« Each phase of capitalism has a particular affect which holds it together. As long as the dominant affect is [personalised], it remains effective, and strategies against it will not emerge. The problem is only visible at an individual, psychological level; the social causes of the problem are concealed. Each phase blames the system’s victims for the suffering that the system causes.
[Until WWII], the dominant affect was misery. In the 19th century, the dominant narrative was that capitalism leads to general enrichment. The public secret of this narrative was the misery of the working class. … When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid-20th century, the dominant public narrative was that the standard of living—which widened access to consumption, healthcare and education—was rising. Everyone in the rich countries was happy, and the poor countries were on their way to development. The public secret was that everyone was bored. This was an effect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s—a system based on full-time jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, … and the co-optation of the labour movement which had been built to fight misery. Job security and welfare provision reduced misery, but jobs were boring, made up of simple, repetitive tasks.
If the first wave of social movements were a machine for fighting misery, the second wave (of the 1960s-70s) were a machine for fighting boredom. Most tactics of this era were/are ways to escape the work-consume-die cycle. … In the feminist movement, the “housewife malaise” was theorised as systemic in the 1960s. … The mid-century reorientation from misery to boredom was crucial to the emergence of a new wave of revolt. We are the tail end of this wave. Just as the tactics of the first wave still work when fighting misery, so the tactics of the second wave still work when fighting boredom. The difficulty is that we are less often facing boredom as the main enemy. This is why militant resistance is caught in its current impasse.
Capitalism has largely absorbed the struggle against boredom. … Companies have adopted flattened management models inciting employees to not only manage, but invest their souls in, their work. Consumer society now provides a wider range of niche products and constant distraction. … Capitalism has encouraged the growth of mediatised secondary identities—the self portrayed through social media, visible consumption, and lifelong learning—which have to be obsessively maintained.
In contemporary capitalism, the dominant reactive affect is anxiety. Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. When discussed at all, [anxiety] is understood as individual psychological problems, often blamed on faulty thought patterns or poor adaptation. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination. One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multi-faceted omnipresent web of surveillance. We need to think about the ways in which a neoliberal idea of success inculcates these surveillance mechanisms inside the subjectivities and life-stories of most of the population. We need to think about how people’s deliberate and ostensibly voluntary self-exposure, through social media, visible consumption and choice of positions within the field of opinions, also assumes a performance in the field of the perpetual gaze of virtual others. We need to think about the ways in which this gaze inflects how we find, measure and know one another, as co-actors in an infinitely watched perpetual performance.
… The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally. Precarity leads to generalised hopelessness; a constant bodily excitation without release. … The situation feels hopeless and inescapable, but it isn’t. It feels this way because of effects of precarity—constant over-stress, the contraction of time into an eternal present, the vulnerability of each separated (or systemically mediated) individual, the system’s dominance of all aspects of social space. … Structurally, the system is vulnerable. The reliance on anxiety is a desperate measure, used in the absence of stronger forms of conformity.
If the first wave [of anti-capitalist revolt] provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have. […] »
— “We Are All Very Anxious” (published May 9, 2017)
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