Verso Futures

The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy.

– Theodor Adorno

Verso Futures is a series of essay-length philosophical and political interventions by both emerging and established writers and thinkers from around the world. Each title in the series addresses the outer limits of political and social possibility.

Also available in Verso Futures:

The Future by Marc Augé

Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Déjà Vu and the End of History by Paolo Virno

First published in English by Verso 2015
Translation © Aileen Derieg 2015
First published as Die Regierung der Prekären
© Isabell Lorey 2012
Foreword © Judith Butler 2015

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-596-9 (PB)
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v3.1

Foreword

By Judith Butler

The important contribution of this thoughtful work is to let us understand finally that precarity is not a passing or episodic condition, but a new form of regulation that distinguishes this historical time. When one claims that some populations are more precarious than others, and tries to explain that difference, one is left with the task of explaining in what precisely precarity consists, where it begins and ends, and how we understand its scope and its mechanisms. In fact, we can only identify the instances by seeking recourse to its more general form, and this leads us to a consideration of how precarity has itself become a regime, a hegemonic mode of being governed, and governing ourselves. Lorey’s book allows us to consider the emergence of a neoliberal form of regulation and power that is at once prefigured by Foucault and exceeds his own theory of power. The text clearly relies on Foucault for many important considerations, especially the understanding of power as it produces a subject as well as its relationship with itself. But it also introduces a new question: how do we understand precarity and its pervasive sense of ‘insecurity’ as a dense site of power in subject formation? In other words, how do we understand the organization of ‘security’ under neoliberal conditions as requiring and inducing precarity as a mode of life, as an indefinite trajectory, as the organizing principle for the process by which we are governed and by which we come to govern ourselves?

Lorey’s book works with enormous conceptual clarity to help us to distinguish among forms of precarity, their social implications, and the particular ways in which precarity names a new form of power and potential for exploitation. Drawing on the history of political sovereignty, the Marxist idea of reproductive labour, a feminist critique of ideas of masculine independence, and an analysis of neoliberal forms of induced destitution, Lorey’s work offers a historically and politically nuanced understanding of how new forms of power converge at the present time for new regulatory purposes. Whatever one might want to say about the transience or precarity of life itself, cast in existential terms, such claims are not separable from the social and economic organization of needs and, more particularly, the production of ‘insecurity’ for the purposes of extending securitarian forms of power. Lorey’s work asks us to pay close attention to ‘precarization’ as a process that produces not only subjects, but also ‘insecurity’ as the central preoccupation of the subject. This particular form of power lays the groundwork for establishing the need for security as the ultimate political ideal, one that works to amass power within the state and corporate institutions at the same time that it produces a new kind of subject. In the place of critique and resistance, populations are now defined by their need to be alleviated from insecurity, valorizing forms of police and state control, promises of global investment, and institutions of global governance. Just as the discourse of ‘financial crisis’ can and does work to shore up the need for greater managerial control of the market (and the need for an ever more expert set of capitalists), so the discourse of ‘precarity’ consolidates power among those who wield the power to alternately promise its alleviation and threaten its continuation.

Lorey’s work involves a rethinking of the doctrine of sovereignty, offering an important reformulation of Agamben’s recent views on the sovereign exception. Situating her analysis within a critique of liberal political philosophy and a revised conception of biopolitics, Lorey shows how sovereignty itself becomes an instrument in the regulation and self-regulation of populations. In fact, everyone is prekarisiert by the norms that govern the idea of sovereign citizens. Their sovereignty depends on the presumption that one’s person or property is perpetually threatened by the outside, and that the exercise of sovereignty thus consists in a demand for security. In a sense, contemporary securitarian regimes govern populations (and are thus bound up with biopolitics) by amplifying and redefining this basic dynamic of ‘defending against a threat’ that defines liberal ideas of sovereign citizenship. Ironically, if not painfully, the idea of sovereignty implies precarization, which at once gives the lie to the traditional account of sovereign independence at the same time as it exposes its inner logic. In the terms of later modernity, the sovereign people, and the sovereign subject, are threatened by forms of illness, contagions of sexual panic, waves of criminality, possible invasions of many kinds. Thus, the need for immunization becomes paramount, and power takes the form of a subjugation by and through that need. On the one hand,the sovereign subject is markedly singular, and must be distinguished from the masses by its individualization; and yet, the subject’s relation to its own life is clearly managed by large-scale forms of social and political regulation that it has adopted and now cultivates as its own practice of self-making. Indeed, the more the subject regulates him or herself, the more effectively does that broader form of regulation work – taking the form of a mode of self-management that takes for granted the individuality (and the need to cultivate the individual) that is its very instrument.

This important book challenges us to imagine political mobilizations that would refuse the lure of ‘being threatened’ and take a critical distance from those forms of fearfulness that make us vulnerable to exploitation. In effect, Lorey asks us to think about the alternatives to accepting fear and insecurity as the basis for a political mobilization, alternatives to accepting deliberately induced states in which we seek security at all costs. What would it mean to focus instead on the induced character of precarity, and the exploitation of insecurity? Power is imposed on the subject, and yet power is the means by which the subject relates to itself, even cultivates itself. Thus, Lorey opposes a politics of pure victimization (that would see power as only imposed from the outside) as well as the ultimate value of ‘security’ (the affective investment of the regulated subject). Instead, she asks us to consider those forms of political mobilization that rally precarity against those regimes that seek to augment their power to manage and dispose of populations – in other words, precarity as activism. New governmental forms engaged in the precarization of populations work precisely through cultivating forms of subjectivation and practical possibilities (Handlungsmöglichkeiten) that can, and must be, undone through an activism of the precarious, one that combats the false promises of security, its managerial tactics, and its exploitations.

The Government of the Precarious:

An Introduction

If we fail to understand precarization, then we understand neither the politics nor the economy of the present. Precarization is not a marginal phenomenon, even in the rich regions of Europe. In the leading neoliberal Western industrial nations it can no longer be outsourced to the socio-geographical spaces of the periphery where it only affects others. Precarization is not an exception, it is rather the rule. It is spreading even in those areas that were long considered secure. It has become an instrument of governing and, at the same time, a basis for capitalist accumulation that serves social regulation and control.

Precarization means more than insecure jobs, more than the lack of security given by waged employment. By way of insecurity and danger it embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation. It is threat and coercion, even while it opens up new possibilities of living and working. Precarization means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency.

In the secularized modernity of the West, however, being exposed to contingency is generally regarded as a nightmare, as a loss of all security, all orientation, all order. This monster of the bottomless pit can clearly no longer be really tamed even in the post-Fordist industrial nations of the ‘West’. Fear of what is not calculable marks the techniques of governing and subjectivation, merging into an inordinate culture of measuring the immeasurable.

This leads to a form of governing that at least since Thomas Hobbes has been viewed as no longer possible: a government that is not legitimized by promising protection and security. Contrary to the old rule of a domination that demands obedience in exchange for protection, neoliberal governing proceeds primarily through social insecurity, through regulating the minimum of assurance while simultaneously increasing instability. In the course of the dismantling and remodelling of the welfare state and the rights associated with it, a form of government is established that is based on the greatest possible insecurity, promoted by proclaiming the alleged absence of alternatives. The way that precarization has become an instrument of government also means that its extent must not pass a certain threshold such that it seriously endangers the existing order: in particular, it must not lead to insurrection. Managing this threshold is what makes up the art of governing today.

Against this background, the question raised is not how to prevent and end the threat of precarity that is driving the disintegration of order. It is rather a matter of understanding how we are governed and keep ourselves governable specifically through precarization. In analyzing these techniques of governing, approaches that in various contexts imagine civil war, anomie or the possible break-up of society are of little help. The question is rather where, within these governing mechanisms, cracks and potentials for resistance are to be found.

(Self-)Government

The analysis of precarity that I develop in this book focuses on the term ‘government’. Michel Foucault has shown that ‘Western’ practices of governing can be traced back genealogically to Christian pastoral power. Already in this powerful prelude to modern governmentality, what is involved is an art of governing people, not things or territories. With the pastoral form of power, specific modes of individualization, including becoming a Westernmodern subject, are both condition and effect at the same time. Individualization means isolation, and this kind of separation is primarily a matter of constituting oneself by way of imaginary relationships, constituting one’s ‘own’ inner being, and only secondly and to a lesser extent by way of connections with others. Yet this interiority and self-reference is not an expression of independence, but rather the crucial element in the pastoral relationship of obedience.¹

Corresponding practices of governing consequently consist in being led in one’s own conduct by others in precisely such a way as to produce relations to self that are then perceived, in the best case, as independent and autonomous. The art of governing generally consists in the ‘conduct of conducts’,² in influencing the conduct of others through their individualization. This does not, however, inevitably mean that individuals are trapped in a vicious circle between being guided by others and being self-guided. Numerous examples of ‘counter-conduct in the sense of struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’³ can already be found in the Middle Ages.

In the eighteenth century, pastoral power underwent a fundamental transformation: the laws to which people had to subject themselves were no longer laws of the king or the church, but rather the self-imposed laws of the citizens. This modern, male, bourgeois form of sovereignty required modes of subjectivation positioned ambivalently between self-determination and subjugation, between self-creation and obedience, between freedom and servility. For the modern citizen, if social and political conditions and one’s own life are perceived as capable of being arranged and influenced by one’s own (co-)decisions, then citizens – believing in collective, and thus implicitly their own, sovereignty, autonomy and freedom – voluntarily subject themselves to the conditions of society.

Yet modes of self-governing do not serve only to make oneself and others governable. At the same time, the potential emerges in them to no longer be governed in existing ways and even to be ever less governed. In the analysis of governing through insecurity, the government of the precarious, it is important to understand the actualization of this double ambivalence of governmentality under neoliberal conditions: the ambivalence between being governed by others and self-government, as well as the ambivalence in self-government – between servile making-governable and refusals that aim to be no longer governed in this way. When we ask in this book why protests against government through insecurity are so difficult and rare, this means problematizing the obvious dominance of the servile side of precarious self-government. This side cannot be separated from the form of labour that is currently becoming hegemonic, one that demands the whole person, is primarily based on communication, knowledge and affect, and becomes visible in a new way as virtuoso labour.

Crisis of the Collective, Chances for the Common

Since the formation of capitalist relations of production, there have been many for whom freedom of labour-power has not been a guarantee against existential vulnerabilities. Wage labour brought neither security nor independence.⁴ Only collective welfare-state institutions that had to be fought for were able to ensure relative independence, essentially for the male breadwinner of the family. For this form of security, relational reproduction and care work had to be feminized, domesticated and devalued in its quality as labour.⁵ However, the securing of predominately male independence had the advantage that the dependent workers could be organized and assembled for collective struggles.

With the neoliberal demolition and restructuring of collective security systems and the rise of short-term and increasingly precarious employment conditions, the possibilities for collectively organizing in factories or occupational groups are also eroded. New forms of individualization through employment have appeared, which are ever less capable, if at all, of being organized through traditional institutions of representations of interest. How can new practices of organizing that break through these forms of individualization be found today? How can a perspective on social and political conditions be developed that does not reject relationships, connections and dependencies among individuals, in other words, one that imagines and practises forms of self-reliance that start from connections with others?

This is possible when precarization is not perceived and combated solely as a threat, but the entire ensemble of the precarious is taken into consideration and the current domination-securing functions and subjective experiences of precarization are taken as a starting-point for political struggles.

To understand precarization in this way, it is necessary to re-open the field of concepts of the precarious, following its constriction by French social-science usage since the early 1980s, along with its entry into the corresponding debates in other languages.⁶ If precarization is no longer limited to lack, coercion and fear, then the demand for a simple ‘politics of de-precarization’⁷ no longer makes sense, as it seeks nothing other than the reformulation of traditional social-security systems. Politics of this kind would only be meaningful, in my view, if it could problematize and break through the hegemonic political and social-security logics of modern nation-states, if precarity and precarization could thus be analyzed in their functions as instruments of domination, and finally, if new modes of securing and protecting against precarity and precarization could be found in the recognition of an ineluctable state of precariousness.

The Precarious and the Critique of Representation

In the late 1990s both Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Castel, two of the most influential sociologists in the field of international precarization research, explicitly feared that collective resistance in the context of precarity would become impossible.⁸ Castel took note of the movements of the precarious in Europe, including the transnational EuroMayDay movement,⁹ only marginally and relatively late, while Bourdieu was not even able to witness them.¹⁰ He died in early 2002, less than a year after the first MayDay parade took place in Milan on 1 May 2001. On this traditional day of labour, not only do the heterogeneous precarious in many European cities problematize their situations and experiences, which often remain invisible in corporatist organizations, but, starting from political practices that critique identity and representation, they also seek new forms of organizing the unorganizable.¹¹ Precarious working and living conditions are taken as the starting-point for political struggles, in order to find possibilities for political agency in neoliberal conditions.

What is unusual about these social movements is not only the ways in which new forms of political struggle are tested and new perspectives on precarization developed. They have also – and this is striking in relation to other social movements – repeatedly traversed and crossed the seemingly very separate fields of the cultural and the political. During the past decade, exchanges around the partly subversive knowledge of the precarious, in the communicative search for a common ground with a view to facilitating a political constituting, have frequently taken place less in political or even university contexts than in art institutions and social centres (as in Italy and Spain). This is only one aspect in the search for and invention of new modes of coming together and organizing, which have become difficult in their traditional forms, as Bourdieu and Castel rightly noted.

The precarious cannot be unified or represented, their interests are so disparate that classical forms of corporate organizing are not effective. The many precarious are dispersed both in relations of production and through diverse modes of production, which absorb and engender subjectivities, extend their economic exploitation, and multiply identities and work places. It is not only work that is precarious and dispersed, but life itself. In all their differences, the precarious tend to be isolated and individualized, because they do short-term jobs, get by from project to project, and often fall through collective social-security systems. There are no lobbies or forms of representation for the diverse precarious.

Yet this should by no means be understood solely as a lack, since it also holds out the opportunity to invent new and appropriate forms of political agency on the basis of precarious living and working conditions. The MayDay movements did not so much attempt to represent a collective subject of the precarious as to try out non-representationist practices. In this respect, the movements of the precarious were the predecessors of the university occupations of 2008 and 2009, as well as of the current Occupy movements and their insistence on democracy beyond representation. Paolo Virno writes: ‘It is typical of the post-Fordist multitude to foment the collapse of political representation: not as an anarchic gesture, but as a means of calmly and realistically searching for new political forms.’¹²

The different meanings of the concept of ‘precarious’ were repeatedly linked in the MayDay movements with the experiences of the individuals and with political practices. The Frassanito Network, in its definition of precarization, outlines the ambivalence of the term, particularly in the context of migration: ‘Precarization thus symbolizes a contested field: a field in which the attempt to start a new cycle of exploitation also meets desires and subjective behaviors which express the refusal of the old, so-called Fordist regime of labor and the search for another, better, we can even say flexible life.’¹³ In precarization an extreme degree of exploitation and a ‘liberation’ from traditional conditions of exploitation bound up with the production apparatus of Fordism merge into new modes of subjectivation.

Three Dimensions of the Precarious

The conceptual composition of ‘precarious’ can be described in the broadest sense as insecurity and vulnerability, destabilization and endangerment. The counterpart of precarious is usually protection, political and social immunization against everything that is recognized as endangerment.¹⁴ Historically, we owe political ideas of protection from insecurity not just to Hobbes’ conception of a security state, in which the representing sovereign protects against the so-called natural state of man, inherent to which is the destruction of property and life by dangerous others. Protection from insecurity, from the precarious, has also been the responsibility of the welfare states of the twentieth century.¹⁵ At the same time, neither Hobbes’ Leviathan nor the welfare state prevents the precarious, they rather respectively engender new historical forms of precarity, new insecurities, from which they are again supposed to provide protection.

Those who are promised security are generally unable to develop free of concern about the threatening, precarized others; they are obligated to obedience and subordination. In a historically different way the precarious thus represent both the cause and the effect of domination and security.

However, when domination in post-Fordist societies is no longer legitimated through (social) security, and we instead experience governing through insecurity, then the precarious and the immune, insecurity and security/protection, stand ever less in a relation of opposition and increasingly take on a graded relationship in terms of a regulated threshold of being (still) governable. A crucial basis for this development is that precarization in neoliberalism is currently in a process of normalization, which enables governing through insecurity. In neoliberalism precarization becomes ‘democratized’.

To further expand on all these theses, I distinguish between three dimensions of the precarious: precariousness, precarity and governmental precarization.

Precariousness – here I follow Judith Butler – is the term for a socio-ontological dimension of lives and bodies.¹⁶ Precariousness is not an anthropological constant, a transhistorical state of being human, but rather a condition inherent to both human and non-human being. Above all, however, precariousness is not simply individual or something that exists ‘in itself’ in the philosophical sense; it is always relational and therefore shared with other precarious lives. Precariousness designates something that is existentially shared, an endangerment of bodies that is ineluctable and hence not to be secured, not only because they are mortal, but specifically because they are social. Precariousness as precarious ‘being-with’ in Nancy’s sense is a condition of every life, producing very different variations historically and geographically.¹⁷

The second dimension of the precarious, precarity, is to be understood as a category of order, which designates the effects of different political, social and legal compensations of a general precariousness. Precarity denotes the striation and distribution of precariousness in relations of inequality, the hierarchization of being-with that accompanies the processes of othering. This dimension of the precarious covers naturalized relations of domination, through which belonging to a group is attributed or denied to individuals. Precarity involves social positionings of insecurity, yet it implies neither modes of subjectivation nor the power of agency of those positioned.

The third dimension of the precarious is the dynamics of governmental precarization. This relates to modes of governing since the formation of industrial capitalist conditions, and in modern Western societies cannot be separated historically from the ideologeme of bourgeois sovereignty.

Although precariousness designates both a condition of life and the foundation of the social and the political, it was not until life entered politics – with the biopolitics that developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as analysed by Foucault – that governing began to centre in a previously unknown way on preserving the life of each and every individual in a population, so as to strengthen the state and serve the productivity of the capitalist economy.¹⁸ In the course of this new art of governing, governable biopolitical subjectivations emerged. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biopolitical subjectivations increasingly intertwined with ideas of liberal bourgeois freedom and democratic self-determination.

Governmental precarization thus means not only destabilization through employment, but also destabilization of the conduct of life and thus of bodies and modes of subjectivation. Understanding precarization as governmental makes it possible to problematize the complex interactions between an instrument of governing and the conditions of economic exploitation and modes of subjectivation, in their ambivalence between subjugation and self-empowerment. Practices of self-empowerment do not automatically have an emancipatory effect, but are instead to be understood in a governmental perspective as thoroughly ambivalent. They can signify modes of self-government that represent a conformist self-development, a conformist self-determination enabling extraordinary governability. Practices of empowerment, however, can also break through, refuse, or escape from appeals to functional self-government.

In a governmental perspective, precarization can be considered not only in its repressive, striating forms, but also in its ambivalently productive moments, as these emerge by way of techniques of self-government. In a historical era when contingency is not only subject in a new way to conditions of economic exploitation, the term governmental precarization can also cover a productive way of dealing with what is incalculable, with what cannot be measured or modularized, with what eludes government through insecurity.

None of the three dimensions of the precarious occurs individually, but rather in historically differently posited relations. Basically, it can be said of the relationship between precariousness and precarity that different forms of domination are thereby evoked. The socio-ontological level is constructed as a threat against which a political community must be protected, immunized. Legitimizing the protection of some generally requires striating the precarity of those marked as ‘other’. This especially distinguishes liberal governmentality to a high degree. The threatening precariousness can be turned into the construction of dangerous others, positioned respectively within and outside the political and social community as ‘abnormal’ and ‘alien’. In neoliberalism, as noted, precarization is currently undergoing a process of normalization in which, though the patterns of a liberal ordering of precarity continue to exist in a modified form, existential precariousness can no longer be entirely shifted through the construction of dangerous others and warded off as precarity; instead it is actualized in the individualized governmental precarization of those who are normalized under neoliberal conditions.

In my research on the government of the precarious, I am interested in developing a political and social theoretical perspective that starts from connectedness with others and takes different dimensions of the precarious into consideration. In light of the existential precariousness of every (living) being, understanding social relationality as primary does not mean starting from something that is equally common to all. Recognizing social relationality can only be the beginning of an entry into processes of becoming-common, involving discussions of possible common interests in the differentness of the precarious, in order to invent with others new forms of organizing and new orders that break with the existing forms of governing in a refusal of obedience.

Berlin, March 2012

1 Cf. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 207–8.

2 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in James D. Faubion, ed., Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley, London: Penguin Press, 1994, pp. 326–48, here p. 341.

3 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 201.

4 Cf. Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question, trans. Richard Boyd, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003.

5 Cf. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York: Autonomedia, 2004.

6 See also Precarias a la deriva, ‘Projekt und Methode einer “militanten Untersuchung”. Das Reflektieren der Multitude in actu’, trans. Kathrin Held and Peter Tabor, in Marianne Pieper, Thomas Atzert, Serhat Karakayali and Vassilis Tsianos, eds, Empire und die biopolitische Wende. Die internationale Diskussion im Anschluss an Hardt und Negri, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2007, pp. 85–108, here p. 93.

7 Klaus Dörre, ‘Entsicherte Arbeitsgesellschaft. Politik der Entprekarisierung’, Widerspruch. Beiträge zu sozialistischer Politik 49 (2005), pp. 5–18.

8 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘La précarité est aujourd’hui partout’, in Contre-feux. Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l’invasion néolibérale, Paris: Liber – Raison d’Agir, 1998, pp. 95–101; Robert Castel, L’insécurité sociale, Qu’est-ce qu’être protégé?, Paris: Seuil, 2003, pp. 46–7.

9 For a brief history of the EuroMayDay movement, cf. Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement, trans. Aileen Derieg, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010, pp. 75–90.

10 Cf. Robert Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der sozialen Unsicherheit’, trans. Thomas Atzert, in Robert Castel and Klaus Dörre, eds, Prekarität, Abstieg, Ausgrenzung. Die soziale Frage am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2009, pp. 21–34. Here Castel mentions the French cultural workers or Intermittents.

11 Cf. Kulturrisse. Zeitschrift für radikaldemokratische Kulturpolitik: ‘Organisierung der Unorganisierbaren’ (April 2006), available at http://kulturrisse.at.

12 Paolo Virno, ‘Publicness of the Intellect: Non-State Public Sphere and the Multitude’, transversal: ‘Publicum’ (June 2005), available at http://transversal.at.

13 The Frassanito Network, ‘Precarious, Precarization, Precariat?’ (2005), available at http://thistuesday.org.

14 On the different dynamics of protection and threat that are covered in the term ‘immunization’, see Isabell Lorey, Figuren des Immunen: Elemente einer politischen Theorie, Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011.

15 Cf. Castel, L’insécurité sociale.

16 Cf. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London and New York: Verso, 2009; and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso, 2004.

17 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

18 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 141; Isabell Lorey, ‘Als das Leben in die Politik eintrat. Die biopolitisch-gouvernementale Moderne, Foucault und Agamben’, in Pieper et al., eds, Empire und die biopolitische Wende, pp. 269–92.

Chapter 1

Precariousness and Precarity

How can we understand, initially at a theoretical-systematic level, the connection between precarity as a relationship of inequality on the one hand, and existential, social precariousness on the other, the relationship between the first and the second dimension of the precarious? Judith Butler offers some considerations about this in her book Frames of War. Here she continues to pursue the political-philosophical question that was already raised in her book of essays, Precarious Life, as to when a life is considered grievable and therefore liveable. Within only a few pages, in the introduction to Frames of War, Butler introduces a second concept alongside precariousness: that of precarity,¹ adopting the neologism that has been used for several years now, especially in political-theoretical and activist discourses on precarization.²

Butler conceptualizes the general precariousness of life, the vulnerability of the body, not simply as a threat or a danger from which we have necessarily to be protected. She argues against reproducing the anxieties of precariousness and thus supporting traditional modern logics of domination, instead positing the lack of recognition of fundamentally precarious life as the starting-point for analysing relations of domination.

‘Precariousness’ as an existential state designates what constitutes life in general – both human and non-human. Butler formulates an ontology that cannot be understood apart from social and political conditions. These conditions enable historically specific modes of being, making it possible for bodies to survive in a certain way, which would not be viable without their being embedded in social, political and legal circumstances. At the same time, however, it is precisely these circumstances that endanger life. For this reason, according to Butler, it is important to focus on the political decisions and social practices through which some lives are protected and others are not.

Precariousness becomes ‘co-extensive’³ at birth, since survival depends from the beginning on social networks, on sociality and the work of others. The fundamental social dependency of a living being due to its vulnerability, due to the impossibility of living a wholly autonomous life, also highlights – going beyond Butler – the eminent significance of reproductive work. Because life is precarious, it is crucially dependent on care and reproduction.

Precariousness relates not to life itself, but rather to the conditions of its existence;⁴ what is problematized here is not what makes everyone the same, but rather what is shared by all. Precariousness that is shared by all can also be understood as a separating factor: on the one hand it is what we all have in common, but on the other it is what distinguishes and separates us from others. These two aspects of ‘shared/separated’ cannot be sharply differentiated, but should instead be considered in their ambivalence. Sharing and separation have always already been inscribed in general and conditional precariousness: commonality and difference, conjunction and disjunction.

Precariousness is consequently neither an immutable mode of being nor an existential sameness, but rather a multiply insecure constituting of bodies, which is always socially conditioned. As that which is shared, which is at once divisive and connective, precariousness denotes a relational difference, a shared differentness. What is connective is not a pre-existing common good to which one could have recourse; instead it is something that is only engendered in political and social agency.

Shared precariousness is thus a condition that both exposes us to others and makes us dependent on them.⁵ This social interdependence can express itself both as concern or care and as violence. In other words: because they are precarious and hence finite, bodies are dependent on something outside themselves, ‘on others, on institutions and on sustained and sustainable environments’.⁶ Without protection, without security, without care no life can survive, and yet at the same time, it always remains exposed to risk and the danger of death. ‘No amount of will or wealth can eliminate the possibilities of illness or accident for a living body’, as Butler says.⁷

The assumption that life, because it is precarious and endangered, because it is exposed to an existential vulnerability, must be or even could be legally or otherwise entirely protected and secured, is nothing other than a fantasy of omnipotence.⁸ Although they need protection, living bodies can never be completely protected, specifically because they are permanently exposed to social and political conditions, under which life remains precarious. The conditions that enable life are, at the same time, exactly those that maintain it as precarious. All security retains the precarious; all protection and all care maintain vulnerability; nothing guarantees invulnerability.

Shared precariousness as a relational difference does not exist beyond the social and the political. Therefore it does not exist independently from a second dimension of the precarious, namely that of hierarchizing precarity. This corresponds to a second form of difference: that of classifying and discriminating differentiation. Butler underscores the paradigmatic relationship between precariousness, precarity and domination in Western modernity. She emphasizes the break that Hobbesian state theory signified, conceiving commonly shared precariousness primarily as a threat: being anxious and frightened by others and by the vulnerability shared with them.⁹ ‘Yet, precisely because each body finds itself potentially threatened by others who are, by definition, precarious as well, forms of domination follow.’¹⁰ Domination turns existential precariousness into an anxiety towards others who cause harm, who have to be preventively fended off, and not infrequently even destroyed, in order to protect those who are threatened.¹¹ The precariousness shared with others is hierarchized and judged, and precarious lives are segmented. This segmentation produces, at the same moment, the ‘differential distribution’¹² of symbolic and material insecurities, in other words precarity. Precarity as the hierarchized difference in insecurity arises from the segmentation, the categorization, of shared precariousness. The classification of what is ineluctably shared produces inequality. Precarity can therefore be understood as a functional effect arising from the political and legal regulations that are specifically supposed to protect against general, existential precariousness. From this perspective, domination means the attempt to safeguard some people from existential precariousness, while at the same time this privilege of protection is based on a differential distribution of the precarity of all those who are perceived as other and considered less worthy of protection.

1 Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Grievable Life’, in Frames of War, pp. 25–6; for further considerations of precariousness and precarity, see also the interview with Judith Butler and Antke Engel, ‘Politics under Conditions of Precariousness and Violence’, in Marina Gržinić and Rosa Reitsamer, eds, New Feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Networking Conditions, Vienna: Löcker, 2008, pp. 135–46; Judith Butler, ‘For and Against Precarity’, Tidal. Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy 1 (December 2011), pp. 12–13, and ‘Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable’, with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar and Ana Vujanović, Theatre Drama Review 4 (2012), pp. 165–79.

2 In discussions in the context of the European movement of the precarious (since 2001, the EuroMayDay movement) not only is the term ‘precarization’ (Prekarisierung) used in German, but also – often synonymously, without the differentiation developed here – ‘precarity’ (Prekarität) and ‘precariat’ (Prekariat) (cf. Raunig, A Thousand Machines, pp. 75–90). Even before Butler established the connection to political-theoretical and activist discussions about precarity herself, her concept of precariousness was already linked with precarity. (cf. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks’, Fibreculture 5 (2005).

3 Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Grievable Life’, p. 14.

4 Cf. ibid., pp. 22–3.

5 ‘Although precarious life is a generalized condition, it is, paradoxically, the condition of being conditioned’ (ibid., p. 23).

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., p. 30.

8 Cf. ibid., p.18.

9 Cf. also Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

10 Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Grievable Life’, p. 31.

11 Elsewhere I have called this kind of binary confirmation of domination juridical immunity. In this immunizing dynamic, the precarious constructed as threat can be fended off to an ‘outside’. However, the dangerous precarious can also be taken into a political community in the dynamic of biopolitical immunization and thus neutralized in their dangerousness and integrated – this dynamic of the immune corresponds more to normalized governmental precarization (cf. Lorey, Figuren des Immunen).

12 Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Grievable Life’, pp. 25–7.

Chapter 2

Biopolitical Governmentality

In order to develop the third dimension of the precarious, governmental precarization, it is necessary first of all to describe the political-economic framework, which I call ‘biopolitical governmentality’.¹ Michel Foucault uses the concept of ‘governmentality’ to designate the structural entanglement between the government of a state and the techniques of self-government in modern Western societies. This entanglement between state and population-subjects can be regarded as the political and economic paradigm shift towards Western modernity.

What had been developing since the sixteenth century first came to fruition in the course of the eighteenth: a new governing technique, more precisely the lines of force of modern governing techniques up to the present. Neither the traditional sovereign, for which Foucault cites the sixteenth-century figure of Machiavelli’s Principe as a prototype, nor Hobbes’ voluntary community of subjects bound by contract, in the seventeenth century, were interested in leading the people for their own sake, but primarily in ruling them for the sake of the sovereign.² It was only in the course of the eighteenth century, as liberalism and the bourgeoisie became hegemonic, that the population came into the focus of power, and with this a mode of governing oriented to bettering the life of the people. For the strength of the state now no longer depended on the size of its territory or on the mercantilist and authoritative regimentation of subjects,³ but rather on the ‘happiness’ of the population.⁴

Methods of governing continued to change in the course of the eighteenth century in the direction of a political economy of liberalism: a self-limiting of governing techniques in favour of a free market on the one hand and population-subjects on the other, who were bound in their thinking and their conduct to economic paradigms as well. These population-subjects were not simply subjugated through repression and obedience, but instead became governable, as Foucault wrote in his lectures on governmentality, in so far as their number, ‘their longevity, health and ways of conducting themselves [had] complex and tangled relationships with these economic processes’.⁵ Liberal modes of governing supplied the basic structure of modern governmentality, which has always been biopolitical.⁶ In other words: liberalism provided the economic and political frame for biopolitics, just as biopolitics appeared as ‘an indispensable element in the development of capitalism’.⁷

By the end of the eighteenth century, the strength and wealth of a state depended increasingly on the health of its population. Within a bourgeois-liberal framework, government policies with this orientation have meant, through to today, establishing, producing and then securing normality. To accomplish this, the first requirement was a large amount of data: statistics were prepared, the probabilities of birth and death rates calculated, along with frequencies of illnesses, housing conditions, nutrition, etc. However, this was not sufficient. To establish and maximize the health standards of a population required productive biopolitical modes of governing that promoted life, as well as the active participation of every single individual, in other words: it required each individual’s self-government.

In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault writes: ‘Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner.’⁸ Foucault describes two things here that I think are important: ‘Western man’ has to learn to have a body that is not dependent on particular conditions of existence, which means he must learn that ‘his’ precariousness assumes different extents that he can influence. Secondly, he has to learn to develop a relation to himself that is creative and productive, one in which it is possible to shape one’s ‘own’ body, life and self, and thus also one’s ‘own’ precariousness. Through attending to what is one’s own, the ties to others are dissolved, relational difference is segmented. Individualization is the precondition for the Western liberal governing of everyone’s body and self.⁹ Biopolitical-governmental self-governing thus arises at those moments when the social conditions of the precariousness of the body and the whole of life are perceived by the individual as capable of being treated and formed. Indeed, these kinds of ways of self-governing strengthen fantasies of mastering one’s ‘own’ precariousness as adeptly as possible. Philipp Sarasin shows how in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the context of Western hygienic discourse, the belief emerged that ‘it is largely up to the individual him- or herself to determine health, illness or even the time of death’.¹⁰ This kind of imaginary self-sovereignizing refers to endeavours to overcome the contingency associated with the existential precariousness of life, and these kinds of endeavours never arise independently from governmental dispositives.

In the context of liberal-governmental self-techniques, the attribute ‘one’s own’ always signifies a ‘possessive individualism’ in Macpherson’s sense.¹¹ These kinds of self-relations oriented to the imagination of self, however, initially applied only to the bourgeois class, before gradually extending to the entire population by the end of the nineteenth century. The issue here is not the legal status of the subject, but rather the structural conditions of normalizing societies: people must be capable of guiding themselves, of recognizing themselves as subjects of a sexuality, and learning to have a body that can remain healthy through diligence (nourishment, hygiene, housing conditions) or become ill due to lack of diligence. Specific self-techniques need to be developed, with the help of which the conditions of precariousness can be influenced. In this sense, the entire population must become biopolitical subjects.¹² Biopolitics strives to reduce the vulnerability of an existential precariousness by way of specific techniques of self-formation, in order to ensure on average an economically productive life for the population.

With reference to workers, imaginary self-relations¹³ of this kind mean that one’s own body is imagined as the property of the self; it is ‘one’s own’ body that has to be sold as labour-power. In this respect as well, the modern ‘free’ individual is forced to participate in reproducing him or herself through powerful self-relations, making a good sale of their labour-power in order to be able to live, and live increasingly better, in order to reduce precariousness.

In modern societies, therefore, the ‘arts of governing’¹⁴ – what Foucault also called ‘governmentality’ – do not consist primarily in being repressive, but rather in an ‘internalized’ self-discipline,¹⁵ a mode of self-control that always serves to regulate ‘one’s own’ precariousness.

As early as the second half of the seventeenth century, John Locke – who according to Marx demonstrated that ‘the bourgeois way of thinking is the normal human way of thinking’¹⁶ – wrote in his Two Treatises of Government that man is ‘master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it’.¹⁷ For bourgeois man, as a precondition for his formal freedom as citizen – as well as for the worker who, with the freedom of wage labour, possesses and must sell his labour-power – property took on a supposedly ‘anthropological significance’¹⁸ at the beginning of modernity. This in turn seemed to be the precondition for the individual to become independent and detached from the traditional system of subordination and security; detached, in other words, from the relative security of his precariousness at the price of unfree obedience and dependency.

In a biopolitical perspective, however, the significance of property transcends the limited levels of citizenship, capital and wage labour, and has rather to be understood in its full generality. For bodily property relations are regarded as governmental (gouvernementale) self-government in a biopolitical dispositive for the entire population, not only for the male citizen or worker. Modern self-relations are based structurally, beyond just an economic appeal, on a relation to one’s own body as means of production. Accordingly, possessive-individualist self-relations imply notions of ‘one’s own’ precariousness that can be arranged for security according to class- and gender-specific positions, as well as ethnic, racialized, sexualized and religious attributions – starting from and in relation to a national and male heterosexual norm.

Mastery of one’s self and one’s property is fundamental to historically specific, male-connoted ideas of autonomy and freedom. Here the fact of being connected with others in shared precariousness comes to the fore; in bourgeois society, beginning in the eighteenth century, this tends to shift from ‘one’s own’ into an area of the ‘other’, in the private sphere and with a female connotation. The governmental masculinist way of managing ‘one’s own’ precariousness through the security of property – which in bourgeois understanding also includes wife, children and servants – began to spread to the working class as a materializing ideology in the early twentieth century, with Henry Ford’s introduction of the family wage. Specifically, this meant, on the one hand, the gender-specific division of labour in production work and, on the other hand, the reproduction work in the household that secured wage labour, but was also devalued and unpaid at the same time.¹⁹

Normalizing self-government is based on an imagination of coherence, identity and wholeness that goes back to the construction of a male, white, bourgeois subject. Coherence is in turn one of the preconditions for modern sovereign subjects. ‘Inner’, ‘natural’ truths imagined in this way, constructions of authenticity of this kind, continue up to the present to nourish notions of being able to live one’s life freely, autonomously and according to one’s own decisions, in other words being sovereign. These kinds of biopolitical-governmental power and domination relationships are not easily perceived, because they frequently appear as sovereign, self-made, free decisions, or as personal insights, and even today they produce the desire to ask, ‘Who am I?’ or ‘How can I fulfil myself?’ The concept of one’s own responsibility, so frequently invoked in the course of neoliberal restructuring, functions in the tradition of this liberal technique of self-government.

In this widely understood sense of the economy and biopolitics, the lines of self-marketing labour-power, of entrepreneurs of the self as a mode of subjectivation, reach back to the beginnings of modern liberal societies and are not an entirely neoliberal phenomenon.²⁰ From a perspective of this kind, today’s appeal to individual responsibility appears to repeat something that had already failed to function in the nineteenth century, namely the primacy of property and the construction of security on this basis. At the beginning of bourgeois rule, property was appealed to and deployed as protection against the imponderables of socially conditioned existence, as security against a vulnerability deriving from the secularized community and the rule of princes and kings. Ultimately, this was only valid for a few, and by the end of the nineteenth century the nation-state had to guarantee social security for many citizens.

The Ambivalence of Biopolitical-Governmental Self-Governing

Foucault speaks of a cover-up, and this is probably one of the most important ideological achievements of liberal governmentality: the ambivalence between empowerment and subjugation perceived as an ongoing paradox. The sovereign was beheaded in the French Revolution, yet sovereignty and its theorizations still remain extremely functional for the new, modern technique of governing, though now no longer as describing a relationship between sovereign and subject that covers the entire political and social body. With the end of aristocratic rule, there was a transfer of juridical sovereignty from the king to the so-called ‘people’, in other words to the individual male citizens who were considered as making up the nation. By means of state sovereignty, the citizen could now ‘exercise his or her sovereign rights’.²¹ But this ‘democratization of sovereignty’, collectively expressed as ‘sovereignty of the people’, is not the outstanding achievement of bourgeois domination. An assessment of this kind covers up and ‘conceals’ the fact that this democratic sovereignty ‘was heavily ballasted by the mechanisms of disciplinary coercion’,²² as Foucault writes.

The ambivalence between self-legislation and coercion was already pointed out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his writing on the Social Contract. In their sovereignty, the self-governing citizens should also be subjects at the same time. ‘The essence of the political body consists in the concurrence of obedience and freedom’, according to Rousseau.²³ It is only in this simultaneity of subjugation and freedom, of regulation and empowerment, that the governability or self-governability of sovereign bourgeois subjects is achieved. Even today, however, this bourgeois-democratic mode of becoming a subject is not apprehended as constituting ambivalence, but rather as a paradox, as though simultaneous subjugation and empowerment was unimaginable. Yet in the eighteenth century, the Western citizen had not emancipated himself from subjugation and constituted himself as sovereign. The old relation between sovereign and subject was instead shifted ‘into him’, resulting in the fundamental tension of biopolitical governmental subjectivation.

Although Foucault sees this tension and even relates it to the new art of governmentality,²⁴ the way he problematizes sovereignty always remains bound up with rights (and their subjects), rather than being linked with imaginations of the capability for self-creation, coherence and autonomy as condition and effect of biopolitical governmental subjectivation.

The ambivalence of the constitution of Western modern subjects is not based solely on a particular conception of citizenship. Biopolitical-governmental subjectivation in general – modes of self-governing in normalizing societies – takes place according to the same seemingly paradoxical logic as affects citizens as (legal) subjects, in other words between subjugation and empowerment. With the biopolitical demand to orient oneself to what is normal, everyone had to develop a relation to themselves, to control their own bodies, their own lives, by regulating themselves and thus conducting themselves. Despite all individual differences, this demand for self-regulation in both the private and the public sphere was fundamental, both in the family and in the factory or in politics.

It is particularly because techniques of self-government emerge from the simultaneity of subjugation and empowerment, from the ambivalence of coercion and freedom, that in this seemingly paradoxical movement the individual becomes not only a subject, but also a specific, modern, ‘free’ subject. ‘Power’, according to Foucault, ‘is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are “free”.’²⁵ Freedom arises from the governmental ‘art of governing’:²⁶ ‘Freedom … is never anything other than a relation between the governing and the governed.’²⁷ The problematization of governmental techniques of governing does not centre on the question of the regulation of autonomous, free subjects, but rather on that of regulating the relationships by which the so-called autonomous and free subjects first become such at all.

What distinguishes liberal forms of governmentality is that the governability of each and every individual within a population always also becomes possible through the way in which they conduct themselves. The art of governing, according to Foucault, consists in conducting conduct. The power of governing is not just exercised repressively from above. Instead, liberal governmental (gouvernementale) governing entails individuals having an acting influence on the actions of others, on the possibilities of conduct.²⁸ Subjectivized in this way, this subject then recurrently participates in the (re-)production of the conditions for governmentality, because it is in this scenario that the possibilities of agency first arise.

Individuals moving in power relations, by which they are guided and governed, are always subjects who act, subjects capable of acting.²⁹ In acting, they participate in the manner in which they are governed. Modern subjects embody liberal-democratic modes of governing through self-government, through the way they live. Participation is the ‘motor’ of this governmental biopolitics, yet not in the conventional sense as political participation, but rather as fundamental participation through self-government. It is precisely through the way they conduct themselves, how they govern themselves, that individuals become amenable to social, political and economic steering and regulation. However, the active participation of each individual in the reproduction of governing techniques never serves only subjugation. Self-conduct does not necessarily have to comply with the dominant discipline and subordination. In the ambivalence between subjugation and empowerment, self-government can always enable immanent struggles over the manner of leadership as well.³⁰ Reducing self-government to mechanisms of subjugation would mean failing to recognize this ambivalence, and obscuring contradictions, social struggles, and potentials for resistance.

Liberal governmentality needs not only a certain form of freedom, but also at the same time mechanisms of security, of ensuring.³¹ The two, freedom and security, mutually prevent their absoluteness; a certain insecurity is immanent to liberal modes of governing, not least of all due to this dynamic. The impossible protection from precariousness finds an equivalent in governmental conceptions of security, which calculate a remainder of risk both politically and economically.³² A welfare-state protection against certain existential dangers and risks is nevertheless possible – even if, so far, it has never been possible for everyone.

Protection and Inequality

Within the framework of its welfare-state paradigm of protection, liberal governmentality was based on multiple forms of precarity as inequality through othering: on the one hand, on the unpaid labour of women in the reproduction area of the private sphere; on the other hand, on the precarity of all those excluded from the nation-state compromise between capital and labour – whether as abnormal, foreign or poor – as well as those living under extreme conditions of exploitation in the colonies.³³ All those who did not meet the norm and normalization of the free, sovereign-bourgeois, white subject, along with his concomitant property relations, and all those who threatened this norm, were precarized. Western modernity, along with its conceptions of sovereignty and biopolitics, is unthinkable without a ‘political culture of danger’,³⁴ without the permanent endangerment of the normal, without imaginary invasions of constant, everyday threats such as illness, filth, sexuality, criminality or the fear of ‘racial’ impurity, which must be immunized against in various ways.³⁵ The presumed paradox of biopolitical governmentality is evident here in a further aspect: this mode of governing makes it possible, as Cornelia Ott has aptly phrased it, ‘for human beings to learn to consider themselves as unique “subjects”, while uniting them at the same time as an amorphous, standardized “population mass” … The reverse side of the “right to life” here is always the exclusion or destruction of life.’³⁶

The liberal mode of governing produces precarities as economic, social and legal relations of inequality through systematic categorizations and hierarchizations according to ‘body’ and ‘culture’. In this sense I use precarity as a structural category of ordering segmented relations of violence and inequality. This dimension of structural inequality, however, is missing in Foucault’s conception of governmentality.³⁷

Helped by a hierarchizing and discriminating culture of danger, the contradictions of liberal political economy are reinforced in the interplay between freedom and security, self-empowerment and compulsion. As an immanent contradiction of liberal governmentality, precarized deviance has repeatedly distorted and disturbed the stabilizing dynamics between freedom and security and has frequently triggered collective counter-behaviour and struggles.

From the nineteenth century on, hegemonic economic modes of subjectivation and self-government were not practised in liberal-capitalist societies independently from social protection techniques and institutions. The latter were intended to reduce social insecurity and keep the risk of unemployment, illness, accident and social exclusion calculable for an increasing number of the national population.³⁸ At the same time, the institutions of the welfare state did not primarily serve the protection and security of the workers, but rather supported economically productive self-government techniques among obedient and cautious citizens,³⁹ who ensured themselves and precarized others simultaneously. This governmental dynamic involves attempts to control the precariousness shared among all by striating and positioning dangerous ‘others’ as the precarious ones at the ‘margins’.

In neoliberalism the function of the precarious is now shifted to the middle of society and normalized. This means that the function of bourgeois freedom can now also be transformed: away from dissociation from precarious others and towards a subjectivizing function in normalized precarization. Whereas the precarity of the marginalized retains its threatening and dangerous potential, precarization is transformed in neoliberalism into a normalized political-economic instrument.

1 On biopolitical governmentality as a social-theoretical concept, cf. Lorey, ‘Als das Leben in die Politik eintrat’.

2 Cf. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 227–54.

3 Mercantilism was already oriented to the growth of the population, but more in terms of quantitative aspects, rather than the quality of life of the people.

4 On the historical understanding of ‘happiness’ and ‘felicity’ referred to here, cf. Isabell Lorey, ‘The Dream of the Governable City. On Plague, Policey and Raison d’état’, transversal: ‘Art and Police’ (June 2007), available at http://transversal.at.

5 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 22.

6 For one of the few passages where Foucault points out the inseparability of modern governmentality and biopolitics, see ibid.

7 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, pp. 140–1.

8 Ibid., p. 142, emphasis added.

9 On the genealogy of individualization that can be traced back to Christian pastoral, cf. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 227ff.

10 Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen. Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765–1914, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001, p. 19.

11 Crawford B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

12 Cf. Lorey, ‘Als das Leben in die Poltik eintrat’, pp. 272–7; and Lorey, Figuren des Immunen, p. 270.

13 Based on Louis Althusser’s ideas, these self-relations are not to be separated from the ‘real conditions of existence’ (here the governmental techniques for governing the population) as materialized, for example, in the constitution of bodies. Cf. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, trans. Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 127–86.

14 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 165.

15 I presume that self-conduct did not first become ‘internalized’ and take effect as a regulatory principle under neoliberalism. Regulation and control are not techniques that first prevailed against discipline in neoliberalism (this is to take a different view from Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59 [1992], pp. 3–7, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Specifically, when a central biopolitical productivity is attributed to (gendered and racialized) bodies in terms of hygiene and health, these subjectivation practices must be located at the beginning of modernity, at the latest around the end of the eighteenth century for the bourgeoisie.

16 Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One: Theories of the Standard of Money’, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya, in Marx Engels Collected Works, MECW, vol. 29: Economic Works 1857–61, New York: International Publishers, 1987, pp. 314–22, here p. 315.

17 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis, London: A. Millar et al., 1764, II. 44.

18 Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 18.

19 Cf. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. Vol. I–III, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, here Notebook 4, §52 and Notebook 22, §11; Gundula Ludwig, Geschlecht regieren. Zum Verhältnis von Staat, Subjekt und heteronormativer Hegemonie, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2011, especially pp. 76–81.

20 In contrast to Foucault, who in The Birth of Biopolitics describes the entrepreneur of the self only in conjunction with the development of neoliberal governmentality; this is also the case for the research following from him.

21 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey, New York: Picador, 2003, p. 37.

22 Ibid.

23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 111.

24 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 165.

25 Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, p. 342.

26 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 120.

27 Michel Foucault, ‘Le Libéralisme comme nouvel art de gouverner’, in Guillaume Le Blanc and Jean Terrel, eds, Foucault au Collège de France: un itinéraire, Bordeaux: PU, 2003, pp. 205–12, quoted from Thomas Lemke, ‘Dispositive der Unsicherheit im Neoliberalismus’, Widerspruch. Beiträge zu sozialistischer Politik 46 (2004), pp. 89–98, here p. 89.

28 Cf. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, p. 341.

29 Cf. ibid., p. 340.

30 Cf., among others, Michel Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’, trans. Lysa Hochroth, in Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, eds, The Politics of Truth, New York: Semiotext(e), 1997, pp. 41–82.

31 Cf. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.

32 Cf. also Herfried Münkler, Matthias Bohlender and Sabine Meurer, eds, Sicherheit und Risiko. Über den Umgang mit Gefahr im 21. Jahrhundert, Bielefeld: transcript, 2010.

33 Cf. Angela Mitropoulos, ‘Precari-Us?’, in Josephine Berry Slater, ed., The Precarious Reader, London: Mute Publishing, 2005, pp. 12–18; also in: transversal: ‘Precariat’ (March 2005), available at http://transversal.at.

34 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 66.

35 Cf. Isabell Lorey, ‘Weißsein und die Auffaltung des Immunen. Zur notwendigen Unterscheidung zwischen Norm und Normalisierung’, in Bettina Bock von Wülfingen and Ute Frietsch, eds, Epistemologie und Differenz. Zur Reproduktion des Wissens in den Wissenschaften, Bielefeld: transcript, 2010, pp. 99–111.

36 Cornelia Ott, ‘Lust, Geschlecht und Generativität. Zum Zusammenhang von gesellschaftlicher Organisation von Sexualität und Geschlechterhierarchie’, in Irene Dölling and Beate Krais, eds, Ein alltägliches Spiel. Geschlechterkonstruktionen in der sozialen Praxis, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997, pp. 104–24, here p. 110. On the connection between biopolitical socialization and colonialism, see Isabell Lorey, ‘Der weiße Körper als feministischer Fetisch. Konsequenzen aus der Ausblendung des deutschen Kolonialismus’, in Martina Tißberger, Gabriele Dietze, Daniela Hrzán, and Jana Husmann-Kastein, eds, Weiß – Weißsein – Whiteness. Kritische Studien zu Gender und Rassismus, 2nd edition, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 61–84.

37 Similar points of criticism of the Foucauldian conception of governmentality are also expressed by Birgit Sauer, Die Asche des Souveräns. Staat und Demokratie in der Geschlechterdebatte, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2001, p. 109; Antke Engel, ‘Wie regiert die Sexualität? Michel Foucaults Konzept der Gouvernementalität im Kontext queer/feministischer Theoriebildung’, in Marianne Pieper and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, eds, Gouvernementalität. Ein sozialwissenschaftliches Konzept in Anschluss an Foucault, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 2003, pp. 224–39; Alex Demirović, ‘Das Problem der Macht bei Michel Foucault’, Working Paper of the Institute for Political Science 2, Vienna, 2008.

38 Cf. Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers; François Ewald, L’état providence, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1986.

39 Cf. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Judicial Forms’, in Faubion, ed., Power: Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3, pp. 1–89.

Chapter 3

Welfare State and Immunization

Current social-science research on ‘precarity’,¹ in which the concept generally has a negative connotation, can be understood in the genealogy of the liberal form of precarity as inequality, which has partly become inscribed in the welfare-state safeguarding of existential precariousness. The exclusively negative meaning of ‘precarity’ goes back to the two French sociologists whose ideas still form the fundamental analytical parameters for institutionalized precarization research in the social sciences today: Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Castel.² Castel’s argument exemplifies the way in which a solely negative construction of ‘precarity’ assumes a political-immunological function, which is particularly reproduced and constricted in the adaptation of his theses in the German-language zone.

The biopolitical-immunizing dynamic in Castel’s position moves between security and protection on the one side and endangerment and threat on the other. Accordingly, in his analyses of ‘precarity’, the welfare state stands on the side of protection, whereas ‘precarity’ is on the side of potential endangerment – not only of those affected by insufficient protection through employment, but also of society as a whole.

If I criticize here the opposition that Castel posits between the secure welfare state and insecure ‘precarity’, it is not my intention to deploy a neoliberal discourse of freedom that celebrates ‘the liberation of individuals from the clutches of the “nanny state” ’.³ Instead, two questions arise: Who was already not (sufficiently) safeguarded in the Fordist welfare-state system? And in what way is social insecurity currently becoming a component of social normality? If ‘precarity’ is conceived solely as threat and insecurity, this means it is always posited in contrast to a norm of security; it remains in the mode of deviation. This makes it impossible to grasp the processes of normalization that I understand as the regulation of modes of precarization and thus as a neoliberal instrument of steering and technique of governing.

Biopolitical Immunization

I use the concept of ‘biopolitical immunization’ to designate a modern dynamic of legitimizing and securing relations of domination. This figure of the politically immune is characterized – in contrast to juridical immunity – by the movement of taking in. This involves a manner of safeguarding that implies a movement into what is to be protected. What is to be protected can be a political community, a social constellation, from which an evil coming from ‘within itself’ must be differentiated in order to protect this community. First, this kind of evil must be discursively positioned at the social margin – frequently supported by a process of othering – in order to then be split: into one part that is considered, in relation to immunization, as ‘capable of integration’, and another part that is constructed as ‘incurable’ and deadly for the community, and that must therefore be completely excluded. The security of the community is regulated through the integration of a neutralized and domesticated potential danger, which is in part produced by security techniques for their own legitimization.⁴

A political-immunological perspective also makes it possible to inquire how the threatening and dangerous is constructed in a pattern of social-theory argumentation – as in the sociological analysis of ‘precarity’ – if previous forms of immunization no longer protect against what is threatening and dangerous. What ideas of society, state and the individual emerge, if relations of power and domination are understood as legitimating and reproducing themselves in an immunizing dynamic between security and insecurity, between protection and endangerment?

These kinds of threat scenarios usually aim to (re-) immunize relations of domination. In other words, they indicate a crisis of specific relations of domination, the disintegration of which is depicted as catastrophic, and particularly a (re-)establishing of protection and security techniques that can be used for steering and regulating the governed.

In this context, security discourses cannot dispense with parameters of threat and endangerment, in order to legitimize their immunization.

Modern discourses of immunization no longer solely involve potential dangers from the outside. There has long been an awareness of immanent danger; the endangered, weak position is part of society, and if its endangerment is not controlled and regulated, it can only be contained at best. Should the danger spread, however – and this kind of proclaimed potential danger underscores the urgency of this model of argument – then the entire society is endangered and threatened with disintegration and breakdown.

One very old fear of this kind of disintegration is the fear of ‘civil war’, with its concern about a division of society that potentially leads to the collapse of ‘social peace’, of the common consensus, and the end of the unity of a social organism. However, the greatest danger for a social or political body lies not in insurrection, not in internal struggle alone, but rather in a split-off, in secession, in falling apart. In the constructions of modern security societies, the threats that can lead to this do not come from outside but instead develop in an excess that is no longer governable, that grows from within protective regulation. This includes everything that falls out of the existing order, an excess of what is to be ordered, an excess of what, to a certain extent, can apparently no longer be regulated or controlled, and consequently no longer governed, and that challenges the normal order.

The Return of Insecurity

In his social-history study From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, Robert Castel – currently one of the most internationally influential left sociologists of labour – shows that the position in life associated with wage labour was for many centuries one of the most insecure, undignified and wretched. Anyone who ‘slipped down’ into wage labour entered into ‘dependent labour’ and thus into a social position of neediness and reliance on poverty relief. For a long time, wage labour led to poverty, to a state in which one found ‘one’s self subject to the empire of necessity’⁵ and became aware of precariousness to an extreme degree. Only in the last century, and in most cases not until the beginning of its second half, did European and North American welfare states succeed in removing wage labour from disadvantage, associating it with safeguards against social risks, and thus transforming life under ‘hazardous conditions’⁶ into a secured life. When Castel speaks of social protection he is envisioning a ‘society of individuals’⁷ who ‘are legally entitled to minimal social preconditions for their independence’.⁸ In these manifestations of the welfare state, social independence is inseparably connected with entitlement to social benefits linked to employment. And social independence is to be understood as a safeguarded form of autonomy and relative sovereignty with respect to existential precariousness.

For more than thirty years now, however, according to Castel, we have been faced with the problem of the erosion and increasing fragility of this social-welfare construction. In view of the massive destabilization of wage-labour conditions and the renewed comprehensive subjugation of labour to the laws of the market, Castel maintains that we should speak of a ‘return of insecurity’.⁹ This is not simply a repetition of the old misery, but rather an insecurity that is newly bound up with wage labour. The independence of the many is at stake here, and with it, society as a whole. To analyse how threatening this social and economic development is, Castel has suggested a three-zone model: between a ‘zone of integration’ and a ‘zone of disaffiliation’ there is an unstable and expanding zone of ‘precarity’, of ‘social vulnerability’.¹⁰

As I will show in the following, Castel develops his social theory within the immunological dynamic described above, between protection and threat, security and endangerment. He conceives not only the relationship between individual and society, but also the state, in these relations of tension. The challenge that ‘precarity’ poses for contemporary societies – especially in France and Germany – is described in implicitly biopolitical-immunological terms. Castel’s threat scenario is not only androcentric, as has often been noted from the standpoint of gender studies.¹¹ He understands precarity primarily as a threatening anomie, a potentially destructive process: his argument focuses on the threat of a break-up of society.

It is no coincidence that Castel cites Thomas Hobbes as a modern authority for his historical perspective on social and political insecurities.¹² As mentioned earlier, Hobbes was the first modern theorist of the state to legitimize the subjugation of the individual to the rule of the Leviathan with an appeal to the argument of the protection and security of the individual. The deadly equality and freedom characteristic of the natural state were to be ended by way of the promise of protection. Fear of unprotected vulnerability is replaced by fear of the protecting Leviathan.¹³ Safeguarding from precariousness, which in Hobbes merges with the threatening other, requires obedience to the sovereign. Of course, for Castel, such a state of authoritarian obedience is no model for democratically constituted societies. However, he does take over the idea that the state has to protect the individual, because this is both the price and the opportunity for living independently together in a society,¹⁴ and he uses this idea for the contemporary analysis of post-Fordist wage-labour conditions against the backdrop of newly regulated and simultaneously eroded welfare states: ‘It is the collective that protects.’¹⁵

For Castel, since the seventeenth century there is ultimately only one thing that has had to be combated in the framework of the various forms of modern European statehood: the insecurity of human existence that evokes the need for safety which emerges, first of all, in ‘security societies’.¹⁶ Since the rise of the importance of the individual in modernity, according to Castel, historically specific political, legal and social relations have corresponded to nothing other than the ‘search for systems of protection’.¹⁷ Nonetheless, societies that are constituted through relations of protection and security simultaneously engender ‘a feeling of insufficient security’¹⁸ – the consciousness of vulnerability emerges through the protection itself, or rather through a protection that is constantly insufficient. All-encompassing security can never be established; any claim to it must always fail, leading to ‘disappointments and even resentments’.¹⁹ The highest task of the modern state can therefore not consist in doing away with social and legal insecurities, but rather in ‘taming’ them.²⁰

Castel describes the various forms of this kind of ‘safeguarding construct’²¹ as if the social position of male citizens applied to all members of a society, failing to reflect on how gendered relations of domination are just as inherent to these male civic positionings as are dominance relationships towards those who do not count as citizens of the state in question. Although Castel does point out that security even for the majority of the population does not mean the end of social inequalities or the establishing of protection among equals,²² he is not particularly interested in the analysis of inequalities. The one who is threatened or protected is, in a direct sense, always the male citizen, the male worker, and the ‘standard worker’s course’²³ that posits him as family breadwinner.

Castel does not take into account the fact that this modern citizen and worker was generally only safeguarded by way of the state or the institution through the construction of a protective masculinity in the private sphere. In the domestic community the man as husband was the breadwinner and patriarchal protector of the family, in other words of his wife and children.²⁴ Protective patriarchal masculinities and the correspondingly necessary social and legal guarantee of domination in the private sphere are historically the reverse side of state protection of the modern (male) individual.²⁵ In this kind of tension, the modern ambivalences associated with the need for protection and freedom, with vulnerability and property to be protected, did not apply in particular to those without property, to female citizens or to non-citizens. Inseparably interwoven with the feminized private sphere to be protected, the existential vulnerabilities that modern social and political security techniques are supposed to safeguard against become male-heterosexualized vulnerabilities. The comparable potential vulnerabilities of women (illness, accident, etc.) were generally only indirectly socially safeguarded or protected through the husband as primary earner and thus principally insured person (for example in Germany until the 1970s), and they were linked with a continued feminization of the need for protection. It is not uncommon for modern security discourses at both the public and the private level to still be heteronormatively structured.²⁶ This complexity of state protective constructions and so-called security societies remains obscured in Castel’s analysis. It is precisely against this background, however, that the immunizing logic of his argumentation on ‘precarity’ must be problematized.

The Virus of ‘Precarity’

The great achievement of the welfare state, according to Castel, consisted in its capacity to protect, to a certain degree, even those not safeguarded through property: that unprotected ‘strata of the population’ permanently affected by social insecurity, by unforeseeable dangers such as illness, accident and unemployment, and therefore exposed to the constant danger of poverty. Without such state protection, people are constantly exposed to insecurity as if to a contagious epidemic, as Castel’s wording explicitly suggests: ‘Like a virus that permeates everyday life, dissolving social ties and undermining the physical structures of the individuals, [social insecurity] also has a demoralizing effect as a principal of social dissolution.’²⁷ This reciprocal infection,²⁸ with the virus of the incalculable social vulnerability of individuals and their unsettling dependency on others, is exactly the threat that, to a high degree, constitutes states and societies, which build on protection and securities, as endangerment.²⁹

If the many are contaminated with insecurity, and thus the security of the majority can no longer be guaranteed, then the patterns of legitimizing domination collapse. Immunization through security is endangered if the population is in danger of being infected with insecurity to a certain degree. In a society of wage labour, the welfare state ‘tamed’³⁰ the virus of social vulnerability, largely hindered mutual infection – also as a potentiality for revolt – and immunized against it, so to speak, by managing to get social insecurity under control, which meant ‘efficiently reducing social risks’.³¹ For the ‘vast majority of the population’³² it became possible to plan for the future, especially because ‘individuals belonged to collective protecting instances’³³ which gave rise to social insurance benefits.

In contrast to this, what we are currently experiencing is the ‘return of mass vulnerability’.³⁴ The ‘collective safeguarding systems … – the state and the homogeneous socio-professional groups – have crumbled since the seventies’.³⁵ In his analyses, Castel seeks to ‘take the full measure of the threat of fracture’,³⁶ focusing on the threat due to the ‘return of social insecurity’³⁷ and the renewed outbreak of the virus of potential disintegration that he also calls ‘precarity’ or ‘precarization’. ‘Precarity and precarization thus designate the principles of fracture, which cannot be limited to the lower classes of society.’³⁸ The relatively stable, immunizing welfare state, which protects against social and economic insecurities due to physical injury and social isolation, is crumbling and thus itself becoming precarious. ‘So there are stable situations that are in danger of becoming destabilized. There are situations of vulnerability, in which those affected can more or less hold up for a certain time, but which may also possibly tip.’³⁹

Those who are increasingly in danger of dropping out of protective state regulation, or who have already dropped out, those who in terms of social security seem to be ever less protected in social collectives and thus elude the order of security, are not, according to Castel, to be understood as ‘superfluous’ or even excluded⁴⁰ – contrary to a discourse that has been clearly evident in the social sciences in recent years.⁴¹ He repeatedly rejects analysing the ‘margin’ of the welfare-state order – which he understands in terms of insecurity or ‘precarity’ – as ‘superfluous’. The overflow, what is literally running over, those who are considered superfluous, are not for Castel in an outside state.⁴² However, as he perceives it, they do threaten the ‘centre’⁴³ – in other words, those who are ‘integrated’ into society, those who belong, the normalized majority who are (still) secured through employment conditions. Infection itself is not the problem: a security society can never completely eliminate the risk of insecurity. The threat to existing relations of domination based on security first arises as a result of excess, of transgressing the limit of the tolerable number of infections. It is this dynamic of the immunization of a normalization society⁴⁴ upon which Castel’s zone model is based.

Being counted as belonging to an inside or an outside, or counting oneself as such, is not an either- or question for Castel, but involves rather a processual path between zones. Instead of a strict boundary, he envisions a kind of threshold of ambivalence between inclusion and exclusion, between the ‘zone of integration’ and that of ‘disaffiliation’. The ‘intermediate, unstable zone’ is that of ‘precarity’, of insecurity and endangerment.⁴⁵ ‘Precarity’ corresponds to a ‘new form of insecurity that is highly obligated to the crumbling and dissolution of the protecting structures that had developed within wagelabor society. Consequently one must speak … of an insecurity that continues to be surrounded and permeated by structures of safeguarding. The aim is to avoid a disastrous view of things.’⁴⁶

Castel concedes that ‘precarity’ is not only a phenomenon of the socially weak or the ‘lower classes’, but that there is also ‘a “higher” form of precarity’.⁴⁷ As an example he refers to ‘the so-called intermittents du spectacle in France – those discontinuously employed in the field of theatre, film and media’. He immediately adds, however, that ‘a precarity of this kind certainly presents itself differently and evokes reactions and modes of behaviour that are different from the precarity in “simple circles” ’.⁴⁸ It is beyond question that hierarchizations and differences among the precarious must be reflected upon. With this line of argument, however, Castel not only isolates the ‘higher’ precarity attributed solely to the middle classes from a different form of ‘precarity’ that applies exclusively to those groups positioned at the margins of society or among the ‘lower classes’. With this separation he also makes the intense engagements and struggles of the intermittents invisible, in a sense, even though they very quickly allied with so-called ‘marginal groups’ to form the Précaires Associés de Paris.⁴⁹ It is obviously not in Castel’s interest to grasp precarization as a phenomenon that is gradually becoming normalized, that also reaches the ‘centre’, and that can evoke political struggles across the strata of the population. On the contrary, he emphasizes that ‘precarity’ touches ‘especially the most disadvantaged strata. Particularly here there is a danger that it could become a permanent condition of life’⁵⁰ and lead to a ‘disaffiliation’, to ‘successively leaving those affected behind … which can push them over the edge of society’.⁵¹

Castel’s destabilized zone of ‘precarity’ is not one that automatically and inevitably leads in the direction of disaffiliation and finally to a break, a secession from society. Yet the threat is obvious due to the lack of protection evident in a situation of ‘vulnerability’. It is not clear whether the domestication and taming of those rendered insecure will be possible again as healing⁵² through integration, or whether the collective protection of the majority through immunization will become possible again. Castel is not concerned with just re-establishing the old safeguarding conditions, but rather with the new conditions that will have to be invented: a reconceptualization of protection and security that is no longer oriented to groups and collectives, but more towards the pluralism of individuals. Without systematically explaining the notion, Castel maintains that this calls for a ‘strategic state’,⁵³ within the framework of which wage labour must be secured.⁵⁴ Consequently, those affected by ‘precarity’ must be led back, as far as possible, into the zone of integration. If, on the other hand, they tend more to the social situation of disaffiliation, then they are not only close to being excluded, they could even bring down the entire social assemblage.

The stability of welfare-state protection never exists equally for all,⁵⁵ but it regulates a normalized majority society that has now become fearful in Castel’s threat scenario. He considers precarization less as a phenomenon that affects current industrial capitalist societies in different ways as normality, instead seeing society threatened more by the danger that the virus of insecurity could increasingly eat its way into the centre, into the zone of integration. In the imaginary architecture of his zone model, it is evident that Castel is always concerned also with the endangerment and insecurity of the integrated, participating, majority middle class, which seems to be threatened by the margins heavily affected by ‘precarity’, looking their own vulnerability, their precariousness, in the eye. It is from the peripheries, from the marginalized – and Castel includes among these not only the ‘white lower class’ but also the residents of the banlieues – that the break, the secession, the disintegration of society threatens.⁵⁶

Castel criticizes the demonizing and stigmatizing of youth from the banlieues as a new ‘dangerous class’ as an ‘abridgement’, in which ‘everything that a society holds as a threat is projected onto specific groups at its margins’, and which does not contribute at all to solving the ‘problem of insecurity’.⁵⁷ But his own threat scenario, which focuses on the lack of integration of the purported social margins due to precarious working conditions, fears the breakdown of society starting specifically from these ‘margins’. For Castel, ‘precarity’ is the threat that endangers the immunizing social safeguarding of the male citizen, making him socially vulnerable and precarious in new and old ways at the same time. If the break-up of society, the secession or defection of certain of its parts, is to be warded off, then an antidote for rampant ‘precarity’ must be found. In Castel’s logic, this antidote would consist in a securing integration that neutralizes the danger and the participation of those endangered by social insecurities. Against the background of current integration debates,⁵⁸ his argument for more integration is not an unequivocally conservative model that fears the loss of hegemony of the national-ethnicized majority society, but it does imagine a white majority social middle that should prove itself a pluralistic republic by ensuring active integration and thus warding off and combating ‘precarity’.⁵⁹ The ‘disaffiliation’ of those who prove to be incapable of integration would then no longer threaten the cohesiveness of society as a whole. In this kind of domination-securing dynamic that I have called ‘biopolitical immunization’, security is to be achieved in a twofold way, in order to stabilize and heal the constantly contaminated self: It occurs through the integration of those ‘others’ who can be neutralized, in other words domesticated, as well as through the exclusion or rejection of the ‘foreigner’ who cannot be integrated.⁶⁰

Regulating risks depends on a tolerable measure of insecurity. If contingency and unpredictability become dominant, then governmental security societies become ever harder to govern. Even if modern security techniques no longer have to operate primarily through social homogenization and fixed stabilizations, excessive unpredictability remains a potential threat to be taken seriously. Any weakening in the dynamic of this kind of biopolitical figure of the immune always invites the exaggerated rhetoric of an impending disaster or looming downfall, unless there is a prospect of a renewed immunization. Social-science arguments that make use of an immunological paradigm thus frequently legitimize the re-stabilization of presumably unregulatable conditions that have become unstable, thus overlooking the potential for emancipatory social change that can arise specifically from these kinds of fractures.

Castel is not wholly wrong in his view of precarity and precarization as eating their way into the entire society like a highly contagious virus that can lead to tumult. The reasons for the inflammatory viral infection, however, are no longer to be found (only) in the unreasonable political and economic impositions to which the marginalized are subject, but consist rather in the normalization of precarization throughout the whole of society, and which therefore require responses other than an increase in integration. There is no longer a centre or a middle that could be imagined as a society stable enough to take in those pushed to the margins. In the context of the current economic and political crises it is no longer sufficient to demand an equal, pluralistic society on republican foundations.⁶¹ Contemporary political and economic conditions in the (post-)industrial nations are enraging more and more people across almost all sections of society, as conditions for work, residence and education become increasingly unacceptable. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent the political protests repeatedly triggered by precarization remain only endemic or whether they might become global and pandemic. What is obvious is that the contemporary normalization of precarization substantially challenges established forms of politics. It is not only the capitalist mode of production that finds itself in a special crisis; the fundamental crisis of modes of political representation also becomes conspicuous.⁶²

1 The use of ‘precarity’ in quotation marks designates the term as used solely in a negative sense in precarization research in the social sciences, in the following primarily in the line of research taken by Robert Castel. Castel himself uses both ‘precarity’ and ‘precarization’ without defining a difference. The term precarity, as used here in the assemblage of the precarious as an ordering category of othering (which is not to be understood without negative components), will appear in the following without quotation marks.

2 Cf. the lecture given by Bourdieu in 1997, ‘La précarité est aujourd’hui partout’, in Contre-feux, and the book published by Castel in French already in 1995, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers.

3 Birgit Sauer, ‘Von der Freiheit auszusterben. Neue Freiheiten im Neoliberalismus?’, in Marlen Bidwell-Steiner and Ursula Wagner, eds, Freiheit und Geschlecht. Offene Beziehungen–Prekäre Verhältnisse, Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2008, pp. 17–31, here p. 18; cf. also Aldo Legnaro, ‘Aus der neuen Welt. Freiheit, Furcht und Strafe als Trias der Regulation’, Leviathan. Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 2 (2000), pp. 202–20.

4 Cf. Lorey, Figuren des Immunen, pp. 260–80.

5 Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, p. xiii.

6 Ibid.

7 Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 90.

8 Ibid.

9 Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der sozialen Unsicherheit’.

10 Cf. among others, Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, pp. xv–xvi.

11 Cf. Brigitte Aulenbacher, ‘Die soziale Frage neu gestellt – Gesellschaftsanalysen der Prekarisierungs- und Geschlechterforschung’, in Castel and Dörre, eds, Prekarität, pp. 65–80; Hildegard Maria Nickel, ‘Die “Prekarier” – eine soziologische Kategorie? Anmerkungen zu einer geschlechtersoziologischen Perspektive’, in Castel and Dörre, eds, Prekarität, pp. 209–18; Susanne Völker, ‘ “Entsicherte Verhältnisse” – Impulse des Prekarisierungsdiskurses für eine geschlechtersoziologische Zeitdiagnose’, in Brigitte Aulenbacher and Angelika Wetterer, eds, Arbeit. Perspektiven und Diagnosen der Geschlechterforschung, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2009, pp. 268–86.

12 Cf. Castel, L’insécurité sociale, pp. 13–15.

13 Cf. Lorey, Figuren des Immunen, pp. 243–8.

14 Castel considers independence and autonomy as the foundation not only for social security but also for the constitutional security of citizens that was already inherent to Hobbes’ conception, taken as the inviolability of property and of person (cf. Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 93).

15 Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der sozialen Unsicherheit’, p. 23.

16 Cf. Castel, L’insécurité sociale, pp. 7 and 58–62.

17 Ibid., p. 7.

18 Ibid., p. 8.

19 Ibid. Castel describes ‘collective resentments’ (Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 49) and racist attitudes of those belonging to the French majority society. He says that the white lower class, the petits blancs (ibid., p. 52) look for scapegoats for the worsening of their social situation and project social conflicts onto directly neighbouring social groups (cf. ibid., p. 51), often onto the differently ethnicized and racialized residents of the banlieues. Castel also repeats this line of argument elsewhere (cf. Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’, p. 32).

20 Cf. Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’, p. 23.

21 Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 15.

22 Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’, p. 24.

23 Ilona Ostner, ‘Individualization, Breadwinner Norms, and Family Obligations. Gender Sensitive Concepts in Comparative Welfare’, FREIA-Papers 38, 1996, p. 1, available at http://vbn.aau.dk.

24 In one passage Castel even points out that women, children and servants were protected ‘in the patriarchally organized family’, but the price for this protection was their ‘profound dependency’ (Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 90), so that they were consequently unfree in protection. However, this did not move him to systematically include these gender- and class-specific dependencies in his analysis.

25 Cf., among others, Cornelia Klinger, ‘Krise war immer … Lebenssorge und geschlechtliche Arbeitsteilungen in sozialphilosophischer und kapitalismuskritischer Perspektive’, in Erna Appelt, Brigitte Aulenbacher and Angelika Wetterer, eds, Gesellschaft. Feministische Krisendiagnosen, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2013, pp. 82–104.

26 Cf. Iris Marion Young, ‘The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (2003), p. 1–25.

27 Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 29.

28 Cf. Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, p. 416.

29 Cf. Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

30 Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’, p. 23.

31 Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 34, emphasis in the original.

32 Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’, p. 24.

33 Cf. Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 37.

34 Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, p. 445.

35 Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 40.

36 Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, p. xiv, emphasis added.

37 Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’.

38 Ibid., p. 31, emphasis added.

39 Ibid., p. 29.

40 Cf. Robert Castel, ‘Die Fallstricke des Exklusionsbegriffs’, trans. Gustav Roßler, in Heinz Bude and Andreas Willisch, eds, Exklusion. Die Debatte über die ‘Überflüssigen’, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008, pp. 69–86, and Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’.

41 Cf. Bude and Willisch, eds, Exklusion.

42 Cf. Castel, ‘Die Fallstricke des Exklusionsbegriffs’, and Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’.

43 Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, p. xxiii.

44 Cf. Lorey, Figuren des Immunen, pp. 260–80.

45 Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, p. xvi.

46 Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’, p. 27, emphasis in the original.

47 Ibid., p. 32.

48 Ibid.

49 Cf. Précaires Associés de Paris, ‘Éléments de propositions pour un régime solidaire de l’assurance chômage des salaries à l’emploi discontinu’, June 2003, available at http://pap.ouvaton.org; GlobalProject/Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires d’Ile de France, ‘Spectacle Inside the State and Out. Social Rights and the Appropriation of Public Spaces: The Battles of the French Intermittents’, trans. Aileen Derieg, transversal: ‘Precariat’ (July 2004), available at http://transversal.at; Antonella Corsani, ‘ “What We Defend, We Defend For Everyone”: Traces of History in Motion’, trans. Mary O’Neill, transversal: ‘On Universalism’ (June 2007), available at http://transversal.at; Antonella Corsani and Maurizio Lazzarato, Intermittents et précaires, Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2008; Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Die Dynamik des politischen Ereignisses. Subjektivierungsprozesse und Mikropolitik’, trans. Stefan Nowotny, in Isabell Lorey, Roberto Nigro, and Gerald Raunig, eds, Inventionen 1: Gemeinsam. Prekär. Potentia. Kon-/Disjunktion. Ereignis. Transversalität. Queere Assemblagen, Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011, pp. 161–74. The collective Précaires Associés de Paris is an alliance of intermittents, unemployed people and trade-union groups. Starting in 2002 they carried out occupation actions for several years ‘to open up a space of reflection and discussion to everyone affected, to ensure that the voices of the precarious are heard, and to fight for new social rights together’ (Précaires Associés de Paris, ‘Éléments de propositions’). In addition, there were expressions of solidarity with Sans-Papiers organizations at demonstrations, such as on 8 July 2003 in Paris.

50 Castel, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Unsicherheit’, p. 31.

51 Ibid., p. 29. The term ‘leave behind’ (in German abhängen) is associated with the construction of the ‘precariat left behind’ in discussions in German. This goes back to a controversial study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, associated with the German Social-Democratic Party, from 2006. As a result of this study, terms like ‘precariat’ and ‘precarity’ were used for the first time in bourgeois media and by political actors, but only – entirely in keeping with the study – to mark new constructions of the ‘lower classes’ (Unterschichten). Cf. Frank Karl, Gesellschaft im Reformprozess, Studie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, 2006; critical responses include: Claudio Altenhain et al., eds, Von ‘Neuer Unterschicht’ und Prekariat. Gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse und Kategorien im Umbruch. Kritische Perspektiven auf aktuelle Diskurse, Bielefeld: transcript, 2008.

52 This is an allusion to a buried etymological meaning of the German word heilen [on which the English word ‘heal’ is based: translator’s note], which can mean not only ‘healthy’, ‘whole’ and ‘uninjured’, but also had the connotation, beginning in the fifteenth century, of ‘to castrate’, ‘tame’ and ‘make useable’, ‘to remove the wildness’. Cf. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, ed. Friedrich Kluge, revised by Elmar Seebold, 24th edition, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002, p. 402.

53 Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers, p. 443.

54 Cf. Castel, L’insécurité sociale, p. 86.

55 On the ‘golden age’ of Fordism, which primarily kept ‘privileged mainstream workers’ – who were white, male and/or positioned in a national-ethnicized way – in secured working conditions in the US, Europe and Japan, and discriminated against everyone else, see Nancy Ettlinger, ‘Precarity Unbound’, Alternatives. Global, Local, Political 32 (2007), pp. 319–40, here pp. 322–3.

56 Cf. Castel, L’insécurité sociale, pp. 52–6; Robert Castel, La discrimination négative. Citoyens ou indigènes?, Paris: Seuil, 2007. For a different reading of the events in the Paris banlieues in Autumn 2005, which emphasizes the post-Fordist construction of unproductivity in the context of precarity, see Judith Revel, ‘De la vie en milieu précaire (ou: comment en finir avec la vie nue)’, Multitudes 27 (2007), available at http://multitudes.samizdat.net.

57 Castel, L’insécurité sociale, pp. 53, 54 and 89.

58 Cf. Sabine Hess, Jana Binder, and Johannes Moser, eds, No Integration?! Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Integrationsdebatte in Europa, Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. Serhat Karakayali points out that the ‘migrants that are meant in the integration debate … are seen as a problem, specifically because they are not recognizable outside … The integration issue deals much more with social deviance and its domestication.’ Serhat Karakayali, ‘Paranoic Integrationism. Die Integrationsformel als unmöglicher (Klassen-)Kompromiss’, in ibid., pp. 95–103, here p. 101.

59 Cf. Castel, La discrimination négative, pp. 100–12.

60 Cf. Lorey, Figuren des Immunen, pp. 260–80. The dynamic of biopolitical immunization also includes the identity-logic construction of invulnerability, which is often linked with notions of superiority and sovereignty (cf. Lorey, ‘Weißsein und die Auffaltung des Immunen’).

61 Cf. Castel, La discrimination négative, pp. 100–12.

62 Cf. Isabell Lorey, ‘Demokratie statt Repräsentation. Zur konstituierenden Macht der Besetzungsbewegungen’, in Jens Kastner, Isabell Lorey, Gerald Raunig and Tom Waibel, eds, Occupy! Die aktuellen Kämpfe um die Besetzung des Politischen, vol. 15 of the series ‘es kommt darauf an’, Vienna, Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2012, pp. 7–49; Isabell Lorey, ‘The 2011 Occupy Movements: Rancière and the Crisis of Democracy’, trans. Aileen Derieg, Theory, Culture & Society 6 (Special Issue on Jacques Rancière) (2014).

Chapter 4

Precarization as an Instrument of Governing

Precarization as governmental precarization does not inevitably eat its way through society like a virus spreading resistance. On the contrary, despite the transnational struggles of the precarious, which marked the entire 2000s, and despite the protests of 2011 especially in southern Europe and the US, it currently seems possible, at least in some of the richer parts of Europe, for citizens to come to terms with social insecurity in the most different ways and in the most diverse social positions, to handle the privatization of risks and contribute to the normalization of precarization through subjugation and conformity – borne by their fear of being replaceable.

Contrary to Castel’s threat scenario, neither the security of a social order nor neoliberal governing techniques are presently endangered by ‘precarity’ spreading out from the ‘margins’. Precarization has, rather, long since arrived in the so-called middle of society. Precarious living and working conditions are currently being normalized at a structural level and have thus become a fundamental governmental instrument of governing.

The result of the normalization of precarization,however, is certainly not that we are currently living in an insecurity society; we still live in a security society, but it is one that has become governable through precarization. The state is not withdrawing from all formerly fundamental institutions of safeguarding. In neoliberalism, however, safeguarding no longer needs the extent of liberal welfare-state techniques of protection. Instead the state increasingly limits itself to discourses and practices of police and military safeguarding, which in turn increasingly operate with disciplinary control and surveillance techniques.¹ At the state level, political and social safeguarding are still just about balanced: the more social safeguards are minimized, and the more precarization increases, the more there is a battle to maximize domestic security. Migrant others, in particular, must repeatedly demonstrate through assimilative integration that they are suitable for the collective of those who are still minimally safeguarded – otherwise they can be declared a security risk.

When domestic security discourses are correlated with normalized social insecurity in neoliberalism, then the fundamental dispositive of liberalism shifts. Instead of freedom and security, freedom and insecurity now form the new couple in neoliberal governmentality: the state does not on principle limit freedom or combat insecurity, but both become the ideological precondition for governmental precarization.

What we are dealing with specifically are strategies for securing domination which rebuild existing concepts of security so that insecurity becomes a normalized mode of governing. The central paradigm of the governability of biopolitical subjectivations currently consists neither in safeguarding through a representative sovereign nor in welfare-state institutions of safeguarding. What characterizes this paradigm is rather a ‘neoliberal government of insecurity’.²

According to Maurizio Lazzarato in his 2008 book on the ‘government of inequalities’, all safeguards against risks, all socio-political institutions, operate within a neoliberal logic of ‘dispositives that must function with a minimum’.³ This minimum defines a threshold in a political sense: specifically, the varying border area in which it is repeatedly necessary to determine anew where ‘the risk of “civil war” threatens the rupture of social peace’.⁴ The immunizing demarcation with respect to threatening secessionist struggles is regulated using techniques of the minimum, the minimalist state, and the self-regulating forces of the market. These techniques are central to the ability of neoliberal politics to operate with institutions, turning them away from the production of social safeguards towards the production of social insecurity. The art of governing currently consists of balancing a maximum of precarization, which probably cannot be exactly calculated, with a minimum of safeguarding to ensure that the minimum is secured at this threshold.

The process of normalizing precarization does not entail equality in insecurity. Within the framework of neoliberal governmentality, there is no need to do away with inequalities:

Neoliberal logic has good reason to want no reduction, no end of inequality, because it plays with these differences and governs on the basis of them. It only attempts to establish a tolerable balance, as much balance as the society can bear, between different normalities: between the normality of poverty, of precarity (précarité), and the normality of wealth. It is no longer concerned with ‘relative poverty’, the gap between different incomes, nor is it concerned with the causes of it. It is only interested in ‘absolute poverty’, which prevents individuals from playing the game of competition … In order to establish this tolerable balance, a new form of hardship, the neoliberals need the institutions of the welfare state.⁵

Against this background, precarization is a steering technique of the minimum at the threshold of a social vulnerability that is still just tolerable. The focus of this logic of governing is consequently no longer primarily on regulating fixed hierarchized and identitarian differences. At the same time, those who are still, or newly, construed through racializing or ethnicizing ascriptions as being extremely threatening and other continue to be exposed to the ‘liberal’ mechanisms of precarity. Precarization is therefore not an impending danger for a centre, but a technique of governing that is in the process of being normalized.

In this process, however, a loss of hegemony can, in fact, be noted: that of the standard male Fordist employment conditions, which ensured a man’s – socio-politically supported and protected – independence on the basis of the domestication of wife and children, in turn giving these a dependent security. The private sphere of reproduction attributed to women only signified a continual safeguard for married women. For heteronormative social protection they had to accept their structural insecurity, their precarity, which was protected in dependency. By way of welfare-state safeguarding, the hegemony of a protective bourgeois and heteronormative masculinity was enabled, and specific normalities were produced, which guaranteed the nexus between work, family and nation.⁶

Against this background, not only does social insecurity merely return, its governmental function is also fundamentally transformed. Social, economic and legal insecurity (in terms of both labour rights and other rights) is increasingly less a threat that can be projected solely onto those who are dependent, marginalized, or alien ‘invaders’, in order to legitimize positioning them in society at the inner and outer peripheries, and be able to maintain an (imaginary) centre of the (national) self, of the normal and of belonging. The distinction between the liberal, Fordist normal and the precarious that deviates and is separated from it has long since become impossible. The traditional boundaries between the social positionings of the normal and the precarized are dissolving: precarization becomes a normality with new inequalities. The imaginary centre of the normal is not simply threatened, nor is it merely unsettled. Instead, it becomes itself increasingly insecure and threatening.⁷

The normality of the minimum developing in the neoliberal paradigm stands in a continuous line of precarious working and living conditions in place since the formation of capitalism. The becoming-normal of precarization historically ties into the norm of unsecured working and living conditions without becoming identical with them. If the Fordist welfare state is considered as a historical exception against this background, as a limited phase of a special normal, and precarity and precarization are viewed as a norm of capitalist conditions lasting beyond this phase,⁸ then domination-shaped continuities and ruptures of this norm in times of exceptional safeguarding have to be taken into consideration if we are to be able to grasp the current process of normalizing precarization.

The exceptional safeguarding through the welfare state guaranteed livelihoods and social advancement for many in different ways, reproducing and manifesting at the same time classifications and subdivisions of labour according to naturalized gender attributes and characteristics of origin. This liberal legitimation of precarity through the classification and construction of bodies and ‘cultures’ has become fragile, and with it the relations of domination in which the value of labour was measured by physical and culturalized characteristics. Currently, however, this means primarily that male citizens, who previously enjoyed the securities of the standard employment conditions, are also increasingly confronted with precarious living and working conditions. Nevertheless, international divisions of labour continue to exist, as well as a clear wage gap between the genders in the national labour markets. Women’s responsibility for domestic housekeeping and care work also remains largely unchanged. For its part, however, reproductive work is increasingly organized in an international division of labour and is economically and ethnically differentiated and hierarchized.⁹

Economization and the political regulation of differences function quite differently under neoliberal conditions than under liberal parameters. Liberal and Fordist biopolitical governing techniques adhere to naturalized differences of bodies, striating and counting them on the basis of a universalized, standardized measure of superiority that produces precarity. Neoliberal and post-Fordist governing techniques are entirely different: biopolitical steering techniques govern in this political-economic mode on the basis of competing differences. It is no longer primarily a matter of deviations from a national normality, but rather of regulating a tolerable balance between diverse normalities.¹⁰ Biopolitical governmentality then functions through the double ‘mode of modulation’:¹¹ measuring and counting in terms of universalized, standardized units of measure at the economic level, which can be called ‘modularization’, conjoins with the qualitative differences of bodies, actions, activities and affects that must be produced in competition through active (self-)design, in other words through ‘modulating’. At the present time, this self-governing modulation is primarily understood in the sense of servility, of subservience and obedience, which is certainly usable both politically and economically in the calculated exchangeability of the module. Individuals are supposed to actively modulate themselves and arrange their lives on the basis of a repeatedly lowered minimum of safeguarding, thus making themselves governable. Governmental techniques of self-government emerge in this way, which I have called ‘self-precarization’.¹² Living and working conditions are supposed to orient themselves in relation to an economicized measure. This measure can assume the most diverse forms, ranging from a minimalist (welfare) state all the way to educational policy talk of excellence and evaluation, but it can also lead to the categorization of the ‘superfluous’. This kind of abstract equivalence, according to Angela Mitropoulos, presupposes inequality and exploitation conditions as well as violence, and also produces them.¹³

1 Cf., among others, Lemke, ‘Dispositive der Unsicherheit’, Patricia Purtschert, Katrin Meyer and Yves Winter, eds, Gouvernementalität und Sicherheit: Zeitdiagnostische Beiträge im Anschluss an Foucault, Bielefeld: transcript, 2008.

2 Lemke, ‘Dispositive der Unsicherheit’, p. 93; cf. also Aldo Legnaro and Almut Birenheide, Regieren mittels Unsicherheit. Regime von Arbeit in der späten Moderne, Konstanz: UVK, 2008; Maurizio Lazzarato, Le gouvernement des inégalités. Critique de l’insécurité néolibérale, Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2008.

3 Lazzarato, Le gouvernement des inégalités, p. 58, emphasis added.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 57.

6 Cf. Angela Mitropoulos, ‘Oikopolitics, and Storms’, Global South 1 (2009), pp. 66–82.

7 Reactions to this include demands for securing borders and thus purportedly strengthening the protection of the ‘natives’. Yet borders remain permeable, cannot be closed per se, and absolute security is not possible. In this lasting insecurity, there are attempts to regulate the autonomy of migration, which results in a growing endangerment and precarity of the migrants. Cf. also Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek, eds, Grenzregime. Diskurse, Praxen, Institutionen in Europa, Berlin, Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2010.

8 Cf. Mitropoulos, ‘Precari-Us?’; see also Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society 7–8 (2008), pp. 51–72, here p. 54.

9 Cf. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001; Luzenir Caixeta et al., Hogares, Cuidados y Fronteras/Home, Care and Borders/Haushalt, Sorge und Grenzen, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2004; Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor, New York and London: Routledge, 2010; Ursula Apitzsch and Marianne Schmidbaur, eds, Care und Migration. Die Ent-Sorgung menschlicher Reproduktionsarbeit entlang von Geschlechter- und Armutsgrenzen, Opladen and Farmington Hills: Budrich, 2010; George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, ‘Notes on the Edu-Factory and Cognitive Capitalism’, transversal: ‘knowledge production and its discontents’ (May 2007), http://transversal.at.

10 Cf. Lazzarato, Le gouvernement des inégalités; see also Antke Engel, Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie. Queere kulturelle Politiken im Neoliberalismus, Bielefeld: transcript, 2009.

11 Gerald Raunig, Factories of Knowledge. Industries of Creativity, trans. Aileen Derieg, Cambridge MA and London: Semiotext(e), 2013, pp. 40–52.

12 Cf. Isabell Lorey, ‘Vom immanenten Widerspruch zur hegemonialen Funktion. Biopolitische Gouvernementalität und Selbst-Prekarisierung von KulturproduzentInnen’, in Gerald Raunig and Ulf Wuggenig, eds, Kritik der Kreativität, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2007, pp. 121–36.

13 Cf. Mitropoulos, ‘Precari-Us?’

Chapter 5

Virtuosity and the Post-Fordist Public Sphere

The private and the public, once a pair of opposites, have been becoming increasingly blurred for some time now: the formerly private is not only ever more present in public, but self-relations and working relations are also interlocking in such a way that new public spheres are emerging. Through communication and services, production becomes social in a new way. This transformation of production is accompanied by practices of subservient self-government, of which the self-exposure of the seemingly private self in (social) media is only one symptom. As all the experiences of individuals tend to become part of the production process, self-realization takes place as a performance in public. Work thus virtually becomes a virtuoso presentation. But if work becomes virtuosic in the public sphere, what then becomes of political action, which was formerly the sphere of the public and of virtuosity?

In A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno put forward the following claim: ‘I believe that in today’s forms of life one has a direct perception of the fact that the coupling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own, that they are gasping for air, burning themselves out. This is just like what is happening in the world of contemporary production.’¹ The phenomenon, by way of which Virno investigates the indistinguishability of both collectivity and individuality and public and private, is that of post-Fordist modes of production. For him, these modes involve more than labour in the traditional sense, in other words more than a productive activity, they are rather a concurrence of different forms of life.² He focuses on modes of production that are becoming hegemonic, based on communicative and cognitive abilities, on a high degree of flexibility in the deployment of the labour force, and on permanently dealing with the unpredictable or contingency.³ These kinds of modes of production challenge the whole personality, its intellect, its thinking, its capacity for speaking, its affects. According to Virno, this brings about an end to divisions of labour (in the sense of distributing labour),⁴ and the establishment of substantial personal dependencies; in place of dependencies on rules and precepts, we have dependencies on individual persons in the work relationship, as well as on networks in order to get the next job as needed.⁵

Labour based on communication does not so much produce a product, it is rather an ‘activity without work’.⁶ In this tendentially productless mode of production, no material things are manufactured in the classical sense, but socialities do emerge in them. A special aspect of this production of the social is that it does not remain limited to places and times of wage labour; it goes beyond them and tends not to come to an end. In this interlocking of production and sociality, both labour and social life become highly precarious.⁷

Political Freedom and the Stage of Virtuosity

Virno describes the implosion of the socio-economic spheres of the private and the public, or the individual and the collective, in relation to the Aristotelian tripartite division of human experience into labour (poiesis), intellect (the life of the mind) and political action (praxis). He maintains that, despite occasional possibilities for overlap, the three areas have until now been generally presented as being separate from one another. In this schema, labour means the production of new objects in a repetitive, foreseeable process. Set against this is the second area, that of the intellect, isolated and invisible by its very nature, since the thinker’s meditation eludes the gaze of others. Finally, the third area of human experience, that of political action, affects social relations, thereby differing from the sphere of labour, which forms ‘natural’ materials through repetitive processes. What is remarkable here is that political action, in this traditional sense, has to do with the possible and the unforeseen: it produces no objects, but brings about changes by way of communication.⁸ Only political action is considered public in this schema, since, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase, it means being exposed to ‘the presence of others’.⁹

Despite criticism from many sides of the inadequacy of this Aristotelian model for the present, the three-part division between labour, intellect and political action is still widespread today. According to Virno, this is due, not least of all, to Hannah Arendt’s great influence.¹⁰ Yet Arendt also speaks of overlaps between the three areas – interestingly just like Virno in conjunction with virtuosity, in other words with creativity in a certain sense. In her text ‘What is Freedom?’ she compares performing artists, or virtuosos, with those who are politically active according to her understanding, i.e. who expose themselves to the gaze of others. With performing artists, Arendt writes, ‘the accomplishment lies in the performance itself and not in an end product which outlasts the activity that brought it into existence and becomes independent of it … Performing artists – dancers, play-actors, musicians and the like – need an audience to show their virtuosity, just like acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space.’¹¹

For Arendt, politics is accordingly an art of performing, a performative art. Because of the necessary audience, the necessity of ‘exposing oneself to the gaze of others’, both politics and virtuosity need a ‘space of appearances’. And thus, according to Arendt, ‘whatever occurs in this space of appearances is political by definition, even when it is not a direct product of action’.¹² With this addendum – ‘even when it is not a direct product of action’ – it can be concluded that ‘all virtuosity is intrinsically political’.¹³

In this text, directly after stressing how interwoven virtuosity and politics are, Arendt writes emphatically about freedom. Virno, however, makes no reference to this. And yet this nexus linking virtuosity and politics with freedom seems to me to be a central point.

The space of appearances, in other words, the political-public realm – and Arendt always has the Greek polis in her mind’s eye – is the place ‘in which freedom can appear’.¹⁴ ‘Without such a space, established and equipped especially for it, freedom cannot be realized. There is no such thing as freedom without politics because it could not last.’¹⁵ Arendt differentiates this concept of freedom from the freedom of thought and will. She sees the latter in particular as an egocentric burden derived from Christianity. For her, on the other hand, freedom means a political freedom that has detached and separated itself from the private, from the ‘maintenance of life’:¹⁶ it means a freedom in the public realm, a freedom of action, not of will or thought.¹⁷ Arendt banishes care for life – and consequently also the safeguarding of existential precariousness and the concomitant care work – to the private household. For her, political action can only be imagined in relation to a liberation from the burdens of the oikos. With this division between the private household and the politically connoted public sphere, Arendt reproduces the liberal and bourgeois gendered separation of spheres.

In her eyes, the freedom of will that is attributed to the private is a non-political freedom, because it is experienced ‘in intercourse with oneself’ and is ‘independent from others’.¹⁸ In antiquity, according to Arendt, freedom understood as political freedom meant taking part in public debates. What was ‘shared by many people’ emerged through their talking with one another, exchanging different perspectives.¹⁹ The condition for this communicative construction of a world was a freedom of movement to escape the private sphere, to remove oneself from the whole realm of household and family constraints.²⁰ Of course, this was only possible for a free man such as the master of the house, the pater familias. When he crossed the threshold of his house, he left the private ‘place where the life of every individual – though bound up in that necessity and coercion – was secured’; ‘thus’, writes Arendt, ‘only that man was free who was prepared to risk his own life’.²¹ In keeping with this understanding, political freedom cannot be separated from insecurity and the perils of life, ‘and that also holds true in general for the connection of politics with danger and risk’.²² For Arendt, the endangerment of life is a precondition for the political and a certain form of the public sphere. In the conception of antiquity, of course, this was primarily the scope of action of free men, which was based simultaneously on the secured oikos and the protecting, patriarchal masculinity operating within it. Nevertheless, Arendt’s idea that political freedom has something to do with the unpredictable, with insecurity and risk, remains interesting. Consequently, being exposed to the gaze of others entails an endangerment of life: political action involves dealing with the contingency of precariousness without the desires of individualistic private protection.

Performatively Virtuoso Workers

Let us return now to Virno, who refers to Arendt as well as to Marx to explain the current precarious forms of production and life. However, from Virno’s perspective, Marx recognizes the activity of performing artists and knowledge workers (among whom he includes teachers, doctors, actors, orators and preachers) only as ‘activity without work’,²³ and draws an analogy between it and the activities of servants. Consequently, in Marx’s terms, neither virtuosos nor servants produce surplus-value. For him, they both belong to the ‘realm of non-productive labour’.²⁴ However, Marx should not be accused of banishing cultural producers in general to the realm of unproductive labour, since he does not tie the distinction between productive and unproductive labour to the content of that labour. On the contrary, ‘to be productive labour is a quality of labour which in and for itself has absolutely nothing to do with the particular content of the labour, its particular usefulness or the specific use value in which it is expressed’.²⁵ Instead, Marx defines productive labour through a relationship, but it is not a relationship with money in general or with the question of whether or not an activity is performed for financial reward. For Marx, the only relationship that constitutes productive labour is the one with capital. ‘Productive labour is exchanged directly for money as capital’, and consequently ‘counterposes the values created by labour to the worker himself as capital’.²⁶ The services of a doctor, just like those of a cook, signify an exchange of labour ‘for money as money’,²⁷ and are therefore not considered productive. Marx also clarifies the distinction between the two exchange relationships of labour with the example of a virtuoso performer: ‘A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital.’²⁸ For Marx then, an activity is unproductive when ‘the product is not separable from the act of producing, as with all executant artists, orators, actors, teachers, doctors, clerics, etc.’²⁹ Here Marx describes one of the fundamental aspects of virtuoso labour: it is an activity without work that produces something in speaking and affective performing. Virtuoso labour thus corresponds to a performative activity.

But what if the singer becomes a self-entrepreneur? Does the relation between labour and capital implode in her very self? Is she to be designated as ‘unproductive’ in Marx’s sense if she not only takes her voice to market, but also, in her artistic independence and with projects subject to time limits, constantly sells her whole personality, when singing ‘like a bird’ serves to get her the next job? Do not performative, communicative knowledge workers – these being the virtuosos of today, simultaneously service-providers, producers and self-entrepreneurs – stand in the values they have created opposite themselves as capitalized forms of life, in a manner that resembles and yet is totally different from the relationship that Marx defined as ‘productive labour’?

Virno also concludes that, in the post-Fordist era of cognitive capitalism, Arendt’s classifications no longer apply and that Marx’s conceptual apparatus clearly does not seem adequate as a means of understanding contemporary forms of production and their related forms of life. For these become intensified in new relations, where ‘productive labor, in its totality, appropriates the special characteristics of the performing artist. In post-Fordism, those who produce surplus-value behave – from the structural point of view, of course – like the pianists, the dancers, etc.’³⁰ Virtuosity and the components of freedom, and their concomitant insecurities, thus structure – in a way that differs from Arendt’s formulation – not just political action today, but increasingly also modes of production, especially in new ‘immaterial’³¹ labour relations based on a broad concept of creativity, which can by no means be considered ‘unproductive’.

When the Virtuosity of the Political Conjoins with Cognitive Labour

When performative-virtuoso labour becomes a new form of productive labour, then the activities of the artist and the teacher become the rule rather than the exception. They not only interweave in Marx’s sense with ‘serving’, or reproductive labour in the household, but also in a general sense with service-provider work, which does not present itself exclusively as servile. This does not mean, on the other hand, that reproduction work has generally become part of wage labour or that the gender-specific division of labour is suspended.

When labour appears ever more frequently as knowledge and service work, and is based to an ever greater degree on communication, then the intellect, thinking and speaking in general increasingly coincide with the realm of labour. What these performative cognitive activities have in common is that in them the entire person, with their knowledge and their affects, becomes part of the capitalist production process, as do their relationships to those who direct or commission these activities and to those for whom they are carried out.³² Indeed – and this is not necessarily covered by the concept of ‘immaterial’ labour – subjectivations and social relations emerge in this production process. Although the materiality of performative-virtuoso labour is not oriented to the traditional production of products, this does not mean that it is without materiality. It is a materiality not only of performative bodies, but also of subjectivations and socialities.

This capitalized materiality of the social has repercussions for the public sphere. The post-Fordist worker becomes a self-entrepreneurial virtuoso also because she or he must perform their exploitable self in multiple social relations before the eyes of others. The realization of this self, reduced to labour, requires the performance in public. In post-Fordist production relations, the intellect becomes public – something which would have been unthinkable for Arendt. Being ‘exposed to the gaze of others’, which was fundamental to her conception of the public, has developed into one of the decisive characteristics of virtuoso working and living conditions. The presence of the other has become both an instrument and an object of labour.

In performative cognitive activity, work and social relations are interwoven; producing, acting and speaking coincide. Against the background of the tripartite model derived from Aristotle and Arendt, not only do poiesis and intellect overlap, but also praxis: today, virtuoso workers increasingly resemble political citizens in the classical sense. On the one hand, this post-Fordist form of labour is based on social relations and influences them in a way similar to the ways traditionally attributed to political action; on the other hand, and beyond this, performative cognitive activities are themselves increasingly arranged as ‘social cooperations’.³³ Cognitive labour appropriates the characteristics of the virtuoso political.³⁴

Do economy and politics then coincide in neoliberalism, in such a way that performative-virtuoso workers automatically become political actors? Because of the necessary public space of appearances, Arendt concedes something of the political to the virtuosos by definition, even if their activity does not directly involve (political) action.³⁵ However – and this is the decisive criterion – performative-virtuoso production is not immediately and automatically linked with political freedom, but rather with what Arendt calls freedom of the will, with individualistic forms of freedom.³⁶ Even though her analyses hardly seem to be relevant to the current processes of economic and social transformation, Arendt’s differentiation between various forms of freedom makes it possible to clarify why this public, economicized acting is not political action. Thanks to the ‘shift from action to willpower’, according to Arendt, the ideal of freedom ceased to be that of the virtuosity of acting together with others ‘and became sovereignty, the idea of a free will, independent from others and eventually prevailing against them’.³⁷

Applied to individuals’ own market-conforming self-formation, techniques of self-government are currently placed primarily in the service of economic valorization. However, when the presence of others is reduced to a capitalized product relation, the compulsion to prove one’s own virtuosity becomes a self-referential and competitive servility. Virtuoso labour thus shows itself as ‘universal servile work’.³⁸ When producing and acting coincide in the public, this action does not necessarily become political; on the contrary, it is not infrequently an action through both which the other and the self become economically governable.

Although such individualized virtuoso action takes place according to the old logic of a presumably sovereign self-formation independent of others, at the same time it is also an action of self-subjugation that is accompanied by fear. Hobbes’ fearsome sovereign, whom the subjects were supposed to obey, has long since been transformed – and to an extreme degree in neoliberalism – into a self-governing fear. Governmental precarization, (self-)governing through insecurity, currently still persists at the level of acting subjects in many places, in an anxious self-arrangement.

Even though it can only be carried out in the presence of others and often involves social cooperation, and though it is situated amid the materialization of the social, a servile virtuosity concentrated on itself hinders common political action. It is a ‘publicness without a public sphere’,³⁹ an acting before the eyes of others, in which the virtuoso intellect specifically does not conjoin with the political, nor with public critique and disobedience, nor with the invention of socialities beyond capitalization. In other words, there is no increase in politicization solely on the basis of the increase in virtuoso living and working conditions.

When the structural aspects of the virtuosity of the political show themselves in productive labour, in activities that constitute modes of self-government in public interaction, then political action is evacuated in a sense, but at the same time a potentiality for a new virtuoso-political emerges in the production conditions. Precisely because current modes of production and living are based on political virtuosity – on the art of the possible and dealing with the unforeseen, with insecurity and risk⁴⁰ – a potentiality of the political emerges in this precarization, which calls to mind what Arendt noted for political freedom. This form of freedom is based on insecurity, and it is what first makes ‘the virtuosity of acting together’ possible at all. It is not a freedom that emphasizes the separation from others, the imagination of the invulnerability of some, of a unified political community supported by sovereignty. This freedom, according to Arendt, only functions under the condition of non-sovereignty.⁴¹

The Privatization of Risks and Cares

In neoliberal governing through precarization as insecurity, it is generally at the level of self-government that a special mode of subjectivation of anxiety enters the foreground. This happens through a confrontation with the dimension of the precarious that I call ‘precariousness’. In the current dynamic of governmental precarization, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between an abstract anxiety over existential precariousness (anxiety that a body, because it is mortal, cannot be made invulnerable) and a concrete fear of politically and economically induced precarization (fear of unemployment or of not being able to pay the rent or health-care bills even when employed); both of these negative cares overlap. As Virno writes:

What we have, then, is a complete overlapping of fear and anxiety. If I lose my job, of course I am forced to confront a well defined danger, one which gives rise to a specific kind of dread; but this real danger is immediately colored by an unidentifiable anxiety … One might say: fear is always anxiety-ridden; circumscribed danger always makes us face the general risk of being in this world … The loss of one’s job, or the change which alters the features of the functions of labor, or the loneliness of metropolitan life – all these aspects of our relationship with the world assume many of the traits which formerly belonged to the kind of anxieties one feels outside the walls of the community.⁴²

The social and political link between a frightening precariousness (which a political community is supposed to protect against) and the threat of precarized others (through which their exclusion is legitimized) is no longer capable of establishing social security for most of those ‘within’ the community. For many, the anxious worry arising from existential vulnerability is no longer distinguishable from a fear arising from precarization. There is no longer any reliable protection from what is unforeseeable, from what cannot be planned for, from contingency.

Due to the dismantling and remodelling of collective safeguarding systems, every form of independence disappears in the face of the dangers of precariousness and precarization; invulnerability and sovereignty become obvious illusions. Even those who were previously secured at the cost of national and global others are losing social protection. From everyone, regardless of gender or origins, an individualized capacity for risk management is now required, with which a precariousness that cannot be assured can be actualized in different ways and which materializes differently depending on the social positioning of precarity. The overlapping of the anxiety of precariousness and fear in precarization is evident in the unreasonable demand to privatize risks. The new quality of insecurity arises not least through the erosion of workers’ rights, the restructuring of social, health and educational systems, all the way through to the self-responsible prevention of illness and the loss of wages and pensions. Consequently, a neoliberal individualized self-government and self-responsibility is partly confronted with existential precariousness in a new way. Coupled with social, political and economic precarization, for many the privatization of risks and their prevention means nothing other than the individualization of precariousness.

In the neoliberal dynamic of governmental precarization, the illusion of individual security is maintained specifically through the anxiety over being exposed to existential vulnerability. In the permanent race for the hoped-for securing of one’s own life and that of one’s immediate social milieu against competing others, the fact that a lastingly better life cannot be an individual matter is obscured. In governmental subjectivations, however, the demands of preventive, individualist self-protection, of self-immunization in precarization, are more affirmed than questioned. Self-government and the conduct of life are primarily at the service of political governability and capitalist valorization – and the anxiety of precariousness maintains this relation. Social practices that are oriented not solely to the self and one’s own milieu, but rather to living together and to common political action, recede ever more into the background and become ever less imaginable as a lived reality.

1 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, Foreword by Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, Los Angeles, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, p. 24.

2 Cf. ibid., p. 49.

3 Cf. also Isabell Lorey and Klaus Neundlinger, eds, Kognitiver Kapitalismus, vol. 13 of the series ‘es kommt darauf an’, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012.

4 ‘Of course this does not mean that work loads are no longer subdivided, parceled out, etc.; rather, it means that the segmentation of duties no longer answers to objective “technical” criteria, but is, instead, explicitly arbitrary, reversible, changeable.’ Virno, ‘Publicness of the Intellect’.

5 Cf. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, pp. 41–2.

6 Paolo Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’, trans. Ed Emory, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy: A Political Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 188–210, here pp. 189–92. Virno uses ‘attività senza opera’. In A Grammar of the Multitude this concept is translated as ‘activity without an end product’ (ibid., p. 52).

7 When I describe the tendency of these kinds of post-Fordist living and working conditions to become hegemonic and thus normal, this is not to imply that traditional industrial production has disappeared. However, it is losing its sole, structure-giving significance for current capitalist production processes. In addition, I do not want to assert an exception for industrial production in my considerations of precarization. Industrial work relations are also marked by flexibilization, limited contracts, and the dismantling and remodelling of social security systems.

8 Cf. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, pp. 49–70.

9 Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, in Between Past and Future, London: Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 142–69, here p. 152; see also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, Chap. V: ‘Action’.

10 And due of course, it must be added, to the hegemony of industrial capitalist patterns of thinking, which continue to exist.

11 Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, pp. 151–2.

12 Ibid., p. 153.

13 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 53.

14 Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, p. 154.

15 Ibid., p. 156.

16 Ibid., p. 155.

17 Ibid., and p. 165.

18 Ibid., p. 163.

19 Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction Into Politics’, in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn, New York: Schocken, 2005, pp. 93–200, here p. 128.

20 Cf. ibid., p. 121.

21 Ibid., p. 122.

22 Ibid.

23 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 54.

24 Ibid.

25 Karl Marx, ‘Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus Value: Productive and Unproductive Labour’, in Marx Engels Collected Works, MECW, vol. 34: Economic Works 1861–64, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: International Publishers, 1994, pp. 480–6, here p. 483, emphasis in the original. Thanks to Karl Reitter for this reference.

26 Ibid., emphasis in the original.

27 Ibid., p. 485, emphasis in the original.

28 Ibid., p. 484, emphasis in the original.

29 Karl Marx, ‘Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63: Productivity of Capital, Productive and Unproductive Labour’, in Marx Engels Collected Works, MECW, vol. 34: Economic Works 1861–64, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: International Publishers, 1994, pp. 121–46, here p. 143.

30 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, pp. 54–5.

31 On the concept of ‘immaterial’ labour, see Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor’, trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in Virno and Hardt, eds, Radical Thought in Italy, pp. 133–47; and Michael Hardt, ‘Affective Labor’, boundary 2, 2 (1999), pp. 98–100. The terms ‘immaterial labour’ or ‘affective labour’ have been repeatedly criticized by feminists because they again describe labour from the perspective of capitalist accumulation and insufficiently reflect on non-labour, care labour, the production of the social, etc. Cf. among others, Susanne Schultz, ‘Dissolved Boundaries and “Affective Labor”: On the Disappearance of Reproductive Labor and Feminist Critique in Empire’, trans. Frederick Peters, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 17 (2006), pp. 77–83; Cornelia Eichhorn, ‘Geschlechtliche Teilung der Arbeit. Eine feministische Kritik’, in Thomas Atzert and Jost Müller, eds, Immaterielle Arbeit und imperiale Souveränität. Analysen und Diskussionen zu Empire, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2004, pp. 189–202; and Caffentzis and Federici, ‘Notes on the Edu-Factory’.

32 Cf. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 68.

33 Ibid., p. 62.

34 Cf. ibid., p. 53.

35 Cf. Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, p. 155.

36 Birgit Sauer has pointed out that in neoliberal discourses the metaphor of freedom is used to prompt fantasies about manifold options and opportunities, about individual freedom of choice. In neoliberalism, however, these kinds of discourses about freedom are embedded in a ‘domination-shaped restructuring of the political’. What emerges is a ‘new form of governing through freedom’, freedom transforms into domination. See Birgit Sauer, ‘Von der Freiheit auszusterben’, in Bidwell-Steiner and Wagner, eds, Freiheit und Geschlecht, pp. 18–19; cf. also Jacob Segal, ‘The Discipline of Freedom: Action and Normalization in Theory and Practice of Neo-Liberalism’, New Political Science 3 (2006), pp. 323–34, here p. 324.

37 Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, p. 163.

38 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 68, emphasis in the original.

39 Virno, ‘Publicness of the Intellect’.

40 Cf. Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’, p. 191.

41 Cf. Arendt, ‘What is Freedom?’, p. 165.

42 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 33, emphasis in the original (translation modified). This does not mean, however, that this kind of overlapping is to be noted for the first time in history.

Chapter 6

Care Crisis and Care Strike

Judith Butler argues in favour of no longer regarding common shared precariousness as threatening and dividing it up into hierarchized protected differences, but instead recognizing existential vulnerability and considering it as an affirmative basis for politics. For Butler, precarity in its different extents forms the starting-point for political alliances against a logic of protection and security for some at the cost of many others.¹

Precarias a la deriva,² a group of feminist activists from Madrid, also focus on existing logics of security and insecurity in order to lastingly break through them. Precarity is the starting-point for the Precarias as well, but it is one that must first be explored together. Their central political and social strategy consists in enhancing the status of care.

In a further development of the Situationist practice of the dérive, the Precarias practise a different kind of roaming through the city. Their political practice overlaps with their own research practice of dérive: ‘interviews in movement’³ are conducted during tours through the city, in order to relate different locations to one another in collating precarious living and working conditions.

The Precarias’ dérive inscribes itself in the tradition of ‘militant research’, generating ‘minor knowledge forms’ for the purpose of self-organization. This practice refers back to the idea of co-research associated with the Italian workers’ movement of the 1970s, as well as to practices of consciousness-raising deriving from second-wave feminism.⁴ Starting from their own precarized existences, in their encounters and affections with other precarious they seek to break through the isolation and individualization of post-Fordist living and working conditions.⁵ They traverse not only places of work, residence, shopping and meeting, places of sexuality and of transport, but also the different modes of subjectivation involved. The Precarias a la deriva start, first of all, from their own different experiences of precarity and precarization, in order to enable a common orientation with others in the dérives. This orientation is not directed to a goal, but emerges in practice. In the dérive they pass through social spaces and explore the conditions of precarized everyday life, in order to find out, first of all, what a common struggle against precarity and precarization might mean.⁶ As they start from the presupposition that the precarious goes far beyond the realm of work and covers the whole of existence, there is no search for a common identity that would conjoin everyone into a unity. Instead, the Precarias are interested in inventing ‘common notions’ in Spinoza’s sense.⁷ Such notions are formed by way of the affective connections of bodies, through what they have in common in their mutual affections. Common notions arise through actualizing that ‘which is common to and a property of the human body and such other bodies as are wont to affect the human body’.⁸ Developed in encounters with others, in exchanges with them, both the multiplicity and the singularities of existence manifest themselves in common notions.

Similarly to Butler, the Precarias also argue against traditions of thinking that refuse our fundamental social relationality, warn against infection by others, maintain a logic of individualism and security, and thus perceive precarization solely as a threat. They contrast this kind of social and political logic with a ‘logic of care’,⁹ situating the term ‘reproduction’ and the multiplicity of care activities associated with it in the context of post-Fordist production conditions, and taking into consideration the new forms of communicative knowledge and affect work. In their militant research the Precarias focus not only on housework, nursing, child-raising and education, but also on work in call centres and sex work.¹⁰ Enhancing the status of these care activities enables alternative political responses to current problems, which the interminable reformulations of the logic of threat and security are not capable of providing. Contrary to the tradition of the political community of protection, the Precarias a la deriva therefore develop the common notion of a ‘care community’, a cuidadanía.¹¹

The focus on care has, above all, two strategic components: on the one hand, it is intended to enhance the status of care work with a new understanding and make this the starting-point for political-economic considerations. The traditional evaluation is not thereby simply reversed, rather, the gender-specific and heteronormative distinction between production and reproduction is to be divested of its foundation, just like the separation between a private and a public sphere.¹² On the other hand, the focus on care is intended to ‘return to the initial moment of anxiety’¹³ and acknowledge our relationality with others – and thus also ‘our vulnerability and … our situated, partial and unfinished constitution within the weave of relationships in which we live’.¹⁴

According to the Precarias, we currently find ourselves in a multi-dimensional ‘care crisis’, which is not to be separated from the ‘precarization of existence’ with which more and more people are confronted in different ways.¹⁵ Especially among the middle class, privatized risk management, in which one’s own life conduct has to be controlled through self-discipline, is still correlated with the tendency of individuals to close themselves off and with demands for security from those declared as ‘risk groups’. Individualization and segmentation increase, not least of all due to post-Fordist working conditions, which demand permanent availability while cutting labour rights and social rights at the same time. Time and the capacity for caring for others become scarce; self-care serves almost exclusively to (re-)produce a profitable and productive body. Yet regardless of how intense capitalized and technicized self-care is, bodies remain – not only at the beginning of life, but also and especially later in life – dependent on being cared for by (usually in their turn precarious) others, and increasingly by migrant women. Up to the present, the necessity of care work has not led to fair wages.¹⁶

In addition, care work is closely linked with the denial of labour rights and citizenship rights, but also with the lack of the right to be cared for and to carry out care work under conditions of dignity. The strategic reference to a right to care activity is not intended to reproduce a ‘feminine duty’, nor to privilege heteronormative gender roles by way of which people who do not fit the norm are refused this right. The right to care activity also includes the right not to have to carry out such activity, meaning generally the right to have a choice about care work.¹⁷

Against this background, the Precarias call for a ‘care strike’,¹⁸ designed to break open the rigid order of threat, preventive care, care-taking and self-care in order to arrange them anew. When the neoliberal dispositive of care – as the intertwining of affective and cognitive labour, the privatization of prevention, anxiety about precariousness, and servile self-care – becomes capitalizable and governmental in all four dimensions, what form can a care strike take? Can the relationality of life, our connectedness with others, be the object of a strike? Here a strike does not mean the suspending of care activities. On the contrary, care work is to be shifted to the centre, thus interrupting the existing order. The strike applies to political and economic dispositions that devalue care as being private, feminine and unproductive, thereby depoliticizing it. These are perspectives through which care work is perpetually made invisible, so that its associated conflicts are consequently not perceived. The care strike is intended to emphasize exactly these debates and struggles, starting from them in order to create, in Donna Haraway’s sense, the ‘instruments of vision’ that ‘vision requires’.¹⁹

The practices of care and the refusals taking place within them, with their major and minor resistances, should be articulated ‘to produce new more liberatory and cooperative forms of affect’.²⁰ Social relationships are ‘striked’, according to the Precarias, by producing excesses that flee from the interests of profit.²¹ This refusal, this flight, already takes place in everyday practices, but it must be composed, articulated, actualized, constituted. This is why the activist researchers ask questions such as ‘What is your precarity?’, ‘What is your strike?’,²² in order to move from singular practices to the common notions of ‘precarity’ and ‘strike’ in which affective encounters and communicative exchange with others are manifested. When the dispersed precarious roam around conducting their militant research, when they suspend their isolation in the strike, this does not lead to unification. Instead, ‘linguistic-affective territorialities are created between the points that do not already have territories a priori at their disposal’.²³ The strike practices encompass interruptions and ruptures as well as inventions and improvizations. In them, new forms of living together and new forms of constituting emerge, with a view to changing fundamentally the ‘increasingly precarized world’.²⁴

1 Cf. Butler, ‘Precarious Life, Grievable Life’, p. 32.

2 For the Spanish pun in the name ‘Precarias a la deriva’, see Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren, ‘Translators’ Introduction to Precarias a la deriva, “A Very Careful Strike – Four Hypotheses” ’, caring labor: an archive (2005), available at https://caringlabor.wordpress.com.

3 Precarias, ‘Projekt und Methode’, in Pieper et al., eds, Empire und die biopolitische Wende, p. 91.

4 Cf. Marta Malo de Molina, ‘Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-Inquiry, Co-Research, Consciousness-Raising’, trans. Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias, transversal: ‘militant research’ (April 2004), available at http://transversal.at.

5 Cf. Precarias a la deriva, ‘De preguntas, ilusiones, enjambres y desiertos. Apuntes sobre investigación y militancia desde Precarias a la deriva’, in Revista Derive Approdi et al., Nociones Communes: Experiencias y ensayos entre investigación y militancia, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2004, pp. 81–92, available at http://nodo50.org.

6 Cf. Birgit Mennel and Stefan Nowotny, ‘Die militante Ethik der Precarias a la deriva. Eine Einleitung’, in Precarias a la deriva, ‘Was ist dein Streik?’ – Militante Streifzüge durch die Kreisläufe der Prekarität, trans. Birgit Mennel, intro. Birgit Mennel and Stefan Nowotny, vol. 11 of the series ‘es kommt darauf an’, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011, pp. 7–32, here pp. 9–15.

7 Neither Precarias a la deriva nor Marta Malo de Molina explicitly refer to Spinoza, but their understanding of common notions appears to be based on a Negrian and Deleuzian interpretation of Spinoza. Mennel and Nowotny offer this reading in their introduction, which I follow here. Cf. Malo de Molina, ‘Common Notions, Part 1’, and Mennel and Nowotny, ‘Die militante Ethik’, in Precarias, ‘Was ist dein Streik?’, pp. 19–24.

8 Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata), trans. R.H.M. Elwes, The Project Gutenberg 2009, Part II, Prop. XXXIX, available at http://gutenberg.org; cf. Mennel and Nowotny, ‘Die militante Ethik’, p. 20.

9 Precarias a la deriva, ‘Geld oder Leben!’, in ‘Was ist dein Streik?’, pp. 57–135, here p. 58 and pp. 70–80. Spanish original: Precarias a la deriva, ‘¡La bolsa contra la vida! De la precarización de la existencia a la huelga de cuidados’, in Maria Jesús Vera, ed., Estudios sobre género y economia, Madrid: Akal, 2005, pp. 104–34.

10 Cf. also Precarias, ‘Projekt und Methode’.

11 See the explanations of the concept cuidadanía in Precarias, ‘Geld oder Leben!’, pp. 104–15. The Spanish term cuidadanía is derived from the word cuidado (care) and is a play on words with cuidadanía (citizenship).

12 Cf. ibid., pp. 110–13.

13 Ibid., p. 74.

14 Ibid., pp. 111–12. As is clear from the terminology, the Precarias repeatedly refer to Donna Haraway, especially to her two texts ‘Situated Knowledges’ and ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, both published in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991.

15 Cf. Precarias, ‘Geld oder Leben!’, pp. 80–91; Precarias a la deriva, ‘Die Prekarisierung der Existenz. Ein Gespräch’, in Renate Lorenz and Brigitta Kuster, sexuell arbeiten. eine queere perspektive auf arbeit und prekäres leben, Berlin: b_books, 2007, pp. 259–72, here p. 269.

16 Cf. Precarias, ‘Geld oder Leben!’, pp. 78–9.

17 Cf. ibid., 85, 89–92, 114. On migrant women’s obligation to care for their ‘transnational families’, see Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization.

18 The Spanish pun ‘la huelga de cuidados’ means ‘at the same time, something very carefully done, something dangerous (something around which one should take care), as well as referring to the proposal of a strike by those who carry out both paid and unpaid caring labor’. See Ingrassia and Holdren, ‘Translators’ Introduction’, caring labor.

19 Cf. Precarias, ‘Geld oder Leben!’, p. 116; Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 193.

20 Precarias a la deriva, ‘A Very Careful Strike – Four Hypotheses’, trans. Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren, caring labor: an archive (2005), available at https://caringlabor.wordpress.com.

21 Cf. Precarias, ‘Geld oder Leben!’, p. 127.

22 Precarias, ‘De preguntas’, in Revista Derive Approdi et al., Nociones Communes, pp. 81–4.

23 Ibid., p. 91.

24 Precarias, ‘Geld oder Leben!’, p. 117.

Chapter 7

Exodus and Constituting

Drawing a line of flight out of the dispositive of care means moving away from the dominant model of being limited and threatened by others, and from preventive care focused on what is one’s own, in the direction of a cuidadanía, a care community in which our relationality with others is not interrupted but is regarded as fundamental. This would not automatically mean the end of domination, inequality and violence, nor the end of all modes of governing, or of precarity and precarization. Nor would such a line of flight entail reversing the dominance within the binary of individualism and collectivism in favour of the latter. As a break with binary logic, the line of flight is always immanent to power relations.¹

In the context of militant research, the point is first of all to generate common notions in order to probe and establish what is commonly shared – by way of which the potential for changing existing conditions can be emphasized. In general there is no possibility, not even in this kind of political process, of referring to a commonly shared precariousness. Precariousness forms no foundation, cannot be generally defined, and does not exist per se. It remains undefined, specifically because it always exists in relation to others and is thus constantly linked to social and political possibilities of action.

Against this background, there are no political perspectives to be derived from a commonly shared precariousness that could be argued for within the logic of the modern understanding of equality, roughly along the lines that all people are equal because all are fundamentally precarious, from which the political task of a struggle for the recognition of this human foundation could be derived. Since precariousness is by no means this kind of foundation, the starting-point for a political line of argument must rather be the ambivalence of that which is shared and divides, in other words the relational difference, and the resultant possibility of what is common in differentness. Like precariousness, what is in common is not something that has always already existed, to which recourse can be had; rather, it is something first produced in political action, because shared differentness does not exist outside the social and the political. What is in common does not have to be made visible because it is hidden, it rather becomes perceptible in fleeing and in the process of constituting.

If the commonly shared comes into being through fleeing, then this brings us back once again to Hannah Arendt’s idea – although somewhat differently from how she conceived it – of the way in which political freedom is linked with freedom of movement, with leaving the domination relations of sovereignty. With Arendt this freedom to leave is tied to a new start, a new beginning.² This can be conceived as linked not only with the line of flight in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, but also with Virno’s political-theoretical conceptualization of exodus. Virno also starts from the idea of a way of acting together politically at a distance from sovereignty and thus also – more radically than Arendt – from the state. He understands the movement of exodus in terms of a massive defection from the state in order to institute ‘a non-state run public sphere’ and achieve a ‘radically new form of democracy’.³ In concentrating on social cooperation, he focuses on a ‘nonservile virtuosity’⁴ that defects from post-Fordist production conditions.

In order to achieve radically new forms of democracy, the goal of this flight or exodus is not to reach a realm beyond, a completely new place where living together is reinvented. My understanding of exodus is inspired by Virno, but differs on the question of immanence. Unlike the biblical exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, which involved the radical foundation of a new order,⁵ my interest is in emphasizing the potentiality and movement of exodus within power relations themselves, their reversal and the flight from them that is always possible, but never leads to an outside of power. This is the reason for stressing the ambivalent constitution of the self-government of governmental modes of subjectivation. An exodus from neoliberal governmentality arises from the rejection of capitalizable self-government and the turn to a self-conduct that tests new modes of living in disobedience. These kinds of rejections are not a deliverance from all previous neoliberal entanglements, but rather the beginning of engagements and struggles to no longer be governed and no longer govern oneself in this way, at this price.

A nonservile virtuosity is immanent to a servile one, just as the potential to flee from present servile virtuosities emerges, not least of all, in precarious modes of subjectivation themselves. The point is that in the exodus of the many, a constituting, an organizing, of the manifold singularities emerges, in order to ‘return’ and fundamentally change the existing social relations.⁶ One instrument for this is the invention of common notions.

Productivity That Cannot Be Completely Capitalized

One important presupposition for both a political and a theoretical perspective on the common is that the new form of labour force based on communication, knowledge, creativity and affect is by no means exclusively productive for a new phase of capitalist accumulation. The economization of the social, the coincidence of work and life, the demand for the whole person to be involved in performative-cognitive, affective labour, in other words, the capitalization of modes of subjectivation – these processes are not at all total, all-encompassing or wholly determined. Excesses, potentials for the articulation of resistance, always arise. Modes of subjectivation are not always subsumed into normative political and economic calls for flexibility, mobility and affective and creative work. In uncertain, flexibilized and discontinuous working and living conditions, subjectivations arise that do not entirely correspond to the neoliberal logic of valorization, and which may resist and refuse it.⁷

The processes of precarization are a contested social terrain, in which the struggles of workers and their desires for different forms of living and working are articulated.⁸ The processes of precarization are not only productive in the sense of contributing to capitalist exploitation. In the post-Fordist conditions of precarious production, new forms of living and new social relationships are continually being developed and invented. In this sense, processes of precarization are also productive.

Those forms of working that are primarily based on communication and affects, on exchange with others, cannot be wholly calculated. The measurable character of production is exceeded, so that in comparison with Fordist industrial labour, production tends to become incalculable.⁹ At many moments in the processes of precarization, something unforeseen, contingent, and also in this sense precarious arises. It is this aspect of precarization that harbours the potential of refusal, producing at the same time a re-composition of work and life, of a sociality that is not in this way, not immediately, not so quickly, perhaps even not at all, capitalizable. These kinds of re-compositions can effect interruptions in the process of normalization, in other words, in the continuity of exploitability and governability.

Living and working in precarious conditions, therefore, does not just mean being exposed to the unforeseeable, to insecurity, being unable to make long-term plans and being exploitable specifically for this reason. Beyond this, in dealing with contingency, the possibility arises at the same time of being able to leave and start something new: the potentiality of exodus and constituting. The exodus from domination relations, the defection from ways of being governed, does not necessarily lead to individualistic dispersion, but can also form itself anew in founding, in constituting. Com-position as a resistive movement means, at the same time, empowerment in the sense of a constituent power. Constituting in this sense counters notions of community or collective identity and does not imply a state constitution, i.e. a constitution that has been coupled with self-legislation and consequently with bourgeois sovereignty since the French Revolution.¹⁰ In contrast to this, constituting is understood at both the theoretical and the political level as a movement that distances itself from sovereignty and thus from the juridical. The precondition for the unfolding of this kind of constituent power is the common refusal or the common exodus, not to linger in negation or deconstructive questioning, but rather to be able to invent a re-composition.

The first step in this direction is disobedience, the refusal of servile virtuosity. Especially because precarious knowledge workers act in the presence of others, they are not only more individualized to an extreme degree, but are also always part of the production of new socialities. In this shared virtuosity the potential for a common constituent power arises that opens up a space for communicating with others about how one wants to live and to work, about what is needed for safeguarding and for mutual protection.

The potentiality of exodus can be linked to a transformed concept of ‘political freedom’: a ‘political freedom’ that does not mean an individual practice, but one that uses the conditions of post-Fordist virtuosity for a new constituting. It is a question of joining with others, exchanging with others, acting together with others. Virtuosity under the conditions of non-sovereignty means a common exodus and the resultant constituent power, in order to intervene again – and this is the pivotal point – in the conditions that were refused.

Against this background, is it sufficient to demand improved rights of protection for the precarious and the recognition of a common precariousness in a juridical logic? Is it not also necessary to break open the binary of security and protection on the one side and what is threateningly precarious on the other? Precariousness as social-ontology and precarity as identitarian positioning both primarily emphasize the aspects of exposure and victimization. Precarization goes beyond this and is decidedly productive in its governmental dimension: both as an instrument of governing and as a capitalist exploitation relation, as well as a self-governing that not only implies subjugation but is also incalculable and potentially empowering. Techniques of self-conduct comprise active modes of self-exploitation as well as forms of voluntary self-precarization.¹¹ At the same time, inherent in these are also new modes of subjectivation which are able to elude neoliberal forms of domination and enable new practices of resistive composition and constituent power. They are able to breach existing relations of domination, a breach that signifies a certain affirmation in which something new can emerge.

Fearsome Politics of the Precarious: When Anxiety No Longer Tames

In the context of the movements of the precarious that arose in the early 2000s through the EuroMayDay network, there is this kind of affirmation that is not opportunism but rather a potentiality of constituting.¹² The term ‘precarized’, for example, was rejected because of its passivizing and victimizing connotation of being determined (by others); instead, ‘precarious’ and ‘precarization’ were reworked, no longer referring solely to ‘an evil to be forestalled’ they became a self-designation.¹³

Whereas social-science discourses focus on coming up with definitions of terms like ‘precarity’ that are as precise and delineated as possible, in order to determine who is more or less affected, the opposite approach has been taken in the context of the EuroMayDay movement. No one here is interested in negating differences among the precarious; rather, in the midst of all the differentness strategies and alliances are sought. These are not intended to reproduce or fix demarcations through group constructions or categorizations derived from the social sciences, as happens in striating classifications that separate the underprivileged precarious from the better-off precarious, or migrants and illegalized persons on the one hand from creative workers on the other.

Starting from considerations in the context of debates about the ‘autonomy of migration’,¹⁴ the theoretical and political analyses emerging from these movements of the precarious centre on agency and self-chosen precarization.¹⁵ They seek to connect different experiences and concentrate not only on the frightening, threatening side of precarization, but also on the entire web of governmental precarization, thus pursuing a perspective on the potentialities of resistance and the invention of the new at the same time.

When what is incalculable and contingent is recognized and becomes the foundation for political practices, precarization cannot be tamed with a unifying politics of representation.¹⁶ Particularly against the background of the activists’ very different precarious modes of existence, various alliances arose in the EuroMayDay movement between precarious cultural producers, knowledge workers, migrant organizations, initiatives of the unemployed, organizations of illegalized persons, and even trade unions. To avoid newly segmenting, separating and individualizing the manifold precarious, the critical discourses and resistive practices in the context of precarization have repeatedly concentrated in the past decade on what the precarious have in common in all their differentness. Alternative practices of knowledge production like ‘militant research’ have frequently been used to explore ‘the underground, and frequently invisible, trajectory of everyday life uneasiness and insubordinations’,¹⁷ exploiting the productivity of precarious living and working conditions to change modes of governing, to refuse them together and to elude them.

Political practices based on the multiplicity of the precarious have repeatedly been made explicit as critical of identity and representation, as non-representationist practices which can be understood as a political ‘form of formlessness’,¹⁸ or a new form of democracy. This does not mean a total lack of representation or concrete demands, but is rather the ‘ambivalent precondition for the emergence of fear as well as for the invention of new, terrifying forms of concatenation’.¹⁹

The combination of a subjugating anxiety and an outwardly turned fear emerges specifically in the dynamics of governmental precarization – in the modes of subjectivation developing in it between servility and fearsomeness/destitution (Entsetzen). This Entsetzen is twofold: on the one hand, it is not a united form but a composite – in other words a constituted formless form of the many, continuing the tradition of the fearsome multitude, the crowd, the undefinable arbitrary many; while on the other it embraces destitution as a displacement in the sense of defection, of fleeing, and of a common exodus. In a destituting, fearsome mode of constituting, a capacity of the threatened and threatening precarious emerges to invent new forms of protection that do not consist in the immunizing warding off and negating of vulnerability and contingency. Instead they break through these kinds of domination-securing dynamics to subvert the concomitant fantasies of invulnerability and superiority.

Because governmental precarization is both a condition and an effect of neoliberal governing through insecurity, designed to make individuals governable, a one-sided focus on danger and threat fails to recognize the immanent potentiality of the empowering, resistive reversal or flight. Of course, exactly this productivity can potentially be capitalized and governmentalized again, and it does not escape the subjugating dynamics of governmental precarization in an absolute way. Nevertheless, and regardless of this, through permanent singular refusals, the small sabotages and resistances of precarious everyday life, a potentiality emerges that subverts the disciplining of governmental precarization time and again. This constituent power is also fearsome, because it breaks with the immunizing defensive discourse of the bourgeois centre about the ‘threatening precariat’, and ultimately reverses this attribution into an offensively connoted ‘monster precariat’.²⁰ These kinds of interventions are struggles over forms of governing as well as over living conditions and ways of thinking, in which contingency and incalculability no longer have to be experienced as a threat. This can be fearsome, since in their everyday practices of resistance and political struggle the precarious have the potential to refuse to allow themselves to be divided and dispersed for the protection of some against the threatening others.

1 The ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are fundamental to the figure of flight. See A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; see also Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 36–8 and p. 135, but also Foucault’s understanding of power relations, which always enable a reversal and/or flight from them. Cf. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, p. 346, and Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, eds, The Final Foucault, trans. J.D. Gauthier, S.J., Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1988, pp. 1–20, here p. 12.

2 Cf. also Oliver Marchart, Neu beginnen. Hannah Arendt, die Revolution und die Globalisierung, with a preface by Linda Zerilli, vol. 3 of the series ‘es kommt darauf an’, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2005.

3 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, p. 68.

4 Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’, p. 200.

5 Cf. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, New York: Basic Books, 1986.

6 On this figure of exodus and the meaning of ‘return’, see Lorey, Figuren des Immunen, especially pp. 36–51 and pp. 293–313; Isabell Lorey, ‘Attempt to Think the Plebeian: Exodus and Constituting as Critique’, trans. Aileen Derieg, transversal: ‘The Art of Critique’ (August 2008), available at http://transversal.at; Isabell Lorey, ‘Konstituierende Kritik. Die Kunst, den Kategorien zu entgehen’, in Birgit Mennel, Stefan Nowotny and Gerald Raunig, eds, Kunst der Kritik, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010, pp. 47–65.

7 Cf. Brigitta Kuster, ‘Die eigenwillige Freiwilligkeit der Prekarisierung’, transversal: ‘Precariat’ (July 2004), available at http://transversal.at; Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2008; Marianne Pieper, Efthimia Panagiotidis and Vassilis Tsianos, ‘Regime der Prekarisierung und verkörperte Subjektivierung’, in Gerrit Herlyn et al., eds, Arbeit und Nicht-Arbeit. Entgrenzungen und Begrenzungen von Lebensbereichen und Praxen, Munich: Mering, 2009, pp. 341–57.

8 Cf. Frassanito-Network, ‘Precarious, Precarization, Precariat?’; see also Luzenir Caixeta, ‘Jenseits eines simplen Verelendungsdiskurses. Prekäre Arbeitsverhältnisse von Migrantinnen und Möglichkeiten einer (Selbst-)Organisation der Betroffenen am Beispiel von maiz’, Kulturrisse. Zeitschrift für radikaldemokratische Kulturpolitik: ‘Organisierung der Unorganisierbaren’ 4 (2006), pp. 22–5; Marion von Osten, ‘Irene ist Viele! Or What We Call Productive Forces’, trans. Jennifer Cameron, e-flux 8 (2009), available at e-flux.com.

9 On the surplus production of the cognitive that overturns industrial-capitalist value theory, see Lorey and Neundlinger, eds, Kognitiver Kapitalismus.

10 Cf. Isabell Lorey, ‘Von den Kämpfen aus. Eine Problematisierung grundlegender Kategorien’, in Sabine Hess, Nikola Langreiter and Elisabeth Timm, eds, Intersektionalität revisited. Empirische, theoretische und methodische Erkundungen, Bielefeld: transcript, 2011, pp. 101–16, especially p. 103.

11 Isabell Lorey, ‘Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the Normalization of Cultural Producers’, trans. Lisa Rosenblatt and Dagmar Fink, transversal: ‘Machines and Subjectivation’ (November 2006), available at http://transversal.at.

12 EuroMayDay parades have been taking place on May 1st since the early 2000s in over twenty European cities with up to 150,000 participants, to problematize the precarization of living and working conditions on the traditional Day of the Worker. The activists come together from very different social positions. However, the parades of the transnational network EuroMayDay are only one event alongside other events, surveys and publications throughout the entire year. EuroMayDay is concerned with new forms of organizing as well as reaching mutual understanding about different modes of precarization and collective knowledge production. See, among others, http://euromayday.org; transversal: ‘Precariat’ (July 2004) and transversal: ‘Militant Research’ (April 2006), both available at http://transversal.at; mute magazine, culture and politics after the net (2005), available at http://metamute.org; and Raunig, A Thousand Machines, pp. 75–90.

13 Raunig, A Thousand Machines, pp. 78 and 85.

14 Cf. Sandro Mezzadra, ‘The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration, and Social Struggles’, trans. Rodrigo Nunes, in Vicki Squire, ed., The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 121–42; Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, ed., Turbulente Ränder. Neue Perspektiven auf Migration an den Grenzen Europas, Bielefeld: transcript, 2007; Papadopoulos et al., Escape Routes.

15 Cf. Kuster, ‘Die eigenwillige Freiwilligkeit’; Caixeta, ‘Jenseits eines simplen Verelendungsdiskurses’.

16 Cf. also Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’, p. 201; Marion Hamm and Stephan Adolphs, ‘Performative Repräsentation prekärer Arbeit: mediatisierte Bilderproduktion in der EuroMayDay-Bewegung’, in Gerrit Herlyn et al., eds, Arbeit und Nicht-Arbeit. Entgrenzungen und Begrenzungen von Lebensbereichen und Praxen, Munich: Mering, 2009, pp. 315–40.

17 Malo de Molina, ‘Common Notions, Part 1’.

18 Raunig, A Thousand Machines, p. 117. On the new forms of democracy that have arisen in the occupation movements of the precarious in 2011, see Isabell Lorey, ‘Präsentische Demokratie. Tigersprung und Exodus’, Kamion 0 (2014), pp. 83–8, available at http://transversal.at; Isabell Lorey, ‘Democracy and Occupation: Horizontality and the Need for New Forms of Verticality’, trans. Aileen Derieg, in Pascal Gielen, ed., Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2013, pp. 77–99; Lorey, ‘Demokratie statt Repräsentation’, in Kastner et al., eds, Occupy!; Isabell Lorey and Gerald Raunig, ‘Matrix Examinatrix: Dispersion and Concentration’, trans. Thomas Taborsky, Krisis. Journal of Contemporary Philosophy 3 (2011), pp. 32–9, available at krisis.eu.

19 Raunig, A Thousand Machines, p. 117; see also Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos, ‘Prekarität: Eine wilde Reise ins Herz des verkörperten Kapitalismus. Oder: Wer hat Angst vor der immateriellen Arbeit?’, in Raunig and Wuggenig, eds, Kritik der Kreativität, pp. 145–64.

20 Gerald Raunig, ‘The Monster Precariat’ (2007), available at http://translate.eipcp.net.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Judith Butler, Stefan Nowotny and Gerald Raunig, the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp), and kpD/kleines postfordistisches Drama: Brigitta Kuster, Marion von Osten and Katja Reichard.

For making the English edition of this book possible, I especially thank Aileen Derieg, who has translated for me for many years, and everyone who supported the publication, particularly Marina Sitrin, Lynne Segal, Brett Neilson, Vassilis Tsianos, Dimitris Papadopoulos, Angela McRobbie, Emma Dowling, Stefano Harney, Erik Empson, and Sebastian Budgen.

My thanks as well to all the publishers and editors who contributed to the development of the following texts that were preliminary to this book:

‘Politics of Immunization, and the Precarious Life’, trans. Rainer Emig, in Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher, eds, Dance, Politics and Co-Immunity: Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts, Zürich: Diaphanes, 2012, pp. 265–76.

‘Gouvernementale Prekarisierung’, in Isabell Lorey, Roberto Nigro and Gerald Raunig, eds, Inventionen 1: Gemeinsam. Prekär. Potentia. Kon-/Disjunktion. Ereignis. Transversalität. Queere Assemblagen, Zürich: Diaphanes, 2011, pp. 72–86.

‘Becoming Common. Precarization as Political Constituting’, trans. Aileen Derieg, e-flux: ‘Searching for the Post-Capitalist-Self’ 17 (2010), available at http://e-flux.com.

‘Prekarisierung als Verunsicherung und Entsetzen. Immunisierung, Normalisierung und neue Furcht erregende Subjektivierungsweisen’, in Alexandra Manske and Katharina Pühl, ed., Prekarisierung zwischen Anomie und Normalisierung: Geschlechtertheoretische Bestimmungen, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2010, pp. 48–81.

‘Virtuosität zwischen Dienstbarkeit und Exodus. Post-fordistische Öffentlichkeit, soziale Produktion und politisches Handeln’, fkw/Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und Visuelle Kultur: ‘Das Private bleibt Politisch’ 49 (2010), pp. 11–23.

‘Virtuosos of Freedom: On the Implosion of Political Virtuosity and Productive Labour’, trans. Mary O’Neill, in transversal: ‘Creativity Hypes’ (February 2007), available at http://transversal.at (also published in German in Claudio Altenhain, et al., eds, Von ‘Neuer Unterschicht’ und Prekariat. Gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse und Kategorien im Umbruch. Kritische Perspektiven auf aktuelle Debatten, Bielefeld: transcript, 2008, pp. 153–64).

‘Vom immanenten Widerspruch zur hegemonialen Funktion. Biopolitische Gouvernementalität und Selbst-Prekarisierung von KulturproduzentInnen’, in Gerald Raunig and Ulf Wuggenig, eds., Kritik der Kreativität, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2007, pp. 121–36.

‘Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the Normalization of Cultural Producers’, trans. Lisa Rosenblatt and Dagmar Fink, in transversal: ‘Machines and Subjectivation’ (November 2006), available at http://transversal.at.

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