Word of the Day: Heteronomy
How we get pushed around, or not.
noun
het·er·on·o·my
ˌhe-tə-ˈrä-nə-mē
: subjection to something else
especially : a lack of moral freedom or self-determination
For this reason, the passage from Arab spring to Arab winter should be understood first and foremost as a narrative of self-determination, choice, and consequences, not as a story of heteronomy and external imposition.—New York Times, 12 May 2020
What the book calls the "wage relationship" refers to a position on the labor market rather than a real social relationship conceived as more or less antagonistic, structured by power relations and likely to carry political socialization effects. If, on the employees' side, concrete work is not very visible, similarly, the other part of the wage relationship, the employer, remains invisible. However, between the figure of the state-boss who lends himself more easily to the politicization of the wage relationship, that of the small artisanal boss that we rub shoulders with on a daily basis and who can be perceived as an ally against the "big guys" (which we saw in the yellow vest movement), or the temporary employment agency or the anonymous transnational boss who obscure, each in a different way, the figure of the employer, we can hypothesize that there are elements here that can lead to differentiated political behaviors. The question would then be how to succeed in objectivizing these experiences of work which are also varied experiences of subordination in employment. This would be another way of returning to the question of autonomy at work dear to Coutrot, by dwelling a little more on the different nuances of heteronomy in work.
| Karel Yon, Focale Collective, Popular Votes! The Social Bases of Electoral Polarization in the 2017 Presidential Election