Abstract
The recent census reveals that a full half of the U.S. population is living near or under the poverty line. Despite widespread images of millennials seeking pleasure, plugging into new technologies, and opting to live in their parents’ basements in order to extend their adolescence, this sobering statistic reminds us that this new generation is entering a labor market that is growing more flexible, more precarious, and more polarized between high-wage and low-wage earners. For previous generations of working-class young adults, factory jobs provided the bedrock of stability upon which marriage, a family, and a responsible grown-up identity could flourish. These used to be the markers of adulthood. Now that this bedrock of stable working-class jobs is gone, what does adulthood mean in a neoliberal era? How do young people know if and when they have crossed the threshold into adulthood?
Jennifer Silva sets out to answer this important question in her book Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. Although neoliberalism is typically described in terms of deregulation, income inequality, the shrinking of social safety nets, the privatization of public goods, and the calls for “personal responsibility” in the face of these ensuing crises, Silva’s innovative investigation of neoliberal forces leads us through the subjective consciousness of the one hundred young adults she interviewed for this project.
First, Silva uses her interviewees’ own narratives to illustrate the many obstacles youth face in their journey to adulthood. These include obsolete manufacturing skills; short-term and flexible job opportunities that leave working-class young adults without stable schedules, adequate income, or benefits; the deregulated credit-card and payday lending industries that prey upon young people desperate to fill in the gaps created by unemployment and underemployment; the unfulfilled promise of the military as a route to social mobility; and rising college tuition.
Silva goes on to explore the ramifications of these institutional insecurities on the intimate terrain of love, marriage, and family. Rather than simply delaying marriage, men and women opt to protect their own interests in an increasingly unpredictable world of risk. In this new world, commitment does not buffer young adults from the storms of an insecure labor market. Instead, it becomes one more risk that young people cannot afford to take.
Out of the wreckage of this post-industrial economy, how do young people refashion what it means to be an adult? The major life lesson that these young adults learn is that they cannot depend on anyone except themselves. In this way, self-reliance and individualism become the keys to self-worth and dignity.
The adult self, then, is a “hardened self,” which achieves adult status via what Silva terms the “mood economy.” Working-class young people find adulthood through a journey of self-transformation. This gives them the ability to will themselves through the pain of family and intimate violence, drug and alcohol addiction, and cognitive, emotional, and mental disorders. Adulthood, then, consists of turning suffering into a narrative of therapeutic transformation and triumph.
What are the implications of this new route to adulthood? Silva persuasively argues that for these young people, adulthood is achieved when the hardened self engages in the isolated project of transforming suffering into emotional self-management. This therapeutic project obscures the injustice of those institutions which have failed young people in this new economy. It funnels resentment and distrust toward others who experience even greater suffering, for the suffering is rendered as a result of individual (rather than systemic) failure. It isolates young people from each other and sabotages their intimate relationships. Importantly, this project presumably steers working-class young adults away from collective action.
Silva paints a devastating picture of a generation of working-class adults who are poorly equipped to recognize or battle the neoliberal sources of their trauma. And yet, at the end of her book she discusses the “glimmers of opposition to privatization and deregulation” represented by recent social movements like Occupy (p. 155). Silva does not explain how such movements could appear in the kind of atomizing social climate she describes in the book, and perhaps she does not accord enough of her discussion to young adults’ central role in organizing these movements. While her study is an incredibly insightful examination of why working-class young adults fail to mobilize collectively along class lines in a neoliberal era, she also neglects to discuss the ways in which they do: for example, landmark labor organizing in the fast food industry, immigrant rights organizing and the DREAMers, and the Occupy movement. How does her picture of working-class emotional self-management square with these new forms of organizing?
Furthermore, Silva’s stellar analysis of class should also be matched by an equally robust gender and racial analysis throughout the book. Although these analyses are threaded throughout her chapters, she does not quite illustrate how her core concepts of the “hardened self” or the process of therapeutic emotional self-management take racialized and gendered forms. At times she harkens to a picture of long-gone working-class life that looks unmistakably white and male, yet rarely in the book does she explicitly analyze how whiteness or masculinity might play a role in young white men’s expectations of adulthood and sense of betrayal in particular. Despite these omissions, Silva’s book is a groundbreaking examination of how working-class young people are crafting new routes to adulthood that work to restore their dignity while reproducing the very neoliberal logics that have undermined their futures.