Law, Migration and Precarious Labour

Ecotechnics of the Social

Anastasia Tataryn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351791724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Immigration Law
• Index: Law

Providing a radical new approach to labour migration, this book challenges the prevailing legal and political construction of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer, whilst at the same time reimagining this irregularity as the basis of an alternative, post-capitalist, sociality.

The text draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and more specifically his term 'ecotechnics', in order to examine how economic, political, and juridical norms deny the full legal status of certain people who are deemed to be irregular. This ostensible irregularity is revealed as a regular feature of labour market practice, and a necessary support for the conceptual foundations of capitalist legality. As this book shows, however, this legality – and with it, the technological subordination of life to the circulation of capital as if this were the only possibility for our being in the world – is not insurmountable. The book's consideration of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer comes to provide an alternative basis for reimagining our relationship not only with migration and with labour itself, but ultimately with each other.

This powerful analysis of contemporary labour migration is of considerable interest to legal and political theorists, philosophers, labour lawyers, migration experts, and others with theoretical, political, or policy interests in this area.

1 The ecotechnics of immigration and employment law

In this book, I address situations that have become new normals in migration (movement across territorial boundaries) and conditions of work (labour). As new norms, current practices and discourses of migration and labour expose a deeper ‘crisis’ of politics, economics and law. Each day, news headlines, reported events and soundbites from politicians seem to reach new levels of catastrophe and disbelief. News fatigue is not limited to being exhausted by horrific events, for instance people dying by the hundreds at sea along migrant routes; villages being attacked by Daesh fighters or Boko Haram or Russian or American or Saudi or British-backed military jets; children being shot at in schools and shopping malls; islands and coastal villages being decimated by extreme weather or earthquakes; wildfires ravaging forests and ecosystem; coral reefs bleached, icebergs melting, ocean levels rising and desertification spreading. We are exhausted by the deferral of responsibility (Medland et al. 2019), the short-sightedness and the obfuscation of reality guiding politicians, political conduct and debate around the world (Trilling 2018).

Humanity, in its mess, is hurtling towards drastic ecological change caused by resource extraction, industrialisation, contamination, poisoning of water systems and the widespread destruction of biodiversity. Technology expels its residue both materially and in the breakdown of empathetic relationality through the reification of the ‘social’. This new social is an ephemeral space, where Tweets replace political expertise, debate and diplomacy, and insecurities about everything from physical appearance to opinions on political matters are loudly filtered, edited, judged, and indiscriminately circulated. The rapid pace of technological development and infiltration into every minutia of our lives: sourcing and consuming calories (food), digesting, moving, sleeping, communicating, choosing friends, partners, reproducing, prolonging life, and selecting life, is unprecedented. Life is being outsourced, physically and mentally, for the benefit of capital accumulation favouring a fragment of the world’s population (Anderson 2017, 1534). We experience this, and yet as plural and diverse people we have yet to develop pluralistic and contextualised understandings of this infiltration. In the meantime, attempts to remedy or resolve the increasingly common experiences of insecurity and precarity originate in the modern liberal political-economic-legal system. The historically and culturally specific onto-epistemological framework of this system may or may not have ever successfully addressed challenges to social, political, economic and cultural experience. Yet, as seemingly the only option available, this paradigm continues to frame our understanding and experience of twenty-first-century technological life.

Joining other scholars and writing that looks towards ‘plural, ethicopolitical’ rethinking, reimagining and reimbodiments (see Kothari et al. 2019, xxviii; Thomas-Pellicer and De Lucia 2016, 10; Grear in Thomas-Pellicer and De Lucia 2016, 2; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2015, 11; Viveiros De Castro 2004, 484), I put forward ecotechnics as an onto-epistemological challenge to explore, disrupt and exceed normative categories in migration and labour law. Ecotechnics, a term drawn from Jean-Luc Nancy, provides a diagnosis as well as a deconstructive possibility. In this introductory chapter, I will first sketch my understanding and use of the term ecotechnics. Second, I will demonstrate how ecotechnics can be applied to being, migration and labour, and why ecotechnics is a helpful onto-epistemological challenge through which to understand the technologies, legal and otherwise, associated with migration and labour. Third, I will provide a chapter outline of the subsequent chapters, to conclude with a summary of the overarching themes of the book.

Ecotechnics – what?

In the introduction to her book on Judith Butler’s work, Moya Lloyd comments on Butler’s writing style: Butler poses questions in the place of normative assertions, ‘to open a field rather than close it’ (Lloyd 2007, 22). Butler identifies and questions the normative violence where contingent foundations categorise bodies – people – as corporeal ontologies in a particular way. The normative categories imposed through this violence are the focus of political projects that seek recognition and agency for persons or groups marginalised by the mainstream. Paradoxically, there is on the one hand, a political fight for subjugated identities, for persons (bodies) to be recognised and not discriminated against within the existing system of categories and norms. On the other hand, the norms are based on contingent foundations, grounded by a particular conceptualisation of being (ontology) that has created a system that constructs, and subjugates, difference. Within this Western, modern, liberal paradigm, the autonomous individual ‘I’ is privileged in what Mignolo (2010) refers to as ‘ego-logics’. The recognition of persons who do not conform to the ego-logical norm will always be insufficient and limited. Juridical systems of power assign categories and align subjectivities according to normative categories that are assumed to be necessary and natural and, moreover, the only possibility for recognition (see Marks 2011). The norm is affirmed constantly through language, discourses and popular culture including media, news and social media. Failure to conform to the norm renders persons abnormal, sub-citizen, or irregular. Furthermore, the fault of not conforming is attributed to the failure of the marginalised individual, not to the system allocating recognition.

Where persons are identified as ‘irregular’ and ‘migrant’ and ‘worker’, these labels serve a purpose in the circulation of political, juridical, economic and technical processes. These categories, and the bodies interpreted into these labels, are part of the world that is ecotechnical. Nancy (2012) asserts that our world is now ecotechnical. Moreover, there is nothing outside the ecotechnical circulation of being. The normative violence of contingent foundations identified by Butler is part of an ecotechnical reality. But what is ecotechnics? The term ecotechnics links the eco, home, environment (from οικος, meaning dwelling, and used in eco-nomic and eco-logy), with technē (from τέχνη, meaning ‘craft’ or ‘art’, and used in techn-ology, techn-ique), the technical structure that orders and ‘makes sense of’ the interruptive, incoherent and incommensurable (see Miller 2012). Thus, ecotechnics refers to the circulation of techne, technologies, of capital, of law, of intelligibility, that circulate at the same time as we are existing in eco-: the sense that sustains and maintains being in the world. To diagnose the world as ecotechnical is to say that everything, everyone, every being, moves as techne (overwhelmingly experienced as capital) and eco – this is how we create, how we live and how we give meaning to our reality.

Etymologically linked with ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’, ecotechnics is distinct from both. Yet, at the same time, it is intricately connected to the former two terms. In ecology, oikos is joined with logos (λόγος), meaning form, or ground. Ecology is the form of dwelling or habitating in the world. Ecology refers to the form that our environment exists in and assumes. In economy, oikos joins with nomos (νόμος), meaning order or law: the law or order of dwelling. Distinctly, ecotechnics is oikos with technē (τέχνη), the craft or technique of dwelling. Towards the conclusion of this book, I offer a fourth term which moves towards the possibility of opening thought to ‘eco’, by not denying, but existing in spite of ecotechne: the term ecosociality, which joins oikos + social (socialis) meaning allied, common, to explore dwelling in common.

As a term, ecotechnics recognises both environment/home (dwelling/eco) and craft (techne/technology) when referring to the capital circulation in the world that affects the circulation of sense. Sense refers to the circulation of life that exceeds containment into techne (Hutchens 2005, 141). Ecotechnics diagnoses a circulation of life that has been dominated by processes of neoliberalisation, including current key market values such as flexibility, casualisation and mobility reinforced within the nation-state. These processes of neoliberalisation technologise the reproduction of being through the coming together of singular beings in a plural (eco), which happens in spite of neoliberalisation (Nancy 2000). Our being is, from Nancy (2000), singular plural. What this means is that we are singular beings in this world only because of and in a plural. In other words, we only ever know ourselves (‘I’ know ‘myself’) through the plurality of other singularities. And the plurality of other singularities is not limited to human or animal singularities, but all things. Being singular plural, therefore, identifies being in the world – which is the world happening – as the plurality of beings that know their own singularity only because the world exists, we exist, in a plurality.

In Nancy’s words, ‘being’ is an action that is ‘neither negative nor positive but the mode of being-together or being-with’ (2000, 13). Moreover, the plurality of singular beings – the world happening – is an ongoing site of sociality. For Nancy, this is an ‘originary sociality’.¹ It is originary because in every instance of an alterity, a difference, between the singular and the plural (i.e. another singular), the sociality that happens is original. The coming together of being singular plural, as an originary sociality, forms a limit (being singular plural) that is potentially unique each time. This limit is original to that sociality because it – the coming together of that singular plural – is an originary response to the singular plural. This limit is the need for and the existence of law.

1Nancy writes of the ‘originary sociality’ in the The Inoperative Community (Nancy 1991, 28). Originary sociality is similar to Derrida’s originary sociability. Sociability, in Derrida’s originary sociability, is ‘prior to all determined law, qua natural law or positive law, but not prior to law in general’ (Derrida 2006, 231). This ‘law in general’, has been understood by Peter Fitzpatrick to be a form empty of universal claim. It is preceded by a sense of ‘pre-legal’ justice. According to Peter Fitzpatrick, law depends on what is excluded from it – the excluded provides content to what is included. In other words, the community that is the originary sociability, ‘as a continuate being-with cannot be contained within any existent realisation of it [determined law] … it must ever extend receptively beyond present existence, otherwise it will not be able to continue “in being” ’ (Fitzpatrick 2008, 289). Thus, law is both determinate and responsive, meaning that it has the capacity-within-law to be something other than what it purports to ‘be’. The question that is debated and discussed about Derrida’s writing on law via Fitzpatrick’s work concerns how to understand the exteriority of law and the boundaries or limits of sociability as a negative/negated law (see Fitzpatrick 2012, 2009, 2008). This particular discussion of Fitzpatrick’s work is beyond the focus of this work; nevertheless, the concerns about law as both a limit and extending beyond a prescribed, determined limit are relevant. Here, rather than discuss Derrida and Fitzpatrick’s work, I refer to Nancy’s reference to ‘originary sociality’ in order to discuss the alterity that is the sense or ‘eco’ circulation. This differs from Fitzpatrick’s and Derrida’s respective works because my analysis is not focused primarily on the quality or ‘being’ of law, rather it is concerned more with how ecotechnics opens onto approaching sociality beyond legally reinforced practices of citizenship and subjectivity in irregular migration and labour. I provide a more detailed discussion of ecotechnics in relation to law in Chapter 4.

Law is a techne that concretises at the limit of a sociality. However, beyond or before law as a juridical infrastructure, the singular plural is an ethical imperative. The ethical imperative is an imperative to respond, to be response-able, in/to that originary sociality. The originary sociality which is open and potentially new every time (Chapter 4 and 5). The singular plural, as it is happening, goes beyond a predetermined structure that would aim to determine what is the being that takes place in a sociality. For instance, the coming together of singular beings to be plural in any given territory is happening. Interactions take place that determine certain basic needs or relationships, for instance requiring shelter, food, water, work or care. Technologies of intelligibility, order and capital identify beings according to nationality, skills and abilities, legalities and economic value. These technologies determine the experience of a sociality, but not at the expense of the sociality happening. As ecotechnical, our interactions, relationships, experiences, happen both as a consequence of technologies providing form and structure, and world-creating sense, which holds the possibility of being originary (unique) every time. Given current migration discourses, labour and employment ‘crises’, populist politics, ‘global’ market economics, protectionist nation-states and embedded legal regimes, openness to sense through originary sociality may not seem a satisfactory resolution or alternative. But it does not claim to be. Openness is a onto-epistemological challenge to be explored and to expand paradigms of thought; what comes after is unknown.

Within ecotechnics, and nothing is external or outside this circulation, sense is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Styx
• 1 The ecotechnics of immigration and employment law
• 2 Migrants at work as ecotechnics
• 3 Labour as ecotechnics
• 4 Law as ecotechnics
• 5 Home/nation: eco/techne
• Index