Elusive adulthood and surplus life-time in Spain

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork in Madrid, I argue that the growing redundancy of living labour power in the capitalist production process has translated, since the last decades of the 20th century, into surplus portions of the individual life-cycle. Capitalism’s promise of productivity, associated with adulthood, has shrunk to become a window of opportunity. Besides sheer luck, it takes protracted preparation to seize this opportunity and inordinate effort to retain it. Adulthood is the mystified representation of structural pressures on productive activity, as an elusive personal accomplishment whose curtailment is one’s own fault. Failure to realize it is further depoliticized as either a rejection of adulthood, or acceptance of besieged adulthood as a sign of maturity.

The ‘wicked trinity’ of late capitalism: Governing in an era of stagnation, surplus humanity, and environmental breakdown

“…Capitalism exhibits a growing inability to sustain existing levels of labour demand as it matures, thereby generating a trend towards the production of an expanding army of superfluous proletarians (Arzuaga, 2019). Superfluity manifests as both mass unemployment and underemployment, as an increasing number of people are forced to make ends meet in precarious jobsfrom app-mediated services to street hawking (Smith, 2020;Jones, 2021;Weiss, 2021). 3 This crisis of work is inescapably linked to the unfolding environmental catastrophe because runaway productivity growth also generates a 'blind compulsion to dominate nature' (Cassegard, 2021: 194).…”

A Family Matter: Responsibility and Selfishness in Spanish Households

“…My initial approach to contemporary adulthood was through the lens of work (Weiss 2021a), but the predominance of family and gender in my interlocutors’ accounts made me broaden my perspective. Scholarship on Spain likewise alerted me to changes now occurring.…”

Liminal states: Propertied citizenship and gendered kin work in middle-class Kolkata families

“…The imagery associated with home-ownership taps into shared affective landscapes that rely on middle-class domesticities to reproduce what Raymond Williams famously called collective ‘structures of feeling’. Lauren Berlant (2011) has argued that ‘cruel optimism’ – hope against the odds – relates the neoliberal promise of opportunity and better futures to the de facto experience of surplus time and labour as part of a stalled lifecyle expectation among the global North’s precariat, and ethnographers like Weiss (2021), Jeffrey (2010) and Petitt (2019) have shown how this manifests in cultures of waithood among unemployed graduates, who are kept in a ‘liminal’ state. In this article I argue that such approaches can be usefully employed to analyse many Indian middle-class women’s experiences of urban change, where younger interlocutors imagine their personal trajectory in terms of educational and career achievements, while narratives across the life course show that middle-class women’s experiences of global capitalist forms are determined by the institutions of kinship and marriage that make social use of their ‘surplus time’ as gendered care work.…”