Deprivatizing Anxiety

The essay “We Are All Very Anxious” by the Institute of Precarious Consciousness argues that each phase of capitalism is organized around a particular affect.¹ In an earlier, Fordist, era, it was boredom that was the ‘dominant reactive affect.’ Repetitive labor on production lines engendered boredom, both the central form of subjugation under Fordism, and also the source of a new oppositional politics. It could be argued that the failure of the traditional left is tied up with its inability to adequately engage with this politics of boredom. The latter wasn’t articulated via trade unions or political parties, but via the cultural politics of the Situationists and the punks. It was neoliberalism, not the organized left, that was best able to absorb and instrumentalize this critique of boredom. Neoliberalism quickly moved to associate Fordist factories and the stability and security of social democracy with tedium, predictability and top-down bureaucracy. In its place, neoliberalism offered excitement and unpredictability—but the downside of these newly fluid conditions was and still is perpetual anxiety. Anxiety is the emotional state that correlates with the (economic, social, existential) precariousness, which neoliberal governance has normalized.

The Institute of Precarious Consciousness was right to observe that too much anti-capitalist politics is locked into strategies and perspectives that were formed in an era when the struggle was against boredom. It is also correct to argue both that capitalism has effectively solved the problem of boredom, and that it is crucial that the left finds ways of politicizing anxiety. Neoliberal culture —which came to dominance as the anti-psychiatry movement was waning—has individualized depression and anxiety. Or rather, many cases of depression and anxiety are the effects of neoliberalism’s successful tendency to privatize stress, to convert political antagonisms into medical conditions.

Beyond the individual cases of depression, though, we must also talk of a collective depression that could not be experienced collectively. This depression was collective in the sense that it was very widespread, but it was not a collective experience, precisely because it took the form of a decomposition of collectivity in new modes of atomization.

One difference between sadness and depression is that, while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive’s world extend to every conceivable horizon. In the depths of the condition, the depressive does not experience his or her melancholia as pathological or indeed abnormal. The conviction of depression that agency is useless, that beneath the appearance of virtue lies only venality, strikes sufferers as a truth which they have reached but others are too deluded to grasp. There is clearly a relationship between the seeming ‘realism’ of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and what I have called capitalist realism: the view that there is no viable alternative to capitalism.

Denied the stable forms of employment that they had been trained to expect, deprived of the solidarity formerly provided by trade unions, workers found themselves forced into competition with one another on an ideological terrain in which such competition was naturalized. Some workers never recovered from the traumatic shock of seeing the Fordist, social democratic world suddenly removed, and remain permanent psychic casualties of neoliberalism.

Yet even those within relatively stable forms of employment are not immune from the effects of precarity. This is best understood not as a particular form of employment so much as an existential condition. Many workers now have to periodically revalidate their status via systems of ‘continuous professional development’; almost all work, no matter how menial, involves self-surveillance systems in which the worker is required to assess their own performance. Pay is increasingly correlated to output, albeit an output that is no longer easily measurable in material terms. For most workers, there is no such thing as the long term. As sociologist Richard Sennett put it in his book The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, the post-Fordist worker “lives in a world marked […] by short-term flexibility and flux […] Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connection.”² Throughout history, humans have learned to come to terms with the traumatic upheavals caused by war or natural disasters. However, “What’s peculiar about uncertainty today,” Sennett points out, “is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism.”³ It isn’t only work that has become more tenuous. The neoliberal attacks on public services, welfare programs and trade unions mean that we are increasingly living in a world deprived of security or solidarity. The consequence of the normalization of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalized anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle.

This restlessness, this twitch, is amplified by digital communication technology. What characterizes the present moment more than our anxious checking? This encompasses both checking our messages—which may bring opportunities or demands, often both at the same time—or, more abstractly, checking our status, which, like the stock market is constantly under review, never finally resolved. As soon as there is email, there are no longer working hours or a workplace. This is one of the major factors that contributes to our permanent state of restlessness: The expansion of the category of work itself. “In an eccentric and an extreme society like ours,” argue Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming in their book Dead Man Working, “working has assumed a universal presence—a ‘worker’s society’ in the worst sense of the term—where even the unemployed and children become obsessed with it.”⁴ Work now colonizes weekends, late evenings, even our dreams. As Cederström and Fleming point out: “Under Fordism, weekends and leisure time were still relatively untouched. Today, however, capital seeks to exploit our sociality in all spheres of work. When we all become ‘human capital’ we not only have a job, or perform a job. We are the job.”⁵

There’s no escape—and not only because work expands without limits. Such processes have also hacked into libido, so that the ‘tethering’ imposed by digital telecommunications is by no means always experienced as something that is straightforwardly unpleasant. Sherry Turkle argues, for example, that though many parents are increasingly stressed as they try to keep up with e-mail and messages while also giving attention to their children, they are also magnetically attracted to their communications technology. She writes that: “They cannot take a vacation without bringing the office with them; their office is on their cell phone. They complain that their employers rely on them to be continually online but then admit that their devotion to their communications devices exceeds all professional expectations.”⁶

Practices ostensibly undertaken for work, even if they are performed on holiday or late at night, are not experienced simply as unreasonable demands. From a psychoanalytic point of view, it is easy to see why such demands—demands that cannot possibly be met—can be libidinized, since this kind of demand is precisely the form that the psychoanalytic drive assumes. Jodi Dean has convincingly argued that digital communicative compulsion constitutes a capturing of the Freudian or Lacanian drive: individuals are locked into repeating loops, aware that their activity is pointless, but nevertheless unable to desist.⁷ This ceaseless circulation of digital communication lies beyond the pleasure principle. The insatiable urge to check messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion, akin to scratching an itch that gets worse the more one scratches. Like all compulsions, this behavior feeds on dissatisfaction. If there are no messages, you feel disappointed and check again very quickly. But if there are messages you also feel disappointed: no amount of messages is ever enough. Sherry Turkle has talked to people who are unable to resist the urge to send and receive texts on their mobile telephone, even when they are driving a car. At the risk of a labored pun, this is a perfect example of death drive, which is defined not by the desire to die, but by being in the grip of a compulsion so powerful that it makes one indifferent to death.

The expansion and libidinization of work, the generalization of anxiety, are the psychic consequences of the triumph of the neoliberal project. It is crucial, however, that we do not understand neoliberalism on its own terms—that is, to say, we must not see it as a primarily ‘economic’ doctrine. David Graeber has argued that:

Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties. […] But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and over determining the future.⁸

If neoliberalism must be understood as a political project to depoliticize labor, then one of its aims has been the elimination of the very concept of class from contemporary discourse—an aim that it achieved all too successfully.

At this point, it is therefore crucial that we remind ourselves of the importance of class, and try to assess if there are any possibilities in the current conjuncture for class consciousness to re-emerge. In “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” an important essay written nearly twenty years ago now, Fredric Jameson pointed out how “the denunciation of class—even amongst Marxists—has become an obligatory gesture today, as though we all know that race, gender and ethnicity were more satisfactory concepts or more fundamental, prior, concrete, existential experiences.”⁹ Jameson warned that it “would be a great mistake for Marxism to abandon this extraordinarily rich and virtually untouched fields of analysis on the grounds that class categories were somehow old-fashioned and Stalinist and needed to be renounced shamefacedly in advance, in order for Marxism to stage a respectable and streamlined reappearance in the field of intellectual debate in the new world system.”¹⁰ Sadly, this now reads less like a warning than a prophetic account of the emergence of a left that has indeed jettisoned class as an embarrassing relic.

It is worth recalling that class does not—and cannot—have any sort of official existence in capitalism. Capitalism is supposed to have rid us of feudalism’s encasements. The point of Marx’s critique of the French Revolution was to expose this as an illusion, or, rather, only a partial truth. Instead of delivering the universality it promised, the French Revolution amounted to the takeover by a particular class, the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, in a certain sense, this class didn’t even act in its own interests, but in the interests of the real ruling power on earth, capital.

Yet a return to the so-called strict Marxist definition of class—the idea that class is determined by relationship to means of production—will not be sufficient. One problem with this definition is that, on its own, it does nothing to counter capitalism’s claims to meritocracy and classlessness. It tells us nothing about why there is a class system—why, that is, whole groups of people have their relationship to the ‘means of production’ effectively fixed. A proper analysis of class demands an account of the—cultural, sociological, ‘psychological’—forces that perform this fixing. Moreover, far from being the only proper Marxist account of class, the very economism of this definition is opposed to the spirit of Marx’s analysis, which disdained ‘the economic’ as the bourgeois category par excellence. And, it’s probably worth also noting that, at least since the 1970s, the concept of ‘production’ has for many reasons proved very problematic. All of the current emphases on so-called ‘immaterial labor’ point to the inadequacy of the old concept of ‘means of production’ for grasping the nature of capitalist exploitation today.

An adequate understanding of class requires us to get to grips with the question of subordination, and how it is produced. “Class consciousness,” Jameson argued in “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” “turns first and foremost around the question of subalternity, that is around the experience of inferiority. This means that the ‘lower classes carry around within their heads unconscious convictions as to the superiority of hegemonic or ruling-class expressions or values, which they equally transgress and repudiate in ritualistic (and socially and politically ineffective) ways.”¹¹ This marking as inferior is fundamental. Although we could say that, in the ordinary course of things, the assumption of inferiority isn’t directly ‘experienced’ at all; rather, it functions as an unconscious frame which shapes and conditions all experience.

As the psychotherapist David Smail—whose work is a major resource for understanding the connections between class and so-called mental illness—explains:As the psychotherapist David Smail—whose work is a major resource for understanding the connections between class and so-called mental illness—explains:

Power is maintained within class groupings through the process of distinguishing the superior from the inferior by means of signs, which cannot easily be faked. In English society particularly, the possession of money is by no means enough to gain admission to the higher reaches of class distinction. ‘Breeding,’ to pass as genuine, has to show the signs of having been acquired naturally, rather as native speakers of a particular language can be usually be distinguished from those who have learned to speak as a secondary acquisition. What demonstrates the entitlement of the upper classes to their position are the ease and familiarity, the assurance with which they move about a world, which at every level and in every domain is peppered with indications as well as tests of their distinction.¹²

Yet the subordinate group is not merely lacking in relation to the dominant class. Once the machineries of subordination are revealed through class consciousness, the subordinate group has a capacity for a knowledge of society which is greater than that of the dominant group. The very ease and familiarity in the world of the dominant group, the lack of discontinuities in its experience, means that it lives in ideology in a way that the subordinate group never can.

One of the most powerful and painful explorations of such machines of inferiority in English literature becomes clear in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Pip has been taken to the house of the rich woman, Miss Havisham, and made to play with her ward, the beautiful and haughty Estella. Estella humiliates Pip by mocking his ‘coarse hands’ and ‘common boots.’ Afterwards, when he reflects on the encounter, Pip feels a profound sense of shame:

I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was not favorable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever taught me to call those picture cards Jacks, which ought to be called knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then I should have been so too.¹³

Here, the sense of shame and inferiority that had previously formed the background of Pip’s experience—a vague frame—comes to the foreground. But this foregrounding is very far from constituting class consciousness. Pip internalizes this sense of shame, seeing his own self now from the perspective of the dominant class. Class consciousness, by contrast, would entail a rejection both of interiority and of the dominant class perspective. The affect of shame would be de-privatized, understood as an effect of the class system. Class consciousness does not involve, therefore, an experience with a positive content. It is, rather that class consciousness is a cognitive shift that emerges from discontinuities in/ of experience, discontinuities that result from living in two worlds. These are the dominant world, the world that generates what is taken to be ‘normal,’ and the subordinate world, which is defined in all sorts of ways as inadequate in relation to this dominant reality.

Pip’s shame and his pursuit of wealth and success are a kind of parable for what has happened under neoliberalism. With the infrastructures that sustained working class solidarity dismantled, the working class was left isolated. Additionally, it became vulnerable to the shaming generated by a neoliberal ideology, which maintained that success and wealth are available to anyone who works hard enough. How can this be reversed? Certainly, we need to produce (or re-discover) a sense of agency that will make class consciousness possible again. Plainly, this is a massive task and one that will likely involve the re-invention of older structures (such as parties and unions), as well as the invention of new political forms. As part of this process, we will need also to reverse the depoliticization of anxiety that has happened over the last thirty years. This might look something like the resumption of the anti-psychiatric movement that stalled as neoliberalism moved towards hegemonic domination. It might involve a new, collective form of therapy—a form of therapy that would explore the wounds of class by rejecting the individualization that is at the root of our current therapeutic culture.

1. Available online at: http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/
2. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York, NY: Norton, 1998), 30
3. Richard Sennett, ibid, 31.
4. Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working (Winchester, UK/Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2012), 2.
5. Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, ibid,, 7.
6. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More Form Technology and Less from Each Other (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2011), 264
7. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010).
8. David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, available online at: http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit#.
9. Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” New Left Review 209 (Jan–Feb, 1995), 92.
10. Fredric Jameson, ibid., 95.
11. Fredric Jameson, ibid, 93.
12. David Smail, Origins of Unhappiness (London: Karnac Books, 2015), 43.
13. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, available online at: http://literature.org/authors/dickens-charles/great-expectations/chapter-08.html