Vulnerability

For Fineman, vulnerability is “the primal human condition” (Fineman Reference Fineman2017, 141).Footnote ⁵ It is universal and constant throughout the life-course of the human being; on this account, humans are not self-sufficient or independent but instead deeply in need of the support of others—that is, humans are fundamentally dependent beings, and there is no position of invulnerability (cf. Fineman Reference Fineman2015, 105). Vulnerability results from the fact that humans are both embodied and embedded: “[A]s embodied beings, individual humans find themselves dependent upon, and embedded within, social relationships and institutions throughout the life-course” (Fineman Reference Fineman2017, 134).

Fineman distinguishes between two kinds of dependency, inevitable and derivative dependency. Inevitable dependency describes “the needs for care associated with certain biological and developmental stages of life,” as seen in infants and the elderly, as well as in middle-aged individuals who fall ill, for instance. The aforementioned embodied dependencies are also part of inevitable dependencies. In her groundbreaking Autonomy Myth, she writes, “Far from being pathological, avoidable, and the result of individual failings, a state of dependency is a natural part of the human condition and is developmental in nature”; “developmental dependency,” she continues, “should at least be regarded as both universal and ‘inevitable,’ and for these reasons, certainly not deserving of generalized stigma” (Fineman Reference Fineman2004, 35).

Derivative dependency, by contrast, is not universal, but this form of dependency is also stigmatized in a society that endorses the autonomy myth. “Derivative dependency arises when a person assumes (or is assigned) responsibility for the care of an inevitably dependent person” (36). Not everyone in society is a caretaker; many, especially men, receive care that enables them to advance their own projects, often at the expense of those of an unacknowledged caretaker. In a move we endorse, Fineman criticizes how, in US society, caring for one another has been both privatized, “assigning it to the family,” and gendered, “falling on the shoulders of those who were assigned the social roles of wife and mother”; further, we agree with her move to publicize care for dependency such that it becomes “the concern of society generally, with responsibility shared across social institutions” (Fineman Reference Fineman2017, 129). But we will challenge her move to the state as the only vehicle that can publicize these responsibilities.

For Fineman, the universality of inevitable dependency can be responded to sufficiently only by the state. Her argument rests on the premises that “inevitable dependency is of general concern and may, therefore, be conceived of as generalized or collective responsibility”; and further, that “undertaking caretaking exacts a unique cost from an individual caretaker, who becomes derivatively dependent on society and its institutions for additional material and structural resources necessary to do that work well” (Fineman Reference Fineman2004, 285). Her claim, in turn, is that only the state can address sufficiently the collective responsibility for caretaking work.

Before we suggest an alternative way of publicizing care work through the vocabulary of precarity, we will address more specifically Fineman's portrayal of the role of the state.

The Role of the State

By Fineman's lights, the role of the state is to “be responsive to the realities of human vulnerability and its corollary, social dependency, as well as to situations reflecting inherent or necessary inequality, when it initially establishes or sets up mechanisms to monitor these relationships and institutions” (Fineman Reference Fineman2017, 134). This is a specific form of responsibility. It is not the only conceivable form. Of the first two definitions of “responsible” in the American Heritage Dictionary, (1) “Liable to be required to give account, as of one's actions” and (2) “Involving important duties, the supervision of others, or the ability to make decisions with little supervision,” Fineman's use of the term falls under the second (American Heritage Dictionary 2020). This responsibility is less about giving an account and more about supervision. The state must set up institutions and manage others through them. This is a bureaucratic and managerial definition of responsibility. “Because law should recognize, respond to, and, perhaps, redirect unjustified inequality,” she writes, “the critical issue must be whether the balance of power struck by law was warranted” (Fineman Reference Fineman2017, 142). Her selection of what counts as “the critical issue” presupposes that there can be a balance of power under the law—a claim worth interrogating given the foundations of the US on the twin pillars of transatlantic slavery and genocide of Indigenous people, two examples of clear imbalance in regard to how power is exercised.Footnote ⁷

Yet Fineman would disagree with our analysis, starting from a premise different from a critique of the state. In her “initial question” below, Fineman sets up the tensions in a way that will enable her turn to the state.

We take issue with several elements of this way of framing the issue. Although it is correct that individuals are differently situated in any given society, Fineman places agency with the vague “webs” that affect “destinies and fortunes.” She does not, for instance, here use words like “racism,” “oppression,” or “colonization” to describe those webs, and her lack of specificity makes us wonder just who is doing the managing and monitoring and, in turn, whether we want to participate in it, much less endorse it. In the abstract of this article, Fineman writes: “While it is universal and constant, vulnerability is manifested directly in individuals, often resulting in significant differences in position and circumstance” (133). The passive voice—“is manifested”—suggests that vulnerabilities simply occur and that they are borne passively. In other words, there is a lack of attribution to the forces that generate particular vulnerabilities in oppressive circumstances. Further, the language of “destinies and fortunes” rings of luck, of mere chance. We want to avoid discussion of different situations through the language of destiny and fortune, because we think it hides particular, planned violences, especially gendered and racialized violences.

Resilience

Because of how Fineman sets up the tensions of collective organization and social change, she defines resilience as a response to vulnerability in the context of neoliberalism. It is important to note at the outset that Fineman articulates her concept of resilience as a challenge to neoliberalism; she claims that resilience avoids appeals to personal achievement and instead places the burden on social institutions. The family and the school, for instance, are integral institutions in “building the necessary resilience for individuals to survive and thrive in society” (Fineman Reference Fineman2014, 103). By attempting to place the question of resilience on institutions, she wants to shift critical attention away from individual failure (for example, “he just didn't pull himself up by his bootstraps”) and toward “the deficiencies of institutions and the failure of state regulation” (for example, “his family and school did not adequately support him”) (104). That is, when an individual does not succeed in society, we should look to institutions, and not the individual, as the cause. Indeed, individual choices can be made only once institutions, such as schools, have provided the resources required to make a choice (for example, food, here in the form of school lunches). But we note that in her language above, resilience nevertheless is what is built in individuals. She continues this language of resilience and the individual in a later article: “Although nothing can completely mitigate our vulnerability, resilience is what provides an individual with the means and ability to recover from harm, setbacks and the misfortunes that affect our lives” (Fineman Reference Fineman2017, 146). To our ears, the language of “setbacks” suggests minor challenges, as when one is set back from a desired arrival time by a detour on the highway or a delay at the train station. And once again, luck enters in the language of “misfortunes.” In this discussion of resilience, then, we hear not of specific oppressions, such as continued colonial violence, but instead of chance.

In the section of the article titled “Institutions and Resilience,” Fineman develops her account of resilience. She outlines five “resources or assets that societal organisations and institutions can provide,” namely, “physical, human, social, ecological or environmental, and existential” resources (Fineman Reference Fineman2017, 146). We can restrict our analysis to physical resources in order to make our point. In addition to addressing housing and food, physical resources, she argues, “also provide for our future well being in the form of savings and investments” (146). Savings and investments advance banks and markets; even if they are placed in a credit union or invested in so-called green stocks, they are part of an individual's worth. Of course, these banks advance the projects of state capitalism (for example, funding the Dakota Access Pipeline, whose construction was enforced by state police). Therefore, these “physical resources” are consistent with how we defined neoliberalism above, insofar as the ability to save and plan for one's future well-being is contingent upon compliance with and participation in a market mechanism that “decides,” through a distribution of market “winners” and “losers,” where and how these physical resources are spent. “Human resources,” she continues, “contribute to our individual development, allowing participation in the market, and the accumulation of material resources. Human resources are often referred to as ‘human capital’ and are primarily developed through systems that provide education, training, knowledge and experience” (146).Footnote ⁸ This language of resources as capital sounds out of place for a theory that claims to be a challenge to neoliberalism.

At the very least, Fineman's market-friendly language tends toward state-sanctioned capitalism that is often presented as the only option for social organization today. Even if we read these claims as referencing not an individual but a more collective, or institutional, sense of savings and investments, and even if we think of this market on the most basic and local level, it is clear that this discussion of “[r]esilience-conferring institutions” carries a “commercial flavor,” to use Weil's phrase—that is, resilience is here “linked with the notion of sharing out, of exchange, of measured quantity . . . essentially evocative of legal claims”; such claims, crucially, “must rely on force in the background, or else [they] will be laughed at” (Weil Reference Weil and Miles2005, 81). What Weil again helps us to see is that Fineman's articulation of resilience relies on the force of the state in the background. This state force is often exercised against its most vulnerable subjects, precisely to enforce or protect those resilience-conferring institutions (for example, when water protectors at Standing Rock are jailed in order to advance the interests of the banks and funds that house savings and investments). As Fraser puts it, “social protections are often vehicles of domination, aimed at entrenching hierarchies and at excluding ‘outsiders’”; and this is harmful to women even when reforms to state capitalism trade “women's dependence on an individual male breadwinner” for “dependence on a patriarchal and androcentric state bureaucracy” (Fraser Reference Fraser2013, 44). “[I]t is disproportionately women who suffer the effects of bureaucratization and monetarization,” Fraser continues, such that “viewed structurally, bureaucratization and monetarization are, among other things, instruments of women's subordination” (46). Yet Fineman presents the robust state as good, making few qualifications that address our concern about the violences of state capitalism or the androcentrism of state bureaucracy. Finally, the commercial flavor of resilience becomes most clear in her reference to “human capital,” thus showing that a rhetoric of resilience fits comfortably in a capitalist society. A few examples will bring this point into further relief.

It is not coincidental that “resilience” is the term of choice in Sheryl Sandberg's and Adam Grant's Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (Sandberg and Grant Reference Sandberg and Grant2017). Tellingly, on the book's website, there is a section on incarceration with the headline “Overcoming the effects of incarceration.” This puts the burden on the individuals afflicted as their loved one is behind bars; terms like “overcoming” thus privatize the struggle. They do not foreground the injustices that led to the person being behind bars in the first place, especially under conditions of what Michelle Alexander has called “The New Jim Crow” that allow for (state-backed) prison expansion (Alexander Reference Alexander2010), what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called “golden gulags.” (Gilmore Reference Gilmore2007). What we are seeing, in sum, is that the language of resilience, as James notes, “recycles damage into more resources” (James Reference James2015, 7). According to this logic, “the person who has overcome is rewarded with increased human capital, status, and other forms of recognition and recompense, because, finally, and most importantly, this individual's own resilience boosts society's resilience” (7). Thus resilience is a “neoliberal ethical and aesthetic ideal” (6).

Fineman would resist our charge. By beginning at the institutional, and not individual, level, she attempts to deny that her vocabulary of resilience fits within a neoliberal logic. In this way, she takes herself to be “shift[ing] the focus to the state and social responsibility because it recognizes that a deficit in resources often reflects an institutional or societal failing more than an individual one” (Fineman Reference Fineman2017, 147). In a neoliberal context of individualized responsibility, it cannot be repeated too much that one's lack of resources reflects more on institutions than on the individual. But advancing this shift in emphasis does not require the rhetoric of resilience. And further, as Danielle Petherbridge has argued convincingly, too often the appeal to the vulnerable subject has “resulted in new forms of governmentality, paternalism, or forms of sovereign power as a means of addressing the fear or threat of vulnerability” (Petherbridge Reference Petherbridge2016, 589).Footnote ⁹

In sum, we have (1) argued that the rhetoric of resilience is a repetition of neoliberal logic, and (2) called into question the reliance on the “responsive state.” To her credit, Fineman anticipates the second part of our response. She notes, “Even self-identified progressive social reforms are suspicious of the state; the rhetoric of non-intervention prevails in policy discussions, deterring positive measures designed to address inequalities” (Fineman Reference Fineman2008, 2). We want to underscore that, given a history of state violences, this suspicion of the state is warranted. The state is an entity to make demands on more than to rely on. Fineman sees this point, too, arguing that her concept of vulnerability across the life-course serves grassroots political efforts: “Mobilizing around the concept of shared, inevitable vulnerability may allow us more easily to build coalitions among those who have not benefitted as fully as others from current societal organization” (17). Indeed it may, but the practical or coalitional question becomes about which concepts are the most effective in regard to mobilization. To our minds, mobilizing around a universal (shared vulnerability) can serve to weaken efforts around particular struggles, as when some organize around the universal “All Lives Matter” instead of the particular “Black Lives Matter.” To consider an alternative way of framing the debate, we look away from vulnerability and resilience and toward precarity and resistance.

Butler and Vulnerability

Before we leave the terrain of vulnerability, it is first helpful to examine how the term functions in Butler's work. She retains crucial aspects of vulnerability, but she nonetheless insists on a more contextualized term for the purposes of social and political critique. In Precarious Life, she claims that “each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed” (Butler Reference Butler2006, 20). Not unlike how Fineman presents it, here the language of vulnerability is a descriptor for a universal condition of being not just human, but a living thing in general. Accordingly, we see the language of vulnerability as problematic not because it is inaccurate, but because it is not yet precise enough. Vulnerability constitutes a universal criterion for what it means to be living in general. It offers an alternative to the “autonomous” subject of legal liberalism, and thus it has been important to political efforts to rethink the relationship between the individual and the collective. This is important political work. A limitation of vulnerability in its universality, however, regards motivating particular political efforts. Indeed, such a universality can function as a neutrality.

Butler finds vulnerability to constitute a more or less neutral condition of existence. Fineman emphasizes that vulnerability, though exemplified by the dependencies of childhood, illness, disability, and advanced age, is a feature of all humans in their life-course. All emphases select some elements and leave out others. What Fineman's focus leaves out are some nuances within vulnerability, for human life includes a vulnerability to harm as well as a vulnerability to pleasure, love, joy, or other affirmative passions. Butler reminds us that we are always vulnerable to, or susceptible to, undergoing a range of feelings or affections from the outside. Openness to a certain degree of suffering is a condition of possibility for an openness to all of those experiences that render a life worth living. “To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is,” Butler observes, “to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way” (Butler Reference Butler2006, 30). We thus agree with Butler that the language of vulnerability is overly vague in a second sense, namely, insofar as it fails to draw a distinction between exposure to the “good” and exposure to the “bad”—that is, exposure to joy and to sadness, to pleasure and to pain, to love and to violence.

Third, and finally, if vulnerability constitutes a universal condition of living, then the “denial of vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery . . . can fuel the instruments of war” (29). The willed denial of vulnerability often feeds into the very drive to control and to manage—drives that (re)produce conditions of what Butler will come to call precarity. In leaving vulnerability behind in favor of the term precarity, then, we affirm the descriptive accuracy of vulnerability as a universal condition of living beings, and for this very reason, challenge its efficacy for critical and particular political interventions.

We can summarize our claims by way of analogy. If an artist were asked to present contemporary social life, and if they painted a single tree nearly uprooted by the wind, they would symbolically get right several elements of the present: the individualization of neoliberalism, the deracination of refugee crises, the attempt to hold on and to stay grounded in changing environments. But they would miss the drones above, the flashes of billboards and phones, the hustle of gig-taxis, the interstates and factories generating the emissions that heighten the storms. Describing the present through the language of vulnerability, fragility, or contingency is like this landscape painting; ultimately, it naturalizes political forces we want to foreground, name, and attribute by way of highlighting their construction. Thus we can make a distinction: vulnerability is something to be affirmed as a necessary condition of living—as an openness to life, community, contingency, and otherness; precarity, by contrast, is something to be resisted as an unnecessary and unequal distribution of risk across diverse populations.

Precarity and Precariousness

For Butler, precarity is closely linked to another term, precariousness. We have suggested that the framing of universal vulnerability pays little attention to differences within vulnerability, such as a vulnerability to those things that we affirm (it is because we are exposed to others that we gratefully receive their care) and those things that we avoid or negate (it is also because we are exposed, susceptible, or vulnerable that we can be harmed and abused). The language of precariousness enables us to make this distinction. Precariousness is still a universal term, for it “implies living socially, that is, the fact that one's life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (Butler Reference Butler2009, 14). Butler puts this even more explicitly: “[P]recariousness has to be grasped not simply as a feature of this or that life, but as a generalized condition whose very generality can be denied only by denying precariousness itself” (22). Precariousness thus signifies a generalized exposure to risk, an existential vulnerability to loss, injury, and death. It is, then, a generalized vulnerability to harm, as opposed to a generalized vulnerability to either harm and its others—love, care, joy, and so on. Still, precariousness does not yet constitute a salient political concept, precisely due to this generalizability.Footnote ¹⁰

In turn, Butler deploys the term precarity to signify the politically produced condition of unequal or differentially allocated degrees of precariousness. We quote Butler at length from her later work, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly:

Whereas precariousness is a universally shared condition, precarity constitutes a differential allocation of precariousness. We all share in the condition of precariousness by virtue of being finite bodies susceptible to injury and harm. We do not, however, share equally in this condition, because sociopolitical conditions differentially allocate access to material needs such as food, water, shelter, health care, and more—as the efforts to respond to the water crises of different kinds in post-Katrina New Orleans and more recently in Flint, Michigan demonstrate. Populations forced into greater risk of harm, injury, violence, or neglect thus live in conditions of greater precarity than those who typically enjoy stable access to material goods. For the purposes of our argument, what is especially important to note about “precarity” is its relation to the state. State violence, as Butler notes, is arbitrary—unrestrained by some higher authority. The state is the prime conduit of how precarity is politically induced and not naturally or existentially present.

With the above distinction between precariousness and precarity in mind, the political project can no longer be framed as a desire to rid oneself of either vulnerability or precariousness, for such a project cannot but help chase the specter of individual autonomy and security. Nevertheless, because precariousness constitutes a generalized condition, “one objects to the differential allocation of precariousness and grievability” (Butler Reference Butler2015, 22). Hence the political project becomes one of “minimiz[ing] precariousness in egalitarian ways” (Butler Reference Butler2009, 21). If the repudiation of vulnerability and subsequent maximization of security produces concomitant populations who suffer as their land and resources are stolen or refused, then the minimization of precariousness in egalitarian ways calls for an equal distribution or allocation of resources across populations. This minimization refuses the drive for autonomy at the same time that it refuses privileging one population over others. That is, it owns up to its dependence on others precisely as it builds community with them—living, dying, and mourning together. It is not clear to us that the state is the optimal, much less the only, vehicle for achieving this distribution or community.

The Politics of Precarity

We find that the language of precarity and the political project that follows from it responds more vitally to the neoliberal present than that of vulnerability for a number of reasons. First, precarity calls attention to the ways in which conditions of differentially allocated precariousness are politically produced by specific agents, motives, institutions, and practices, rather than obscuring the roots of such conditions in existential and universal terms (“all are vulnerable”). Second, responding to precarity calls for collective action and resistance as opposed to individualized or privatized resilience. For example, rather than responding to the slow disappearance of tenure-track jobs in academia with simply a stronger “work ethic” and competitive drive against one's peers, we should instead organize our academic labor, create community-oriented research groups, advocate for open-access publishing, and, when necessary, look toward and create alternatives to the university in general. Third and finally, the political projects and practices that emerge from a critique based on precarity avoid the framing of relying on and instead emphasize making demands of the state and other normative institutions. These institutions are complicit with, if not the source of, politically produced conditions of differential precariousness. The political projects we endorse take the risk of collective experimentation and political improvisation in the search for new forms of communitarian living—forms that refuse privatization, capital, and the enclosure of worlds.

A politics of collective experimentation stands in contrast to contemporary interventions that frame exposure to risk as a direct result of the withdrawal of the state (the rolling back of various welfare programs such as but not limited to social security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment, insurance programs, and so on). The latter framing implicitly treats precarity—again, the differential distribution of existential risk—as a prepolitical condition that the state then comes to cover over, remedy, or otherwise address. Thus, vulnerability to such risk comes to be seen as the natural result of the absence of the state. Such frames treat precarity as simply “out there,” uncaused by political, state-based, or institutional factors. If precarity is framed in this way, then the natural response would be to call for more state intervention, what Fineman describes as “the responsive state.” Political theorists on the Left often frame these calls in terms of state-sponsored welfare programs and job security, but we have seen time and again that the other side to this call—the other side to reliance on the state as the agent responsible for reeling in rather than causing precarity—rests in border security, police enforcement, and military intervention. We note here, for example, that Angela Nagle, a lauded journalist claiming to be on the Left, recently published a piece in American Affairs calling for strengthened security at the US–Mexico border precisely on the grounds that open borders threaten the viability of state-sponsored welfare programs and domestic job security (Nagle Reference Nagle2018).Footnote ¹¹

We resist these characterizations for reasons that are now obvious. To treat precarity as a natural result of the withdrawal of the state is to naturalize differential exposure to risks that are, more accurately, politically produced, and often state-produced, conditions. To naturalize such conditions is to imply that life could not be otherwise. Such frames thus presuppose the order of the nation-state at the same time as they presuppose the existence of socially produced populations based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship status, ability, and so on. Vulnerability is natural; neoliberal precarity is produced. If precariousness describes a differently shared existential risk in which every human being partakes, then precarity can be understood, as Butler explains, as “the politically induced condition that would deny equal exposure through the radically unequal distribution of wealth and the differential ways of exposing certain populations, racially and nationally conceptualized”—and to this we would also add populations conceptualized in terms of gender identity, labor conditions, ability-status, and sexual orientation—“to greater violence” (Butler Reference Butler2009, 28). What purpose do national borders serve other than the separation of human beings into groups with greater or lesser exposure to precariousness? Is not the border itself an instrument of precarity—the differential allocation of exposure to violence, starvation, and illness?

We maintain that precariousness is a shared and generalizable condition, and we maintain further that precarity, as the socially and politically produced allocation of risk, is a direct result of political and legal apparatuses including but not limited to national borders, the police, the military, corporate powers and insurance companies, medical bureaucracies, tax codes, passports and other forms of identification, and so on. We recognize the very production of precarious populations to be a socially produced (and thus changeable) condition that results not merely from the withdrawal of the state, but from the work of the state and state apparatuses themselves, what Saidiya Hartman summarizes under the heading “predatory state forms.”Footnote ¹² To be sure, such a conceptualization by no means implies that we would advocate for a quickened withdrawal of welfare programs that have survived the last forty years of neoliberal cutbacks. Fineman would remind us here that not only individuals but also institutions can be vulnerable; indeed, one of her chief concerns about neoliberalism is that privatization eviscerates already vulnerable public institutions. Insofar as vulnerability fails to attend to the dynamics of predatory and not just protective (we ask: of whom?) state forms, we find it helpful as a starting point for generalizable conditions of what it means to be a living thing but limited as part of a critical political vocabulary. Precarity better attends to the political situation at hand.

Let us summarize our critique of the vulnerability approach to critiquing neoliberalism through three points. First, the framework of resilience proves more conducive to individualized projects of self-making—once again, projects that necessarily come at the expense of others down the street or on the other side of the globe. Because precarity attends to politically produced group dynamics, it provides an alternative to the resilient, entrepreneurial self, and instead insists upon collective resistance to the very conditions in which we find ourselves. If resilience desires accommodation and adaptation—a privatized palliative to the global disaster—then resistance seeks changes that are critical more than functional: political participation beyond reformist norms, and collective change against the trends of neoliberal isolation—a refusal of and direct challenge to the conditions that have produced this disaster.

Second, while there are no words, phrases, or frameworks that are safe from neoliberal cooptation, the language of resilience seems to directly and uniquely cater to the neoliberal status quo. As Butler puts it, “neoliberal rationality demands self-sufficiency as a moral ideal at the same time that neoliberal forms of power work to destroy that very possibility at an economic level” (Butler Reference Butler2015, 15). Thus, neoliberal forces can sell an ideal of self-sufficiency while simultaneously destroying the very conditions for life, “using the ever-present threat of precarity to justify its heightened regulation of public space and its deregulation of market expansion,” all the while selling the notion that your and others’ precarity is a direct consequence of your or their actions (15). Neoliberalism privatizes both fault and “success.” The language of resilience directly agrees with this investment, as does the language of privatized responsibility. This is psychologically harmful: “[T]he more one complies with the demand of ‘responsibility’ to become self-reliant, the more socially isolated one becomes and the more precarious one feels” (15). Such models of privatized resilience and individual responsibility produce the neoliberal subject as an insidious combination of self-manager and commodity. One manages oneself to sell oneself on the market, and this self-commodification is supposed to serve as one's redemption from conditions of precarity. This model of resilience and responsibility “redefines responsibility as the demand to become an entrepreneur of oneself under conditions that make that dubious vocation impossible” (16). By turning the world into a market in such a manner, political and economic forces absolve themselves of any culpability, once again obscuring the real locus of precarity—obscuring, that is, the political as such.

In contradistinction to (privatized) resilience, the language of (communal) resistance at least nominally recognizes that political, social, and economic agents themselves produce and uphold the conditions of precarity. Thus, communal resistance asks not for an individualized, privatized response to precarity—one that would simply adjust to these conditions rather than contest them—but rather for a challenge to both these conditions and those who are invested in upholding them. Resistance is communal insofar as it refuses the self-commodification of entrepreneurial subjectivity, and seeks out, both locally and internationally, others to whom one is linked by virtue of their mutual exploitation, their mutual heightened exposure to risk. If resilience turns its back on others in order to shore up a sense of self-reliance, then resistance actively seeks out others for mutual support. The call for communal resistance is thus a call to seek out and create the conditions of possibility for a life worth living, a life freed from the politically produced constraints of precarity.

Third, and finally, if it is the case that the state is complicit with, if not the main source of, precarity production today, then a politics that calls for a grand restoration and expansion of state power cannot suffice as a strategy of resistance. Fineman understands this concern, noting that state responses to claims of vulnerability often include “surveillance and regulation” that are either “punitive and stigmatizing” (as in the case of prisoners or single mothers) or “paternalistic and stigmatizing” (as in the case of the elderly or people with disabilities) (Fineman Reference Fineman2014, 109). But she nevertheless returns to the state, in part because she understands it as the only option in regard to protecting the public as such: “[C]oercive institutional supervision can only be undertaken by the state in its capacity as the legitimate manifestation of public authority” (Fineman Reference Fineman2008, 18–19). It is true that calls for the state to reform its institutions often constitute a forced choice for precarious populations, as when Indigenous nations must fight for their land in court. Butler reminds us that precarious populations

Our point is that, given the deep imbrications of contemporary violences and the state form, we should refrain from concluding that appeals to the state are the only political option, much less that the state is the only legitimate manifestation of the public. Precarity serves as an organizational frame for publicizing vulnerabilities in a way that calls into question the legitimacy of the state in its present form.

Precarity, as a shared condition between and across various populations, serves “as a site of alliance among groups of people who do not otherwise find much in common and between whom there is sometimes even suspicion and antagonism” (Butler Reference Butler2015, 27). Indeed, the political strategy we are outlining refuses to rely on preestablished group identities that often fall on national or ethnic lines. The political group is produced in the performative assembly, taking on a fragile character that emerges both out of shared precarity and shared resistance to the conditions that produced such precarity. This character is not so much “a collective identity” as it is “a set of enabling and dynamic relations that include support, dispute, breakage, joy, and solidarity” (27). There is thus a veritable realism to political improvisation, insofar as it neither pretends to know the answer in advance, nor preemptively commits itself to one form of resistance over another. Yet it does this at the same time that it recognizes the complicity of traditional forms of liberal politics, which cannot help but affirm modes of state control and policing.