The Law Is All Over: Power, Resistance and the Legal Consciousness on the Welfare

Poor

- I suggest that the legal consciousness of the welfare poor is a consciousness of

power and domination, in which the keynote is enclosure and dependency, and a
consciousness of resistance, in which welfare recipients assert themselves and
demand recognition of their personal identities and their human needs. Law is, for
people in welfare, repeatedly encountered in the most ordinary transactions and
events of their lives. Law its immediate and powerful because being on welfare
means having a significant part of one’s life organized by a regime of legal rules to
claim jurisdiction over choices and decisions which those not on welfare would
regard as personal and private. The public assistance means becoming a legal
subject more than a natural subject: puts it a mask. Precisely, it´s the mask Lemaitre
(2011) was talking about in the value of the human. Also, it’s the mask I talk about
in my exam essay. The individual has to transform its practices to fit in an
imaginary subject recipient that is the welfare recipient. Even thus the rights-
protecting movement has limited the sphere of action of this form, it still has force:
it’s a web enclosure in which they are caught, an irresistible and inescapable
presence.
- ¿What´s legal consciousness? the same as ideology, the way similarly situated
persons come to see the world in similar ways. This parts from the idea that the
subjectivity is not free floating and autonomous but is, instead, constituted in a
historical contingent matter.
- Legality functions as the communicator between the poor welfare recipient and their
pressing needs.
- For Spencer the power of legal rules and practices is derived, at leas in part, from
the incomplete, yet authoritative, representation of law’s categories and abstractions
by officials authorized to say what the law is (Bourdieu talks about this). They are
caught inside rules, but are, at the same time, excluded from its interpretive
community.
- Welfare recipients are trapped or ‘caught’, because they are involved in an outgoing
series of transactions whit official visibly engaged in the interpretation and use of
rules, the welfare poor have access to inside knowledge not generally available to
those whose contacts whit law are more episodic or from whom law is less visible.
This inside knowledge means, as we will see, that they have a few illusions about
what law is and what can it do, that makes them resists the ‘they say’ and ‘supposed
to’ of the welfare bureaucracy. So on, they use legal ideas to interpret and make
sense of their relationship to the welfare bureaucracy even as they refine those ideas
by making claims the meaning and moral content of which are often at variance
whit dominant understandings by making use of the cracks that particular
conjunctions open in proprietary powers.