The biopolitics of precarity and the self

The biopolitics of precarity and the self: an introduction

When people take to the streets together, they form something of a body politic, and even if that body politic does not speak in a single voice – even when it does not speak at all or make any claims – it still forms, asserting its presence as a plural and obdurate bodily life. (Butler, 2012: 168)

Describing the significance of people taking to the streets to protest, Judith Butler insists that a multiple bodily presence is a manifestation of a collectivity that refuses to be (treated as) disposable or negligible. She does not argue that the formation of a body politic necessitates homogeneity of, or even concrete, political demands. Instead, she articulates how bodies move through public spaces to make apparent a refusal or an inability to continue with everyday life. Butler describes a body politic that is vulnerable and precarious not only to suggest that we are currently witnessing a new form of political demonstrations, but also to elaborate how collectivities may be forged through differences and thus without a need for definitive identities. Precariousness and precarity, in this sense, refer to the potentiality to form non-dominant modes of collective existence that pose a challenge to the constraining, destructible and unbearable effects of contemporaneous living. These concepts also refer to what might be understood as an intensification and an increasing normalization of insecurity and instability in our sense of selves, our work/home lives (or even in this impossible separation), time, space and belonging. Precarity describes a structure of daily life where, in Lauren Berlant’s words, there is a ‘loss of faith in a fantasy world to which generations have become accustomed’ (Puar, 2012: 166). Daily life is now the production, surveillance and management of information about and experience of health scares, risks of illness, economic crises, local and global migration, job insecurity, intensification of national security, and a rise in a rhetoric of fear fuelled by (often illegal) wars and ‘terrorist’ attacks. Such a sense of vulnerability may lead to what Berlant describes as an exhaustion from constant change, uncertainty and unpredictability of economic, social, cultural and biological life. Furthermore, precarity, as Butler (2004) argues, is often used to justify a defensive, self-protectionist response, involving a closing-down of borders, violence towards others and the production of a flexible discourse of othering (where such a process places responsibility for socio-economic, national and international problems on these shifting category of others).

We take precariousness and precarity as our starting point for this Special Issue to examine the biopolitics of migration, health and illness, labour, the self, and the formation of relationalities or collectivities. This Special Issue emerges out of a concern with the changing landscape of technologies of the self and techniques of domination (Foucault, 1993, 1994). We are concerned with the living body as an object of knowledge and politics. In many ways, we follow Michel Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics as when life becomes an object of political strategies that aim to optimize and transform it to achieve particular ends (Lemke and Baele, 2008: 48). We also concur with Foucault’s differentiation between technologies of discipline and technologies of security, which he defines in the following way: ‘the body–organism–discipline–institution series, and the population–biological processes–regulatory mechanisms–State’ (Foucault, 2003: 250). We are particularly interested in how self-regulation and self-responsibilization emerge through transnational labour practices, postcolonial discourses, changing labour conditions, health targets, insecurity and experiences of illness. Indeed, our driving questions are the following: How does precarity or a sense of vulnerability affect meanings of labour, the self and risk, and how does precarity shape modalities of agency? How is labour of the self shifting, and are there any ways in which its tiresome unbearability can be undone, bypassed or at least temporarily destabilized? How do technologies of the self and techniques of domination encourage us to migrate, be flexible, labour endlessly, and how do temporalities of illness, collectivities and everyday life imagine (or temporarily activate) other potentialities?

In this Special Issue, we bring Foucault’s work on biopolitics into conversation with recent feminist, Marxist and queer scholarship on precarity to examine how vulnerability is productive of (and perhaps even symptomatic of) epistemologies of the self. Put simply, this Special Issue addresses how we take responsibility for ourselves – or even what it means to hold on to a sense of self – when we feel or are vulnerable. Yet, it should be clear that when we speak of the self, we are not only referring to a sense of individualness that could be said to be constitutive of the human, to an ideology of individuality, or to what in Western philosophical traditions is understood as contained and sealed within a single and separate body. Similar to Foucault, we are interested in how the self emerges from and is intimately tied to population, and therefore how labour of the self is normative and regulated, and managed and surveilled both through institutions and individuals. Authors in this Special Issue therefore engage with what they understand as an increased emphasis on potentiality, on maximizing one’s potential not only in terms of training, but also flexibility, mobility and personality (see Mäkinen, this issue). In terms of the latter, we agree with Isabell Lorey (Puar, 2012: 164) that one has to put one’s ‘whole personality on the market’, but we also suggest that the personality is a form of labour that requires external professional management, support and optimization. The self, in this sense, is an object of knowledge to be trained, disciplined and even normalized, while at the same time it must be distinct, unique and appeal to the relevant audience (e.g. a future lover or employer). What many articles in this Special Issue explore is how a paradox emerges whereby there is a need for constant intervention that aims to produce an improved ‘you’ and the persistent appeal to a creative and outstanding being who already exists.

Yet this is not the only paradox explored in this Special Issue, because what these articles grapple with is a constant struggle between discourses that could be said to be at odds with each other and yet are in fact co-constitutive. For example, labour migration is examined through a postcolonial lens (see Näre and Nordberg, this issue) to show how media representations simultaneously produce the figure of the ‘good migrant’ (as essential to the European labour force) and the ‘suspect worker’. This analysis shows how such contradictions are integral to a neoliberal regime that requires migration while at the same time instantiating a process of othering that produces segregation, violence and exclusions. Thus, it is not that racism is a consequence of, for example, recent migration to Finland. Rather, racism is integral to the very discourse that promotes the nation as open, welcoming and in need of labour. Furthermore, we want to suggest that in a feminist tradition of thinking through relationality this Special Issue offers glimpses of where such regulation, surveillance and normalization do not quite work, or at least fail to capture everything all of the time. While Nikolas Rose (2007) and others speak of a responsibilization in the medical arena – where genetic testing is not only something one undertakes for oneself but also for others (e.g. in the interests of usually the family’s health) – we argue that responsibilization is also taken up in creative ways that may establish collective bonds (see Young, this issue). Indeed, many of the articles, in this Special Issue, grapple with what it means to be responsible for another, especially during times of crisis or illness. In this sense, they challenge the biopolitical hold on responsibility by doing a diffractive reading (Barad, 2007) with feminist, queer, disability and postcolonial theories. Responsibility in this context takes us back to Butler in that it is an attempt to think through our ethical relationality to others. It is therefore not about how to optimize the self but rather an undoing of the self in its very indebtedness to others. It articulates how responsibility allows for a reconceptualization of collectivity. In this sense, this Special Issue tackles the biopolitics of precarity through its socio-economic, political and ethical dimensions.

Precarity and precariousness of life

Precarity and precariousness are concepts that circulate as ways of describing life itself and global political phenomena that refuse to accept contemporary forms of living, as well as critical modes of interrogating what life means and whether there are political strategies for mobilizing other possibilities. In many ways, there are two main lines of inquiry within this discussion, although many scholars also insist on a third that keeps to the fore the continued changing nature of precarization (Puar, 2012: 169). One prevailing strand includes the use of precariousness and precarity to animate questions of what counts as human and of how vulnerability could form the basis for thinking ethical relationality. Butler (2004) powerfully articulates a philosophical argument based on a politics of precarity and an ethics of vulnerability. She argues that our corporeal vulnerability – that we are always and already dependent on others – is one way to formulate an ethical indebtedness to others. Such an argument is the basis of a politics that wants to see a decrease or even a cessation of violence. Butler (2004: 30) further draws attention to the inequitable ways in which corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally, creating conditions under which certain human lives are more grievable or more susceptible to violence than others. She insists that a turn to vulnerability is not an existential quandary based on a fundamental humanism. Instead, precarious life exposes the very ways in which we rely on, need and are dependent on others in a fundamental way, which necessitates a rethinking of our very relationality with others. It is therefore not about our humanness as such, but about how ethical responsibility can be thought through our inter- and intra-relationality with human, environmental and animal others, and other others. As Butler insists, precarity exposes ‘that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs’ (Puar, 2012: 170). This ethical bond ties self to other not as an optional possibility, but as the foundation for thinking and acting collective politics. It further allows for a practice and thinking of collectivities as emerging, changing, becoming.

The second prominent strand of precarity is mobilized to make sense of and theorize contemporary capitalism and its effects on life, labour and subjectivity. Precarity is often identified as a paradigmatic feature of our post-Fordist, post-welfare and neoliberal times (although, along with many other scholars, we express caution towards the insistence on such newness). Lauren Berlant (2011) conceptualizes the prevailing ethos of precarity with the notion of ‘cruel optimism’. That is, how capitalism, thriving on instability, produces precarious bodies, minds and modes of being with others that hold out the promise of flourishing while simultaneously wearing people down. Lorey (Puar, 2012: 164) argues that precarity characterizes labour markets, and therefore that the conditions of precarity increasingly also apply to the traditionally sheltered and privileged groups such as middle- and upper-class white populations. As Nancy Ettlinger (2007: 322) remarks, ‘precarity spares no one’. However, as Lorey argues, this in no way implies ‘equality in precarity’ (Puar, 2012: 172). On the contrary, different social groups are unevenly exposed to the vicissitudes of neoliberal capitalism, which thrives on inequality. In this context, this Special Issue focuses on how precarity is produced through discourses of migration, labour, health, time and selfhood. It traces some lines of flight whereby precarity may be used to temporarily undo the unsettling and unbearable constraints of biopolitical precariousness (Ridout and Schneider, 2012: 9).

Neoliberalism as a biopolitical mode of governing introduces market-driven calculations for the management and regulation of populations. It encompasses two types of optimizing strategies: technologies of subjectivity, encouraging citizens to optimize choices, efficiency and competitiveness; and technologies of subjection that entail political strategies to regulate populations for optimal productivity (Ong, 2006: 6–13). In these processes, the relationships between governing and the governed, capital and labour, as well as sovereignty and territoriality are reconfigured (Ong, 2006: 3). Neoliberal technologies, along with other governing projects, create contradictory spatio-temporal configurations where some populations are subjected to intense and unjust regulations and confinement, while others circulate with ease; where some knowledge flows freely (often as common sense) and yet other epistemologies are constrained or rendered invisible; and citizens are obliged to be self-managing and yet patriotic in their fidelity to politics on terrorism, migration and the changing landscape of welfare states. Neoliberal technologies re-organize spaces and populations in relation to global market opportunities, including some in the gains of neoliberal calculations while exacerbating the precarity of others, and creating economic zones geared towards the global circuits of capitalism while disavowing the possibility of other spaces and practices from these processes (Ong, 2007). As Loïc Wacquant (2012) argues, neoliberalism appears uplifting and liberating at the top of a class hierarchy, where it acts to leverage the resources and expand the life options of those with economic and cultural capital, while it turns out to be paternalist, punishing and intrusive for the many trying to sustain a working life. Many of the articles in this Special Issue analyse how biopolitical structures of neoliberal capitalism institutionalize precarity through these processes of inclusion and exclusion, marketization and privatization, and show how they exacerbate existing global and local inequalities and create newer forms of injustice. They highlight the forms of agency these biopolitical structures engender or foreclose, and the global power geometries that they build on, sustain and potentially destabilize.

Precariousness and the biopolitics of temporality

The logics of late capitalism entail a shift from a fantasy of accumulation of experience that allows one to progress into the future to an intensification of the present where one must be flexible, adaptable and preferably mobile. The past is not the guarantee of a future, and the present is where the self must be reworked, rethought, retrained, remobilized in yet another, multiply endless, direction. Many feminist, queer, disability and postcolonial scholars have written extensively on how temporalities can be reimagined in order to remember histories that are written out of dominant narratives (Bhabha, 1994); to bear witness to a multitude of sexualities and genders (Halberstam, 2005); to examine how life does not progress from one able-bodied, heterosexual event to the next (McRuer, 2006); to make apparent the racist violence of national and international policies (Puar, 2007); and to give recognition to the very ways in which life is lived as non-linear (McCormack, 2014). This challenge to temporality as an assumed linear progression is thus central to a reconfiguring of hierarchal relations on intimate and public, and global and local levels. What debates on precarity make visible is that neoliberalism also instantiates a shift in time, a move towards thinking of life as a series of projects, where the future may still be imagined as bright, but the present is a series of self-regulatory processes that are supposed to enable the prospect (and fantasy) of one day not being vulnerable.

However, what many of the authors in this Special Issue explore is how a non-linear time is not only a biopolitical structure that demands constant self-responsibilization but also a momentary glimpse of how such constraints do not quite take hold of all time. Linear time demands progress and neoliberalism promises success, if we not only labour away, but also ignore the very structural inequalities that make access to sustainable education, health, work and environmental systems almost impossible (or at least very difficult). Such linear notions of time are tied to a heteronormative life, where technologies of security monitor data over time, across generations, ensuring continuity of the species. Continuity of life as a heteronormative project envisions reproduction as a normal (read: normative) act between a biological man and a biological woman who then give birth to future workers. A reproductive imperative for the creation of future labourers is a racialized process, whereby some bodies matter because they can be exchanged on a market that builds on and is intimately tied to former slave and indentured labour trade routes, practices and histories. Able-bodied, reproductive workers come to matter through these postcolonial contacts, and the promise of labour and markets opening up a brighter future keeps in place a biopolitical temporality of precarity.

In the Special Issue, the authors engage with notions of temporality by turning towards issues of health and illness, memory and history, and labour and migration. We would suggest that this is not simply a fragmentation of time as symptomatic of a neoliberal order. Instead, queer modes of remembering capture how the biopolitical designation of an ‘at risk’ group, while producing a population that can be targeted by health officials, further opens up the possibility of collective responsibility (see Young, this issue). In other words, illness narratives are modes of sharing histories that cannot be reduced to categories of so-called risky behaviour. Yet, history opens up the possibility of a somewhat fleeting collectivity that bears witness to a shared loss and knowledge, which allows for creative ways of reinventing health recommendations. The focus of many of these articles is: What role does history – and the act of narrativization – play in creating and animating bearable lives? When medical professionals insist on a progressive narrative of life, where biomatter can be moved between dead and living bodies, then we must address what the consequences are of refusing to remember who has died and what processes made such exchanges possible (see McCormack, this issue). What it means to remember when that knowledge is the sole property of the clinic necessitates that we not only engage with what it means to have a history of biomatter (which would also be a history of the people from whom it originated) but also what it means to refuse access to knowledge to those affected by such bio-exchanges (McCormack, 2015). In this context, the biopolitical ordering of time is significant because it demands a move towards a healthier future, and closes down a past that connects donor and recipient. A turn to the donor is thereby conceptualized as a turn to a past that is over and a thing from which the recipient should move on. Rethinking time, here, is both a philosophical and practical way of addressing how history changes understandings and practices of relationality. We may call these queer or illness related, but most significantly we must recognize that a turn to the past is a desire to remember even if those memories are no longer accessible. It defies a biomedical imperative and a biopolitical order, and in so doing creates a different sense of self, intimate being with others, familial logic and ethics (see McCormack, this issue; Shildrick, 2012).

Precarious narratives that ooze out of experiences of illness often call on a listener or reader to engage in ways that differ from the biopolitical logic of data interpretation. Through systematic categorization and surveillance, populations are encouraged to behave (for their supposed own good) in different ways. Authors in this Special Issue grapple with how populations are produced through labour needs that respond to healthcare demands. We therefore witness how healthcare is dependent on a migratory flow of people, who are simultaneously deemed essential and demonized as not as good as local health professionals (see Näre and Nordberg, this issue). The targeting of populations for health reasons – be this as workers in or as users of the health systems – captures an essential precarity: on the one hand, a population who serves a need or who is interpreted as requiring intervention; and, on the other hand, a persistent process of stigmatization as a result of such targeting. The effects of knowledge of illness, of an emphasis on risk, of creating a readily identifiable group (of, for example, migrant health workers, or gay and bisexual men) and of repeatedly surveilling these diverse people (through government practices or the media) is perhaps what is promoted as ‘help’ but it is also that which ostracizes. We are not arguing that illness prevention, migration for labour needs or long-term health support necessitate the production of precarious lives. On the contrary, our aim here is to show how such processes are produced and therefore how they can also be avoided. One way in which the authors address the latter as a possibility is to propose a process of historicization whereby we remember the colonial histories that make certain migrations possible (see Näre and Nordberg, this issue), the histories of illness that allow for a collective sense of responsibility (see Young, this issue), and a relationality that is based on an indebtedness to others (see McCormack, this issue). In this sense, this Special Issue argues that neoliberalism may institute a presentism and late capitalism may fragment time, but the desire to remember may temporarily break the constraints of the biopolitical logic of precarity.

Biopolitics of care

All authors in this Special Issue address the idea of care – whether in its intimate or structural forms – as pertaining to management of the self, making life more bearable, experiences of illness, or unemployment. Bringing together precarity and biopolitics raises questions around care for the self and responsibility for others, and how these may not always be reduced to institutionalized or regulatory modes of care. Indeed, the authors here address whether it is possible to exercise agency when everyday labour wears you down; how interventions on the self may offer more than a normalization process; whether we can render visible how migrants are produced through a process of othering; how care constitutes a ‘we’ that animates an intergenerational bond; and how caring for others creates a different sense of time or relationality from that of biomedicine. Care is therefore a concept around which all the articles pivot, while – or even because – the focus remains issues of regulatory power, technologies of the self and the excess of such structures.

Lena Näre and Camilla Nordberg’s article addresses precarity in the context of labour migration, which they understand as a process through which the transnational political economy is constituted. They detail how the Finnish media represent Filipino nurses who are recruited to supplement a ‘care deficit’ in Finland. Media representations play a pivotal role in creating social imaginaries, and are therefore discussed for how they constitute Filipino nurses through a nationally hospitable and colonial lens. Näre and Nordberg address how the global geopolitics of precarity is forged through both colonialism and global capitalism. They argue that the Filipino state is keen to promote the ‘export value’ of female Filipino migrants as responsible, professional and caring workers (cf. Ong, 2006). In so doing, they insist on a dynamic postcolonial lens for understanding how there is an inequality within which labour migrations are embedded that marks regions as labour exporting or labour importing. In this context, the Filipino nurses are imagined as flexible ‘global commodities’ that can be mobilized to meet the needs of production in different parts of the world.

Näre and Nordberg capture how the temporality of precarity is predicated upon an image of the Philippines as a ‘traditional’ and ‘backward’ country and Finland as a modern ‘future-oriented country’, and this image, they suggest, is mobilized to explain and justify labour movement as ‘a win–win situation’ both for nations and individuals. In this context, they argue that the figure of the Filipino nurse in the Finnish mediascape emerges as an ambivalent and precarious subject, constructed around two contradictory discursive axes. On the one hand, she is a ‘good migrant’ with a ‘cultural vicinity to Europeanness’, but on the other hand, she is also a ‘suspect worker’ marked by racialized cultural difference and in need of special surveillance. Here, healthcare is predicated on a postcolonial practice of exporting labour to meet a so-called demand and on rendering those migrants different from the imagined host nation through a process of racist othering.

Ingrid Young’s article further delves into these issues of the biopolitical production of surveilled populations by focusing on a series of interviews with gay and bisexual men in the North East of England. Similar to Näre and Nordberg, Young begins with a media representation but in this case of gay men in Sweden dying from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-related illnesses in the 1980s. She does so to argue that the dominant narratives about individual responsibility and practice (as seen in biomedical frameworks of HIV, as well as more generally) do not reflect the contemporary experiences of gay and bisexual men. Young insists that there continues to be a sense of community – imagined through a shared biomedical history – to which men of multiple generations are attached. Weaving these media representations with a close reading of her interviews, Young undoes the biomedical logic of care that is based on a heteronormative structure. While building on Nikolas Rose’s (2007) and Paul Rabinow’s (1996) work on biosociality, she also diverges with her focus on how narratives of HIV render visible a sense of mutual responsibility on a collective level.

Young challenges us to think through what biosociality means by not simply reproducing gay and/or bisexual men as uniting identities. Instead, she invites us to reflect on how the production of a risk category – of a Foucauldian population at risk – fails to bear witness to the complex ways in which gay and bisexual men take responsibility for their sexual health and that of their lovers. Young turns to the stories the men share between the generations – histories of illness, loss and care – to articulate how contemporary sexual health practices are negotiated within memories of a shared history and a biomedical imperative to prevent HIV transmission. By stressing a shared sense of history, Young demonstrates that these men bear witness to a vulnerability that is foundational to their sense of belonging with each other, a temporary and fleeting belonging that nevertheless, Young argues, sustains a sense of well-being and erotic pleasure and diversity.

Where Young engages with how histories forged through biomedical epistemologies are foundational to a vulnerable sense of being with others, Donna McCormack interrogates the biomedical logic of refusing to give organ recipients access to information about the donor or the donor family. McCormack details current transplant policy to effectively capture the constraints placed on organ recipients. Turning to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams, she analyses how this film portrays a disjointed time to capture the experience of organ transplantation. In so doing, she delineates how organ transfer creates a temporality that is indebted to a past of which there is no, little or not enough knowledge. She argues that the film represents this biomedical procedure as a haunting, precisely because the donor is haunted by that which is constrained, repressed and held back. In other words, by focusing on the biopolitical order of biomedical time, McCormack suggests that the constant need to move forward, to get better, to heal and to forget fails to recognize that some transplantees feel connected to another being or at least to a part of another being. In this sense, there is a need to know the origin of this bodily migration and how such processes occur. It is not that this article calls for full medical disclosure of histories of biomatter’s migrations, but for a dialogue on the consequences of refusing to speak of histories that make life possible.

More specifically, this article tackles the heteronormative logic of organ transplantation in a way that is lacking in much work on transplantation and post-transplant relationships. McCormack examines how 21 Grams defies a heteronormative structure in order to make possible a bond between the donor family and the recipient. She suggests that such ties break down normative familial bonds, demanding other ways of conceiving intimacy, relationality and family. Building on the extensive work on the relationship between organ donor and organ recipient and how this reconfigures our understandings of the self/other relationship, McCormack captures how the disruption of time and heteronormativity opens up the possibility for remembering histories that are often only present in visceral form. She suggests that a living in the past, present and future simultaneously is not a pathological problem, but a desire to remember that which exists outside of the biopolitical order of time. She concludes with a focus on futurity, showing how the promise of a future restores the familial norms of heterosexual reproductivity and disposes of those who cannot conform to the temporal logic of biomedicine.

Katariina Mäkinen’s article further grapples with technologies of the self by addressing work-related coaching as a lens through which to understand the logics of precarity and post-Fordist capitalism. She conceptualizes coaching as a form of affective labour, arguing that coaching is a response to both the insecurities of labour markets and the pressure to continually optimize the self. For Mäkinen, coaching also serves as a strategy to mitigate the risks of precarity in the labour markets and to endure insecurity.

Mäkinen argues that subjectification is not only a process related to labour performance but is also increasingly an affective engagement designed to enhance the personality. In this context, coaching illustrates a particular self-work ethic (Heelas, 2002) that is characteristic of contemporary capitalism. Labour is thereby transformed into a potentiality, which inheres inside every person and may be discovered if one works hard enough. Potential, as affective labour and a technology of the self, may also be conceived, Mäkinen argues, as that which assists in the unbearability of precarious labour markets. Here, finding one’s potential is part of a broader strategy of ‘branding’ oneself and thus enhancing one’s ‘employability’ in the eyes of potential employers. Therefore, what results is a technology that simultaneously commodifies the self and produces affective responses to help survive these very processes of commodification.

Mäkinen suggests that maximizing one’s potential in coaching is a way of becoming a ‘flexible self’, an ideal subject of post-Fordist capitalism, with capabilities to adjust to any task or situation. In so doing, she illustrates the specific temporalities of precarity, whereby coaching seeks to cultivate dispositions that should help workers anticipate an increasingly insecure or precarious future. According to Mäkinen, coaching both promises security by furnishing workers with capabilities to respond to the potential demands of the future and produces intangible ‘potential’ that can be traded in the labour market. What we see is a temporal paradox: the self-transformation in coaching hinges on discovering and maximizing one’s inner potential, and this potential is something that exists already but gains significance only with regard to the future. To this extent, the future exists already if only one labours hard enough to realize it, to literally bring it from the inside out.

Developing Mäkinen’s dialogue with autonomist Marxist writings, Eeva Jokinen’s article elaborates a concept of precarious everyday agency as a way to understand the logic and effects of post-Fordist capitalism. Drawing on a set of focus groups with people living in precarious conditions in Finland, Jokinen traces both how these people strive to make life liveable and how these precarious conditions in turn shape modalities of everyday agency. She explores experiences of and responses to the neoliberal incitements to be mobile, aloof, flexible, ready to move and endure disorientation, and the sorts of agency and habitus they produce. In this way, she details how precarity infuses everyday life.

Jokinen identifies habits and habit-breaking as key aspects of this precarious everyday agency. She grapples with the temporality of the everyday, with a focus on how the present emerges as a dominant timeframe, especially through experiences of an increased need for flexibility. She expands on Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the ‘feel for the game’ by explicating how it is transformed into an imperative to maintain several simultaneous feels for multiple on-going games. In other words, habits play an ambivalent role in precarious conditions. On the one hand, they provide a sense of continuity and predictability, and, on the other hand, they must be constantly broken, as if one might develop a habit of not keeping habits. The article therefore shows that constant self-fashioning and self-investment are integral elements of precarious everyday agency. The biopolitical imperative to self-manage and to be responsible for the self is shown to be part of a life where one must constantly retrain and be mobile if one is to maximize one’s labour potential.

Working with Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, Jokinen explores the optimism of a potentially different present and the cruelty of the current reality where the sense of being worn down prevails. Self-responsibilization allows for a critique of institutional imperatives and Jokinen captures how, through humour, the focus group participants express everyday agency, seek out modes of survival and make life temporarily more liveable.

This Special Issue therefore takes the concept and practice of care in order to critically engage its institutional effects on individuals and populations. It engages such effects through a focus on everyday life, migration, health and illness, technologies of the self, and techniques of domination. However, it also attempts to capture those moments when care is about ethical responsibility for the self and for others, as ethical indebtedness and therefore as political collectivities. It examines these moments by turning to temporality, sexual practices, colonial, unspoken and unspeakable histories, and everyday agency. In so doing, it aims to show how regulation, optimization and surveillance do not always achieve their aims. Indeed, these slippages are temporary moments and spaces where what emerges are other possibilities, histories, collectivities, agencies, temporalities and relationalities.

Biocapital, or the labour of life

The twentieth century brings the production process inside the body and puts organs, blood, and cell lines into circulation outside the body, scrambling the classical Marxist distinction between the living and the dead. (Cooper and Waldby, 2014: 12)

When Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby describe a shift in labour theories where the boundary between the living and the dead is blurred, they speak specifically of the market in biomatter. Similarly, we see these concepts of life and death as central to the subject matter of this Special Issue where we raise questions about what it means to live, to endure, to survive, or to make life and labour possible through the suffering or death of others. Like Butler, we want to ask, what makes life bearable, possible and liveable? Our aim is not to draw up a template, although all articles give recognition to a change in structural conditions as the potential to undo the unbearability of precarity. Rather, the selected articles critically engage with how some lives and histories come to matter; how representations make other lives unbearable and disposable; and how techniques of domination and technologies of the self produce paradoxical welcoming situations that do harm to those conceived as other. They address how precarity is lived, expressed, managed and even embraced. They grapple with such a biopolitics in order to propose ways of thinking through the processes that instantiate vulnerability as a burden requiring a potentially endless labour. The latter is imagined and enacted as that which may make a difference, which may make this life matter.

This vulnerable line between life and death (which is most certainly not new, but is transformed, as Cooper and Waldby suggest, by the circulation of post-mortem biomatter) is what many of the authors tend to as they theorize a sense of belonging. Precarity of time, of history and of the self is thus not simply a neoliberal symptom, but rather an effective way of thinking through political collectivities that strive to make life liveable for those deemed expendable or, as Butler (2004) suggests, ungrievable. This proximity between life and death captures the very ways in which collective formations, in the articles in this Special Issue, are a matter of survival for those who often face stigmatization and ostracization from dominant society. These collectivities often require or more precisely only come into being at the very moments when there is a breaking down of normative, hegemonic structures. Their existence is itself a labour that may make a difference, and in so doing give time and space to those who live outside the linear logic of biomedical norms or the presentism of neoliberalism.

This Special Issue reflects on biopolitics and precarity in an attempt to think through technologies of the self and techniques of domination in late capitalism. We witness how the boundary of life may be extended for some through an institutionalized practice dependent on death (and that may not want to remember these histories in ways required by others) and yet how life may be lived as readily disposable for many. In this sense, this Special Issue brings to the fore the temporalities of what is not always recognized in biomedical practices, labour migrations, media representations, labour of the self and everyday agency. We are therefore inviting further conversations on the biopolitical logic of time and the production of selves in excess of biopolitical life.