and Valentina illuminate a few crucial observations with respect to the experiences of economic precariousness. Let us first consider the unpredictability of wages and work. On the one hand, working “extra hours” has become one way to save money in order to buy large consumer goods. These consumer goods, then, are taken as part of household assets in needs assessments, without consideration that “extra hours” and “almost going crazy” in fact allowed for their purchase. On the other hand, working “extra hours” may be necessary just to cover monthly expenses, or may be insufficient to cover the month. Second, institutional credit through department stores and supermarkets is often necessary in order to “make it to the end of the month.” Yet, as we also have seen in chapter 1, the unpredictability of work is at odds with predictable monthly debt payments, but this unpredictability also means that credit must be relied on.
Third, there is an intense moralism articulated around the relations of the poor to consumer goods. This moralism may be related to an image of the poor as nonmodern or precariously modern. In this view, consumer goods bring the poor into modernity, and being deprived of consumer goods then qualifies a household to be a recipient of state intervention and aid. But, at the same time, many households do have consumer goods, and it is the plethora of consumer goods that feeds arguments that the poor are engaged in profligate spending: that they are not being “responsible” consumers. Thus, we can understand Valentina's gesture of pointing at the television and her vehement remark that it is an achievement. The argument about profligate spending not only forecloses a consideration of the multiple demands and desires that the poor experience but also asserts and demands a hyperausterity and hyper-rationality of the poor that those who are not poor—and who do not struggle to get to the end of the month—could simply never live up to. It grounds decision making in the division of reason and emotion. And it limits poverty to survival, but in doing so, forecloses careful attention to how need might be enmeshed in a whole range of relations.6
GOVERNMENT OF THE POOR
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