archive : s0metim3s

What would it mean to explore precariousness without seeking to resolve its tensions, to regard it as the space of experimentation whose significance is reducible neither to a catastrophe brought down from some transcendental realm nor the destruction of a prior commonplace considered to be the premise of antagonism as such? Both of these approaches, in understanding precariousness as the unconditioned consequence of a capitalist strategy for decomposing an identity that was neither universal nor indisputably (or effectively) antagonistic, constrain politics to the eliciting of a victimised, at times emasculated, subject. Here, capital assumes a god-like demeanour; and it is not surprising that politics becomes ever-more theological, as the prayer that the state might deliver us from its own contingencies through a codification of rights or in the recourse to an explicitly Christian figuration of Lenin.

Part two of the edu-factory contribution, also in draft and incomplete. The first part is here.

So, the initial question I posed – that of how to approach questions of hierarchisation without supposing, or imagining, that this might be set aside by the ostensibly universalising reach of the general equivalent – could be better put as a question that does not only obtain for the university, but instead as the suturing of affects, norms and labour that the university partakes in but by no means exhausts.

Part one, still in draft, of the edu-factory contribution. Part two here. The edu-factory site is here.

Addendum: The final version of the below is here - the second part has been delayed by travel …

How to consider the forms of hierarchisation, submission, intolerance, meekness and domination that obtain in the university without at the same time deferring to either the dream of a universality or, what is the same thing, the nightmare of a total mobilisation – which is to say, the absolute hierarchy of the general equivalent?

If Lauren Berlant’s piece explored precariousness as an intimate meshing of affect and labour around normativity in the films La Promesse and Rosetta, Laura Fantone’s “Precarious changes: Gender and Generational Politics in Contemporary Italy” (Feminist Review, 87, 2007) gives a thorough account of the precario debates within Italy as they turn around the questions of difference (of citizenship, gender and generation).

The final paragraph of Lauren Berlant’s “Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta” (Public Culture 19:2):

I close, therefore, not with a solution to the problem of aspirational normativity as expressed in the conventionalities of subaltern feeling, because, I am arguing, the subordinated sensorium of the immaterial worker, whose acts of rage and ruthlessness are mixed with forms of care, is an effect of the relation between capitalism’s refusal of futurity in an overwhelmingly productive present and the normative promise of intimacy, which enables us to imagine that having a friend or making a date or looking longingly at someone who might, after all, show compassion for our struggles, is really where living takes place.

It’s good to see some different approaches to the question of precariousness or, to be more specific, ones that move beyond norms of what politics (or politics and economics) is or might be to explore, in turn, what is normal and how. Addendum: The entire essay is here, as a pdf.

Nickel and dimed, as a musical - from The American Ruling Class.

In addition to the many excellent writings by Laura Agustin (many of which are here), the abstract from Nandita Sharma’s “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid” (NWSA Journal, 17.3, 2005):

the historical and contemporary discursive practices of anti-trafficking campaigns […] within the global North, often led by feminists, constitute the moral reform arm of contemporary anti-immigrant politics that targets negatively racialized migrants. As in the past, current campaigns collude with a state-backed international security agenda aimed at criminalizing self-determined migrations of people who have ever-less access to legal channels of migration. I argue that only by recognizing the agency, however constrained, of illegalized migrants can we come to understand how processes of capitalist globalization and the consequent effects of dislocation and dispersal shape the mobility of illegalized migrants. Within the current global circuits of capital, goods, and people, I argue that along with a call to end practices of displacement, a demand to eliminate immigration controls is necessary if feminists are to act in solidarity with the dispossessed in their search for new livelihoods and homes.

The rest is here as a pdf.

Also, while not on ‘trafficking’, Mandy Thomas’ piece on the garment industry might be of some interest. Part of it - the part about watching horror films - reminds me of why I think the Zombie Shuffle might resonate more than do EuroMayDay-type actions with the experience of precarious work (and without the latter’s recourse to strategies of inclusion-regulation).