Comments on: Packing my library, or the impossibility of precarious feeling https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2017/08/22/packing-my-library-or-the-impossibility-of-precarious-feeling/ critical anthropology of academic culture Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:31:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.1 By: Davydd Greenwood https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2017/08/22/packing-my-library-or-the-impossibility-of-precarious-feeling/#comment-12009 Sun, 10 Sep 2017 15:04:07 +0000 https://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=2442#comment-12009 This is a gripping and painful essay that does not reflect my life experience in which precarity was only a few momentary episodes. That world is GONE including what was good about it and what was awful.

My immediate reflection on this essay is that this kind of precarity is precisely what the free market requires. There is no permanence, little unpacking makes any sense. You are whatever you are worth at this moment, the future is uncertain, and the past is a chain of data about what you used to be worth.

So elegantly articulated in the blog, I wonder it if it does not help us to understand what has happened to the White working class in the US. In the face of enduring precarity and given a desire to believe that bad things don’t happen to good people for no reason, perhaps feverishly latching on to pseudo system-destroyer finds an explanation. Better to believe in something than in nothing.

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