Becoming precarious, queering debt

Becoming precarious, queering debt

Isabell Lorey
Translation: Kelly Mulvaney

Subjectivating precarization and production without wage

In neoliberal global capitalism, not only the relation of capital and work but also that of time, flexibility, and measurability is of central importance. Wages are sinking, while workload, hours spent working are on the rise. Working time no longer covers only tasks that are paid, but tends to encompass all social doing. Work is becoming excessive and simultaneously negated as work that should be paid, especially when it comes to creative and cognitive work. The neoliberal ideology of “life-long learning,” with its activating force, has extended the time of education beyond school and university degrees. The promise of learning something while at work, of gaining further qualifications, legitimizes the non-payment or the extremely low payment of that work not only for the institution in which it is performed. It has become normal for those who seek further qualifications, too, to become more and more financially indebted. The interlacing of knowledge and debt characterizes central aspects of contemporary modes of production.

Knowledge, communication, and creativity were only able to become productive thanks to a fundamental change in modes of production, that is, in how commodities and services are made, how work is organized, and how capital accumulation occurs. This transformation can be observed from the 1970s. With the crisis of Fordism, activities that were not traditionally understood as work, and were therefore not considered in terms of economic rationality, became increasingly relevant for the composition of the labor force. Forms of knowledge and activity that were previously allocated not only to the cultural field, but above all to women in the reproductive sphere, such as affective and emotional labor, have gained significance (Precarias a la deriva, 2004, 2014; Dowling, 2016). These are activities that are in demand today primarily in the service sector: creative, affective, and communicative activities, performed largely in precarious labor conditions—with temporary contracts, in part-time jobs.

When work becomes increasingly precarious, there is a tendency for the whole person to become labor power, body and intellectual capabilities included. The productivity of this form of work consists in the making of subjectivities and social relationships. Subjects and their capacities to socially interact become both the resource and product of the new paradigm of political economy. Subjectivation and social relationships are made valuable in and through communication (Raunig, 2016). Connectedness with others is turned into economically exploitable relations of exchange. With this, both the strategic meaning of traditionally material and machinic means of production and the classic logic of investment in industrial capitalism lose significance. An array of their productive functions gets transferred onto the living, the social bodies of the labor force (Marazzi, 2009). In cognitive and communicative capitalism, these new means of production of machine-bodies are central cruxes for a specific dynamic of scarcity: rather than products, secure employment contracts are in limited supply; precarization is becoming the motor of productivity (Lorey & Neundlinger, 2012). Investments are made less in job creation and more in the expansion of digitalization and increasing share values. More and more, new service-based production takes place without wage or social security. The creative, communicative, and affective capacities of workers, which tend to be formed outside of paid employment settings, get appropriated in companies and institutions as work that is usually unpaid (Lorey, 2015).

Another important aspect of this scarcity is time. With the excessive extension of working time, the potential wealth of non-waged working time appears only as lack. When one’s own personality and social relationships are made productive, it becomes more and more difficult to interrupt work as a refusal or strike. Individuals find themselves in a dynamic of disciplinary self-governing, which secures not only productivity, but also obedience. When sociality is made productive, it is not easy to grasp everyday social activity as work that must be paid. This contributes to the widespread belief that what is fun need not be paid. More and more people do not consider communication and the exchange of knowledge to be work. Self-precarization is spreading like a virus (Lorey, 2006).

Governing through precarization

With the expansion of this increasingly de-waged mode of production based on communication, knowledge, and affect, a form of governing has been established, now in Europe for more than two decades, that does not legitimize itself by guaranteeing social protection and security for the majority of citizens, but is rather characterized by social insecurity and precarization.¹ Governing through precarization means that the precarious are no longer solely those who can be marginalized to the peripheries of society. Due to the individualizing restructuring of the social welfare state, the deregulation of the labor market, and the expansion of precarious employment conditions, we currently find ourselves in a process of normalization of precarization, which also affects larger portions of the middle class. In this normalization process, precarization has become a political and economic instrument of governing. At the same time, people continue to be legally, economically, and socially marginalized and excluded through structural inequality, through precarity, which means that they are less protected than others or that protection is altogether denied to them (Butler, 2009). This becomes apparent in the various Western democracies with simultaneously occurring processes of economic and financial border elimination on the one hand, and border creation to ward off global migration on the other. Legal status and mobility are being hierarchized in order to facilitate extreme forms of exploitation (De Giorgi, 2010). Through the dismantling and restructuring of collective security systems, individualized risk management is demanded according to societal positioning along the scale of precarity, yet this takes shape in very different ways—depending on gender, class, “race,” origin, or legal status.

Social security and therefore also social reproduction are being increasingly de-collectivized; they are again being privatized, but this time handed over to the self-responsibility of the individual and capitalized. As a result, more and more people are only able to fund retirement provisions, healthcare, and education by taking on debts. At the same time, the productivity of the self and of sociality in low-wage or unpaid positions leads directly to indebtedness. De-collectivization and its accompanying individualization of risk, self-management, and self-responsibility, as well as the capitalization of reproduction, are the central anchoring points in the neoliberal regime of precarization for an economy of guilt and debt.

Guilt and debt

Precarious living and working conditions and the privatization of protection against precariousness are conditions of both a prospering financial capitalism and its concomitant debt economy. This economy is based on the expansion of productivity that involves less work in the traditional sense than subjectivation (Lazzarato, 2012). A subjective figure is needed to assume responsibility, to take on debt, and to internalize the risks both as guilt and as debt: a personality that is doubly indebted and responsible for oneself. This personality plays a decisive role in enabling and stabilizing neoliberal governing through precarization and insecurity, for there is no longer an outside of debt. Everybody is indebted in one or another way: “If it is not individual debt, it is public debt that weighs, literally, on every individual’s life, since every individual must take responsibility for it” (Lazzarato, 2012, p. 38). As Maurizio Lazzarato reminds us, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have expressly linked the debt economy with morality, that is, with specific modes of subjectivation. In the Christian genealogy, becoming indebted cannot be separated from burdening oneself with guilt. According to Nietzsche, incurring debt results in guilt through the promise to repay creditors. The indebted person promises to continuously behave in such a way that they are able to give back what was given to them, so that they can pay back their debts (Lazzarato, 2012, p. 30). In the debt economy, this financial exchange constitutes subjectivation. The obligation to pay back debt corresponds to that disciplinary self-governing that ensures not only subjectivizing and social productivity, but also compliance. To place one’s behavior at the service of repaying debt means to place life and sociality at the service of debt and to make oneself even more governable.

To understand the governmental intertwining of time, precarization, and debt, it is important to bear in mind that precarization means dealing with the unforeseeable, with contingency, acting without being able to predict what the near or distant future will bring. It is precisely this ability to deal with contingency that is exploited by the loan contract, preventing agency that might start something new or refuse to work under the given conditions. The financial promise of the repayment of debt must go on, even if it requires something decidedly paradoxical of the indebted person: in their precarization they must estimate something inestimable, namely, the future. “[T]o view the future as the present and anticipate it,” as Nietzsche (2006, p. 36) formulates, means not only controlling the future in the present, but also through self-governing to make precarization and the precarized person calculable in the incalculability of their life and to hold them under control—yet doing so primarily on behalf of the creditor.

In self-precarization, however, this paradox of calculating the incalculable is reversed, the temporality of debt is fantasmatically inverted: by investing the self in what is supposedly one’s “own” future, the doubly indebted personality consciously accepts precarization in the present. The fantasy of shaping the future means accepting precarization in the present. For the illusion of a predictable and better time-to-come, self-precarization appears to be a necessary investment above all amongst the northwestern European middle classes. What is abandoned in this projection of a future is the agency that might start something new in the present.

Starting something new, taking action, as Marx already pointed out, requires forces that emerge from sociality, from relatedness with others, from precariousness: trust in oneself, in others, and thus in the world (Lazzarato, 2012, pp. 56-7).² And it is precisely this trust—this ethical relationship—that gets exploited by credit and indebtedness. Working time becomes living time; each worker, with their affects and communicative capacities, remains permanently indebted to the donors. Along with this comes the constantly increasing acceleration of production, the calculation of sociality according to efficiency criteria, the lack of time to do something other than produce countable sums of loan repayment.

If capital exploits social activities and therefore life itself, however, this does not mean that, in turn, resistance is no longer possible—or other living practices and other modes of passing time. As the debt and finance economy increasingly enjoys access to social activities through measuring and evaluation, a break with the concomitant partitioning of time becomes necessary. We need time, a time of break, one in which the general mobilization can be stalled, a time that suspends the time of debt and exploitation. An idle time (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 246). This break in time would need to be more than the subjective refusal of work. Another mode of living time is required, one that takes back the social wealth that is commonly produced. “To re-transform money into available time”, as Lazzarato writes, “to transform wealth into possibility, not only struggle but also new processes of subjectivation are needed” (Lazzarato, 2015, p. 251). A common exodus; a common refusal to be governed in this way and simultaneously subjectivized as capitalizable; a refusal to economically instrumentalize affects and relationships. This would also be an exodus from all forms of masculinist economy.

Becoming-precarious, queering debt

In his considerations on debt, gift, and credit, Jacques Derrida points out that there are phenomena that remove themselves from exchange, from the dynamic of giving and taking, and therefore from the debt economy, which can neither be possessed nor repaid, and which also cannot be remitted. “To give time, the day, or life is to give nothing, nothing determinate, even if it is to give the giving of any possible giving, even if it gives the condition of giving” (Derrida, 1992, pp. 34-70). Infinite debts for which no forgiveness is possible. Care and protection that make survival/life possible can be excessive gifts that suspend the economic calculus of debt, depart from the economy of debts, and let the impossible begin (Derrida, 1992, pp. 1-33).

In a similar way, in the 1970s, Hélène Cixous already proposed to break through the masculinist gift economy and the asymmetry of the debt relation. To give a gift that expects no return, and which cannot be given back, means for Cixous (1981) “making a gift of departure,” departing, taking off, leaving. Such a gift without return allows “breaks,” “parts, partings, separations… from this we break with the return-to-self, with the specular relations ruling the coherence, the identification, of the individual.” To suspend identity, return, and thus also the indebted autonomy allows for leaps in time, writes Cixous: giving up self-referentiality, the reference back to oneself, and instead “departing,” beginning without origin. This corresponds to the capacity to lose control and let go: to wander around, to risk the incalculable, unforeseeable, that which cannot be anticipated. The gift that breaks with the debt economy makes possible a becoming-precarious in the present, without credit into and for the future, that, which credit does not allow: to begin something new.

Giving without return, without credit, without future, necessitating another understanding of the present: away from the moment, which linearly moors past and future, a moment that is only ever rushed through, which is imagined without duration, on the way to the process, to the expansion, to an expanded present as a temporality of becoming. In the normalization of precarization it becomes apparent precisely in the crisis of the debt economy that there is no future, and at the same time a new present simultaneously opens through this, in which people care about how they want to live now (cf. Desideri & Harney, 2013).

Becoming-precarious in the present, without credit on the future, is no individual undertaking. It is always a becoming-precarious together with others. A common capacity to depart in the present and begin something new. This implies an understanding of the present that I call “presentist.”³ To become-precarious in the now, to take off in a leap of time; Benjamin says, to prepare for the leap into the open sky:⁴ presentist becoming-precarious. Coming from the precarious, the presentist does not devalue or defend commonly shared precariousness and the connectedness with others resulting from it (Lorey, 2017b). The presentist-precarious preserves precariousness, actualizes it in the expanded present.

“Credit is a means of privatization and debts a means of socialization,” write Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013, p. 61). “And credit can only expand by means of debt. But debt is social and credit is asocial. Debt is mutual. Credit runs only one way. But debt runs in every direction, scatters, escapes, seeks refuge.” These bad debts are endlessly distributed debts, which for social reasons, for reasons of being_with_ and not for economic or moral reasons, cannot be repaid: “debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt,” write Harney and Moten (2013, p. 61), because they flee identity, are without referencing, without autonomy, full of affections. To practice bad debts corresponds to the capacity to be affected by others, by people and things: to be open, vulnerable, precarious. Becoming-precarious as the capacity of becoming affected.

These bad debts are not based on the idea of the autonomous, legally capable individual and the predetermination of the future. They break through the white, masculinist logic of debts and of the identity of debtors, they move as they expand differences, for everyone owes something else (Desideri & Harney, 2013, p. 169). Taking bad, social debts as the point of departure leads to a complicity without borders of belonging, to the principle of association. Not to scarcity and lack, for the elimination of which debts are accumulated and things must be made better in the future, but rather to the abundance of social wealth, to excess in the now.

To do something other than work, other than extending financialization into socialities, other than amortizing and repaying debt or having one’s debt forgiven, it is necessary to transgress the economic measure of equivalence, the paradigm of calculation, measurement, counting, ranking, appraisal. To (once again) realize the incalculability of a social economy of existence is a prerequisite to an exuberant giving without caring about measurability. Becoming-precarious means being open for an organization in/of the present that disobeys the linear relation to the future and of which it is not yet known where it leads and what it brings, an organization in the present for which it is necessary to now take the time.

Endnotes