The chapter “The Experience of Precariousness as Vulnerable Time”, authored by André Barata and Renato Miguel Carmo, has been published in Faces of Precarity: Critical Perspectives on Work, Subjectivities and Struggles, edited by Joseph Choonara, Annalisa Murgia, and Renato Miguel Carmo (Bristol University Press, 2022).

The chapter (pp. 44–58) examines the emergence of an abstract concept of time – time disentangled from events. Consolidated throughout modernity with the advance of industrial production and the transformation of labor into abstract labor, time came to be socially measured in clock hours. In the contemporary world, this shift operates along two main dimensions:

1. individuals increasingly experience their relationship with time less as autonomous subjects;

2. and more as objects of an external, transcendent, and imperturbable time.

This experience produces a temporality marked by the vulnerability and powerlessness of personal time, contrasted with the continuous, regulating force of social time, thus contributing to an understanding of current forms of labor precarization.

📖 Reference:
Barata, André; Carmo, Renato Miguel do. “The Experience of Precariousness as Vulnerable Time.” In: Faces of Precarity: Critical Perspectives on Work, Subjectivities and Struggles. Eds. Joseph Choonara, Annalisa Murgia, Renato Miguel Carmo. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022. DOI: 10.51952/9781529220094.ch004

The translation of this text was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

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