Precarity, Social Movements and Political Communication
Martín Bergel, Julia
Risler (Translation: Brian Whitener)
PDF [104 KB]
Forms of auto-organization and communication strategies in the
era of globalization
In our time, human experience finds itself under siege by multiple
threats that underline the fragility of contemporary life. Environmental
catastrophes, international terrorism practiced by states and elites
that have given themselves a license to kill, brutal social inequalities
derived from the rule of the market over citizen’s rights,
offer frequent scenes of barbarity to those who have the heart
to look on them. As well, other threats, perhaps more subtle but
no less real, join in the production of a scenario in which fear,
distrust and terror are the norm.
Our moment, then, appears to us as a scenario in which the production
of the social tie is affected by countless conditions. In recent
years, however, with the pace of civilizing change that marks the
current moment — and within the idea of irreversible crisis
previously generated by classical forms of politics that formed
the backdrop of the 20th century — we have seen a group of
dissimilar experiences emerge (as much in Argentina as in the world
at large) that have lead to the reinvention of forms of experiencing
the common good and the collective where were the market and contemporary
fears invite only the development of individualistic trajectories.
This project proposes to develop a field of interrogation common
to these experiences that have shown us these singular trajectories
that share a common horizon: that which here we call flights from
precarity.
The notion of precarity has been revealed to be particularly
operative in describing modes of contemporary existence. In
a limited sense,
this notion is useful for designating the recent changes in a constitutive
area of the human: labor. The course of neoliberalism across the
globe, together with the crisis in welfare politics that constituted
the fundamental framework of nation states after the war, produced
a group of radical modifications in the map of productive activities.
As used by certain theorists and social activists in Spain and
other countries in Europe, precarity serves to map, to de-nature
and to politicize the modes in which labor markets in the era of
post-Fordist fluidity try to fix new parameters of control for
productive praxis. The precariat, the contemporary garb worn by
the old proletariat, would permit us, although only potentially,
to illuminate the conditions of labor not only of factory workers,
but also of all those who live off their labor. “Precarity” then
is as much a descriptive, sociological notion that helps realize
today’s forms of labor, as it is a political one, capable
of creating ways of thinking held in common and of creating methods
of cooperation for a set of very diverse situations.
If phenomenon of this type began to occur in Europe, in a context
of relative abundance — a context, however, that is increasingly
being eroded — labor precarity is demonstrated in a much
more forceful manner in Latin America, as has been recently exhibited
in Argentina. Speaking here (in Argentina) of precarious work is
to speak of, to start with, half of the workers here: those who
work in “the black.” To continue, we must note the
multitudes of workers who, despite being not salaried, produce
a type of wealth that makes possible the survival of hundreds of
thousands of people. It is necessary to add, then, those who work
under those so-called “trash contracts,” contracts
of temporary labor, without the recognition of the most basic labor
rights: no bonuses, no vacations, no sick leave. Moreover, to this
situation we would add the variety of scholarship recipients, workers
ad-honorem, volunteers, intermittent artists, etc., a vast group
of situations that implicates large swaths of young people and
of the middle classes. In sum, precarity is a blemish that extends
from excluded sectors to persons living on the edge of penury;
it is also the ground from which new forms of aggregation and cooperation
among segments of workers (i.e., public transit employees, call
center workers, the self-proclaimed “young precarious scientists,” amongst
others) have emerged.
But here we don’t want to limit ourselves to a narrow use
of the notion of precarity. Parallel to its ability to make visible
the morphology of contemporary forms of work, this category permits
us to focus on other dimensions as well, including precarity derived
from the lack of rights in the area of communication subjugated
by the mass-media empire; the precarity of citizenship in front
of the existence of mechanisms for the coercion of civil liberties
that are trying to kill the use of public space (from railings
in parks that impede free movement to the criminalization of the
right to protest); and psycho-affective precarity derived from
contemporary forms of alienation (stress, fear, etc.).
Taken together, then, the precarization of existence is reflected
in the permanent instability of the most essential aspects of living
that alter, in a profound manner, the very notion of a project
of life, above all for young people. Those who today are parents
and grandparents were able to plan their lives not without difficulties
or essential limitations, but in a relatively stable scenario and
set of conditions. For the new generation, their work is not just
that of determining what they will do in life but also that of
reinventing the very notion of a project of life itself. How do
they imagine the future when instability is the starting point?
How can they construct personal and collective trajectories in
which they are no longer subject to the chance and dispersion of
the market? Re-inventing the notion of living is a job that is
directly connected with the work of reinventing spaces for collective
organization that allow would us to realize these projects of life.
Communication
as a tool for flights from precarity
The experiences that have attempted to produce flights from precarity
have to cope with the modes of existence found in contemporary
societies. To be effective, they can’t organize themselves
without acknowledging the changes that have transformed the world
in the last few decades. One of the areas that has recently exhibited
radical levels of change is that of communication.
Communication, taken broadly, has always been constitutive of
human experience. But in recent decades, a series of modifications
have
tended to join more closely the communicative sphere to all social
practices, from production to politics. Communication, in the
contemporary moment, appears to touch every area of human existence.
The traditions of the Left during the 20th century, in general
terms, tended to be reluctant to think specifically about communication.
Normally, the moment of expressing oneself served as the only
valid and rather inflexible model for every situation and little
attention
was paid to different enunciative textures and diverse subjects
or to the general climates and contexts in which all communicative
experience develops. Moreover, this model tended to be, as well,
repetitive and monotonous in its modes of communicating and frequently
demonstrated its predilection for speaking as opposed to listening.
This situation, insofar as the classical paradigms that structured
the modes of political organization have entered into crisis
in the last decades, has been modified over the last few years.
To
cite one important case, zapatismo, in its modes of communication,
has innovated in at least two ways. On the one hand, it understood
when to speak and when to remain silent (those famous “zapatista
silences”); from this the zapatista experience could be defined
as “a revolution that understands how to listen.” On
the other, in their public announcements, the Zapatistas utilized
a wide range of varying forms of discourse, paying attention
to the nature of their interlocutors. From another angle, we
could
mention as well the experiences in Argentina and in other parts
of the world that have experimented with new languages and technics
for communication, from the use of new technologies to the development
of a battery of expressive and artistic resources.
If communication then is a decisive area but one not sufficiently
recognized as such by social movements, the experiences that
flee from precarity should make space and time for themselves
to think
about communication. Political communication has at least two
dimensions with direct consequences for auto-organization. On
the one hand,
the images and stories that circulate in the “jungle of symbols” can
have an empowering effect and strengthen a collective of persons,
as well as destroy such as collective. Identity, the “us” capable
of traversing subjectively (or not) a group of persons and sustaining
this group in a prolonged collective action, depends, in good measure,
on communicational effects, as much in creating an internal dialogue
and the (auto)construction of a communal meaning from inside each
experience as in the “reception” and interiorization
of “external noise.” On the other, the modes of existence,
the revindications, the political successes of a political-social
experience depend on how we think our interventions into the
public space that constitutes our societies, which, for good
or bad, are
saturated by communication.
Communication present us with an area that, like other spheres
of the social in contemporary society, appears marked by radical
ambivalence: it is possible as much to appear as an obstacle
as to be a decisive moment in the creation and recreation of
social
linkages in a given political community (neighborhood, local,
national, or global). From here this ambivalence exhorts us to
create practices
and manners of thinking that are flexible, open, and creative,
if we really mean to try to win the political battles of our
time.
The encounter, “Precarity, Social Movements and Political
Communication,” proposes to generate a space for the collective
elaboration of experiences of auto-organization that can imagine
lines of flight out of precarity and that can cope with the challenges
of a hyper-communicative world. It’s a gathering that functions
as a type of “laboratory of experiences” for the uses
of diverse communication strategies. How does the “external
noise” affect the capacity for auto-organization of the experiences
that resist precarization? How to cope with the global communication
system that creates hegemonic images of organized subjects (a paradigmatic
case: the piqueteros)? In what way can media be used creatively
to promote practices of struggle? What concrete communication strategies
contribute to the empowerment and auto-affirmation of those collectives
that are fleeing from precarity? What practices of communication
and what forms of the circulation of language create the everyday
experience of the social movements? What uses do new technologies
have in this process? What uses do experimental, artistic, etc.
languages have? These and other issues will be debated, beginning
from concrete experiences thought as singular cases, with the common
goal of creating a space for exchange that can be productive for
the group as a whole.
Participants: Amxr Mediactivismo, El Fantasma
de Heredia, Marcelo Expósito, FM La Tribu, Área de
Cultura del Frente Popular Darío Santillán, Grupo
Alavío, Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), Espacio de Mujeres
del Frente Popular Darío Santillán, Sebastián
Hacher, Franco Ingrassia, Jóvenes Científicos Precarizados,
Ana Longoni, Julia Masvernat, Jorge Muracciole, Precarias a la
Deriva, Prensa de Frente, Trabajadores de Atento, Unión
de Trabajadores Costureros
Coordinators: Martín
Bergel and Julia Risler
Buenos Aires, 9-11 May 2006
Further info, abstracts, and related links and contacts:
http://www.cceba.org.ar/evento/taller007.pl
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