Contests over value: From the informal to the popular

Darkness is the risk every time the light switch is turned on (Baptista, 2019). This is a plausible disposition to every attempt to guarantee particular outcomes, to cover all the angles. For the repetition of any sequence that gathers and aligns multiple forces and materialities posits the possibility of the unanticipated. Planning, sequencing, and enstructuration indeed do manage the odds, engender a consensually recognised predictability to the course of certain events and operations. But the capacity of the apparently random intersection of forces to find its own obdurate form, without preliminary calculations of likely causation, also demonstrates that stability, however momentary, is detached from whatever is considered the prevalent normative procedures of its anticipation.

Many roads then lead to the same destination, and the designations of formality and informality simply constitute a pragmatics of what, amongst a whole lot of things to pay attention to, a particular act of consciousness, individual and collective, will end up paying attention to. Informality simultaneously embodies marginality, a particular mode of existence produced through the sanctioned dis-attention to particular realities, a strategic ruse that enables ‘dangerous’ ideas and practices to become generative in inhospitable circumstances, as well as the generative possibilities of misrecognition and opacity as a way for particular operations to ‘hide in plain sight’. As such, informality is both a medium and a product of political action, and a way for discrepant, even contradictory processes, to ‘lend each other a hand’, to assume a degree of mutual implication and responsibility without seeming or being compelled to do so.

Informality, as reiterated in these series of case studies, is intensely situated in the specifics of articulation: of how bodies and materials of all kinds are related to each other. It concerns what of those relationships can be subject to contractual form, and what incipient forms emerge outside of such contracts. For any framework of recognition that accords particular value and use to an existence inevitably misrecognises as well. It cannot fully anticipate what such an existence can be used for and through the very act of recognition constitutes a space besides such an operation to which it must adapt without clear specifications

Such a doubled existence is fundamentally ambivalent, since any designation of something as ‘informal’ immediately constrains that which is designated to a status that is only partial – partial not only in its incompleteness, but to its availability to specific functions and agendas. But the stability of those agendas is always a ‘precarious achievement’. For the endurance of any operation requires it to extend itself into larger surroundings as an affirmation of its own functioning. But in being extended, it also confronts situations for which it can never be definitively prepared. The frame of formality may hold things together over long periods of time, but its ability to do so means that its components cannot be held down. So the oscillations of gathering and letting go, of defining and ambiguating, constitute an incessant motion.

At the same time, across the world, the streets, the police, the social welfare institutions, the schools, the penal system, and the courts may have largely worn down the capacities of many residents to effectively improvise their existence, to wheel and deal their way into greater opportunities. Cooperation and collaboration may be precarious and short-lived. These same residents may largely be detached from any sense of aspiration and conviction. Instead of efforts to restore the marginalised and diminished into a fuller human existence, it may be necessary to concede to this detachment and envision ways of etching out a social fabric where the boundaries between the virtuous and destructive are erased; where there are no sustainable entities called households, schools, churches, or markets, and where bodies and lives are affixed to provisional structures, techniques and practices that have no clear dispositions in advance.

Returning a moment to its past connotations and preoccupations, what passes itself off as informality is an amalgam of efforts on the part of the urban majority to constantly re-open the question of value – what is to be valued, by whom, and how? The organised manifestations of informality are not simply a reserve in waiting, an unacknowledged or unsanctioned constellation of social forces ready to address and compensate for social crises or matters of livelihood. They are, rather, an organised contestation of the fundamental underpinnings of social wealth, of how it is produced and distributed.

As such, the informal continues to struggle to find forms capable of concretely ensuring the sustenance of that majority, its social reproduction, and its adeptness at dealing with various temporalities and modes of inclusion into the normative registers of accumulation and regulation. Not a sector pre-formatted or rooted in the coherence of a cultural genealogy, the manifestations of informality take shape through protracted negotiations, concessions, resistances, and accommodations to the state and to shifting modes of exploitation. As such, informality is a constant question rather than an entity in its own right, and a questioning that takes place on and through what Veronica Gago (2018) calls a ‘promiscuity of territory’.

Much of the past emphasis on informality as a means of describing economic practice has now shifted, particularly in the so-called Global South, to notions of popular economies. ‘Popular economies’ refers to the variegated, promiscuous forms of organising the production of things, their repair, distribution, use, as well as the provision of social reproduction services that simultaneous fall inside and outside the ambit of formal capitalist production. Neither reducible to notions of informality, shared or social economy, the popular embodies the various efforts undertaken by those with no, partial or unsustainable access to wage labour not only to generate a viable livelihood but to anchor such livelihood in forms of accumulation that enable them to participate in larger circuits of sociality and to elaborate the semblance a public infrastructure.

Popular economies are always mutating in terms of repositioning themselves in relationship to their availability as important domains for the extraction of value and the ongoing exertion of exploitation for more powerful institutional actors. That which seeks to ‘withhold’ itself from subsumption in circuits of capitalist extraction or from being relegated to the status as an economy in reserve – instruments of limited accumulation for those considered expendable – always must recalibrate expectations and practices in order to retain as much as possible the worth of its own efforts. That which is withheld might be considered the constitution of ‘a human dimension’ even as it is reliant upon various non-human actors. If the informal retains some usefulness it may be in its pointing to a realm of subject creation that entails the vast networks of incalculability that underlie all cotemporary computation. It points to a realm of ‘world sensibility’ (Hansen, 2015) that is outside the discernment of human cognition but which embodies an environmental force shaping the affective atmospheres in which actors come to the fore and operate.