BY IAN KAPPOS
Interlude for the Precariat
There is an academic named Guy Standing (born 9th of February, 1948) who coined the term “the precariat.” He defines the precariat as such (and I paraphrase): “a distinctive socio-economic group, not a working class, not a middle class, not ‘informal,’ [but] precarious,” characterized by a precariousness of existence. The life of the precariat is patterned by lack of job security, little to no upward economic mobility—traits that more or less also describe the situation of the proletariat, the oppressed working class. But what distinguishes the precariat is its unique place within a newly fragmented class structure, a class structure made possible by several factors, not the least of which being the rise of a globalist economy, a job market that demands specificity of skillset, and by increasingly narrow and financially draining avenues by which one can attain specific skillsets.
Literally, the precariat is a portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat.”
Amazingly—but not shockingly—Standing’s observation has largely gone unnoticed by the very same subjects upon whom the sum of his research is based. Now I find myself in a precarious situation: Shall I choose to be disappointed by this,
by the fact that so few of my peers give a shit about anything? or
shall I choose to expound upon Standing’s ideas, make them more relevant to my peers? and—
I won’t lie here—more relevant to
myself or let’s say,
more hard-hitting, because for as much
knowledge as I may acquire and retain up here, much
like the “trickle-down economics” that frame my life, the lives of my friends,
family, it is a pitiful and
pitiable amount of knowledge that manages to
trickle
down
here. And at any rate,
by the time it does, it’s
too little, too late. So, in classic precariat
fashion, I choose both.
(Let us, now, for the sake of this entry in the overall discourse, assume that the following example of the precariat identifies
as male,
is white,
is heterosexual, and likes to think—
really, prays—that
he has something, anything positive
to offer the world.)
Now:
Enter: the precariat
Sanctioned &
Cinched &
Strapped in
Alone
he sits in bed, thinking about all the things he needs to do &
wonders if he is, in fact, confusing these things with
the things he wants to do; he writes to-do
lists, then
short-lists & long-lists of these to-do lists, a progressively
metacognitive exercise that, in his brighter moments, he
is sure later on, much later on—as an old man & out of ideas & resting on his laurels, having achieved ____
or ____, having sculpted an entire canon of brilliant something or other,
he is sure these lists must one day
amount to something, a post-structural magnum opus
so vast & struck
through with so many strokes of casual genius that even the corpse of David Foster Wallace would envy such a
something or other. But even
this daydream, so lofty and self-aggrandizing,
this
only gives him a temporary feeling of self-worth. Even these
whimsical thoughts—so fleeting, so rare to come—of believing he will
actually do a single fucking thing off
his lists
of the millions of things he has ever
wanted to do, the intoxicating effect of
these thoughts,
they wear away. And then he is back
to
the drawing board, so to speak
(which, for all intents & purposes, means
staring into every aspect of his life that serves as evidence to the contrary of the utter delusion that he has
just embarrassed himself by
entertaining for several minutes).
He who so fiercely online-dates that it is almost a violation of the laws of physics that
he doesn’t actually want, isn’t
actually looking
for love. Or rather, through an unintentional
lifestyle of restraint, has denied
himself any point of reference. (No one ever told him—or if they did he never remembered—not to
drink the seawater.)
He who, despite his highest ideals, his best of intentions, still—to his dismay—finds himself invariably and seemingly irreparably drawn to that otherworldly, unrealistic
Image of Woman created
& commodified by
draconian capitalist marketing techniques.
He who—even as he writes this—feels an anger like
fuck-ing-quick-sand, a hot-cold-sucking-suffocating sensation
of powerlessness
deep inside his chest, where, screaming beneath it all, he knows is a voice of pure and human reason that is not long
for this world.
He who wants to believe he is an artist, who
wants to believe he is a writer, but
who also knows that any true artist, that is, any creative type who is compelled by altruism, by that
timeless enigma of spirit, by want
of peace within art rather than art as
a stepping stone to peace, would not—as he so often does—daydream
of “arriving,” of “making it,” and so—just as before—he finds himself
at the end of the day ignorant
of love, going
to sleep shaking off nightmares of fraudulence and the omen
of Marx’s theory of
alienation.
He who goes to sleep wearing all black, as if he plans to attend a funeral in his dreams.
He who can’t
ever
seem to get to work on time, no
matter how much time he puts
into hating himself.
He who denounces everybody else’s claim
to “woke-ness,” simply
because—as any idiot could tell you—he sees in them that exact thing
he sees &
fears &
resents within himself: a yearning to not
be left behind, to not be
seen as useless, since where does one
go in this day & age, or really any
day
and
age for that matter, without
a sense of purpose, even if that sense of purpose is totally fucking
ersatz?
He who reads,
The evolution of the precariat as the agency of a politics of paradise is still to pass from theatre and visual ideas of emancipation to a set of demands that will engage the state rather than merely puzzle or irritate it, and thinks,
“Oh, that would make a great Facebook post.”
He who
prays
God
for a tourniquet
against time
so that he can go back to age 22 and make reparations for his total fucking buffoonery, for not taking advantage of youth & piss & vinegar.
He who will regale you with endless tangents of pseudo-political
nonsense but when
it comes to writing lyrics for a so-called political band he
plays in, will
find every reason in the world to push
that off, even if it means swiping
right
on a Republican or
ordering books on the
history of anarchism
through Amazon.com.
He who wants you to think that he is punk but secretly and earnestly
hopes that you never ever come
across a picture of him & how
he dressed when he was sixteen years old.
He who sees the date on the calendar draw closer & closer
and thinks to himself, “What the fuck am I going to write to
convince these people that I write about anything other than magic & fairies doing drugs?”
So—what does this
what does this
have to do with class? Let’s imagine Standing.
Standing
would no doubt argue
that it has something to do with a “consciousness of the common
sense of insecurity,” and then would—as
one would imagine—pose a question, something along
the lines of: “Who or what [is] the enemy?”
And he,
our antihero, our situational precariat, who for 27
years has held fast to the
belief that he is nothing, that
whatever art he offers the world would be fake
and would come from a place of selfish
desire rather
than from a place
of virtue,
that however he may
attain validation or praise he
would thereafter be riddled with guilt for having deceived the
giver of praise or validation, that whoever
loved him would
either not know who they were
loving or would be so broken inside themselves
as to never know the fucking difference anyway, he,
our precariat, would look Standing straight in the eye &
answer wordlessly,
having known the truth
all along.
Ian Kappos was born and raised in Northern California. Over two dozen of his works of short fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared online and in print. Co-editor of Milkfist (www.milkfist.com), he sort of maintains a website at www.iankappos.net.