Anxious and precarious: entanglements of affect and labour in contemporary culture

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic has made it palpable, anxieties can turn into pervasive affects with detrimental effects on the psychological well-being of the individual. To be anxious is to be on edge, not only psychologically, but also ontologically and existentially; or to use Heidegger’s terms, it is to be in a state of “groundless floating”. 1 Ranging from general anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and phobias to the simple sentiment of being out of sort, anxieties operate as harbingers of imminent disruptions. Often linked with the concept of “disorder”, anxieties are mostly mentioned in a context that frames personal and socio-economic behavioural patterns in terms of pathology, normality, and abnormality, which implicitly refer to normative views of what constitutes a fulfilled, ’good’ life. It is no coincidence that anxiety, as a heightened state of insecurity and being-alarmed, has been on the rise because of the radical transformations of the welfare state and the liberalisation (i.e., deregulation) of the labour market. These macroeconomic factors have eroded former assurances and made normative fantasies of the ‘good life’, centred around notions of upward mobility, job security, meritocracy, increasingly unattainable. Lauren Berlant famously called “the emergence of a precarious public sphere” in which “optimistic objects/scenarios that had once held the space open for the good-life fantasy”, while under pressure, are still the object of our strife, a state of “cruel optimism.” 2 While anxiety seems to be omnipresent, it also runs counter to what has been described as the official happiness agenda, i.e., the ensemble of practices and instruments to measure and foster our sense of contentment,