It is no coincidence that recent volumes on representations of precarity (Korte & Regard 2014 Hogg & Simonsen 2021 Rys & Philipsen 2021) highlight affect and anxiety as leitmotifs. Next to existentialism, anxiety has also become an integral thread in recent phenomenological approaches to a life worth living (Wills 2008 Trigg 2017 Bergo 2021).ĭue to the entanglement of economic developments and affective ecologies, anxiety has become a recurrent theme in theoretical descriptions as well as in cultural representations of precarious work, too. In addition to its entanglement with labor and affect, anxiety has been a driving force for a myriad of extensional writers, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Dostoevsky, for whom anxiety would be a kind of “neuroexistentialist” mode of being (Caruso & Flanagan 2018). It is against this background that Guy Standing (2011), for instance, sees anxiety as fundamental to the precariat’s state of being, while public intellectuals and writers like Ilija Trojanow (2017) identify continuous “Angst” as a dominant affect in present-day economies. Accordingly, anxiety is intrinsically related to the narratives that shape our understanding of why a vision of the good life is at risk, as it is often induced by the actual risk or the imagined threat of losing a (relatively) stable status. It is no coincidence that anxiety, as a heightened state of insecurity and being-alarmed, has been on the rise, because radical transformations of the welfare state and the labor market have made those normative visions of a good life increasingly unattainable, producing a state of “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). Often linked with the concept of “disorder”, anxieties are mostly mentioned in a context that frames personal and socio-economic behavioral patterns in terms of pathology, normality, and abnormality, which implicitly refer to normative views of what constitutes a “good life”. Ranging from general anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and phobias to the simple sentiment of being out of sort, anxieties operate as harbingers of imminent disruptions. 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” (1996).
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