Précarité
precarity
In Anna Tsing’s work, precarity isn’t a misfortune reserved for the poorest—it’s the underlying condition of all existence: being vulnerable to others, never in control, not even of oneself. A precarious world is one without teleology—without the promise of progress guaranteeing a collective happy ending. Far from being merely a threat, this indeterminacy is also what makes life possible: without it, no transformative encounter, no unexpected collaboration between species could ever take place.
La précarité désigne la condition dans laquelle on se trouve vulnérable aux autres. Chaque rencontre imprévue est l'occasion d'une transformation : nous n'avons jamais le contrôle, même pas de nous-mêmes. Pris dans l'impossibilité de nous fier à une structure communautaire stable, nous sommes projetés dans des agencements fluctuants qui nous refabriquent en même temps que les autres. Nous ne pouvons nous appuyer sur aucun statu quo : tout est toujours en mouvement, y compris notre capacité à survivre. Penser avec la précarité change l'analyse sociale. Un monde précaire est un monde sans téléologie.
Tsing upends a reflex. We instinctively file precarity under the heading of the exception—a mishap that strikes the poorest while the world, elsewhere, “more or less ticks along.” Instead, she makes it the baseline condition: no one controls the course of their own life, no one can lean on a stable structure that will hold firm while they rest. What we call stability has never been anything but a reprieve.
Her diagnosis has a precise target: the dreams of modernization and progress that, throughout the twentieth century, provided a guiding thread supposedly leading somewhere—growth, science, stable employment, a collective happy ending. Tsing doesn’t dismiss them out of hand; she notes that the thread has snapped, and that we must now think without it. A world without teleology isn’t a world without momentary direction—it’s a world that no longer promises an overarching one.
The book’s masterstroke is refusing to stop at the grim diagnosis. Precarity, she argues, also makes life possible: it’s precisely because nothing is fixed that unexpected encounters—between a mushroom, a dead tree, a community of displaced foragers—can generate viable worlds. Haraway’s chthulucene and sympoiesis share this premise: we only make worlds together, in the tangle, never in isolation.
Tsing’s precarity ≠ the collapse of collapsology. Collapsology remains an inverted teleology: it swaps the promise of progress for a deadline of rupture, but keeps the structure of a narrative that knows where the world is headed. Precarity, by contrast, rejects that certainty—it predicts neither salvation nor collapse, it describes a permanent indeterminacy in which we learn to live, patch by patch, without ever securing a guarantee of what comes next.