J.S.Etienne

I. Identity and infrastructure

Our visible identities are supported by invisible scaffolding. Our meaning requires infrastructure. The institution, the qualification recognized by a professional body, the employment contract, the colleagues, the friends, the roof over one’s head, the books on the shelves, the room of one’s own—together, such things constitute an infrastructure that holds and maintains the person we see ourselves as and the direction we choose to face. This intricate scaffolding—comprising, among other things, our relationship with corporate and governmental bodies; institutional, legal, and social recognition; and material goods—reflects the complexity of identity in late modernity. Centuries ago, if identity could even be imagined, it was buttressed by family, a local community, the Church, and the land one was born to work or the craft one was expected to practise. That simpler scaffolding, which had a solidity that could endure across generations, has been fragmented by modernity. We are now supported by more shifting and maze-like arrays of planks, bracing, ledgers, and ladders.

We rarely notice the presence of this scaffolding, but we certainly notice its absence. A decade ago, although I often thought about my own identity, I paid little attention to the infrastructure quietly supporting it. My qualifications, the academic institution I worked for, my research and teaching colleagues, the friends with whom I visited galleries and discussed politics and art, the books shelved around the walls of my flat, the desk at which I wrote and prepared lectures—all this seemed like fabric I wore as effortlessly as clothing. Like clothing, it could fray or fade, it could be refreshed, it could be replaced, but it could no more crumble and disintegrate than could a pair of jeans. But I missed its real essence: it was not clothing, it was infrastructure. And infrastructure can collapse.

II. Fragility, precarity, and shock events

Like a cubist portrait, modern identity resembles a multi-panelled structure rather than a single integrated form. It is complex, fragmented, and marked by a fragility liable to shattering. Modernity has introduced dynamism and convolutions into our scaffolding at the expense of simplicity and certainty. The result is identity simultaneously vibrant, plastic, and brittle.

A fragile building can endure when it is well supported. But when its scaffolding is weak, its existence becomes precarious. In the conditions of late modernity—neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, globalization, the information and digital revolutions—precarity has become a common, sometimes permanent, experience for millions. Rapidly changing political, social, and economic priorities favour labour, wage, and job flexibility over security, dismantling many traditional safety nets, such as welfare, social housing, rights, and legal protections. From this, a new social class has emerged: the precariat.

Unlike traditional social classes, the precariat lack intra-class bonds and can be hard to delineate. Few are insulated. Precarity is the lived experience of asylum seekers and migrants; graduates trapped in a cycle of insecure jobs for which they are overqualified; temporary, seasonal, and gig workers; the disabled and those with chronic health conditions; the marginalized and the poor. But a feature of precariatization is that almost anyone is at risk of falling into precarity. Perhaps only those who can call on family support have a true shield against precarity—but in an increasingly precarious world, where threats seem to abound across all generations and social groups, bonds can be loosened, resulting in the ability to support often being unmatched by willingness.

The daily rhythms of instability and insecurity mean the precariat are constantly at risk of scaffolding collapse. Their experience—navigating the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, negotiating asymmetrical rental agreements, living by their wits from month to month—is one of perpetually balancing on the edge of disaster. Precarity does not remain confined to work or income: it seeps laterally across a life. Food becomes less affordable; health frays under stress and overwork, often while access to care narrows; social, community, and family life are progressively disrupted.

The scaffolding propping up the precarious life is unsurprisingly rickety. A coupler can detach, a transom can loosen: a client cancels a project; a platform withholds payment; the state alters its terms; a landlord raises the rent. Precarity invariably involves weak connections and shallow foundations. When contracts are temporary, when agents insert themselves into employment relationships, when eviction can arrive with little notice, it makes psychological sense to withhold faith from infrastructure so contingent and unstable. Why commit to a community, social group, or hobby when the vagaries of income, work, and daily life cast a permanent shadow of disruption and dislocation? And when the mantras of self-reliance and flexibility have become enculturated—while obscuring the precarity that flows from them—family support, workplace solidarity, and community help become more tenuous.

A feature of precarity is the difficulty of escape: precarity traps—such as cycles of insecure employment preventing meaningful career building, or perpetual debt to sustain basic living conditions—ensure there is no obvious route to security. There is, of course, another exit, one indicated by the warning sign fixed to the precarious scaffolding itself: succumbing to shock and the long-threatened collapse.

The possibility of shock events looms over the precarious life. Weak infrastructure can sustain a life and identity through stillness and calm, but it cannot resist large, sudden shocks. A building without a steel frame can stand for decades on a geological fault line—until the earthquake hits. In a world of hollowed-out welfare systems and weakened labour and housing security, many lives lack the support of steel frames, and hence their ability to withstand shocks—for some, even a tremor might unravel the scaffolding.

Shock events come in countless forms: a financial crisis, a pandemic, an incoming government with a radically disruptive agenda, or the numerous manifestations of the climate crisis. There are bespoke shocks too: a mental or physical health crisis, burnout, an investment gone bad, a relationship breakdown. For those whose scaffolding is precarious and weak, such shocks—whether external and societal, or individual and personal—are not disruptions but collapses. The building, the life, the identity, once visible albeit precarious, become invisible. They disappear, reduced to rubble.

III. The phenomenon of disappearance

I barely noticed the 2008 financial crisis. The “credit crunch” seemed to belong to a different planet. I had an academic position, I was part of an institution, my skills and qualifications were recognized and valued by colleagues, and my salary covered my rent and my bills, with enough to spare to fill my flat with books, to date, to socialize, and to have a cultural life. During the 2011 riots in England, my understanding of the anger, frustration, and despair behind the violence was theoretical, not lived. I was conscious of how short term my vision was—my life horizon was at most a year—but I welcomed the freedom this entailed. But I was guilty of fallacious reasoning: I blithely assumed my streak of landing on my feet would continue. I was not alive to how precarious my situation was.

My precarity became visible in 2014 when I was made redundant. I was invited to apply for a “new” position: the same job, with the same workload, but now considered a part-time role. I chose self-respect over abasement to new terms that seemed a mockery—a common dilemma for those in precarity. My choice hastened my decision to follow an uneven and hazardous path: a period on unemployment benefit, housing benefit to cover some rent, private tutoring, self-publishing an unnoticed novel, updating unread blogs. By 2017, amid the new uncertainties arising from the Brexit referendum and a rapidly increasing cost of living, I had burned through my redundancy settlement.

In my precarity, I had become a commodity. The process of commodification—whereby something or someone is transformed into a commodity to be bought and sold in a marketplace—is the beginning of disappearance. I no longer had a profession that shaped my identity; instead, I had become a set of skills, knowledge, and experience to be marketed on platforms, traded by agencies, and managed by welfare. My worth depended on my compliance with the diktats of welfare agencies, on my acceptance of third parties profiting from my labour, on my tolerance of platforms designed to race to the bottom, and on my willingness to present myself much as I might advertise a car to be sold. Because survival was increasingly a struggle—my life horizon had now shrunk to a month—the deeper, richer areas of my life were being overrun by the time and energy required to demonstrate I was a commodity of value.

It created a state of growing alienation from work, from society, and from culture. Why be attached to work when it was being governed by algorithms, unseen profiteers, and haggling at the margins of a dignified, living wage? How could I form healthy relationships and a full social and cultural life when the material basis of my life was constantly imperilled?

Desiring to liberate myself from a marketplace that urged gratitude for any work, even at basement rates, I set up my own editorial business. I had no great passion for editing—I wanted to write—but it was something I was skilled at, and it seemed a less precarious endeavour than writing. For the next two years, through membership of a professional organization, focused training, networking and cultivation of contacts, and sheer graft, I established my business. On the face of it, my editorial freelancing was a remarkable success: from a standing start, I had built an extensive client list and rolling projects. Beneath the surface, however, I was being unsustainably stretched. I was working almost every single day: I estimate that there were fewer than ten entirely work-free days over a two-year period. Holidays and time off seemed out of reach, because my income barely covered rent, bills, and basic cost of living. Without access to any financial support that would enable me to take a break, I was in a precarity trap: I needed a pause to rethink my business and make it more lucrative at less cost, but simply to survive from one month to the next required a permanent cycle of clients and projects.

In the summer of 2019, burnout finally overwhelmed me. My mind and body refused to carry on. The weak scaffolding—minimal resources, lack of external support, insecure housing—fell away and the building collapsed quickly. Within two months, I had lost my flat, I had dumped most of my meagre possessions, and I had transferred my books from their life on shelves to an uncertain dormancy in dozens of boxes. After a quarter of a century of living in London—a city I loved, where I was rooted in its life and culture, where I had earned two degrees, had all my significant relationships, fathered two children, researched and lectured, socialized and made friends—I found myself living once again with my parents, in my sister’s old room in the village where I grew up, housed but homeless. My life in the city had been erased; the material shape of it had been dismantled and scattered to refuse tips, recycling centres, and storage boxes; I had receded from view.

My plan, nevertheless, was that the thinness of my circumstances would be temporary as I strived to reconstruct from the rubble. Initially, the signs were promising: I reactivated my business, I kept up my interests, I maintained contacts. I had not yet entirely disappeared. But then came Covid, a classic shock event. There are different ways of remembering the pandemic. For some, it revealed social cohesion as the government supported businesses, and social groups (especially the young) made sacrifices to protect others. For others, Covid and its lockdowns both exposed and exacerbated existing inequalities, with the most socially and economically vulnerable groups most profoundly affected. Those with strong scaffolding could withstand the viral earthquake; those with weak scaffolding were pushed to, and often over, the edge of disaster.

My elderly parents, fearful for their own health, opted to shield for the duration of the pandemic. Consequently, for eighteen months I was stuck, unable to leave their house, not seeing my own children, with no control over my present or future. Visible only to my parents’ social bubble—my sister, her husband and son—and with work drying up due both to the pandemic and my own increasing sense of the pointlessness of it, I had finally disappeared from the world.

IV. Radical loneliness in an atomized society

Covid arguably revealed how atomized modern society is. Both as a virus and as the cause of a profound dislocation of political, social, economic, and cultural norms, it often seemed to pose an existential threat. As with precarity, when survival itself appears to be at stake the tendency is to turn defensively inwards, to prioritize ever smaller groups and units as objects of care and concern. Atomization is not simply the logical extreme of modern individualism; it is fuelled by precarity and the sense of a world full of risk, insecurity, and peril. It is a defensive posture. It manifests itself in, among many other things, the desire for walls and hard borders; SUVs that resemble armoured cars; houses (such as that of my parents) protected by iron gates, high fences, motion sensor external lighting, and multiple locks. Lockdowns, quarantine, and enforced isolation under conditions of threat hasten these atomizing tendencies.

My mental and physical health spiralled due to my isolation during the pandemic. I was confined to a village where I knew nobody, to a house I did not regard as a home, and to a room that was not my own. I had become invisible to the world.

Originally a forced and reluctant retreat, it became one that I fatalistically surrendered to: I withdrew, mentally giving up hope in the face of a life that now seemed interminably bleak, empty, and meaningless. By the time my parents emerged from shielding, I was experiencing recurring poor health, I was extremely inactive, and I was beset by bitterness, loneliness, and depression. As the world resumed, I remained reclusive and out of sight, an anomic existence that lacked the energy, strength, or will to choose anything but capitulation.

Over the next few years, many empty periods have left blanks in my history: I dimly recall days of sleep interspersed with prolonged silent dialogues with myself, full of bitterness, nostalgia, and regret, while staring at the ceiling or at the bricks of the neighbouring house, the view from my room. My coping mechanism was to escape reality: I devoured films and drama series, and I lost myself in the fantasies of computer games. But these were oases of vitality: for nearly five years I did not read a single book, I wrote nothing, I saw and contacted nobody apart from my immediate family and children, and I barely left the village, sometimes not even leaving the house for weeks.

With nobody to support me, I was caught in a vicious trap: my self-worth and self-respect as a middle-aged man living with his parents, without income or meaningful work, friendless, and mentally fragile, had disintegrated, which made it increasingly difficult to take any steps towards rebuilding. The further I sunk, the harder any prospect of escape became.

I was radically alone. This was not the solitude that I had frequently chosen in life—for solitude is a willing embrace of quiet reflection or undisturbed creativity. Rather, it was a loneliness embedded in every part of my being, in my thoughts and feelings, in how I carried out simple movements through a day. It was not the loneliness of a marginalized life; it was the loneliness of almost complete disappearance, of a life that was no longer even a blip on the world’s radar. I saw myself as a prisoner: aware of the outside world, but forgotten by it and unable to affect, participate in, or connect with it. Unlike a prisoner, however, I had no fellow inmates with whom I could create the semblance of a social world.

In this sequence of precarity and shock events leading to disappearance, which in turn results in radical loneliness in an atomized society, there is one further consequence worth noting: the death of the heart. James Baldwin used this phrase to describe the moral apathy stemming from segregation. In the enforced disengagement from others and the world occasioned by radical loneliness, perhaps the most painful disappearance is that of the heart, the symbol of life itself. The activities of the world can begin to seem no more than two-dimensional images on a screen; culture can feel like an abstract idea rather than a meaningfully lived experience; the reality of other people can seem to have no more significance than characters in a computer game. Isolation and loneliness lead to apathy, anomie, and heartlessness.

V. Final questions

In Mexican folklore, there are three deaths: physical death; burial; and when one’s name is spoken for the final time. I thought of my disappearance as akin to the third death, awkwardly upending the normal sequence. But disappearance is not necessarily death. If the world stops seeing you, do you cease? Whether the unwitnessed falling tree in the forest makes a sound might be questioned, but its reality as a tree does not require witnesses. And, as many elderly people would attest, invisibility does not mean non-existence. Nevertheless, death takes many forms: social death and civic death, for example. A human life is more than biological survival. Most of us consider identity to be central to the human life: our unique sense of self, our relations to others, our membership of social groups, and our formative experiences. Identity is not simply self-conception; it positions us in society.

I began by commenting that our identities require scaffolding. Precarity weakens the scaffolding; shock collapses it; loneliness follows collapse; and in prolonged loneliness something more intimate begins to die. But does identity require recognition? Perhaps. The Acropolis endures as an identity because it is recognized. If identity is inextricably bound up with our place in society, then a disappearance from society and loss of its recognition would seem to result in a disintegration of identity.

Even in my radical loneliness, however, I was recognized—by myself. One consciousness at least was consistently aware of me. That self-recognition might also be part of the scaffolding, a quietly resilient section of the infrastructure. Self-recognition might be what keeps the heart beating even when it appears to be dying. And if the heart is still pulsing, then we might begin to discover other parts of the scaffolding that prove strong enough to prevent total collapse. Could articulation be just such a robust piece of scaffolding? I remained in dialogue with myself throughout my loneliness. Even at my most withdrawn, I was not silent. Might visibility begin with language and dialogue—even if only with oneself? And might naming and describing disappearance be the first step in resisting it?