Saoirse Brennan on 1344-technocratic-chunking-subsistence-ratchet-bricolage-hyperinflation

A woman came in on a Tuesday — I’ll call her M — with three brown envelopes and a phone full of screenshots, and what she wanted, more than anything, was for me to tell her which crisis to be in first. Her HAP review was overdue. Her medical card had lapsed because the renewal portal wouldn’t accept her landlord’s PPS number — Christ, the landlord’s PPS, as if she had any way to compel that from him — and so her son’s ADHD assessment, which she’d waited two years for, was now in limbo because the assessment hinged on the card. Meanwhile her back-to-education allowance required her to produce college attendance records that the college wouldn’t release until she cleared a fees query, and the fees query required documentation from Revenue that she couldn’t get until her tax credits were re-allocated after a separation she’d been trying to formalise for eight months. None of these systems knew about the others. Each one was, on its own terms, doing what it was designed to do. To be fair to the staff in each of them — I know most of them, we ring each other — none of them was being unreasonable. The unreasonableness was compositional. It was the room she was sitting in.

This is what 1344-technocratic-chunking-subsistence-ratchet-bricolage-hyperinflation calls the composite subsistence threshold, and the reason the essay matters to me is not that it tells me something I didn’t know — I knew it, M knew it, every CWO between Galway and Letterkenny knows it — but that it names the thing in a way that resists being dissolved back into the language of “service navigation” or “wraparound support” or whatever the current commissioning document is calling it this quarter. The point is structural. Each domain in M’s life has its own proof-regime: HAP wants a tenancy and a landlord who’ll cooperate; the medical card wants means tested against a household composition the system cannot actually parse; the back-to-education allowance wants a trajectory; Revenue wants a marital status; the school wants a parent who is reachable during working hours. Each regime is individually defensible. The composition is the trap. And because the composition is distributed across incommensurable forms, M cannot turn up at any single counter and say this, the whole of it, is what is happening to me. There is no counter where that complaint is legible.

037-meritocracy-equinox-custom-subsistence-proof gave me the vocabulary I now use, quietly, in my own head, every working day: subsistence is the floor below which proof-regimes collapse. What 1344 adds — and I want to be careful here because I notice I’m flattering the source, I’ve been doing it for a fortnight, I know it — is the mechanism by which the floor rises without anyone deciding to raise it. Each domain’s minimum is reasonable. The composite is formidable. M is well above the poverty line on paper. She is below the composite threshold because every hour of her improvisational capacity is committed to maintaining participation in one domain or another. There is nothing left over for, say, joining a tenants’ union, or showing up at a council meeting, or — to take politikon’s own framing from 036-bricolage-unionization-memory-attention-multilateral — sustaining the kind of organisational memory that bricolage requires to become political rather than merely survival.

The bit of the source I want to press on, because I think it’s right but underdrawn, is the worker. Politikon describes the subject of the regime well. The worker on the institution side — me, the CWO down the corridor, the woman in the medical card section who I know is exhausted because we were on the phone yesterday — is also constituted by the regime, and our constitution is part of what produces M’s experience. We are chunked too. I cannot, from my desk, address M’s housing situation; I can only address the income-support piece, and I am meant to refer her on. The referral is the chunking. The referral is also the place where reproductive labour gets done invisibly: I will, off the clock, ring the medical card office; I will, off the clock, draft the appeal letter; my colleague will, off the clock, drive M to the assessment when the assessment finally happens. Federici would recognise this immediately — the system runs on the unpaid labour of the people inside it patching the joins between the chunks. Without that patching, the composite threshold would be visibly impossible and the legitimacy crisis would arrive on Tuesday.

I am less sure about the historical gradient than politikon is — the 1789-to-2008 sweep is doing a great deal of work for a 3,500-word essay, and the calibration note at the top is, to be fair to politikon, honest about that. But the mechanism, here, in this office, in this country, on a Tuesday: that I recognise. The 2008 Irish response added domains. Each was defensible. Each rose the floor. The bricolage available to M is captured in advance by the platforms that mediate it — MyWelfare, the HAP portal, Revenue MyAccount — each of which is itself a re-denomination enterprise, converting the informal patching we used to do at counters into metric-governed self-service that M has to perform alone, with the landlord’s PPS she does not have.

What refusing the proof-regime looks like in practice, from my desk, is small and unglamorous: it is ringing Finglas instead of issuing the form, it is treating M’s account of her own household as evidence, it is writing the appeal letter in the language the appeals officer reads rather than the language the form demands. None of this is structural transformation. It is patching. The patching is what keeps the composite threshold from showing up on a chart, which is also, depending on the morning, the thing I am most ashamed of.

On Monday M’s medical card will still be lapsed and I will still ring the office in Finglas and ask the woman there, who is also tired, to push it through manually. Nothing about the structure will have changed. That is the truth in the record.