few decades, wars, the redrawing of nation-state boundaries, and the restructuring of ethnic and citizenship categories have stranded people in temporary zones and camps that have calcified into permanence. The UNHCR estimates there are over 65.6. million forcibly displaced people worldwide, of whom approximately two-thirds are internally displaced and therefore unprotected by International Law (UNHCR 2016).11 In the same year, UNHCR estimated there were 10 million stateless individuals (ibid.). A crisis of recognition draws attention once again to the challenge of alterity: how to unite without forcing assimilation (Povinelli 2002), how, to return to the previous section, to recognize difference and common humanity. In such contexts, indeterminacy has typically been theorized as an undesirable condition, imposed by state authority, where resistance is the positive counter move to regain or remake political subjectivities.
Michel Agier documents a further “disquieting ambiguity” of refugee camps: humanitarian interventions that appear to be linked disturbingly to penal technologies of containment, and are an exercise in “managing the undesirables” (2010). He suggests a growing and carefully maintained division between “a clean, healthy and visible world … [and] the world’s residual ‘remnants,’ dark, diseased and invisible” (2010: 4). Following Giorgio Agamben (1998), Agier describes states of permanent precariousness where a rhetoric of constant emergency means that refugee camps “exclude past and future” in an exceptional but enduring present (2010: 79). Nicholas De Genova (2002) and Sarah Willen (2007) similarly focus on the production of migrants’ illegal statuses and spaces—and their attempts to resist ambiguity. Recently, a series of interventions have highlighted resistance, reclamation, and the forging of new political subjectivities in these atemporal, aspatial spaces (Gabiam 2016; Turner 2012) even when simple existence can be taken as resistance (Schiocchet 2010: 67). Julie Peteet notes that, for example, in Palestinian refugee camps, young men re-ascribe meaning to beatings as rites of passage that constitute forms of masculinity (2005).
Agamben shows that those who are excluded from society live exposed and threatened lives (1998: 29). Such impositions of structural indeterminacy go beyond ascriptions of criminality and move toward the negation of humanity—as in the evacuation of meaning (Thorleifsson and Eriksen this volume) of the common use of tropes for unwanted migrants as indiscernible, uncountable masses (Alexander this volume). The number of unregistered people who fall between the cracks is growing as states militarize borders, tighten population classifications, and control measures for “homeland security,” and restrict welfare to those with the right kind of identification documents. In 2014, the World Health Organization estimated that, as a consequence of such measures, two-thirds of deaths and nearly half the number of births globally are unrecorded (WHO 2017).
Alongside the indeterminate status of the world’s “outlaws” and refugees, late capitalism has intensified conditions of precarity in the working lives of people in ostensibly stable political environments. Marx highlighted the reserve army of unemployed that kept nineteenth-century capitalism ticking. But now, cheaper labor can easily be found elsewhere in the world. Mechanization often replaces the need for bodies at all. Weakening labor legislation, the growth of unpaid internships, “zero hour” contracts, and corrupt or emasculated trade unions all contribute to contemporary economic precarity. Even when work is available, it may be poorly paid, unreliable, part-time, and insufficient for a livelihood. Such flexible labor has been enabled by financial deregulation and the easy global movement of capital (Harvey 1987). The essential character of formal employment has been transformed, not only rendering previous working-class identities indeterminate but as Richard-Michael Diedrich suggests for unemployed Welsh former miners, “steadily dissolving what the individual had believed to be the stable core of his … identity” (2004: 117). The ethnographic emphasis here has been on how precariously employed persons experience their labor; studies show it is often felt as extreme vulnerability (Allison 2012; Genda 2005; Gill and Pratt 2008; Hann and Parry 2018; Millar 2014; Mole 2010; Munck 2013; Sanchez 2016; Standing 2011).
Indeterminacy has become the dominant condition of insecure work in many industries as “permanent impermanence” normalizes ostensibly temporary contracts within regular structures of production. Employment conditions and forms are thus seemingly predictable and fixed through time, yet are underpinned by profound insecurity, collapsing previously clear distinctions between regular and casual work (Sanchez 2018: 235).
In such a context of increasing political and economic indeterminacy, Hudson McFann suggests a chilling typology of how humans-as-waste (see Mbembe 2011; Yates 2011) have been produced, typically as a product of ordering regimes such as colonialism, modernity, and capitalism (McFann n.d.), which both depend on and produce surplus people, lands, and materials. Hudson McFann’s typology describes the symbolic deployment of the concept of waste (following Douglas’s 1966 structuralist account and Julia Kristeva’s 1982 notion of the abject); the biopolitical (such as Foucault’s accounts of state ordering) and the politico-economic, informed by a Marxist critique of capitalism that demands a surplus labor population and wastes human bodies (Gidwani 2013; Gidwani and Reddy 2011; Yates 2011). To this we add Zygmunt Bauman’s construction of late modernity as a fluid or liquid condition that seems to counter the rigidity of an ordering regime and yet rehearses expelling unwanted bodies as just so many wasted lives (2013).
Precarity and ambiguity can also generate strategies for living beyond, or in spite of, the state, as Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin Demant Frederiksen and their contributors (2015) trace through their notion of the “grey zone,” where the informal, ephemeral, and ambiguous have become ordinary. Improvisation can intersect with forms of exclusion and regimes of governance based on legibility. The temporalities of indeterminate encounters with the state require attentiveness. It is not only in refugee camps, among asylum seekers, and on the margins of the state (Auyero 2012; Das and Poole 2004;) that suspension and waiting are ways of being and expressions of power hierarchies.12 Akhil Gupta reminds us of the chronic suspension of many giant infrastructure projects (2015), Timothy Choy and Jerry Zee of the chemical and other pollution suspended in the atmosphere that allows/damages life (2015). Samuel Beckett, of course, identified waiting as the human condition (1956).
Just as ordering regimes waste and devalue people, so too are landscapes marked with such regimes’ failures, byproducts, and cast-offs that give the lie to any notion of future-oriented improvement. The often unfulfilled promise of modernity’s grand projects become inscribed upon the landscape as half-built infrastructure and ruins, which point to forgotten futures (Gordillo 2014; Gupta 2015; Hussain 2013; Ringel this volume; Stoler 2013) and shape lives transfixed in a present, waiting either for the past or the future to return, as Paul Wenzel Geissler (2010) so movingly shows through a discussion of the people who continue to live and work in an abandoned colonial field station in Kenya. Both this and Thomas Yarrow’s (2017) account of Ghana’s incomplete Volta Dam project, suggest a different relationship to modernity’s march than suggested by the preceding pages. The failed promises of modernity can be mourned by people who live among the ruins.
Policies devised by such modernist states are typically linked to a specific mode of acting on the world to produce outcomes that are aimed at closure and containment (Hinchcliffe 2001). In the essentially limitless context of the environment and climate such aims are inherently flawed, since certitude can be misplaced and potentially damaging (see Alexander forthcoming; Wynne 1992, 1997). “Dealing with” the wastes of military and industrial extraction, consumption, and production is often only hopeful postponement, appealing to an imagined future state, when science will have caught up with its earlier incarnation and be better able to resolve the endless stream of byproducts and hybrid entities that have qualified “nature.” Buried shrapnel or lurking landmines can also be a source of profound indeterminacy (Henig 2012; Kim 2014), unmapping previously known landscapes. Compared with the relative localization of such military waste, chemical (like nuclear) contamination is “amorphous and invisible” (Broto 2015: 94), exacerbated by the inability to determine the temporal and spatial reach of leaks (Topçu 2008). Pollution and contamination are thus
