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Anger as a register for communicating social change: Dismantling the neoliberal trope of positive emotions


 

One of the most powerful tropes of neoliberal governmentality is happiness. 

Individualizing the anxiety, anguish, and deep sense of insecurity that are the byproducts of five decades of relentless neoliberal transformations, the owners of transnational capital and the enabling structures of the state proselytize us into happy subjects who see inequality, poverty, precarity, and struggles as personal failures. The prescription then is to turn these personal failures into successes in the competitive neoliberal order. 

To succeed in the marketplace, one must first and foremost be happy. One must learn to find joy and be joyful. One must be self-fulfilled so he/she can find fulfillment in the mechanisms of the market. Any failure to attain happiness, joyfulness, and a state of self-fulfillment is a personal failure. 

An entire industry of self-help, pop psychology, meditation, and new age spiritualism has propped up to hold us up to this state of happiness.

This cluster of positive emotions, paraded as the instruments of self actualization amidst the profoundly disenfranchising effects of neoliberal policies, is an essential tool of the free market ideology, performing layers of communicative inversions (Dutta, 2017). As I define in my earlier work, communicative inversions are the turning on its head of materiality. 

A wide array of rhetorical devices are put into place to perform communicative inversions. 

The "positive emotions" tool as a communicative inversion turns the deep anxieties tied to the free market ideology as sites of love, joy, and happiness. 

The individual thrown into the streets and rendered homeless because of the mortgage crisis brought about by predatory lending and extreme profiteering without accountability is prescribed meditation and self-help classes. The worker in a middle class job being fired to enable ongoing profiteering by capital is precsribed a course on self-reflection and finding pleasure. The household struggling to have enough food on the table amidst multiple shifts is offered a class on positive psyschology to cope with the challenges. "Positive emotions"  form the zeitgeist of precsriptive adaptation to the everyday misfortunes among the working classes intertwined with the ever-expanding reach of neoliberal transformations.

Now what would social change mean in this backdrop? Given the deep inequalities, precarity, attacks on the climate, and widespread expulsion of people into networks of precarity, social change is a large-scale change in the policy frameworks and structures that have enabled the grotesque accummulation of capital and power in the hands of the few.

Social change, change in the existing social order, will come about through the work of dismantling neoliberalism. That the ideology of the ever-expanding free market that individualizes responsibility while creating new opportunities for capitalist profiteering needs to be actively resisted, challenged, and taken down forms the basis for social change.

To catalyze for social change as the work of resisting and dismantling the five decades of neoliberal reforms, community organizers, activists, communities at the margins, and academics need to work collectively on building registers that see through the "communicative inversions" performed by neoliberalism. One such fundamental communicative register that inverts the cloak of positive emotions centers anger as the basis of social change.

Anger as a register for communicating social change sees the unacceptable levels of inequalities that have been bred by the neoliberal order and mobilizes to dismantle the neoliberal order itself. 

Anger recognizes that no form of dialogue, politeness, and conversation with the hegemonic social order will bring about the social change that is needed. It therefore foregrounds an altogether different framework for resistance, one that confronts, uses the language of confrontation, and seeks to break open.

Anger recognizes that talks at the World Economic Forum are not the basis of solving problems such as inequalities. Because power in these infrastructures are very much held in the hands of the capitalist class and the state collaborators of the capitalist class. 

With anger, the starting point is the deep understanding that the very class that has organized and orchestrated the inequalities we inhabit today must be dismantled. It begins with the recognition that the grotesque sites of consolidation of power need to be turned upside down.

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