State of Insecurity by Isabell Lorey

Author:Isabell Lorey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Precarization as an Instrument of Governing

Precarization as governmental precarization does not inevitably eat its way through society like a virus spreading resistance. On the contrary, despite the transnational struggles of the precarious, which marked the entire 2000s, and despite the protests of 2011 especially in southern Europe and the US, it currently seems possible, at least in some of the richer parts of Europe, for citizens to come to terms with social insecurity in the most different ways and in the most diverse social positions, to handle the privatization of risks and contribute to the normalization of precarization through subjugation and conformity – borne by their fear of being replaceable.

Contrary to Castel’s threat scenario, neither the security of a social order nor neoliberal governing techniques are presently endangered by ‘precarity’ spreading out from the ‘margins’. Precarization has, rather, long since arrived in the so-called middle of society. Precarious living and working conditions are currently being normalized at a structural level and have thus become a fundamental governmental instrument of governing.

The result of the normalization of precarization,however, is certainly not that we are currently living in an insecurity society; we still live in a security society, but it is one that has become governable through precarization. The state is not withdrawing from all formerly fundamental institutions of safeguarding. In neoliberalism, however, safeguarding no longer needs the extent of liberal welfare-state techniques of protection. Instead the state increasingly limits itself to discourses and practices of police and military safeguarding, which in turn increasingly operate with disciplinary control and surveillance techniques.1 At the state level, political and social safeguarding are still just about balanced: the more social safeguards are minimized, and the more precarization increases, the more there is a battle to maximize domestic security. Migrant others, in particular, must repeatedly demonstrate through assimilative integration that they are suitable for the collective of those who are still minimally safeguarded – otherwise they can be declared a security risk.

When domestic security discourses are correlated with normalized social insecurity in neoliberalism, then the fundamental dispositive of liberalism shifts. Instead of freedom and security, freedom and insecurity now form the new couple in neoliberal governmentality: the state does not on principle limit freedom or combat insecurity, but both become the ideological precondition for governmental precarization.

What we are dealing with specifically are strategies for securing domination which rebuild existing concepts of security so that insecurity becomes a normalized mode of governing. The central paradigm of the governability of biopolitical subjectivations currently consists neither in safeguarding through a representative sovereign nor in welfare-state institutions of safeguarding. What characterizes this paradigm is rather a ‘neoliberal government of insecurity’.2

According to Maurizio Lazzarato in his 2008 book on the ‘government of inequalities’, all safeguards against risks, all socio-political institutions, operate within a neoliberal logic of ‘dispositives that must function with a minimum’.3 This minimum defines a threshold in a political sense: specifically, the varying border area in which it is repeatedly necessary to determine anew where ‘the risk of “civil war” threatens the rupture of social peace’.

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