Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

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Situating precarity between the body and the

commons

Tavia Nyong'o

To cite this article: Tavia Nyong'o (2013) Situating precarity between the body and
the commons, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 23:2, 157-161, DOI:
10.1080/0740770X.2013.825440

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Published online: 12 Nov 2013.

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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2013
Vol. 23, No. 2, 157161, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2013.825440

INTRODUCTION
Situating precarity between the body and the commons
Tavia Nyongo*

Department of Performance Studies, New York University, New York, NY, USA

It is a mark of the acceleration with which ideas now circulate that the two years since this
special issue of Women and Performance was rst oated, precarity has crossed over
from the European and Latin American Left to the United States. Already, the academic
database Project Muse connects to more than 100 articles and books containing the
keyword precarity, a word not yet included in standard English dictionaries.1 Thanks
to Occupy Wall Street as well as new journals of left tendency like Tidal, n + 1, and The
New Inquiry, students and activists readily identify and organize as the precariat: that
class of workers who own nothing beyond their own elastic adaptability to the ever-
intensifying rigors of the social factory. The exibility of this precariat melts the solidities
of industrial trade unionism and party hierarchy into the air, as the multitude organizes its
sentiments along horizontal axes of social media and mutual aid.
Precarity is at least provisionally a term shared between the academic seminar and the
general assembly. It is almost as if, as Sanford Schram has put it, precarity is one of those
rare concepts to have successfully moved from a philosophical abstraction to an actually
existing discursive practice operant in movement politics.2 Such a sequence should,
however, perhaps be reversed. Perhaps it is the academic Left, and some liberals, who in
this case have eagerly followed activism and politics. The contagious sense that something
might be happening, that another world might be not only possible but indeed be actually
coming into view, seems to have been occasioned by street theorizing as much as by straight
theorizing, and to owe its existence less to the acts of the charismatic artist or academic
superstar than to the steady clamor of the murmuring multitude.
We can see such a virtuous circle of incitement and theorizing in the recent political writ-
ings and speeches of Judith Butler, who has been a guiding theorist of performance studies
and queer studies for over two decades, and now directly engages the subject of precarity,
which she explicitly links to her earlier work on queer performativity.3 The subversion of
identity through the iteration of norms has found an apt, if unlikely, sequel in the political
contestation of what constitutes a livable, or grieveable life. Butlers account of precarity
draws deeply from the well of moral philosophy, in which it nds an anti-foundational foun-
dation for our grievances against war, racism, and capitalism in the constitutively open,

*Email: tavia.nyongo@nyu.edu

2013 Women & Performance Project Inc.

158 T. Nyongo

nite, and vulnerable human condition. Perhaps precarity is not solely intrinsic to life in its
individual existence but also in and through its collective repetition across lives. Perhaps
this collective persistence is why precarity is always on the move, why it forms such a fugi-
tive, provisional scene of study as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten might have it an
undercommons whose proper location is missing from any map that still relies on the crum-
bling division between town and gown, between the philosopher and the poor.4
The rapid spread of the concept of precarity has given some critics pause. Precarity
teeters on the edge of tipping over into an empty buzzword, in Rob Hornings summation,
a trendy thing to say to forestall rather than develop analyses.5 It was in hopes of delaying
this decay of precarity into a buzzword in performance studies that Rebecca Schneider,
Nicholas Ridout, and I set out to collaborate on this two-part special issue, of which this
is the second, on the relationship between performance and precarity.6 In their introduction
to the Winter 2012 issue of TDR, Ridout and Schneider republish our original joint call, and
outline the genealogy of precarity as a political keyword for Left organizing against econ-
omic austerity and casualization. Their introduction, as well as articles by Randy Martin,
Shannon Jackson, and others, takes up what Ridout and Schneider term the place of the
arts in global capitalism, and the particular relations implied by affective labor.7
Rather than rehearse those points, in this brief introduction I seek to develop the conversa-
tion in some new directions. I have been especially keen to track difference within the
at-times universalizing vocabulary of precarity, a concept which may accurately limn one
aspect of neoliberal governmentality, but which fails to adequately represent the full
violence of global capitalism in all its dimensions, and which may therefore prematurely
limit our affective mapping of the possibilities for resistance.8
The keywords surrounding precarity affective and cognitive labor; contingent and
exible employment; amateurism and virtuosity have assuredly opened up new thresholds
in activism and theory. At the same time, the very scope of the critique of contemporary
capitalism threatens to generalize precarity as a ubiquitous and therefore undifferentiated
condition. If precarious life is to offer a means towards new solidarities based on
shared vulnerabilities, then those who proceed under its sign must remain scrupulously
attentive to the constitutive and uneven distribution of that vulnerability, and must not
simply fall back upon a well-meaning but empty humanism. For instance, there is a
growing interest in considering black politics under the rubric of precarious life. This for-
mulation of mourning as a dark power of the black multitude, an innovative expression of
the black counter-public, contains both chances and dangers. It would prove most useful if it
were invoked alongside Ruthie Gilmores inuential denition of racism as the state-sanc-
tioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to
premature death. 9 Can we ask: is racism precarity? What opportunities are there in follow-
ing Gilmore by bringing state and law, production, exploitation, and death, and the twin
operations of collectivity and differentiation into our analyses of what precarity is or does?
On comparable grounds, we might point to Angela McRobbies critical review of the
literature on precarity to query the assumption that simply because of the origins of affec-
tive labor-theory origins in feminist sociology, precarity comes with its feminism prein-
stalled. McRobbie critiques a lively debate on affective and immaterial labour where
the focus is (implicitly or explicitly) on women but where there is either an absence of a
feminist perspective or else a reliance on vocabularies which, while prevalent in late
 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 159

1970s Marxist-feminist debate, are now exhausted and in need of revision. 10 The modal
subject of many studies of gendered precarious labor, McRobbie notes, are highly edu-
cated [] beneciaries of second-wave feminism [ with] no children [and] freelance
careers [] characterised by constant change [] predominantly white [ with] training
and education prior to this entrepreneurial activity.11 Needless to say that accounts of per-
formance and precarity that restrict their concern to the orbit of the Euro-American artworld
will, for the most part, nd such subjects to be their primary locus of concern. The coeval
precarity of other womens lives consigned to life-times of disposability elsewhere in the
production cycle of global capitalism, as well as the grounding of precarity in the domestic
and unwaged servitude Angela Mitropoulos rightly casts as the norm rather than the
exception of capitalism, will be correspondingly neglected.12 But there is another way.
The consideration of race, gender, and nation would not simply be additive (we are also
precarious) but transgurative. To reintroduce difference into theorizations of precarity is to
insist, paraphrasing Spinoza, that we do not yet know what a precarious body can do. In
particular, we do not yet know how it comes into contact, into assembly, into collective
and distributed agency, into being singular plural with others.13 The group-differentiated
vulnerability that Gilmore writes of might also go by a series of other noms de guerre: the
undercommons of black study (Harney and Moten), the punk rock commons (Muoz),
and shadow feminism (Halberstam).14 Under any name, a consideration of how we are
held in violent relationality by the group differentiations that are reproduced by racial capit-
alism summons us towards a precarity that is less economistic or moralistic, less concerned
with either embracing or refusing exibility: a precarity that is instead more concerned with
compassion, with co-passion, co-presence, a being in common with that which we do not
know, and with those whom we can not speak for. For compassion is not altruism, Jean-
Luc Nancy insists, nor is it identication; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.15

*****

This special issue opens with examinations of two distinctive moments in the articula-
tion of labor with performance. Jisha Menon considers the cosmopolitics of the call center, a
lightning rod for debates surrounding the raced and gendered global division of labor under
transnational capital. Alex Pittman revisits one classic mode of capitalist production, the
assembly line, and one technique of surveillance, the time clock, and shows how both
are disarticulated in performances that track the shift to post-Fordism. Delving deeper
into the history of contingent labor in the arts, Emily Klein opens up the archives of the
New Deal in order to illuminate the ways in which the theater has long been constituted
through contingent labor practices that reinscribe gender and racial hierarchy.
The next series of articles take up the aesthetic staging of art as labor and life as precar-
ious, through focal studies of particular artists. Lydia Brawner and Abigail Levine employ
critical and autoethnographic lenses to grapple with the questions of consciousness, agency,
and esprit de corps raised by recent artworld performances staged by marquee artists
Marina Abramovic and Yvonne Rainer. Malik Gaines considers the consciousness of a
diva of another genre, the pianist and singer Nina Simone, who, he suggests, retrieved
and reimagined Brechtian tactics of theatrical alienation in order to enlist her audiences
in the active labor of unworking racism. Anna Dezeuze takes up the case of another virtuoso
160 T. Nyongo

of precarity, the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Detailing how Clark was among the rst to
propose precariousness as a response to the cultural ferment of the Sixties, Dezeuze,
like Klein, offers a deeper history, and more hemispheric geography, than accounts
which tie precarity to the rise of neoliberalism.
Returning, in conclusion, to the present and its prognosis time, the issue concludes with
Coleman Nyes careful assessment of the relationship between the anatomopolitics of
bodily precarity and the biopolitics of populations at risk for breast cancer. Tracing how
rhetorics of hope and deadline circulate in feminist organizing for a cure, Nye points
to the political ambivalence of the very concept of economy, as she tracks the gathering
and dispersion of the individual in the group trial, the demographic statistic, and in the
common cause that is also, ineluctably, a singular case: one life irreducible to any other.
In the Ampersand section, Branislava Kuburovic presents a photo essay of the work
of Margarete Kern on guest workers in Germany. Online, Katherine Brewer-Ball interviews
the artist MPA on her performance work, artistic labor, and Occupy Wall Street.

Notes
1. Precarity in English follows cognate usages in French (prcarit), Spanish (precariedad) and so
on.
2. Schram (2013).
3. Butler (2003; 2009).
4. Harney and Moten (2013).
5. Horning (2012).
6. Ridout and Schneider (2012).
7. Ridout and Schneider (2012, 6); Jackson (2012); Martin (2012).
8. On affective mapping, see Flatley (2008). The interventions of Angela Mitropoulos (2005;
2012) have also been crucial in bringing gender, national, and racial difference more centrally
to bear on discussions of precarity.
9. Gilmore (2007).
10. McRobbie (2011, 69).
11. McRobbie (2011, 72).
12. Tadiar (2013); Mitropoulos (2005).
13. Nancy (2000).
14. Harney and Moten (2013); Halberstam (2011); Muoz (2013).
15. Nancy (2000, xiii). See also Flatley (2008), for a discussion of how W.E.B. Du Bois exemplied
and indeed anticipates such an orientation. Such a compassion (a disturbance of ones own
being by ones relatedness) involves a recognition that ones own being is always already
tied up with the being of others, and others not only in the present, but from the past as well.
Our mood is never ours alone. And no persons being can be safeguarded against the being
of others. Thus, Du Boiss response to being a problem is not to somehow reinforce the ontol-
ogy of blackness but to expand the sense of problematicity so that no ontology escapes it.
(Flatley 2008, 116).

References
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Verso.
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Flatley, Jonathan. 2008. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge,
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Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, And Opposition in Globalizing
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