Curre et labora: Between precarisation and the pedagogy of flexibility: who lives by working?

Abstract

The impermanence, associated with the praise of rebirth, is fostered by the morphology of the labour market and its growing immateriality, by the new social pyramid of labour which opposes to an ultra-skilled apex, a base for which informality, precarization, and unemployment are constantly growing; in between we find a mobile band, destined to disappear with the intermittencies of the market and new technologies, temporarily qualified. While the top, globalized, universal, fully enjoys the right to movement, the majority of the population is forced into it, without benefiting from it: instead, the relationship with the territory is impoverished, the of the subjects appears increasingly circumscribed or, in reaction, phenomena of voluntary detachment from labour increase, in a discontinuous line that no precariousness longer connects means of livelihood and the time of work. This paper aims to explore the shadow line that is drawn between the apologia of the homo mobilis and the possibility of permanence of political: in the face of the pedagogy of flexibility that is being imposed, we question the real boundaries of free will and the possibilities of recovery of the social/work dimension as a foundational element of the processes of self-construction and the processes of othering.