../diaries of
an unemployable
marxist sociologist

We Are Still Very Anxious

A body-based approach to anxiety under neoliberalism

In 2014, a collective named the Institute for Precarious Consciousness (ICP) wrote an article called We Are All Very Anxious, which became a somewhat seminal piece in leftist-political approaches to the mental health crisis. The ICP argue that anxiety is a predictable effect of neoliberal policies and cultural changes, and that it is the dominant affect of our time. Since then, countless pieces have been published documenting the skyrocketing rates in anxiety disorders and its increasing prevalence as a widespread societal pathology. The ICP also identify anxiety as a major barrier to collective organising against capital, as it commonly leads to people shutting themselves off in an attempt at self-preservation, rather than reaching out towards building collective solutions.

I want to take a bit of a closer look at anxiety as a physiological process, as a material manifestation of how our bodies interact with social structures, cultural ideals, and economic realities. I often hear anxiety described as a somewhat abstract feeling, without exploring the intense physiological sensations of it, and how these can come about from the ways our bodies react to and interact with the messy world of our complex sociocultural systems. Describing anxiety as a feeling makes it seem almost immaterial, even though feelings are always also a physiological state of the body.

Spaces of Refuge

On creative and intellectual work under late capitalism

The other day I listened to a podcast with Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist slash leftist intellectual. When he was talking about his reasons for going into academia in the 1970s, he said something that struck me.

He recounted how he became an academic because he felt uncomfortable with the way society worked. Critics of society often become intellectuals because that is the only space in which they can exist authentically. He said he became an academic because he did not want to belong to society the way it was, and academia offered him a place at least somewhat outside of it.

This got me thinking about academia today, and whether there are any spaces left where writers, critics, and artists can thrive. I have considered going into academia myself, and remain conflicted about it due to both my own and my friend’s experiences within contemporary academia. I almost felt a sting of pain when Carlo implied that academia was a kind of refuge for him. Because it doesn’t feel that way for me, though I wish it did.