We find ourselves mostly in agreeance with, and are fascinated by, the Institute for Precarious Consciousness' text (read here!) on anxiety's role in our age. However, we would still like to illuminate a few features of our post-Fordist, anxiety-driven epoch in hopes that it can spark further discussion.
“The totalitarian society of capital lives on the monotonous repetition of the existant. It serves the owners, the cops, the judges. None of them are indispensable to the structure they serve.
They make a life of shit the only model of life possible.
But communism is young and beautiful.”
- Collective A/Traverso, “Radio Alice-Free Radio”
I
Let us begin by positing that, apropos of the first footnote of the text, anxiety, in the sense that it is planetary, is expierenced as a culmination. The epochs of misey and boredom are entangled into our post-Fordist, money-capital experience of anxiety. Thus it is not only the southern hemisphere that experiences anxiety riddled with misey and boredom. In fact, often times it is anxiety that ensnares us to boredom and misery. It is as much of a vicious cycle as the cliché holds. Whenever someone leaves their routine, she is apt to experience anxiety. Often, many self-help guides that the Institute for Precarious Consciousness criticized suggest that any experiences outside of your routine can cause your anxiety, and thus we should confine ourselves to ritual and regularity as a remedy. We are told to meditate, relax, undertake mindless activity: namely, to do nothing. Hence the pathogens of anxiety settle everywhere, but not soley as anxiety. Our era is an amalgamation consisting of the struggles of the past.
II
For instance, when one plans to leave the stress, boredom, and misery of their work behind, anxiety is the mechanism that "requires" you to return to the security and regularity of work. Adventure is costly.
We are comfortable in our anxiety. We have developed a desire for exigency. So how do we situate a struggle against anxiety when it has become an integral part of our lives? Is relaxation necessary prior to struggle or can anxiety reemerge as a tool to combat capital?
Perhaps in the same way capital mobilizes workers, but mobilizes them for capital, anxiety creates urgencies, and despite the fact that these urgencies manifest a viscious cycle, these urgencies can be channeled against anxiety itself. We need to be anxious for the defeat of anxiety.
A
Capital's recuperation process is the threat of anxiety for misery and boredom.
B
Surveillance is not only accepted internally, but also externally because of anxiety-driven obsessions with regularity and idiosyncratic rituals. Anxiety channels our desires into surveillance vicariously through the blackmail of boredom and misery. “Ritual takes place through repetition, and repetition implies the discontinuity of the material, the irreducibility or materiality to phenomenality” (Judith Butler).
III
You can build on struggle to an irreversible point, but sadly we are not that far from boredom and misery. These are still characteristics experienced in own epoch.
Nonetheless, we agree, the revolutionary theories of the late 19th to 20th centuries are archaic. To apply the methodologies of the past to the struggles of today would be anachronistic. To create a dis-alienated space means to become dis-alienated from our future.
IV
“Here is the strong novelty of militancy today: it repeats the virtues of insurrectional action of two hundred years of subversive experience, but at the same time it is linked to a new world, a world that knows no outside.” - Toni Negri & Michael Hardt, Empire
V
Anxiety, misery, and boredom have an entirely discursive and erratic relationship/network. There is no definite equation. In a sense, this network is asymmetrically exchangeable but not mathmatically commutative.
This misery/boredom/anxiety matrix presents more diffulculties than the
Institute for Precarious Consciousness' formulae allow. If one psyche was always traded for another then there would be no capacity for becoming.
It is not that one grid was exchanged for another, but rather that one grid is placed on top of another—and one seaps into the other.