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there seems to be a lack of demand coming from the Other and the subject
appears to be entirely free to find enjoyment that brings him or her satisfaction.
As a result, the subject s anxiety increases because he or she has to face another
demand in his or her inner self the demand of the superego. Anxiety then
becomes coupled with guilt.
THE HORROR OF POVERTY
The problem with theories that claim we live today in a form of cultural
capitalism is that they neglect the fact that material production nonetheless
continues, though often hidden in the countries of the Third World. Developed
countries might have the perception that they are nowadays living in a virtual world
of cultural capitalism, while most of their everyday products are made in China
or by the invisible immigrant workers in the sweatshops of New York,
sometimes the workers actually become visible, and are subsumed into the
imaginary presented by the new type of capitalism as some kind of decorative art
objects that offer proof of authenticity. In Chapter Two we pointed out how
expensive restaurants with their open kitchens expose their low-paid workers to
the public. We might think this decor is chosen as proof that cooking is really
happening in the restaurant, to counter conspiracy theories like those that
evolved around Chinese restaurants in Paris: the idea (a kind of urban myth) took
hold there that the cooking was done in giant underground kitchens and when
meals were ordered in a small, supposedly authentic restaurant, their chef just
warmed up a pre-packed meal or ran to the underground kitchen to fetch it.
SUCCESS IN FAILURE 39
However, one can also read this need to expose workers as decorative art objects
as a particular way of tackling class divides today.
Recently there have been a number of books published in which middle-class
writers decide to live for a period of time as poor workers, and in their books
they depict the lives of the lower classes. Such books, of course, primarily try to
prove that the liberal approach, which tries to replace welfare with workfare is
unsatisfactory, since people who earn minimal wages cannot make ends meet no
matter how many hours they work per day. However, behind these attempts to
show the impossibility of survival on minimal wages, one also finds an attempt
to picture the lives of the poor in a way that calms the fears of the middle
classes.
If a decade ago, the lower classes were primarily afraid for their jobs (or were
permanently unemployed), now the same kind of insecurity touches the middle
class. Ben Cheever in his memoir of a writer who becomes a low-paid salesman
remembers a training course in the electronics store in which the teacher asked
the future salesmen: What do people fear more than death? Public speaking ,
was Cheever s answer.18 This was definitely wrong, since the teacher reminded
him that the greatest fear felt by Americans is that they will lose their job. And with
the growing uncertainty about pension funds, people have also lost the belief in
the possible security that will come in old age.
One way of tackling this insecurity is to observe the life of the poor in order to
draw the conclusion: This is not me! I am far better off than they are. Fran
Abrams, the author of Below the Breadline, thus starts her book with the calming
reassurance:
Let me tell you about the nearly poor. They are, to misquote F.Scott
Fitzgerald, different from you and me. They are soft where we are hard,
cynical where we are trustful, in a way that unless you were born poor, it is
very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are
less than we are. Even when they enter far into our world, they still think
they are less than we are. They are different.19
But are they really so different or do the middle classes want to believe that they
are in order to retain their own sense of being protected from the horror of the
lower-class lifestyle? Adams herself concludes that many of the poor actually
want to
swim in the middle of the stream, to live the same lives, maintain the same
standards, as their better-paid neighbours. Sadly, many of them found
themselves pushed off towards the mudflats of society, unable indefinitely
to continue to stay afloat [& ] If they chose not to make a fuss, to shut their
mouths tightly and just plough on, they usually had their reasons. Reasons
born out of lifetimes of experience which told them that rocking the boat
could only lead to capsize.20
40 SUCCESS IN FAILURE
While these books about the poor state clearly that they do not want to incite
revolution, they also insist that through their research they wanted to show the
dignity of the lives of the poor. They wanted to make visible not only their
poverty, but also the way they cope with it and how they continue to express
determination, sheer grit and almost unbelievable optimism and joie de vivre .21
But is not dignified here synonymous with silenced?22 Do middle-class people
really want to hear how the poor live; i.e. do they actually let the poor speak?
Ben Cheever openly admits that he is not really talking about the other poor
people he encountered on his voyage to their world by saying:
This book s greatest failure is that it s turned out such a personal story. I
am the character I talk about most. So it seems as if I m the only character
who matters. Please know that this is not what I think. I am selling Ben
Cheever. Not because he s the best product. I m selling Ben Cheever
because he s all I ve got. It wouldn t have been fair or legally advisable
to reveal everybody else s life as if it were my own. Instead I ve had to
reveal my own life as if it were everybody else s.23
In the final analysis, these books about the lives of the poor reflect the move from
the ideology Be yourself to the propagation of its failure. The writers thus write
primarily about themselves and express their feelings about poverty from the
distant point of view of an observer who is only taking a tourist trip to the land
of the poor. However, their message is also that work necessarily brings failure
to the poor.
Yet these accounts about the lives of the working class do not calm the
anxieties of the middle class who have in the last years lost the economic
security of their jobs. Anxiety and depression have paralysed many former
employees of dot.com businesses. Some speculate that women cope differently
than men with the loss of job: For most women, survival trumps ego; they
simply adapt and find some job. For men, grappling with joblessness inevitably
entails surrendering an idea of who they are or who others thought they
were. 24 We will look closer at gender difference with regard to anxiety in the
next chapter but, as regards joblessness, we can see how important for keeping
anxiety in check is the identification with the symbolic place that one occupies in
the social network.
AGAINST CONTINGENCY
What, therefore, is the logic of this search for the secret of how people really
live? At first it looks like today s virtual world demands a quest for some kind of
reality and that people are searching for what is behind the imaginary simulacra
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