TDR: Special Consortium Issue: Precarity and Performance, 56.4 (Winter 2012)
And who can afford to live out a life in which one’s labor is disposable and the worth of one’s knowledge unrecognizable by prevailing market standards? The result is surely rage. But perhaps we can ask more precisely, how to make sense of bodies who assemble on the street, or
who occupy buildings, or who find themselves gathering in public squares or along the routes that cross city centers?
In some ways, the question is too large, since there are all kinds of assemblies: the revolutionary assemblies in Tunisia and Egypt, the demonstrations against educational cuts and the emerging hegemony of neoliberalism in higher education that we have seen in Athens, Rome, London, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, to name but a few. And then there are the demonstrations that are without immediate demands, such as Occupy Wall Street.
Then, of course, there are the riots in the UK, which are also without explicit demands but have a political significance that cannot be underestimated when we consider the extent of poverty and unemployment among those who were looting.
When people take to the streets together, they form something of a body politic, and even if that body politic does not speak in a single voice — even when it does not speak at all or make any claims — it still forms, asserting its presence as a plural and obdurate bodily life.
What, then, is the political significance of assembling as bodies, stopping traffic or claiming attention, or moving not as stray and separated individuals, but as a social movement of some kind?
This assembling of bodies does not have to be organized from on high (the Leninist presumption), nor does it need to have a single message (the logocentric conceit) to exercise a certain performative force in the public domain. The “we are here” that translates that collective bodily presence might be re-read as “we are still here,” meaning: “we have not yet been disposed of.”
Such bodies are precarious and persistent, which is why I think we have always to link precarity with forms of social and political agency where that is possible. When the bodies of those deemed “disposable” assemble in public view, they are saying, “We have not slipped quietly into the shadows of public life; we have not become the glaring absence that structures your public life.”
In a way, the collective assembling of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, and a way of asserting, in bodily form, one of the most basic presuppositions of democracy, namely, that political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, and to do so in ways that establish equality as a presupposition of social and political existence.
So when those institutions become structured in such a way that certain populations become disposable, are interpellated as disposable, deprived of a future, of education, of stable and fulfilling work, of even knowing what space one can call a home, then surely the assemblies fulfill another function, not only the expression of justifiable rage, but the assertion in their very social organization, of principles of equality in the midst of precarity.
Bodies on the street are precarious — they are exposed to police force, and sometimes endure physical suffering as a result. But those bodies are also obdurate and persisting, insisting on their continuing and collective “thereness” and, in these recent formations, organizing themselves without hierarchy, and so exemplifying the principles of equal treatment that they are demanding of public institutions.
In this way, those bodies enact the message, performatively, even when they sleep in public, or when they organize collective methods for cleaning the grounds they occupy, as happened in Tahrir and on Wall Street. If there is a “we” who assembles there, at that precise space and time, there is also a “we” that forms across the media, and that calls for the demonstrations and broadcasts its events.
Some set of global connections is being articulated, a different sense of the global from the “globalized market.” And some set of values is being enacted in the form of a collective resistance: a defense of our collective precarity and persistence in the making of equality and the many-voiced and unvoiced ways of refusing to become disposable.
I think it may be important to keep active the relationship between the various meanings of the precarious that both Isabell and Jasbir have laid out: (1) precariousness, a function of our social vulnerability and exposure that is always given some political form, and precarity as differentially distributed, and so one important dimension of the unequal distribution of conditions required for continued life;
but also (2) precaritization as an ongoing process, so that we do not reduce the power of precarious to single acts or single events. Precaritization allows us to think about the slow death that happens to targeted or neglected populations over time and space. And it is surely a form of power without a subject, which is to say that there is no one center that propels its direction and destruction.
If we only stayed with “precaritization,” I am not sure that we could account for the structure of feeling that Lauren has brought up. And if we decided to rally under the name of “the precarious” we might be making a social and political condition into an identity, and so cloaking some way that that form of power actually works.
So maybe precarious is what we feel, or would rather not feel, and its analysis has to be linked to the impetus to become impermeable, as so often happens within zones of military nationalism and rhetorics of security and self-defense.
But it seems also important to call “precarious” the bonds that support life, those that should be structured by the condition of mutual need and exposure that should bring us to forms of political organization that sustain living beings on terms of equality. It is not just that a single person is precarious by virtue of being a body in the world.
Although that is surely true, since accidents happen and some of us are then snuffed out or injured irreversibly. What seems more important than that form of existential individualism is the idea that a “bond” is flawed or frayed, or that it is lost or irrecoverable.
And we see this very prominently when, for instance, Tea Party politicians revel in the idea that those individuals who have failed to “take responsibility” for their own health care may well face death and disease as a result.
In other words, at such moments, a social bond has been cut or destroyed in a way that seeks to deny a shared precariousness and the very particular ethos and politics that ideally should follow from that — one that underscores global interdependence and objects to the radically unequal distribution of precarity (and grievability).
So I want to caution against an existential reading and insist that what is at stake is a way of rethinking social relationality. We can make the broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions.
As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions.
In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.
Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends upon dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable — a life that is, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance.
In my own view, then, we have to start from this shared condition of precarity (not as existential fact, but as a social condition of political life) in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not.
My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.
No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life — it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. Nothing “founds” us outside of a struggle to establish bonds that sustain us.
I thought to take up this question of the human since references to precarity sometimes rely on ideals of humanization and sometimes actually decenter the human itself. It is always possible to say that the affective register where precarity dwells is something like dehumanization.
And yet, we know that such a word relies on a human/animal distinction that cannot and should not be sustained. Indeed, if we call for humanization and struggle against “bestialization” then we affirm that the bestial is separate from and subordinate to the human, something that clearly breaks our broader commitments to rethinking the networks of life.
On the one hand, I want to be able to say that the “human” operates differentially, as Fanon clearly thought it did ([1952] 2008; [1961] 2005), such that some are humanized and others are not, and that this inequality must be opposed. But the critical task is to find a way to oppose that inequality without embracing anthropocentrism. So we have to rethink the human in light of precarity, showing that there is no human without those networks of life within which human life is but one sort of life.
Otherwise, we end up breaking off the human from all of its sustaining conditions (and in that way become complicit with the process of precaritization itself ). So the point is not to develop a conception of the human that would include every possible person first because such conceptions come to operate as exclusionary norms, and they are based on this breaking off of the human from its own material need, and the broader fields of life in which that need is implicated.
To think critically, usefully, about how the norm of the human is constructed and maintained requires that we take up a position outside of its terms, not as the nonhuman or even the anti-human, but rather precisely through thinking forms of sociality and interdependence, no matter how difficult, that are irreducible to uniquely human forms of life and so cannot be adequately addressed by any definition of human nature or the human individual. To speak about what is living in human life is already to admit that human ways of living are bound up with nonhuman modes of life.
Indeed, the connection with nonhuman life is indispensable to what we call human life. In Hegelian terms, if the human cannot be the human without the inhuman, then the inhuman is not only essential to the human, but is therefore the essence of the human. The point is not to simply invert the relations, but rather to gather and hold this merely apparent paradox together in a new thought of “human life” in which its component parts, “human” and “life,” never fully coincide with one another. In other words, if we have to hold onto this term “human life” in order to describe and oppose those situations in which “human life” is jeopardized, it will have to be done in such a way that the very conjunction — human life — will on occasion seek to hold together two terms that repel one another, or that work in divergent directions.
Human life is never the entirety of life, and life can never fully define the human — so whatever we might want to call human life will inevitably consist of a negotiation with this tension. Perhaps the human is the name we give to this very negotiation.
What seems to follow is this: while it is important to ask, Whose life qualifies as a human life?, we have also to ask the inverse question: What of human life is inevitably nonhuman?
If there is a human life that does not qualify as human, that has to be marked and opposed, then the question becomes: Through what modes of sociality is that opposition articulated?
And how do those modes of oppositional sociality redefine and resituate the human in light of animal and organic networks of life? There has to be a way to find and forge a set of bonds that can produce alliances over and against this grid of power that differentially allocates recognizability and uses the “human” as a term through which to institute inequality and unrecognizability.
The beginning of such alliances can be found in ethical formulations such as these: even if my life is not destroyed in war, something of my life is destroyed in war when other lives are destroyed in war, and when living processes and organisms are also destroyed in war. Since the existence of other lives, understood as any mode of life that exceeds me, is a condition of who I am, my life can make no exclusive claim on life (“I am not the only living thing”). At the same time, my own life is not every other life, and cannot be (“My life is not the same as other lives”).
In other words, to be alive is already to be connected with, dependent upon, what is living not only before and beyond myself, but before and beyond my humanness. No self and no human can live without this connection to a biological network of life that exceeds and includes the domain of the human animal.
This is why in opposing war, for example, one not only opposes the destruction of other human lives, but also the poisoning of the environment and the assault on living beings and a living world.