Conference blogging
Posted on | June 22, 2005 |
I’m not sure how well or how accurately I will do this, but here is the first of a few summaries of what I saw at ASCP. As a lot of the material was out of my usual area, it’s likely that there will be some major misrepresentations in what follows, so please correct bits and/or take issue.
Brett Neilson, ‘From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again’. This paper was the first thing I heard at the conference and the only real critique of Judith Butler’s recent work that I heard all week. Brett questioned the way that precarity has been interpreted in the US (as precariousness) by contrasting it with European histories of political expression and workers’ movement. There, precarity emerged out of May Day protests as a way of explaining the rejection of the job-for-life paradigm; ie. it reflected the increasingly typical experience of irregular work and a lack of stable housing among creative workers, migrants and women (although Brett did not want to link these three groups into one category – ‘the precariat’ – as others have, for reasons which become clear).
The point of the paper was to suggest that precariousness has only gained prominence as a concept in the US since 9/11, largely to make sense of the fear and vulnerability felt by many Americans since the attacks. This is dangerous on the one hand because it conveniently feeds off the rhetoric of fear and terror promoted by the State. Also, such an understanding of precariousness does not adequately reflect how the condition is experienced unevenly and differently amongst different subgroups of the population, or the ways that it has been lived and expressed outside the US political context. While (Butler’s) recent work has given much needed emphasis to the fragility and vulnerability of ‘precarious life’ Brett argued that the concept needed to work practically as well as ontologically.
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