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ABSTRACT
This article explores the universalizing logic of precarity and precariousness in global studies discourse. Originally articulated in the work of Guy Standing and Judith Butler, this logic presupposes a possibility for a global politics of equality between precarious subjects in the North and South based on an emergent shared horizon of suffering. In a close reading of Standing and Butler, I challenge claims about equivalence by calling attention to the liberal analytics that inform their work. Drawing on a postcolonial attunement to historically constituted exclusions, I argue that precarity is better understood as a dis-ordering experience of sovereign subjectivity whose principal referent is the liberal not global subject of precarity. Globalizing the liberal subject of precarity entails the recuperation of its constitutive outside, namely the Third World, as the original site of abjection. The de-politicizing implications of attempts to universalize the subject of precarity are briefly outlined in conclusion.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For discussion and lively debate around a very early iteration of this project, my thanks to students in my seminar at PUC-Rio – Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and to Joǎo Nogueira for extending the invitation.
2. Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection is a psychoanalytic one that tracks the mechanisms of revulsion and disgust that disrupt the subject’s sense of subject-object distinctions. Within some traditions of thought in political-economy, (including what I refer to as the liberal analytic in this paper), the characterization of people in extreme poverty/precarity as ‘servile, wretched, contemptible’ (Webster’s dictionary meaning of abjection), worthy of revulsion and disgust merits the use of Kristeva’s concept albeit in a different register.
3. For good overviews of ‘precarity studies’ see especially Castels, Citation2001; Han, Citation2018; Jørgensen, Citation2016; Lemke, Citation2016; Millar, Citation2014; Seymour, Citation2012; and Trott, Citation2014.
4. Post-foundational conceptualizations of the subject use the language of non-sovereignty to signal a critique of the Enlightenment notion of a unitary subject. Non-sovereignty, however, can also be deployed in a postcolonial register where the liberal subject of autonomous self-mastery is simply not the dominant ideal.
5. I take the term ‘precarity talk’ from the virtual roundtable discussion edited by Jasbir Puar (Citation2012).
6. See especially, Munck, Citation2013; Standing, Citation2013 and Scully, Citation2016.
7. Robert Castels points out that wage labour was seen as a sign of dependency, not freedom, for a long time in western modernity. Projecting these disavowed elements to the ‘savage slot’ rendered the Third World the locus of dependency and unfreedom.
8. Standing’s work in promoting Universal Basic Income and cash transfers across many countries also contributes to the common sense that precarity is a global concept.
9. Julia Kristeva explains abjection as ‘a something I do not recognize as a thing’ (Kristeva, Citation1982).
10. That Levinas also works with an idea of Europe that ‘blocks any easy engagement across geographies’ (Drabinski, Citation2011, p. 2) is also problematic for any attempt to globalize Levinasian thought. In a closely argued but nevertheless sympathetic engagement with Levinas, Drabinski points out that Levinas remains tied to a ‘metaphysics and so also a kind of epistemology of alterity,’ both of which blocks his thinking from the ‘sorts of geographical wanderings with which it ought to be engaged’ (Drabinski, Citation2011, p. 3).
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Ritu Vij
Ritu Vij is Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, specializing in political economy, social theory, and modernity in the context of contemporary Asia. Her publications include Japanese Modernity and Welfare: State, Civil Society and Self in Contemporary Japan (Palgrave 2007), Globalization and Welfare: A Critical Reader (ed.) (Palgrave 2007) as well as journal articles and book chapters on precarity and gender, temporality and immigrants, human security and slums, and politics and homelessness.