Unstable capitalist work undermines self-narratives that human rights discourse then redeems

Evidence

In an essay on flexible capitalism at the close of the twentieth century, Richard Sennett has argued that the highly unstable conditions of work in America are making a coherent narrative of the self—and therefore the realization of “character”—increasingly difficult. It is possible (although this is not Sennett’s argument) that this new stage in the growing anxiety about the private self is not unconnected to the increasing insistence on the redemptive quality of human rights at a global level. When the secularist ideological order separating public politics from private belief is seen to crumble, the new terrain is occupied by a discourse of human rights that can be taken as either sacred or profane. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 748

Categorization

• XREF: Direct bridge to Cooper: the dissolution of stable work-based identity under flexibilized capitalism (Sennett) opens the space the moralized rights/responsibility discourse fills.
• SEED: Essay angle: how economic precarity manufactures the very redemptive-subject rhetoric that legitimates austerity — a synthesis of Sennett, Asad, and Cooper.
• QUESTION: Asad’s speculation that rights discourse rises precisely as work-based identity dissolves is worth checking against Cooper’s post-2008 moral-capitalism account.