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Note: for an up to date and fully referenced version of this paper, please read Chapter 5 of my book 'Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era' (Zero Books, 2013). For an updated position on the same arguments, please read my article 'Spent? Capitalism's Growing Problem with Anxiety' in Roar Magazine (link above, under Articles). Anxiety, precarity and depression have become the watchwords of an era wherein continuous productivity, connectivity and alertness is demanded at all hours. The increasing speeds and quantities of information to contend with, increasingly within the personal space of a hand-held media device, is unravelling the old disciplinary times of work and leisure, negating time, space and agency into a flattened society of control (Deleuze 1990). Whilst wary of succumbing to the pessimism of other Critical theorists, this paper uses and develops theory to account for the rising recorded rates of common mental disorders like anxiety, depression and stress. Anxiety is symptomatic of an era of 'non-stop inertia' (Southwood 2011), where workers and non-workers are compelled to produce and consume at all hours, with increasing performativity (Virno 2004), in the face of the vanishing horizon of a sustainable future. This negation of time and space, features of what I call negative capitalism, has generated a specific kind of anxiety, using Tim Berners-Lee's vision of continuous connectivity – 'anything being potentially connected with anything' – machines, information systems and bodies become fused into one organic-biopolitical network (Berners-Lee 2000). The postwar consensus of Keynesianism and social democracy, Fordism and psychoanalysis, marked by a socialised politic, has shifted to post-Fordism, neoliberalism, psychopharmacology, an economic politic, where disorder is managed by mathematical-scientific reasoning and marketised interventions. Finally, a strategy of collective 'CBT' is outlined that identifies the cause of this anxiety, enacting a catharsis to overcome the collective feeling of anxiety and fear.
This chapter argues that a core driver in the spread of psychopharmaceuticals has been the ability of such products since the 1980s to serve key aims of the neoliberal political economy. It will argue that the proliferation and normalisation of psychopharmaceutical consumption – enabled through the processes of medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation – would not have enjoyed such rapid ascent had surrounding political/economic circumstances not been uniquely supportive. By focusing on the United Kingdom and the United States, this chapter will argue that to understand the expansion of psychopharmaceutical consumption since the 1980s we must go beyond the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatric profession, to inspect the deeper neoliberal interests, aims and logics to which both profession and industry have been responsive and beholden. To explore the link between neoliberalism and psychopharmaceutical expansion, this chapter will be divided into the following sections. Firstly we will provide a working definition of neoliberalism, followed by an assessment of the processes known as medicalisation
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
Dysfunctional Capitalism. Mental Illness, Schizoanalysis and the Epistemology of the Negative in Contemporary Cultural Studies2017 •
In cultural studies, neoliberal capitalism has been critically discussed in connection with a rise of mental illness. Within this discourse, psychology and psychoanalysis are being ambivalently debated as either complicit with the capitalist representational system or as potential tools to critically interrogate it. This paper traces these arguments in publications by writers such as Mark Fisher and Franco Berardi, and examines their relationship to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of schizoanalysis. It re-assesses Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas and concludes with an outline for the complimentary use of psychoanalytic theory and schizoanalytic ideas as a meta-discourse within cultural studies.
The paper attempts at a general understanding of contemporary capitalism and some of its social and mental consequences. It works through combinations and variations of concepts from classical and contemporary social theory. Some key concepts are Mammonism, acceleration, ubiquity, self-dynamics, precariat, inertia, conformity, flexibility, specter of uselessness. The text refers to classical modern thinkers like Marx, Simmel, Musil, Benjamin, and to contemporary ideas in the works of Deleuze, Rosa, Crouch, Illouz, Standing, Hochschild. It is summoned up by asking some important, complex questions that regard democracy, community and autonomy.
This research concerns neglected affective, relational, material, and processual dimensions of amateur crafts practice in an arts-for-health context. Existing studies on the social impacts of the participatory arts are prone to blur the borders between advocacy and research, and are vulnerable to accusations of ‘policy-based evidence making’ (Belfiore and Bennett, 2007, p.138). Researchers have relied predominantly on interview material and surveys, and there is a lack of fine- grained, long-term, ethnographic work based on participant observation. The distinctive potentials of making in this context, furthermore, have barely been investigated. This thesis addresses these deficits through a sustained ethnographic study of two wellbeing-oriented crafts groups supported by Arts for Health Cornwall (AFHC). One group was based in the community, the other in primary care. The partnership with AFHC was enabled by a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Observation produces novel understandings of the potential benefits of crafting for health as emergent properties of particular locations, relationships, and practices organized in distinctive ways around creative making. Firstly, as a counterweight to normative views of amateur crafts creativity as soothing and distracting, this study highlights a range of transformative affects including frustration, creative ambition, and enchantment. Secondly, countering an atomistic, stable depiction of such affects, this study describes them as fluid aspects of making processes. Thirdly, these unfolding processes are seen to be inseparable from the intersubjective (peer-to-peer and participant-facilitator) dimensions of creative groups. Lastly, this in vivo perspective problematizes a view of materials as an inert substratum upon which makers exercise their creative powers, and highlights the relevance of a ‘vital materialism’ (Bennett, 2010) for understanding the potential benefits of manual creativity. Sustained observation also produces a situated, spatial account of the extended networks of community belonging produced by the activities of such groups. Fieldwork is contextualized within a wider field using interviews with nine UK arts for health organizations. Consideration is also given to the influence of contemporary discourses of wellbeing, agency, and creativity on policy making in the area of arts for health. Findings have implications for good practice in the field, and for further research to inform political leadership concerning the role of the arts in health. These implications are drawn out in relation to the potential future contribution of the arts within a UK health economy undergoing rapid, crisis- driven transformation.
Analytically, the concept of neoliberalism helps to account for the relationship between forms of governance, self-governance, and capitalist market forces. But how do we decipher its limits? Taking political interest in mindfulness as my ethnographic focus, I explore theoretical categories of neoliberalism and " responsibilization " that cross-cut emerging forms of governance in contemporary British society. I chose this particular ethnographic focus in order to examine the multiple meanings and values invested in subjectification practices, and the ways in which diversity is maintained through the structure of political inquiry. I argue that practices of subjectification are never totalizing, that politico-economic concerns remain central to professional interest in self-governance, that subjectification practices may hold multiple and/or diverse meanings, and that the maintenance of this multiplicity is a motor of political process.
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A series of blogs produced for the LSE's Business Review about the growth of precarious work and the impact on working people.
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