Text page
Deprivatizing Anxiety
"Deprivatizing Anxiety" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is re- placed by a more generalized anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle. 2 Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York, NY: Norton, 1998), 30.
Definition · paragraph 11
This might look something like the resumption of the anti-psychiatric movement that stalled as neoliberalism moved towards hege- monic domination. It might involve a new, collective form of therapy—a form of therapy that would explore the wounds of class by rejecting the individualization that is at the root of our current therapeutic culture. DEPRIVATIZING ANXIETY
Definition · paragraph 11
It might involve a new, collective form of therapy—a form of therapy that would explore the wounds of class by rejecting the individualization that is at the root of our current therapeutic culture. DEPRIVATIZING ANXIETY
Definition · paragraph 1
In its place, neoliberalism offered excitement and unpredictability— but the downside of these newly fluid conditions was and still is perpetual anxiety. Anxiety is the emotional state that correlates with the (economic, social, existential) precarious- ness, which neoliberal governance has normalized. The Institute of Precarious Consciousness was right to observe that too much anti-capitalist politics is locked into strategies and perspectives that were formed in an era when the struggle was against boredom.
Stakes · paragraph 3
2 Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York, NY: Norton, 1998), 30. 3 Richard Sennett, ibid, 31. 369 DEPRIVATIZING ANXIETY
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.