The right to be weary? Endurance and exhaustion in austere times

Abstract

This paper seeks to advance understandings of austerity's everyday affects by examining how neoliberal welfare retrenchment is lived, experienced and resisted. Drawing on interviews with young people in housing need, we demonstrate the ways in which day‐to‐day coping with welfare reform can lead to a state of fatigue, a gradual slow wearing‐out that comes with having to endure everyday hardship. Such weariness, we argue, is an integral part of understanding the everyday impacts of austerity. Yet despite the apparent centrality of weariness to issues such as precarity and poverty, there has not yet been sustained discussion into the idea of weariness itself. A common conceptualisation positions weariness as the antithesis of political action, where individuals are slowly worn down until they no longer have the strength or capacity to resist. However, this paper offers a more reparative reading of weariness, one which does not narrowly conceptualise weariness as simply a closing down. Instead we question whether weariness should necessarily always be equated with inaction. The paper focuses on forms of suffering and violence that are felt as a kind of steady on‐going form of endurance, rather than as a sudden eruption. We foreground affective moments that are neither passionate nor intense, but instead listless and still, generating feelings of inertia, flatness, impasse. The paper concludes with some reflections on what we term “the right to be weary,” examining how weariness could be understood as a potential retreat from the relentless drive to move forwards, a form of passive dissent.