precariousness

Is there something inherently bad in the type of activity we associate with “precarious labor”, or can precarious labor be made safe, without foregoing its flexibility and fluidity? The assumption that work which is short-term, mobile, variable in intensity and adaptive is bad is tied, of course, to its frequent connection to a lack of guarantees of financial support that allows for future planning, provision for needs such as health care and time-off,  and social/legal standing. The Fordist factory work is replaced by the migrant day-laborer, the adjunct instructor, the consultant, the temp…. Obviously, these figures are highly useful for Capital, given its own emphasis on mobility, profit-margins, efficiently, global reach, and it seems not unlikely that capitalism takes little account of human needs or life plans, much less suffering. And there is very real danger that some workers, particularly those (often women) engaged in sex work or global domestic employment, who lack legal or practical protection. It is highly unlikely that, of its own accord or even perhaps with pressure, the working world will revert to a model where each household is headed by a breadwinner who stays at a company throughout his life and is stable in this position (if this was even truly true). But, along with the uncertainly engendered by precarious labor, and the frequency with which the precarious do the same work as others who have more guarantees, without receiving the same compensation or respect, there are also ways in which precarious labor is beneficial. Surely a world in which work is not restricted to the options of 9-5, 5 days a week is potential beneficial to family life, as well as those who pursue art or education as well as employment.  

Precarious labor, of course, is experienced in different ways by different classes, and those devestated by the shifts in the job market since 2008 are most often middle-aged men who were exposes to emasulation and mass experiences of superfluidity, and the ability to set own’s own hours at the unemployment office is surely not a valuable gain. But, if the economists are right that certain types of jobs will not return, certainly a more broadly flexible conception and practice, perhaps combined with more robust options for technical re-training for adults, could alleviate at least some of the existential precariousness of this situation. Similarly, for the actual poor, for whom “precariousness” is often a euphemism for either absolute exclusion or minimum wage slavery, particularly for the millions of paperless immigrants who perform much of the unwanted work in the developed world, some sort of guarentee of security, both material and in terms of the possibility of entering into history of “being sombody”, not in the vulgar sense, but in the sense of the dignity of living in the company of others who might remember your story, should be possible.

Labor is precarious not because it is flexible, part-time or connected to maintenance of life and the private sphere, but because this model of laboring is seen as apolitical, private, and valueless. It is, paradoxically, seen as superflous, even as it is actually key to the operations of the secured operations (thus, a Day without Immigrants would actually bring most cities to a standstill). This is the work that builds and cares for the public space, which is paradoxically allowing its evisceration on the grounds of economic necessity. Decoupling the political from the public, and from paid, full-time employment, so that the citizen is more than a good worker, and so that material and social benefits are untied to one’s employment status, is one way to begin to make precarious labor, whether it the work of mothers, sex workers, secretaries or interns more safe. 

upaya

today: read Birmingham on Arendt/Benjamin, Arendt on Kafka, Dude quoted below on time/woling/connolly, a bit of the cambridge arendt companion. wrote two or three pages on feminism and public/privateness, to be part of the chapter on contemporary citizenship and work. its not too late, hoping to reread/skim stevens States without Nations, Peg’s Arendt and Human rights, and read some more cambridge and Balibar on europe…

I need a dissertation tracker that works like my nike tracker in my shoe. Self-surveillance may not be the only method for writing a dissertation, but I think it has to be mine.

elaborate metaphors are fun.

A riptide is a little understood phenomenon. It is not really a tide at all, but a strange current created by the interaction of waves and wind which functions like a conveyor belt more than a rabbit hole. You may swim into a rip tide because it appears unusually smooth and inviting, and then quickly panic as your are pulled out to sea. You may struggle towards the shore against an unmatchable ocean. You will fight against the current until you grow exhausted and drown; if you only knew it, the water to either side of you is calm. 

To survive a riptide, you must tread water, poised, until you are deposited at the other end of the conveyor belt. You must then swim at a diagonal towards the shore and away from the riptide, resisting the urge to take the quickest route. You must see the riptide, and by extension the ocean, not as a combative force but as a impersonal one, responding to patterns that you, too, can live by. 

To repeat: sometimes, you must tread water.