The camper van is a symbol of precariousness, but of the deluxe kind. It is the middle class dream of wealth, a campervan and you can transport your kids to good places, it affords you the adventure but with a house in a shell attached to it. It is wanting an adventure but not too adventurous. But at the same time is the most mobile form of mass travel that we invented. So, what, why, how to make the connection between our topic and our form of research? Precarity and education is a deluxe kind of problem. I am not sure about the post-operaist intertwining of what appear to me 2 very distinct conditions of existence. On the one hand there are those who temp because one day they want to be special, and on the other there are those who temp just because. It is not a matter of conditions that changes, both free labour and precariousness are nasty enough, complex enough not to reduce the problem to a matter of money.
The camper van reminds me also of the unite states and their dreams… a dreaming nation, where people in Alabama or Luisiana would spend quite some money on luxurious models of trailers that will never get moved around anyway, and they just live there. The pretentious aesthetics of those camper houses. Their smell of cheap hair spray is one of my stronger tactile impressions of the states. I went to hear a talk about a group of architects who set up a school in Alabama and are now building very interesting houses for a very poor county, getting people to move from trailers to this new homes made with the free labour of the architecture school students. It is a good project, especially since trailers value goes down really quickly , opposite to property. The scary part is that now corporations are flirting with the school offering for their students the opportunity to design fresh looking buildings for them. Bingo.

V.