The Sticky Shame and What to Do with It

The preceding chapter documented the various ways that unemployed people are encouraged to point the arrow toward themselves when looking for a reason why they are unemployed and how to solve the problem. The activation polices and the work on empowerment and motivation invite unemployed people to be self-responsible, self-reflective, and take on risk management themselves. That provides a fertile ground for the self-reflective emotion par excellence: shame. The link between unemployment and shame was established a century ago. However, the specific workings and the way shame is affected by specific labor market dynamics and meetings with institutional actors are less explored. Shame manifests not only in the explicit, but mainly in the silences, in the unsaid and undetermined. It is a very private, an almost visceral experience, however contra-intuitively, shame is intimately linked to the cultural politics of emotions (Ahmed, The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2014a). This chapter zooms in on how unemployed people are affected by and deal with shame in an affective economy. A substantial group of the interview participants dis-identifies with the unemployed label and instead they draw on the concepts of ‘freelancer’ or ‘entrepreneur’ to escape the stickiness of unemployment. Based on that I document how some escape the shame and stickiness of unemployment by defining other people as the ‘real’ unemployed such as social assistance recipients. Consequently, the unemployed people further contribute to the negative representation of unemployment with which they are forced to struggle. The chapter also explores how precarization plays a role here. The diversification of contracting in today’s labor market makes it easier to be ‘in between job’, working a little, working unpaid etc., resulting in an overall erosion of the dominant binary between being either unemployed or employed. The chapter contributes to the emerging field of studies of affective subjectification in answering the overall research question by documenting the intertwinement of monetary and affective economy, as receiving unemployment benefit comes with a particular affective price; namely, they are subjectified as ashamed and passionate as two sides of the same coin.