Precarity and International Relations [1st ed.] 9783030510954, 9783030510961

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Precarity and International Relations Edited by Ritu Vij · Tahseen Kazi · Elisa Wynne-Hughes

International Political Economy Series

Series Editor Timothy M. Shaw University of Massachusetts Boston Boston, USA Emeritus Professor University of London UK

The global political economy is in flux as a series of cumulative crises impacts its organization and governance. The IPE series has tracked its development in both analysis and structure over the last three decades. It has always had a concentration on the global South. Now the South increasingly challenges the North as the centre of development, also reflected in a growing number of submissions and publications on indebted Eurozone economies in Southern Europe. An indispensable resource for scholars and researchers, the series examines a variety of capitalisms and connections by focusing on emerging economies, companies and sectors, debates and policies. It informs diverse policy communities as the established trans-Atlantic North declines and ‘the rest’, especially the BRICS, rise.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13996

Ritu Vij · Tahseen Kazi · Elisa Wynne-Hughes Editors

Precarity and International Relations

Editors Ritu Vij Department of Politics and International Relations University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, UK

Tahseen Kazi Department of Political Science and International Studies Georgia Southern University Statesboro, GA, USA

Elisa Wynne-Hughes School of Law and Politics Cardiff University Cardiff, UK

ISSN 2662-2483 ISSN 2662-2491 (electronic) International Political Economy Series ISBN 978-3-030-51095-4 ISBN 978-3-030-51096-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 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 credit: © Rob Friedman/iStockphoto.com 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

This volume is the result of multiple conversations at different forums, including panel discussions at meetings of the International Studies Association (ISA), British International Studies Association (BISA), European International Studies Association and workshops held at Cardiff University and Queen Mary University, London. We would especially like to thank the Poststructural Politics Working Group of the British International Studies Association, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Cardiff and Georgia Institute of Technology for funding support for the two workshops. A huge thanks to Timothy Shaw, Anca Pusca, and the team at Palgrave for their steady support throughout the turbulent process of delivering the final manuscript. Ritu Vij: My interest in the problem of precarity began with a conference, ‘Reframing Development: Post-Development, Globalization, and the Human Condition’, April 8–10, 2009 at Osaka University. Funding support from the Carnegie Trust of Scotland for research in Japan and India (2010–2014) laid the foundation for a broader project on Precarity, Affect and the Problem of Sovereignty, early iterations of which appeared between 2013 and 2015; I thank the Trust for its support. I would also like to thank Anna Agathangelou, Paul Dumouchel, Reiko Gotoh, Matt Davies, Vivienne Jabri, Joao Nogueira, Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Simon Philpott, Kimi Sakurai, Michael Shapiro, Takahara Takao, Wanda Vrasti, R.B.J. Walker, and Heloise and Martin Weber for feedback and discussion of my precarity-related work at meetings of BISA, EISA, and v

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ISA, and presentations at Auro University in Surat, India; Hitotsubashi, Meiji Gakuin, and Rikkyo Universities, Japan; and the University of Paris Nanterre, France; Brett Neilson, Sam Opondo and Sami Suliman for collaborating on a special section on ‘Precarity and the International’ (along with Anna, Heloise and Michael); Philip Armstrong for a very helpful exchange; and Nancy Ettlinger for her constructive engagement with this project and for her patience. Even as this volume goes to press, the growing pandemic around the acceleration of the spread of the Coronavirus, the affective and bodily precariousness that constellates our everyday lives and working conditions reminds us that the concepts that detain us are never just intellectual hobbies, but urgent political demands that compel us to respond. I thank the communities of friends, family and colleagues whose unconditional support sustains me in the best of times, but more so now as the everyday precarity induced by the pandemic envelops us all. Tahseen Kazi: This volume began for Elisa and I in 2016 as a BISA Poststructural Politics Working Group-sponsored workshop held at Cardiff University that we co-organized, entitled ‘Agency, Precarity, Precarious Life’. Together, Elisa and I took the plunge into precarity’s entanglements with things international. I am deeply moved by the partnership, trust, and friendship we have built together over the years. The subject of precarity has since turned into a considerably larger personal project that centres on my manuscript in progress entitled Politics of Precarity. In 2017, Ritu and I co-organized a workshop at QMUL on ‘Precarity and the problem of sovereignty’ and this was followed by a 2019 ISA panel of the same name. I would like to thank the participants—many of whom are named above and below—of all three of these meetings for stimulating conversations. I would lastly like to shout out my love for James and the life we have shared for two decades now, and for Julian who busts out radical joy every day for all to witness. Elisa Wynne-Hughes: I would like to thank the participants in the BISA Poststructural Politics Working Group Workshop ‘Agency, Precarity, Precarious Life’, in particular those who organized panels or acted as discussants/convenors, including Leonie Ansems de Vries, Christine Hentschel, Louiza Odysseos, Nicola Pratt, Amit Rai, Philip Armstrong, Birgit Schippers, Bal Sokhi-Bulley, Ritu Vij, and Andreja Zevnik. I also thank all of the contributors for their hard work and patience in bringing this volume to life. Tahseen Kazi has been a source of intellectual inspiration, support, and friendship throughout this process. Finally, I would like to thank Matthew O’Donnell, Annika and Heidi O’Dwyn for the warmth, support, and joy they bring to my life.

Praise for Precarity and International Relations

“This book is an outstanding contribution to much needed innovative conceptual work in IR. It engages the debates on precarity to problematize the sovereign imagination that informs, and limits, critical investigations of contemporary world politics. It moves beyond the commonplace denunciations of precarity/precariousness as a concept restricted to the experiences of capitalist social formations of the ‘North’ turning its focus on the multiple and transversal connections that make the fractured space of the international today. Without giving in to universalistic readings of a common global precariousness, the authors in this volume explore paradoxes, complexities, and potentials of different instantiations of precarity in the production of politics of contestation, resistance and solidarity. An indispensable collection for researchers and students invested in reimagining critical IR.” —João Nogueira, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro “This volume provokes and courageously crafts new ways of thinking about precarity and precariousness and international relations. It challenges the epistemological moves that collapse suffering and the generating of equivalencies between the precarious liberal and the Third World subject, the migrant and the abandoned, the able/disabled, precarity and the subject of aesthetics. Ritu Vij, Tahseen Kazi and Elisa Wynne-Hughes bring together authors and interlocutors that provide us a mode of writing

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that engages with the forces of precarity—instantiations of how to imagine new forms of life within and against a precarious world.” —Anna M. Agathangelou, Department of Politics, York University “Intervening in ‘precarity talk’ across a variety of fields, this important volume brings together critical transnational analyses of the key IR concepts of Sovereignty, Solidarities, and Work. Highlighting precarious working conditions, lived experience, and contracts as politically produced effects the chapters carefully draw out the heterogeneous and ongoing implications of the withdrawal of the welfare state, the gradual erosion of social protection in the era of financialized neoliberal capitalism, the (re)emergence and recognition of the fragile and precarious condition of workers in capitalist social relations. Scholars and students of Critical Management Studies and intersectional decolonisation will equally benefit from close consideration of these fine chapters.” —Amit S. Rai, Queen Mary, University of London

Contents

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Introduction Ritu Vij, Elisa Wynne-Hughes, and Tahseen Kazi

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Part I Precarity and Sovereignty 2

Notes on Abandonment Philip Armstrong

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The Global Subject of Precarity Ritu Vij

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Precarity at the Nexus of Governmentality and Sovereignty: Entangled Fields of Power and Political Subjectivities Nancy Ettlinger

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Part II Precarity and Solidarities 5

Irregular Labour and the ‘Life of the State’: Precarity, Citizenship, and Sovereignty in Decolonizing Africa Nick Bernards

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Struggling with Precarity: From ‘More Jobs’ to Post-work Politics Wanda Vrasti

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Disability Counter-Communities: Resisting Precarity with Friendship Ivanka Antova and Bal Sokhi-Bulley

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Precarity and Judith Butler’s Ambivalent Social Bond. What Is the Value of Ettingerian Transconnectedness? Nóirín MacNamara

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Part III 9

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Precarity and Work

Precarity Unbound: Insurrectional Migrancy and Citizen Precarity in a Globalized World Nevzat Soguk Within the Factory of Mobility: Practices of Mexican Migrant Workers in the Twentieth-Century US Labour Regimes Claudia Bernardi

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The Aesthetics and the Politics of Precarity: Three Films Matt Davies

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Fashioning and Contesting Precariousness: Unauthorized Migrant Workers in Japan Hironori Onuki

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Ivanka Antova is a Ph.D. candidate at the Queens University Belfast School of law. Her Ph.D. thesis is a Foucauldian analysis of the effect the welfare reform in the United Kingdom is having on the citizenship and socio-economic rights of disabled people. Ivanka’s work combines elements of critical legal theory, disability studies, and human rights law. Philip Armstrong is a Professor of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. He has published widely in the area of contemporary visual arts and culture, as well as essays on contemporary political theory. Publications include Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (U of Minnesota P, 2009), Jean-Luc Nancy, Politique et audelà: Entretien with Jason Smith (Galilée, 2011), and (with Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville) As Painting: Division and Displacement (MIT Press and Wexner Center, 2001). Translations include Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Disavowed Community and The Pleasure in Drawing, as well as the collected writings of Michel Parmentier. Claudia Bernardi is a Lecturer in Latin American History at Roma Tre University, and fellow of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University. She is finalizing her first monograph titled Una storia di confine. Frontiere e lavoratori migranti tra Messico e Stati Uniti, 1836– 1964 (Carocci editore, 2017). She is an activist of the self-managed ESC Atelier and founder-member of LUM (Free Metropolitan University) in Rome.

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Nick Bernards is an Assistant Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is author of The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018), and recent articles in Review of International Political Economy, Globalizations, and Geoforum. Matt Davies is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at Newcastle University and Professor Adjunto at the International Relations Institute of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His research explores culture and everyday life in relation to international political economy, focusing on popular culture and aesthetics, subjectivity and embodiment, and more recently on urbanism. He has a long-standing interest in precarity and precarious labour, having coedited (with Magnus Ryner) Poverty and the Production of World Politics (Palgrave, 2006) and several articles on aesthetic and cultural approaches to understanding work. Nancy Ettlinger is a Professor of Human Geography at Ohio State University. Broadly, she is interested in the relation between governance and resistance, and bottom up approaches to connecting micro with macro-scale processes. Her current scholarship focuses on problems in the digital cultural economy. She has published in journals such as New Formations (forthcoming); Foucault Studies; New Left Review; Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation; Geoforum; Political Geography; Environment & Planning A; Annals of the Association of American Geographers; International Journal of Urban & Regional Research; Antipode; Progress in Human Geography; Journal of Economic Geography; Feminist Economics; Human Geography; and Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. Tahseen Kazi is a Visiting Assistant Professor in International Studies at Georgia Southern University. She writes on race, coloniality and international hierarchies, and is presently working on a book-length manuscript on this subject. She has contributed book chapters, reviews, and articles on Leadership and the Modern subject, Global Governance, Race and Global Capitalism in journals including Foucault Studies and Global Studies. Nóirín MacNamara is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics in Queen’s University Belfast. Her research brings the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger into conversation in order to

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better understand the role of responsiveness in relation to the social bond, modes of encounter, and modes of social transformation. Hironori Onuki is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and research associate of the York Centre for Asian Research, York University, Canada. Nevzat Soguk is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). He was formerly the Deputy Director of Global Cities Research Institute, at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. During his UHM years, Soguk has published two single author books, States and States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Globalization and Islamism: Beyond Fundamentalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) and four edited books, including Global Insurrectional Politics (Routledge, 2017) and (with Scott G. Nelson) Modern Theory, Modern Power and World Politics (Ashgate Publishing). Bal Sokhi-Bulley works on rights as technologies of governmentality, rights and resistance, and critical legal research methodologies. Her recent monograph is Governing Through Rights: Human Rights Law in Perspective (Hart Publishing, 2016) and she is co-author of Research Methods in International Law (Hart Publishing, 2011) with Robert Cryer, Tamara Hervey and Alexandra Bohm. Bal has published in various journals including Theory and Event and Law and Critique. Ritu Vij is a Senior Lecturer in IR at the University of Aberdeen, UK; previously Social Science Research Council (USA) and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellow at Keio University, Tokyo. Her work focuses on classical political-economy approaches (and their limits) to questions of work, labour, and subjectivity at different sites in Asia. Her current project examines the limits of contemporary thinking on sovereignty, precarity, and subalternity. Her recent work includes Precarity and the International, a special issue of Globalizations, articles on affective and housing precarity, human security and difference, and the cinema of precarity. Her earlier books are Japanese Modernity and Welfare (Palgrave, 2007) and Globalization and Welfare: A Critical Reader (Palgrave, 2007). Wanda Vrasti is a writer, instructor, and community organizer living in Berlin. She earned a Ph.D. in International Relations from McMaster

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University in 2008 with a dissertation on volunteer tourism and its situatedness within neoliberal practices of subjectivation. Her academic interests include, broadly speaking, Marxist political economy and radical social theory, while publications of hers have appeared in New Left Review, Millennium: Journal of International Relations, Citizenship Studies and several edited volumes. Since moving to Berlin, she has been an active member in various urban justice movements and an intrepid cultural producer and organizer within the local queer scene. She is currently training to become a psychoanalyst. Elisa Wynne-Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics. Her research focuses on the intersections between popular culture and international relations, focusing on tourism and the anti-street harassment movement. Her work has appeared in Review of International Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. She has recently published a coedited volume on Postcolonial Governmentalities: Rationalities, Violences and Contestations.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Ritu Vij, Elisa Wynne-Hughes, and Tahseen Kazi

Prologue By Ritu Vij ‘Precarity’, a three-channel video installation by the London based academic and filmmaker, John Akomfrah,1 explores risk, hybridity, and the unfathomable through the cityscape of New Orleans and the life of a jazz musician. In the cinematic cuts that assemble the montage of images that comprise the film, transience, impermanence, and the fragility of things dominate. A second three-channel film, ‘Vertigo Sea’2

R. Vij (B) Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected] E. Wynne-Hughes School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. Kazi Department of Political Science and International Studies, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_1

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an audio-visual essay on genocidal practices, focuses on whale-hunting, the slave trade, and contemporary migration flows in which scenes of African bodies washed ashore reprise the bloody violence of dismembered whales. Exhibited alongside ‘Vertigo Sea’, J. M. W. Turner’s nineteenthcentury Biblical painting, ‘The Deluge’, summons to mind his other iconic painting, ‘The Slave Ship’ (Zong), that depicts the intentional drowning of deported but insured African slaves, an early memorialization of the ‘necrogeopolitics’3 of profit and death. Yet another video installation entitled ‘Precarity’, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker,4 offers to the viewer a five-screen installation of multiple contexts that render global health, the relationship to labour rights and economic survival, precarious. Finally, combining the two etymological registers of the term ‘precarity’, prayer (precor) and debt (precarius ), the figure of ‘San Precario’, a man on bended knee with hands folded in prayer, the fictitious patron saint of precarious workers, offers a counter-point to the devaluation of labour and the depredations of neoliberalism. Seen together, these artworks foreground a pervasive consciousness of insecurity and unpredictability, capturing the heightened sense of vulnerability and ambient anxiety that characterizes contemporary life in ‘capitalist ruins’ (Tsing 2015). Precarity, precariousness, precariat—a cluster of words that invoke the state of permanent instability, vulnerability, and dependency depicted in the artworks introduced above, have entered the lexicon of critical social theory in recent times. Capturing the zeitgeist of the present moment, these terms join a growing list of words—disposability, risk, uncertainty, abandonment, and resilience—that together name a generalized apprehension about the coagulation of various crises in our times: global health pandemics, food, housing, water and job shortages, the rise of rightwing populism, civil strife, displacement of populations, a swelling tide of refugees and asylum seekers, and environmental crisis, to name but a few. ‘We are all precarious now’ Ulrich Beck (2000) notes, gesturing towards a new all-enveloping condition. Variously understood as a politically generated condition, a state of insecurity that leaves people without access to socio-economic networks of solace, the work of scholars like Judith Butler, Isabell Lorey, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, Guy Standing, and Anna Tsing has generated a wide-ranging inter-disciplinary discourse in the humanities and social sciences on both the concept and implications of precarity for our times. Anna Tsing’s early focus on the submerged relationalities that can

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capacitate new modes of sociality in a time of economic and environmental crisis, for instance, is fortified by Judith Butler’s (2001, 2004) Levinasian inspired notion of precariousness as an ontological condition in which social relationality is both foundational to being and necessary to thriving. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter’s (2008) influential early text on precarity as a politically produced effect, on the other hand, outlines the contingency of employment security during the phase of Fordist exceptionalism (when wages and jobs both grew) under a Keynesian instituted order, and the production of (labour) precarity in an era of post-Fordism. The withdrawal of the welfare state, the gradual erosion of social protection in the era of financialized neoliberal capitalism, has occasioned the (re)emergence and recognition of the (always, Marxists contend), fragile and precarious condition of workers in capitalist social relations. In the most widely circulated rendition of the term, however, Guy Standing’s (2011, 2012, 2014) sociological formulation of the ‘precariat,’ a loose conglomeration of workers in zero-hour contracts in the ‘gig economy’, including highly paid fashion designers as well as cleaners in the service sector, has captured the popular imagination. The precariat, a potentially ‘dangerous class’ portends crises of social cohesion that occasion a Polanyian double movement, a re-imagining of social protection for the twenty-first century. Departing from labour and employment centred precariousness, finally, others draw attention to its politicization and the self-constitution of precarious workers themselves. As the lines between work and life become blurred, performative and affective aspects of work re-constitute modes of being such that new forms of self-organisation and resistance can lead to the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious (Lorey 2011, 2015). Precarity here names not only a crisis of employment, but rather calls into question the normative basis of social order and its central legitimating principles (the work-ethic or possessive individualism, for instance). This collection brings together scholars working with the triptych of precarity/precariousness/ precariat, albeit in different theoretical registers, to begin a conversation about implications of debates around precarity for International Relations (IR). Despite the ubiquity of the concept of precarity and precariousness in a growing literature in the humanities and social sciences, IR, curiously, has yet to offer a sustained engagement with ongoing debates. In light of precarity’s presumed universality as a generalized and generalizable affliction of contemporary life, the silence of a discipline that takes the international, the global or the

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world as its object is, to say the least, puzzling. Occasioned by the observation that the concept has been taken up only sporadically by IR scholars interested in specific aspects of precarity discourse (labour, migration, and governance, for instance), this collection aims to initiate a wider conversation about the implications of ‘precarity talk’ (Puar 2012) for central concepts in IR. Building on the work initiated in a small earlier collection on ‘Precarity and the International’5 (Aganthangelou 2019; Neilson 2019; Opondo and Shapiro 2019; Suliman and Weber 2019; Vij 2019), and the work on precarity done by individual scholars in International Political Economy (IPE) (Moore 2018), governance (Bernards 2018; Duffield 2019), migration (Jorgensen and Schierup 2016), and bordering practices (Huysmans and Squire 2009; Schierup et al. 2015), the essays in this volume explore the implications of the concept of precarity for IR. How does precarity intercede in IR? Does it offer a vital intervention that speaks to who we are as embodied subjects in the modern international, to modes of inclusions/exclusions that call into question settled notions of relationality in a predominantly—and problematically—state-centric IR? Organized thematically, the volume directs attention to the implications of precarity thought for three concepts in IR: Sovereignty; Solidarities; and Work. Each section begins by mapping the terrain of extant scholarship on precarity as it relates to the concept under review and then proceeds to presenting the various contributions chapters make. Our aim in organizing the volume around these three self-standing sections, each written by one of the co-editors (‘Sovereignty’ by Ritu Vij, ‘Solidarities’ by Elisa Wynne-Hughes, and ‘Work’ by Tahseen Kazi), is to enable a sustained conversation about what precarity thinking brings to the table on these key topics in IR. As the community of scholars investigating precarity within the discipline grows, works that explore precarity’s implications for other concepts in IR will likely appear. Describing his artwork, ‘Precarity’, as an attempt to “reflect the notion that a spirit of predictability no longer governs our sense of time and place”, the painter and teacher, Ian Burcoff’s aesthetic of disjointed images endeavours to speak to the ‘fragility of our current times’. Recently opened (on 6 March 2020) at the Strand Center for the Arts in Plattsburgh, New York, the exhibition closed only two short weeks later as New York City went into lockdown, joining cities across the world in a desperate bid to slow down the deadly effects of the fast-moving global coronavirus pandemic that has infected close to 2.4 million people in

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211 countries and killed 165,000.6 As the ongoing spread of COVID19 rapidly lays bare the fragility of public health infrastructures, access to safe housing, food, income and jobs, with the poor and homeless unable to engage in the life-saving practices of social distancing, hand washing (lacking ready access to soap, hand sanitizers and running water), the ‘quarantine line’ (Armitrage 2020)7 separating the afflicted from the healthy, the elderly from the young, fly zones from no-fly zones, cities from country-side, brings into urgent visibility ongoing practices of making borders, lines and distinctions and, as the section immediately following outlines, the constitutive antagonism between precarity and sovereignty in the modern international. New aesthetic modes of expressive solidarities in both virtual and real time (clapping, singing, and orchestral assemblages, for instance8 ), and the paradoxical extension of a partial, if temporary, safety-net for precarious workers by heretofore neoliberal states9 speak poignantly to both the depredations and promise of precarity as a defining concept for our times.

Precarity and Sovereignty By Ritu Vij What implications, if any, does the discourse of precarity have for sovereignty, disciplinary IR’s master concept? Does precarity constitute a mode of ‘dissident thought’ (Ashley and Walker 1990) that troubles conventional IR’s conflation of sovereignty with state sovereignty, specifically its claim of permanence as the locus of power and authority in bounded territorial space? Or does it provide a new site for critically examining sovereignty as a problem, a complex historical and cultural-political practice that necessitates the constant making and remaking of the normative and institutional edifice of sovereignty? Inasmuch as sovereignty is not something real, something that is already present in the world, but must be reproduced, maintained, defended, and re-legitimized daily, the practical politics of the labour of making/remaking sovereignty varies in time and space. What does precarity thought contribute to this critical reading of sovereignty? And, contra conventional statist readings of sovereignty, does the discourse of precarity bring into visibility sites of sovereignty—capital and subjects for instance—otherwise occluded in IR’s statist understanding of sovereignty?

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Current precarity discourse centres on socio-political understandings of precarity as a condition of employment insecurity, a new social movement, or political subjectivity. Reading this voluminous inter-disciplinary literature from the vantage point of the problem of sovereignty, however, brings into focus the entanglements of precarity with sovereignty. At least four iterations of this entanglement are discernible in the scholarship: 1. Geographies of precarity that attribute the production of precarity within territorially demarcated space to sovereign acts of power (and violence). Here, statist accounts track changes in employment laws and regulatory structures, specifically the withdrawal of social protection mechanisms to account for precarity as a politically produced effect (Brass 2011; Neilson and Rossiter 2005; Pang 2018; Standing 2011, 2012; Van der Linden and Roth 2014; Waite 2009). Anchored in the methodological territorialism that characterizes conventional IR, these accounts of the differential distribution of precarity at multiple geopolitical sites work within the register of sovereign territorial space. 2. Departing from traditional IR approaches, critical political economy accounts, on the other hand, privilege the sovereignty of capital rather than state to locate the production and uneven distribution of precarity at multiple sites across the world by examining the global politics of development (Harvey 2004; McMichael 2008; Perelman 2000; Read 2002; Suliman and Weber 2019). In a related effort, postcolonial accounts foreground connected histories (Bhambra 2010), and multiple histories of labour (Mezzadra 2011) to call attention to practices of colonial violence that produce the double bind of sovereignty (at once desired and denied) for postcolonial states and subjects. Socio-economic precarization here is the politically produced effect of postcolonial states and global capital. The normative valorization of work and the work-ethic in accounts of capitalist modern subjectivity materializing within canonical texts of political economy (including, Hegel, Marx, and Weber), however, complicate the notion of sovereignty at play in these accounts of capital’s production of precarity. 3. Genealogical accounts of precarity as an art of liberal governmentality (Lorey 2011; Barchiesi 2012; Huysmans and Squire 2009; Mezzadra 2011) offer a different perspective. Here, Foucauldian critiques of sovereign power draw attention to the exclusionary

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practices that produce risk, uncertainty and precarity as a modality of rule. The migrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker are subjects made by liberal government, emblematic of the practices of drawing borders, lines and distinctions central to the labour of making and remaking sovereignty. Biopolitical strategies that render some populations precarious occasion also the performative and aesthetic practices that re-legitimize sovereignty by (re)valorizing centres of sovereign authority, especially states and nations. 4. Afropessimist accounts’ (Barchiesi 2015; Hartman 1997; Wilderson 2010) focus on the political ontology that divides the Slave from the Human and call attention to the problematic concept of the human that anchors precarity thought. In a world in which whiteness as such constitutes the privileged site of modernity within which precarity as a crisis of capital, labour, or sovereignty emerges, Afropessimism marks the limits of precarity’s conceptual reach as a category of critique. Even the anxious (Berlant 2011) and vulnerable (Munck 2013) subjectivities associated with the condition and experience of precarity fail to include those ontologized as not ‘not quite humans’. Insofar as sovereignty as a principle of a modern social imaginary entails the performative and aesthetic making of claims of sovereign presence for both states and subjects, the slave remains outside the bounds of the human, precarious or ‘sovereign’. Whereas political-economy and society specific accounts take a largely melancholic view of precarity as a pathologized loss (of sovereign well-being and security), post-foundational critiques adopt a ‘celebratory attitude’ (Ashley and Walker 1990), given the potential for forging new modes of politics and relationality in sites and spaces that take precarity not sovereignty as a point of departure (Butler 2004; Lorey 2015). There is, however, an alternative pathway that critical scholars in IR may be uniquely positioned to develop. Rather than conceive of precarity and sovereignty as mutually exclusive modes of producing, governing or being, marking the presence or absence of security, exploring the constitutive antagonism of precarity and sovereignty contained within the logic of sovereignty that has fashioned the modern international (re)locates precarity in the ‘shadowlands of sovereignty’ (Vij), forthcoming. Tethered to sovereignty as the regulative ambition of (western) modernity,

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specifically the secular theodicy of state sovereignty and the modern (selfdetermined) individual, ‘precarity talk’ (Puar 2012) renews attention to both the fiction and fragility of sovereignty and its re-inscription in our times. In this, precarity offers a new site for exploring what critical sovereignty scholars in IR—Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker (1990), Jens Bartelson (1995), David Campbell (1992), Vivienne Jabri (2013), Michael Shapiro (1991), and R. B. J. Walker (1992)—have incessantly called to attention, namely, the historical making and remaking of practices of sovereignty. The production of insecuritizing practices detailed in the discourse on precarity, as well as the programmatic solutions put forward to ameliorate the condition of precarity, offer a new location for understanding contemporaneous practices of the re-inscription of sovereignty as a modular form of constituted order. Insofar as sovereignty as the principle of modernity and the modern International continues to shape politics and everyday life, precarity qua condition, experience, or ontology is aporetic. Rather than the loss or repudiation of (state) sovereignty, alternatively mourned or celebrated in conventional and critical accounts, precarity, properly conceived, can be seen as shaped by and within extant logics of sovereignty, compelled in its putative overcoming by a tacit desire for a renewed sovereignty, albeit on different terms. Characterized by a nostalgia for an institutionalized order whose very conditions of reproduction have been rendered fraught given the many challenges of our times, precarity’s affective attachment to sovereignty is not unambiguous. Wrought within the logic of sovereignty and its actualization, precarity’s life in the shadowlands of sovereignty marks both its limits and containment within extant logics. Equally, the hierarchization of precarities that maps the modern international as an uneven space of multiple discriminations, an unequal terrain of wealth and want, compels analytical attention to the imbrication of precarity with sovereignty. The essays that comprise this section provide three distinct— and novel—points of entry into grasping precarity’s entanglements with sovereignty. As such, they offer a space-clearing theoretical exercise that potentially opens a new line of inquiry for critical scholarship in IR, namely the study of precarity as a site of praxis for the contemporary labours of making/remaking sovereignty. Interrogating the grammar of abandonment—and precarity—as radical vulnerability, exposure, and marginalization of the human subject that is dominant in contemporary discourse, Phillip Armstrong attempts to pin down the critical significance of the term beyond its current descriptive

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and analytical usage. Alert to both the specificity and differentiation of geopolitical contexts that produce scenes of abandonment and the dedifferentiation that attends the global circulation of images of the same, Armstrong’s chapter aims to move beyond a reading of abandonment as either a condition of the subject (produced by different histories and logics), or, more poignantly for critical thought in IR, as an abandonment from a positivity (from citizenship, rights, welfare, etc.), to reveal the constitutive antagonism contained (and effaced) in the dialectic that sutures abandonment/precarity to the logic of sovereignty. Aligned with continental theory’s (especially Agamben’s and Nancy’s but also Heidegger’s) collective ambition to move beyond the paradox of sovereignty, Armstrong’s chapter lays bare the continued hold sovereignty thinking has on critical precarity talk. The ‘excess of pathos’ that saturates abandonment as a radical extremity of precarity in conventional thought is recuperated in Armstrong’s nuanced counter-reading as a ‘limit-concept’ in Agamben’s sense. Just as sovereignty borders on the concept of bare life (one is the concealed nucleus of the other), abandonment is better grasped, he suggests, as ‘constitutive of bare life’, not qua substantivist condition of (socio-economic-political) lack, nor as an (ontological) quality of a subject but principally as an analytical term that ‘strips life back to its bare nudity’. In pursuing this claim, Armstrong repudiates the hierarchization implicit in talk of precarity’s overcoming of abandonment, the latter posited as the extremity of the former, but rather reaches towards the ‘conceptual limits or exhaustion’ of precarity, the ‘sense in which precarity has not been thought through far enough’. Arguing against the dominant impulse to construe precarity/abandonment as provoked by the state or law, a negativity or state of deprivation (of rights, income, jobs, etc.), Armstrong makes the case for moving the critical register of thought beyond ‘subjection to the state’. Moving carefully between Agamben and Nancy’s reading of abandonment and the paradox of sovereignty, Armstrong offers, in conclusion, a plea for conceiving abandonment in Nancy’s terms not as an abandonment by anything—by the state, by government institutions and policies, by a sovereign authority. Rather, abandonment viewed simply as existence ‘no longer produced or deduced, but simply posited’ is to acknowledge the abundance at the heart of abandonment, an excess that is ‘the very freedom of this abandonment’ (Nancy 1993: 9). As originary existence posited as such, abandonment entails not it’s overcoming as the

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loss or constraint of freedom but rather the freedom inscribed in the very abundance of abandonment. Eschewing the promises of secular salvations of rescue in security and development narratives that haunt discourses of precarity, Armstrong’s mediations on abandonment urge us to rethink precarity and the solidarities and modes of being that subtend precarious life in the fractured political space of IR beyond the substantivist registers of political communities, nations, and economies. Beyond all hierarchizations, abandonment as the very condition of being, a condition of excess, offers an alternative ground on which to rethink being in all its multiplicities. Beyond precarity, beyond sovereignty, abandonment, on this reading, offers a potentially fruitful alternative analytical pathway to develop in critical IR. Ritu Vij’s essay that follows calls into question the universalizing logic of precarity and precariousness in a transdisciplinary discourse on the global subject of precarity. The erasure of the modern international as fragmented political space in claims about a universal precarity shaped by the flattening of differences in the spatial and temporal coordinates of the smoothed spaces of global capitalism is subject to critique in her reading of the influential work of Guy Standing and Judith Butler. For Standing and Butler, the logics of precarity/precariousness presuppose the possibility for a global politics of equality between precarious subjects in the North and South. Challenging claims of equivalence, the chapter examines the occlusion of difference in the constitution of the international and its implications for understanding the antagonisms contained (and repressed) in the figure of the global subject of precarity. In a departure from established conventions of critiques in the literature on global precarity, Vij draws attention to precarity as principally a liberal analytic, tethered to and framed by liberal account of the sovereign subject. Concepts of precarity and ontological precariousness gain traction, she suggests, only in reference to the regulative ideal of self-mastery, autonomy, futurity, and the expectational horizon of an invulnerability to insecurity. This regulative ideal is central to modes of sociality in western capitalist modernity and the dream of sovereignty, but also underpins the concept of precarity. Precarity as exposure to vulnerability is the spectre that haunts the liberal subject of security. Precarity, Vij suggests, is better understood not as a globally dispersed socio-economic positivity but as a dis-ordering experience of sovereign subjectivity. Extended globally, global precarity talk enacts a double erasure obscuring: the sedimentations of colonial history that take the

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Third World as the constitutive outside of the liberal/modern international, moulding distinctions between the sovereign subject of western liberal modernity and its non-sovereign, illiberal other; and the political economy of colonial difference that inscribes Third World ‘backwardness’ as the pathologized container of material lack, dependency, and abjection. Globalizing the subject of precarity entails, Vij suggests, the recuperation of its constitutive outside, namely the Third World, as the original site of abjection. Thus, the liberal anxieties that frame global precarity talk depend on and mobilize long-standing tropes about abjected modes of life in the Global South to ground its key claims. Reading precarity/precariousness as liberal discourse unsettles the pathologization of vulnerability and opens pathways to recognizing ontological differences in modes of life and living in de-pathologized vulnerability. In a fresh approach to rethinking the conditions of possibility of precarity, Nancy Ettlinger sees precarity as the deleterious consequence of continual slippages between modes of power relations, specifically, the insertions of sovereign power in the microspaces of everyday life that are, in fact, shaped by mentalities, norms, and discourses aligned with the exercise of indirect, not direct, power. Questioning both time-bound renditions of precarity as the effect of neoliberal labour regimes, flexible production, and the weakening of Keynesian modes of social protection dominant in contemporary understandings of the temporal and historical specificity of precarity, as well as spatially bound, context-specific geographies of precarity, Ettlinger draws attention to power relations in the context of prevailing inequalities and hierarchies. Ettlinger problematizes Foucault’s discrete conceptualizations of governmentality (the conduct of conduct or actions on actions) and sovereignty (acts by actors over other actors), drawing attention to Foucault’s failure to account for shifts between systems of indirect and direct power. Against both Agamben and Hardt and Negri’s zerosum readings of sovereignty and governmentality, she suggests the two exist as complementary, not alternative or competing systems of power: ‘sovereign power needs techniques of power in a system of governmentality to ensure that actors hold and act on sovereign power over other actors to normalize and sustain a so-called “state of exception”’. Everyday codes of conduct—mentalities, in Foucault’s terms—in other words, normalized and internalized in work-places, schools, the military, etc. contain also the possibility for the informalization of codes

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of ethical conduct and the rupture of routine techniques that characterize daily life (in schools, prisons, militaries etc.) by sovereign acts of power. Governmentality, on this account, is a means towards a sovereign end. In a context of hierarchies and inequalities, capricious sovereign acts informalize codes of conduct associated with specific governmentalities, making subjects precarious. Thus, bosses, employers, directors, and security guards—actors operated on by a multiplicity of colliding governmentalities (neoliberalism, patriotism, racism, liberal assimilationism, etc.), can act unpredictably on other actors to rupture extant codes of conduct, producing precarity. In the context of prevailing social hierarchies and inequalities, the capricious irruption of sovereign acts of power destabilize. Ettlinger’s argument here can be read as emblematic of the paradox of the workings of sovereignty within colliding fields of governmentalities in the production of ordinary or everyday precarity. In dialogue, these interventions articulate precarity’s entrapment in an extant logic of sovereignty, potentially offering a point of departure for exploring contemporaneous modalities of remaking sovereignty. For instance, conceptualizations of precarity as states of pathos induced or provoked by the state and law betray an underlying tacit desire for new forms of state or global governance. They also crave a re-inscription of sovereignty and its authority that enables an overcoming of the very passivity and vulnerabilities sovereign authority produces in the first place. Exploring precarity within the ‘shadowlands of sovereignty’ can open a new line of inquiry for IR scholars already attuned to the performative and aesthetic practices of remaking sovereignty.

Precarity and Solidarities By Elisa Wynne-Hughes Critical scholarship on international precarity defines solidarities in relation to how we understand what precarity is and its global distribution. In other words, the potentials for collective contestation of precarity are very much shaped by our understanding of the concept itself, and indeed the two are linked. Precarity can be understood either as reflecting experiences within a labour market context or as a social or human ‘condition’ (Waite 2009: 416). One key tension in the literature is whether precarity is merely labour activism for the neoliberal age, or whether it implies different forms of solidarity beyond work. Does it speak to mobilizations that destabilize identities (work, gender, class, citizenship,

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etc.), while also offering alternatives to solidarity conceived on ethical grounds (translation, humanitarian, cosmopolitan)? This section examines the various responses to this tension. It also addresses the way that precarity, as a common condition and point of mobilization, contributes to our understanding of solidarities as ‘active’, in contrast to concepts like risk and vulnerability. Chapter summaries are woven into these discussions to indicate how they speak to tensions and questions emerging from the entanglements between precarity, solidarities, and IR. Precarity associated with labour market conditions is reflected in the increasingly unstable and insecure work within advanced capitalist or neoliberal societies, which has produced new forms of solidarity and contestation. Louise Waite argues that precarity has political potential as it has, from the 2000s, been used increasingly by (sometimes transnational) activists and social justice movements as a concept to unite around, describing shared experiences of marginalization under neoliberalism (Waite 2009: 417). She argues that ‘what is emerging around the concept of precarity, therefore, is the possibility of a potentially disruptive socio-political identity that is linked to a new brand of labour activism’ (2009: 418). For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, insofar as political organization and forms of resistance reflect ‘the material work relations in the production process’ (Hardt 2005: 18), the ‘multitude’ which emerges after 1968 is spontaneous, autonomous, multiple, and decentralized (Hardt and Negri 2001), but converges towards ‘a common social being’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 159). Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter contend that ‘precarity is an ontological experience and social-economic condition with multiple registers that hold the potential to contribute to a political composition of the common’ (2008: 55). This reflects Andreas Bieler’s work on transnational labour solidarity, which he sees as the outcome of various forms of struggle by workers in structurally different positions, including informal labour and groups marginalized along the lines of race and gender, shaped by the ‘historical specificity of our current period’ (2014: 115). Guy Standing also argues that the precariat, which has been expanding in the post-Fordist era, is the key agent of progressive transformation though they do not yet possess ‘a common consciousness or a common view of what to do about precarity’ (Standing 2014: 31– 32). Isabell Lorey observes that with the normalization of precarity has arisen new forms of democracy through the organization of protests and movements, like Occupy’s camps and assemblies, representing a ‘presentist’ democracy rather than a representative one insofar as it is practiced in

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the moment and subjectivates those involved (in Puar 2012: 172–173). Precarity is emerging as a condition around which a resistant constituency is being formed. The work-based approach to precarity has been challenged from several angles relevant to our understanding of the solidarities produced. It has been critiqued in terms of the tendency to universalize or ontologize precarity and the precarious, limiting the parameters of the concept and the potentials for solidarity. Standing, for instance, been critiqued for homogenizing the experiences of the precariat in the Global North and South (despite the fact that many workers in both regions did not experience the employment securities of the mid-twentieth-century period) without recognizing differences or contextual struggles. He labels the precariat as a ‘dangerous class’ based on the various negative outcomes of insecurity, and prioritizes policy makers and a specific sector of the precariat (the young and educated) as the agents to realize his (rather paternalistic) vision for change as seen in A Precariat Charter. He thereby ignores how ‘collective actors with different vulnerabilities and resources [are] able to forge common struggles’ (Paret 2016: 185). Several authors, in contrast to Standing, argue that Fordism was an exception (even within Western Europe) rather than an employment norm from which we have deviated (Neilson and Rossiter 2008; Mezzadra 2011). Neilson and Rossiter (2008) perceive that, because precarity is required for capitalist production and reproduction, it could contribute to new forms of political organization, but this would mean pushing the concept further and also not employing it as the basis for struggle in a universal or monopolizing way. While they do not see precarity as a unitary experience, they argue that it offers the opportunity for translation between different experiences of precarity (discussed further below). Lorey echoes their point, stating that what those struggling against precarization have in common is not their identity but experiences (2010). The chapters on solidarity in this volume are collected in the spirit of encouraging experience-based translation, rather than seeking a common or unitary identity, as will be discussed below. Indeed, this approach reflects Kelly Staples’ call to collapse ‘the distinction between what is realistic and what is ideal’ by contending with the ‘social space’ of solidarity, rather than understanding it in connection with abstract principles on the one hand or sovereign interests on the other (Staples 2019: 170). Waite also warns against universalizing precarity or the ‘precariat’ as it is complex and heterogeneous, but recognizes the possibility for ‘work-based solidarity’

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in certain spatiotemporal contexts (425). Sandro Mezzadra goes further to argue that ‘free’ wage labour is only one form within capitalism and should be understood as located within ‘forms of “dependent” labour, ranging from slavery to informal labour, from wage labour to formally independent labour’ (2011: 159). These forms of labour are not solely shaped by economic factors but also by ‘war making, the state, empire building, political struggle, citizenship, capital/labour relations, unionization, racism, gender, and so on’ (Chalcraft in Mezzadra 2011: 161), meaning that labour power is neither abstract nor universal (2011: 163– 164). Lorey agrees that precarization should be understood beyond the economic dimension and indeed manifests itself in various contradictory (gendered, racialized, sexualized, professional) subjectivities at different times (in Puar 2012). In contrast also to work-based definitions of precarity, Judith Butler starts from the position that precarity is a shared human condition and ‘common non-foundation’ based on our interdependence, but recognizes that the strength of the social bond that sustains us varies based on the presence or absence of political and economic institutions that provide for and protect bodily needs (Butler in Puar 2012: 170). She argues that there is currently an ‘unequal distribution of precarity’ based on who is seen as human, grievable, and worthy of protection, representing a loss in the social bond. Nancy Ettlinger similarly argues that precarity, despite materializing in different ways, ‘is located in the microspaces of everyday life and is an enduring feature of the human condition’ (2007: 320). In so doing she argues against limiting precarity to the outcomes of terrorism or labour conditions insofar as ‘bounding precarity spatially and temporally is an implicitly essentialist enterprise’ driven by urges for certainty (2007: 320). Lorey takes Butler and Ettlinger’s points further to argue that ‘precariousness not only includes humans, but it also exceeds humanity and is relatable to everything that acts’ (in Puar 2012: 173). There have therefore been calls to broaden precarity, and indeed survival, beyond work, and even beyond the human (see Armstrong, this volume). Franco Barchiesi takes these critiques of precarity in a different direction, disrupting the experience-based notion of solidarity. He argues that precarity is insufficient to describe experiences of Blackness because the difference between slavery and waged work is not just a matter of degree. Indeed, extreme precarity is the moment before the condition of social death experienced by ‘enslaved Blacks’ and indeed, for Black people, the denial of life is what makes them ‘productive’ within capitalism. This

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condition cannot be resolved through the ‘new social movements’, which are implicated in antiblackness to the extent that they ‘keep grounding their optimistic sense of agency in the celebration of life and its limitless productive potentials’ (9). This does not mean that Black struggles, including those of Black workers, are insignificant but that they ‘cannot undo Blackness as a constantly re-enacted ontological positionality’ (9). The extension of precarity from a purely work-related condition means an expansion of its potential for solidarities, but also indicates the potential limits of this concept to ground collective action. Nick Bernards’ chapter in this volume could be seen as an example of Black solidarity that challenges us to think about the potential positional re-enactment of Blackness therein. It argues that the brief period of ‘social citizenship’ and ‘standard’ working relations in the global North, does not capture the contestations around the connections between ‘nationhood, citizenship, “working-class” identities’, especially in the contexts of ‘decolonization, state formation and global governance’. In this way he suggests the necessary entanglement of multiple identities rather than their rejection in favour of experience-based solidarities. In relation to the transnational character of precarity, Bernards discusses the contestations over the kind of international solidarities with which African workers should engage, which raised questions about the relationship between ‘nation, “class,” and irregular work’. He argues that the reshaping of class, which occurs in tandem with national/global struggles around ‘race, gender, colonialism, and citizenship’ must be examined to understand its role in international relations. He suggests doing so through Gramsci’s concept of ‘political relations of force’, furthering understandings of how solidarities around precarity go beyond worker solidarities. He argues that ‘contra any assumptions linking precarity to the degradation of sovereignty and citizenship, in global perspective precarious workers (and many more importantly, the political articulations of precarious workers with normalized or organized ones) have frequently been central to articulations of sovereignty and citizenship’. In contrast to Neilson and Rossiter he argues that we cannot assume that precarity entails the ‘erosion of citizenship’, but that the contested relationship between citizenship and sovereignty is one that requires careful study, in the context of ‘multiscalar patterns of struggle’. Solidarity within IR has also been conceived as an ‘active’ practice in contrast to risk and vulnerability, which are seen as acting upon passive subjects. Precarity’s conceptual distinctiveness is therefore what makes

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that link between active and passive. Waite argues that precarity is distinct from concepts like risk and vulnerability insofar as it denotes ‘both a condition and possible point of mobilisation among those experiencing precarity’ (2009: 413). The question is, in speaking of both a common condition and point of mobilization, what might precarity research offer that studies of risk and vulnerability don’t seem to? The ‘becoming-common’ of precariousness is one way in which precarity might form the basis for collective and active resistance in a way that risk and vulnerability cannot. Neilson and Rossiter suggest that the way to understand any form of ‘common’ is through transnational struggle and the practice of ongoing translation and mistranslation. They state that ‘at stake is neither alliance-building based on what used to be known as international solidarity nor a struggle for mutual recognition that binds subjects in relations of identity and difference. Rather, connection involves a process of permanent translation’ (2008: 65). Lorey similarly argues that ‘there is not a singular “we” founded in common precariousness but a contingent coming together that invents and practices forms of solidarity that could be a first step towards organizing and instituting “bonds that sustain us” (Judith)—without (re)distributing new forms of precariousness in precarity and without protecting only some and not protecting others’ (in Puar 2012: 173). As an example of mobilization underscored by translation, Lorey examines, for example, how EuroMayDay forged alliances between ‘precarious creatives on the one hand and the excluded precarious workers on the other (the white “lower class,” migrants, or illegalized persons)’ (2010: 3). Lorey critiques Hardt and Negri in that she sees ‘becoming-common as political agency’ rather than seeing the common as ‘a social ontological constitution’ (5). For her, the common is not an ontological category because it has to emerge and be shaped in conflict and struggle. Lorey argues that ‘the ontological common of precariousness is not sufficient to develop a political understanding of precarity’ (5), seeing precarity instead as a productive tool of governance, exploitation and also a means of ‘potentially empowering subjectification’ (6). More specifically she states that what those struggling against precarization have in common is ‘a desire to make use of the productivity of precarious living and working conditions to change these modes of governing, a means of working together to refuse and elude them’ (2). We see here how precarity makes solidarity visible differently from cosmopolitanisms that approach solidarity through the concept

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of humanity. Whereas Vivienne Jabri identifies a political cosmopolitanism—which takes seriously postcolonial critique and local resistance to violent and exclusionary practices—in contrast to liberal cosmopolitanism ‘located in a transcendent sphere of humanity’ (Jabri 2007: 716), the interest here is in exploring precarity politics beyond the notion of precarity as a universal condition of vulnerability. Unlike humanity, which serves as the origin of and orientation for many cosmopolitan notions of solidarity, precarity conceptually elides such transcendence with its inherent tensions. Echoing these discussions and in contrast to collective resistance based on labour precarity, Wanda Vrasti’s chapter in this volume argues for new bonds of solidarity which are not based on being workers, favouring instead experience-based bonds. She argues that Fordism benefitted mainly male industrial workers, but even this came at the cost of their ‘right to political militancy and aspirations for workplace democracy’. In the post-Fordist era, workers have been divided in terms of those who can afford and are privileged by precarity (in the sense of independent and flexible working conditions) and those for whom it is a ‘life sentence’. The ideas of autonomy and self-fulfilment in work have also become associated with neoliberalism and those privileged within it (technical and creative workers). Instead these notions should be understood as promising freedom and greater control over one’s work‚ life and economic destiny, socialist ideals that currently serve capitalist ends. Vrasti suggests, therefore, that instead of returning to Fordism we should work towards a system that offers more people access to autonomous working conditions. She makes the case for ‘post-work’ politics, which recognizes that work is no longer needed to facilitate production and therefore full employment is impossible. To do so, we need to separate our definition of worth from our participation in labour, and restructure our production, reproduction, and resources to make time for life beyond work (e.g. reduced hours and a social wage). She states that, ‘in a post-work society, casual labor would not be used as a perfidious opportunity to de-securitize and de-stabilize workers, but as a chance to free up more time for the kinds of autonomous, collaborative activities people now have to sacrifice material security and personal well-being for’. This approach is, according to Vrasti, also more ecologically sustainable, as it recognizes that resource extraction, industrial production and mass consumption are not desirable. According to Vrasti, what is standing in the way of this shift is global capital and specifically the role of debt, which has arisen because jobs

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and wages are effectively decreasing as production does not require work. Debt has become a new justification for more work. Similarly, Ivanka Antova and Bal Sokhi-Bully’s chapter in this volume puts forward an experience-based notion of solidarity, arguing that within governmental relations there is the potential to resist, not through individual counter-conduct but ‘to engage in collective counter-behaviour and form counter-communities’ that are not defined by work. Antova and Sokhi-Bully’s notion of counter-conduct ‘refers to those collectivities of individuals who refuse the right way to be in community and society; who behave otherwise and so demonstrate how different, noninstrumental collective forms are possible’. They emphasize that this is not spectacular resistance that escapes precarity but involves rethinking relationality and the opportunities to ‘perform struggle collectively’. They draw on Foucault’s understanding of friendship to argue that friendship is a creative and performative enactment of counter-community, offering the possibility to resist precarity through ‘the exercise of a new (relational) right that counters government through community’, examining ‘the promise that it holds for being otherwise, and being disabled, within today’s community and society’. They use the example of the (relational) right not to work, and how ‘community-threatening’ counter-communities can, through friendship and performing rights (rather than the current ‘active citizens’ or new disabled communities), refuse and challenge the rhetoric of (productive) community and community rights outlined above, ultimately creating new collective bonds. At the same time counter-communities that perform friendship have transformative potential insofar as they create new culture (not a disabled culture but broader), a culture of disability (non-productivity) or a shared ‘(disabled) mode of life’ that is not community-threatening but ‘community-friendly’. The chapters in this volume go beyond the notion of employment-based solidarities and seek to envision collective action that is not (solely) connected to labour conditions. More than this, precarity destabilizes distinctions between labour and life outside labour, allowing for a possible shift in the subject of solidarity from labour to life itself. The idea that precarity is a human condition also indicates the potential for universal forms of ‘solidarity’ that neither the concepts of risk nor vulnerability would be open to (Ettlinger 2007; Butler in Puar 2012). Both Ettlinger and Butler see the formation of contestations as constitutive of forms of solidarity. Butler sees the presence of people

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demonstrating on the streets as performative in that it forms a kind of plural and persistent ‘body politic’ that refuses to become disposable and functions, through its organizing principles, to collectively reproduce ‘equality in the midst of precarity’ (Butler in Puar 2012: 168). Ettlinger writes that the need for ‘certainty in uncertainty’ could be directed towards a ‘transformative governmentality’ which is not solely bottom-up but functions within and across scales insofar as it ‘infuses daily life’ (2007: 320–321). For Ettlinger, building a positive governmentality would require not ‘unity’ but negotiations by individuals and within/between (contingent) networks through both cooperative and confrontational politics (Ettlinger 2007: 333). Nóirín MacNamara’s chapter within this volume similarly argues that we cannot examine subjects separately as doing so functions to reproduce the ideas of white innocence and victimhood that underpinned Brexit. She suggests instead a multileveled concept of subjectivity. MacNamara critiques approaches to the social bond that emphasize differentiation— and indeed reproduce precarity—based on masculine/feminine hierarchical distinctions that are seen as inherent to particular racialized bodies rather than constructed through shifting social relations. She recognizes this binary logic as powerful but supplements it with the alternative logics of an ‘ambivalent-(yet transconnected) approach’ to understanding social ties and subjectivity that draws on the work of Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger. From Butler’s work, she employs the idea of inescapable social ties through ‘an embodied awareness of interdependencies’ and the politics of vulnerability. These ties result in ambivalent social bonds addressed through temporary connections and ‘liveable forms of destructiveness’. She engages with Ettinger to go beyond Butler’s assumption of separate yet interdependent selves and to access non-cognitive levels of subjectivity and co-becoming ‘beyond yet connected to individuated “I’s”’. The notion of transconnectedness helps us to understand alternative logics of differentiation that involve the ‘psychic plurality of partial subjects, co-emergence and working-through non-cognitive knowledge’, which can transmit traces of past and present events, whether traumatic or joyful. She argues that cultural translation within an expanded approach to subjectivity could allow white subjects responding to racial violences and exclusions to ‘inhabit the critique, with its lengthy duration’ (Ahmed 2004), rather than fantasizing about integration, harmony, and restoration with regards to legacies of modernity. Chapters in this volume generally understand that contestations take place not outside of but

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within conditions of precarity. This resistance must also occur collectively and with a recognition of social bonds—insofar as precarity is ultimately a human condition—but also different experiences of precarity.

Precarity and Work By Tahseen Kazi Consider how the following topics implicit in histories of the precarity of work might foster rethinking about labour’s entanglements in international relations: precarity about wages, precarity about the work contract, and precarity regarding preparedness for work. Precarity about wages concerns the changes that wages encumber on ways of living, including the prospect of slow death from wage insufficiency, and felt lack of control over wages (Vosko 2009). The prospect of low wages, for example, can force abandonment of traditional or desired forms of labour. It can also necessitate simultaneously enacting disparate talents in attempts to hold multiple jobs, each low-paying. Precarity regarding the work contract stems from how contracts and agreements, in formal and informal work, restrict capacities, such as workers’ capacities to collectively bargain, to publicly disclose work practices and to assure protections related to their labour. Additionally, precarity about the work contract is about the inherent finitude of contracts, their limited tenure, which forces workers to retain an attitude of openness to the ever-present possibility of having to reinvest into finding new work again. It pertains to workers’ limited protections from bodily harm and the limited control over the conditions of work that they codify. Precarity regarding the contract also arises from the knowledge that contracts are difficult to arrive at in the first place due to the geographic, psychological, educational, temporal, and political spaces (to name just a few) between the self as aspiring worker and the contract itself, a mediated space populated by many kinds of employment brokers, as well as notions about race, gender, social networks, class, caste, (non)citizenship, educational systems, and the expectation of competition (Deshingkar 2019). Another aspect of precarity regarding contracts has to do with the cultures of contracts which depend on the vicissitudes—or even absence—of regulations. Regulations are often agreed upon between state authorities and employers, and can affect a worker’s exposure to harm, their status in the employment agreement, and their options to exit (Kalleberg and Vallas 2018; Webster et al. 2008). For example, one result of such regulations

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is that certain workers have to sustain ‘permanently temporary migrant’ status for years and decades, along with the transient forms of life this entails (Swider 2015). Precarity regarding preparedness for work speaks of precarity’s linkage to preoccupation, to projection, and to labour experienced as toil and suffering thrown forth for a hoped-for future. When linked to precarity, projection, and preoccupation take the form of an injunction of preparedness. Anxieties regarding this injunction underlie investments in attempts to shape aspects of encounters with prospective employers. The investments made here include fulfilling education and training expectations, meeting requirements of physical fitness, acquiring state-authorization for the work, cultivating an expected capacity to produce affective states as the ‘immaterial labour’ involved in work, and producing for the prospective employer an already existing, appropriately individuated, ‘branded’ self (Vallas and Hill 2018). All this must be done prior to the employment contract, as sacrifices to be made for the uncertain salvation of becoming a worker. Precarity, here, can take the form of an openness to direction by a broker or other mediator in the ‘job market’ and heavy investments of wealth for preparedness to attain employment. It can also involve breaking state and other laws and thus wagering bodily harm and incarceration to position oneself favourably for employment. Moreover, the injunction does not end with the contract because maintenance of employment status necessitates self-reproduction as worker. As a result, the feeling of precarity is about (in)abilities to reconcile lifestyles, officially and culturally given measures of how life ought to be lived on a given income, with costs stemming from the requirement of self-reproduction. Work precarity thus describes an affective state of predictable unpredictability that has a social existence as an encultured openness to suffering from and coping with ever-changing ways of living, a sensitivity to the finitude of states of being, and anxiety regarding preparedness for work. Openness to unplanned ways of living from wage precarity, openness to the finitude of forms of life due to contract-related precarity, and preoccupation as an injunction to practice a precarious preparedness for unexpected turns in wage employment circumstances, together might be said to mark work with a collective mood or ‘structure of feeling’ of precarity (Anderson 2017). Baey and Yeoh (2018: 267) describe precarity as a condition-in-the-making and add that precarity is

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‘often experienced as an accumulation of circumstances that chisels away— continually and even relentlessly—at the worker’s sense of self and wellbeing. In other words, as a sense of precarity increasingly takes root in individual lives, it soon becomes a “structure of feeling” operating across this category of workers and their families’.

Precarity is affective, but its affect has a social life that materializes in how labouring lives are lived together. All this is to say that precarity gives structure to suffering and describes a problematic, and therefore politically intensive, collective state. Moreover, it is distinct from mourning as another affective state that has received attention recently in international studies (Auchter 2014; Wang 2008). For Judith Butler, whose work on mourning much of this scholarship depends, loss and dispossession are grievable for changing the self and revealing that being exists for, or by virtue of, another (Butler 2003). Precarity, by contrast, reveals something else and speaks to a different politics. Precarity comes with the sense that memory, experience, and anticipation of change describes an uncontrollable and unrelenting finitude that runs through self and self-other relations. It is a sense of unpredictability, dependence on the actions of others, and the finitude of forms of labour and life. As a structure of feeling, it coheres socially into ‘stray life’, life as running loose with a perpetual openness ‘to temporary and contingent relations’ (Neilson and Rossiter 2005). Yet academic discourses on the connection between precarity and time have not centred on the temporality of relations that produce precarity or on precarity as a distinctively projective affect. The prominent debates have been about whether precarity is an eternal ‘condition’ or the result of a situation in effect only since informalization and flexibilization of work in the so-called developed world following a few decades of stable, full-time, and salaried employment standards. It is worth noting that the conceptual temporalization/eternalization that has been made of precarity has occurred in attempts to mobilize a new politics on the basis of precarity and precariousness in endeavours to critique not precarity itself but something else: neoliberalism in the case of some European movements and Standing’s oeuvre, and state security policies in Butler’s call for recognition of equality regarding grievability. Such temporalization/eternalization of precarity comes with its own problems. For one, both discourses elide—by making precarity out as a new concept rather than an uncovered but already implicit subject—how remarkable it is

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that precarity, as a structure of feeling and condition-in-the-making of predictable unpredictability, has not long been a focus of study. Given that the circumstantial evidence shows precarity to be widely experienced and multiply expressed, how come it has not already long received sociological and political attention? While it gained notoriety as a concept by which to claim a new class struggle, the intellectual interest sustained in recent years has turned to precarity as a ‘connecting device’ for analysis of previously seemingly disparate concerns including citizenship, labour, and migration (Neilson and Rossiter 2005). Here is another manner in which precarity strays. It coheres in multiple labouring contexts. This sustained interest is as if precarity’s occultation was withdrawn just a little in the course of going about doing something else—trying to revive class struggle (EuroMayDay, Standing), seeking a basis for changing early twenty-first-century security policy cultures (Butler)—and once its covers slipped the appetite to see precarity surged. As if the slight unveilings carried out in essentially other political engagements called forth a profusion of multidisciplinary investments. Much of these investments have taken the form of critique of the fixes proposed by Standing and Butler: respectively, class-based collective action and recognition of an equality of grievability. Acting in the knowledge of criticisms of both Butler’s precariousness and Standing’s precarity but moving beyond critique, the chapters on work in this volume withhold such temporalizations and present contraindicating experiences. In the chapter ‘Within the Factory of Mobility’, Claudia Bernardi counters claims that link precarity to First World neoliberalism through her example of twentieth century migrant worker braceros programs in the United States, illustrating how these programmes were characterized by uncertain contracts, and by regimes of debt and of work as a reward for compliant behaviour. Rather than focusing on the erosion of previously available worker-citizen rights in the chapter ‘Fashioning and Contesting Precariousness’, Hironori Onuki studies the production of precarious, unauthorized migrant labour in contemporary Japan. Matt Davies reads three films about migrant labourers, in the chapter ‘Aesthetics and Politics of Precarity’, to depict how each film, in its own way, narrates precarity as subjectivating outcomes of relations rather than as the specification of an objective or subjective condition. Davies describes how the precarities with which the films’ subjects live and act are neither reducible to particular employment relations nor generalizable to a universal ethical condition. In ‘Precarity

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Unbound’, Nevzat Soguk accepts that neoliberal flexibilization of labour and the gig economy deploy structured vulnerabilities but adds that today precarity is increasingly recognized as capital’s strategy rather than merely its undesigned outcome. Soguk’s point is that globalization’s proliferation of migration and neoliberalism’s flexibilization, rather than producing precarity as a novel condition, have made visible aspects of capital’s modus operandi that had previously been obscured in certain sites by welfare policies. A common approach of the contributions to this volume on work is to see precarity for what it is, compared to what is claimed about it, and to ask how such claims are produced. It is to register precarity politics as productive of neurotic securitization, of suffering, but also, as Davies finds, of actions and identifications ‘not previously defined as political’ (Davies, this volume). The questions considered in the chapters include: How is precarity occluded in work relations? Where is precarity politics locatable? How is precarity politics practiced? Additionally, the reader might locate a second thematic weight of this volume’s contributions on testing, marking, and probing international political economic links to affective states of anxiety, social belonging, insecurity, and proximity to what Berlant (2007) terms the ‘good life’. Depicting work precarity in this way makes Palgrave’s International Political Economy series an appropriate venue for probing questions about the politics of working culture, work subjectivity, and the affective experience of work. By linking these two, labour and life, precarity shifts from being a trait by which to denounce well known political institutions such as state security and global neoliberalism into a discernible condition-in-the-making. As a third common theme, the authors in the section on work see precarity as the subject of political practice, and articulate different forms of international precarity politics through studies of labouring migration. The questions posed by this volume’s contributions to labour and work are about the precarity politics by which subjectivities are shaped, and precarity politics’ multiscalar (local, international) contexts in the making of postcolonial statehood. Bernardi describes an assemblage of political devices—national, subnational and informal—that accrete in the ‘Braceros Program’ for managing labour surplus that produces a permanent and controlled circulation of precarious, mobile, Mexican living labour in a ‘factory of mobility’. Through analysis of three films about migrants, Davies contends that precarity politics manifests from coping with

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particular distributions of uncertainty and certainty (as policing) in space and time, and the capacity of any politics of precarity to disrupt policing lies in embodied everyday rhythms of creative coping. Onuki sees politics as immanent to precarity’s formation, by showing how the formation of migrant worker precarity involves moments of success such as the establishment of Japanese ‘special residence status’ without the previous requisites of marriage or blood ties. In an unexpected overturning of the ordinal relations precarity invokes, Soguk argues that the visibility of migrants among citizens undermines the façade of rights-bearing citizenry which, until recently covered over the shared plight of citizens and non-citizens positioned as mere ‘resources’ in global capitalist relations. These contributions each address, in their own way, how precarity produces intensely political sites—some hyper-local, some at larger scales, but in every case carrying a transnational aspect—in which subjects and relations between subjects are liable to transformation. The chapters in the section on work demonstrate an implicit awareness of—and critical attitude towards—the ordinal scales with which everyday practices of precarity are publicly presented. For decades, if not centuries, consumers of the news have been daily reminded of who the precarious are, and how their precarity ranks with respect to others’ throughout the globe. The Coronavirus pandemic has surely undermined this global ordinal structuring. As this chapter is finalized in March 2020, the relatively effective abatement to date of Covid-19 contagion in South Korea and Singapore has led BBC News to provoke readers by asking ‘What could the West learn from Asia?’ (Cheung 2020) even as Donald Trump attempts to rehabilitate colonial hierarchies by reference to the pandemic as the ‘China virus’ and The Economist struggles to explain away, by analogy to plumbing (Staff 2020), the patent irresiliency of the US financial system (not to mention the further devastation its bailout would have in store for workers in the United States and abroad). By contrast, the authors of the volume’s section on work are not seeking to point out precarious life only to tell the reader that it is a shame that more important matters, such as corporate bailouts, warrant what limited investments are available. It is not a rehabilitated ordinal recognition that is at stake in their use of labour studies as a conduit for making a political economics that just might yet have political effect. Rather than ‘sorting people into categories that become selfperpetuating’ and entrenched (Alberti et al. 2018), the research on the precarity of work conducted for this volume undertook the slow labour of

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recording how precarious, labouring interdependencies sometimes enact therapeutic, non-pathologizing, and perhaps even radically democratic ways of life. Their contributions attend to what Han calls the ‘bits and pieces of social life’ without making these interdependencies fit into some or the other grid of precarity as a master concept (Han 2018). The contributions proliferate the sites of work-related politics. Making a point of noting that they cannot fall under predefined categories of political events (strikes, protest marches), Davies lifts up such events as contending for the TV remote at a bar, the decision not to hitch a ride in the confines of the back of a truck, and a workplace conversation about the prefecture of one’s birth as each worthy of political exploration. He adds that the site of political analysis is precarity itself and not one or another choreographed activity, writing that ‘Politics occurs in the new connections between subjects that precarity might enable’. Soguk delves into the political agency of a casual but remarkable conversation between an Italian fascist and Gambian immigrant. Bernardi sees both politics and ‘resistance’ in the desertions and informal solidarity networks created by workers. The stories that the authors weave depict precarity as a social state productive of active politics, rich with affects beyond suffering, involving different mixes of precarity about wages, the work contract and preparedness for work. By way of closing this section, outlines of the chapters on precarity and work follow. Whereas much of the focus has been on how new employment conditions create precarity, in Chapter 9, Soguk’s interest is in how, in the wake of globalized capitalism, migrants carry an insurrectional capacity to ‘liberate life from sovereignty’. Soguk reminds the reader that migrants— who know about the precarities emergent in the state they have left, in stateless life and in the states they go to—thereby ‘know the perils of the citizen/nation/state formula’. Thus, migrants’ transversal imaginaries and insurrectional subjectivities act as ‘existential mirrors’ that present to citizens precarities otherwise obfuscated by state practices to idealize and de-weaponize migrant subjectivities. Engaging with Paul Virilio’s warning of the demise of rights-bearing citizenship (Virilio, 2005), Soguk responds by showing migrants’ democratizing agency to reveal how transversal capitalism has produced a universalized precarity. In Chapter 10, Bernardi makes the case that migrant work is part of an assemblage of political devices for managing labour surpluses, turning the

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trans-state mobility of living labour into a permanent and controlled capitalist circulation. It is this management of mobility that attunes the act of crossing borders to precariousness. Bernardi depicts precarity and mobility as linked in chains of production, constituting ‘factories of mobility’ in which intermediaries including governments and capital owners expropriate living labour and its socio-spatial formations. Beyond countering claims that link precarity to First World neoliberalism by her example of the migrant braceros program, Bernardi shows how these programmes were characterized by uncertain contracts, and regimes of debt and work, as reward. By way of a sensitive commentary, in Chapter 11, on three films—one about a Bolivian migrant working in Argentina, another that follows two Afghan refugees’ westward journey and a third about a Belgian young woman returning to work in her birthplace of Japan—Davies describes how each film in its own way depicts precarity as neither reducible to particular employment relations nor generalizable to a universal ethical condition. For Davies, precarity is constituted through relations between subjects and objects as increasing uncertainty is met with the policing of the subject who must act as if the connections between intentions and plans and outcomes are broken. Here, the politics of precarity are depicted as emerging not from actions or identifications previously defined as political as such, nor from a simple recognition of the subjectivity of an other. Davies tells us that politics occurs in the new connections between subjects that precarity might enable. In Chapter 12, Onuki resists the notion that Japan’s ‘gap society’ has created conditions for workers such that life for Japanese insecure labour is increasingly resembling that of migrant workers. Onuki traces the state of migrant labour following Japan’s 1990 Immigration Control Act, noting that it has recently realized as, on the one hand, a relative surge in legal immigration of ‘unskilled labour’ into Japan and, on the other, a steep decline in ‘overstayers’ due to strict enforcement of visa limits. Precarity for ‘overstayers’ who remain takes the form of an attractive corporate demand for their work combined with the constant fear of being caught by immigration officials during their daily commute. Onuki describes sometimes successful attempts by workers to organize collective legal claims and thereby attain special qualification for residency.

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Notes 1. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, this work was first shown in the USA March 29–September 2018. 2. This work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco (SFMOMA) in 2018. 3. The term is borrowed from Alphin and Debrix (2019). 4. Shown multiple times in art galleries and conferences since 2015, this work was most recently exhibited in Amsterdam, Dublin and Lisbon in 2018. 5. This collection, edited by Ritu Vij, appeared in a 2019 Special Section of Globalizations, 16(4), 506–591. 6. As of the early morning hours of 17 April 2020, 2.4 million cases of COVID-19 have been documented in 211 countries with the death-toll recorded at 165,000, according to data provided by the Johns Hopkins University. 7. Simon Armitrage’s new poem, ‘Lockdown’ published in The Guardian, 21 March 2020. 8. Clapping in support of health-workers on the front-lines of the pandemic has been enthusiastically embraced by citizens of India, Italy, Spain and Turkey; the campaign ~clapforourcarers in support of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom inaugurated on 26 March 2020 now occurs weekly; the United States has followed suit. The Philadelphia Harmonic Orchestra’s decision to play Beethoven to an empty concert hall, the U2 frontman Bono’s new composition, ‘Love Be Known’ written for Italy where nearly 5000 have died, and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra’s rendition of ‘Ode to Joy’ assembled from the home confines of participating musicians are but a few examples of solidarities forged in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. 9. As governments scramble to contain the economic tsunami caused by the coronavirus pandemic, with businesses shutting down as ‘shelter-in-place’ and lockdown orders mandate social-distancing, the announcement of large bailout packages, $2.2 trillion in the United States, £330billion in the United Kingdom thus far, bring into stark relief the essentially ideological character of heretofore ‘laissez-faire’ neoliberal states. Slavoj Zizek’s recent speculation that the pandemic might yet create the conditions of possibility for a communist state, if still utopian, appears less far-fetched as the United Kingdom announces state guarantees of 80% of workers’ wages for those made jobless as a result of layoffs during the pandemic.

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PART I

Precarity and Sovereignty

CHAPTER 2

Notes on Abandonment Philip Armstrong

‘Zones of abandonment’ in Brazil, in which the homeless and mentally ill are left to die (Biehl 2013). A dead child face down on the beach near Bodrum, drowned as a family flees Syria by boat, headed towards the island of Kos that they never reach—just one more piece of ‘detritus’ washed up and ‘left abandoned’ on the shores of the Mediterranean. A ‘land of open graves’ in the Sonoran Desert in the Southwestern United States with the bodies of undocumented migrants, strewn across the ground like the carcasses of dead animals, ‘abandoned’ to the flies under a relentless sun (De León 2015). ‘Children abandoned on east Africa’s “roads of death”’ (a Reuters headline reads), where Somali mothers are ‘abandoning their dying children by the roadside as they travel to overwhelmed emergency food centers in drought-hit eastern Africa’ (Hornby and Babington 2011). Whether journalistic reports, anthropological accounts, titles for photographic coverage, ethnographic narratives, political commentary or documentary footage, these various scenes of abandonment are evoked in ways that are at once geographically

P. Armstrong (B) Department of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_2

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specific and singular in their contexts and occasions, and yet increasingly blurred in a seemingly unending litany or catalogue of our everyday global condition, interminable tableaux of our planetary turn. Often isolated, insulated, ‘disappeared’ from public view, these scenes are now rendered visible, open to global circulation and exchange, exposed, disseminated, publicized, analysed—scenes that remain at once exemplary and yet banal, at once pictures of extraordinary intimacy and suffering and yet testifying to the nauseating and indifferent evidence of spectacle, at once a showing and gesture of compassion and yet the posturing of a worldly revelation that reveals nothing other than the world’s extreme poverty and destitution. If references to ‘abandonment’ have proliferated in relation to a wide range of recent political discourses, journalistic reports, visual images, and social commentaries—an epithet that seems increasingly appropriate to capture much of the world’s misery—I want to suggest that the exact tenor, scope, and critical significance of the term remain difficult to pin down. Whether used as a mere description or deployed more analytically as a conceptual tool, the assumptions and presuppositions inherent in the deployment of abandonment as a term often remain obscure and deeply ambiguous, lost and dissimulated amidst the very ease with which these same references find their contemporary resonance and appropriate relevance. The following ‘notes’ are thus quite modest. Arranged into ten fragments or ‘vignettes’, they seek to address and engage these very assumptions and presuppositions, opening up paths in which abandonment might find some renewed sense of its conceptual consequence or critical import, beyond or prior to the ease with which it finds such descriptive and widespread purchase. At the same time, I want to argue that our concern here is how these pervasive references to abandonment might begin to relate to a more established set of discourses foregrounding questions of precarity and precarious life. For these are terms with which abandonment appears to share much in common, even if the literature on precarity and precarious life is now considerably more expansive, more widely recognized in debates about different forms of contemporary existence and forms of life, for which abandonment might appear as an evocative but relatively marginal term. In short, rather than assessing the legitimacy of abandonment in light of its application to a specific geopolitical context or its relevance—its appropriateness—to the scenes evoked at the outset, rather than calculating whether abandonment is (politically) adequate to its object and rather than assessing

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whether abandonment is more or less critically pertinent than discourses on precarity, these brief notes seek to create a space in which appeals to abandonment might open towards some renewed measure of the term’s conceptual and critical force. 1) On the one hand, abandonment seems to capture well an economic, political and social condition, in the sense that Hannah Arendt will refer to a ‘human condition’ (Arendt 1958) whose economic, political, and social implications demand not only to be taken into consideration but rethought and rearticulated. Understood as a condition, abandonment is then recognized in a number of pertinent contexts or recognizable situations, in which people or certain parts of a population are subject to radical insecurity, uncertainty, precarious existence, capture, and vulnerability (and where the characterization of these forms of existence as ‘radical’ becomes an index of the extremity or degree of abandonment at stake). These contexts or situations may include being abandoned by the state, by governmental institutions and policies, by a sovereign authority that had previously sought to include or declared all members as equals or by an authority that had guaranteed forms of protection, security, and inclusive citizenship. Or abandonment suggests the demise of established forms of political representation, speech and meaningful existence within a people or body politic, a disconnection of subjects, sections of the population, groups or classes from active participation in forms of governance, civil society, deliberation, and democratic rule. Here abandonment further contributes to what Zygmunt Bauman has characterized as those ‘wasted lives’ (Bauman 2003) that testify to the unbinding or disintegration of anything resembling a social contract, the ‘superfluous’ and marginalized populations of outcasts, migrants, refugees, and exiles that modernity has at once abandoned and simultaneously produced. Or it points to the capture of subjects by capital, by what Claudia Bernadi in this volume terms ‘structured labor mobility regimes’. Entangled in relations of power or force, even when subject to neglect, rejection, or exclusion, abandonment further addresses those refused, seeking, or unable to attain the membership, citizenship, rights, security, or welfare provided by a state, a condition that either has never existed, that no longer exists in the same way, or that is promised but never realizable, for which the ‘refugee’ has become one of our most visible emblems. This would also include those who might willingly refuse the protection of the state, who willingly discard the conditions of membership, security, welfare, and political and social inclusivity—indeed, those who embrace abandonment (whether

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militantly or romantically) as the enabling condition of an individual or collective resistance to or autonomy from what are considered the state’s coercions and demands. Situated on a planetary scale, appeals to abandonment also refer to different parts of the world in which peoples are severed from the connections, associations, visibility or sense of belonging granted to or experienced by others, opening up areas, regions or zones of the world characterized by neglect, desertion, rejection, exile, invisibility, dispossession, the loss of global interdependency and opportunity, what James Ferguson has aptly termed the abandonment of those in ‘global shadows’ (Ferguson 2006).1 In short, understood as a condition, abandonment fits well with different histories, logics, and practices of marginalization, banishment, segregation, and apartheid, with different logics and practices of inclusivity, exclusion or ‘differential inclusion’, as well as with the myriad forms of economic, political, social, and cultural disenfranchisement. 2) On the other hand, the pertinence and critical relevance of abandonment—whether for simple forms of social description or as a category for political thought—seems to coincide with a perceived lack of critical rigour and conceptual focus. Above all, the term may come across as too existential or too psychological to have the appropriate legitimacy required for the designs or scientific ambitions of established strands of political discourse and social commentary, which may well account for the relative ease with which it applies to such a diversity of contexts and situations. In this sense, abandonment has strong intimations not just of a condition but of a state of being that comes across as too emotionally charged, evoking an existential or subjective condition that lacks established stable or recognizable economic, social, and political referents. Indeed, there seems to be an excess of pathos implied by the term and overshadowing its use; that even if we have come to recognize the importance of the affective dimension of all political discourse and the concrete effects or material conditions tied to such affects, abandonment connotes an excess of pathos, at worst a tone of melodrama and pity— of being forsaken, left behind, evoking a sense of piteousness—arousing more a mood than a mode of analysis, more an emotion than a form of conceptual elucidation. The turn to abandonment further suggests an ontological condition that resists its more formal articulation as a political ontology, as if this excess of pathos opens towards conditions of existence that remain too fundamentally ambivalent for understanding and

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delimiting those forms of life defined by exclusion, segregation, and disenfranchisement, too hesitant and uncritical for interrogating how exclusion, extreme vulnerability, and disenfranchisement actually came into being in the first place. We will return to this question of excess at stake here. For the moment, if abandonment potentially suffers the same fate as alienation as a term (with which it seems to share a certain proximity), collapsing under the weight of a critical interpretation of its assumptions and presuppositions, it may appear that abandonment is useful as a loose description of a widespread condition but much too equivocal and imprecise to constitute an analytic measure of concrete, historical, differential, or intersectional forms of social existence. At best, it becomes an extension of the tragic mode or another iteration of nihilism. Similarly, for those invested in certain quantifiable forms of political discourse or the precisions required for ‘policy’, for those invested in a science of the political as the arena for offering solutions to the world’s problems, abandonment’s failure to lend itself (in the way that, say, ‘poverty’ seems to lend itself) to statistical analysis, quantifiable metrics, or sociological calculation potentially condemns abandonment to an evocative if perhaps finally empty category for political practice or the effective implementation of policy. Indeed, even if we refuse the ambitions and rhetorics of quantifiable metrics, policy, or claims to scientificity, the turn to abandonment still seems incapable of addressing the constitution or affirmation of political agency, of providing an adequate measure of effective social transformation or of offering any form of strategic resistance to social injustice. At the same time, the relative lack of specificity regarding those identities or groups to which abandonment is attached, the lack of historical precision for the geopolitical contexts in which it is considered relevant, the resistance of the term to more lasting and legitimate forms of political discourse—in short, the very ease with which it can be deployed—taken together, these reservations point to the problem of attaining a precise analysis or even problematization of the differential distribution of those peoples whose condition is seemingly best described in terms of ‘abandonment’, but whose phrasing in precisely these same terms tends to dissimulate and efface the very ‘condition’ they seek to describe, delimit, understand, articulate—indeed, contest—in the first place. 3) References to abandonment are thus marked by an essential ambivalence, pointing to a proliferation of discourses seeking to describe and interrogate conditions of exclusion, segregation, and disenfranchisement while simultaneously suggesting a marked hesitation, reserve, or rejection

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regarding the term’s effective critical pertinence. There are two ways in which this ambivalence may be addressed. The first suggests that this ambivalence concerning abandonment in the proliferation of recent references and discourses is less an incoherence or contradiction—less the need to measure out the pros and cons of the term or their dialectical resolution—than a productive or creative ambivalence. In other words, it is less a question of the inconsistency of abandonment as a concept than of foregrounding its role as a ‘limit-concept’. Here limit-concept should be understood not as the positing or creation of a concept in its self-sufficiency, internal coherence, or potential application but rather in the way that Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer describes Carl Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty as a ‘limit-concept’ (Agamben 1998, 11). For a limit-concept for Agamben is always ‘the limit between two concepts’ in which (at least according to the example that Agamben cites from Schmitt) sovereignty cannot be separated from the concept of ‘life’. Or rather, as Agamben phrases it, sovereignty borders on the concept of ‘bare life’. Inheriting the term from Walter Benjamin, the turn to the concept of ‘bare life’ is then indissociable from an ‘abandonment’ rendered irreducible to any sense of pathos the term usually evokes. For abandonment constitutes a decisive aspect of ‘the originary juridicopolitical relation’ (109), not a condition or quality of the subject. Indeed, the ‘inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original— if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power’ (6). In turn, this emphasis on limit-concepts not only points towards Agamben’s related argument concerning the ‘zone of indistinction’ between ‘sovereign power’ and ‘bare life’, in which the classical distinction between zoe and bios is displaced into a new understanding of biopolitics. Agamben’s affirmation of a ‘limit-concept’ or ‘zone of indistinction’ also initiates and delimits the way in which ‘the originary structure and limits of the form of the State’ are placed ‘in a new perspective’ (12). We will not rehearse Agamben’s widely discussed argument concerning sovereign power, the state of exception, and the biopolitical, instead focusing here on the role of ‘abandonment’ in his argument. In other words, we are asking in what ways Agamben’s volume offers another way in which to begin to address the assumptions and presuppositions inherent in more widespread discourses of abandonment. For abandonment not only touches on a range of related terms with which it resonates: precarious life, vulnerability, austerity, destitution, poverty, disposability,

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resilient life, dereliction, dispossession, pessimism, survival, necropolitics. It is constitutive of ‘bare life’ itself or the very term that allows us to think life as ‘bare’ [nuda] in the first place, at least in the sense that abandonment is not a condition and not a quality or capacity of a subject but an analytic term that strips life back to its bare nudity, to its extremity, to its limit or mere exposure. Agamben refers to the need ‘to push the experience of abandonment to the extreme’ (60). In other words, this emphasis on abandonment as a limit-concept gestures less towards the incoherence and inconsistency of the term, in which we weigh out its advantages and disadvantages, than towards the possibility of opening up new political genealogies, genealogies in which the ‘zone of indistinction’ between sovereignty and bare life is not just structurally implicated but in which ‘the originary structure and limits of the form of the State’ are also at stake.2 We will return to Agamben’s reconception of abandonment as essential or fundamental to this ‘zone of indistinction’ between sovereignty and bare life, at least insofar as it is precisely the turn to abandonment that empties this ‘zone’ all of ground, spatial, or territorial identity, essence or foundation. Suffice it to remark that this positing of abandonment as limit-concept suggests a number of other critical consequences that we will also need to take into consideration in rethinking the term. These include the withdrawal or reconfiguring of abandonment understood merely not merely as a ‘condition’ but an exclusively ‘human’ condition. This includes the related assumption, as recent references to abandonment invariably tend to suggest, that this condition can only be articulated in ‘human’ terms.3 Secondly, the argument demands a renewed understanding and reworking of abandonment in terms of whether it suggests either modes of passivity or modes of agency and action, which suggests a further sense of being abandoned understood as a radical passivity that remains irreducible to any strict opposition between passivity and action (what is deemed ‘radical’ here again points to the question of foundations and limits). And thirdly, the argument demands a renewed understanding of the pathos that might have served to exclude abandonment as a viable form of political discourse. Here pathos is now situated as a simultaneous extension and displacement of the rhetorical modes in which the ‘pathetic’ is voiced, of π αθ ´ oς as it relates to suffering and experience within liberal, capitalist, or neoliberal regimes (a concern undertaken with remarkable precision in the writings of Asma Abbas [2010a, b]). In other words, while references to abandonment might provide a heuristic for thinking

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through these related problematics, the apparent lack of conceptual rigour and ambivalence surrounding the deployment of abandonment as a term becomes precisely a measure—as we will see, an immeasurable measure— of abandonment’s potential force as limit-concept. In short, emphasis is now placed on the invention of another sense of the political or another sense of ‘life’ in which abandonment is no longer defined, presupposed, or articulated only as the loss of an attachment, affiliation, membership, or belonging to a State form (through citizenship, rights, suffrage, security, welfare, and so on), or only as a condition of the (liberal) subject.4 Or again, abandonment radically displaces and severs any sense—implicit or explicit, desired or presupposed—in which the turn to abandonment finds its measure or force from the loss of—or nostalgia for—a given or prior identity, subjectivity, immanence, originary community, or political foundation, specifically in relation to which those abandoned once belonged (or are assumed to belong). 4) Secondly, if references to abandonment are marked by an essential ambivalence, as we have suggested, the relation—the proximities and distances—between abandonment and the more established and widely discussed discourses around precarity and precarious life must also be rethought. I have argued elsewhere that tracing out the displacements between precarity and abandonment does not entail merely separating them into distinct categories or fields of operation: social and economic on the one hand—a condition of labour, work, or social reproduction, a measure of defining quite specific conditions of precarious existence— ontological, existential, ethical, and philosophical on the other, referring to those forms of precarious life marked by vulnerability, dependency, dispossession, and exposure to the other (Armstrong 2015). Rather than distinct shifts in emphasis or categorization, the displacements between precarity and abandonment are parsed out instead as implying an intensification of precarity and its conditions (or an intensification that also includes the refusal of situating precarity or precarious life as ‘conditions’). In this sense, turning to abandonment does not betray the critical purchase of understanding precarity and forms of precarious life, the different ways in which precarity has come to intervene in established political discourses or generate shared resistance and political mobilization, or the ways precarity transforms forms of governance or the social norms, expectations, and investments regarding work and labour. Nor does the turn to abandonment obscure or recuperate the ways in which a sense of conflict and constitutive antagonism pertinent to precarity

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becomes muted, at worst rendered ‘merely’ ontological or existential, or in which the privileging of abandonment works to efface a more carefully articulated, expansive, differential, embodied sense of the conditions informing precarious existence. Nor again is it a question of precarity’s overcoming of abandonment, suggesting an implied hierarchy or dialectic between the two terms, weighing out the pros and cons of each term into livable and unlivable proportions. For the critical gesture that remains decisive here is how to push the concept of precarity to the extreme. In other words, what abandonment discloses—what it provokes and initiates at the same time—is the sense in which precarity has not been thought through far enough, not worked through to its conceptual limits or exhaustion, not thought through to its extremity, to an utter or absolute dereliction or destitution that Jean-Luc Nancy has phrased as ‘the extreme poverty of abandonment’ (Nancy 2000, 39) (as we will see, it is this phrasing that informs Agamben’s own demand, cited earlier, ‘to push the experience of abandonment to the extreme’). By insisting on this extremity, limit, or conceptual exhaustion, it is not a question— this should be evident—that there has not been enough abandonment or precarity in the world. Rather, the argument here is not to privilege either precarity or abandonment but to open up ways in which an insistence on—indeed, affirmation of—abandonment allows us to rethink precarity in and at this limit or extremity. Or again, the argument seeks at this limit or extremity provoked by the turn to abandonment not just a condition in which precarity conceptually exhausts itself but the ways in which abandonment inaugurates the limits of precarity’s constituent or transformative force, the limit in which to think what it opens and closes off and so a limit-thought that brings into relief abandonment’s potentiality (or ‘impotentiality’, as Agamben will argue). What is disclosed at this extremity is not an intensification defined by negation—at least in the sense that abandonment might be understood as the increasingly negative condition of precarity. It is not an ambivalent situation either, in the sense explored in the opening sections, an ambivalence concerning the feasibility of applying abandonment to situations and contexts in which it may or may not appear (politically) appropriate, adequate, or legitimate. Or it is only ambivalent in the strict sense of a relation in which (as Agamben’s ‘limit-concept’ attests) two limits touch or border on one another and so a limit characterized as a relation without relation (a phrase to which we will return). For this is an intensification in and at this limit and an intensification experienced precisely as an affirmation, not negation.5

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5) When situated in light of a ‘limit-concept’, any appeal that might be made to the discourse of abandonment in terms of exclusion and disenfranchisement exposes itself to the risk of miscalculating the critical implications and effects of this very discourse. There are two ways to understand this problematic. First, phrased in terms that we evoked at the outset—the assumption that peoples or parts of population are abandoned by the state that had previously sought to include all members as equals or that had guaranteed forms of protection and inclusive participation; the assumption that peoples or parts of the population are abandoned by the state by being denied welfare provisions that had previously existed; the assumption that those who are considered stateless are abandoned when lacking the attributes of citizenship; the assumption that those out of work or abandoned to economic immiseration and capture should be exposed or inculcate themselves with a new work imperative that is socially recognizable—this phrasing already misrecognizes that the conditions of abandonment from the state or provoked by the state invariably imply forms of subjection to the state. In this sense, those who are considered ‘abandoned’ are subject to calculations of state power as well as different forms of global governance, to the various social technologies and mechanisms of control and capture in which abandoned subjects, including stateless figures like refugees (or the very assumption that refugees are to be characterized as intrinsically ‘stateless’), are permanently identified, monitored, observed, evaluated, assessed, and disciplined, even as these initiatives are phrased in terms of sympathy, charity, compassion, work incentives, benevolence, research subjects, or representation. In short, the discourse of abandonment becomes here the enabling condition for thinking new forms of state or global governance, new declensions of power and identification, reinscriptions of sovereignty and its authority, and what Elizabeth Povinelli has termed those singular ‘economies of abandonment’ that the state enacts, condones, guarantees, or sets in place. Secondly—whether situated in relation to the state or not—appeals to the discourse of abandonment in terms of exclusion and disenfranchisement tend to reinscribe the very passivity and vulnerability they denounce or seek to overcome. More pertinently, the appeal to abandonment tends to both justify and legitimate those very discourses seeking to respond to a ‘condition’ characterized by those who are considered abandoned. In this sense, the turn to a discourse of abandonment tends to justify and legitimate those ‘interventions’ or policies seeking to find a solution to

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abandonment’s underlying conditions, those political, social, or economic engagements intending to improve and alleviate the conditions that determine the situation or apparent ‘crises’ of abandoned peoples. The essential complicity between abandonment and the surmounting or overcoming of the conditions in which people are said to be abandoned then works in a number of recognizable ways. Whether through humanitarian relief, charity work, missionary practices, television and online fundraising drives and pledges—all established in the name of those whose lives and communities need saving from the abandoned or destitute situation in which they are assumed to find themselves—or whether through the introduction of neoliberal techniques of governance, the imposition of deregulation and privatization, the financial assessments of austerity programmes, the opening of ‘market-driven solutions to global poverty’, the imposition of cross-conditionalities and the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes— all set in place for those assumed to lack institutional or communal structures, support, and solid social foundations, all assuming that those effected should begin to take responsibility for their passivity and feelings of abandonment—the underlying logic at work in all these cases, however different the motivations or means and however implicit or explicit the appeals to abandonment, is to posit or presuppose a condition in order to overcome, surmount, or transcend that condition. Or rather, whatever the quite different modes, discourses, and rationales motivating each of these practices, they each seek in different ways to respond to conditions evoked in terms of an abandonment by assuming the descriptions and pertinence of the destitution or incapacity of peoples in the first place—whether through sympathy, data and statistical calculation, policy reports, projection, imaginary reconstructions, fantasy, naiveté—and then offering a substitute, alternatives, strategies, policy, short and long-term solutions, and so on. The more conditions seemingly best described in terms of abandonment are posited or presupposed, the more a lack of agency is assumed or anticipated, the more those who are abandoned are assumed to be responsible for their own abandonment, the more rights are granted or bestowed to or on others, the more the pathos of abandonment shapes perceptions, images, and representations of poverty, the more others represent or speak in the name of those who have been silenced or are assumed to be without voice—in fact, the more abandonment is simply assumed as a ‘condition’ and not a limit-concept—the more these different responses and interventions not only find a measure

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of self-justification, self-legitimation, and urgency, but the sanctioning of their moral or liberal authority.6 7) In terms of the underlying logics and presuppositions informing and grounding the recent proliferation of discourses of abandonment, the primary logic in which these discourses miscalculate the effects they produce is through continual resource to an underlying dialectic. It is precisely the dialectic that organizes and sustains the very terms in which responses to abandonment find a measure of their legitimacy and justification, not to mention their moral authority and sanctification. Every time a condition of abandonment is posited in order to overcome or transcend this condition, a dialectic is at play. Every time the descriptions of abandonment are assumed as negative conditions, which then become the prior and enabling condition against which alternatives, strategies, policies, and solutions are considered determinate and achievable, a dialectic organizes the argument, governs the rationales, and sustains the reproducibility of the logic. Indeed, it is this same dialectic that governs and orients a number of related problematics, including the discourses of ‘sacrifice’ that underpin a wide range of responses (at this level, it matters little whether we refer to charity work and missionary practices, humanitarian gestures, fundraising drives, or the justifications of austerity or structural adjustment programmes).7 One might even argue that the dialectic informing and sustaining these responses finds one of its originary motivations and guiding presuppositions in the Christian phrasing of abandonment—Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? For the utterance of Christ on the cross—‘my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?’—speaks out and demonstrates against being abandoned by a sovereign authority whose sovereignty or transcendence is not only summoned, presupposed, and reinscribed, whose support is withheld and whose spiritual welfare is withdrawn, but whose acts of salvation and potential redemption are evoked, anticipated, and presupposed in the very utterance. It would be difficult to underestimate the degree to which a Christian phraseology and logic orients and subtends even the most seemingly secular of responses to the plight of those considered ‘abandoned’, or even the most hostile and antagonistic responses speaking on behalf of precarious lives to forms of sovereign power and authority.8 The question thus remains how to escape or distort the dialectic that subtends, governs, and orients a wide range of discourses of both precarity and abandonment, however disparate and seemingly irreconcilable they might seem when situated side by side. In one sense, rethinking the

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prepositions in which abandonment is articulated is decisive for situating the different ways in which the dialectic informing and sustaining discourses of abandonment is either reproduced and reinscribed or challenged and displaced. No doubt recent political theory has addressed these dialectical discourses in a number of ways.9 Arguably, one of the most difficult problematics at stake here is the way in which the limitconcept of abandonment itself seeks to displace the very terms governing its dialectical appropriation. Indeed, one might argue—again, this would need to be demonstrated—that this question of dialectical appropriation is one of the central problematics inherent in numerous discourses on precarity and precarious life or why turning to abandonment as limit-concept becomes another way of parsing out and rethinking the dialectical narratives informing and shaping these very discourses, in all their multiplicity and complexity. Here Agamben’s Homo Sacer comes back into view, notably in light of its own reference to Nancy’s ‘Abandoned Being’. For Agamben’s foregrounding of ‘bare’ or ‘naked life’ in terms of an abandonment is also articulated as a stripping bare, of life stripped of all attributes, conditions, predicates, and qualifications, and thus without substance, property and essentially, dialectically, or ontologically inappropriable. If abandonment—or rather, an abandoning —suggests this laying bare or stripping away, then understanding the laying bare that is bare life implies a problematic sense of transitivity, not an emptied or evacuated substantiality, not a loss of security in which the subject or its belonging to a community was once founded in its substance, security, and self-sufficiency (again, the logic that underpins numerous discourses on precarity). As Nancy writes, abandoned being ‘is not entrusted to a cause, to a motor, to a principle; it is not left to its own substance or even to its own subsistence. It is—in abandonment’ (Nancy 2000, 44). One might argue that this sense or ‘being’ of abandonment is also not a condition or a predicate of an identifiable or recognizable figure (and here one might note the degree to which Agamben deploys references to specific ‘figures’ in his discussion of homo sacer and elsewhere10 ) but the creation, situated in relation to the ‘exhaustion’ of all ‘categories’ or ‘transcendentals’, of a strategic or essential fiction that immobilizes its dialectical appropriation or conceptual grasp. This is not the fictioning of an entrepreneurial self, not a self-fashioning, not the fiction of a liberal subject alone—not the positing of a self that is assumed to take responsibility for the precarious or abandoned situation in which it finds itself—but the way in which

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the positing of abandonment assumes a strategic and heuristic function, an enabling fiction or a ‘limit figure’ as Agamben will sometimes write— in other words, an autonomous, groundless, and analytic space to think and live with, which is also the non-subjective and groundless foundation of what Agamben terms the ‘experience’ of abandonment. In other words, if we are to think of bare life as abandoned, it is not because bare life can then be articulated as a condition, as a model to be imitated, as a historical category or as a ‘type’, an identifiable group, peoples, or a dispossessed and definable part of the population. These are all measures, categories, figures, and forms of life to which abandoned being remains irreducible as a limit-concept, even as it makes possible the thought of these measures, categories, figures, and forms of life, or the histories to which they give rise.11 Instead, as Nancy argues, the nudity and bare exposure of abandoned being resists or ‘immobilizes’ its dialectical determination, motivation, or appropriation: Abandoned being immobilises the dialectic whose name means ‘the one that abandons nothing, ever, the one that endlessly joins, resumes, recovers.’ It obstructs or forsakes the very position, the initial position, of being, that empty position whose truth of nothingness, immediately turned back on and against being, mediates the becoming, the inexhaustible advent of being, its resurrection and the parousia of its absolute unity, truth, and goodness, arousing and pouring back into the foam of its own infinity. (Nancy 2000, 37)

Suffice it to remark the numerous ways (again, this would need to be demonstrated) in which this ‘parousia’ informs even the most secular responses seeking to save and resurrect those who are deemed ‘abandoned’. 8) Agamben argues that ‘the originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment’ (29). In this relation, the legal ‘ban’ or ‘bandon’ to which abandonment etymologically refers—which Agamben transforms from an argument first proposed by Nancy in his essay ‘Abandoned Being’—is never addressed or assumed as a description or measure of a human condition but foregrounds for Agamben the ‘potentiality…of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying’, in other words, a ‘ban’ that captures the sovereign exception, ‘the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes itself in it by suspending it’ (28). For bandon refers etymologically to ‘an order, a

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prescription, a decree, a permission, and the power that holds these freely at its disposal’ (Nancy 2000, 44), in other words, a general proclamation of the sovereign rather than specific prohibition. Abandonment, therefore, is to be delivered over to the sovereign ban and to respect the ban; ‘abandonment is a compulsion to appear absolutely under the law, under the law as such and in its totality’. In Agamben’s own translation of the argument, if the law prescribes nothing but respect for the law, ‘the relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’ (Agamben 1998, 28–29). Indeed, if the originary relation of law to life is not the ‘application’ of the law but the sovereign ban implied in abandonment, this then further reveals for Agamben the paradox at the heart of sovereignty—that ‘there is nothing outside the law’ and that ‘the matchless potentiality of the nomos, its originary “force of law,” is that it holds life in its ban by abandoning it’ (29). It is this ‘structure’ of the ban that Agamben seeks to understand in order to call it into question. While Agamben draws from Nancy’s essay and etymology in order to elucidate the exception as the structure of sovereignty, he states that it is decisive to ‘critique’ and move beyond the conception of the ban or abandonment that Nancy proposes, which for Agamben ‘does nothing other than repeat the ontological structure’ of sovereignty (Agamben 1998, 59). As Agamben concludes, ‘only if it is possible to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of law…will we have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty toward a politics freed from every ban’ (59). If we insist on Agamben’s disagreement with Nancy in thinking through the force of this ban or abandonment, our concern here is not with the displacements between zoe and bios in the modern period or with the threshold of biological modernity that Agamben rethinks from Foucault, both situated in light of ‘the politicisation of bare life’ (4)—in short, the ways in which ‘the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power’ (6). Rather, the question that remains in play here is Agamben’s articulation of this disagreement with Nancy in terms of a movement beyond and the freedom it implies (‘to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of law’, thereby foreshadowing ‘a politics freed from every ban’). For how are we to think this ‘beyond’ and the freedom it implies? Or in what sense does Agamben’s argument here tend to reinscribe the very

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dialectical movement that terms like ‘bare life’ and ‘abandoned being’ otherwise resist, refuse, or ‘immobilize’? Nancy and Agamben’s respective emphasis on being ‘abandoned’ as a question of the law tends to efface the prepositions that are also in play here. If Agamben’s turn to abandonment refuses those discourses that typify abandonment as a condition that best describes those who are excluded, marginalized, or disenfranchised by the state or from a previously secure position, then being abandoned for Agamben is an abandonment to a law that leaves those who are abandoned on the threshold ‘in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable’. In other words, in the same way that we might imagine an independence or sense of autonomy not (as we might usually think of it) from—from something or someone, from a previously repressive condition in which that from which one seeks independence remains secure and uncontaminated in its original place—but to an independence and autonomy or in the same way in which independence is not of a given people in their self-determination freed from constraint but an independence to a people ‘to come’—a self-independence that exposes its self to rather than (re)founds or identifies itself by separating itself from a prior condition, even as it simultaneously transforms that from which it seeks its independence—so rethinking abandonment cannot be dissociated from rethinking the very prepositions in which it comes to be articulated. Indeed, this insistence on rethinking the prepositions in which abandonment comes to be articulated cannot be dissociated from the new space or topology that Agamben also proposes—an ‘indeterminate threshold’, an ‘a-territoriality’, a ‘zone of indistinction’, or a ‘complex topological figure’ (37). These are all terms that have neither inside or outside but begin to articulate a topology ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘at’, or ‘to’ which those abandoned are now ‘situated’. Suffice it to remark the more visible ways in which it is the use of prepositions that also informs and inflects the different ways in which, for example, the ‘space’ of the refugee is presented in both scholarly and journalistic writings or how the prepositions characterizing this space are articulated in ways that invariably presuppose the territoriality and borders of the state against which the refugee is figured and comes into relief, even in its most transient, mobile, and precarious of situations. Similarly, abandonment exposes those who are banned not just to a situation of being outside the law ‘and made indifferent to it’ (which fits well with logics of exclusion and disenfranchisement) but of being abandoned to the law. In this sense, contrary to Agamben’s phrasing,

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Nancy will argue that we are not abandoned by anything—by the state, by governmental institutions and policies, by a sovereign authority. In other words, for Nancy there is no moving beyond the ‘paradox of sovereignty’ towards a politics ‘freed from every ban’. Rather, Nancy appears to be suggesting a more extreme paradox. For what remains to be thought, at one and the same time, is both an abandonment to the law, to the law as such, to a ‘categorical imperative’, but only insofar as the law withdraws, and it withdraws in such a way that the law of abandonment is the ‘other of the law’, the other which makes the law possible: Abandoned being finds itself deserted to the degree that it finds itself remitted, entrusted, or thrown to this law that constitutes the law, this other and the same, to this other side of the law that borders and upholds a legal universe: an absolute, solemn order, which prescribes nothing but abandonment. (Nancy 2000, 44)

Being abandoned is thus not a question of the subject, in the sense of a subject that has been abandoned and that seeks to overcome that precarious condition in order to reclaim, restore, or restitute a subject in its originary fulness.12 No more is abandonment a question of will. Understood ontologically, whatever is, whatever comes into being, is in abandonment and if this is indeed a ‘condition’ it is a condition of thought, not a human condition: ‘abandoned being has already begun to constitute an inevitable condition for our thought, perhaps its only condition’ (36) (François Raffoul usefully suggests that abandonment in this sense should be thought as an ‘incondition’ [Raffoul 2012, 67]). Nancy writes: It would be necessary to renounce without renouncing, not to determine dereliction in any way at all or invest it with any desire or provide it any model… all our spiritual exercises must be rid of the will, must disengage from ‘exercise’ and ‘spirit.’ We would finally have to let ourselves be abandoned. At the end of words, that is what ‘thinking’ would mean. (Nancy 2000, 43)

In short, in letting ourselves be abandoned, in this letting be, in this nondialectical thinking of existence, in this relation without relation, existence is ‘no longer produced or deduced, but simply posited’. 9) This insistence on parsing out the ‘grammar’ of abandonment suggests the necessity of other genealogies of abandonment. One of

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the places where this initiative is found is by returning one more time to Nancy’s argument in ‘Abandoned Being’, which Agamben’s more conspicuous reworking of Schmitt, Arendt, and Foucault largely dissimulates. Here again the primary reference would be Heidegger’s elucidation on ‘abandonment’ in the Contributions, of Seinsverlassenheit as danger, as nihilism, as the essential mode in which an unquestioning calculation of modern technics comes into being (Heidegger 1999). These are terms which might be read here as opening towards Agamben’s own understanding of contemporary biopolitics (he also cites Heidegger’s text) and terms which are voiced in own Nancy’s essay when he argues that ‘to be abandoned is to be left with nothing to keep hold of and no calculation’ (39). One of the decisive aspects of Nancy’s reading of Heidegger—whatever his distancing from Heidegger’s larger claims and rhetoric—is not only to rethink abandonment in relation to the law and as the surrendering to the law as such but to acknowledge an excess or abundance at the heart of abandonment. This acknowledgment would constitute less a response to a constraint or convention than the way one abandons oneself at a limit or extremity, in excess of one’s self, for, as Nancy writes, ‘one abandons oneself in excess, for there is no other modality of abandon’ (Nancy 2000, 37). The intensification of this excess or abundance—what Nancy also phrases as this ‘profusion of possibles’—is what abandonment also names and which discourses of precarity can never fully contain or limit (or which these same discourses limit through various forms of dialectical appropriation). Indeed, this excess or abundance is what abandonment is (if there is an ontology to abandonment, it is at once in excess of all ontology and an ontology in abandon). As Heidegger will insist in the Contributions, excess (Übermaβ) should be understood not as quantitative surplus, not something that can be calculated, but as a measure without measure, ‘the self-withdrawing of measuring out ’, as a measure that ‘refuses to be evaluated and measured’. Indeed, it is this excess that ‘holds open the strife and thus the arena for every strife’ (Heidegger 1999, 176). In short, it is this excess that is not only a questioning of calculation and measure but becomes the site of an irreducible conflict or antagonism. Taking us beyond—or prior to—questions of description, applicability, feasibility, measure, and calculation to which it also remains irreducible and rather than the collapsing of abandonment into an ambivalent category for describing a contemporary condition, what

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Heidegger’s argument throws into relief is an excess that is —that exists, antagonistically—in abandon(ment).13 In Homo Sacer, Agamben argues: The ban is a form of relation. But precisely what kind of relation is at issue here, when the ban has no positive content and the terms of the relation seem to exclude (and, at the same time, to include) each other? What is the form of the law that expresses itself in the ban? The ban is the pure form of reference to something in general, which is to say, the simple positing of relation with the nonrelational. In this sense, the ban is identical with the limit form of relation. A critique of the ban will therefore necessarily have to put the very form of relation into question, and to ask if the political fact is not perhaps thinkable beyond relation and, thus, no longer in the form of a connection. (Agamben 1998, 29)

If Agamben phrases this problem in terms of forms of relation or ‘the simple positing of relation with the nonrelational’, the phrasing of the argument returns us one more time to Nancy’s own claim concerning existence as ‘simply posited’14 For this ‘positing’ for Nancy is not a latent possibility implied through a dialectic of a position that ‘endlessly joins, resumes, recovers’ and so harbours within itself the germs of its own resolution, reappropriation, salvation, and resurrection. It is not determinable in this sense. Rather, it opens the permanently nascent state—an incessantly interrupted coming into being and existence, a letting be—that only ever emerges in and as the irreducible and antagonistic excess of abandonment.15 As Nancy will further argue, when existence is ‘no longer produced or deduced, but simply posited’, then ‘this simplicity arrests all thought’. The claim evokes no mere passivity. For in this arrest—in this immobilization, suspension, or interruption, in this letting be—‘once existence is abandoned to this positing at the same time that it is abandoned by it’, then we must think not the overcoming of abandonment as the loss of constraint or freedom but ‘the freedom of this abandonment’ (Nancy 1993, 9).16 10) In conclusion, if we want to insist on abandonment as a ‘condition’, we might begin to construe this freedom precisely as a condition, understood not as a subjective capacity, human quality, or as those who are abandoned without identity, representation or voice, but more literally as an originary and always singular ‘speaking-together’ or ‘speaking-with’. In ‘Abandoned Being’, Nancy argues that being has ‘ceased to speak itself in multiple ways’, that Aristotle’s pollakos legomenon—of Being

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spoken-in-multiple-ways—has been abandoned, banished, given over to the law, reasoned, and gathered under the Logos. But the excess at the heart of abandonment is also the gift or ‘sharing’ of speech and thus a sharing that refuses this gathering and so left open to being-with, finite exposure, and coexistence.17 Or rather, ‘what is left’, Nancy concludes, ‘is an irremediable scattering, a dissemination of ontological specks’ that leaves ‘nothing to keep hold of and no calculation’ (39). In one sense, the pollakos is that ‘in which an interminable abandon of the essence of being interminably exhausts itself’ (42). In other words, abandoned being is being abandoned to the very possibility of such multiplicity: ‘If being has not ceased to speak itself in multiple ways—pollakos legetai—abandonment adds nothing to the proliferation of this pollakos. It sums up the proliferation, assembles it, but by exhausting it, carrying it to the extreme poverty of abandonment’ (36). But as we have also seen, this extremity—speech’s abandonment—is also the condition of an excess, in excess, in the sense of speech that is ‘in abandonment’ and, as Nancy insists, ‘it is abandon (which is openness )’: ‘There is always a pollakos, an abundance, in abandon: it opens upon a profusion of possibles’ (37). It is the gift and sharing of speech that the cries of abandonment incessantly and interminably announce, the sharing of voices that do not anticipate or presuppose a sovereign authority in which they might find their redemption, identity, representation, reason, or salvation, nor a sovereign authority or narrative in, through or against which abandoned being (re)finds its voice. For as Nancy suggests, this is the voice that is ‘already an abandonment’ (38).

Notes 1. Ferguson’sargument finds further support in several texts included in this volume, including Bernadi’s analysis of Mexican migrant workers; Bernards’ essay on precarity in relation to decolonizing Africa; Kazi’s analysis of precarity in light of ‘African suffering of colonial slavery’; and Vij’s rethinking of precarity in light of the global North and South. 2. The question of abandonment as limit-concept can open to other genealogies as well. Drawing from Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte or ‘history of concepts,’ see Franco Barchiesi’s ‘Precarity as Capture’ (Barchiesi 2012) for rethinking of the concept of precarity as it reclaims its autonomy from ideas about the precariousness of contemporary labour.

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3. One notes that ‘condition’ as a term remains curiously unexamined in Arendt’s The Human Condition. Non-human factors pertinent to abandonment might include climate, natural resources and the environment, language, species extinction, lost biological immunity and so on. In other words, understood within our anthropocentric moment, the bodies of children washed up on the beach along the shores of the Mediterranean have to be thought in relation to the ‘abandoned’ detritus that swirls in plastic patches around the oceans. 4. The argument extends to Ritu Vij’s essay in this volume, which offers an incisive questioning of the ‘liberal subject’ informing discourses of precarity. 5. The terms or ‘logic’ of the argument here could be extended through a reading of Heidegger’s essay ‘Poverty’ (Heidegger 2011), which turns on Hölderlin’s phrase ‘we have become poor in order to become rich.’ See also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Présentation’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 2004). In another context, it remains to be seen how this provocation—in which abandonment allows us to rethink precarity in and at a limit or extremity— opens towards arguments informing recent discourses of ‘afro-pessimism.’ 6. See Marc Abélès, The Politics of Survival (Abélès 2010) for further elaboration of this logic, as well as Duffield’s Post-Humanitarianism (Duffield 2018). On humanitarian interventions situated in reference to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life,’ see Benjamin Noys, ‘The Time of Death’ (Noys 2002), notably the claim at the end of the essay that Agamben’s ‘analysis of the emergence of “bare life” gains confirmation in the “humanitarian interventions” that confront us with the images of that “bare life” on our television screens and, at the same time, maintain that “bare life” as the support for sovereign power. In fact, this sovereign structure of the “West” is now one that is more and more “globalized” as countries and continents are abandoned to the state of “bare life”’ (59). 7. For a recent discussion of the role that sacrifice plays in the context of neoliberalism, see Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos (Brown 2015). 8. Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Berlant 2011) may be read as analysing the contemporary counterpart to this theological register. See Kazi’s essay in this volume for further elaboration of how ‘transmutation realises governmental authority in a sense analogous to how transubstantiation of the Eucharist in the body realised the Christian body’s adoration of Christ.’ 9. Here one might think of Rancière’s ‘the part who have no part’ in Disagreement (Rancière 2004) as one exemplary response. 10. One might refer here to Agamben’s references to the refugee as a ‘figure’ as elaborated in ‘Beyond Human Rights’ (Agamben 2000, 15–26). 11. In relation to Agamben’s text, see Ziarek’s ‘Bare Life’ (Ziarek 2012) and the argument that Agamben ‘does not…sufficiently address two

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12.

13.

14.

15.

crucial questions: the problem of resistance and the negative differentiation of bare life with respect to racial and gender differences.’ As we are suggesting, it is not the question of ‘resistance’ or ‘racial and gender differences’ that is the problem here. It is their framing in terms of bare life’s so-called ‘negative differentiation’ that demands critical elaboration and rethinking. As Benjamin Pryor argues: ‘the law tries to render this abandonment void, to resituate subjects of the law in a realm that resists abandonment and that can be thought in its fullness, in its stasis, in its pure immanence to reason, to thinking, and to time/memory/history in the turn to precedent and the sciences of the juridical. The appeal to the social sciences characteristic of legal realism and critical legal studies serves to prop up and intensify this turn, to give it another foothold in immanence, if not an immanence of law to legal reasoning, then of legal reasoning to “man” – or the critique of that reasoning to a more free, more authentic subject who would be the subject of a freer, more appropriate law’ (Pryor 2004, 278–279). Again, the argument resonates strongly with Ritu Vij’s essay in this volume and the role that the ‘liberal subject’ plays in discourses of precarity. While not pursued further here, this emphasis on excess might also be extended to post-Marxist discussions of ‘surplus populations,’ as well as Papadopolous, Stephenson and Tsianos’ argument in Escape Routes concerning ‘an excess of sociability and subjectivity in precarious lives which does not directly correspond to the immediate conditions of work’ (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, 231). Elsewhere in this volume, Antova and Sokhi-Bulley’s essay on ‘disability counter-communities’ offers a precise way of seeking other ways of understanding this same question of relation, affirming ethical relations that are ‘formless’ and so the invention of new relations (without relation) of ‘friendship.’ Gilbert Leung writes: ‘Abandonment is thus the inaugural throwing of being, from the very birth of being, and there is nothing upon which abandoned being relies, which makes it non-dialectical, and nothing to which abandoned being can go back to, which renders being in a permanent state of being born.’ For further elaboration, see Anne O’Byrne’s Natality and Finitude (O’Byrne 2010). Maria Margoni also recalls Agamben in this same context, his ‘brief appreciation of Gilles Deleuze’s “a life,” for what is hinted at here is a politics “beyond relation” where life converges with Spinoza’s conatus (the force of self-preservation) and is simply “let be”’ (Margoni 2005, 34). She goes on to argue that there is a sense of ‘paradoxical survival (this existence-in-excess-of-death) that characterises Agamben’s homo sacer.’

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16. The reception of Nancy’s ‘Abandoned Being’ essay in English through its inclusion in The Birth to Presence volume tends to obscure its initial book publication in Nancy’s L’imperatif catégorique, notably its place alongside Nancy’s essay ‘The Kategorein of Excess’ (translated in Nancy 2003, 133– 151) devoted to a reading of Kant’s ‘categorial imperative.’ Gilbert Leung (Leung 2013, 2015) recalls the importance of Nancy’s text on Kant in relation to the role of freedom in the ‘Abandoned Being’ essay, further noting that ‘we need to further understand his analysis of Kant’s intimate association of law with freedom. We need to understand how, as a consequence, the law of freedom becomes the law of the law and, in its radical emptiness, the law without law or the law that does not cease freeing itself from law. We are then left with a radiant paradox: the law guarantees the outlaw, it guarantees the exception to the exception, indeed it becomes their condition of possibility.’ Suffice it to remark Leung’s argument suggests a useful point of departure for rethinking the role that Nancy’s essay on ‘Abandoned Being’ plays in Agamben’s Homo Sacer. On the relation of abandoned being, the law and freedom, see also Pryor’s ‘Law in Abandon.’ We will take up Nancy’s writings on freedom in this context on another occasion, beginning with the role that ‘abandonment’ plays in The Experience of Freedom (Nancy 1993). 17. The argument should resonate with MacNamara’s text in this volume and its reading of ‘Ettingerian transconnectedness,’ notably the closing affirmation of ‘matrixial compassion.’

Works Cited Abbas, Asma. 2010a. Voice Lessons: Suffering and the Liberal Sensorium. Theory and Event 13: 2. Abbas, Asma. 2010b. Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Abélès, Marc. 2010. The Politics of Survival, trans. Julie Kleinman. Durham: Duke University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Beyond Human Rights. In Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Armstrong, Philip. 2015. Precarity/Abandonment. In Nancy and the Political, ed. Sanja Dejanovic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barchiesi, Franco. 2012. Precarity as Capture: A Conceptual Reconstruction and Critique of the Worker-Slave Analogy. UniNomade 2.0. Available at: http:// www.uninomade.org/precarity-as-capture/. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. London: Polity. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Biehl, João. 2013. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone. De León, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duffield, Mark. 2018. Post-Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity in the Digital World. London: Polity. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1999. Contributions to Philosophy: (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2011. Poverty. In Heidegger, Translation and the Task of Thinking: Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad, trans. Thomas Kalary and Frank Schalow, ed. F. Schalow. New York: Springer. Hornby, Catherine, and Deepa Babington. 2011. Children Abandoned on East Africa’s ‘Roads of Death’. Reuters, July 25. Available at: https://www. reuters.com/article/us-famine-children/children-abandoned-on-east-africasroads-of-death-idUSTRE76O3P020110725. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 2004. Présentation. In La pauvreté (die Armut), ed. Martin Heidegger. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg. Leung, Gilbert. 2013. Abandonment: Notes on the Thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. Available at: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/03/27/abando nment-notes-on-the-thought-of-jean-luc-nancy/. Leung, Gilbert. 2015. Abandonment. In The Nancy Dictionary, ed. Peter Gratton and Marie-Eve Morin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Margoni, Maria. 2005. Care and Abandonment. Foucault Studies 2: 29–36. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Abandoned Being. In The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2003. A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Noys, Benjamin. 2002. The Time of Death. Angelaki 7: 2.

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O’Byrne, Anne. 2010. Natality and Finitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos. 2008. Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century. London: Pluto. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Pryor, Benjamin. 2004. Law in Abandon: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Critical Study of Law. Law and Critique 15: 259–285. Raffoul, François. 2012. Abandonment and the Categorical Imperative of Being. In Jean-Luc Nancy: Justice, Legality and World, ed. Benjamin Hutchens. London: Continuum. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. 2012. Bare Life. In Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol. 2, ed. Henry Sussman. Michigan: Open Humanities Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Global Subject of Precarity Ritu Vij

Introduction1 This chapter2 explores the universalizing logic of precarity and precariousness in global studies discourse. Originally articulated in the work of Guy Standing and Judith Butler, this logic presupposes a possibility for a global politics of equality between precarious subjects in the North and South based on an emergent shared horizon of suffering. In a close reading of Standing and Butler, I challenge claims about equivalence by calling attention to the liberal analytics that inform their work. Drawing on a postcolonial attunement to historically constituted exclusions, I argue that precarity is better understood as a disordering experience of sovereign subjectivity whose principal referent is the liberal not global subject of precarity. Globalizing the liberal subject of precarity entails the recuperation of its constitutive outside, namely the Third World as the original site of abjection. The de-politicizing implications of attempts to universalize the subject of security are briefly outlined in conclusion.

R. Vij (B) Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_3

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In a widely cited essay, ‘Choosing Precarity’, the noted critic Simon During suggests that modes of contemporary dispossession may be better apprehended through the concept and discourse of precarity, a term whose expansive epistemic reach invokes ‘the insecurity of all those who live without reliable and adequate income or without papers, as well as those with no, or unstable, access to the institutions and communities best able to provide legitimacy, recognition and solidarity’ (During 2015, 58). The precariat, he notes, is ‘a global group that includes people from many classes, religions and cultures’ whose ‘subjectivity becomes increasingly exposed to serious, restless, and vulnerable contextlessness’ (During 2015, 59). Central to the passage to precarity is, During suggests, the displacement of one background anthropology by another, specifically an anthropology of lack in which vulnerability, uneasiness, instability are recognized as fundamental to an (originally Christian) understanding of human nature. In a reading of Amit Chaudhuri’s novel, The Immortals, that concludes his argument, During finds the novel’s protagonist Nirmalya’s decision to ‘choose poverty’ in London over the comfort of a middle-class existence in Bombay an instance of an affirmative precarity, a choice of a secularized anthropology of negation. Wrought within a uniform temporal horizon (of neoliberal capital time), and inhabiting a similar anthropology of lack, precarity as a global condition brings into equivalence subjects in the Global North and South. During’s argument joins a growing transdisciplinary discourse on the universal logic of precarity and precarization (Barchiesi 2011; Bernards 2018; Breman and van der Linden 2014; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Ettlinger 2007; Lorey 2011, 2015; Pang 2018; Trott 2014; van der Linden 2014; van der Linden and Roth 2014; Waite 2009). Contemporary thinking on precarity and precarization as universalizing concepts subsumes previous formulations of precarity as principally the insecuritization of waged work in the Global North catalysed by the depredations of neoliberal economic globalization and the dismantling of the Keynesian social compact (Neilson and Rossiter 2008). Insecure, contingent and informal unwaged labour, once the hallmark of underdevelopment in the Global South, but now increasingly visible in the hinterlands of want amidst wealth in the Global North, summons a mode of thinking that posits a global (neoliberal) logic and ontology of precarity’s socio-economic form beyond labour contingency (Lorey 2015; Barchiesi 2012). For some, the subject of precarity is a globalized subject

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given the prevailing neoliberal logics of governing that necessitate practices of insecuritization as a (Foucauldian) biopolitical technology of rule (Lorey 2011, 2015), a practice of global governance (Bernards 2018), or a source of ‘political subjection’ (Lazzarato 2017). As a structure of feeling occasioned by the loss of futurity (Foti 2017) or ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011), an attachment to a condition of loss, precarity indexes the antinomies of an ongoing global present. For labour historians and sociologists, in particular, work insecurity stems from the informalization of production inaugurated by financialized neoliberalism and globalization (van der Linden 2014; van der Linden and Roth 2014; Brass 2011; Bourdieu 1998; Beck 2000). For political theologians (Milbank and Pabst 2015) financialization itself (and its associated depredations) is symptomatic of a ‘meta-crisis of secular capitalism’. On an alternative critical register, neoliberal globalization generates logics of dispossession (Harvey 1982, 2004), expulsion (Sassen 2014) primitive accumulation (Perelman 2000) or ‘aleatory capitalism’ (Read 2002) that flatten the texture of the social fabric as violent processes of market dis-embedding (Polanyi 1957) create ‘surplus populations’, sites of abandonment (Povinelli 2011) and abjection3 (Kristeva 1984) subject to forms of slow violence (Nixon 2011).4 Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), however, are widely seen as the key texts to apprehending the subject of precarity in global terms. Standing anchors precarity in a sociological analysis of labour contingency in which work and employmentrelated uncertainties spill over into socio-cultural-psychological insecurities. As labour supply chains connect multinationals to an ever-ready supply of cheap labour, the depression of wages globally conjoined with austerity and increased competitiveness causes an ever-increasing race to the bottom as rising levels of unemployment are exacerbated by the worsening of conditions for labour. The ‘global precariat’ composed of precarious workers, but predominantly migrants, asylum seekers and refugees are subjected to a range of insecurities that produce ‘precaritized minds’ and the negative affects that characterize them, including anomie, alienation, and the loss of dignity that comes with heightened dependency on others. In a follow up text, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014), a manifesto of 29 rights for the global precariat, Standing notes: ‘Knowing that your fellow citizen has the same rights as you do humanises us all’ (Standing 2014, 379).

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On a different register, Butler’s concept of ontological precariousness as an existential condition appears to render the claim about a global subject of precarity incontrovertible. Foregrounding the contingency of life and the awareness of co-vulnerability, Butler’s Levinasian ontology of relationality renders the recognition of all life as precarious. While this post-foundational account of the non-sovereign5 subject is supplemented by a recognition of the hierarchies of socio-economic ‘precaritization’ that make some more vulnerable than others, Butler’s socio-economic register of difference does not vitiate the claim about the universality of ontological precariousness. Like During’s appeal to a philosophical anthropology as the ground of a globally induced condition of vulnerability, Butler’s ontological/ethical turn conjoins the socio-economic-affective register of precarity talk with the philosophical for an attunement to a decidedly global precarity. For both During and Butler, precarity and precariousness lead us to recognize and accede to an account of what it is to be human and the vulnerability attached to life and living itself; for Standing, guaranteeing the rights of all, denizens and citizens, humanizes all. Insecurity, uncertainty, contingency, and dependency, however, are not novel conditions but integral to both life and living at all times and places. Unemployment, informal work, the constant (re)production of a reserve army of labour, extremes of wealth and want, migration and refugees have been part of the international landscape for at least as long as capitalism and the system of states have been consolidated. And recognition of our ontological vulnerability as a species, i.e. the facticity of our primal dependency on others is also not new but indeed central to moral philosophy in western and non-western genres of humanist thought. Why then the heightened anxieties that have mobilized a discourse constituting the subject of precarity as global? What might critical International Relations (IR) attentive to the occlusion of difference in the constitution of the international bring to our understanding of precarity/precariousness and the antagonisms contained (and repressed) in the figure of a global subject of precarity? What is at stake, theoretically and politically, in the concept of a global subject of precarity? In a departure from established conventions of critique in the literature on global precarity, this chapter draws attention to precarity as principally a liberal analytic, tethered to and framed by liberal accounts of the sovereign subject. Concepts of precarity and ontological precariousness gain traction, I argue, only in reference to the regulative ideal of self-mastery, autonomy, futurity, and the expectational horizon of an

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invulnerability to insecurity that is central to western capitalist modernity. “The subject of security is the subject of security” R. B. J. Walker writes, “…..… predicated on the impossible dream of absolute invulnerability” (Walker 1997, 78), where “modern accounts of security are precisely about subjectivity, subjection and the conditions under which we have been constructed as subjects” (ibid., 71). This subject is the liberal subject of security, forged and sustained within a specific unequal ordering of the modern international: wealth and security inside liberal, modern, democratic states; poverty and insecurity outside—in illiberal, traditional, ‘backward’ states. Taking this insight from critical IR as a point of departure brings a new angle of vision to debates about the analytical reach of precarity/precariousness. I argue here that precarity as exposure to vulnerability is the spectre that haunts the liberal subject of security. Precarity is thus better understood not as a globally dispersed socio-economic positivity, but as a disordering experience of sovereign subjectivity, a breach of the regulative ideal and anthropology of self-mastery, whose principal referent is the liberal not global subject of security. Extended globally, however, global ‘precarity talk’6 (Puar 2012) enacts a double erasure, obscuring: (1) the sedimentations of colonial history that have rendered the Third World the constitutive outside of the liberal/modern international, shaping distinctions between the sovereign subject of western liberal modernity and its non-sovereign, illiberal other; and (2) the political economy of colonial difference that has rendered Third World ‘backwardness’ the pathologized container of material lack, dependency, and abjection. Globalizing the subject of precarity thus entails the recuperation of the Third World as a site of abjection. The entangled histories of imperial violence, slavery, and colonial conquest suppressed in global precarity talk return, albeit surreptitiously, to anchor claims about the global subject of precarity. The denial of coevalness, central to demarcating socio–cultural–economic distinctions between the west and the rest (Fabian 1983), is reversed in global precarity talk as a common horizon of suffering in the neoliberal present seemingly brings into equivalence those in the North and the South. Paradoxically, however, this reversal of the denial of coevalness does not translate into equivalence: within a quantified comparative register (more or less precaritization), abjection in the Global South remains the yardstick against which well-being (and now suffering) in the North continues

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to be measured. Forms of life (mis)construed as abjected on this quantified evaluative register remain outside the bounds of liberal recognition as otherness is converted into sameness. For the majority of the world’s population inhabiting modes of life in which uncertainty, contingency are anchored in and sustained by alternative ontological landscapes and the multiple temporalities constitutive of them, however, life is not simply abject but ‘waxes and wanes’ at different ‘thresholds of life’ and intensity (Singh 2015) that are material but also spiritual, cultural and aesthetic. By enclosing quotidian de-pathologized modes of life in what Sherry Ortner (2016) describes as a ‘dark anthropology’ of dispossession, vulnerability and precarity, contemporary discourse on the global subject of precarity forecloses recognition of alterity. The subject of precariousness is the modern subject of security, globalized only at the risk of writing out of contemporary history subjectivities and lives lived in modes of de-pathologized vulnerability in much of the world. Reading precarity/precariousness as liberal discourse unsettles the pathologization of vulnerability as a global condition; it also opens pathways to recognizing ontological difference in modes of life and living in de-pathologized vulnerability for most of the world’s population. The argument proceeds in three steps: (1) the first section interrogates accounts of precarity writ large, focussing especially on Guy Standing’s work, to show how the (liberal) anxieties that frame global precarity talk depend on and mobilize long standing tropes about abjected modes of life in the Global South to ground its key claims. My argument— that precarity is a liberal not global analytic— supplements extant modes of critique anchored in Marxian, biopolitical or global development approaches (Agathangelou 2019; Suliman and Weber 2019), but moves the conversation in a different direction. (2) The second section explores some antinomies in Judith Butler’s notion of ontological precariousness as it relates to claims about the unequal distribution of precaritization; the liberal subject, undone by the former, returns in the latter as a default liberal analytic of quantification (more or less precaritization) that unwittingly renders vulnerabilities in the South abject. Repudiating the continued abjection of the South in the false equivalence posited in global precarity talk, I conclude by sketching an alternative approach to thinking precarity qua vulnerability in a global context, briefly returning to Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals (2009) to illustrate my argument.

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Precarity as a Liberal Analytic ‘We’re all precarious now,’ declares a headline in Jacobin Magazine, capturing the zeitgeist of the contemporary moment. Academic debates about the reasons for the globalization of precarity have been fierce and are well documented in the literature.7 Broadly speaking, the claim about a globally dispersed worker precariousness is tied to financialized neoliberalism, and the rise of automation and austerity (especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis). The decline of manufacturing in the advanced capitalist economies and the worldwide depression of wages in the North due to the addition in the global workforce of workers from the South (China and India) willing to work for lower wages is also seen as pivotal to worker precariousness in the North. The iconic text in these debates, Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) especially has been the subject of intense criticism (Breman 2013; Munck 2013; Scully 2016; Seymour 2012) for eliding the class aspects of precarity, including its propensity to generate a reserve army of labour, surplus populations, and disposable lives. For these critics, precarity is at best a descriptive classification of labour stratification (revealing the text’s hidden attachment to the labourism it otherwise excoriates), or worse a ‘bogus concept’ (Breman 2013). For others, growth in working-class precariousness is the movement ‘toward de-proletarianization rather than toward proletarian unification’ (Wacquant 2007). I will not rehearse this debate here since my purpose is to bring into visibility a feature of global precarity talk that has thus far escaped critical scrutiny: grasped as a form of Northern theory, global precarity talk registers a latent anxiety about the movement from secure to insecure work that unsettles the liberal sovereign subject. It is this anxiety that both reinscribes abjection in the South and misconstrues the phenomenology of precarity there while claiming a false equivalence between precarized subjects in the North and South. Claims about worker precarity as a global condition typically deploy empirical data to make their case. I begin, then, with a brief look at data on the global distribution of precarious work to contextualize the discussion that follows. Re-categorized as ‘irregular work’ in contrast to ‘decent’ work by the International Labor Organization (ILO hereafter), Guy Standing’s former employer, and the principal global institution responsible for tracking (and governing) precarious work, the data on ‘irregular work’ tell an interesting story. Stretched globally, the absence of ‘decent work’ marks the point of departure for thinking the subject of precarity in global terms. The ILO’s most recent report on irregular work, Non

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Standard Employment Around the World: Understanding, Challenging, Shaping Prospects (2016), documents the rising instance of temporary employment in 150 countries. Benchmarked against the norm of ‘decent work’ (work that is full time, indefinite), irregular work comprises 5% of the waged workforce in countries like Jordan and Latvia, Norway, and Sierra Leone but 25% in Mongolia, Peru and Spain; two-thirds of workers in Bangladesh and India, however, are in causal work. In the advanced capitalist economies, on the other hand, insecure and contingent work for people on zero-hour contracts made up 2.5% of the workforce in the United Kingdom and 10% in the United States at the end of 2015. Similarly, the ILO’s 2018 report on ‘Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture’, points to the big difference in the size of the informal sector in the North and South: the total share of informal employment in total employment is 18.1% in North America compared to 87.8% in Southern Asia (with a larger component of informal employment in the informal sector for both). In the cold, harsh light of this comparison, the ILO’s adoption (Recommendation No. 204, 2015) to achieve ‘decent work for all’ can be read as phantasmatic, applicable perhaps to the relatively small informal sector in the Global North, but not the South where the sheer scale of the problem (88% in the informal sector in the case of India) defies any realistic scenario of a transition to ‘decent work’ (Doogan 2009; Munck 2013). Given the magnitude of difference in the extent of ‘irregular work’ in the North and South, the claim to equivalence is, at the very least, puzzling. Standing’s analysis begins with an almost exclusive focus on labour conditions in the North and the (comparatively small) rise in precarious work (as documented above) before moving to claim that the North’s proximity to the South in terms of the (falling) conditions of labour warrants recognition of a novel condition of globalized precarity. The bulk of Standing’s text, The Precariat, is devoted to making the case for the emergence of a ‘new class system’ in reference to Europe and North America (with some scattered reference to Japan) (see also, Standing 2012, 2013). This new class system is made up of (in descending order), a rentier class of the elite, the salariat with employment security, proficians (making money but without security of employment), the old working-class proletariat, the precariat, and the unemployed. The precariat as a new ‘global class’ is defined by labour contingency, but ‘most significantly by the absence of an occupational identity or a narrative to give to their lives which creates existential insecurity’ (Standing

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2011, 24). Reliant exclusively on money wages, without non-wage or rights-based state benefits, the ‘precaritised mind’ (Standing 2011, 18– 19) is highly anxious, reduced to being supplicants, asking ‘for favours, for charity, to show obsequiousness, to plead with figures of authority. It is degrading and stigmatizing’ (Standing 2016). Finally, ‘the precariat have a weakened sense of “social memory”…. relational and peer-group interaction… no sense of career, secure occupational identity, few, if any entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits’ (Standing 2011, 23–24). Given the centrality of work, property, and possession to (the constitution of) personhood in western modernity—the condition of possibility for autonomy for Kant or subjective freedom for Hegel—the loss of occupational identity can indeed be tantamount to loss of self and the onset of ontological insecurity. Work (or more precisely work as labour that is remunerated) and its corollary, a work-ethic (Weeks 2011), is central not only to economy and ethical being, but also to subjective identity. Understood both as an internalized social norm and the locus of self-making (as the negation of one’s natural or determinate condition), work as labour can be seen as pivotal to western ontology, it’s absence or loss designating pathologized lack, or, worst, dependency.8 Without ‘the mediation of work’ (Hegel [1820] 1991, 267), in a capitalist social context where quantitative hierarchies of wealth and want establish self and social worth, subjectivity and well-being are put into jeopardy. The precarious here join the ranks of the ‘undeserving poor’, their material lack evidence of the lack of personal or social self-worth. To be sure, Standing himself does not ground his discussion of precarity in the context of what I am calling (following During) the background anthropology of precarity’s provenance in the North. But, as I argue below, precarity’s (restricted) epistemic reach comes fully into view only in the context of its background anthropology. As a description of the precarious subject in the Global North, Standing’s account may withstand scrutiny: within a normative horizon in which the regulative ideals of self-reliance, autonomy, and work-centred subjectivity are dominant, the negative affect generated by the loss of work may well be severe. However, worst by far, in Standing’s reading of the pathology of precarity is the loss of futurity that creates a precaritized mind, reducing precarious subjects to ‘supplicancy and dependency which is degrading and stigmatizing’. Rather than instantiating a universal relation to time, the notion of the loss of futurity gains salience in the context of a specifically western ontology. Every ontology ‘has a particular regime of temporality’

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Phillipe Descola notes, ‘and only the ontology of the West is marked by an ‘“onward” arrow of time, an endless progress!’ (Descola 2017; see also Holbraad and Morten 2017). Supplicancy and dependency, disavowed in (hegemonic) western thought as hallmarks of the absence of ‘maturity’, of the liberal subject (rational, autonomous, sovereign) turn out to be the affective axis around which the latent anxiety about the insecuritization of work turns. Standing’s conceptualization of precarity in other words, and its attendant phenomenological and affective attributes can be clearly seen as anchored in a particular (liberal) notion of the subject. Globalizing the subject of precarity thus presupposes the universalization of the liberal subject, and the concomitant erasure of pre/proto capitalist zones of life. The (liberal) violence produced by modernization/developmental projects devoted to fashioning precisely such subjects in the South serve as a cautionary note against such civilizing missions in the present conjuncture. But Standing does not stop at the borders of Euro-America. Devoting the first half of The Precariat to elaborating his concept of precarity and detailing the reasons for its growth, Standing anchors his account firmly in the conditions of work insecuritization in the North (Britain, Italy, France, the United States, and a brief discussion of Japan, also an OECD country). Having done that, however, Chapter 4 goes on to declare that there is, in fact, a ‘global precariat9 ’ (Standing 2011, 111) but now made up largely of migrants and refugees documented and undocumented, a ‘floating reserve’ army of global labour that constitutes the bulk of the precariat. The majority of immigrants are, by Standing’s reckoning, from poor countries, making the ‘global precariat’ largely composed of people from formerly colonized areas: Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. A quick look at comparative data confirms that among the top 25 countries by the destination of refugee populations as a share of the total population, nearly all 25 were of the Global South with the Palestinian Territories (43%), Jordan (30%), and Lebanon (25%) at the top of the list; Germany, the only Northern country on the list took in refugees equivalent to 1.5% of its total population. Pakistan, Jordan, Uganda, all three ‘developing’ countries took in 1 million asylum seekers, the same as Germany. That South-South migration overwhelms South-North flows is evident even from this cursory look at the figures. That most migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are not moving from secure to insecure work is, arguably, also clear. That ‘migrants’ and refugees’ lives are subject to uncertainty, insecurity, and unpredictability is indisputable but on a

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purely descriptive level. Analytically, on Standing’s terms, precarity entails labour contingency but also, among other things, ‘the loss of occupational identity……a weakened sense of “social memory”…. relational and peer-group interaction… no sense of career, secure occupational identity, few, if any entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits’ (Standing 2011, 23–24), a description that rings hollow for the vast majority of people in the South doing insecure work or caught up in the maelstrom of civil strife or war that has created the contemporary ‘migrant crisis’ for Northern states. Dependency on others, anathema to precarious subjects in the North is, in fact, axiomatic to life in the South, particularly for populations with limited access to material resources. Why then Standing’s compulsion to claim migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers as exemplary? And central to his claim that the precariat is indeed a global precariat? Standing’s position is that global migration (documented or otherwise) is subject to capture analytically since it only requires the extension of the concept of precarity to a global register, even though the bulk of migrant populations do not meet the criteria Standing elaborates in his concept of precarity. Described in anecdotal rather than statistical terms, the migrant/asylum seeker/refugee’s life is, on Standing’s terms, wretched, dismal, abject: living in squalid conditions in makeshift encampments all across Europe (including Italy, Germany and Sweden), (not to mention internal migrants in China and India), the migrant as precariat exemplar is, I want to suggest, essential, not supplementary to Standing’s case. Rather than an empirical instantiation of Standing’s concept of precarity, the figure of the abjected migrant/refugee/asylum seeker performs a vital function in Standing’s precarity talk. Seen within the context of the long durée, precarity as a liberal analytic of the internal Other is premised on a prior Other—the non-Western ‘Third World’ as its constitutive condition of possibility. As the container for disavowed attributes of the (liberal) Self: immaturity, backwardness, religiosity, but above all, material ‘lack’ and poverty, the South as an ‘excentric’ (Bhaba 1994) dystopian zone of abjection10 has been central to the boundary making practices constitutive of the modern international. Temporal and cultural non-equivalence between the advanced North and the ‘backward’ South, between wealth in one and poverty in the other has been key to establishing distinctions between the west and it constitutive outside. Global precarity talk ostensibly undoes this distinction, foregrounding a now putatively common horizon of suffering. However, in

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claiming a common condition of insecurity, global precarity talk universalizes an abjection previously located in the Third World. The compulsion to globalize the subject of precarity can arguably be seen as logically necessary: vulnerability, poverty, material lack, the constitutive ‘wound of wealth’ in the North, disavowed and located in the Third World, can be recuperated in precarity talk only by laying claim to a form of life it has itself construed as abject. The South as a place of desperate poverty, destitution and lumpen life-worlds retains its hold in the social imaginary as equivalence is dirempted into its opposite. The West’s use of the East to tell stories about ‘itself to itself’ has been called out by postcolonial thought in the last many decades. That it continues to frame arguments ostensibly devoted to undoing hierarchies of wealth and want between the North and South is testimony to its intractability. ‘Africa’, Achille Membe writes, ‘is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity’ (Membe 2010, 3). Abjection in the South, recuperated in the figure of the migrant, enables, we might say, a transfer of abjection from the South to the North in a move that augments the dystopic depiction of the precariat. Parallel to that, and more poignantly I want to suggest here, the South retains its imputed position as the locus of abjection. Colonial imaginaries are reinscribed yet again in claims about (false) equivalence between precarious subjects in the North and South. There can be no conceptual straight lines that can be drawn ‘from the colonial slum to the cosmopolitan precariat’ (Lawn 2017); nor can the vast swathes of humanity that make up the informal sector or the lumpen-proletariat in the Global South be seen simply as an instantiation of precarity in the South (Munck 2013), or as precursors to precarity in the North (Han 2018). Sedimented colonial imaginaries remain entrenched in efforts to think the ongoing global present in popular titles like Third World America (Huffington 2010) and other academic work. Two brief examples help to register the ubiquity of such moves. Ulrich Beck’s notion of the ‘Brazilianization of the West’ (Beck 2000, 1) is particularly apt. Grounding the globalization of precarity in the spread of ‘neoliberal free-market utopia’, Beck draws attention to the deterioration of work conditions and the heightened risk that insecuritization of work brings to European societies. As work relations in the North are de-regulated and flexibilized, the West comes to resemble, he notes, the ‘patchwork quilt of the South, characterised by diversity, unclarity and insecurity in people’s work and life’. Brazilianization here connotes the turn to informal, nomadic

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multi-activity work, typically associated with countries of so-called ‘premodernity’ (Beck 2000, 93). In a move intended to convey self-irony he goes on to note ‘it may be said that the Brazilianization thesis does appear at first sight to renew, through negative immersion, the romantic image that Westerners tend to have of Brazil’ (Beck 2000, 93). However, lest the reader makes the error of collapsing historical and cultural differences between Brazil and the West, he clarifies what he means by the term: ‘what appears the same means in Europe the erosion of labour rights, living standards and social security’ (Beck 2000, 96). ‘The theorem of Brazilianization is beyond either universalism or relativism!’ (Beck 2000, 96). We can marvel at the sentiment expressed here as we note that slouching from Europe to Brazil is a journey of lament as ‘our’ collective (European) descent into a society of risk entails also an act of renaming: Europe no more, now Brazil; colonial distinctions, cultural, historical, economic are, it seems, hard-wired in time. Jean and John Comaroff’s provocation in Theory from the South (2012), that ‘Euro America is evolving toward Africa’ is metonymic of the trend in scholarship to lay claim to a more radical, cosmopolitan, and inclusive equivalence between North and South. Ironic, even playful, the book’s attempt to move beyond mere coevalness to turn Eurocentric modernization theory upside down, by locating a Euro-American future in Africa’s present in all its fractured intensities is especially instructive for our purposes here. Arguing that Africa (a stand-in for the South) is the site of innovation (in finance, social policy, slum re-development) at a time when advanced capitalist societies in the North are hard pressed to find solutions, the Comaroffs, in an effort to move beyond Fabian’s critique of the denial of coevalness end up, inadvertently and despite their stated intent, reinscribing it. Africa is ‘ahead’ in that it provides an ‘advanced face’ of the ‘hydra headed configurations of contemporary capitalism’, and its itineraries of socio-economic lack: ‘material inequality, human disposability, epidemic illness, social exclusion’. Despite their ‘partially parodic’, ‘counter-evolutionary’ perspective that attempts to reverse Hegelian teleology and turn epistemological racism on its head (Africa leads, Euro-America lags), the Comaroffs unwittingly tap into an imagery of Africa they intellectually and politically reject. Srinivas Aravamudan’s wry observation to the Comaroffs is especially apt: ‘Africa is ahead, not because it is more enlightened in classical terms; it is ahead because it is more familiar with……..urban blight, genocidal epidemic of HIV-AIDS, rampant inequality, because it is the world’s dark overlord, prescient of all

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things to come’ (Aravamudan 2012). Structurally entrenched geocultural geo-epistemologies are not easily cast aside; the global subject of precarity its most recent instantiation. Without recourse to the tired image of the Third World as a zone of abjection, global precarity has no independent locus. A putatively generous move (‘we are all precarious now’) ends up reinforcing the tired image of the Third World as a zone of abjection, now available to previously sovereign Western liberal subjects. By freezing historical time and its denial of coevalness, global precarity talk creates a unitary present that elides the historical shaping of hierarchies of wealth and want and the construction of the Third World as abject. Claiming common ground, however, does little to stop the echoes of earlier times and calls to mind James Blaut’s scathing account of ‘European diffusionism’ where the West has a permanent geographic centre and a permanent periphery, an inside and an outside. “Inside leads, Outside lags” (Blaut 1993, 1) still reverberates. Extending a predominantly liberal analytic of precarity globally entails a deft acrobatic move: Euro-American precarity appears to bring the outside in but Europe still ‘leads’ in its denial of radical alterity in the South. Modes of life in the South construed as abject in the modern international are, in fact, simply forms of life lived otherwise, alterities destined to remain forever beyond the grasp of the vocabulary of dominant strands of social thought, frozen in historical time as the permanent Outside of the liberal modern. The continued imbrication of liberal analytics with a denial of alterity remains in play, as I show below, in work paradoxically devoted to undoing the liberal subject as the condition of possibility for generating a transformative global ethics and politics.

Ontological Precariousness: A Liberal Backstop? I have thus far argued that global precarity talk posits a non-equivalence at very heart of claims of equivalence between precarious subjects in the North and South: the South as the abjected other anchors and mobilizes a discourse about the globalized subject of precarity. I now turn to a critical exploration of Judith Butler’s influential claim that ontological precariousness as the determinate condition of all subjects renders precarious subjects in North and South fundamentally equal in their common exposure to vulnerability. If we are all indeed equally precarious in our very existence as sentient beings, equivalence between subjects in the North and South is, quite literally, a fact of life. Recognition of this shared

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vulnerability as a fact of our common humanity can, Butler suggests, mobilize a transformative politics against the unequal distribution of socio-economic precaritization. There is, of course, much that can be said about Butler’s wide-ranging reflections (2001, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2015) on precariousness and precarity. In what follows, I draw attention only to those antinomies in her thought that unsettle claims about equivalence between precarious subjects in the North and South. My main aim is to show how Butler, her professed antipathy to liberal thought notwithstanding, retains a fidelity to a liberal analytic by (1) relying on a thin, quantitative notion of vulnerability that enables comparison (more or less precaritization) that unwittingly renders those at the lower end of the scale abject; (2) abstracting vulnerability such that it forecloses recognition of alterity. Modes of life deemed abject on a quantitative register of comparison are, in their alternative ontological and temporal habitations, simply quotidian. This line of critique goes some distance in enabling the recuperation of modes of life captured but misconstrued by global precarity talk as sites of abjection. ‘I propose to start, and to end, with the question of the human (as if there were any other way for us to start and end!’ (Butler 2004, 20) writes in response to the question of how to build community in the face of exposure to vulnerability and loss. Turning the question around she asks instead if common human vulnerability can become the basis for a new community. Her answer is unequivocal: ontological precariousness—the fact that we are all given over to the other due to a ‘primary vulnerability, a primary helplessness’—enables the recognition of all humans as equal and can therefore enable a transformative ethics and politics against precaritization. ‘Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed’ (Butler 2009, 25). I do not mean to deny that vulnerability is differentiated, that it is allocated differentially across the globe…..I am referring to violence, vulnerability, and mourning, but there is a more general conception of the human with which I am trying to work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others. (Butler 2004, 30–31)

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Precarity, however, designates that ‘politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (Butler 2009, 25). Whereas precariousness points to our common human vulnerability as the basis for a new community, the recognition of the vulnerability of only some renders the lives of others outside the social bond: ‘Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of {some} lives as lives ?’ (Butler 2004, 12). Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’ (1998) account of ethics as responsibility to the other, specifically his claim that ‘once one has truly encountered the other, it is impossible to do him (sic) harm’, Butler outlines a social ontology of relationality that takes the primordial atemporal experience of the other as a way to understand the way in which all of us are already given over ‘not precisely bounded, not precisely separate, but in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy’ (Butler 2001, 39). Committed to unsettling the unitary account of the self-possessed sovereign subject of Enlightenment thought, Butler’s Levinasian account of relationality acknowledges nonetheless that this primal dependence on the Other can provoke both the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence (Butler 2004, 37). However, the Hobbesian solution to the ambiguous provocations of ontological vulnerability, namely that we attempt to impose our vulnerability on others, is one that is not easily set aside. To resolve this dilemma, Butler turns to the role of recognition and norms such that more inclusionary norms based on the ‘insurrection at the level of ontology’ (Butler 2004, 33) can foster an ethos of solidarity that would affirm mutual dependency. Recognition of precariousness as a shared existential ontological condition (of Being) is construed as dependent on the resignification of norms that ‘have developed historically to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others’; and further, ‘norms of recognition are essential to the constitution of vulnerability as the precondition of the human’ (Butler 2004, 43). ‘The postulate of generalized precariousness which calls into question the ontology of individualism, implies though it does not directly entail, certain normative consequences’ (Butler 2009, 33). These ‘normative consequences’, Butler assumes, are potentially progressive: ontological precariousness, because equally shared by all, implies a radical equality; however, the uneven distribution of socioeconomic-political precaritization and inequality raises a crucial question

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not directly addressed by Butler: by what measure do we apprehend equality in shared vulnerability and the unequal distribution of precarity? On the above highly compressed summary of Butler’s argument, ontological precariousness is the basis of an ethic of radical equality where the common horizon of a shared vulnerability is all encompassing, i.e. global. However, insofar as vulnerability can only be understood according to cultural and historical norms that recognize it as the precondition of the human, the measure by which we apprehend shared, i.e. equal, vulnerability and its unequal distribution across geographies, is crucial. If the resignification of norms of value and valuation (grievable and ungrievable lives) precedes recognition of our global humanity and efforts to build a collective solidarities, by what measure are vulnerabilities apprehended in their (in) equality? I will set aside here the fraught question of recognition and the trajectory of classical liberal thinking that places the idea of autonomy, self-mastery and sovereign subjectivity at its centre but simply note that Butler’s attempt to move the problem of recognition from an ontology of individualism to a Levinasian ‘ontological claustrophobia’ (Llewelyn 1995, 7–17), is not without its difficulties (see especially Alford 2002; Drabinski 2011; Gilson 2014; Lloyd 2015; Mills 2015; White 1999). Equally contentious is the question of resignifying exclusionary norms and their associated practices from a socio-historical field shaped by the ravages of colonialism, slavery, empire and capitalism, a question of politics not ethics. The Hobbesian dilemma, that shared vulnerability does not produce equality but more often the impulse to impose our vulnerability on others, renders a smooth passage from an ethics of equality to its socio-political instantiation fraught. A Butlerian response, satisfactory in its own way perhaps, would be that ontological precariousness offers a more promising pathway to building precisely such a collective project of a resignification of norms. But does it? And if so, what is the notion of equality that informs the presumed passage from ethics to politics? Others have pointed out some of the problems contained in this circulatory logic, not the least of which have to do with the tenuous use Levinasian thought can provide to aid Butler’s project (Alford 2002; Mills 2015; Tsantsoulas 2018). Three points are worth noting: (1) Levinas’ commitment to the other is to the Otherness of the other (to the non-Being of Being in the cryptic language he uses), to Otherness as abstraction. The Levinasian self is held by this abstract (transcendent) otherness of non-being, a pre-ontic bond of relationality (‘relation

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without relation’ in Levinas’ terms), apprehended ‘at a distance’ and not by virtue of the thickness of encounter with the other. This abstracted relation to otherness seeps into Butler’s account as well and presses on her theoretical-political desire to think her way to recognition of a common or shared vulnerability.11 (2) Levinas’ argument about the ‘ambiguity of vulnerable embodiment’ (it can invoke both a fear of violence and a fear of inflicting violence), undercuts Butler’s attempt to construe the general condition of existential or ontological vulnerability in terms of equality; i.e. the link between ontological precariousness as a generalized condition of life as the basis of equality in Butler’s formulation can be called into question. To sustain both claims (about the equality of ontological precariousness and the Levinasian ambiguity that shadows it), Butler needs to ‘view equality as a quantitative descriptor only’ (Tsantsoulas 2018, 164), one that can ‘provide the ground for objecting to the differential allocation of precarity but only on the thin basis that it is quantitatively unequal’ (Tsantsoulas 2018, 164). (3) Insofar as (1) and (2) hold, vulnerability is both construed as abstraction, as a generalizable and equally shared form of life, but also subject to measure, by virtue of this abstraction, on a thin quantitative register of more or less precaritization of the same. It is this de facto resort to an abstracted, thin and quantified comparative register of measuring the unequal distribution of socioeconomic-political precaritization that reveals Butler’s unwitting fidelity to a principally liberal analytic. Insofar as western capitalist modernity reduces all qualitative differences to mere distinctions, a measure of different quantities of the same matter, Butler’s implicit measure of unequal precaritization depends on a measure of value and valuation that cannot apprehend (qualitative) differences in the domain of vulnerability itself. Vulnerabilities, because measured on an identical quantified register can only yield a comparative valuation: those at one end marked by wealth and security, those at the other end by deprivation and lack. Recognition that those placed at the lowest end of a quantified comparative scale may not be abject but simply inhabiting ‘low consuming modes of life’ (Nandy 2001, 11) that are quotidian, i.e. not pathological, is foreclosed in a liberal analytic of quantification. Quantification registers distinctions but distinctions that are without difference. Outlining the connection between vulnerability and the quantified register by which its unequal distribution is implicitly measured in her account enables Butler’s unwitting (default) attachment to a liberal analytic to come into view.

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In this context, it may be useful to briefly consider Butler’s description of precaritization to see its affinities as a liberal analytic with Standing’s. For both, the substantive features of precaritization relate quite candidly to the liberal subject whose natural habitat historically has always been in the North. Precaritization, a politically induced condition for Butler is the process: .…of acclimating a population to insecurity. It operates to expose a targeted demographic to unemployment or to radically unpredictable swings between employment and unemployment producing poverty and insecurity about an economic future, but also interpellating that population as expendable, if not fully abandoned. These affective registers of precaritization include the lived feeling of precariousness which can be articulated with a damaged sense of future, and a heightened sense of anxiety about issues like illness and mortality (especially when there is no health insurance or when conditions of labour and accelerated anxiety converge to debilitate the body. (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 43)

Consistent with my argument that precarity gains traction only in reference to the liberal subject, specifically its move from security to insecurity, Butler’s tracking of precaritization (and distinctions in the quantum of its provision on varied counts) with the move from security to insecurity brings its underlying liberal affinities more sharply into view. A preontic relationality dispossesses sovereign subjectivity; dispossession within the domains of political economy/political sociology on the other hand indexes the material and affective losses attendant on the move from security to precarity. On a quantitative measure, however, vulnerabilities at the lowest end of the scale are necessarily construed as abject, recognition of their radical alterities foreclosed by the use of a quantified metric of more or less vulnerability. Where the liberal subject (unitary or de-constructed) is taken to be the unexamined norm against which vulnerability is measured, those at the bottom of the scale can only be seen as abject. For the vast majority of populations in the Global South, however, living within alternative ontological landscapes albeit mediated by capital, contingency/uncertainty/lack of futurity, and vulnerability may not be a dis ordering experience that disrupts the linear chronology of past– present–future within a temporal horizon framed by the expectation of an invulnerability to insecurity, what Peter Sloterdijk (2013) excoriates as ‘the expectation of security without struggle’. Nor is it the ‘norm’ against

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which precarity as a new exception in the North is counterposed. It is rather a moment in a different ontological landscape in which vulnerability is not marked as a pathologized condition of lack but is simply life qua Being. Unlike the fear of vulnerability that predicates the discourse and affect of precarity in the ‘west’, the seemingly normalized embrace of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’ in the Global South marks not just fatalistic surrender to structurally produced inequities of wealth and want, but rather, and this is my point here, the mobilization of a vast repertoire of cultural, spiritual, and social resources and the multiple temporalities contained therein, that enable modes of life and living that abjure vulnerability as abjection. Contrary to the ‘dark anthropology’ of vulnerability and precarity that remains sutured to and informed by underlying regulative ideals of self-mastery and security, ‘vulnerability’ in the Global South paradoxically yields a more affirmative response, one structured by subaltern aspiration rather than despair. This aspiration, however, is not to enter the hallowed portals of liberal sovereignty and its horizon of expectation of becoming inured to insecurity. The deep structures of socio-affective ties that bind populations in putatively abjected zones in relational dependencies are not merely pre-ontic but pivotal to life and living. Optimism is rendered ‘cruel’ (Berlant 2011) in the North precisely because it marks an attachment to security whose very condition of possibility no longer holds; in the South, in contrast, for the vast majority of populations vulnerability is shaped by temporal horizons both secular and spiritual that mark the ‘waxing and waning of life’ itself (Singh 2015). Notions of risk and vulnerability resonate quite differently in contexts in which the liberal subject is absent. Butler’s notion of ontological precariousness, premised on the vulnerability that flows from the contingency of life itself and the social inter-dependence that necessarily and always underpins life, attempts to reconcile the dispossession of the sovereign subject with hierarchies of socio-economic dispossession; these hierarchies render some lives more precarious than others. Ontological precariousness, however, is an abstraction, trans-coded and constellated under distinct socio-political-culturalreligious-economic contexts in markedly distinct ways. Precariousness in its archaic (Latin) sense as ‘subject to the will or decision of others’ or its contemporary Butlerian/Levinasian sense as dependence on others is the disavowed other within western liberal modernity. For many in non-western contexts, however, dependency is axiomatic to socio-cultural and economic life itself; ‘surplus populations’, the apotheosis of unwaged

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precarious life deploy survival strategies that depend on the valuation of concrete modalities of social inter-dependence. Social inter-dependence, abstracted in Smithian, Hegelian, and Marxian accounts, but concretely disavowed in the life-worlds of ‘autonomous’ individuals in liberal capitalist modernity, is recuperated in Butler’s Levinasian telling as an ethical response to precarious life under conditions of neo/liberal modernity. In other times and places, however, social inter-dependence and the contingencies this entails are recognized as the condition of possibility of life itself . The life-worlds of precarious populations in the Global South are distinct not only in the obvious empirical sense but also in the ways that they escape enclosure by precarity’s form understood as a pathologized condition of dependence and vulnerability. Seen from this vantage point, vulnerability gains conceptual traction not as an (empty) universal, contra Butler, but as the spectre that haunts predominantly liberal accounts of autonomy, security and self-determined futurity in an intellectual and historical lineage that runs from Smith and Kant to Hegel and Marx. Neoliberalism’s disavowal of social inter-dependence merely makes explicit this logic. That ‘San Precario’, the fictitious saint of the precarity movement (conjured up in 2004 in Italy) appears on bended knees with folded hands, a supplicant in prayer, dependent on (divine) will or the will of another, is a vivid reminder of the deep unease that accompanies overt social dependencies in western contexts; to be beholden to another a repudiation of the regulative ideal of autonomy, self-reliance and self-determination that is axiomatic to western liberal modernity. To conclude, Butler attempts to suture a post-foundational account of the dispossessed subject to a global ethics based on recognition of a shared common vulnerability so as to mobilize a transformative politics against the unequal distribution of socio-economic precarity. By deploying a defacto quantified measure of vulnerability, however, Butler’s account retains an unwitting affinity to a liberal analytic that, like Standing’s, forecloses recognition of alterities within the domain of vulnerabilities as de-pathologized modes of life.

Concluding Remarks ‘An ontology of the present’, Frederic Jameson notes, ‘needs to be an ideological analysis as well as a phenomenological description’ and must be attentive to Koselleck’s description of historical temporalities

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(Jameson 2015, 101). Later, and contrarily, he notes that with decolonization ‘subaltern others’ are able to ‘……speak in their own voices and claim their own existential freedom. …… Now suddenly, the bourgeois subject is reduced to equality with all these former others, and a new kind of anonymity reigns throughout world society as a whole …….the emergence of the vulnerable subject into a world of billions of anonymous equals’ (Jameson 2015, 129–130), is the definitive sign of the present. For Jameson too, it would appear, ‘we are all precarious now’. Precarity and ontological precariousness, however, I have tried to show, offer a liberal not global analytic that depends on (1) the recuperation of abjection in the South as the locus of global precarity talk; and (2) mis-recognition of low consuming modes of life in the South as sites of material lack and abjection. Insofar as this is correct, how might we locate and apprehend the vulnerable subject in an ontology of the present, without resorting to either the flattening summoned by Jameson or the distinctions (without difference) enabled by liberal analytics? I can only gesture towards an alternative here. The lived experience of qualitatively distinct de-pathologized vulnerabilities in the Global South can be brought into a global field of vision in the fullness of their alterities only by escaping ‘liberal capture’ inherent to global precarity talk (indicatively, AlSayyad 2004; Roy 2011; Sanyal 2007; Sethi 2011; Singh 2015). Central to the flattening, quantifying compulsions of a liberal analytic is its temporal logic: secular, linear, moving only ever in one direction. To escape abjection by liberal analytics in the lived experience and phenomenology of ‘precarity in the South’, subaltern ontological landscapes and the temporalities constitutive of them need to be made central to analysis. ‘I could not talk only about lack, even in a milieu of poverty’, the anthropologist Bhrigupati Singh notes …….‘and then gods and spirits beckoned me, since they too, were part of this landscape’ (Singh 2015, 9). Eschewing the binary framing of autonomy/dependency, sovereignty/precarity, security/insecurity that underpin theorizations of ontological precariousness and the subject of precarity in the North, vulnerabilities of life and living in the South may be better apprehended through an analytical strategy that takes seriously Koselleck’s (2004) notion of multiple temporalities, or ‘noncontemporaneous contemporaneity’ (Harootunian 2015). A positivist (mis)reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s claim in Provincializing Europe (2000) that the human is not ontologically singular, that ‘gods and spirits {are} existentially coeval with the human’, has led unfortunately to the

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tendency to split the material from the spiritual/cultural in the so-called ‘ontological turn’ (Descola 2013; 2017; Holbraard and Pedersen 2017) and claims about ‘multiple ontologies’ that, in the extreme, rehabilitate forms of cultural essentialism in themselves also highly problematic. However, Chakrabarty’s ‘time knots’ can be effectively deployed to braid the (non)secular with the material to apprehend lives and modes of living otherwise. The ‘time knots’ that permeate subaltern lives enable thicker forms of associations and socialities in which relations of dependency are not merely pre-ontic but central to everyday life in all its quotidian elements. Low consuming subalterns in the South do not seek the horizons of liberal sovereignty; neither are they, for that reason, abject. The protocols of quantified liberal thought, however, with its circumscribed vision of ‘more-or-less’ and its metrics of commensurability foreclose recognition of de-pathologized vulnerabilities in the South. The universal logic of precarity as a disordering experience of liberal subjectivity breaks down in contexts where, for the vast majority of populations (in the South), life is lived otherwise. The de-pathologized thicker socialities and relations of mutual dependency that characterize life and living, especially for vulnerable populations in the South, impede the epistemic reach of precarity as a global analytic. And what, finally, of Nirmalya? The protagonist of Amit Chaudhuri’s novel, The Immortals whose decision to ‘choose precarity’, Simon During suggests, is emblematic of the global condition of precarity, one in which the smoothed spaces of contemporary capitalism have rendered archaic distinctions between metropole and periphery, North and South? Nirmalya, the son of a middle-class family living in Bombay, is a music lover trained in classical singing by Shyam Lal whose work with his gifted mother, Mallika Sengupta, provides the main arc of the book’s narrative. Committed to the mundane rather than the exceptional, Chaudhuri meticulously traces the everyday lives of two families in the Bombay of the 1970s and 1980s. Towards the end of the book, Nirmalya departs India for England to study philosophy. ‘It is a jump out of India’s modernising process’, During notes, ‘into the heart of European modernity itself’. More crucially, ‘it is a jump into – a choice – of a certain mode of precariousness’ (During 2015, 35), that marks Nirmalya’s entry ‘into interiorised Western subjectivity’ (During 2015, 36). It is, I think, striking, that During tracks Nirmalya’s precarity and precariousness to interiorized subjectivity to European modernity, and his passage out from

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India to London, locating precarity/precariousness literally (and theoretically I have argued) in the North. In a passage on the penultimate page of the novel, however, comes another line that arguably reverses During’s reading of the novel, and captures in spirit if not in letter the line of argument I have been trying to pursue. Nirmalya: ‘Ah, the embrace of poverty! It was much less attractive here than it was at home; you felt the fight was going unnoticed, somehow’ (Chaudhuri 2009, 404). Why would the fight, we might ask, against poverty/precarity go unnoticed in London? Because poverty in the North is less than poverty in the South? Or because the liberal analytics of socio-economic precaritization and the flattening quantifications of thought they deploy render those in poverty unnoticeable in the North but, because thoroughly abject, noticeable in the South? Or is it because the fight against poverty in the South summons a different horizon of life and liveability, one in which expectations about security without struggle have no resonance. And one in which the fight itself in all its varied registers constitutes a fully human (de-pathologized) mode of life? Symptomatic of the return of a new universalism, anchored in a tacit desire to reignite the ‘utopian spark’ (Žižek 2002, 310) of an internationalism rendered archaic in the post-1989 world, Standing and Butler’s accounts of shared vulnerability as the condition of possibility for a renewed globalism hold out the hope of a revived internationalism. Like species thinking, however, these attempts anchored as they are in a specific notion of human life, namely liberal subjectivity and its security, unwittingly de-politicize. The difficult task of shunning the liberal subject or abandoning the desire to reconstitute its remains simply defers the forging of a politics, one that is attentive to historical difference.

Notes 1. For discussion and lively debate around a very early iteration of this project, my thanks to students in my seminar at PUC-Rio—Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and to Joˇao Nogueira for extending the invitation. 2. This chapter first appeared in a special section, ‘Precarity and the International’ in Globalizations (Vol. 16, no. 4, 2019). I thank Taylor and Francis for granting permission to re-print. 3. Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection is a psychoanalytic one that tracks the mechanisms of revulsion and disgust that disrupt the subject’s sense of

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subject–object distinctions. Within some traditions of thought in politicaleconomy (including what I refer to as the liberal analytic in this paper), the characterization of people in extreme poverty/precarity as ‘servile, wretched, contemptible’ (Webster’s dictionary meaning of abjection), worthy of revulsion and disgust merits the use of Kristeva’s concept albeit in a different register. For good overviews of ‘precarity studies’, see especially Castels (2001), Han (2018), Jorgensen (2016), Lemke (2016), Millar (2014), Seymour (2012), and Trott (2014). Post-foundational conceptualizations of the subject use the language of non-sovereignty to signal a critique of the Enlightenment notion of a unitary subject. Non-sovereignty, however, can also be deployed in a postcolonial register where the liberal subject of autonomous self-mastery is simply not the dominant ideal. I take the term ‘precarity talk’ from the virtual roundtable discussion edited by Jasbir Puar (2012). See especially, Munck (2013), Standing (2013), and Scully (2016). Robert Castels points out that wage labour was seen as a sign of dependency, not freedom, for a long time in western modernity. Projecting these disavowed elements to the ‘savage slot’ rendered the Third World the locus of dependency and unfreedom. Standing’s work in promoting Universal Basic Income and cash transfers across many countries also contributes to the common sense that precarity is a global concept. Julia Kristeva explains abjection as ‘a something I do not recognize as a thing’ (Kristeva 1984). That Levinas also works with an idea of Europe that ‘blocks any easy engagement across geographies’ (Drabinski 2011: 2) is also problematic for any attempt to globalize Levinasian thought. In a closely argued but nevertheless sympathetic engagement with Levinas, Drabinski points out that Levinas remains tied to a ‘metaphysics and so also a kind of epistemology of alterity’, both of which blocks his thinking from the ‘sorts of geographical wanderings with which it ought to be engaged’ (Drabinski 2011: 3).

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CHAPTER 4

Precarity at the Nexus of Governmentality and Sovereignty: Entangled Fields of Power and Political Subjectivities Nancy Ettlinger

My intent in this chapter is to offer a definition of precarity that pertains to multiple contexts, and to develop three interrelated arguments. First, I argue that precarity is both ubiquitous and longstanding, that is, not specific to a particular world region or time period. Unbounding precarity in time and space suggests that it is a part of the human condition. Consistent with Foucault’s (2000a, 343) view that power relations are anchored ‘deep in the social nexus’ and crystallize in institutions, I direct attention to precarity in the first instance not at the scale of institutions and state–society relations, but rather in the microspaces of everyday life. Second, I reframe apparent explanations of precarity that actually are more descriptive of specific contexts than explanatory. Drawing from Foucault’s scholarship while also reacting to problems or holes in his conceptualization of governance, I explain precarity across contexts in terms of

N. Ettlinger (B) Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_4

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unpredictable, deleterious shifts in fields of power between governmentality or indirect governance in which power is diffuse, and coercive, sovereign, direct power, which, contra Agamben, I suggest complements but does not negate diffuse power. Foucault recognized the coexistence of governmentality and sovereign governance, but never examined their relation, which is precisely the location of my explanation of precarity. Third, people are subjected to chaotic slippage between fields of power differently because they have multiple, often incoherent subjectivities. If precarity underscores the human condition, it therefore does so unevenly. Subjectivities matter, and recognizing them gives voice to those who refuse the subjection of the terrors of precarity, while helping to interpret implicit complicity in insidious modes of governance.

Precarities Although most would agree that life is precarious, the definition of precarity and its context nonetheless is open to debate. The literature on precarity is decidedly global North-centric, not as an explicit denial of precarity elsewhere, such as in the global south where precarity is understood as integral to daily life, but perhaps more as an inwardlooking reaction to disruptions to formerly robust economic, political, and social institutions such as the welfare state, Fordism, and Keynesian policy. Beyond the regionalized specificity, precarity also tends to be defined in terms of particular temporal contexts, including: neoliberalism (Schram 2015); state-society relations regarding the dissolution of the welfare state (e.g. Lorey 2015) and government policies that entail the outcasting of immigrants (e.g. Banki 2013; Mountz 2010); the dissolution of Fordism and the development of flexible production that render conditions of work precarious (Christopherson 2008; Christopherson and Storper 1989); and more generally, restructuring of the cultural economy (e.g. Banks et al. 2013; Gill and Pratt 2008; Lazzarato 2011; Murgia 2013; Murgia et al. 2012; Neilson and Rossiter 2005; Ross 2003, 2009; Scholz 2013; Standing 2011; Terranova 2000).1 Although most approaches tend to link precarity to economic conditions, in geopolitical terms it has been conceptualized in terms of the development of organized terrorism, which can range from specific groups such as AlQaeda (Butler 2004) or ISIS and nation-states that commit acts of terror against their own civilian population (e.g. Syria’s chemical warfare against

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its own population, brutal tactics of the US government targeting immigrants and persons of colour) to biopolitical strategies more generally (e.g. Gregory and Pred 2007) such as surveillance and the militarization of urban life (e.g. Graham 2012; Mitchell 2010). I regard all these space-time contexts as pertinent yet not comprehensive. To avoid a context-specific definition of precarity that excludes other relevant contexts, I suggest abstracting up a level to offer a definition of precarity that is sensible across contexts. Towards this end, I define precarity as uncertainty with deleterious consequences; ‘deleterious’ is key because it distinguishes precarity from uncertainty, and clarifies the terrorizing aspect of precarity, which occurs across space as well as over time. Below I turn to the omnipresence of precarity, first across space and subsequently over time. The next section explains precarity in any context by the continual slippage between modes of power relations with reference to Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality and sovereignty and alternative views of sovereignty, notably those of Agamben. The ensuing section clarifies that irrespective of the nature of power relations at any given moment, the effects on individuals are highly variable because subjectivities vary both among individuals and regarding any one person because each person operates with multiple subjectivities. This non-essentialist approach to subjectivity departs from approaches that tend to map a singular subjectivity onto specific objectified conditions. In the penultimate section I draw attention to the range of intensity of precarities that wide-ranging subjects confront; precarities are relevant to all of us. I conclude with thoughts about the usefulness of understanding precarities relative to continual slippage between modes of power. I suggest that consciousness of these processes will change neither the material basis of uneven power relations nor the consequences, but nonetheless is useful both to interpret the dynamics of any context and to the proactive and reflexive construction of one’s subjectivity in the face of otherwise daunting constraints. Precarity Across Space A comparative contextualization of precarity suggests that presumed boundaries between the global North and south are constructed, and at the least, may be dissolving (Aytes 2013; Beck 2000). This position requires looking beyond data collected by and for governmental organizations, which often adhere to old categorizations and conceptions of

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employment and unemployment (Winick 2018). For example, whereas the International Labour Organisation (2016) reported that non-standard (casual, contingent, informal) employment constitutes only about 10% of the US workforce compared to 75% in low to middle-income countries, an independent research firm2 in the United States found that as much as 34% of US workers in 2014 were freelancers3 (Horowitz and Rosati 2019). The gap in conditions between the so-called ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ world persists, yet the rate of change towards increased insecurity in the global North clearly has accelerated, and precarious conditions of work continue to worsen. The considerable extension of precarity beyond the experiences of minorities in the United States and the global North more generally (e.g. Lodovici and Semenza 2012) at this point reflects differences between the global North and south in degree more than kind. Recognizing that precarity is rendered both unevenly and differently in different contexts, I ask what underscores precarity across space. My answer: informalization, which often is understood as specific to the global south. Consider, however, the following remarks of a freelance administrative worker in Italy: I started as an occasional worker in January 2005… and in fact until June I didn’t have a contract and I was paid not so much as a euro. So I worked six months… on trust… In 2005 I was there the whole year as an occasional worker… The year after they decided to give me a freelance contract, which in fact I signed three months later. So I again worked on trust for the first months… because I liked them… I worked full-time, even though with this contract you shouldn’t even be in the office… After that I won a competitive examination for a fixed-term contract… but because that contract was a cost to them, there was only money for a part-time job…. (in Murgia et al. 2012, 95–96)

The above quote is germane for three reasons. First, it is emblematic of the informalization of work in a global-North context. Second, and pertinent to the argument I develop, the quote reveals a capriciousness among power brokers in the workplace that entails a toxic mix of unpredictable actions executed at a whim and the absence of ethical considerations. Third, this freelancer’s comments exude anguish, which derive neither from state-society relations nor from corporate strategies of flexibilization, but rather from specific capricious decisions at particular times in a specific place—in the microspaces of everyday life in a workplace where individual agents act outside the purview of formal regulations.

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Informalization commonly is understood with reference to systems in the aggregate. One notable referent is labour regimes in which people work ‘off the books’ without statutory rights. Others include juridical systems in which marginalized groups lack protections and thereby are vulnerable to capricious actions by those in the majority, or various types of organized terror that informalize violence beyond formal declarations of war. Yet capriciousness on the part of bosses, employers, managers, supervisors, directors, and the like can occur in wide-ranging contexts, even in apparently stable workplaces where workers have access to collective bargaining. There are innumerable avenues by which an actor with power over another in a workplace can informalize regulatory principles in daily work life and seriously impair a life. Regarding the informalization of juridical life, political scientist Michael Lipsky’s (1980, 2014) concept ‘street-level bureaucrats’ is useful; he argued that low-level public-service agents ‘on-the-street’, ranging from social workers and teachers to police, routinely interpret policies and regulations formulated in far-away offices. I would add that these agents filter their interpretations through their own biases, life experiences, and self-interest. Such interpretations can be constructive or destructive; it is in the latter case, when agents in a position of power over others act capriciously, that juridical systems become informalized and daily interactions become susceptible to acts of physical or psychological abuse perpetrated on vulnerable actors. Tensions of difference along many axes (class, gender, age, sexuality, differently abled, race/ethnicity, citizenship) can motivate acts of terror that are enacted in wide-ranging spaces: in homes, workplaces, cyberspace, and in residential neighbourhoods by gangs, police hostile to particular groups—any actor hostile to difference. Crucially, terror across many spaces in everyday life does not represent a separate, political sphere. Rather, it inhabits every space when capriciousness under conditions of hierarchy generates informalization and the dissolution of rules, laws, or any system of guidance, and thereby produces precarity in the microspaces of wide-ranging work and living contexts, across space. The concept ‘street-level bureaucrats’ can be extended fruitfully beyond public-service employees to all people who routinely interpret societal norms by filtering them through biases, life experience, and self- interest with the potential (although not necessarily inevitability) of capricious practices in the context of hierarchical, uneven power relations.

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Precarity Over Time Precarity also commonly is understood as temporally specific, generally since around the late 1970s/early 1980s in association with neoliberalism and the emergence of a regime of flexible production. Alternatively, I suggest that precarity is longstanding. The idea that precarity has relatively recently been produced by neoliberalism emanates from the dominant narrative of neoliberalism that defines it as a policy package of deregulation, privatization, and trade deregulation, emerging during the Reagan-Thatcher era (Harvey 2005) and concurrent with the rolling back of the welfare state and Keynesian policy (Peck and Tickell 2002).4 Deregulation systematizes avenues for informalization across many spheres, from work to finance. Privatization devolves responsibilities from the state to organizations and individuals who often lack the resources to take on such responsibilities, and it increases the cost of consumption at a time when work has become increasingly unstable and wages have declined, along with possibilities for collective bargaining. Trade liberalization ensures persistent hegemony of global-North firms by prohibiting protectionist policies in the global south through global-North orchestrated organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank while industries remain subsidized in the advanced economies. In sum then, per the dominant narrative of neoliberalism, policies produce inequalities, which engender precarity for the marginalized within countries and in the world ‘order’ of the global North and south. Alternatively, Foucault’s (2008) lecture series on The Birth of Biopolitics examines neoliberalism over a much longer period in the context of the rise of modern western states, which emerged from around the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Foucault also discussed liberalism, which he cast not as a temporal period of governance preceding neoliberalism, but rather as a discursive, moral check on neoliberalism. Liberalism, which classically is predicated on equal exchange, is non-existent in practice because equal exchange is a fiction. From this vantage point, Foucault argued that liberalism serves as a moral check on neoliberal practices,5 which are predicated on competition that is imperfect and not natural (i.e. given by the market), but rather are constituted by uneven power relations. Government programmes and policies are pertinent in this portrait of neoliberalism, but not as drivers of inequality, which is integral to the logic of neoliberal life, but rather as supports that nibble at the edges

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of neoliberal regimes to alleviate but nonetheless perpetuate tensions and thereby preserve inequality, the backbone of society. Foucault also conceptualized neoliberalism at the scale of individual people, casting them as ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ who constantly draw from their diverse abilities to find ways to be productive in the terrain of imperfect and constructed competition; his neoliberal subject refers not just to the marginalized, but rather to all members of an enduring, unequal society. Yet if precarity is part of the human condition, how then did it materialize prior to neoliberalism and the rise of modern states? Although Foucault (2007a, 2008) in different lecture series in the 1970s located the emergence of governmentality and neoliberalism in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, he later remarked regarding Aufklärung (‘the enlightenment’, understood to have emerged in the eighteenth century, concurrent with development of neoliberalism, governmentality) that: …it is not because we privilege the 18th century…that we encounter the problem of Aufklärung. I would say instead that it is because we fundamentally want to ask the question, What is Aufklärung? that we encounter the historical scheme of our modernity. The point is… to see under what conditions, at the cost of which modifications or generalizations we can apply this question of Aufklärung to any moment in history, that is, the question of the relationships between power, truth and the subject. (Foucault 2007b, 57)

Departing from an origins mentality, Foucault’s late scholarship recognized power relations across context-specific processes and particular time-space locations. His later view resonates with the project here, which views the relation between inequality and precarity as basic to all societies. I suggest that neoliberalism is one of many modes of governance predicated on inequality. Even pre-capitalist societies do not escape the divides of inequality, even if constructed on axes of difference other than class—gender, for example, age, family, and so on. Elaborating now my previous argument that capriciousness generates informalization, which produces precarity, I suggest that inequality across many axes provides the hierarchical grounds for capriciousness (defined with reference to unethical and unpredictable, deleterious actions at a whim), which engenders informalization, and thereby produces precarity over time and across space. Regarding the attribution of precarity specifically to the regime of flexible production that emerged in the early 1980s, I call attention to the

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apparent antithesis of flexible production, namely Fordism, which often is understood as the golden period of the industrial era in light of decent wages, stable employment, and collective bargaining. Some, however, regard Fordism as little more than a blip in the long saga of problematic capital-labour relations, and recognize that the ‘golden’ aspect of Fordism pertained only to some, notably white, native men, thereby rendering life precarious for all Others such as women, immigrants, and persons of colour (Ettlinger 2007; Lorey 2015; Neilson and Rossiter 2008). Moreover, and connecting with my previous argument, even the most ‘golden’ of workplaces leaves space for possibilities of capricious decision-making and actions. Further, beyond the global North, precarity characterized Fordist workplaces in the global south where transnational firms and other organizations in the global North located production to avoid precisely the processes of collective bargaining that in part constituted the quite partial golden period ‘at home’. Moving from the past to the present and future, there are indeed other strategies beyond flexible production that render life precarious. For example, by the onset of the new millennium, firms have developed fundamentally new strategies to reap tremendous profits at the expense of labour in the digital economy, resulting in even lower wages and more unstable work, crucially, rendered by new processes that target a digital labour market (e.g. Beerepoot and Lambregts 2015; BergvallKåreborn and Howcroft 2014; Ettlinger 2014; Scholz). While precarity is longstanding, the processes that render it differ over time and across space.

Explaining Precarity Beyond identifying and describing the different ways in which precarity is produced across time-space contexts, I turn now to explain how precarity is produced with reference to the dynamic relation between different modes of governance. Governmentality and sovereignty each entail considerable variation, but that warrants at least another paper. My twofold purpose here is to develop an argument about their relation, and subsequently, the implications for the production of precarity. Although much has been written about governmentality and sovereignty, the relation remains unspecified (as I explain below, excepting those who assert their sameness). Discussion of the implications of the coexistence of governmentality and sovereignty for precarity therefore requires

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at the outset a conceptualization of how and why these two modes of governance are interrelated. The very meanings of governmentality and sovereignty are contested and thus also require discussion. In principle, Foucault distinguished the two modes of governance regarding the conceptualization of power: diffuse in the context of governmentality, and vested in particular positions of hierarchy in the context of sovereignty.6 Connecting this distinction to the argument developed in the previous section, governmentality as indirect governance per Foucault (2000a, 341) entails ‘actions on possible actions’. In contrast, sovereignty entails acts by actors on other actors on the grounds of inequality whereby some actors become susceptible to capriciousness on the part of those in positions of domination who informalize societal norms, filtering them through biases, life experiences, and self-interest. I suggest that life becomes destabilized, uncertain, insecure—precarious —when sovereign power intervenes in normalized life, capriciously, in workplaces, homes, neighbourhoods, cyberspace. Foucault’s early scholarship on the emergence of governmentality around the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries argued for its salience, albeit coexistence, with sovereign power in the context of a dramatic increase in population and urbanization. In contrast, Agamben (1998) argued that sovereignty is biopower (a ‘technique of power’ in Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality) and universal; Hardt and Negri (2009) also saw biopower as sovereignty, although as I will elaborate, in somewhat different terms. My stance is partially consistent with the Foucauldian perspective, specifically regarding fundamental differences between governmentality and sovereignty with reference to the conceptualization of power. Yet Foucault did not engage the relation between these two modes of governance beyond recognizing their coexistence and indicating the prevalence of the former. I ask, then: do these different modes of governance have a temporal relationship? If so, under what conditions does sovereignty emerge as a dominant mode of governance in a context in which governmentality generally prevails, and how and why might governmentality again surface? Do these different modes of governance exist in the same time-space context yet entail different expressions of power? In brief, I suggest that the relation between governmentality and sovereignty is dynamic and uncertain, and that this instability produces precarious conditions and affects subjectivities relative to actors’ different histories of experience across space and over time. The terror of violence

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and denial of basic civil rights that can occur unpredictably and on a whim by capricious actors can dissolve stable rhythms of life at any moment, as direct, sovereign rule overtakes governance-at-a-distance. Precarity resulting from a shift from the security of normalized life to direct, sovereign power can occur anywhere in the microspaces of everyday life. The uneasy subjectivities produced by threats to livelihood and wellbeing—whether by prison guards, employers, partners, or any agent with the power to suspend and destroy a sense of security—emanate not just from the violence of sovereign acts of power, but importantly, from the unpredictable shift from normalized ‘actions on actions’ to acts by actors on others. The chaotic underpinnings of the process of change is key to the production of precarity. But what happens once sovereign rule overtakes governmentality? Contra Agamben, and accepting the distinction between the two modes of governance, I suggest that once sovereign power surfaces, its normalization requires indirect governance of a wide variety of actors, including apparent victims—a matter of governmentality. The paradox, then, is that sovereignty becomes as much a mentality requiring continual reproduction through governance-at-a-distance, as it is a direct and coercive mode of governance that holds and exercises power over, rather than through, subjects. Two distinct modes of power relations operate: one operates over specific subject-victims while the other indirectly guides all actors at-a-distance to sustain what Agamben (2005) has called a ‘state of exception’, which is misleading semantically because ‘state’ connotes insularity and implies a discrete event or set of events, and implies a static state of affairs that exists outside a norm. Indeed, discrete states of exception may exist, but when they perversely become normalized over time, they are sustained as mundane in a destructively, physically, or non-physically violent governmentality—an ironic, indeed precarious subversion of indirect governance. Sovereignty and governmentality therefore can mutually constitute one another, despite the different ways in which power relations operate in each. As I will elaborate, imperfections in the system of governmentality render intelligible how a new kind of governmentality can emerge that fosters the development of sovereign power. For those living in extreme circumstances and immediately subject to sovereign power—undocumented immigrants, for example—precarity haunts every space; but, for those living under conditions that are less extreme, precarity is produced by the immanence of sovereign rule and the associated uncertainty with deleterious consequences. Although

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Agamben (2008) recognized this immanence, he nonetheless generalized extreme circumstances because he presumed the immanence of extremes in all circumstances. Alternatively, I suggest the following. First, although precarity is part of the human condition, the nature of the production of precarity is context specific. Second, the immanence of extreme conditions cannot and should not be translated into conditions that necessarily are extreme. Third, variation across contexts as well as subjectivities helps interpret how and why a governmentality might morph into another that may be constructive, or a destructive means of sustaining an apparent state of exception. The ensuing subsections elaborate the nature of governmentality, sovereignty, their relation, and the uneven production of precarity produced by the relation. Governmentality and Conceptualizations of Power and Resistance ‘Governmentality’ is the mentality (e.g. liberalism, neoliberalism, racism, patriarchy, and the like) by which indirect governance occurs such that actors self-govern in accordance with societal norms. Foucault considered governance in modern society to be an art because individuals are free (in the political sense) and have choices; thus, actions occur on the basis of choice, not coercion. Laws are important devices by which particular problems in society (health, migration, crime, work, and so on) connect productively with the economy (Foucault 2008). However, governance-in-practice entails the design of tactics (not laws) that guide free individuals with choices in daily life to act, often unconsciously, in accordance with societal norms, which are communicated through a variety of texts or discourses that embed various mentalities. Such indirectness means that governance is dissipated throughout formal and informal institutions in society at multiple scales. As Foucault famously said of political theory, ‘we need to cut off the king’s head’ (1980a, 121) and further that ‘the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think’ (Foucault 2000c, 220). Governance per Foucault therefore extends well beyond what is formally understood as formal ‘government’ constituted by elected officials. The extensiveness of governance connects with Foucault’s novel view of power—power as ubiquitous (not confined to particular positions in a hierarchy) and diffuse (held by all actors, not a matter of power by one actor or entity over another). Accordingly, institutions are the loci of the

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crystallization of power relations, which are rooted ‘deep in the social nexus’ (Foucault 2000a, 343). Thus, societal-scale mentalities and associated norms and discourses produce practices, but the relation is recursive because mentalities and norms are not imposed top, down, but rather are constituted by regimes of practices in daily life. This bottom, up element of Foucault’s conceptualization is critical in distinguishing his thinking from various renditions of Marxism, which casts ideas as imposed on populations and individual actors (e.g. Foucault 1980a, b).7 Foucault recognized issues of hierarchy and oppression, but he highlighted a diffuse and productive expression of power. Given oppression he would ask: how is it that oppression is tolerated and sustained; how are different actors (including apparent victims) enrolled, even if unconsciously, in the production of oppression; and how do mundane, everyday activities implicitly re/produce such oppression? Governmentality as an analytical framework is useful towards connecting macroscale, societal mentalities, or rationalities with everyday behaviours in daily life. It is this connection that makes governmentality both fascinating and intelligible: it helps interpret ‘everydayness’—daily practices in which individuals engage, often without consciousness of their linkage to macroscale, societal norms—as well as the role of ‘regular’ actors (i.e. not necessarily ‘leaders’) in re/producing those norms. Specifically, ‘techniques of power’, the programmes, strategies, tactics calculated to ground these mentalities (e.g. Foucault 2000d) connect societal-scale mentalities with mundane material life. This connection between the discursive and the material also distinguishes the contribution of Foucault’s governmentality framework insofar as he privileges neither discourses nor material experience in conceptualizing governance, but rather, their relation.8 Techniques of disciplinary power (e.g. surveillance as in Bentham’s panopticon9 ) operate on individual actors to ensure that they will conduct themselves in accordance with societal norms, while techniques of biopower (such as the use of quantitative measures, maps, and the like10 ) monitor populations to enable analysis and manipulation. These different techniques of governance work in tandem to simultaneously individuate and reinforce the totality (Foucault 2000e). The governance of a mentality—governmentality—is, however, open to rupture because the iteration of mentalities, discourses, and norms throughout societal institutions and organizations is imperfect. Techniques of power that are calculated to ground governmental mentalities can be conceived poorly, thereby rendering them ineffective, often

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because the inadequate design of tactics is tied to the classification and compartmentalization of problems, without recognition of critical overlap. Any one governmentality, such as, for example, neoliberalism, and its associated norms, discourses, techniques of governance, and regimes of practices intersects with other governmentalities, such as patriarchy, racism, homophobism, xenophobism, and the like, and their associated norms, discourses, techniques of governance, and regimes of practices, thereby producing complex and often incoherent actions that frustrate singularly conceived designs.11 It is in spaces of rupture in part produced by ineffective designs where possibilities for transformation and the production of new mentalities lie for either a specific actor, or more ambitiously, a particular polity or society more generally.12 Effective resistance, per Foucault, targets not a group or organization (e.g. the government or an authoritative body) or actor (an individual in a hierarchy vested with authority), but rather the mentality by which governance occurs. Another reason for the development of ruptures is that resistance can occur proactively as a matter of an individual’s reflexive critique of the system; from this vantage point, resistance targets not just a mentality, but also the subjectivity that has been created through an existing governmentality. In his late scholarship (Foucault 1988, 1990a, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2011), and various interviews (e.g. 1997a, b), Foucault shifted his attention from the governance of populations to the governance of the self and ethics.13 Resisting that which has subjected oneself requires developing holistic knowledge (savoir, beyond connaissance) of the system, and the specific techniques of power that have dominated and shaped one’s subjectivity and guided decisions and actions. This critique is a continual project that permits one to challenge and resist societal mentalities, norms, discourses, and techniques of power in order to reconstitute one’s subjectivity (e.g. Foucault 2000a, 2005, 2007b). Such critique is difficult; it requires continual ascetic practices of the self to achieve an aesthetics or art of living based on the constitution of an ethical self (Valverde 2004). The demanding nature of such resistance helps explain its relative scarcity despite the omnipresence of possibility. Foucault’s (2005) lecture series The Hermeneutics of the Subject and related materials on ethics and resistance via individualized, reflexive critique set the stage for his final lecture series The Government of Self and Others (Foucault 2010, 2011), which engaged parrh¯esia (truth-telling) from a political vantage point regarding the governance of self as well as

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others. He discussed the latter in terms of the governance of polity and prospects for democracy, and engaged with issues of ‘ascendancy’, that is, how an individual might ascend to political position in a hierarchy. In this context, Foucault’s last lectures are based on power as vested in hierarchy, without, however, discussion of power as diffuse and its relation to the dynamics of governing a polity. And in Foucault’s earlier conceptualization of governance (Foucault 1990b, 2000b, 2007a) the agonistic relation between dominance and resistance rests on the idea of power as diffuse, yet leaves unclear the role of hierarchy, repression, and power as negative and destructive. Crucially (and frustratingly!), Foucault examined different expressions of power discretely, leaving unattended the nature of their relation. Left hanging is the question as to how, and under what conditions, the system of governmentality predicated on power as diffuse becomes transformed into another system of exclusions predicated on power as vested in particular positions in a hierarchy. First, however, I want to engage the pessimistic argument that the ubiquity of hierarchies negates the very idea of power as diffuse, and subsequently I offer a rebuttal that recognizes the coexistence of different expressions of power, and concomitantly, the simultaneity of different modes of governance and the resultant precarity produced by their coexistence. Questioning the Finality of Sovereign Power Whereas law for Foucault connects problems productively to the economy, for Agamben (2011), as clarified in The Reign and the Glory, the economy is an exercise of power. Agamben’s scholarship on sovereignty as developed in his trilogy Homo Sacer (1998), The State of Exception (2005), and Remnants of Auschwitz (2008), casts it in terms of the force of law that is separate from the law, rendering existence bare, in a state of exception. Inspired by Nazi-camp survivor Primo Levi (2008), Agamben argued that subjectification of prisoners of war depresses humanity, and renders subjects guilty by their existence and survival.14 Levi’s (2008) account of life at Nazi camps offers a compelling picture of how people’s subjectivities change along with mentalities, norms, and discourses under such extremism—how people become conditioned to expect and act on what formerly may have been understood as unthinkable, such as prisoners preparing other prisoners for the gas chamber. Prisoners under extreme conditions are exceptional insofar as

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they have no (or virtually no) choices. As Levi noted, even suicide is not really a choice; it was extremely rare in Nazi concentration camps because of the immanence of death. Precarity haunts every space, and its horror often persists in the minds of survivors until death. Agamben (2008, 50) views the extremes of camp conditions as immanent for all those outside camps, extending, for example, to the conditions under which undocumented immigrants live. He generalizes the extremes to represent the terror of sovereignty as a mode of governance that is universal and not specific to any one time/space context. As Negri (2008) lamented, the productive subject in Agamben’s conceptualization is lost, overcome by pure alienation. Like Hardt and Negri (2009), Agamben interprets Foucault’s biopower as sovereign power, although unlike Hardt and Negri,15 his ethical response—his resistance—differs considerably. Whereas resistance for Hardt and Negri takes the form of a new world order, and for Foucault resistance can lead to new truths at the scale of self and/or society, resistance for Agamben is the capacity to endure bare life and bear witness to it. Sovereign rule per Agamben is inhumane in a world constituted by oppressors and victims; thus for him, counter-conduct is to be human by giving voice to humanity (testimonials, in particular, in Remnants of Auschwitz). This bleak expression of resistance permits neither transformation nor even peace from prior torment. If this is what power as vested in hierarchy necessarily looks like, then power as diffuse, with all the possibilities of resistance and hope embedded in that mode of governance, is impossible. Transformative Processes and Dual Expressions of Power I suggest that sovereignty and governmentality represent more than a zero-sum game, and that they coexist as complementary, not necessarily as alternative or competing systems of power. Sovereign power needs techniques of power in a system of governmentality to ensure that actors hold and act on sovereign power over other actors to normalize and sustain a so-called ‘state of exception’. For example, US soldiers at Abu Ghraib somehow transitioned from regular army to regular terrorists. The issue here is the ‘somehow’, the process by which the nature of the soldiers’ actions as well as their subjectivities changed.16 G. W. Bush’s ‘bad apple’ explanation for these soldiers’ actions explains nothing because, among other things,17 it lacks acknowledgement of change in soldiers’ behaviours

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that is supported by the testimonies of people who knew the soldiers at an earlier time when they apparently lacked the behavioural features that would permit the atrocities they later committed. The military is well known for techniques of training and socialization that permit possibilities for the informalization of codes of ethical conduct. Soldiers are trained in the military to objectify and think of ‘the enemy’ in dehumanized terms to ensure that they will proceed with inhumane actions against said enemy (Costanzo and Gerrity 2009; Levi 2008; Zimbardo 2007).18 This type of training is reinforced by routine techniques that characterize daily life in prisons (e.g. euphemistic referents to torture, vague instructions to prison guards, approval of brutality by supervisors, the absence of a system of accountability, and group cohesiveness that is integral to military socialization), thereby cultivating the normalization of the otherwise unthinkable (Costanzo and Gerrity 2009). Further, contextual factors such as spatially delimited environments of extreme stress in enclaved zones of enemy territory or prison camps are conducive to the development of a sustained ‘state of exception’. Conditions of inequality materialize in the hierarchical relation of guard-prisoner, military biopolitical training techniques that target ‘the enemy’, the numerous ways in which brutal and sadistic practices are daily cast as acceptable, and the specificities of local context. As inequalities enable capriciousness, the normalized informalization of humane codes of conduct and the pleasure that some may take in inhumane acts unfold. The sovereign power that some actors hold and act upon over others is constructed and rests on a governmentality that overtakes other, competing mentalities by virtue of contextual circumstances, techniques of power that constrain and guide individuals’ thoughts and actions, and the development of an unethical, unpredictable capriciousness unleashed through inequality. Sovereignty encompasses a specific expression of governmentality, but not on the terms suggested by Agamben, who framed governmentality in terms of a top, down, indomitable biopower. Understanding governmentality as a means towards a sovereign end opens the otherwise opaque process by which actors, perhaps unconsciously, move from one governmentality to another in a field of power that morphs from diffuse to located. Governmentality as a mode of governance provides an opening for transformation precisely because the iteration of societal mentalities, discourses, and norms throughout societal institutions and organizations is imperfect and thereby leaves space for rupture.

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However, Foucault’s lack of engagement with the relation between sovereign and diffuse power results in an unsatisfying explanation for the transformation of a truth rendered by ‘actions on actions’ into an altogether different expression of power, the sort of power bound up in eugenics, an extreme example. In the mid-1970s Foucault suggested that eugenics could be understood as a means to preserve the health of a population (Foucault 2003). Despite Foucault’s usual multiscalar approach that conceptualizes interrelated processes operating at different scales (e.g. body, household, community, city, region, nation, world region) (Ettlinger 2011), his approach to eugenics and as well as racism fixes analysis at the scale of two populations in conflict, implicitly reminiscent of Carl Schmidt’s (1995) friend/foe binary. This binary approach forgoes problematizing either the relation between processes at different scales or, crucially, the operation of a fundamentally different expression of power. The squeezing of racism and eugenics and associated actions into the governmentality frame is disconcerting insofar as the health of one population is rationalized at the expense, and against the health, of another, which at the least is inconsistent in principle with governanceat-a-distance when thinking in multiscalar terms. More appropriate than fitting actions by one population against another into governmentalityas-usual, it might be useful to view racism and eugenics in terms of a subverted governmentality that shifts from one field of power relations to another, accompanied by techniques of power that guide individuals and whole populations to shift their role in fields of power relations. The entanglement of modes of governance relative to different operations of power helps explain the coexistence governmentality and sovereignty as well as their relation, and in that sense, is preferable to the tidier but static understanding of a sovereignty-governmentality binary. One issue as yet unresolved is why governmentality as ‘actions on actions’ would morph into another governmentality that is deleterious as opposed to constructive. I suggest that the explanation lies with the multiplicity of governmentalities operating on individuals and the potential collision of a governmentality as ‘actions on actions’ with one or more that are destructive. Soldiers, for example, often are steeped in a patriotic mentality, which can be associated with wide-ranging discourses, techniques of power, and regimes of practices. A patriotic governmentality can intersect with positive governmentalities such as ethical and global citizenship. But when it collides perversely with destructive governmentalities such as racism, xenophobia, liberal assimilationism to name a few, all of

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which are forged on the basis of inequality, then a regime of practices such a torture becomes unsurprising, as are mechanisms or techniques of power to sustain and normalize the terrors of destructive sovereign power. Such transformations prompt another question as to why some individuals may engage in acts of terror on others while other individuals refrain. I frame my response to this question with reference to subjectivities .

Precarity and Diverse Subjectivities Literatures on precarity tend to presume a singular subjectivity. Subjects who fall short of realizing their career goals after having invested time, money, and education commonly are cast in the cultural economy literature as self-deprecating, while subject-citizens have been cast singularly as neurotic (Isin 2004) or resilient (O’Malley 2013). These interpretations map whole populations onto objectified realities on the presumption that people’s identities are determined and necessarily interpellated by the governing system, implicitly suggesting that, like objectifying circumstances, subjectivity also can be normalized. Alternatively, I suggest that objectified realities are mediated by actors’ multiple subjectivities , which are mutable and fluid, and therefore the shifting field of power relations is felt and perceived differently depending on actors’ histories of experience. Actors carry with them a kaleidoscope of thoughts and feelings derived from experiences across space and over time, and they carry this mélange with them as sediments19 into which new experiences settle, affect, and are affected by, previous experience (Ettlinger 2004). Different people occupying the same site and objectified by the same precarious circumstances may both think and act differently relative to the nature and extent of their experience. As issue is not just the context at hand, but also the multiple time/space contexts that constitute individuals’ experiences across space and over time and affect actors’ interpretations, thoughts, and actions in any one context. Subjectivity itself requires dynamic and relational contextualization. In any one timespace context, some actors have more choices than others, and some have more constraints than others as a matter of objectification; variation in the configuration of choices and constraints is indeterminate in light of the combination of objectification and subjectification, dynamically and relationally understood.20 Arguably, more reasonable than an oppositional conceptualization of a singular subjectivity—for example, one of neurosis or resilience—is a

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continuum of various combinations of these two poles: calculation and effective adaptation to precarious circumstances on the one hand, and on the other, frenzy and anxiety. Actors are not necessarily fixed in positions along the continuum, but rather can move across the continuum relative to context and experience. Any one subjectivity or constellation of subjectivities can surface and become salient at a particular time in a specific place; how an actor responds to a particular objectifying circumstance is contingent, relative to the intersection of the dynamics of the context and the actor’s life experience. From this vantage point, whereas objectifying circumstances can become normalized, subjectivity cannot. Crucially, variable subjectivities guide an actor towards a particular constellation of governmentalities, understanding that people have agency. A guard at a prisoner-of-war camp may recognize the perversity of the normalized system and be uncomfortable with it in light of her or his particular histories of experience, while participating nonetheless. The discomfort of such precarity can overwhelm, producing a frenzied existence that possibly may intensify violence. On the other hand, people can try to navigate the system in whatever way they can, sometimes participating fully, sometimes backing off or even helping prisoners, even if in small ways. The interlacing of people’s life experience with the dynamics of a specific context helps account for the choices in which people select, even if unconsciously, a particular constellation of governmentalities that steer their actions. The relation, then, between governmentality as the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 2000a, 341) and subjectivity/ies is recursive. The larger point is that sovereign power and the rendering of a ‘state of exception’ mundane need not be understood as final. Even if those in a position to act on others are in a numerical minority when they resist a deleterious governmentality that normalizes the informalization of capricious practices, it would be a shame to ignore the minority politics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) of their self-expression. Similarly, regarding those who are acted upon, mapping an entire population onto a singular subjectivity relative to objectified realities denies voice and ignores the courage among those who resist interpellated identities. Further, regarding collective resistance, subjectivities matter because recognizing and servicing different needs and understandings within a group are central challenges to sustaining resistance. For example, while some decry precarious work and demand full-time, stable employment, others demand a basic wage to enable fruitful use of the time that becomes available under conditions of less-than-full-time work; beyond

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the stark difference in the nature of demands and associated objectified realities, one might imagine a wide array of subjectivities. Since the beginning of the new millennium, precarity has been recognized as an instrument of struggle, notably in western Europe in association with EuroMayDay and specifically in Italy in association with the postAutonomist-Operaismo movement and its icon San Precario, as well as in Spain in association with the feminist Precarias à la Deriva (e.g see Casas-Cortés 2014). However, the heterogeneous population of people constituting ‘the precariat’ (Standing 2011) reflects highly variable objectified conditions as well as subjectivities, suggesting that effective and sustained resistance beyond discrete events are far from inevitable (Neilson and Rossiter 2008; Ross 2008). Strategizing collective resistance therefore requires recognition of internal differences and the development of mechanisms to permit expressions of difference while maintaining a negotiable unity. ∗ ∗ ∗ Just as variable subjectivities matter to the way precarity is experienced and the nature of reactions, variable objectified realities also matter. Taking Agamben on his own terms of extreme conditions of precarity, my arguments thus far pertain to especially horrific conditions of precarity. But what about everyday subjects under conditions less extreme than inhumane prisoner-of-war camps? Beyond a continuum of subjectivities, contra conceptualizations such as Agamben’s that generalize from extreme cases of objectifying circumstances, it also makes sense to consider a continuum of objectifying circumstances—from death camps, torture, and the lives of undocumented immigrants to circumstances of relatively privileged people, readers of this chapter for example.

Everyday Subjects and Shades of Objectifying Precarity Less extreme yet unusually stressful conditions characterize the circumstances of undocumented immigrants. Immigrants applying for temporary protection visas have been described as leading desperate ‘lives in limbo’ (Leach and Mansouri 2004; Mountz et al. 2002), and their circumstances of intense precarity are suggestive of the lives of undocumented immigrants more generally (e.g. Gonzales 2011). Indeed, irrespective

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of achievements in schools and in jobs, the precarity of lack of citizenship never diminishes (Vargas 2011). Whereas sovereign power metes out torture and death for prisoners of war under inhumane circumstances, it metes out detention and deportation for undocumented immigrants, and underwrites everyday processes of alienation as well as physical and non-physical abuse. Techniques of biopower and discursive regimes frame the undocumented as an ‘alien’ population while techniques of disciplinary power guide employers, regular citizens, border patrols, and detention-camp guards (Hiemstra 2014) to daily re/produce practices that dehumanize economic, political, and environmental refugees. Other techniques of disciplinary power guide undocumented immigrants to repress their selves and identities to evade acts of sovereign power that continually hover, disrupting life with events that violate the self and linger in the mind in tense anticipation of the next. Without diminishing the depth of the problems and stresses of such circumstances, we nonetheless can recognize that even if severely constrained, undocumented immigrants nonetheless have some choices, at least more than prisoners of war subjected to sovereign power under inhumane conditions. It is difficult to imagine a time and space for these individuals that are not precarious. Less clear, and lacking interrogation, are the avenues by which undocumented immigrants living under extreme stress courageously construct spaces of comfort and joy that can derive from love and happiness in relationships and many other avenues by which they refuse their interpellated identities and the hegemony of exclusive governance. This is not to suggest that such spaces offset horrendous, objectifying circumstances, but rather that some actors may be able to navigate precarity to circumvent a steady state of neurosis. The main point is to relinquish the absolutism that casts people unilaterally without regard for different circumstances relative to people’s dynamic subjectivities, and to consider and recognize agency and resistance. It is easy to slide into a bleak Agambenian point here: that resistance lies merely in survival, an assertion that requires interrogation rather than presumption because each actor engages continual precarity differently, even when such precarity is severe. Consider the situation of a privileged person, with a gainful job, citizenship, and a variety of other accoutrements of apparently nonprecarious life. Whereas suicide is hardly a choice among the victimized at a Nazi concentration camp, it is an option for the relatively privileged, who can become overwhelmed nonetheless by precarious circumstances.

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Short of suicide, precarity can induce subjectivities ranging from confidence to neurosis, depression, and self-deprecation due to inability to meet often unrealistic expectations. Although circumstances for apparently privileged people may seem inconsequential in comparison to the lives of prisoners-of-war or undocumented immigrants, precarity nonetheless is ubiquitous. Daily examples include the impossibility of meeting deadlines with consistently too little time; continual engagement in maintaining multiple (and too many) responsibilities; and oppressive objectification from surveillance systems and/or from persons who act capriciously to informalize codes of conduct on the grounds of inequality. Techniques of power guide everyday citizens indirectly regarding not just actions on actions, but also acts on other people that can have deleterious consequences. Consider, for example, a teacher who, even if pursuing a democratic pedagogy (e.g. Gutman 1987), nonetheless engages in sovereign power when recording grades that can alter students’ grade point averages, and possibly, prospects for scholarships, jobs, and/or continuing education. The flow of power relations from diffuse in a democratic classroom to sovereign acts of grading in the same classroom, and back again, can produce precarity as expectations based on everyday democratic processes become incongruous with the results of the sovereign act. Both students and teachers may be disappointed, and the mixture of the two systems of power can affect student–teacher relations as well as self-perception, also on the part of both students and teachers. The precarity, I suggest, is produced not completely by the sovereign act, but rather by the flow of power relations that can produce instability and bafflement, all with the threat of potentially negative consequences. Crucially, acts of grading, like acts of soldiering, may be deleterious or constructive. A teacher may use the act of grading to be helpful, and may opt to contextualize performance (as opposed to the often dehumanizing approach that divorces students from their contexts). Alternatively, and in the worst-case scenario, a teacher can psychologically torture a student through a variety of capricious practices, including grading as well as daily acts that demean. The effect is an informalization of codes of conduct as the neoliberal governmentality of placing students in competition with one another collides perversely with other governmentalities such as racism, sexism, and the like. In this precarious circumstance, a constellation of deleterious governmentalities directed in part from life experience

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that intersects with the unequal grounds of the teacher–student relation guides the capricious teacher. Subjective reactions to shifting fields of power relations vary relative to different actors’ sensibilities and range of experience. Some students and teachers implicitly deny or avoid thinking about the sovereign act and the precarity induced by the entanglement of governmentality and sovereignty in the classroom. Others implicitly recognize the entanglement and either navigate potential frictions with relative ease or become distressed by the instability of social (and power) relations and their significance. More likely, most operate with some combination of these reactions. I offer the example of a relatively democratic classroom to demonstrate that the imbrication of modes of governance, resultant precarity, and differential subjectivities exist even in relatively cozy classrooms of the privileged that lie at one, relatively mild end of the continuum of life circumstances, anchored at the other end by inhumane prisoner-of-war camps and the lives of undocumented immigrants.

Conclusion Precarity as an objectified set of circumstances can produce a wide range of subjectivities that curiously may bear similarity to those developed in different, and more (or less) apparently severe cases of objectified circumstances, depending on the experiences, thoughts, and feelings actors bring to a particular context. Understanding and developing a proactive consciousness of shifts in the field of power relations associated with different modes of governance cannot change objectified circumstances, but it can help to construct one’s subjectivity proactively and fruitfully. Foucault’s scholarship on ethics suggests that one’s self does not exist as an essence given by circumstances, but can, possibly, be constructed with cognizance of both the external gaze of the system of governmentality, as well as the gaze upon oneself in relation to the system of governance to which one has been subjected (O’Grady 2004). It therefore is useful to recognize that the external gaze is much more complex than a singular governmental system, and further, the courageous, proactive constitution of subjectivity often takes place at the nexus of governmentality and sovereignty, the uneasy coexistence of which produces the precarity we all experience, differently. I have intended this understanding of precarity to be sensible across time-space contexts, and in this sense I argue that precarity is part of the

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human condition, even if it is unevenly experienced. I also have argued that precarity, as shifts in the field of power relations, occurs on the grounds of inequality and is enacted capriciously, engendering the informalization of codes of conduct; inequality as well, then, also is part of the human condition, along with the productive energies wrought of power as diffuse. Underlying all the arguments in this chapter is a negative value judgement about the precarity located in processes of change between governmentality and sovereign power. I have suggested that some governmentalities can be positive and constructive while others are deleterious, and that the perverse collision of governmentalities can produce inhumane acts of sovereign power, depending on people’s subjectivities derived from life experience and the dynamics of a particular context that steer actors towards particular constellations of governmentalities. Agency and subjectivity matter, as do our value judgements about the systems of governance that objectify us. Although neither inequality nor precarity can be eliminated, we nonetheless can, as Foucault (1997a, 298) pointed out in his argument against utopia (a set of conditions that can never materialize): “… acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ¯ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible….”

Notes 1. A narrower body of literature revolving around the economy reverses the causal arrow on flexible production and precarity. Specifically, the Italian postAutonomists argue that strategies of worker resistance in the 1960s and ’70s created precarious conditions for firms, which responded with strategies of flexible production (Hardt and Negri 2000; Lazzarato 1996; Virno 2004). 2. The firm was commissioned by the Freelancer’s Union and Elance-Odesk, now merged as Upwork, one of the largest online marketplaces that matches freelancers with tasks. 3. ‘Freelancing’ refers to working solo without worker rights or job security. 4. See Ettlinger and Hartmann (2015) for an elaborated discussion of this ‘dominant narrative’ and the Foucauldian alternative. 5. This perspective is surprisingly positive and optimistic. A more skeptical view of the relation between liberalism and neoliberalism (accepting liberalism as a discursive fiction) is that neoliberal actors often appropriate

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liberal discourse to justify neoliberal practices, thereby conflating the two to obscure corruption. Foucault also asserted that sovereignty entailed rule over a bounded territory, such as a nation state, whereas governmentality operated on populations. That said, in principle it is arguable whether governmentality is outside the purview of ‘territory’ (Elden 2009). This bottom, up element of Foucault’s conceptualization is critical in distinguishing his thinking from various renditions of Marxism, which casts ideas as imposed on populations and individual actors (e.g. Foucault 1980a, b). Foucault’s engagement with governmentality reflects his shift from an earlier focus on discourse (e.g. 1972, 1973) to a concern for regimes of material practices and their relation to discourses (e.g. see Foucault 2000d). Surveillance is most often cited as a technique of disciplinary power, although in Discipline and Punish Foucault (1995) delineated a wide array of techniques of disciplinary power (e.g. enclosure, partitioning, coding of spaces, classification, regulation of rhythms, and so on; see Gore’s [1995] analysis that makes use of this wide array of disciplinary techniques to critically examine issues of pedagogy). Foucault emphasized statistics in the context of biopower, although scholarship has shown that qualitative accounting also constitutes techniques of biopower (e.g. Ghertner 2010). See also contemporary approaches to biopower that account for the use of social media to govern lives via algorithms (Cheney-Lippold 2011). In a discussion of research methods, Foucault (2000d) commented on ‘internal analysis’ (the relation among a societal mentality and associated norms, discourses, techniques of power, and regimes of material practices) and ‘external analysis’, which relates different internal analytics. Yet government policy, for example, rarely pursues methods towards grasping and preparing for such intersections, and the consequences. Foucault mentioned the scaling up of resistance to collective action and the changing of societal truths (e.g. Foucault 2000f, 244), although such commentary lacked specification of enabling conditions. Some useful secondary literature on Foucault’s shift to ethics includes: Faubion (2001), Luxon (2008), McGushin (2007), McLaren (2002), O’Leary (2006), Paras (2006), Rabinow (2009), Taylor (2009), and Taylor and Vintges (2004). See also the acclaimed novel Sophie’s Choice (Styron 1979). Hardt and Negri (2004) argued that resistance occurs via collaborative and cooperative social relations, which are embedded in networks among ‘the precariat’ (immaterial labor); thus resistance is immanent. See,

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however, Mudu (2009) for a trenchant critique. Hardt and Negri’s logic is elegant but it lacks connection with empirical realities. Butler (2009, 75) in somewhat different terms recognized, albeit briefly, processes that operate between ‘frames’: ‘So the point would not be to locate what is “in” or “outside” the frame, but what vacillates between those two locations, and what, foreclosed, becomes encrypted in the frame itself’. The bad apple theory aptly has been critiqued for lack of engagement with a plethora of problems in the Bush Administration. Here I focus in particular on its lack of attention to the dynamic subjectivities of the guards. Carl Schmidt (1995) also made this point in his famous friend— foe binary, although unlike Levi and Agamben, he did so perversely normatively. Doreen Massey (1995) developed the idea of a geomorphological metaphor, although her analysis was fixed on the relation between processes at the mesoscale (e.g. communities) and macroscale phenomena (notably rounds of investment across space). It is this combination of constraints and choices, and variation in the configuration of the two relative to individual actors’ histories of experience that clarify the weak links in rational choice theory.

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Lipsky, M. 1980. Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage. Lipsky, M. 2014. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, expanded ed. New York: Russell Sage. Lodovici, M.S., and R. Semenza (eds.). 2012. Precarious Work and High-skilled Youth in Europe. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Lorey, I. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. A. Derieg. New York: Verso. Luxon, N. 2008. Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault. Political Theory 36: 377–402. Massey, D. 1995. Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. New York: Routledge. McGushin, E.F. 2007. Foucault’s Ask¯esis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. McLaren, M.A. 2002. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mitchell, K. 2010. Ungoverned Space: Global Security and the Geopolitics of Broken Windows. Political Geography 29: 289–297. Mountz, A. 2010. Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mountz, A., R. Wright, I. Miyares, and A. Bailey. 2002. Lives in Limbo: Temporary Protected Status and Immigrant Identities. Global Networks 2: 335–356. Mudu, P. 2009. Where Is Hardt and Negri’s Multitude? Real Networks in Open Spaces. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 8: 211– 244. Murgia, A. 2013. Representations of Precarity in Italy: Collective and Individual Stories, Social Imaginaries and Subjectivities. Journal of Cultural Economy 7: 2–11. Murgia, A., B. Poggio, and N. Torchio. 2012. Italy: Precariousness and Skill Mismatch. In Precarious Work and High-skilled Youth in Europe, ed. M.S. Lodovici and R. Semenza, 71–111. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Negri, A. 2008. Sovereignty: That Divine Ministry of the Affairs of Earthly Life, trans. G. Fadini with R. Valgenti. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9 (Winter): 96–100. Neilson, B., and N. Rossiter. 2005. From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks. The Fibreculture Journal 022, http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-022-from-precarity-toprecariousness-and-back-again-labour-life-and-unstable-networks/. Accessed 15 October 2014.

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PART II

Precarity and Solidarities

CHAPTER 5

Irregular Labour and the ‘Life of the State’: Precarity, Citizenship, and Sovereignty in Decolonizing Africa Nick Bernards

Introduction Sovereignty and citizenship have often been closely entangled with work and livelihoods. T. H. Marshall’s (1950) landmark intervention on ‘citizenship and social class’, for instance, pointed to the emergence of a model of ‘social citizenship’ in which political membership was increasingly being associated with more extensive rights to social and economic security. Such entitlements remained intimately linked to the valorization of particular modes of work—indeed, standard models of social security, particularly in Anglophone countries, remained reliant on contributions paid out of workers’ salaries. Accounts of contemporary precarity have tended to focus on precisely the breakdown of this contract between state and worker/citizens under the pressures of globalization. In perhaps

N. Bernards (B) School for Cross-Faculty Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_5

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the most widely discussed recent example, Guy Standing (2011) explicitly links the rise of precarity to the erosion of citizenship, noting that precarious workers are increasingly better understood as ‘denizens’ rather than ‘citizens’, in that they often lack access to a range of rights associated with citizenship (2011, 14), and worries about their vulnerability to mobilization by demagogues. This is a close cousin to the argument from Bourdieu (1998), among others, that because precarious workers are faced with a daily struggle to secure their livelihoods, they face a foreshortened ‘shadow of the future’ that inhibits their political mobilization. Such assumptions are notably frequently replicated in media analyses linking ‘white working class’ support for the far right to the decline of secure employment in the face of globalization. Such accounts of ‘populism’, as Shilliam (2018) and Narayan (2017), among others, have argued persuasively, are deeply problematic. There are real problems with this wider account of precarity too, not least the empirically questionable assertion that precarious workers are especially subject to demagogic or tribalist politics (Munck 2013; Chun 2016; Scully 2016). Yet, such accounts are also decidedly unsatisfactory for a more basic reason: for most of the world, the ‘standard employment relation’ (Vosko 2010) has never existed for more than a small minority of people. As a number of recent authors have noted, the vast majority of workers in the global south have never held secure waged employment (Neilson and Rossiter 2008; Munck 2013; Harris and Scully 2015). Indeed, Paret (2018) rightly notes that Marshall’s sociology of citizenship was developed and promulgated in a geographically and historically exceptional context in which stable work was the norm, underpinned by a postwar social bargain centred on redistribution from continual gains in productivity (Maier 1977). Further, even in the brief twentieth century metropolitan heyday of welfare-state capitalism, articulations of secure livelihoods and citizenship themselves were always deeply inflected with racial and colonial (see Shilliam 2018; Bhambra and Holmwood 2018) and gendered hierarchies (Vosko 2010). It’s not a stretch to suggest that precarity is the historic norm of life under capitalism (Neilson and Rossiter 2008). The intersections of precarity and citizenship are thus hardly new, nor are they unique to contemporary neoliberalism. However, our ‘default’ models of sovereignty and citizenship often remain premised on a presumed model of ‘standard’ working relations. The point I want to argue in this chapter is that, if we look at the world outside the brief heyday of

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‘social citizenship’ in the global north, articulations of sovereignty and citizenship with work and livelihoods have long been crucial points of contestation. Indeed, such forms of contestation are historically vital to making sense of intersecting processes of decolonization, state formation, and global governance (Bernards 2018). To take such contestations seriously requires an International Relations (IR) scholarship more explicitly attentive to questions of work and class and the ways that the latter are articulated across scales. The chapter draws on Gramsci’s notes on the ‘relations of political force’ in order to articulate such an approach. The first section below gives a brief overview of this concept. The remaining sections develop a historical analysis of International Labour Organization programming in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper highlights two key dynamics in particular in respective sections. First, the relationships between ‘nation’, organized labour, and irregular workers were complex, contradictory, and contested. Second, these struggles around precarity and citizenship are conducted across multiple scales at once. ‘International’ settings were vital sites at which postcolonial statehood and citizenship were negotiated.

The Political Relations of Force Examining the relationships between precarity, nationhood, and sovereignty requires in the first instance a renewal of attention to the politics of class for IR scholarship. However, it requires that we take the making and unmaking of working classes as political agents as something to be explained, rather than an explanatory force. How exactly we understand the linkages between normalized forms of proletarian wage labour and other forms of exploitation is not a question that can be settled in the abstract, but rather is a critical object of political contestation. Importantly, the production of class in this sense takes place in no small part through dynamic interplays of relations of production and accumulation with struggles over (among other things) race, gender, colonialism, and citizenship (see Hart 2006; Hall 1980; McNally 2016). The point I want to press in this section is that Gramsci’s concept of ‘political relations of force’ offers a means of mapping these struggles out. For Gramsci, the relations of force present at any given conjuncture can be examined at three levels: the ‘objective’ economic sphere or ‘structure’; ‘military’ relations, or prevailing balances of coercive force; and the ‘political’ sphere of organization and consciousness. It is this latter category of

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‘political’ relations of force—in Gramsci’s words, ‘the degree of homogeneity, self-awareness, and organisation attained by the various social classes’ (1971, 181)—that is particularly salient as a point of departure for present purposes. Gramsci differentiates three possible ‘moments’ in this respect—organization on the basis of common ‘economic-corporate’ interests, the recognition of ‘solidarity of interests among all the members of a social class’, and the recognition that the ‘present and future development’ of a particular class ‘can and must become the interests of… subordinate groups too’ (1971, 181). This latter moment describes Gramsci’s more widely cited conception of ‘hegemony’, but here hegemony is situated as one (relatively rare) possibility among others, established through ongoing political struggles. Where this sequence of ‘moments’ might be read to imply a teleological movement from the recognition of common economic interests by subordinate classes to their articulation of a broader-based ‘hegemony’, Gramsci insists that ‘in real history these moments imply each other reciprocally… combining and diverging in various ways’ (1971, 182). Equally importantly, these relations of force are arranged simultaneously within and across ‘national’ territories (1971, 176). The state and the process of governance are thus fundamentally open-ended, multi-scalar, and contested processes, in which the articulation of different forms of group consciousness is a crucial struggle. As Gramsci notes, ‘the life of the state is conceived as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria… between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups’ (1971, 182). The concept of the political relations of force, then, highlights the dispersed political struggles through which different forms of consciousness and subjective identifications of solidarity are articulated. As Hall suggests, Gramsci’s method here is suggestive that ‘the “unity” of classes is necessarily complex and has to be produced’ (1986, 14). Importantly, Gramsci’s approach thus highlights the extent to which the political salience of class is deeply contingent and coloured by complex, multiscalar patterns of political mobilization and contestation. As Hall (1980, 1986) in particular has pointed out, class in this sense is typically mutually constituted with other forms of social differentiation, notably race, gender, and citizenship. Such struggles are inherently international ones. Gramsci’s explicit reflections on the international in the Prison Notebooks are limited to a

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brief reflection on a debate between Stalin and Trotsky on the praxis of nationalism and internationalism. Gramsci argues that the construction of an international revolutionary proletarian movement needed to be carried out in particular national contexts, particularly because in order to establish a genuine hegemony the working classes need to enrol peasant and intellectual communities whose outlook is ‘national’ or even ‘local’ (1971, 240–241). A better way of reading this assertion, though, would be to argue that in Gramsci’s perspective the ‘international’ is constructed (unevenly) out of myriad more localized forms of action. This point is underlined by Gramsci’s passing acknowledgement in his discussion of the political relations of force that: ‘It is also necessary to take into account the fact that international relations intertwine with these internal relations of nation-states, creating new, unique, and historically concrete combinations’ (1971, 182). This point comes out particularly clearly if we situate these passages in the context of Gramsci’s broader oeuvre. As a number of previous authors have noted, Gramsci’s reflections on ‘passive revolution’ suggest much the same of the constitution of the state— ‘national’ states are fundamentally historical creations, produced in part through patterns of uneven development on an international or global scale (Morton 2007). The day-to-day work of making and unmaking political relations of force, moreover, is at least implicitly a multi-scalar activity. This is particularly clear in Gramsci’s pre-prison writing. He argues, for instance, that international political action made possible the emergence of communism in Russia by blurring ‘national’ histories: Socialist propaganda put the Russian people in contact with the experience of other proletariats. Socialist propaganda could bring the history of the proletariat dramatically to life in a moment: its struggles against capitalism, the lengthy series of efforts to emancipate it completely from the chains of servility that made it so subject and to allow it to forge a new consciousness…. (1977, 36)

International praxis , in short, for Gramsci made possible a kind of warping of ‘national’ space-time in Russia. ‘International’ action in this sense (leading to the fundamental transformation of both ‘global’ and ‘national’ political economies) consists of very mundane, minute everyday practices carried out by a wide range of actors. The point here is that Gramsci offers some hints towards how an IR of class and state-formation that is sensitive to the dynamics of precarity

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and irregular work might be carried out. Gramsci calls our attention to the ways in which the constitution of class relations is refracted through patterns of political contestation carried out simultaneously across scales. He usefully points to the entanglement of the ‘life of the state’ with broader patterns of contestation over the construction of class solidarities. It is at this point that a more complex politics of precarity—the question of how the relationships between precarious and normalized forms of work are conceived, mobilized, and contested—starts to come into view. In what follows, I apply this perspective to an analysis of the politics of work and precarity in decolonizing Africa.

Class and Nation in Decolonizing Africa It is worthwhile starting here with a very brief history of the emergence of ‘working class’ organization in colonial Africa and its relation to anticolonial movements. Colonial rule was in profound material and political crisis by the mid-1930s—the Great Depression working to compound and exacerbate models of political authority and extractivist economies that were fundamentally brittle and beginning to creak under the strains of their own contradictions. One key prong of efforts by colonial authorities to rescue their project was to extend something resembling the ‘standard employment relationship’ (Vosko 2010) to a small segment of African working classes. This ‘stabilization’ of the ‘modernized’ segments of African populations engaged in waged labour (mostly in mining, transport, and civil service occupations) was fraught, complicated, and unevenly implemented (see Bernards 2018, 63–74; Cooper 1996; Larmer 2017). It is worth noting here that such interventions were often coordinated internationally, with both the ILO (through its Committee of Experts on Social Policy in Non-Metropolitan Territories), and the InterAfrican Labour Conference (IALC)—an informal network of colonial administrators, in which the ILO’s officials often participated—playing crucial roles. I am less interested, though, for present purposes in the specifics of efforts at ‘stabilization’, than I am in the complex matrix of political problems around the relationships between class, citizenship, and nationhood that they opened up. The effort to articulate a clear line between a small class of regularized proletarian workers and a large population of various forms of irregular labour did not in fact prevent challenges to colonial order. As Buhlungu (2010) has argued, the features of colonial political economies played a

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major role in shaping these dynamics. The emergence of trade unionism in colonial contexts was inevitably political in the sense that the close entanglement of colonial states and capital meant that workplace struggles were also challenges to political structures that permitted few rights and little dignity to colonial subjects. Cooper notes the significance of two further factors. First, as noted above, in relatively narrow colonial export economies, workers situated at strategic nodes (mines, plantations, railways, or ports) were able to exert a profoundly disruptive influence with work stoppages. Second, and at least as importantly, ‘the discourse that labour movements employed in the postwar era -- putting claims to resources in the terms in which imperial rule was now asserting its justification -- made them hard to combat without calling into question the modernizing project on which France and Britain had staked so much’ (2005, 205). Proletarianized workers were able to redeploy the ideas about stabilization circulating at the IALC and the Committee of Experts in order to make claims for greater pay and higher standards of living. In the process, in claiming membership in a universal ‘working class’ they undermined the imagination of racial difference upon which the colonial project rested. Yet, while workers’ successes in gaining higher wages and increased social protections may have helped undercut colonial authority, they also opened up a complicated set of relationships between trade unions and irregular workers on one hand and trade unions and postcolonial governments on the other. Here it is worth revisiting one of the earliest academic debates about trade unions in postcolonial Africa: the ‘labour aristocracy thesis’ of the 1960s and 1970s. The term ‘labour aristocracy’ was coined by Lenin. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (1967) used it to argue that unionized workers represented a relatively privileged, and hence primarily conservative, political force. Arrighi and Saul (1968) would take up this argument more systematically in the late 1960s, noting the emergence of a small subset of ‘stabilised’ urban workers performing skilled labour in capital intensive industries: ‘These workers enjoy incomes three or more times higher than unskilled workers, and, together with the elites and sub-elites in bureaucratic employment in the civil service and expatriate concerns, constitute what we call the labour aristocracy of tropical Africa’ (1968, 149). Redistributive development strategies for promoting the development of internal markets and the mobilization of peasant labour, Arrighi and Saul argued, would be hampered as long as this labour aristocracy

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could ‘continue to use its power in a state-controlled modern sector in order to appropriate a considerable share of the surplus in the form of increasing discretionary consumption’ (1968, 151). Later studies would suggest that there was, in fact, limited empirical support for the notion that skilled urban wage workers enjoyed standards of living much higher than those of unskilled or informal workers. Indeed, skilled urban workers often saw significant declines in real incomes across the 1960s and 1970s, often shared households (or even their own time) with informal jobs, and retained ties to extended households in rural areas, including by sending remittances (see Sandbrook 1982, 128–137). Equally, the actual political activities of African unions and unionized workers were far too varied and contested to support sweeping conclusions about any inherent ‘conservative’ or ‘revolutionary’ tendencies (see Waterman 1975; Sandbrook and Cohen 1975). What the debate itself does reveal particularly clearly, though, is the extent to which the question of relationships between unionized (and primarily skilled, urban) workers and other subordinate social groups was politically contested. Gramsci is helpful here—we can usefully understand such debates around the relationships between different elements of working classes in sub-Saharan Africa as, in the first instance, struggles over the remaking of the political relations of force. The link Gramsci draws between such struggles and the ‘life of the state’ is also useful. To a considerable degree, postcolonial struggles about labour turned on the character of the relationship between the small core of proletarian workers represented in the trade unions and the broader population. Some postcolonial regimes recognized the value in claiming that unionized workers were part and parcel of a wider ‘nation’ whose legitimate mode of representation was through the nationalist party. For instance, according to a Senegalese worker delegate at the ILO’s first African Regional Conference: ‘A worker should never forget that he is also a citizen, and thus a member of the local, regional, national, and international community’ (ILO 1961, 76). Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, in a pamphlet released in 1961, very clearly articulated the arguments that many leaders would make for subordinating labour to the nationalist party. He compares Tanzania to Britain—the Labour Party, he argues had emerged out of union struggles against capital and the state, while in colonial Tanganyika Nyerere suggests that:

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Our development has been the other way around. When… we established our nationalist movement, its first aim was political -- independence from colonialism. Within this nationalist movement, and very much a part of it, one of our objectives was to help the growth of a trade union movement… Once firmly established, the trade-union movement was, and is, part and parcel of the whole nationalist movement. (1969, 282)

Factually, Nyerere’s claim is questionable—trade unionism developed among primarily casualized workers in the transport infrastructure of Tanganyika prior to and largely independent of the organized nationalist movement (see Iliffe 1975). Indeed, relationships between Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union and the Tanganyika Federation of Labour were often fraught, and closer engagements between the two only began to emerge in the last five years of colonial rule (see Tordofj 1966). The politics of the argument, however, are very clear. It suggests that national struggles for independence from colonialism ought to take priority over other interests for workers. Nyerere’s effort at assimilating all pre-independence political activity into the rubric of the ‘nationalist movement’ is a powerful political tactic. Yet the fact that he felt a need to articulate this view in the first place is itself indicative of a recognition that workers did not all see things the same way. Nyerere survived an army mutiny supported by the labour movement in 1964 before bringing trade unions more directly under the control of the Tanganyika African National Union, either imprisoning or giving ambassadorships to the former leadership of the trade unions (Bienefield 1975). Elsewhere, the delineation of organized labour from the broader population could be mobilized as a means of disciplining organized labour. In Kenya, for instance, the government frequently claimed that the trade unions represented a relatively privileged segment of the population, and thus had limited claim to political legitimacy or to make demands about pay or working conditions. Tom Mboya, a former union leader and key figure in the country’s independence movement who served as Minister of Economic Planning and Development until his assassination in 1969, gave a lecture to the ILO’s International Institute for Labour Studies in 1967 in which he contrasted organized workers with ‘the “have nots” in society [who] are not normally well organized and must rely on the government or political parties to represent their interests’ (Mboya 1967, 5, emphasis added).

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This kind of rhetoric was mobilized as a means of disciplining organized workers on a number of occasions. As unemployment, and more broadly the disconnect between high rates of economic growth and the stagnant living standards of the majority of Kenyans, emerged as a key political issue, relatively well-off unionists were increasingly convenient targets. Trade unions were identified as a major source of unemployment in the 1970 report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Unemployment in 1970—high levels of wage disparity between urban and rural areas, partly ‘as a result of the trade union activities’ were blamed for excessive rural–urban migration and the resort of capital to laboursaving technologies (Republic of Kenya 1970, 3). The report accordingly recommended wage-restraint policies in urban areas (1970, 8). The government, meanwhile, was making moves to establish greater control over the trade unions. Kenya’s Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU) had been formed in 1965 after the government dissolved the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL) and the rival Kenyan African Workers’ Congress. The KFL had split over a combination of personal disagreements among the leadership of the KFL and interlinked questions of international affiliation and the ‘political’ independence of trade unions. Amsden, writing in 1971, noted that ‘it is clear that Kenya’s trade union movement is no longer free to participate in opposition politics. With this avenue of activity blocked, COTU’s new administration has taken the path of least resistance’ (1971, 118). It is notable just how far many of the concepts through which the ILO subsequently sought to make sense of and govern irregular forms of work were shaped by this context on the one hand, and by longer standing colonial dualisms between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ on the other. The concept of ‘informal’ work—popularized by an ILO World Employment Programme (WEP) mission to Kenya two years after the Select Committee report, can usefully be read in terms of how it bridges these politics (ILO 1972). The WEP report on unemployment in Kenya diagnosed the problem in terms of the presence of a large ‘informal’ sector of the economy disconnected from the relatively privileged ‘formal’ economy. The mission’s proposals were explicitly articulated around ‘forging links which are at present absent’ between formal and informal activities. As critics pointed out at the time (Leys 1973), formal and informal activities were already closely interlinked in myriad ways, not least to the extent that ‘informal’ food vendors, domestic workers, and

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the like allowed the reproduction of ‘formal’ labour power at exploitative wages. But what is noticeable is that the idea of ‘informality’ built on a particular configuration of political relations of force (see Bernards 2018). Mboya and Nyerere both frame trade unions as representatives of a particular class of ‘haves’, increasingly understood under the rubric of the ‘formal’, as against the wider population of ‘have nots’—in this sense they parallel contemporary theorizations of trade unions as representatives of a narrow ‘labour aristocracy’. Where Fanon and Arrighi and Saul, however, located the possibilities of emancipation in the autonomous mobilization of the peasantry, Mboya and Nyerere use quite similar characterizations of the working class to claim both that the appropriate role of trade unionism is rather narrow (the representation of workers’ interests in collective bargaining), and that the political role of trade unions ought to be subordinate to the nationalist party/movement as the legitimate representative of nation and its ‘have nots’.

Internationalizing the Politics of Precarity? A second key point to highlight here is that these struggles over the relationship of the state to both organized labour and to the larger mass of people reliant on irregular livelihoods were continually carried out across scales. Here again, Gramsci’s emphasis on the ways in which the political relations of force are shaped by various transnational forms of practice is useful. National struggles were, in the first instance, overlaid with conflicts at the regional level between conservative nationalist unions (often closely affiliated to single-party governments), ‘independent’ unions with affiliations to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and radical unions with links to the communist-led World Confederation of Trade Unions (WFTU). This meant that in any given country multiple government and trade union donors were often operating separate workers’ education programmes. It concerned ILO officials that ‘donor organizations seem sometimes to be more concerned with outbidding each other to establish clients for themselves’ (Chu and de Givry 1972). Several pan-African union confederations were also in place. The most notable were the All-Africa Trade Union Federation (AATUF)— based initially in Accra, then in Dar es Salaam—and loosely linked to the WFTU, although typically more defined by anti-colonialism than

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communism; and the African Trade Union Confederation (ATUC), based in Dakar, whose members were mostly affiliated to the ICFTU. More conservative unions favoured the formation of a single regional federation backed by the Organization for African Unity (OAU)—along the lines of the Organization for African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) eventually established in 1973 (see Agyeman 2003). Struggles over internationalism were always intimately entwined with the struggles over the political composition of the ‘working class’ identified above. The example of Ghana is perhaps especially telling. Ghanaian trade unions had played an important part in the struggle against colonialism, but even prior to the country’s independence from Britain there were considerable divisions within the workers’ movement over how closely they should be linked to the Convention People’s Party (CPP). Broadly speaking, the leadership of the national confederation, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), were closely linked to the CPP. They played a prominent role in pushing these concerns internationally too, driving the establishment of the AATUF, and pushing for a particular brand of anti-colonial unionism clearly subordinated to ‘national’ development projects. However, rank and file unionists—especially in certain sectoral unions, most notably the Railway Union—continued to press for greater autonomy from the government. In short, the relations of political forces were marked by particularly unsettled group formation, both within the trade union movement and in terms of the CPP’s ability to claim authority over the ‘nation’ as a whole. This fragile political balance had potential material implications, especially for the ruling party. The fragility of the CPP’s position was highlighted particularly clearly by an illegal seventeenday strike by the railway and harbour workers in Sekondi-Takoradi in September of 1961. The demands of the strikers were put in terms of relatively minor economic issues—the July budget had included a compulsory savings scheme and a property tax on larger than average houses which were unpopular among skilled workers likely to suffer somewhat from these measures. However, the strike was widely supported by unskilled workers, market women, and even some of the unemployed in the area. These actors would not have been especially affected by the policy measures at the heart of the strike. Instead, their support for the strikers was driven largely by ‘the wider significance these economic issues assumed in the context of the politics of the national labour movement, and of widespread popular opposition to the direction of development of the CPP regime’ (Jeffries

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1975, 263). This support was crucial for the union, which was able to arrange to have food supplied to the strikers by market women. The broader mass support for the strike also heightened its political salience. There were wider debates at play about the relation between the TUC and CPP—the Railway Union in particular advocated for a role for the TUC as a check on the power of the CPP, whereas the TUC leadership and CPP sought to maintain closer control over the workers’ movement. For marginal urban workers to support the strikers meant an explicit challenge to the CPP’s efforts to articulate a ‘national’ consciousness centred on the party. Anti-colonial internationalism intersected with irregular forms of exploitation in other ways too. The Ghanaian government lodged a complaint about the use of forced labour in Portuguese African territories in 1961. The complaint was probably well founded, and the ILO did appoint a Commission of Inquiry, but the Governing Body did not ultimately decide to issue any sanction against Portugal. This is less interesting here, however, than what the act of making the complaint itself did accomplish. When the Commission of Inquiry appointed by the ILO to investigate the complaint asked for additional information, one of the key documents included was a series of excerpts from a speech by Kwame Nkrumah in the Ghanaian Parliament in May of 1961 (two months prior to the July budget strike). The selections included in the communication to the ILO mentioned the importance of Portuguese forced labour for South African mining, reports of Portuguese troops ransacking the Angolan countryside with impunity, and outlined the system of forced labour recruitment and quotas in place—including, notably with a direct reference to Ghana’s own colonial history: ‘Requests are… sent to local administrators up and down the country until they reach what would be the equivalent of a District Commissioner in old colonial times in Ghana’ (ILO 1962, 119). The portions of the speech excerpted from the communication to the ILO are particularly interesting. Nkrumah linked the effort to abolish forced labour in the Portuguese colonies to the formation of pan-African solidarity: In Angola, in spite of the enervating force of slave labour… that country has now entered the African nationalist revolution and it will never be the same again… The evils of Portuguese colonialism are realized by all African states without exception. We should therefore be able to go united

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to the assistance of the people of Angola and it is most important that the differences of approach we have on other problems should not prevent our mobilizing the full strength of African opinion against what is taking place today in those parts of African controlled by Portugal. (Nkrumah 1961, 2, emphasis added)

Indeed, he (accurately) linked the perpetuation of forced labour in Portugal’s colonies to the continuation of forms of neo-colonial economic dependence elsewhere: ‘In the neo-colonial world of southern Africa, the Portuguese colonies and all that they stand for are essential for the purpose of depressing African wages, preventing trade union organization, and maintaining high profits for expatriate-owned industries and farms’ (1961, 3–4). The Portuguese system of labour recruitment for South African mines was, significantly, cited as evidence on this point. Nkrumah even explicitly argued that the resistance to this neo-colonialism required the formation of African trade union unity, without ties to European-dominated international federations: ‘Creating our own African international trade union organizations, we cannot individually opt to associate with other international unions, for this will do exactly what we must guard against’ (1961, 8). It is worth noting in this respect that the TUC leadership—fragile though their position in Ghanaian union politics—were among the leaders of the movement pressing for a ‘panAfrica’ trade union confederation made up of unions under the control of ‘nationalist’ parties, and saw the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions as a potential threat to their own position to the extent that it might provide support for breakaway factions like those in the Railway Union. These arguments were omitted from the version of the speech submitted to the ILO. They are, however, an indication of the particular politics of postcolonial statehood in which the Ghanaian allegations against Portugal must be read. For Nkrumah, emphasizing the subordination of the labour movement to nationalist, anti-colonial ends was a critical means of trying to mitigate some of these conflicts. Crucially, he noted in a speech to parliament that: ‘Creating our own African international trade union organizations, we cannot individually opt to associate with other international unions, for this will do exactly what we must guard against’ (Nkrumah 1961, 8). If these undoubtedly reflected Nkrumah’s famous concerns about neo-colonialism and pan-African solidarity, they also have to be read in

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the context of the CPP’s political struggle to control the labour movement, perhaps exemplified by the railway strike. There is a distinct political logic here to claims to subordinate trade unions to a wider ‘national’ or even ‘pan-African’ anti-colonial movement encompassing of irregular workers both in Ghana and beyond. The point here is that the politics of precarity spilled across national borders, taking place in international arenas, and at times revolved around conflicts over the type and scope of international solidarities in which African workers should be engaged. It’s worth noting that this set of struggles turned in large extent on the question of how to conceive of the relations between nation, class, and irregular work. Interventions from the Ghanaian TUC, the AATUF, and Nkrumah posed the CPP as the legitimate representative of the ‘nation’, and indeed of subaltern African people exploited under conditions of ‘slavery’ in Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa. This depended on two key assumptions: (1) that organized labour was a discrete social force subordinate to the ‘nation’, and hence that ‘working class’ identities were both the preserve of a narrow segment of urban, proletarian workers and secondary to citizenship; and, (2) that the mobilization of this working class, nationally or internationally, outside the remit of the party was an opening to neo-colonialism. There is something to the latter point insofar as the British TUC, AFL– CIO, and ICFTU were in fact engaged in well-documented forms of anti-communist ‘trade union imperialism’ (see e.g. Cox 1977; Herod 2001, 161–163) across much of the third world at the time, and as noted above the engagements of metropolitan trade unions with African unions in the 1960s were very often aimed at establishing clientelist relationships. Yet, the ability of the strikers to draw on support from a wider range of people who we would probably now describe as ‘precarious’ workers (unskilled workers, street vendors, even the unemployed) suggests that the particular vision of the solidarity of subaltern classes implicit in Nkrumah’s nationalism was deeply contested. Precarious workers and those in more protected forms of employment articulated challenges to the vision of national development that saw their ‘economic-corporate’ interests as being opposed to each other. Gramsci’s conception of the political relations of force, insofar as it hints at the complex, multi-scalar entwinement of constructions of class with relations of gender, race, and citizenship through the ‘life of the state’, is useful here.

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Conclusion My larger point here is that, contra any assumptions linking precarity to the degradation of sovereignty and citizenship, in global perspective precarious workers (and maybe more importantly, the political articulations of precarious workers with normalized or organized ones) have frequently been central to the articulation of sovereignty and citizenship. Treating precarity in terms of any presumed loss of social citizenship or growing transition from ‘citizens’ to ‘denizens’ glosses over the fraught history of political struggles over the linkages between nationhood, citizenship, and ‘working class’ identities, particularly in the colonized world. By way of conclusion, I want to make two wider claims about why paying attention to these histories matters for IR scholarship. The first is that, while the politics of precarity are to a considerable degree questions of citizenship and sovereignty, the relationships are scarcely as straightforward as conceived in conventional narratives about the erosion of citizenship. The politics of precarity are vital to understanding the political relations of force required to sustain patterns of citizenship and sovereignty. The second is that the history of struggles outlined here suggests that questions of citizenship and nationhood have never been confined to ‘local’ or ‘national’ terrains. They suggest a need to think more explicitly about the politics of space and scale. IR scholarship cannot confine its gaze to an a priori ‘international’ sphere made up of multilateral institutions; it needs to come to grips with how those institutions are embedded and entangled with multi-scalar patterns of struggle. Gramsci, as I have argued here, offers us a number of useful ways of starting to ask these questions.

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CHAPTER 6

Struggling with Precarity: From ‘More Jobs’ to Post-work Politics Wanda Vrasti

Certainly, this is not a new contradiction, although technological advances in production and transportation, the decline of manufacturing, and the shift to finance capital have intensified it to the point where modern employment ‘exists less and less to provide a living, let alone a life’ (Power 2013). This contradiction lies at the heart of several manifestations of the crisis: the ballooning of private debt to make up for wage compression, a swelling population of unemployed and precariously employed people, the disappearance of labour as a legitimate partner in the social democratic compromise, the death of working class culture, new methods of population control including workfare, prisons and police, and a total subjugation of the person to a work ethic that has lost its material foundation. No image captures these social crises better than the debt-driven precarious worker. While the figure of the unemployed (the excess worker) still conjures images of idleness, moral corruption, and political threat, precarity has moved to the centre of our political discourse

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on crisis. The global financial crisis has both increased the numbers and exposed the condition of precarious workers, in particular the working poor and the so-called graduates with no future, both of whom do not earn enough to live debt free or plan. The most recent global crisis of capital can be read through various lenses, as an economic or, more narrowly, a financial crisis, a crisis of social reproduction or a crisis of democracy. All of these perspectives contribute something to our understanding of the present conjecture although neither of them is exhaustive or excludes the others. A lesser travelled path, though, proposes to read the present as a crisis of the society of work, meaning a society where work is no longer needed to facilitate increases in production despite the fact that work remains the principal means of mass survival. To paraphrase Marx, the primary contradiction of modern capitalism is that it constantly insists on reducing its dependency on labour (through automation, outsourcing, wage depreciation, etc.) while continuing to use work as the sole measure and means of access to wealth, status, and dignity (1973 [2011], 706). Not even the so-called salariat is now safe from precarity, the effects of which are steadily moving ‘right up the chain of class strata, leaving only a minority – segments of the middle-class, the ruling class – relatively secure’ (Seymour 2012). Roughly a quarter of the adult population in OECD countries is now in the precariat (Standing 2011, 24), with youth figures being so high governments have to systematically fear the possibility of social unrest. [Precarity is] being unable to plan one’s time, being a worker on call where your life and time are determined by external forces. The term refers to all possible shapes of unsure, not guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalized, seasonal, and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work to subcontractors, freelancers, or socalled self-employed persons. But its reference also extends beyond the world of work to encompass other aspects of intersubjective life, including housing, debt, and the ability to build affective social relations (Foti cited in Neilson and Rossiter 2005, 1). This is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labor protection, although all this is widespread. It is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations of those who saw themselves as

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belonging to the industrial proletariat or the salariat had come to expect as their due. (Standing 2011, 24)

While contingent labour has always been a feature of capitalist societies since the Industrial Revolution, with the advent of neoliberalism and post-industrial forms of production, flexible labour has moved from a peripheral position to a preferred labour relation (Hardt and Negri 2004). Nonetheless, a distinction ought to be made between precarity as that which occurs after the dissolution of fixed employment, and precarity as the condition of being a priori excluded from ‘regular’ employment due to race, gender, or citizenship status. Whereas the former treats precarity as an exceptional situation and a violation of the post-war promise of fixed jobs, fixed homes, and fixed social relations, the latter understands precarity as a constant of life under capitalism. In the wake of the global financial crisis, though, and the havoc wreaked by mass foreclosures, crippling student and medical debt, tuition hikes, austerity cuts, rising (youth) unemployment figures, the dominant reading of precarity became that of exception to or deviation from a ‘normal’ capitalism. In a moment of historical myopia, the experience of precarity became reduced to the voices and priorities of those who, until recently, enjoyed the benefits, however limited, of a more ‘regulated’ regime of accumulation—unionized industrial workers, white-collar workers, and public servants. The vast majority of people, e.g. minorities, migrants, women, and the working poor, for whom precarity has always been a birthright, were sidelined in the process. This narrowing has validated a singleminded pursuit of job creation as the ‘logical’ approach to solving the crisis that ignores the fact that capitalism has never been able, not even during Fordism, to extend the gains of permanent, full-time employment to everyone. The traditional wage relation has been built on the back of colonial divisions, sexual and racial hierarchies, and ecological domination. Returning to the middle-class dream of Fordist regulation will not overcome the capitalist requirement for a global division of labour or the sublimation of nature, nor is such a return possible given the technical recomposition of advanced capitalism and, even, modernity. A more ambitious strategy for opposing the exposure of an increasing stratum of the population to the dangers of economic uncertainty and outright poverty would be to treat this as an opportunity to confront the contradictions of work in late capitalism, and a provocation to redraw the relation between

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employment, income, and dignity along more equitable, sustainable, and autonomous lines. My argument unfolds in three steps. The first section recounts the now-familiar story of the rise and fall of Fordist capitalism to counter the notion that precarity is an exceptional state or a recent development particular only to neoliberalism. If we take a long historical view, we see that Fordism is the exception and precarity the norm for most people living under capitalism. The second section offers an alternative understanding of precarity shaped by autonomist Marxism. It sees the cuts in wages and benefits, job insecurity, and increased levels of personal debt, introduced from the 1970s onwards, not only as a strategy to discipline labour as much as a response (sadly, an inverse response) to the demand for flexible, participatory, and gratifying work. The Janus-faced character of neoliberal precarity, as part discipline and part inverted pleasure, demonstrates that whereas the social conditions that make contingent labour a precarious and punitive affair need to be resisted, flexible work, by itself, is not a deviation from some ‘normal’ (full-time, permanent) work arrangement, but an expression of people’s genuine desire to gain more control over their time and autonomy in their lives. So, instead of trying to shore up employment relations by returning to Fordist modes of production and regulation, the concluding section of the paper makes the case for a post-work politics that wants to reduce the stronghold productive activity has over our lives.

Fordism as Exception, Precarity as Norm The most common approach to precarity is to view it as the flipside of the full employment regime pursued during the Fordist accumulation regime and a violation of the compromise forged between labour and capital during that time. Although a relatively short and quite exceptional historical period, Fordism is generally cast as the ‘normal’ mode of capitalism, making precarity seem like an exceptional and recent symptom of neoliberal capitalism disembedded from government regulation and, ultimately, democratic rule. A more nuanced view can turn this view on its head. The Fordist regime of accumulation, or ‘embedded liberalism’ as it is known sometimes, was rooted in the grand Keynesian insight that increases in productivity must be matched by wage increases to allow workers to absorb excess goods and keep the productivist machine

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running. Without this equilibrium between mass production and mass consumption, profits could not be realized and the whole system would come to a halt. The result was a compromise between labour and capital, where workers agreed to give up some of their time, energies, and political potential in exchange for gaining access to the consumptive dream of the ‘American way of life’. Far from natural, this equilibrium required careful supervision from the state through collective bargaining agreements, price controls, and a certain measure of central planning. Plus, whatever the market could not provide, the state would compensate through public works projects, government spending (even at a deficit), and easy access to credit. This highly centralized and meticulously planned regime of accumulation did not allow for much popular participation. Workplace democracy or self-government in public affairs remained wanting, eventually producing a series of ‘blue collar blues and white collar woes’ with the strict labour discipline, managerialism, and democratic deficit of the system. But, at the very least, Fordism rewarded worker docility with the promise of collective security and prosperity (Lipietz 1992). When set against the flexible mode of accumulation introduced by neoliberalism in the late 1970s, the Golden Age of capitalism is almost universally praised for offering people (at least unionized industrial workers) the safety and certainty of a stable income and ample social security. Workers’ docility was essentially bought off by partially including organized labour in the consumptive gains of capitalist productivity. Still, any analysis that paints Fordism as a peaceful and prosperous period of accumulation neglects the unique historical conditions that allowed (some) workers (and only in the West) to be temporarily insulated from economic insecurity. Up until the Second World War, Keynesian economic thought was hardly orthodox. It took history’s deepest economic crisis and a climate of great political upheaval to justify stronger government intervention in socio-economic affairs. ‘Pre-trade union Fordism’ was, in fact, a brutal mode of production, based on de-skilling, work speed-up, rigid chains of command, physical intimidation, policing, surveillance, and propaganda. It was only after the Great Depression had exposed the unsustainability of a disembedded regime of accumulation that labour rights, a living wage and tight financial regulation became legitimate tools of government. And even then, these measures were only introduced after a vigorous period of labour struggle, involving sit-down strikes, factory occupations, and violent confrontations with the police.

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Threatened by the rise of competing models of regulation, like Fascism and Stalinism, the American political and managerial classes were forced to eventually embrace ‘regulationist Fordism’ to stabilize the domestic situation and prevent more radical political alternatives from gaining ground (Lipietz 1992, 5; Neilson and Rossiter 2008, 56). After the United States emerged victorious from the war, it proceeded to extend the Fordist model of production and regulation to its protectorates around the world, not as a gesture of goodwill but in an effort to stabilize Western economies and slowly create the conditions for global capitalism (Panitch and Gindin 2012). In the decades following the war, the Western world experienced unprecedented rates of growth largely because the United States was prepared to run deficits with other countries, absorb excess products, and back up the Fordist social compact with its military power and gold reserves. In exchange for ideological compliance and access to export markets, the United States even went as far as to tolerate discrimination in trade relations and use military spending to boost the reconstruction of European and Japanese industry and exporting capacity (Holmes 2011). Developing countries, however, were excluded from this deal. For the Third World, there was no Marshall Plan, only a brutal series of murders, embargoes, coups d’états, dictatorships, and neo-colonial wars (Lipietz 1992, 10). Colonial-style exploitation of natural resources went hand in hand with imperialist repression of ‘unfriendly’ regimes and popular movements. Also excluded from the deal were black and migrant rankand-file workers in Western liberal nations, along with women, upon whose un(der)paid and unrecognized labour the whole system rested. As it would become clear during Third World liberation struggles and the race and culture wars of the 50s and 60s, the compromise was ecologically and economically unsustainable, exclusionary, undemocratic, and atomizing. Its faults were numerous: Of course, we should never tire of pointing out that even in the supposed “Golden Age,” the middle class was largely aspirational and a completely rigged game. Individualized consumer lifestyles depended on the neocolonial exploitation of the “third world,” huge racialized underclasses (with virtually no access to debt or credit), and the systematic exploitation of women’s reproductive labor in the home and the market. It also depended on a deep cultural conservatism enforced by homophobic terrorism and

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what we now understand to be completely unsustainable ecological practices, including the mass exploitation of fossil fuels, the proliferation of toxic chemicals and plastics, and the mass production of commodities and their subsequent waste. While capital may have been able to buy off a section of the working class (particularly those whom it valued in whitecollar, managerial, and professional positions), there was (and is) no way to extend this “prosperity” to more than a fraction of the world’s population, though this promise was (and is) among the key justifications for capitalism. (Haiven 2013)

Even for those who enjoyed the generous protections and consumptive pleasures of the Fordist compromise, notably male industrial workers, the cost of this privilege was not negligible. To achieve a relative degree of material security, workers had to forfeit their right to political militancy and aspirations for workplace democracy. From the very beginning, the Fordist social compact had been constructed on a deep-seated suspicion of the political potential of workers and, especially, their antagonistic position to capital. It was not the magnanimity of ruling elites that gave birth to the New Deal, but the strategic need to ‘continually respond to the […] existential threat [posed by workers] with entitlements and monetary payoffs that boost the propensity to consume’ (Holmes 2011). Protected from economic hardship but stripped of its radical potential, the Fordist worker had been gradually reduced to a passive production-consumption machine with no possibility to pursue emancipation in the workplace or self-determination in personal or public affairs. This painfully crafted stalemate between labour and capital would come to an end in the long decade of the ’70s, unfortunately not in the favour of labour. The Fordist crisis had already begun in the late 1960s. It was brought on by a confluence of factors, some economic, such as the integration of global markets, the rising cost of the welfare state and the saturation of Western consumer markets, others more social, like mounting shop floor disaffection and civil discontent with the militarism and managerialism of liberal democracy. The transition to neoliberalism was anything but smooth and automatic. Although it garnered some support by promising to replace the ‘rigidities’ of the past with more flexible and participatory modes of production, consumption, and governance (support which strangely enough enlisted both the language of freedom and selfexpression of the ’68 counter-culture and the rising social conservatism of the economically frustrated white and male working class), neoliberalism

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asserted itself through a series of brutal attacks on the post-war social contract. Painfully won labour rights were dismantled, at times with the use of police and even military force (see Chile); jobs and production sites were automated and outsourced; public assets and national resources were sold off at fire-sale prices and privatized in the name of ‘efficiency’; while financial capital was encouraged to fill the void left by stagnating wages and shrinking welfare provisions. In the Global North, opposition to the spending cuts and privatization measures introduced by the ReaganThatcher Right was suppressed through wage cuts, systematic attacks on the power of organized labour (something I will return to in the next section), artificially imposed recessions, and even police repression. In the Global South and the former communist bloc, international organizations, like the World Bank and the IMF, forced resistant nations to comply with the ‘Washington Consensus’ by dressing up austerity measures as economic development. Meanwhile the number of overworked, poorly remunerated, and indebted victims of precarity has been steadily on the rise. There is no denying that post-Fordism inaugurated a period of economic uncertainty, social erosion, and democratic unaccountability. Yet, to hold up Fordism as an ideal only makes sense for a narrow segment of the population who had the privilege to enjoy the benefits extended through bureaucratic managerialism, generous military spending, and the systematic exclusion of minorities, migrants, and developing populations (Neilson and Rossiter 2008, 54–57). If we take a long historical view, as I have tried to do here, we can see that it is Fordism, not neoliberalism, that is in fact the exception to capitalist rule. Worker demands and business interests converged for a brief moment in time because full employment, high wages, and strong benefits were the trifecta needed to balance out a system that could produce more than people could consume. But as soon as capital became globally mobile and relatively independent from labour, allowing productivity to surpass wage increases, the agreement was scrapped and replaced with a debt-driven model of growth (Kunkel 2010). Both before and after this short-lived period of comparative prosperity, precarity has been the norm. To view precarity as a novelty, as something that came only after the breakdown of Fordism, which a return to post-war methods of production and regulation can overcome, reduces precarity to the experience of the newly proletarianized middle class. It ignores women, minorities, and developing populations excluded from the Fordist compromise, together

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with the imperialist practices mobilized for this exclusion. Precarity is hardly an exception or a violation of some ‘normal’ regime of accumulation. It ‘is and has always been the standard experience of [life] in capitalism’. The outrage accompanying ‘the recent rise of precarity is actually its discovery among those who had not expected it by virtue of’ their economically or biologically privileged position (Mitropoulos 2005). This, unfortunately, is the dominant understanding of precarity emerging out of the crisis. The 2007–2008 financial meltdown has been a shock especially to those who, prior to that, had been able to reproduce a middle-class standard of living (meaning consumption) through borrowed money. Where wages could no longer purchase the ‘American dream’, mortgages, student debt, credit cards, and pension funds stepped into conceal the effects of precarity. The credit crunch put an end to this, exposing debt as an unsustainable (and predatory) solution to the widening gap between production and consumption. The anger and disillusionment articulated in squares and public assemblies all over the world in recent years are certainly justified but its political potential remains to be determined. If the expectation is for governments to create more and better jobs by investing in the ‘real’ economy or funding public works projects of the kind we saw after the war, only disillusionment can follow. A return to the Golden Age of capitalism is both impossible and undesirable. The Fordist social contract was not only partial, its normative content was also questionable. The ‘good life’ can and has to mean more than striking a balance between work and consumption. I will further unpack these claims in the final section, but before that I wish to dwell a little longer on the final days of Fordism to better understand the origins, form(s), and purpose of precarity today.

Post-Fordist Precarity: Between Discipline and Pleasure By the late 1960s, Fordism had entered a crisis of productivity. Growing international competition from Western Europe and Japan, saturation of export markets, and the prohibitive cost of the welfare state were making it increasingly difficult for the United States to sustain and finance the balance between high productivity, high wages, and full employment. Productivity began stalling, wages were stagnating, and profits remained unrealized. The US government tried to intervene with wage and price controls and monetary adjustments, but where these methods had been

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helpful in rebuilding post-war capitalism, in a global and highly competitive economic environment they only compounded the inflation rate already pushed into the double digits by the astronomical cost of the Vietnam War and the OPEC crisis (Panitch and Gindin 2012). Parallel to the twin problems of economic stagnation and inflation, the final days of Fordism also witnessed a tide of social unrest, spearheaded by students, minorities and, later on, blue-collar workers increasingly dissatisfied with their end of the bargain. The race and culture wars of the late 60s were followed by an upheaval in class relations in the early 70s, which indicated that, for the post-war generation that had not experienced the hardships of the Great Depression or the sacrifices of the Second World War, the promise of a secure job in a sclerotic organization was not a sufficient measure of the ‘good life’. For rank-and-file workers, minorities and the new generation of university graduates the New Deal was just not good enough: it was not inclusive, egalitarian or fulfilling enough. This combination of stagflation and worker unrest provided the perfect political opportunity for those interested in disciplining labour. The Full Employment Profit Squeeze thesis, popularized at the time but still prominent today, gave policy makers and business leaders an excuse to blame workers for the Fordist crisis of productivity. A tight labour market, so the argument goes, where people have little trouble finding a job, gives workers the collective power and confidence to push wages beyond profitable levels. This sets off a chain reaction with investors increasing consumer prices and workers demanding still higher wages. The spiral eventually slides into inflation and can only be stopped by abandoning full employment as a policy goal to allow free competition to determine fair wages and prices. From a purely economic point of view, the Full Employment Profit Squeeze thesis makes little sense, although liberal and even some left economists tend to find truth in it. Robert Brenner showed in his classic study, The Economics of Great Turbulence (2006), that profits and investment in the Fordist period were squeezed by acerbic international competition between industrial producers and overproduction of manufactured goods, not excessive wages. It is not that workers were paid too much for investors to make a profit but that they made too little to absorb the dizzying number of available goods (Kunkel 2010). It is inevitable that an economic model organized towards the endless production of goods for profit, and not for the satisfaction of real human needs, will eventually experience market saturation and shrinking profits. Still, full

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employment became the preferred explanation for America’s economic decline because it identified a clear scapegoat, which, though not directly responsible for reducing profitability, posed a growing political threat for sustained growth. As economist Michal Kalecki famously explained already in 1943, full employment is a political problem more than an economic one. By eliminating the threat of joblessness, full employment increases the collective power of labour and undermines the social position of the owner class. [U]nder a regime of permanent full employment, the ‘sack’ would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. Strikes for wage increases and improvements in conditions of work would create political tension.

This description accurately captures the twilight of Fordism. In 1970 alone, 2.4 million workers engaged in large-scale work stoppages, slowdowns, and wildcat strikes, 34 of which mobilized 10,000 or more workers. ‘They fought with supervisors on the line, clogged up the system with grievances, demanded changes in the quality of work life, walked out in wildcat strikes, and organized the overthrow of stale bureaucratic union leadership’ (Cowie 2010). The kernel of this rebelliousness was what the Italian workerist movement called the ‘refusal to work’, a term describing workers’ rejection of capitalist labour discipline and their struggle to gain more control over the content of their work and, ultimately, their lives. Faced with a direct challenge to the economic and political distribution of power, full employment quickly emerged as a convenient explanation for the crisis, one that is still instrumental today. Accusing workers of enjoying too high wages and too much power absolved the political managerial class from having to address any of the larger, structural tensions within capitalism (i.e. racism, sexism, ecological limits to growth, democratic deficit), while also giving them an opportunity to dismantle the victories labour had so painfully secured over the years. Neoliberalism was not an obvious or inevitable solution to stagflation. Nor did policy-makers have a clear, cohesive answer to the problem. Successive administrations, on both sides of the Atlantic, more or less ‘stumbled’ towards neoliberalism, which at that time was only one ‘chaotic experiment’ among many (Harvey 2005, 13). Its advantage over other policy options was that it promised to restore post-war levels of

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growth by freeing the market from any distortions holding back competition. Collective bargaining agreements, social provisions, and other redistributive measures were going to be replaced by policy options that privileged investors’ interests. According to neoliberal economic thinking, it is investors and entrepreneurs, not workers, who generate wealth through their innovative and risk-taking behaviour. Hence, the responsibility of politics is to make sure business has the right incentives to keep putting out competitive products at low prices to stimulate demand and create jobs. Wealth will naturally trickle down from the top if only the fetters of taxation, regulation, borders, and especially the obstacle represented by labour are removed. Far from an economic inevitability but also not an elite conspiracy, neoliberalism has to be understood as an intentional and systematic political strategy to restore corporate profitability in a post-Fordist (i.e. global, flexible, and post-industrial) economic context. Full employment, meaning the power and prosperity of the industrial working class, was not only an economic impediment to this, it also threatened the balance of forces needed to sustain a fully mobile global economy. The working class, in general, as a core actor in the social democratic compromise had to be destroyed. Several strategies were used to accomplish this goal. First was an attack on the traditional wage relation sustained by technological revolutions in production, transportation, and communication. Since the 1970s a series of strategies, some technological (e.g. automation, containerization, just-in-time production, surveillance), others political (e.g. downsizing, outsourcing, wage cuts, longer working hours), were introduced to discipline labour and allow business to ‘do more with less’ (Schor 1992). In the process, work contracts became more temporary and flexible, hiring and firing was made easier, the workplace was fragmented, and the right to strike and organize became increasingly difficult. Real wages have been steadily declining since the 1980s, while the social networks and bonds, which once could have made up for these economic shocks, have been decimated in the name of fiscal discipline. The result is that today at least a quarter of the adult population in OECD countries is in the precariat (Standing 2011, 24). But the power lines between labour and capital could have never been redrawn so dramatically had neoliberalism not also responded to a genuine popular desire for autonomy and self-realization in work. We are used to reading the rise of precarious labour against the backdrop of

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Fordist social regulation, in which case it automatically acquires a negative connotation. But post-Fordist precarity had, from the very beginning, two faces: the stick of breaking labour solidarity and the carrot of making work satisfying and self-directed. Removing the ‘rigidities’ of Fordist production was as much about suppressing the power of organized labour as it was about managing the democratic excess and insurrectionist desires articulated by young workers and the counter-cultural movement. To put it in the terms of André Gorz, ‘post-Fordism presents itself both as the heralding of a possible reappropriation of work by workers and as the regression towards a total subjugation and quasi-vassaldom of the very person of the workers. Both aspects are always present’ (1982, 32). The new generation of technical and scientific workers, trained to fulfil the needs of cognitive capitalism (an accumulation regime that produces value through symbolic functions, immaterial work, cultural and communicative processes), wanted a better work-life balance, more transparent and participatory management styles, and more fulfilling types of work. Neoliberalism would cater to their insurrectionist demands but only as part of an impossible trade-off between freedom and security, which would make gratifying work the luxury of our times. In the hands of management theorists and new economy entrepreneurs, flexible work relations would become an excuse for cutting wages and undermining work security, creativity became a shorthand for intensified productivity, autonomy was used to encourage personal responsibility, and the dream of work-as-personal-fulfilment became an apology for self-imposed precarization. The post-Fordist utopia of gratifying work engaged workers’ dissatisfaction with the rigid factory discipline and undemocratic management styles but not with the material foundation of this discontent. The critique of alienation was severed from the critique of exploitation and the realities of private property, productivity, and the pursuit of profit to conceal the persistence of exploitation in labour, further flexibilize labour relations, and to undermine any potentially dangerous demands for better pay, protection, and work reduction organized labour might pose. The result has been a total destruction of working class solidarity and the workers’ movement. It used to be that labour and capital were recognized as fundamentally antagonistic yet independent and equal parties in a social compact. This is essentially the bargain that Fordism was built upon. Workers did not belong to the company; they only lent out their bodies and energies to it for a set amount of time and money. And, although

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this exteriority also entailed the foundation for alienation, workers at least possessed the freedom to maintain a sense of identity outside of work. With the decline of industrial capacities, however, the workforce was fragmented into a core of skilled technicians and creative workers invited to play junior partner in the production and management process, and a mass of disposable labour made perfectly adaptable and responsive to capital’s fluctuating demands (Gorz 1989; Little 1996). This splintering has allowed capital to destroy what was left of working class solidarity by transferring the historic antagonism between itself and labour onto workers themselves, between employed and unemployed, between unionized workers and contingent labour, and among precarious workers. Precarity is a reality on both sides of the divide but whereas the mobile and educated few can ‘afford’ precarity as a worthwhile price to pay for gratifying, independent work, for de-skilled industrial workers, low-wage service workers, feminized and migrant labour precarity is a life sentence. This division has not only helped make it more difficult to articulate a common voice and political programme for the precariat, but it has blocked the emergence of a coherent vision of freedom in/from work. With technical and creative workers praised as the model for productivity and motor of growth in neoliberal economies, the demand for autonomy and self-fulfilment in work has become automatically suspect. Artists and creative workers, for instance, are often accused of actively inviting their own exploitation and driving down the wages and working conditions for everyone by choosing professional recognition and self-realization over fair pay and fixed work relations. Although the relative privilege of people in the creative industries cannot be denied, this approach confuses the way in which people choose to navigate an economic system with how that economic system is organized. It also turns what should be a structural antagonism between workers and capital into a personal one between different types of workers. Neoliberalism produced so many converts because it exploits the credo that individuals have power over their economic destinies. Yet this belief is not the exclusive property of the market fundamentalists nor should it be regarded as such. It can be espoused by individuals in more democratic kinds of work environment – ones that are just and vibrant but are also well protected from market overexposure. […] Everyone should have a right to choose their own balance of freedom and security in employment,

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and we should craft policies to ensure that making the wrong choices does not prove catastrophic to people. (Ross 2010, 95)

We cannot ‘dismiss the hunger for “free agency” as a mere product of market ideology; the flexibility it delivers is a response to an authentic employee demand’ (Ross 2008, 38). The idea that work should foster the development of individual potentials is at heart a socialist aspiration that was only gradually, with the passage from industrial to cognitive capitalism, reassembled to serve capitalist ends. This is the skill of capitalism, to remake itself in the image of our struggles, from the innovative impulses of our acts of resistance. Post-Fordist capitalism recognizes our penchant for self-directed work outside capitalist command, but uses it to its own advantage. Our habits and aspirations become clues for ‘tolerable’ ways to reduce labour costs and worker power. The privilege to work without a boss or a fixed schedule has become the highest earned freedom in modern society, one people would even sacrifice economic security for. ‘So when we think about rebuilding our employment base today, we should not be promoting forms of security that simply entail a guaranteed slot in some sclerotic organizational hierarchy. Nor should we dismiss the choice, for some, of non-standard work as a neoliberal delusion’ (Ross 2010, 95). What should be condemned are the social conditions that make this option a costly and punitive choice available only to a privileged few. How we might create the necessary conditions for more people to enjoy autonomy in work and life is what I turn to next.

A Post-work Approach to Precarity The growing chasm between wages and productivity, between economic output and consumers’ purchasing power brought on by four decades of neoliberalism and its reckless attempt to solve the Fordist crisis of profitability through automation, finance and increasingly fictitious valorization schemes, have brought us to an absurd impasse: [W]ork has triumphed over all other moments of existence at the very moment when work has become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automation of production have so progressed they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of labor necessary to manufacture products. We’re living in a paradox of a society of workers without

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work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to detract us. (The Invisible Committee 2009)

‘When work is scarce political horizons become more limited’ (2012). Instead of recognizing that the link between work and production has been broken, the preferred response to the global financial crisis from forces both on the Left and the Right has been to push for a reregularization of labour relations at all cost. For the Right, this has meant a renewed confidence in work as the definitive measure for responsibility, potential and social purpose, coupled with an effort to ‘create jobs’ by churning out low-wage service jobs, miniaturizing work and aggressive activation and back-to-work tactics. The effect has been the proletarianization of an even larger segment of the population and the further erosion of the traditional working class. For the Left, it has meant an attempted return to Keynesian economics in the hopes that greater state intervention in the economy and a stubborn commitment to the principles of modern economic development (i.e. industrial production, growth as progress, central planning) will realign work with wealth. A return to mass industrial Fordism is impossible. The post-war era of economic growth and productivist full employment was a distinct historical period, the conditions for which no longer exist. It relied upon jobs related to mass urbanization, cheap and abundant fossil fuels, and easy access to credit. None of these conditions can be replicated. Urbanization is, to a large extent, a completed process, although suburbanization continues in an unsustainable form to provide a profitable outlet for finance capital. New sources of petroleum and energy are being discovered but their high cost of extraction dwarfs their profitability and produces further social and ecological instabilities. Also, the current astronomical levels of public and private debt (87.7% of GDP for the Eurozone and 100% for the United States) make future debt-driven growth highly unlikely (Peters 2012). More importantly, though, the technological recomposition of capital casts a shadow of doubt on any dreams of productivist growth. If during the post-war period technology was still a factor of growth, new technologies are destroying jobs and value faster than they are creating them. Automation, computerization, and containerization, not outsourcing, are the greatest threats to employment, which is why a return to ‘making

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things’, as evidenced in the trend to re-shore production, has not generated substantial job growth. For a slim minority of high-skilled technical workers and entrepreneurs the latest tech-bubble has been manna from heaven. For the majority of blue-collar workers though and increasingly also service, clerical and intellectual workers, the information revolution has meant longer working hours, greater surveillance and a loss of bargaining power (Gorz 1989). Those of us committed to a politics of freedom and common wealth need to understand that efforts to resuscitate the old employment arrangement, where wages and worth are measured in hours spent in productive work, does more harm than good. It erodes natural and social life on the planet, reduces people’s needs, activities, and desires to the world of production and consumption, and maintains the legitimacy of a work ethic, which is being increasingly used as a mechanism of social control rather than to generate increases in productivity (Peters 2012, 2013). As technological innovation together with economic and ecological limits to growth render obsolete the productivist dream of full employment, it becomes imperative to decouple our understanding of value and worth from our participation in the labour market. Instead of trying to create more of the jobs we already have, the alternative suggested by post-work writers, like André Gorz (1982, 1989, 1999), and Kathi Weeks (2011), would be to reappropriate and repurpose existing forms of production and reproduction to secure the time and resources needed to enjoy a life beyond work (Weeks 2011, 13). The ambition of postpolitics is to ‘liberate [life] from production by ceasing to treat it as the centre of gravity of all social activities and individual action’ (Vincent cited in Weeks 2011, 101). This ‘refusal of work’ should not be confused with the ‘refusal to work’, a childish position of privilege that invariably ends up denigrating working class culture and the concerns of working people. Post-work politics does not seek to abolish work, only to change the function of work and its allotted importance. As Marxist feminists have correctly pointed out, when taken to an extreme, the utopia of eliminating work through the acceleration of technological and productive forces, for instance, involves a masculinist desire to free humanity from the realm of necessity, including the basic necessities of social reproduction, and make room for an unfettered life of the mind. This dream has more in common with bourgeois culture than with a universal politics of freedom. It is important

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to remember that ‘[f]reedom within the realm of necessity can be universalized to all; freedom from necessity can be available to only a few’ (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 1999, 8). Work also remains essential for social and emotional reasons. ‘[A]ccess to work in the public sphere is essential to economic citizenship and to full participation in society. In complex modern societies, the participation in the social process of production is an essential factor of socialization and of membership in socially formalized communities and groups, even if working time is reduced to less than half the present average’ (Gorz 1997, 182). The merits and benefits of gainful and meaningful employment cannot be overstated. The problem, however, is that these benefits are not equally distributed, and those who do not enjoy them jeopardize not only their income but also their social place and sense of self-esteem. Hence, postwork hopes to distribute employment by reducing work and pursuing a politics of full employment. There is an important distinction between ‘creating jobs’ and ‘full employment’: whereas the former is an economic strategy that maintains people’s dependence on wage labour as the only means of mass survival, the latter issues a universal right to gainful employment that raises the bargaining power of labour and supports people’s right to decide what jobs they do and for how much money. The Keynesian social compact already included this goal as part of its democratic mandate, but ‘[a] full employment vision for the twenty-first century can and must look different from the full employment realities of the postwar era’ (Maisano 2012). Unlike the productivist full employment of the post-war era, which was predicated on mass resource extraction, intense industrial overproduction, mass consumption, and general wastefulness, post-productivist full employment wants to reduce labour time and reorganize work in line with social needs. ‘Laborare tutti, labor are meno’, was the 70s Italian autonomist slogan—where all work, we can all work less. Such a version of full employment is realistic about the economic and ecological limits of production, and wants to put labour in the service of social needs and ecological limitations, as opposed to making it a tool of subservience to abstract accumulation. Instead of attempting a (impossible) re-regularization of work, which would involve a return to an industrial, productivist, growth-based past, it embraces the black sheep of our time—intermittent, part-time work, and tries to invert it from a source of insecurity and precarity into the basis of a work regime that combines social usefulness and self-determined activity. In a post-work

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society, casual labour would not be used as a perfidious opportunity to desecuritize and de-stabilize workers, but as a chance to free up more time for the kinds of autonomous, collaborative activities people now have to sacrifice material security and personal wellbeing for. The greatest obstacle to a reorganization and revalorization of work is obviously global capital. Although we have the technology and infrastructure needed to reduce work and redistribute employment, ‘capital has maintained a veto on such a solution. […] Employers are still far more willing to grant wage increases than cede control over scheduling hours of work’ (Schor 1992, 76). It is cheaper, although not more effective, to have the same people working longer than hiring and training more people. Cutting the work week in half would not reduce productivity, but it would harm profits. Politically also, maintaining an artificial scarcity of employment helps undermine worker solidarity and instil a culture of individual competitiveness and entrepreneurship. The result has been a single-minded approach to solving the unemployment crisis through job creation, with no regard for whether these are socially useful or desirable jobs. It is the only approach that does not challenge income distribution, property rights, the current division of labour, capitalist economic rationality, and bourgeois morality. Yet capitalism is not the only obstacle. There are also reasons endemic to the Left for why post-work politics continues to be a relatively obscure position. One obstacle is the narrow view on work adopted by the socialist Left. For unions and socialist parties today, work remains the organizing principle of reality, its rationalization and perfection the cornerstone of emancipatory politics. In the words of Jean Baudrillard, ‘a spectre haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity’ (cited in Weeks 2011, 81). Marx recognized that demanding higher wages would be like asking for ‘better payment for the slave’ (cited in Weeks 2011, 21), thus implying that the ultimate goal of socialism should be to use the strategies and organizational forms of the working class to help workers ‘win the power no longer to function as worker[s]’ (Gorz 1982, 67). Still, labour-based socialism has continued to treat work as the highest sphere of human activity and the exclusive basis for social identity and purpose because, in many ways, it is like capitalism—a theory of progress. As a result, the institutional Left has always been better at solidifying the compromise between labour and capital than at challenging the productivist ethos this deal was built upon.

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Gorz, along with many autonomist thinkers, warned that this reactive position would gradually come to erode the power of leftist organizations: ‘the Left would remain weak and defensive so long as it remained trapped by the ideology of work and sought mainly to protect the rapidly deteriorating gains made by workers during the golden age of industrial capitalism’ (Gorz cited in Maisano 2011). A socialist critique that only takes issue with work from the vantage point of equality and dignity, neglecting questions of autonomy and freedom, a critique that does not extend to the labour process itself is an impoverishment of the Marxist position. Socialism cannot just be about transferring the ownership title from bourgeois to worker hands, while ‘leaving the basic form of industrial production – and even the mode of capitalist command over production – intact’ (Weeks 2011, 84). The point is not only to liberate work from its disciplinary confines to achieve better workplace democracy or even full worker productivity. The goal is to allow people to work less, collectively determine the content and purpose of their work, and ultimately become more than just workers. What we cannot expect from the organized Left, we usually hope to find on the streets, in grassroots, horizontalist movements. Unfortunately, here we detect a second obstacle to post-work politics becoming a more prominent part of the discourse, namely, the hegemony of debt. With debt becoming a core strategy of value extraction in late capitalism, a process that has been dubbed ‘rent-becoming-profit’ (Marazzi 2011), it has also moved to the centre of radical social organizing, from protests against rising food prices in developing nations to campaigns for debt forgiveness in OECD countries. Particularly in the case of the latter, the main effort has been to combat the isolating and moralizing grammar of debt. Different from work, the cooperative nature of which invites the formation of common identities and interests, debt is an atomizing strategy that precludes solidarity (Graeber 2011). The Occupy Wall Street movement and the related Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee campaigns provided a first opportunity for debtors from different categories (e.g. home owners, students, and precarious workers) to identify a common enemy and perhaps a common humanity, as well. An exclusive focus on debt, however, reduces the spectrum of emancipatory politics to a single demand, that of more work. If debt is clearly recognized as a coercive method of value extraction, wage labour is still seen as a free and equal exchange between consenting parties, and therefore a fair measure of human ability and worth. This effectively allows

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debt to function as the new work ethic, pushing people into seeing (more) work as the only solution to the economy of guilt and shame debt locks us into. In reality, the reason why debt is moving to the centre of value creation is because, with work becoming unhinged from material production, wages have been steadily declining or, at best, stagnating. ‘As wages and jobs vanish […] the lending/debt machine becomes the dominant work relation’ (Bolton 2012). This means that demands for a jubilee must go hand in hand with the fight for a reduced work week and a social wage. Just as debt forgiveness promises to change our understanding of money from a fixed measure of value to a socially determined relation (Graeber 2011), post-work politics can help shift our perception of work from a debt paid to society to a labour of love performed for society. In this paper I have tried to show that any discussion of precarity grounded in rupture, loss, or betrayal (‘precarity as exceptional accumulation’ or ‘precarity as violation of the wage relation’) ends up short-sightedly mourning the bygone days of industrial Fordism instead of pushing the critique of precarity to its full post-work conclusions. The nostalgia for a bygone New Deal (or the hope for a novel Green New Deal) papers over the blind spots and exclusions of the Fordist peace and bypasses present contradictions to resuscitate a productivist compromise that does not push the horizon of leftist liberation far enough. Seeing how rescuing the current economic order or reviving the previous one is unlikely (successive rounds of ‘crisis management’ since the 1970s have only pushed us further into pauperism), emancipatory politics cannot shy away from ambitions. They may be aiming high, but they are never naive.

References Bolton, M. 2012. Work Isn’t Working. New Left Project, August 31. http:// www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/work_isnt_wor king. Brenner, R. 2006. The Economics of Global Turbulence. New York: Verso. Cowie, J. 2010. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press. Gorz, A. 1982. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-industrial Socialism. London: Pluto Press. Gorz, A. 1989. Critique of Economic Reason. New York: Verso. Gorz, A. 1997. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-industrial Socialism. London: Pluto Press. Gorz, A. 1999. Reclaiming Work. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Haiven, M. 2013. Finance Depends on Resistance, Finance Is Resistance, and Anyways Resistance Is Futile. Mediations 26: 1–2. http://www.mediationsjo urnal.org/articles/finance-depends-on-resistance. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmes, B. 2011. American Dreams. Seminar Lecture in “Three Crises: 30s– 70s–Today,” at Mess Hall in Chicago, October 15. http://messhall.org/wpc ontent/uploads/2011/10/3.-American_Dreams.pdf. Kalecki, M. 2010 [1943]. Political Aspects of Full Employment. Monthly Review, May 22. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html. Kunkel, B. 2010 [1992]. Full Employment. n +1, June 4. http://nplusonemag. com/fullemployment. Lipietz, A. 1992. Towards a New Economic Order: Postfordism, Ecology and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Little, A. 1996. The Political Thought of André Gorz. New York: Routledge. Maisano, C. 2011. Take this Job and Share It. The Jacobin, Issue 1. http://jac obinmag.com/2011/01/take-this-job-and-share-it/. Maisano, C. 2012. Working for the Weekend. The Jacobin, Issue 7–8. http://jac obinmag.com/2012/10/working-for-the-weekend-2/. Marazzi, C. 2011. The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Marx, K. 2011. Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin Books. Mies, M., and V. Bennholdt-Thomsen. 1999. The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy. London: Zed Books. Mitropoulos‚ A. 2005. “Precari-Us?” https://transversal.at/transversal/0704/ mitropoulos/en. Neilson, B., and N. Rossiter. 2005. From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks. Fibreculture 5. http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-022-from-precarity-to-precar iousness-andback-again-labour-life-and-unstable-networks/. Neilson, B., and N. Rossiter. 2008. Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (7–8): 51–72. Panitch, L., and S. Gindin. 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. New York: Verso. Peters, Aaron. 2012. Forget the ‘Golden Age’ of Capitalism: There’s No Return, and Our Future Can Be Better. Open Democracy, March 6. http://www. opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/aaron-peters/forget-%E2%80%98goldenage%E2%80%99-of-capitalism-there%E2%80%99s-noreturn-and-our-futurecan-be–1.

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Peters, Aaron. 2013. Weaponizing Workfare. Open Democracy, March 22. http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/aaron-peters. Power, N. 2013. What Might a World Without Work Look Like? The Guardian, January 3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/ jan/03/world-withoutwork. Ross, A. 2008. The New Geography of Work: Power to the Precarious? Theory, Culture & Society 25 (7–8): 31–49. Ross, A. 2010. The Making of Sustainable Livelihoods. Communication and Cultural/Critical Studies 7 (1): 92–95. Schor, B.J. 1992. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books. Seymour, R. 2012. We Are All Precarious—On the Concept of the ‘Precariat’ and Its Misuses. New Left Project, February 10. http://www.newleftproject. org/index.php/site/article_comments/we_are_all_precarious_on_the_con cept_of_the_precariat_and_its_misuses. Standing, G. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. The Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Weeks, K. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Disability Counter-Communities: Resisting Precarity with Friendship Ivanka Antova and Bal Sokhi-Bulley

Introduction [We] have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship… —Michel Foucault (2000a, 136. Emphasis added)

This chapter was conceived at the beginning of 2016, when we witnessed cuts to welfare spending in the United Kingdom announced in then Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget. These cuts affected the Employment Support Allowance (ESA) and Personal Independence Payment (PIP), two main disability benefits (Sandhu 2016). Spurred by the effects

I. Antova Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. Sokhi-Bulley (B) School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_7

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of austerity on disabled people within Britain’s ‘Community and Society’,1 we wanted to explore the particular precarity of disabled people in the context of welfare reform.2 However, we focus here not on austerity and cuts but on what it means to live precarity in a cultural context wherein ‘community’ has become the dominant, and exclusionary, value (Sokhi-Bulley 2016a, Chapter 4). ‘Community’ is defined by the Government’s Community and Society policy agenda as a space in which people ‘solve their own problems to create strong, attractive and thriving neighbourhoods’ (www.gov.uk/ government/topics/community-and-society. Emphasis added). There is, moreover, a ‘spirit’ of community through which ‘networks and relationships are formed’ to create an intangible sense of togetherness, bound with responsibility, duty, and obligation.3 Those in community (who are responsible, dutiful and fulfill their obligation to make their communities better) will be empowered through community rights. These so-called ‘community rights’ focus on community empowerment, planning, and housing (Localism Act 2011, Parts 5, 6 and 7). Being in community is, then, defined by activism, volunteering, and work—and so those recruited to be a part of community are the active, volunteering, and working citizens. These are what we identify as the community-friendly citizens, versus the community-threatening citizens—those who are not active, do not volunteer and (above all) do not work (in the right way). That is, disabled citizens, situated within the community of ‘encouraged irresponsibility’ facilitated by an overly generous welfare state (Cameron 2012, emphasis added).4 We begin this chapter by examining the particular precarity of the disabled within modern British (Community and) Society. Here, we are all made into active citizens and promised community rights—however, ‘community’ and ‘community rights’ do not reach the disabled citizen; she does not take on responsibility and make the most of opportunity (Ia). Rather, the precarity of the disabled is governed through welfare reform strategies such that disabled people are represented as communitythreatening (IIb). The disabled, we go on to argue in the second part of the chapter, must form new collective bonds and perform their rights to counter responsibilization through community. Current critical disability scholarship explores the possibilities of affective relationships (IIa); we suggest starting from the collective and using a new concept, ‘friendship’, to understand how rights and recognition might be performed, in

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community. Or, rather, a new kind of resistant community that we call counter-community (IIb). Our key objective then is to ask what role friendship plays in the performative enactment of counter-communities, questioning whether friendship opens the possibility for the exercise of a new (relational) right that counters government through community. There is then a triangle, friendship—counter-community—rights, that needs some explanation. ‘Friendship’ means differently than our ordinary, conventional understanding of the term. We take our reading from Michel Foucault, to use this relation to refer to a collective position that we have yet to invent, that promises new relational possibilities that involve a new relational right (Foucault 2000a, b). The idea of relational right is both challenging and without legal form; we use it to refer to an ethical relation that already exists and so can be performed rather than claimed (i.e. it is the idea that you do not need a legal right to exist in order to claim it; the right exists because you are claiming it).5 We offer the tangible example of the right not to work. This type of juridically impossible right is a challenge to both the rhetoric of community (which creates non-productive citizens as community-threatening), to community rights (which are more about a right to community than actual entitlements) and to the very language of rights (which must be used tactically as part of a wider strategic struggle for recognition of the precarity of the disabled—see further Golder 2015, 147). The challenge is enacted as a counter-conduct, through community-threatening communities that we call ‘counter-communities’; these are the communities doing friendship and performing rights. We explore some examples later on. Counter-community speaks to new ways of being that move away from stabilizing existing relations of, here community and disability, towards carving out a space for dissatisfied and disenfranchised individuals to elude the disciplinary effects of the normalizing categories of ‘community’ and ‘disability’. And to thereby make these mean differently. Can we move towards, for instance, in place of Foucault’s ‘homosexual mode of life’ (Foucault 2000a), a ‘disabled mode of life’? Who is that mode of life for? Can we make disability and rights and community mean something else and become different in the process? We examine in this chapter the role that friendship plays in the performative enactment of countercommunities, and the promise that it holds for being otherwise, and being disabled, within today’s community and society. This chapter may be read with MacNamara’s contribution to this collection, which also picks up on

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themes of exclusionary community, relationality, and co-becoming. Similarly, readers of our chapter will find that Bernards’ chapter on citizenship and sovereignty, and Davies’ chapter on how precarity shapes possibilities for subjectivity echo related themes.

The Ethic of Responsibility: Precarity Let us begin by engaging with the theme of precarity that runs through this edited collection. Is precarity the same as disposability? The disabled, dissatisfied citizen (and indeed all responsibilised citizens) are not disposable—to understand disposability as Povinelli does, there is no spectacular state of crisis but rather a quieter state of abjection where they, we, drift (Povinelli 2011). Lorey (2015, 11–12) makes an effective distinction between precarity, the precarious and governmental precarization; alongside the naturalized state of domination (precarity) and shared endangerment (precarious), precarization is an ambivalent state of governing that is now the norm. We see disability as ‘precarized deviance’ (Lorey 2015, 38). Disability is made governable through welfare reform as good governance, through responsibilization and work capability indicators. There is, nonetheless, within this governmental relation the inherent possibility to resist, to engage in collective counter-behaviour and form countercommunities. This is not spectacular resistance—not the spectacle of a riot, for instance—but rather, as again Povanelli calls it, precarity lived as the ‘ordinary, chronic and chruddy rather than [the] catastrophic, crisisladen and sublime’ (2011, 13). Faced with governmental precarization, the question is not how to prevent or escape the threat of precarity but how to look for the mechanisms and potentials for resistance. To rethink relationality—which means rethinking care and affective relationships—and what room there is for performing struggle collectively, and in rights. Community and Society In modern British society, we are made into active citizens, volunteers, champions, and instructed to be responsible, to make the most of opportunity and duty to our communities (Sokhi-Bulley 2016a, Chapter 4). Despite a rhetoric of ‘community and society’ (previously Big Society, see www.gov.uk/government/topics/community-and-society), community has replaced society and become an ethos —a way of regulating

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behaviour through a code of good and right conduct that is based in the right way to behave in/make the most of your community (SokhiBulley 2016a, 84). We are enticed towards community with a promise of ‘community rights’ (Department for Local Communities and Government 2013; see also Localism Act 2011). This seems an insidious rhetoric in itself since Theresa May and her Conservative Party made it clear that rights are dispensable and not the universal, indivisible and inalienable values that we may have thought, particularly in the wake of Brexit and recent terror attacks in Manchester and London (Spurrier 2017).6 But not only this—community rights represent a failure in rights—and a threat, actually, to the idea of rights as empowerment—since they are less about empowerment and individual, juridical rights than about a right to community (Sokhi-Bulley 2016a, 85). The ‘rights’ themselves consist of neighbourhood planning, community right to build, community right to bid, community shares, Our Place!, community right to challenge, town and parish councils, right to manage and community cashback and right to reclaim land (Department for Local Communities and Government 2013). They are thus dependent on being active—on you making the most of the opportunity, the right, to work. There are two points to be made here: first, not only should we all want to be part of a community (after all, community is the ideal that we chose and for which we are now responsible) but there is a right kind of community, and a right way to be in that community, of which we should be a part. These are the active, thriving, resilient communities that conduct neighbourhood planning, both work and volunteer, and put in place their own initiatives to tackle disaster—such as flooding (Bulley 2013). The second point is that we cannot refuse community precisely because it is the ideal that we chose. We chose it by being responsive to an ethic of responsibility that mobilizes the ethos of community—that is, a spirit, or a whole culture, of responsibilization (Sokhi-Bulley 2016a, 85–87). Whether it be holding street parties, or volunteering for the Olympic Games, or restoring a local pub, we have come to value ‘community’ and become governmentalized in the process. That is, community becomes a technical, calculable term, and citizens of community and society are managed according to their emotional attachments to the community and their adherence to shared values (common sense, responsibility and duty— Cameron 2011, 2015; Sokhi-Bulley 2016a, 85–86 and 90). Community then becomes an ‘affective and ethical field … a space of emotional relationships through which individual identities are constructed through

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their bonds to microcultures of values and meanings’ (Rose 2000, 1400. Emphasis added). We are made responsible at the same time as we take individual responsibility for our role in, or rather obligation to, community. This obligation is implicit in the ‘community spirit’ (Department for Local Communities and Government 2013, 18) and reflects a sense of communitas —community as a commitment that necessitates obligation (Esposito 2010, 3–5). How can we refuse community? Or, perhaps a more appropriate question in the context of the theme of precarity that runs through this edited collection, how can those who are excluded from (the right kind of) community refuse community? Why would you want to? Because there is something dangerous in the ethic of responsibility that permeates British society—and that is that it stifles struggle. It does not allow for the (performative) enactment of counter-conduct without recognizing that behaviour as deviant. So, if you are a youth who would rather go out and riot in the streets of London than volunteer for the National Citizen Service (NCS), or a troubled family member who does not want to be turned around in that way, or part of a neighbourhood where you are not interested in neighbourhood planning rights, you become marginalized or even criminalized (Sokhi-Bulley 2016a, 114–115). You are the dissatisfied, disposable citizen who does not have recourse to rights. Your state of precarity creates a dissatisfaction because you do not want to be governed like that (we are all essentially precarized individuals in today’s neoliberal society—living in a state of governmental precarisation, an ambivalent state of governing that is now the norm, Lorey 2015, 11–12)—but perhaps some are more precarious, more dissatisfied, than others. Dissatisfied youth, the urban poor, troubled families, the disabled who live their precarity through the ‘ordinary, chronic and chruddy’ (Povinelli 2011, 13). This chapter is dissatisfied with the rhetoric of community rights and its false promise of liberty and limited understanding of collectivity. It is dissatisfied with the current state of welfare reform in modern, responsibilized British society where disabled people are disadvantaged by the right to community over actual entitlements; moreover, the welfare reform ensures that only the right type of communities are fostered and rewarded. In this chapter, we look for avenues of resistance through friendship that lead to a new understanding of collectivity and affective relations that challenge the community rights rhetoric through the performative enactment of counter-communities.

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The Welfare Reform as Good Governance To reach our understanding of friendship as a performative enactment of counter-community (and hence resistance to the responsibilisation narrative), we first offer a reading of the welfare reform as good governance. That is, good governance of public funds, services, and policies that ensures that the ‘right type’ of communities are thriving. These are the communities that are satisfied with the allure of community rights. A good starting point for this discussion is to provide a distinction between the common understanding of the reform as good governance and the less visible agenda of responsibilization of claimants that it pursues. To the general public, the Chancellor in 2016 explained the welfare reform as ‘long term solutions to long term problems’ (Osborne 2016); for example, institutional dependency, overly generous social security funds and a welfare state unfair to the taxpayer. The ‘streamlining the system and making work pay’ provisions operate on two levels (HM Treasury 2016): first, they increase accountability for public spending; and, second, they protect the community from the deviant act of passively receiving benefits, as opposed to actively participating in the labour market. Beneath the accepted understanding of the welfare reform as a governmental initiative aimed at simplifying the benefits system lies a tackling of the persistent problem of ‘worklessness ’ (Barnes et al. 2011, 5. Emphasis added). The set of policies termed the welfare reform are good governance strategies that seek to improve the lives of people in communities by putting more people back to work. As we all (should) know, ‘for the vast majority of people, work is good for you’ (Harrington 2010, 9. Emphasis added). The welfare reform ensures that disabled citizens are governed into being productive, self-reliant, and useful to society. Through managing the ‘hopelessness and integrational poverty’ (Department for Work and Pensions 2010, 1) that welfare dependency has caused, the welfare reform operates as a means of correcting the consistent communal irresponsibility of deviant claimants. If claiming benefits and not working is seen as a key threat to community, it is easy to explain the focus on the behaviour of claimants in relation to employment: the welfare reform policies ‘will reintroduce the culture of work in households where it may have been absent for generations’ and ‘unemployed people who can work will be required to take all reasonable steps to find and move into employment’, thus providing people with ‘greater incentives to meet their responsibilities’ (Department for

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Work and Pensions 2010, 4). In short, the welfare reform ensures that the right communities (active, responsible) are governed through a rhetoric of community rights that focuses on the importance of work through prescribed pathways, such as benefit sanctions, a benefits cap, and work capability assessments. By intervening in perceived irresponsible behaviour, the welfare reform thus produces a sharp distinction between the community-friendly claimants and the community-threatening claimants. The communityfriendly are the productive, responsible, and active citizens: the teenager who ‘just says yes’ to NCS and gives herself the opportunity to develop new skills, remain ‘awesome’, and become a ‘champion’ and ‘a completely different person’ who wants to volunteer and aspire to change her community for the better (www.ncsyes.co.uk). The community-friendly citizen is the resident who takes up the neighbourhood planning right to decide where new homes, shops, and offices will go; decide what new buildings will look like; decide what facilities, services, and infrastructure is needed and so define what the ‘neighborhood’ is (Localism Act 2011, Part 5; Department for Communities and Local Government 2013, 3). And the resident who builds ‘community spirit’ and ‘local neighbourly culture’ by hosting or participating in street parties.7 Or the good, hardworking citizen who takes time off work to volunteer for a local charity, serves as a school governor or becomes part of a voluntary church or faith group which plays an important role in the country’s ‘social fabric’ (Conservative Party Manifesto 2015, 46; Parker and Rigby 2015). The community-threatening claimants are those who are somehow refusing to pledge an allegiance to their community, either by not working (being a burden), or by actively damaging the community balance (being a ‘benefit scrounger’). It is not that the call to volunteer, to make the most of opportunity, is not available to the disabled. There are organizations, like Mencap, who ‘actively encourage people with physical disabilities, sensory impairments and learning disabilities to join our active and diverse team of volunteers’ and ‘take action’ (https://www.mencap. org.uk/volunteer).8 The point is rather that opportunity is tied with responsibility and responsibility is tied to work. Your community rights are a right to community that are dependent on you making the most of the opportunity, the right, to work. The recent cuts to disability benefits are thus a direct attempt at the responsibilization of disabled people since the cuts are in place to further a work capability agenda—that is, ‘to assign them [disabled people] to a

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work or a work-related activity group but also to ensure that those who cannot work receive the full support of the state’ (Harrington 2010). Work capability is currently assessed using the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which assesses suitability for the ESA—still the main out of work sickness benefit (since the Welfare Reform Act 2007—Department for Work and Pensions 2011). Using a gruelling questionnaire and a personal assessment carried out by a healthcare professional, the WCA sorts people into three categories: those fit for work, those unfit for work but fit for pre-employment training and those unfit for work and training. The objective is clearly to get people to work and out of claiming the benefit and so reduce welfare spending.9 It both compares and contrasts to the new PIP (since the Welfare Reform Act 2013), which is not overtly linked to a person’s ability to work but is intended as a ‘modern, dynamic and sustainable benefit’ (Department for Work and Pensions 2015)10 that is non-means tested, available to people in and out of work, and focuses on providing long-term support (in the form of a daily living component and a mobility component—manifested as a carer’s allowance and access to a mobility scheme). PIP, though it differs in that the onus of providing evidence of disability is on the assessment provider and not on the disabled person,11 still involves an assessment (carried out typically over the phone) that monitors ten daily living activities (e.g. preparing food, washing and bathing) and two mobility activities (moving about, going out—Department for Work and Pensions 2015). The assessment represents a dual relation of autonomization and responsibilization (Rose 2000 describes these as key characteristics of ‘ethopower’). Through pastoral care and expertise—exercised by ‘professionals such as a GP, hospital doctor, specialist nurse, community psychiatric nurse, occupational therapist, physiotherapist, social worker, support worker or counselor’ (Department for Work and Pensions 2015, 3)—the dissatisfied, disabled citizen is observed and conditioned into proving their own autonomy (or at least that they desire it) and being responsible in the sense that they must be shown to not have the capacity to work and be of value to community in this way before they will be ‘taken care of’. They are also responsibilized into responding to expertise and its governing dynamic in an expected, reasonable, and responsible way. The disabled must not claim benefits to which they have not been judged to be entitled. Moreover, the process itself, where the questionnaire and the medical assessment represent tactics and techniques of a wider strategy of governmentality, produces an assumption that this type

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of governmentable subject is by default deviant. This deviancy manifests itself as an unfitness, or worse unwillingness, to work and to take responsibility and opportunity within one’s community.

Countering Responsibilization: (A New) Collectivity It follows from the responsibilization of benefit claimants through the welfare reform policies outlined above that disabled people have been constructed as belonging to a particular collectivity: a community-threatening precariat. The notion that disabled people have been constructed as a threat to a particular social order—to the right way of doing society—is by no means new. Under the influence of the individual and medical models of disability, disability has been seen as a medical diagnosis, as a personal tragedy, as a deviation from normalcy, as a problem and as a burden for society (Barnes and Mercer 2003. For a detailed description of the models, see Chapter 1: A Choice of Models). The precarity that emerges from being isolated to the fringes of communities has been resisted with the development of the social model of disability, arguing that disability emerges not because of impairment, but because of the societal barriers that are being imposed on people (Oliver 2013). The welfare reform has only solidified these barriers and the precarity that emerges from them. Precarious life, or life which is uncertain and under constant threat, is the reality for many disabled people who have been disproportionately sanctioned by the reform. The numbers here tell a sinister story (Duffy 2013). Under the current social security regulations disabled people lose an average of £4410 per person from their overall income—this is nine times more than the burden placed on most other citizens (Duffy 2013). Even if not abstract, disability precarity is still a complex issue that deserves attention. In this second part of the chapter, we look at how precarity has been understood by disability scholars; particularly, how it has crystalised and been resisted in relation to work (“Community and Society” section). This allows us then to present our own reading of how precarity can be countered through the performance of friendship and the formation of counter-communities (“The Welfare Reform as Good Governance” section).

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Precarity and Resistance: Current Disability Narratives Disability scholars have explored ‘acts of resistance and agency’ in the context of the ‘cruel optimism’ of austerity (that is, responsibilization through a focus on work) and focused on processes of ‘both conformity and resistance’ by the disabled precariat (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2015, 186). Work has been described as ‘slow death’, or the exhaustion of the mind and body in trying to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of a neoliberal society obsessed with productivity (Berlant 2007). Disability is seen as ‘simultaneously for and against slow death’, with disabled people struggling to meet the demands of the neoliberal work market, yet opening up the possibility to reimagine relationships within collectivities ‘that in part emerge as a product of (and response to) precarity’ (Bates et al. 2017, 162). Critical disability scholars have not only problematized the relationship between disability and work but precarity also, particularly in the context of austerity. These critiques of precarity have in common the theme of reimagining how precarity is experienced and described, focusing on the complexity of ‘affective relationships that individuals have towards austerity’ (Hitchen 2016, 103). Hitchen, for example, uses the concepts of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘mood’ to move beyond understanding austerity as ‘only an economic policy or ideology’ to exploring how austerity ‘may be lived and felt in everyday life’ (2016, 106). She presents an ‘antiausterity politics’ or ‘counter-politics’ that draws out the ‘fluctuating, non-coherent affective relations’ that are in essence the lived experience of austerity (103). It is precisely this lived experience that we aim to highlight and that we see as the performative enactment of refusal through our engagement with friendship and performing a relational right to not work. While the rhetoric of community rights belies an understanding of how austerity can be negated (the embrace of community rights ensures safety if a community-friendly mode of life is also embraced), the concept of friendship allows for a ‘counter politics’ (118) to emerge that not only acknowledges the unstable and unpredictable nature of austerity, but also allows for a new mode of life to emerge that refuses the false allurement of community rights. Hitchen’s ‘counter-politics’ brings affect to the fore; she highlights the importance of shifting the debate ‘beyond the “economic-ness” of austerity, towards emphasizing the multiplicity of how it feels to live with austerity’ (118). We move beyond this focus on just affect as emotion to thinking about how it feels to live with others and to

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live otherwise—that is, to be able to perform a right to be otherwise (to not work) in conditions of austerity. Runswick-Cole and Goodley present a sort of counter-politics of their own in what they refer to as ‘disability commons’—the flexible and creative affective relationships that emerge when disabled people collectively refuse the lived experience of disablement and form ‘circles of support, “real’’ employment and advocacy’ (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2015, 180). The precarity that emerges from being governed as irresponsible or entrenched in the ‘cruel optimism’ of community rights is resisted, they observe, through ‘working the spaces of neoliberalism’ by re-shaping, re-fashioning, and resisting the neoliberal processes that stifle the disabled mode of life (a way of being that resists worklessness as a community-threatening narrative). Their work is rigorous in drawing on a ‘long history of the politics of disability’ to show the ‘disability commons’ as disabled people refusing their construction as ‘wasted humans’ through ethnographic encounters (2015, 180; they refer here to the work of Oliver 1990 and draw on Tyler 2013). We attempt here to propose something more radical than a ‘commons’—a new culture, in fact, that is born out of friendship and that can be a way of life for disabled and non-disabled people alike. Moreover, we suggest a right not to work or be ‘active citizens’ as forming this culture, which goes beyond considering ‘real’ employment and ‘self-advocacy’ which are two of the three sites of ethnographic encounter discussed by Runswick-Cole and Goodley (the other being ‘circles of support’). Bates et al. draw attention to the fact that disability precarity in the context of austerity is lived in multiple ways, or what they refer to as ‘differential precarity associated with dis/ability’ (2017, 172). A key part of the resistance to precarity emerging from disabled people being disproportionately affected by austerity is to ‘tackle different kinds of precarity’, ‘disavow work’ and ‘ask what dis/ability does to employment’ (2017, 172–173). It is clear then that critical disability scholars have placed a great importance on deconstructing what work actually means from a disability perspective and how narratives on work feature in the flexible affective relationships that emerge among the disabled precariat. Current critical disability narratives offer a three-part strategy for resisting precarity that emerges from the ‘host of broken promises’ in relation to work and disability under the austerity regime (Bates et al. 2017, 172). First, to affirm that disabled people have ‘a right to work’ and that their access to work on an equal basis forms the foundation

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of their substantive equality and independent living (Kavka 1992).12 Second, to demand that the definition of work be expanded, in order to recognize the contributions of disabled people who are not doing paid labour and so counter precarity in relation to employment by deconstructing employment (Abberley 1999; Barnes 2000, 2003; Barnes and Mercer 2005). Third, to make the critical argument that in the context of the welfare reform, disabled people should explore the possibility of denying the responsibility to be producing labour and instead take advantage of the ‘right not to work’ (Taylor 2004).13 Resistance to precarity addresses the ‘self-valorisation’ (Graby 2015, 152) of disabled people in relation to work and their ‘wounded attachment’ (Brown 1993) to being perceived as able to produce labour. Work as a central feature in perpetuating precarity operates through ‘the desire of disabled people to be included in the workforce, from which they are largely excluded, despite the ways in which such a goal can re-inscribe the competitive, individualized, entrepreneurial subject formation that is key to neoliberalism’s success’ (Fritsch 2015, 39). In this chapter, we reflect on the literature on the lived experience of austerity that prompts the emergence of disability commons to critically analyze the meaning of work and worklessness. Our contribution to the narratives on redefining or refusing work is the use of the concept of friendship to create ‘resistant possibilities’ where worklessness as deviance is countered by a defiant yet non-instrumental participation in activities such as disability activism or disability theatre, where creativity and volunteering can be seen as counter-conduct. We use ‘non-instrumental’ here to mean a lack of concern with improving productivity, as work capability indicators and Community and Society policy would demand. So, we align with literature that highlights the value in actively sharing the stories of struggle and precarity (as opposed to passively serving as a source of ‘sad stories’, Beresford 2016), or that points to ‘recognition of disability in terms of alternative lives and values that neither enforce nor reify normalcy’ (Bolt 2015, 1107), or notes embracing ‘interdependent living…not in our little disability bubble, but in society as a whole’ (Watch 2015, 1436), to show that disabled people are resisting the isolation of the community-threatening construction. We move towards examining the relation between disability and connectedness as a resistance to the governing narrative that constructs the disabled citizen as community-threatening. The key element of resistance to precarity for us is the performative nature of friendship; friendship is the performance

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of patterns of behaviour that represent new relations and a new right (a relational right as opposed to a juridical one to, for instance, not work) through resistant counter-communities (Sokhi-Bulley 2018). Hence, our proposed ‘right not to work’ is an ethical position, not a legal one. Counter-Community and the Performance of Friendship The kind of resistance that we recognize here is not then an attempt to remove precarity but to imagine where, within the governing tactics of a narrative that constructs disability and worklessness as deviance, the potentials for resistance are to be found (Lorey 2015, 2 and 6). We propose that this resistance is to be found in examining, strengthening and promoting new relations that start from connectedness (Lorey 2015, 6; see also MacNamara’s chapter in this collection). The potential for resistance to precarization is thus to be found in friendship. ‘Friendship’ is not institutionalized in (British) society (see the observation from Adams et al. 2000, 117 that ‘[f]riendship is not institutionalized in American society’). It remains an elusive concept but one that has positive connotations; friendship leads to disabled people feeling happier, valued and included, and enhances well-being (Mencap 2016).14 Friendship also ‘provides an emotional support network in times of crisis, boosts happiness and reduces stress, improves self-confidence and is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle’ (Sense 2015, 4).15 Organizations such as Mencap and Sense, who work with people with (learning) disabilities and impairments, even speak of a ‘right’ to friendship (#RightToFriendship— see Sense 2015, 4). This right consists of the right to develop friendships and the right to opportunity for friendship (Mencap 2016, 1; Sense 2015, 4). Not only this, but Mencap finds a legal basis for this right in Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (the right to private and family life) (2016, 1); and Sense finds legal backing for the right in the Care Act of 2014, which talks about developing and maintaining family or other relationships (2015, 5). Moreover, ‘friendship’ is considered a ‘best practice’ in terms of disability activism, responsibility, and duty. Age United Kingdom, for instance, operates ‘Friendship Centres’ where groups of active older people meet on a regular basis for social activities like rambling and pub lunches (Mencap 2016, 18). Other initiatives such as ‘Stay up Late’ (a charity where volunteers accompany young people to late night events such as music gigs) and GoodGym (combining volunteering with keeping fit) are also examples of the ‘best practice’ of

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‘friendship’ (Sense 2015, 18). So, ‘friendship’ is about securing well-being and a healthy lifestyle; it is a right for which there is legal basis; and, it is best practice. We do not dispute this understanding, and practice, of friendship. What we do is recognize that tying ‘friendship’ to a legal right and to best practice is not enough; ‘friendship’ is not and cannot be made enforceable and/or institutionalized as a juridical relation. Rather, we suggest starting from relationality to arrive at a concept of a relational right that takes an ethical, rather than a juridical, form. By ‘relationality’ we refer to ‘attitudes and patterns of behaviour’ that are shared (Foucault 2000b, 157); for example, as we discuss below, performing in a theatre as opposed to going to work each day. These behaviours are the perhaps ‘strange practices’ that belong to a way of life, or cultural form (in our case disability as a cultural form, and below we discuss the practice of not working; Foucault 2000b, 157 talks about the cultural form of homosexuality, and simply the practice of making love to someone of the same sex). These attitudes and patterns of behaviour reveal the exercise of a right ‘in its real effects’ as opposed to legal formulations (Foucault 2000b, 157).16 So, a relational right is ethical then since, being concerned with attitudes and behavioural patterns, it is about existing better within one’s community—this supports Foucault’s quintessential understanding of ethics as a concern with the self (Foucault 1997, 260; 2005, 527; 2010, 377– 378). Friendship, as a performance of relationality, is thus an ethics. It is a way of being connected with others, sharing attitudes and patterns of behaviour that not only better your existence within a community (that you have chosen) but also represent a ‘way of life that can yield a culture’ (Foucault 2000a, 138). That Foucault defines ‘friendship’ as a relationship that is ‘still formless’ and so needs to be invented is, at first glance perhaps, frustrating and unhelpful (2000a, 136; see also Stamp 2009, 4); but it is within this frustration that its value lies. Friendship offers the possibility of new relations, of a way to become (Foucault 2000c, 163). Foucault’s concern with what he called the ‘problem’ of friendship was situated within a critical desire to address the ‘problem of homosexuality’—how can we ‘work at being homosexuals’, create a ‘homosexual mode of life’, ‘create a gay life’ in the face of homophobia and aversion to institutionalizing homosexual practices? (Foucault 2000a, 136 and 137; 2000c, 101, 163 and 170). Friendship provides a creative response that allows for affectional relations and for the performance of a new relational right (Foucault

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2000b, 158). Friendship is performed as resistance; it not only negates the right way to be an active citizen within community and society (e.g. you can perform in a disability arts theatre rather than work for a salary) but it is a creative process, where the possibility of the types of relations, of the types of connectedness, can be invented (Foucault 2000b, 168).17 So, what is being invented then is a counter-culture, performed by counter-communities who exercise the relational right to not work. Let us examine in some more detail the connection between, first, friendship and relational right, and second the relation between friendship and counter-community. First, given the disparaging way in which we speak of community rights, why use the language of ‘rights’ at all? As we have insinuated above, the language of rights is inadequate to recognize the struggle of the marginalized within community and society (e.g. the disabled) and to address it because rights language becomes subsumed by languages of opportunity, duty, and responsibility. Rights language is attached to citizenship (to be a citizen is to have rights) but this status belongs only to the ‘active citizen’. Thus, despite the development of formal rights instruments like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), citizenship continues to be seen predominantly through the lens of ableism. Community rights rhetoric maintains the lie of ‘community’ as inclusionary, whereas there is always and already an exclusionary binary (friendly/threatening) within community and society. Nonetheless, rights remain a ‘truth-weapon’ in social and political struggle, and a valuable tool for advancing the interests of political subjects (Foucault 2003, 50). Golder calls this tactical use of rights a ‘critical counter-conduct of rights’ (2015, 22)—where an engagement with rights is ambivalent (it sees rights as simultaneously ‘liberatory and subjectifying’), ungrounded (in that it lacks a naturalized subject of rights) and strategic (insofar as rights promise possibilities as tactical political instruments). Rights can be performed as an ethical relation based in a non-instrumental relationality.18 So it remains important, useful and strategically sensible to use rights tactically and ask: how can we reimagine ways to allow the disabled person to be treated as a subject with rights she can perform so as to live an enriching life? We can recognize the right not to work as it is performed through relations of friendship by counter-communities (for instance, in disability theatre, as we discuss further below).

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This addresses the second point on the connection between friendship and counter-community. Friendship is performed in countercommunity—that is, by (disabled and non-disabled) individuals who share attitudes and behavioural patterns that resist having to be productive through doing work to be seen as ‘community-friendly’. The connectedness and collective enrichment that individuals get from this shared relation can be termed friendship (and it is thus a relation that starts with connectedness rather than individual right). It is also about resistance. We have fashioned the term ‘counter-community’ as a deliberate nod to Foucault’s term ‘counter-conduct’. We are inspired by Foucault’s search for an alternative vocabulary that escapes the pitfalls of ‘resistance’, ‘revolt’ and ‘dissidence’, for example, since these terms risk dismissing the mundane, everyday and non-spectacular forms of refusal (Foucault 2007, 200–201). Instead, we want a focus on the specifics of ‘the way in which someone actually acts ’ within the field of power relations (i.e. within the social) without the need to judge the behaviour as proper, or giving it ‘sacred status’ (Foucault 2007, 202. Emphasis added). Counterconduct is thus a refusal, a way of being (and acting) that demonstrates ‘we do not want this salvation, we do not wish to be saved by these people and by these means … We do not wish to obey these people … We do not want this truth’ (Foucault 2007, 201). Counter-community thus refers to those collectivities of individuals who refuse the right way to be in community and society, who behave otherwise and so demonstrate how different, non-instrumental collective forms are possible. That is, not taking the opportunity and duty to work, to build things and to volunteer in the way you are told to (so, to be part of a London 2012 Olympic vision for example) but to carve out a new sense of self in community. This happens through performing friendship (sharing attitudes and patterns of behaviour) that are the exercise of a relational right to not work/not be ‘active citizens’. We do not call such a ‘being otherwise’, as for instance Isin does, ‘acts of citizenship’ because they are not, we think, a ‘claim to transform themselves (and others) from subjects into citizens as claimants of rights’ (2009, 368). And yet we are advocating a similar call to recognize these ‘acts’ as political ‘insofar as these acts constitute constituents (beings with claims)’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008, 8). We are saying that rights can be recognized as relational rights rather than juridical rights; the ‘failure’ of rights language for the disabled and their lived precarity does not mean we abandon rights but rather that we reimagine them, we

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use them tactically to play a more strategic ‘game’ (Golder 2015; SokhiBulley 2016b). Moreover, although we use the term counter-community, we are promoting the relation—friendship—as creative resistance, rather than advocating a new kind of community (a disabled one) over the old one (active citizens). Walters’ formulation of ‘acts of demonstration’ is quite appealing; these are acts that ‘occur when an injustice is revealed, a relationship of power is contested, or a particular wrong is protested, but when the identity of the subjects at the heart of the protest is left relatively open’ (2008, 194).19 However, we contest the grandeur of ‘demonstration’ and the idea that behaviour must be ‘revealing of injustice’ since it is the mundane, the everyday, even the expected—the being rather than the act itself that interests us and that is a claim to the political. What we want to emphasize is a reimagining of these acts as friendship—a way of being together that resists how we are told to be in community (productive) while at the same time performing a right (to not work) and live an enriched, community-friendly life. We want to provide some evidence now of how counter-communities are already performing rights and counter-conduct through friendship. Counter-communities are performing counter narratives to the nondisabled, inactive, irresponsible, and not dutiful non-disabled (or community rights) narrative through being in different kinds of communities where the care/control binary is shifted. So, for example, groups that draft alternative community manifestos, perform art and commune in book clubs are where we see new affective relationships (friendships) forming. The Action Ability Belfast Speak Out Group, a self-advocacy group in Belfast (where we both have lived and worked, and where we began writing this paper) has put forward an Alternative Manifesto to the Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics, where, alongside asking politicians to take disability rights seriously, proposal 5 asks for ‘action to give disabled people opportunities to produce their own art … to ensure disabled people are catered for at exhibitions, events and shows’ (https://imaginebelfast.com/your-manifestosubmissions/ and www.disabilityaction.org/news/item/851/action-abi lity-belfast-self-advocacy-group/). Disability Arts Online is promoting the importance of art in reflecting the experience of disability and contesting the disabled as a spectator category—the multi-media show Contained, for example, narrates performers’ personal experience to the audience. In a similar vein to non-scripted theatre, this kind of spontaneous performance enacts struggle and experience through telling ‘their’ stories—and changing the narrative from one of whining about ‘their’ experiences,

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feeling like benefit scroungers and having misunderstood conditions such as epilepsy demonized, to one of a narrative that is worth telling because it is ‘more unheard’ (http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/Disability-isnot-a-spectator-sport). This year (2019) the annual Bounce Disability and Deaf Arts Festival in Belfast celebrated the work of disabled artists from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom. It featured documentaries on disability activism, Ken Loach’s award winning documentary on the welfare reform and its impact on disability, and dance and theatre performances dedicated to breaking down stereotypes and challenging preconceptions about disability. The aim of the festival was not only to make art more accessible to disabled people but, more importantly, to promote disability art and create a platform where disabled artists present alternative stories and narratives about disability that escape the trap of being pitied, and focus instead on the politics of disability.20 And, the Next Chapter Book Club (based in Canada but also in three European Countries) is an innovative community-based reading programme that is set up to provide ‘meaningful opportunities for lifelong learning, social connections and authentic community engagement’ (http://nextchapterbookclub.org/who-we-are/our-mission). So, opportunity becomes about not what you can do for your community but how you can better your own existence through learning; community becomes about engagement through alternative means other than work and claiming benefits through a rigorous pastoral control mechanism. To these examples we might add those ‘best practice’ initiatives we talked about earlier—the Friendship Centres, Stay up Late and GoodGym (Mencap 2016; Sense 2015). These demonstrate disabled and non-disabled people sharing a way of life that is enriching; this is friendship. These examples/practices illustrate counter-community as a more creative, challenging and promising response to precarization that does not necessarily seek to actively remove precarity but to start from connectedness and perform relational rights through friendship. It remains to explain how—in other words, what role does friendship play in the performative enactment of counter-communities? To frame friendship as a right (to follow Mencap and Sense) is actually misleading; rather than there being such a legal right, it is the ethical right not to work that is performed through shared patterns of behaviour and shared attitudes (a friendship relation) in counter-community. Sharing an interest in and doing art, for example, shows friendship within Action Ability

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Belfast, for instance, as does reading in Next Chapter Book Club. These counter-communities show a connectedness through behaviour that is friendship—moreover, it is a type of resistance (to how to be communityfriendly, by being productive) and it is parrhesia (speaking freely about oneself, with courage and usually with knowledge that this free speech will be opposed—see further Foucault 2011, 1–23). As resistance, counter-community refers to a form of struggle (to counter the ‘community-threatening’ label ascribed to the disabled) that is less of a spectacle but perhaps more spectacular because of its transformative potential; there is the potential for counter-communities that perform friendship to create culture. That is, a culture of disability (and of non-productivity) that is not community-threatening and is in fact community-friendly. This contests what Zivi calls a ‘rights culture’ —rights have become a ‘set of ideas, norms, and practices’—to create a new culture. The ‘culture’ of community rights creates practices that drive us to accept a right to community—which is available to those who do the right thing by creating a culture of community; that is, empower themselves through being responsible, active citizens who take care of themselves and in turn their own prescribed communities. The relation of friendship, rather, allows for a multiplicity of relationships and taking care of yourself, allowing you to be frank with each other and parrhesiasts (Foucault 2011)—rather than focusing on what a (community) rights culture expects you to be doing in community. The point then is that this parrhesia (Foucault 2005, 390)—the expression of the care of the self in a social context—has the potential for a reciprocal salvation where we can all be better within our communities (Foucault 2011). It is not about creating our own disabled culture but about creating culture (Foucault 2000c, 164), where relations of friendship allow for the acting out of a relational right, an ethical respect for the other, not based on the normative requirements (work, volunteering, championing) of institutions, not jaded by their rhetoric or false flattery (in the form of ‘community rights’) and therefore not instrumental in seeking to be ‘productive’. Whether the institution (here community is itself the institution) can allow and recognize this kind of affectional relation is the inherent problem of ‘the problem of friendship’—these sorts of relations have traditionally been minimized institutionally—and is a question that Foucault also could not answer. For now, perhaps it is enough to urge that we become better friends —by opening ourselves up to new relations

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that create different ways of life whereby disability is not continually constructed as disposability within a community (rights) rhetoric. Such friendship(s) refer to possible relations between disabled-disabled, between disabled-non-disabled and between non-disabled-non-disabled, and so refer to a (new) culture of refusal of precarity.

Conclusion We have sought here to rethink precarity, to contest community and its limited understanding of collectivity and to propose ‘friendship as a way of life’ (Foucault 2000a). What we mean by this is that, to counter the community-threatening label that many disabled people (who do not/ cannot work, or be active citizens as defined by the community and societal rhetoric) we need to work towards a new relational system. We need to start with connectedness and observe the (affectional) bonds that give meaning (that is well-being and pleasure) to the disabled precariat, and so give friendship more solid, even institutional, recognition. The performative enactment of counter-communities that perform a relational right—that is, an ethical way of being together by acting, reading, and learning together—resists the narrative of community rights that requires active citizenship to earn rights. The concept of a relational right, here we have discussed a tangible example of the right to not work, offers promise of a new (disabled) mode of life where disability is no longer feared or made threatening. Rather, the disabled and the non-disabled can share a mode of life, or a culture, that has been innovated to value the non-instrumental relation of friendship.

Notes 1. ‘Community and Society’ is a newer policy area that replaces David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’—see www.gov.uk/government/topics/commun ity-and-society. Accessed 16 September 2019. 2. We ought to qualify our use of the terms ‘disabled people’ and ‘the disabled’. We are influenced in our choice of language by the social model of disability which, in short, argues that disability is not inherent to the person but socially constructed (see in particular the influential work of Oliver 2009. For a critique of this model, see for example Shakespeare 2014). According to the social model, ‘disability’ is the result of societal oppression and external barriers that are imposed on top of the specific impairment. We choose to use the terms ‘disabled people’ and

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

‘the disabled’, rather than ‘people with impairments’, or even ‘people with disabilities’, because we share the view that disability is not synonymous with impairment. Rather than internalize disability (arguably the term ‘people with disabilities’ suggests that the individual carries the disability regardless of the external environment), we choose to focus on the external factors affecting and creating disability (hence, even the perhaps jarring term ‘the disabled’ is used to signify that individuals are, collectively, made disabled). It is not our intention to suggest that all impairments are the same, or to suggest that disabled people are a homogenous group, or to ignore the personal and temporal nature of pain (see Scarry 1985), and the relation between exhaustion and endurance (see Povinelli 2011). Rather, our intention is to show how, despite the various definitions of disability, disabled people/the disabled have been collectively constructed as a community-threatening group by factors external to their impairments, such as a growing preoccupation with responsibility and productivity. We also disclose that we are nondisabled and that there is a growing need for the work of disabled scholars on disability to be prioritized. See Sokhi-Bulley (2016a, 105) for evidence of ‘community spirit’ in action, including street parties. The welfare reform sees disabled benefit claimants as part of the overall problem of worklessness and over-reliance on the social security fund. Moreover, disabled people are affected disproportionally by the welfare reform (see the report by Duffy [2013] quoted ahead). In this chapter, we focus specifically on disabled people, but many of the arguments relating to the responsibilization of benefit claimants can be made relevant to other marginalized groups as well. Foucault (2000b, 157) phrases it such: ‘A “right”, in its real effects, is much more linked to attitudes and patterns of behaviour than to legal foundations’. On 22 May 2017, Manchester arena suffered a suicide bombing attack in which 23 adults and children were killed and 119 wounded (see Booth et al. 2017 for comment); on 3 June 2017, eight people were killed and 48 injured when a van containing three attackers drove into pedestrians on London Bridge, and the attackers then stabbed a number of people in Borough Market (for comment see Davies 2017). The application form, contained in the above document, to apply to your council to hold a street party is entitled ‘Celebrating your Community’; www.streetparty.org.uk; see also the Big Lunch website at www.thebig lunch.com. Note also Volunteering Matters (previously Community Service Volunteers) who state that ‘We believe that having a physical or learning

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10.

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13. 14. 15.

16.

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disability shouldn’t prevent anyone from volunteering’—https://volunt eeringmatters.org.uk/pillars/disabled-people/. The Personal Independence Payment (PIP) replaced the previous benefit that claimants could access to help with the cost of a long-term health condition or disability known as the Disability Living Allowance (DLA). In order to claim PIP, a claimant has to go through a WCA, which determines if a person is fit to claim the benefit and how much they can claim. Note that there is now an updated version, Department for Work and Pensions, Personal Independent Payment (PIP) Handbook, December 2018. Available https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/upl oads/attachment_data/file/610259/personal-independence-paymenthandbook.pdf. Accessed 16 September 2019. The three contracted assessment providers are Atos Independent Assessment Services (Atos), Capita and Maximus Centre for Health and Disability Assessments (Maximus)—see Work & Pensions Select Committee, PIS and ESA Assessments, https://publications.parliament. uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmworpen/829/82904.htm. Accessed 26 September 2019. The right to work from a social model of disability perspective has also been discussed by Oliver (1998). From a human rights perspective, disabled people’s right to work has been discussed by Hurpur (2012). The ‘right not to work’ has been discussed at length in the work of Gorz (1982), Russell (1998), and Weeks (2011). For more on ‘Friendships – what we think’, see at https://www.mencap. org.uk/about-us/what-we-think/friendships-what-we-think. The Report was part of the Sense 60th Anniversary Campaign, ‘We all need friends’, available https://www.sense.org.uk/support-us/cam paigns/loneliness/. Accessed 16 September 2019. See also https:// www.visionuk.org.uk/sense-we-all-need-friends-campaign/. Accessed 16 September 2019. Foucault (2000b, 158) gives a brief mention to the example of adoption of adults as a ‘new relational right’ not limited by ‘impoverished relational institutions’. It may seem we have ignored the obvious Derridean reading of a ‘politics of friendship’ here (1997); what we attempt to do is supplement what is arguably a ‘curiously static’ (Webb 2003) aporia of friendship with a reading that emphasizes the ‘problem of friendship’ and how to arrive at a ‘multiplicity of relationships’ (Foucault 2000a, 135). For more on the parallels and divergences between Foucault and Derrida on ‘friendship’, see Stamp (2009); on the limits of a/our Foucauldian reading of friendship see further Sokhi-Bulley (2019).

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18. Golder (2015, 132–138) gives the example here of Foucault’s reference to a right to die/suicide as an aesthetic and creative act that has performative effect, whereby we change ourselves in the process; moreover, Foucault uses the right to die tactically, to prompt us to rethink our lives and how we are made to live them under biopolitical care. 19. Walters writes in the context of migration politics and citizenship, and gives the example of the 2006 immigrant protests in the United States (2008, 194). 20. One of the festival highlights is a screening of the ‘Defiant Lives’ documentary directed by Sarah Barton, which tells the story of ‘the most impressive activists you’ve never heard of and … the rise and fight of the disability rights movement in the United States, Britain and Australia’.

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CHAPTER 8

Precarity and Judith Butler’s Ambivalent Social Bond. What Is the Value of Ettingerian Transconnectedness? Nóirín MacNamara

In this chapter, I outline the view of the social bond1 which the Brexit referendum starkly illustrated centred on whiteness as a power relation, and I propose that this form of the social bond can be partly countered using a multi-levelled concept of subjectivity. Akwugo Emejulu (2016) argues that Brexit highlighted how whiteness as a power relation operates by simultaneously casting itself as victim and as innocent. I posit that this victim/innocent casting is enabled by the dominance of a form of subjectivity continually structured through a binary logic of differentiation. This logic of differentiation is initially modelled on the masculine/feminine binary and it emerges from what Oyèrónk´e. Oyˇewùmí terms ‘body reasoning’. It constructs hierarchies through what can be located ‘in’ bodies, rather than constructing hierarchies through fluid and contextspecific social relations, for example. Given that the binary logic of

N. MacNamara (B) Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_8

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differentiation is oriented towards defining, and then fixing material and perceptual conditions in place, its inevitable failures can lead to what Ritu Vij (this volume) identifies as a global North-centric understanding of precarity as disordering experience(s) of sovereign subjectivity. I propose that precarity could be usefully understood as that which is produced and differentially distributed in culturally specific ways via the logics of differentiation we use to structure our ideas of self, of self/other relations, and of the form and impact of social ties. I propose that global North societies need to both own the binary logic of differentiation through which power and hierarchies are constructed, and allow for other supplementary logics of differentiation which can relativize the force of the binary logic. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger, and cognizant of the need to consider that which Sara Ahmed terms ‘staying with critique in its lengthy duration’ in relation to whiteness, I present an ambivalent-(yet transconnected) approach to thinking social ties. Here both ambivalent bonds (Butler) and matrixial webs (Ettinger) are operative within a multi-levelled account of subjectivity. The ‘body reasoning’ of Western thought is not denied or wished away. It is instead expanded beyond one type of body, and body reasoning is supplemented with ‘mode reasoning’. I propose that an ambivalent-(yet transconnected) view of social ties demands a politics that fully owns the force of how its hierarchies are produced, examines that which is muted or repressed, and, in the global North context, interrogates the spheres of subjectivity that are enabled through different types of body/trauma/phantasy/desire complexity.

Exclusion as Central to ‘How We Are’ One of the core slogans of the Leave campaign during the June 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union was to ‘Take back Control’. Its success partly drew from the idea that ‘we’ (read white subjects of Empire) were once in control, and that this has been lost. As Emejulu outlines, the Leave campaign purposely promoted whiteness as a power relation, and control as a supposedly achievable political goal, in order to garner support for a political decision which was based on exclusion and hostility, and that would have few discernible political or economic benefits to UK voters. A whiteness as victim narrative was deployed in order to attribute decreases in living standards to inward migration, ignoring the impact of neoliberal government policies. The

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post-Brexit surge in race-related hate crimes was then responded to from the starting point of whiteness as innocence. Here the white subject is shocked and outraged at the surge of race-related hate crimes which they now notice via whiteness (e.g. abuse directed at Eastern Europeans), they disavow such injustices (this is not how we are), but at the same time their newfound witnessing and outrage does not include understanding of, or an imperative to dismantle, systems of racial hierarchy (Emejulu 2016). The claim that ‘this is not how we are’ is particularly interesting in analyses of how the social ties between us are conceptualized and lived. In Western political discourse the subject is still idealized as a disembodied rational actor. This dematerialization of the ‘natural’ individual imaginatively centres sociality (socio-historical-cultural understandings of how societies are produced and reiterated) on individual contributions in the paid economy and the sphere of formal politics, for example. Womxn, racialised others, children, and animals are all obliged, in different ways, to perform the bodily functions which are refused by an imaginatively dematerialized subject. This imaginatively dematerialized position can at least temporarily be inhabited by any of us, regardless of gender or race, but dependent on the wider context. Alongside the idealization of disembodied rational actors in Western thought, the social bond is thought of as an ultimately singular phenomenon and centred on a degree of commonality, ease, and cooperation. It is often conceptualized as a bond between brothers and the public sphere is, to various degrees of explicitness, viewed as a fraternity. Mainstream political thought is bound up with a teleological structure wherein violence is thought in the teleological perspective of non-violence (Bennington 2000, 28–29). The realities of exclusion and violence are either largely unaddressed or viewed in terms of our eventual arrival at a space of non-violence and harmony. In slight contrast, from the perspective of post-Marxist radical democratic theory for example, the social bond is between divided subjects who have competing ideas of the good with antagonism ever present in their relations (Mouffe 2005, 139). Radical democracy is about organizing a pluralist democracy such that power relations can be transformed but never eliminated, domination can be contested and antagonistic relations transformed into agonistic relations. Instead of an imagined end-point of harmony and ease, radical democratic theory proposes violence as an ever present element which must be given liveable forms. Yet even without the imagined harmonious end-point, post-Marxist radical democratic theory still centres competing ideas of the good as core drivers within political

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life. In centring such ideas of the good as core drivers, they arguably unduly privilege the ‘absent fullness’ (Laclau) which we strive for, even as it is fully acknowledged as an impossibility. This largely orients our focus towards a better future albeit one characterized by agonistic relations, rather than towards the social and political conditions we currently inhabit and reproduce. We can locate discourses of white supremacy and of whiteness as victim and innocence in dissatisfaction with the unrealizability of the ideal of sovereign subjectivity and of a racialized hierarchical so-called ‘good’. As Wanda Vrasti and Nancy Ettlinger respectively demonstrate (this volume), discussions of precarity grounded in rupture or betrayal mourn false and nostalgic forms of industrial-Fordism that were based on exclusion and environmental destruction. Framing precarity in terms of a lost security can easily be channelled by political campaigns and projected outwards onto marginalized social groups. Post Trump and Brexit, counter strategies to these projections have been put forward. In their responses to Brexit, for example, Gurminder Bhambra (2015, 2016, 2017) and Nadine El-Enany (2018) have proposed developing analyses which depart from the racialized histories of enslavement and colonialism so that the ways these histories continue to configure the present may be illuminated. It is only through socio-historical deep dives that research and political discourse can meaningfully include those who have been ‘left out’ as well as those who self-perceive as being ‘left behind’. Such deep dive analyses could also perhaps foreground the cultural specificity of the ideal of disembodied sovereign subjectivity and the costs it inflicts on those required to carry out its bodily functions. Yet even deep dive analyses can potentially be diverted towards whiteness as innocence, concluding that ‘this is not how we are’ now, or at the very least ‘this is not how I am’ or ‘how I wish to be’. In her discussion of the racist political and social conditions we all live within and on the limitations of awareness and declarations of whiteness in countering these conditions, Ahmed posits that white subjects must ‘inhabit the critique, with its lengthy duration’ (2004). She argues that a declaration of whiteness, and an immediate commitment to anti-racist action, can at times function to block hearing. It involves a fantasy that that which is admitted to is somehow left behind or at least diminished by being owned by the speaker. Ahmed proposes a ‘double turn’, suggesting that white subjects must turn towards their role and responsibility in histories of racism, as histories of the present, and also turn away from themselves and from

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a focus on shame as a ‘passing phase’ with healing and harmony as an end-point. In turning away from integration, pride and restoration, they would turn towards others. In and of itself this ‘double turn’ is insufficient but she posits that it creates space within which the work of exposing racism could provide as yet unknown conditions for another kind of work (Ahmed 2004). Discourses of white supremacy, of whiteness as victim, or whiteness as innocence, of course refuse Ahmed’s double turn through self-interestedness, through wilful ignorance of socio-historical conditions, and arguably through a clinging to ‘the good’ as a core driver of social bonding and political action. Modes of exclusion and violence are in fact central to ‘how we are’. Constructs of social ties and of community, serve as frameworks for how we think and do politics and how we imagine political groups, transitivity, and processes of translation. The dominant focus on commonality, ease, fraternity, and a working-for integration in global North discourses regarding the social bond arguably significantly impedes our abilities to both acknowledge violence and exclusion and to inhabit critique with its lengthy duration (Ahmed). Butler’s solution, similar to post-Marxist radical democratic theory, refuses both an ontology of the individual as autonomous from social and political conditions, and end-points of harmony and ease. However in contrast to a post-Marxist account orienting us to competing versions of an ‘absent fullness’, Butler develops a politics of vulnerability. Such a politics highlights how grief, injury, or an apprehension of mortality can awaken us to unchosen and inescapable social ties. Although experiences of grief and injury can of course lead to affective death to the suffering of others, they can also lead in a different direction, to an embodied awareness of interdependencies. In Butler’s terms it is the interdependent nature of social life that points towards meaningful concepts of ethics and politics. This is not theorized in terms of eventual harmony. Instead the ongoing violence of exclusions and our ambivalence regarding social ties which contain both care and destructiveness is foregrounded. Within a politics of vulnerability, differential distributions of perceptual precarity (the degrees to which different people are perceived or self-perceive as ‘belonging’ to the polity and wider global communities) can be partly addressed through heightened awareness of how exclusion works and of the need for livable forms of destructiveness. Although this is certainly useful, I posit that amending the concept of social bonds so that they are now ambivalent—rather

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than chosen and an eventually singular social bond (mainstream political thought) or multiple bonds formed and frayed through competing ideas of the good (post-Marxist thought)—does not adequately question the one-sided construct of subjectivity primarily based on cuts, splits, and cleavage. Nor, as Vij notes, does it foreground a global analytic of precarity which centres ‘subaltern ontological landscapes and the temporalities constitutive of them’ (this volume). I posit that Ettingerian transconnectedness usefully supplements Butler’s politics of vulnerability. Although it, also, does not centre subaltern ontological landscapes, it does further illuminate the cultural specificity of global North constructs of subjectivity, highlighting that which has been muted or repressed in their development. Due to my own personal, geographical and theoretical background I focus on a global North subject, reference a ‘we’ of the global North and present broad scale logics of differentiation to substantiate my argument. I fully acknowledge that the combined forces of colonialism and globalization render any ‘we’ temporary and particular, and modes of cohabitation, cultural and socio-political crossovers and contestations means that any logics of differentiation are differently inflected for most of us. My concern relates to ‘inhabiting critique in its lengthy duration’ such that we ‘own’ racist social and political conditions and their resultant distributions of perceptual and material precarity. In what follows I contextualize how logics of differentiation operate. I then outline how Butler thinks processes of social bonding in the direction of temporary connections and liveable forms of destructiveness rather than end-points of ease and harmony. I argue that her analysis, although suited to weaning subjects off desired forms of dematerialized subjectivity, autonomy, and sovereignty, is limited by its focus on subjectivity primarily as the result of cuts and splits. I outline how an Ettingerian account of subjectivity draws from different types of body/trauma/phantasy/desire complexity to elaborate specific logics of differentiation which enable an expanded account of subjectivity, meaning-donation, and reiterations of sociality. I posit that a Butlerian politics of vulnerability, supplemented by an Ettingerian account of subjectivity, could better enable cultural translation and Sara Ahmed’s double turn.

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Logics of Differentiation Logics of differentiation shape my ideas of self, self/other relations, and of community. The dominant construct of subjectivity in Western political thought is established through a binary logic of differentiation, initially built on a masculine/feminine distinction. Historically the intelligible masculinity of men as elaborated in 17th and 18th century Europe rested on the mother-nature of often privileged women, and the imaginative map of the political as (male) individual contracting was built on a sexual-racial contract (Pateman 1988; Mills 1997). As Oyèrónk´e. Oyˇewùmí demonstrates, the European dematerialized ‘natural’ (masculine) individual is somewhat ironically based on ‘body reasoning’ as a primary societal organising principle, where hierarchies are established through the kinds of bodies present. To a large extent identity is located ‘in’ one’s body. This contrasts with hierarchies which were historically established through seniority, for example. Where seniority was a primary societal organizing principle, one was never in a permanently powerful or powerless position. Legibility was continually produced through one’s relationships with others, in shifting contexts (Oy˘ewùmí 1997, 2002; Coetzee and Halsema 2018). The point here is not to idealize various logics of differentiation. The task is rather to see the gendered binary logic of differentiation as generative of a particular dichotomous form of subjectivity which fixes hierarchies ‘in’ bodies and has specific effects. This binary logic does not primarily orient the subject to examining the form and meaning of their relationships with others in shifting contexts, for example. For her part, while also seeing subjectivity as the result of foreclosures (this/not that) Butler urges disinvestment from, and deidealization of, the masculine/feminine structure. She notes how the ‘feminine’ not only refers to womxn, but also to racialized others, children, and animals. She proposes that the links between all those associated with concepts of ‘the feminine’ must be kept in view as part of any deconstruction of the masculine/feminine binary (1993a, 20–27). She proposes that we acknowledge the inevitability of exclusion and both the force and potentialities for subverting current configurations of foreclosure which reinforce norms of masculinist reason, whiteness and heterosexuality, for example. Butler’s focus on taking responsibility for how individuated ‘I’s’ reiterate power relations, and disabusing us of any imaginings of harmonious connectedness or altruism leads her to theorize a struggle for autonomy in

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conditions of constitutive and dispossessive relationality. This struggle is characterized by always slightly unbearable, unwilled, and often unwanted experiences of vulnerability and exposure. Arguably Butler urges a shift away from ‘body reasoning’ wherein the masculine is culturally associated with disembodied rational selves, and bodily functions are offloaded, in different ways, to those who are culturally associated with the feminine and its domain of connectedness, carework, the unsymbolizable, and self-sacrifice. In place of this, Butler arguably presents ‘mode reasoning’, wherein we all constantly enact shifts between the struggle to assume individuated positions in order to achieve social and political viability, and the acknowledgement of how we are ‘mired’ in, and need to navigate, conditions of constitutive and dispossessive relationality. In my reading, instead of a shift away from ‘body reasoning’ to ‘mode reasoning’, combining Ettinger’s account of subjectivity with Butler’s politics of vulnerability brings two distinct logics of differentiation and their effects into view. This supplements Western thought’s body reasoning with mode reasoning, owning the specific ways material and perceptual precarity is produced. Ettinger specifies how the Western individuated self, centred on cuts, splits, and cleavage, is modelled on general human needs, desires, and anxieties which are symbolically associated with the male body. She proposes that this has not only resulted in a rather limited understanding of subjectivity, it has also involved the active suppression of general human needs, desires, and anxieties based on other types of body/trauma/phantasy/desire complexity. Drawing from her experiences as both an artist and a psychoanalyst, Ettinger presents an expanded account of subjectivity which identifies the complexities of individuation and connectedness symbolically based on two types of body/trauma/phantasy/desire complexity—respectively associated with the male body and the late stage gestating body. This allows for an ‘owning’ of the cultural specificity of subjectivity built on body reasoning. Ettinger outlines how each body/trauma/phantasy/desire complexity generates different logics of differentiation and forms of meaning-donation in social and political life. These are applicable to us all, regardless of the specific bodies we inhabit. I argue that Ettinger broadens our understanding of ‘body reasoning’ such that its ongoing force can be accounted for and it can be supplemented with ‘mode reasoning’. I explain this further below.

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Butler’s Ambivalent Social Bond Butler’s account of processes of social bonding is oriented towards taking responsibility for the reproduction of matrices of power. Broadly speaking she can be seen to establish the culturally specific yet alterable configurations of foreclosures through her reading of Laplanchian primary and ongoing dependencies; the inescapability of social bonds through her reading of the Levinasian ethical relation; and the always already ambivalent social bond, yet oriented in the direction of liveable modes of destructiveness, through Kleinian reparation. Regarding the foreclosures that establish us as subjects, Butler refuses the masculine and feminine subject positions established within Lacanian theory, arguing that they are ‘secured through the depositing of nonheterosexual identifications in the domain of the culturally impossible, the domain of the imaginary, which on occasion contests the symbolic, but which is finally rendered illegitimate through the force of the law’ (1993a, 73). She proposes that we must both establish multiple positions and interrogate the ‘exclusionary moves through which “positions” are themselves invariably assumed’ (1993a, 74). Any ‘position’ is established through a binary logic of differentiation—this/not that. Drawing on the work of Laplanche, Butler maintains that full articulation of our ‘selves’ is impossible, not because of a Lacanian bar which forecloses primary jouissance, but rather because of the enigmatic impressions made on the child by the adult world. This adult world, which is ‘entirely infiltrated with unconscious and sexual significations’, imposes itself on the infant who passively registers and, with growth, represses enigmatic signifiers (Laplanche cited in Butler 2005, 72). Butler draws on Laplanche’s account of primary dependency to highlight that prior to the formation of any ‘will’ or sense of autonomy we were related to unchosen others through our needs. The primary others who cared for us live on in us and they haunt the way we are ‘periodically undone and open to becoming unbounded’ (Butler 2004, 28). She suggests that this primary dependency, the conflicts which accompany it, and forms of dependency which follow us throughout life, are the psychoanalytic basis for a theory of the social bond. Butler reads the Levinasian ethical relation as an affirmation of the unfreedom at the centre of social and political life, highlighting that Levinas frames responsibility as that which emerges from being subject to the demand from the Other, despite ourselves. However whereas Levinas

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locates the call from the Other as coming from ‘beyond being’ or transcendence, Butler follows Derrida’s (1978) critique of this, insisting on affective transitivity between self and other(s) and the role of language and power in self/other relations. She holds fast to an intertwinement of our lives with other lives, and to the presence of the performative ‘I’ even when dislocated and ceding ground. For Butler ..the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense ‘our’ life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world. (2015, 108)

She thus minimizes Levinas’ focus on the role of ‘beyond being’ or ‘transcendence’, and his argument that there is a passive level of subjectivity within which ‘my’ powers are paralyzed and at which I am affected ‘despite myself’. Instead she focuses on how we are each potentially answerable and undone by one another, and not by any Levinasian ‘beyond being’. She maintains that there is something unbearable in intertwinement and dependencies, that this follows us throughout life, and it is unbearability with which we must negotiate. Butler draws on Levinas and Laplanche to establish that the self is always already caught up in, and in some sense haunted by, relations of dependency and responsibility such that any well-defined self is impossible. In contrast to mainstream Western political thought wherein, for example a Kantian inspired political and ethical theory could begin with a relatively well-defined self who uses the categorical imperative to arrive at their moral obligations and develops an account of the social bond which emphasizes choice and commonalities, Butler begins with the unbearability of exposure and the effects of primary and ongoing dependencies to highlight the opacity of ourselves to ourselves, even as we struggle for personhood. Whereas a Kantian approach might assume an achievable distinction between self and other, and an initially generic self/other relation which is only later specified in terms of its identify formations, Butler stresses how we are imbued with unconscious and sexual significations of the adult world from the beginning. This includes the ways in which Western ways of seeing and knowing are saturated in racist and sexist epistemes (Butler 1993b) such that only some bodies are presumed to represent the universal. Given the ongoing primacy and purchase of body reasoning centred on a binary logic of differentiation, certain bodies are

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presumed threatening in different ways from the outset (e.g. blackness as associated with aggression, womxn who have abortions as monstrous and murderous). Countering these racialized-gendered imaginary schemas involves both continually identifying how they are orchestrated and interpreted in line with the structural needs of whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity for example, and properly engaging with the disconnects between rational commitments and conscious and unconscious impulses and desires. Finally, whereas a Kantian approach elaborates moral obligations and can invoke conscience to counter human fallibility and destructiveness, Butler suggests that ongoing renunciation of destructiveness in particular, is an entirely insufficient means of negotiating interdependencies. Drawing on a Freudian account of how the superego can hold the ego accountable for its misdeeds through judgement and punishment, Butler (2016) posits that the continual renunciation of aggression and destructiveness results in the super-ego becoming an ever crueller psychic mechanism that cuts social ties. It works such that we potentially end up valuing cruelty. In place of guilt which recruits the super-ego to judge and condemn self and others, Butler proposes Kleinian reparation as a productive form of guilt that animates rather than cuts the social ties which sustain us but towards which we nevertheless remain ambivalent. Within Butler’s framework we do not preserve each other out of self-interest, or in sole service of our ideals and moral obligations to one another, but rather because we know that ‘we are already tied together in a social bond that precedes and makes possible both of our lives’ (Butler 2016). Melanie Klein argues that love and care are copresent with aggression and hatred in all of us. Both destructive urges and a profound urge to make sacrifices in order to help loved people who have been harmed in phantasy exist side by side in the unconscious mind (1937, 311). Guilt then may not only function as a way of curbing one’s destructiveness through strengthening the super-ego, but also as an act of safeguarding the life of the other. Klein states that we are constantly and without any deliberation or logic, substituting ourselves for others and finding ourselves as substitutes. We care for one another but also punish one another for our unrepaired pasts and our destructiveness (Butler 2016). Butler reads Klein as demonstrating how guilt recruits destructiveness for the purpose of preserving the life of the other. There is always ambivalence insofar as destructiveness does not transform into

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repair but rather ‘I seek to repair even as I am driven with destructiveness’ (Butler 2016). In identifying with another and putting them first we share in their satisfaction so it is also not an altruistic act. The focus on the need to give destructiveness and aggression liveable forms in ways that point us towards our interdependencies and animate social ties is a key strength of Butler’s account of the ambivalent social bond. Here forms of security which overcome precariousness and precarity are not the goal. She aims to demonstrate the ‘mired’ character of subjectivity within which disorienting experiences such as injury, rage, and grief can either enable a point of identification with suffering itself and apprehension of social ties on that basis, or they can result in mimetic violence and affective death that cuts social ties (2004, 42). Citing Chandra T. Mohanty, Butler posits that topographies have shifted and borders are now densely populated sites of unchosen cohabitation, such that we cannot assemble a ‘we’ without finding out how we are tied to one another, and such ties are always already ambivalent (2004, 2016). Cultural translation is not then about establishing fixed models of reason, communication, and the subject but rather relates to traversing other modes of knowledge and ceding ground to different discursive spheres which call the sufficiency of existing epistemological frames into question. Only by apprehending ties, thereby apprehending interruptions which demand translation, and ceding ground in response to such claims from different discursive spheres does ‘something like ethics emerge within a matrix of power’ (Butler 2012, 12). Within Butler’s politics of vulnerability, primary dependency renders us alike insofar as we all live it separately. In fact we ‘are alike only in having this condition separately and so having in common a condition that cannot be thought without difference’ (Butler 2004, 27). She posits that this could lead us to rethink the political sphere within which we struggle for autonomy, while physically vulnerable and dependent on one another. Theoretically at least her account facilitates the ambivalence of processes of social bonding which nevertheless can work in the direction of liveable forms of destructiveness and interdependency. It also minimizes notions of ‘the good’ as core drivers of political action. Arguably Butler’s mode reasoning involves both assertions of self where we advocate for the specificities of identity and of desire in order to push back against a form of humanism which only works through unacknowledged privilege, and an acknowledgement of the inescapability of constitutive and dispossessive relationality which

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produces the opacity and complexities of desire and identity formations (Butler 1993a, 79). Yet three interlinked problems remain. First, the socio-historical conditions of Laplanchian primary dependency and the Levinasian ethical relation, and their connections to understandings of precariousness and precarity is not foregrounded in Butler’s account. As Vij (this volume) argues, Butler presents a deconstructed liberal, rather than a global, analytic of precariousness and precarity. Vij stresses the need to forge a global analytic and politics that is attentive to historical difference and the constitution of alternative ontological landscapes through multiple temporalities. Second, Butler’s focus on how foreclosures and processes of differentiation can be differently constructed so that we disinvest from the masculine/feminine binary potentially leaves people who are culturally aligned with concepts of ‘the feminine’ without sufficient means of escape. For example, culturally speaking, ‘the feminine’ of the binary logic, structures pregnancy and childbirth as ‘disappearance in service of the life of other(s)’ (Ettinger 2006b, 114) and the racialization of people of colour and particularly Blackness, as symbolic death (Wynter cited in Tsantsoulas 2018, 167). In Western thought dominated by binary thinking, some people are always more readily associated with concepts of the feminine linked to vulnerability, disappearance, the expendable, and the unsymbolizable. It is thus not only necessary to identify and counter how foreclosures are currently constructed and to own/never fully own the exclusions through which we proceed. It is also necessary to work with and away from the way in which the masculine/feminine structures vulnerability and self-loss as always already far more of an occasional ‘opt-in’ option for some than for others. Finally, even if we specify Butler’s account as a deconstructed liberal analytic of precariousness and precarity which enables the apprehension of ties and cultural translation between people constituted within different but overlapping ontological landscapes, the dominance of only one logic of differentiation in Butler’s account arguably limits the potential of such modes of cultural translation. There remains a theoretical gulf perhaps between subjects produced as a ‘separate’ self through exclusion and foreclosures—focused on the inescapability of power dynamics resulting from negotiating separateness—and subjects located in ontological landscapes which remain at least partly produced through alternative logics of differentiation and multiple temporalities (Vij, this volume). To proceed towards a fuller account of cultural translation and Ahmed’s staying with critique, we perhaps need

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to specify what the binary logic of differentiation produces, that which it has worked to suppress, and how it can be supplemented with other logics of differentiation. I propose Ettinger’s matrixial theory as particularly instructive in this regard.

Bracha Ettinger’s Expanded Account of Subjectivity As discussed above, achieving the ideal of the rational subject in Western political thought and working towards a social bond based on ease and harmony involves constant processes of offloading violence and negativity onto ‘others’. Butler’s solution whereby we acknowledge that we are produced through exclusions and at the same time mired in relationality and opaque to ourselves, and we acknowledge that social ties contain both care and destructiveness, still centres a subject produced through cuts and splits, always a bit at odds with its vulnerability and exposure to others. Ettinger proposes a different direction of travel insofar as she presents an expanded account of subjectivity itself. Subjectivity moves from being centred on individuals, to denoting experiences of self and forms of connectedness at multiple ‘levels’. Subjectivity thus extends-exists beyond the individuated level in meaningful ways. We can perhaps reasonably suppose that experiences of lack, loss, separateness, cleavage, and a dimension of plurality and coexistence within subjectivity are universal. We can see how some or all of these elements of human existence are inscribed in social and political life via available symbolic filters. Western subjectivity is structured in line with a type of body reasoning that centres the male body, and general human needs, desires, and anxieties symbolically associated with the male body are culturally foregrounded. Ettinger argues that general human needs, desires, and anxieties associated with other types of body/trauma/phantasy/desire complexity were denied and repressed in psychoanalytic thought in order to protect the development of the male child’s Ego. She theorizes two levels of subjectivity, each based on specific body/trauma/phantasy/desire complexity, and she leaves open the possibility of other levels yet to be theorized. One level is the individuated phallic level of subjectivity based on male body specific trauma/phantasy/desire complexity, inaugurated through the castration phantasy. At this level I exist and experience life through language and affect at a conscious level. I retain some sense of an ‘I’ and I conceive

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of myself to varying degrees as separate and distinct from others. The second level is that which Ettinger terms the matrixial level of subjectivity. This is inaugurated through the intrauterine phantasy (Ettinger 2006c, 47–48). This is an invisible level of human plurality and coexistence, operative throughout all our lives, at which non-cognitive unprocessed trauma circulates. It is accessed through a withdrawal of self, such that ‘you’ are not present. It is also at a temporal disjoint to the individuated phallic level of subjectivity. That which is worked-through at the matrixial level of partial subjects, accessed through a withdrawal of self, only has effects in social and political life in the long term (Ettinger 2001, 52). Ettinger develops matrixial theory by reinterpreting and expanding upon key aspects of the work of Levinas and Lacan in particular. In conversation with Ettinger in 1993, Levinas said that his key question is if the human individual actually starts out individuated. The core of his philosophy is the idea that ‘the human self is before anything else responsibility for the Other’ (Levinas 2006, 139). He stresses the passive level at which I am ‘disturbed’ and ‘disorientated’ despite myself, and, as discussed above, he attributes this affective experience to a demand from transcendence or ‘beyond being’. Yet while Levinas stresses a withdrawal of self in terms of self-sacrifice or ‘dying in giving life’, Ettinger frames a withdrawal of self in terms of co-becoming at a matrixial transubjective level. It is therefore an ‘active-passivity’ at a non-cognitive level and Ettinger discards the non-reciprocal element between ‘self’ and ‘transcendence’ within Levinas’s ethical relation. Furthermore Ettinger attributes Levinasian ‘being affected’ as something which arises to consciousness of the ‘I’ from the interlaced matrixial transubjective level of subjectivity. Affect, traces, pictograms, and other forms of non-cognitive knowledge which, she argues, circulate at the transubjective level, are immanent to the world and indirectly connected to the socio-historical conditions of those connected to an encounter-event. Levinas’s untenable focus on ‘beyond being’ as the source of ‘the demand’ is thereby also discarded. Ettinger points to the forms of co-becoming, creativity, and transconnectedness that come through a ‘withdrawal of self’. Ettinger is critical of psychoanalytic theory which locates subjectivization processes primarily in terms of processes of individuation, of cutting self from other, and of negotiating the divide and transitivity between individuated subjects. She argues that Lacan’s Symbolic order as the realm of language provides a partial account of meaning-donation in social and political life. That which escapes human ‘entry’ into the realm of language

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and which language cannot contain, such as archaic psychic events, is located in the Real in Lacanian theory. The Real is established as lack, because it refers to that which is impossible to symbolize and so cannot be known consciously or unconsciously (Ettinger 1992, 181). In Lacanian theory we repress contents through submitting them to the unconscious, and both consciousness and the unconscious are formed with our entry into language. The unconscious does not contain what precedes language, which becomes a ‘hole’ in the Symbolic (Ettinger 1992, 184). Lacanian theory thus lacks the means of signifying a dimension of plurality and coexistence within subjectivity, because such a dimension is beyond the realm of graspable signification. Subjectivity is constructed within a framework of lack and ‘holes’ in the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic (Ettinger 2006c, 41). For Lacan, the psychoanalytic project should aim to expose the arbitrary yet difficult to alter nature of both the order of language and the subjectivity constructed within it. Rather than negate or dismiss Lacan’s Symbolic, Ettinger redefines it as the ‘phallic stratum of subjectivity’ within an enlarged Symbolic and an expanded account of subjectivity. Lacan understands that which comes before language as beyond signification or conceptualization, in the field of the Thing. In contrast, Ettinger understands that which precedes language as being in the field of Event and Encounter, as ‘an almost-other-Event-Encounter that is borderlinked to the I ’ (2006c, 175). Given that the matrixial level and structure of subjectivity is inaugurated through the intrauterine phantasy, it is theorized as Feminine(m) (Pollock 2006) yet applicable to all regardless of gender identity. As Griselda Pollock notes, the model of the late intrauterine encounter2 provides an image, with model and image being the key terms, of a time when asymmetrical partial subjects coexist within wider matrixial webs, not as whole or differentiated but rather as ‘unknown to each other, but without either rejection or assimilation, in relations that can only be called non-phallic’ (2000, 124). What the matrixial level of subjectivity describes is an interlaced aspect of subjectivity, beyond yet connected to individuated ‘I’s’, operative throughout our lives, which involves transconnectedness, co-emergence and differentiation-in-transgression. Both phallic and matrixial levels can be operative in the same encounter but we, as phallic subjects, often only have a sense of the matrixial transubjective at work after the fact. Intuition and transference can be, though are not always, examples of something which originated at the matrixial

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level rising to the individuated, phallic level of subjectivity. In this chapter I am admittedly drawing too clear a distinction between these levels but this is necessary for now. Ettinger theorizes this matrixial level of subjectivity in terms of matrixial webs which arise and come to the fore during encounters through what she terms borderlinking. Borderlinking relates to a matrixial weaving or webbing between several partial subjects in an encounterevent (2006c, 181). Webs contain traces of previous encounter-events. As neither ‘you’ nor ‘I’ are there, projection, substitution, and split do not work within the matrixial sphere. To self-fragilize and to share via mental waves and affects means that the number of partial subjects engaged is quite limited. Thus Ettinger says the principle of ‘severality’ applies to matrixial encounter-events. Within a matrixial encounter-event several partial subjects, or I and non-I(s), work through the exchange of mental affects. Subjectivity constructed through what Oyˇewùmí terms ‘body reasoning’ theoretically has many levels/spheres in an Ettingerian framework. Two of these have been theorized—the phallic as individuated, and now the matrixial as transconnected partial subjects—and Ettinger posits potentially more levels which remain to be theorized. The matrixial Feminine(m) thus does not refer to a subject position, it instead references a logic of differentiation as a structuring principle of subjectivity for all, regardless of gender. The Feminine(m) logic of differentiation-in-transgression is accessed through self-fragilization and it involves the co-emergence of partial subjects in service of copoïesis characterized by transconnectedness. Transconnectedness initiates a working-through of non-cognitive knowledge as a form of meaningdonation, albeit the effects of which are only evident in the long term (Ettinger 2001, 52). Taking Ettinger’s work into account means that we have an understanding of subjectivity as inaugurated at the transubjective level in matrixial webs, in a before: in com-passion and compassion, in the particular I within non-I fragilization, before (and after) the consolidation of individual boundaries. (Ettinger 2006b, 112)

Ettinger’s point is that the whole self and the other in self-identity are fictions, albeit necessary fictions. They are located in just one sphere of experience which operates alongside other spheres. Although she argues that the transubjective sphere is at our core, as humans we cannot always

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be connected to that level as it requires fragility. This required fragility means that the matrixial sphere can retreat beyond our awareness very early on in life. It is also possible to not bear the matrixial sphere in consciousness at all and to only be conscious of other spheres where identity is defined and maintained. That said, Ettinger posits that bearing a consciousness of the matrixial sphere means it is impossible to ever fully step out of it. It refers to a zone of shared psychic traces (2001, 41).

Ambivalent-(yet Transconnected) Social Ties Split, projection and abjection are psychic mechanisms used at the phallic individuated level of subjectivity in order to refuse and get rid of unwanted aspects of the self. The refusal of connectedness, and staying with critique (Ahmed) for example, results in continuous reiterations of whiteness as victim and as innocence. Although there are certainly many reasons for this, a significant factor relates to modernity’s idealization of separateness/hierarchy and sovereignty based on body reasoning. Butler’s theorization of the ambivalent social bond works to undo ideas of the transparent, altruistic self, working towards ‘the good’. It stresses the intertwinement of our lives with those of others and both the care and destructiveness within social and political life. Addressing the legacies of modernity involves identifying and mitigating the ways in which ‘selves’ are shored up and closed off from others and arguably this is a key focus for Butler. It also involves addressing how the masculine/feminine binary structures socio-symbolic codes of life, death, and disappearance in Western thought and although Butler addresses this, it has not been her recent focus. To achieve both, an immediate shift from body reasoning to mode reasoning is insufficient. Instead I propose that we need to work with and expand upon how Western concepts of the subject are centred on body reasoning. At the individuated phallic level of subjectivity, centred on male body specific trauma/desire/phantasy complexity, the masculine/feminine binary could gradually shift away from being located ‘in’ bodies, towards denoting ongoing individuation and the oscillation between modes of subjectivity: assertions of self (culturally masculine) and being constituted and dispossessed through intersubjective forms of relationality (culturally feminine). At the transconnected matrixial level of subjectivity, centred on a late stage gestating body specific trauma/desire/phantasy complexity, the Feminine(m) logic of differentiation-in-transgression enables a very subtle measure of human

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difference involving psychic plurality of partial subjects, co-emergence and working-through non-cognitive knowledge. Moving concepts of the masculine, feminine, and Feminine(m) away from being located ‘in’ bodies and towards denoting access to, and movement within, different spheres of subjectivity, between which we all enact constant shifts, could potentially enable changes to socio-symbolic codes of life, creativity, death, and disappearance in the long term. A Butlerian view of the ongoing formation or break down of the bonds between us departs from a starting point of primary and ongoing dependencies, which in her view oblige a working-for the material and perceptual conditions of liveable lives. That our sense of self is both constituted and dispossessed within sociality leads her to foreground understanding the ties between us—even as they are differently constituted within different ontological landscapes—as integral to enabling liveable lives for all. She posits an essentially ambivalent stance towards processes of social bonding but she argues that we must engage with and seek to repair social bonds even when driven with destructiveness. I have added an underlay of Ettingerian matrixial webs to these ambivalent phallic bonds in order to highlight the one-sidedness of an account of subjectivity based on only one logic of differentiation and to further consider that which Ahmed’s call to live the critique in its lengthy duration would entail. In Ettingerian terms we are periodically undone not only through affect registered through constitutive and dispossessive intersubjective relationality (Butler) but also through that which circulates at a transubjective level which has been denied and repressed within Western culture. Ettinger argues that in psychoanalytic terms traumatic events are sometimes not cognized by the survivor. Instead they are encrypted within the psyche which enables the continuation of psychic life for the survivor. The survivor has no access to this crypted event but it haunts all other relationships of love for them. This ‘knowledge’ which was never cognized, and so cannot later be cognized, is transmitted at a non-cognitive level through the matrixial psychic webs which the survivor has access to. For anyone who receives it, it is not part of their own history as a separate subject, and it is not the result of intersubjective relations either, since the survivor is not conscious of it. As it was never fully cognized by the survivor it travels in what Ettinger terms grains, and grains of grains. Such trace and trauma is transmitted to other matrixial partial subjects irrespective of whether they are connected to family members or even members of the same community. The trace and

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affect of traumatic events that were never ‘ours’ can thus be transmitted at the transubjective level (Ettinger 2006c, 164–165). Being open to the matrixial level of subjectivity entails an awareness that ‘an individual might be unconsciously metramorphosing traces of the trauma of someone else, who belongs to the same matrixial web’ and that we all carry traces of the joy and trauma of others in past and present webs (Ettinger 2011, 22). Matrixial encounter-events have the potential to be both healing and/or traumatizing, as I and unknown non-I’s must be open and vulnerable to the traces exchanged within each encounterevent. Partial subjects within an encounter-event are like poles ‘across the same string, and the poles tremble together but differently at each stroke’ (Ettinger 2005, 215). This movement is not subordinated to the preservation of the community’s identity; indeed, it transgresses the community. Ettinger argues that although this transgression of individual psychic boundaries happens anyway, with or without signification, it requires self-relinquishment and, therefore, calls for specific ethical attention and responsibility. It is this aspect of transconnectedness which I think needs to be added to Butler’s ambivalent social bond if we are to further address the legacies of modernity. Ettinger thinks through the question of how to engage with, contain, and elaborate traces at the transubjective level. This is a ‘working-through-with-in’ and it does not work-through at the pace of politics. The effects of such a working-through are not immediately visible in social and political reality and so necessitate trust. The question is thus not how to meet and share with others, but rather how impossible it is to not-share and how to think about this level of difference-in-jointness within human experience which ‘precedes and coincides with my being One-self’ (Ettinger 2006a, 196). That the matrixial psychic dimension is limited by the principle of severality and is not at the level of individuated identity means that it evades the whole subject, forms of community, and endless multiplicity. It is operational on a relatively small scale but within all our lives. Matrixial webs, accessed through self-fragilization, borderlinked to other webs, evade any ‘Web of webs’ precisely because transformation and resistance ‘is born within the human pole of the string’ (Ettinger 2009, 28). I term these social ties ‘ambivalent-(yet transconnected)’ to denote the ongoing force of ambivalence at the individuated level and the historically denied and muted aspect of transconnectedness in Western thought. These ties extend beyond borders because human connections extend across borders and communities.

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Staying with Critique, Cultural Translation, and Ambivalent-(yet Transconnected) Ties Thinking matrixial webs, ambivalent phallic bonds, and other forms of ties together is not about seeking ways to live ‘a good life’ in multiracial and gender diverse political formations, nor is it about developing a more nuanced account of relationality. Ettingerian transconnectedness refers to ‘relations-without-relating’ precisely because no individuated subjects are present. It centres on non-cognitive knowledge, and there is a significant temporal disjoint between co-poïesis at the matrixial level and that which ultimately registers and travels at the phallic level of subjectivity. The expanded account of subjectivity outlined here goes beyond, yet is connected to, individuated I’s; it has an underlay of matrixial webs at a transubjective level; and it is criss-crossed by phallic bonds at the individuated level. The refusal of the ties between us and retreat to whiteness as victim and/or innocence for example, is about a shoring up of oneself at the individuated level. It also involves further repression of that which circulates at the non-cognitive matrixial transubjective level. I am not advancing this argument in the service of developing a universalizing logic of precariousness and precarity. Instead, from a clear starting point of a concept of the deconstructed liberal subject (Vij, this volume), itself historically based on dematerialized masculinities, and generative of a narrow concept of the political centred on a gendered and racialized social contract, I want to underline the enduring force of a binary logic of differentiation based on body reasoning. I argue that we need to relativize this binary logic by addressing its one-sidedness, acknowledging that it generates meaning-donation (through language and cognized emotion and affect) at only one level of subjectivity and, in different ways, it allocates socio-symbolic codes of death and disappearance to those associated with the feminine. The task is to decisively get beyond ideas of ‘the good’ as the core driver of political action and to also get beyond the desire for linear and superficial processes of apologies, healing and restoration regarding the legacies of modernity. The attachment to ‘doing’ in service of an ‘end-point’ is undesirable precisely because it skips forward. It fails to fully acknowledge and exist within our histories and current social and political situation, it does not address the need to rework usage of the masculine, feminine, and Feminine(m), and it is shut off from the self-fragilization needed (at least some of the time) for an Ettingerian working-through of non-cognized trauma. Of course

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‘doing’ in the form of reparation and anti-racist work is wholly necessary. Yet understanding that a concept of subjectivity based on cuts, splits, and cleavage is one-sided, and considering the potential of an expanded, multi-levelled concept of subjectivity, assists in addressing the question of the unbearability of exposure which is foregrounded in Butler’s politics of vulnerability. It highlights that exposure (and precarity) is predominantly experienced as unbearable in Western thought because of the historical stress on general human needs, desires, and anxieties symbolically associated with the male body and the active repression of other needs, desires, and anxieties. Consideration of Ettingerian transconnectedness is not a quick fix for this and matrixial encounter-events can be healing and/or additionally traumatic given that they involve self-fragilization. In my view thinking social ties as ambivalent-(yet transconnected) does however acknowledge the historical and ongoing force of body reasoning. I fully acknowledge that desires for separateness and control are evident in most political campaigns and pursuing a notion of ‘the good’ has a unifying force which campaigns need in order to mobilize sufficient grassroots support. However currently it seems important to relativize these desires and to relativize the binary logic of differentiation that generates them. Reiterations of whiteness as a power relation are about self-interest, and countering them requires living the critique in its lengthy duration (Ahmed). I posit that we can only, however imperfectly, live such critiques within a politics that fully owns the force of how its hierarchies are produced and which addresses the incompleteness of a concept of subjectivity primarily and forcefully structured through a binary logic of differentiation. Butler downplays Levinas’s focus on ‘transcendence’ and the frankly racist and sexist conclusions he came to as a result (Butler 2012, 45– 50). For her part, Ettinger retains yet significantly reworks Levinas’s focus on there being a level of subjectivity at which ‘I’ am not there. She argues that her key concepts are not inventions, rather they are elements of human experience which have always taken place but which global North subjects are averse to thinking because they involve self-loss, selffragilization, and not-knowing/never-knowing. The matrixial transubjective sphere is outside of power dynamics reiterated at the individuated level of subjectivity but it also contains the often traumatic non-cognized ‘grains’ and ‘grains of grains’ of those same power dynamics. From an Ettingerian perspective, self-fragilizing and contributing to a ‘workingthrough’ of those traces is not a wished for escape from the difficulties the

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binary logic of differentiation generates, but rather ameliorative labour, going beyond both its one-sided structuring of subjectivity and the harms it inevitably perpetuates. Violence and exclusion are in fact central to ‘how we are’. Precarity is not best theorized as the betrayal of a lost promise of security that itself was based on exploitation, exclusion, and environmental destruction. Differential distributions of material and perceptual precarity appreciably relate to how global North forms of subjectivity are structured, such that continually addressing precarity requires sustained analysis of this. Acknowledging the specificity of constructs of subjectivity, thinking beyond an individuated level, and properly entertaining the possibility and force of non-cognitive knowledge in reiterations of sociality, could enable an elaboration of ‘cultural translation’ as accounting for the effects of the different logics of differentiation in structuring subjectivity (Ettinger); ceding ground within alliances built on cultural crossovers, contestations, and convergent temporalities (Butler); and forging coalitions which work to establish the material and perceptual conditions of liveable lives that can nevertheless be navigated within different ontological landscapes. Such modes of cultural translation within which binary and matrixial logics of differentiation are operative could potentially, but do not necessarily, enact Ahmed’s ‘double turn’ at least some of the time. They could centre creativity, working-for and working-through as invention not of ‘the good’ or even in the direction of an ‘absent fullness’, but rather invention through ‘the event’ of mired subjectivity that meaningfully owns the impacts of how its hierarchies are produced and sustained, and also works to subvert them, however imperfectly.

Notes 1. I use the term social bond to refer to the overarching form of bond that is aimed for from various theoretical perspectives. I use the term social ties to refer to the multiple ties constituted within human existence e.g. aimed for bond(s), everyday interpersonal ties, matrixial webs. 2. By drawing from the late intrauterine encounter to theorize a psychic dimension of subjectivity which is feminine, but accessible to all of us regardless of gender identity, Ettinger risks being accused of essentialism or of being anti-abortion. She theorizes this sphere of subjectivity as feminine in order to address the way the feminine as a concept has been significantly undertheorized within psychoanalytic theory and the effects this has had with regard to how we think of subjectivity, processes of meaning-donation, and reiterations of sociality. She fully supports reproductive justice and rights for women, non-binary people, and trans-men,

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claiming that matrixial theory is an act of resistance against those who are anti-abortion because it dissolves any idea of the unitary subject. Antiabortion activists present the fetus as separate to the mother with a separate desire, but this makes no sense from a matrixial perspective which theorizes an asymmetrical encounter-event at a transubjective level. This is wholly different to a mother/infant dyad. The mother, as the already existing phallic subject, always has ‘full response-ability for any event occurring with-in her own not-One corpo-Reality and transsubjectivity’ (Ettinger 2006c, 180).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of AntiRacism.” Borderlands 3 (2). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ ahmed_declarations.htm. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2015. “Citizens and Others: The Constitution of Citizenship Through Exclusion.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 40 (2): 102–114. https://doi.org/10.1177/0304375415590911. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2016. “Postcolonial Reflections on Sociology.” Sociology 50 (5): 960–966. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038516647683. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2017. “Brexit, Trump and ‘Methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class.” The British Journal of Sociology 68 (S1): 214–232. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12317. Bennington, Geoffrey. 2000. Interrupting Derrida. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993a. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993b. Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 15–23. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life the Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself . New York: Fordham University Press. Butler, Judith. 2012. Parting Ways Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith. 2016. “Why Preserve the Life of the Other?” Filmed 30 June 2016 at Yale University. Video, 1:11:24. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=40YPnzv5JzM&t=1789s.

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Coetzee, Azille, and Annemie Halsema. 2018. “Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oy˘ewùmí and Irigaray in Dialogue About Western Culture.” Hypatia 33 (2): 178–194. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12397. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 97–192. London: Routledge. El-Enany, Nadine 2018. “The Next British Empire: Nostalgia for Britain’s Imperial Past Is Fuelling a Dangerous White Supremacist Mindset That We All Need to Be Vigilant Against.” IPPR Progressive Review 25 (1): 30–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/newe.12089. Emejulu, Akwugo. 2016. “On the Hideous Whiteness Of Brexit: ‘Let Us Be Honest About Our Past and Our Present If We Truly Seek to Dismantle White Supremacy’.” Verso Blog, June 28. http://www.versobooks.com/ blogs/2733-on-the-hideous-whiteness-of-brexit-let-us-be-honest-about-ourpast-and-our-present-if-we-truly-seek-to-dismantle-white-supremacy. Ettinger, Bracha. 1992. “Matrix and Metramorphosis.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4 (3): 176–208. Ettinger, Bracha. 2001. “Working-Through: A Conversation Between Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger and Craigie Horsfield.” In Drawing Papers 24: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: The Eurydice Series, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Brian Massumi, 37–62. New York: The Drawing Center. Ettinger, Bracha. 2005. “Matrixial Co-Poiesis: Trans-Subjective Connecting Strings.” Poiesis 7: 212–217. Ettinger, Bracha. 2006a. “Com-Passionate Co-Response-Ability, Initiation in Jointness, and the Link X of Matrixial Virtuality.” In Gorge (l): Oppression and Relief in Art, edited by Sofie Van Loo and Bracha L. Ettinger, 11–33. Antwerpen: Royal Museum of Fine Art. Ettinger, Bracha. 2006b. “From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsability: Besidedness and the Three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-Enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment.” Athena: Philosophical Studies 2: 100–135. Ettinger, Bracha. 2006c. The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press. Ettinger, Bracha. 2009. “Fragilization and Resistance.” Studies in the Maternal 1 (2): 1–31. Ettinger, Bracha. 2011. “Uncanny Awe, Uncanny Compassion and Matrixial Transjectivity Beyond Uncanny Anxiety.” French Literature Series 38 (1): 1–30. Klein, Melanie. 1937. “Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works.” In The Writings of Melanie Klein (1975), edited by Roger Money-Kryle. New York: The Free Press.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. 2006. “Que dirait Eurydice? What Would Eurydice Say? Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger in Conversation with Emmanuel Levinas.” Athena 1: 137–145. Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. New York: Cornell University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 51–80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. ‘‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2): 499–535. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. Oy˘ewùmí, Oyèrónk´e.. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oy˘ewùmí, Oyèrónk´e.. 2002. “Conceptualising Gender: The Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies.” JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies 2 (3): 1–9. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pollock, Griselda. 2000. “Abandoned at the Mouth of Hell or A Second Look That Does Not Kill: The Uncanny Coming to Matrixial Memory. In Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death, edited by Griselda Pollock and Penny Florence, 113–177. New York: G&B New Arts Press. Pollock, Griselda. 2006. “Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference.” In The Matrixial Borderspace, edited by Bracha Ettinger, 1–38. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Tsantsoulas, Tiffany N. 2018. Sylvia Wynter’s Decolonial Rejoinder to Judith Butler’s Ethics of Vulnerability. Symposium 22 (2): 158–177.

PART III

Precarity and Work

CHAPTER 9

Precarity Unbound: Insurrectional Migrancy and Citizen Precarity in a Globalized World Nevzat Soguk

Introduction Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body washed ashore in a Turkish resort town in September 2015.1 He had drowned when the boat carrying him and many other refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran sank in the Aegean Sea. No one knows how many people died in that accident. It may have been tens even hundreds of people as happened almost regularly that year around the Aegean and the Mediterranean seas. The small fragile body of a three-year-old, with his face sinking into the sand, as if sleeping, captured the world’s attention. It was reported that Aylan’s intended destination was Canada. Aylan’s family had resorted to their unauthorized travel in desperation after Canada had denied them entry visa and Turkey had refused to issue them travel documents. Such were the sovereign walls Aylan’s travel had crashed against, resulting in his

N. Soguk (B) Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_9

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demise, while the story of his death seamlessly travelled through sovereign borders to reach virtually the whole world. What to make of this paradox? Why begin the paper with Aylan’s story? Is it for playing on emotions, so that the paper can exploit them in support of its arguments to come? Is it because it is an easy, a convenient, way of starting a paper about displaced or dislocated people? Is the intention one of invoking the picture, making few comments on what a tragedy Aylan’s death was and then demanding greater empathy for other Aylans and action in solidarity with displaced peoples around the world? Naturally, solidarity should be paramount in mind—solidarity with humans forced into leaving their home towns and home countries— travelling, walking, running, swimming, into uncertain futures. Yet what makes solidarity challenging is the world of hierarchies across lives that differently enable or disable people in terms of living without fear, exploitation, discrimination, and persecution. Let us not forget that Aylan was a Kurd, a marker of misfortune in the Middle East by virtue of the strong regional nationalisms and unforgiving global geopolitical interests. Misfortunes of being a Kurd aside, what is certain is that the collective ‘we’ paid more attention to Aylan dead than alive. We would have paid even less attention if he had been alive as a child lost in the massive sea of displaced refugee and migrant populations in Turkey, Greece, or somewhere else in Europe. According to Europol, as of 2016, tens of thousands of refugee children were missing (Townsends 2016). Separated from their families, children simply disappear into Europe’s dark underbelly (to use Eduard Glissant’s [1997] characterization of the dangers of sea-crossing), but not many know, nor care, about where Europe’s dark underbelly lies. Children disappear into its abyss and we carry on as long as the abyss remains uncaptured in iconic images like the one depicting Aylan’s apparition—literally from the abyss of the Aegean sea onto the beach. At the end of 2019, agencies now talk of a ‘lost generation of refugees’ in Europe (BBC News 2019). Not surprisingly, when Aylan’s image hit the headlines, virtually the entire world moved in response—but it moved largely ‘virtually’ in twitter statements and Facebook postings, issuing ‘RIP Alan’ messages. It did not move ‘actually’, in this material world, not in ways that have the potential to challenge the prevailing economy of imagery that reduces politics to pictures and confines our responses to the logic of what should be called the ‘suffering watching industry’. Ironically, because the ‘suffering watching industry’ did not carry the associated images, the death of Galip,

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Aylan’s five-year-old brother, which occurred during the same incident, largely went unnoticed. Galip’s dead body was found on the same beach, just a few metres away from Aylan’s body.2 How do we begin to account for this incomplete representation of the same event in history? Historically, the event hosts two dead children, yet we actively mourned one, while we wilfully or not ignored the other. If one were to use Aylan’s death an accusation, as a judgment, it would be that collectively ‘we’ have become, almost too easily, the consumers of the ‘suffering watching industry’. More and more, we seem to lack sufficient critical subjectivity to comprehend and confront the hegemonic logic in our lives—the logic of statist sovereignty and nation-citizenship which at once creates the hierarchies that limit life opportunities for Aylans and others and punishes them as they attempt to escape those hierarchies. Given this observation, this paper’s objective is not passing judgment on our collective role in making this world into a brutal place for so many. Nor is the goal to appropriate images and stories to call for deeper solidarity with the displaced peoples—those who are on route to somewhere and those who are stuck in displacement in camps or besieged towns. Instead, its objective is threefold. First, it is to theorize migrants as insurrectional agents, able and willing to challenge the hegemonic logic of states, citizens, and borders. Second, it is to show how the theoretically ‘privileged’ subjectivities of citizens paradoxically obfuscate the already extant and the newly emerging political and economic precarities across citizen lives. It is to argue that precaritizing is pervasive and universalized in a differentiated way around the world among all citizens and migrants alike. As a closing gesture, and thirdly, it is to offer some thoughts on how the commonalities and convergences of precarities among ordinary people could activate a transversalist politics of subjectivity that can resist precaritizing policies, conduct, and logic.

Migrants as Mirrors to Pervasive Precarity Around the World To begin with, my argument is simple: nowadays, in the contemporary capital-driven nation-statist order, migratory dynamics not only demonstrate the conditions of precarity among migrants but also expose the growing precarities among citizens. Migrant populations composed of refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, and exiles perfectly embody precarity, defined as a pervasive, though experientially differentiated,

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condition of political and economic vulnerability and insecurity. On the other hand, their precarity, sharpened in displacement, fuels a certain defiant, if insurrectionary, capacity wherever they may be around the world. Particularly in the proverbial ‘West’ their very presence stirs great controversy. It is in the West, where the contemporary capital-driven state sovereigntist international order traces its origins and showcases its exemplar political governance, that migrant precarity turns into defiance and reveals the precarity within the very exemplar of the order. Migrants show precarity to be an increasingly universalized condition afflicting all—citizens and migrants—in different ways. At once precarious and defiant, migrants figure/emerge as transformative subjects in the contemporary capital-driven state-sovereigntist international order. Their movements animate insurrectional energies as capacities to pressure state sovereigntist order as the hegemonic mode for political authenticity, agency, community, and social order. As I stated, migrant lives are at once conditioned by an existential precarity and transformative capacity. On the one hand, at every level, they encounter attempts to plunder their time and alienate their bodies from politics and rights. For example, in many cases, migrants spend/lose years trying to reach their destinations, often subject to physical and emotional exploitation during and after their journey (Wedeman et al. 2019). According to the Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), ‘workers are often forced to work for little or no pay, subjected to dangerous environments without proper safety equipment and left to sleep in fields or construction sites without running water or sanitary facilities’ (Favre 2019).3 On the other hand, however, migrants tolerate these unequal power relations in their lives and the associated vulnerabilities as part of their desire to redefine their own subjectivities from those who simply obey to those who strategically defy the normative ideals of dominant governmentality. They defy the ideals around which modern, nationstatist territorial orders are constructed and justified, including those ideals undergirding the countries and national communities and the international state system. As they do so, they emerge as the existential mirrors on which citizens’ extant and future precarities are revealed. In the last two decades, the citizen/nation/state form has been under unprecedented pressure. Even in the West, the balance of power has shifted in favour of global political-economic forces beyond the control of citizenry, against citizenry. As Paul Virilio observed, modern citizenship has become a process leading to a disappearance of the right-bearing citizenship by

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turning citizens into foreigners or migrants within; where the citizens, and others, appear to be little more than ‘living-dead (mort-vivant), raw materials, in the service of trans-political capitalism and anational states’ (Virilio 2005, 173). Following these arguments, it is analytically instructive to eschew thinking of displaced people merely as figures who represent turmoil outside as they search for refuge, or turmoil inside as they arrive in places of refuge. Migrants and refugees may be people in distress, but they are not without agency. As Agamben (1998, 8–9) reminded us about the humans treated as bare bodies, even the bare bodies can resist in unexpected ways that shatter our illusions about power and order. Rather than assuming that migrants and refugees lack any stable subjectivity or historical agency, it is important to start by recognizing that migrants and refugees retain considerable agency as architects of their lives and agents of broader history. Since in the state-driven international imaginaries they are conceived as aberrant figures with ineffectual subjectivity, their actual agency, as demonstrated in their movement, acquires a certain transformative capacity. Migrants emerge as insurrectional subjects who, in desperation fuelled by overwhelming precarities in their lives, either push back against or simply refuse to abide by the prevailing normative ideals that limit life choices. As the contemporary global context becomes characterized increasingly by the tensions within the territorial order of the citizen/nation/state trinity, migrant agency is magnified, not only exposing the perils of this privileged form of modern governance, but also challenge its limits.4 To paraphrase Marx’s famous dictum, migrants, too, make their own histories, and yes, under conditions of not their choosing. Still, act they do on the conditions they inherit and must negotiate. Unmistakably, their agency, acquired in the midst of precarious existence, is resisted ferociously. The resistance to the migrant or refugee figure is especially acute in these days. More than ever before, a spectral politics hovers over refugees and migrants at every level. This politics conditions both the lives of displaced people and the reception by host communities. Whereas previously, the prevalent view of displaced people in Europe and the Americas was that of ‘estrangement’ presenting cultural and economic challenges to host societies, nowadays, the view has shifted almost universally to one of ‘endangerment’ of the host society. From estrangement to endangerment, migrants travel back and forth in the state-sovereigntist imagination.

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Granted that there has always been a good deal of securitization of migrancy in these geographies. However, the extent to which migrants and refugees are securitized nowadays is unprecedented. They are not only cast as figures of cultural alienation and economic competition, but, more spectrally, as potential agents of destruction of the European and American societies, and the Western civilization, they are presumed to represent. Not surprisingly, through the state-sovereigntist system, this logic of representation has been exported to non-western political geographies such as Asia and Africa. South Africa, for instance has experienced an astonishing rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, often culminating in violence against immigrants from other countries of Africa. A new form of xenophobia pitting Africans against Africans, dubbed the ‘Afrophobia’, is taking roots on the heels of ‘economic frustration’ in Southern Africa (Turkewitz 2019).5 Five or so million immigrants in South Africa originate from countries like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Somalia, and Nigeria, driven to South Africa for the same reasons of structural precarities that motivate their compatriots to move to Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Ironically similar frustrations defined by economic and political precarities also fuel the ‘Afrophobic’ reaction of Africans against Africans. Something other than a simple ‘racial’ othering is a foot in this juncture of sovereigntist state system—at once dominating political governance yet unable to contain the insurrectional force of the vulnerabilities and precarities its governmental modalities help to create.

An Unravelling: The Tale of States, Citizen Privileges, and Migrant Precarity I situate my contribution precisely at this juncture: where the insurrectional qualities of the contemporary human displacements crush against the practices of sovereignty; and where sovereignty practices labour to capture and tame the transformative capacities of displaced people within the territorial order of states, nations, and citizens. I write and speak not with a view to valorizing sovereignty practices, but with a view, à la Michel Foucault, to liberating ‘rights from sovereignty’ and its spectral reason. I argue that whereas in the past the capture and taming was relatively effective within the modern citizen/nation/state form (which has always served as the political handmaiden for global capitalist order),

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nowadays the success is hardly guaranteed given the unprecedented challenges confronting the nation-statist territorial order in the face of an ascendant predatory capitalist logic across the world. Let me briefly explain what I mean by the challenges faced by nation-statist territorial order since my arguments regarding migrants’ insurrectional subjectivities can only make sense against that background. The nation-statist order is based on a series of assumptions built around the historical figures of the citizen, the nation, and the state. Within this trinity, the citizen is presumed to be the authentic figure of legitimate political identity, who fulfils his/her destiny by vanishing into the fold of the nation, and through the nation, rests his/her destiny in the hands of the state. In turn, the state mobilizes itself both to represent the citizens and to protect them from threats and insecurities. And perhaps most important, enjoying internal and external sovereignty, the state actively shapes the political, economic, and social environment to create and maintain the conditions of authenticity for citizen subjects.6 While this is the promise politically, historically the authenticity promised through the citizen/nations/state form has never really fully materialized—even in the West where the idea was first invoked and put into practice. However, the degree to which the Western form has afforded some privileges to citizens, protecting them from conditions of abject precarity, in the West, the citizen/nation/state story has had some currency. Citizens in the West benefited from the system in ways which were unavailable to citizens elsewhere in the world. Especially in the proverbial ‘Rest’, that is, the global non-West, or the Third World, the power relations this modern form enacted have largely been economically exploitative and politically repressive in all but few cases. However, in the last two decades, the citizen/nation/state form has come under unprecedented pressure across the world. Even in the West, the balance of power has shifted in favour of global political-economic forces beyond the control of citizenry. ‘In the confluence of global capitalism and territorially unbound statism, traditional citizenship as a space of modern authority and privilege has lost its center (Soguk 2007, 2014b, 55).7 It is fragmented, diffused, and, in the words of Fredric Jameson, “amputated” possessing little effective historical agency’.8 Virilio observed this shift best when he argued that, even in the West, modern citizenship has become a process leading to a disappearance of the right-bearing citizenship by turning citizens into foreigners within; where the citizens, and others, are little more than living-dead (mort-vivant),

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or raw materials, in the service of transpolitical capitalism and anational states (Virilio 2005, 173). Precarity is increasingly pervading condition in the lives of citizens in the West as well. The following exchange between a member of an Italian Fascist front and an African immigrant from Gambia living in Italy for three years illustrates this phenomenon against the background of hostility to migrants and refugees (BBC News 2017). Italian Fascist: If all these people move from Africa to Europe… First of all, we cannot help everyone because you know our economy is in crisis now, especially here in south Europe, in Italy or in Spain. I think that also in Africa someone arrives to exploit your land like Chinese, are the new colonialists… African Immigrant: I want to be free. I did not leave my country for economic reasons. Do you understand? So, this what I can say, there are different types of immigrants. I think also it is right for every human being to move around, and find a better living condition. Italian Fascist: Yes! African Immigrant: There is nothing bad about that, we are humans… Alberto: Now the European countries have to take care of Africa, also because of colonialist time, But in Africa, because you are full of resources. You are full of wonderful land. And we have to develop your knowledge to exploit yourself your land (emphasis mine). African Immigrant: If you send me away from [back to] my country, you will not go to Africa too… This means you will not get the gas as well, you will not drive your beautiful cars, because we are going to stay in our land. That means that we are not also ready to see any white man our country (emphasis mine). Italian Fascist: Yeah, I know that! African Immigrant: Can we live in the world in this situation? Italian Fascist: But look I am thirty years old. I have no car. I have two jobs to do because I cannot get enough money to survive in Rome with this rent (emphasis mine). African Immigrant: Do you think it is easy to sleep on the street in this cold? Italian Fascist: Of course not!

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African Immigrant: Do you think that they are happy to come to here? No! But they need peace, you know! There are a lot of problems in Africa, which started since the colonialist times, still now they are existing and existing! (emphasis mine).

Put aside for a second the fact that the conversation is taking place between an Italian fascist and a migrant and focus instead on the issues around which the conversation is taking place. The citizen-fascist complains about his economic precarity which fuels his insecurities and which in turn feeds into his anti-immigrant sentiments. The migrant– refugee, on the other hand, highlights how political precarity, colonial and neocolonial in roots, compels him and others to migrate to places like Italy. Tensions abound in the encounter. However, more than the tensions between them, what the video reveals are the differentiated yet convergent vulnerabilities of the ordinary people around the world. I say differentiated for even amidst the economic hardship, the citizen-fascist still enjoys freedom from spectral politics that challenges migrant’s humanity or his place within humanity. Surely, some qualitative privileges, such as welfare and healthcare, still apply to citizenry in places like Italy in ways that are missing among the majorities of people living in countries like the African Immigrant’s Gambia. Yet, it is also important to point to the convergent vulnerabilities of citizens and migrants. The migrant city dweller reminds the citizen-fascist of the historical political-economic forces that regiment their lives and converge them in what Eduard Glissant (1992, 66–67) would characterise as ‘unexpected transversal encounters’. Encounters that shatter simplistic notions of who belongs where and under what conditions. No matter the protests from the citizen-fascist, his community, as with other urban communities in Europe, North America, and around the world are increasingly composed of ‘mixed’ populations of citizens and migrants. Just as citizen and migrant bodies occupy overlapping times and spaces, their plight is also increasingly a function of globally orchestrated hyper-capitalism. That the citizens of countries in the proverbial West are increasingly captive to the vagaries of hyper job markets, either unemployed or underemployed in large numbers or employed at wages that subject them to precarious living is telling. This is a sign not of capitalism’s inability to employ them but of its unwillingness to do so, for citizen labour in the West is now more expensive relative to the labour of the masses in the Rest. That is the reason why the citizen-fascist needs two

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jobs to survive in the same way that the migrant-arrivant already knows that his original country has little to offer him but political and economic precarity. So, the inexorable convergence of their lives is born out of the chaotic cohesion of global capitalist orchestration. In a recent column, Slavoj Zizek, echoes this observation in a way that concurs with Virilio’s conclusions. In many ways, argues Zizek, citizens in the West are being ‘left behind by God and the free market’ in conditions that are characterized by a deepening precarity (Zizek 2017). They are fast becoming a precariat—a class of people destined to lead uncertain, precarious lives. ‘No security for anyone’, suggests Zizek, by recollecting Antonio Negri’s public rumination while passing by a group of labourers on strike in Rome: ‘Look at them’, Negri is said to have remarked, ‘They don’t know they are already dead’ (Zizek 2017). Of course, neither Zizek nor Negri is the first to sense the growing precarity among ordinary people. In a certain way, critics of capitalism, from Marx onwards, predicated their analysis on the universalization of vulnerability across specific populations through class exploitation or other forms of political-economic alienation.9 It is widely accepted that it was Pierre Bourdieu, however, who introduced pervasive economic insecurity and vulnerability as precarity into analytical debates in the 1980s and 1990s. Referring to the ‘casualization’ and ‘flexibilisation’ of work markets, Bourdieu highlighted the universalized loss of security among ordinary people under deepening modalities of neoliberal capitalism. ‘Job insecurity [precarity] is everywhere now’ Bourdieu (1998, 81) asserted in his Acts of Resistance. Precarity ‘affects the person who suffers it…it pervades both the conscious and unconscious mind’ (Bourdieu 1998, 82) The existence of a large reserve army, which, because of the overproduction of graduates, is no longer restricted to the lowest levels of competence and technical qualification, helps to give all those in work the sense that they are in no way irreplaceable and that their work, their jobs, are in some way a privilege, a fragile, threatened privilege (as they are reminded by their employers as soon as they step out of line and by journalists and commentators at the first sign of a strike). Objective insecurity gives rise to a generalised subjective insecurity which is now affecting all workers in our highly developed economy. (Bourdieu 1998, 82–83)

Bourdieu anticipated what is next for the hitherto privileged spaces of citizenry in the West, as had been already observed in ‘underdeveloped

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countries’. ‘This kind of “collective mentality”…common to the whole epoch, is the origin of the demoralization and loss of militancy….suffering very high rates of unemployment or underemployment and permanently haunted by the specter of joblessness’ (Bourdieu 1998, 82). Starting with Bourdieu, through the works of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar, Giorgio Agamben, Paulo Virno, and others, a rich literature on precarity (especially in the West) has developed. Some, such as Guy Standing’s (2011) and Judith Butler’s (2004) works, have become seminal by now not only on precarity as a pervasive condition but also on forms of resistance vis a vis precarity.10 While these works have explored the deepening of precarity in the West, they have historically paid scant or sporadic attention to the universalized precariousness in the Rest of the world. The scant or sporadic attention includes a generalized disinterest in and a lack of knowledge about the Rest, whether called the Third World, the Global South, Underdeveloped Countries, or the Postcolonial World. While there is a growing interest nowadays in the intersections of precarities inhabiting these ‘other’ worlds and those experienced in the Global West, there seems still to be a conceptual deficit in following the historical shifts in the subjectivation/subjectivities of precarity hailing in/from the Global South. One can detect this deficit even in Bourdieu’s groundbreaking thoughts on precarity. Bourdieu states that the ‘mentality’, born of precarity, leading to ‘the demoralization and loss of militancy’ is earlier ‘observed in underdeveloped countries’ (Bourdieu 1998, 83)11 Interestingly, even in his work in the late 1990s, Bourdieu neglects to dwell on how precarious subjectivities in underdeveloped countries might have changed or evolved—‘from demoralization and loss of militancy’ to something else over the years, especially since his experiences in and work on Algeria in from 1950s. Of course, many observers speaking from postcolonial or decolonial thought-worlds have been tracing shifts and changes in postcolonial subjectivities, including those cultivated under conditions of pervasive precarity.12 In my work focusing on migratory movements, I theorize this shift in subjectivity and agency under the rubric of ‘insurrectional’ subjectivity. I argue that very conditions of deep and pervasive precarity in the proverbial Global South have been fuelling a subjectivity, and its accompanying experiential ethos (ontopolitics) in defiance of the forms and the norms of the capital-driven state-sovereigntist world order. Migrants best embody such a defiant subjectivity in linking up places and peoples in unexpected ways across the West and the Rest, both to

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show the transversal functional connections and the practical experiential convergences of lives in question. Promises and perils of migrancy and citizenship appear increasingly bound up together in common yet differentiated conditions of precarity. If this is indeed the case, there is then a growing convergence of the West with the Rest in terms of what citizenship promises citizen-subjects and what it delivers or fails to deliver. Increasingly, in both the West and the Rest, the façade of rights-bearing citizenry conceals the reality of citizens and non-citizens positioned as mere ‘resources’, or ‘raw materials’ for the ‘transpolitical capitalist order’ (Virilio 2005, 172–177). Some might call into question the veracity of the powers of transpolitical order, as populist states appear to make a comeback onto the international stage, claiming to put first their own nations and citizens. Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, Orban’s Hungary, and/or Trump’s America are examples, where state-sovereignty appears increasingly invoked in the service of their respective nations and citizens. Cries of ‘Russia for Russians’ or ‘Hungary for Hungarians’ grow louder and louder. However, a quick analysis of how these countries/states are positioned within the global capitalist system shows that political populism is not accompanied by alienation or even curtailment of transnational capitalism and its hegemonic universal logic within these countries. Rather, populism is deployed as a rhetorical device to obfuscate the state’s ongoing role in accommodating capitalism’s global transpolitical, operations. Populism does not reject capital, even if it occasionally denounces it. Instead, it disarms people through the rhetoric of nationalism, thus to avail them as resources within the system and for the felicity of the dominant interests. ‘Proud’ Russians, Hungarians, or Indians ready themselves as deposits of production even as they may see themselves self-determining. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, ‘straited’ and hierarchical, the space of the state promotes ideal conditions for capital within sovereign territorial order. In turn, the operations of the capital generate the ‘smooth’, universalized space of the precariat across the world.13 It is here that Virilio’s thoughts converge ‘large bodies of citizens as deposits of underclasses’ with what he refers to as ‘the transplanted proletariat’ of migrants. Both citizens and migrants provide for an intensive worldwide industrial exploitation and political alienation. They have more in common in precarity in their lives than they have difference as citizens and migrants. Migrants and citizens fit into the capitalist scheme essentially as ‘deposits of resources’, or as ‘raw materials’, though they are still

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differentially included into or positioned within the rhetoric of rights, of community, of democracy, of citizenship, and so on. Citizenship still carries some seemingly enviable rights and privileges denied to migrants and refugees. However, it is also true that differences are increasingly of the degree and intensity of precarity and not of citizens’ freedom from precarity. It is no longer the case that citizenship shields citizens from intense exploitation. In fact, in many ways, sovereignty and citizenship capture and make people available for systematic exploitation through precaritization. There is growing evidence that precarity is not simply an end-result or a product of the operations of transpolitical capital, but also the capital’s modus operandi and its strategy. It is a form of capital-driven or neoliberal governmentality, in a Foucauldian sense, where the precaritizing logic, policies, and conduct condition subjectivities and limit their political horizons by limiting their economic possibilities and political imaginaries (Foucault 2008). Precaritization ‘regiments’ subjectivities—whether of citizens or migrants—to confine their horizons within the global capitalist milieu and its state sovereigntist political order. Through orchestrating economic insecurities and vulnerabilities, it works to produce ‘governable’ subjects across the world. Increasing limits to welfare and healthcare, privatization of public goods, flexibilization of labour market, the rise of the gig economy, migration, and terrorism are weaponized through the rhetoric of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationalism. Citizens and migrants are deployed uniquely instrumentally in this orchestration, as I already intimated, though both figures also show growing capacities to question their plight. Such push-backs notwithstanding, in the precaritizing process, the figure of the migrant is idealized and weaponized to fuel the anxieties of citizen-subjects while the inherent anxieties in migrancy are used to discipline migrant agency. In the emergent nexus, both the figure of the citizen and of the migrant are then mobilized as resources for the dominant capitalist interests and its sovereign statist order. However, as I just indicated, these figures can also resist. Particularly migrant activism and praxis, of the undocumented or irregular kind, can and does disrupt this governmentality. ‘The subject of historical knowledge’, argued Benjamin, ‘is the struggling, oppressed class itself….the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden’ (Benjamin 1942, 394) Migrants may not be the ‘avenging class’ to liberate the downtrodden, but function as subjects and depositories of a certain kind of historical knowledge regarding precarity

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and alienation. They know the perils of citizen/nation/state formula. They know that their home nation-states offer citizens little if any protections. They also know that, while there are no guarantees, when they enter into migratory circuits displacement can work as liberation from conditions of home-bound precarity and exploitation. Leaving home behind thus signals not only a refusal to accept precarity at home but also a refusal to forfeit rights in displacement or migrancy. As result, even as migrants may suffer in displacement, their movements carry the potential to expose the logic of precaritization that makes vulnerabilities possible in both migrant and citizen lives. The conversation between the Italian Fascist and the African Immigrant in Rome is an instance where the migrant knowledge on precarity pushes back against the citizen-subjectivity that is still anchored in the promises of the nation-state form even when experiencing its perils. Still, Virilio maintains, curiously, in spite of an intense trans politicization and deterritorialization, populations of peoples are still ‘encouraged to cultivate attachment to the idea of the nation-state form as being ultimately definitive of human political and economic opportunities around the planet’ (Virilio 2005, 177). Migrant precarity becomes useful in this project of sustaining illusions about sovereignty and citizenship as nodes of privilege and power. Historically casting migrants as figures of lack in need of restoration or fearsome figures in need of confrontation was a productive way of constructing and consolidating states and citizens as sovereign figures of agency. Nowadays, however, the same spectral politics is oriented primarily to obscure and obfuscate the unravelling of citizenship as the privileged mode of political authenticity in the world. While the attachment to the citizen/nation/state form is still in place, it is also increasingly frayed. Instead of a world of fulfilled communities of nation peoples, protests around the world in France, Greece, Argentina, Chile, Lebanon, Peru, Columbia, Iraq, and Hong Kong by masses bespeak of a world of cruel hierarchies and multitude of precarities that cut through local, national, and global landscapes.14 But even the cruelty may prove productive. It produces desperate people, citizens, and migrants alike, who have nothing to lose but their ‘chains’ to precarious lives, to recollect Marx’s words. Instead of the territorial order of promises, masses may yet to turn to possibilities of transversal cooperation across ethnic national, racial, and religious chasms. Just as inequalities are produced and maintained by transversal capitalist orchestrations of resources and relations, humans, too, both citizens and

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migrants, can yet grow transversal in imagination and agency. Such a politics is more possible now than ever before given the unprecedented precarity effecting lives in the West in addition to the Rest of the world’s ordinary masses. Whereas before Western citizens may have been impervious to the critique of capital-driven citizen/nation/state formula as a source of their rights and privileges, their increasing vulnerabilities now make them more receptive to fresh approaches. Examples of such approaches are not exceptional anymore. The mayor of Palermo set in motion such an approach in 2019: the mayor Leoluca Orlando refused to apply a law that limited ‘humanitarian parole’ of migrants seeking residence in Italy to two years. Arguing that the limit would force migrants to go underground, the mayor refused to abide by the law. Encouraged by his example, some other mayors followed suit (Horowitz 2019). The mayor’s action was not necessarily intended as a challenge to the state form. Instead, it amounted to a fresh position on what a community is and who have a right to openly participate in the community. In effect, it affirmed the right of migrants as humans to participate in their respective communities. Thus, arguably, the boundaries of the community of citizens were expanded without renouncing citizenship and sovereignty was strategically, even if temporarily, wrested from the state without denouncing the state.15 Ultimately, the cardinal question is if and how such approaches can be cultivated further and scaled up. Approaches that would be sufficiently inclusionary of all without appearing to alienate the rights associated with citizenship. Approaches that instead would show how citizenship jealously wedded to territorial sovereignty is no longer a sufficient, or the best, purveyor of rights, nor a mode of privileged membership sufficient to account for the human diversity in ‘national’ communities. The national communities are no longer purely of the nation, but are increasingly composed of mixed populations of people, of citizens and non-citizens, of the privileged and the impoverished, of the racially othered and ethnically excluded. They are no longer impervious to the world’s transversal dynamics in fields ranging from economy to ecology. ‘Anthropocene Alerts’ is the way Timothy Luke (2019) captures the transversal nature of ecological/environmental precarities and politics. Luke’s term is both an alert about Anthropocene realities and a warning about the Westerndominated nature of politics activated around these realities. Still, he points to a field of exhilarating subjects—global ecological milieu—that is open to transversal collaboration. An emerging consciousness regarding

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the potential for global ecological collapse already agitates in that direction. What then might be the sort of politics that could cultivate such subjectivities, cognizant of pervasive precarities on the one hand and productive of novel norms of political community and belonging on the other?

Conclusion: Liberating Rights from Statist Sovereignty To reflect, I return to Etienne Balibar’s (2001, 17–27) discussion of ‘democratic politics of isonomia’—equality in rights of humans as humans, not of humans as citizens in participating politics and community. For Balibar, isonomia is the necessary condition for the kind of transversal politics that can alert masses to the universal perils of precarities. Isonomic politics does not necessarily jettison citizenship as a mode of rights within a community but broadens its modalities beyond the state so as to broaden the boundaries of community. In short, Balibar calls for a kind of ‘cosmopolitics’ anchored in the democratic instincts of isonomic attitudes and practices; where all human beings—natives and newcomers, citizens, and migrants—can participate in communitybuilding. In cosmopolitical thinking, the Italian Fascist and the African Immigrant would be equal participants as humans in the life of Rome as a polity though they may still end up with different positionalities in the life of Rome as a city. Following Balibar, only the active participation of all populations, including migrants, can democratize agency and reveal the universalized precarity as a deliberate product of transversal capitalism. Once the processes of exclusion turn into a process of inclusion into the city or the polity, politics becomes isonomic, struggles less ‘territorial, and certainly not purely national’ (Balibar 2001, 18). They become insurrectional! Universalized precariat, particularly in the urban milieus of the world, offers a portal to new insurrectional communities. Migrant and refugee movements accelerate this dynamic by wearing their migrant precarity openly and by signalling and highlighting citizen precarity. No measure in the armoury of the modern governance has succeeded in controlling the migratory flows, legal or illegal, voluntary or forced, political or economic. Instead of governments stemming the migrant tide, migratory activism, in defiance, has conditioned the content and contours of governmental policies—compelling shifts in policy and conduct.16 This

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dynamic turns migrants and refugees into architects of their own lives against all odds. It also inserts anew the ethical element into the conventional meaning of democracy for all. In what Balibar calls ‘Insurrectional democracy’, the right of the human-persons (not just citizen-subjects) to participate in the community becomes in actuality basis of the democratic process. If we take community as an organic, historically dynamic reality, we can begin to construe migrants as newcomers to the community and citizens as old-timers, intrinsically no more or less authorized to ‘claim’ the community or to speak on its behalf. Then, the defence of the community need not mean excluding all others but refiguring the community. This necessitates fresh forms and norms of participatory politics that can accommodate change even as people can negotiate the boundaries and demands of membership and agency within the community. A sort of politics that is cognizant of the convergence of the precarious status of citizens and migrants in essence as raw materials or last deposits of underclasses for global capitalist interests. A sort of politics that would allow for ‘a new process or a new regime of the becoming-subject of the citizen’ (Balibar 2012, 2008). A provision has to be made for the becoming of citizen subject as well along the lines of what Fernand Braudel (1988, 23) suggests of nations and national identities. France is a ‘forever incomplete project’, asserted Braudel, thus provisioning for the inexorability of change in identity and subjectivity. In the same way, citizen, too, is (must be seen as) a forever incomplete project whose contours and content need not be always wedded to statist-sovereignty. Instead, the field of citizenship can be negotiated for a politics that would establish and deepen solidarity among human subjects, in the words of Balibar (2012, 208), ‘by annihilat[ing their] subjection to various preestablished authorities, legal and extralegal, immanent and transcendent… and by conferring upon the subject[s] its/[their] capacities to relate to others’. A sort of politics that might confront the system that thinks of humans—citizens, migrants, and refugees alike—only as mere resources or raw materials for its sovereign economic machine. This might mean that we may have to re-figure, or better, re-invent, citizenship as an ideal of subjectivity on the one hand, even as we progressively liberate it from categorical state-sovereigntist practices on the other. I characterize such politics as ‘insurrectional politics’ fueled by people compelled into slow and steady activism and militancy under political, economic, and cultural duress. The old world of citizens, nations, and

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states is surely not dead, but to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, the new world of sundry precarities, coupled with insurrectional migrancy that is mixing people into a transversal crucible, having been already born, is poised to transform it radically. Perhaps, Virilio’s pessimism that characterizes citizens and others as mort vivant, ‘the living dead’, is not warranted after all.

Notes 1. From among thousands of reports one can access, see Anne Barnard and Karam Shoumali (2015). 2. For an image of Galip’s body in the same beach, see https://www.flickr. com/photos/bosnjaci/21182067581. 3. See the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) (2019) report on migrant worker exploitation in the EU. 4. In migrancy, we might begin to glimpse at the sort of political subjectivity that is needed to challenge the hegemonic logic and to pressure its dominant modalities in the hope of triggering different, if even slightly more fair, political and economic orders. If not triggering different orders, perhaps triggering ‘emergencies’ that not only expose the devastating hierarchies but also possibly begin to cultivate novel subjectivities that are defiant of the arbitrary limits to political life. As Walter Benjamin once intimated (1942, p. 392), emergencies carry the potential for the emergence of novel orders, and subjects who can defy the normative foundations that create and instrumentalize dislocation on the one hand and yet deny their role on the other hand. 5. Julie Turkewitz of The New York Times reported (2019), ‘Rioters looted shops and set fire to cars and buildings in the latest outbreak of violence against African immigrants in and around Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city. The police said five people were killed and at least 189 arrested’. 6. For a sustained analysis of this historical governmental arrangement and my debt to Richard K. Ashley’s take on ‘statecraft’, see Soguk (1999, pp. 37–48). 7. For a more elaborate analysis, see Soguk (2014b, 2015). 8. Jameson’s (1991, p. 17) use of the word is in the context of his discussion of ‘Pastiche’ in the following fashion, ‘…But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction…’. Also see (p. 334), ‘…from which everything interestingly complex about “Western civilization” has been amputated’.

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9. For a discussion of Marx on ‘reserve army’ of people and how this is related to the emergence of the conditions of precarity as conceptualised in Bourdieu’s work, see R. Jamil Jonna and John B. Foster (2016). 10. An instructive discussion on theories of resistance to precarity can be found in Charles Masqulier (2019). Masqulier critically engages the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler in favour of combining Bourdieu’s thoughts on habitus and doxa through theories of intersectionality. The idea is to overcome the symbolic tensions among differential habituses by strategically cultivating their experiential commonalities; all the while neither rejecting nor ignoring symbolic tensions. Tensions between a migrant and a citizen, or between a white worker and a black worker, for example. 11. Here is the full sentence: ‘This kind of “collective mentality” (I use this expression, although I do not much like it, to make myself understood), common to the whole epoch, is the origin of the demoralization and loss of militancy which one can observe (as I did in Algeria in the 1960s) in underdeveloped countries suffering very high rates of unemployment or underemployment and permanently haunted by the spectre of joblessness ’. Emphasis is mine. 12. For a recent example of such work, see Ritu Vij (2019). 13. For insights into why I use these concepts as my analytics here, read the chapter, ‘The Smooth and the Striated’, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988). 14. For a more systematic discussion of this tension, see Soguk (2014a). 15. I also agree with the argument that migrant resistance can directly challenge state sovereignty through a host of activities that might be called ‘infra-statist’, such as migrants shedding their identity altogether in order to avoid repatriation. For a discussion of how that happens, see for example Antje Ellermann (2010). To this one can also add the extra statist activism of Sanctuary Cities around the world, where cities are declared in effect free from some of the sovereignty practices of the state. A sort of zone of exception organized against the state’s claim to be in sole possession of such power. 16. Take, for example, Europe’s attempts to control and regiment migratory flows! While not ineffectual, they have largely morphed into a facade where Europe pretends to be in control yet cannot even disguise the chaos within and without its borders. Not unexpectedly, both within and outside Europe, European policies end up contributing to the precarious conditions in migrant lives. See the EU FRA (2019) report as to how this happens within the borders of the European Union countries. Equally troubling is the fact that same polices also ‘contribute to abuse of migrants’ outside of the borders. See for example Human Rights Watch (2019).

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References Agamben, G. (1998). Homo, Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Balibar, E. (2001). Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence. Constellations, 8(1), 15–29. Balibar, E. (2012). Civic Universalism and Its Internal Exclusions: The Issue of Anthropological Difference. Boundary 2 an International Journal of Literature and Culture, 39(1), 207–229. Barnard, A., & Shoumali, K. (2015). Image of Drowned Syrian, Aylan Kurdi, 3, Brings Migrant Crisis into Focus. The New York Times, September 3. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/world/europe/syriaboy-drowning.html. Benjamin, W. (1942). On the Concept of History: Theses on the Philosophy of History. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998). Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Braudel, F. (1988). Identity of France: History and Environment (Vol. 1). New York: Harper & Row Publishers. BBC News. (2017, August 24). Fascist vs. Immigrants: Why Are You Here? Video available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-410 38372/a-member-of-an-italian-fascist-party-faces-an-african-immigrant. BBC News. (2019, November 19). EU Countries Are Warned of ‘Lost Generation’ of Young Refugees. BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-europe-50472402. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London and New York: Continuum. Ellermann, A. (2010). Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the Liberal State. Politics & Society, 38(3), 408–429. European Union Agency on Fundamental Rights. (2019). Protecting Migrant Workers from Exploitation in the EU: Workers’ Perspectives. Available at: https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-2019-severe-lab ourexploitation-workers-perspectives_en.pdf. Favre, L. (2019). Migrant Workers Face Risk of Abuse, EU Says. US News, June 26. Available at: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/art icles/2019-06-26/migrant-workers-face-risk-of-abuse-eu-report-warns. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures and the College of France: 1978–1979. New York: Picador and Palgrave Macmillan. Glissant, E. (1992). Caribbean Discourse. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Horowitz, J. (2019). Italy’s Crackdown on Migrants Meets a Grass-Roots Resistance. The New York Times, February 1. Human Rights Watch. (2019, January 21). No Escape from Hell: EU Policies Contribute to Abuse of Migrants in Libya. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/01/21/no-escape-hell/eu-policiescontribute-abuse-migrants-libya. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Jonna, R. J., & Foster, J. B. (2016). Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness. Monthly Review, April 21. Luke, T. W. (2019). Anthropocene Alerts: Critical Theory for the Contemporary as Ecocritique. New York: Telos Press Publication. Masqulier, C. (2019). Bourdieu, Foucault and the Politics of Precarity. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 20(2), 135–155. Soguk, N. (1999). States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Soguk, N. (2007). Border’s Capture: Border Crossing Humans and the New Political. In P. Rajaram & C. Grundy-Warr (Eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Soguk, N. (2014a). Global Citizenship in an Insurrectional Era. In E. Isin & P. Nyers (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (pp. 49–61). London: Routledge. Soguk, N. (2014b). Local, Radical, Global: From International Relations to Insurrectional Relations. In M. Steger, P. Battersby & J. Siracusa (Eds.), SAGE Handbook of Globalization (pp. 70–84). London: Sage. Soguk, N. (2015). Insurrectional Politics: Theories and Practices of Contemporary Insurrections. Globalizations, 12(6), 829–833. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Townsends, M. (2016). 10,000 Refugee Children Are Missing, Says Europol. The Guardian, January 30. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2016/jan/30/fears-for-missing-child-refugees. Turkewitz, J. (2019). South African Riots Kill Five and Spur Cries of Xenophobia. The New York Times, September 3. Available at: https://www.nyt imes.com/2019/09/03/world/africa/south-africa-immigrants.html. Vij, R. (2019). The Global Subject of Precarity. Globalizations, 16(4), 506–524. Virilio, P. (2005). Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy. London and New York: Continuum.

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Wedeman, B., Munayyer, W., & Chaim, G. (2019). Migrants Describe Being Tortured and Raped on Perilous Journey to Libya. CNN , October 13. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/africa/libya-migrantschaim-intl/index.html. Zizek, S. (2017, September 16). Ordinary People Left Behind by God & the Free Market. Russia Today. Available at: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/403545-mar ket-automatization-economy-workforce/.

CHAPTER 10

Within the Factory of Mobility: Practices of Mexican Migrant Workers in the Twentieth-Century US Labour Regimes Claudia Bernardi

Introduction The contradictory and ambivalent nature of Mexican migrant worker presence in US ‘wonderlands’ is blatantly apparent in this short piece of satire published in New York Times in 1959: «What are these people doing?» asked Alice, surveying a vast, fertile, southwestern valley. «They’re cultivating surplus cotton and lettuce» replied the Red Queen. «Who are they?» asked Alice, tactfully ignoring the matter of why anyone should produce surplus crops. «They are Mexicans imported because of the labor shortage» explained the Red Queen. «Labor shortage?» asked Alice, «I thought we had 5.000.000 unemployed and a million or so migrant farm laborers who need work». «Obviously» retorted the Red Queen testily, «YOU don’t understand the American agricultural system». (Hill, New York Times, April 5, 1959, in Craig [1971, 34–35])

C. Bernardi (B) Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_10

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The ‘wildly curious’ Alice questions the identity and function of migrant workers, the so-called braceros, challenging the assumption of their need as supply labour force in a context of alleged scarcity. One of the assumptions underlying this paper is that far from being a necessary anomaly in war times or during phases of economic expansion, the import of temporary migrant workers is the ‘recurrent exception’ that is at the core of capitalistic modes of production throughout the twentieth century.1 Undoubtedly, the ‘strange figures’ of migrant workers in the US Southwest have modified their form over time, as a result of a variety of measures of control, capital’s demands, state politics, and under the pressures of racial discrimination and ideological labeling conveyed by public opinion. Beyond the top-down intervention of entrepreneurs, intermediaries, media, states officials, and law enforcement, braceros also adjusted ‘their form’ to satisfy their own desires and needs, through timely practices of resistance and refusal of work. Rather than considering migrant workers as passive actors or victimized subjects, this chapter claims that the structured and managed labour migration of Mexican workers in the United States throughout the twentieth century was the outcome of the capture of autonomous migrants’ movements and knowledge, and of the provisional successful control of the labour force. Within this structured regime of mobility and composite regimes of labour, these migrants opened up lasting conditions of possibility despite their status as temporary workers and their condition of managed migrants trapped in a permanent circulation: ‘A curious cycle of entry, work, repatriation’ (Kiser and Woody Kiser 1979, 59). Put in the sterile language of diplomacy, braceros are the object of negotiation in a series of bilateral agreements between Mexico and the United States that were stipulated in 1942 for importing Mexican workers to be employed in railroad maintenance and southwestern fields. The Emergency Supply Farm Labor Agreement legalized the import of migrants as a temporary measure due to the exceptionality of war, but the agreement was renewed until 1964 through Public Law 78— known unofficially as Programa Bracero—following strong pressure from growers, and despite the opposition of US unions and large parts of Mexican society. Almost five million contracts were awarded and nearly 10 million Mexicans entered the United States in these twenty-two years: 94% of them worked in the border states, in particular in California, Arizona, and Texas (Samora 1971; Acuña 2000; Calavita 2010; Cohen 2011).

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While braceros made their main appearance in public debate and institutional discourses during the Second World War, the term had been applied to previous experiences of labour-managed migration in the area, substantiating the idea of Mexican workers as a ‘reserve army of labor’, a well-known concept in Marx’s critique of political economy (Hahamovitch 2003; Surak 2013). In the Great War, almost 72,000 braceros crossed the border under the Ninth Proviso contract labour programme, and the Díaz-Taft Agreement of 1909 moved one thousand workers to the sugar beet fields in Colorado and Nebraska. The term bracero has even been applied to the forced importation of Cochimí indigenous labour in the eighteenth-century Spanish Alta California.2 The wide variety of political formations and relationships that promoted the importation of labourers, and the heterogeneous subjects to which the term is applied, suggests the weakness of the definition of bracero both as a mere juridical object of international agreements, and as a general labeling term for identifying low-skilled Mexican—or brown or ‘indian’ descendant—workers in the present-day United States.3 Rather than constraining the analysis of migrant workers’ experience to formal agreements or a unifying pejorative label, the attention is here turned to the lively practices generated by braceros and their frictions and fallout in terms of representation, discourse, and politics inflicted by entrepreneurs, governments, unions, and society at large.4 Over the past decades, a voluminous literature on Programa Bracero has accumulated. Scholarship has focused attention on the violation of workers’ rights and legislation, states’ roles, and the specificity of braceros as ‘guest workers’ in hosting societies (Galarza 1964; Hahamovitch 2003; Kavakli Birdal 2012). Taking a different tack, this paper considers the bracero as a peculiar form of labour whose practices have deeply shaped the ‘factory of mobility’ that had been assembled from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. The concept of a factory of mobility envisages the use of managed labour migration as constitutive of the capitalist mode of production through the analysis of the ways in which braceros ’ mobility was captured, valorized,5 and structured into a ‘chain of production’ through a complex system of recruitment, selection, importation, and deportation of migrant workers. My reading is primarily going to be informed by previous studies, archival and oral sources to provide a contribution to the existing literature on the creation of a peculiar regime of mobility merged with regimes of labour that I define as the ‘factory of mobility’ (Bernardi 2018).

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This formulation aims to shed light on the construction of a complicated logistic and bureaucratic system as a device of control, capture, and valorization of workers’ mobility across nations, in order to shape a peculiar form of labour that preserves migrants in a precarious life condition. The debate around the concept of precarity has produced a large stream of literature that is comprehensively presented in this volume in the contributions by Matt Davies and Hironori Onuki. Sociological approaches that only considered precarity as the insecurity of employment in Post-Fordist society of Western countries have been largely criticized by those studies pointing to the crisis of work and capital’s capture of life beyond the workplace (Barchiesi 2012). Furthermore, in the last two decades, precarity has been politically investigated through experiments of ‘research in common’ to create effective protests and forms of organization: ‘invisible, underground, unorganised’ precarious subjects have forged timing strategies of refusal and transnational networks of organization (Fumagalli and Lazzarato 1999; GruppoInchiestaRoma 2001; Precarias a la deriva 2004). Drawing from this literature, this chapter aims to present precarity as coextensive with the inner workings of wage labour already in the Fordist regime and constitutive element of the capitalist mode of production beyond Western borders. This perspective aims to unveil the ideology of mass employment and wage labour in Western countries, pointing to the proliferation of ‘forms’ of labour (van der Linden 2008) and to their frictions with capital and states’ politics of workers’ capture, valorization, management, and control. The investigation of bracero as ‘one’ of the ‘multiple histories of labour’ (Chakrabarty 2000) reveals the simultaneous and continuous use of a flexible, removable, racialized, disposable, and temporary worker, beside and together with the creation of a stable, nationalized, homogeneous subject—the well-known free worker, wage earner citizen. The analysis of the precarious living and working conditions of bracero purports to shed light on the issue of precarity in a transnational space.

The Capture of Turbulent Migrations Scholars usually consider the decades between the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as the time of the first wave of large migrations from Mexico to the United States. This migration is largely attributed to the political backlash of porfiriato 6 and, more

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importantly, to the gold rush and promises of success for resourceful individuals, which attracted the stream of hopeful migrants. However, hidden behind the glossy surface of the clash between a rising world power and an underdeveloped country, between the beneficial condition of property rights and the lack of opportunity in the latifundio large estate system, between the advanced liberal state and the brutal regime, there were practices of escape from the peonage system that pervaded the socioeconomic life of Mexicans in their country (Katz 1976; GouyGilbert 1985). Breaking the bond of debt servitude and running from forced internal deportations made them ‘free workers’ heading north: migration turned out to be the flight from oppressive working and life conditions that characterized late nineteenth-century Mexico until the Revolution.7 The escape from the bond of debt and coercive labour led migrant workers to US southwestern mines and fields where their presence was fiercely delineated through stigmas inherited from colonial times, which both affirmed the impossibility of their social inclusion on racial rationales and asserted the intrinsically transient nature of Mexicans. The racial discourse inscribed upon migrants was aimed to substantiate the idea of Mexicans as transient and racially contaminated subjects: ‘nomad’, ‘mongrel’ and ‘Indian’ were the most common terms used to describe their nature. Because of their ‘Indian’ ancestry, they were supposed to be nomad so deportation was presented as a justified measure for ‘respecting’ their transient nature, as the Committee on Immigration affirmed: ‘The Mexican is inherently a nomad, little prone to rooting himself’ (Reisler 1976, 129–130). This racial inscription shaped Mexicans as temporary and inferior subjects that had to be handled with paternalism and patience, as their presence was only a short break before the journey back to their natural place. Indeed, they were considered not dangerous like Blacks, but ‘indolent, lazy and tractable’ (Report of Governor C. C. Young’s Mexican Fact-Finding Committee 1930; Bogardus 1931; Cárdenas 1975). Their condition as expropriated subjects in US southwest lands did not prevent them from crossing the border to seek their life course.8 This heterogeneous milieu across the border was met with the restraining politics of the US government which aimed to re-establish nationalist rationales and manage these turbulent migrations, through deportations and immigration laws (Papastergiadis 2000). The period between the First World War—defined as the ‘death knell of liberal immigration policies’ (Hahamovitch 2003)—and the beginning of Emergency Farm Labor Supply Agreement (1942) is usually considered

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a transition between the liberal policies phase and the state intervention one: the managed migration of the Great War ended the liberal phase of labour migration, while the Second World War ratified the beginning of the government-administered period. From this perspective, the state is assumed as a criteria of distinction and key element to evaluate the way in which migrant workers are handled by historical actors; it is the watershed to mark the periodization, and the pillar of the analysis on labour migrations that are mainly analyzed in relation to the consolidation of states’ politics. Undoubtedly, states’ roles were increasingly important. But states were already influential from the end of nineteenth century, when exclusion acts and immigration laws aimed to categorize and select the population, stating the unlawfulness and undesirability of some categories of migrants whose unpredictable movements required regulation.9 The state politics of juridical bordering did not function merely as a filter imposed on incoming flows through exclusion acts and immigration laws, but actively promoted expulsion and immobilization, as well as the massive recruitment of migrants, often to replace troublesome workers. These various forms of juridical bordering by states constituted less of a crystal clear ‘knell’—to reprise Hahamovitch’s metaphor—than a clang of apparently oppositional policies that forged the management of the labour force and its smooth circulation across borders.10 Indeed, in this interlude of experimentation, deportations already played a constitutive and crucial role in the relationship between Mexico and the United States for regulating labour mobility, producing migrant illegality, and imposing a biopolitics of deportation (Balderrama and Rodriguez 1995; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Bernardi 2011). Deportation became a welldeveloped political device of discrimination and management of migrants: any behaviour believed problematic or causing delays and any objection to work was sanctioned and solved with deportation. In other words, juridical status was then accompanied by removability due to unsuitableness, protests, refusal to work, and unmanageable situations created by workers. Among the most well-known cases in which organized protests faced the removal of Mexican workers was the case of the Bisbee mines (Benton-Cohen 2009). It is no coincidence that the massive deportation of Mexicans from this Arizonian mine in 1917, operated by the National Guard after a long and tenacious strike by migrant workers— with a large Mexican majority—was simultaneous with the import of thousands of more suitable braceros to sustain the war effort and its need of minerals under the Ninth Proviso (Deutsch 1987; Alanis Enciso 1999;

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Plascencia 2016). The United States dealt with foreign troublemakers in specific sites of production, and conspicuously solved the hitch in the production process: this state’s intervention not only resulted in providing the labour supply, as interpreted in the New York Times satire described above, but also addressed the lack of docile and obedient workers. Expulsion and recruitment under the state’s provision worked side-by-side with the active role of capitalists in the import of migrants via intermediary enganchistas. The experience lived by Mexican workers was appropriated by the active maneuvers of so-called ‘hookers’—enganchistas —labour contractors, usually Mexicans or Mexican descendants, whose function was expressly to capture migration flows and affective networks on behalf of US growers and entrepreneurs. Indeed, employers sought to recruit migrants, sending labour contractors to the established areas of emigration like Mexico City, Guanajuato, Jalisco, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas (Massey et al. 2002). Initially, labour contractors recruited from the same villages where migrants came from as a useful means to assure them of the true existence of jobs, and reminded potential workers of the familiar names of migrated fellows. The hookers used the very networks of migrants and their routes of migration in order to organize large groups of departing workers, privileging families, taking over the role played by local Mexicans who were used to direct migrants to their destinations (Filindra 2014). A ‘great bulk of the contractors’ ensnared the Mexican migrants through a distorted narration of the ‘other side’ by leveraging their expectations and luring workers with false promises: they guaranteed good wages and low interests loans on workers’ future paychecks that would refund their travel costs and, above all, they depicted good working and living conditions. Actually, as soon as Mexican workers arrived in the United States, they found that interests were higher, payments lower, working and living conditions extremely poor. Until the final repayment of their debt, migrant workers were ‘hooked’: indebted and compelled to work under scant conditions that they had not expected. The ‘hook’ acted together with the ‘rope’, la cuerda, which was used to tie up workers during their transportation to avoid escapes and to control ‘the load’ (Gamio 1931; Cardoso 1980; Arias and Durand 2000). In brief, growers and entrepreneurs captured the turbulent movement of free workers moving northbound and then extended their arm to the interior states of Mexico using migrants’ networks, thereby establishing a specific regime of labour mobility through the ‘hookers’.11 In

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this guise, hooks and removals were coexistent exercises of control and subjugation that aimed to manage workers’ very movements in order to incorporate them into this fresh regime of labour mobility as an integrated component. The discursive apparatus of individual liberty and free enterprise that strongly characterized twentieth-century United States until the Great Depression, masked complex forms of coercion and exploitation in working places. Indeed, the immobilization of migrants was another device applied by entrepreneurs in order to maximize profits through labour control: guards patrolled the fields up to the 1940s limiting movement, and workers who were unable to control their debts would have their cars confiscated in order to immobilize them (Montejano 1987). The action of different and simultaneous devices—namely immigration laws, deportations, recruitments, hookers, immobilization—captured the living work spread out across the border into a process that valorized labour mobility.

The Circulation of ‘Bonded’ Workers Literally, in Mexican Spanish, braceros are those individuals ‘who use their arms.’ The term entered public discourse by depicting a clear image of the migrant workers’ function: migrants are reduced to their body parts needed to work, they are reified and degraded by the inner workings of a labour regime (Schmidt Camacho 2008). Whereas the commodification of a labour force reduces a person to a valuable object, braceros are immediately captured in a double process: commodification and representation. In fact, the origin of the term bracero is rooted in the colonial history and representation of indigenous people for whom the term was first applied, a long time before the scientific racism that largely influenced the debate.12 Bracero describes a body fragment—the arms—valued for the purpose of working, a body fragment that is consumed by work: ‘They are viewed as commodities, as objects, as chattels […] You rent a bracero for six weeks or six months, and if he gets damaged, you don’t care. You’ll never see him again. You get next year’s model—a newer, younger, healthier one.’13 In a bracero’s words: ‘I have worked all my life and all I have is my broken body’.14 The term gained popularity after the Second World War and soon became the most common one to name all Mexican-looking people: bracero stood for temporary, underpaid, in debt, low skill, not white,

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nomad, worker. Fragmented into body parts without any rights guaranteeing their reproduction as a labour force, and lured into scattered temporalities imposed by seasonal work and contract labour itself, braceros were captured in a transnational system of circulation established by entrepreneurs, associations of growers, local, national and federal governments, officers and guards in both countries, and labour contractors handled by commissary companies operating on a ‘mass production basis’ (Galarza 1964). The programme for importing Mexican workers imposed a complex logistical and bureaucratic machine that changed the space of the two countries involved through the dissemination of selection and recruitment centres, labour pools and migrant trades beyond the routes of entry that undocumented migrants opened during the programme.15 Programa Bracero, it can be argued, did not mark the historical passage from liberal policies to state intervention, from private management to public ones, as scholarships largely considered it (Surak 2013). Viewed as a new relation between capital and migrant movement, the programme is the political assemblage of several devices already at play that showed their effectiveness in capturing and valorising turbulent migrations and transnational connections of workers. A brief glance into the very process of circulation sheds light on the peculiar forms of capture and valorization of workers’ mobility. Braceros were paid less than other workers for the same task in the same working place; their salary was usually paid irregularly and its amount was often unknown until payday despite the contract. Shifting wage schedules were communicated at the last minute, underlining how workers had to always be available or, better yet, how the time of contract was fragmented into uncertain shifts. When workers and contractors disagreed on the amount of money due, the explanation usually given to braceros was that changes in wage rate were made in accordance with varying picking conditions, or with transfers from one field to another. Here, reproduction also became a valuable means of profit. Indeed, there were ‘illegal deductions for rooms, board, transportation, and farm tools and supplies’ that were not considered basic needs to guarantee workers’ production and reproduction, but were a supplementary benefit to be paid for: ‘a lucrative sideline that impinges on the rights and privileges granted the workers by law’ (Galarza 1964). At the same time, the government ‘deducted money for taxes, pensions, social benefits’, from which workers clearly would not benefit (Mize and Swords 2011; Miller 2013).

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Besides illegal and unfair deductions, poor working condition and uncertainty, control was imposed on workers’ mobility. As former bracero Don Liberio affirmed: ‘If you violated the 45-day contract and didn’t come home on time, they wouldn’t renew your contract. They wouldn’t let you go back’ (Mize and Swords 2011). Each bracero, regardless of the availability of fields to pick, had to stay in the farm until the end of the contract, and return immediately home at its end. Any other movement was considered a violation of the contract that turned the worker into a fugitive, and led to the loss of lawful status and the very possibility to be recruited again within the programme. In brief, the regulation and profitability of workers’ movement were strongly intertwined with control over the workforce that aimed to dispose of workers at any time without any support. The contract was not a guarantee for workers, but the certification of a chain of blackmails that was used to bond migrants to a particular machine of circulation. Furthermore, it is crucial to consider the proliferation of ways through which workers provided new earnings for their employers and institutions through their very mobility, and not only in the workplace. Indeed, migrant workers did not produce value just in the worksite; quite the contrary, when they left their home, crossed the border and moved to the fields, they were already productive before the inspections and for a long time after the end of the formal contract. Their movement and role was relevant beyond the act of crossing the line: every step in this cartography of mobility could be a source of value extraction. Institutions, officers, representatives, and ‘other non-legal individuals and groups, over the time, have profited of the official program’ (Galarza 1964), and found their way within this complex device of mobility and profit. Hence, it has to be asked how the same workers’ circulation produced value, transforming the space between workplaces, between countries and between cities into sources of profits. The valorization process not only relies on places as static geopolitical objects, but has also to do with the profitability of mobility itself that turns space into the very battlefield that is continuously recreated by frictions. Transportation was a means of profit: employers used a tight scheduling of bus movements to keep expenses down. Flatbed trucks, unqualified drivers, and bus accidents were the norm, and ‘state regulation of the wanton disregard of safety measures was poor or non-existent’ (Mize and Swords 2011). Mexicans had to pay the costs of transportation from their home to the recruitment centre. As workers usually had no money to buy tickets, they became

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indebted with a 5–10% rate of interest (Chàvez 2012). These costs applied not only to employed braceros who were more likely to repay their debts, but also to those who were rejected, usually for health reasons or lack of skill. Just in 1954, more than 21,000 were rejected, so it is clear that the simple access to competition for being recruited was immediately profitable. In other words, the very expectation of a contract became part of the economic process created by the selection procedure for inclusion into the programme. This expectation and desire was put to work so that counterfeit certificates for admission to the selection opened a profitable black market also for US officials.16 By 1944, ‘military officers had already swindled braceros of at least forty thousands pesos through the sale of counterfeit certificates’ (Cohen 2011). The areas around centres, on both sides of the border, turned out to be the space of proliferation of informal economies and satellite activities that valorized the waiting time of braceros during the selection process (Fuentes 2002; Burr 1961; Chàvez 2012). This seemingly dead time became the occasion for selling the acceleration of the process. Relations established by coyote with officials in the centres facilitated and sped up the selection and recruitment process for workers willing to pay (López 2002): it was a network of relations that was sold to the bracero. Like in the United States, despite the agreement and consequent terms of contract, ‘in practice there has grown up in Mexico a fringe industry consisting of the procurements of contracts’ (Galarza 1964). The programme ‘simply offered small-town mayors or their underlings the chance to sell permits, reward their allies, and supplement their salaries. Indeed, a black market in contracts flourished’ (Snodgrass 2011). Even several institutional levels of the Mexican government were involved in this transnational process of value extraction. The government asked for money from every candidate to fund public infrastructures, as happened in Oaxaca where bribes made them suitable participants in the selection process.17 In Tamaulipas and Baja California, workers were forced to work in the fields without being paid to prove their ability, in the hope of receiving certificates that would allow them the possibility of being inspected by the commissions in order to be recruited.18 In brief, unpaid work became the condition for access to a future, possible, temporary job that became a reward to be earned. Besides bribes and the informal economy that valorized migrant workers’ movements and presence, the programme imposed a ‘forced saving plan’ based on a 10% deduction from braceros’ earnings that they

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were supposed to receive on their return home.19 The circulation of labour was accompanied by the financialization of the deposits at Wells Fargo and Union Trust Co. in San Francisco that was then moved to the Banco Nacional de Crédito Agrícola of México: the government have never paid them all back, despite the mobilizations and protests of braceros (Torres Ramírez 2005; Durand 2007; Kosack 2015). In sum, deductions, fees, deposits, debts, bribes, and taxes had contributed to this transnational trade of production that valorized paths of mobility and, furthermore, dead time and expectations of workers. In brief, it is not only the availability of a labour pool and its management that is at stake, but the very movement of workers in all their valuable features for the purpose of creating a rigid mobility of commodified migrants bonded to the regime itself: either moved or immobilized, commodification is about nurturing labour regimes of migrant circulations.

Refusal in the Factory of Mobility Historical and/or political analysis of the raison d’etre of the Bracero Programme largely falls into a static or economist perspective and, at worst, understands it through a mechanical approach of ‘communicating vessels,’ where surplus people move from the less developed country to the more advanced one. Such perspectives are unable to grasp the imposition of structured labour mobility regimes that were displaced onto a transnational level. Exploring the relation and frictions between the political and economical actors at play allows for the comprehension of the complex set of mutations experienced in North America by those precarious subjectivities and their experimentations with molecular forms of resistance. Programa Bracero was a coordinated attempt, developed jointly by institutional, public, and private actors, to capture and valorize the turbulent movements of migrants, their networks, and their mobility in order to both serve capital’s accumulation and create a better valorized worker whose expectations, reproduction, and mobility could be exploited, thus transforming the contract into a reward for loyal and docile workers. Nonetheless, practices of resistance and refusal sprinkle the landscape populated by these figures. In the first place, migrants’ often unanticipated crossing of state borders challenged the structured bureaucratic regimes that supported

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capital’s needs. Indeed, migrants moved along the edge of the programme, crossing the border as undocumented, outside the recruitment process but inside the window that agreements opened to receiving migrants. During the programme, undocumented migrants always outnumbered recruited braceros (Kirstein 1977; Briggs Vernon 2004). It is worth questioning why so many migrants preferred to cross the border outside of the programme: They attribute their undocumented migrations not to desperation but to their own resistance to the Bracero Program. In their minds, a bracero contract offered only hard labor in the fields, imposed contractual limits on their mobility, and, they believed, discounted the cost of the food and housing provided by employers. (Snodgrass 2011; italic mine)

In this way, they resisted forms of coercion, reducing their indebtedness, and refusing to pay taxes and fee deductions. Migrants were escaping disciplinary grids applied not only to gateway points but also to the very conditions of admittance established by the agreement. Crossing outside of the Bracero Programme speaks to a desire among migrants to escape the regime of mobility managed by the state and capitalists, with its associated overexploitation of their activity at every stage of mobility. The entire process was ‘dehumanising’, made to discipline Mexican workers and ‘get them used to abuse’, reminiscent of factory and army conditions, as affirmed by state officials in recruitment centres (Ann Cheatum 2003; Corella 2003; López 2002). Beyond the legal agreement, migrants used other paths to escape lousy working conditions imposed by the programme, by working in southwestern fields as undocumented migrants. Migrating as undocumented was itself a form of unorganised resistance to the logistical and bureaucratic system of bribes, scrutiny, selection, and control imposed with the Bracero Programme. As workers embraced strategies of refusal from the regime of labour and mobility imposed by the agreement, their movements were again the objects of attempts at regulation and limitation by states. Mexico faced the problem of an excess of workers moving from the country so, to impede the flight of braceros, the government offered only temporary passports to modulate mobility through borders (González Navarro 1994). On the other side of the border, workers were reintegrated in the legal framework of the agreement through practices of ‘drying out’ that became a

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normal tool in the attempt to regularize the juridical status of undocumented ‘wetbacks/mojados ’.20 Through this, the state was made to bend to the effective practices of thousands of Mexicans that moved outside of the recruitment system, even as those practices were opened by the recruitment system itself. Migration outside of the agreement meant both a turbulent crossing to escape the disciplinary filters of borders as well as a line of flight from the managed flows established by the Braceros Programme. Political organization by workers and any form of protest was strictly prohibited; in fact, braceros who took part in protests were registered by employers and not recruited anymore (Hahamovitch 2003). Moreover, migrant workers who had experienced deportation or other crimes were not admitted. These rules were imposed to get a docile, social, and committed worker: a disciplined labour force was a fundamental requisite to admittance. In other words, agreements combined labour management, deportation and border patrols to discipline migrants from the moment of their departure from home, until the full consumption of their labour force. In addition to the forms of control and management from home to the fields described above, Mexicans faced the absence of any kind of protection. Indeed, US unions were mostly on the side of state, defending national and ethnic lines of differentiation to protect their bargaining power and the possibility of mediation with the various actors involved. Since the approval of the Bracero programme, unions opposed Mexican workers, their presence and their role in labour market.21 This segmentation of workers was very convenient for the economy’s growth and stability became the keyword in dealing with workers. The common accusation made by hostile entrepreneurs was of dangerous and anti-social conduct among workers. Despite the continuous attempts at the marginalization, control, and segmentation of migrant workers, they refused to be seen as victims and believed themselves capable of making their world (Cohen 2011). For some years, braceros ’ attempts at unionization on both sides of the border embraced the possibility of a transnational organized structure able to support the social movements that spread in southwestern fields in the fifties. This attempt lasted for almost one decade and saw the protagonist involvement of outstanding figures of the Chicanos movement such as César Chávez. The reasons for failure of braceros’ unionization were their lack of financial support, the constant threat of deportation for migrants’

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political activities, the uncertain contract renewal, the political attacks, and intimidation by the Mexican state (Loza 2016). Despite this failure, the present-day political organization Alianza Bracero Proa is still fighting to recover the 10% deduction on salary that braceros never received at their return (Astorga Morales 2013). In the context of labour managed migration, the classical forms of waged labourer protests such as strikes were rare: ‘You cannot call it a strike. It is a stoppage. How can you strike when you are already in a jail?’ Any attempt at organization, collective bargaining, or the election of spokesmen to comply with the obligations of contract found outright hostility (Galarza 1964; Morales 1989; Gamboa 1990). At the same time, food strikes were more successful in the short term and many effective stoppages took place, even if they did not resonate beyond the workplace (López 2002; Mize and Swords 2011). The threat of removal was a powerful tool in employers’ hands to avoid structured workers’ organization so that when protests happened, the most common answer was deportation, or transfer to another camp miles away that was part of the growers’ association: braceros were moved between camps to impede their attempts to organize, and to create a permanent circulation between working places. Another way of discouraging protests was not to assign workers fields to pick, so that they would receive the minimum wage that was usually not enough to live on: ‘we noticed that the workers who complained get less work. They are transferred to the extra gang. This gang he says is of the loafers and the strikers. They don’t get a field to pick like the rest’ (Mize and Swords 2011). In this way, whereas stoppage was a form of resistance, immobility was turned against braceros when they were not assigned fields to pick, as was mobility when braceros were moved to another grower’s field to break solidarity during protests. In brief, coercive mobility was the consequence of and solution to the refusal of work or to workers’ demands for better working conditions. At the same time, temporariness and unknown working destinations prevented migrants’ long-term organization. Nonetheless, the violation of contracts and eventual desertions became widespread phenomena among workers (Kirstein 1977). Mobility is the element at stake in the battlefield that is reproduced around the Braceros Programme. Whereas migration is often identified as a movement between states, the migrant worker assemblage also uncovers mobility as a struggle within national borders and between the thousands of spots in this landscape of mobility and its impossibility. If mobility is

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turned into a field of valorization, then escape from the programme and desertion in working places are practices of resistance: ‘Escape comes first! People’s efforts to escape can force the reorganization of control itself; regimes of control must respond to the new situations created by escape’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2008). The movements of migrants outside of the recruitment process were already conspicuous before and during the agreement, showing that labour programmes had not been able to capture and manage all the Mexican workers, and to handle migrants’ practices of resistance, desertion and escape in order to reduce their turbulent movement into a completely managed, regulated and filtered labour migration. Stoppages and attempts of transnational organization are therefore part of a constellation of political possibility for temporary migrant workers.

Conclusion In the factory of mobility in which braceros are captured, productivity is not solely located in the workplace, at home and in the reproduction of labour, but is in the very commodification of migrant labour that valorizes workers in their mobility, immobility, and waiting times. Migrant work is not simply about the supply of labour, but part of an assemblage of political devices for managing surpluses in the mobility of living labour into a permanent and controlled circulation. While the fifties and the following decade marked the rise of wage labour and social guarantees in Western countries as a universal norm and ideological measure for all labour relations (Moulier Boutang 2002), braceros lived and used their scattered temporality to articulate their political subjectivity inside the simultaneous, but shrouded, factory of mobility (Bernardi 2018). Within this tension, they have been silenced protagonists of original patterns of resistance beyond classical forms of structured organization and protests. Desertion, escapes, informal networks of solidarity and attempts at structured transnational connections are some ways through which workers tried to change the balance of power in their favour in relation to capital and state control, intermediaries, and law enforcement. The state scarcely regulated capital intervention, legislated on labour matters and alleviated working conditions, but it was a protagonist and willing actor in the management of labour and the promotion of a work ethic rooted in a narrative emphasizing the individual betterment of life and success (Cohen 2011). Whereas scholars have underscored the

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leading role of the state in terms of negotiation and its internal differentiation along institutional lines, this chapter has highlighted the proliferation of representations and discourses perpetrated by institutional actors with the aim of creating a regime of labour based on work as reward and debt as means to obtain it, while mobility and temporariness became constitutive elements of labour itself and life experience at large. The wide range of credentials, unpaid work, indebtedness, uncertain contracts, and labour control soon became constitutive components of a well-established labour mobility regime that differentially hierarchized the racialized workforce, then incorporated and circulated it into a permanent condition of disposability and precariousness. The incorporation of the non-integrated subject into a regime of labour mobility was a massive and elaborated strategy of workforce circulation and the externalization of a work ethic to serve one’s country. Labour managed migration was the planned answer to workers’ unpredictable mobility to maintain in circulation a fragmented, racialized, flexible, tractable, non-unionized workforce. In other words, a disposable and precarious workforce. Precariousness is attuned to the experience of mobility beyond the simple act of crossing borders and boundaries. It is linked to the chain of production that constitutes the factory of mobility in which connections between socio-spatial formations and temporality are expropriated and valorized by capital, states, and various figures of intermediation. Acknowledgements The research for this paper was financially supported by the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (2014– 2015), and it was discussed at Cardiff University during the British International Studies Association conference thanks to a travel grant issued by Georgia Institute of Technology on October 2016.

Notes 1. The pivotal and monumental study by Yann Moulier Boutang (2002) questions the concept of ‘wage labour’, and traces the long history of capitalist/capitalism’s development, from the fourteenth century till the first half of twentieth century, in many diversified contexts. In this important study, labour migration is placed at the core of capitalist accumulation in the history of economy.

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2. The study by Richard S. Street (1996/1997) presents the first ‘bracero’ in 1769–1790, when Franciscan missionaries settled in Alta California thanks to Cochimí Indian farm work. This specific labour migration is deeply rooted in the colonization process that, in US Southwest/Northern Mexico, formally ended only in 1848. This interpretation of ‘braceros’ exemplifies the historical overlaps and hybridity between colonized subjects and indentured labourers in the very same areas where Programa Bracero would later take place (Street 1996/1997). About the Ninth Proviso and Díaz-Taft Agreement, see the pivotal study of Mark Reisler (1976), then the following works by Cardoso (1980), Alanis Enciso (1999), and Plascencia (2016). 3. Among the exceptions are the recent work by Luis F. B. Plascencia (2016), which investigates the long history of bracero as agricultural contract labourers under state coercion in relation to the experience of Jamaican workers in Canada. This study considers bracero as a form of ‘unfree labour’, providing an important contribution to the existing literature as it addresses the relevance of the Bracero Programme in perpetuating forms of labour coercion, while previous studies are mainly focused on the state role and institutional interventions. 4. Kitty Calavita’s (2010) important and pivotal study has analyzed the internal differentiation and fragmentation of the state across institutional lines that led to several contradictions within the state apparatus, in order to point out the heterogeneity of responses and variety of actors at play. 5. In a similar guise, the study by Mahua Sarkar (2017) is concerned with surplus value appropriation in labour mobility in the case of contemporary Bangladeshi male workers in Singapore. 6. Porfiriato is the common term used to indicate the authoritarian regime of general Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). In 1910, John Kenneth Turner wrote a pivotal study about the working conditions and enslavement of Mexicans during the regime (2010). 7. See Moulier Boutang (2002) for a theoretical analysis of the relation between flight and labour in the long history of capitalism, and Mezzadra (2006) for a definition of escape (right to escape) in the context of contemporary migration. 8. At the conclusion of the Mexican–American war in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexican land owners found themselves strangers in their homeland and had to face the process of de facto expropriation of their properties. The Land Act in 1851, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the Desert Land Act of 1877 abolished the Mexican system of land concession, and assigned small plots to farmers willing to cultivate them— make them profitable—for at least five years. As result, 80% of these lands were sold to railway companies and land agents. Illegal expropriations

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12. 13.

14. 15.

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worked side-by-side with the deceptive use of the bureaucratic and administrative system, which ultimately deprived also those Mexicans rightfully entitled to land possession. See Menchaca (1995), Benton-Cohen (2009), and St. John (2011). The Immigration Act of 1917 and the following one of 1924 were stringent laws that included a literary test for admission, added harsher sanctions, extended the period of deportability, approved funds for enforcement, introduced the quota system based on nationality and, above all, created a new class of person—the illegal migrant—within the national body. Mexicans were exempted from the Act of 1917 until 1919, and the quota law did not apply to them as it was mainly addressed to European migrants. See Scruggs Otey (1960) and Ngai (1999, 2004, 2005). On the modern history of labour management see work by van der Linden (2010). Entrepreneurs also established casas de enganche, literally ‘houses of the hook’, placed along the border (the most famous are the ones are in Laredo and El Paso) that worked jointly with recruitment agencies in Mexico for apprehending potential workers. See Arias and Durand (2000). Thanks to Luis F.B. Plascencia for this suggestion; see his work for further information about the genealogy of the term. Anderson H., ‘Blood on the Lettuce’, 18 September 1963, transcript of radio broadcast, 2, folder 3, box 11, Ernesto Galarza Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University, in Flores (2013, 125). Testimony of a Mexican worker of the Imperial Valley (California, 1935), in Balderrama and Rodríguez (1995, 328). The location of recruitment centres represents a map of the knots that linked villages of departure and sites of selection, with US centres on the other side of the border. Furthermore, their location is testimony to the continuous tension and negotiation between governments, state agencies, and various institutions. Indeed, the composite political assemblage that led to the collocation of recruitment centres mainly along the border and in the northern part of Mexico was due to the strong pressure of growers that saw their transport costs diminished as a result. See ‘Letter from Yuma Vegetable Shippers Association-Yuma Producers Cooperative-Yuma County Chamber of Commerce to Senator Carl Hayden’, 16 August 1949, p. 2, and ‘R.L. Skov to Clinton P. Anderson’, ‘B.L. Yarbrough and J.C. Wilson to Clinton P. Anderson’; ‘Clinton P. Anderson to the President’, 17 August 1949’ in the Commission on Migratory Farm Labor Collection. The whole process was supposed to follow these steps. Individual employers and the grower’s association requested braceros from the state employment department, which issued a ‘certificate of need’ approved by the Secretary of Labour in Washington. When a scarcity of labour force

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and the unavailability of domestic labour was proved, then a schedule of requirements was drawn up and orders were placed by the US representative at the recruiting centre with the Mexican official of corresponding rank. In Mexican recruitment centres, the Mexican Department of Health examined the workers, police and military authorities cleared them for compliance with Mexico’s military service laws, and workers were given a certificate and identification card. Then, recruited braceros left the centres by bus, travelling to reception centres located along the United States side of the border where they passed through the hands of US medical examiners and of Department of Justice security officers: their body was scrutinized again and sanitized with DDT. Employers could choose whether or not to accept the worker selected. After a contract was signed by the employer’s representative, the Mexican consular official, and a representative of the US Department of Labour, the worker was transported to a particular reception centre where he/she had to wait to be called by an employer. The contract guaranteed (de jure) the following: a minimum wage per hour; migrant workers could choose their own representatives to negotiate and mediate with employers; salary was reduced by 10% as deposit that would be repaid at the end of the contract; work was guaranteed for 75% of the time of contract, or migrants would receive a minimum sum of money on non-working days. After signing the contract, employed braceros were then transported to the housing camps, or to association labour pools if the employer was part of the grower’s association (Galarza 1964). Through this process, certificates and identification cards became a precious black market good that flourished on both sides of the border. Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca. Informe que rinde el C. Gobernador Constitucional del Estado li. Alfonso Pérez Gasga a la Legislatura del Estado, acerca de la gestión administrativa comprendida del 17 de septiembre de 1959 al 16 de septiembre de 1960, México, Editorial Jus, 1959–1960, 9, in González Navarro (1994, 285) [italic are mine]. Memoria de labores del cuarto año de gestión administrativa del C. Francisco González de la Vega, Gobernador Constitucional del Estado de Durango, 18. González Navarro (1994, 284); Primer Informe de Gobierno Dr. Norberto Treviño Zapata, Gobernador Constitucional del Estado de Tamaulipas, Ciudad Victoria, 1958, p. 26, in Ibidem; cfr. Fitzgerald (2018). Yolanda Chávez Leyva, min. 19:40, in Gravitt et al. (2006). Wetback, or mojados in Mexican Spanish, is a derogatory term used to identify and label Mexican migrants who supposedly get wet while crossing the Río Bravo to enter the United States. Actually, crossing the river is a rare practice so this label denotes further its racial intent to attribute an inferior status—to be undocumented—with an embodied

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sign. Regarding undocumented migration and ‘illegal alien’, see North and Houston (1976). To ‘dry out’ the undocumented, the US patrol was used to transport migrants to the border and get them to put one foot over the border onto Mexican soil in order to make them re-enter the United States as legal bracero. 21. See the letters sent to President Truman by Unions and Associations (Commission on Migratory Farm Labour Collection).

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CHAPTER 11

The Aesthetics and the Politics of Precarity: Three Films Matt Davies

Precarity poses a highly potent political problem: it speaks directly to the conditions in which subjectivity can emerge, conditions which in turn highlight the potentially destabilizing effects of the emergence of precarious subjects. The shared or common sense of the correct places for things and people that situates the precarious at the margins of subjectivation— that is, the sensibility that cannot recognize precarious subjects—is in conflict with the processes and experiences that shape and emerge from the subjectivity of the precarious themselves. Precarity defines an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ of social order; it is a boundary condition in which subjectivities can either be brought in, acting to reproduce the distribution of subjects, or excluded as pathological, disrupted, and inferior subjectivities. A politics of precarity depends upon creatively overcoming the subjective slippage between, on the one hand, this ‘inside’, which is defined by the constraints on desiring, deciding, or acting imposed by

M. Davies (B) Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_11

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the givenness of the identity associated with being precarious and, on the other, the ‘outside’ defined by constraints on subjectivity that result from the inability to connect decisions and outcomes. This chapter investigates the relations between precarity, subjectivity, and politics, by examining three films about precarious workers: (1) Israel Adrián Caetano’s 2001 film, Bolivia, which examines the life of a Bolivian migrant worker in a café-bar in Buenos Aires, Argentina; (2) Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film, In This World, which traces the journey of two Afghan refugees from a camp in the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan through Iran, Turkey, and Europe, with London as their intended destination; and (3) Alain Corneau’s 2003 film, Fear and Trembling, which tells the story of a young Belgian woman who was born in Japan but left as a young child and has returned to Japan to work in a major corporation. The films do not provide evidence or present data about the lives of precarious workers; they present specifically aesthetic arguments about how precarity affects subjectivity and politics (cf. Davies 2010). Rancière (2009) suggests that to elucidate such arguments, we must ask how the films relate thought, action, art, and image and the disjunctures between these elements. The disjunctures open a space where the temporality and spatiality of precarity can be investigated. This is not only a question of the narrative, nor of the relations internal to the story or the frame: it also involves the aesthetics of the films, how they produce an extension of the perceptual and conceptual apparatuses of the viewer into the world. The films—their arguments and their aesthetics—will be analysed with regard to three kinds of concerns: space, time, and the body. First, the chapter investigates how the films portray spatial distributions of uncertainty and precarity; second, it looks into how uncertainty and certainty are ordered temporally; and third, the body and its relations with artefacts and objects are analyzed as a presentation of subjective states and status. These various distributions of certainty and uncertainty are analyzed with regard to their consequences for subjectivity and the politics of these consequences. Before these analyses, however, we must specify precarity and its relation to subjectivity and politics.

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Defining Precarity Precarity refers to working under precarious conditions or terms of employment in contemporary capitalism: temporary and flexible employment, low-pay and low-status jobs through which discrimination increases the vulnerability of the worker, migrant labour, and unpaid work (see, e.g. Gill and Pratt 2008). Precarity is defined temporally by short time horizons. Spatially, precarity appears in terms of the contingency of place and of spatial relations and in terms of movement—often transnational movement (see Bernardi, and Onuki, This Volume)—around the margins of core, securitized, or indispensable places and activities. There are two principle approaches to theorizing the politics of precarity. A political-economic understanding of precarity emerged from feminist studies of women’s work, especially in terms of how women enter the labour market and the consequences of their entry for both the employment relation and for social reproduction (Vosko 2006; Vosko et al. 2009). Studies of the emergence of the mobilization of women workers, migrant workers, students, and creative workers in Southern Europe, especially in Italy, France, and Spain, drawing on concepts such as ‘creative labour’ or ‘affective labour’ or ‘immaterial labour’‚ set out to link the mobilization of these workers to the flexibilization of their working conditions. Guy Standing’s synthetic account of the ‘precariat’ as a new class of precarious workers both charts the social and economic changes behind the increase of numbers of precarious and contingent workers and explores what he sees as the likely political responses to this increase (Standing 2011). This political-economic approach emphasizes the uncertainties faced by people whose employment status is highly contingent, temporary, and flexible. It is politically problematic because it tends to read political dispositions off of sociological or economic conditions. In other words, precarious workers or the ‘precariat’ are assumed to be disposed to particular forms of political mobilization or to assert certain kinds of demands on the basis of their precariousness. While much valuable research has been done on mobilizations of precarious workers, it nevertheless replicates the habits of economic determinism. It also presents a problem for the analysis of subjectivities because the deterministic logic of the ways these studies approach politics leaves little room for conceiving the subject as capable of autonomous thought and action.

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A contrasting approach, developed mainly by Judith Butler (2006), builds on the critique of the retrenchment of American military power in the wake of 9/11. That day’s attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon define an event that Butler identifies as having exposed the interdependence and vulnerability that marks the human condition, the denial of which is premised on the failure to recognize the Other as equally human. Butler observes that people are vulnerable and can be injured, and that this presents an ethical basis for thinking about interdependence. Vulnerability and interdependence are part of the human condition; life is fundamentally dependent on anonymous others. But post-9/11, the public mourning Arab victims of violence is closed off: Arabs are made ‘other’ and dehumanized. Invoking Levinas’s arguments about face-to-face encounters, Butler sets out to criticize this dehumanizing othering and to recover an ethical basis for defending belongingness to the larger human community through recognizing the vulnerability of the self in the face of the other. This second approach is problematic because in its search for a universal definition of the human condition to found an ethics, it removes the concept of precarity from the specific conditions that produce it. By turning away from the particular conditions of precarity, the approach forecloses specifically the space for politics. Butler makes precariousness (precarity) a universal quality and while it may provide a compelling basis for an ethical argument, its very universality suspends difference and thus forecloses the spaces through which a politics of precarity might be seen or rendered. Ettlinger’s (2007) concept of precarity attempts to bring these two approaches together by ‘unbounding’ the concept in time and space. I wish to present precarity as a condition of vulnerability relative to contingency and the inability to predict. … Precarity is located in the microspaces of everyday life and is an enduring feature of the human condition. It is not limited to a specific context in which precarity is imposed by global events or macrostructures. (Ettlinger 2007, 320)

Precarity may be thus grasped in terms of contingency and uncertainty, e.g. the uncertainty of continued employment and the attendant uncertainties regarding lodging, food, health, and community. In Ettlinger’s approach, there is a kind of binary at work between uncertainty and

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certainty, which she sees as operating through the reduction and elimination of difference. This binary also makes it difficult to focus on the politics of precarity because the movement that the binary establishes is from uncertainty—precarity—towards certainty. Both subjectivity and politics, as will be seen, depend on a position beyond this binary movement. For Ettlinger, uncertainty and its tendency to resolve into a search for certainty constrains political possibilities materially and discursively by externalizing difference and homogenizing the interior of a group. The range of actions available to the individual in the group is constrained by this logic of classification, which highlights differences while suppressing similarities; homogenization, which foregrounds similarities while suppressing differences; and legitimization, in which ‘identities and power relations bound up in classification and homogenization are justified and possibly institutionalized’ (Ettlinger 2007, 326). However, by equating precarity with uncertainty in this conception, for Ettlinger precarity becomes a (quasi-) universal condition in which the logics of classification, homogenization, and legitimization police the social order. Once we define precarity as an unbounded condition, it becomes difficult to see how it might be related to particular political dispositions or processes. In order to link precarity to politics, it must be first seen to have a particular impact on the subject or processes of subjectivation. What, then, is the relationship between uncertainty and the subject? In a world with no uncertainty, subjective acts are not possible because the outcomes are always already known for the actor: to act is merely to fulfil the given obligations of the circumstances. At the same time, as Ettlinger demonstrates, uncertainty also renders subjective action impossible because the actor can draw no correlation between act and outcome. Certainty and uncertainty are both impediments to acting. Another way to frame the problem is to see the capacity to tolerate uncertainty as a condition for acting, thus for subjectivity or for being a self. Subjectivity is a matter of managing or coping with uncertainty. David Levine’s (1998) conception of uncertainty is finely tuned to the range of experiences of and responses to precarity. This is not to deny the force of Ettlinger’s argument about the particular structure of precarity as people in their everyday lives attempt to navigate experiences of certainty and uncertainty. The point is that precarity tends to be a pathological

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form of uncertainty, a ‘radical uncertainty’ that, as Levine puts it, impedes action: Being uncertain means doubting what we know, what we want, and what we can accomplish. Radical uncertainty means doubting to the point that we cannot know what we want or what steps will enable us to gain what we want. Uncertainty does not impede action… [it] is a necessary context for action, insofar as it indicates that we live in a world where possible futures are not foreclosed by custom and tradition. Radical uncertainty does impede action, since it disconnects the future from the plans we have for it in the present. (Levine 1998, 80)

For Levine, to act means to make a connection between an internal or subjective plan and an external or objective result. Certainty refers to a strong and direct connection: when I do x, the outcome will certainly be y; if I drop a glass, I can expect it to fall towards the ground. Uncertainty comes in when the connection is weaker. However, there is a range of possibilities for uncertainty. Thus I get on the train to go to work with a strong expectation of arriving at work but there is much about the objective world that could disrupt my plan: the train could break down or not be running, work may be cancelled due to problem in a building, I could get ill or injured on my way to the train. All of this makes my journey uncertain but not precarious: ‘According to the first [sense of uncertainty], I am uncertain when I think something is true about the world, especially the likely future shape of events, but acknowledge that I could be wrong’ (Levine 1998, 69). But there are also more radical forms of uncertainty. ‘Radical uncertainty refers to a state in which knowing is not possible, and thus implies its disconnection from acting… [this sense of uncertainty] means that I consider the future course of events unknowable, and act accordingly’ (Levine 1998, 69–70). Thus, in the first sense of uncertainty signaled by Levine, knowledge of past patterns of outcomes provide the basis of an expectation that future patterns will be similar. However, he distinguishes between the way that rules determine outcomes and the ways that rules provide a context for individuals to pursue their ends. In the event that the rules are determining, ‘to act’ is not meaningful. Where the subject is ruled by tradition or by its insertion into a hierarchy sanctioned by custom, the outcomes

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of actions are pre-determined for the subjects. This can lead to pathological outcomes for the subject because the subject’s practical intelligence is denied and its tacit skills are merely deployed in the performance of given, pre-determined tasks (Dejours and Deranty 2010). ‘Powerlessness is the fate of most living in this world. Their lack of power means that acting in the modern sense is not part of their lives’ (Levine 1998, 73–74). This account bears a striking resemblance to the social order organized by classification, homogenization, and legitimization as described by Ettlinger, or to ‘the police’ as described by Rancière: ‘society here is made up of groups tied to specific modes of doing, to places in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places’ (Rancière 2010, 36) Levine contrasts this with life under the rule of the market, which devolves the power to affect outcomes relevant to life plans to the individual and, through the expanding scope of the subsumption of the individual capacities to affect cost, price, and demand, ‘helps turn caprice into statistical regularity’ (Levine 1998, 74). Uncertainty changes, then, from a problem of fate into a problem of the changeability of the future as ways of life are changed in relation to the revolutionary force of ever-changing means, forces, and relations of production. If…we become uncertain about ourselves and what we can or should do, this is not the uncertainty built into the flow of time per se, but the uncertainty built into the way modernity reconstructs the flow of time to accommodate the process of change. … Instability associated both with technological unemployment and cyclical fluctuations in output and the demand for labor makes livelihood uncertain for most workers. The threat of loss of subsistence implied by unemployment is among the most objective kinds of insecurity the individual can feel. (Levine 1998, 74–75).

Up to this point, the burden of knowability and uncertainty rests on the objective world. ‘On the objective side, what stands in the way of acting is the inability of the agent to predict and control outcomes because they are wholly determined by external forces. On the subjective side, what stands in the way of acting is the inability of the subject to form and act on plans due to factors bound up with self-doubt’ (Levine 1998, 76). Levine is criticizing economic theory inasmuch as either it emphasizes the subjective side to the point where the world is deemed unknowable, or it reduces the subject to a set of ordered preferences and endowments.

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Thus the notion of precarity speaks to the conditions in which subjectivity emerges. What are the destabilizing effects of the emergence of precarious subjects? The politics of precarity are also bound up in the issue of uncertainty. Politics, in the first instance, is a matter of subjectivation, that is, of becoming capable of registering subjectivity through the disruption of a regime—or a ‘distribution of the sensible’, in Rancière’s formulation—that denies or ignores this capability for particular subjects. It should be emphasized that this conception presupposes neither individual nor collective subjectivity. Subjectivity emerges rather in the gap between action and recognition and, as Dejours argues, in the creative overcoming of the suffering that characterizes the resistance of the social and material worlds to our efforts to realize our intentions (Dejours 2007).

The Time and Space of the Precarious Subject: Insides and Outsides Cinema is a useful medium for investigating temporal rhythms and the production of space. For research into precarity, the combination of moving images, style and genre, and narrative permits an exploration of the range of perceptions and the common (shared) sense of people whose vulnerabilities to uncertainty are defined in spaces in motion and flux, that is, of people who experience the spatial distributions of subjectivity and uncertainty in movement. The notion of the aesthetic subject (Shapiro 2010), with its sensitivity to spatial and temporal distributions of possibilities for subjectivity, informs the following analysis but at the same time, the psychoanalytic conditions for being a subject, not one that ‘has’ attitudes or beliefs but in terms of how one comes to be a subject and what that means for politics, must also figure here. I take Shapiro’s critique of the ‘psychological subject’ less as a straightforward rejection of the importance of the psychology of the subject and more as a strong argument against the reification of the subject. What are the temporal and spatial horizons of subjectivity, uncertainty, and precarity? How do space and time bring thoughts, feelings, and the experiences of diverse contexts together in film? The three films under discussion here are about migrants: people in movement. Bolivia tells the story of Freddy, a migrant worker from Bolivia working in a café-bar in Buenos Aires along with Rosa, a migrant worker from Paraguay; Enrique, the owner of the bar; and various local

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patrons of the bar such as the taxi drivers Oso and Marcelo. In This World tells the story of Jamal and Enayatullah, Afghan refugees living in a camp in the Northwestern Frontier of Pakistan, who decide to try to migrate to London. The film traces their journey across Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Europe. In Fear and Trembling, Amélie is a young Belgian woman who has returned to Japan to work as a translator for a large firm on a one-year fixed contract. In This World and Bolivia make use of specific stylistic devices to give realism to their stories. In This World makes use of handheld digital cameras and available light, nonprofessional actors, and minimal incidental music in the soundtrack (apart from the music that is playing in the background in various scenes) in order to give the film a documentary feel. Bolivia makes use of a very different stylistic device to assert the realism of its story. Shot in 16 mm black and white film, with minimal make-up for the actors, unobtrusive lighting and sharp contrasts, and filmed in location settings in Buenos Aires rather than in studios, the style invoked here is of the Italian neorealists of the 1940s and 1950s. Both styles are conventions in filmmaking that set out to present the viewer with a reality-effect, used to uncover hidden or invisible truths: in these cases, the lives of people who live and work at the margins of core, metropolitan economies. In other words, the filmmakers in both films set out to disrupt the regime of the visible—the distribution of the sensible— by confronting the viewer with the lives of subjects whose subjectivity would otherwise not appear on film. Fear and Trembling, in contrast, has a much more conventional, composed, and artificial style. Shots and scenes are carefully composed to highlight the hierarchies of corporate life, the degradation and degeneration of the subjectivity of the central character, Amélie, and the artificiality of her own perceptions of the spaces and of the culture to which she aspires to conform. The realism of the documentary style or the neorealist style situate the viewer on the outside of the lives of the subjects, from where they can be seen; in Fear and Trembling, we explore Amélie’s subjectivity from inside as her fantasies unravel and her ability to act is constrained. Amélie apparently lacks the characteristics of an objectively precarious worker. Although she is a migrant worker—voluntarily moving back to Japan as a university graduate in order to work in a Japanese corporation and, as she puts it at the beginning of the film, to become Japanese herself—she has a contract and, in her account of the working

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practices of a major Japanese corporation, at least, to dismiss her or for her to resign before the end of the contract would result in ‘losing face’. All three films explore the distributions of subjectivity, precarity, and uncertainty through the interplay of interiors and exteriors, and a ‘doubled outside’ (Walker 2006), the ‘outside’ that defines and contains the binary relations between interior and exterior that organize the films’ protagonists’ lives. As migrants, these protagonists—Freddy, Jamal and Enayatullah, Amélie—stand both outside and inside the communities and social worlds towards which they migrate and as such, the solutions to their dilemmas or resolution of their desires cannot be found by bringing them ‘inside’. If we rely on a straightforward political economy understanding of precarity, then in Bolivia, Freddy would be the character we would identify as precarious: a migrant worker without documents, having lost his access to land where he had been a peasant farmer on a coca farm that was burnt down by Americans presumably in the war on drugs: international action that provokes the movement of Freddy from Bolivia and the countryside to the city in Argentina. But while the power relations that govern Freddy are explicit throughout the film, he is not fatalistic; on the contrary, he seems to be the character in this film most capable of coping with uncertainty, most able to make subjective choices in his circumstances. While his objective conditions are precarious, Freddy’s subjectivity appears to be much less so. Oso is the character in Bolivia who faces the most radical uncertainties. Deeply in debt, including to Enrique the owner of the bar, he gradually loses control throughout the film up to the point where he punches Freddy and Freddy hits back, breaking his nose. This is a good illustration of the pathology of precarity, because the only reaction left to Oso is pathological: it is to kill Freddy. The objective sources of Oso’s precarity are plain in the film: debt, negotiating around access to a car so he can work, etc., but the subjective sources are also plain. For Rosa, there is the certainty of having to negotiate the constant pressures from the men to be sexually available. Hers is a grim certainty that constrains her ability to act or to express herself. As an immigrant her outcomes are known for her, she has very few meaningful choices she can make throughout the film. Most of the action of Bolivia takes place in Enrique’s café bar, which stages the diverse experiences of people in different kinds of vulnerability. The inside of the café provides objective certainty (work rhythms, pay)

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that is disrupted by leaving the café. The bar acts as a condensation point for people in movement: the Buenos Aires taxi drivers as well as Freddy and Rosa, the immigrants. Freddy and Rosa are the only principle characters who the film follows outside of the bar—Freddy to make a phone call, Freddy and Rosa to go dancing and to stay together in her hostel, Freddy on the streets after work being stopped by the police and later finding a different café where he can sleep a little. The sole exception to this set of spatial relations—the Argentines in the bar, the immigrants in a more fluid space—comes in the films only point-of-view (first person) shot: when Oso and Marcelo are thrown out of the bar and Oso shoots Freddy on the bar’s threshold from the passenger seat of Marcelo’s taxi. In In This World, there is a marked contrast with Bolivia: the interior of the confined spaces is the space of maximum uncertainty: Jamal and Enayatullah are detained on the bus; Enayatullah is reluctant to get in the back of a truck because he does not know where it will take them; Enayatullah dies in a poorly ventilated shipping container. In Fear and Trembling, the opening and closing scenes are set in a Japanese garden, the Ryoanji Zen garden in Kyoto, where Amélie contemplates her lost childhood and her time working for Yumimoto corporation. The garden establishes a paradoxical relationship between inside and outside: a contained space for contemplation where Amélie, as an outsider, considers her relation to a highly structured, apparently harmonious space that she craves to be ‘inside’. Amélie’s uncertainty is thus established in terms of her desire to return to a place of happy childhood memories and in doing so, to become ‘a real Japanese’—a desire that the more vigorously Amélie pursues it, the more impossible it becomes. Most of Fear and Trembling takes place on the 44th floor of an office tower, headquarters of the Yumimoto Corporation—a multinational corporation presented as involved almost indiscriminately in every kind of trade and so big that the figures representing its cash flow become ‘abstract art’. Amélie’s workspace is hierarchically structured. In an establishing shot, the desks in the office are distributed from the bottom of the frame, where Amélie works under her immediate boss Mori Fubuki, to the top of the frame where the floor manager works. There are a few exterior shots where Amélie walks to work, and the shots where she fantasizes about flying over the city define the space of her life where she feels in control. However, the spatial relations of this film, like the other films discussed here, manifest the extended lived spaces of the migrant

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worker—the mobile subject of the films—primarily within the confines of the workplace. The aesthetic conventions of neorealism in Bolivia and of the documentary conventions that order In This World intend to represent space ‘as it is’ and thus the tensions between the conceived space, the perceived space, and the lived space of the protagonists do not figure so clearly in the narrative organization of the spatial distributions of uncertainty. Fear and Trembling is aesthetically much different: Amélie’s perceived space, her cognitive, symbolic space, is structured by her fantasy of what a ‘real Japanese’ must be, so there is a contradiction between her perceptions and her lived space. She relies on an imaginary space (her imagined self-defenestration that allows her to fly over Tokyo while daydreaming in front of a 44th floor window) to give her a sense of control over circumstances. Interiors and exteriors are not merely the spaces inside and outside buildings. Because they are all migrants, each of the protagonists is also situated in an urban ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ exterior to the fixed spatial relations of territorial states and national economies. In the racist discourses of the patrons of the café-bar—especially Oso’s discourse— Bolivia, the nation, is conflated with Paraguay, Ecuador, and other external countries. It is the ‘outside’ to the resident precarious subjects of Buenos Aires. It is also a place to which Freddy cannot return. Amélie does not suffer the same restriction on her mobility; she is in Japan voluntarily. The doubled outside—the frontier that determines who or what counts as inside and who or what remains outside—in Fear and Trembling is more obscure: Amélie’s exile to the toilets that she must clean for the last seven months of her work contract seems to indicate a place safely outside the corporate hierarchy that she continually disrupts. The title of the film In This World is a reference to a comment made by Jamal when he is speaking on the phone from London to relatives back in Pakistan and reports that Enayatullah has died: he is ‘not in this world’. Death, as a limit to the subject, also defines what is inside and outside of the world. Thus the ‘outside’ that describes the place of the foreigner is quite slippery: it is not a fixed place but a space shaped contextually by the forces that determine how people can be together and how they must be kept apart.

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The Time and Space of the Precarious Subject: Temporality and Rhythm Thus spatially, the precarious subject of these films is not the outsider who must be brought in—the outcomes of all three films suggests that this ‘bringing in’ is not possible. Instead, the precarious subject is subjected to a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion that defines the structures of certainty and uncertainty. So also temporally: the precarious subject is not a ‘primitive’ or ‘native’ who must be brought into modernity. In Bolivia, Freddy repeatedly demonstrates a manifest adaptability from rural farmer to urban life. Modern technologies are a central element of the daily life of the characters in In This World, such as the mobile phones they use to keep in communication with the communities from which they depart as migrants. Amelie’s provenance is manifestly modern and European, indeed, this is what enables her to take up a job in a (modern) Japanese corporation. In these films the precarious subject appears always already modern. This raises questions about the linear, progressive time of modernity and modernization. For each of the films, indeed, the subjects are always simultaneously inside and outside of modernity. The usual binary contrast between the temporality of modernity (linear, progressive, objective) and pre-modern temporalities (circular, cyclical) operates on subjects by presenting modernity as the goal: the project is to bring the pre-modern subject inside, to make the subject conform to the structuring and constitutive properties of linear and progressive time. The film that comes closest to presenting the subject’s journey as from pre-modern into modern time is Bolivia, through Freddy’s subjective flexibility: displaced from his farm in Bolivia by war on drugs, he adjusts to urban life in Buenos Aires. As noted, Bolivia uses the conventions, including the narrative conventions, of neorealist cinema to demonstrate Freddy’s passage from the foreign ‘outside’ (Bolivia) to being a foreigner ‘inside’. The experience of the duration of events conforms to narrative conventions in film—no long, boring sequences, which keeps the narrative moving along. Durations are contrived to feel ‘natural’. Twenty minutes into the film, Freddy asks permission to make a call home. He gets very little time to talk—the call is expensive, it costs him nearly a day’s salary. The film illustrates Freddy’s subjective journey not only through narrative but also through imagery. Images of the clock face show up throughout the film, and the patrons of the bar struggle over the remote

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control for the television—that is, the rhythms of the broadcast day shape their interactions and desires. When the clock breaks, the film provides a visual hint that the modernity of the linear temporality is not secure. However, cyclical time does not disappear in the film: the opening scene in the bar window with a sign advertizing for a position in the kitchen; at the end, after the uniformed police arrive to deliver Enrique and Rosa summons to appear before the court regarding Freddy’s death, Enrique makes a new sign advertizing for a cook. In Fear and Trembling, Amélie is trying to make the opposite journey. Rather than a passage from tradition to modernity, she embarks on an impossible return to an idealized childhood identity. As in Bolivia, however, the events of the film render linear, progressive time unstable. Amélie begins the film, and her contract with the Yumimoto Corporation, with the expectation that her skills in the Japanese language and her understanding of Japanese culture will secure for her promotions in the corporation as a vehicle for her quest to become a ‘real Japanese’. However, her repeated faux pas in the corporate hierarchy eventually land her working in the company’s toilets where her skills are irrelevant and progression nullified. The effective binary temporalities are therefore not modern and pre (or post) modern but internal and external. Linear, progressive time has an objective, external character. In Bolivia, references to linear time are explicit: the clock face, for example—though the owner of the bar, Enrique, must try to repair the clock by replacing its battery with one from the TV remote; in Fear and Trembling, Amélie has a one-year contract with Yumimoto: her narrative rests on the certainty of her temporal grounding. But linear time is also structured by uncertainty for the precarious: in In This World, the time it will take Jamal and Enayatullah to travel to London is uncertain. How they cope with this uncertainty is the basis of the film’s plot. Unlike Fear and Trembling, Freddy does not have any certain grounding for his time frames: he does not know when he will be able to return to Bolivia, for example. Oso, Freddy’s antagonist, is similarly unable to manoeuvre through the structured uncertainties of linear time: for example, he does not know when he will be able to pay his debts to Enrique. Internal, subjective time in the films is the time of moments: experiential, rhythmic, the feeling of duration. This interior experience of time is how the films show signs of either certainty or subjective capacity: so for In This World, Jamal and Enayatullah cope with the uncertainties of

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their trip in the moments of pause that interrupt their progress. These are moments of sociability, work, and rest, waiting for something to happen. In Bolivia, just as the interior of the café frames a space of certainty and containment for Freddy, it is also where the rhythms of his work shape his time. The strongest clues to the characters’ subjective states are given by alcohol and drunkenness. When Freddy goes out with Rosa to dance, he drinks too much, gets reckless and isolated, and eventually assaults her. Oso, the Argentine taxi driver and patron of the café, also suffers the most radical uncertainties: uncertainty in the external linear progressive time, and also uncertainties internally as he gets increasingly drunk and aggressive. In Fear and Trembling, Amélie imagines herself becoming a ‘real Japanese’ in one year, performing her work in line with her expertise and advancing through the corporation. But her experience of time is in conflict with this as she is given ‘punishment’ jobs that waste her time and efforts, from being told to repeatedly photocopy her departmental manager’s golf club rules to spending seven months—over half of her one-year contract—cleaning the toilets. Amélie’s fugues, when she imagines herself flying out the window and above the city, contrast with her clear uncertainty in dealing with the contradictions between her fantasy of becoming a ‘real Japanese’ and her inability to work according to the expectations of her bosses and co-workers. The exterior or objective temporal structure of certainty that allows Amélie to repeat her pathological, self-defeating efforts to be a ‘real Japanese’ is absent from the exterior/objective temporal structures of the protagonists in Bolivia or In This World. Indeed, the linear time horizons for Freddy and for Jamal and Enayatullah are matters of uncertainty. Freddy does not know where he will sleep at night, nor when he might return home to Bolivia. Enayatullah and Jamal have a goal, London, but do not know in what time frame they might get there. Their journeys are punctuated with or by interruptions: detained by Iranian police at the border, they are released into Pakistan; stuck in Tehran, they take up work in a cutlery factory; they must wait at the Turkish border for a pass to be clear and then for a patrol to move away; Enayatullah’s journey is finally interrupted short of Italy by his death in a shipping container; and Jamal reaches London only to have his asylum application denied. This exterior, linear structure of time also operates in these three films as the unfolding of their narratives. There are internal structures to their rhythms and durations that also deploy patterns and markers

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of uncertainty and certainty. Because of the uncertain nature of Jamal and Enayatullah’s journey, they spend lots of time stopped, waiting, not progressing. These moments appear to be cyclical rather than linear: working, resting, being social—the mundane rhythms of everyday life. Similarly for Freddy: there are various shots of him working that focus on his hands—grilling meat and sandwiches, filling a water glass. The effect in the film is to underscore Freddy’s embodiment as a subject, rather than the abstraction of commodifiable body parts that often defines discourses of migrant labourers (see Bernardi, This Volume, pp. 8–9). The ‘double outside’ (Walker 2006) is also temporal. Modernity is the constitutive temporal other to this binary of linear versus repetitive time. Modernity defines linear progressive time as an external (to the subject) locus of certainty or uncertainty in these films. Whether certain or uncertain, it provides the ground on which the protagonists (subjects) act. But the ‘other’ time—nonlinear, rhythmical, a time of durations—is not specifically internal. The objectivity of the linear and progressive timelines is encountered by the subjects but then is internalised into their own capacities to be, or to feel themselves to be, centres of decision, action, or desire. Thus the passages or journeys of the subject in these films are not a matter of bringing the subject into modernity. Indeed, each film in its own way demonstrates the impossibility of such a passage, for the precarious subjects are ‘always already’ modern. However, the films also do not indulge in a pastoral or Orientalist or romanticised account of a supposedly pristine non- or pre-modern time. Instead, the films show that there is a temporal ordering of objective externality and internal experience that distributes certainty and uncertainty in ways that problematize and even pathologize subjective action for the precarious subject. In these films, such problems and pathologies are manifest in the bodies and the artefacts of the precarious.

Body and Artefact As stories about precarious workers, all three films give prominence to bodies at work. The three films register the bodies of their protagonists through different aesthetic commitments and thus in different scales and registers. The (different) realist aesthetic commitments of Bolivia and In This World emphasize the body in objective relations to other

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bodies, artefacts, and environments while the aesthetics of Fear and Trembling tend to emphasize Amélie’s subjective state. Facial close-ups are rare—avoided, perhaps—in both Bolivia and In This World. Hands figure prominently in Bolivia: Freddy washes his hands frequently; much of the work he does is shown by focusing on his hands. Thus rather than relying on facial expression to present the subjective state of the characters, for these latter two films certainty and uncertainty are revealed through the body and its relation to the objects and artefacts with which is must interact. For the central characters in these films, precarity is manifest in the structuring of uncertainty and certainty as encountered as external or objective conditions, or as characteristic of their internal or subjective state. In Bolivia, Freddy manifests his uncertainty in one drunken meltdown but otherwise, especially at work and in relation to his work, he is subjectively adaptable and creative in the face of external uncertainties. Oso is an unemployed taxi driver: his uncertainty is internal and external. At various points in the film, Freddy is seen drinking water, coffee, wine; but alcohol signifies subjective uncertainty—Freddy gets drunk at the dance before assaulting Rosa; Oso’s last straw is when he gets so drunk that Freddy and Enrique must throw him out of the bar. The subjective states of the characters of the films are often explored through their relations with their possessions as markers of an objective world. In Bolivia, Freddy has a carrier bag with his clothes and papers. When the police rummage through the bag, it is a sign of his objective precarity but also of his mobility, his subjective capacity to cope with uncertainty. It is also the trace that remains of him after he has been killed: the manager of the hostel cleans up the room where he and Rosa stayed, picking up his papers and clothes while complaining to Rosa about having unpaid guests in the room. More generally in Bolivia, patrons of the bar bicker over the television, or over access to the remote control. As noted above, the clock in the bar breaks and when it does, Enrique takes a battery from the remote control for the television to fix it. Uncertainty springs in part from the fragility of things in Bolivia: in addition to the clock and the remote, we are also shown shots of a dripping coffee machine. The films show work by focusing on the body in motion; subjectivity emerges in the way that all of the films, not just Bolivia, present bodies at work. However, even the hands are not given the privilege of close-up shots in In This World. Instead, the film tends to keep the

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viewer at arms-length from the characters. In In This World, Jamal shows subjective competence and capability comparable to Freddy’s; he carries his body confidently and adjusts quickly to his changing circumstances. Enayatullah’s shows less confidence, at least initially. Precarity and uncertainty are manifest for Jamal and Enayatullah in their objective, external circumstances more than in their internal, subjective processes. All three films represent the international mobility of the migrant workers in and through confined spaces: the bar in Bolivia, the transport vehicles in In This World, the office in Fear and Trembling. Enayatullah in particular avoids confined spaces: his reluctance to get into a truck when he is not certain where it is taking him highlights his precarious situation, especially as he has by that point been detained once in a bus and will later die in a shipping container. But Jamal and Enayatullah both show great resilience in their journey as they take up work when necessary to pass time or earn money for their journey, such as in the workshop where they help make cutlery. Because Fear and Trembling departs from a realist aesthetic, the imaginary nature of the subject’s relation to the objective world is more evident. The narrative of Fear and Trembling inverts the relation that characterizes Bolivia or In This World, that of the uncertainty of objective world in relation to the precarity of the subjective world: Amélie feels certainty in objective, external conditions but she suffers her internal, subjective uncertainty. Amélie is gradually stripped of her mental skills: Saito first orders her to forget how to speak Japanese; Fubuki makes her work on calculating expenses when Amélie complains that she needs work in which her brain is ‘needed’; and after inadvertently humiliating Fubuki, she is made to clean toilets for the last seven months of her year-long contract. The more she attempts to conform with her ideal of what a ‘real Japanese’ is, the more her subjectivity is degraded. One could object that Fear and Trembling is a racist film: the Japanese characters are all very one-dimensional, each carrying a stereotype of Western perceptions of Japanese culture, Japanese sociability, and especially of the Japanese corporation and its ethos. However, the film sets itself up from the opening shot as Amélie’s fantasy, an imaginary relation with Japan rooted in her childhood experiences and her longing for a lost connection. That her imaginary relations nonetheless take the forms of projections of Western anxieties about Japan is precisely the basis of her

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inability to perceive the social relations she inhabits or the practical consequences of her efforts to manifest her fantasies in her workplace relations: she thus suffers a radical subjective uncertainty. Amélie’s conversation with Fubuki about having been born in Kansai prefecture is just one of the moments in which Amélie fails to connect with the people she works with because she cannot leave behind her fantasy of having a natural connection to Japan. Amélie’s insistence on living out her fantasy in her imaginary social and spatial relations produces the disconnection or disjunction with her lived spaces: a disjunction that reveals itself in her body. The actor playing Amélie, Sylvie Testud, allows her character to betray a loss of control through her increasingly wild hair, by dancing naked in the office at night after failing to complete an important task, by sleeping under a pile of garbage on the office floor. Although Fear and Trembling tends to focus on Amélie’s face to show her subjective state, the scene of her most radical loss of control comes when she strips naked and dances in the darkened office—her face is no longer the focus as her body registers her inability to complete her work. Indeed, each episode of self-degradation accompanies a descent into the physical body in terms of her work assignments. She illustrates this herself when she tells Fubuki a more extended account of her fantasy: she says that as a child, she wished to be God; as an older child, she lowered her ambition and hoped to be Jesus; later she adjusted her ambitions again, aiming no higher than martyrdom. This descent from pure divinity to embodied divinity to divine suffering is mirrored in her own professional trajectory in the corporation: she has gone from having gained a contract with the corporation where she expects to bring her special talents to bear on important jobs; to showing off her linguistic talents while being asked to perform meaningless tasks; to the martyrdom of having to leave aside her particular skills—fluency in Japanese—to suffer physical breakdown doing tasks she is ill-suited to: she is made to calculate expense receipts until her fingers lock up. She tells this story of her divine ambitions to Fubuki, in an evident ploy both to accept and manipulate her subordination. She finally succeeds in properly occupying her place as subordinate only to immediately commit another faux pas, embarrassing Fubuki when the latter is crying privately in the toilet. Critics of Fear and Trembling frequently note the sadomasochistic relations between Amélie and her co-workers, especially Fubuki.1 The sadomasochism of the relation with Fubuki is made most explicit in two episodes in the film. Mr Omochi dresses Fubuki down in front of the

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office staff and Amélie can no longer understand what he is saying, and so she projects onto his comments a fantasy that he is raping Fubuki. This is the scene that leads to the moment when Amélie follows Fubuki into the toilet and finds her crying. And when Amélie meets with Fubuki to explain why she will not be renewing her contract at the end of the film, her account of Fubuki’s response is overtly sexual as Amélie says she gives Fubuki an orgasm as she plays into her ongoing subordination. However, unlike other films that hint at a form of sadomasochistic dependency in an office setting (such as The Devil Wears Prada, implicitly, or explicitly, Secretary), in Fear and Trembling this quality of the relationships is presented from the perspective of Amélie’s fantasies. This is important because it allows us to explore Amélie as precarious due to her subjective uncertainty. In contrast to Enayatullah’s vulnerability to confinement, in Fear and Trembling non-confined space signifies an imaginary, though constrained, freedom. Amélie attempts to regain her lost childhood connection to place in Japan but the early sequence in which she looks out the 44th floor window over the city and, in her fantasy, throws herself out so she can fly over the city, leads her in the end to say that she has surely left parts of her body throughout Tokyo. In conversation, she tries to connect with Fubuki by discussing their common birthplace of Kansai prefecture where each makes a claim to having her heart there—Amélie claims to have left her heart there. Body and artefacts merge to create an imaginary realm of psychic safety, a defence against the lived uncertainties that frustrate Amélie’s efforts to bring her plans to fruition.

Conclusions Precarity and subjectivity are connected through the notion of uncertainty. Following Ettlinger, we accepted that uncertainty is a defining characteristic of precarity. But uncertainty is also a defining characteristic of and precondition for subjectivity. Certainty—the certain correspondence between an actor’s position and acts and their outcomes—forecloses the sense of being a centre of decision and action because the outcomes are—certainly—already known. Acting is thus merely fulfilling a role. In terms of political analysis, this state recalls Rancière’s notion of ‘police’, tying people to specific modes of doing and being. Similarly, however, radical uncertainty—where there is no correspondence between

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acts and outcomes—also forecloses subjectivity, making, deciding and acting meaningless. If we identify uncertainty as the characteristic of precarity, then the precarious subject cannot act—and no politics of precarity is possible. However, if we grant another kind of uncertainty, an uncertainty that the subject can cope with, then there is no difference between the precarious subject and any other subject. Without this difference, again, there can be no politics of precarity. Nevertheless, as we have seen in these films, certainty and uncertainty can have peculiar distributions in space and in time, with different consequences for different subjects. One conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the expression of subjectivity in precarious circumstances amounts to what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls ‘cruel optimism’. The bad outcomes for Freddy, Enayatullah, and Jamal, and in a different way for Amélie, suggest that the condition of the subject in precarity, the asserting of subjective capacities, to live creatively through coping with certainty and uncertainty, leads to pathological outcomes: fixations on fantasy (for Amélie); deportability (for Jamal); or death (for Enayatullah and for Freddy). Or alternatively, if Freddy is autonomous or resilient, is he not then achieving or reproducing the capacities identified with the liberal subject? Are the politics of Freddy’s subjectivity disruptive of the order that locates him socially and economically as precarious? It would seem, on first reading, that the pathological outcomes of precarity for the subject in these films derives precisely from the conditions of their subjectivity. It is the pursuit of their subjective goals that undermines their subjectivity—or kills them. However, are these precarious subjects not precisely the unaccounted, the part with no part? In This World and Bolivia, films with realist styles, both humanize their subjects and position the viewer to be sympathetic to their plights. The films, as visual media and in their aesthetics, make visible the lives and work of subjects whose struggles to survive call into question the political-economic and cultural orders that render them invisible. To move their spectators, the films rely on an ethical instinct that demands that something must be done to rectify the conditions of the precarious worker for the precarious worker, on behalf of the precarious worker. Politically, the realism of these films indicates a particular kind of equality of subjectivity of the central characters with the subjectivity of the viewer: the liberal equality of autonomous individuality. On the other hand, a political subjectivity is found in the equality of the subjects seen in terms of solidarity that disrupts the police order,

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as Onuki shows in his discussion of the NGOs that assist unauthorised migrants in Tokyo (Onuki This Volume, p. 303). This is a solidarity that connects subjects across their differences without effacing difference. The disruptive force of the logic of equality shows up in these films not in any discursive claim for recognizing the common humanity of the presumably dehumanized precarious subject; it shows up in the subjects’ work. In other words, the logic of their equality appears in the embodied everyday rhythms of creatively coping with their particular uncertainties. Thus—counterintuitively perhaps—it is Amélie who shows how to find a political moment in precarity. Amélie’s frustrating insistence that she is like her Japanese interlocutors is patently wrong in the narrative. Yet this insistence is what provokes the most overtly political moment in the film, the moment when her plight does make her recognizable to her Japanese cohort: when workers begin using toilets on different floors so as not to contribute to her humiliation. This gesture disrupts the policing of Amélie—putting Amélie in her place—through the assertion of a logic of equality—Amélie is at last recognizable as a subject by other subjects when her dignity is at stake. There can be no political guarantees with regard to precarity. These three films, each in its own way, show how precarity cannot be located specifically as an objective or subjective condition. Precarity is neither reducible to particular employment relations nor is it generalizable to a universal ethical condition. Rather, precarity is constituted through the relations between subjects and objects as increasing uncertainty is met with the policing of the subject who must act as if the connections between intentions and plans and outcomes are broken. The politics of precarity thus emerge not from actions or identifications previously defined as political as such nor from a simple recognition of the subjectivity of an other. Politics occurs in the new connections between subjects that precarity might enable.

Note 1. Cf. reviews aggregated at Rotten Tomatoes http://www.rottentomatoes. com/m/fear_and_trembling/.

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References Berlant, L. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bolivia. 2001. Directed by Adrián Caetano. Argentina and The Netherlands: Fundación PROA, Hubert Bals Fund, Iacam, Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, La Expresión del Deseo. Butler, J. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso. Davies, M. 2010. “You Can’t Charge Innocent People for Saving Their Lives!” Work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. International Political Sociology 4 (2): 178– 195. Dejours, C. 2007. Subjectivity, Work, and Action. In Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory, ed. J.-P. Deranty, D. Petherbridge, J. Rundell, and R. Sinnerbrink, 71–87. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Dejours, C., and J.-P. Deranty. 2010. The Centrality of Work. Critical Horizons 11 (2): 167–180. Ettlinger, N. 2007. Precarity Unbound. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 32 (3): 319–340. Fear and Trembling. 2003. Directed by Alain Corneau. France: Canal+, Divali Films, France 3 Cinéma, Les Films Alain Sarde. Gill, R., and A. Pratt. 2008. In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness, and Cultural Work. Theory, Culture, and Society 25 (7–8): 1–30. In This World. 2002. Directed by Michael Winterbottom. United Kingdom: The Film Consortium, British Broadcasting Corporation, Film Council, The Works, Revolution Films. Levine, D.P. 1998. Subjectivity in Political Economy: Essays on Wanting and Choosing. London and New York: Routledge. Rancière, J. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London and New York: Verso. Rancière, J. 2010. Ten Theses on Politics. In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 27–44. London and New York: Continuum. Secretary. 2002. Directed by Steven Shainberg. USA: Slough Pond, TwoPoundBag Productions, double A Films. Shapiro, M.J. 2010. The Time of the City: Politics, Philosophy and Genre. London and New York: Routledge. Standing, G. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. The Devil Wears Prada. 2006. Directed by David Frankel. USA: Fox 2000 Pictures, Dune Entertainment, Major Studio Partners. Vosko, L.F. 2006. Precarious Employment: Towards an Improved Understanding of Labour Market Insecurity. In Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada, ed. L.F. Vosko, 3–39. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.

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Vosko, L.F., M. MacDonald, and I. Campbell. 2009. Gender and the Concept of Precarious Employment. In Gender and the Contours of Precarious Employment, ed. L.F. Vosko, M. MacDonald, and I. Campbell, 1–25. London and New York: Routledge. Walker, R.B.J. 2006. The Double Outside of the Modern International. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 6 (1): 56–69.

CHAPTER 12

Fashioning and Contesting Precariousness: Unauthorized Migrant Workers in Japan Hironori Onuki

Introduction The alleged advent of the ‘gap society’ (kakusa shakai) has aroused a vigorous debate in twenty-first century Japan (Bunshun Shinsho Henshubu 2006; Chiavacci and Hommerich 2017). This debate is mainly concerned with the socio-economic repercussions of increasing income inequalities after the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. Japan’s efforts to tackle subsequently prolonged recession through its ‘introspective adjustment’ (Hook and Harukiyo 2001) to heightened competition associated with neoliberal globalization have entailed structural labour market reforms. In contrast to Japan’s post-war economic prowess that made lifetime, regular (seiki) employment the norm, these reforms have facilitated the growth of unstable, non-regular (hiseiki) employment in temporary, part-time, day, or contract work, which currently accounts for approximately 38% of the entire workforce—more

H. Onuki (B) University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1_12

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than 21 million workers (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2019). What has jolted the Japanese population, much of which subscribes to more egalitarian ideals, is that non-regular employees are becoming entrenched in poverty (Yuasa 2007). There has been an emergence of ‘working poor’ (wakingu pua) who work as much as or more than full-time regular employees but who lack possibilities for upward mobility and have little prospect for maintaining a subsistence level of living or earning more than welfare payments (Osawa 2010). These trends have brought about an unrelenting societal malaise—exacerbated by the disaster of the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown in 2011 and its consequences—and signalled the demise of the comforting perception that ‘all Japanese are middle class’ (Allison 2012; Vij 2012). In Japan’s gap society, Karin Amamiya (2007a, b), an eminent activist and author, stresses that Japanese young workers are disproportionately succumbing to the precariat. ‘Precariat’—a neologism combining ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’—refers to the workers consigned to the unstable forms of employment, with no job security, low wages, limited social benefits and statutory entitlements, high risks of ill-health, and the absence of collective protection (Standing 2011; Vosko 2010). This term is originated from the concept of ‘precarity’, which has emerged since the early 2000s as a platform for a series of social struggles in Europe against poor living and working conditions accompanied by an incessant lack of certainty within the context of neoliberal globalization (Neilson and Rossiter 2008). Influenced by the European precarity movement, Amamiya (2007b) posits that the deepening precariousness of young workers in Japan has been ‘deliberatively created’ by the neoliberal logics of capital that pursue flexibility in employment relations through means such as reducing new regular employment opportunities. While rightly pointing to some of the structural and political forces at play, however, Amamiya (2007a) questionably asserts that ‘the young Japanese have turned out to be like migrant workers’. Such an association of migrant workers with disadvantaged, non-regular jobs seemingly reflects dominance of discriminatory discourses against these workers in Japan, which takes for granted the production of them as precarious subjects. This chapter seeks to denaturalize and re-politicize such a presumption by: (1) drawing attention to the ways in which Japan’s immigration controls construct migrant workers as certain forms of labour that cluster in particular jobs within the flexibilization of the Japanese labour market; and, (2) illuminating the everyday struggles of migrant workers against

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precariousness in Japan in order to highlight their agency amidst difficult socio-economic conditions fostered by these controls. Since the end of World War II, Japan had been long thought to be immune from the globalization of labour migration. The post-war formulation of the Japanese immigration control legislations strictly rejected the entry of the so-called ‘unskilled workers’ (tanjun rodosha) from abroad, which had remained essentially unchanged until very recently. The social history of Japan’s ‘miracle’ economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s without launching any labour-importing schemes had underpinned the conservative belief that deemed the Japanese modern nation as a homogeneous entity and the incorporation of culturally and ethnically different ‘others’ as a serious threat to its social security. Yet, as a response to a dwindling workforce due to a rapidly ageing population and chronically low birth rates, the Japanese state revised its Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act (hereafter the Immigration Control Act ) at the end of 2018 to authorize a large number of migrant workers to engage in manual labour (Asahi Shimbun 2018). Though this new law is regarded as a ‘remarkable turn’ for Japan to relax its longstanding insularity (Rich 2018), for decades the Japanese state has utilized a series of ad hoc measures to recruit migrant workers to low-skilled and low-wage jobs. Especially since the mid-1980s, the escalation of labour scarcity through the ‘bubble’ boom of the Japanese economy generated a dramatic increase in migratory labour flows to Japan, mainly from other Asian countries. The proportion of these migrants in Japan was still the lowest among the major highly industrialized nations, but the rapidly augmented influx of ‘foreign national workers’—literally translated from gaikokujin rodosha, intimately associated with unauthorized migration for employment purpose from non-Western underdeveloped regions—became one of the most discussed ‘problems’ in the late 1980s (Lie 1994). While this discussion suddenly receded when the Japanese economy fell into recession in the early 1990s, during the subsequent period unskilled migrant workers have made up part of an ‘ongoing transformation of capital-labo[u]r relations in Japan that is characterized by rising income inequalities and greater vulnerability of many segments of labo[u]r’ (Douglass and Roberts 2003 [2000]). With such historical context in mind, focusing in particular on unauthorized migrant workers in Japan,1 this chapter seeks to press forward two interrelated arguments about the practices of producing and

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contesting precariousness. First, it is argued, following Bridget Anderson (2010), that the immigration controls, which regulate the transnational inflows of workers and define the conditions under which their entry is authorized or denied, help to fashion precarious labour in ways that respond to capital’s demand for greater labour market flexibility through the ‘construction of institutionalized uncertainty’. The second argument is that unauthorized migrant workers, who may be portrayed as being at the forefront of precariousness due to their extremely uncertain, insecure, and unstable conditions fundamentally attributable to their status of ‘illegality’ in Japan, are not simply powerless victims but rather are political actors who contest and negotiate such conditions even at the most subaltern level. In developing these arguments, this chapter attempts to contribute to a broader International Political Economy (IPE) literature by shedding light on power dynamics that are producing, reinforcing and/or challenging the augmentation and diversification of precarious workers within the neoliberal restructuring of the global political economy. This chapter is organized in three sections. The first section briefly reviews existing literature on precarity in relation to the dynamics of global labour migration. The second section highlights the role of the Japanese immigration regulations as moulds producing unauthorized migrants as ‘cheap’ and flexible workforces available when required in Japan’s de-regulated labour market. The third explores the questions of what forms of agency are and are not manifested through the contestations of unauthorized migrant workers against precariousness in Japan.2

Precarity and the Politics of Global Labour Migration The concept of precarity has increasingly gained prominence in IPE as well as many other fields of the social sciences. These include the scholarship that has drawn attention to widespread climate of fear and censorship derived from post-9/11 rhetoric about terrorist threats (Butler 2004; Ettlinger 2007), the research that focuses on the rise of job insecurity under post-Fordist global capitalism symbolized by the hegemony of ‘immaterial’ labour (de Peuter 2011; Gill and Pratt 2008), and discussions around the validity of regarding the precariat as an emerging class in a traditional Marxist sense (Seymour 2012; Standing 2011, 2014) or

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as a globally universalized subject (Vij in this volume). This extensive use in diverse research areas indicates that precarity remains a contested term, and also runs the danger of becoming ‘a catchall, meaning everything and nothing at the same time’ (Anderson 2010). Grappling with the complexity and ambiguity of the concept, Louise Waite (2009) argues that the analytical advantage of precarity—in contrast to those of cognate terms such as ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’ that are often employed to designate particular neoliberal labour market conditions—stems from its conceptual depth that encapsulates such conditions and possible points of mobilization among those suffering from these conditions. Put differently, the concept of precarity explicitly incorporates the structural and institutional contexts that promote the precarization of labour with the diverse, multifarious, and individualized experience of precariousness. In this light, the discussion here centres on this double-edged meaning of precarity and relates this to the politics of global labour mobility. On the one hand, the concept of precarity describes conditions of heightened uncertainty, instability, and insecurity in employment through neoliberal transformations of the labour markets that have reinforced capital’s control over labour, particularly those in the advanced capitalist economies (Waite 2009; see also Kalleberg 2011). The globalization of neoliberalism as the ideological framework for governing relations of production and social reproduction has accelerated the flexibilization of the labour markets, which shifts risk away from capital and the state towards labour (Beck 2000). This process involves the replacement of previously guaranteed regular employment relationships by disadvantaged non-regular ones, bringing about the situations in which ‘the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege’ (Žižek 2012). The growth of precarious work along with the neoliberal imperative for greater labour market flexibility, legitimated by the principles of possessive individualism and personal responsibility, has further deepened the marginalization of labour by such means as driving down wages and expanding the sections of unprotected workers who are neither united through workplace organizations nor supported by increasingly marketized welfare provisions (Davies and Ryner 2006). In this sense, precarious employment is intimately associated with a broader concern about precariousness of people’ lives, which prevents them from predicting the future. According to Leah Vosko (2010, emphasis in original),

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Precarious employment is shaped by the relationship between employment status (i.e. self- or paid employment), form of employment (e.g. temporary or permanent, part-time or full-time), and dimensions of labour market insecurity, as well as social context (e.g. occupation, industry, and geography) and social location (or the interaction between social relations, such as gender, and legal and political categories, such as citizenship).

Among these factors, legal and political categories—more specifically, migrant status configured by the state’s immigration controls that regulate the terms of entry of migrants and the conditions of their residence and work in the specific nation-state—should be regarded as key to explore the extent and nature of precariousness among migrant workers. In particular, Anderson (2010) identifies three ways in which immigration controls create different migrant statuses: (1) The selection of legal entrants; (2) The enforcing of certain types of employment relations; and, (3) The creation of institutionalized uncertainty. While the first two aspects are concerned with the operation of immigration policies as a tap governing the inflow of labour and its effects on the position of migrant workers in the labour markets, the third highlights the production of migrant ‘illegality’ by the state as an inevitable function of border controls and nationally organized citizenship. Building on the latter point, Anderson elaborates that it is not simply the absence of status, as commonly imagined, but the structural constitution of institutionalized uncertainty—which can be also called ‘deportability’ enforced by the states (De Genova 2002)—that fundamentally increases the predisposition of migrants working ‘illegally’ to precarity. The imposition of precarious employment on unauthorized migrant workers, as Anderson aptly notes, should be acknowledged as one of many ways in which immigration controls serve to form certain types of workers in order to fulfil the demands of employers for extremely flexible or severely commodified labour. Thus, in incorporating the contemporary dynamics of global labour migration into more general discussions of precarity as uncertain, insecure, and unstable employment conditions under neoliberal labour market reforms, what appears to be crucial is to carefully account for the role of immigration regulations as the moulds that promote the fashioning of highly precarious labour over whom employers have particular and powerful mechanisms of control. On the other hand, as noted by Waite (2009; see also Gill and Pratt 2008), the concept of precarity also encapsulates possible rallying points for

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resistance against the labouring and living conditions of uncertainty, insecurity, and instability, and highlights the ways in which the experiences of such conditions serve to further discontent and motivate mobilization. Unlike the term ‘vulnerability’, which entails the danger of confining the workers so affected under the ascendancy of neoliberal ideologies and policies to victimhood (Anderson 2010), the notion of precarity opens up analytical spaces for the political agency of these workers and political potentialities that spring from their struggles. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, the word precarity has been prominently used by various activists and social justice movements in Europe for their aims to make connections between people’s different conditions. In this emergent trend and its spread to countries beyond Europe, including Japan, Guy Standing (2011) expresses alarm that the ‘precariat’ is a ‘dangerous class’, which can be mobilized by different groups for various goals, not all of them progressive. Based upon Standing’s discussion, Arne Kalleberg and Kevin Hewison (2013) posit that regardless of their internal divisions, precarious workers are united in their experiences of the four As: anger (due to blocked aspirations and deprivation), anomie (stemming from a feeling of passivity associated with despair and sustained defeat), anxiety (owing to chronic insecurity), and alienation (derived from lack of purpose and social disapproval). In their view, political activism such as that seen in the EuroMayDay protests and the globalized Occupy movements, exemplifies the ability for people facing different degrees and natures of precariousness in their labouring and living conditions to act in concert under the escalation of these As. What might be signified by the concept of precarity, therefore, is the rise of new forms of political struggle and solidarity, which move beyond the traditional brand of labour unionism. Concerning this emergent perception that precarious workers comprise political forces capable of collective resistances against global neoliberal rule, Waite (2009) asks whether migrant workers can and should be deemed part of them. From an arguably Eurocentric perspective, Standing (2011) posits that migrant workers have played a substantial role in the transnational diffusion of the precariat demonstrations. An analysis by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), influentially inspiring scholars and activists eager for a critique of, and alternative to, precariousness, stresses migrants as a ‘special category’ that hold exceptional revolutionary potential within the all-encompassing concept of ‘multitude’. In contrast, Meghan Eberle and Ian Holliday’s study (2011) of Burmese

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migrants working mostly without authorization in Thailand describes how their everyday experiences of precarity—characterized by the fear of deportation, a high degree of exploitation, and social stigma—have made them overwhelmingly disinterested in political issues. Indeed, focusing on migrant workers employed in low-paid sectors of the UK economy, Waite (2009) notes the ways in which precarity is experienced very differently by these workers because of complex stratification among them, depending on national, ethnic, gender, and age identities. Against the essentialized and ‘celebratory’ imagining of migrant workers, these findings underline that it is vital not to portray migrant labourers as the ‘precariat’ in a manner that results in the erasure of their heterogeneous migrationrelated experiences of precariousness. However, if used carefully, the concept of precarity helps to scrutinize the political agency of precarious workers (not least migrant labourers) while acknowledging the opportunities for solidarity within them in specific spatial and temporal contexts, driven by some shared experiences of uncertain, insecure, and unstable conditions in labour and life (see, for example, Bernardi in this volume for the case of Mexican migrant workers in the US). It also emphasizes the importance of a conscientious effort to account for multiple patterns and extents of precariousness faced by diverse groups of workers as well as similarities and differences even within the seemingly unified groups (see also Davies in this volume). With these discussions about the double meaning of precarity in mind, the following sections explore the lived experiences of unauthorized migrant workers in Japan. The next section first examines Japan’s immigration controls and demonstrates the ways in which their reforms especially since 1990 have helped to construct unauthorized migrant workers as highly precarious labour within the neoliberal restructuring of the Japanese labour market and employment relations.

The Production of Unauthorized Migrant Workers as Precarious Subjects in Japan Until the above-noted 2018 revision of the Immigration Control Act , Japan’s immigration regulations had basically banned the entry of unskilled migrant workers to its labour market, while promoting that of skilled ones engaged in the areas that required high levels of skill and/or education (e.g. corporate managers, engineers, and academics).

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Yet, during the Japanese economy’s boom years of the 1980s, the emergence of an acute labour shortage, combined with a sudden rise in the yen’s value and the widely recognized prestige of Japan as Asia’s ‘economic locomotive’ (Sellek 2001), induced a rapid influx of unskilled migrant workers, the vast majority of whom were ‘overstayers‘—those who entered Japan as tourists and simply overstayed their visa periods to work. As a response to the intense and acrimonious debate about the increasing presence of unauthorized migrant workers, the Japanese state revised the Immigration Control Act in 1990. One of the major changes was the introduction of legal penalties against employers knowingly hiring unauthorized migrants and the brokers finding jobs for them (Ministry of Justice 1993). Even after the 1990 reform of the Immigration Control Act , however, the so-called ‘back-door’ was left open to the inflows of unauthorized migrant workers to Japan. The estimated numbers of overstayers roughly tripled from 106,497 in 1990 to a peak of 298,646 in 1993, which comprised about a half of the total 610,000 migrant workers (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2004).3 The lax, sporadic enforcement of employer penalties represented the ‘ingeniously constructed’ discrepancy between ‘given reason’ (tatemane) and ‘real reason’ (honne) of Japan’s immigration controls under the deepened dependence of many small and medium enterprises on unauthorized migrant workers as lowcost labour (Milly 2007), which has effectively imposed institutionalized uncertainty on unauthorized migrant workers. Following the bursting of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s, it was tacitly anticipated among the Japanese that unauthorized migrants, as temporarily utilized complementary labour, would leave Japan (Inagami 1992). Yet, as a result of the continued existence of non-cyclical but rather structurally generated labour scarcity among the low-waged jobs in the Japanese economy (Tanno 2013 [2007]), the size of unauthorized migrant workers did not dramatically decrease. After the peak of 1993, their numbers gradually declined but still stood to exceed 200,000 until 2005. During the recessionary period of the 1990s, while many unauthorized migrant workers prolonged their stay in Japan, Japanese business leaders pursued the flexibilization of the labour market in order to equip firms with a greater ability to adjust labour costs and employment management according to fluctuations in the global economy. The latter was endorsed by the proposal of Japan Federation of Employers’ Associations (Nikkeiren—currently Nihon Keidanren, Japan Business

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Federation), ‘Japanese-Style Management’ in the New Era (1995). This proposal, as Daniel Dirks et al. (2000) observed, was less of a suggestion but rather a description of ongoing neoliberal transformations that had heightened the elasticity of the labour market by expanding and diversifying non-regular workers within firms as a cheap and flexible buffer to maximize competitiveness. Emphasizing that ‘the diversity of a corporation’s own work force has become a source of profitability’, the Japan Business Federation (2003) also call for the freer employment of unskilled migrant workers. For Japan’s large capitalists, the role of such workers is no longer to simply fill in a labour market gap but to contribute to non-regular labour supply for sustaining and expanding precarious employment conditions. Given the initiatives of Japan’s business leaders as well as the decline of its labour force, the Japanese state has attempted to selectively enlarge the entry of unskilled migrant workers from abroad while intensifying surveillance over their influx and residence. On the one hand, Japan has begun to accept migrant caregivers since 2008 to secure elder care provision (Ford and Kawashima 2013; Onuki 2009). On the other hand, the Japanese state has tightened its immigration controls in the name of making Japan ‘a strong society against crime’ (Cabinet Office 2003). In particular, derived from the assumption that unauthorized migrants are a hotbed of ‘foreigner crime’ (gaikokujin hanzai) which threatens Japan’s social order, it instituted a plan to halve the number of these migrants over five years from 2004. The interrogation of ‘foreign-looking’ persons by police and immigration officers on the street and, more frequently, in front of a train station turned into a daily affair, especially around Tokyo. While this five-year plan fuelled the 48.5% decline in the number of unauthorized migrant workers (from 219,418 in 2004 to 113,072 in 2009) (Ministry of Justice 2009), it substantially heightened the fears of deportation among those who still remained in Japan. The subsequent number of overstayers had steadily decreased. Yet, it has begun to displace once again an increasing trend since 2015 even amid Japan’s intensifying crackdown on overstayers in the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, reaching the estimate of 74,167 in 2019 (Ministry of Justice 2019). While the Ministry of Justice notes that such situations can be partially explained by a significantly growing entry of overseas visitors because of the state’s efforts to promote Japan as a tourismoriented country, the acutely escalating shortages of workforce due to demographic changes in Japanese society should also be taken into serious

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account for the recent trend (Suzuki 2019). Although it is difficult to obtain an accurate accounting of unauthorized workers, the disaggregation of a report on 9134 migrants (6120 males and 3014 females) who were deported in 2017 and identified to be employed without work permits (66.7% of all deportations) discloses that while their places of origin were remarkably diverse (51 different countries/regions), the overwhelming majority of them were from neighbouring Asian nation-states. Those from China, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia accounted for 90% of the total. A large number of these unauthorized workers were employed in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing sectors (Ministry of Justice 2018). Thus, Japan’s increasingly stricter immigration controls since 1990 have produced institutionalized uncertainty that renders the labouring and living conditions of unauthorized migrant workers deeply marginalized and vulnerable by intensifying ‘the power of the state to illegalize’ their presence in Japanese society (Yamamoto 2007, emphasis in original). Especially within the neoliberal restructuring of the Japanese employment relations, the state’s attempt to severely monitor the residence of unauthorized migrant workers while promoting social apprehension of foreigner crime not only compels them to adopt an inconspicuous lifestyle due to the escalated risks of disclosing their migrant status, but also makes them highly precarious workers that cannot be obtained in the local labour market. In this light, attention is now turned towards the everyday struggles of unauthorized migrant workers against this manufactured precariousness in Japan.

The Everyday Struggles of Unauthorized Migrant Workers Against Precariousness The heterogeneity among unauthorized migrant workers entering Japan since the mid-1980s can be seen in terms of places of origin as well as gender, ethnicity, and time of arrival, which renders it problematic to describe a typical ‘migratory experience’ or provide ‘one size fits all’ analysis. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that, as a main motivation behind their decisions to enter Japan, the bulk of these workers point to higher earnings prospects given wage differentials between Japan and their original ‘home’ countries in Asian and other developing regions. Many of them, while displaying shy smiles when disclosing their migrant status, often quickly insist that ‘this is the inevitable result since I did not have any

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other alternatives than to come and work in Japan’ and that ‘I have made my mind to try my luck in Japan’ for their families’ economic survival and future improvement (see also Liu-Farrer 2008). Such unauthorized migrant workers have seemingly managed to accept and endure precarious labouring and living conditions, with Filipinos calling the system one of ‘always in hiding’ (tago-gn-tago) (Ventura 2006 [1992]). They have done so by retaining a belief in their ability to achieve their financial goals within a short period of time, at least during the initial stage of their residence in Japan. Despite such a belief in the temporariness of migration to Japan, there has been a growing tendency for the unauthorized to stay for longer periods than originally planned. Until 1992, the majority of unauthorized migrant workers (70.6% in 1991 and 58.8 in 1992) had resided in Japan for no more than one year. Stays began to lengthen, however, and those working more than five years in Japan had come to comprise 25.7% by 1998 (Sellek 2001). The decreased wage levels during Japan’s sluggish economy and high costs of living in Japan could be considered as partial reasons behind the lengthening of their stay. In addition, a Filipino overstayer,4 who has been working in Japan for about five years, notes: My initial plan was to stay in Japan for two years. But I could not find jobs constantly during my first year in Japan, which had prolonged my stay…. I am still hoping to go back to the Philippines after I save enough money to start my own small business…. But by considering my current financial condition, I cannot go home now.

As his narrative suggests, along with the difficulty in securing employment, unauthorized migrant workers’ conviction that they must maximize their current opportunities to earn Japan’s high wages due to the difficulty of their re-entry to Japan has also contributed to their long-term residence. Within this context in which long-term residence in Japan has become the prevailing norm among unauthorized migrant workers, Japanese immigration controls have made it extremely hard for these workers to reunify with their spouses and children as well as to form new families in Japan. Whereas, overstayers’ prolonged separation from their families has caused the exacerbation of their emotional hardships, Yuko Ohara-Hirano (2000) also highlights the ways in which some of them have received vital socio-psychological resources from their overseas families to tackle the

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obstacles in Japan. Based on interviews of 265 Filipinos in the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area, she argues that emotional support supplied by their families in the Philippines, often manifested in an expression of their gratitude, helps to lower the cognitive life strains accumulated by migrant workers. Indeed, a Bangladeshi overstayer describes his pride about supporting his children’s education through working in Japan for 13 years as follows: I have been earning 200,000 yen a month in Japan by working at the small family-owned farm that cultivates green peppers…. Because of the money I am sending from Japan, my five children could finish their university degrees…. I think that since my children obtain high education, they will be able to find great jobs in Bangladesh.

It is vital here to carefully recognize that although unauthorized migrant workers’ transnational family relationships vary depending on factors such as cultural backgrounds, positions in the household, and residential durations in Japan, an expression of gratitude from their families and their sense of dignity as the breadwinners can help them to bear with unrelenting marginalization, alienation, and exploitation as precarious labourers in Japan. For many employers of small and medium-sized enterprises, the use of unauthorized migrant labour is not their preferred course of action. Rather, it is often an inevitable consequence of their incapability to attract Japanese or authorized migrant workers under both intensified pressures to cut production costs within the neoliberal restructuring of the global market economy and the hierarchically stratified Japanese labour market (Watanabe 2005). Such circumstances are elaborated by the remark of an unauthorized migrant from Ghana, who works at a small waste disposal factory in Tokyo: Some companies hire us, even without visas. In such cases, if you have the paper [work permission], you may not get a job because your wage tends to be expensive. These employers simply want to secure cheap labour!

These employers, who seemingly perceive that they gain much and lose little by taking on unauthorized migrant labour even with the possibility of legal sanctions, frequently force overstayers to accept highly exploitative and strictly disciplined employment patterns (Minami 2008).

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For example, a Bangladeshi migrant employed at a plastic moulding firm in Kanagawa was coerced to work 12-hour overnight shift without even a break for meals and with only five holidays every six months, which far outstrips a 40-hour work week stipulated in Japan’s Labour Standards Law. For more than four years he had put up with this dehumanized treatment, but he was suddenly dismissed on the grounds of the firm’s financial deterioration (Honda 2002). Combined with unauthorized migrant workers’ desire to continue on the job while quietly swallowing predicaments at work, the stigma of ‘illegality’ that Japan’s immigration regulations saddles upon them aggravates unequal capitallabour power relations by limiting their agency to contest the conditions of precarity in Japan. A dialogue between two Filipino overstayers discloses both possibilities and constraints for unauthorized migrant workers’ struggles against the precariousness of labour and life, especially under Japan’s increasingly tightened immigration surveillance. According to one of them, Many of us have been having very difficult time to keep working in Japan. Some are taking the trains in very early morning to go to their workplaces, because immigration and police officers regularly wait at the stations during rush hours in order to apprehend overstayers. In fact, many of my friends were arrested by the officials on the way to work….

Another Filipino adds that: ‘Some are even riding a bicycle for one hour to work, just because of avoiding the stations…. For us, every day is a risky day’. Their conversation shows their constant fears of institutionalized uncertainty, i.e. deportability. Nonetheless, it also reveals how unauthorized migrant workers have developed survival strategies to break out of the encirclement inflicted by the state in order to maintain their employment. Furthermore, these two unauthorized Filipino migrant workers refer to the role of Japanese support groups as indispensable in handling their troubles with their employers. Both of them suffered work-related injuries at construction sites. Injuries and accidents are constant threats to unauthorized migrant workers since they engage mostly in unhealthy and unsafe occupations. The attempts of ‘concealing industrial accidents’ (rosaki kakushi) have been prevalent among the employers hiring unauthorized migrant workers (Ko 2010). These employers ignore their lawfully required responsibility for accidents, based upon their assumption

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that the unauthorized hesitate to officially register compensation claims due to the risks of exposure about their migrant status. Under such situations, these Filipino workers eventually obtained compensations from their employers with the assistance of the Kanagawa City Union (KCU), a progressive community labour union in the Tokyo suburb of Kanagawa Prefecture.5 Recalling his struggles for the employer to acknowledge responsibility for the accident, one of these Filipinos notes that: It is difficult for me to fight against my employer without the KCU’s support. The reasons are because I really do not know Japan’s legal system, and because I do not have a proper visa. So, it is better to give the case to someone who knows the system and can negotiate with the employers.

His narrative, with those of other unauthorized migrant workers who have sought the assistance of community labour unions and/or NGOs, sheds light on the importance of these organizations in protecting their rights as workers and residents in Japan. For these workers, however, supportive organizations are fundamentally deemed to be service providers designed to address specific labour disputes with employers. In terms of their relations with NGOs and community labour unions, it has been rare to see the autonomous mobilization by the unauthorized, beyond the position of passive service recipients. The lack of such mobilization can be understood as partially reflecting the ways in which the immigration controls have effectively rendered it unsafe and less likely for unauthorized migrant workers to publicly resist precariousness even within the context of their long-term, if not permanent, residence in Japan. Amid such highly constrained situations surrounding the everyday struggles of unauthorized migrant workers, groups of workers have collectively launched strategic movements to break away from their constant fears of deportation and their precarious labouring and living conditions by seeking ‘special residence permission’ (zairyu tokubetsu kyoka). Special residence permission has been functioned as the only route open for unauthorized migrants to make their stay in Japan legitimate on a permanent basis within Japan’s post-war immigration control legislations (Takaya 2019). The granting of dispensation is determined on the basis of discretionary approval by the Minister of Justice who considers the circumstances of each applicant on humanitarian grounds, principally as a special exception within the repatriation procedure for those violating

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Japan’s Immigration Control Act . Up until the late 1990s, these permissions were almost exclusively granted to a small yet growing number of unauthorized migrants who got married to Japanese nationals or who were raising her/his children with Japanese nationality. In September 1999, 21 unauthorized migrants voluntarily surrendered to the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau in order to make requests for special residence permission. This group was made up of five households (four from Iran and one from Myanmar) and two individuals (from Iran and Bangladesh). As Katsuo Yoshinari (2007) of the Asian People’s Friendship Society (APFS)—an NGO in Tokyo that helped organize these unauthorized migrants—stresses, this ambitious move could not be put into practice without the migrants’ courage to submit their petitions for dispensations by preparing for the possible worst-case scenarios of being rejected and consequently apprehended. In February 2000, the Minister of Justice made an ‘epoch-making’ decision to offer permissions for the permanent residence of 16 unauthorized migrants without any legally confirmed marital or blood relationship with the Japanese (Watado et al. 2007). Following this collective action of unauthorized migrant workers and their families, a series of the petitions brought about by unauthorized migrants for special residence permissions has garnered widespread media attention (e.g. Osaki 2015). In contrast with the alleged stereotype of them as the ‘villain of the worsening security situation’, their reported pictures as ‘ordinary people’ have left a strong impression on the audience (Ko 2010). Put alternatively, through visualizing unauthorized migrant workers and their families as virtual members of Japanese society, hitherto unknown or overlooked by the majority of the Japanese, these collective actions have put forth their presence in Japan as a newly visible political issue. In this sense, these movements by unauthorized migrant workers and its recognition among many Japanese appear to provide an opportunity for the development of some forms of solidarity between unauthorized migrants and Japanese precarious workers to cooperatively resist the increasing precariousness of labour and life within the neoliberal restructuring of the Japanese employment relations. Yet, such a development has not yet been explicitly observable in contemporary Japan.

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Conclusion In contemporary Japan, the rise of the gap society and the simultaneous expansion of the precariat have been widely discussed, but such discussion has tended to ignore or take for granted the production of migrant workers as precarious subjects to the point of erasing their agency. Problematizing such a tendency and, more specifically, focusing on the conditions of unauthorized migrant workers in Japanese society, this chapter examines the practices of fashioning and contesting precarity. This analysis is guided by the double meaning of precarity, which encapsulates: (1) the conditions of heightened uncertainty, instability, and insecurity in employment through the neoliberal transformations of the labour markets; and, (2) possible points of mobilization to cope with such conditions. In so doing, it demonstrates the ways in which Japan’s increasingly tightened immigration controls create institutionalized uncertainty and serve to constitute unauthorized migrant workers as highly precarious labour. This chapter also sheds light on the everyday contestations of these workers against precariousness in Japan. Furthermore, it draws attention to a lack of the development of some forms of solidarity between unauthorized migrants and Japanese precarious workers to cooperatively resist the increasing precariousness of labour and life within the neoliberal restructuring of the Japanese employment relations. This reflects not only the still-dominant mythical perception of Japan as a homogeneous society but also the difficulty in finding points of mobilization among workers struggling with some shared employment conditions yet experiencing diverse patterns and degrees of precariousness within the globalization of neoliberalism.

Notes 1. There are many other terms—illegal aliens, undocumented migrants, unregistered foreigners, to name a few—to describe migrants who work in Japan without employment permission. However, I prefer to avoid use of the word ‘illegal’, which has negative, oppressive, and discriminatory connotations found in the state’s official definition. Indeed, under Japan’s Alien Registration Law (until its abolition in 2012) unauthorized migrant workers could be documented and registered as ‘residents without valid authorization’ at the local government offices. Therefore, this chapter adopts the terms ‘unauthorized’ to broadly refer to migrants employed without official permission, those who are remaining in Japan beyond the

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2.

3.

4. 5.

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permitted period of their visas (mostly as “temporary visitors”), and those who entered Japan with false documents or by other illegitimate methods. This chapter is largely based on the field research that I conducted in Japan between 2007 and 2017 (including interviews with unauthorized migrant workers, state officials, business groups, and representatives of NGOs and community labour unions). These statistical figures vastly underestimate the population of unauthorized migrant workers in Japan, since they only reflect those migrants who were found to have overstayed their visas upon departing from Japan. They consequently exclude those who were undetected or who entered Japan with false documents or by other unauthorized means The names of unauthorized migrant workers quoted in this chapter are all anonymized. For more details about KCU’s activities, see its homepage (http://kcu.het eml.jp/wphp/, assessed on 6 October 2019).

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Index

A abandonment, 2, 8–10, 21, 37–59, 65 Abbas, Asma, 43 abjection, 11, 63, 65, 67–69, 73, 74, 76, 77, 82, 84, 86, 87, 176, 220. See also Butler, Judith Global South as locus of, 74, 84. See also Global South abstraction, 80, 82, 103, 294 actions on actions, 11, 102, 109 activists and social justice movements, 13, 309 acts of terror. See terror, acts of aesthetic practices. See practices, aesthetic Afghanistan, 231 Africa Afro-pessimism, 7, 57. See also blackness ‘Afrophobia’, 236 Algeria, 241 Angola, 143 decolonizing, 134

Gambia, 238, 239 Ghana, 140, 141, 143, 315 Inter-African Labour Conference (IALC), 134, 135 Kenya, 137, 138 Mozambique, 143, 236 Nigeria, 236 Somalia, 236 South Africa, 143, 236, 248 Syria, 37 Tanzania (Tanganyika), 136 Zimbabwe, 236 Agamben, Giorgio, 9, 11, 42, 43, 45, 49–52, 54, 55, 57–59, 94, 95, 101–103, 106–108, 112, 118, 235, 241. See also indistinction, zone of agency, 16, 27, 43, 47, 113, 116, 234, 235, 241, 243–247, 305, 306, 316, 319 political, 310 agent, 13, 14, 96, 97, 102, 131, 233, 235, 236, 270, 285

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Vij et al. (eds.), Precarity and International Relations, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51096-1

325

326

INDEX

Ahmed, Sara, 204, 206–208, 215, 220, 221, 224, 225 Akomfrah, John, 1 alterity, denial of, 76 ambivalent bonds, 204 Anderson, Bridget, 22, 306–309 anthropology of lack, 64 Arendt, Hannah, 39, 54, 57, 241 Aristotle, 55 Armitage, Simon, 5, 29 asylum seeker. See refugees autonomy, 10, 18, 40, 52, 56, 66, 71, 79, 83, 140, 152, 160–163, 168, 181, 208, 209, 211, 214

B ‘bad apple’ explanation, the, 107, 118 Balibar, Etienne, 241, 246, 247 Barchiesi, Franco, 6, 7, 15, 56, 64, 256 Bauman, Zygmunt, 39 Benjamin, Walter, 42, 243 Berlant, Lauren, 7, 57, 65, 82, 183, 299. See also optimism, cruel Bernardi, Claudia, 24, 25, 27, 28, 255, 258, 268, 281, 294, 310 Bhambra, Gurminder, 6, 130, 206 Bieler, Andreas, 13 binaries, 84, 109, 118, 188, 190, 204, 212, 224, 225, 282, 283, 288, 291, 292, 294 masculine/feminine, 203, 209, 211, 215, 220, 223 Birth of Biopolitics, The, 98 blackness, 16, 213, 215. See also racism; whiteness body, the, 57, 81, 105, 109, 116, 141, 183, 216, 220, 231, 233, 248, 260, 261, 271, 272, 280, 294, 295, 297, 298 bodily harm, 21, 22

‘body reasoning’, 203, 204, 209, 210, 212, 219, 220, 223, 224 Bourdieu, Pierre, 65, 130, 240, 241, 249 bourgeois subject, the, 84 braceros programs. See migrants Brazil, 37 Brazilianization, 74, 75 Brexit, 177, 203, 206 Burcoff, Ian, 4 bureaucrats, street-level, 97 Butler, Judith, 2, 3, 7, 10, 15, 19, 20, 23, 24, 63, 65, 66, 68, 76–83, 86, 94, 118, 204, 207–216, 220–222, 224, 225, 241, 249, 282, 306

C Caetano, Israel Adrián, 280 Canada, 191, 231, 270 capitalism, 3, 10, 15, 27, 65, 66, 75, 79, 85, 130, 133, 150–152, 154, 157–159, 161, 163, 167, 168, 235, 237–240, 242, 246, 269, 270, 281, 306 Golden Age of, 153, 157, 168 capriciousness, 96, 97, 99, 101, 108 casualisation. See informalization categorical imperative, the, 53, 212 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 84, 85, 256 Chaudhuri, Amit, 64, 68, 85, 86 China, 69, 73, 313 Christianity, 48, 57, 64 citizenship, 9, 12, 15, 16, 21, 24, 27, 39, 44, 46, 97, 109, 113, 129–132, 134, 143, 144, 151, 166, 176, 188, 193, 196, 234, 237, 242–247, 308 coevalness, denial of, 67, 75, 76. See also sameness; time and temporality

INDEX

colonialism, 16, 79, 131, 137, 140, 206, 208. See also decolonialism; postcolonialism difference of, 11, 67 violence of, 6 Comaroff, Jean and John, 64, 75 commodification, 260, 264, 268 communism, 133, 139 contestation, 12, 13, 16, 19, 131, 132, 134, 208, 225, 306, 319 contracts, 3, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 39, 70, 129, 156, 157, 160, 223, 254, 261–264, 267, 272, 287, 290, 292, 293, 296–298, 303. See also labour, contracts control, 18, 21, 46, 137, 138, 141–143, 149, 152, 153, 157, 159, 165, 167, 191, 204, 224, 234, 237, 249, 254, 256, 259, 260, 262, 265, 266, 268, 269, 285, 288–290, 292, 295, 297, 304–308, 310–314, 317, 319 Corneau, Alain, 280 counter-community, 19, 58, 175, 176, 178, 179, 182, 186, 188–193 counter-conduct, 19, 107, 175, 178, 185, 189, 190

D debt debt servitude, 257 medical, 151 mortgages, 157 Rolling Jubilee, 168 Strike Debt, 168 student, 157, 168 decolonialism, 241. See also colonialism; postcolonialism dependency, 2, 11, 44, 65–67, 71, 73, 78, 82, 85, 87, 150, 179, 211, 212, 214, 215, 298

327

deportation. See migrants, deportation of Derrida, Jacques, 196, 212 dialectic, 9, 45, 48, 55 differentiation, logic of, 203, 204, 208–212, 215, 216, 219, 221, 223–225 -in-transgression, 219, 220 disability, 19, 173–176, 180–188, 190–196 discrimination, 8, 154, 232, 254, 258, 281. See also racism disenfranchisement, 40, 41, 46, 52 disposability, 2, 42, 75, 176, 193, 269 dissident thought, 5 During, Simon, 64, 66, 71, 85 E economics, 2, 3, 15, 18, 25, 26, 29, 39, 40, 44, 46, 47, 75, 78, 82, 113, 129, 131, 132, 138, 140, 142, 150, 151, 155, 156, 158–160, 162–167, 169, 183, 204, 233–236, 238–240, 244, 246–248, 254, 263, 281, 285, 303, 305, 314. See also power, economic gig economy, 3, 25, 243 Keynesian, 64, 94, 153, 164 trickle-down, 160 El-Enany, Nadine, 206 Emejulu, Akwugo, 203, 205 employees. See workers employment. See also workers Full Employment Profit Squeeze thesis, 158 insecure, 70, 150, 308 self-employment, 308 temporary, 70, 150, 281, 303 equality, 10, 20, 23, 24, 63, 79, 80, 84, 168, 185, 246, 299, 300. See also inequality

328

INDEX

radical, 78, 79 ethics, 76–79, 83, 105, 115, 117, 149, 165, 169, 178, 187, 207, 214, 268, 269, 282 Ettinger, Bracha, 204, 210, 215–222, 224–226 Ettlinger, Nancy, 11, 12, 15, 19, 20, 64, 100, 109, 110, 116, 206, 282, 283, 285, 298, 306 Euro-America, 72, 75 Eurocentrism, 75, 309. See also postcolonialism Europol, 232 excess, 9, 10, 40, 41, 54–56, 58, 149, 152, 154, 161, 265 external gaze, 115 extremity, 9, 39, 43, 45, 54, 56, 57 F fascism, 154 feminine, the, 211, 225. See also binaries, masculine/feminine; masculine, the as associated with carework, 210 as associated with disappearance, 215, 220, 221, 223 as associated with the unsymbolizable, 210, 215 feminism, 112, 165, 281 Ferguson, James, 40, 56 finitude, 21–23 First World, the, 24, 28. See also Global North Flexibilization, 23, 25, 96, 240, 243, 281, 304, 307, 311 Fordism, 14, 18, 94, 100, 151–153, 156, 157–159, 161, 169. See also post-Fordism Foucault, Michel, 11, 19, 51, 54, 93–95, 98, 99, 101, 103–107, 109, 111, 115–117, 175, 187– 189, 192–196, 236, 241, 243,

249. See also counter-conduct; governmentality; politics, biopolitics France, 72, 135, 244, 247, 281 freedom, 10, 18, 51, 55, 59, 71, 84, 155, 161–163, 165, 168, 239, 243, 298 friendship, 19, 58, 174, 175, 178, 179, 182–193, 195 futurity. See time and temporality, futurity, loss of G globalization, 25, 64, 65, 69, 74, 129, 130, 208, 303–305, 307, 319 Global North, 14, 16, 56, 64, 70, 71, 95, 96, 98, 100, 131, 156, 204, 207, 208, 224, 225 Northern theory, 69 Global South, 11, 14, 56, 64, 67, 68, 72, 74, 81–84, 94–96, 98, 100, 130, 156, 241 Gorz, Andre, 161, 162, 165–168, 195 governance, 4, 12, 17, 39, 44, 46, 47, 65, 98, 103–108, 113, 116, 131, 132, 176, 179, 235, 236, 246 modes of, 94, 99–102, 106, 109, 115, 155 sovereign. See sovereignty governmentality, 11, 12, 20, 94, 95, 99–109, 111, 114–117, 181, 234, 243 liberal, 6 Gramsci, Antonio, 16, 131–133, 136, 139, 143, 144, 248 relations of force, 131, 132 Great Depression, the, 134, 153, 158, 260 Greece, 232, 244 grief. See melancholy; mourning grievability, 23, 24. See also Butler, Judith

INDEX

H Hardt, Michael, 11, 13, 17, 101, 107, 116, 117, 151, 309 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 54, 57 hierarchies, 11, 12, 26, 66, 71, 74, 76, 82, 106, 130, 151, 203, 204, 209, 224, 225, 232, 233, 244, 248, 287 Hobbes, Thomas, 78, 79 human, concept of, 7 Hungary, 242 I identities, 12–14, 16, 17, 41, 43, 44, 55, 56, 70, 71, 73, 110, 111, 113, 143, 144, 162, 167, 168, 177, 190, 209, 214, 218, 220, 222, 225, 237, 247, 249, 254, 280, 283, 292, 310 immanence, 44, 58, 102, 103, 107 immigration, 257, 258, 260, 306, 316. See also migration control, 304, 306, 308, 310–314, 317, 319 Immigration Control and Refugee Act, 28, 305, 310, 311, 318 migrants. See migrants immobility, 267, 268 impotentiality, 45 independence, 52, 137, 138, 140 India, 29, 69, 70, 73, 85, 86, 242 indistinction, zone of, 42, 43, 52. See also Agamben, Giorgio industrial action. See strikes inequality, 11, 12, 75, 78, 98, 99, 108, 110, 114, 116, 305 economic, 303. See also power, economic racial, 244. See also racism informalization, 11, 23, 65, 96–99, 108, 111, 114, 116

329

International Labour Organisation. See labour International Political Economy (IPE), 306 intrauterine phantasy, 217, 218 Iran, 231, 280, 287, 318 Iraq, 231, 244 Italy, 29, 72, 73, 83, 96, 112, 238, 239, 245, 281, 293

J Jabri, Vivienee, 8, 18 Japan, 24, 28, 70, 72, 157, 280, 287, 290, 296–298, 303–306, 309–320 community labour union, 317 gap society, 303 immigration control, 305 Immigration Control and Refugee Act, 305 special residence permission, 317, 318

K Klein, Melanie, 213 Koselleck, Reinhart, 56, 83, 84 Kurdi, Alyan, 231 Kurdi, Galip, 232

L labour. See also workers activism, 12, 13 casual, 96 coercive, 257 contingency, 64 contractors of, 259, 261 contracts, 255, 261, 269 forced. See slavery

330

INDEX

forms of, 12, 13, 15, 21, 23, 131, 134, 255, 256, 304 informal, 13, 15, 138 International Labour Organization (ILO), 69, 70, 131, 134, 136–139, 141 irregular, 131, 134, 139 ‘labour aristocracy thesis’, 135 market, 12, 13, 179, 243, 281, 303, 304, 306–308, 310–313, 315, 319 mobility of, 28, 254, 255, 258–260, 264, 268, 269, 307. See also mobility organized, 131, 137, 139, 143 preparedness for, 21, 22 regimes of, 11, 254, 255, 259, 260, 264, 265, 269 surpluses, 27, 268 unpaid, 269, 281. See also slavery valorization of, 256 Lacan, Jacques, 217, 218 Laclau, Ernesto, 206 Laplanche, Jean, 211, 212 Lenin, Vladimir, 135 Levinas, Emmanuel, 78–80, 211, 212, 217, 224, 282 Levine, David, 283–285 Levi, Primo, 106–108, 118 liberalism. See also neoliberalism analytics of, 10, 63, 66, 68, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 215 anxieties of, 11, 68 embedded. See Fordism liberal governmentality, 6, 114, 243 social, 12, 13, 65, 76, 94, 155, 160, 304, 307 subject, liberal, 49, 58, 63, 67, 68, 72, 76, 81, 82, 86, 87, 223, 299 Lipsky, Michael, 97

Lorey, Isabell, 2, 3, 6, 7, 13–15, 17, 64, 65, 94, 100, 176, 178, 186

M manufacturing, decline in, 69, 149 Marxism, 104, 117, 152 masculine, the. See also binaries, masculine/feminine; feminine, the as ‘natural’ individual of political theory, 209 castration phantasy, 216 phallic bonds, 221 phallic level of subjectivity, 220 subject position, 211 matrixial encounter-events, 219, 222, 224, 226 level of subjectivity, 217–220, 222, 224 theory, 216, 217, 219, 226 webs, 204, 218, 219, 221–223, 225 melancholy, 7. See also grievability; mourning mentality, 11, 99, 102–106, 108, 109, 117, 241 Mezzadra, Sandro, 6, 14, 15, 270 microspaces, 11, 15, 93, 96, 97, 102, 282 migrants. See also refugees braceros programs, 24, 28 deportation of, 255, 266 economic, 233, 246 everyday struggles of, 304, 313, 317 exiles, 39, 233 forced, 246 illegality of, 258 migrant workers, 26, 28, 56, 253–255, 257–260, 262, 263, 266–268, 272, 280, 281,

INDEX

286–288, 290, 296, 305, 306, 308–320 overstayers, 28, 311, 312, 315. See also migrants, unauthorized practices of, 7, 246, 254, 264, 268, 319 transnational family relationships, 315 unauthorized, 24, 305, 306, 308, 310–315. See also migrants, overstayers, 316–320 undocumented, 37, 72, 243, 261, 265, 273, 319 Migrant worker everyday struggles of unauthorized, 313 migration. See also immigration deportability, 308, 316 global labour, 306, 308 global labour migration, 306, 308 illegality, 306, 308, 316 migrant worker, 304 overstayer, 28, 311. See also unauthorized transnational family relationship, 315 unauthorized, 305 military, the, 11, 12, 108, 131, 154, 156, 272, 282 mobilisation, 17, 44 mobility, 18, 181, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267, 270, 290, 295, 296, 304 factory of, 24, 25, 28, 255, 268, 269 regimes of, 39, 254, 255, 260, 265, 269 mobilization, 12, 13, 17, 264 modern international, the, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 67, 73, 76 Mohanty, Chandra T., 214 Mouffe, Chantal, 205

331

mourning, 23, 77, 169, 282 movements, 3, 13, 23, 51, 52, 69, 83, 132–135, 137, 138, 140–143, 154, 159, 161, 168, 196, 222, 234, 235, 241, 244, 246, 254, 258–268, 281, 283, 286, 288, 289, 304, 317, 318. See also mobilisation N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 9, 45, 49–56, 59 Nandy, Ashis, 80 necrogeopolitics, 2. See also politics; slavery Negri, Antonio, 11, 13, 17, 101, 107, 116, 117, 151, 240, 309 Neilson, Brett, 2–4, 6, 13, 14, 16, 17, 23, 24, 64, 94, 100, 112, 130, 150, 154, 156, 304 neoliberalism, 2, 12, 13, 18, 23–25, 28, 57, 65, 69, 83, 94, 98, 99, 103, 105, 116, 130, 151–153, 155, 159–161, 163, 184, 185, 307, 319. See also liberalism New Deal, the, 155, 158, 169 ‘new social movements’, 6, 16 nomads, 257, 261 non-essentialism, 95 normalization, 13, 102, 108 normalized life, 102 norms, social, 44, 71 O Occupy movements, the, 309 ontology differences in, 11, 68, 215 of precarity, 2, 7, 10, 13, 14, 64, 66, 82, 208 of relationality, 66, 78 social, 17, 71, 78 western, 71

332

INDEX

Onuki, Hironori, 281 optimism, cruel, 65, 82, 183, 184, 299 otherness, 68, 79, 80. See also sameness Oyˇewùmí, Oyèrónk, 203, 209, 219

P pathos, 9, 12, 40, 42, 43, 47 performance, 114, 182, 185, 187, 190, 191, 285 performativity, 3, 7, 12, 19, 20, 175, 178, 179, 183, 185, 191, 193, 196, 212 policy, 9, 14, 23–25, 39, 41, 46–48, 53, 75, 94, 97, 98, 117, 138, 140, 158, 159, 163, 174, 179, 182, 183, 193, 204, 233, 243, 246, 249, 258, 261, 308, 309 Political Economy, International (IPE), 4, 25, 306 politics biopolitics, 42, 54, 258 emancipatory, 167–169 isonomic, 246 juridico-political relations, 42 necrogeopolitics, 2 political agency, 17, 27, 41, 310 post-work, 18, 152, 165–169 practical, 5 state, 27, 254, 256, 258 transversal, 233, 245, 246 Portugal, 141, 142 postcolonialism, 6, 18, 25, 63, 74, 87, 131, 135, 136, 142, 241. See also colonialism; decolonialism post-Fordism, 3, 156, 161. See also Fordism poverty, 38, 41, 42, 45, 47, 56, 57, 67, 73, 74, 81, 84, 86, 87, 151, 179, 304

Povinelli, Elizabeth, 46, 65, 176, 178, 194 power as ubiquitous, 93, 103 diffuse, 94, 101, 103, 104, 106–109, 116 economic, 113, 159, 160, 204, 234, 237 fields of, 94, 108–110, 115, 116, 189 techniques of, 11, 101, 104, 105, 107–110, 114, 117 practices, 2, 4–6, 8, 16–18, 21, 22, 25–27, 41, 47, 48, 65, 79, 97, 98, 104, 105, 108–111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 133, 139, 157, 187, 191, 192, 236, 237, 247–249, 255, 257, 263, 266, 268, 272, 288, 305, 318, 319 aesthetic, 7, 12, 105 boundary-making, 73 praxis , 8, 133, 243 precariat, 304 precarity as a human ‘condition’, 6, 8, 12, 15, 19, 45, 93, 94, 99, 103, 112, 116, 282 ‘becoming common’, 17 experiences of, 7, 13, 14, 63, 96, 151, 156, 204, 283, 310 global analytic of, 85, 208, 215 logic of, 10, 63, 64, 85 material, 208 ontological, 10, 13, 66, 84 perceptual, 207, 208, 225 political potential of, 13, 309 precariat, the, 2, 3, 14, 64 precarisation, 191 precarities, 8, 24, 27, 95, 233–236, 241, 244–246, 248 precaritised mind, the, 71

INDEX

precarity talk, 4, 8–11, 66–69, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, 87 San Precario, 2, 83, 112 work-based approach to, 14, 15 predictable unpredictability, 22, 24 prison, 12, 102, 108, 149 Prison Notebooks (Antonio Gramsci), 132

Q quantification, 68, 80, 86 quantitative register, 77, 80

R raciality, 15, 205, 206, 209, 223, 256, 269 racialization, 215 racism, 12, 15, 75, 103, 105, 109, 114, 159, 260. See also blackness; whiteness white supremacy, 207 Raffoul, François, 53 Rancière, Jacques, 57, 280, 285, 286, 298 refugees, 2, 7, 28, 39, 46, 52, 57, 65, 66, 72, 73, 113, 231–233, 235, 236, 238, 243, 246, 247, 280, 287. See also migrants refusal, 44, 183, 189, 193, 220, 223, 244, 254, 256, 258, 264, 265, 267 regulation, 96, 97, 117, 151–154, 156, 160, 161, 182, 258, 262, 265, 306, 308, 310, 316 absence of, 21 relationality, 2, 4, 7, 19, 176, 188, 210, 214, 216, 220, 221, 223 ontology of, 66, 78 pre-ontic, 79, 81 relational right, 187

333

representation, 39, 46, 47, 55, 56, 136, 139, 233, 236, 255, 260, 269 resilience, 2, 110, 296 resistance, 3, 13, 17–19, 27, 40, 41, 44, 105–107, 111–113, 138, 142, 163, 176, 178, 179, 183–186, 188–190, 192, 222, 235, 241, 254, 264, 267, 268, 286, 309 rights, 2, 9, 18, 24, 39, 44, 47, 65, 75, 97, 102, 116, 129, 130, 135, 153, 155, 156, 160, 164, 166, 167, 174–180, 184, 186–190, 192, 194–196, 225, 238, 243–245, 246, 247, 255, 257, 261, 270, 317. See also citizenship Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), 234 relational, 19, 175, 183, 186–189, 191–193 risk, 1, 2, 7, 13, 16, 17, 19, 46, 68, 74, 75, 82, 189, 225, 304, 307, 313, 317 Rose, Nikolas, 178, 181 Rossiter, Ned, 2, 3, 6, 13, 14, 16, 17, 23, 24, 64, 94, 112, 130, 150, 154, 156, 304 rupture, 12, 104, 105, 108, 169, 206 Russia, 133, 242 S sacrifice, 18, 22, 48, 57, 158, 163, 167, 213 sameness, 100. See also otherness denial of, 68 scale, 20, 26, 40, 70, 77, 80, 81, 93, 99, 103, 104, 107, 109, 131, 133, 134, 139, 144, 208, 222, 294 Schmitt, Carl, 42, 54

334

INDEX

security, 3, 7, 10, 12, 14, 18, 23–25, 39, 44, 49, 63, 70, 80–83, 86, 102, 116, 153, 155, 161, 162, 167, 179, 182, 194, 206, 214, 225, 240, 272, 304, 305, 318 economic, 129, 163 precarity as the modern subject of, 10, 67, 81, 84 segmentation, 266 self-mastery. See autonomy Shapiro, Michael J., 4, 8, 286 slavery, 15, 56, 67, 79, 143 slippage, 11, 94, 95, 279 Sloterdijk, Peter, 81 social bond, the, 15, 78, 203, 205, 207, 211–214, 216, 220–222, 225 social death, 15 solidarities, 4, 5, 10, 12–19, 27, 29, 64, 78, 79, 132, 134, 141–143, 161, 162, 167, 168, 232, 233, 247, 267, 268, 299, 300, 309, 310, 318, 319 ‘active’, 13, 16 work-based, 14 Sonoran Desert, the, 37 sovereignty dispossession of, 81, 82 liberal, 82, 85 making of, 5, 7, 8 sovereign subject, the, 10, 63, 66, 67, 69, 78, 79, 81, 82, 204, 206 space, 5–8, 10, 21, 26, 39, 50, 52, 85, 93, 95–97, 100–102, 105, 107, 108, 110, 113, 117, 118, 144, 174, 175, 177, 184, 205, 207, 237, 239, 240, 242, 256, 261–263, 280, 282, 286, 287, 289, 290, 293, 296–299, 309 spectacle, 38, 176, 192

Standing, Guy, 2, 3, 6, 10, 13, 14, 23, 24, 63, 65, 66, 68–73, 81, 83, 86, 87, 94, 112, 130, 150, 151, 160, 241, 281, 304, 306, 309 Staples, Kelly, 14 Statelessness, 27, 46 state of exception, 11, 42, 102, 103, 106–108, 111 state, the, 2, 3, 5–9, 12, 15–18, 21–23, 25, 27–29, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 52, 53, 55, 57, 66, 67, 71, 73, 94, 98, 102, 103, 113, 117, 129, 131, 133, 135, 136, 139, 141, 150, 152, 153, 164, 176, 178, 179, 181, 195, 213, 233–238, 241–246, 248, 249, 254, 255, 257, 258, 259, 261, 264–271, 280, 284, 290, 293, 295, 297, 298, 305, 307, 308, 311–313, 316, 319. See also politics, state life of the, 132, 134, 136, 143 strikes, 27, 140, 141, 143, 153, 159, 160, 240, 258, 267 structure of feeling, 22–24, 65 struggle. See resistance subject bourgeois, 84 global, 10, 64, 66–68, 76 liberal, 10, 49, 58, 63, 67, 68, 72, 76, 81, 82, 86, 87, 223, 299 modern, 4, 68, 291, 294 of security, 10, 49, 63, 67, 68 subjectivity(ies), 6, 7, 10, 15, 25, 27, 28, 44, 58, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 74, 79, 81, 85, 86, 94, 95, 101–103, 105–107, 110–116, 118, 203, 204, 206, 208–210, 212, 214, 216–221, 223–225,

INDEX

233–235, 237, 241, 243, 246– 248, 264, 268, 279–281, 283, 286–288, 295, 296, 298–300 suffering, common horizon of, 67, 73 supplicancy, 71, 72

T terror, 94, 97, 101, 107, 177 acts of, 94, 97, 110 Third World, 11, 63, 67, 73, 74, 76, 87, 143, 154, 237, 241. See also Global South time and temporality futurity, loss of, 71 regimes of, 71 temporal logic, 84 temporal non-equivalence, 73 trade unions, 135–140, 142, 143. See also labour; workers translation, 13, 14, 17, 51, 207 cultural, 208, 214, 215, 225 transversality, 233, 239, 242, 244–246, 248 of capitalism, 27, 246 trauma, 217, 221–223 Tsing, Anna, 2 Turkey, 29, 231, 232, 280, 287 Bodrum, 37 Turner, J.M.W., 2

U uncertainty, 2, 7, 26, 28, 39, 65, 66, 68, 72, 95, 102, 151, 156, 262, 280–286, 288–300, 306–309, 311, 313, 316, 319 unemployment, 65, 66, 81, 96, 138, 151, 167, 241, 285 unskilled worker, 305

335

V value, norms of, 79 victimization, 113 Vij, Ritu, 4, 7, 10, 11, 29, 56–58, 204, 208, 215, 223, 249, 304, 307 violence, 2, 6, 65, 67, 72, 77, 78, 80, 97, 101, 102, 111, 205, 207, 214, 216, 236, 248, 282 continuum of, 111 Virilio, Paul, 27, 234, 235, 238, 240, 242, 244 Vosko, Leah, 21, 130, 134, 281, 304, 307 Vrasti, Wanda, 18, 206 vulnerability de-pathologized, 11, 68, 83–85 exposure to, 8, 10, 44, 67, 76, 77, 210, 216, 224 pathologized, 82, 83 quantified, 80, 81, 83, 85 quantitative notions of, 77 shared, 77, 79, 80, 83, 86, 286

W Waite, Louise, 6, 12–14, 17, 64, 307–310 Walker, R.B.J., 5, 7, 8, 67, 288, 294 welfare reform, 174, 176, 178–180, 182, 185, 191, 194 whiteness, 7, 203–207, 209, 213, 220, 223, 224 white supremacy. See racism, white supremacy white working class, 130 Winterbottom, Michael, 280 work. See labour workers. See also labour management of, 162, 256, 264, 266

336

INDEX

migrant. See migrants, migrant workers precarious. See precarity, precariat, the “salariat”, the, 150 shortage of, 311, 312 trade unions. See trade unions

unpaid, 263, 281. See also slavery unskilled, 135, 136, 140, 143, 305 working poor, the, 150, 151, 304 Wynter, Sylvia, 215 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 307