“A Modern Plague”: Rerouting Affective Engagements
with Anxiety in the Context of the Anxiety Epidemic.
RMA Thesis
Supervisor: Dr Timothy Yaczo Second Reader: Dr Marija Cetinic Date: June 14th 2019
Table of Contents
Introduction: “A Modern Plague”: Contemporary Discourses of Anxiety ... 1
Cultural authorities on anxiety ... 3
Chapter breakdown ... 6
Slow, Steady Survival: Anxious Subjectification and Modes of Relationality in Deux Jours, Une Nuit. ... 10
Anxious subjectification ... 13
Anxiety as a means of relationality ... 19
Slow, steady transformation ... 23
Anxiety is Ordinary: Affective Accumulation and The Everyday in Zadie Smith’s NW ... 29
Resisting a diagnostic reading of anxiety ... 32
Rerouting the melodramatic ... 37
Shifting what is notable ... 42
Accompaniment and Anxious-knowing in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City. ... 46
Unsettling the threshold of diagnosis ... 49
Accompanying overwhelming emotions ... 54
Altered perception and anxious-knowing ... 57
Conclusion ... 63
Introduction: “A Modern Plague”1: Contemporary Discourses of Anxiety
What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental illness? Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness now strike people down all over the world (George Monbiot).
Anxiety is one of our modern plagues. Its effects are visible everywhere,
interfering with our happiness and our ability to live productively. Anxiety limits our connections with other people, saps our energy, reduces our focus and our skilfulness and undermines our health (Alison Bonds Shapiro).
Situated within a more general phenomenon of rising mental illness, anxiety has come to be narrated as part of an “epidemic of mental illness” (Monbiot), named one of western society’s “modern plagues” (Bonds Shapiro). While there is an apparent friction between social causes, listed in Monbiot’s The Guardian article, and the biological focus of
Psychology Today, in both cases anxiety is expressed through a discourse of crisis and
disease: a virus striking people down across the world. The semantic field of “plague” and “epidemic” instil a sense of urgency and contagion––the anxious feeling that we must act now, or become the next victim struck down. As the headlines accumulate, they become decontextualised. This “detachment from a given object,” Sara Ahmed writes in The Social
Politics of Emotions, “allows anxiety to gather more and more objects, until it overwhelms
other possible affective relations to the world” (66). The language of infection and threat does not therefore describe a pre-existing state of anxiety alone, but itself contributes to an anxious affective relation to the world, which gains more and more sites of worry.
The rhetoric of the “effects” of anxiety in Psychology Today also reduces an
understanding of anxiety to the symptomatic. Listed symptoms, from sapped energy and reduced focus, to an excess of worry, place anxiety as an exclusively negative feeling––one that interferes with our lives, and affects not only the individual’s productivity, but also society’s ability to function. Anxiety thus must be overcome or managed correctly before we can be productive. These symptoms also enact a division between a ‘normal’ or rational anxiety and an irrational anxiety, that which a health article in The Telegraph by Louise Chunn calls the “‘nameless dread.’” The first is considered a natural response to threatening or stressful situations, while the second denotes an excess of worry, signifying a pathological, symptomatic response. The individualisation of depression and anxiety, as Mark Fisher has noted, forms part of a neoliberal “tendency to privatise stress, to convert political
antagonisms into medical conditions” (550). The pathologising language used in
contemporary discourses of anxiety ensures the focus remains on the individual, assuming emotions to be internal even as the signalled causes are social, and works to depoliticise them.
The point of departure of this thesis is a frustration with the increasing categorisation and pathologisation of emotion, with the calls to quiet or overcome anxiety, and with the
sensationalising and decontextualising language of anxiety as epidemic. Putting Luc and Jean-Pierre’s film Deux Jours, Une Nuit (2014), and two novels, Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City (1969), into conversation with approaches to anxiety in the context of “epidemic,” I ask how these narratives work to reroute our
assumptions and affective engagements with anxiety. To turn to Lauren Berlant’s formulation in the interview “Affect in the End Times” I ask how the rerouting of our affective
engagements with anxiety might open up “new affective collective ground” (86): ways of thinking both about and with anxiety outside of the genres of crisis and diagnosis. The basis
of my work aligns with Ann Cvetkovich’s guiding statement in Depression: A Public Feeling that depression is a “social and cultural phenomenon, not a biological or medical one” (90). I view the narratives I analyse as contributing in various ways to an understanding of the sociality of anxiety, offering also a conceptualisation of anxiety as politically and critically productive force, rather than a disease which can be treated. In opening up alternative engagements with anxiety as a social phenomenon I will argue for ways of thinking not only about, but also through anxiety, that do not dismiss it to pathology.
I begin my work by first building on the analysis of online media articles with which I opened this thesis, to further situate problematic elements of a contemporary discourse anxiety. While I do not posit these articles as pinnacles of scientific, social or psychological research, my choice to focus on them is precisely due to their accessibility and wide
circulation, and the subsequent role they play in a contemporary social imaginary in relation to anxiety.2 In the following chapters, I will draw from the analysis of these articles, reading each narrative to make an intervention into the contemporary understanding of anxiety outlined here.
Cultural authorities on anxiety
Important to discourse surrounding the current phenomenon of anxiety is the statistical language held up as scientific proof of a rising problem. An opinion article in The Guardian from 2016 exemplifies the way many discussions in the online media begin:
We live with an epidemic of anxiety. In 1980, 4% of Americans suffered a mental disorder associated with anxiety. Today half do. The trends in Britain are similar.
2 For the purpose of this thesis I have chosen to focus on articles written by the British media, as it is largely
A third of Britons will experience anxiety disorder at some stage in their life. (Hutton)
Like the language of epidemic, the figures, expressed in short emphatic statements, have a strong rhetorical effect. While this article argues that fundamental social change is needed to defeat the anxiety epidemic, the figures on which it is based,” that a “third of Britons will experience anxiety disorder at some stage,” impress not only the rising crisis, but also inspire the feeling that it could be ‘me next.’ As Kathleen Woodward documents in her book
Statistical Panic, even when the citation of statistics is meant to be reassuring, more often it
produces “a sense of foreboding and insecurity” (209). Statistical language about anxiety is in this sense self-fulfilling. Fear of contagion, in which statistical language plays a role, is an important aspect in ensuring the self-governing of subjects in regimes of neoliberal governing through insecurity and anxiety, and one that I will develop in the first chapter.3 For Melanie Yergeau, author of Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness and a founder of the autistic neuroqueer movement, the idea of contagion of mental disorder is significant in the legitimisation of regulatory intervention. Specifically, she argues that a fear of contagion is “situated within societal responses to and of gay panic,” as a threat to social order (26). The statistical language of epidemic, viewed through these lenses, functions within modes of regulation, both of the individual and of society.
As well as contributing to the sensationalising discourse of epidemic, the statistical language of Hutton’s article engages with anxiety only once it has crossed the threshold into a disorder––once it fulfils certain criteria of categorisation and diagnosis. In doing so, statistics position both an engagement with and understanding of anxiety to the realm of scientific, rational discourse of numbers and proof. Woodward argues that “the altogether
banal and reductive language of the statistic…continuously offers itself up as a way of understanding our lives and the world” (208). As a way of understanding the world, these statistics cannot account for the nuanced, lived-feeling of anxiety, especially of those feelings which do not meet the criteria for diagnosis. For Cvetkovich, the problem with statistics as the “starting point for underscoring the seriousness of depression” is both that these figures are often linked to the need for treatment, and that they are entangled with hierarchies of knowledge and cultural authority (91). Framed through statistics and clinical language an understanding of anxiety and its seriousness becomes limited to a scientific discourse of numbers and clinical symptoms, discounting other possible understandings, lived-experiences, and approaches.
One influential cultural authority on anxiety in the past two decades, which I situate as an approach that reduces anxiety to the symptomatic, is the discourse of Cognitive
Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Cognitive Behavioural Therapy aims to “assess and correct biases in thinking” by redirecting thought patterns and “cognitive distortions” (Roger Covin et al. 297). Through the theory of CBT anxiety is defined by overwhelming or spiralling emotional responses, and categorised as a pathology which alters our approach to the world. A 2016 article from the BBC about CBT states that an “anxious mindset can change the way you view the world in profound ways...By biasing attention, anxiety alters what we are conscious of, and in turn, the way we experience reality” (Azarian). From this perspective, references to distortion and an altering of consciousness have negative connotations,
signalling the change in perception as irrational or unrealistic. An anxious mindset therefore must be restored, through what the article calls “attention training”––a method to re-focus the brain away from negative stimuli (Azarian). Calls to train attention and emotion are echoed in the uncountable self-help articles and books which offer ways to calm or quiet spiralling
thoughts and overwhelming emotions,4 reinforcing a conceptualisation of anxiety as negative: that which “saps our energy, reduces our focus and our skilfulness and undermines our
health” (Shapiro).
The concepts of attention training and error correction also categorise only certain, well-regulated emotional responses as rational, realistic responses. In this there is an assumed hierarchy between emotionality and rationality, with emotions, as Ahmed makes clear, historically having been “‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason” (3). This extends also to a “hierarchy between emotions” ––in which certain, ‘uncontrolled’ emotions are deemed less civilised and more feminine (Ahmed 3). The categorisation of emotion on which CBT’s therapeutic model hinges does the work of dismissal in regard to emotions deemed unruly, irrational or uncontrolled. Feminist theorist Sue Campbell, writing in 1994, argues that the dismissal of certain emotional responses contributes to a characterisation of women’s “emotional lives as unhealthy, attempting to limit our ways of acting in the world, and consequently, our effects on the world” (49). It is in the division between rational and irrational responses, categorising certain emotions as unhealthy and in need of regulation, that I locate CBT’s problematic limitation of certain ways of understanding or being in the world.
Chapter breakdown
Departing from a conceptualisation of anxiety as a social phenomenon, in the first chapter, “Slow, Steady Survival: Anxious Subjectification and Modes of Relationality in
Deux Jours, Une Nuit,” I focus on the sociality of anxiety, looking at how it serves as “the
neoliberal social order’s psychic motive force” (Tomkumitsu). Through Jean-Pierre and Luc
4 See for example: The discourse of popular app Headspace or the Psychology Today article “9 Ways to Calm
your Anxious Mind” (Melanie Greenberg). For an in-depth discussion of “training” in relation to regimes of normativity see Jack Halberstram’s introduction to The Queer Art of Failure.
Dardenne’s film Deux Jours, Une Nuit, I examine the anxiety produced for and required by the precarisation of labour in Europe. Here I draw from the work of Isabell Lorey, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato to examine the role a fear of contagion and the crossover between existential and economic vulnerability play in the production of the anxious subject. In the protagonist’s door-to-door journey to win back her job, I ask how sites of relationality formed between anxious subjects constitute a potential productivity of anxiety. Thinking with Judith Butler’s conceptualisation of vulnerability, I ask how an anxiety formed around
interdependent vulnerability might produce new modes of solidarity or social transformation, challenging the logic of individual security as a means to feel lastingly better. This
perspective offers a counter to the conceptualisation of anxiety as exclusively negative, needing to be overcome. In doing so, the film challenges an understanding of anxiety as an individual, medical disease. It also aligns with queer and feminist work of considering how those affects that are assumed to be negative and needing to be overcome, may instead foster forms of solidarity and function as tools in the work of what Ann Cvetkovich calls “slow, steady transformation” (2).
In the second chapter, “Anxiety is Ordinary: Affective Accumulation and The Everyday in Zadie Smith’s NW,” I continue to think about the sociality of anxiety. Following the lives of two female characters, the narrative engages with the anxieties that form around the pressure to move forward and achieve in line with conformative conventions. Thinking with Ahmed’s conceptualisation of emotion as arising in the contact between objects, I suggest that the novel resists locating anxiety ‘in’ any object or subject, but rather tracks how it circulates, becomes detached from individual objects, and accumulates in this detachment. I then focus on the way in which NW reroutes moments of potential drama back into the mundanity of the everyday. Drawing from Ben Highmore’s work on the everyday, and Cvetkovich’s on the ordinariness of feelings of depression and anxiety, I argue that the in the
denial of the dramatic, the novel enacts an anxiety that is distinctly ordinary. Remaining outside of the genre of catastrophe and resolution opens up ways of feeling better, or just different, that are also ordinary. The register of ordinariness stands in contrast to the
sensationalising language of “epidemic,” and offers in place of statistical discourse or lists of clinical symptoms, a nuanced account of the lived-experience of anxiety as it surges and dissipates. This chapter views the work of nuancing as political, and asks what an attendance to undiagnosable, inexpressible feelings does to our understanding of the pervasiveness of anxiety in the present moment.
Where the second chapter explores a feeling of anxiety that is pervasive but not diagnosable, the final chapter, “Accompaniment and Anxious-knowing in Doris Lessing’s
The Four-Gated City,” begins by considering the moment of diagnosis specifically. Pointing
to the moment of diagnosis as an act of separation, The Four-Gated City unsettles the threshold between a social climate of anxiety and the label of mental illness. In doing so, the novel also critiques the division between emotional responses deemed rational and those dismissed as irrational. I align the novel’s critique of categorisation with the work of Melanie Yergeau and Jackie Orr, both of whom argue that the reduction of certain articulations to the symptomatic or pathological strips them of rhetorical significance. Through the protagonist’s journey of self-exploration, the narrative offers a model of accompanying overwhelming, painful emotions that does not dismiss them as disordered or incoherent. Putting the novel into dialogue with the conceptualisation of anxiety trafficked by CBT discourse, I suggest that this model of accompaniment opens up anxiously altered perception as a meaningful way of knowing the world. Developing this reading, I propose the concept of anxious-knowing: a form of attunement to the present moment which does not submit to a hierarchy between emotions, but draws precisely from the overwhelming emotionality of an anxious mindset.
While each chapter focuses on a different aspect of anxiety discourse, certain concerns overlap. In particular, the fear of contagion; the division between rationality and irrationality, sociality and pathology; and the overwhelmingly negative connotations of anxiety, thread throughout my work. In my analysis I aim not to offer a definitive answer to what anxiety is, or how it feels, but to explore alternative engagements with anxiety. This approach is situated in the wider field of exploring negative affects as critical and political tools, following the work of theorists such as Sianne Ngai, Jack Halberstram, Kathleen Stewart and Ann
Cvetkovich. As such, while my chapters do not build to a singular conclusion about anxiety, the final chapter’s exploration of anxious-knowing draws together an overarching concern of this thesis. In it, I ask how we might engage with anxiety in a way that does not dismiss it to a pathology, or to a form of brokenness, that which must––in specific, normative ways––be cured or fixed. The rerouting work this thesis aims to do is to see in an often painful,
inexpressible or messy emotionality a means of connection with the structural feeling of the present moment.5 In this, I hope in some way to expand the work of feminist, queer and disability studies theorists, writing against hegemonic accounts of normativity and modes of affective regulation, with whom the theoretical basis of this thesis is in conversation.
5 The term structural feeling draws both from Raymond William’s term “structures of feeling,” with which I will
Slow, Steady Survival: Anxious Subjectification and Modes of Relationality in Deux Jours, Une Nuit.
(Figure 1. Still from Deux Jours, Une Nuit 00:02:59)
A few minutes into the opening scene of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s quietly powerful 2014 film Deux Jours, Une Nuit, the screen fills with the shaky bathroom-mirror reflection of Sandra, a young Belgian mother and factory worker, as she takes a Xanax to try to cope with the surmounting pressure she is facing (fig. 1). Absent from work due to her mental health, at the point of her return to her position at a solar panel factory the foreman holds a vote between the employees: Sandra’s job or their 1000-euro bonuses. The rationale for the vote comes from the factory CEO, who, facing competition from the Asian market and needing to ‘streamline’ business,6 has seen in her absence that sixteen employees, with overtime, can do the work that seventeen did before. With only two votes for her initially, Sandra is convinced by her friend, Juliette, and husband, Manu, to request that a new vote
6 For an analysis of the language of management with specific reference to “streamlining” see Eve Chiapello
take place on Monday, after she has had time to go door-to-door to talk to her colleagues individually. Over the course of the film, spanning the weekend––traditionally a period of rest from labour––she visits the homes of eleven colleagues, seeking them out also at a sports club, places of extra work, or on domestic errands when they are not in. Sandra must
convince them not only that she is up to the job, but that they should relinquish their bonus so that she is able to earn the salary she needs to support her family. While the vote is not
successful, Sandra is offered her job back at the expense of the fixed-term contract of one colleague not being renewed. The film ends with her silently refusing this offer, returning instead into the demands and insecurity of a job search.
This chapter positions Sandra’s feelings of anxiety, both before and after the vote, as an effect and requirement of the logic of subject production through modes of precarisation. Referring to the work of political activist and critical theorist Mark Fisher, Miya Tomkumitsu writes that anxiety and depression “often have social causes, but we are led to believe that we suffer individually and must struggle alone…we are prevented from even considering such conditions as social.” My analysis asks how Deux Jours, Une Nuit intervenes into a
discussion of the ways a socially produced anxiety is constructed as an individual illness, and how the individualisation of both anxiety and the solutions to overcome it, function to
reproduce the logic of competition and governing through precarisation. I then ask how the very sociality of anxiety, central to the logic of neoliberal subjectification, and an awareness of this sociality, might form seeds of social transformation.
In the first section I analyse Sandra’s door-to-door journey as both a consequence of the ongoing precarisation of labour and as metonymic of the demands for the subject to compete, prove, and reprove their worth in the context of these conditions. Drawing from the work of Isabell Lorey, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, I suggest that the film draws attention to
how “a special mode of subjectivation of anxiety” is produced by neoliberal governing through precarisation and debt (Lorey 88). The claim of an anxious subject produced by and central to neoliberalism through a balance of insecurity and security, is not in itself new, nor particularly surprising, however. Forms of anxious subjectification are central not only to the work of Lorey, Virno and Lazzarato, but also to Karl Marx’s theory of the subject’s
requirement to sell her labour power, embodied by the figure of Sandra.7 The premise and effects of the vote resonate with the work of Franco “Bifo” Berardi, who explores the affective consequences of shifting labour conditions based on the fantasy of freedom and flexibility, the development of cognitive capitalism, and the demands of a connectionist society as a source of increasing anxiety.8 Also kin with the film’s narrative is Mark Fisher’s analysis of “the perpetual anxiety of hyper-precarity” (204), and the naturalisation of
precarious working conditions, where no amount of work can secure you permanent security (550). The aim of this chapter, therefore, is not to offer a radically new perspective on the well-theorised production of anxiety in neoliberalism. Nor is it to do the work of exposure–– revealing the causes of modern anxiety. By departing from an analysis of the sociality of anxiety I want to draw attention to the specific intervention Deux Jours, Une Nuit makes into this discussion: by ensuring the responsibility is on the shoulders of the individual subject, the vote functions to obscure the structural cycle of insecurity and anxiety, precluding a collective solidarity between the colleagues.
The second part of this chapter moves from an analysis of the sociality of anxiety, to a consideration of what this sociality might do. In the journey Sandra must undertake,
reminiscent of door-to-door sales or charity fundraising, sites of relationality are also formed.
7 Isabell Lorey draws from Marx’s “Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus Value" in Marx Engels Collected Works in developing her theory of “virtuoso labour” (State of Insecurity, 80).
8 See for example The Soul at Work by Berardi. See also Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, “The Symptoms of
Here, I think with Isabell Lorey, Judith Butler, and Ann Cvetkovich to consider both the critical and political potentiality of anxiety as a relational feeling. Focusing particularly on the exchange of vulnerability which takes place between Sandra and one colleague, Anne, and the sacrifices each character makes, I explore how their relationality, formed through an acknowledgement of shared anxiety, opens the way for the possibility of forms of connection and solidarity which oppose the capitalist logic of individualism. I argue ultimately that the film problematises a conceptualisation of anxiety as an exclusively negative affect which must and can be overcome. Instead it opens up a means to see how through shared, socially produced anxiety the “slow, steady work of resilient survival, utopian dreaming, and other affective tools for transformation,” are also made possible (Cvetkovich 2).
Anxious subjectification
As the concepts of precarity, precariousness, and precarisation form the background of my argument about anxious subjectification, I begin by delineating my use of these terms. I think with Lorey’s definitions, who’s theory of the normalisation of precarity and the centrality of insecurity to the neoliberal project is my main companion in exploring anxiety as the defining affect of this paradigm. In State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, Lorey draws from Butler’s conceptualisation to distinguish between “precariousness”: the socio-ontological condition common to all human and non-humans, always relational to other precarious lives, and yet never the same (11); “precarity”: the social hierarchisation and distribution of precariousness (12); and “governmental precarization”: the use of
precariousness and hierarchies of precarity as an instrument of governing in modern Western societies, referring not only to destabilization through employment but through biopolitical modes of subjectivation (13). For Lorey, precarisation signifies more than insecure jobs, more than economic uncertainty––it “embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of
subjectification” (1). Building on the logic of Lazzarato’s theory of the indebted subject central to capitalist productivity, she argues that insecurity is central to neoliberal government of the precarious. I will use Lorey’s work as a foundation from which to focus more
specifically on anxiety, formed around precariousness, as produced and required by modes of governmental precarisation.
The link between Sandra’s anxiety and the precarisation of labour in Belgium is made clear from the start of the film. Deux Jours, Une Nuit opens with a scene of stillness: Sandra resting on the sofa, only the sounds of her breath audible. The quiet is soon broken, however, by the sharp ring of her phone. Sandra’s rest is interrupted by the news of a vote held in her absence due to mental illness by the foreman of the factory where she works, in which all but two of her colleagues voted to keep their bonuses at the expense of her job. Shaking, telling herself not to cry, Sandra turns to a bottle of Xanax in an attempt to quiet the rising anxiety she feels. Convinced by her friend Juliette to talk to the factory CEO Mr Dumont later that afternoon, in what Juliette expresses in terms of the ‘first round’ of the fight, Sandra is incapacitated by anxiety, showing the physical signs of a panic attack. As Dumont drives away, she clasps her throat in silent desperation, unable to breathe (fig. 2). She is rendered immobile and speechless. Her shoulders heaving, she has to drink before she can regain her voice. Although Sandra turns to her pills in these moments, the film resists the medicalisation of her feelings. Through the intrusion of work into her rest time, and the entanglement of the vote with an increasing precarity of jobs in Europe, Deux Jours, Une Nuit makes explicit the link between anxiety and the contemporary demands of the labouring subject.
(Figure 2. Still from Deux Jours, Une Nuit 00:08:24)
The vote held to decide the fate of Sandra’s job in her absence embodies the demand for subjects to compete to prove and reprove their labour value in the context of an increasing precarisation of labour. Dumont legitimises the vote by stating that he cannot afford to pay both Sandra’s wage and the others’ bonuses in light of increasing global competition. As is also highlighted in the film’s reference to two employees on fixed-term contracts, Jerome and Alphonse, Sandra’s job is rendered disposable or replaceable as a consequence of wider instability of the labour market. The factors include a globalising market in which companies must streamline and increase productivity to compete, accompanied by the reduction of jobs and the proliferation of temporary contracts and contingent employment positions. As Virno explains, “[i]nsecurity about one’s place…[and] anxiety over being “left behind” translate into flexibility, adaptability, and a readiness to reconfigure oneself” (16). The journey Sandra embarks on to win back her job is metonymic of the insecurity and anxiety which demands that the individual to constantly proves their labour worth in the context of increasing contingency and decreasing jobs.
Job insecurity and the fear of marginalisation create a climate of anxiety through
contagion: the feeling that it could be ‘me next,’ around which the vote is structured. Anxiety amongst colleagues is increased through rumours, apparently initiated by the foreman, Jean-Marc, that if not Sandra, it will be someone else’s job on the line. Shown to be superfluous to the running of the factory in her absence, Sandra is positioned outside, embodying both a threat and a warning to those still (partially) secured through employment contracts. Lorey, unpacking the work of sociologist of labour, Robert Castel, explains how precarity has come to be constructed as a ‘virus’ against which society must protect (52), a logic which fosters the illusion that “securing…one’s own life” can protect against instability (90). The vote functions to reduce economic precarity to the level of individual competition, and to prevent forms of solidarity or collective action perhaps possible in modes of governing based on alternative affective control, such as through fear.9 This works to obscure not only the larger, less tangible forces producing the employees’ precarious positions, but also the fact that by entering into its logic, the vote reproduces the very conditions which construct the employees as able to be rendered superfluous, thus perpetuating the cycle of insecurity. Anxiety about insecurity fuels the logic of contagion, individual responsibility and the fantasy of security. These in turn reproduce the very conditions which are a source of anxiety.
Ensuring the balance between a threshold of minimum economic security and absolute vulnerability is another important factor in harnessing anxiety as an affective tool to produce the self-governing subject (Lorey 66). For Sandra, losing her job means not being able to pay the bills and provide for her family. Trying to convince her to ‘fight,’ Manu asks, “How will we pay the mortgage without your salary?” (0.05.55). Sandra’s voice quavers: “[w]e’ll go back to social housing” (0.05.57). The couple’s fears point to a position of heightened
9 See the introduction to Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings for a discussion of anger and fear as less ambiguous
precarity predating the scope of the film, and reminds both the characters and the viewer how what can feel like security can give way at any moment. Lazzarato’s work on the making of the “indebted man” sheds light on how credit, in this case the mortgage, “constitute specific relations of power that entail specific forms of production and control of subjectivity” (29). The anxiety produced by the insecurity of Sandra’s position is therefore not exclusive of the fight for her job; it is only the most recent manifestation. The looming threat of not being able to pay the bills, of returning to a precarity closer to the absolute vulnerability of the outside, is a continual site of anxiety, simultaneously all-encompassing and acutely specific. This feeling of anxiety is required by the logic of debt and self-governing to produce a subject who continually works to prove themselves employable, in turn ensuring the constant production and accumulation of capital. Debt holds Sandra to the necessity to fight for her job, to prove herself employable, constructing a subject who cannot simply remove herself from the cycle of anxiety. Sandra’s anxiety is thus produced by the social forces which have constructed her situation. These forces materialise at the level of the individual, frozen by the dread of not being able to pay the bills, or, for her colleagues, by the fear of being the next to fall outside the protection of the minimum security offered by their job.
But Sandra is also incapacitated by a less tangible, more existential anxiety, one that is encapsulated by the way in which she internalises the initial lack of votes from her colleagues to save her job. Telling her husband it was as if she “didn’t exist” (00:11:16) she believes that her colleagues see her as nothing and internalises this perception, crying that “they’re right. I don’t exist. I’m nothing. Nothing at all” (00:11:19-24). The fear of being judged as nothing, as worthless, encompasses an existential anxiety of fulfilling this judgement, and becoming nothing––a body not worthy of protection. In the crossover of existential anxiety and economic fear in contemporary neoliberal societies, Lorey argues, there arises “a special mode of subjectivation of anxiety” (88). She writes that “[i]n the neoliberal dynamic of
governmental precarization, the illusion of individual security is maintained specifically through the anxiety over being exposed to existential vulnerability” (Lorey 90). Drawing from Virno’s work, Lorey theorises that in “it is increasingly difficult distinguish between an “abstract anxiety over existential precariousness,” the anxiety of bodily vulnerability, and a “concrete fear of politically and economically induced precarization” a fear of not being able to pay the rent or keep one’s job (88, emphasis in original). The crossover between the threat of economic and existential, bodily vulnerability produces Sandra as an anxious subject who must fight to regain her job in order not only to remain afloat financially, but to assert her worth as a subject.
Within the logic of anxious subjectification constructed through precarisation, Sandra’s fight is itself framed as the remedy to her anxiety. On finding out about the vote, and
watching his wife crumble into despair, Sandra’s husband, Manu, warns her against taking more pills. He tells her that “the only way to stop crying, is to fight for your job” (00.05.45). This statement encapsulates the sentiment that anxiety can be overcome by individual means, shifting those means from a pill to proving one’s employability. Within this logic, the
“illusion of individual security” (Lorey) functions as what Lauren Berlant conceptualises a cruel optimism: an optimism that ties subjects to the very conditions that are obstacles to their flourishing (Cruel 1). Securing one’s own life, getting over just the next hump, in this case the vote, functions specifically as a fantasy of what Cvetkovich calls “magic bullet solutions” (2). Regaining her job replaces the pills as a solution to Sandra’s feelings, but both methods deflect the structural necessity of her anxiety to the neoliberal project to the responsibility of the individual who must overcome. Feeling better becomes a means of securing individual security. This obscures the fact that the fantasy of individual security functions to ensure that the subject continually proves and pre-proves their employability by upping productivity and adaptability, reproducing the logic of competition and thus insecurity (Lorey 65). It is
however, Sandra’s ‘fight’––an embodiment and consequence of the centrality of anxiety to modes of governing through precarisation––and the interpersonal meetings she undertakes, which produce moments in the film which constitute the basis for a critical productivity, as well as modes of slow, steady political transformation which do not subscribe the fantasy of individual security as a magic-bullet solution, a fantasy that can only ever reproduce the anxiety it wants to overcome.
(Figure 3. Still from Deux Jours, Une Nuit 01.15.33)
Anxiety as a means of relationality
At every door Sandra faces a scene of precarity that matches her own: a colleague salvages tiles to make ends meet; someone works weekend shifts on the black at local grocers; a friend does not come to the door, knowing she cannot give up her bonus. It is in this element of facing––of meeting her colleagues face-to-face––that I locate both the critical and political productivity of Sandra’s anxiety. The penultimate visit Sandra makes, to
Dominque’s house, is representative in many ways of the others. He comes to meet her at the threshold of the family home where he is the only breadwinner, despite knowing he is
powerless to help (fig. 3). The on-screen image, spilt between their two faces, emphasises the intimacy of looking the other in the eye, reading each other, and establishes the significance of the in-person interaction. Dominque shows a willingness by opening the door, but
simultaneously maintains a distance by not crossing the threshold or inviting Sandra in. Close to tears he says, “You’re right to fight to stay, and I should help you. It’ll be a disaster for me if the majority backs you, but I hope for your sake they do” (01.15.33-43). His words echo his body language, conflicted between acting in the way he believes to be morally right, supporting his colleague to fight a situation which could easily be his own, and the necessity of securing his own life against absolute vulnerability the only way that seems available–– through the individualising logic of self-preservation.
The emotive scene nuances a common picture painted of the individuality and
competition that characterises neoliberal labour, one encapsulated in George Monbiot’s The
Guardian article, referred to in the introduction. For Monbiot, distress, specifically “plagues
of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating disorders, self-harm and loneliness,” are caused by the separation produced by the underlying mantra of neoliberalism: “that we will prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.” Whereas Monbiot’s reference to “self-interest” infers an active selfish choice, condemning the individual, the scene between Sandra and Dominique makes clear that in regimes of governmental precarisation competition does not signify the choice of self-interest over the wellbeing of others, but necessary, inescapable, and affectively mixed acts of survival. It is through the affective exchange in their face-to-face meetings that Sandra apprehends the differing but shared anxieties which govern her colleagues. In her visit to his home, she sees Dominque not just as a colleague who will not vote for her, but as someone struggling to provide for his
family. In other words, Sandra is made aware, at least in part, of the specific precariousness around which her colleagues individual subjectification forms. Seeing that she is not alone in her precariousness and feelings of anxiety, these meetings in turn yield a critical attunement to the structural social production of anxiety through the realisation that she is not alone in her feelings.
More than a critical productivity, however, the in-person meetings actively oppose the logic of extreme individualism: the physicality of the interactions stands in contrast to an increasingly atomised connectionist society. The meetings both highlight and foster sites of relationality. In the interplay between “I” or “me” and “you” in Dominique’s words, there is an acknowledgement of interdependence, however painful. The awareness of
interdependence shifts the expected power structure of Sandra’s visits. In the genre of the door-to-door visit, particularly where a subject is seeking donations or charity, the power lies with the person able to grant or deny that charity. The same is true of Sandra’s situation: she is at the mercy of her colleagues’ decision to grant her a vote, open to rejection and
humiliation in her visits. Yet in answer to her pleas, made at the threshold of precarious domestic spaces, her colleagues also expose their own vulnerabilities, redressing the power balance. In place of the hierarchical power structure, an awareness of relationality arises in the door-to-door exchanges. As each party offers their own sites of anxiety, a new form of relationality forms also through this shared anxiety.
The modes of relationality formed in this meeting take on a more explicit form in Sandra’s visit to another colleague, Anne. Wanting to help Sandra but knowing that her husband is against it, Anne argues with him and is forcefully pulled back into the house. Believing herself to be the cause of conflict, and internalising the rejections she has received, Sandra returns home, deeply but quietly affected. After making quotidian arrangements for
her children’s lunches, she takes a whole bottle of Xanax and retreats to her darkened bedroom. The absolute desolation embodied in this act, is, however, interrupted by a site of relation. Anne visits Sandra’s home to share the news that she will vote for her. The support, made, as we later discover, at the expense of her marriage, counters the logic of
individualism and gives Sandra a glimpse of optimism that cuts through her despair. In visiting Sandra, Anne offers her solidarity, despite the difficulties she will face, despite the bodily vulnerability alluded to in the physical scene between her and her husband. Her act takes on more significance as it interrupts Sandra’s suicide attempt, providing her with a glimmer of hope, enough for a reason to live. But in exposing her vulnerability, Sandra also opens up a space of transformation in the life of her colleague. Anne says, “I’ve never
decided anything for myself before…You thanked me before for coming to your house, well, thank you for coming to mine” (01:14:00-01:16:33). In reaching out through her own
vulnerability, Sandra gives Anne the ability to do something different, to break a cycle of negativity in her life. An exchange takes places and a relationality is formed in the opening up of vulnerability, through which both women are able to transform their situation, even if only temporarily.
The anxiety over being exposed to existential and economic vulnerability, on which the entire logic of the vote is constructed, enables Sandra and Anne, in Lorey’s words, to “acknowledge [their] relationality with others:” the way their vulnerability and security is dependent on others (95). In being forced through anxious subjectification to bear the
individual responsibility to fight for her job and secure her life, Sandra also places her fate in the hands of others. Butler highlights this relational aspect of vulnerability. She writes that precariousness, a socio-ontological condition formed around a being’s vulnerability to death, and thus that which can never be fully protected against, “implies living socially, that is, the
fact that one's life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (Butler 14).10 Constructed as an anxious subject through the crossover of existential and economic precariousness, Sandra’s anxiety, formed around vulnerability, also implies living socially. The social production of anxiety, constructed through vulnerability and contagion, produce also sites of relationality and exchange, such as those between Sandra and Anne. The
political productivity of this relationality is in its seeming alternative––or even resistance––to the logic of individualisation and the fantasy of individual security as a means to overcome anxiety, logic which perpetuates regimes of precarisation.
Slow, steady transformation
Political productivity in Deux Jours, Une Nuit does not point to radical social change, however. Instead, the film challenges the fantasy of “magic bullet solutions” in favour of slow, steady transformation, that does not reproduce the regime of individualism on which governmental precarisation is structured (Cvetkovich 2). Although far from a solution to Sandra’s situation, the exchange between Sandra and Anne is followed by the most upbeat moment of the film––a scene which permits a cautious optimism. Turning up the radio, Sandra, Manu, and Anne sing along to “Gloria” by Van Morrison, smiling in a moment of togetherness. In this moment a respite is achieved, for both the characters and the viewer. Singing unreservedly in the bubble of the car, the tension, if not the awareness of pain and the struggle still to come, melts away temporarily. For Cvetkovich, respite is an important
keyword and a feeling which can do political work. She uses it “to describe moments of relief from despair aptly captured by the word’s legal origin in the delay of a prison sentence” (Cvetkovich 79). The scene does not imply the “utopian dreaming” of an unambiguous solution, or a happy ending (Cvetkovich 2). But as a little respite from the cycle of dread, this
moment, which stems from an exposure of vulnerability by both women, opens up a breathing space. This space constitutes what Cvetkovich might call an “affective tool for survival” and, potentially, for transformation (2). It is in the production of affective tools for respite and relational survival, that I locate the political productivity of anxiety.
The political productivity of both respite and relationality takes on the form of modest resistance in a gesture made by Sandra in the final scene of the film. Despite the support of eight colleagues who sacrifice their bonus for Sandra’s job, she loses by one vote. After the result, Sandra is called into the CEO’s office. Telling her which chair to sit on in a familiar show of power, Dumont ‘gifts’ Sandra with the offer to reinstate her job after the summer, to avoid hard feelings between the workers. The offer comes precisely at the cost of what one of her colleagues, Alphonse, has risked to support Sandra: Dumont will “not renew” the contract of an employee on a temporary contract. Alphonse, who we understand to be the colleague who will suffer at the expense of this offer, is the most vulnerable employee due to being the most recently hired, and on a fixed-term contract. Acutely aware of his position of precarity, knowing that the foreman can take away his livelihood by simply giving him a bad review, in voting for Sandra, Alphonse risks his position of minimal security. Sandra responds to
Dumont’s offer by saying nothing. She walks away in a gesture of small, but significant, refusal. Her silent refusal returns her into a cycle which mirrors that of her door-to-door journey prove herself worthy of support, into the demands of searching for a job, again selling herself as labour. Talking to Manu on the phone as she walks away, symbolically embarking on her continuing journey, she acknowledges the hard times ahead, but with a glimmer of pride, says “I’m happy” (01:31:18).
Sandra’s refusal rejects the logic that reducing anxiety lastingly can be achieved through securing individual security. Her happiness in the final moment of the film does not come
from regaining her job, maintaining the fantasy that regaining her job could constitute a magic-bullet solution, but rather from willingly returning into a cycle of insecurity and anxiety with a gained awareness that she is interdependently linked with other precarious, anxious subjects. Her choice is enabled by the risk Alphonse takes for her, and the sacrifice Anne makes. Each gesture refuses the illusion of overcoming a structurally produced anxiety by individual means. Berlant discusses the genre of the gesture in Cruel Optimism. Thinking with Agamben, she reads the gesture not as a message, but as the formal “performance of shift that could turn into a disturbance” (Berlant Cruel 198). For Berlant the gesture “does not mark time, if time is a movement forward, but makes time, holding the present open to
attention and unpredicted exchange” (Cruel 198). Each gesture––of sacrifice, risk, or an acknowledgement of relationality––holds open the present to an awareness of
interdependency and an exchange that is in excess to the logic through which it is produced. For Berlant, “a deadpan nonresponse,” like that performed by Sandra, can be a gesture, and a “situation can grow around it or not, because it makes the smallest opening, a movement-created space (Cruel 199). Sandra’s “deadpan nonresponse” does not constitute a movement forward; it can only return her back into the cycle of insecurity and anxiety. In her
nonresponse, however, an opening takes shape, however small. Like Alphonse, she refuses the individualising logic that anxiety can be overcome by securing individual security, and like Anne, she sacrifices her immediate self-interest for her colleague. Her return into the cycle of anxious subjectification is therefore not only a return, but a revolution: she is aware that she is not alone in her feelings, nor in her struggle. The opening here is felt in a moment of respite, which again becomes a critical tool. Sandra’s gesture provides her with a moment of relief from the logic of competition. Her happiness comes not because she won––the assumed ‘happy ending’––but because she is aware of a relationality with those around her.
These small gestures thus dissolve the individualism on which governance, embodied in the premise of the vote, is secured at the beginning of the film.
While the solidarity that emerges between Sandra, Alphonse and Anne’s gestures refuses the logic of individualism as a means to overcome anxiety, no action refuses anxiety itself, choosing rather to reside in anxiety together. This suggests, that in anxiety itself, rather than in the overcoming of anxiety, there is a potential for transformation. Her return into a cycle of insecurity acknowledges a collective anxiety, which, based on vulnerability, can never be fully overcome. This is not to say that the anxiety Sandra feels is positive––a state which should be welcomed unreservedly. It is rather to suggest that within the anxious
subjectification which drives neoliberal regimes of self-governing and precarisation, there are also produced affective relations that cannot be immediately harnessed to serve individualism and capitalist productivity. As Lorey makes clear, in forms of subjectivity based on affective manipulation “excesses, potentials for the articulation of resistance, always arise” (103). Anxiety, formed as it is around vulnerability, is also at its core a relational feeling. Within anxiety, comes also an excess, not just of worry, but of care––caring that we might lose that which we love, caring what others think of us. 11 Caring too much resists the logic of
neoliberal individualism through its basis of relationality and an excess of care. Anxiety, produced structurally, through the anxious subjectification central to precarisation, in Deux
Jours, Une Nuit does not get in the way of politics, or need to be converted into “something
more active to become politics” (Cvetkovich 110), but places this anxiety itself as holding a kernel for social transformation. Anxiety is thus is not a barrier to survival or transformation,
11 See Ahmed on the loss of love at the base of anxiety in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (67), and Cvetkovich
in Depression: A Public Feeling on acedia, a historical antecedent of depression, being “about caring too much, and it is characterized by a restlessness of the mind as much as by apathy or lethargy,” as well as defined by not caring (111).
but a part of it. In acknowledging the sociality and thus relationality of anxiety formed around vulnerability, the film offers an approach to respite that does not reproduce the individualising logic central to modes of governing through precarisation.
In my analysis of the fight which Sandra must undertake to win back her job Deux Jours,
Une Nuit, I have shown how anxiety is central to the affective manipulation on which modes
of governing through precarisation are based––a system which holds up the illusion of individual security as a means to overcome vulnerability. While the film highlights an anxious subject at the centre of a precarious society, however, the question of locating the source(s) for how Sandra feels, is displaced by larger questions of modes of affective
survival, relationality and transformation. The work the film does is to highlight the potential transformation in this anxiety, placing anxiety as a means of potential critical and political productivity. The possibility of the sites of relationality formed between colleagues stems from the very sociality of anxiety, and from Sandra’s gained awareness of the
interdependence of vulnerability. Enabled by the acknowledgement of this relationality, arising in affective exchanges her door-to-door journey demands, and the gestures of risk and sacrifice made by some of her colleageus, Sandra’s final gesture of non-compliance
constitutes a means of resistance to the logic of individual security as a magic-bullet solution to feeling better. In Sandra’s final words, “we put up a good fight,” we might read a shift from her fighting for her job at the beginning of the narrative, to a fighting with: a form of solidarity that dissolves the individual and gives rise to a productive anxiety (00:31:13). Thus, her choice to reside in a position of vulnerability, the film intervenes in contemporary discourses which place anxiety as a purely negative feeling which must be overcome. It also intervenes in a wider question of what affect can do: asking what role affects central to modes of governing play in joining precarious bodies in a solidarity that creates “new kinds of affective collective ground,” acknowledging a sharedness of feeling, but not assuming that
those feelings are the same (Berlant “Affect in the End Times”). The transformative
productivity forged in the connections Sandra makes with colleagues, and in her final gesture of non-compliance, remains, however, open-ended, reminding us that transformation is a slow and affectively mixed process, marked by struggle.
Anxiety is Ordinary: Affective Accumulation and The Everyday in Zadie Smith’s NW
Leah Hanwell cannot understand why everybody in her world has to keep moving forward. “Why won’t everyone stay still? She has forced a stillness in herself, but it has not stopped the world from continuing on” (Smith 78). Leah experiences a debilitating lack of control in the face of this perpetual current of forward movement, in which she feels time is accelerating. Each milestone––of life and work––“only serves to horribly close down the possibilities of all the other things that didn’t happen” (Smith 78). Leah’s character, a thirty-five-year-old woman from North West London, embodies a very familiar anxiety; one that is at once existential, even philosophical, while also specific to her time, place and gender. According to an infographic titled “The Four Ages of Anxiety” in The Telegraph article “How anxiety became a modern epidemic,” it is precisely Leah’s age and gender that are responsible for her feelings (Chunn). Women in their twenties and thirties, the article cites, “often have the highest levels of anxiety,” due “to a struggle to ‘have it all,’” colliding with “the ticking of the biological clock.”
The work of this chapter is to explore NW’s intervention into a feeling of rising anxiety––one bound up with the sources of worry particular to women of this age in a contemporary
western society––through two characters, Leah, and her friend Natalie Blake. I will explore how the novel’s affective engagement with these women’s feelings of anxiety stands in contrast to the sensationalising and pathologising discourse of “epidemic,” analysed in the introduction. Tracking the construction and circulation of sites of anxiety as they accumulate and intensify, NW resists reductive causal explanations and categorisations of anxiety, whether biological or social. In its account of accumulation, the narrative remains resolutely at the level of the everyday, enacting an anxiety that is distinctly ordinary, in relation to both Ann Cvetkovich and Ben Highmore’s conceptualisation of the term.
The three main sections of NW, “visitation,” “guest,” and “host,” follow the lives of three characters: Leah Hanwell, Felix Cooper and Natalie Blake, respectively. The final two
sections, “crossing” and “visitation,” return to Natalie and Leah, tracking both women on the cusp of what could become mental breakdown. All three protagonists have grown up on a council estate in Willesden, in Northwest London. Leah and Natalie, who changes her name to from Keisha to Natalie after school, have known each other since a traumatic childhood event brought them together at age five. The stories of these two women, on who my work in this chapter focuses, are intimately interwoven, whereas Felix, removed from their circle, enters their lives only through the media coverage of his murder. The characters of NW each deal with the societal, bodily, and existential pressures of life specific to the economically disadvantaged urban area in which they live, but not reducible to this setting alone. Despite objectively dramatic moments ––an abortion, a murder and a near suicide–– the tone of the stylistically varied narrative remains undramatic, even distanced, removing these happenings from the genre of the event.12 This constructs an affective engagement at the level of the everyday, the non-event. At the moments in which the women’s feelings could tip over into the dramatic or extreme, the novel returns them to the everyday, to the mundanity of daily life.
My analysis of NW asks what work a refusal of the melodramatic and diagnostic does to an understanding of the present phenomenon of rising anxiety. In Depression: A Public
Feeling, Cvetkovich emphasises depression as an ordinary feeling in an “effort to describe
the present through attention to the felt experience of everyday life, including moments that might seem utterly banal” (12). In a commitment to the ordinariness of depression, she challenges the dramatic, homogenising genre of the best-selling memoir as discourse which
feeds into the pathologisation of feeling and the sale of psychopharmaceuticals and fantasies of a messianic resolution to feeling bad. I argue that NW performs this commitment to the ordinary, tracking the lived-feeling of present-day anxiety, and moments of feeling better, without having to elevate them to the genre of melodrama. By rerouting our engagement with anxiety, Smith’s novel attends to those forms of feelings that do not register in statistics or diagnoses––those which do not “meet the criteria for diagnosis” (“How anxiety became a modern epidemic”). Outside of clinical symptoms or sensational headlines, feelings can be lived as invisible or inexpressible to others, but are no less pervasive or affecting. NW’s affective engagement with anxiety, to use Kathleen Stewarts’s words in her study of
Ordinary Affects, is at the level of an [e]veryday life…lived on the level of surging affects,
impacts suffered or barely avoided” (9). I argue ultimately that remaining at the level of the everyday, the novel does political work, shifting what is deemed notable in attending to the present moment.
I begin this chapter by analysing how the demand to reproduce, entangled with the fantasy of achieving what Lauren Berlant calls “the good life,” is constructed as a site of anxiety, and how it structures Leah and Natalie’s lives (Cruel 2). Thinking with Sara Ahmed’s work in the Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explore how the women’s anxieties cannot be located in individual objects or subjects but emerge between bodies, intensifying as it gathers objects of worry. Tracking the slide between objects of anxiety resists a diagnostic account of their feelings, and nuances causal explanations of anxiety. Attending to an accumulation of anxiety, however, NW does not build to a moment of dramatic climax or rupture. Analysing moments in the final sections, which track the women on the verge of suicide and breakdown, I show how the novel denies the interplay between catastrophe and resolution in these moments, returning both Natalie and Leah to the mundanity of everyday life. It is in this rerouting of the dramatic that I locate clinical NW’s political work, tracking
the small, often imperceptible or inexpressible feelings of anxiety which circulate below the threshold of diagnosis, and attending to ways of feeling better also as ordinary. Thinking with Raymond William’s concept “structures of feeling,” I suggest that the novel displaces
questions of both fixed causes and categorisation, and instead attends to the specificity of the women’s experience lived under the societal pressures to progress.
Resisting a diagnostic reading of anxiety
The two female protagonists of NW, Natalie and Leah, are anxious about many things: from their physical appearances to their identity, and social inequality to “their own
materiality” (Smith 266). Underlying these worries is the recurring feeling of uncontrollably accelerating time, a product of the familiar capitalist demand for progress, embodied in the requirement for each generation to be “fitter, healthier, more productive,” as Leah formulates it (Smith 44). For Leah, aged thirty-five, this acceleration materialises in the pressure to reproduce. On an outing to buy a sofa, Leah’s mother is talking at her daughter about what her life should be: “[y]ou should get on with it. Council’s set you up nicely really, you’ve got a little car, you’ve both got jobs. It’s the next thing” (Smith 45). These words: “You’re next. It’s the next thing,” haunt Leah. For her, this phrase, echoed by friends, colleagues, family, the media, “willing them to reproduce” (Smith 272) is terrifyingly ominous; it sounds “like the cry of a guard in a dark place” (Smith 35). The daily announcements of pregnancies by her peers is suffocating, it signals the closing down of possibilities to an inescapable and singular destination. The haunting resonance of the cry of “you’re next,” turns what seems to be friendly advice or encouragement into a menacing and inescapable threat.
The pressure to move to the “next thing” is crucial component in the normative fantasy of what Berlant defines as “that moral-intimate-economic thing called “the good life”” (Cruel
lives in a flat owned by the council with her husband Michel. For him, the flat is a stepping stone in “getting there” (Smith 24). But Leah “does not know where “there” is” (Smith 24). ‘There,’ the good life, is entangled with fantasies of “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy,” even as these fantasies start to fray (Berlant
Cruel 3). Michel pushes himself to climb “the ladder,” be “always moving forward…thinking
of the next achievement,” despite losing much of their savings in online stock markets (Smith 30). As a part of this fantasy Michel dreams of the perfect family. He longs for children not only on a biological level, but as the next step towards fulfilling his destiny. Having once been the same age as Michel, the demands of this fantasy mean that now “Leah is ageing in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his” (Smith 20). Despite the social pressures of the good life fantasy, Leah, pregnant at the beginning of the novel, does not tell Michel, but has an abortion in secret, and begins to take the contraceptive pill. But as much as the normative “good life” fantasy terrifies her, and the abortion acts to reclaim her body and life as her own, the pressures of normativity mean that she is just as anxious to be a “normal women,” to think “[t]he sort of thing normal women think”: to want to want to have children and move forward in the way that is expected (Smith 60). The conflict between the pull to be a ‘normal woman’ and yet to resist what she experiences as a loss of control over time and her body generates further anxiety.
For both Natalie and Leah, anxiety is felt both in the pressure to follow the (multiple and conflicting) rules of convention, and in a desire to deviate from them. For Natalie, it is not just getting pregnant, but the demands of following convention in pregnancy, birth, and raising a family which fill her with dread. As an entry in the third section of the novel, “host,” articulates, anxiety becomes the pervasive affect of meeting these expectations, but also of not submitting to them. Subject to more and more images “from the great mass of cultural detritus she took in every day,” telling her how to behave in her pregnancy, Natalie becomes
bored and anxious: “To deviate from them filled her with the old anxiety. She grew anxious that she was not anxious about the things you were meant to be anxious about” (Smith 274). Here, Natalie’s feelings become detached from any object; they form around not being anxious enough, in the right way. The stream of sites of anxiety and negative formulations that make up the second sentence give the sense of a cycle of worry, disorientating the reader. In displacing the object of worry this passage performs a meta-anxiety about anxiety itself. The repetition of the word “anxious” embodies not only the multiple sites of anxiety, but as I will explore further below, the way in which anxiety becomes decontextualized and
accumulates in its travels.
A question posed by Natalie to Leah in the final chapter allows for a closer examination of the way anxiety accumulates in the novel, declining, as I will show, a diagnostic reading of anxiety as residing in certain objects or subjects. In this scene Leah is sitting in the garden, where “she had lain for several hours, refusing to speak,” having just revealed to her husband that she has been taking the contraceptive pill while they have been trying to get pregnant (Smith 334). She is rendered immobile and passive by the anxieties which have formed around the feeling of lack of control over her destination. Natalie says to Leah, “I’m trying to understand what’s really the matter with you. I don’t believe you’re sitting here flirting with skin cancer because you don’t want a baby” (Smith 335). But it is precisely this question–– locating what is “really the matter” ––– that the novel complicates. While Leah’s anxieties have stuck largely to the object of having a baby, Natalie is correct in surmising that this is not ‘really’ where Leah’s feelings can be located. Trying to understand herself the fears that are structuring her life earlier in the novel, Leah thinks,
For some reason it had never occurred to her that all this wonderous screwing was heading towards a certain, perfectly obvious destination. She fears the destination.
Be objective! What is the fear? It is something to do with death and time and age...if I do nothing if I stand still nothing will change I will always be
eighteen...very banal, this fear. Everybody has it these days. What else? (Smith 24)
Her anxieties about having children slide with multiple other sites of anxiety. She feels backed into a corner by the inevitability of a destination which she never wanted and is not ready for. Children come to embody ageing and the closing down of other choices she has made in her life, by marrying her husband rather than continuing relationships with women, for example. The frantic, almost pleading run of unpunctuated words “if I do nothing if I stand still nothing will change I will always be eighteen” conveys her feelings of
helplessness and loss of control in the face of the strength of the current of progress. What is ‘really’ the matter with Leah is thus not having a baby itself, but is displaced into the
inescapability of the “destination,” and all this implies.
Yet neither can this feeling itself, nor even the feeling an inescapable destination, be located as the cause of her anxiety. Emotions for Sara Ahmed do not reside ‘in’ any object or subject, but are relational (5); shaped by contact with objects and involving “(re)actions of ‘towardness’ and ‘awayness’” from objects (8). Ahmed argues that it is the past histories of each object, often inaccessible in the present moment, that shape our relation to an object. At the same time, our approach to the object shapes its character. Attempting to delineate the cause of Leah’s anxiety, we see that it does not reside ‘in’ having children, but the past histories of contact with this object––the histories of the demands of normativity and the material and affective pressures they exert on women—that shape Leah’s relation to it. The suffocation Leah feels in the resonating cries of “you’re next,” for example, produces the choice between having children or not as a site of anxiety. Leah then approaches this destination as one to fear, simultaneously making her approach to it an anxious one. The
