kind, but there are just not that many authors who could achieve something similar. I am not sure to what extent I myself could do it, even though I have these contacts. JC: In your work, we encounter the precarious in doomsday scenarios, in ghost stories, to use terms that also appear in the titles of some of your essays. One thing, however, remains unclear in this context: is this a parody on the addiction to the catastrophic that is obviously part of modern existence, or do you yourself want to confront us with the real catastrophe we will all face one day? This question arises, among other things, because of the odd focalization of your stories. KR: I like to speak of the grammar of catastrophe in which we are caught. On the politico-economic level, the neoliberal setting with its just-­ in-­time structure is already structured by the catastrophic. In the media discourse, which works via the spectacular, a particular form of reporting and focusing on certain topics has established itself since 9/11. It is very strongly linked with the grammar of the catastrophic. One example of this is the obsession with live news tickers we have experienced during the coronavirus pandemic. In the United States, however, it is always present on various levels. You witness everything live and remain glued to this image of the spectacular. At the same time, images of natural catastrophes are being adopted in media language, in the way things are reported: there is a sort of dramatic composition following this structure. What I am talking about is catastrophe as a phenomenon within media discourse, but that is intertwined with other forms of the catastrophic. And then there is the political level, where the grammar of the catastrophic is used to push things through, for example emergency laws that are passed extremely quickly and without consulting the usual democratic institutions. And finally, there is the arousal we feel when confronted with the catastrophic, which we contribute ourselves. These narratives we all use are linked with the others I mentioned. Just think of 9/11: that had been a Hollywood film before and was then copied—it works according to the same logic. As you can see, there are many connections there.

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JC: At the same time, the usual doomsday scenarios are almost euphemistic representations when compared to actual catastrophes. You demonstrated this in your narrative prose in Nachtsendung, where it remains uncertain whether we are dealing with a real or rather with a perceived catastrophe. KR: I had planned this anthology as a dystopia that does not take place in the too-distant future, maybe in five or ten years. Then I realized that the dystopian is a very genre-related form of narration; it tells us what has always been known and only has very little to do with realism. I, however, wanted to show the present, and I did not want a fixed structure geared toward the climax—that would just be more of the same. At the end, there is the little group of survivors, and in between, you get power struggles between groups. I rather imagined some sort of map with different scenarios, and this is how I got interested in the ghost genre. This is because the uncanny is created exactly in this disturbed relation between the world and the subject. By these means, I can address the problematics of realism as part of my narrative. Also, the intention is to show things in a way that is not clear, because they are not clear to us either. That is exactly what is fascinating. Even when experiencing a catastrophe, we are not aware that we are experiencing it. On 9/11, I was in Downtown Manhattan, and the most revealing image for me was that people were panic-buying in supermarkets right next to someone just buying a birthday card. People shopping in the supermalls while the towers collapse. This side-by-side existence of total catastrophe and everyday life is precisely what is real. HK: Is this why you chose the conditional mood (‘Konjunktiv’)? Because there is nothing we know for sure? KR: No. The conditional mood is my favorite form of grammar because it introduces a mediality, and also a shift—it has several functions: as a reader, I have to ask constantly who is talking, when they are talking, and how I relate to this. I am constantly building that image. That is what is fascinating. I am never in the same room at the same time when the person who is talking is there, a shift is taking place there. JC: Regarding the conditional mood, here is a quote from your essay “Gespensterarbeit und Weltmarktfiktion” [“Ghost labor and Global-­ Market Fiction”] that fits the context of the conditional: “Writers are allegedly masters of the fictitious, and yet they are dethroned by the socially fictitious; they are specialists of language-related conditions, for medial as well as for political rhetoric. This is why I could imagine this mélange of alarmist, social Darwinist rhetoric which simultaneously feigns

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appeasement and revolution, a fear-inducing mixture we have been confronted with during the past few years. I would then be able to take a closer look at the linguistic conditions, and identify the strangest phenomena, the formation of metaphors, quirky links, superlativisms. The references to disaster films alone would deserve a closer look” (Röggla 2013, 229–230). This sounds like a list of possibilities, of things you could have done but then did not do. Does it, however, not describe what you actually did? Or is what you are asking here rather the question about the effectivity or the lack of effectivity of literature? KR: What may be involved here is the Austrian element, which likes to play on the conditional. It is a play on possibilities, a propensity to try different versions. However, the problem with the effectiveness of literature is, after all, that it unhinges the intentional and places it in new framings. A text that was written with a specific intention is not a literary text. On the other hand, there are many texts that very clearly have an effect, even a political effect, fostering resistance, and I would not want to question that at all. At the same time, I have reservations: if you build on an intention from the beginning, this cannot work. With regard to the passage you just quoted, the gesture of futility can also be a provocation. It is also possible to write something against one’s intention, and then you know exactly that will have a certain effect in that specific framing. JC: I would like to look at this again from a completely different point of view, namely that of spatialities. What is noticeable in your texts is that you mainly choose non-places or transitory places. In one of your Zürich lectures, you mention in this context that “in the age of fear, a plot [can] only be the movement through spatial constellations that are fragile. Through a permanent outside spatiality that counteracts and threatens the inside spatiality which is frantically kept up” (Röggla 2016). You talk about an inside spatiality that consists of back-room negotiations, of layers of protocol, as you call it. How does this relate to precarity? KR: That back-room structure implies that decisions are not made where they are officially made. On the official level, it is rather the spectacle of a decision that is being produced elsewhere. This spatial structure can be transferred to the production of goods, because globalization, too, works through the separation of spaces. This is also something that causes extreme changes in our cities and in our architecture: in this context, what is just staged for tourists, where does life really take place, where do people live and work? In the past thirty years, this has been undergoing changes, and as a consequence, we can talk about a separation as described in The

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Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. This is also linked with precarity— the fact that we can never get hold of something there and then. And, regarding the theater, I can no longer suggest on stage, like Shakespeare did, this is the king, he is in a conflict with someone, there is a war going on. Such devics no longer work these days. It is not very realistic and does not affect the tragedies of our times either. The tragedies of our times are created through separation. That is even true for wars; there is no battlefield as such where fighting takes place, there are drones, bombers, and they are always on their way to somewhere and not ‘there.’ There is no longer one specific spatially defined ‘theater of war’ constituting a ‘there.’ Those who have to be ‘there’ are the ones living in precarity, the ones who are no longer able to change places. This is the strange paradox of migration; it makes you a person without a place without giving you control over the places. You are on your way, but you cannot choose your place. Those not living in a precarious situation have that choice. If you continue with this thought and relate it to the seasonal workers or to the workers in the meat industry, you will find that they are almost held like slaves. Those workers have got no sovereignty regarding places at all. This is, for example, what Milo Rau shows in a very impressive way in his Jesus film [The New Gospel]: an Italian worker collapses and the permission to take him to hospital is denied. Those people have to function where they are, and if they do not, tough luck for them. Given those general conditions, I do not think it would make sense to show a spatiality on stage about which you can make sovereign decisions. JC: Would it be right to say that there is hardly an inside in your texts— neither in the spaces nor in the characters? KR: This is certainly true for the theater. And also, I do not have any psychological characters at all. What I am fascinated by is how language constructs our identity. Moreover, I am more interested in what happens between people than in the characters themselves. This means that I am more interested in social connections than in psychology, even though the two are obviously connected. However, it is certainly about very concrete actions. I also have a very clear idea of the characters. You get to know them through the way they talk, through their gestures, but nothing is formulated in great detail. This is the same when you work with actors. There are some who are very good at this, but also others who need description, things that are formulated in greater detail. In this respect, I am more like someone doing drawings, and I leave room for imagination.

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For me, however, it is not about entering inner worlds in the classical way of, say, Arthur Schnitzler’s dramas, or to deal with them as topics. JC: Let’s return to the question of effect, especially  concerning the construction of society and the role literature can play in this. In the previously quoted essay, you use terms such as ‘revolt’ and ‘slogans’—what people want to hear from you, you say, is ultimately ‘Down with neoliberalism,’ but that is not enough for you. Is literature a place at all where the idea of revolution, of social change can be made palpable? KR: It certainly is! My revolutionary-minded colleague Annett Gröschner comes to mind again—after all, a revolt begins with many gestures of resistance; I wish I had written something like her Walpurgistag, to formulate the different practices and gestures of resisting, to find alliances, to write a positive book. This is a painful question for me: I do not always want to look at the world from a purely pessimistic point of view, with that critical attitude. Also, one permanently gets asked about possible solutions, and one would like to offer an answer—or perhaps one would not. The question, rather, is what it is that motivates you when you write, and in this context, I am certainly still influenced very strongly by my background: by Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, so it is about ‘showing what is evil’ … JC: Back to dystopias then … KR: Yes, perhaps, dystopian elements, but it is not about repeating ‘the dystopian’ as such, I have never found that interesting. It’s something I have been working to come to terms with for years. During the past few years, I have dealt in detail with legal matters, with jurisdiction, and I try to identify strategies of resistance in there. Using law to resist “the rule of law.” In my first publications in this context, I have ended up dealing with the NSU trial and with how the judges have partly failed there.7 I have accompanied Wolfgang Kaleck for quite a while, a human-rights lawyer who also represents Edward Snowden. Developing a text on that basis is very difficult for me; it could turn into a heroic tale. I have also been asked to do something on a climate tribunal for the Theater of the Anthropocene in Berlin. Due to the pandemic, it was not possible to realize this project, but this form makes me feel uncomfortable anyway. I will now do a drama 7  NSU stands for “Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund,” a neo-Nazi terrorist group that committed several murders and bomb attacks between 1999 and 2007. Two of the three main perpetrators committed suicide, leaving only Beate Zschäpe to stand trial. She was eventually given a life sentence, while a number of accessories were sentenced to imprisonment.

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that deals with this topic, with the pivotal question of how I introduce these hints or possibilities of the act of resisting in my own writing? At the moment, this is still happening via language, which means it is already in there, in my texts, because my texts are a form of protest after all, and they do not only represent this language of power but they also try to oppose and unhinge it through neologisms and comical elements. Jokes and comical elements provide us with weapons and with instruments of resistance, but this could go much further. JC: Is this, however, enough for a new toolkit for utopia, or are you allergic to this term? KR: It is a sensitive term, but it is also an important one, because without an idea of how we want to live together we would not be able write at all. All of us have got ideas in our heads of what we really want. In this respect, the utopian is something very close to life. It is always made so abstract, so remote. I have always liked speaking about the concept of ‘futurity,’ which is connected with the fact that we have options, desires, hopes, ideas in some form. However, I have just done a seminar on Hearing the future, with a group of younger people. They did not want that, the topic of the future did not appeal to them, which was frustrating. JC: The topic of future keeps coming up in your more recent texts. In your conversation with Cécile Wajsbrot, there is also a reference to Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle. In this story, it is fear of the future that blocks the way to the future. My impression is that in your texts, you show in a very similar way that it is fear of the catastrophe that causes that catastrophe. KR: Well, with my perspective on disaster, I provide something like a preliminary definition: it is some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, the attitude of expecting something that produces exactly what was expected. This is the big question, and it also applies to the climate crisis: how is it possible to narrate it without falling into the trap of feeling powerless, the feeling that nothing can be done anymore anyway? This feeling of powerlessness also plays an important role in all disaster films, the feeling of not being able to change anything anymore. This is part of the problem. We need to find another narrative form for that, for example the way Donna Harraway does it, or Anna Löwenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World.8 In Löwenhaupt Tsing’s book, life in precarious conditions is 8  Löwenhaupt Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton UP. Germ. Der Pilz am Ende der Welt. Über das Leben in den Ruinen des Kapitalismus. Trans. Dork Höfer. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.

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also a topic; she accompanies mushroom collectors. They are looking for a very expensive Japanese mushroom which can only grow under difficult ecological conditions designed by humans. That mushroom hardly ever exists in natural conditions. It is also very difficult to find, and a new economy emerges out of this. The approach is to describe the climate crisis out of the condition of precarity, and to show strategies of dealing with life in a damaged environment. It is not about saying ‘That is the way it is,’ but about looking into the question of how human beings can survive here. JC: A completely different question: you have written several texts that appeared in different forms: We Never Sleep as a prose text and as a drama, Die Unvermeidlichen as a drama and as a radio play. Are these differences between genres still relevant? In Die falsche Frage, you asked this question. KR: On the one hand, I would say: yes, they are relevant, and I am playing with them. In the case of We Never Sleep, I found it very exciting to translate the aesthetic question that is inherent to the program of this book for the theater. At the same time, this means that it becomes something different. The text changes according to its medium and according to the way it is received. This is why I would say that the differences between the genres makes them exciting to play with. I would not do everything in three versions, that would be pointless. Die Unvermeidlichen would not work as a novel. This becomes very obvious the other way round if you look at my NSU trial. A trial in court is something completely different, depending on whether I put it on stage, turn it into a novel or make a radio play out of it. This subject matter, which immediately turns into genre in the theater (because the trial belongs to the origins of the theater), does not appear too often in novels. If it does, we usually get an insight into the psychology of a lawyer or a judge, like in Dürrenmatt’s work, so that you can somehow get an aesthetic grip on this abstract beast of the court. This means that the medial form depends on the subject matter, on the question being asked. I have a draft of a novel that is completely different from the radio play that has already been broadcast, and there is a theater version that should have been performed for the first time on 11 September 2020, and we do not know yet whether this will work at all. The novel will still work if I publish it in two years’ time, but the theater always has to deal with the question of current affairs hanging over it. This may mean that I will have to revise it.

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HK: In her book Fragen zu Corpus delicti [“The Method—Questions”], Juli Zeh commented on the different forms of writing when she wrote The Method as a theater play and as a novel. She said that she normally writes with her ‘lower language muscles’, which means that she deliberately locks out the outer world and turns toward her own inner world, whereas with a theater play, she uses certain given technical requirements as the starting point and writes consciously. Is it the same for you? KR: No, I am interested in topics that point toward different media. After the preliminary work is done, it is interesting to see that it develops into either a novel or a play. There is never a writing that is independent of the form, I would not know what that would look like. When I am writing a novel, I am not interested in writing something particularly ‘novelistic,’ I advance within the medial space of the book, which implies a large, multi-layered prose structure. Regarding the theater, we are in the post-­ dramatic phase: it is more about exploring the possibilities of the medium than it is about meeting genre-related requirements. Regarding my court drama, I get into conflict with the genre, and I need to know that, I have to deal with it. However, this does not mean that I always have to deal with the same problem when working for the theater. It depends on the questions I ask, on the material I work with, and it is the same when I have to deal with the medial parameters of the theater. There are traditions there. You have got far more space there, you must leave gaps, you must not become too chatty. And if you become too chatty, that spoils the strategy. There is a need for lacunae. In prose, there is not, actually. JC: Literature itself is part of a competition between media. You always refer to films and get involved deeply with Hollywood films: would film be an option when it comes to looking to other forms of representation? Can literature even still get a grip on reality given that we mostly encounter it through visual representations? KR: The oral, language, narration are still eminently important. There is no image without a caption. Something I do, however, notice with my students is that they bring together images and texts far more often and also work across the media a lot. Blogging culture and Internet culture integrate pictures, too, which means that an exciting medial dialogue between images, text and sound comes into being. I myself am very much obsessed with the language and text, but what interests me is the question to what extent literature is starting to become a very elitist topic again. What is going on in the schools, what about literary education? What happens if you have to interact with students who do not even know the name

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Hölderlin? If a lot has eroded in this area and the pleasure of reading is not necessarily stimulated? Also, I would no longer work extensively with Hollywood films, but rather with Netflix series, and also with genre texts like Harry Potter or mystery literature. In this area, a lot is moved around and sold and read, but those are worlds of their own. Writing is developing into a form of co-writing. I do not know what will remain of the literature I grew up with, the literature that was valuable; let me just name Thomas Bernhard, Ernst Jandl, Elfriede Jelinek. They are still being read, and back then, they had a very broad readership, even though their aesthetics are not easy. Today, however, it is all about clarity and straightforwardness, as can be found in Juli Zeh or Ferdinand von Schirach, but to my mind, those are not great aesthetic achievements. Of course, stages want to their box-office successes but then, this type of theater no longer holds the promise of a new perspective on the world. Rather, you are being confronted with more of the same, with what you know already. Where you learn nothing about legal matters that would get you anywhere on a political level. These plays are more on fundamental ethical questions which we really decided on long ago. At the same time, it is understandable that people love this; it is something you know, and you feel you can relate to it, and you feel understood.

Bibliography Röggla, Kathrin. 2013. Geespensterarbeit und Weltmarktfiktion. In besser wäre: keine. Essays und Theater, 209–232. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. ———. 2016. Von Zwischenmenschen, Zeugen und wiedererkannten Helden. https://www.kathrin-­roeggla.de/meta/zuerich-­2016-­2. Accessed 28 June 2021.

CHAPTER 12

Precarious Authorship in the Digital Society. Literary Value Chains and Kathrin Röggla’s “Essenpoetik” Thomas Ernst

The poetics of precarity concern not only literary reflections on precarious milieus, but also the precariousness of literary writing itself and literary life in general. If scholars reflect on the relationship between literature and working conditions, it is necessary to also reflect on the value chains of literature and on the economic precariousness of most authors. Historically, the attempt to stabilize freelance authorship through the legal institution of intellectual property rights was the beginning of modern copyright law. This construction is currently at the center of political debates, since the idea of ‘intellectual property’ and the business models derived from it are mostly tied to the object ‘printed book.’ In the digital society, new models must therefore be found that legally and economically secure the already mostly precarious forms of literary authorship.

T. Ernst (*) University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_12

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This chapter aims to address these challenges by focusing on German-­ language discourses and by dealing with four questions: Firstly, how can ‘precarious authorship’ be described historically in the Gutenberg Galaxy and to what extent have attempts been made to stabilize the model of freelance authorship through the attribution of ‘intellectual property’ (historical and juridic dimension)? Secondly, what effect has today’s digital media change on authors’ business models and their already precarious situation (digital and economic dimension)? Thirdly, which new book-­ economic models like crowdfunding are emerging to establish new literary value chains in the digital society (book-economic dimension)? And fourthly, to what extent have these new production models also an effect on the aesthetics and forms of literary projects (aesthetic dimension)? In a first step, historical developments and research discourses must be reflected in a necessarily interdisciplinary manner in order to adequately analyze the relationship between literary authorship and precarious business models in the digital society. Subsequently, three examples will be addressed, each of which represents a specific way of dealing aesthetically with digital media change, using a different mixture or concept of revenue models: the radio play “Stripped. Ein Leben in Kontoauszügen” (2004) by Stefan Weigl and the crowdfunded non-fiction book “Eine neue Version ist verfügbar” by Dirk von Gehlen (2013) will be read rather cursorily, whilst the poetics lectures “Essenpoetik” (2014) by Kathrin Röggla will be analyzed more closely.

Intellectual Property and Stripped Writers: Literary Economy of the Gutenberg Galaxy In regard to the economic safety of a writer’s existence, in the German-­ speaking world the eighteenth century was an important period of transition: the poet “could no longer rely on patrons [from the court] and not yet on adequate remuneration from the book trade” [“Der ständische Dichter konnte also nicht mehr auf Gönner und noch nicht auf eine angemessene Honorierung durch den Buchhandel hoffen”], as Reinhard Wittmann (2011, 155) states. Only those who were already protected by a main profession as a professor or civil servant or by an elevated position in the old estates could afford their literary activities. From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, thoughts of the Enlightenment and a new subject philosophy mingle with international discourses on ‘the

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genius’ against the background of a gradually organizing book market with publishers and book dealers. In the German discourse, in literature the time of Goethe and in philosophy, the time of Fichte and Kant arrives. In particular Fichte’s “Beweis der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks” (“Proof of the Illegality of Reprinting,” 1793) introduces the central arguments for ‘intellectual property.’ According to the basic assumption of subject philosophy, readers of a text always form their own individual idea of a text, which has to be separated from the original idea of a text. This original idea and its specific form (which is central to the creative process) stay with the author and can logically never be ‘rethought’ by anyone else. Although a text can be sold in a printed book form and stays open to new reading processes (and thus to the development of new, individual thought-forms), the original thought-form is not transferable. Fichte now refers to this original thought-form as ‘intellectual property,’ which always remains with the creator or author, and from which two rights are derived: firstly, the author’s right to claim exclusive ownership of her or his text (and, e.g., to prevent unauthorized reprinting), and secondly, to refuse any interference with the content of the text (Fichte [1793] 1964, 410–413). This construction allows authors to give specific licenses to publishers for the printing of their texts and to monetize their own creations through those legally protected book sales. The establishment of the idea of ‘intellectual property’ in the 1770s and its legal establishment in the 1830s was—at least theoretically—the central step to secure the existence of freelance writers legally and economically. From early on, the seriousness of those debates and the awareness that this question is one of life and death for authors was obvious: the desecration of intellectual property is referred to by the term ‘plagiarism,’ which is derived from Latin and means ‘kidnapper’ (plagiarus). Johann Gottlieb Fichte also did not allow any ambiguity here: in order to lend emphasis to his construction of ‘intellectual property,’ he underlined his argument with a parable involving the (useful) plagiarism of medicine. In his parable, the caliph who has to judge about this act does not react squeamishly to the plagiarist: “He had the useful man hanged” [“Er ließ den nützlichen Mann aufhängen”] (Fichte [1793] 1964, 426). From the nineteenth century on, a strongly institutionalized structure of publishing houses, book traders, interest groups and copyright collecting societies (Verwertungsgesellschaften) as redistributing and balancing forces has been established. Despite this legal structure, the actual goal of copyright to enable writers to have a secure existence, could only be

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achieved to a limited extent. On the one hand, the rights exploiters, very often large publishing houses, keep large parts of the proceeds for themselves, not to forget the whole infrastructure of bookshops and intermediaries who also need revenues for their work. On the other hand, the vast majority of book publications have never even come close to generating a profit. As a result, the stereotype of the unbound, creative and fulfilled writer’s life on the one hand and the everyday realities of most authors threatened by existential fears on the other have fallen far apart. The financial situation of most authors between publishing houses, booksellers and readers is problematic, to say the least. An empirical study by Martin Kretschmer and Philip Hardwick from 2007 has shown that “current copyright law has empirically failed” (Kretschmer, Hardwick 2007, 3) to guarantee authors a stable source of income: The rewards to best-selling writers are indeed high but as a profession, writing has remained resolutely unprosperous. For less than half of the 25,000 surveyed authors in Germany and the UK, writing is the main source of income. Typical earnings of professional authors are less than half of the national median wage in Germany (…). 60% of professional writers hold a second job of some kind. (Kretschmer, Hardwictk 2007, 3)

There are several commercial activities that authors carry out in addition to their actual writing: public readings, writing for television and public relations, teaching at school, university and other places, or even small jobs in copy shops or cafés and so on. There are empirical reasons why Pierre Bourdieu defined the symbolic capital, not the economic capital as the nomos of the literary field (Bourdieu 1992, 162). Although both authors and rights exploiters have an interest in reproducing the stereotype of the autonomous and ingenious artist, the lack of economic security of authors in the late Gutenberg Galaxy is itself thematized and reflected in many forms by authors themselves. In German-­ language literature, Stefan Weigl has developed a concise aesthetic procedure for this: in his radio play  Stripped—A Life in Bank Account Statements (Stripped—Ein Leben in Kontoauszügen,  2004) voice actors read out the authors’ bank statements overlaid with advertising letters and warnings from his bank as well as the comments of an ‘economic journalist.’ The author stages himself with the help of the speakers as a stripped subject that is reduced to his economic failures. Paradoxically enough, for

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this striptease Weigl not only received the author’s fee of the public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk for his radio play, but also the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden in 2005—he thus disclosed his subsidized and at the same time precarious writer’s existence.

Platform Capitalism and Creativity: Precarious Authorship in the Digital Society One could now rightfully focus on how authors in the Gutenberg Galaxy dealt with their problematic income situation and the paradoxical self-­ image of the ingenious author with a lack of economic capital. What interests us here, however, is the change in labor relations in recent decades, which are also characterized by increasing digitalization of the society and also in the field of literature. A combination of the shifted labor sectors (from the ‘industrial world’ and the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ to the ‘post-­ industrial society’ or the ‘digital/information society’) with an increasing deregulation of labor markets and a globalization of capital flows has led to the description of a new social class, the ‘precariat.’ In the German discourse, this term is used to describe the consequences of activating labor market policies: the establishment of permanent probation in the labor market and at the same time the expansion of insecure employment models. Robert Castel und Klaus Dörre (2009) define the ‘precarious’ as the group that suffers most from the perpetuation of insecure forms of employment and life. Precarious employment can also be understood as the opposite of the ‘standard employment relationship’ (‘Normarbeitsverhältnis,’ which actually refers to an activity outside of one’s own household with an unlimited contract for an employer whose working time is regularly spread over the working days). Subjective loss of meaning, recognition deficits and planning insecurity are the consequences of precarious work (Brinkmann et al. 2006, 16 f.). Whereas in the international debate mainly material forms of work are addressed, the German-language discourse also allows the academic milieus and forms of immaterial work to be described as ‘precarious.’ For example, university employees who are repeatedly given fixed-term contracts and are often paid meagerly are referred to as the ‘academic precariat’; in 2021 under the hashtag “#IchbinHanna,” those affected collected countless reports on their precarious living situation, which no longer fits the social image of the aloof thinker in the ivory tower  (#ichbinhanna

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2021). This model can also be transferred to the field of artistic creativity, the precarious authorship in the digital society. Due to the potentials of digital copies and the network structures of social media, the printed book as the central carrier of literary works and as an effect the idea of ‘intellectual property rights’ is challenged radically. At the same time, the relevance of traditional literary life is shifting, new models of producing, distributing and licensing literary texts are established. The battles between distributors and producers have come to a head: in 2016, the distribution practice of ‘Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort’ (central German licensing and collecting society for authors) changed and only authors and no longer publishers participated. Book scholars and literary scholars have shown that under digital conditions the literary value chain can function without mediators such as publishers or booksellers— which creates both problems and opportunities for authors (cf. Ernst 2017; Hagenhoff and Kuhn 2015). The sociologist Carolin Amlinger also recognizes a process that began in the 1990s and has led to a new economic and labor organization in the literary field, paradoxically restating old patterns of exclusion and thus “refeudalization tendencies” (“Refeudalisierungsprozesse,” Amlinger 2016). Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has radically changed the conditions of communication; since about 2005, various social media have been able to define the standards of network communication in a very profitable way. Their business model is based on the assumption that ‘users’ provide their own ‘user-generated content’ and that the exchange of comments and ‘(dis-)likes’ is a surplus value for them (Becker et al. 2019). The beginning of this period was marked by enthusiastic proclamations of “The Wealth of Networks” (Benkler 2006) and of a “Free Culture” that would shape the “Future of Creativity” (Lessig 2004). Consequently, authors use elements of a free online culture to develop business models beyond the logics of publishing houses and ‘intellectual property rights,’ for example, in twitterature, in instapoetics or in crowdfunding projects. However, we are now aware of the monopolizing power of “Platform Capitalism” (Srnicek 2017) and its problematic political and cultural effects. Seven of the ten most valuable companies in the world have originated from a digital business model, including Amazon (Kindle, Goodreads), Facebook (Instagram) and Alphabet (Google), which in various forms also feel responsible for the production, distribution and/or reception of literature. Alongside those monopolists, there are alternative platform models, in the German-speaking context for instance the social

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reading-platform yourbook.shop  or the crowdsourcing-platform Startnext (yourbook.shop 2021; Startnext 2021). Independent models of selfpublishing, direct author-reader communication or the public modification of literature in reading communities have been established (crowdsourcing, fan fiction). Nevertheless, the monopolistic tendencies, the lack of data sovereignty of the users and the hidden algorithms are the cause of necessary criticism of social media that started early on (Kurz and Rieger 2011; Lovink 2012). German-speaking authors deal with the new potentials of digital literary publications and the corresponding business models in innovative ways. Dirk von Gehlen has published his second (non-fiction) book Eine neue Version ist verfügbar (A new version is available, 2012) with help of the crowdfunding-platform Startnext and also intended it to be a crowdsourcing project (you can find a more detailed analysis than this summary in Ernst 2020). This project was financed by 350 supporters who put a total of 14.182 € in the fund (von Gehlen 2012). It was one of the first successful crowdfunded book projects in Germany, and at the same time it was one of the first projects in Germany to address the changed form of text production, distribution and reception in social media on a theoretical level. Firstly, this project shows that books can indeed be successfully launched today without a publisher or book trade, but that, however, publisher-like activities still have to be financed. In the end, the author had to split the revenues between himself, a book designer and an external editor, so the author became a kind of a one-man-publishing-house (a role that he has not taken again since). Secondly, this project shows that although crowdfunding of books can be successful, crowdsourcing is still subject to many difficulties. Thirdly, the changed production process and thus the alternative financing model also have an influence on the text form: the discussions with the hired external editor are partly presented in a separate chapter which would have been unusual in traditional books; a list of the supporters, some of them with photos, closes the book (von Gehlen 2013, 191–206, 209–217). Fourthly, although this book is published under the open license CC BY-NC-SA, the intended diversity of new versions has not really been written by the crowdfunding community. And fifthly, one could add, it is no coincidence that this risky financing model has been tried out by an author who has regular monthly earnings as journalist at Süddeutsche Zeitung.

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Precarious Writing in the Digital Society: Kathrin Röggla’s “Essenpoetik” It is different to turn to a ‘real literary writer’ who continues to write her literary œuvre under the conditions of the digital society. Kathrin Röggla1 is one of the most important contemporary authors who are writing in German; she has published a number of prose books, essay volumes, theater and radio plays. Also, she has won numerous literary prizes and scholarships and is the deputy president of Academy of the Arts in Berlin. Her early works also reflect the precarious living and working situations of the younger generation and the crisis-like present. While the so-called ‘Hartz reform,’ which deregulated the German labor market, was carried out in 2005 and increased the precarization of working life, Röggla already dealt in 2000 with this topic focusing on life in Berlin. Thus the first prose piece in her book Crazy weather (Irres Wetter, 2000) is programmatically called “you can’t earn money this way” [“so kann man kein geld verdienen”] (Röggla 2002, 5–12), and in “remainders of working life” [“reste von erwerbsleben”] (ibid., 134–140) precarious life avant la lettre is described as “making new money for a starvation wage, that’s what they call it here” [“neues geld ausbaden für einen hungerlohn, nennt man das hier”] (ibid., 134). In her 2004 published work we do not sleep. Novel (wir schlafen nicht. Roman; Röggla 2004), which has already become canonical for literary reflections of the working conditions in the digital society, on the basis of conversations she has had Röggla constructs New Economy workers such as a key account manager, an intern or an online editor and assembles the collected statements on topics such as “life-style,” “hard business studies,” “private life,” “adapting” or “we do not sleep.” Annemarie Matthies reads the text as a reversal of superficially positive New Economy discourses, which are turned into its opposite by the experts’ contributions. we do not sleep presents in a literary way the “fundamental irreconcilability of the New Economy and subject-oriented work” [“prinzipielle Unversöhnlichkeit von New Economy und subjektgemäßem Arbeiten”] (Matthies 2017, 104). By building such texts on the concrete (and selected, modified and assembled) statements of working people, the author makes the hidden 1  In this volume, you can read the interview by Jan Ceuppens and Hilde Keteleer “with Kathrin Röggla about precarity and the grammar of catastrophes,” see pp. 159–176.

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aspects of work processes visible aesthetically. At another point, she also reflects on this writing activity, which is ultimately also based on systemic collaboration: “The writer […] is also just a hidden manager, that’s also just an ‘Ich-AG’. […] You too only produce your goods, […] which can then be clicked on in the internet […]! You are nothing but brands” [“Der Schriftsteller, (…) das ist doch auch nur so ein verkappter Manager, das ist auch nur so eine Ich-AG. (…) Ihr produziert doch auch nur Eure Waren, (…) die man dann im Internet anklicken kann (…)! Ihr seid nichts als Marken”] (Röggla 2013, 308). Röggla then refers to Gilles Deleuze’ concept of a society of control, she refers back to Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality and Judith Butler’s book Excitable Speech, and goes into Hubert Fichte’s poetics of investigative conversation in order to find a basis for literary communication: “A conversation is a process that changes one’s position. […] Therefore, in a text based on conversation, I am logically not concerned with being identical with myself or with finding a language that is my very own, but with making contact” [“Ein Gespräch ist ein Prozess, der die eigene Position verändert. (…) Deswegen geht es mir in einem Text, der auf Gesprächen basiert, logischerweise nicht darum, identisch mit mir zu sein bzw. eine Sprache zu finden, die meine ureigenste ist, sondern in Kontakt zu treten”] (Röggla 2013, 318 f.). A literary form particularly suitable for this kind of conversation is the poetics lecture, which gains its special quality above all from the performance between author and academic audience. Regarding the content, research states that the poetics lecture as a genre is characterized by a “real openness” [“ausgesprochene Offenheit”] (Hachmann 2014, 149), and that the authors, which seems counterintuitive, give less information about their own writing rather than “formulating that they have no poetics” [“formulieren, keine Poetik zu haben”] (Bohley 2017, 252). The actual value of poetics lectures, however, consists in the acquisition of symbolic capital (Eke 2016, 23  f.), whereby Johanna Bohley refers to Juli Zeh, who calculated an hourly wage of five euros, and states that poetics lectures “require a high time commitment for the authors, which is relatively poorly paid” [“für die Autoren mit einem hohen zeitlichen Aufwand verbunden, der verhältnismäßig schlecht bezahlt wird”] (Bohley 2017, 247). In contrast, however, poetics lectures increase the “fame and market value of their authors” [“die Bekanntheit und den Marktwert ihrer Autoren”] (ibid.). Kathrin Röggla has been invited several times by universities to give poetics lectures: in Duisburg-Essen and the Saarland (2014), in Bamberg

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(2017), Cologne (2019) and Graz (2021). Nevertheless, her three poetics lectures of 2014 given at the University of Duisburg-Essen and titled “Essenpoetik” have been freely published under ‘CC BY-NC-ND 2.0’ (Röggla 2015a).2 Especially the first lecture, titled “Literature and politics—business and system” (“Literatur und Politik—Betrieb und System”), reflects with regard to content and form the pressure and the precarious circumstances under which literary texts are produced today. It can be shown that the linguistic form of her “Essenpoetik” and its specific intermedia use of different clips reflect the diversity and fragmentation of today’s literary production conditions. Using the example of Frankfurt Poetics Lectures, Monika Schmitz-­ Emans emphasizes that although this format is first and foremost about “processes of oral performance,” a “tension between orality and writings is negotiated here per se” [“Prozesse mündlicher Performanz,” “per se eine Spannung zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit”] (2018, 227), since the oral performance usually refers to a written script. In this sense, she describes Juli Zeh’s Frankfurt Poetics Lectures, in which Zeh reads out a series of e-mails, as “a one-person play” [“Einpersonen-Stück”] in which the author plays “herself as a character who operates between different forms, levels and performances of written communication” [“sich selbst als eine Figur [spielt], die zwischen unterschiedlichen Formen, Ebenen und Performanzen schriftlicher Kommunikation agiert”] (ibid., 245). Similarly, in “Literature and politics—business and system” Röggla stages her everyday life as a writer between writing processes, panel discussions, negotiations about theater projects, conversations with her editor and reflections on her own writing life: a diary of the first-person narrator “Kathrin Röggla” in sixteen entries, repeatedly interrupted by short video clips such as the song “Pollesch ist durch” by Die Radierer or excerpts from theater performances of plays by René Pollesch or theater and radio plays by Röggla herself. The framing “Instruction manual” 2  Disclaimer: I worked from 2010–2016 as Assistant Professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen and was not involved in questions of remuneration of Kathrin Röggla for her poetics lectures, but I did give the introduction, took care of technical issues as well as the later documentation of the poetics lectures in written and audio-visual form. I would like to thank Antonia Kampe for the literature research and Till Mischko, who is currently working on a PhD project at the University of Trier on ‘Precarity in Contemporary German Novels,’ for inspiration. Parts of this contribution correlate with a German-language essay that is currently being written for “Handbook Poetics Lectures,” edited by Johanna Bohley, Gundela Hachmann and Julia Schöll (will be published in 2022).

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(“Gebrauchsanweisung”) at the beginning states that this poetics lecture should function like a slowly turning kaleidoscope in which diary entries stand next to theory quotations and film and audio clips: “It is a kind of collage that can tell much more about my working life than a bound lecture could” [“Es ist eine Art Collage, die viel mehr über mein Arbeiten erzählen kann als es ein gebundener Vortrag möchte.”] (Röggla 2015a, 2). As the central theme of this first “Essenpoetik”-lecture, Andreas Stuhlmann recognizes that “the role of the writer has changed enormously […] in the last 20 years” [“Die Rolle des Schriftstellers bzw. der Schriftstellerin (…) in den letzten 20 Jahren enorm gewandelt”] (Stuhlmann 2017, 83)—roughly the time when the discourse on precarization was also established. The first diary entry immediately sets the hectic tone of the fragmented account of the writer’s everyday life (you can watch the lecture online: Röggla 2015b, 15:55–16:42): October, 5 The everyday life of a writer consists of a thousand small adjustments to discourse and literary programmes. Completing commissions, jury meetings, radio recordings, studio visits, workshops in small towns, poetics lectureships, radio play manuscript submissions, reading samples in the theater, editorial meetings, writing assignments for a daily newspaper, panel discussions, short statements, transfer tasks, reading tours, moderating, being on the road in current thematic fields: NSA, Frontex, economy/financial crisis, bio-politics, ISIS, etc. and so on. Der Alltag eines Schriftstellers/einer Schriftstellerin besteht aus tausend kleinen Anpassungen an Diskurs und literarische Programme. Auftragserledigungen, Jurysitzungen, Radioaufnahmen, Studiobesuche, Workshops in Kleinstädten, Poetikdozenturen, Hörspielmanuskriptabgaben, Leseproben im Theater, Lektoratstreffen, Schreibaufträgen für eine Tageszeitung, Podiumsdiskussionen, Kurzstatements, Transferaufgaben, Lesereisen, Moderationen, unterwegs sein in aktuellen Themenfeldern: NSA, Frontex, Ökonomie/Finanzkrise, Biopolitik, IS, usw. und so fort. (Röggla 2015a, 2)

Here, the first-person author clearly marks that what is at stake is an insight into the multifaceted precarious life behind the stereotype of the ‘autonomous’ and ‘ingenious’ writers’ existence. Actually, according to the diary entries, such a life is “pure madness, or a variant of either: ‘staying in business’ or ‘staying in discourse,’ ‘staying in conversation,’ talking—making money” [“Der reinste Irrsinn, bzw. eine Variante von entweder: ‘im

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Geschäft bleiben’ oder ‚im Diskurs bleiben’, ‚im Gespräch bleiben’, sich unterhalten—Geld verdienen”] (Röggla 2015b, 3). In October alone, the program includes readings in Tirol and Berlin, a workshop, two panel discussions, a gallery opening and a Skype conversation with Milo Rau about possible project participation. Later, however, the author repeatedly addresses the project character and the uncertainties of the writer‘s existence: the entry from April 12 describes a “grotesque casting conversation with the director Christopher Rüping for the Zürich playhouse” [“Groteskes Castinggespräch mit dem Regisseur Christopher Rüping für das Zürcher Schauspielhaus”]: he asks Röggla to write a play about Alzheimer’s as an in-house-writer, but in collaboration with the actors. In four months she should therefore move to Zürich. “I can’t move to Zürich.—Oh, so it’s not going to work out with us” [“Ich kann nicht nach Zürich ziehen.—Ach so, dann klappt das wohl nicht mit uns”] (Röggla 2015a, 5). As the theater business is changing, the form of authorship is also changing, toward playwrights who often direct plays themselves: “Classical literary authorship is disappearing or being reduced to small pieces. […] The author is the service provider, the text must constantly adapt to the needs of the team, it is controlled, fitted in” [“Die klassische literarische Autorschaft verschwindet oder wird verheizt in kleinen Stückchen. (…) Der Autor ist der Dienstleister, (…) der Text muss sich andauernd den Bedürfnissen des Teams anpassen, er wird kontrolliert, eingepasst”] (ibid.). The subject of precarious authorship continues to run through the diary: on September 16, the author receives an invitation to a panel discussion in another city, but no honorarium could be paid, so she cancels her participation (Röggla 2015a, 8). The author also reflects on her precarious position as a writer, about the results of the ‘Hartz reforms’ in Germany, and connects these existential situations with ideas of the ‘entrepreneurial self,’ referring to works by Ulrich Bröckling and Michel Foucault (Röggla 2015a, 10f., 13). Later, at a panel discussion in an Italian theater, she intervenes against the contributions that are part of a “neoliberal agenda,” because there was “something so cynical and sinister about the mystification of ‘the economy’ as a great whole, as a religious greatness, in this dangerous crisis situation” [“Mystifizierung ‚der Wirtschaft‘ als großes Ganzes, als religiöse Größe, hatte etwas derart Zynisches und Unheimliches in dieser gefährlichen Krisensituation”] (Röggla 2015a, 19). What is interesting now is the legal and publishing form into which Röggla transfers her poetics lecture. While she converts other poetics

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lectures into printed books and in this way hands them over to the mechanisms of the traditional book market, the “Essenpoetik” is made freely available in both written and audio-visual form under a creative commons (CC) license. In this way, the author, as a literary-economic subject, implies that, firstly, the honorarium for the poetics lectures by the Rectorate of the University of Duisburg-Essen is apparently sufficient enough that she foregoes any additional possible revenue. Most importantly, secondly, she signals that the poetics lectures are indeed intended to have the effect of attracting greater attention to her own work in the digital society. It would be worth a separate analysis to what extent the video recordings of the “Essenpoetik” available on YouTube, which are already accessed 3500 times (June 2021), as well as the open access text version published on the servers of the University of Duisburg-Essen have actually reached a larger or different audience than a traditional book publication would have. These online publications have the paradoxical effect that they must do without the interrupting twenty-one audio and video clips (including excerpts from films by Alexander Kluge, readings by Hubert Fichte, productions by René Pollesch or radio plays by Röggla herself), since these are legally protected and not available in open access. Of course, this is particularly irritating when it comes to theater productions of texts by Röggla herself, which cannot even be presented in excerpts. In this way, the “Essenpoetik,” precisely by becoming part of the creative commons universe, marks that large parts of cinematic, dramatic and literary production remain protected by copyright (for good reasons) even in a digital society. While the first poetics lecture of “Essenpoetik” thus reports on the everyday challenges of a precarious writer’s life in the digital society, and this economic situation is also reflected in the literary form as well as in the mode of publication, Röggla finds a different solution to secure her literary writing a few years later. Since august 2020, she is Professor of Literary Writing at Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, 2021). It will be interesting to observe in the next few years whether this changed working situation, which now sees literary writing as a sideline from a financially secure position, also has an effect on Röggla’s literary aesthetics.

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Precarious Authorship in the Digital Society: A Preliminary Conclusion This chapter has asked whether and, if so, how the precarious working conditions of literary authorship, which are further amplified in the digital society, are reflected in literary writing. To this end, historical and media developments, interdisciplinary research perspectives as well as cursory readings of the radio play “Stripped” (2004) by Stefan Weigl and the crowdfunding project “Eine neue Version ist verfügbar” (2012/2013) by Dirk von Gehlen and a more intensive analysis of the poetics lectures “Essenpoetik” (2014/2015) by Kathrin Röggla were presented. It could be shown that in the Gutenberg Galaxy with the legal construction of ‘intellectual property’ and the established book market, a complex structure was supposed to create an economic foundation for freelance authorship, based on the aesthetic and legal object ‘printed book.’ Nevertheless, the majority of authors could not live from writing. “Stripped” by Stefan Weigl reports impressively on the precarious life of writers: the author as an economically failed and stripped subject (historical and juridic dimension). In the digital society, the already precarious situation of writers is becoming even more difficult: the printed book as a source of income is losing its relevance, the public spheres and models of literary authorship are shifting (digital and economic dimension). Using the example of the crowdfunding project by Dirk von Gehlen and the open access licensing of Kathrin Röggla’s “Essenpoetik,” it could be shown that authors in the digital society are experimenting with other business and legal models, whereby the monetization of the completed text is no longer the central aim. The revenue model in those cases concentrates on the participation of the readers in the production process (“Eine neue Version ist verfügbar”) or on the performance of the text in front of the academic audience (“Essenpoetik”) (book-economic dimension). Finally, these examples show that the precarious life of writers also translates into the aesthetic forms of its literary reflection: whereas von Gehlen’s crowdfunding project reveals the exchange with the editor and Weigl’s radio play as a collage removes the private character the authors’ financial situation (“Stripped”), the fragmentation of the author’s everyday life in Röggla’s “Essenpoetik” translates into her frantic diary entries that are interrupted by short clips (aesthetic dimension). However, there is also cause for optimism: Dirk von Gehlen’s crowdfunding has worked and co-financed another designer and an editor, his

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transparent writing process has been universally praised; Stefan Weigl not only received a honorarium for his radio play, but also a literary award for its content and aesthetics. Kathrin Röggla decided to make her poetics lectures freely available digitally, both textually and audio-visually, after the University of Duisburg-Essen had rewarded her poetics lectures; as a professor at the KHM of Cologne, she is meanwhile in a financially secure writing situation anyway. It is remarkable, though, that all these works and forms of literary communication have been taken place beyond publishing houses and the book trade. Carolin Amlinger already analyzed in 2016 that the social differences in the literary field have become even more severe, “so that a small number of the literary elite is confronted with a growing mass of writing poor. What is new about these ‘poor poets,’ however, is that they recognize artistic precarity as such” [“so dass eine kleine Zahl der schriftstellerischen Elite einer größer werdenden Masse an writing poor gegenübersteht. Neu an jenen ‘armen Poeten’ ist allerdings, dass sie die künstlerische Prekarität als solche wahrnehmen”] (Amlinger 2016). We have seen how this reflection on literary precarity is unfolding. However, as media and economic conditions continue to develop to the disadvantage of established literary business models, and at the same time digital and social media continue to enable new production and business models for literary writing, research must continue to be very attentive.

Bibliography Primary Literature Bücher online kaufen—und so Deine Lieblings-Buchhandlung unterstützen. https://yourbook.shop/. Accessed 24 October 2021. von Gehlen, Dirk. 2012. Eine neue Version ist verfügbar. https://www.startnext. com/neueversion. [Crowdfunding-project.] Accessed 20 June 2021. ———. 2013. Eine neue Version ist verfügbar. München: Selbstverlag. [Book.] #ichbinhanna. 2021. https://twitter.com/search?q=%23IchbinHanna. Accessed 20 June 2021. Röggla, Kathrin. 2002. Irres Wetter. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 2004. wir schlafen nicht. Roman. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ———. 2013. Stottern und Stolpern. Strategien einer literarischen Gesprächsführung. In besser wäre: keine. Essays und Theater, 307–331. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.

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———. 2015a. Essenpoetik. http://roeggla.net/wp-­content/uploads/2015/12/ roeggla-­essenpoetik.pdf. ———. 2015b. Literatur und Politik—Betrieb und System (1. Vorlesung) (1.12.2014, DU-Essen). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5UEut9i48g. Accessed 20 June 2021. Startnext—Die Zukunft gehört den Mutigen. https://www.startnext.com/. Accessed 24 October 2021. Weigl, Stefan. 2004. Stripped. Ein Leben in Kontoauszügen. In ARD Hörspieldatenbank. https://hoerspiele.dra.de/vollinfo.php?tipp=1&dukey=1446335. [Audio: https://archive.org/details/stripped-­ein-­leben-­in-­kontoauszuegen-­stefan-­ weigl-­2004]. Accessed 20 June 2021.

Secondary Literature Academy of Media Arts Cologne [Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln]. 2021. Prof. Kathrin Röggla. https://www.khm.de/lehrende/id.29843.prof-­kathrin-­ roggla/. Accessed 20 June 2021. Amlinger, Carolin. 2016. Schreiben. Eine Soziologie literarischer Arbeit. In Soziopolis, February 1. https://www.soziopolis.de/schreiben.html. Becker, Wolfgang, et  al., eds. 2019. Geschäftsmodelle in der digitalen Welt. Strategien, Prozesse und Praxiserfahrungen. Wiesbaden: Springer. Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks. How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Bohley, Johanna. 2017. Dichter am Pult—Altes/Neues aus Poetikvorlesungen 2010–2015. In Gegenwart schreiben. Zur deutschsprachigen Literatur 2000–2015, ed. Corina Caduff and Ulrike Vedder, 243–254. Paderborn: Fink. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Rede und Antwort. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brinkmann, Ulrich, Dörre, Klaus, and Röbenack, Silke. 2006. Prekäre Arbeit. Ursachen, Ausmaß, soziale folgen und subjektive Verarbeitungsformen unsicherer Beschäftigungsverhältnisse. Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. https://www. researchgate.net/publication/303813859_Prekare_Arbeit_Ursachen_ Ausmass_soziale_Folgen_und_subjektive_Verarbeitungsformen_unsicherer_ Beschaftigungsverhaltnisse/link/5755480c08ae10c72b6664ee/download. Castel, Robert, and Klaus Dörre, eds. 2009. Prekarität, Abstieg, Ausgrenzung. Frankfurt; New York: Campus. Eke, Norbert Otto. 2016. ‘Reden’ über Dichtung. Poetik-Vorlesungen und Poetik-Dozenturen im literarischen Feld. In Poetik des Gegenwartsromans, ed. Nadine J.  Schmidt and Kalina Kupcyńska, 18–29. München: edition text + kritik. Ernst, Thomas. 2017. Wem gehören Autor-Leser-Texte? Das geistige Eigentum, netzliterarische Standards, die Twitteratur von @tiny_tales und das Online-­ Schreibprojekt morgen-mehr.de von Tilman Rammstedt. In Lesen X.0.

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Rezeptionsprozesse in der digitalen Gegenwart, ed. Sebastian Böck et  al., 145–167. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress. https://www.vr-­ elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.14220/9783737007450. ———. 2020. Crowdfunding und Crowdsourcing in der Praxis: Neue Geschäftsund Rechtsmodelle der Netzliteratur. In Tipping Points. Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zu neuen Fragen des Urheberrechts, ed. Simon Schrör et  al., 81–96. Baden-Baden: Nomos. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748910664-­81. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1793. 1964. Beweis der Unrechtmässigkeit des Büchernachdrucks. Ein Räsonnement und eine Parabel. In Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Band I.1.: Werke 1791–1794, ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Jacob, 409–426. Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Hachmann, Gundela. 2014. Poeta doctus docens. Poetikvorlesungen als Inszenierung von Bildung. In Subjektform Autor. Autorschaftsinszenierungen als Praktiken der Subjektivierung, ed. Sabine Kyora, 137–155. Bielefeld: Transcript. Hagenhoff, Svenja, and Axel Kuhn. 2015. Digitale Lesemedien. In Lesen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Ursula Rautenberg and Ute Schneider, 361–380. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter. Kretschmer, Martin, and Hardwick, Philip. 2007. Authors’ Earnings from Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: a Survey of 25.000 British and German Writers. Poole, UK: Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2619649. Kurz, Constanze, and Frank Rieger. 2011. Die Datenfresser. Wie Internetfirmen und Staat sich unsere persönlichen Daten einverleiben und wie wir die Kontrolle darüber zurückerlangen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture—The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin. Lovink, Geert. 2012. Networks Without a Cause: a Critique of Social Media. Cambridge, Malden: Polity. Matthies, Annemarie. 2017. Spielbälle. Neuverhandlungen der Arbeitswelt im Medium Literatur. Köln: Halem. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. 2018. Oralität und Schriftlichkeit, Zeitlichkeit und Performanz im Spiegel Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen. In Textgerede. Interferenzen von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit in der Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. David-Christopher Assmann and Nicola Menzel, 227–247. Paderborn: Fink. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, Malden: Polity. Stuhlmann, Andreas. 2017. „Kleine Textmonster“. Zu Kathrin Rögglas poetischem Verfahren. In Kathrin Röggla, ed. Iuditha Balint, Tanja Nusser, and Rolf Parr, 79–106. München: edition text + kritik. Wittmann, Reinhard. 2011. Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels. München: Beck.

PART III

Figurations of Precarious Work in Contemporary Literature

CHAPTER 13

Toward a Poetics of Precarity. Labor Spheres in Contemporary European Fiction Roswitha Böhm

Despite their alliterative connection, the two elements of the conceptual pair ‘Poetics of Precarity’ stand in clear tension with one another: the first recalling the normative and the prescriptive; the second the transitory and indeterminate.1 Further juxtapositions might include the form-fixing versus the status-dissolving, and the aesthetically encompassing versus the socially threatening. In this chapter, I wish to explore the question of what productive potential this tension might hold. Which forms of expression does the poetic find for the precarious and what influence does the precarious have on the poetic? The political and simultaneously aesthetic reflection on the precarization of work in post-industrial societies has become a frequent topic in 1  I would like to thank Gabriella Szalay for the extremely knowledgeable and linguistically sensitive proofreading of my text.

R. Böhm (*) Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_13

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recent text- and image-based media. Siding with the French-Canadian essayist and literary critic, Lakis Proguidis, who has argued that contemporary culture offers us the chance to discover a “previously unknown aesthetic and conceptual universe” [“univers esthétique et conceptuel jusqu’alors inconnu”] (Proguidis 2001, 9), I want to take a closer look at this recent interest in the precarization of work, particularly from a literary perspective. As Proguidis has pointed out, regardless of whether one is concerned with production or reception, the extrême contemporain is like a seismograph, which offers us the possibility of ‘orbiting’ and thereby questioning and capturing the immediate present. It also serves as a means of better understanding the conditio humana in our present moment, since, “we do not know this specific, concrete world of ours” [“Ce monde précis, concret, le nôtre, nous ne le connaissons pas”] (ibid., 13). This ‘concrete world,’ which belongs to us but is unknown to us, only reveals itself, and becomes visible and tangible in all of its glory, Proguidis continues, when novels—or formulated more broadly—when works of art allow us to discover it (cf. ibid.). After a tour d’horizon, wherein I will provide a brief overview of the treatment of poverty and precarity in the social sciences, I will turn my attention to how the theme of precarious working conditions and labor spheres have historically been treated in literary contexts. The final part of my chapter will be devoted to the analysis of an exemplary contemporary text, namely the novel Notre aimable clientèle (Our Valued Customers, 2005) by the French author Emmanuelle Heidsieck. Since, from a literary and cultural studies perspective, it is not only the preoccupation with the theme of precarious labor spheres per se that is of interest here, but also and especially the differences in its aesthetic implementation and the “rhetorics of the social” [“rhétoriques du social”] (Chaudier 2005, 133), the various points of contact between economic and linguistic-literary processes will likewise be explored.

Defining Precarity: Approaches from the Social Sciences My current research project, “Towards a Poetics of Precarity: Innovation and Intervention in Contemporary French Fiction,” examines narrative texts that address precarious working and living conditions from the 1990s until today. I am particularly interested in gaining deeper insights into the

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connection between aesthetic practices and social realities through the use of cultural narratological approaches. The decision to anchor my project in the period beginning in the 1990s is driven by a distinct set of historic, economic, and socio-political circumstances, which are exemplified by the term “precarity.” Derived from the legal term precarius (i.e., “that which can be attained by prayer only”) the adjective précaire has formed part of the French language since the fourteenth century, while the noun précarité, used to describe the “state of that which is precarious,” was first recorded in the Dictionnaire Universel de Boiste in 1823. However, the first mention of precarity (or précarité), according to its current socio-­ political usage, can be dated to 1987, when it appeared in a report of the Conseil Économique et Social. As a consultative assembly in France, the Conseil Économique et Social publishes reports that advise lawmakers on questions of social and economic policy. After defining precariousness as “the absence of one or more forms of security, particularly employment security” [“l’absence d’une ou plusieurs des sécurités, notamment celle de l’emploi”] (Wresinski 1987, 6), its report on “extreme poverty and precariousness” [“grande pauvreté et précarité”] (ibid.) urged “real coherent, global and prospective solutions to the problems considered” [“de véritables solutions cohérentes, globales et prospectives aux problems considérés”] (ibid.). In other words, precarity in the form that it assumes within the present essay emerged out a specific socio-historical and economic configuration that can be seen as a “new variant of the social question of advanced capitalist societies” [“neue Variante der sozialen Frage der fortgeschrittenen kapitalistischen Gesellschaften”] (Schultheis and Herold 2010, 244). In order to better understand this configuration, let us pause for a moment and consider some of its key aspects. According to Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (1999), we are currently living in the third phase of capitalism (preceded by family and corporate capitalism), which they define as a globalized network capitalism, based on new technologies. Societies that participate in global network capitalism are characterized by radical market logic and the demand for maximum mobility and flexibility. Consequently, they may also be viewed as information societies that are subject to a “digital imperative” (DeLillo 2004, 24). As the German literary, media, and cultural studies scholar Joseph Vogl has noted, such a technical and economic upheaval of the existing social system inevitably leads to an “exponential increase in capital mobility” [“exponentiellen Mobilitätszuwachs im Kapitalverkehr”] (Vogl 2010, 14). François Dubet

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and Didier Lapeyronnie (1992) underline this point by arguing that the ‘new’ element in the social question cited above is that exploitation has been replaced by segregation: marginalized persons are now viewed as simply superfluous to the production of capital and thereby society, and are being systematically excluded from the dominant contexts of recognition and belonging (cf. Bude and Willisch 2008; Kronauer 2002). Even though poverty has always existed,2 since the 1990s there have been significant changes to its public perception. Within the context of the—still ongoing—economic, political, and social crises around the world, the social and political sciences have helped to forge a specific concept of precarity that has in turn be taken up by the media. At the same time, numerous narrative texts—whether they assume the form of novels, docu-fictions, or prose miniatures—have addressed the struggles of dealing with precarious working and living conditions: it would not be too far-fetched to assume that their treatment of the subject have continued to influence other forms of social communication. My project therefore aims, on the one hand, to question the potential of such texts to create cultural meaning, and on the other, to examine the ethical implications of aesthetic concepts. More specifically, I hope to show the extent to which social issues—in this case, the role of work in the post-industrial societies of the twenty-first century—are being addressed in terms of cultural negotiation, while asking which particular aesthetic forms so-called ‘precarity stories’ use for this purpose. From the perspective of the social and political sciences, the topics that concern us most here—work, poverty, and precarity—have all been well researched. When it comes to describing contemporary society, for example, scholars have developed a differentiated typology of exclusion, which distinguishes between those who are “deliberately excluded, functionally excluded, and superfluous to existence” [“gezielt Ausgegrenzte, funktional Ausgegrenzte und existentiell Überflüssige”] (Bude and Willisch 2006). Poverty in turn is understood as a political-normative and relational concept with scholars such as Christoph Butterwegge (2009) emphasizing the fact that poverty is a multidimensional problem, which is comprised of a variety of economic, social, and cultural factors. For example, if a person is regarded as poor when his or her economic resources fall “permanently below the level of social prosperity” [“dauerhaft 2  For a detailed and useful definition and account of poverty in the Federal Republic of Germany, cf. Butterwegge (2009, 11–95).

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unterhalb des gesellschaftlichen Wohlstandsniveaus”] (Groh-Samberg 2009, 118), then this working definition can be used to delimit the concept of precarity with regards to the temporal and financial dimensions under consideration here. If precarity is based on socio-structural changes, and is consequently a relational category, it cannot by way of necessity mean, “total exclusion from the labor market, absolute poverty, complete social isolation, and forced political apathy” [“vollständige Ausgrenzung aus dem Erwerbssystem, absolute Armut, totale soziale Isolation und erzwungene politische Apathie”] (Brinkmann et  al. 2006, 17). Rather, it indicates the decline of a previously generalized “level of income, protection, and social integration” [“Einkommens-, Schutz- und sozialen Integrationsniveaus”] (ibid.), including the erosion of established social standards, such as labor laws, as well as a pluralization and individualization of forms of work and the de-institutionalization of employee status (i.e., dissolution of the ‘classic’ wage employment relationship through temporary work, part-time work, mini-jobs, etc.). The French social scientist Robert Castel (2009) has identified the return of social insecurity and an increase in existential fears [“la montée des incertitudes”] as potential risks to social cohesion, while the French philosopher Guillaume le Blanc (2007) has stated that a ‘precarious life’ is characterized by an all-encompassing feeling of uncertainty. The great paradox of precarity lies in its invisibility, as those who are most affected by it do everything in their power not to be defined as such. They are the “integrated excluded,” [“exclus inclus”] (Le Blanc 2007, 118), who are less interested in protesting their current situation than in regaining their former social status and standard of living. Overall, precariousness is a state of entre-deux; a situation of the provisional and the transitory, “a kind of social limbo” [“eine Art sozialer Schwebezustand”] (Butterwegge 2009, 25). Even if the risk of falling into such a “transitory intermediate situation” [“transitorische Zwischenlage”] (Kraemer 2008, 147) is more prevalent among certain educational levels, occupational groups, employment biographies, and age cohorts, precarity is increasingly becoming the norm (cf. Bourdieu 1998). It even affects those who, due to their social status and education, including their previous profession, believed themselves to be spared from processes of precarization (cf. Hürtgen 2008). For example, cultural workers and academics are affected by the neoliberal reformatting of society that is commonly referred to as “oikodicy” [“Oikodizee”] (Vogl 2010) in reference to the financial-economic belief in the self-regulating justice

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of the worlds’ markets. This state of affairs is sometimes lamented under the guise of “the precarious intellectuals” (Rambach and Rambach 2001; Moureau 2007) and sometimes celebrated through the phrase “digital bohemians” (Friebe and Lobo 2006). However, more critical voices complain that a creative industry, which feeds the values of anti-capitalist culture, including independence and creativity, into capitalism, only serves to consolidate the latter (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Glinoer et al. 2014). Thus, it would seem that precarization can be understood as a social process through which the erosion of established standards also affects the so-called integrated (Brinkmann et al. 2006, 17). In this sense, an employment relationship can be described as precarious if, as a result of their work, employees fall significantly below a certain level of income, protection, and social integration that is considered to be standard by the society in which they operate. Moreover, gainful employment can still be seen as precarious insofar as it is subjectively associated with a loss of meaning, lack of recognition, and planning uncertainty. Now that we have (briefly) reviewed its place in the social sciences, let us turn to the question of how literature deals with situations of precarity and processes of precarization.

Narrating Precarity: Aesthetic Criticism of the Primacy of Economic Thought “Labor spheres” have been a persistent theme in French literature since at least the time of Honoré de Balzac’s realistic novels. In addition to a continued interest in realism and naturalism, the twentieth century has witnessed a host of other literary trends along similar lines, including the littérature populiste (André Thérive, Léon Lemonnier) and the littérature prolétarienne (Henry Poulaille) of the 1930s (cf. Kern 2021), and the roman ouvrier of the 1980s (François Bon, Leslie Kaplan, Annie Ernaux). But the question remains: what forms of aesthetic representation of working worlds do contemporary authors turn to in order ‘to express their century,’ to quote Balzac’s bon mot? In contrast to the employee literature of the Weimar Republic or the working-class literature of the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary authors tend to lend their attention either to the technical services sector, with its highly qualified employees, or to the precarious world of mini-jobs, which is defined by bridging activities and activation measures. As contemporary authors (re)discover the economy and its related business and work spheres

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as interesting literary subjects, they are increasingly becoming aware of political-economic interdependencies and the drawbacks of economic activity. A common thread that can be found running through the work of German, French, and Spanish authors like Dirk Kurbjuweit (2003), Kathrin Röggla (2004), Sapphia Azzedine (2009), Florence Aubenas (2010), Laura Meradi (2009), and Isaac Rosa (2011) is a feeling of unease in the face of a working life that is determined by the demands of the globalized financial world, which requires adaptability, flexibility, and commitment from its employees, while no longer offering them a secure job, a decent salary, and recognition in return. Even if the individual texts differ greatly in their aesthetic implementation of this theme—whether in their choice of genre or style—they all show a marked interest in the cultural and symbolic implications of a changed (and changing) labor sphere. Dominique Viart has proposed the concept of a “dislocated real” [“réel disloqué”] (Viart 2005, 210–11) to describe the literary ‘modeling’ of the (negative) changes in social life that are occurring at the hands of economic processes. “Disloquer” medically means “to move violently (the parts of a joint), to contort, to disunite,” [“déplacer violemment (les parties d’une articulation), contorsionner (se), désunir”] (Robert 1990, 552) but also “to break, to smash, to demolish, to dismember” [“briser, casser, démolir, démembrer”] (ibid.); one could therefore translate it as “the dismembered, the dismantled or the tattered real.” The reality that these books tell us about is the “dislocation of the subject and the social bond” [“dislocation du sujet et du lien social”] (Viart 2005, 210)—a reality in which the ties between the individual and the social are dissolved and speech is pulverized [“discours lui-même pulvérisé”] (ibid.). Michel Collomb, for his part, recognizes that the social is a component of the individual, instead of it being a constraining, external reality (Collomb 2005, 7), while Christian Baudelot (2004) emphasizes the close interrelationships between social processes and individual destinies. Traces of such an “interweaving of the social and the individual” [“imbrication entre le social et l’individuel”] (Collomb 2005, 8) are to be found in theater, film, and art, but also in contemporary narrative texts by François Bon, Emmanuelle Heidsieck, Yves Pagès, and many others. These texts denounce the disappointed hope of shared economic power and analyze the discrepancy between corporate restructuring plans and their actual implementation, which usually assume the form of a ‘redundancy,’ or downsizing of human labor. They also frequently investigate the

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circulation of specific language codes, whether those codes are borrowed from the new information technologies, or the neo-liberal economic ideology. Such developments have led Corinne Maier to speak of a “true metamorphosis of ideology infected language” [“véritable métamorphose du langage au contact d’une idéologie”] (Maier 2005, 26). In her book, Bonjour paresse. De l’art et de la nécessité d’en faire le moins possible en entreprise, which was first published in 2004 and translated into English a year later under the title Hello Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Pay, Maier purposefully and incisively engages with a socio-economic and literary-­ historical tradition that stretches all the way back to economic writings of the nineteenth century and continues up to and through our present day. Consciously referencing titles such as Paul Lafargue’s Le Droit à la paresse (The Right to Laziness) from 1880 and Françoise Sagan’s best-selling novel Bonjour tristesse (Hello Sadness) from 1954 in her own, she makes a convincing case for what in France is called—in an eloquent paradox—the “active disengagement” [“le désengagement actif”] (ibid., 14); a reference to both the condition of being alienated from one’s work and the means by which to avoid work altogether. Maier then goes on to dissect the different types of employees that are to be found at all levels of the corporate hierarchy, and exposes how linguistic excess doubles as a strategy of concealment among corporate management. In particular, Maier is interested in the so-called langue de bois, which she characterizes as “the zero point of language where words no longer mean anything” [“le niveau zéro du langage, celui où les mots ne veulent plus rien dire”] (ibid., 24). Intentionally referring to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (1949), Maier uses terms such as “no man’s langue” or “novlangue” to protest against the phrase-mongering that is typical of corporations and its psychosocial effects. Here she detects a language “that is separated from thought” [“qui a divorcé d’avec la pensée”] (ibid., 27) and is characterized by complexity, distorted meaning, and the failure to follow fundamental grammatical rules. Another typical feature of “novlangue” according to Maier, is the frequent use of acronyms; abbreviations of terms that are based on the first letters of the individual words and which—since they cannot be deciphered by everyone—are to be understood as an act of demarcation. Proceeding in this way has a precise, albeit hidden, goal: “It [the language] does not seek to convince, prove or seduce, but delivers evidence in a uniform manner, excluding value judgments. What’s the point? To make you obey” [“Elle [la langue]

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ne cherche ni à convaincre, ni à prouver, ni à séduire, mais livre des évidences de façon uniforme en excluant les jugements de valeur. Le but? Vous faire obéir”] (ibid., 29). Such language criticism is a constitutive element of the literary examination of precarious working environments—whether this takes place in the briefly examined ironic manifesto penned by Maier, or in the form of a “dramatized call to redefine the concepts of time and work” [“dramatisierte[n] Aufforderung, die Begriffe Zeit und Arbeit neu zu definieren”] (Merten 2005), as, for example, in the plays of Moritz Rinke, or in the “suggestive scenes oscillating between quiet irony, the grotesque and journalistic realism” [“suggestiven, zwischen leiser Ironie, Groteske und journalistischem Realismus pendelnden Szenen”] (Böhm 2002) in the novels of Rainer Merkel. Thus, it seems safe to argue that since the 1990s there has been a considerable increase in the number of ‘precarity stories,’ told through a variety of aesthetic forms. Within these stories, it is possible to (provisionally) identify three trends: (1) narrative texts that take up proletarian working class cultures and the consequences of de-­ industrialization (récits de la classe ouvrière or récits de filiation ouvrière); (2) stories that are increasingly focused on the Technical Services sector, with its high-qualified employees (alternatively known as roman d’entreprise or roman de bureau); and (3) literary endeavors that focus on the already mentioned world of mini-jobs, and, more specifically, on their bridging activities and activation measures (récits de la précarité). Here it seems important to underscore that all three trends—or better yet subgenres— are characterized by precarity, as the more precise definition of each that follows shows. In récits de la classe ouvrière and its accompanying subgenre récits de filiation ouvrière (Grenouillet 2014; Viart 1999), we find narratives that were written in response to the displacement of the working class by the white-collar class, as a result of de-industrialization (Chenu 1993; Castel 1995). Such texts typically combine documentary, fictional, and (auto-) biographical elements, and aim to show the economic and social circumstances of either the author/narrator, or those of a close (usually family) member of the working class. They claim to be reminiscent of a working class world that is in the process of disappearing or has already disappeared, and rely on literary devices such as reports, which are written from the worker’s perspective and offer a detailed account of one’s experience in industry and the service sector. These témoignages are written either by the workers themselves (travailleurs-écrivains), or by writers and

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journalists that claim to ‘give them a voice.’ If the focus is on the narrator’s own educational background, then the report usually includes a reflection on his or her (inner) distance from their original class affiliation. If, however, the focus lies on reminiscing about an earlier generation, or looking at workers and working cultures that still exist or have been recently lost due to forced factory closures, a metanarrative ensues, in which the author questions the possibility of adequate linguistic expression and literarization (cf. Bon 2004; Filipetti 2003; Sonnet 2008). Conversely, in roman de bureau or roman de l’entreprise (Labadie 2016) the reader is treated to the topological and sociological characteristics of office life, including but not limited to: furnishings, working environment, collegial rituals, and the marking and enforcement of power hierarchies (cf. Böhm 2011). These are all presented using a breadth of narrative styles and perspectives that range from a distanced, ethnographic view to an affected, inner view. The generic names used to describe such texts are a reference to the chronotopes of their narratives, some of which can be identified as heterotopias—particularly the enterprise. Through isotopias of exhaustion and illness, the psychosocial effects of entrepreneurial action also come into focus, and we see how dictums like flexibility, increased efficiency, and added assignments, alongside an accelerated work pace and regular reassignments serve to erode the physical and psychological integrity not only of temporary workers, but also permanent employees (cf. Böhm 2015). When taken together, these elements indicate both subjective and objective precarization (cf. Beinstingel 2010; Kuperman 2010; Weber 2006a, b). The poetics of precarity are even more evident in récits de la précarité; a provisional hyperonym that describes texts of different generic affiliations, which address the precarious living and working conditions of temporary and contract workers. Here we find work in the service industries, including commercial cleaning, the accumulation of mini-jobs, and the underemployment of highly qualified people at the center of narrative interest. The authors who work in this provisional subgenre find different aesthetic solutions for the narrative modeling of social issues in the post-industrial age. Given the criticism of the neoliberal credo of accelerated productivity that is either explicitly or implicitly found in their texts, their general refusal to engage in narrative efficiency is particularly striking. Techniques such as the (apparently) flexible and non-binding sequence of prose miniatures, the insertion of meditations that are critical of language, self, and society, or the incomplete character development all serve to precarize the

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development of the plot, and undermine the identity of the characters with corresponding consequences for the aesthetic, cognitive, emotional, and symbolic function of these texts (cf. Pagès 2003; Beinstingel 2007; Belhocine 2016).

The Precarious World of the Employee Emmanuelle Heidsieck, for example, chose the genre of the hybrid social novel for her look at processes of precarization in apparently stable working spheres, which appeared under the title Notre aimable clientèle (Our Valued Customers) in 2005. Born in Paris in 1963, Heidsieck studied at Sciences Po and at Columbia University before starting a career as a journalist with a special interest in social issues, working at Monde Initiatives, Politis, and Actualités sociales hebdomadaires, among others. In all of her novels and short story collections, which deal with the problem of unemployment and the Sans-Papiers—asylum seekers without valid residence papers—Heidsieck combines methods of socio-political research with literary strategies (cf. Heidsieck 1995; Heidsieck and Bresson 1999). Notre aimable clientèle is a short novel, divided into twenty chapters, which tells the story of Robert Leblanc; a 42-year-old father who has recently separated from his family and who works as an “experienced Benefits Liaison Officer” [“technicien expérimenté fonction allocataire”] (Heidsieck 2005, 9) for Assedic in Paris.3 In his own words, he is considered a ‘model employee’: “The right sort, that Robert Leblanc, is what my superiors regularly say” [“Un bon élément, ce Robert Leblanc, disent régulièrement mes supérieurs”] (ibid.). Heidsieck skillfully interweaves elements of Robert’s private life, including his ongoing dispute with his ex-wife over childcare, his vacillating feelings of loneliness and freedom, and his love affair with a younger colleague, with a description of the structural changes occurring at his workplace and their subsequent effects on him, his colleagues, and superiors. The sometimes brutal, sometimes subtle transformation of an institution that is in the process of transitioning from a service public to a service ‘au client,’ that is from one dedicated to public service to one bound to a customer-oriented authority, is traced by the author on many different levels. 3  Assedic is the common abbreviation of Associations pour l’emploi dans l’industrie et le commerce, which roughly translates to ‘Associations for Employment in Industry and Commerce.’ So Assedic is essentially an employment office or job center.

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We learn, for example, that the first-person narrator (Robert) began his professional career in the early 1980s, at a time when Assedic still saw itself as an institution whose mission was to provide unconditional support to the unemployed. During this time, Robert recalls, there was a—humanitarian—leeway for the administrator to grant aid as he saw fit: I have known a time when, at the reception desk, I gave away my metro tickets; I have known a time when we brought them our desserts; when some of them came every day to wash themselves in the lavatory, when some of them slept here in the winter. I have known a time when there was time to listen to them, to understand their life story and to help them not drown. J’ai connu l’époque où, à l’accueil, je donnais mes tickets de métro; j’ai connu l’époque où on leur rapportait nos desserts; où certains d’entre eux venaient tous les jours se laver dans les toilettes, où certains dormaient là, l’hiver. J’ai connu l’époque où on avait le temps de les écouter, de comprendre leur parcours et de les aider à ne pas sombrer. (ibid., 22–23, emphasis mine)

In just three, simple steps, earlier, better times are highlighted. These are in turn contrasted with later ‘improvements,’ like the increased efficiency in dealing with jobseekers that the Directorate of Employment Services has explicitly requested, which includes strict time limits for each ‘customer meeting’ and requires the employee to process each dossier quickly. Since the installment of a computer system called “Aladin,” each employee is also subject to a “permanent control” [“contrôle permanent”], which involves an inhuman “completely faultless procedure” [“démarche zéro défaut”] (ibid., 10) that in case of any doubt forces him or her to decide against the jobseeker’s interests. The changes in dealing with those seeking help are also exemplified by the management’s decision to use the euphemistic term “client” to describe the unemployed. Such a choice in terminology not only serves to gloss over an unpleasant situation, but also shows that the restructuring of Assedic is guided less by humanitarian considerations than by the economic logic of the sale. The reforms that are being implemented are therefore not only leading to a precarization of the unemployed, but also of the employees themselves, who are increasingly beginning to show signs of illness. They are, for example, forced to accept frequent changes in their areas of responsibility and regular transfers:

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They call it ‘Alternation, balance and competence’. Within four years I’ve done about ten sites. 3 months, 6 months, 8 months … no time to settle down. And always sent to the places farthest away from where I live. Ils appellent ça ‘Alternance, équilibrage et compétence’. Depuis quatre ans, j’ai fait une dizaine de sites. 3 mois, 6 mois, 8 mois … pas le temps de s’installer. Et toujours, envoyé dans les lieux les plus éloignés de mon domicile. (ibid., 7)

Such a feeling of unease is articulated not only by the protagonist (Robert), but also by several other senior employees, the so-called “cadres sup,” who are featured in a series of short portraits. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Notre aimable clientele is that it shows different types of employees, at different hierarchical levels within the company, who, in the majority of cases, are either implicitly characterized by the dialogue or by inner monologues with a minimum of explicit information being given about their private life, their social background, or even their external appearance. While the narrative focuses largely on the measures being taken to restructure a former public service company, it is told from the perspective of the characters working there (in changing internal focalization). The novel thus unfolds a wide semantic field of exhaustion and illness, and names the concrete affects that the changes, which are occurring around them, have on the physical, as well as psychological, integrity of the employees: A lot of client advisors can’t keep up. Even the very good ones fall behind. They can’t stand being surveilled. Some have tired eyes, others suffer from insomnia, some have started drinking, drinking alot, others swallow anxiolytics or antidepressants to keep them going. The pressure is exhausting. Anxiety. Beaucoup d’agents n’arrivent pas à suivre les cadences. Même les très bons prennent du retard. Ils ne supportent pas d’être surveillés. Certains ont les yeux fatigués, d’autres font des insomnies, certains se sont mis à boire, à boire trop, d’autres avalent des anxiolytiques ou des antidépresseurs pour tenir. La tension est usante. L’angoisse. (ibid., 11)

Passages like the one above show the close connection between Heidsieck’s choice of language and the economic or working conditions that she explores. Especially effective are the use of acronyms throughout the novel, which refer to specific situations or stages in the life of an employee and represent a rhetorical means of differentiating between outside and inside, belonging and exclusion, and the power relations that underlie

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such demarcations. These acronyms range from the abbreviations commonly used in French, such as DEUG, SNCF, CGT, or CAF, to economic or company-specific abbreviations, such as AMP, AME, GEA, PARE, and AISS.4 At the very beginning of the novel, they are interspersed throughout the text and serve—like stumbling blocks made out of letters—to distinguish between insiders and outsiders: they demonstrate just what a fine line lies between the two, and how quickly the shift from the group of employees who control the jargon in question to those who have fallen out of the system can take place. Later on, they obscure the instruments that are used for controlling the ‘client advisors’ of the Employment Agency, when the “Annual performance review” [“Entretien professionnel annuel”] and the “Competence and availability rate” [“Taux de compétence disponibilité”] only appear as EPA (ibid., 19) and TCD (ibid., 20). A similar strategy is applied to the control of ‘clients,’ whose entitlement to benefits is conditional upon their successful completion of IDE and Rciii.5 In each case, these acronyms reflect the desire for efficiency that is ultimately denounced in the book, by literally embodying the former via their condensed stature. One could, in fact argue, that the use of acronyms in Heidsieck’s novel follows a kind of rhetorical choreography, which has an informative and educational function. For example, when the designation of the relevant organizations increases from two-letter abbreviations to six-letter abbreviations—from the CE via the CHSCT to the DDTEFP6—there seems to 4  The English meaning of the abbreviations and bibliographic references in the order in which they are mentioned in the text (all page numbers refer to the already cited edition of Heidsieck’s novel) are as follows: DEUG—intermediate examination (13); SNCF—railway (16); CGT—trade union (16); CAF for Caisse d’Allocation Familiale—Family Benefits Office (10); AMP for Agent de maîtrise professionnel—professional supervisor (11); AME for Agent de maîtrise encadrant—managing supervisor (11); GEA for Gestion électronique de l’accueil—Electronic Reception Management (11): PARE for Plan d’aide au retour à l’emploi—Return to Work Program (16); AISS for Association internationale de la Sécurité sociale—International Social Security Association (16). 5  IDE for Inscription d’un demandeur d’emploi—registration as a jobseeker (21); Rciii for Réunion collective d’information, identification, inscription—collective information, identification, and inscription event (22). 6  CE for Comité d’entreprise—Works Council (20); CHSCT for Comité d’hygiène et de sécurité sur les conditions de travail—Committee for the Health and Safety of Working Conditions (26); DDTEFP for Direction Départementale du Travail, de l’Emploi et de la Formation professionnelle—National Authority for Labor, Employment, and Vocational Training (39).

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be a certain delirious revelry, both in their increasing frequency and ­growing complexity. Even though French in general has a great fondness for abbreviations, as the psychoanalyst and author Corinne Maier has pointed out, an abundant use of acronyms, which cannot be deciphered by everyone, is to be understood as a phenomenon of demarcation, as well as a strategy of obfuscation, on the part of corporate management: “The goal is to make those who know what these acronyms mean believe that they belong to a privileged minority, the insiders who are really in the know” [“Le but est de faire croire à ceux qui savent ce que ces acronymes signifient qu’ils appartiennent à une minorité privilégiée, celle des initiés qui sont vraiment dans le coup”] (Maier 2005, 31–32). Further examples of the close relationship between economy and language in Heidsieck’s writing, or for points of contact between economic and linguistic-literary processes can be found elsewhere in Notre aimable clientèle. In the following passage, for example, the narrator uses a decayed, tattered syntax that is characterized by asyndeta and ellipses, which stylistically insinuate the insecurity and loss of orientation of the character, as he physically hurries along the subway corridors; an action that mimics the acceleration of the rhythm of is life: What’s this ‘senior meeting’? […] There’s something I don’t understand. Anyway, I don’t run after meetings. […] I’m not gonna get mad about that. This is ridiculous. A grain of sand in the universe. Zero importance. Small-­ mindedness. Office stories. I don’t have a career. Finally, you have to put things in perspective, I work at the Assedic in Paris. It’s ridiculous. No point. Think of something else. Wasted energy. Thinking of my daughters. Forget the baseness. Hop. Here I am on the subway. What can they talk about at this meeting? What if it concerns me? My position, my function, my job? What if they make decisions? Why have you dismissed me? […] I’ll take a quart of Lexomil. It’ll calm me down. The girls are in great shape. C’est quoi cette réunion ‘senior’? […] Il y a quelque chose qui m’échappe. De toute façon, je ne cours pas après les réunions. […] Je ne vais pas m’énerver pour ça. C’est ridicule. Un grain de sable dans l’univers. Importance zéro. Mesquineries. Histoires de bureau. Je ne fais pas carrière. Enfin, il faut relativiser, je travaille à l’Assedic de Paris. C’est dérisoire. Aucun intérêt. Penser à autre chose. Énergie gâchée. Penser à mes filles. Oublier la bassesse. Hop. Me voilà dans le métro. De quoi peuvent-ils parler à cette réunion? Et si cela me concerne? Mon poste, ma fonction, mon ­travail? Et s’ils prennent des décisions? Pourquoi m’avoir écarté? […] Je vais prendre un quart de Lexomil. Ça va me calmer. Les filles sont en pleine forme. (Heidsieck 2005, 50–51)

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A Poetics of Precarity?—An Attempted Conclusion When it comes to balancing the inherent tension between poetics and precarity, the texts that constitute the corpus of my project each arrive at individual, aesthetic answers. Emmanuelle Heidsieck’s novel Notre aimable clientele contains both documentary and fictional elements, which are joined together through a combination of journalistic research and formal aesthetic procedures. However, other authors assume a completely different approach. The German-French author Anne Weber, for example, avoids committing herself to a single genre. Instead, she is concerned with “loosening rusted language screws, exposing and picking apart entrenched word patterns” [“eingerostete Sprachschrauben zu lockern, eingefahrene Wortmuster bloßzulegen und zu zerpflücken”] (Weber 2004, 22–23). In her two narrative texts, Chers Oiseaux and Cendres & Métaux (2006), she demonstrates her sensitivity to language that is subject to the economic demands of accelerated productivity, and counters it with her meditative slowness and narrative inefficiency; a ‘meandering of consciousness,’ which oscillates between poetry and prose. Here a connection can be made between the author’s decision to embrace this narrative form, so specific in its non-specificity, and the vulnerability of the homo oeconomicus, who is trapped within the confines of neoliberal economic logic. The latter strives for unconditional growth and increased efficiency at any price, whereby the employees working for this goal end up in a state of increasing precarity—a socio-political and economic entre-deux. Anne Weber’s texts, however, elude any demand for efficiency and do not pursue a narrative goal. They do not tell stories with a beginning, a climax, and an end. For Weber, it is a common error to assume that a writer is looking for the most adequate language possible for what he or she wants to express. Language is not a means to an end, but the end in itself, because: “In language, the world is already contained, even if in shards or fragments or distorted mirrors” [“In der Sprache ist ja die Welt, wenn auch in Scherben oder Fragmenten oder Zerrspiegeln, schon enthalten”] (Weber 2004, 23). Yves Pagès, to give one final example, sees his collections of short portraits as complementary to his work as a novelist. His micro-narratives are created on the basis of a snippet of conversation, a ‘true’ story, a situation “that concentrates all the elements likely to bring about this small shift, this small imaginary derailment” [“qui concentre tous les éléments propres à susciter ce petit basculement, ce petit déraillement imaginaire”] (Chollet and Lemahieu 2000). In the minimalist sketches that constitute

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his short story collections (cf. Pagès 2000; Pagès 2003), he draws imperfect characters with fragile identities and counteracts the traditional dichotomies of producer and consumer, employee and employer, employed and unemployed. Through the sheer volume of sketches, he allows explicit and implicit parallels, cross-connections, and points of contact between the different spectrums of society to emerge. The analysis of ‘precarity stories’—which constitutes my (preliminary) conclusion—shows that beyond the stereotypical economic-scientific expert knowledge, another kind of knowledge exists, namely a literary knowledge about the economic and social conditions of a worker’s or an employee’s life. The authors discussed in this chapter insist on the instability of both social order and literary representation by oscillating between genres, engaging in linguistic-critical reflections and refusing narrative efficiency. Through the diversity of their approaches, their texts offer a vivid depiction of current working worlds and a literary reflection on social issues in the post-industrial age. They find different but forceful ways of realizing a poetics of precarity.

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Schultheis, Franz, and Stefan Herold. 2010. Précarité und Prekarität: Zur Thematisierung der sozialen Frage des 21. Jahrhunderts im deutsch-­ französischen Vergleich. In Zwischen Prekarisierung und Protest: Die Lebenslagen und Generationsbilder von Jugendlichen in Ost und West, ed. Michael Busch, Jan Jeskow, and Rüdiger Stutz, 243–274. Bielefeld: Transkript. Sonnet, Martine. 2008. Atelier 62. Mazères: Le temps qu’il fait. Viart, Dominique. 1999. Filiations littéraires. In États du roman contemporain: Écritures contemporaines 2, ed. Jan Baetens and Dominique Viart, 115–139. Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard. ———. 2005. Écrire le reel. In La Littérature française au present: Héritage, modernité, mutations, ed. Dominique Viart and Bruno Vercier, 207–227. Paris: Bordas. Vogl, Joseph. 2010. Das Gespenst des Kapitals. Zürich: Diaphanes. Weber, Anne. 2004. Im Schreiben steckt Schrei. In Mainzer Poetik-Dozentur 2003, 15–31. Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur. ———. 2006a. Chers oiseaux. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2006b. Cendres & Métaux. Paris: Seuil. Wresinski, Joseph. 1987. Grande pauvreté et précarité économique et sociale: Rapport présenté au nom du conseil économique et social. Journal official de la République Française 6: 1–93.

CHAPTER 14

The Character of Risk Emily J. Hogg

In contemporary situations of precarity, the inevitable risks of social life are both individualized and intensified. For the United Kingdom, which is the focus of this chapter, labour market flexibilization and the contraction of the welfare state since the 1970s have had the effect, as Guy Standing has written, of “transferring risks and insecurity onto workers and their families” (2011, 1). During the brief postwar moment of welfare state consensus, the risks of illness and unemployment began to be shouldered to a greater extent by the state. Yet after the Thatcherite turn, not only have many aspects of social and economic life become less predictable—think, for example, of the rise in temporary and short-term contracts—but the responsibility for dealing with the risks this uncertainty entails has increasingly been borne by individuals and individual family units, as state benefits become more difficult to access, union power severely restricted and labour laws more flexible. In this chapter, I show how two late twentieth-­ century novels from the U.K. reflect on the demands placed on individuals

E. J. Hogg (*) University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_14

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by precarity’s riskiness. In particular I argue that through their portrayals of their eponymous first-person narrators, Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle (1989) and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) critique the risks associated with precarization. Literary characters have a double nature. As John Frow puts it, they are “ontologically hybrid beings” (2014, 1). That is, characters are person-­ like entities—believable but fictional humans who elicit from readers feelings including compassion, anxiety, identification and dislike. Yet, at the same time, they are illusions created by language, and readers are never in doubt about this fact. It is this ontological hybridity which is central to Catherine Gallagher’s well-known account of the relationship between the emergence of modern capitalism and the emergence of realist fiction in the eighteenth century: she argues that risk-free belief in fictional personhood developed the flexible mindset necessary for participating in the world of credit and speculative investment, a world in which risk-taking is a valuable skill. Here I build on Gallagher’s argument to consider the function of characters’ hybridity in another capitalist context in which the ability to take risks is highly significant, that of late twentieth-century precarity. Both Ripley Bogle and Morvern Callar focus on economically and socially marginalized characters in their early twenties. Ripley, “from out of the less-than-working-classes” (McLiam Wilson 1998, 102) in Belfast, is homeless and living on the streets in London. Morvern is a low-paid supermarket employee on the verge of being fired with no qualifications and a patchy education who lives in the working-class port town in the Scottish Highlands where she grew up. In my close readings, I trace the risks and dangers Morvern and Ripley endure and cause—risks that the narratives connect, in both obvious and subtle ways, with the characters’ socio-economic precarity. I also examine the ways the texts make use of the hybridity that all literary characters share: their simultaneous textuality and humanlike quality. If all literary characters possess this hybridity, I argue that Ripley Bogle and Morvern Callar mobilize the opposite poles of characters’ hybridity at different points in the narratives. At times the novels emphasize the fictionality of Morvern and Ripley, while at others they lay primary emphasis on their believable humanness. Through examining the fluctuating emphasis on the characters’ fictional status alongside the novels’ representation of risk, a pattern emerges: Morvern and Ripley are presented as psychologically real when they are most at risk or most implicated in dangerous situations. When the events of the plot involve less risk, the characters’ constructed, textual nature is most apparent. It is this

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pattern which I interpret as a critical commentary on the pervasive individualized risk of precarious neoliberal capitalism. The “neoliberal ideal,” according to Deborah Lupton, is “the entrepreneurial citizen who manages her or his own exposure to risk” (Lupton 2013, 154). In this context, I argue that Morvern Callar and Ripley Bogle function less to prepare readers for undertaking such self-monitoring (as Gallagher argues with respect to characters’ hybridity and the particular demands of eighteenth-century capitalism) than to highlight its difficulties. At the places in the novels where Morvern and Ripley are most at risk, they invite readers’ emotional investments and encourage readers to relate to them as if they were non-textual people. Where the various risks of the plots recede, the narratives insist upon the characters’ fictional, textual status and reflect self-consciously on their own literariness. Splitting off self-reflexivity from riskiness, therefore, the novels imply that is the possible dangers of the precarious present that require readers’ sympathy and emotional investment—and present “the entrepreneurial citizen who manages her or his own exposure to risk” (ibid.) as a flimsy fiction.

Risk Risk seems to be everywhere in the contemporary moment, from the systemic risk associated with the 2007/2008 financial crisis to the health risks described on packets of cigarettes and bottles of wine, from risk management in financial services to risk perception in psychology. In Ulrich Beck’s famous formulation, contemporary global society is a “risk society”: being at risk, he writes, “is the way of being and ruling in the world of modernity” while “being at global risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (2006, 332). According to Beck, a risk society emerges when risks have become a focus of discussion in and of themselves; questions concerning risk and the management of risk are now regarded as “vital questions for society and its development” (Sørensen and Christiansen 2012, 9) rather than simply the inevitable by-products of certain behaviours, or of life itself, as they might have been in much earlier periods of history. In Beck’s account, the global “risk society” begins when the risks associated with technological development (in particular, nuclear power) are no longer the necessary and calculable by-products of economic growth and scientific advance but become so severe and potentially uncontrollable that they must be measured, managed and discussed on a global level  (1992). As Anthony Giddens glosses it, risk society  in this

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sense “refers to more than just the fact that modern social life introduces new forms of danger which humanity has to face.” Rather it “means living with a calculative attitude to the open possibilities of action, positive and negative, with which, as individuals and globally, we are confronted in a continuous way in our contemporary social existence” (1991, 28). Moreover, although choosing to take risks can be exhilarating and exciting (see Lyng 2005), Deborah Lupton points out that in contrast to earlier usages which contrasted “good” and “bad” risks, “Risk is now generally used to relate only to negative or undesirable outcomes, not positive outcomes […] In everyday lay people’s language, risk tends to be used to refer almost exclusively to a threat, hazard, danger or harm” (2013, 10). Risk is perceived as a negative experience—yet its constant discussion and monitoring has become central to contemporary global society. Although the risk society and precarity have tended to be theorized separately, they are connected in important ways. If global society is now a risk society, one area of substantial risk is created by processes of precarization. As Judith Butler defines precarity, for example, it indicates the way that “failing social and economic networks of support” mean that “certain populations […] become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” and thus “suffer heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and vulnerability to violence without adequate protection or redress” (2015, 33). According to Butler precarity includes actual harms existing in the present moment but also the necessity of dealing with the “unrealized potentiality” (Rigakos and Law 2009, 80) of proliferating future dangers and threats—and doing so while knowing robust systems of support to minimize harm are absent. If precarity is the exposure to harm inherent in sociality as it is intensified, hierarchized and generalized by contemporary economic and political practices (Butler 2009, 2015; Lorey 2015), then the requirement that the individual manage multiple, complex risks is one technique for producing precarity in this sense.

Character This chapter argues that one of the ways that literary texts reflect on the pressures of risk in precarity—and, in particular, on the “calculative attitude” (Giddens 1991, 28) that risk requires—is through the device of literary character. Central to almost all critical discussion of literary character is the observation that, as John Frow puts it, characters are

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hybrids—they are “pieces of writing or imaging” and they are also “person-­ like entities” (Frow 2014, 2). Characters can move us, and we often respond to them in a range of emotional ways that resemble the ways we respond to real people. At the same time, characters are simply textual effects, evocations of recognizable personhood produced by language. In her account of the emergence of fictionality, Catherine Gallagher argues that fictional narration—the articulation of a believable narrative that does not “solicit” (2006, 338) belief—emerged in the eighteenth-century British novel as modern capitalism rendered speculation (rather than faith) the most salient and useful attitude of mind. In this argument, the hybridity of character is closely linked to the issue of risk. Gallagher argues that novel-reading “promoted a disposition of ironic credulity enabled by optimistic incredulity; one is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood” (ibid., 346). Adopting “Such flexible mental states” was beneficial in numerous realms of social experience, she argues—but “One thinks immediately of merchants and insurers calculating risks, or of investors extending credit of small collateral and reasoning that the greater the risk the higher the profit” (ibid.). Learning to think in the flexible, speculative way that trained the ability to calculate risk was, according to Gallagher, closely connected to readers’ investments in character. Fictionality emerges when novels stop trying to convince readers that their characters are real people in the world (as Defoe did with Robinson Crusoe in 1719) and instead use proper names which “do not take specific individuals as their referents,” meaning that “none of the specific assertions about them can be verified or falsified” (ibid., 341). Here risk is again crucial. Gallagher argues that fiction, because it is both believable and not to be believed in, facilitates the flexible thought patterns that make capitalist risk-taking possible. Characters, as “ontologically hybrid beings” (Frow 2014, 1), are crucial to fictionality—they seem like real selves, but we are never in doubt that they are not. She writes that “readers attach themselves to characters because of, not despite, their fictionality”—the “fictional framework” creates a “protected affective enclosure that encouraged risk-free emotional investment” (Gallagher 2006, 351). In Gallagher’s account of the eighteenth-century novel, then, the risk-free engagement with fictional characters can promote risk-taking in the extra-textual world. Feeling for a character is not a risk, yet such feeling, because it is attached to an imagined being, can enable other forms of

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risk-taking, as it trains the capacity to believe in what is not real; to see what is imagined without being deluded. Toril Moi has recently argued that literary critics have tended to put too much emphasis on the fact that characters are merely textual constructs and have seen readers’ emotional investments in characters despite their fictionality as surprising and in need of explanation. As she points out, however, this makes little sense: readers are rarely, if ever, really in doubt that characters are not real people, and the experience of feeling for a character is quite ordinary, quite familiar, and does not seem in practice to pose any great logical difficulty. She writes that “the so-called tension between considering characters as textual phenomena and as fictional human beings” reveals in fact not “logical opposites but examples of different critical practices, which arise in response to different questions” (2019, 63). In this chapter, I suggest that “seeing characters as textual phenomena” and seeing them as “fictional human beings” are not only critical practices applied to works but are also poles between which the presentations of characters in literary works themselves move. Rather than seeing fictionality and believability as opposed—either logically or critically—I claim that within individual literary texts there are moments at which it is the evocation of human identity which is emphasized most strongly and others at which it is the textuality of characters which is most at issue. In the eighteenth-century context described by Gallagher, fictionality was emerging; the ability to believe in something whilst still understanding that it was not real was a capacity that had to be trained. Contemporary readers are, by contrast, deeply familiar with fictional characters and experienced at interpreting them—and the flexibility of mind associated with modern capitalism is no longer something which needs to be learnt. In the vastly different social world of contemporary capitalism, structured by neoliberalization, precarization and flexibilization, I argue that the hybrid status of characters might serve a different function from that identified by Gallagher. Rather than training readers in risk-taking, I argue that the hybridity of character in Morvern Callar and Ripley Bogle invites readers to question contemporary precarity’s required risks.

Ripley Bogle and Morvern Callar Ripley Bogle and Morvern Callar are post-Thatcher novels; they register and critique the radical social and political changes instigated by the Conservative governments of 1979–1990, changes which, as Hadley and

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Ho argue, “cut violently across institutions as diverse as industry, communication, and the arts, in controversial, often devastating ways, forever altering Britain’s postimperial identity at home and abroad” (2010, 2) (Or as Ripley Bogle puts it: “These are the nineteen eighties. We’ve all got our problems these days” [McLiam Wilson 1998, 39]). “Cause of tallness,” Morvern has been working for a superstore since she was 13—a situation she now recognizes as a trap: The superstore turn a blind eye; get as much out you as they can. You ruin your chances at school doing every evening and weekend. The manager has you working all hours, cash in hand, no insurance, so when fifteen or sixteen you go full-time at the start of that summer and never go back to school. (Warner 1996, 10)

Her lack of education limits her options, but she makes very little money in the superstore. Outside of retail, there are few job options: her foster father works on the railways; many men work at the local power station or local quarry, but there are few jobs in these industries for women. One of the locals’ “only way of getting money, apart from signing on [that is, applying for unemployment benefits] was leaping off the railway pier in High Season wearing his tackity boots [hobnail work boots], if the young holiday makers would pay him a fiver” (ibid., 58). In the present of Wilson’s novel, Ripley is homeless and living on the streets in London. At nights he walks to keep warm; he eats at soup kitchens and sleeps on benches where he can during the day. The novel is set in summer but even in summer the temperatures are dangerously low: You are going to have your bollocks frozen. Even if you have done this kind of thing before you will still have forgotten how incredibly fucking cold it gets. […] No one likes to think that they have been sliverclose to expiring of hypothermia the night before. (McLiam Wilson, 1998, 57)

Much of the text is focused on Ripley’s recollections of his childhood and adolescence in another set of difficult circumstances: he grew up in Belfast during the Troubles, describes a number of shocking and violent incidents he witnessed during his youth (“I spent a great deal of my childhood seeing things that I shouldn’t have seen” [ibid., 32]), and was thrown out by his Catholic family when he began a relationship with a young Protestant woman, Deidre, at which point he ended up in a “welfare state loophole”

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with “no adult’s rights and no minor’s entitlements or indulgences” and became “sloshed and steeped in the mire of degradation and poverty” (ibid., 118).

Believability and Textuality in Morvern Callar In both Morvern Callar and Ripley Bogle there are moments at which the characters are presented as intensely believable people the reader is invited to feel for, and moments at which it is their fictionality, their constructed textuality, which is most evident. In both novels, it is when the characters are described as participating in risky, dangerous, violent situations that they are most believable, and it is when there is a relative lack of risk that the texts make extensive, self-referential mentions of literature, and the characters therefore appear as primarily linguistic entities. The first-person narrators of both novels are striking and memorable; from the outset of both texts, the reader knows she is in the presence of what Marco Caracciolo has called a ‘strange narrator.’ In a text with a strange narrator, the reader is “encouraged to build a mental model of the narrator’s fictional, [and] narratively woven, self” (Caracciolo 2016, xiv) but finds that what she hears “from the character is at odds—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically—with what [she] would wish or expect to hear” (ibid., xv). In the case of Morvern Callar, Morvern returns to her flat at the beginning of the novel to find that her boyfriend has died by suicide. She stores his body in the loft, on top of his model village and train set, then (when it seems that some builders are going to discover the secret) she cuts his body into pieces on her kitchen floor and buries them in the countryside. She drains his bank account. Yet these bizarre and disturbing choices are conveyed in a tone which isn’t dark or upsetting but rather innocent and naïve; the ‘strangeness’ of Morvern’s character resides in this disjunction between the danger she courts and her seemingly childlike lack of understanding of danger; the troubling and strange situations she encounters and her blithe and guileless narration of them. In the immediate aftermath of her discovery of her boyfriend’s death, for example, she presses “the diddleypush” (Warner 1996, 5) to remove the floppy disc containing his suicide note from the computer. She takes “a running jump over the dead body” (ibid., 2) to get to the kettle. She washes up with “the face […] by my left foot” (ibid.). Then she gets ready, carefully applying her makeup: “I used a touch of Perfect Plum Glimmerstix and Raspberry Dream powder brush than did my lips with Unsurpassed

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Wine” (ibid., 4). The mention of the names of the shades suggests an attention to detail unexpected in this situation, while the fact that they are shades of red recalls the blood Morvern has described all over the floor. Afterwards she leaves her house with the intention of phoning the authorities to report the death, but she is listening to Miles Davis and ends up not making the call: “it was that bit where the trumpet comes in for the second time: I walked right past the phonebox. It was the feeling the music gave me that made me” (ibid., 5). She goes to work, then to the pub and to a party. Later, when burying the body parts she has dismembered, the mundanely pleasant and the grotesque are juxtaposed in her perception of physical experience: “The sun was hot on my hair as His chopped-off head bumped away against my back” (ibid., 88). Through this disjunction, the reader is invited to feel concern for Morvern as she embarks on worrying courses of action—even if, in isolation, her actions would seem (as the blurb of the Vintage edition suggests) “immoral.” The possibility that Morvern’s disposal of her boyfriend’s body will be discovered is a source of suspense in the first half of the Morvern Callar. Her naivety seems to throw the possibility of a successful plot into doubt, and there are tense moments as the body in the loft seems to be on the verge of being discovered. Because of Morvern’s ‘strangeness’ as a narrator, because her odd narration reveals no motives of hatred or anger, but instead a peculiarly sweet innocence, the emotional engagement the novel invites from the reader is concern and worry: as she puts herself in risky situations, her childlike perspective invites readers to feel alarmed on her behalf (rather than critical or judgmental), especially as her narrative reveals so little explicit commentary on the significant legal and ethical problems she might be creating for herself. In the first part of the novel, then, Morvern is in a worrying situation and the nature of her narration encourages sympathetic and concerned readerly engagement. By its end, it is the other aspect of literary characters’ hybridity which is central: textuality. Describing the limited options Morvern has, fated to “a forty-hour week on slave wages for the rest of your life,” her foster father notes tellingly that “theres no much room for poetry there, eh?” (Warner 1996, 44). What changes her situation—allows her to leave the superstore and see more of the world—is her discovery of a literary work; that is, poetry in the broadest sense. After her boyfriend’s suicide, Morvern discovers the manuscript of a novel on his computer:

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This novel thing was page after page of words and then a number then more pages of words and another number. You had to read to get to the end; you couldn’t see the point in reading through all that just to get to the end. (ibid., 82)

In his suicide note, her boyfriend asks her to send the novel to a publisher. She does so—but under her own name and is soon invited to meet her publishers in London. The meeting is farcical, as Morvern’s lack of cultural capital contrasts starkly with the fluent cosmopolitanism of the hip publishers. “Have you been to the Alhambra in Granada?” asks one of them. “What kind of music is it there?” Morvern replies (ibid., 158). Morvern seems, initially, unlikely to be able to persuade the London publishers that she is in fact the author of the book. Describing her interest in novel-writing, she says: See, I do the books myself cause of the lifestyle that goes with it, y’know? The writers sit there smoking and go round looking for the inspiration. It’s a lifestyle that’s got a lot to offer me, much better than working in a supermarket; waking up on cold mornings knowing it’s thirty-nine years to go till pension. When youre writing you can just knock off, take a look out the window, make a cup of coffee or have a shower. (Warner 1996, 161) [sic]

This is not the way writers normally describe their literary inspiration. But it is also touching: what she wants from the “lifestyle” of the writer is so mundane (the ability to take a break when she wants and have a cup of coffee) and simultaneously so exotic to her, because it is so distant from her job as a superstore employee. But Morvern gets away with her masquerade as the author of the book, just as she gets away with the disposal of her boyfriend’s body. And it profoundly changes her life. Persuading the publishers that she is in fact the author of the book, Morvern is able to find “that happiness that I never even dared dream I had the right” (Warner 1996, 210), and thus transcend her social and economic marginalization. Presenting herself as the author of her boyfriend’s book allows her financial freedom that is quite outside of her expectations or previous experiences. In a sense, Morvern’s story becomes transformed at this point in the novel into a kind of precariat fairy tale. She leaves her job at the superstore and is then able to travel around Spain for an extended period. And then, by the end of the novel, she is becoming the writer she had earlier pretended to be: “I lit the

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lighter and lifted up the big notebook. I had to grip the pen good and tight while writing a few sentences, then when it got burny-hot I put the lighter out” (ibid., 228). Once someone who didn’t see the point of reading, she has become someone who writes texts of her own. Morvern finds happiness that she had never imagined, and, even though she returns home at the end of the novel to look for work, her life has opened up in new ways. She has been able to leave the superstore and have transcendent experiences at raves in Spain. Where her foster father worried about the “a forty-hour week on slave wages” (Warner 1996, 44) Morvern would endure for the rest of her life, she instead finds that, with the money from her boyfriend’s book, “Time was the one thing I had been able to buy” (ibid., 188). But the self-reflexive attention to literature and the repeated references to authorship and writing that accompany this transformation also work to remind the reader that Morvern herself is a literary creation. The references to literature—the transformative role of a novel manuscript in the plot, the final scenes in which Morvern writes—draw attention to Morvern’s textuality and emphasize the text’s own literary status. Thus, Morvern moves across the arc of the novel from appearing primarily as a precarious person in risky situations who the reader is invited to care for to being—simultaneously—more secure and more obviously a fiction. Morvern’s position becomes less worryingly risky at the same time as the novel’s discussions of writers, the writing lifestyle and the act of writing increasingly emphasize that Morvern is a textual projection.

Ripley’s Lies A similar pattern can be observed in Ripley Bogle—yet in reverse. Throughout the novel, Ripley is an emphatically ironic, self-consciously literary character. It is only at the end of the novel, when the reader becomes fully cognizant of the terrible, violent dangers that Ripley has endured (and caused) and which have led him to his precarious life on the streets, that his fictional humanness is most emphasized. In both novels— although the movement from textuality to fictional humanity happens at different points in the narratives—risk is split off from the self-reflexivity indicated by metacommentary on the literary. Where Morvern is naïve and childlike, Ripley is knowing and self-aware: as Elke D’hoker puts it, his narrative is “comic, arrogant, and highly satiric as he sets out to ridicule almost all things and people he encounters” (D’hoker 2007, 461). Morvern describes the extraordinary and bizarre in

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a neutral, almost anhedonic way, while Ripley’s account is baroque, dramatic and characterized by elaborate language. On his childhood, for example, Ripley tells the reader: By all accounts I was an intrepidly repulsive infant. Apparently, even the most philanthropic onlooker could scarce suppress the yawning horror that tended to greet the first sighting of my infant self. It has been reported that a prodigious proportion of the nursing staff on the ward I occupied went on to change their cares or at the very least to require psychiatric care. There were nervous whispers about misbirth, lycanthropy, experimental sub-­ atomic detonations and the like. (McLiam Wilson 1998, 11)

This description layers detail on detail, ascending to dizzying heights of comic ridiculousness: the infant Ripley is not just ugly, he’s absurdly and extraordinarily ugly. Ripley is aware of this tendency in his story-telling; he’s a self-aware narrator who reflects on his own narration: “Hackneyed but true. My life’s like that. It has no subtle irony, no gloved wit, no satirist’s intent. No dash and little flair. I have to settle for the capitals. Writ in large. Brute broad patches of character and discontent” (ibid., 30). Throughout—and in direct contrast with Morvern—Ripley emphasizes his knowledge of literature. He claims to have “read the entire works of Dickens and Thackeray” when he was “five years old” (ibid., 27) and he attended Cambridge University where he studied English Literature. He self-consciously situates himself in a literary tradition, noting that “A lot of big literary numbers have traipsed trampishly around London’s streets. Dickens, Orwell and your very own chunky little self” (ibid., 64), and he invents surreal dialogues between Dickens and Orwell. At the end of novel, however, Ripley re-tells three stories which have already featured in the narration—stories about which, he says, “I haven’t told you the whole hard truth” (McLiam Wilson 1998, 295). These include his role in the murder of his friend Maurice by a faction of the IRA, and the botched abortion he tried to carry out on his girlfriend Deidre. Ripley suggests that the reader has probably already seen through the earlier versions of the stories: “you might have noticed that I was not exactly expansive in my account of the events surrounding the death of Maurice. That must have set you thinking. […] Bit of a bloody gap in the narrative, don’t you think!” (ibid.). In the case of both stories, he repeats: “You can see why I lied about it” (ibid., 312, 314). Maurice’s murder is brutal and traumatic: he dies slowly over the course of a whole night after

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being shot, while he and Ripley are alone on a boat. Ripley led the killers to his friend. In the earlier version of the story of Deidre’s abortion, Ripley insists that he was not the father of her baby and nor was he responsible for trying to end the pregnancy. At the end of the novel, he says that these were both lies; “You must have smelt a rat or two at the time” (ibid., 313). Like the story of Maurice’s murder, the story of the abortion is violent and upsetting: Deidre “leapt on my mouldy bed, her eyes wide with terror and her lips moist with foolish trust” (ibid.). Ripley attempts the abortion with a paintbrush—“shoving, poking, plunging, cranking” (ibid., 313). He concludes: “The whole thing was horrible” (ibid., 314). Later Deidre has a miscarriage in a toilet. The final admission of his lies marks an important shift in the novel. It could be argued that Ripley’s admission simply, in postmodern fashion, reveals the fictionality of the whole enterprise: if Ripley admits he is a liar, it simply underlines the fact that there is no true version of any of Ripley’s stories; he is only a character in a novel. However, the refrain “You can see why I lied about it” (McLiam Wilson 1998, 312, 314), repeated after the story of Maurice’s death and the attempted abortion, suggests a different reading. Both stories are terrible and traumatic. In order to make sense of “You can see why I lied about it,” the reader has to bring what she knows of human motivations—not textual constructions. Ripley has lied because the stories paint him in a terrible light: “I had but poor claims to the state of humanity itself in that episode,” he says of Deidre’s miscarriage (ibid., 318). The reader is invited to read guilt, shame, horror and trauma into Ripley’s motivations for lying, as well as a naked desire for approval: “I really wanted you to like me” (ibid.). Throughout the novel Ripley has been a tricky postmodern narrator, constantly pointing to his own literariness. But at the end of the novel, as his implication in two upsetting, violent and risky incidents provides an answer to one of the questions that has haunted the narrative—how did Ripley go from a university education to a precarious life on the streets?—readers are encouraged to attribute qualities such as conscience, grief and regret to him. The shift is a matter of degree: Ripley is still a self-conscious, self-reflexive narrator. Yet it is as the awful traumas of his childhood and adolescence are revealed, and their role in producing his current dangerous existence as a homeless person is implied, that his textuality takes second place to his believably humanlike qualities.

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Conclusion The individualization of risk is key technique through which neoliberal politics produces precarity: the demand to keep risks in mind, to constantly contend with, calculate and manage the possibility of danger produces a profound vulnerability. Against this background, I suggest that we can read the presentation of character in Ripley Bogle and Morvern Callar as a critical reflection on the contemporary experience of precarious risk. Both novels feature compelling, memorable narrators who, across the texts, are variously intensely believable and emphatically textual. Of course, all literary characters exhibit this tension to some degree, but in this chapter, I have suggested that Morvern and Ripley are most believable and seem to invite the greatest degree of emotional engagement from readers at the moments where they are most at risk. In addition, they are more emphatically textual, more self-conscious and self-reflexive at the points in the texts when their precarious lives are less risky (or, in Ripley’s case, where the full risk and danger of his life have not yet been acknowledged). Both novels associate the fictional, the textual and the invented with minimized or evaded risk, while their central characters are presented as most humanlike when they encounter risky situations. Precarity’s temporary employment contracts and punitive welfare state regimes require subjects to shoulder the risks that corporate entities and the government dealt with in the recent past. In this context, I claim that Morvern Callar and Ripley Bogle can be read as novels which use the hybridity of literary character to critique the “neoliberal ideal” of “the entrepreneurial citizen who manages her or his own exposure to risk” (Lupton 2013, 154). They do not train readers to cope with the demands of individual risk management but rather, against the prevailing paradigm which normalizes and celebrates individual risk-taking, they use the believable humanness of their central characters to invite readers to worry about risk and see it as something that necessitates concern and sympathy. Meanwhile, the other side of characters’ hybridity—textual constructedness—is associated in these novels with their characters’ avoidance or escape from risk. In this way, the novels imply that the possibility of truly managing or controlling precarity’s escalating riskiness should simply be understood as a fiction. Acknowledgments  The research and writing of Chapter 14, ‘The Character of Risk’, was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, grant number DNRF127

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Bibliography Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. ———. 2006. Living in the World Risk Society: A Hobhouse Memorial Public Lecture Given on Wednesday 15 February 2006 at the London School of Economics. Economy and Society 35 (3): 329–345. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. ———. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Caracciolo, Marco. 2016. Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press. D’hoker, Elke. 2007. The Unreliable Ripley: Irony and Satire in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 53 (3): 460–477. Frow, John. 2014. Character and Person. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Catherine. 2006. The Rise of Fictionality. In The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1, 336–363. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hadley, Louisa, and Elizabeth Ho. 2010. Introduction. In Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hadley and Ho, 1–26. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Trans. Aileen Derieg. London: Verso. Lupton, Deborah. 2013. Risk. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Lyng, Stephen, ed. 2005. Edgework: The Sociology of Risk-Taking. London: Routledge. McLiam Wilson, Robert. 1998 [1989]. Ripley Bogle. London: Vintage. Moi, Toril. 2019. Rethinking Character. In Character, ed. Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi, 27–75. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rigakos, George S., and Alexandra Law. 2009. Risk, Realism and the Politics of Resistance. Critical Sociology 35 (1): 79–193. Sørensen, Mads P., and Allan Christiansen. 2012. Ulrich Beck: An Introduction to the Theory of Second Modernity and the Risk Society. London: Routledge. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Warner, Alan. 1996 [1995]. Morvern Callar. London: Vintage.

CHAPTER 15

To Be or Not to Be a Laborer. Three Swedish Novels About Young Adults, Temporary Employment, and the Precariat’s Consciousness Åsa Arping

This chapter deals with three Swedish novels from the 2010s, following young adult protagonists and their temporary jobs in traditional labor professions—as caregiver, caretaker, and shop assistant.1 The stories represent a kind of contemporary narrative that depicts young people’s often dramatic first encounter with new, unaccustomed contexts and complicated 1  In Swedish statistics and political debate, employees are counted as laborers if their occupation belongs to The Swedish Trade Union Confederation’s (LO) collective agreement area. The 14 unions within LO organize, for instance, industrial and construction workers, health care assistants, cleaning staff, and employees in hotels, restaurants, and trade.

Å. Arping (*) University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_15

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social codes and hierarchies. Although not set in the new, growing gig or platform economy, they show clear traces of a welfare society and working life in rapid change, as deregulation and privatization have led to slim work organizations and growing demands for “flexibility,” regardless of whether the operations are run privately or publicly. The three protagonists share, at least initially, the attitude that their positions are temporary and they expect to move on to something else. Still, the work gradually affects them and changes their view of the chores, of themselves, and of their place in a working collective. What significance do the protagonists’ young age and the temporariness of their employment have for their attitude toward work in these depictions? What emotional economies surround work, and to what extent are the characters performing and reflecting in class-coded ways? I will discuss these questions by placing the chosen novels in dialogue with some concepts from economic and sociological research—primarily Guy Standing’s thoughts on the precariat’s consciousness, Sverre Lysgaard’s concept of the working collective, and Beverley Skeggs’s claim that people’s quest for respectability—to pass society’s unspoken middle-class norm—is discernible in the characters’ actions and feelings. I draw attention to how the novels depict temporary work as part of their identity creation and future plans: Do they want to be laborers, and what does that entail? In the following analysis, I will alternate between focusing closely on the texts, particularly their main protagonists, and zooming out in order to relate the novels to each other as well as to contemporary societal patterns. After a short presentation of the three respective stories, I compare how the protagonists perceive their new jobs, and I connect their approaches to Standing’s definition of the precariat’s consciousness. Thereafter, I search for class-coded identity features in the protagonists’ actions and reflections before highlighting some elements in the stories that deviate from the otherwise dominant realist narratives.

Three Novels About Temporary Employment It’s a complete coincidence that I ended up here. I disclaim all responsibility for my temporary workplace, because that is exactly what it is. Temporary. It has nothing to do with me. I’m only doing it for the money. (Beischer 2015, 11)2 2  In the Swedish original: “Det är en fullständig slump att jag hamnade här. Jag frånsäger mig allt ansvar för min till fälliga arbetsplats, för det är just vad den är. Tillfällig. Den har inget med mig att göra. Jag gör det för pengarna.

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The first-person narrator’s statement quoted above, from Sara Beischer’s novel Jag ska egentligen inte jobba här [I’m Actually Not Supposed to Work Here], is particularly clear in its distancing. Moa’s temporary position at the Liljebacken nursing home outside of Stockholm is purely a means to support herself; she could just as well work somewhere else. At 19, she has moved from the south of Sweden to the capital, with the aim of realizing her dream of becoming an actor. Gradually, however, she becomes significantly more involved with the residents and her colleagues than she would have imagined. The novel was first published in 2012, in the wake of the so-called Carema scandal in Sweden, and a loud debate about what the fast privatization of formerly publicly run care was leading to. Blazing newspaper headlines signaled neglect, and care workers testified to being required to weigh soiled adult diapers and see that they had reached their capacity, before changing them in order to save money for the company owners (Hökerberg 2011).3 The question of how slim staffing generated increased dividends for shareholders and higher bonuses for managers of venture capital companies, provoked renewed discussions about profits in tax-­ financed welfare in Sweden. The story of Moa, her colleagues, and the residents is powerfully narrated; it works a lot with clichés and contrasts, and often employs gallows humor, resulting in a paradoxical combination of cordiality and distance. Eskil, the first-person narrator in Jack Hildén’s Vi, vi vaktmästare [We, we caretakers], first printed in 2014, does not have as clear future plans as Moa. He is a 20-something who works as a substitute caretaker at a company called Nordens Affärer [Business of Norden] in central Stockholm, saving money for a trip. To the recurring question of what will happen when the employment contract expires, he claims that he will study to be a teacher. Whether this really occurs, the story does not tell. But even though Eskil at the end of the novel chooses to attend a rock concert instead of hanging out with his former workmates, his time as a caretaker has certainly left its mark. At the porter’s office everyone except the immediate supervisor is male, and the novel depicts Eskil’s recurrent reflections on his own masculine 3  These claims were later partially contradicted by the companies and researchers, who stated that the weighing of diapers was primarily about adapting the protection to the individual users, a procedure that was in fact advocated by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare.

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identity: Is he, or does he want to be, a caretaker? If so, how should he act; should he continue to keep to himself, or should he instead try to integrate, to socialize? In the second part of the novel, Eskil is back after a few months’ journey to South America, and is re-employed for a shorter period, until the service function is to be taken over by another contractor. A central chore in the novel concerns what the feeling of being interchangeable does to a young person trying to find themself. Despite double university degrees, Alice, the 26-year-old protagonist in Måns Wadensjö’s Monopolet [The Monopoly] (2019), has had a hard time finding a job. After a few months, she takes what she can get—a part-time job at the liquor store in one of Stockholm’s well-to-do northern districts. Although shop assistant is hardly her dream occupation, she discovers that she is quite good at it, and thinks that maybe the structure she manages to establish at work will spill over into her private life. The novel’s title refers to the state-run Systembolaget’s retail monopoly on alcohol sales in Sweden. But it may also allude to how a job can almost devour a person and become her sole interest. The story, told in the third person, follows Alice and her development from inexperienced substitute to polished full-timer with the entire class society in front of her cash register. But the novel also accommodates another protagonist, Butiken [the Store], which is depicted in its ups and downs, and gradually appears almost as a living organism in an ecosystem that needs all parts to function in order to form a harmonious whole. The story consists of detailed descriptions of different work elements, the relationships between colleagues, and encounters with customers. Intertwined are recurrent reflections on what work does to the mind and how thought affects work. The narrator often connects everyday events to various phenomena that Alice has presumably studied. Through a fanciful imagery, with allusions to mythological figures, historical events, and descriptions of absurd occurrences, the depiction sometimes abandons the otherwise dominating realism. Given that most contemporary fictional stories about work and class in Sweden are characterized by a realistic narrative, it is interesting to note that all three novels contain some deviations from the norm. I will return to this later on.

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A Foreign World of Labor On her first day at the nursing home, Moa is thrown straight into caregiving, and the reader witnesses her shocked reactions to the frail bodies and odors of the elderly: “I never knew that old people could be so disgusting” [“Jag visste inte att gamla människor kunde vara så äckliga”] (Beischer 2015, 14). Her job includes a variety of duties, from taking care of the residents’ intimate hygiene to serving coffee, feeding, handing out medicine, making beds, and cleaning. The descriptions of Moa’s first experiences almost signal trauma, with wide-eyed comments about stools, anxiety, and death. “I quickly learn to split into two. My body works, but I myself am far away” [“Jag lär mig tidigt att dela upp mig i två. Min kropp arbetar men det jag som är jag är långt härifrån”] (ibid., 35). The fact that the residents are to be called customers adds to the distance and unreality. On her first visit to one of the residents, Moa is so affected by the whole situation—the stench and screams from the fragile 91-year-old woman— that she faints. Soon, this will be the first dead person Moa has seen, and the daily chores also accommodate a tangible existential experience. Alice, too, has had a momentous first day at work: As she entered the store, “everything she saw around her seemed new, hard and foreign” [“allt det hon såg runtomkring sig var nytt, hårt och främmande”] (Wadensjö 2019, 13). At 05.17, when her subway departs, the city is very still. The few other passengers generally wear uniforms or overalls. On her first morning at work, she and two other beginners get to unpack new bottles to put on the shelves. She becomes acquainted with the store’s special jargon and routines, with “morning picking,” “evening tearing,” and “hidden bottles,” and she learns how to handle the cardboard crusher. The store manager had informed her already, during her job interview, that the clientele usually belongs to the upper social strata: “You are treated a bit like their servant, but that is nothing you would have any problems with, is it?” (ibid., 12). Alice quickly masters every step of the supply chain and strives to manage all parts to perfection; she draws up a mental memory card of the store and its range so that she can advise customers on suitable beverage choices and quickly guide them to the right shelf. But as she keeps refining her work, there is also a certain kind of arrogance in her ambitions, and the growing competition that is triggered between colleagues threatens team spirit. New ways to approach work as a common endeavor will be required

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before there can be any hope of a functioning organization which also provides space for recovery and playfulness. Eskil describes his work as fairly straightforward: “My job is simple. After a week of training, anyone can do it” (Hildén 2018, 13). At the beginning of the novel, he has been employed for two months. The tasks consist of collecting and distributing mail in a small red cart, cleaning and refilling coffee machines, handing over assignments to colleagues, or just awaiting new missions. Sometimes he is in charge of locking up. His favorite chore is throwing cardboard into the mechanical crusher, and the various steps in the process are described in detail. Eskil controls everything but has no ambition to become particularly good at anything, since he does not intend to stay for long. Some effort is spent on seeming to be busy: “Giving the appearance of working is an art form in itself,” he claims [“Att ge sken av att jobba är en konstform i sig”] (ibid., 35). He invents ways to slow down the pace of work, by slowly walking around with the mail cart on different floors, or going to the top floor to have a cup of espresso from the coffee machine. Although the same kind is installed on all floors, to him it tastes better higher up, closer to the company management. The hierarchy of the workplace and Eskil’s own position occupy many of his thoughts. Perhaps his job is not that simple, after all. In addition to the recurring practicalities, it requires a good deal of social interaction with co-workers and employees at the business company as well as customers from outside. For Eskil, the crucial challenge is spending leisure time with the other men in the porter’s office.

The Precariat’s and the Proletarian Consciousness For all three protagonists, employment is temporary and unclear in duration. To Moa and Eskil, this seems to be perfectly in order, since they have other plans. Uncertainty and flexibility are often associated with young adults taking their first steps into working life. Young people in today’s post-industrial societies are expected to live on standby for increasingly longer periods of their lives. Adolescence has become more and more extended, in many cases well into the 30s, and correspondingly, identity creation is prolonged. Psychologist J.J. Arnett, who in order to illustrate this process has developed the concept of ‘emerging adulthood,’ claims that young people, when asked what adulthood entails, mention not only the purely demographic aspect, or the ability to support themselves, but also individual character qualities, such as taking responsibility for one’s

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own decisions (2000, 473). Still, according to Arnett, work is an important part of forming an identity as an adult (ibid., 474). As a number of researchers have shown, insecurity around basic working conditions is in fact spreading quickly to ever-larger sections of the population. An increasing number of people have precarious, short-term jobs; in Sweden, the proportion is between 15 and 17 percent of the total working population, and growing (Statistics Sweden, Labour Force Surveys 2019). Once one of the OECD nations with the strongest protection for employees, Sweden is now in the bottom tier, which also includes the United States and Great Britain (Alfonsson 2020, 145). During the last decades’ brutal changes due to globalization, deregulation, and intensifying competition, the close connection between class, identity, and work that emerged in the modern welfare society has weakened considerably. Ten years ago, Guy Standing formulated ‘the precariat’ as a new, growing group of people, “a class-in-the-making,” whose short-termism hinders it from becoming part of a solidary labor community and forming a ‘class-of-itself’ (2011, 44, 61). In a subsequent work, A Precariat Charter (2014), Standing points to the fact that as work does not offer the same long-term security, people’s attitudes toward it have changed considerably. He discerns an emerging mindset, ‘the precariat’s consciousness,’ that differs radically from the previous, ‘proletarian’ one: “While proletarian consciousness is linked to long-term security in a firm, mine, factory, or office, the precariat’s consciousness is linked to a search for security outside the workplace” (17). Although temporary employment as such is anything but new, Standing emphasizes that the mentality that surrounds it has more or less become the norm, at the same time as unemployment has settled at significantly higher levels. This has created new types of stratifications and has changed thoughts and habits. Compared to previous generations, young people today are less inclined to link their self-­ image to lifetime employment and paid work. Jobs come and go. That is Eskil’s thought after the announcement that his and the other caretakers’ employment will soon end, as the company they work for, Workfuse, will be replaced by another contractor, Eventa. But as he compares his own carefree approach to the attitudes of two of his co-workers, he realizes that some may reason differently: I know how it works. You get a job. It ends quickly. The contract states how many hours you are guaranteed per week: 0–45. I know all this. But Sven

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and Nikolaos, they do not know. I see them approaching an abyss. They are afraid, all the time, without showing it. Jag vet hur det fungerar. Du får ett jobb. Det tar slut snabbt. På kontraktet står hur många timmar man är garanterad per vecka: 0–45. Jag vet allt detta. Men Sven och Nikolaos, de vet det inte. Jag ser dem närma sig en avgrund. De är rädda, hela tiden, utan att visa det. (Hildén 2018, 137)

In this quote, Eskil’s reasoning, which obviously corresponds to ‘the precariat’s consciousness,’ is compared to his senior colleagues’ ‘proletarian’ way of thinking, and he obviously considers his own position as the only reasonable one. The others are stuck in a bygone era according to Eskil: “Somewhere they became their professions” (ibid., 52). He does what he is supposed to, but no more. He plans a trip to South America, with the intention of staying until the money runs out. Then he will perhaps study. Eskil’s seemingly light-hearted attitude toward work and support corresponds to the common image of freedom-loving youth. But it may also be a pose or a facade, established as a protection against possible adversity. Although Eskil’s plans to be a teacher appear feasible, he seems to use them as a kind of shield against the outside world’s (and perhaps his own) questions and expectations. “As long as possible, you should keep your doors open” (Hildén 2018, 197), he tells himself (and the reader), but at the same time he claims to want to be faced with more sharp situations that will force him to make radical decisions and to express a clear opinion. Eskil also displays the four emotional A’s that Standing refers to as typical of the precariat—anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation (Standing 2011, 65ff.). He expresses anger toward management, for their higher incomes and (in his opinion) false courtesy, as well as toward the female cleaners, who, despite the individualized work, try to establish some kind of community among themselves. He worries about how to look and behave in order to fit in, without finding any clear instructions. In addition, he experiences a sense of meaninglessness toward the work as such, for what it entails but perhaps also because it is temporary, and he therefore does not really count. “Only now do I understand why they barely greeted me”—he thinks of his colleagues after a few months, when things have improved—“They expected me to be replaced at any time” (Hildén 2018, 67). In his dissertation on young Swedish temporary employees and their life conditions, sociologist Johan Alfonsson highlights powerlessness and meaninglessness as central to the alienation many of his informants experience in what he labels today’s ‘flexible capitalism,’ whose slim

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work organizations constantly reduce self-determination as well as the possibility of collective action (2020, 51). As Moa initially introduces herself to the residents at the nursing home, she carefully emphasizes that she will only be working there through the summer. However, she soon realizes that she is not the only one with other plans. In her eyes, two types of staff appear at Liljebacken—those who regard the job as temporary and those who seem to have come to terms with the fact that the job has become part of themselves. Roy, who has worked at the nursing home for a long time and is approaching retirement, still dreams of starting his own hairdressing salon. Martina, who has just become a full-time employee, wants to become a makeup artist, and Leena, as it turns out, was also an actress once but chose the security of a permanent job over short-term projects interspersed with unemployment. The devoted Eva, who sometimes lingers after working hours to wipe the floor or bake a sponge cake for the elderly, is initially highlighted as a cautionary tale. Moa never wants to be like that. At the same time, she notices the difference in status between temporary and permanent employees. The latter have their own personal coffee mugs, which are kept on a special shelf in the staff room. The fact that Moa early on accidentally uses Leena’s mug not only causes conflict but serves as a harbinger of her own future in the workplace. Alice’s first employment contract states only 12 hours a week, and during the first weeks she wears a small tag on her chest that says “New at work.” Initially, she is an observer scanning the dynamics of the workplace and the different categories among the employees: The hardened and experienced ones with stories from the past to tell, the younger ones moving forward and up, and the substitutes who are supplementing their study grants and pensions: “What united them all and held them together was their conviction that there was something special about this store” [“Det som förenade dem alla och som höll dem samman var att de alla var övertygade om att det var någonting särskilt med den här butiken”] (Wadensjö 2019, 25). Although her own position as a newcomer is uncertain, Alice enters her duties with unimaginable energy and curiosity. Her attitude to everything new is almost solemn. She is fascinated by the work and gets sucked into it. Although Alice’s reactions stand out, Standing’s thoughts on the precariat’s consciousness are in many ways applicable to the three novels’ characters and their short-term life plans. They are used to a system where precarious and temporary employment is the rule rather than the

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exception. Unlike some of their senior colleagues, they have no specific wish to remain in their temporary workplaces. But their attitude, as I mentioned earlier, can at the same time be seen as an expression of powerlessness and alienation toward a situation they cannot affect. Even though the temporariness as such offers a certain kind of freedom, with no strings attached, the precariat’s consciousness makes it almost self-evident that one should avoid investing much of oneself, since committing to something that probably will not last would appear to be pointless. According to Standing, the precariat’s incapacity or reluctance to unite as a group “intensifies a sense of alienation and instrumentality in what they have to do” (2011, 44). This of course risks adding to the distance between the individual and the workplace. Jag ska egentligen inte arbeta här and Vi, vi vaktmästare both raise the question of whether such an attitude is possible and reasonable in a working collective. Monopolet, however, deals with the opposite problem. Even though Alice never dreamed of working as a shop assistant, the Store soon becomes all she thinks about.

Doing, Thinking, and Feeling Class That the temporariness and adaptability of the precariat’s consciousness also accommodate class-coded features, is clearly discernable in the three novels. Eskil’s seemingly carefree attitude toward his substitute position and unclear future displays traces of a middle-class self-confidence and assured faith. If money runs out, he can simply, as he points out, call his parents. Neither Moa nor Alice formulates such a backup solution. Moa seems particularly anxious to establish a new, autonomous identity, far from her small-town childhood. Working as a care assistant is for her, at least to begin with, just a step on the way to acting school, but most of all it is about supporting herself. Alice, who is a few years older, demonstrates a more philosophical and at the same time unconditional view of her store employment. Right from the start, at the job interview, the narrator points her out as a deviant in the well-to-do district, wearing her father’s old worn leather jacket, “which did not really blend into a shopping center on this side of town” [“som inte riktigt smälte in i ett köpcentrum på den här sidan av stan”] (Wadensjö 2019, 7). Several factors indicate that Eskil and Alice belong to the same type of urban cultural middle class that Moa tries her very best to join.

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Still, the question of how class appears in fiction is complex, since characters’ experiences cannot be treated simply as real-life testimonies. Actions and emotions in novels are constructed, configured, and mediated. In literature, class affiliations are often illustrated by different status markers and tastes, which can be quite locally distinctive and therefore not always easy to single out. In the three novels, traces of class are primarily present through different types of characteristics—in how Alice thinks and talks to others in the liquor store, in her relationship with co-workers, and in descriptions of the customers; in Eskil’s gaze on himself and others; and in Moa’s way of labeling her colleagues and in her attempts to fit in, not least in different cultural environments outside of work. Moa is particularly quick to judge; her initial descriptions of colleagues at the nursing home are equally apt and prejudiced. Through her critical gaze, Roy becomes the cliché image of a gay man—the first one she has ever met. He is wearing “a ring in his ear, Acne jeans and a hoodie” [“ring i örat, Acnejeans och munkjacka”] and “frantically flutters his colored eyelashes” [“blinkar frenetiskt med sina färgade ögonfransar”] (Beischer 2015, 35). Martina, the makeup artist to be, is bluntly displayed as a kind of white trash: “Martina has never been to the theater. But she has had four abortions” [“Martina har aldrig varit på teater. Men hon har gjort fyra aborter”] (ibid., 37). The safe and steady Eva, on the other hand, is so devoted to her work, alert and singing tunes in major key, that Moa at first wonders what is wrong with her. Moa’s clichéd decoding of her surroundings also reveals a lot about how she herself does not want to be, or appear. Although the three novels devote limited space to the main characters’ lives outside work, it becomes clear that work and leisure are hard to combine. Moa, whose spare time is described in more detail, is also the only one with clear future plans. During her free time, she identifies so strongly with the image of a culturally engaged city dweller that she reveals herself as anything but one. She buys a beret, cloth bag, and notebook, and selects a “regular café” in the Old Town, where she plans to read plays and write “observations” of other customers. Her navigation in an urban, strongly class-coded existence is a central driving force in the novel. But while her interests simulate cultural middle class, getting access is difficult. Attending a party thrown by her colleague Leena, who has friends in the music and cultural industry, Moa is particularly worried about her attire: “I go downtown to find something new to wear. Something new that does not look new. I do not want anyone to think that I have bought

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something new just because I am going to a party” [“Jag åker in till stan för att hitta något nytt att ta på mig. Något nytt som inte ser nytt ut. Vill inte att någon ska tänka att jag har köpt något nytt att ha på mig bara för att jag ska gå på fest”] (Beischer 2015, 165). This passage displays the kind of emotional class politics that Beverley Skeggs discusses in Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, where the desire to pass as middle class creates anxiety (1997, 83). The quote reveals how Moa’s ambitions to blend in require deliberate effort and forethought that must then be hidden. With a slightly ironic twist, attention is drawn to the paradox of the whole operation. Moa is not only aware of the unspoken demands and how these make her feel stressed. She also reflects on what is contradictory, and perhaps a little silly, about the expectations as such, and how she tries to fulfill them. There is an interesting tension in the novel, between the worries and shortcomings of a young person embarking on a class journey and a critical outside voice that speaks in the present tense, but as if in retrospect. Moa’s rather clumsy attempts to fit into metropolitan cultural life, together with her wish to leave her small-town upbringing behind, are characterized by what sociologists call disidentification and dissimulation, a distancing from and hiding of her class background (cf. Skeggs 1997, 74ff.). Her initially contemptuous gaze at co-workers who, in her opinion, exhibit bad taste or exaggerated cleverness, is perhaps too reminiscent of everything she is trying to leave behind. But the attitude also radiates the youth’s disregard for everything middle-aged or average. Working in a nursing home does not fit into Moa’s self-image and future plans. The split is illustrated by the fact that she has prepared two completely different CVs (curriculum vitaæ or qualifications). One is aimed at “ordinary workplaces. A kind of survival CV.  Or an I-am-a-happypositive-and-cooperative-girl-CV” [“vanliga arbetsplatser. Ett slags överlevnads-­CV. Eller ett jag-är-en-glad-positiv-och-samarbetsvillig-tjej-CV”] (Beischer 2015, 52). The other is the one that is always in her handbag, listing qualifications from theater productions. Eskil also creates two separate worlds, one at work and one outside. He considers himself as something “more” than a caretaker: “There are things I do in my spare time that conflict with the person I am at Nordens Affärer” (Hildén 2018, 52). The effort he devotes to books and reading as well as his travel plans are two examples. Eskil believes that he is different from the other caretakers at the company; he moves differently and eats different food. The kind of masculinity that the others display seems

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to confuse him. Just like Moa, he is grim in his judgment of others, but also of himself. “I feel ugly,” he states, and devotes a great deal of thought to how others perceive him as he receives deliveries or goes out to lunch in his working clothes: “People look at me and may think things” [“Folk ser på mig och tänker kanske saker”] (ibid., 28). At Alice’s job in the liquor store, people of various classes and ethnicities pass by. There are the well-to-do homeowners but also the Polish guest workers who build their kitchens. And there are the regular customers who are sometimes already too drunk to be allowed to shop. Alice strives to treat everyone equally; still, she feels more connected to the regulars than to the occasional visitors who often treat her “like a completely interchangeable cash machine” [“som en helt utbytbar kassamaskin”] (Wadensjö 2019, 113). Alice does not seem to feel anxious about who she is or wants to be. However, she experiences anger and disappointment at how some customers, especially the socially privileged, treat her as almost invisible: “Probably, she had to remind herself, they thought absolutely nothing about who she was—they did not even see her, and that was exactly what had become unbearable for her” [“Förmodligen, det var hon tvungen att påminna sig själv om, tänkte de absolut ingenting om vem hon var—de såg henne inte ens, och det var just det som hade blivit outhärdligt för henne”] (ibid., 266). Alice and Eskil share the discomfort of noticing that people they meet at work do not seem to be interested in who they really ‘are,’ inside their work attire and outside of work. Among the caretaker colleagues, however, what Eskil wants most of all is to blend in. At work he worries that his “real” self may shine through, and somehow reveal him—“just because I wear the right clothes, does it not show that I am another?” [“Bara för att jag bär rätt kläder, betyder det att det inte syns att jag är en annan?”] (Hildén 2018, 71). To Moa, on the other hand, the special nursing jumper is among the best things about the job, since the pencil in the chest pocket and her name tag make her look almost like “a real nurse” (Beischer 2015, 38). In the midst of everything new, the three protagonists find at least some stability through another person at work who functions as a kind of mentor; a confident colleague who can help to bridge the gap. Alice builds a special friendship with Elin, who is described as a legend in liquor stores all over Stockholm due to her speed and skill. Elin has sinewy tattooed arms, a bubbling laugh, and a natural air of authority. Eskil establishes a charged homosocial relationship with property manager Tomas, who

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becomes a somewhat ambiguous father figure. On the one hand, Tomas is an adult male who is self-evident and uncomplicated, carefree in his body and his labor identity. On the other hand, he has completely different interests and priorities in life than Eskil. He wants to build a swimming pool and travel to Madrid, and he repeatedly makes racist statements, which Eskil disapproves of without really daring to protest. Leena, whom Moa first clearly distances herself from, gradually becomes a kind of role model. She was an actress but retrained as an assistant nurse. She is critical of the theater’s youth fixation, sexism, and murderous competition. Leena teaches Moa to look more realistically at the conditions within the theater and emphasizes the benefits of the care profession.

To Be or Not to Be a Laborer For Eskil, be(com)ing a laborer never seems to go deeper than his work outfit—the thick gray trousers and the black shirt with the company logo. At the same time, his experience of working as a caretaker is contradictory. On the one hand, he feels like he is in costume and is ashamed to be seen by people when he is outside. In the workplace, however, he tries to behave in a way that to him signals working class, in a similar sense as Judith Butler claims that gender is created ‘performatively,’ through imitation and repetition (1990). Although his imitation is not ironic but shaped by a genuine desire to belong, to a larger degree than with Moa or Alice, Eskil’s identity as a laborer appears to be borrowed—something he tries out for a limited period of time, then puts away and possibly remembers with some nostalgia, like an interesting tourist trip. In fact, in one of the few passages that depicts Eskil’s experiences from his travel in South America, the parallel to his struggle to be a caretaker is obvious: “You try to dress so you blend in, but you miss something / They identify the attempt / You are revealed” (Hildén 2018, 194). At the beginning of each story, it is clear that the protagonists primarily think of work based on their own current situation. As time goes by, however, they become, albeit to varying degrees, part of something bigger. The fact that they are employed in typical labor professions does not mean that they automatically assume an identity as laborer, or as working class. On the other hand, they grow into a larger context that affects them in different ways. In the 1960s, sociologist Sverre Lysgaard formulated a theory about ‘the working collective,’ characterized by employees forming their own system of norms that can function as protection against demands

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from the organization in which they work (2014). In order for such a community to emerge, however, it is necessary for the employees to experience equality and closeness, and they need to create common problem images, all of which is considerably more difficult to achieve for temporary employees. Eskil in particular, and to some extent Moa, initially establishes a social distance by not really integrating. Eskil withdraws during the breaks to read books and insists that he will study to be a teacher. Moa splits in two; she dreams of acting school and only continues to work while waiting for the next admission round. Alice, on the other hand, changes quickly, from unnoticed newcomer to one of the store manager’s favorites. Work leaves deep imprints on her mind as well as her body. After just a couple of months she has started to become someone else, outside of work but also in the Store, which begins to feel like home. A special form of consensus emerges between the employees: “what they had in common was a layer of experiences that everyone had had alone and completely for themselves, but which they could still trust that the others had also had” [“det de hade gemensamt var ett skikt av upplevelser som var och en hade haft ensam och alldeles för sig själv, men som de ändå kunde lita på att de andra också hade haft”] (Wadensjö 2019, 72), states the narrator. But based on Lysgaard’s definition of the working collective, the proximity and community in the Store is, after all, quite weak. The team spirit is primarily based on competition, and the experiences of work remain largely individual; a stronger system of standards such as protection against management is never established. And perhaps it is precisely the lack of collective structures that make both the Store and the relationships between those who work there vulnerable. When adversity strikes, there is no common force holding the parts together. Only when Alice, her friend Elin, and the others can let go of the prestige and laugh at the misery together does there seem to be a possibility for a better and happier future for the Store. Gradually, Eskil too allows himself to become more involved with his co-workers, to the extent that on a couple of occasions he spends time with Tomas and some of the others after working hours. He reflects on whether, despite all the differences, he might become part of the gang. Still, there is no clear community of the kind that Lysgaard formulates that unites them. Although Eskil at some point is instructed in how to close packages properly, and Tomas shows him how he can pass the time by confidently moving in the corridors with a work tool in his hands, the tasks and areas of responsibility, just like in the Store, are highly

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individualized. Only when it is too late does Eskil notice his social ties to the others. As the new contractor takes over property management and service, he remains employed for a short period to train the new caretakers, and he experiences a clear deterioration of his situation. Not only because he cannot work as freely and take the same frequent breaks as before but because he actually misses the old work team. Even though there are new job possibilities on the horizon and temporary employment offers advantageous flexibility, Eskil learns during the course of the story that work is, after all, something significantly more than just the tasks themselves. Step by step, Moa also realizes the meaning of her work at the nursing home and that she is actually quite good at “working with people.” The elderly, who at first just seemed scary and disgusting, start to crystallize as individuals. Gullan,  good-natured  and plump; toothless Elna with her budgie, and Urban, the indecent, swearing former priest who is longing for closeness. Moa begins to think about them sometimes even on her free time; she even jumps in to offer extra help and stays longer when needed. Her colleagues also appear in a more favorable light as Moa notices that they cover for her. At the same time, she begins to scrutinize the working conditions and notices that some of the full-time employees also do extra work in other places to make ends meet, arrangements made possible by the privatizations. Of the three protagonists, Moa is the one who most clearly becomes part of a working collective, according to the previously mentioned definition by Lysgaard. Still, it’s only in Sara Beischer’s sequel Jag ska egentligen inte prata om det här [I Am Actually Not Supposed to Talk About This] (2018) that Moa ‘becomes’ a laborer, in the sense that she herself recognizes and reflects on her own class affiliation. According to the plot, Moa has written a novel about her experiences at the nursing home, addressing issues such as understaffing and the vulnerability of the elderly. As it is published and attracts a lot of media attention, a new life for her as a writer begins to take shape, which makes her reflect on her own background and class identity in new ways: “It may seem strange that I haven’t thought about this before, but you don’t walk around as working class thinking here I am walking around being working class” [“Det kan tyckas märkligt att jag inte har funderat på det här tidigare, men man går inte runt som arbetarklass och tänker att här går jag runt och är arbetarklass”] (Beischer 2018, 180). Her reasoning is supported by Skeggs, who emphasizes that working-class

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people, and especially women, rarely talk about class. Those who do are mainly middle class or have made some kind of class journey (1997, 76f.). The underlying norm in all three stories signals cultural, urban middle class, and significant attention is paid to the characters’ distancing from what they perceive as both lower-class and upper-class behavior. White, Swedish ethnicity is another norm, although not explicitly discussed as such. Traces of another part of society are glimpsed in the margins, in the form of foreign guest workers, migrant beggars, and the foreign-sounding names of a few of Eskil’s workmates.

Enchanted by Work While Eskil thinks of himself as ‘much more’ than a caretaker, he realizes he must be on his guard. The transformation can occur quickly, and then he may become like the others. His testing of identities in the workplace is actually quite reminiscent of the fairy tale’s enchantment. In his eyes, the decor at the company becomes more beautiful on each floor in the building; the carpets are thicker and the espresso tastier higher up. His life as a caretaker functions as a kind of transformative act, like Superman’s change in the telephone booth (which is actually mentioned in the story). Or, like an inverted Cinderella story, where the caretaker role in itself carries the magic. At five o’clock the spell is broken and he quickly showers off any trace. But in Eskil’s experience of the workplace, there is also an eerie strand of self-loss and alienation. His perception of himself as socially competent in formal contexts lacks value in the group of caretakers, which gives him a feeling of emptiness and non-authenticity. Who is he, where does he come from, and who does he want to be? In this environment, his past experiences fit as little as his body and his movements. “[…] I walk like a caretaker and know how the elevator doors open, but as soon as my body is expected to help me out of something, it wonders: Am I standing in the right way? Should this foot look like this?” [“I Nordens Affärer går jag som en vaktmästare och känner till hur hissdörrarna öppnas, men så fort min kropp förväntas hjälpa mig ur något så undrar den: Står jag rätt nu? Ska den här foten se ut så här?”] (Hildén 2018, 161). Eskil’s lack of appropriate habitus and masculinity in the working environment affects him fundamentally, both physically and mentally. He feels alternately looked down upon and made completely invisible; he believes he does not “stick” on the surveillance cameras in the nearby store and sometimes steals food even though he does not need to.

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Monopolet also shows clear traces of magic and offers some almost carnival elements. Alice’s encounter with the Store is wide-eyed, similar to when Lewis Carroll’s heroine enters Wonderland. She is fascinated by how her body changes from the physical work she is doing, increasingly resembling a fantastic machine, “a collection of body parts that she could use for almost anything” [“en samling kroppsdelar som hon skulle kunna använda till nästan vad som helst”] (Wadensjö 2019, 65). To her, the Store becomes the solution to all riddles, the point where everything converges—“the navel of the world.” It is a place that abolishes the order of things and the passage of time, by offering people an opportunity to escape everyday life: “Wine is the magic potion that makes transformation possible” [“Vinet är den trolldryck som gör förvandlingen möjlig”] (ibid., 187). Alice’s total commitment to work reaches its climax in a strange scene where she happens to drop a very rare bottle of wine on the floor. In front of her astonished co-workers, she falls to her knees, dips her finger in the pool—and tastes. The plot corresponds to a kind of sacred communion: “She had taken part of the floor, part of the shop, and put it in her mouth; it had become a part of her now, and if there had ever been any return from the path she had begun to walk, it was certainly gone now” [“Hon hade tagit en del av golvet, en del av butiken, och stoppat den i sin mun; den hade blivit en del av henne nu, och om det någon gång hade funnits någon återvändo från den väg hon hade börjat gå var den helt säkert borta nu”] (ibid., 191f.). Alice is so infatuated with the Store that she does not notice her colleagues’ critical comments about her arrogance or hear her friends’ warnings that she must also have a life outside of work. Yet her hubris has an end. During a heavy snowfall in February, the Store’s gradual decay begins. Deliveries and sales end up out of step, and the growing disorder spreads to the staff, in the form of discord, negligence, increased waste, sick leave, and dropouts. In the midst of all the stress, Alice and her best friend and workmate Elin suddenly disagree over a trifle. If the store is to be saved, Alice must reclaim her individuality and at the same time help to establish a kind of community similar to what Lysgaard defines, which requires striving in the same direction with others and not just emphasizing oneself. Moa’s first impression of the nursing home is in turn rather reminiscent of the classical horror story, with its distorted proportions and loss of control. Her overall educational project is about bridging the gap between the life she dreams of and what reality has to offer. It is about becoming an adult, in the sense of being prepared to take responsibility and participate.

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When she accepts an offer of a permanent position after a year, this does not necessarily mean that she will stop applying for acting school. At the end of the novel, she labels herself, without irony, as an adult, with her own flat, a permanent job, and a six-month admission card at the swimming baths. In a final dilemma, a choice between attending a screen test and a long-promised visit to a café with one of the residents, Gullan, she eventually chooses the latter. Eskil makes the opposite choice; he decides to go to a rock concert instead of meeting up with his former colleagues. The mobile call from Tomas stays unanswered. As Eskil leaves the caretaker job and, as it seems, (re)enters middle-class life, perhaps to be a teacher, he believes he has at least gained a new and perhaps valuable experience.

Conclusion: Three Educational Stories About Community Whether in care, trade, manufacturing industry, or service, and regardless of how (working) life later takes shape, their first short-term job is an experience that many people in high-income countries carry with them. This chapter deals with three young adult protagonists, ethnic Swedes, and their first encounters with traditional labor professions, depicted in three novels from the 2010s, in a time of radical change for the global workforce. They all share an initial distance from their temporary employments, an attitude that follows a current precarious logic rather than an earlier proletarian one, based on Guy Standing’s definition. This, as well as their young age, or emerging adulthood, complicates the possibility to place them in a certain social class. Neither Moa nor Eskil identifies with their own clichéd perception of what a laborer is or does. Both consider education as a way forward and initially use their future plans as a protection, not realizing how this affects how they are perceived by others in the workplace. Alice, who despite her university degrees has not managed to get a job, enters her part-time employment with a less biased attitude and soon manages to find both meaning and joy in her work. For her, the problem instead becomes one of setting limits on how much space the Store and her own pursuit of perfection should fill. All three struggle with how to get work and private life to go together. While Moa and Eskil initially build completely different identities for themselves as employees and private individuals, Alice becomes so

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engrossed in her work that life outside almost seems to lose its meaning. Neither of these approaches proves to be reasonable. As has been shown, temporary work is surrounded by a complicated economy of emotions— shame, abhorrence, and alienation, but also togetherness, empathy, and fulfillment. Of the three characters, only Moa clearly becomes part of the kind of working collective that Lysgaard formulates, where the employees manage to shape their own norm system and establish common problem images. Her way of relating to both work and class also changes the most during the course of the story. She goes from regarding the elderly with disgust and her colleagues with contempt to taking her own initiatives to improve the environment in the nursing home. In the subsequent novel about the time after her employment, Moa finally seems to be rooted in her own working-class identity and background. Eskil leaves his temporary job as caretaker, apparently without any sense of loss. Nevertheless, the months at Nordens Affärer appear to be important in an ongoing identity building process that is about both class and masculinity. The story of Alice and her arrogance finally ends in a redemptive laugh. Perhaps a working collective will rise from the rubble and save the neglected liquor store. Like most novels about contemporary life in Sweden, the three works are characterized by a realistic narrative. Still, all of them contain deviations, such as elements of enchantment, magic, and horror. Eskil is magically transformed into a caretaker, but the spell ends at five, when he becomes his ordinary self. Moa is appalled by the terrifying frailty of the elderly and in her spare time she tries hard to style herself as an urban cultural worker. But once she overcomes her fear of the unknown, she manages to muster both tenderness and empathy and to feel connected to her co-workers. Alice’s body and mind are altered by the hard work, and she enters into a kind of communion with the Store. But her enchantment, or perhaps rather curse, must also be broken, in order to achieve a more well-­ balanced relationship between herself, work, and her  colleagues. The common lesson of the stories is that work turns out to be something significantly more than the tasks themselves, something that also requires an emotional investment and an ambition to establish functioning and sustainable relationships. Work only becomes meaningful when it is carried out in interaction with others, which in turn requires personal commitment and sensitivity to other people’s needs and desires, as well as a belief in the power of common solidarity.

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Bibliography Alfonsson, Johan. 2020. Alienation och arbete: Unga behovsanställdas villkor i den flexibla kapitalismen. Lund: Arkiv förlag. Arnett, J.J. 2000. Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties. American Psychologist 55 (5): 469–480. Beischer, Sara. 2015 [2012]. Jag ska egentligen inte jobba här. Stockholm: Lind & Co. ———. 2018. Jag ska egentligen inte prata om det här. Stockholm: Lind & Co. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Hildén, Jack. 2018 [2014]. Vi, vi vaktmästare. Stockholm: Norstedts. Hökerberg, Josefin. 2011. Kissblöjorna vägs – för att spara pengar. Dagens Nyheter. November 11. Lysgaard, Sverre. 2014 [1961]. Arbeiderkollektivet: En studie i de underordnedes sosiologi. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Skeggs, Beverley. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage Publications. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2014. A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury. Statistics Sweden. 2019. Labour Force Surveys. https://www.scb.se/en/finding-­ statistics/statistics-­b y-­s ubject-­a rea/labour-­m arket/labour-­f orce-­s urveys/ labour-­force-­surveys-­lfs/pong/publications/labour-­force-­surveys-­lfs-­2019/. Accessed 22 April 2021. Wadensjö, Måns. 2019. Monopolet. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag.

CHAPTER 16

Neighboring with the Roofless. Imagin(in)g Homeless Others Agnieszka Pantuchowicz

First, nomadism is precarious; second, offensive and third, borderline. The nomadic is also a precarium, something that only survives until it is revoked, that fails as a prerequisite, or to put it more agreeably: the constituting difference between a goal and the results. Precariousness, acting in precarious contexts, is a prerequisite of the nomadic (Raunig 2002, in Milev 2011, 143).

The universality of the biblical demand of loving one’s neighbor remains equally universally unmet for a number of reasons, one of them being the location of the neighbor in relation to the territory which the ‘host’ is occupying. Though the idea of hospitability has been broadly theorized and written about in the wake of Derrida’s incitements to rethink it, its connections with neighboring are worth having a look at in the contexts of what has been termed the ‘immigration problem.’ Derrida’s concern is

A. Pantuchowicz (*) SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warszawa, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_16

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the other rather than the neighbor, and this other is frequently rendered not only as migratory, but also as seeking home, and thus not only as desiring hospitality, as Gilbert Leung and Matthew Stone note (Leung and Stone 2009, 193–206), but also as desiring to become a neighbor— both the subject and the object of the biblical demand of loving in which the neighbor should be loved ‘as thyself.’ However appropriate or inappropriate the English translation of the Hebrew ‘rēaʿ’ as ‘neighbor’ may be, the object of love seems to be an another, rather than the other, someone already belonging to a certain enclosed social space rather than a stranger coming from the outside. One etymologically derived sense of the word neighbor is that of a ‘near-­ dweller,’ and it recalls someone who dwells nearby, one occupying a certain space in a more or less permanent way. A dweller stands in opposition to a nomad, and though he or she needn’t occupy an architectural construction, a building or an edifice, as Heidegger famously tried to indicate, some activity of building crucially accompanies the very possibility of both dwelling and being, at least in its verbal expression through the German verb ‘bauen’ which now seems to mean only ‘to build.’ For Heidegger, ‘bauen’ still carries its originary sense which “has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbor” (Heidegger 1971, 145). The ‘-bar’ ending the German noun carries within itself traces of the verb ‘bueron’ which signifies dwelling. The verb ‘bauen,’ which also means to build, still speaks that sense and, Heidegger notes, also says how far the nature of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan. bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. (ibid.)

From the perspective of Heideggerian ontology, he (and perhaps also she) who does not build cannot be raised to the status of being. However abstract Heidegger’s idea of building may be, it evidently points to some kind of technology of constructing what one is, of constructing an identity which is rooted in the ground, in a territory or a terrain which, through building, loses smoothness and becomes striated. The two seemingly oppositional configurations of space—the smooth and the striated—are what Deleuze and Guattari see as the spaces of a nomos and a logos of which we should conceive of in terms of coexistence and competition (1988, 478). This distinction, as Flora Lysen and Patricia

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Pisters note, is a conceptual pair introduced “to rethink space as a complex mixture between nomadic forces and sedentary captures” (2012, 1). In some sense, this complex mixture inscribes the nomadic within the sedentary, though the conflict within this mixture seems to be motored by the encounter of affirmation and its negation through separation, in fact exactly through building. Brian Massumi hints at this possibility in the translator’s foreword to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: The modus operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent object is negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, xiii)

The rhetoric of immigration as a threat to the securely unified state of political states, now frequent in various parts of the world, seems to be one which, frequently implicitly, makes use of the figure of home as a walled space, as a horizontally enclosed territory which is threatened from the outside by the nomadic mobility to which the idea of neighboring, and thus also of loving one’s neighbors, is as it were unthinkable because of its alleged hostility to the constraints of walls, to the limiting power of logos from whose perspective the nomadic is seen as an uncontrollable force of deterritorialization, yet another Deleuze-Guattari term which Stuart Elden finds to be significant in thinking “anew on the notion of territory, and to recognize how its logic is both played out and challenged in a period of globalization” (2005, 10). Since the power of the nation-state is clearly a version of Massumi’s wall-building, migration can be perceived as a threat to the stability of the walls, as an attempt to break their constrains by external, mobile hordes attempting to change the striated space of the city into a desert—a wall-less and roofless terrain without clearly marked topographical places. Immigration—now clearly a global phenomenon— brings in the idea of deterritorialization, thus inciting a way of thinking in terms of wall-less worlds of uncontrollable forces operating within a new kind of geography translating state territories into spacing of what Massumi sees as new vistas, but what may well be also perceived as a threat symbolically comparable to the ruining of Rome by the Vandals. The image of the immigrant in contemporary sedentary states is nowadays frequently that of a mobile, nomadic ‘arrivant’ who does not dwell, who does not really belong to land and slips out from the sphere of neighboring as a nonbuilder of common identity. In the neoliberal context of the idea of ‘homo

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œconomicus,’ this identity seems to be one which is precarity-­induced by way of an individual’s taking up the role of what Michel Foucault called in his lectures on bio-politics an “entrepreneur of himself”: Homo œconomicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself. This is true to the extent that, in practice, the stake in all neoliberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo œconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo œconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings. (2008, 226)

Such an entrepreneurial position of the individual subject stimulates a certain fear of failure which, in Foucault, is a constitutive element of liberalism, its “internal and cultural corelative” (ibid., 67). This fear is not the fear of the Other; it does not come from the outside, and, however paradoxically, eliminates the outside as constitutive of ourselves. What Foucault calls “the culture of danger”—without which there is no liberalism (ibid.)—is in fact a culture without a threatening outside, one in which danger is contained within everyday practices and experiences of living. This internalization of danger prompts Foucault to formulate liberalism’s motto as a call to live dangerously, though without a touch of an adventurous spirit of exploring the unknown: ‘Live dangerously,’ that is to say, individuals are constantly exposed to danger, or rather, they are conditioned to experience their situation, their life, their present, and their future as containing danger. I think this kind of stimulus of danger will be one of the major implications of liberalism. (ibid., 66)

The political culture of danger whose emergence Foucault situates in the nineteenth century is a culture of the inside, a culture of domestic fear of everyday dangers which “emerge, and spread everywhere, perpetually being brought to life” (ibid.). What is thus brought about is the inevitability of danger which is contained within individuals’ experiences of their “situation, their life, their present, and their future” (ibid.). Fear is as it were a constitutive outside of the security of the inside, the problem being that it also dwells inside the home (‘οἶκος’) of this kind of economy. It is thus not a fear of an apocalyptic catastrophe, not even a fear of death, but rather a fear of economic loss, perhaps of deficiency of one’s achievement.

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The basic social units within such a social fabric have the form of enterprise, and though Foucault posits this claim in the form of questions, he clearly expresses a vision of a society in which individuals and their neighbors are partly technologized institutions multiplied from within the social body. It “is not a matter of constructing a social fabric in which the individual would be in direct contact with nature,” writes Foucault, but of constructing a social fabric in which precisely the basic units would have the form of the enterprise, for what is private property if not an enterprise? What is a house if not an enterprise? What is the management of these small neighborhood communities […] if not other forms of enterprise? (ibid., 148)

The already mentioned ‘entrepreneur of himself’ is also an enterprise of himself, an institution of sorts, for which smooth flows of capital and production have to be ascertained and assured. The culture of danger feeds upon a ‘permanent fear of failure’ which, as Thomas Lemke notes, becomes “the basis and motive for the constitution of the responsible, reliable, and rational self” (2015, 50). This regulatory, or self-regulatory, social mechanism is put in motion by precarity by way of mobilizing uncertainty and compelling “individuals to act as entrepreneurs and accept the imperative of self-adjustment” (Masquelier 2019, 135). Perhaps paradoxically, the seeming loss of the possibility of participating in the processes of production carried by the idea of unemployment does not exclude one from partaking in self-regulation. The word ‘unemployment’ is a litotes, a rhetorical construct which does not disavow employment, but rather suspends it and leaves it in reserve as possible to be returned to. In other words, unemployed individuals remain within the space of the regulatory system whose home-policy takes care of keeping them inside by way of projecting the loss of a job as an individual’s failure to fully adopt himself or herself to the demands of the welfare of the, however imaginary, home so that the exclusion is not perceived as exclusion. Thus an unemployed person, writes Foucault, “is not someone suffering from an economic disability; he is not a social victim. He is a worker in transit. He is a worker in transit between an unprofitable activity and a more profitable activity” (2008, 139). Both the employed and the unemployed live and ‘function’ within the limits which enable a kind of neighboring which is founded on shared interests, and which neighbors as it were collectively protect. Though, needless to say, there are people who do not have homes, the

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potential homelessness associated with being unemployed is also a transitory state which does not disintegrate the economic community. Such a disintegration is prevented by the renunciation of the de-precarizing potential of full employment in favour of the integration in a market economy. But this entails a fund of a floating population, of a liminal, infra- or supra-liminal population, in which the assurance mechanism will enable each to live, after a fashion, and to live in such a way that he can always be available for possible work, if market conditions require it. (ibid., 207)

It seems to be this liminal space of marginality, the space between the inside and the outside, that separates the home of economy from the outside, from the environment. Both the employed and the unemployed of the world society participate in the building of this walled space as an integral part of the incessant process of construction of what might be called a self-building building. Peter Sloterdijk compares this process to foam whose building blocks are bubbles—“systems or aggregates of spheric neighborhoods in which each individual ‘cell’ constitutes a self-­ augmenting context (more colloquially: a world, a place), an intimate space of meaning whose tension is maintained by dyadic and pluripolar resonances, or a ‘household’ that vibrates with its own individual animation, which can only be experienced by itself and within itself” (2016, 56). The bubbles constituting the foam are mutually impermeable and, as Hannes Bergthaller puts it, “the walls that constitute individual bubbles are shared, thin, and constantly shifting, and the tensional forces which shape one bubble have immediate effects on all of its neighbors. There is no ‘outside’ from which a transformation of the whole could be rationally orchestrated” (2015, 173). This outside is also the sphere of non-­ neighboring which the social reality of the “apartment individualism” (ibid., 167) of the bubble ignores, thus withholding the possibility of any kind of kinship with the other. A bubble-like apartment is not a rectangular, two-dimensional space and, as it seems, the word ‘apartment’ is used to underline the apartness of individually inhabited spheres which, metaphorically compared to spherical bubbles, also question the groundedness of Heidegger’s ontological architecture of dwelling in the earth. As Stuart Elden notes, “Sloterdijk takes the Heideggerian idea of being-in-the-­ world and analyses the ‘in’ the way Heidegger expressly denied as a spatial

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term, as a question of location, of where we are” (2013, 2). This “where” is not a simple topographical location, a point on the map or an area, but rather a three dimensional volume. The crucial element of such a ‘volumetric’ space is the atmosphere which constitutes the inside of each bubble, the dimension which adds verticality to the horizontal surface of the world. “Just as the world does not just exist as a surface,” writes Elden, “nor should our theorizations of it; security goes up and down; space is volumetric” (ibid., 15). The atmosphere within Sloterdijk’s neighboring bubbles is not shareable, and what they share are only the contiguous membranes and, importantly, the precariousness resulting from their fragility. Christian Borch in his insightful reading of bubbling in Sloterdijk thus describes this predicament: “Each bubble is a singular entity which is at once separated or isolated from other bubbles and connected to its neighbours through the membranes they share. The shared membranes imply co-fragility. If one foam bubble bursts, this will affect the neighbouring bubbles” (2011, 31). Neighboring within such a space is thus limited to superficial contacts and, importantly, to the care for oneself, for one’s security, which care is simultaneously protective of others. One of the means of protection is architecture. For Sloterdijk “architecture is a crucial way of establishing immunity” (Borch 2011, 32). What architecture enables is not only the protection from the outside, but also broadly understood air conditioning, the management of atmosphere within the individual bubbles which entails both the possibility of contagion as well as care for what Geront Böhme saw as an inevitable product of architecture: Exactly architecture produces atmospheres in everything it creates. Of course, it also solves specific problems and fabricates objects and buildings of all sorts. But architecture is aesthetic work in the sense that it always also generates spaces with a special mood quality, i.e., atmospheres. […] The visitor, the user, the customer, the patient are met with or seized by these atmospheres. (1995, 97, I quote after Broch 2011, 33)

The aesthetic dimension of atmosphere seems to be manageable only within closed spaces of architectural bubbles within whose world wall-­ lessness is in fact synonymous with rooflessness, both being openings to the outside world which, as it seems, needn’t be bubbled. If, as Sloterdijk claims, there is no communication between the bubbles, and what we have

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to deal with are “only inter-autistic and mimetic relations,” then what links the bubbles as it were internally is imitation, in fact what Borch calls “contagious imitations” (2011, 31 and 34) which furnish the atmospheres of individual bubbles regardless of their architectural dimensions and placement. A link with an outside of the foamy bubbled world seems to be impossible here, and the bubbling world is in fact confined to the sedentary life of striated spaces. Deleuze and Guattari’s imaginary smooth space of the desert which they associate with nomadic life is imaginary indeed, because the sand of the desert is constantly being striated by the atmosphere, by winds and gales which come as it were from the air. The air within Sloterdijk’s bubbles is manageable, and it seems to be this kind of atmosphere which we have been somehow able to immunize from the dangers which it may carry. For the nomad, the air is not manageable, but it is something whose various powers he or she knows by experience. Though not tied to buildings, the nomad can be tied by weather, and Brian Massumi’s association of the nomadic with the force of breaking constraints (see above) makes the image of the free mobility of nomads slightly misleading, as the nomad may also be restrained by the power of invisible walls of the air. The nomadic ‘knows’ the power of the air, and, unlike the sedentary cultures of bubbles, must take its presence into consideration. The nomad can thus be imagined as living a roofless life, and this image seems to be accompanying numerous anti-immigration discourses and political arguments, usually coming from those parts of the political scene for which man’s master over nature is an unquestionable truth. In Poland, this image, especially in the case of immigrants from Islamic states, seems to be strengthened by frequent medial association of immigrants with Islamic terrorism and the imaginary nomadism of Arabic life, additionally productive of the complex image of the terrorist’s uncontrollable mobility and the infectious impact of Islam. This mixture of Massumi’s power and force is productive of what might be called a horizontal precarization of state-dwellers for whom the perspective of neighboring with immigrants within their territory is equally unwelcome as the liberating spirit of mobility. It is perhaps for this reason that even those immigrants who did not plan to permanently settle in Poland were not supposed to be held in groups, and what was proposed as regards their presence within the country’s territory, was supervision and prohibition of “ghettoization”:

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The groups of Muslims who came to Poland from Africa and Asia after the fall of the communist system have been much less studied. Most of them treated Poland as a transitional stage in their travels to Germany, Denmark and the Scandinavian countries. Undoubtedly, the fate of these people should be followed and any cases of ghettoization should not be allowed, because it is—based on the experience of Western European countries—one of the key factors causing, in unfavorable circumstances, radicalization and alienation from the current environment, including the environment of the family. (Boćkowski 2019, n.p.)

The atmospheric dimension of the prevention of ghettoization was also a way of blocking the formation of a self-contained social bubble which, because of a perhaps radical disparity of the atmospheric ambiances, could precarize all the otherwise more or less similar (mimetically related) bubbles. Sloterdijk is not quite clear about the absorptive capacity of the social foam, though what seems to be responsible for the refusal to neighbor with the ghettoized others might also be an atmospheric difference in the form of a religious spirit which, in the Polish context, finds any other spirit than Catholic poisonous. The observation of “the fate of these people” seems to be targeted at individuals who are left with nowhere to permanently dwell also for the reason of their allegedly transient presence within the territory of the state. This kind of rooflessness and wall-lessness may be well seen as having been positioned as a part of the environment, of the outside of a bubble which has no membranes, and, like the air—and moreover an alien kind of it—threatens with the potentiality of spreading an as yet unrecognized plague. For instance, the leader of the Polish political party now in power expressed this fear literally bringing in diseases as a crucial argument against the admission of immigrants in the country: After all, there are already symptoms of very dangerous diseases that have not been seen in Europe for a long time. Damn on the Greek islands, dysentery in Vienna. Various types of parasites, protozoa, which are not dangerous in the organisms of these people, and can be dangerous here. This does not mean discriminating against someone, but you must check. (W polityce, n.p.)

Involved in this rhetoric of being deprived of the homely security projected upon immigrants, there is also fear of the insufficiency of the immunity system of the bubble—of its walls and roofs—and the threat that by way of the uncontrolled mimetic imitation of the surrounding, the bubble

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will change its own climate, its own cultural atmosphere, the change being potentially associated with the loss of identity and degeneration.1 The work of what Broch calls “organizational rays of imitations” (2011, 33) which constitute links between Sloterdijk’s bubbles may thus become seen as a threat, as a terror coming from the air which after 9/11 came to be associated with Islamic fundamentalism. In his Terror from the Air Sloterdijk wants to make us attentive to the materiality of the air and its various political, cultural and military locations. “[T]he air,” he writes, “totally lost its innocence” (2009, 109). Terror from the air is not an Islamic invention, and in fact the precariousness of the Cold War was largely managed by the fear of an attack from the air from either of the sides of the iron curtain. As regards terror, Sloterdijk gives numerous examples of its ‘airy’ origins, “trying to show how poison gas attacks in World War I, the Holocaust, gas chambers, aerial bombardment, etc. share similar logics of assault. He broadens his analysis to include analyses of radioactivity, meteorology, pneumatology (spiritual beings)—means by which commanding the air can terrorize the earth, what he calls ‘atmoterrorism’” (Elden 2013, 2). Roofing is not the only way of dealing with the air, and the seeming security which walls and ceilings offer has been undermined by what became to be called sick building syndrome which demands, as Michelle Murphy shows, the necessity of moving environmental politics indoors and thus of bringing to the attention not only emissions of toxicity, but also exposures, so as to allocate the indeterminacy and uncertainty of the causes and sources of certain medical symptoms and to delineate “how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent” (2006, 7). Atmosphere pollution has unnoticeably affected not only the insides of Sloterdijk’s bubbles, but has also penetrated into their dwellers, into us and the things we use, thus complicating the sense of the idea of exposure which nowadays may come as it were from the inside:

1  The rooflessness associated with the nomadic life can also be tied with the idea of rootlessness seen as having no genealogy and in a way belonging to the air rather than to the soil. In a different context the relation between rooflessness and rootlessness is discussed in Somerville (1992). Rooflessness is sometimes used as a measure of homelessness with reference to lack of shelter of any kind—to people “who are sleeping rough, newly arrived immigrants and victims of fire and floods” (Fitzpatrick 2000, 32). The term brings in the vertical dimension of precarization in which the presence of nomadic threat is translated into an atmospheric kind of invisibility involving the possibility of being virus-like transmitted.

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The intensification of production and consumption in recent decades has yielded a chemically recomposed planetary atmosphere to alarming future effect, while it has penetrated the air, waters, and soils to accumulate into the very flesh of organisms, from plankton to humans. (Murphy 2008, 696)

The realization that the air is not simply a transparent outside, something out there, is gradually being recognized, especially due to the air pollution and, more recently, also through the masks we are wearing in the pandemic era. With the realization that buildings can also be sick, there seems to be no kind of inside which could be seen as granting security from the outside. In a sense we have all become roofless and homeless, with some of us convinced that virus with which we have to share our space is an immigrant, though this time from China. The suspicion of its being a terrorist, or at least a terrorist-like creature, is also at hand. On the European Eye on Radicalization webpage, in an article comparing terrorism with coronavirus, the two phenomena are shown as two kinds of fear: “A Tale of Two Fears: Comparing Terrorism and the Coronavirus” (Marone 2020, n.p.). The Title’s allusion to Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities seems to be justified by the fact that the action of the novel partly takes place in the Paris of la Terreur. One of the similarities addressed in the article is that of secrecy: [T]errorism is based on secrecy—viruses are invisible to the naked eye and in many respects they present a mysterious nature (at least for non-­ specialists). Moreover, for both threats, fear and their elusive qualities encourage the proliferation of conspiracy theories about their origin and development. (Marone 2020, n.p.)

What thus links terrorism and viruses is the atmospheric invisibility, a possibility of an unexpected attack of nomadic (viruses probably do not have homes) creatures about the reasons of whose arrival we can only speculate. More importantly, however, the similarity between the two threats is somehow linked to Islamic fundamentalism, and to the demand of loving one’s neighbor which gets transformed to the precariousness of fear: Both threats risk provoking not only fear, but also mistrust among people. With regard to terrorism, we can recall, for example, that Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, then-official spokesman of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), in a famous speech, ‘That They Live By Proof,’ on 21 May 2016, incited ISIS’s sympathizers to scare the ‘crusaders’ and terrorize them, ‘until every

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neighbor fears his neighbor.’ […] In some respects, something similar applies to COVID-19: in this case the distrust towards one’s neighbor, which may be less acute but more extensive, is due to the fact that the other person, against his/her will and (at least in the absence of symptoms) even without his/her knowledge, can represent a vehicle of contagion. (Marone 2020, n.p.)

As it seems, however, the transformation of us, but also more or less of everything around us, into would-be vehicles of contagion can be somehow resisted through Donna Haraway’s call for “making kin, not babies” (2015, 161). This call for bringing all of what she calls “critters” into the sphere of neighboring is also a call for our care for the roofless, who or whatever they are. Perhaps regardless of the precariousness of the pandemic togetherness, we may still rethink this togetherness positively and, say, more extensively, of stretching and recomposing of kin “allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word. All critters share a common ‘flesh,’ laterally, semiotically, and genealogically” (ibid., 162). Though there seem to be some difference between Haraway’s assemblages and Sloterdijk’s foams, those different images of ourselves enable us to see neighboring as a much deeper and broader kind of relationship than a family-state-­making kind of bond. A need, or perhaps a demand, for a broader perspective on neighboring has been addressed in Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland through the stories of American van-dwellers whose life-philosophies are related in the text in their remarks and life-stories which, however different, indicate a need for a different perspective on precariousness of homelessness. Driving across America they use public roads, and thus orient themselves by topographic places, none of such places can be called their home, though, perhaps paradoxically, they insist on being called “houseless” rather than “homeless”: “Some call them ‘homeless.’ The new nomads reject that label. Equipped with both shelter and transportation, they’ve adopted a new word. They refer to themselves, quite simply, as ‘houseless’” (Bruder 2017, xii–xiii). Home seems to have become de-localized and is no longer associated with ownership or property, and it is the possibility of remaining on public land which brings in a new dimension of neighboring. From the administrative perspective of the state, the van-dwellers must be officially “domiciled” somewhere, as they are required “to maintain fixed—in

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other words fake—addresses” (ibid., 49–50) which do not tie you to anywhere: “And living nowhere, it turns out, means you can live anywhere you want, at least on paper” (ibid., 50). This kind of freedom of belonging is also a freedom from belonging to the state, and thus also from the care of the state. Though they live in America, the van-dwellers are partly a product of what Bruder calls “more precarious individualism” incited by the replacement of defined-benefit pensions with what is called “401(k) plans” which “rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death” (ibid., 66). This “more precarious individualism” seems to have been a farewell to the hope of being cared for by the state and thus also of the feeling of belonging to it, which resulted in a transformation of citizens into migrants, whom Bruder also sees as a tribe living on the margins of the welfare state: And so they found a way to hack the system. They gave up traditional stick-­ and-­brick homes, breaking the shackles of rent and mortgages. They moved into vans, RVs and trailers, traveled from place to place following good weather, and kept their gas tanks full by working seasonal jobs. Linda [a van-­ dweller] is a member of that tribe, as she migrates around the West, I’ve been following her. (ibid., 7)

The concept of tribe, however, is a misleading one here, as the people whose stories Bruder brings in in her book hardly ever stay, or remain, together in a single place or space. Their togetherness is of a different kind than tribal, and Cloe Zhao’s film version of Nomadland (2020) represents this kind of togetherness, somehow paradoxically, through the long sequences showing the main character—Fern—alone. Though Fern moves on mostly by herself in the film, we never sense, Sherry Coman notes, “that she is lonely: the movie walks a beautiful line between what it means to be lonely, and what it is to be simply alone” (2020, 5). Being alone and without a stable kind of neighborhood, the van-dwellers, as one park ranger who observed their yearly meetings in Quartersize RV park noted, impressed him with their “neighborliness,” adding that their “ability to coexist is based simply on their desire to enjoy the public land, and the fact that it belongs equally to the guy riding the bicycle as to the guy in the motorhome” (Bruder 2017, 122). Bergthaller’s figure of ‘apartment individualism’ (see above), transformed into a nomadic kind of mobile apartment individualism, seems to be a new social space in which the public become as it were privatized, though without appropriation—perhaps a

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trace of the Thoreauvian idea of sauntering—of moving sans terre— “without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere” (Thoreau 1965, 635). What the “more precarious individualism” of having become uncared seems to have brought about is what Bruder signals in the foreword to her book as “a contagious feeling: Something big is happening” (2017, xiii). This new big thing is hardly theorizable, though the book allocates its emergence within the American social space as a blurring of the clear-cut distinction between the public and the private. The feeling is contagious, it is in the air, and the van-dwellers “are at the epicenter of something new” and, around “a shared campfire, in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia” (ibid., xii). In the final scene of the film version of Nomadland, Fern stops in front of the house in which she used to live—the red mailbox is covered in rust. The name of the town is Empire, and it was a company town of a gypsum mining corporation. In the book, the town—which used to be the site of “fortunes of wallboard manufacturers tied to the domestic construction industry”—“would completely disappear” (Bruder 2017, 42). It is perhaps this disappearance which, along with the rust covering postal addresses, translates the possibility of neighboring with the roofless into a kind of neighboring of the roofless away from the precarities of various, also ideological, domestic construction industries.

Bibliography Bergthaller, Hannes. 2015. Living in Bubbles: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology and the Environmental Humanities. In Spaces in-between: Cultural and Political Perspectives on Environmental Discourse, ed. Mark Luccarelli and Sigurd Bergmann, 163–174. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Boćkowski, Daniel. 2019. Jaka jest mniejszość muzułmańska w Polsce? Nie ma radykałów, zagrożenie terroryzmem jest bardzo małe. Onet Wiadomości. September 12. https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/jaka-­jest-­mniejszosc-­ muzulmanska-­w-­polsce-­nie-­ma-­radykalow-­zagrozenie-­terroryzmem/nlvwx85. Accessed 24 Jan 2021. Böhme, Gernot. 1995. Atmosphe: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Borch, Christian. 2011. Foamy Business: On the Organizational Politics of Atmospheres. In In Medias Res. Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Poetics of Being, ed. Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens, 29–42. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Bruder, Jessica. 2017. Nomadland. Surviving America in America in the Twenty-­ First Century. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Coman, Sherry. 2020. Nomadland. Journal of Religion & Film 24 (2): 1–6. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone. Elden, Stuart. 2005. Missing the Point: Globalization, Deterritorialization and the Space of the World. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 30 (1): 8–19. ———. 2013. Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power. Political Geography. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.009. Accessed 21 Dec 2020. Fitzpatrick, Suzanne. 2000. Young Homeless People. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at The College de France, 1978–79. Ed. Michel Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Haraway, Donna. 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities 6: 159–165. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought, 141–160. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. Lemke, Thomas. 2015. Foucault, Governmentality and Critique. London: Routledge. Leung, Gilber, and Matthew Stone. 2009. Otherwise than Hospitality: A Disputation on the Relation of Ethics to Law and Politics. Law and Critique 20 (2): 193–206. Lysen, Flora, and Patricia Pisters. 2012. Introduction: The Smooth and the Striated. Deleuze Studies 6 (1): 1–5. Marone, Francesco. 2020. A Tale of Two Fears: Comparing Terrorism and the Coronavirus. European Eye on Radicalization. https://eeradicalization. com/a-­tale-­of-­two-­fears-­comparing-­terrorism-­and-­the-­coronavirus/. Accessed 14 Jan 2021. Masquelier, Charles. 2019. Bourdieu, Foucault and the Politics of Precarity. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 20 (2): 135–155. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1600910X.2018.1549999. Milev, Yana. 2011. In the Beginning was the Accident: The Crystal Palace as a Cultural Catastrophe and the Emergence of the Cosmic Misfit. A critical approach to Peter Sloterdijk’s Weltinnenraum des Kapitals vs. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the underground. In In Medias Res. Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Poetics of Being, ed. Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-­ Eelens, 133–149. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Murphy, Michelle. 2006. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty. Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Durham, NC, London: Duke University Press.

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———. 2008. Chemical Regimes of Living. Source. Environmental History 13 (4): 695–703. Raunig, Gerald. 2002. Kriegsmachine gegen das Empire. Zum prekären Nomadismus der VolxTheaterKarawane. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics. http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/0902/raunig/de. Accessed 11 Jan 2021. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2009. Terror from the Air. Trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ———. 2016. Foams: Spheres III. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Somerville, Peter. 1992. Homelessness and the Meaning of Home: Rooflessness or Rootlessness? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16 (4): 529–539. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-­2427.1992.tb00194.x. Thoreau, Henry David. 1965. Walking. In Walden and other writings, 635–659. New York: Modem Library Editions. W polityce. 2015. Kto przesadził? Kaczyński: Imigranci mogą przynieść nieznane ̇ choroby. Celiński: To język nazizmu! Mówiło się, że Zydki mają tyfus. October 13. https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/268356-­kto-­przesadzil-­kaczynski-­imigranci-­ moga-­przyniesc-­nieznane-­choroby-­celinski-­to-­jezyk-­nazizmu-­mowilo-­sie-­ze-­ zydki-­maja-­tyfus. Accessed 11 Jan 2021.

CHAPTER 17

In Real Time. Phenomenologies of Precarity in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet Benjamin Kohlmann

Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet—consisting of Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020)—has frequently been feted for its attempt to chronicle “in real time” the messy unfolding of Britain’s political and social present.1 Written and produced at dazzling speed, Smith’s novels brilliantly interweave moments of national and personal crisis. And while the central national-scale events—ranging from the 1  This observation figures prominently in recent interviews with Smith as well as in reviews of Seasonal Quartet. See, for example, Begley (2017); Armistead (2019); Wills (2020). Unsurprisingly, the idea has also been central to the marketing of the book: “the past five years have witnessed some of the most extraordinary news events in living history,” Alice Vincent writes on the Penguin website: “They have also seen the release of Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: four books that, in an unprecedented feat of publishing, have tracked these world-turning moments in real-time” (2020, n.p.).

B. Kohlmann (*) University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_17

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Grenfell Tower fire to the domestic fallout of the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis—figure in the narrative with varying degrees of prominence, they provide the framework in which the novels’ poignant examination of loss and reparation, despair and hope, acquires heightened contemporary significance. In the context of the present volume on the “poetics of precarity,” I want to turn to Smith’s books as an occasion to address two larger questions that pertain more generally to recent literary and literary-­ critical work on the socioeconomic issue of precarity. First, Smith’s particular interest in exploring individualized experiences of precariousness reflects a broader tendency in recent writing to frame precarity in terms of the specific affects and psychopathologies to which it gives rise (e.g., fear, uncertainty, depression, panic). Second, and largely as a result of this tendency, Smith’s novels struggle to envision how new solidarities might be forged under the current regime of systemically produced socioeconomic vulnerability. The present chapter suggests that the two preceding points— Smith’s particular attention to affect rather than socioeconomic structure, and her difficulty in imagining the emergence of new solidarity collectives of the precarious—are best understood as symptomatic expressions of the dilemma that the current (neoliberal) configuration of precarity poses for artistic representation. In Smith’s case, these problems are further compounded by the four novels’ extreme proximity to their own historical moment. Seasonal Quartet, I suggest, offers an instructive limit case for contemporary fiction’s struggle to gain critical purchase on its socioeconomic present: the extreme topical proximity of Smith’s novels to the moment of their writing runs the risk of devolving into a mere up-to-­ dateness that fails to produce a sustained critical understanding of the deeper structural sources of socioeconomic vulnerabilization. As Peter Osborne has suggested, this particular sense of the word contemporary marks a narrowly chronological understanding of the term, which “place[s] it in danger of being emptied out of its complex […] social and political meanings, by being treated as a simple label or periodizing category” (2012–2013, 41).2

2  Peter Osborne seeks to reclaim a more critical understanding of ‘contemporaneity’ in Anywhere or Not at All (2013, 17).

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“Something New and Strange”: Collaging Precarious Affects in Seasonal Quartet Needless to say, my aim here is not to chastise Smith for failing to do something—that is, envision the emergence of a coherent anti-capitalist program—that was never part of her artistic project to begin with. Instead, I turn to Smith’s fiction because it can help us highlight tensions that are constitutive of a good deal of recent writing about precarity. This chapter explicates these tensions by drawing on the work of the Italian autonomist thinker and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, who has offered one of the most seminal theoretical accounts of the affective phenomenologies of (neoliberal) precarity. Bifo’s writings shed useful light on the dilemmas and aporias of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: for example, Bifo has centrally identified the fragmentation of experience into individualized affects—“an open concatenation of ands: and … and … and …”—as a hallmark feature of the neoliberal economy’s increasing individualization (“fractalization”) of work as well as a corollary of the privileging of the subjectivity of personal expression (2015, 9).3 In a related vein, Smith has observed that her main narrative interest in Seasonal Quartet lies in rendering the subjective experience of “life” in terms of an “and/and/and”—that is, in terms of a consecutive accumulation of irreducible lived moments (Laing 2016, n.p.). When it is read in this light, Smith’s attention to affect—her artistic effort to create the image of a particular historical moment through a set of individual experiences of precariousness—runs the risk of merely replicating the disjunctive logic of neoliberalism itself. “As industrial discipline dwindled,” Bifo explains in his account of the emerging postindustrial economy since the 1980s, individuals found themselves in a state of ostensible freedom. No law forced them to put up with duties and dependence. […] In a regime of aleatory and fluctuating values, precariousness became the generalised form of social relations, which deeply affected the social composition and the psychic, relational and linguistic characters of a new generation as it entered the labor market. Rather than a particular form of productive relations, precariousness is the dark soul of the productive process. An uninterrupted flow of fractal 3  We can note in passing that this privileging of personal expression—for example, in the fragmented attention economy of contemporary social media—is closely mirrored in the hegemonic dominance of first-person narration in much contemporary fiction (though not in Smith’s Seasonal Quartet).

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and recombining info-labor that circulates in the global web. […] Connectivity and precariousness are two sides of the same coin. (2011, 35)

On this account, the restructuring of the economy around several vectors—new forms of affective labor, the individualization of work, and total connectivity (the latter made possible in particular by increased digitization)—has contributed to a unique neoliberal phenomenology, “an epistemic process of a new segmentation of time” in which “[d]eterritorialized fragments of precarious time are scattered all over the space of the physical world: fragments of life unable to meet and conjoin but perfectly able to interact as they are recombined by the digital net” (Bifo 2009, 190, 2015, 211–12). When it is seen from this vantage point, Seasonal Quartet’s attention to the phenomenal affects of precariousness mirrors neoliberalism’s economic valorization of fragmented forms of affective (immaterial) labor.4 But Smith’s narrative investment in the affective valences of precariousness also echoes Bifo’s critical foregrounding of the psychological toll of systemic vulnerabilization: in neoliberalism, Bifo writes, “the dark side of the soul—fear, anxiety, panic and depression—has finally surfaced after looming for a decade in the shadow of the much-touted victory and the promised eternity of capitalism” (2009, 207). I have so far used the terms precariousness and precarity as though they were synonymous. In doing so, I have followed much recent critical usage that asserts that the (socioeconomic) condition of precarity is best understood in terms of a specific social distribution of (existential, ontological) precariousness. As scholars including Judith Butler, Isabell Lorey, and Achille Mbembe have argued, the “differential distribution of symbolic and material insecurities” has become one of the central means of neoliberal governance—for example, strategically exposing populations to socioeconomic vulnerability (e.g., by cutting unemployment benefits) makes them more likely to choose gig work, however unattractive the latter may be (Lorey 2015, 21).5 As Lorey explains, the conceptual elision of (economic) precarity with the larger (ontological, anthropological) question of precariousness serves to fold the former into the latter: “Precarity as the 4  In a now-classical article, Maurizio Lazzarato—another prominent member of the Italian Autonomia movement—introduced the term immaterial labor to describe the extraction of surplus value from predominantly cognitive and affective (rather than physical) activities. See Lazzarato (1994). 5  See also Butler (2006) and Mbembe (2003).

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hierarchized difference in insecurity arises from the segmentation, the categorization, of shared precariousness” (ibid.). This broader emphasis on precariousness has certain political benefits insofar as it opens up a space for transcategorical alliances across disenfranchised groups that do not traditionally share much political ground.6 At the same time, however, the very looseness and capaciousness of the category of “precariousness”—as it has been theorized by Butler, Mbembe, and others—also constitutes its main weakness because it claims a kind of intuitive or spontaneous intelligibility between precarious lives regardless of the (very different) structural and economic factors that condition individual instances of precarity. Smith’s Seasonal Quartet presents us with a rich texture of experiences of precariousness. The novels are loosely connected by the reappearance of individual characters, but the main organizing principle of the sequence consists in a complex web of metaphors and symbols: it is this fabric of recurring motifs rather than any single plotline or identifiable set of political concerns that lends the four books coherence. For instance, a female ‘patron saint’ from the visual arts presides over each of Smith’s novels: the pop artist Pauline Boty in Autumn, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth in Winter, the painter Tacita Dean in Spring, and the photographer and film director Lorenza Mazzetti in Summer. The links between literature and the other arts that emerge over the course of each novel help to foreground some of the books’ key concerns: memory, loss, spiritual rebirth, and forgiveness.7 Moreover, these links also sustain a set of meta-literary reflections that concern the novels’ distinctive formal properties. For example, in a narrative flashback that invokes the visual language of Pauline Boty’s avant-garde paintings, Daniel Gluck, the 101-year-old former songwriter who is one of Autumn’s protagonists, informs his teenage neighbor Elisabeth Demand that “collage is an institute of education where the rules can be thrown into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange” (Smith 2016, 71–2). Elisabeth is confused by Daniel’s use of the word collage (“you’re using the wrong word,” she tells him) —after all, she has just declared that “I want to go to college […] to get an education  On this point, see Marchart (2013).  Additional matrices of meaning that extend across individual novels are Smith’s symbolic invocation of the seasons as well as her intertextual nods to Shakespeare’s late romances. I will touch on both sets of references later in this chapter. 6 7

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and qualifications so I’ll be able to get a good job” (ibid., 71; emphasis added). However, Smith indicates that this apparent slip of the tongue is fully intentional: indeed, the artistic practice of collage, which makes it possible to link or superimpose disparate ideas and objects, perfectly describes the formal organization of Smith’s novel itself as much as the work of Boty, whose pop-art collages serve as frequent reference points in Autumn. Much like Boty’s pop art, Smith’s Quartet is concerned with evoking connections between materials and subjects that do not normally occupy the same conceptual or material space. In Smith, these linkages often take the form of alliances of the precarious—hence the (seemingly) unlikely friendship between Daniel (who is, in the novel’s present, a bedbound resident at a senior citizen home) and Elisabeth (a precariously employed part-time lecturer in art history). In this context, Daniel’s apparent slip of the tongue is significant in another sense: in the tense post-2008 economy, Elisabeth’s “college” education has failed to secure her a “good job” (or indeed any permanent job), and the uncertainty she experiences by dint of her temporary employment means that her precarious life and Daniel’s can be “collaged” into one overarching narrative frame. In Smith’s novel, Elisabeth’s and Daniel’s experiences of precariousness appear comparable because they both result from systemic failure or institutional neglect: Daniel’s isolation in late life can be constellated, Smith suggests, with the failed promise of a permanent job that is suffered by many members of the younger generation. Elisabeth’s situation specifically corresponds to a form of “cruel optimism” in which accepted ideas of a good life (as well as other goals regarded as desirable or fulfilling) are rendered structurally inaccessible by the precarization of life-forms under neoliberalism: “To be truthful, it isn’t her flat,” the narrating voice informs us of Elisabeth’s home, “she’s got used to the idea that she’ll probably never be able to buy a house” (Smith 2016, 203; original emphasis).8 Elisabeth discovers that the values and goals around which she has oriented her life—a permanent job, a regular income, a home—are increasingly unattainable to the younger generation. In related fashion, Smith suggests, dignified old age eludes the impecunious Daniel, who sees out his final years in the anonymity of an underfunded care home. The other novels in Seasonal Quartet establish 8  Cruel optimism is Lauren Berlant’s phrase: “A relation of cruel optimism,” she explains, “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (2011, 1).

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similar links between distinct moments of existential precariousness. For example, Winter symbolically associates the antinuclear protests on Greenham Common (in the 1980s) with the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean (in the 2010s); Spring invites us to connect the mourning for a friend who has been lost to cancer with the existential uncertainties triggered by Brexit; and Summer analogizes the experience of immigrant detention centers with the looming threat of Covid and collective concerns about the climate crisis. Woven into this tapestry of historical events are personal (albeit, Smith suggests, anthropologically universalizable) experiences of old age, economic precarity, and loss. The criterion that allows Smith to constellate these disparate experiences of precariousness into a narrative whole is that of synchronicity, that is, the mere fact of temporal coexistence (what we might call ‘con-­ temporaneity’). Much of the narrative significance that Smith manages to generate by way of such linkages is based on analogy—a form of poetic thinking that assumes total intelligibility between individual affective experiences of precariousness instead of exploring the structural causes that give rise to these disparate experiences in the first place. It is symptomatic of this analogical procedure—and of its hostility to systemic or analytic thought—that whenever Smith tries to gesture beyond individual experiences of precariousness she ends up etherealizing specific socioeconomic risks into the abstract vision of an undefinable and absolute threat. As a result, precariousness in Smith’s novels tends to appear every bit as inevitable as the seasons themselves: thus, in Autumn “a sky that’s all threats” (Smith 2016, 53) forebodes the socio-economic and cultural fallout of Brexit, and Winter analogizes the possibility of ecological extinction to the threat of nuclear winter. To put this another way: Smith’s novels give us an ambitious artistic vision of several loosely connected personal and social worlds, but they do not offer a principle of coherence that would obtain outside the strictly aesthetic procedures and symbolic organization of the novels themselves. To point out the absence of such a principle is not to pass judgment on the brilliant artistry of Smith’s novels—it is only to note that the phenomenological attention to the affective valences of precariousness that characterizes so much contemporary fiction, film, and poetry compromises the ability of these artworks to offer a

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more cohesive analytic account of the specific socioeconomic relations that generate precarity.9

Connection, Conjunction, and Collectivity Many reviewers of Seasonal Quartet responded to the thematic scope and ambition of Smith’s novels by remarking that these books offer a vision of contemporary Britain in its totality. In a review of Summer, Clair Wills notes that “[o]ne of the questions Smith must have asked herself before she sat down to write these novels ‘in real time’ is what kind of novelistic structure could hope to encompass the totality of Britain now” (2020, n.p.). Departing from such claims, I want to suggest that it is a mistake to impute any such ambition to Smith’s novels—after all, her books offer only a loose constellation of individual characters and situations rather than a vision of socioeconomic “totality” in any of the senses that that term (“totality”) has received in literary scholarship.10 As my remarks in the preceding section indicate, the novels’ resistance to thinking about socioeconomic relations is a function of the text’s insistent concern with the affective content of precariousness. We can understand this resistance in terms articulated by Bifo: The phenomenological approach takes leave from the assumption that knowledge can lead to the perfect totality […]. So it opens the way to the possibility of different theoretical constructions, based on different Erlebnis [i.e., affective experiences]. […] Meaning is therefore an event, not a necessity—and we can share it with other singularities which enter into vibrational syntony (or sympathy). (2015, 19–20)

In what follows I turn to a set of questions that follows on from these observations, notably: which forms of community and networks of solidarity, if any, can emerge from Smith’s equivalential treatment of

9  For important recent accounts of art’s capacity for properly systemic thought, see Benn Michaels (2015) and McClanahan (2016). 10  Much of this scholarship can trace its origins back to Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1914–15) and History and Class Consciousness (1923), which identify literary realism as the art most concerned with representing the totality of social relations. The possibility of totalization, Lukács argues, is made possible by the historical spread of capitalism itself which submits more and more areas of human existence to its logic.

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precarious affects—especially if the emphasis on Erlebnis dispenses with any sustained analysis of the structural causes that root such experiences? The work of Bifo offers a particularly useful route into these debates, and it offers an instructive point of comparison with Smith’s work. Rejecting the now-defunct left-wing vision of the working class as a unified revolutionary agent, Bifo envisions a new configuration of social collectivity, what he dubs the dispersed “collective subjectivity” composed of irreducible “singularities” (2015, 20). Bifo contends that such collectivities emerge by way of a spontaneous, qualitative leap when the types of “connection” which obtain inside the circuits of capitalism (e.g., in the corporatized networks of contemporary social media) give way to more meaningful forms of human contact and mobilization (what Bifo calls “conjunction” or “conscious affective collectivity” [ibid., 178]). The qualitative distinction Bifo postulates here—between algorithmically mediated “connections” and genuinely transformative human “conjunctions”—may strike some readers as (at best) elusive or (at worst) excessively romantic.11 As I want to suggest in what follows, Smith’s novels can help us foreground the particular imaginative and poetic alchemy that is involved in the transformation of “connections” into “conjunctions”— that is, in the transformation of the disjunctive parataxis of “and/and/ and” into a set of subjective affective experiences that, while individualized, are also held to be mutually intelligible. Smith’s fiction engages in a fantasy of experiential intelligibility that recalls Bifo’s, yet in her case the “conjunctions” that emerge between individual experiences of precariousness are overlaid by a thick web of symbols and intertextual references that foreground the type of poetic (symbolic, magical) thinking involved here. In Seasonal Quartet the syntagmatic logic of the “and/and/and” is transcended by a web of references—to the redemptive cyclicality of the seasons, and to the wish-fulfillment fantasies of Shakespeare’s late romances (Cymbeline, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest)—that lend support and significance to such interpersonal “conjunctions.” We will accordingly need to reconfigure our understanding of what it means for Smith to write ‘in real time’: Smith’s writing takes place 11  Bifo’s arguments are more generally indebted to the radical tradition of the Italian Autonomia movement and as such share some common ground with thinkers of the “multitude” such as Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, who assert that capitalism’s decentered communicative networks can support the growth of a revolutionary “multitude.” See, for example, Hardt and Negri 2004.

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not in the sequential ‘real time’ of history but in the time of the poetic imagination in which events constantly point beyond themselves; it is only on this alternative plane of meaning—which Smith associates with the poetic imagination, and which Bifo refers to under the label conjunction— that the expanding and timeless present of capitalism can be rescued into true (human) significance. Smith repeatedly positions her own novels against the unrelenting presentism of digital media, including instant messaging services such as Twitter. Twitter, as Smith noted in a 2012 keynote, has been a formal innovator whose ability to “make the person in the street into an epic” (2012, 10’:24”–26), demands new and formally innovative artistic responses. In Seasonal Quartet, Twitter features in part because its ability to magnify ordinary lives resonates with the artistic accomplishments of the realist and modernist novel (a polemical point Smith makes in her keynote), but also because of its tendency to intensify neoliberalism’s aggressive valorization and monetization of affects (including the negative affects of envy, contempt, and disgust). Spring opens with a long passage, written in the first-person plural, that articulates the accelerated communicative logic of online networking services: Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. […] What we want is elected members of parliament saying knife getting heated stuck in her front and twisted things like bring your own noose […] What we need is to say thinking is elite knowledge is elite what we need is people feeling left behind disenfranchised what we need is people feeling. What we need is people feeling. What we need is panic we want subconscious panic we want conscious panic too. […] We need news to be phone size. We need to bypass mainstream media. We need to look past the interviewer talk straight to the camera. We need to send a very clear strong unmistakable message. We need newsfeed shock. […] We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people […] We need the dark web money algorithms social media. We need to say we’re doing it for freedom of speech. We need bots we need cliché we need to offer hope. […] we’re the new factory whistle we’re what this country’s needed all along we’re what you need we’re what you want. What we want is need. What we need is want. (Smith 2019, 3, 5–6)

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Market-mediated communication through digital services such as Twitter thrives on amplifying and exploiting “feelings” of “disenfranchisement” and “panic.” Moreover, the companies’ monetization of these affects depends on their algorithms’ ability to manage and weight utterances according to their anticipated ability to provoke responses from other users—a process that produces an extreme orientation toward the present by simulating the immediacy of face-to-face dialogue.12 Against the monetization of ‘real time’ by social media such as Twitter, Smith’s writing insists on reclaiming a different present. We have already seen that one of the techniques Smith deploys in Seasonal Quartet is that of textual collage—the splicing of characters, narratives, and events (including macroscale events such as global warming) in a way that creates the impression of an interconnected web of affective relations. In a related vein, Smith repeatedly presents us with counterfactual moments of human connection that did not happen or that can no longer happen, and that must be therefore be imagined in the medium of art. For example, in Spring Smith gives us the text of a letter, written by the television filmmaker Richard Lease to a slick corporate operator called Martin Terp. Richard’s long-time friend and collaborator Patricia ‘Paddy’ Heal has recently died, and Richard wants to honor her memory by resisting Martin’s attempts to sex up the script of a television play that turns on a missed encounter between the writers Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke. Richard’s letter thus implicitly reflects on the significance of two failed encounters—one that never came to pass (between Mansfield and Rilke) and one that can no longer take place (between Richard and Paddy): Dear Martin, […] Re this new script: I see it shaped formally as like a series from these writers’ lives. By which I mean depiction of very slight moments from their lives that will act as revelations of depth. This I think is more in keeping […] with the truth of a relationship between two people who did not know each other and about which and whom, even though they may be famous writers with seemingly well-documented lives, we still know next to nothing. […] 12  Highlighting the corporate extraction of surplus value from such interactions, Aarthi Vadde reminds us that “Facebook presents its platform as a gift without commodity logic when in fact user information [including “affective currencies such as ‘likes’”] is the hidden commodity being sold to advertisers” (2017, 32).

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A postcard meant that all those great poems somehow got themselves written. The slightness of it gestures against the odds. It is like a magic spell. And this in itself is very like the fact of those two writers just living in the same place at the same time in their lives, whether they met or not. This is the kind of coincidence that sends electricity through the truths of our lives. Our lives which often have what we might call a postcard nature. I hope you see what I am getting at? (Smith 2019, 96, 99)

Richard reflects on the significance of human encounters as well as on the extent to which their meaningfulness seems to derive from their contingency and precariousness. In his eyes, the material ephemerality of postcards most faithfully captures the nature of such encounters (“the kind of coincidence that sends electricity through the truths of our lives”): in contrast to the tell-all explicitness of Tweets, which are always already inserted into the monetizing logic of capital, postcards seem capable of offering “revelations of depth.” The counterfactual nature of the meeting between Rilke and Mansfield illustrates Smith’s conviction that such “revelations” of meaning always involve an element of imagination, the “magic spell” of poetic speculation. Following Bifo, we can say that—in contrast to the fugitive and sometimes anonymous “connections” afforded by social media—Smith believes that “conjunctions” are characterized by a qualitative surplus of significance: Conjunction is concatenation of irregular bodies that do not correspond to any prefabricated model, and do not act in accordance with an inscribed structure. Conjunctive bodies are not pre-formatted; they can choose the dimension in which linguistic exchange occurs, they can define in an aleatory way the level of the exchange. […] Connection displaces the process of signification from a dimension in which conscious bodies conjoin according to aleatory patterns to a dimension in which bodies adapt to a code, to a digital format of exchange. (Bifo 2019b, 108)

Smith’s Seasonal Quartet evinces a fear that meaningful human conjunctions might be reduced to the status of algorithmically engineered connections. In one particularly striking passage, Smith adopts an ominously depersonalized use of the collective pronoun we. This we refers not to a human collective but rather appears to render audible the voice of the digital and algorithmic circuit itself:

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We want the best for you. We want to make the world more connected. We want you to feel the world is yours. We want you to see the world through us. We want you to be yourself. We want you to feel a little less alone. We want you to find others just like you. We want you to know we’re your best source of knowledge in the world. (Smith 2019, 119)

The “connected[ness]” that is pictured here is subject to fully corporatized mechanisms of technological mediation, and as the passage suggests, it is part of the function of these mechanisms to simulate a form of experiential immediacy (“We want you to feel the world is yours”). It is against this impoverished and merely simulated version of connectivity that Smith wants to rehabilitate alternative understandings of solidarity, hospitality, and companionship.13 Under conditions of digitized connectivity, Bifo contends, the ability to grasp social relations in their entirety—and the ability to form new bonds of solidarity as a result of this analysis—enters a crisis. This circumstance, he argues, can be understood by invoking the term precarity, which for him takes on a newly expansive meaning: it no longer refers solely to positions of intensified vulnerability but to the increasing mediatedness of all human relations: “Precarity refers not only to the deregulation of the labor market and the fragmentation of work, but also the dissolution of community. A continuous flow of info-labor runs in the global network, and it is the general factor of capital valorization, but this flow is not able to subjectivize, to coagulate in the conscious action of the collective body” (Bifo 2011, 128–9). The somatic, corporeal dimension singled out by Bifo (“the conscious action of the collective body”; “conscious affective collectivity”) also characterizes moments of conjunction in Smith’s novels. For example, we are told that Daniel Gluck—Autumn’s presiding spirit and the book’s ethical center—“had forgotten there is a physicality in not wanting to offend. Sweet the feeling of decency flooding him now, surprisingly like you imagine it would be to drink nectar” (Smith 2016, 8).14 13  “We want to make the world more connected” has the feel of an advertising slogan and brings to mind Nokia’s “Connecting People” (or any other such piece of advertising boilerplate). 14  In a passage that speaks directly to this (and related) moments of somatized affect in Smith’s novels, Bifo writes: “Empathy is the source of conjunction. During the history of civilization and of techno-evolution the syntactization of the world (the reduction of the common world to the syntaxis of linguistic exchange [including the recent reduction of

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In Seasonal Quartet, such moments of physical contact—whether they take place between individual characters in the novel, or occur thanks to the intercession of auratic objects such as postcards—displace any broader novelistic interest in the representation of a socioeconomic totality. Smith’s attempt to write her novels ‘in real time’ places her fiction in dangerous proximity with the new digital media of which she is otherwise wary: by edging ever closer to the present moment, her fiction runs the risk of succumbing to the cumulative, paratactic temporal logic of the “and/and/and.”15 Smith hopes to avert this dilemma by distilling moments of human contact that promise to trip up, or to transcend, the technologically mediated logic of connectivity. As Smith herself indicates, it is only in the symbolically charged sphere of the aesthetic that the qualitative transformation of ‘mere’ connectivity into ‘real’ conjunction can be imagined with any degrees of concreteness. I have described this form of contact as a mode of magical (poetic) thought: in contrast to Bifo, for whom such transcendence remains the distant object of theoretical speculation and political desire, Smith programmatically pits the redemptive world-making capacities of art—for example, the art of Shakespeare’s romances; the art of the painters and sculptors who preside over her novels; and the artifice of her own fiction—against the real-world problems of precarization and (economic) vulnerabilization. “There is no point in making up a world when there’s already a real world,” the disillusioned Elisabeth Demand remarks with a view to the alternative worlds created by art. Daniel contradicts her: “Whoever makes up the story makes up the human interaction to the syntax of the algorithm]) slowly erodes the traces of empathic understanding, and slowly enhances the space of syntactic conventions” (Bifo 2015, 17). For a wide-ranging literary-critical account that seeks to “recuperate[e] the channels of reciprocal communication opened up between embodied voices,” see Scappettone (2018, 43). On the precariousness of ‘breathing in common,’ see also Bifo (2019a). 15  On this point, see also Jodi Dean’s account of “communicative capitalism”—a term Dean uses to describe the difficulty of articulating politically coherent positions outside the “multiple opinions and divergent points of view [which] express themselves […] in dense, intensive global communication networks” (2009, 21). By writing ‘to the moment,’ Smith runs into similar difficulties: will her novels turn out to be just one more voice in a communicative economy (and attention economy) that is increasingly dominated by the blogosphere? Does Smith’s decision to superimpose the elongated patterns of seasonal cycles onto the hectic rhythms of day-to-day politics effect a critical distancing from the latter, or is the ‘seasons’ conceit a device that lends itself to co-optation as a marketing strategy by Smith’s publisher (each of Smith’s books was published and marketed in its titular season), thereby reinserting her novels into the commercial logic of the publishing industry?

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world, Daniel said, so always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion. […] Always give them a home” (Smith 2016, 119–20). Daniel’s comment invites us to think of Smith’s own fiction as a home for the homeless, a voice for the disenfranchised, and a shelter for the precarious. This ethical ideal is nowhere more strongly in evidence than in Winter, a novel that revolves around the necessity of “offer[ing] hospitality.” Winter associates this ideal with Christmas, and the vision of a “child [i.e., the infant Jesus] so sensitive that he literally radiates sensitivity” comes to provide a model that is emulated by the other characters (Smith 2017, 39, 243). Imperceptibly, Smith’s attempt to write ‘in real time’ effects a shift in the meaning of the word real itself: the ‘real’ time that Smith’s novels evoke is not (as many critics have claimed) the temporality of day-to-day politics, in which economic precarity is an urgent and existential issue for many, but rather the epiphanic (‘more-than-real’) time in which human contact is capable of creating significant and indeed life-­ changing experiences (what Spring calls “revelations of depth”).16 Precarity is here no longer imagined in economic terms at all—instead, the socio-­ economic exigencies of precarity are transubstantiated into the sphere of poetic symbolism. As I have suggested, this special attention to the power of art performs a type of wish-fulfillment that deserves to be called magical rather than political.

Bibliography Armistead, Claire. 2019. Ali Smith: This Young Generation is Showing Us That We Need to Change and We Can Change. The Guardian, March 23. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/23/ali-­s mith-­s pring-­y oung-­ generation-­brexit-­future. Accessed 11 Dec 2020. Begley, Adam. 2017. Ali Smith: The Art of Fiction No. 236. The Paris Review 221 (Summer). https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6949/the-­art-­of-­ fiction-­no-­236-­ali-­smith. Accessed 11 Dec 2020.

16  While many critics read Smith’s novels as being in some central sense about Brexit or Covid, Smith herself has pointed out that her plans for a Seasonal Quartet preceded those events by some 20  years. It would be more accurate to say, then, that Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer are primarily about the cyclicality of time and the meaningfulness of personal relations, rather than about this or that historical event. See London Review Bookshop Podcast (2017).

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Benn Michaels, Walter. 2015. The Beauty of a Social Problem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Franco. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. ———. 2011. After the Future. Oakland: AK Press. ———. 2015. And: Phenomenology of the End. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. ———. 2019a. Breathing: Chaos and Poetry. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. ———. 2019b. Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. London: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Laing, Olivia. 2016. Ali Smith: ‘It’s a Pivotal Moment… A Question of What Happens Culturally When Something is Built on a Lie. The Observer, October 16. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/16/ali-­smith-­autumn-­ interview-­how-­can-­we-­live-­ina-­world-­and-­not-­put-­a-­hand-­across-­a-­divide-­ brexit-­profu. Accessed 10 Oct 2020. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1994. Immaterial Labor. In Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, 133–147. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. London Review Bookshop Podcast. 2017. Winter: Ali Smith and Olivia Laing. November 3. Podcast, MP3 Audio, 49:55. https://media.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/2017-­11-­03-­ali-­smith-­olivia-­laing.mp3. Accessed 1 Oct 2020. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso. Marchart, Oliver. 2013. Die Prekarisierungsgesellschaft: Prekäre Proteste. Politik und Ökonomie im Zeichen der Prekarisierung. Bielefeld: transcript. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. McClanahan, Annie. 2016. Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Osborne, Peter. 2012–2013. Temporalization as Transcendental Aesthetics: Avant-Garde, Modern, Contemporary. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 44–45: 28–49. ———. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso. Scappettone, Jennifer. 2018. Precarity Shared: Breathing as Tactic in Air’s Uneven Commons. In Poetics and Precarity, ed. Myung Mi Kim and Cristanne Miller, 41–59. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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Smith, Ali. 2012. How Should Authors Approach the Task of Writing a Novel Today? Keynote at Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, August 19. Video, 1:55:59. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHOSXziim9A. Accessed 15 Nov 2020. ———. 2016. Autumn. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2017. Winter. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 2019. Spring. London: Hamish Hamilton. Vadde, Aarthi. 2017. Amateur Creativity: Contemporary Literature and the Digital Publishing Scene. New Literary History 48 (1): 27–51. Vincent, Alice. 2020. Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: An Oral History. Penguin Books: Articles, August 6. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/august/ ali-­smith-­autumn-­winter-­spring-­summer-­seasonal-­quartet-­oral-­history.html. Accessed 15 Dec 2020. Wills, Clair. 2020. Caricature Time. London Review of Books 42 (19), October 8. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-­p aper/v42/n19/clair-­w ills/caricature-­t ime. Accessed 10 Nov 2020.

CHAPTER 18

Coda: Narrating Precarity in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic Stijn De Cauwer

In the Spring of 2020, the coronavirus swept over the entire globe and its impact has dominated most of 2020 and 2021. As the intensive care units of many countries were quickly filling up with patients to the point of collapse, governments were forced to take measures which until recently would have been unthinkable: borders were closed; cafes, restaurants and shops had to remain closed; professional sports and cultural activities were put on halt; and maybe the most impactful of all, people in many countries were forced to remain in lockdown, confined to their houses with their social contacts strongly reduced. While certain national leaders remained stubbornly dismissive of such far-reaching measures, and, indeed, the threat of the virus as such—with Trump and Bolsonaro as two particularly crass examples—, this position became untenable. Even those countries who were reluctant at first, placing their faith in the development of a form of herd immunity, such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and The

S. De Cauwer (*) University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0_18

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Netherlands, saw themselves forced to impose similar restrictive measures as the other countries when their hospitalization numbers reached the maximum capacities. The unprecedented situation and the ensuing far-reaching measures required a struggle over the control of how the situation was narrated. Virologists, biostatisticians and other experts were given prominence in the media, as well as the responsibility for much of the official communication, while their expertise was strongly contested by a motley collection of conspiracy groups, political parties and self-styled alternative ‘experts.’ Political leaders were adopting a particular governmental style, from the hard authoritarian approach in China to the military rhetoric of Macron, but in many cases they were struggling to find the right tone of communication, caught off-guard by the suddenness and magnitude of the crisis. That control over the narrative of the pandemic was crucial became apparent when the Chinese authorities repressed the publication of the posts by Wuhan citizen Fang Fang on social media, questioning the handling of the pandemic by the Chinese government.1 Simply one person giving voice to her daily experiences, doubts and views on Weibo was enough to threaten a mammoth state apparatus such as the Chinese regime, who labeled Fang as a traitor and censored her Weibo account. Though the full economic, social and personal damage of the pandemic still has to become clear, it is already obvious that 2020–2021 will be the biggest economic catastrophe the world has seen since the Second World War. Various national and transnational reports show that poverty and unemployment have significantly increased. While we still have to see which measures countries will take to assuage the economic devastation in various sectors, ominous warnings can already be frequently heard that the world will head for many years of economic scarcity, with governments quite likely imposing austerity measures to cope with their enormous financial losses. Also clear is that the already existing dynamics of precarity have severely worsened, especially in sectors that were already marked by precarious working conditions. Moreover, the pandemic will have made working in certain economic sectors that were otherwise relatively stable much more precarious. While one could mention many sectors and occupations here, let me just point out the report written and released by UNESCO on the 1  Her diary is translated into English as Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (Fang 2020).

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12th of December 2020, in which they warn that the cultural sector has been impacted even harder than expected. They conducted an empirical study to assess the economic impact of the pandemic on the cultural sector, which is already notorious for precarious working conditions. Unsurprisingly, their findings were grim: “In the film industry, it is estimated that ten million jobs will be lost in 2020, while one third of art galleries are estimated to have reduced their staff by half during the crisis. A six-month closure could cost the music industry more than $10 billion in lost sponsorships, while the global publishing market is expected to shrink by 7.5% due to the crisis caused by the pandemic.” Furthermore, they emphasize that women hold a higher percentage of precarious jobs in the arts sector and are hence “particularly vulnerable to social and economic insecurity” (ibid.). During the first weeks of the pandemic, one could still hear certain pundits claim that every person is equally vulnerable to the virus, but it quickly became apparent that both the health risks and the economic damage certainly did not affect everybody equally. Various groups of people who already belonged to the most disadvantaged parts of society, such as people without adequate health care coverage in the United States, were disproportionately more affected by the virus. Amnesty International published a report on the 21st of April 2021, stating that the pandemic had aggravated forms of discrimination, inequalities and abuses all over the world. Moreover, certain people were expected to keep on working and, consequently, were significantly more exposed to the virus, while other types of workers were allowed to telework in relative safety: construction workers, nurses, package and food deliverers, police, manual laborers, supermarket personnel, cleaning staff and so on, all were deemed to be ‘essential jobs.’ They had to keep on working, sometimes lacking in proper forms of protection, while having to perform heavier workloads and longer working hours in sectors in which people have been addressing for years the fact that they are structurally understaffed, low-paid and underfunded, in some cases aggravated by earlier waves of austerity. While the past months the work overload and untenable working conditions of nursing and other hospital staff were often rightfully highlighted, there is another type of precarious employment that has become more widespread during the pandemic: people working for platform companies. During the past months, the general reliance on, and even dependency of, platform companies, such as online retailers and package delivery services, has strongly increased. As shops and restaurants were closed in

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some countries, click and collect purchases and parcel delivery at home became much more the norm, also increasing the well-documented negative consequences of the platform economy (as described in Heike Geißler’s Saisonarbeit2): inhuman working conditions in the warehouses and delivery services, dictated by algorithms; low-paid, expendable and fiercely competitive gigs; strong opposition to unionization; aggressive tactics toward independent shops by giants such as Amazon (Alimahomed-­ Wilson and Reese 2020; Cant 2019; Ravenelle 2019; Rosenblat 2019; Scholz 2016). As Christiaens and De Cauwer write: “Platform companies effectively render each individual worker into its own one-person subsidiary company. Investments (renting a delivery van), financial risks (not meeting your daily quota), health risks (not being able to work due to illness and stress), and constant availability (zero-hour contracts) are subsequently the burden of the individual worker” (2020, 124). Because of the increased demands during the lockdown months, the working conditions in warehouses such as those of Amazon also worsened, which led to strikes of the Amazon warehouses staff in countries such as Italy, Germany and the United States (where Amazon is fiercely trying to prevent the forming of unions in their Alabama site). Though most of us are well aware of the various negative effects of the reliance on platform companies such as Amazon, the lockdown almost left us with no choice but to further our use of such sites. Amazon’s profit reached new dizzying heights, tripling its net profit in the period January to March, 2021, to 8.1 billion dollars, giving it an immense economic power. The rise of the platform economy is directly related to the decline of more traditionally organized forms of economic activities, while other economic sectors rely on platforms for their exposure to customers. William Davies writes: “The appreciating asset value of the platform occurs through deteriorating social prospects elsewhere: what Facebook does for journalism, Spotify does for musicians and Uber Eats for independent restaurants” (2021, 90). Furthermore, the success of platform companies is based on the fact that they are able to collect and monetize our detailed online activities, interests and preferences. Given the fact that many people were obliged to work from home, people have spent more time online, thus increasing the primary asset of many platform companies: the data of our online activities, offering ever-expending means of extracting value from 2  Translated into English as Seasonal Associate (Geißler 2018). See the interview with the author in this book.

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our lives. Once again the words of Davies: “This represents a new phase of what David Harvey terms accumulation by dispossession, only it is the infrastructure of civil society that is being seized” (2021, 90). In the outpourings of attempts to theoretically analyze the pandemic during the first months, there was also a noticeable shift from claiming that everybody is equally affected by the virus to describing the inequalities aggravated by the pandemic. In a reaction to the many texts that appeared in which the lockdown measures were compared with the descriptions by Michel Foucault of the measures taken against the plague or his writings about biopolitics, Daniele Lorenzini rightly pointed out that Foucault too emphasized the inequalities at work in biopolitics. In order to safeguard the health of certain parts of the population, other parts of the population have to be more exposed to risk, illness, exploitation and disadvantageous living conditions (Lorenzini 2020). Foucault famously described biopower as “the right to make live and let die,” clarifying that by forcing certain people into disadvantageous conditions (from refugees to people with inadequate health coverage), they are also indirectly exposed to death (2003, 241). Lorenzini remarks that biopolitics is marked by “differential vulnerability”: “Far from being a politics that erases social and racial inequalities by reminding us of our common belonging to the same biological species, it is a politics that structurally relies on the establishment of hierarchies in the value of lives, producing vulnerability as a means of governing people” (2020). Similarly, life in lockdown has also emphasized the connection between people doing ‘high skilled’ work online from home, and various forms of ‘deskilled’ labor, from the workers handling the purchases made online to the deliverers on bikes bringing their lunch break to their door. In the vast theoretical studies about post-Fordist work, with its reliance on immaterial labor, creative and communicative skills and the blurred boundary between work and leisure, the dependence of post-Fordist labor on traditionally Fordist labor and various forms of deskilled work has always remained underemphasized. As Christiaens and De Cauwer write: “Clearly, though theories of post-Fordism have been very successful in describing the rise of high-skill, virtuosic jobs in the Western service sector, they have mostly ignored the simultaneous proliferation of deskilled jobs in, for example, the transportation sector, call centers, and distribution chains” (2020, 123). The fact that certain types of laborers were significantly more exposed to contamination and forced to work excessively hard during the

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pandemic was emphasized by Angela McRobbie in two texts published on the blog of Verso Books, in which she described her own near-lethal hospitalization because of COVID-19 (McRobbie 2020a, b). In these emotional accounts, she highlights the role of overworked and underpaid staff during her illness and time in intensive care. In the first of these texts, published in March, 2020, titled “Our Low-paid Workers are our Lifeline,” McRobbie states that “the only reason” she wrote about her experience “is to re-iterate how, as a society, we now have to swivel 360 degrees to properly value those dedicated workers whose compassion has humbled me in ways I can hardly convey” (McRobbie 2020a). She proceeds to describe her illness from the moment she probably contracted it during a flight to the moment of being released from the hospital, emphasizing the care and attention she received from various people in low-paid, precarious working conditions, fully exposed to the virus. She starts by naming the cabin crew on her EasyJet flight from Berlin to London, just as exposed as her to people who might have contracted the virus. When she became increasingly sick with COVID-19 and her daughter decided to call an ambulance, the paramedics in the ambulance wore no facial protection whatsoever. She mentions the hospital staff doing 12-hour shifts, checking her heart rate and oxygen levels while barely conscious in the hospital, as well as the staff members taking their time to console distressed and confused patients with only a simple face mask to protect them, thus risking their lives in doing so. When the illness had made her quite deaf and dazed by fever, the staff remained patient. The hospital staff was complaining about a shortage of masks, and her daughter luckily just acquired a box of 100 masks. When her severe sickness improved and she was discharged from the hospital, several staff members including cleaners wished her the best. The compassion and care of the staff strongly moved her. She ends her text with a powerful plea to improve the working conditions of these workers and to offer them much better protection against the virus while they do their work. McRobbie explicitly connects the impact of the virus and the way it unequally impacts people’s physical, economic and social situation to the increasing mechanisms of precarization she has been describing in her academic writings (McRobbie 2015, 2020c). In her academic studies, she describes “how our low pay economy ‘incarcerates’ sectors of the population with long hours, and near to xero [sic] hours conditions meaning that there is little if any chance for further job training, for day release or for upping qualifications” (McRobbie 2020a). The pandemic has once again placed the spotlight on the

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precarious living and working conditions of certain workers, whose plight was not documented enough in the general media. She describes how people in such jobs often tell her that they hope that their children will do well in university, while they, on the contrary, remain trapped in a future of low-­paid jobs. Her text ends with a clear plea for social scientists: “If social scientists have any role to play (and in the last 2 weeks I have doubted my own professional value indeed in comparison to virologists, epidemiologists, not to say health staff) then we can clamour loudly for a new world after the virus which permits the service sector to be able to see true improvement in wages, conditions and also opportunity to gain more qualifications” (ibid.). Almost 5 months after this first emotional account of her experiences, McRobbie wrote another piece in which she denounced how the various victims of the corona pandemic were turned into mere abstract numbers shown everyday by the media (McRobbie 2020b). The media stopped providing detailed accounts of suffering or the stories of people whose relatives were struck by the virus. In the second text, she analyzes this politics of public mourning, as well as the differences she notices between the coverage of the pandemic in other countries. She connects the lack of news coverage about the impact of the pandemic in various parts of the world with the cutbacks in the BBC: “In Britain the downward spiral of circulation for the liberal press as well as the cost-cutting at the BBC has limited the number of foreign correspondents over the last decade, and this is offset by the decline of students taking modern language courses and then going on to become journalists” (McRobbie 2020b). The lack of foreign news coverage partly explains the lack of curiosity about other countries and, consequently, the lack of solidarity, in her view. She contrasts the various forms of solidarity and support groups that have sprung up on a local level with the general neglect by the government: “The privileged white men in the cabinet cannot even pretend to show kindness or compassion” (McRobbie 2020b). She once again hopes that the renewed gratitude for the NHS staff and the various forms of solidarity developed in  local communities could turn into something more permanent, turning the tide of the neoliberal cutbacks of the past decades, though she is well aware that this will require a huge turnaround: “For so long the ravages of neoliberalism in British society appeared to be irreversible—who could imagine a more equitable housing market? Who could see a situation where cleaners and janitors and people doing care work with the elderly might find a voice and be listened to?” (McRobbie

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2020b). She ends by stating that the priority of the left should be to maintain this openness that the pandemic has created, and to make the voices of people in precarious working conditions heard. Her two blog posts are a poignant example of the value of forcefully narrating the precarious situation of many people and powerfully and clearly formulating the political demands that should be made in the wake of the societal inequalities that the pandemic has magnified. McRobbie’s blog texts are part of a notable phenomenon during the first months of the pandemic, namely the outpouring of online posts, interviews and brief articles by academics and public intellectuals, offering their impressions and analyses of the situation. Many of the ‘usual suspects’ in the humanities, theorists who often comment on current affairs, were quick to offer their assessment of the situation: Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Achille Mbembe, Bruno Latour, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito and so on.3 Giorgio Agamben posted texts at regular intervals, which, due to their almost flippantly negative tone, were at best frowned upon and triggered a chain of responses from other theorists (Agamben 2021). One of the most discussed texts was by Bruno Latour, in which he called to treat the current pandemic as one big rehearsal for the drastic changes our lives must undergo to counter global warming (2020). Because of the urgency and timeliness of these texts, many of the journals and publishers decided to post them immediately online, sometimes on webpages or blogs especially made for the situation, instead of going through the time-consuming process of publishing them in their journal or in a paper volume. Critical Inquiry, New Left Review, Rethinking Marxism and Verso Books all had active webpages on which they regularly posted essays. Sometimes these essays were collected and released as free e-books (Lyon-Callo et al. 2020) or as an online special issue4 and some books about the pandemic were published and released in paper form unusually fast, such as Žižek’s Pandemic! (2020). While theorists were mostly keen and quick to formulate their observations, the literary response to the pandemic has been very scattered and diverse. The New Yorker made an edition titled “Dispatches From a pandemic,” with contributions by authors such as Maggie Nelson and Ben Lerner. There have been published collections with literary reactions to  Some of these texts are collected in Castrillón and Marchevsky (2021).  An example is the online issue of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies: https:// www.utpjournals.press/journals/topia/covid-19-essays. 3 4

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the pandemic by authors, poets and young adult fiction writers (Craig et  al. 2020; Quinn 2020; Stavans 2020). Some authors, such as Zadie Smith and Paulo Giordano, have published essays about the pandemic and its impact (Smith 2020; Giordano 2020), while others published their lockdown diary entries or newspaper columns in book format, such as Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer in The Netherlands (Pfeijffer 2020), and still others combined their observations with photographs of the abandoned city, such as Bill Hayes in How We Live Now: Scenes From a Pandemic (Hayes 2020). The pandemic has made an appearance in much-anticipated novels such as Rachel Cusk’s Second Place and Ali Smith’s Summer, two novels that reflect the ‘real time’ events in the period in which they were written (Cusk 2021; Smith 2020a). There were novels that strangely seemed to anticipate the pandemic, such as Songs for the End of the World by the Canadian author Saleema Nawaz (2020), and novels about the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic that suddenly gained extra relevance, such as Sjón’s Moonstone (2017). Just as many people were forced into a dazed, confused and unfocused existence during the lockdown, unable to properly focus on their work or readings as the days blended into the same strange monotony or taken up by new daily tasks such as homeschooling, many of the early literary reflections expressed the same confusion. It was as if writers were trying to adjust to the new situation, with its strange new temporality and feeling of isolation, and they often expressed their difficulties with adjusting to this new state. Ali Smith described the “fractured attention span” and her lying awake at night (Smith 2020b). In her contribution to The New  Yorker, Maggie Nelson starts by writing: “I don’t feel much like reading these days; who does? Who has the time, with all the kids at home? Or who can concentrate?” (Nelson 2020). To find the inspiration she has been lacking, she rereads the essay “Winter in the Abruzzi” by Natalia Ginzburg, which was written when Ginzburg was forced into exile to a small Italian village, and which Nelson finds a near-perfect essay. The essay describing the small pleasures during her forced exile, as well as the severe pain (Ginzburg’s husband died in a fascist prison while she was in exile in the village) and shattered dreams, presents Nelson with a “stern and tender fellowship, which it delivered to me today across seventy-six years and 6,331 miles” (2020). The essay brought her to tears while she was helping her child through a chaotic Zoom class. Similarly finding solace in the writings of other writers, Hal Foster expressed his distaste for all the circulating opinions and “navel-gazing” reflections by writers and he chooses to quote at

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length a passage from Alexander Kluge’s Dispatches from Moments of Calm instead (Foster 2020; Kluge and Richter 2016). Some writers compared the lockdown experience to other situations of isolation, as if trying to find a familiar space, though they are well aware that the comparison only works partially and is not really adequate: Ali Smith compared it with the “splendid isolation” of writing novels (2020b) and Alexander Kluge compared it to his experiences during the Second World War (dbate 2020). In their attempts to cope with the situation while being forced to hear an overload of depressing news every single day, some authors seek a straw to cling onto in the smallest things. In his piece in The New Yorker, Ben Lerner deals with the daily gibberish of Trump, and his reduction of human suffering to mere numbers, by presenting his utterances as avant-garde poetry: “his non sequiturs, his use of disjunction, his mangling of syntax can make his rallies resemble nightmarish (and much more crowded) versions of poetry readings I’ve attended in which nonlinear language is conceived of as an attack on the smooth functioning of bourgeois political rhetoric” (2020). Dropping his playful and ironic tone at the end of his piece, he wants to end on a somewhat optimistic note, however “frightened and furious” he is, and he does this by hearing a vital pulse, even in the meter of Trump’s cringeworthy nonsense: “Iamb: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, the sound of a heartbeat, the oldest number, an embodied rhythm held in common, a force bigger than any tyrant or fool, a collective pulse that beats beneath his sophistry” (ibid.). Much of the writing produced during the pandemic seems to be a way to try to come to terms with the affective changes that the pandemic has forced upon us: changes in our lives, things we can no longer do and people we can no longer see, uncertainty about the future in various ways, uncertainty about our occupation and health, uncertainly about the well-­ being of children and the elderly, disruptions of our habits and patterns, and so much more. Even during the years before the pandemic, the world seemed to be marked by one large, impactful crisis-situation quickly followed by the next one: the financial crisis of 2008, the European debt crisis, the drama of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, Brexit and the Trump election, to name but a few. One crisis quickly being overruled by the next crisis can be overwhelming, with people struggling to maintain their grip on the situation. This feeling was formulated by Olivia Laing in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency even before the pandemic broke out:

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Frankly, the news was making me crazy. It was happening at such a rate that thinking, the act of making sense, felt permanently balked. Every crisis, every catastrophe, every threat of nuclear war was instantly overridden by the next. There was no possibility of passing through coherent stages of emotion, let alone thinking about responses or alternatives. […] What I wanted most of all, apart from a different timeline, was a different kind of time frame, in which it was possible both to feel and to think, to process the intense emotional impact of the news and to consider how to react, perhaps even other ways of being. (2020, 1)

A similar feeling is expressed by Ali Smith: “Long long ago. In the days before ‘Brexit’ and ‘Covid-19’ existed. Back when ‘unprecedented’ wasn’t yet an everyday kind of word” (Smith 2020b). Both Laing and Smith turn to the arts and writing to find a way to cope with the disruption of time by global crises such as the pandemic and to find a different kind of temporality and an affective state which gives them the means to make sense of it all, or at least to begin to do so. Some have wondered whether the specific stylistic forms, however confusing and tentative, of the writing produced during the pandemic can be called ‘quarantine genres.’ In an attempt to explore this possibility, the editors of the Belgian-Dutch literary journal nY have turned to the work of Lauren Berlant and her view on the function of genres (nY 2020). What Berlant calls ‘genres’ in her work are the ways in which people affectively try to cope with their situations, including expectations and disappointments. She describes a genre as “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation” (Berlant 2008, 4). In this way, these genres are not exclusive to art or literature but part of daily life, or what she calls the “crisis ordinary” (Berlant 2011, 9). People adopt these genres to remain attached to a given idea of the ‘good life,’ even when these expectations lead to disappointments over and over again. They are a means of affectively negotiating with unexpected events when they suddenly present themselves. In Cruel Optimism, she describes the function of genres as “an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art” (Berlant 2011, 6). The genres described by Berlant do not only serve to adjust to the present situation as it is, or to remain attached to illusionary ideals (to maintain the ‘cruel optimism’ of the title of her book), but they also allow for affective elaboration and the renegotiation of one’s expectations and ideals. However minimal, these genres offer a form of affective work, in the “interval between crisis and response”

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(Berlant 2011, 261). In the light of Berlant’s theories, the often confused and uncertain literary reflections about the pandemic and the lockdown experience are ways of affectively coping with the imposed changes, including the disappointments and anxieties, and to gradually readjust one’s expectations and desires for the future. At the moment of writing, some of the cultural activities are gradually restarting. The film industry and the theater world have in part found ways to adjust their production process to the health requirements imposed by the pandemic, and they are slowly looking to return to their regular agendas. As the vaccination process is gaining traction, the political focus will fully turn to the aftermath of the pandemic. The following years we will see whether our governments will pay attention to the precarious work and living conditions in all its diverse forms exacerbated by the pandemic, and answer to the calls to use the situation to make society fundamentally more social, caring and sustainable, or whether, on the contrary, there will be years of austerity and economic exploitation. This will be a crucial political battle for the years to come. In the meanwhile, it will remain important to forcefully narrate the lives of people affected by the pandemic and living in precarious conditions who often remain mere abstract numbers and statistics, if their situation is registered at all.5 Narration can also help us to confront the changes in our lives, to assess the losses and to formulate more desirable visions of society.

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Castrillón, Fernando, and Thomas Marchevsky, eds. 2021. Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society. London: Routledge. Craig, Erin, Auriane Desombre, Erin Hahn, Bill Konigsberg, Rachael Lippincott, Brittney Morris, Sajni Patel, Natasha Preston, and Jennifer Yen, eds. 2020. Together Apart. New York: Delacorte Press. Cusk, Rachel. 2021. Second Place. London: Faber. Davies, William. 2021. The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media. New Left Review 128: 83–99. dbate. 2020. #Corona-Interview: Alexander Kluge über Corona, Krieg und blauen Himmel. Accessed May 18, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=o1oVvVnkRTY. De Cauwer, Stijn, and Tim Christiaens. 2020. The Multitude Divided: Biopolitical Production during the Coronavirus Pandemic. In Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Vincent Lyon-Callo, Yahia Madra, Ceren Özselçuk, Jered Randall, Maliha Safri, Shizu Sato, and Boone W.  Shear, 118–127. Brighton: ReMarx Books. Fang, Fang. 2020. Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. Translated by M. Berry. New York: HarperCollins. Foster, Hal. 2020. Life in Lockdown: Hal Foster. Accessed May 18, 2021. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4690-­life-­in-­lockdown-­hal-­foster. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. Translated by D.  Macey. New York: Picador. Geißler, Heike. 2018. Seasonal Associate. Translated by K. Derbyshire. Cambridge: Semiotext(e). Giordano, Paulo. 2020. Nel contagio. Roma: Einaudi. Hayes, Bill. 2020. How We Live Now: Scenes From a Pandemic. New  York: Bloombsury. Kluge, Alexander, and Richter, Gerhard. 2016. Dispatches From Moments of Calm. Translated by N. McBride. London: Seagull Books. Laing, Olivia. 2020. Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. New York: Picador. Latour, Bruno. 2020. Is This a Dress Rehearsal? In the Moment. Accessed May 18, 2021. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-­this-­a-­dress-­rehearsal/. Lerner, Ben. 2020. Trump Wants to Protect the Numbers, not the COVID-19 Patients They Represent. The New Yorker. Dispatches from a Pandemic, April 13. Lorenzini, Daniele. 2020. Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus. In the Moment. Accessed May 18, 2021. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/ biopolitics-­in-­the-­time-­of-­coronavirus. Lyon-Callo, Vincent, Yahia Madra, Ceren Özselçuk, Jered Randall, Maliha Safri, Shizu Sato, and Boone W.  Shear, eds. 2020. Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism. Brighton: ReMarx Books.

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McRobbie, Angela. 2015. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Malden: Polity. ———. 2020a. Our Low-Paid Workers are Our Lifeline. Accessed May 18, 2021. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4616-­o ur-­l ow-­p aid-­w orkers-­a re-­ our-­lifeline. ———. 2020b. Notes on Covid: Then and Now. Accessed May 18, 2021. https:// www.versobooks.com/blogs/4843-­notes-­on-­covid-­then-­and-­now. ———. 2020c. Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare. Malden: Polity. Nawaz, Saleema. 2020. Songs for the End of the World. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Nelson, Maggie. 2020. Finding Moments of Calm During a Pandemic. The New Yorker. Dispatches from a Pandemic. April 13. nY. 2020. Nieuwe Reeks: Genres in Quarantaine, May 18. Accessed May 18, 2021. https://www.ny-­web.be/artikels/nieuwe-­reeks-­genres-­in-­quarantaine/. Pfeijffer, Ilja Leonard. 2020. Quarantaine: dagboek in tijden van besmetting. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers. Quinn, Alice, ed. 2020. Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. New York: Knopf. Ravenelle, Alexandrea J. 2019. Hustle and Gig; Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy. Oakland: University of California Press. Rosenblat, Alex. 2019. Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work. Oakland: University of California Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2018. Finance is an Extractive Sector. In Critical Theory at a Crossroads: Conversations on Resistance in Times of Crisis, ed. Stijn De Cauwer, 113–133. New York: Columbia University Press. Scholz, Trebor. 2016. Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Malden: Polity Press. Sjón. 2017. Moonstone. Translated by V. Cribb. London: Sceptre. Smith, Zadie. 2020. Intimations: Six Essays. London: Penguin. Smith, Ali. 2020a. Summer. London: Penguin. ———. 2020b. Before Brexit, Grenfell, Covid-19… Ali Smith on Writing Four Novels in Four Years. The Guardian, August 1. Stavans, Ilan, ed. 2020. And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers from Around the World on the COVID-19 pandemic. New York: Restless Books. UNESCO. 2020. December 22. Accessed May 18, 2021. https://en.unesco. org/news/covid-­19-­hits-­culture-­sector-­even-­harder-­expected-­warns-­unesco. Žižek, Slavoj. 2020. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. Malden: Polity Press.

Index1

A AAN, see Academics Against Networking (AAN) Academia, 170 Academics Against Networking (AAN), 129 Acker, Kathy, 130 Acronyms, 225 Aesthetic resilience, 10 Affect, 6, 170–173, 225, 237, 288, 289, 295, 297, 314, 315 Affective labor, 290 Agamben, Giorgio, 312 Agency, 81, 173–176 Algorithms, 297, 308 Alienation, 7, 50, 162, 256 Amazon, 2, 160, 308 Analogy, 293 Anxiety, 7, 256, 260, 290 Apartment individualism, 276 Architecture, 272, 277

Artistic critique, 5 Audience, 124, 132, 201 Austerity, 2 Authentic, 76 Authenticity, 47, 103, 115, 180 Authorship, 193 Autobiography, 90, 104, 115, 132, 149, 221 Autofiction, 161 B Bakunin, Mikhail, 60 Beck, Ulrich, 235 Beischer, Sara, 251 Jag ska egentligen inte jobba här, 251 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo,’ 289, 294 Berlant, Lauren, 6, 132, 315 Biographical element, 165 Biopolitics, 309 Boredom, 172

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Rys, B. Philipsen (eds.), Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88174-0

319

320 

INDEX

Bourdieu, Pierre, 81, 154, 196 Bourgeois, Lucien, 89 L’Ascension, 90 Brausewetter, Artur, 52 Der Armenpastor, 52 Bruder, Jessica, 282 Nomadland, 282 Business language, 138 Butler, Judith, 24, 92, 236, 262, 290, 312 C Capitalist realism, 136 Care, 173–176, 310 Carlyle, Thomas, 25 Catastrophe, 183, 188 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 147 Characters, 237, 257 Characters’ hybridity, 234 Class, 4, 11, 25, 27, 46, 94, 258, 264 Class and emotion, 260 Class consciousness, 80, 94 Class struggle, 84 Coe, Jonathan, 32 What a Carve Up!, 32 Cognitariat, 5 Collage, 291 Collective subjectivity, 295 Commons, 130 Community, 51, 117, 132, 133, 294 Conjunction, 295 Conservative ideologies, 43 Contemporaneity, 293 Counterpublics, 116, 124 COVID, 112 Critique, 4 Cruel optimism, 6, 292, 315 Cultural sector, 307 Cusk, Rachel, 313 Second Place, 313

D Debord, Guy, 162, 186 Deskilled labor, 2, 309 Détournement, 162 Dickens, Charles, 25 Digital media, 296 Disidentification, 260 Disjunctive logic, 289, 295 Disraeli, Benjamin, 25 Sybil or The Two Nations, 25 Dissimulation, 260 Distribution of the sensible, 44, 94 Documentary, 180 Dolan, Jill, 117 Dystopia, 184, 187 E Economy, 276 Emerging adulthood, 254 Emotion, 256 Engels, Friedrich, 60 The entrepreneurial self, 235 Entrepreneur of himself, 274 ‘Entrepreneur of the self’ (Foucault), 5 Eribon, Didier, 146 Retour à Reims, 146, 153 Ethical interstice, 27 Eviction, 111, 113 F Fairy tale, 265 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 195 “Beweis der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks,” 195 Fiction, 237, 313 Fictionality, 237 Figurations, 3 Film, 190

 INDEX 

First-person narrators, 234 Fisher, Mark, 136 Flexibility, 254 Flexibilization, 2 Flexible capitalism, 256 Forster, E.M., 25 Howards End, 25 Foster, Hal, 313 Foucault, Michel, 275, 309 Fragmentation, 24, 289 Frohman, Denice, 117 Futurity, 188 G Gaskell, Elizabeth, 25 Geißler, Heike, 181, 308 Saisonarbeit, 159, 308 Gender, 4, 38, 82, 132, 262 Genres, 23, 189, 221, 315 Gentrification, 112, 117 Ginzburg, Natalia, 313 Göhre, Paul, 45 Drei Monate Fabriksarbeiter und Handwerkbursche. Eine praktische Studie, 46 Gröschner, Annett, 182 Walpurgistag, 182 Gutenberg, 194 H Hayes, Bill, 313 How We Live Now: Scenes From a Pandemic, 313 Hegel, G.W.F., 49 Heidsieck, Emmanuelle, 223 Notre aimable clientèle, 214, 223, 227 Heise, Thomas, 116 Hildén, Jack, 251 Vi, vi vaktmästare, 251

321

Holtby, Winifred, 30 South Riding, 30 Home, 276 Homelessness, 111, 301 Homo oeconomicus, 4, 228, 273–274 Housing precarity, 113 Hybrid position, see In-betweenness I Immaterial labor, 5, 197, 290 Immaterial work, 13 Immigrants, 278 Immigration, 271 In-betweenness, 34, 148, 217, 228 Indignados, 1, 125 Inequalities, 309 Insecurity, 2, 307 Intellectual property, 193, 195 Interstice, 34 Invisibility, 37, 217, 281 Invisible, 8, 10, 167, 179 Ironic, 243 Ironic performance, see Irony Irony, 6, 124, 132, 139, 140 K Kisch, Egon Erwin, 58 Der Rasende Reporter, 62 Kluge, Alexander, 181, 314 L Laing, Olivia, 314 Lanchester, John, 36 Capital, 36 Language, 162, 163, 220, 227, 228 Language criticism, 164, 178, 221 Latour, Bruno, 3, 312 Le Blanc, Guillaume, 24

322 

INDEX

Leitner, Maria, 73 Hotel Amerika, 73 Lerner, Ben, 312, 314 Liberal ideologies, 43 Literary characters, 234 Literary figuration, 4 Literature in commons, 142 Lockdown, 313 Lorey, Isabell, 1, 24, 81, 92, 290 Lotman, Yuri, 42 Louis, Edouard, 145 En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, 146, 149 Histoire de la violence, 146, 149 Qui a tué mon père, 146 Lumpenproletariat, 60, 63, 64 M Macron, Emmanuel, 145 Marsh, Roya, 121 “Gentry-Phi-Cation,” 121 Marx, Karl, 60, 95 Mathieu, Nicolas, 146 Leurs enfants après eux, 146, 156 Mbembe, Achille, 290, 312 McLiam Wilson, Robert, 234 Ripley Bogle, 234, 243 McRobbie, Angela, 310 Melle, Thomas, 182 3000 Euro, 182 Metonym, 80 Microlinguistic subversion, 11 Micropolitical acts of resistance, 9 Micropolitical acts of subversion, 6 Mini-jobs, 218 Mise en abyme, 153 Modern copyright law, 193 Moore, Michael, 117 “Gentrification in 5 Parts: A Play on the Senses,” 117 “A Scribe Called Quess?,” 117

N Nation-state, 273 Nawaz, Saleema, 313 Neighbor, 271 Nelson, Maggie, 312, 313 Neoliberalism, 2, 5, 235, 289, 292, 311 Networking, 129, 137 Networking services, 296 New Objectivity, 75, 84 Nomad, 278 The nomadic, 273 Non-authenticity, 265 O Objects, 94 Occupy, 1, 125 Osborne, Nell, 129 P Pagès, Yves, 228 Pastiche, 6 Performance, 113, 115, 116, 119, 202 Petrie, Nick, 124 “1034 Lincoln Pl.,” 124 Pfeijffer, Ilja Leonard, 313 Platform capitalism, 2, 198 Platform companies, 307 Platform economy, 250 Poetics lecture, 201 Poetics of precarity, 11, 52, 130, 131, 134, 214 Polyphony, 150 Postcolonial gaze, 68 Post-Fordism, 75 Poullaille, Henri, 151 Precariat, 11, 65, 81, 197, 255 Precariat’s consciousness, 250, 255 Precario bello, 4 Precarious authorship, 204

 INDEX 

See also Authorship Precarious employment, 197 Precarious governance, 76, 81, 84 Precarious individualism, 283 Precarious individualization, 75, 289 Precarious intellectuals, 218 Precarious labor, 3 Precariousness, 1, 24, 92, 290 Precarious work, 3 Precarity, 1, 2, 23, 24, 58, 75, 91, 92, 135, 215, 275, 290, 299, 306 Precarity intermediary, 6 Precarity stories, 216 Precarization, 1, 58, 81, 114, 213 Privilege, 23, 156, 169 Proletariat, 80, 103 Protest, 9, 74, 175 Punk-feminism, 130 Q Quarantine genres, 315 R Race, 4, 38, 114 Rancière, Jacques, 44, 94 Realist fiction, 234, 252 Real time, 295 See also Time Récits de filiation ouvrière, 221 Récits de la classe ouvrière, 221 Récits de la précarité, 222 Reduction to the body, 7 Relations, 294n10 Representability, 167 Representation, 167 Resistance, 4, 74, 84, 174 Respectability, 250 Rhetoric of immigration, 273 Rights, 193

Riot grrrl, 130, 134 Risks, 233, 235, 293 Risk society, 235, 236 Röggla, Kathrin, 200, 219 “Essenpoetik,” 202 “Gespensterarbeit und Weltmarktfiktion,” 184 Irres Wetter, 200 wir schlafen nicht. Roman, 200 Roman de bureau or roman de l’entreprise, 222 Roofless, 282 Rothberg, Michael, 155 Rzeznik, Pawel, 52 Pfarrer Krul, 52 S Sabotage, 173–176 Seasonal labor, 2, 13 Security, 277 The sedentary, 273 Self-reflexive attention, 243 Self-reflexivity, 235, 243 Semiosphere, 42 Situationists, 162 Sjón, 313 Slam poetry, 115 Sloterdijk, Peter, 276 Slum, 57 Smith, Ali, 287, 313–315 Seasonal Quartet, 287 Smith, Stevie, 29 The Holiday, 29 Social Christianity, 45, 50 Social critiques, 6 Social insecurity, 217 Social invisibility, see Invisibility Social isolation, 90, 92 Socialist, 43 Social protection, 2 Social reportage, 46, 59, 61, 74

323

324 

INDEX

Social security, 2 Solidarity, 170, 294, 299, 311 Space, 96, 99–101 Spoken word poetry, 115 Standing, Guy, 233, 250 State-of-the-nation novels, 23 Strange narrator, 240 Symbolic capital, 152, 196, 201 T Technical services sector, 218 Temporary jobs, 13 Theater, 186 Time, 96, 101–102, 294 Togetherness, 283 Totality, 49, 50, 294 Tourist gaze, 68 Trojanow, Ilija, 58 U Ugly feelings, 7, 171 Undercommons, 142 Unemployment, 275 Unions, 2 Utopia, 188 V Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 49 Voice, 96, 103–105, 147

Von Gehlen, Dirk, 199 Eine neue Version ist verfügbar, 199 Vulnerability, 173–176 W Wadensjö, Måns, 252 Monopolet, 252 Wallraff, Günter, 180, 181 Warner, Alan, 234 Morvern Callar, 234, 240 Weber, Anne, 228 Weigl, Stefan, 196 Stripped—A Life in Bank Account Statements, 196 Welfare state, 2, 169, 233 West, Rebecca, 35 The Return of the Soldier, 35 Wilson, Angus, 28 No Laughing Matter, 28 Working class, 103, 262, 295 Working-class speech, 147 Working collective, 250, 262 Y Yellow vests, 1, 146 Z Zhao, Cloe, 283 Nomadland, 283