Constituent Immunisation

To understand why the commons of social production (particularly care-giving and affective relatedness) is constitutively abandoned and warded off in the capitalist democracies of occidental modernity we have to understand the ensemble of the precarious and the dynamics of biopolitical immunisation of “western” governmentality. The first steps in breaking open the regimes of precarisation and immunisation can be seen in the occupation and democracy movements that emerged in 2011. It is a constituent process of inventing new, presentist forms of democracy and experimenting with institutions of the common in the midst of the crisis of representative democracy.

2. With the concept of “biopolitical immunization”1 I designate a modern dynamic of legitimising and securing relations of domination. It is a strategy of governing through normalisation, a social constellation from which an evil that lurks in its “interior” must be dissociated in order to protect a community. Threats are immanent to the normalised bios. The security of the community is regulated through the integration of a neutralised and domesticated potential danger, which is, in turn, co-produced by security techniques with a view to legitimising themselves. The calculation of risks and dangers is a central stabilising factor of societies of normalisation.

3. As part of biopolitical immunisation, life must remain precarious. The residual risk is a prerequisite to the establishment of ever-new security mechanisms. This is based on a politically and economically induced precarity that entails all of the uncertainties resulting from immunisations – in the broadest sense anxieties, discriminations and injuries in relations of inequality. In liberal capitalism, precarity was forced upon those who were constructed as threatening “others” in diverse ways. In contrast to the liberal tradition, precarisation in neoliberalism has become normalised and has taken on the role of a new instrument of governing. This neoliberal governing through precarisation demands of everyone regardless of gender, class and origin, an individualised risk management, with which a precariousness that defeats all safeguards can be actualised in different ways. It can also materialise in different ways, depending on the social positioning of precarity. The permanent race for the protection of one’s own life and social vicinity from competing others obscures the fact that a sustainably better life cannot be an individual matter.

In bourgeois society, the facticity of being connected to others in shared precariousness is connoted female in the private sphere and, ever since the introduction of the family wage, has been devalued as labour in terms of its quality and stabilised through the safeguarding systems of Fordist social welfare states. To ensure the bourgeois construction of the heteronormative family, care work has to be devalued.

Under neoliberal conditions and the dismantling of the safeguarding systems, care work is increasingly capitalised; in the middle class it is outsourced to illegalised and precarious migrants. Since the crisis of the financial markets and under the austerity politics of the EU, care work (including health care) has again been privatised and refamiliarised in a new way.

The neoliberal state is currently both deregulating and reregulating the commons of social production, as we can see with David Cameron’s fantasy of a Big Society, where the social communities have to absorb the austerity politics and organise the ‘civil society’ through voluntary engagement in the neighbourhoods and municipal infrastructures.

Neoliberal European democracies that focused on the financial and economic – and not only those leading austerity politics – are obviously no longer interested in guaranteeing broad social rights and a good life for everybody. Instead, we are facing a new European politico-economic Governmentality based on the normalisation of precarisation and indebtedness to varying degrees – a government through social and economic insecurity that is less built on productive labour than on productive individualised and competitive subjectivation. It is not an exceptional government in the crisis. On the contrary: It is a process of European transformation legitimised by crises. We have to understand how we are specifically governed through perverse democratic governing through precarisation and how we keep ourselves governable.

Accordingly, to reorganise and actualise the commons of social production and take them as a starting point for political institutions of the common means, on the one hand, getting rid of the nexus of individuality and property and, on the other, being careful not to stimulate a neoliberal reorganisation based on the abolition of social rights.

Instead, social rights have to be reconceptualised as rights of singularities: We do not have to invent everything anew. Some ideas are already on the table and the challenge is to develop them further as based on the Latin-American principle of buen vivir, of a good living and living together in wealth and in exchange of different forms of life.2 Another idea is the concept of cuidadanía, invented some ten years ago by the Madrid-based, activist feminist group Precarias a la Deriva. Cuidadanía means living together in a ciudadanía (citizenship) that is based on cuidado (care).3

Constituent immunisation means the self-government of the precarious as an exodus from biopolitical immunisation. This exodus as radical disobedience is a flight in the Foucauldian and Deleuzian sense, as a condition for constituting and as the “return” to the territory of former domination. The con- in constituent, the with, is not geared towards a community, a com-munitas, but to the common that is to be found in compositions and cooperation. Constituent immunisation is a process in which spontaneity and organisation are not separate from one another; it is a simultaneity of beginning and duration. This constituent process can only continue when it is brought forward by instituent practices – through the alternating repetition of beginning anew, of instituting and destituting. The beginning anew, in this kind of ongoing process, corresponds to a recurring break, destituting existing social conditions and, at the same time, creating a breach that enables new views and new possibilities for action. This processual constituting is not opposed to a constituted power. In this process new forms of constituted power are elaborated (dependent mandates, councils or institutions of the common) to allow that which constitutes to manifest itself.

The movements of the heterogeneous precarious have succeeded in breaking open the mechanisms of exploitation and individualisation. Starting radically from precarisation, they do not simply demand the re-establishment of (social) securities. They do not primarily pose demands on governments because they deeply distrust representative democracy. They invent new forms of presentist democracy and unfold new ethical socialities against the austerity policies of European governmentality.5 What is at stake is not a great, one-time break, but the permanent unfolding of affective connections. It is a becoming democracy in the extended present, not in the deferred future. Through trust and affective relatedness, through solidarity networks and collective support, in this present becoming, the movements invent the practices of a presentist democracy.

Other democratic practices, other forms of protection in insecurity, other economies and affective mutual connections that attempt to break through power relations are not projected into the future but immediately practiced and extended. Presentist democracy ruptures the linearity of time and breaks it up.6 It means the simultaneity of break as a disruption of the hitherto existing, and breach as an opening of a space of possibility.

Presentist democracy can continue to spread when constituent processes are complemented by new forms of constituted power that do not hinder constituting. Institutions of the common must not be created from nothing; existing institutions may be transformed. But this requires a radical readiness for new forms of organisation in which the constituent practices of the movements are translated and carried forward.

Although these new ways of self-organisation are precarious, they do not fit into the logic of biopolitical immunisation – one of fear, obedience and subjection – but point towards ways in which another Europe might be possible.