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March 2, 2018
Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive. Thinking through precarity changes social analysis.
most of us were raised on dreams of modernization and progress.
Even when disguised through other terms, such as “agency,” “consciousness,” and “intention,” we learn over and over that humans are different from the rest of the living world because we look forward—while other species, which live day to
Instead, agnostic about where we are going, we might look for what has been ignored because it never fit the time line of progress.
we are surrounded by many world-making projects, human and not human.7
world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species.
The question of how the varied species in a species assemblage influence each other—if at all—is never settled: some thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make life possible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same place. As semblages are open-ended gatherings.
For living things, species identities are a place to begin, but they are not enough: ways of being are emergent effects of encounters.
Assemblages don’t just gather lifeways; they make them. Thinking through assemblage urges us to ask: How do gatherings sometimes become “happenings,” that is, greater than the sum of their parts?
Patterns of unintentional coordination develop in assemblages.
Rice, bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, palms, and fruit trees mingled; farmers needed to attend to the varied schedules of maturation of each of these crops. These rhythms were their relation to human harvests;
What appears "messy" to the capitolist
The polyphonic assemblage is the gathering of these rhythms, as they result from world-making projects, human and not human.
We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others.
One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival.
Population genetics stimulated the “modern synthesis” in biology, uniting evolutionary theory and genetics. Neoclassical economics reshaped economic policy, creating the modern economy of its imagination.
Richard Dawkins’s “selfish gene” gets across the idea, useful at many life scales: It is the ability of genes (or organisms, or populations) to look out for their own interests that fuels evolution.2 Similarly, the life of Homo economicus, economic man, is a series of choices to follow his best interests.
Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent.
We change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations, not in the decision trees of self-contained individuals.
Transformation through collaboration, ugly and otherwise, is the human condition.
War, he argues, creates ethnic identities.15 War forces people to move but also cements ties to reimagined ancestral cultures.
Negotiating multiple forms of prejudice and dispossession, contaminated diversity proliferates.
Why don’t we use these stories in how we know the world? One reason is that contaminated diversity is complicated, often ugly, and humbling. Contaminated diversity implicates survivors in histories of greed, violence, and environmental destruction.
contaminated diversity is recalcitrant to the kind of “summing up” that has become the hallmark of modern knowledge. Contaminated diversity is not only particular and historical, ever changing, but also relational.
If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell about contaminated diversity, then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices.
Progress itself has often been defined by its ability to make projects expand without changing their framing assumptions. This quality is “scalability.”
Thus, too, scalability banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things.
In their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sugarcane plantations in Brazil, for example, Portuguese planters stumbled on a formula for smooth expansion. They crafted self-contained, interchangeable project elements, as follows: exterminate local people and plants; prepare now-empty, unclaimed land; and bring in exotic and isolated labor and crops for production.
Eventually, they posited that everything on earth—and beyond—might be scalable, and thus exchangeable at market values. This was utilitarianism, which eventually congealed as modern economics and contributed to forging more scalability—or at least its appearance.
Furthermore, matsutake foragers are far from the disciplined, interchangeable laborers of the cane fields. Without disciplined alienation, no scalable corporations form in the forest.
Both matsutake commerce and ecology depend on interactions between scalability and its undoing.
The challenge for thinking with precarity is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while also seeing where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt.
the interplay between scalable and nonscalable in forms of capitalism in which scalable accounting allows nonscalable labor and natural resource management.
assemblages are defined by the strength of what they gather as much as their always-possible dissipation. They make history.
Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter.
What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time?
Given this diversity, what makes this part of that global economy we call capitalism?
A supply chain is a particular kind of commodity chain: one in which lead firms direct commodity traffic.1
Amassing wealth is possible without rationalizing labor and raw materials. Instead, it requires acts of translation across varied social and political spaces, which, borrowing from ecologists’ usage, I call “patches.” Translation, in Shiho Satsuka’s sense, is the drawing of one world-making project into another.2 While the term draws attention to language, it can also refer to other forms of partial attunement. Translations across sites of difference are capitalism: they make it possible for investors to accumulate wealth.
capacities. Even in industrial farms, farmers depend on life processes outside their control, such as photosynthesis and animal digestion. In capitalist farms, living things made within ecological processes are coopted for the concentration of wealth.
Instead, civilization and progress turn out to be cover-ups and translation mechanisms for getting access to value procured through violence: classic salvage.
Wal-Mart’s total lack of concern with how the product is made, since value can be translated through accounting.
Pericapitalist economic forms can be sites for rethinking the unquestioned authority of capitalism in our lives. At the very least, diversity offers a chance for multiple ways forward—not just one.
geographer Susanne Freidberg offers a sense of how supply chains, drawing variously on colonial and national histories, may encourage quite different economic forms.
The American dream requires relinquishing one’s old self, and perhaps this is one form of conversion. Protestant revivalism has been key to composing the “we” of the American polity since the American Revolution.
Susan Harding has shown how U.S. public education in the mid-twentieth century was shaped by projects of secularization, in which some versions of Christianity were promoted as examples of “tolerance,” while other versions were parochialized as exotic remnants of earlier times.7
At this interview, they were required to endorse “freedom” and to show their anticommunist credentials. Else they would be enemy aliens: outside the fold. To enter the country, a rigorous assertion of freedom was necessary. The refugees might not know much English, but they needed one word: freedom.
Instead, the refugees say, “Communist soldiers pointed at me, but God made me invisible.” “War scattered my family in the jungle, but God brought us back together.” God operates like indigenous spirits, warding off danger.
Global supply chains ended expectations of progress because they allowed lead corporations to let go of their commitment to controlling labor. Standardizing labor required education and regularized jobs, thus connecting profits and progress. In supply chains, in contrast, goods gathered from many arrangements can lead to profits for the lead firm; commitments to jobs, education, and well-being are no longer even rhetorically necessary.
Scared by the success of Japanese investments, American business leaders destroyed the corporation as a social institution and propelled the U.S. economy into the world of Japanese-style supply chains.
Their work exemplifies Satsuka’s concept of “translation,” in which learning another culture both bridges and maintains difference.4
