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The World We Desire Is One That We Can Create and Care for Together

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THE WORLD WE DESIRE IS ONE WE CAN CREATE AND CARE FOR TOGETHER On collectivity, organisation, governance and commoning in times of crisis and precarity: a reading through the prisms of care and creativity Manuela Zechner Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen Mary University, London School of Business/Management and Department of English/Drama. 1 2 Abstract Written with a contemporary European context of economic, social and reproductive crisis in mind, this thesis presents research about, from and for social movements that struggle against precarity, austerity and capitalist accumulation. Based on accounts and analyses of feminist-autonomist militant practice and networks, this research project revolves around two terms: care and creativity. It maps out a historical-genealogical shift from a paradigm of creativity (reflected in neoliberal governance as well as in social movements of the decades before and after the millenium) to one oriented around care (reflected in the neo-communitarian policy as well as practices of commoning that arise with social and economic crisis in Europe). Structured into three broad sections on work, organisation and governance, the questions at stake here revolve around the possibilities and imaginaries of politics that affirm care and creativity in relation to one another. On the level of work, this means struggles within and against precarity, reproductive and illegalized work; on the level of organisation, it means relating the figure of the network to that of the care chain and the family, confronting new transnational forms of alliance and care; and on the level of governance, it is the relation between neoliberalism and its new communitarian forms that is in question. What the collectives, campaigns and networks constituting the ‘field’ of this research have in common is that they re-think the contemporary relations between autonomy and heteronomy, the global and the situated, as well as macro- and micropolitics. Dwelling on collective experiences and knowledges, this investigation takes care to articulate the dimensions of subjectivity, relation and association with those of economy and governance. Concerned and engaged with contexts of struggle and commoning in the face of crisis politics, precarity and dispersed sociality, a methodology of militant participatory-action research serves to map out contexts of practice in Spain, the UK and Argentina as of 2010-2013. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... 11 0. CONTEXTUALISING 14 0.1 NARRATING HISTORICAL AND GENEALOGICAL PASSAGES WITHIN NEOLIBERALISM: CARE AND CREATIVITY, SUBJECTIVITY AND COLLECTIVITY 15 Crisis, care and creativity .................................................................................................... 15 (Re)organisations of social reproduction ........................................................................ 18 Journeys to Latin America .................................................................................................... 19 Europe working its way towards a new crisis: creativity and speculative hypes .. 21 Networks beyond work, reproduction beyond production: care networks? .......... 23 Subjectivity and collectivity ............................................................................................... 26 0.2 THE ‘FIELD’: A WEB OF COLLECTIVE ENGAGEMENTS 30 UK ............................................................................................................................................. 30 Spain ........................................................................................................................................ 32 Argentina ................................................................................................................................ 35 Experience, genealogy and continuity ............................................................................. 38 0.3 Methodological considerations 43 Time and temporality, remembering and imagining .................................................... 45 4 The future archive interview method .............................................................. 45 Neoliberal captures of time .............................................................................. 46 Collective temporalities .................................................................................... 49 Urgency and speed ............................................................................................ 51 Network(ed) research as (re)production of subjectivity and relations .................... 53 Situatedness and networks ............................................................................... 53 Writing the network, being written by the network: performativities ........ 54 The network as subject? ................................................................................... 56 Manufacturing collectivity ............................................................................... 58 Familiarity, desire and imagination ................................................................ 59 From subjectivity to objectivity and back again ............................................ 60 Transversality and intersectionality ................................................................................ 62 Subjectivity and identity ................................................................................... 63 Constitutive outsides: care chains and creative networks ............................. 67 SECTION A : WORK, ECONOMICS, PRECARITY 70 Introduction to Section on Work 71 A.1 Care, creativitY and work: narrativeS and queStions 76 What do we call ‘work’? ...................................................................................................... 76 Formal/informal, waged/unwaged, paid/unpaid ............................................ 79 The desire to make meaning: making the family work, making work to be remembered by .................................................................................................. 81 What does it matter who is calling something ‘work’? ................................. 83 Speaking of ‘work’ historically and politically: some instances ................................. 85 Waged and reproductive labour ...................................................................... 85 5 ‘Reproduction’ – Alisa del Re .......................................................................... 86 ‘Middle term’ – Dipesh Chakrabarty ............................................................. 87 ‘Beyond the generality of labour’ – Dipesh Chakrabarty, Karl Marx ........ 89 Capital, work, valorization: necessary differentiations ................................. 90 Before and beyond the wage ............................................................................. 92 ‘Shadow work’ – Ivan Illich ............................................................................. 94 ‘Subsistence’ – Ivan Illich, Alisa del Re .......................................................... 95 Life and work ..................................................................................................... 96 Third-person based definitions of ‘work’ ....................................................... 98 ‘Autoregulated and heteroregulated work’ - André Gorz ............................ 99 Contemporary ambivalences of work ............................................................................ 100 Boundary work – Helma Lutz, Pei-Chia Lan ............................................... 102 Wageless life – Michael Denning ................................................................... 102 Labour: an end in itself? The current crisis and work ................................ 104 A.2 Definitional StruggleS and feminiSt viewpoints: work and economicS 107 Feminist economics: the value of informal work ......................................................... 107 The politics of counting, the power of definition .......................................... 109 Economics based on situated realities ........................................................... 110 The ‘other economy’ and the commons ........................................................ 113 Reproductive Labour and the Commons ...................................................... 117 A .3. PrecariousneSS beYond creativitY: Some inflexionS on care and collectivitY 123 Precarity, creativity and movements ............................................................................. 123 Precarity and the neoliberal ........................................................................... 123 Fordism and post-Fordism: locating the exception ...................................... 125 MAYDAY! ‘Precarity’ as code word for transversal struggles? ................ 127 Precarity and Invention .................................................................................. 131 Work, life and fragile togetherness ................................................................ 133 6 Identifying with precarity: critiques .............................................................................. 134 Precarity, the everyday and care ..................................................................................... 139 Precarity and care: a la deriva ....................................................................... 139 Missing compasses ..........................................................................................
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