Why is everyone i know anxious?
I got the idea of doing precarity consciousness-raising circles from a zine reading and conversation with Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste* on the porch at Ponderosa, a dance/performance land project in rural Germany, in July of 2017. The zine included an essay called “Anxiety, affective struggle, and precarity consciousness-raising” published by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, a UK-based militant research collective, in the November 2014 issue of Interface: a journal about social movements. (The essay was condensed and re-released by We Are Plan C under the title “We Are All Very Anxious,” which also could have been what we were reading on the porch.)
The central question is—why does it seem like everyone is anxious? How does that relate to economic precarity and austerity measures? What might collective organizing around anxiety look like? Does it change anything to invite ourselves to perceive our own anxiety as a public rather than just private (or even shameful) issue? Who is getting more anxious, and who is experiencing less stability?
I held an initial consciousness-raising circle and created this zine as a score for leading other circles while participating in the School of Making Thing’s “Performing Playwriting” residency, held at the Prattsville Arts Center in Prattsville, NY in June of 2018. From that circle, my friends and colleagues Cory Tamler and Amanda Friedman decided to hold a series of consciousness-raising circles in Brooklyn in the fall of 2018, and I led several sessions in Toronto with Sophie Traub.
Based on this project, Cory Tamler published an excellent article, “Anxiety Affect Aliens and Other Non-Paranoid Performances Against Capitalism,” in Performance Philosophy in 2019.
*Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (website, tumblr) is part of Wildcat!, which is a civic-minded collaborative project that “examines precarity as a constant condition for the majority of people in society.”