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Seeing collectivity: Structural relation through the lens of Youngian seriality

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

This article is an examination of the puzzle of why there has been so little organizing of the unemployed and the precariously employed in the years since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008. I argue that this paucity of organization is, in part, the result of the sedimentation of a neoliberal commonsense, or a particularly dominant colloquial interpretation of American individualism, which makes it difficult to perceive structural relation – not only in the case of economic politics, but generally speaking. I propose that using Youngian seriality as a lens can help us see structural relation more lucidly without reducing all structural relation to class relations or making essentialist claims about who we may be as persons or about the objective nature or static organization of structures themselves. This way of seeing provides an opportunity to perceive the multifaceted and intersectional ‘we’s’ that contemporary people perceive themselves to be, while not reducing the individual to an atomistic being outside the context of social, political and economic relations.

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Notes

  1. While there has been almost no organization of the unemployed, there has been some organizing among the low-wage sector of the workforce. During the fall of 2013 and continuing into 2014, there have been several fast-food worker strikes for higher wages (see: Bacon, 2013) . In addition, there have been ongoing attempts to organize big box retail workers at places like Wal-Mart and Target, (see: Greenhouse, 2011; also, Kroll, 2013).

  2. Unemployment data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm, accessed 17 March 2014.

  3. Unemployment data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm, accessed 6 June 2014; Wilson (2014, p.15).

  4. While churning is often considered an indicator of a strong labor market because it may mean that people feel confident they will find a new job after quitting a current one, this is not the case when the ‘churn’ rate is at historic lows and what remains is concentrated in the low-wage sector of the economy (Konczal, 2013).

  5. The situation has been quite different in Europe (see Chabanet and Faniel 2012).

  6. It should be noted that in mainstream American political discourse it is quite rare to refer to any group as ‘working class’. The closest approximations that are routinely deployed are ‘blue collar’, ‘working families’ and ‘labor’.

  7. ‘Men’s Hair and Eye Color Preferences’, Racial Reality: Anthropology, Genetics and Human Biodiversity, racialreality.blogspot.com/2011/09/mens-hair-and-eye-color-preferences.html, accessed 2 April 2014.

  8. Scholars like Erik Olin Wright, Richard Breen, and David Grusky, for example, are contentious in their efforts to avoid this common pitfall (see: Wright, 1996b).

  9. ‘Psychological effects of unemployment and underemployment’ American Psychological Association, www.apa.org/about/gr/issues/socioeconomic/unemployment.aspx, accessed 7 April 2014.

  10. ‘The Anguish of Unemployment,’ John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, Rutgers University (2009).

  11. There are hundreds of websites providing aggregated lists of both virtual and real spaces for support and ‘meet-ups’ in addition to recurrent advice about the benefits of ‘coaching’ for ‘job seekers’ (for example, ‘Unemployed meetup groups’ from unemployed.meetup.com/, accessed 7 April 2014; Quast, 2013.

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    Deva Woodly

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Woodly, D. Seeing collectivity: Structural relation through the lens of Youngian seriality. Contemp Polit Theory 14, 213–233 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.34

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