Demand #9 Institute for Precarious Consciousness: Abolish the control society – and the mass-production of stress and anxiety in the workplace, society, and public life
Guest demand by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness
There is a current, widespreadpattern of regulation, surveillance, micro-management, and control extendingacross a range of social spheres. In the workplace, these include measures suchas surveillance, quality benchmarks and performance goals (often unachievable), and vulnerability to easy firing. In public spaces, they include things like CCTV, threatening posters connected to crackdowns, the presence of police and wardens, and the criminalisation of a range of deviant uses of space (begging, loitering, etc). Other manifestations of the same pattern include benefit sanctions and requirements, Internet and phone surveillance, the proliferation of broad and vague laws, anti-protest tactics such as kettling, and the spread of biometric technologies and ID systems.
The psychological and social effect of this process is a mass production of anxiety and related psychological problems (including trauma, fatigue, depression, and impotent rage). Unable to let our guard down in any space for fear of violating a minor prohibition or falling behind the required performance level, most people have become hypervigilant and excessively stressed. We are increasingly unable to listen to our own bodies, to relate compassionately to one another, or to marshal the courage and willpower to resist.
This issue is bigger than one or another tactic or mechanism of management or surveillance. It is built into the fabric of neoliberal social organisation and its way of responding to social problems – the assumption that more or better top-down regulation is a (cost-free) cure-all, and that security and efficiency provide sufficient justifications for intrusive measures which destroy the openness of spaces and the autonomy of individuals and groups. We need to expose the psychological costs of a hyper-regulated society, combat the managerialisation and securitisation of space, and create spaces which refuse these kinds of logics, so as to reconstruct our abilities to relax, concentrate, empathise, communicate, formulate autonomous desires, and struggle against dominant institutions. Let’s create localised economies and subsistence mechanisms to reduce vulnerability to the system, and slow-pace ‘listening’ spaces to slow down the pace of life. Let’s create new forms of consciousness-raising to learn about the psychological impact of the present system and theorise its mechanisms. Let’s demand on a psychological level the same right not to be destroyed, enslaved or tortured by the system that we demand on a physical and material level. Let’s create a world of unmanageable subjects, and forms of life through which such subjects can be reproduced. Let’s rediscover our inner core of creativity and autonomy, and recreate a world where we can live through joy, not fear.
13th March 2015
