Precarious Places by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783658273118
Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

The issues of security and identity are crucial here, and fascist ideology also held up the watchword of security and pure identity. What Hitler granted the Germans in the labor conscription decree of the Office of Four-Year Plan (1938) was that “a worker could not be fired by his employer without the consent of the government employment office. He had job security, something he had rarely known during the Republic” (Shirer not dated, p. 234). More’s Utopians also had job security and lived a generally secure kind of life. Standing’s precariat, as it seems, should follow a different road to security and identity, a road of an organized participation in which it is the collectivity of the endeavor which brings the precarians together. The passive voice used in the demand for a politics of paradise (“is needed”) does not quite explicitly define the subject and problematizes the question of the “who” who needs it. In the above formulation, at least one task of the politics of paradise is to securitize the precariat as a safe element of the capitalist system, the “who” possibly referring either to politicians and labor providers, or to the united precariat which will carry out the work of change and perform a milder kind of revolution than that of the proletariat.

Nagy notes in her article that in is not only the availability of paid and stable work that constitutes one of the sources of precarity, but also exclusion from certain kinds of labor which she sees as culturally acknowledged. This new division of labor is structurally embedded in global capitalism, and though employment outside of conventional work arrangements may go unnoticed by local authorities, the mechanisms of that kind employment “lead to social exclusion of those who are not engaged with formal employment schemes” (Nagy 2018, p. 129). This sphere of labor seems to be constituting a waiting zone within the system. This zone is posited between unemployment and the paradise of secure employment, it is an “employment niche” (ibid., p. 133) “away from bureaucratic surveillance mechanisms” (ibid., p. 133).

A niche is also a kind of non-place, a hollow or a cavity, a place within a place which may go unnoticed only as long as those who hide in it are not too numerous. A niche is also an inside which hides the outside. Gerald Rauning looks at the precariat from the perspective of Marx’s idea of the lumpen proletariat which has become heterogenized and may include nearly anybody who feels, however figuratively, excluded:The figure of the precarious indicates dispersion, fragility, multitude. The precariat does not represent a unified, homogeneous or even ontological formation, but is instead distributed and dispersed among many hot spots, not only because of weakness or incapacity, but also as a discontinuity of geography and production, as distribution in space. (Rauning 2010, pp. 104 f.)

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