Becoming Common: Precarization as Political Constituting

Since 2001 EuroMayDay parades with up to 150,000 participants have taken place in over twenty European cities on the traditional International Workers’ Day, May 1, to call attention to the precarization of living and working conditions. The activists come from the most diverse social positions. The parades, however, are only one activity among many organized by the network over the course of the year, including surveys and publications. EuroMayDay involves new forms of organizing and communication about different modes of precarization and collective knowledge production. See also →; issues of transversal, eipcp’s multilingual web journal, including “Precariat” (July 2004), →, and “Militant Research” (April 2006), →; Mute magazine’s “Precarious Reader” (November 2005), →; Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as a Social Movement, trans. Aileen Derieg (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2010).

Initiated by Marion von Osten and Angela McRobbie; see →.

Particularly influential have been the practices and discourses of the Intermittents du Spectacle in France. See Global Project / Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires d’Île de France, “Spectacle Inside the State and Out: Social Rights and the Appropriation of Public Spaces; The Battles of the French Intermittents” (March 2004), trans. Aileen Derieg, transversal, “Precariat,” →; Antonella Corsani and Maurizio Lazzarato, Intermittents et Précaires (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2008).

See Precarias a la Deriva, “Adrift Through the Circuits of Feminized Precarious Work” (April 2004), transversal, “Precariat,” →.

See Raunig, A Thousand Machines.

Organized by Marina Sorbello and Antje Weitzel, see →. See also “Another Relationality (second part): On a Cure in Times Divest of Poetry/ On Poetry in Incurable Times,” organized by Marcelo Expósito and Jorge Ribalta in cooperation with the eipcp at MACBA in Barcelona (March 17–18, 2006), →; “WORK TO DO! Self-organisation in Precarious Working Conditions: An Exhibition Project in 3 Chapters,” organized by Sønke Gau and Katharina Schlieben, Shedhalle Zürich (2007/2008). In the context of education see for example Universidad Nómada in Spain, →; Radical Education Collective in Ljubljana, →; Chto Delat, →, and Street University, →, in Saint Petersburg; Free/Slow University of Warsaw, →; Edu-Factory, →.

See note 1.

See Mitropoulos, Angela, “Precari-Us?” (March 2005), transversal, “Precariat,” →; Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception, Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 7–8 (2008): 51–72.

Maurizio Lazzarato, Le gouvernement des inégalités: Critique de l’insécurité néolibérale (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2008).

See also Antonio Negri, “Logic and Theory of Inquiry: Militant Praxis as Subject and as Episteme” (April 2003), trans. Nate Holdren and Arianna Bove, transversal, “Militant Research,” →.

See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–147; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The terms “immaterial” or “affective” labor have been repeatedly criticized especially from the feminist side, because they describe labor once again from the perspective of capitalist accumulation and insufficiently reflect on non-work, care-work, the production of the social, and so forth. (See the dossier on the exhibition “Atelier Europa,” a supplement to Drucksache Kunstvereins München, no. 4 (2004); see also →; Precarias a la Deriva, “Adrift Through the Circuits of Feminized Precarious Work”; George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, “Notes on the Edu-factory and Cognitive Capitalism” (May 2007), transversal, “Knowledge Production and Its Discontents,” →.

Frassanito-Network, “Precarious, Precarization, Precariat? Impacts, Traps and Challenges of a Complex Term and its Relationship to Migration,” January 5, 2007, →.

See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Ibid.

On exodus and constituting, see Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution” (1994), trans. Ed Emory (2003), →; Isabell Lorey, “Attempt to Think the Plebeian: Exodus and Constituting as Critique,” trans. Aileen Derieg, in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, ed. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: BPR Publishers, 2009), 131–140 (also available at →); Isabell Lorey, “Critique and Category: On the Restriction of Political Practice through Recent Theorems of Intersectionality, Interdependence and Critical Whiteness Studies” (October 2008) trans. Mary O’Neill, tranversal, “Critique,” →.

“kpD” is the abbreviation for the feminist research and activist group “small postfordist drama” (kleines postfordistisches Drama) based in Berlin. kpD are Brigitta Kuster, Katja Reichard, Marion von Osten, and the author.

Marta Malo de Molina, “Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-inquiry, Co-research, Consciousness-raising” (April 2004), transversal, “Militant Research,” →.

Malo de Molina, “Common Notions.”

See Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

kpD, “Precarization of Cultural Producers and the Missing ‘Good Life’ ” (June 2005), trans. Aileen Derieg, transversal, “Militant Research,” →.

See also Renate Lorenz and Brigitta Kuster, Sexuell arbeiten: Eine queere Perspektive auf Arbeit und prekäres Leben (Berlin: B_books, 2007).

See Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth; see also Negri, “Logic and Theory of Inquiry.“

See note 19.

From the Latin word constituo; see also Gerald Raunig, “Instituent Practices, No. 2: Institutional Critique, Constituent Power, and the Persistence of Instituting,” trans. Aileen Derieg, in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, ed. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: BPR Publishers, 2009), 173–186, 176.

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004); see also Isabell Lorey, “Prekarisierung als Verunsicherung und Entsetzen: Immunisierung, Normalisierung und neue Furcht erregende Subjektivierungsweisen,” in Prekarisierung zwischen Anomie und Normalisierung? Geschlechtertheoretische Bestimmungsversuche, ed. Alexandra Manske and Katharina Pühl (Münster: Westfaelisches Dampfboot, 2010), 48–81.

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 1–32. Butler’s ideas refer not only to the existential significance of reproductive work; precariousness also underlines the radical replaceability of every life.

Butler, Frames of War, 19.

Ibid., 23.

See Isabell Lorey, Figuren des Immunen: Elemente einer politischen Theorie (Zürich and Berlin, 2010).

Butler, Frames of War, 25.

Elsewhere I have called this manifold productivity “governmental precarization” (Lorey, “Prekarisierung als Verunsicherung und Entsetzen”).

See Butler, Frames of War, 28–29.