Categorizing oneself as a “precarious intellectual”
Type de matériel :
73
The formation of a fuzzy social area of precarious cultural or intellectual workers is one of the major morphological transformations of French society in recent decades. It can be designated by transposing into French an expression sometimes applied in the English-language literature to a comparable object: The “creative precariat.” The French creative precariat is the object of various representations, of more or less academic origin. One of their originalities is their relative failure: With the exception of the “bobos,” which are among the most common representations and the most charged with moral and political meanings, but those that aim more widely (in so far as it is possible to judge despite the indeterminacy of these representations) have not grown very famous. However, this does not prevent some of the persons targeted by these representations from knowing about them, and elaborating (and in particular from the category of “ intellos précaires” (precarious intellectuals), charged with militant significations) more or less sophisticated self-definitions with them. The article is devoted to the deployment of these self-categorizations, related to the biographical trajectory and the position of the interviewees. We will show how the interviewees invest in the category of “ intellos précaires”, but also dissociate themselves from it and from the kind of precarious politics that is involved in it.
Réseaux sociaux