Precarious Indigestion
I got an email a couple or so weeks ago from someone who’d read my article in Mute, but found it, as they put it, “difficult to digest”, and wanted me to suggest other things to read on the topic of precarity. Around the same time, Danny Butt remarked elsewhere on, as he termed it, the consumptive dynamics that accompanies the discussion of ‘precarity’. And in the middle of this, I came across Adbusters’ most recent ‘Big Idea’ forum on, yes, ‘precarity’. Adbusters, of course, being the quintessential propagators of a consumerism - hip niche-market - posing as politics.
That said, here are a few articles that are worth reading and not simply digesting for the purposes of the being-seen-to-be-in or the forming-of the niche market:
Anonymous, ‘Is Precarity Enough?’
Werner Bonefeld, The Politics of Debt
The discussion paper from the Frassanito Network, which I posted here (scroll down some).
Franco Berardi’s article is also worth a look, if you can read German or Italian.
I’m sure there are others - I’ll add as I can recall. Not to mentioned the numerous studies on intermittent, casualised work, or simply changes to labour markets and so on, which don’t use the term ‘precarity’. Then, of course, there’s the whole philosophical discussion on precariousness, little of which discusses this in relation to work, but much of which turns on the question of the foundation of politics or, rather: the non-foundation of politics. But that makes it all that much more difficult to digest, I suppose. Bon apetitit.
