Unbounding ‘states of exception’, reconceptualizing precarity

ABSTRACT

This provocation unbounds ‘state of exception’ to account for its sustainability and its role in daily life. I argue that sustaining a ‘state of exception’ requires a governmentality to govern and render the exceptional ‘normal’ over time, pointing to the mutual constitution of the two modes of governance. The omnipresent condition of possible shifts between sovereignty and governmentality relocates precarity from a statically defined objectified circumstance to the active slippage between these two fields of power. Yet whereas a ‘state of exception’ can become normalized, subjectivity cannot because the configuration of individuals’ multiple subjectivities differs relative to their lived experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Governmentality
• sovereign power
• state of exception
• precarity
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

I thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Nancy Ettlinger researches and teaches critical human geography in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University. Broadly, she is interested in how actors are governed and enrolled in a wide range of societal projects such as neoliberalism, and especially recently, digitalization; how actors govern themselves; and prospects for bottom, up approaches to resistance.

Notes

1 The argument in this provocation is elaborated in Ettlinger (2020).

2 Butler (2006) defined ‘precarity’ as a condition that is unequally distributed, and ‘precariousness’ as corporeal vulnerability that effects everyone.

3 Weheliye’s view, and more generally the standpoint of anti-Blackness, does not exclude white individuals and groups from processes of subjection, but rather represents marginalized whites as an extension of, and in relation to, non-white populations.

4 In contrast, Foucault represented the law as a tool to connect problems productively with the economy.