Politics of waiting: Workfare, post-Soviet austerity and the ethics of freedom 9781526126269

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Politics of waiting

POLITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY The Political Ethnography series is an outlet for ethnographic research into politics and administration and builds an interdisciplinary platform for a readership interested in qualitative research in this area. Such work cuts across traditional scholarly boundaries of political science, public administration, anthropology, social policy studies and development studies and facilitates a conversation across disciplines. It will provoke a re-thinking of how researchers can understand politics and administration.

Previously published titles The absurdity of bureaucracy: How implementation works  Nina Holm Vohnsen

Politics of waiting Workfare, post-Soviet austerity and the ethics of freedom

Liene Ozoliņa

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Liene Ozoliņa 2019 The right of Liene Ozoliņa to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2625 2 hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or thirdparty internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Series editor’s preface Acknowledgments

vi ix

Introduction 1 1 Waiting as an organising logic 25 2 Temporalities of austerity 44 3 The anxious subject 60 4 The will to live 80 5 Spaces of the expelled 99 Epilogue: Waiting for freedom 118 References 132 Index 146

Series editor’s preface

Ethnography reaches the parts of politics that other methods cannot reach. It captures the lived experience of politics; the everyday life of political elites and street-level bureaucrats. It identifies what we fail to learn, and what we fail to understand, from other approaches. Specifically: 1. It is a source of data not available elsewhere. 2. It is often the only way to identify key individuals and core processes. 3. It identifies ‘voices’ all too often ignored. 4. By disaggregating organisations, it leads to an understanding of ‘the black box’, or the internal processes of groups and organisations. 5. It recovers the beliefs and practices of actors. 6. It gets below and behind the surface of official accounts by providing texture, depth and nuance, so our stories have richness as well as context. 7. It lets interviewees explain the meaning of their actions, providing an authenticity that can only come from the main characters involved in the story. 8. It allows us to frame (and reframe, and reframe) research questions in a way that recognises our understandings about how things work around here evolve during the fieldwork. 9. It admits of surprises – of moments of epiphany, serendipity and happenstance – that can open new research agendas. 10. It helps us to see and analyse the symbolic, performative aspects of political action. Despite this distinct and distinctive contribution, ethnography’s potential is rarely realised in political science and related disciplines. It is considered an endangered species or at best a minority sport. This series seeks to promote the use of ethnography in political science, public administration and public policy. The series has two key aims: 1. To establish an outlet for ethnographic research into politics, public administration and public policy.

Series editor’s preface

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2. To build an interdisciplinary platform for a readership interested in qualitative research into politics and administration. We expect such work to cut across the traditional scholarly boundaries of political science, public administration, anthropology, organisation studies, social policy, and development studies. Why is anyone interested in an unemployment office in Latvia and training programmes that encourage people to take charge of their lives? The answer is as simple as it is important. We are interested because it is an example of the forms of state control under austerity in post-Soviet economies. In a phrase, the case speaks to big issues. I was drawn to this book by the image of swallowing a toad. The Latvian economy had suffered badly because of the global financial crisis yet there were no protests about austerity. To swallow a toad means to put up with something unpleasant. It is an act of acquiescence chosen because it is the only available response. It is an image that epitomises the ‘Latvian mentality’. Liene Ozoliņa asks why Latvians acquiesced in austerity. She is sceptical about the claim that Latvians have internalized neoliberal beliefs about responsibility and freedom of choice – the present-day version of false consciousness. Rather, in the classic ethnographic way, she paid attention to how her informants – the trainers, the policy makers, the civil servants, and the trainees – understood austerity. The fieldwork involved observing the everyday implementation of workfare programmes, especially the seminars on ‘Competitiveness-raising activities’. There were various specific seminars on, for example, writing a CV, behaving at a job interview, and finding a new job as well as more general seminars on improving one’s self-confidence, and working on oneself. Liene Ozoliņa attended two or three sessions a week for two months, observed registration for the seminars, conducted formal and informal interviews with people she met at the seminars. There were 46 recorded interviews. She spoke also to several former directors and other top-level civil servants of the Employment Agency. Finally, she interviewed former and current policy makers at the Ministry of Welfare, welfare policy analysts, and a former minister of employment affairs. The first three chapters focus on the ways in which austerity worked and the role that time and waiting played as forms of present-day state control. She explores the politics of waiting as a tool of state control. The analysis then shifts away from the state to actors and the ways in which trainers and trainees understood their everyday working practices. At the beginning of the research, Liene Ozoliņa saw the workfare programmes as a cynical state initiative because it focused on individual responsibility when the unemployed confronted a shrinking labour market. By the end, she saw the seminars as a genuine space for both self-examination and meaningful interaction with other trainees. The seminars became a space for working on the self,

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Series editor’s preface

and a way of carving out a life that is ‘livable’. The seminars were no longer about the use of waiting to exert social control but about self-formation and speaking and listening in a public sphere. In other words, workfare programmes began as a tool of the coercive state but became popularly legitimated in everyday practice. The workfare programme both disciplined the unemployed but also served as a space for practicing an ethics of freedom. Ethnography is about giving voice to the silent and opening new research agendas, and Liene Ozoliņa does both successfully. She points us towards exploring the forms of statecraft emerging in the aftermath of neoliberalism and to the individual quest for a meaningful life in this aftermath. Professor R. A. W. Rhodes University of Southampton Series editor

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to all the people in Latvia who shared their time and their stories with me, often during difficult periods in their lives. This includes the people who worked at the Latvian Employment Agency and who invited me into their offices and classrooms and were so generous with their time. This book is first and foremost a result of what I learned from all of you. My academic journey has allowed me to meet a number of people whom I have had the privilege to consider my mentors. At the Latvian Academy of Culture, I first learned how little I knew. Anda Laķe and Silva Seņkāne showed me how sociological research was one way of searching for answers. At the University of Amsterdam, Rob Hagendijk taught me about the intersections between social theory and ethnographic writing and set an example of being not only a good academic but above all a good person. Thomas Blom Hansen’s work and advice were an early inspiration for a number of ideas that later shaped this book. At the London School of Economics (LSE), Manali Desai provided intellectually rigorous guidance through the ups and downs of the research process. Though she never used those words, her mentorship embodied for me the British mantra ‘Keep calm and carry on’. Victor Seidler has offered intellectual inspiration and emotional support throughout the writing process. Finally, George Gaskell provided the necessary encouragement at the right moment to submit the proposal for this book. The LSE’s Department of Sociology has been my academic home since 2010, and I would like to thank Nigel Dodd and the rest of the faculty for making it such a supportive one. I have always thought that the best thing about being at the LSE is being surrounded by so many talented and inspirational colleagues and students. I would particularly like to thank Angela Marques Filipe, Antonia Dawes, Katherine Robinson, Kristina Fuentes and Nabila Munawar for sharing the trials of starting an academic career and for their friendship. I would also like to acknowledge my LSE Writing Group colleagues, who gave generous feedback on parts of the draft manuscript. The London School of Economics, along with the Economic and Social Research Council, provided essential funding for this research project.

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Acknowledgments

My gratitude extends to people in many other institutions and places. My colleagues at the NYLON writing group have provided the most supportive forum throughout the past six years for developing my ideas. Lynne Haney provided crucial feedback for turning an initial version of the manuscript into this book. Previous versions of these chapters were presented at conferences in Stockholm, Riga, New York, London, Miami, New Orleans and Berlin. I express my gratitude to the audiences at these gatherings for their comments and critique, which have helped this work evolve and take its present shape. A special thank you, also, to Sally Eales for a perceptive and caring editing of a version of this manuscript. At the final stages of the writing process, Anthony Mason and Robert Byron at Manchester University Press have been indispensable in helping this manuscript become a book. I am particularly grateful for the anonymous reviewers’ careful engagement with my ideas, and I have done my best to honour their feedback. I would also like to thank the British Journal of Sociology for permission to republish a version of my 2016 article as Chapter 2. And finally, I am grateful to my dear friends Ieva, Iveta, Rita, Sandra and Zanda for the past and the present that we share. I wish to thank my mother, who, ever since I was six years old, has been encouraging me to work less but who also never thought that a six-year-old was too young to talk to about history and politics. And I thank my husband, Benjamin Francis Fitzgerald, for all the love, for all the cooking and for making me laugh. This book is dedicated to our son Kristians, who is about to arrive into this world. London, August 2018

Introduction

Riga v. Athens

As I arrived in Riga in the autumn of 2011 to start my fieldwork, the Occupy movement was springing up in many cities across the world. Protests against austerity were spreading across Europe. Citizens’ movements were soon to turn into anti-establishment political parties across the Mediterranean. Latvia was one of the countries worst hit by the global financial crisis in the world. By the time of the beginning of my fieldwork, the austerity regime had been in place for two years. It had meant slashing government spending on welfare, education and healthcare; cutting public sector wages; and raising taxes to balance the national budget and regain the competitiveness of the economy.1 As a result of the crisis and the austerity regime, the national economy shrunk by 25% between 2008 and 2010. Unemployment had gone up to 21% at the worst point, and unemployment benefits were being cut as part of the austerity measures. Queues for registering for and receiving welfare assistance were getting longer. Yet, I recall noticing the absence of any echoes of Occupy in Riga. The contrast between Greece and Latvia was particularly stark. Here were two countries on the margins of Europe that both saw similarly harsh austerity measures following the 2008 crisis. They experienced similar drops in the levels of GDP. Greek protests were reported for months in daily news across the world. All was quiet in Riga, however.2 People were merely bitterly joking about the austerity being not so much about ‘tightening the belts’ as ‘tightening the other’s belt’. They meant that those who came up with the post-2008 austerity policies, such as reducing unemployment benefits or cutting teachers’ salaries by one-third, did not design any similar measures for themselves. As governments were being toppled across Europe, the Latvian public re-elected the austerity government. While the Spaniards and the Greeks were mobilising at home and building international alliances between anti-establishment social movements, no populist movement ever emerged in Latvia. The country has stayed on the neoliberal course, ‘fiscal discipline’ remaining a constant policy goal.

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Politics of waiting

The Latvian story captured the attention of top economists. Paul Krugman had several of his New York Times columns dedicated to debating whether Latvia was going to have to default on its debts and declare bankruptcy, like Argentina had a decade earlier. Krugman and others were perplexed when the Latvian government chose the radical strategy of cutting budgetary expenses rather than devaluing the local currency. The national government chose a form of tackling the economic crisis that shifted the burden to the ordinary people. How come the drop of 25% in GDP that followed saw no major protests? On beginning my fieldwork at the unemployment office, I became even more puzzled. I was expecting the people who had lost their jobs in the aftermath of the crisis to be deeply critical of the ‘lean and mean’ welfare state.3 My plan had been to study how the welfare state had been reconfigured as part of the post-Soviet social and economic transformations, and I started with participant observation of one of the key workfare programmes4 for the unemployed, called ‘Competitiveness-Raising Activities’, which consisted of a range of one- to fourday seminars. I was expecting people to resent the fact that the support when one lost a job was offered in the form of a couple of seminars on communication skills, while the cash benefits that were essential for paying rent or buying food were meagre and had even been shrunk. Yet, the people I met expressed little critique of austerity politics. Instead, I found a lot of excitement about these seminars that focused on psychological techniques of self-examination and raising self-confidence. Many of my informants were embracing the language of needing to ‘work on oneself ’ to find a new job. Some of them blamed themselves for the loss of employment; others spoke of it as a ‘normal’ thing to happen or even an ‘opportunity’ that life had given them to start anew. I was ready to do what some have recently called an anthropology of suffering – ‘the minute description of individual experiences of exclusion, violence, illness, and poverty’ (Laidlaw 2014: 31). But it was not what my informants wanted to talk about. They were telling me about the importance of taking charge of one’s life and the power of positive thinking. Where there was a critique of austerity, it was expressed in the form of occasional bitter remarks about ‘the state not thinking about the people’. As I soon found out, the seminars had such high attendance figures because the employment agents who registered job seekers actively encouraged signing up for them. This was, in fact, the biggest social assistance programme in the post-crisis years in terms of the number of people involved. The state made this low-cost programme widely available to the unemployed, while signing people up to wait for longer and much costlier vocational training programmes. But I also noticed that many of the unemployed, once they attended one seminar, tried to attend more, and some would go every week to a session by a particular trainer even though that was not formally required by the State Employment Agency. In fact, civil servants were trying to regulate how many seminars a person was allowed to attend per month so as to manage the numbers, although I often

Introduction

3

saw people subvert this rule by not putting their signature down on the attendance list. As several of the people I met at these seminars became my informants whom I would speak with regularly over the course of the fieldwork, I got to follow their experiences of navigating unemployment. As I will show in detail in the empirical chapters of the book, the language of self-improvement, work on oneself and individual responsibility was a constant in the many different life stories I heard. There was bitterness about the economic hardships and the government’s perceived inaptitude, but there was also general agreement with the thesis of ‘living within one’s means’ and ‘taking responsibility for one’s life’. How to make sense of such apparent popular embracing of the austerity? How to swallow a toad

A few years after the crisis, in 2014, a couple of Latvian animators created a film called How to swallow a toad. This short animation feature tells a story about a fictional town where a group of citizens discover that another group has a strange habit. They eat toads. The animation shows in graphic detail the first group watching with disgust as boys stuff large meaty toads in their mouths and, with some effort, gulp them down. The plot of the animation plays with a Latvian saying. To swallow a toad means to put up with something unpleasant. It is an act of acquiescence, resented but chosen as the wiser, the better or sometimes the only available response. It was an artist’s commentary on the Latvians’ acceptance of the crisis and the austerity that followed. This was ‘the Latvian mentality’. Such an explanation was common in the public sphere. Of course, my sociologist’s ear turned sceptical when hearing about such a ‘national mentality’ that essentialised ‘Latvianness’. Yet, this story about the toads, and the wider narrative it was part of, raised intriguing questions – how had it become part of the national selfimage? Why were so many Latvians ready to swallow the toads? How did people make sense of the austerity? Why was there no Occupy movement in Latvia? How come my informants were often blaming themselves for the job losses? An alternative reading of this acquiescence has framed the stark contrast between Latvia and Greece as due to the weak civil society in post-socialist societies. Weak trade unions and the Soviet heritage of low civic engagement and political apathy mean that citizens are unable to launch a successful challenge to the austerity (Sommers and Woolfson 2014; Ījabs 2017). Was it simply that Latvians did not have the kinds of organisational structures needed to mobilise and protest? Was it really due to the weak trade unions, I pondered as I sat in the waiting room at the unemployment office and joined in for tens of the ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars with my informants. It did not seem a satisfactory interpretation. While there is certainly some truth to this reading, it operates with(in) an analytic of lack that has plagued a lot of sociology and political science of the post-socialist region and the Third World (see e.g. Mamdani 1996;

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Politics of waiting

Chabal and Daloz 2006). This analytic of lack means taking Western5 liberal democracies as the norm and analysing ‘non-Western’ societies in terms of the extent to which they are approximating the norm.6 While such a perspective may be useful for a certain kind of macro-level comparative study, looking at what is not there will not help to understand the kinds of relations of power that do structure and underpin the ‘non-Western’ socio-political realities. The third possible interpretation draws on an established tradition in sociology and anthropology. Studies following post-structuralist and constructivist paradigms have traced the processes of ‘making up’, ‘producing’ or ‘constructing’ neoliberal citizens (e.g. Rose 1996; Ong 2006). Individual internalisation of the neoliberal rhetoric of responsibility and freedom of choice is the ultimate triumph of neoliberalism and the key target of such critiques. Was this indeed a case of successful neoliberal subjectivation, i.e. internalisation of neoliberal values of individual responsibility for one’s hardships in life, documented by many sociologists and anthropologists in various contexts across the world? Was this, to put it in Marxist terms, a case of false consciousness, as Latvians embraced the neoliberal rhetoric of self-blame while being disciplined, stigmatised and dispossessed by it? As Ghassan Hage (2018) has recently observed, if we look through a Marxist or a feminist lens, it is always a question of who did what to whom and who is the victim. Yet, he points out, paradoxically the answer is always already known. Trained in post-structuralist social theory and familiar with sociological critiques of neoliberalism, I was initially interpreting the fact that so many of my informants embraced this language of ‘work on oneself ’ as a particular local expression of global neoliberalisation. Yet, participating in these seminars, speaking with the participants and trainers, left me with a feeling that I was getting it wrong. It was as if I already knew who had done what to whom in this whodunit. The poststructuralist subjectivation paradigm, just like in Hage’s comment, had already provided the answer before I had even properly begun the fieldwork. The neoliberal state was trapping the citizens in this rhetoric of competitiveness and individual responsibility, which was actually against their true interests, while they were not economically or sociologically savvy enough to realise it. Over time, I became increasingly uneasy with this reading, not least because my critical stance and my informants’ accounts differed so starkly. What kind of a sociology was it that would make me dismiss the perspectives of those I studied? Staying with this dissatisfaction and pondering over it has eventually led me to a different reading and – I hope – a deeper understanding. As I spent time at the unemployment office, I learned about the effects that the workfare programmes, such as the ‘Competitiveness-Raising Activities’, had on people. As I listened, my interlocutors’ experiences provided a new perspective. As this book will show, the forms of control and discipline that this policy programme embodied were subtler and more ambiguous than the neoliberal subjectivation

Introduction

5

narrative of ‘making up’ or ‘producing’ subjects allows. As the unemployed were waiting for months to take part in some of the programmes, time emerged as a form of control. It became a story about politics of waiting in the aftermath of the global neoliberal turn. And it became a story about sacrifice rather than false consciousness. Waiting emerged as a form of state control in contemporary neoliberal capitalism, but also as a sacrifice for freedom, to be understood in the context of the post-Soviet Latvian state project. I started increasingly paying attention to how my informants – the trainers running the programme, the policy makers, the civil servants and the people who participated in this programme – engaged with questions of ‘will’ and ‘responsibility’, questions of how to live and how to live well, and how to make and re-make themselves as particular kinds of people. I learnt to take seriously my interlocutors’ engagement with ‘the work on self ’ as a way of carving out a life that is ‘livable’,7 even under circumstances of great uncertainty and precarity. It became – as I observed and listened – a story about waiting and about freedom, and about remaking the nation and oneself. Statecraft in the aftermath of neoliberalism

Ever since the global economic crisis, social scientists have been sifting through the rubble left after several decades of global neoliberalisation. There are stories uncovering the social destruction along the American Rust Belt and in the former industrial heartlands of England – closure of industry, unemployment, loss of opportunities and security (e.g. Standing 2011; Lorey 2015; Hochschild 2016). Such analyses are exposing the recent resurgence of nationalism and radical rightwing populist movements as a consequence of several decades of precarisation and socio-economic polarisation. We have been witnessing how states exercise increasingly harsher, more punitive measures on the ever-expanding precariat to secure the continuation of laissez-faire liberalism for the privileged sections of society (Wacquant 2010, 2012; Hilgers 2012; Fassin 2015, 2016). Control and coercion have become more prominent features of the contemporary state than the governing ‘at a distance’ that scholars focused on in the 1990s (Rose and Miller 1992). Some scholars argue therefore that the neoliberal state is morphing into a ‘law-and-order state’ (Hyatt 2011). While drawing on the case study of Latvia, I take a comparative perspective by situating the Latvian story within this global context as well as vis-à-vis both neoliberal and Soviet logics of governance. The ethnographic perspective that this book offers shows how austerity has worked as a political and moral as much as an economic phenomenon. Conceptualised comparatively, this analysis contributes to current debates in sociology and anthropology on the rise of the coercive state and the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism, and on welfare as a key domain of exercising social control.

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Politics of waiting

There are two sets of arguments that I make in this book. First, my interest is in teasing out forms of etatisation (state control) of time8 in post-Soviet neoliberalism and situating these comparatively with regard to temporalities of neoliberal globalisation on the one hand and Soviet forms of temporal controls on the other hand. Scheduling of time emerges as a key form of state control in the wake of neoliberalism. I offer in this book a situated ethnographic analysis that opens up questions as to why people are willing to be patient and ‘wait it out’. Such attention to temporal controls provides a distinct, empirically grounded perspective on the ways in which ‘the apparently unforced consent to the regime of contemporary, intensified capitalism comes about, and where coercion may be at work in the operation of today’s liberal democracies’ (Streeck 2017). Furthermore, I trace how the austerity regime not only relied on a temporality, familiar to Latvians, of living in delayed time but also produced new forms of waiting. The analysis that is presented in this book thus also complicates accounts of global acceleration and space–time compression. I argue that, to understand contemporary logics of governance after the global neoliberal turn, we need to adjust our theories from an emphasis on speed and acceleration to seeing waiting as an indispensable element of contemporary governance and everyday experience. Neoliberal globalisation has produced waiting as much as acceleration. The second set of arguments in this book grow out of considering austerity and workfare within not only broader temporal but also ethical horizons. The ethnographic method allows recognising how this waiting functions not only as a form of state control but also as a space for ethical and strategic action. The Latvian story is distinct because of how its Soviet history intersected with the post-1991 nationalist, neoliberal state project. What could have been perceived as social destruction was framed in the public discourse as a long-awaited opportunity to live in freedom after decades of Soviet rule. As a result, not only have there been few sustained protests to three decades of harsh neoliberal reforms, but also many of those with whom I spoke over the course of my fieldwork embraced the language of self-responsibility, as previously noted. I examine how the ‘work on oneself ’ that the unemployed were made to do could become a variety of meaningful ethical projects, shaped by an anxiety to reconstitute themselves as new kinds of subjects in a post-Soviet liberal democracy, rather than by state-imposed neoliberal ideology. The imperative to work on oneself as a way out of unemployment could have been regarded as a form of stigmatisation and social control but was in fact often perceived as – and turned into – spaces of self-formation, empowerment and practising forms of speaking and listening in a democratic public sphere. I therefore argue that we need to situate the public’s responses to austerity policies not only within the global tempos of acceleration and waiting but also within their historical and cultural horizons. Such a perspective complicates the reading of austerity policies, and workfare in particular, as

Introduction

7

tools of the coercive state and shows how such state tactics can become popularly legitimated. I turn to defining and contextualising these two arguments in more detail now. Bare life and ordinary life

While the neoliberal rhetoric since the 1970s has cherished deregulation of markets and activation of citizens, the associated techniques of governance have accumulated into a twenty-first-century law-and-order state. Recent sociological and anthropological studies of contemporary logics of governance highlight the darker forms of state control, including coercive, even authoritarian elements, instituted via citizenship and migration policies, criminal justice system reforms and social and welfare policies. We see the growth of importance of the penal wing of the state in the United States and elsewhere, with incarceration rates going up and resources, funds and programmes being shifted away from social welfare (the kinder Left Hand of the state) and off to the criminal justice system (the harsher Right Hand of the state) (Wacquant 2009; Fassin 2015, 2016). The wealthy and educated social groups at the top of the social hierarchy are nurtured by the state (e.g. with generous tax regimes) while those at the bottom are disciplined, criminalised and often altogether expelled from social, economic and political spaces. We see zones of exception in Southeast Asia and other emerging economies – some individuals are economically rewarded and politically included because of their place in growth-generating sectors of the knowledge economy while others, often migrants, are denied rights, working in these zones of economic exception while being held in a state of political exception (Ong 2006). We see ‘brutal expulsions’ – increasingly large numbers of people across the world being expelled from their habitats, whether as refugees from war zones or as migrants from areas where land is being bought by foreign governments and companies, forcing people to migrate to overpopulated urban slums or further to the ‘developed’ world (Sassen 2014). Studies of post-socialist transformations have also often focused on coping and surviving (see e.g. Bridger and Pine 1998; Eglitis and Lāce 2009; Stenning et al. 2010). The increasing inequality and precariousness that the neoliberal reforms brought about across large parts of the region justifies such a focus of interpretation. Sociologists have described the Latvian poor as an underclass created by the capitalist reforms and shrinking welfare policies (Eglitis and Lāce 2009). Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s (2004) work on modernity’s human waste, they show with the help of detailed statistics how large parts of society are marginalised and have no space in the post-Soviet Latvian version of modernity. Language of abandonment has become commonplace in anthropological and sociological critiques of neoliberalism. Distinct ‘zones of social abandonment’

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Politics of waiting

(Biehl 2005) and entire ‘economies of abandonment’ (Povinelli 2011) have emerged as the effects of such global dynamics of expulsion. Such analyses in both ‘the West’ and ‘the East’ have rightly illuminated the Janus-faced regimes of governance that have emerged out of the global neoliberal turn. They draw stark contrasts between the privileged and the abandoned. They justly call attention to extreme measures and conditions affecting many across the globe (the incarcerated, the refugees, the homeless). The language of abandonment rightly highlights the widening socio-economic inequalities and the political economies behind them. It thus offers a compelling normative critique of the current global condition. It is a critique of contemporary sovereignty put forward most powerfully by Giorgio Agamben (1995), where some groups of society are reduced to bare life, zoe, while others are entitled to a qualified life, bios. Such a dichotomous vision, however, does not recognise the complexity of state–citizen relationships in diverse historically and geopolitically shaped contexts. One of my aims in this book is to go beyond this dichotomous view of contemporary governance by highlighting subtler, more mundane forms of state control, discipline and surveillance that have arisen along with the brutal expulsions. From the vantage point of a Latvian unemployment office, I ask what we can understand about the state–citizen relationships and logics of governance in the wake of several decades of neoliberalism, if we focus our gaze on ordinary life rather than bare life, ordinary suffering rather than extreme coercion. Waiting is one such subtler form of state control and ordinary suffering that emerged during my fieldwork at the Latvian unemployment office. The neoliberal rhetoric has been saturated with references to activation, individual responsibilisation and entrepreneurship. Yet, social policies that schedule one’s time or that put one on a list for state support but then make one wait indefinitely, in fact produce waiting and passivity among the most vulnerable groups in society. This is one of the paradoxes I explore in this book. Signing people up for vocational training programmes that they then have to wait several months or even years for, building in a six-month wait as a condition for allowing a person to participate in a manual labour programme that earns them a small but vital sum of money – those were among such forms of controlling people’s time and putting them in a bind, all administered by the Latvian state. More generally, austerity made people put their lives on hold and live in a delayed time as many lost their jobs and source of livelihood, and others – like public sector employees – saw significant salary cuts. ‘Dispersed suffering’ is a term that Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) uses in her study of indigenous groups in Australia as they seek to maintain their livelihood and way of life in the face of increasingly harsh government policies. While working in a different context and analysing different kinds of policies, I can recognise Povinelli’s attention to ‘forms of suffering … that are ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime’ (2011: 13). It is the kind of suffering where ‘there is nothing spectacular

Introduction

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to report’ (2011), yet that reveals something as crucial about contemporary logics of governance as Sassen’s (2014) account of the brutal expulsions or Wacquant’s prisonfare analysis (2010). Time, the global economy and the crisis

Acceleration and time–space compression have been the go-to metaphors for understanding neoliberal globalisation (Harvey 1990, 2005; Sassen 2006). Speeding up is a common metaphor these days, probably not least because it corresponds to many people’s experiences, especially perhaps those privileged to write about it in magazines or books. Many of us feel always pressed for time, always connected, always expected to do more (Wajcman 2015; Wajcman and Dodd 2016). Blurring between private and company time and increasing numbers of self-employed, as the gig economy phenomenon grows, can be seen as the most recent manifestation of the core feature of capitalism – always accelerating the cycle of production (Harvey 1990). Perhaps this imagery of acceleration also organically makes sense to us because it corresponds to the broader cultural narrative of time as linear. Such a narrative of acceleration and speed is, of course, part of the temporality of modernity as a vision of constant advancement. But there is evidence mounting against this story of acceleration. While acceleration and speed are prevalent in the popular imagination of our time and have received a lot of sociological attention, waiting, stillness, stuckness is the other side of this coin. It might be that we are talking here about the difference between generic time and experiential time9 – while acceleration and speed is the story we tell of ourselves to ourselves and others, living a life on hold is in fact the experiential time for many in today’s world. Recently, a number of studies have started focusing on the many groups of people who are living in a prolonged – and often permanent – state of waiting. These are welfare clients in social assistance offices like the one where I conducted my fieldwork, but also refugees stuck in camps or detention centres, migrants lingering in ports, young people looking for jobs in idle peripheral economies (Bayart 2007). These are youth from ‘minority’ backgrounds who are incarcerated in the United States, United Kingdom or France, as well as workers on temporary or zero hours contracts having their lives on hold, and young people who are anxious as they feel too financially insecure to be able to plan their future (BBC 2017). Living with uncertainty means living in suspended time. Waiting has emerged as the shadow temporality of neoliberalism. Saskia Sassen’s analysis of globalisation (2006) was one of the earlier accounts pointing out the partiality of the acceleration narrative. Sassen notes that ‘the spatio-temporal orders usually associated with the global economy are elementary – hypermobility and space-time compression’ but argues that such conceptualisation ‘denud[es] the global of much of its social thickness and its specific

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Politics of waiting

spatio-temporal orders’ (2006: 382). A number of ethnographic studies have emerged that document these various spatio-temporal orders sustaining the global economy. Javier Auyero’s study Patients of the State (2012) is one of the most comprehensive ethnographic treatments of politics of waiting that has emerged in recent years. Situating his study among social welfare recipients in Argentina, Auyero shows how the poor are turned into ‘patients of the state’ as they are ‘kicked around’ welfare offices and made to wait indefinitely for appointments, for papers, for benefits. He frames his study therefore as a tempography of domination. Sarah Sharma shows how the waiting zones across the world and people who wait are paramount to the speeding up: while businessmen are stuck at airports, taxi drivers are waiting for them outside the terminals (2014); Craig Jeffrey writes on unemployed young men in India as waiting for opportunities while remaining ‘durably unable to realise their goals’ (2010: 2); Mariane Ferme (2004) documents how attempting to move across national borders can mean endless waiting ‘in the margins of the state’ for one or another legal document. If we consider crisis as ‘lived experience’, as Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman propose in their seminal article (1995: 325), the temporal dimension emerges as fundamental to this experience. The temporal effects of the 2008 global financial crisis and the austerity that followed have been recently examined in a number of studies. For example, Daniel Knight and Charles Stewart open a special issue of History and Anthropology by comparing the crisis in Southern Europe to a car crash ‘where the past, present, and future are all momentarily swimming together as the present undergoes successive re-evaluations’ (2016: 3). Other authors in Knight and Stewart’s edited volume show the various modes of such temporal experiences of the crisis and the austerity, depending on the particular historical and cultural imaginaries that people in a given community share and can mobilise – or that, just the opposite, come to haunt them when the crisis hits. The temporality of austerity means experiencing a sense of a ‘lack of a future’, a trope that ‘expresses a systemic breakdown perceived in everyday life’ (Narotzky 2016: 75). Knight traces how past traumas surface and help individuals make sense of the present, as when Greeks imagine the current crisis as a continuation of the Ottoman rule or the 1940s occupation (Knight 2015). Another collection of articles focuses on boredom as an ethnographic phenomenon that throws light on the marginalisation and precarisation brought on by advanced capitalism (van den Berg and O’Neill 2017). As Marguerite van den Berg and Bruce O’Neill argue, ‘this emergent form of boredom is tied to a new economy’ that has emerged with ‘the rise of financialization’ and ‘the closure of industry’ (2017: 2). Thus, ‘inactivity and boredom are fundamental features of the post-crisis economy in which precarisation is normalised’ (2017: 2). O’Neill’s ethnographic work in Romania shows how the dead time of boredom is experienced by people left displaced and unneeded in the advanced capitalism (2017a, b). Whether it is the long-term unemployed or other social groups stuck in the

Introduction

11

delayed time of austerity, these studies span the ‘socio-geographical spaces of the periphery’ but also societies of ‘the West’ (van den Berg and O’Neill 2017: 5). In contemporary capitalism, many are not even necessary for exploitation (Berlant 2007). The politics of waiting that have unfolded in post-2008 Latvia are not the same as in Southern Europe. The way of experiencing time as ‘pressing rather than merely passing’ (Herzfeld 2009: 111) differs across national and cultural contexts. Shaped by the same global present, the Latvian story must be read also vis-à-vis the Soviet socialist past. The temporal dimension of the post-socialist integration into the global economy has not been studied in much detail and often appears in passing. Elizabeth Dunn points to the perception of Eastern Europe as being ‘backward in time’ and managerial reforms in Poland seeking to establish an active and agile subject (2004). Zsuzanna Vargha shows how the introduction of automatically ordered queueing in banks was ‘a strategy towards … “purification” [that] symbolises the efficiency and freedom of postsocialist market economies and a discontinuity with the past’ (Vargha 2014: 129).10 As I have been making my way around the questions of time, postSoviet austerity and global logics of governance, I have found myself following in the footsteps of Katherine Verdery’s 1996 analysis of socialist temporalities. Her work shows how time mediates the state–citizen relationship in historically and culturally specific ways. Verdery mused in 1996 that ‘reorganisations of time will prove an especially significant and disconcerting aspect of postsocialism for those who live through its changes, and one likely to be ignored by those who study them. The post-socialist equivalent of E.P. Thompson’s celebrated essay on the imposition of capitalist work rhythms is waiting to be written’ (1996: 13). It is not my goal to write the definitive account of post-socialist time, but I do believe that time as a category of organising social reality and a tool for (re-)configuring the state–citizen relationship has played a key role in the way that the two waves of neoliberal austerity – in the 1990s and after 2008 – unfolded in Latvia. As I will show in the chapters to follow, the Latvian post-2008 austerity meant a re-instatement of a familiar temporality. It was a return to the politics of patience11 that ordinary Latvians were familiar with already, not only from the shock therapy of the 1990s but also from the Soviet times and even before. The Soviet state had used scheduling of citizens’ time in myriad mundane ways to control society (Verdery 1996). The rhetoric of building a prosperous communist future while patiently living in a socialist shortage economy is one example of such temporal control. When the post-Soviet Latvian welfare state was originally called ‘lean and mean’ in a 1990s comparative study (Vanhuysse 2009: 60), it was the drastic reduction of benefits and social security measures that was being described. When we see etatisation of time and other subtle forms of control, as will be explored later in the chapter, reappear

12

Politics of waiting

in a post-totalitarian context, this phrase – a ‘lean and mean welfare state’ – gains a new, chilly dimension. When the post-Soviet state uses similar forms of rhetoric and tactics of scheduling people’s time, we see how this political history reappears. In this sense, the economic crisis was experienced as less of an ‘event’ in Latvia (cf. Knight and Stewart 2016: 4). Olga Shevchenko has written on the crisis being ‘normal’ in 1990s post-Soviet Russia (2009). For my Latvian interlocutors, similarly, the austerity reinstated a familiar temporality of living in delayed time, i.e. having to make sacrifices today in the name of a better life tomorrow. Furthermore, while the government relied on the Latvian public’s patience for successfully implementing the massive budget cuts, the workfare programmes for the unemployed at the same time stigmatised waiting as a Soviet remnant. State agents at the unemployment office dismissed ‘waiting for help from the state’ – a social rights claim – as Soviet-like dependency on the state. Thus, while there are important parallels in terms of how the austerity state works in the different regions of the global political economy, I place the waiting I observed in Latvia, on the one hand, within the Soviet socialist history of etatisation of time and, on the other hand, within the post-Soviet politics of undoing socialist legacy and ‘catching up with Europe’. This helps us understand the different public reactions to the crisis and give a more sociologically nuanced reading than the ‘hot-headed Greeks v. passive East Europeans’ narrative provides. To summarise the argument so far, I explore in this book contemporary politics of waiting in three respects. First, I scrutinise waiting as a tool of state control, revealing how technologies of activation and responsibilisation co-exist in the wake of several decades of neoliberalism with more coercive forms of governance. It is the paradox of the global political economy that, while passivity and waiting is stigmatised, it is also produced at the same time. While the contemporary global socio-economic order is often characterised through acceleration and speed, waiting is its shadow temporality. Secondly, waiting is a geopolitical condition; as a metaphor, it allows understanding the political rationality of the post-Soviet state project as it unfolded in the case of Latvia. Eastern Europe has been and continues to be one of the areas of the world ‘always in the waiting room of history’, to use Chakrabarty’s phrase (2000 [2007]). The desire to ‘catch up with Europe’ has been a key element constituting the political rationality of welfare, socio-economic and political reforms across Eastern Europe. And this desire has also produced particular subjectivities. So thirdly, waiting is a form of political subjectivity. It has formed over time, spanning the socialist and the postsocialist periods, and has made certain forms of state control possible. Waiting creates bonds between the citizen-subject and the state, especially as they play out in particular historical contexts. The Soviet etatisation of time plays a role in post-Soviet Latvia, just like the gaze of the state lingers in other post-authoritarian contexts (Mbembe 2001; Hansen 2012). As people swallowed the toad and

Introduction

13

waited for better times to arrive, austerity could be implemented. In the meantime, those who could not or would not wait emigrated to ‘the real Europe’, as one of my informants referred to the Western European countries. Ethics of freedom

To introduce the second key argument of this book, I would like to take the reader back to Latvia, this time to the year 1989. Two million Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians joined their hands in the Baltic Way on 23 August 1989. It was one of the most symbolic events of the independence movement. I recall standing there next to my mother, holding hands with a stranger on the other side. We had boarded a free shuttle bus in Smiltene, my hometown in the northern part of Latvia, organised for all those who wanted to participate but did not have a car. The bus had taken us to the vicinity of the Estonian border. As we stood there, a car was passing by slowly and a cameraman was leaning out of the window and filming the live line. My mother stepped back in a timid attempt to avoid getting captured on film, afraid of the consequences if the Communist Party found out she had participated. Despite the fears that many no doubt felt, our live human chain was imagined as a powerful plea for freedom, both national and individual. The ‘singing revolution’ of peaceful uprisings was underway in Latvia. More mass demonstrations took place, culminating in the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Latvian Supreme Soviet on 4 May 1990. The Soviet Union was unravelling, and the coup d’état in Moscow meant that Latvians could establish an independent state de facto in August 1991. These events, known as ‘The Third Awakening’ (Trešā Atmoda) in Latvia, marked the onset of widescale economic and political reforms. It was a triple transformation, encompassing democratisation, a move to capitalism and nation-state establishment (Offe 1991). But there was a break and a shift at that point that has been less visible, not lending itself to benchmarks and statistics. Namely, the regaining of independence also signalled a shift in subjectivities. I was only six years old at the time, and my generation has been expected to be the embodiment of this new, ‘modern’, democratic personhood – if not born into it then certainly grown into it comfortably, naturally. But for the adults who were around me, the regaining of independence marked a breaking point in numerous ways, both subtle and fundamental. The years of 1989–1991 served as a rupture after which Latvians could not be the same in an important sense, even when life, congealed in many of its everyday and institutional forms, continued on as usual. The majority of the individuals who became my research interlocutors over the course of my fieldwork had experienced this rupture. With their ages ranging from 40 to 60 years, these were people who could now openly criticise the government, who could travel without restrictions and could own a business but who also, in many cases, had fallen into poverty that simply had not been

14

Politics of waiting

possible before. Some of them, whom we will get to know more in the following chapters, changed their professions radically, from a chocolate factory worker to an accountant and, after the 2008 downturn, a gardener; from a hostess on Soviet trading ships, bringing home foreign delicacies, to a cleaner and a doorto-door saleswoman. Educational degrees from the Soviet period were often considered obsolete, and new, post-1991 qualifications became a requirement for many professions. English would replace Russian as the language of status and of opportunity and was suddenly required for even relatively low-skilled jobs. Travelling to exotic southern destinations did not mean going to Crimea or Georgia, like before, but rather to Turkey or the Canary Islands. The sudden plunge into poverty that large parts of the population experienced meant, however, that only very few could afford to go on such trips. Instead, the West arrived in the small towns and villages of Latvia in the form of donated second-hand clothing that was sold by weight. While these are some of the more visible signs of this rupture, there were also many more subtle ways in which people’s lives were reconfigured. The governing elites pursued reforms with a sense of urgency. What had once been ‘the Imaginary West’ (Yurchak 2006: 164), an unattainable subject of longing, became in the 1990s and 2000s a standard to ‘catch up’ with, a set of benchmarks monitored by technocrats and reform advisors. But reform targets included not only political and economic structures but also new types of political subjects.12 State institutions became targeted sites of not only political and economic but also subjectivity reforms. Schools now had to prepare democratic citizens, while state bureaucracies had to mould the type of civil servants needed for implementing liberal democratic governance. The Baltic Way and the subsequent moments leading up to full independence in 1991 were thus a string of ‘events’. Caroline Humphrey defines an event as ‘an extraordinary happening that brings about a rupture of previous knowledge(s)’ (2008: 360). It thus opens up possibilities for ‘a singular human being [to] put him or herself together as a distinctive subject’ (2008: 358). Veena Das also directs our attention to how people are ‘embedded’ in certain events and how ‘the event attaches itself with its tentacles into everyday life and folds itself into the recesses of the ordinary’ (2007: 1). Her ethnographic studies of women’s experiences of the Partition of India reveal how this event, which involved a lot of violence and suffering, dislocated and formed subjectivities in the decades to follow. One of the reasons why the break-up of the Soviet Union was welcomed by a significant part of the Latvian population was because it opened up possibilities for reconstituting themselves as free subjects.13 This does not mean, of course, that individual experiences were unequivocally positive, nor that they were the same for all Latvians. However, such a reading of this event makes sense as part of what I call the Latvian discourse of freedom.14

Introduction

15 Studying our ‘ethical others’

To understand my informants’ engagement with the activation rhetoric at the unemployment office, rather than organising collectively to protest against the policies of budget cuts, we have to recognise that this self-work fitted into their ways of reconstituting themselves as different kinds of subjects. To return to the point on bare life I raised earlier, I found that analyses of global precarisation in the aftermath of neoliberalism that were couched in the language of abandonment and expulsions did not only obscure the mundane and ordinary forms of suffering, such as waiting; they also failed to show how those who were made to wait nonetheless kept on living. As my fieldwork in Riga progressed, I felt compelled to recognise the political agency and ethical projects of those that have been too easily written about (or rather – written off?) in a dichotomous sociological language as expelled, abandoned or made unneeded. So this became a question for myself – in what language can I write about my experiences at the Latvian unemployment office? Saskia Sassen (2014) points to this on the very last page of her book on the brutal expulsions of people across the world from the labour force or from their land, as if to warn the reader that the kind of macro-level analysis that she had just presented is not the whole story. Sassen writes, I want to conclude with a question: what are the spaces of the expelled? These are invisible to the standard measures of our modern states and economies. But they should be made conceptually visible. When dynamics of expulsion proliferate, whether in the shape of the shrunken economy of Greece, the predatory elites of Angola, or the growth of the long-term unemployed or the incarcerated in for-profit prisons in the United States, the space of the expelled expands and becomes increasingly differentiated. It is not simply a dark hole. It is present. (Sassen 2014: 222)

In contrast to sweeping macro-sociological analyses, the ethnographic method allows us to pay close attention to how people actually do keep ‘going on’ and ‘persevering’ in these spaces of expulsion. It allows paying attention not only to ordinary suffering but also to ordinary ethics (Das 2007, 2015; Lambek 2010).15 Life is always more than just surviving, even when one is socially marginalised or excluded. When increasingly, many across the West, the Global South and the former socialist region are turned into the precariat, are we not removing their humanity even further if we reduce their lives to ‘a state of expulsion’ or being ‘cast aside’, and fail to recognise their projects and their aspirations? Even when one is destitute, one strives for more than merely physical survival. When we think of the individuals or social groups whom we study in more complex terms than their bare life – when we recognise ordinary life, but also their striving for a good life – it opens up questions of subjectivity and ethics.

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Politics of waiting

Social theorists have been keen to identify and study ‘alternative social worlds’, ‘alternative social projects’, ‘an anthropology of the otherwise’, ‘counterpublics’ (Warner), ‘new social imaginaries’ (Taylor), and ‘subaltern counterpublics’ (Fraser, all in Povinelli 2011: 7). Elizabeth Povinelli remarks that ‘large groups of people may be, as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it in another context, consigned to the “imaginary waiting room of history”. But they are living within these waiting rooms’ (Povinelli 2011: 77, emphasis in the original).16 Yet, as a way of tracing forms of living despite being put in a waiting room, Povinelli focuses on various progressive projects that her interlocutors engage in. She is interested in resistance to hegemonic forms of power. Auyero (2012), when analysing the temporal relations in Argentina, frames those as a form of domination that can either be submitted to or resisted. But what about those kinds of projects that are not equally progressive and whose ethics the researcher does not necessarily share? Instead of ‘the will to be otherwise’ (Povinelli 2012), how can we think about forms of will and willingness that appear to align with a neoliberal political rationality? This ethnography, therefore, seeks to chart a relatively unexplored territory, as the ethics that I encountered could hardly be called ‘progressive’. As I took part in the seminars and conversed with my interlocutors, they were embracing normative ideas that have been at the heart of neoliberal governmentality. They talked about ‘choosing to have a positive attitude’, ‘taking charge of life’ and cultivating oneself as an ‘active’ subject. In other words, ‘will’ to ‘take charge of one’s life’ and ‘responsibility’ to do so were not only or exclusively disciplinary tools or nodes in the power discourse; they were also categories that my interlocutors – the people out of work, the trainers running the seminars and the civil servants – found meaningful. I find interesting analytical parallels here between my work and Saba Mahmood’s (2005) analysis of the women’s piety movement in Egypt. Mahmood notes, One of the most common reactions is the supposition that women Islamist supporters are pawns in a grand patriarchal plan, who, if freed from their bondage, would naturally express their institutional abhorrence for the traditional Islamic mores used to enchain them. Even those analyses who are skeptical of the falseconsciousness thesis underpinning this approach nonetheless continue to frame the issue in terms of a fundamental contradiction: why would such a large number of women across the Muslim world actively support a movement that seems inimical to their ‘own interests and agenda’. (Mahmood 2005: 1–2)

As Mahmood argues, we must be able to engage with the ethical dispositions of those whose lives we are trying to understand, even if – and especially if – their ethics do not match our own. Furthermore, we need to recognise that human agency can be expressed not only through resistance to power (Mahmood 2005).

Introduction

17

Veena Das (2015) writes about such recognition of what matters to our research subjects when thinking of one of her key interlocutors, a woman called Asha. Das says it is important that ‘as ethnographers we do not rush to offer explanations that ignore the question of what mattered to Asha’ (2015: 83). It is about paying ‘attention to women (and men) who struggle to make everyday life inhabitable … or who swallow the poisonous knowledge of violations big and small’ (2015: 85). Similarly, it became important to me to examine within the same analysis how my Latvian interlocutors swallowed their own kinds of poisonous knowledge of violations (or, as Latvians called them, toads), but also how they sought to make the precarious social reality ‘livable’ at the same time. Thus, over the course of the fieldwork, my reading of these Latvian workfare programmes, and of acquiescence with austerity, became increasingly more complex as I grappled with what mattered to those I was with. I had been initially interested in how this space was used by the state – i.e. actors such as policy makers, civil servants, trainers – to discipline and to impart particular norms and values. However, the ethnography revealed also how the trainers and the job seekers frequently turned this programme – this space of discipline and ‘activation’ – into various different kinds of spaces. Depending on the trainer and the audience, it could be turned into a space of ethical self-formation (Foucault [1984] 1990, [1984] 1992; Faubion 2011), or a space for conviviality or democratic speaking and listening. Rather than merely a zone of abandonment or discipline, the workfare programme that I participated in aligned with the post-Soviet Latvians’ quest to turn themselves into ‘modern’, ‘European’, ‘democratic’ individuals. When the trainers together with the attendees succeeded in turning the seminars into such pluralistic spaces, they were experienced as empowering. When this did not happen, the seminars functioned as a disciplinary space. Thus, in this book I tell a story about the entanglement between global neoliberalisation and precarisation, on the one hand, and historically shaped ideas about the self, democratisation, freedom and ‘catching up’, on the other. Materials and methods

The unemployment office – the key site of this ethnography – is ‘a symptomatic space in the craft of governance’, to borrow a phrase used in a different context by Ann Laura Stoler (2009: 7). This state-funded institution is symptomatic due to the ways in which historically and geopolitically situated discourses of the state and personhood – and relatedly of work, virtue and welfare – are deeply intertwined in this space. This site not only allows the observation of the everyday implementation of workfare programmes but also serves as a vantage point from which to compare Western and post-Soviet policy designs and forms of governance that have emerged after the global neoliberal turn. I primarily draw

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Politics of waiting

on a participant observation of a programme called ‘Competitiveness-Raising Activities’. The programme consisted of one- to four-day-long training sessions (usually called ‘seminars’) on topics ranging from overcoming psychological barriers in the job-search process to writing business plans.17 There were seminars on how to put one’s CV together, how to behave in a job interview, how to go about finding a new job, but also more general questions such as how to gain self-confidence, how to ‘work on oneself ’ and communicate with others. The seminars were run by psychologists, business coaches and other outsourced experts. With more than 50,000 attendees in 2011, the year I started my fieldwork, this was the largest social assistance programme for the unemployed in Latvia. This meant that about every third job seeker in the country had attended at least one seminar that year. The next largest programme in terms of the number of people involved was a six-month programme where job seekers performed mostly manual labour tasks, set by local municipalities, in exchange for a ‘stipend’ of 100 Lats (approximately GBP 120) per month. Participant observations of the seminars constitute a key part of my empirical data. From October to April, I attended seminars almost every week, many weeks four or five days in a row. Over the course of the fieldwork, I sought to take part in a range of different seminars by different trainers, in order to become familiar with the variety of topics and training approaches they employed. Due to the large number of parallel seminars, however, I had to be selective, favouring the most popular courses in terms of attendance numbers. Among the most widely attended were seminars offering psychological support and advice on starting one’s own business. I gained an overview of those seminars I could not attend by studying the written outlines that trainers had submitted to the head office of the Employment Agency for approval. There were four trainers with whom I developed closest contact as a result of attending numerous of their seminars and speaking to them regularly. When returning to Riga in December 2013 for a stint of follow-up fieldwork, I met up with these four individuals again. In addition to being participant at the seminars, I also spent two or three fourhour sessions every week during October and November 2011 observing the registration process at the Riga office. In the waiting room, sitting next to a registration agent, I observed the interactions around the initial document check and the handing out of queue numbers and listened to how people presented their circumstances and claims. In the registration room, my focus was on the scripted encounters between employment agents and their ‘clients’. These observations also gave an insight into the organisation of temporal and spatial practices at the job centre. In addition to my time at the Riga branch office, I occasionally visited the head office of the State Employment Agency where I spoke to staff members and assisted one of the civil servants responsible for the ‘Competitiveness-Raising Activities’ programme nationwide with conducting the selection process for the trainers’ annual tender.

Introduction

19

Besides participant observation of the seminars, I conducted formal as well as informal interviews with people I met at the seminars. Of the many people that I met at the seminars, five individuals became important informants whom I would meet and chat with regularly throughout the fieldwork year. Others agreed to one or two interviews. Overall, I recorded one to five interviews with 24 different unemployed people and conducted 46 recorded interviews in total. To situate these policy initiatives historically and politically, I spoke to several former directors and other top-level civil servants of the Employment Agency, former and current policy makers at the Ministry of Welfare, welfare policy analysts and a former minister of employment affairs. Last but not least, my interviews and observations at the unemployment office were contextualised by following debates in the public sphere (newspapers and TV), by conversing with my friends and acquaintances, but also by walking the streets, observing graffiti and going to contemporary plays in Riga’s many great theatres. Governance is a subtler process than ‘making up subjects’. Rather than assuming ‘subject effects’ (Barnett 2005), ethnography enabled me to recognise the seminars as a space both of discipline and state control as well as of ethics of self-formation and empowerment. Such recognition is possible because ethnographic research is an immersive practice, extended over a relatively long period of time (Burawoy 2009). Ethnography as a method pushes the sociologist to recognise the ambivalence of moral categories, the uncertainty of subject-positions and the unevenness of a story. However, it is also so because of the way that the researcher’s own subjectivity becomes a means of understanding. Ethnography enables the recognition of ambivalence because it consists not only of intellectual and discursive involvement but equally of an affective and bodily experience (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). During my fieldwork, I often found it difficult to reconcile my analytical reading of the seminars with the emotional experience I shared with the other participants. Analytically, I regarded this policy as a cynical government initiative that insists on individual responsibility in the situation of a stagnating economy and a shrinking labour market. Emotionally, there were seminars that worked as a genuine space of self-examination as well as meaningful interaction with fellow citizens. Keeping attention on both of these insights helped me develop a more nuanced understanding about how this workfare programme worked, while also recognising the complexity and moral ambiguity of the encounters that it facilitated. This tension was particularly acute when participating in the seminars. I found interacting with Viktorija, Juris or Sarmīte, and with the people attending the seminars, often inspiring and uplifting, just like the participants themselves did. Had my research consisted only of interviews, my initial reading would have been harder to destabilise. I would also have been more critical of the trainers; more sceptical about their claims of empowerment and more focused on the stigma associated with the labels they used for their seminar attendees, such as

20

Politics of waiting

‘passively waiting’ or ‘being unwilling’. The perspective lent by ethnographic fieldwork sensitised me to the various effects that the seminars had on people, including myself. Sociology as an ethical practice requires the pursuit of theoretical as well as methodological tools to listen to those who have been cast ‘out’ and rendered ‘invisible’. This is not the same as to say that we need to give ‘voice’ to the disempowered. Les Back writes that ‘if sociological literature is to have a future it must hold to the project of listening and speaking to people who live the consequence of the globalised world with respect and humility while maintaining critical judgement’ (2007: 163). He insists that such listening is not straightforward; it is an art to be learned, ‘a form of attention to be cultivated’ by being interested in the other person’s point of view and ready to recognise it as valid and worthy of respect (2014). Over the course of the fieldwork, I learned to pay attention to what my informants found worth expending energy on during their difficult situation, extending the conversations beyond work and politics into the domains of mysticism, esoteric literature and alternative forms of healing and belief. However, it took a gradual re-listening to hear more accurately and sensitively what my informants had said. Indeed, as it became clear throughout the research process, such a skill of listening needs to be developed over time. The digital recording of the conversations allowed me to go beyond the already written up analyses and return to an actual conversation. It allowed me to listen with a different frame of mind. When dissatisfied with one interpretation of their words, it meant trying to form another, one that seemed to capture their experiences and attitudes more truthfully. While I thought of anxious subjectivities and uncertainties of neoliberal ethics, the research process prompted me to reflect on the uncertainties of sociological analysis. Listening and re-listening became a key tool of the research process. Chapter outlines

In Chapter 1, I begin the process of tracing the politics of waiting in post-Soviet Latvia. I show how a particular perception of time played a role as an organising logic in the two waves of austerity, transforming welfare policies and the state– citizen relationship. I argue that the strategy of internal devaluation as a way of tackling the economic crisis was possible because it was relying on the familiar temporal framework of living in delayed time. Yet, this waiting has also been stigmatised in post-1991 welfare reforms as ‘learned helplessness’. I trace the kind of temporal narrative that the Latvian nation has been living by since the nineteenth century, characterised by the catching up–waiting dyad. The paradox at the heart of it has been particularly prominent since 1991 – both stigmatising waiting as learned helplessness as well as imposing waiting through austerity. The analysis in this chapter thus establishes waiting as one of the main discursive and

Introduction

21

temporal frames that necessitated, legitimated and shaped the neoliberal welfare state reconfigurations in post-Soviet Latvia. With these broader temporal politics in mind, I then turn in Chapter 2 to the post-crisis period in Riga to observe ethnographically how these politics of waiting played out. From the vantage point of the Riga unemployment office, I show how the two temporalities – of activation and waiting – were both produced by the austerity state. As the welfare programmes have been reconfigured as psychological activation rather than tangible assistance, such as benefits or vocational training for re-qualification, many of the most vulnerable individuals in society were kept in a limbo. I show ethnographically how the disciplinary austerity state stigmatised lack of activity as a Soviet remnant but at the same time imposed waiting on the groups that were most affected by the crisis and the austerity. The symbolic violence of keeping vulnerable citizens in limbo was doubled when civil servants and seminar trainers failed to recognise the systemic nature of the problems people were experiencing and blamed the unemployed for waiting passively. Rather than thinking of waiting only as a form of discipline, I ask in Chapter 3 how these temporal narratives of catching up and acceleration as well as of waiting and being patient and living in delayed time were interpreted by ordinary Latvians. This chapter thus offers a closer look at the figure of ‘the waiting subject’. I examine what it might mean when one says, ‘I am waiting for the courses’. Whereas one of the ways of being was valorised in the discourse of the state (catching up and activation) and the other was stigmatised (waiting), both were subject positions that were available to be inhabited. I trace the bond between the state and the subject that was maintained and reinforced and given new shapes by this waiting inscribed in policy. Narratives of three of my informants – people I met while attending the seminars at the unemployment office – reveal how the bond with the state, made visible through language, was more complex than the rhetoric of waiting and learned helplessness recognised. By listening to how they talk about the state and themselves, the analysis seeks to follow the kinds of intimate tyrannies that link the subject and the state. By examining how the intimate bonds tying individuals to the state are being imagined, questioned and denounced in state-sponsored narratives and in popular rhetoric, we can also glean an insight into how a particular kind of post-welfare state is being legitimised. Furthermore, my informants’ narratives show how time as pressing rather than merely passing here means experiencing oneself as in need of renovation. Social assistance programmes could therefore easily summon such anxiety. In the first three chapters my focus is on examining the ways that the austerity state worked and the role that time and waiting played in contemporary forms of government. Over the course of the first part of the book, I trace waiting as a historical–cultural narrative but also an ideological discourse and a bond with the state in a post-totalitarian polity. In Chapter 4, the analysis starts to shift away from the focus on forms of (state) control and to take seriously the ways

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Politics of waiting

in which the trainers – and their audiences – understood the practices they were engaging in. Conversations with four of the trainers reveal how they had shaped themselves as entrepreneurial and resilient subjects, but also saw it as more than just a matter of securing a comfortable life. They linked the ideas of willingness and responsibility to the exercise of freedom that was the promise of post-1991 Latvia. In Chapter 4, I therefore start developing an alternative analytical language to explore the concepts of ‘will’ and ‘having a good life’ as they figure in the trainers’ narratives. Rather than treating them within ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, I take them seriously and try to see how they figure in ways that may be disciplinary but can also work as an ethical discourse. Finally, I show in Chapter 5 how the time of waiting can be reclaimed for reflection and connecting with others. The seminars were often turned into a space for such ethical self-transformation that was driven by a desire to carve out a dignified life for oneself even – and especially – when the present provided little security. This initially singularly neoliberal space had the potential to be turned into pluralistic spaces of conviviality, self-exploration and conversation. A form of warm sociality, which was unexpected by the participants, often developed in these group meetings. Rather than seeing these seminars simply as a form of workfare, one of the myriad mobile neoliberal technologies that move across the world and are appropriated in particular ways in particular places, I trace how my informants appropriate them as a contemporary expression in the long lineage of technologies of the self. This workfare programme thus functioned as both a space of state control and disciplinary space as well as an ethical space of self-transformation, meaningful especially in the context of the Latvian discourse of freedom. The Epilogue talks about freedom as a category without which we cannot successfully theorise social reality. I consider how categories like democracy, freedom and justice have become ‘compromised categories’ (Hemment 2015: 34) not only in former socialist societies but in social theory as well. And yet, as the ethnographic analysis presented in this book shows, the Latvian politics of waiting, produced by the austerity state, can only be understood if we recognise how this waiting has been offered as a sacrifice for freedom. Notes 1 I follow Mark Blyth’s definition of austerity as ‘a form of voluntary deflation in which the economy adjusts through the reduction of wages, prices, and public spending to restore competitiveness, which is (supposedly) best achieved by cutting the state’s budget, debts, and deficits’ (2013: 2). Latvia, along with the other two Baltic states, were ‘one area within Europe where the imposition of austerity [assumed] a radical and “experimental” character’ after the 2008 crisis (Sommers and Woolfson 2014: 2). I describe the specific policies that the Latvian government implemented as part of the austerity regime in more detail in Chapter 1.

Introduction

23

2 There had been one mass demonstration in January 2009, at the onset of the crisis, that turned violent; yet, ‘there was little sustained social unrest or concerted public opposition to the government’s austerity programs’ (Sommers and Woolfson 2014: 10, emphasis in the original). 3 The phrase ‘lean and mean’ was used to describe the Latvian welfare system in the 1990s by Vanhuysse (2009: 60). 4 For an overview of the historical emergence of workfare programmes in the United States and Europe and their contemporary application in Great Britain, Germany and France, see Ian Greer and Graham Symon (2014). Greer and Symon provide the following definition of this phenomenon: ‘Whether labelled active labour market policies, workfare, welfare-to-work, insertion, or activation, these interventions have a number of features in common. They tighten the link between welfare support and job search, are delivered in part by contracted-out service providers, and are underpinned by financial penalties levied against jobless clients for non-compliance. In the critical literature the term “workfare” has come to denote the policies and discourses aimed at intensifying labour market discipline on workers and job seekers’ (2014: 2; see also Peck 2001; Wacquant 2009; Greer 2016). I thank Barbara Samaluk for drawing my attention to this paper. 5 Even though resorting to terms ‘East’ and ‘West’ as a shorthand, I am sensitive to the complex historical boundary-work that constitutes them (see e.g. Wolff 1994). 6 Such an approach is steeped in the logic of comparative research on political cultures à la Pye and Verba (1965). Thus, Achille Mbembe writes that ‘African politics and economics have been condemned to appear in social theory only as the sign of a lack, while the discourse of political science and development economics has become that of a quest for the causes of that lack’ (2001: 8). 7 Dace Dzenovska uses the term ‘livable life’, borrowed from Judith Butler, to argue that an individual needs to feel recognised and that the nationalist, neoliberal Latvian state often does not provide such recognition (2012: 75). 8 I borrow the term ‘etatisation of time’ from Katherine Verdery. She uses this term to denote the way that the socialist state governed – in part – by controlling citizens’ time through ‘rituals, calendars, decrees (such as curfews), workday schedules, and so on’ (1996: 40). 9 Michael Herzfeld makes a distinction between experiential time and generic time (2005: 22), when he argues that the former is ‘elided’ ‘in the name of ’ the latter in ‘national history’. 10 I thank Leon Wansleben for bringing my attention to Vargha’s work. 11 I follow Procupez’s understanding of patience as ‘a collective mode of inhabiting temporality rather than as a cultivated virtue’ (Procupez 2015: 56; see also Greskovits 1998; Appadurai 2001). 12 Studies across the former socialist region have marked similar motivations across policy reform areas, from agriculture to enterprise to education (see e.g. Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Dunn 2004, 2005; Larson 2013). 13 See e.g. Eglitis (2002) and Skultans (1998) on the ways in which the post-1991 Latvian state project as a whole as well as individual subjectivities were discursively framed via the rejection of the Soviet past and regaining of freedom. 14 I discuss the idea of freedom in more detail in the Epilogue of this book. See also Ozoliņa (forthcoming).

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Politics of waiting

15 In my use of the term ‘ordinary ethics’, I draw on Veena Das’ work. She writes about ‘self-creation on the register of the everyday [as] a careful putting together of life – a concrete engagement with the tasks of remaking that is mindful of both terms of the compound expression: everyday and life. It points to the eventfulness of the everyday and the attempt to forge oneself into an ethical subject within this scene of the ordinary’ (2007: 218). As Michael Lambek explains in a recent volume on ordinary ethics, ‘the “ordinary” implies an ethics that is relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling undo attention to itself ’ (Lambek 2010: 2). 16 Similarly, Povinelli notes ‘that we are all in a camp and all of our lives have been stripped to bare life, do not help us understand how various forms of eventfulness distribute the texture of enervation and endurance in late liberalism’ (2011: 133). I read her words to mean that the idiom of ‘bare life’ does not help us understand how people keep on living in spaces and times of the aftermath of neoliberalism. Lauren Berlant also points to ‘the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on’ (cited in O’Neill 2017a: 32). 17 More detailed data on this particular programme can be found in Chapter 2.

1

Waiting as an organising logic

The seven fat years

‘We have seven fat years ahead of us’, said the Latvian prime minister (PM) Aigars Kalvītis in his New Year’s Eve speech to the nation. The years ‘that we have been dreaming about’. He said these words on 31 December 2005, only for the economic crisis to hit three years later. The biblical reference to Joseph’s travails in Egypt, enduring seven years of hunger to arrive at another seven of abundance, fitted the ceremonial tone of the speech. The PM’s address on New Year’s Eve is an established political genre in Latvia where we can pick up key nodes of the normative discourse. In a famous example of this peculiar home-grown genre, the PM Andris Šķēle said on the eve of 1996 that Latvians had to start brushing their teeth and washing their pants if they wanted to succeed in the new market democracy. His was a blunt way of condemning the post-Soviet subjects’ alleged passiveness and reluctance to take their fate into their own hands. These words about the seven fat years coming were alluding to the recent growth of the economy and people’s wages, following the long 1990s when harsh neoliberal restructuring had plunged large parts of the population into poverty. A few years before the crash, people’s patience seemed to be finally bearing fruit. There was a construction boom and a crediting boom, as families bought homes and consumer goods – cars, washing machines, wide-screen TVs – or treated their apartments to eiroremonts (‘euro-renovation’). In 2000–2007, the Latvian economy grew on average by 8.8%, and the unemployment rate dropped from 14% to 6% in the same period (Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss 2013: 330). Kalvītis was suggesting it was his government that was finally leading the nation out of waiting and into the European prosperity that was longed for. One of his government’s ministers had used the phrase ‘Pedal to the metal!’ (gāzi grīdā!) to describe the approach to running the economy in the years prior to the crisis. Speeding up seemed the right response after years of getting by. It felt as if, at last, the waiting had ended and life was getting better. The PM’s optimism was reflecting this general sentiment. Then, of course, the global financial crash hit, plunging Latvia into yet another economic crisis and precipitating yet another wave of austerity.

26

Politics of waiting

The PM’s words, while failing to be prophetic, did reveal something crucial about the post-Soviet state project in Latvia. These words spoke of and were spoken within a particular temporal regime that has characterised it. As I will show in this chapter, waiting has been both a target of the neoliberal socio-economic and political reforms as well as, paradoxically, their pre-condition. The temporal politics I am going to examine here throw a light on the economic crisis and how it played out in Latvia. I consider time as a form of control that the state can exercise upon the citizen but also as a narrative that becomes part of the national identity, as well as an organising logic1 that states themselves can be subdued by in the global geopolitical and economic order. This analysis draws on the sociological premise that time is political and that it often works as a tool of power (Thompson 1967; Schwartz 1975; Verdery 1996; Bourdieu 2000, 2014). The state, in particular, plays a central role in organising our experience of time in big and small ways (Bourdieu 2014). Yet, our experience of time also depends on certain kinds of longer-term cultural and historical narratives that the state can tap into. The temporality of modernisation, in both its Soviet socialist and Western capitalist versions (acceleration! progress!), interacts, in the case of Latvia, with a national narrative of ‘lagging behind’. Specifically, I examine in this chapter a paradox at the heart of the post-Soviet temporal regime. I will show how the ‘waiting subject’, imagined as an obstacle in ‘catching up’ with Europe, has been a target of reforms; yet, how harsh neoliberal austerity measures were possible as a solution to the economic crisis only because people were used to being patient. The government stigmatised waiting but relied on this familiar temporality to administer ‘internal devaluation’. The post-crisis austerity, by imposing more delayed time, was relying on this waiting subject, stigmatised all the while as a Soviet relic and/or a carrier of ‘passive Latvian mentality’. Thus, I trace in this chapter the Latvian national narrative of living in delayed time and how it has fitted into the global neoliberal turn. The story that I will tell reveals something important also about the global rhythms of neoliberalism. First, it shows how the temporal logic of waiting works as a form of control not only at the level of state–citizen relationship but also at the level of the global political economy. Through ideas of catching up, development and fiscal discipline, time works as ‘pressing rather than merely passing’ (Herzfeld 2009: 111) for entire communities and nation-states. Secondly, the Latvian story brings up sociological questions about the temporal, ethical and affective regimes that governance reconfigurations rely on. Austerity and the neoliberal reconfigurations of the welfare state need to be considered not only as the implementation of neoliberal economics or class hegemony (the Marxist argument), or neoliberal technologies of governmentality (the Foucauldian argument), but also as policies and state logics that are enabled by particular temporal regimes that are historically and culturally shaped and interact with global organising logics in historically specific ways. To understand the architecture of

Waiting as an organising logic

27

neoliberal austerity, and public reactions to it, we need to understand the broader temporal horizons that act as organising logics within which individuals perceive social reality. Waiting rooms of history

Eastern Europe is one of those regions of the world that can be characterised with Chakrabarty’s words – always in the waiting room of history (2000). The post-socialist transformations have been studied and critiqued in detail in the sociological and anthropological literature, and I do not wish to rehash them here. Rather, my interest here is to highlight the macro-temporality at play. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe was seen as ‘backward in time’ (Dunn 2004: 4). Its development was seen as delayed by the 50-year detour into socialism, and it needed to get ‘back on the road to a capitalism identical to that found in the West’ (Dunn 2004). Given this imperative to catch up, the shock therapy of the 1990s was all about speed (Buck-Morss 2000: 266). When Jeffrey Sachs and other experts were advising Poland and Russia, they were insisting on a rush while also invoking patience. As one of the advisors put it, ‘patience is vital. The harsh economic medicine will ultimately have the desired effect’ (Michael Mandelbaum cited in Buck-Morss 2000: 267). Furthermore, the desire to become ‘fully modern’ and to ‘return to Europe’ (Eglitis 2002, 2011; Rausing 2004; Ozoliņa 2010) legitimated this narrative of being patient while catching up. Such a temporality of catching up, accompanied by anxious subjectivities, has played an instrumental role in integrating the former socialist countries into the global political economy. In Latvia, historians speak of what the economic development could have been had the aberration known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) not happened. The fact that the Latvian economy was indeed doing well in the 1930s has reinforced this narrative. Comparisons with Finland are often made in the public domain, noting how both countries had similar levels of prosperity in the 1930s and how significant the difference between Latvia and Finland is now (Laganovskis 2015). The imperative to join various Western institutions (European Union (EU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Eurozone) has provided the organising logic of the post-Soviet state project in Latvia. Every one of these targets promptly replaced the previous goal once membership was achieved, giving a new stimulus for reforms and a way of sustaining this familiar tempo. The idea of a ‘2-speed Europe’, occasionally pronounced in Brussels, is permanently hanging in the air as a threat that, despite all the efforts, ‘the East’ is not going to keep pace with ‘the West’.2 This temporal lag is an idea that precedes the post-socialist decades. Eastern Europe was constructed as one of Western Europe’s ‘Others’ in the eighteenth

28

Politics of waiting

century (Wolff 1994). There are parallels between the construction of the Middle East as the Orient and Eastern Europe as another Other, even if more ambiguous because ‘scientific cartography seemed to contradict such fanciful construction’ (Wolff 1994: 7). The spatial image of the West and the Orient had a temporal connotation to it, in the case of both the Middle East and Eastern Europe. As Wolff documents, the eighteenth-century travellers constructed the ‘east of Europe’ (‘l’orient de l’Europe’) as backward in time: one eighteenth century French traveller felt he ‘had moved back ten centuries’ upon crossing from Prussia (current German territory) into Poland (Wolff 1994: 6). The Latvian national identity was constructed in the nineteenth century in direct conversation with Western European (as well as Russian) models. The socalled New Latvians, who were the early promoters of Latvian national culture while the territory was still part of the Russian Empire, often studied in Western Europe and were inspired by Herder and other German national romantics. They brought home ideas about the future of the nation’s development and, along with those, a sense of lagging behind. The entire ‘New Latvians’ movement was initially a cultural project of imbuing the Latvians with a sense of agency and promoting educational and cultural development. A nation had to be made out of mostly uneducated peasants and serfs. They believed that the Latvian culture and language, having survived through centuries under foreign rule, was the rich basis for constructing a European nation. The Latvian national epos, Lāčplēsis, was modelled on the Finnish and Estonian national sagas. If all European nations had an epos, Latvians needed one too. The decades of 1860s–1890s are indeed known in Latvian history as ‘The First Awakening’. When an independent Latvian state was established in 1918, this became known in the collective imagination as ‘The Second Awakening’. The Latvian nation was asleep and needed rousing. A popular nineteenth-century verse expresses this sense of lagging behind. It starts with the following lines: When will the time come for Latvians That other peoples are already seeing? When will the darkness pass That is covering people’s eyes? When will a refreshing wind blow And illuminate the nation’s crown? Kad pienāks latviešiem tie laiki Ko citas tautas tagad redz? Kad aizies tumsība kā tvaiki,  Kas ļaužu acis cieti sedz?  Kad pūtīs vējš, kas spirdzina  Un tautas kroni mirdzina?

(Jānis Ruģēns, cited in Ērmanis 1935: 230)

Waiting as an organising logic

29

This nineteenth-century verse reflects well the particular temporal horizon that shaped the emerging Latvian national identity and political subjectivities. It captures the ‘generic time’ (Herzfeld 2005: 22) that came to organise the national self-image. Furthermore, it is also an early intimation of what has since become an ambivalent but hegemonic discourse. Soviet temporalities

The end of the Second World War was the beginning of Soviet rule over what was now the Latvian Socialist Republic. The Baltics were annexed by the Soviet Union, following a secret deal with Hitler’s Germany dividing zones of influence in the Eastern regions of Europe. Time, again, played a central role as a political instrument, now in the hands of the Soviet state. As Susan Buck-Morss (2017) argues, the Soviet project was one of modernisation and it relied upon a narrative of acceleration and progress. In this, the Soviet and the Western modernisation projects were similar. Both East and West shared ‘the utopian dream that industrial modernity could and would provide happiness for the masses’ (Buck-Morss 2000: xiv). Thus, modernisation was ‘a race against time’. The Soviet Union, perceiving the technological and industrial superiority of the United States, introduced plans of accelerated industrialisation to catch up with the capitalist world (2000: 35–39). As Buck-Morss writes, The rapid industrialisation of the First Five Year Plan was conceived as historical ‘acceleration’ (uskorenie). … Under Stalin, ‘speeding up by force became the cureall.’ … The present was an obstacle to be overcome, a continual sacrifice for the sake of the communist future. (Buck-Morss 2000: 37)

Though the discursive framing was that of acceleration and progress to achieve utopia in the near future, the lived present was one of delayed time. The idea was to be ‘building communism’, while for the time being living in socialism. The future required planning and sacrifice, as exemplified by the five-year plans. As philosopher Costica Bradatan (2005) put it, ‘After all, communism is a promise’: In the communist political imaginary, the future is the privileged temporal category, the supreme standard, against which all past and present actions are conceived, assessed, and given meaning. It is the future that validates everything that we do now, and have done in the past. (Bradatan 2005: 266, emphasis in the original)

While the socialist rhetoric was saturated with references to ‘the radiant future’ (Bradatan 2005: 278, see also Hanson 1997), the present was governed by the shortage economy. Living what has become the stereotype, I recall being put in a queue as a five-year-old in the 1980s to wait for alarm clocks that had suddenly arrived in the only department store of our small town while my mother rushed to stand in another queue. Queues are recognised world-wide as the stock image

30

Politics of waiting

of the Soviet Union (Pesmen 2000: 30; Nikolaev 2000, 2005).3 There was a shortage not only of goods but also of living space, as many families in Riga and other Soviet cities were housed in the so-called communal apartments, having to share the kitchen and bathroom with other families. One had to be patient, wait for the arrival of true communism and work at an accelerated speed to ensure its arrival. So, while the socialist society as a whole was racing towards the future (according to the official rhetoric), the mundane reality was often passing time in queues and inventively managing time. Scholars have noted how this is one of the many testimonies to the entrepreneurial nature of the Soviet citizens – life in a shortage economy forced people to come up with a range of strategies to get by.4 Obtaining consumer goods thus even became a way of constructing one’s identity in opposition to the regime (Verdery 1996: 29). This socialist temporality is evidenced compellingly in Katherine Verdery’s analysis of the lived experiences of time in socialist Romania. As Verdery writes, ‘Even as the [socialist] regimes prevented people from consuming by not making goods available, they insisted that under socialism, the standard of living would constantly improve’ (1996: 28).5 One of the key features of the socialist reality that her account illuminates is the widespread etatisation of time. Verdery understands with etatisation the process in which the socialist state governed – in part – by controlling citizens’ time through ‘rituals, calendars, decrees (such as curfews), workday schedules, and so on’ (1996: 40). For an ordinary citizen, this meant never knowing when the public transport would come, having to go without hot water at home for parts of the day, being idle or having to work overtime at factories. In a shortage economy, time, rather than money, was decisive. Such etatisation of time, as Verdery notes, produced ‘subjection to’ the state and ‘learned helplessness’ (1996: 45, 49). When the party leadership ‘expropriated Romanians of much of their control over time’ (1996: 40), it was an exercise of power and a form of disempowering the citizens. Such ‘seizures of time … were basic to producing subjects who would not see themselves as independent agents’ (1996: 56). Building on this analysis, Elizabeth Dunn writes, State socialist biopower often centred on immobilising people: the state placed sharp restrictions on people’s ability to travel, made labour mobility almost impossible by causing severe housing shortages, and trapped people for hours at a time in interminable lines for basic food products. In constantly seizing time and immobilising bodies, the socialist state attempted to make its subjects docile by destroying most opportunities and capacities for independent initiative and planning. (Dunn 2004: 165)

To summarise, the Soviet socialist temporality was characterised by the delay– acceleration macro-narrative and the immobilisation of bodies and etatisation of time at the individual level.

Waiting as an organising logic

31

The waiting society

The post-1991 years have in many ways been about undoing and reversing the heritage of the 50 years of Soviet occupation in Latvia. Indeed, the national independence movement of the late 1980s–early 1990s was ‘The Third Awakening’. The self-identification of needing to be empowered and activated can still be often encountered in the public discourse. Passiveness is seen as part of the Soviet heritage. The durability of this diagnosis is exemplified by a recent report issued by the Latvian Academy of Sciences. The Academy had called a ‘council of experts’ to discuss the obstacles to national development and whether ‘a new national awakening’ was possible (Karnīte 2017: 1). These experts were meant to represent various fields of expertise and included well-known local economists, philosophers, political advisors and a priest. The final report identified insufficient spiritual and intellectual development of the society and widespread ‘negativism’ as key obstacles in fulfilling the national potential. And it also included the following statement: The main problem in Latvia is the servant’s syndrome – an internal process. We are serving to all sorts of things. We rely on the help from Europe, not seeing that Europe is in crisis. … We are after all still the waiting society. We have moved from a collective society to one where individual initiative and self-reliance is key and we are confused. (Karnīte 2017: 3–5, emphasis mine)

As this quote indicates (particularly where the move from ‘collective’ to individualistic society is referenced), the Soviet past is imagined as a key obstacle in meeting the challenges of today. This claim is part of an established cultural narrative – a ‘discourse of learned helplessness’. The paternalist bond with the state, perceived as an unfortunate heritage of the Soviet period, was portrayed in expert reports and political rhetoric as impeding the country’s economic development. An early manifestation of this discourse of learned helplessness in Latvia was a Human Development Report, written by a team of local experts and published in 1995 under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The report quoted a survey where ‘47% of Latvians and 58% of non-Latvians (in Latvia) agreed with the statement that the state should be responsible to provide for every household’. They continued that ‘a prominent Canadian-Latvian psychologist describes the effects of the Soviet system as a syndrome called “learned helplessness”. … Naturally enough, if people do not possess the psychological tools necessary to develop their own lives, they will not be able to play an active role in society either’ (Muižnieks 1995: n.p.). Learned helplessness – the term also present in Verdery’s analysis discussed earlier – is originally a term in psychology that denotes a disposition of low self-esteem and lack of trust in one’s abilities as a consequence of past experiences of oppressed or failed self-realisation. Applied to the entire society, it gained

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Politics of waiting

currency in the expert discourse and political rhetoric as much as it caught on in the popular imagination (e.g. Norgaard, Ostrovska and Hansen 2000; Tabuns 2008; Mieriņa 2011). Latvian sociologists have spoken of an insufficient sense of individual responsibility and a lack of confidence and initiative in society (Tisenkopfs 2009: 25) and the need to ‘establish the patient’s diagnosis’ as being ‘politically helpless’ (Tabuns 2008). In another recent example, a Latvian professor of psychology was asked to comment on the low levels of trust in society and in her answer pointed to ‘the syndrome of helplessness – a realisation, based on experience, that nothing can be achieved by fighting/striving. That is why some people choose to give up, flee or be angry in silence’.6 The psychologist cited in the UNDP report, I believe, was Dr Vaira VīķeFreiberga, an émigré Latvian whose family had fled the Second World War and who had grown up in Canada. After relocating back to Latvia, she was elected the nation’s president in 1999. Staying true to her psychologist’s training, VīķeFreiberga often emphasised during her two terms as president that Latvians needed to take responsibility for their own happiness and success. In a famous speech at the National Song and Dance Festival in 2001, addressing an audience of many thousands in the stadium and in front of TVs, Vīķe-Freiberga raised her arms to the sky and urged the people to repeat together with her, ‘We are strong! We are powerful! We are mighty! We are beautiful! We know what we desire! And we can do what we desire! [And] we [will] do what we desire to do!’ (2001). Her speech was later compared in the press to a mass psycho-hypnotic session. It aimed at instilling more confidence and assertiveness in the ever so docile Latvians. Having spent most of her life in Canada, she was perceived as a Westerner, untainted by the Soviet past, and therefore possessing the authority to pass judgment. This rhetoric of empowerment resonated with the crowds, as thousands of individuals repeated her words in unison. I still remember the strong emotions that overcame me as I was watching this live on TV, as well as my attempt to resist those emotions as somehow shameful. I found myself moved by her words against my will. This desire to undo learned helplessness meant that social welfare policies, including support for the unemployed, were being drafted anew. Whereas previously everybody had been entitled to state support, in post-1991 Latvia the category of those who were entitled was carefully reconsidered. New taxonomies entered the policy landscape. The category of ‘the needy’ was increasingly defining the policy discourse through co-operation projects with international advisors. With the assistance of the World Bank (WB), ‘strict nation-wide criteria in providing social assistance to needy persons’ were launched in 2000 (Lāce 2012).7 In policy discourse, the poverty and precarity of large parts of the population was increasingly conceptualised in individualising terms. Thus, the concept of ‘social exclusion’ entered the state’s vocabulary in the early 2000s through the EU accession projects. The Ministry of Welfare commissioned social research to find out

Waiting as an organising logic

33

which social groups were most at ‘risk of exclusion’.8 Furthermore, the policy discourse shifted from ‘social security’ (sociālā drošība) to ‘human securitability’ (drošumspēja).9 The head of the policy planning division under the PM, who was in charge of drafting the National Development Plan 2014–2020, placed this unwieldy neologism at the heart of the Latvian development model. In a newspaper interview, he praised Latvians for having always displayed their ‘peasant’s resilience’ (zemnieka sīkstums) that should help further build this security-ability (Līcītis 2012). Last but not least, various social assistance programmes – such as the ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars that I attended – were introduced as part of the effort to ‘activate’ the citizenry (van den Berg 2016). (I explore these programmes in ethnographic detail in the next chapter). This diagnosis of learned helplessness and excessive waiting for help from the state has been underpinning the interpretive dimension of the post-1991 welfare regime, and as such it has justified the reorganisation of its redistributive dimension as well (Haney 2002). The Latvian welfare state has been characterised in scholarly literature as particularly ‘lean and mean’, compared to other former socialist countries (Vanhuysse 2009: 60). Indeed, Latvia, along with the other two Baltic states, has been continuously spending the smallest proportion of GDP on social protection, compared not only to West European countries but also to the rest of the former socialist states in Europe. Social expenditure accounted for just 14.5% of GDP in 2016, compared to the average of 21% in OECD member states, 19.3% in the US and 21.5% in the UK (OECD 2018). Even in the pre-crisis period of 2000–2008, when the national GDP was growing rapidly by 6–10% per year, the social protection expenditure as a share of GDP was steadily decreasing. State support of any kind is extremely limited. Because of the strict entitlement criteria, on average only about one-third of all the people out of work receive unemployment benefit. There are no in-work benefits, however low one’s wages are. Municipalities provide Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) and housing benefits for those defined as ‘needy’. The GMI programme – the main social assistance measure for providing cash benefits – is a perfect illustration of the ‘lean and mean’ post-Soviet welfare state. The GMI itself was introduced only in 2003 ‘as a necessary pre-condition for joining the EU’ (Rajevska 2005: 17). The share of the population officially classified as ‘poor’ and therefore entitled to receive the GMI has been fluctuating in recent years around the 4–6% mark, while the actual estimates of people living in poverty fluctuate around 16% of the population, according to recent OECD (2017) data.10 In 2015, only one-third of the poor received the GMI benefit (Lace 2015: 8). Furthermore, the amount of the support has consistently been significantly below the estimated cost of living in the country, thus defying its key purpose. It fluctuates between 15% and 30% of the minimum wage. Besides the coverage, most recipients collect the benefit for only one to three months, showing that it is a measure people turn to in acute need rather than relying on it for their income more permanently (World Bank 2013).

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Politics of waiting

In a telling move, the government stopped co-funding the GMI in 2013, shifting the full responsibility to the municipalities and thus, in practice, jeopardising the provision of even this meagre cash support in many of the poorer municipalities. To take stock of the analysis presented so far, on the one hand we can see a disciplinary discourse of learned helplessness that stigmatises ‘waiting’ and passivity as a form of dependency on the state and as an obstacle in the process of accelerating the economy to catch up with Europe. On the other hand, as I am about to show, the government’s strategies for catching up at the same time relied on the society’s ability to wait. The recent wave of neoliberal austerity, following the 2008 crash, was only possible if Latvians were willing to, yet again, wait some more for the better times to come. The Latvian success story

By the end of 2008, less than three years after Kalvītis’ New Year’s Eve speech promising seven years of abundance, the Latvian economy was in free-fall. Between 2008 and 2010, the country had lost 25% of its GDP. Part of it was a result of the global economic crisis reverberating in Latvia, as Swedish banks stopped crediting the overheated local economy and a run on a local bank required the government to step in with a large bail-out. Yet, the shock contraction of the economy by one-quarter was also to a significant degree the result of a conscious decision of the Latvian government. To cope with the financial crisis, it had chosen a strategy of so-called internal devaluation, which amounted to imposing massive austerity on the population. This second wave of austerity was not inevitable. When the crisis hit and the national economy needed urgent balancing of the books, there was a solution available. The fact that Latvia had its own currency, the Latvian Lats, meant that the government could devalue the currency to alleviate the crisis. This was an option that was not available to Greece but was a seemingly perfect solution to weather the crisis for a country like Latvia which had not yet joined the Eurozone. International advisors were also recommending currency devaluation as the most sensible option (Weisbrot and Ray 2011; Sommers and Woolfson 2014). The alternative – internal devaluation – was seen by most observers and advisers as requiring too drastic measures creating significant social costs. They thought there was a significant risk of mass protests. Thus, currency devaluation was seen as inevitable. The government, however, went against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and WB recommendations (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 42–43, 55–58, 78–79, 85; Weisbrot and Ray 2011: 8). Instead of devaluing the currency, it chose to drastically cut state expenditure (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 1; Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss 2013: 344). The budget consolidation programme, launched in June 2009, saw ‘fiscal adjustment’ amounting to 11% of GDP in 2009 alone (Aslund and

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Dombrovskis 2011: 2).11 In addition, Latvia borrowed money from the IMF and the EU.12 Internal devaluation meant that the costs of the crisis were shifted to the general population. The government cut public sector wages by up to 30%, with the smallest reductions for top civil servants and largest cuts for wages paid to health workers, teachers and police officers.13 Twenty-nine per cent of civil servants were laid off, reducing the total number from 87,500 to 62,300 between 2008 and 2010 (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 73). Framed as part of ‘structural reforms’ to increase the efficiency and competitiveness of the public sector, over 100 schools were closed and 10,000 teachers were laid off, about one-quarter of the total number (Sommers 2014: 30). Similarly, the number of hospitals was reduced and the number of healthcare workers shrunk by 8% (Sommers 2014: 73, 108–109). The government increased the value-added tax (VAT) from 18% to 21%, hitting disproportionally the poorest, who spent most of their income on food, while income tax remained flat and corporate taxes remained low (Sommers 2014: 44).14 People on the lowest wages were hit the hardest also by the lowering of the tax-exempt minimum personal income threshold (Sommers and Woolfson 2014: 9). As the private sector felt the effects of the crisis and the contraction of the economy, employment fell by 33% in 2009 (Sommers and Woolfson 2014: 109). As a result, unemployment rose sharply from 6.6% in 2008 to 20.7% in 2010 (Sommers and Woolfson 2014: 75–76). Two-thirds of state agencies were either closed or merged to reduce expenses. This meant, for example, closing the State Building Inspection and tasking municipalities with the oversight of construction standards. This decision was later scrutinised after the roof of a half-finished supermarket collapsed in a suburb of Riga and 54 people lost their lives. The weakening and fragmentation of oversight was possibly one of the causes leading to this tragic outcome (Woolfson and Juska 2014). There were significant cuts also to social assistance. The size of the unemployment benefit was reduced at the worst point of the crisis while the number of the unemployed was rapidly rising and had reached 21.5% of the active labour force by the spring of 2010. Pensions, already merely at subsistence level for most retired people, were reduced by 10% in 2009, and pensions for individuals who still worked were cut by 70% (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 83).15 The WB experts were insisting on a ‘social safety net’ for ‘the most vulnerable’. As a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Welfare reported to me during an interview, however, there was significant resistance in the Latvian government towards any such additional measures. Eventually, a compromise was reached, and it took the shape of a workfare programme. People who were out of work for over six months could receive a 100 Lats monthly cash payment (equivalent to about 140 Euro at the time) in exchange for manual labour. For months, one could see people in large numbers raking leaves, shovelling snow and plucking weeds on the streets and in the parks of cities and towns across the country, as seasons were

36

Politics of waiting

changing. The programme lasted from 2009 until 2013, and in total 180,300 unemployed people participated. Thousands more were involved in the ‘competitiveness-raising’ programme, providing one–four-day group seminars on topics ranging from gaining self-confidence to writing a business plan. (I discuss this programme in more detail in the next chapter.) Some observers argue that this choice – internal devaluation – was made to avoid losses for foreign banks. As economists Weisbrot and Ray write, ‘Swedish and other European banks would have lost many billions of euros from a devaluation, since many of their loans to Latvia would have been unpaid or restructured’ (Weisbrot and Ray 2011: 8). Sommers similarly argues that Latvia’s ‘success story’ – as the crisis management strategy came to be known on the international stage – has meant that ‘banks get paid’ (Sommers 2014: 24).16 More generally, this is the kind of reading that sociologists and anthropologists have often offered of neoliberal restructuring policies that have been imposed on Africa, South America and Eastern Europe over the past several decades (Wedel 1998; Babb and Fourcade-Gourinchas 2002; Hilgers 2012). Mathieu Hilgers speaks of the international lending by the IMF and WB as a process of (re)producing relations of dominance. On institutional measures imposed by international organisations in exchange for loans, Hilgers argues, such treatments impose a relationship that reinforces mechanisms of material and symbolic domination between creditor and debtor. Responses to the crisis, rather than questioning the neoliberal utopia, consist of corrective measures that seek to make the workforce more flexible and encourage competition – of which the state is now the first representative – in order to arrive closer to the perfect theoretical order. (Hilgers 2012: 91)

According to such a framing, the international financial organisations and global capital are seen to wield power that protects the interests of capital above all. Evidence reveals, however, that in the Latvian case the austerity was not a decision that the troika made. The internal devaluation was a strategy that even the IMF and WB advisors found too harsh, bearing costs too high for the general population (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 42–43). The Latvian government consistently went beyond what the troika asked for, ‘call[ing] for faster and harsher austerity treatments than even the IMF and EU thought prudent’ (Sommers 2014: 25–26; Sommers and Woolfson 2014: 6).17 A book written by Swedish economist Anders Aslund and Valdis Dombrovskis, the PM during the austerity years (2009–2014), shines light on why the government chose this harsh strategy. As Dombrovskis admits, ‘it was a political choice’ whether to choose ‘external’ or ‘internal’ devaluation (2011: 60). One of the key motives behind choosing internal devaluation was retaining the currency peg. This was important in order not to jeopardise joining the Eurozone (2011: 53). As Aslund and Dombrovskis write,

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the value of euro accession as a goal disciplining policy was considerable and instructive to other countries in similar situations. The Latvian people were motivated by their desire for full European integration with early adoption of the euro. This desire led them to focus on two nominal anchors: a fixed exchange rate and a budget deficit below 3 percent of GDP, so that Latvia could accede to the [Economic and Monetary Union] as early as possible. (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 119)

Aslund and Dombrovskis link the adoption of Euro also to macroeconomic stability but, as they themselves point out, it had as much to do with ‘deeper integration into the European community’ (2011: 118). This desire, as they put it, then enabled the scale and rapidity of the austerity: ‘Latvia’s experience with fiscal adjustment shows the advantages of carrying out as much of the adjustment as possible early on. Hardship is best concentrated to a short period, when people are ready for sacrifice’ (2011: 3). The second motivating factor was the belief that ‘only a strong fiscal consolidation would send the signal that the government was committed to fiscal sustainability’ (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011 cited in Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss 2013: 345; Ījabs 2017). In other words, the government wanted to retain its credibility in the eyes of the international political and economic elites and maintain the confidence of the global financial markets. For this same reason, the government chose to repay part of the debt ahead of time.18 The rationale for early repayment was partly to reduce the amount paid in interest on the loan. However, it meant prolonged austerity at home. The IMF experts advising the Latvian government repeatedly expressed doubts about the viability of joining the Eurozone within the timeline that the Latvian government had set. In one internal document from 2009, they noted ‘Latvia’s strategy to adopt the euro at the earliest possible date’ but urged that this objective needed to be ‘balance[d] … against the need for flexibility in the fiscal deficit target to minimise further pressure on economic activity and to protect the most vulnerable at a time of painful dislocation’ (IMF 2009: point 55). The target of adopting the Euro ‘at the earliest possible date’ was costly. A few years later, a report by the IMF notes Latvia’s continuous commitment to joining the Eurozone and praises the government’s ‘fiscal discipline’: The authorities’ strategy centers on adopting the euro (the program’s exit strategy) in 2014. Although greater than expected fiscal space allows them to reverse some crisis-related consolidation measures (including by cutting VAT in July and plans to reduce PIT [personal income tax] starting next year), progress on the Fiscal Responsibility Law and agreement to the Fiscal Compact is evidence of the authorities’ continued commitment to budget discipline. (IMF 2012: 1)

Ultimately, though, the IMF recognised that ‘this is the Latvians’ program’, even if the road chosen ‘may be drawn-out and painful’ (cited in Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 60–61).

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Politics of waiting

To send ‘the right signals’ to the Western political and economic elites and to demonstrate ‘fiscal discipline’, the population had to remain waiting. Official unemployment rose from 5.3% in late 2007 to 20.5% in 2010 (Weisbrot and Ray 2011: 1). According to one estimation, real unemployment levels reached 29% in 2011, taking into account those who were working part-time involuntarily and those who had given up looking for work (Weisbrot and Ray 2011). Creating unemployment (directly by laying off public sector staff and indirectly by shrinking the demand in the private sector); cutting salaries by up to 30%; creating dependency on state benefits or imposing inactivity when reducing the working week from five to four days; making people do manual labour for months to receive a subsistence-level cash benefit – these were all forms of etatisation of time that the austerity state imposed on the population. There was ‘little sustained social unrest or concerted public opposition’ to austerity (Sommers and Woolfson 2014: 10, emphasis in original).19 This has been the paradox: it was an unprecedented austerity, yet there was only ‘muted social protest’ (Sommers and Woolfson 2014). Indeed, the austerity government was reelected in power in October 2010. Aslund and Dombrovskis link it to Latvians’ ‘wisdom’, as ‘few nations have suffered so much and yet survived’ throughout the course of history (2011: 117). Other analysts have attributed this re-election to the ethnic divisions between Latvians and Russians and the perceived threat from Russia (Sommers 2014: 20–23). As Latvian political scientist Ivars Ījabs argues, the ‘internal devaluation’ could only be done because the government knew that the people would not stage violent protests like in Greece. The cost was that people’s income levels dramatically fell, and several more tens of thousands emigrated (Ījabs 2017). He explains the lack of protests with several factors, such as Soviet legacy, lack of trust and weak civil society, as two-thirds of the population do not engage in any civic, collective activities. The role that workfare programmes – most importantly the 100 Lats programme – played in disciplining the poor by scheduling their time must also be recognised. I return to the effects of this programme in more detail in the next chapter, but here it is important to note it as a factor in ensuring the acquiescence of the part of the population that was most vulnerable during the post-crisis period and thus potentially most prone to protest.20 These are all important factors. I wish to argue, however, that the catching up narrative and the familiar temporality of living in delayed time were also playing a role here. They were functioning as disciplinary devices. The political goal of completing the reintegration into Europe meant retaining the competitiveness of the economy in the international markets and obliging the big banks while making the population bear the brunt of it. Not everybody was willing or able to wait it out, of course. While the majority of the population tightened their belts and ‘swallowed the toad’ (to refer again to this Latvian saying), many – those who could not wait – left. There were families who had taken on big mortgages and now, with salaries falling and many losing

Waiting as an organising logic

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their jobs, chose to emigrate to pay the loans back. There were parents who, having lost work, left their children with the grandparents and went to the UK or Ireland where there were always jobs to be found. These emigrants are on average younger and more educated than the average population (Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss 2013: 360). The costs were thus not only the loss of national wealth, wage and benefit cuts for large parts of the population and unemployment, but also increased emigration. The population was 7.7% lower in 2013 than it was in 2008 (Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss 2013: 358). On average, 1.3% of the population left annually from 2008 to 2011 (Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss 2013). Quick loans became a common strategy to cope with the austerity for many of those who stayed. The predatory quick-loan business has thrived since 2009 in Latvia (Spriņģe, Gailāne and Folkins 2013). As long-term planning becomes impossible, people resort to short-term measures.21 Though precise data are not available, there are estimates that one-quarter of the population have taken out such ‘quick loans’ (Sommers 2014: 29). The post-2008 austerity in Latvia thus needs to be understood not only as one local instance of the global story of neoliberal disciplining, but also as another chapter in the national story of patience and resilience. First, the internal devaluation was a decision made by the Latvian government not to jeopardise the goal of joining the Eurozone. The narrative of sacrifice to catch up with Europe and the temporality of living in delayed time were mobilised by the state and enabled such an unprecedented austerity regime to be implemented. Furthermore, while learned helplessness was the target of the neoliberalisation of the welfare system, the two waves of austerity at the same time relied on the nation’s ability to ‘wait it out’. Susan Buck-Morss noted this paradox when writing about the 1990s in Russia and Eastern Europe: shock therapy produces by its speed precisely those problems which the speed of its implementation is designed to defuse: rising unemployment, declining real wages, cutbacks in social welfare, growing disparities of income, drastic increases of poverty, deteriorating health and education – in short, a massive decline in the standard of living of the majority of a country’s citizens. (Buck-Morss 2000: 266)

She points to the parallels of the shock therapy speed narrative with the high Stalinist rhetoric: This rhetoric of consolidation, the proverbial doctrine that ‘things get worse before they get better’, would be humorous if it did not translate into such tragedy for so many human beings – humorous because it is a literal repetition of [the Stalinist rhetoric]. (Buck-Morss 2000: 267)

Thus, while the post-1991 Latvian state was imagined both by the elites and by the society at large through the contrast with the Soviet republic that preceded it, a closer analysis of the post-1991 reforms in this chapter reveals striking parallels

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Politics of waiting

in the Soviet and post-Soviet temporal politics. The post-1991 Eastern European attempts at ‘catching up’ have notable parallels with the temporality that characterised the Soviet modernisation project. Under both governance regimes, the discursive framing is that of acceleration and progress to achieve utopia in near future, while the lived present is one of delayed time. The Soviet narrative of present and future had a similar logic to the post-1991 one. It centred on having to constantly strive to build communism, while still – for now – living in socialism. Seen in this broader context, the austerity can be read as yet another iteration of this double bind of acceleration and waiting. To complete the project of catching up with Europe by joining the Eurozone, large parts of the population had to remain waiting. Crisis and the politics of patience

Time works as a form of control. Austerity not only produces particular temporalities, as several scholars have lately argued (Knight 2015; Knight and Stewart 2016), but, as the Latvian case shows, relies on and is enabled by a particular temporal organisation of the social order. Austerity was possible because of the familiar temporality of ‘waiting for the better days and being patient’. This was reinforced by the narrative of catching up with Europe. It was another chapter in the history of the waiting society. Thus, we can see catching up and austerity as two sides of the same coin. The post-socialist austerity state is characterised by this particular combination of stigmatising and producing waiting at the same time. We do not see harsh policing of those at the bottom like Wacquant or Fassin have shown in the US and French contexts, respectively (Wacquant 2009, 2012; Fassin 2016). Rather than racialised prisonfare, the coercive nature of the post-Soviet state can be seen in the way it has imposed a politics of patience on the population. By patience, I mean here ‘a collective mode of inhabiting temporality rather than as a cultivated virtue’ (Procupez 2015: 56). And in the name of such hope for the future, a lot of sacrifices have been made. Just like the Soviet state asked for sacrifices and etatised time in the name of the radiant future of communism, the post-Soviet state has been mobilising ever more patience to ‘catch up with Europe’. We could even say there was an economic crash and harsh austerity but there was no crisis – if we think of a crisis as an event that makes both ‘material and symbolic architecture … crumble’ (Mbembe and Roitman 1995: 328, see also Knight and Stewart 2016: 4). Crisis, in the case of Cameroon described by Mbembe and Roitman, manifests itself in ‘people generally respond[ing] that they no longer understand at all what is happening’ (1995: 338). There is ‘a sense of loss both in the material sense of waste and dilapidation as well as in the sense of existential deprivation and disorientation’ (1995: 339). This was not the case in Latvia, as the lack of protests attests to (cf. Shevchenko 2009). Instead of a

Waiting as an organising logic

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sense of disorientation, the austerity invoked the familiar temporality of waiting and living in delayed time. Living in a waiting room of history means experiencing ‘time [as] pressing rather than merely passing’, to borrow a formulation from Michael Herzfeld (2009: 111). Herzfeld writes that, ‘to the extent that time is conceptualised as an agentive force, it limits our ability to play with, and deform, conventions’ (2009: 112). He notes that time is pressing for the Greek artisans having to produce artefacts for the market at increasing speed for decreasing profit. His analysis echoes a Marxist diagnosis of the experiences of workers in capitalism. It also parallels studies of post-socialist transformations that have shown how the postsocialist citizens were expected to become more agile, flexible and active (Yurchak 2002; Dunn 2004). In the case I am examining here, the neoliberalisation and democratisation reforms in the post-socialist region have been experienced with a similar pressing temporality, only at the collective level. The sense of ‘lagging behind’ is another form of experiencing time as pressing rather than merely passing, only here it is the nation that is pressured to catch up and develop. The production of indices and international comparison measures tracks this lagging with a meticulousness and an air of objectivity that cannot be easily disregarded. As long as the narrative of living in delayed time and having to catch up prevails, underpinned by global hierarchies of value (Herzfeld 2005: 43), global disciplining is possible. The disciplinary nature of time has been documented in studies of work schedules at the factory or ‘courses in time management’ at the modern post-industrial company (Thompson 1967; Foucault 1975; Rose 1999: 31; Dunn 2004). I am making two interventions here. First, the subject of such temporal discipline can also be the collective, the nation or the society. Second, the work of time goes beyond the disciplining of the subject. In the next chapters. I will examine ethnographically how this imposed waiting worked and how it created further bonds with the state. Notes 1 I borrow the term ‘organising logic’ from Sassen (2006) and use it to refer to macrotemporal logics, as described in this chapter. 2 In the reading of sociologist Daina Stukuls Eglitis, when Latvia regained independence, the reforms were organised by two vectors: one temporal and one spatial (Eglitis 2002). The temporal goal was to reconnect to the pre-Second World War time to continue the interrupted development of the Latvian state. Spatially, the goal was to return to Europe. Eglitis argues that these two vectors served as rationales for policy making. While I support her reading, I believe the temporal logic was organised not only by the year 1939 but also by the past temporality of the Soviet state project and the contemporary temporality of global neoliberalisation, as this chapter shows. The relationship with Europe was not only spatial but also temporal: not only returning to Europe but also catching up with Europe.

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Politics of waiting

3 I thank Olga Shevchenko for bringing the publications by Nikolaev to my attention. 4 See e.g. Caldwell (2004: 111–114) on how the Soviet citizens retained control over their time despite these efforts by the state. Even the mundane activity of lining up was frequently infused with individual initiative and calculation. 5 Buck-Morss makes a similar observation that, especially with Khrushchev’s era, the regime’s promise was ‘steady increases in living standards’ (2000: 243). 6 Kasjauns.lv (2017), emphasis mine. 7 See Haney on a similar process of creating the category of ‘the needy’ in Hungary. Haney situates this category within the liberal welfare system, ‘aimed at the “needy” classes’ and relying on income and means testing (2002: 12, 165–169). 8 The EU has funded research on social exclusion and unemployment (e.g. national programme Darba Tirgus Pētījumi [Labour Market Research] by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology). Training programmes for ‘persons at risk of unemployment’ were funded by the European Social Fund. The Employment Agency introduced special assistance programmes for ‘vulnerable groups’, such as young unemployed people with vocational education or long-term unemployed with addiction problems. 9 Cross-Sectoral Co-Ordination Centre (2012). 10 E.g. in 2007, only 4.5% of the population officially qualified for the GMI (Lāce 2012: 139). In 2014, this share had increased to 6% (Paparde 2014). To use another measure of the coverage, only 12% of people in the lowest quintile of the population received GMI in 2010 (World Bank 2013). 11 According to Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss it was 6.5% of GDP (2013: 345). As these authors specify further, ‘fiscal consolidation in 2009 [was] estimated to have been about 8 percent of GDP’ and ‘a further adjustment of 5.4 percent of GDP in 2010 and 2.3 percent in 2011’ (2013: 346). ‘The new measures included a further 20 percent cut in the government wage bill (in the event, public sector wages decreased by more than 20 percent over the following year), controversial cuts to pensions (later ruled unconstitutional), and reductions in personal income tax allowances, which made the personal income tax less progressive’ (2013: 345). 12 The bail-out loan was provided jointly by the EC, the IMF, the WB, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Scandinavian, Estonian and Czech governments (Sommers 2014: 18). The total amount received was 7.5 billion Euro ($10.5 billion) (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 2). 13 On average, public sector salaries were reduced by 26% in a single year, November 2008 to November 2009 (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 74). Private sector salaries shrunk by 10% according to official statistics but, in reality, likely even more (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011). 14 Writing in 2013, Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss note that private sector wages had not proportionally increased as the businesses were recovering (2013: 352). 15 The cuts affecting the working pensioners were later deemed unconstitutional and were reversed. 16 Sommers and Woolfson write that the economic crisis in the Baltics was ‘a result of private-sector banking crises’, yet ‘the burden of crisis-resolution was to be offloaded to the public sector and the broader society, a “socialization of risk” standing in sharp contrast to the “privatization of profits”’ (2014: 3). Sommers argues that currency devaluation ‘was unpalatable to some managers of the crisis as it risked the possibility of contagion in the form of competitive devaluations throughout the European financial system’ (2014: 25).

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17 Such a pattern has been since repeated. In September 2017, when the OECD suggested having a bigger government deficit to address some of the social issues such as socio-economic inequality, the minister of economics dismissed the advice as imprudent and reaffirmed Latvia’s adherence to strict budgetary discipline. 18 Already, in 2012, the Latvian government announced its repayment of the entire amount of the loan to the IMF ahead of schedule. Repaying the loans from the European Commission and the WB ahead of schedule was not possible due to the loan conditions. 19 There were a number of sporadic protests by some segments of the population at the onset of austerity, as documented by Sommers (2014: 18–20). One violent demonstration that did break out in January 2009 was harshly supressed by the government. Over 100 protesters were arrested, mostly for minor offences like throwing rocks through the parliament building windows and overturning police vans, though there were also some more serious offences committed such as looting. The trials in court were uncharacteristically swift, and 68 men were prosecuted. Yet, as Sommers also notes, ‘the absent dimension of labor-led mobilizations of the population was a primary factor in securing seeming popular acquiescence’ (2014: 20). 20 I examine this argument in more detail in Ozoliņa (forthcoming). 21 I thank Katharina Hecht for this point.

2

Temporalities of austerity

‘You have to keep moving in spite of everything’1

It was an early morning in October 2011, and I was walking through the Central Market to Riga’s unemployment office. The market was bustling as always, despite the fact that Latvians were still coping with the aftermath of the economic crisis. The effects of the crisis were visible in the public space: there were fewer people and cars on the streets and more closed-down shops and restaurants. Instead, little cafes were popping up one after another in the centre of the city where people could have a cheap meal of a couple of savoury or sweet pastries, rather than having a full lunch or dinner. Since the onset of the crisis, it had become fashionable to give hand-made gifts for Christmas and birthdays and talk about the meaning of life not being all about money. As I was beginning my fieldwork, unemployment stood at 16.2%, and there were only between 3,000 and 4,000 vacancies in the entire country (Latvian Ministry of Welfare 2011b; Latvian State Employment Agency 2011). Some analysts estimated that the number of workplaces in the national economy had shrunk from 920,000 to 710,000 as a result of the crisis and the ensuing austerity politics (Ošlejs 2012). I could still see the medieval church spires of the Old Town in the distance, but the marketplace marked a clear divide between the neat and touristy Old Town and Maskavas forštate (the Moscow District), where the unemployment office was located. Entering this area, I instinctively moved my bag slightly towards the front of my body and squeezed it more tightly under my elbow – a habit developed since my student days in Riga. The university I had attended was located further into the Moscow District so I knew to watch out for pickpockets. The 15th trolleybus line crossing the district had long carried a reputation as the most unsafe in the city, with most petty crimes on public transport taking place on its buses. A bar one block away from the unemployment office was called 4 promiles (‘4 permilles’). That is a lethally dangerous blood alcohol level. A sense of deprivation and unease pervaded the area. Some of my informants would later tell me that after their first visit to the unemployment office they wished they would never have to go back.

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I was on my way to attend a seminar called ‘Overcoming psychological barriers in the job search process’. It was organised as part of the ‘CompetitivenessRaising Activities’ programme – the largest social assistance programme for people out of work in terms of participation numbers in the post-crisis years. It was a couple of minutes before 9.00 a.m. as I arrived. People were trickling in and seating themselves silently around a large rectangle of tables. The seminars usually started at 9.00 a.m. and lasted until 3.00 p.m. As Vija, a senior civil servant in charge of this nation-wide programme, once explained to me, the intended purpose of a 9.00 a.m. start was to force people to get up early in the morning, make themselves presentable and leave the house before the day had begun. This way, it was hoped, they would not lose motivation or sink into depression while without a job. The seminars often ended earlier than 3.00 p.m. because people preferred to skip the lunch break to save money on food and get home sooner. The light and spacious room was located on the 3rd floor of the unemployment office. The only decorations in the room were several large framed photographs on the walls. They each depicted a single individual engaged in a particular vocation. One was a secretary, sitting by a desk with an oversized phone and a fax machine. Another two depicted a doctor and a marketing specialist, as the captions informed. The outdated electronics, the furnishings and the smiles on the models’ faces suggested that the photographs were taken in the early 1990s somewhere in Western Europe. Europe was also present in the room in the form of European Union (EU) flags stuck on the legs of the wooden chairs. The labels displayed the logo of the European Regional Development Fund. There was a whiteboard on one of the walls and a big banner propped up in the corner to the left of the board. It exhibited photographs of a large group of attractive, well-dressed people, their figures together forming the shape of Latvia. The motto of the Employment Agency, ‘I know. I can. I do!’, was written at their feet. This slogan was one example of the vernacular of empowerment and positivism that had become commonplace in Latvia. That winter, for example, the snowy streets of Riga were adorned with posters hailing passers-by with words ‘Stop whining, start living!’ (Beidz gausties, sāc dzīvot! in Latvian). The authors of the posters, created as a New Year’s greeting to the public, were two students of a local art college. There was a cartoonish character depicted on the poster, clutching a pair of skis and sporting an image of the morning star on his sweater – a traditional symbol of ‘Latvianness’. The public television was broadcasting shows bearing titles ‘Latvia can!’, ‘You know. You can. You do’ and ‘Everything Is Happening’ (Latvija Var!, Zini. Vari. Dari, Viss Notiek). That day’s seminar was going to be led by Juris, a middle-aged psychologist who had been working for the Employment Agency since 1996. Initially he had been a full-time employee, but he now worked on a temporary contract, like all the other trainers. I found out later that Juris was also a career counsellor at the agency, a lecturer in career consulting at a university and a priest, reading

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Politics of waiting

occasional sermons at a small church. After 12 people had arrived and taken their seats in silence, Juris introduced himself, asked the others to do the same and explained the purpose of the day. While various ‘barriers’ existed to finding work, he was here to help with overcoming those that ‘existed in one’s head’, he said to the timid audience of mostly women. He explained that he could not help with social barriers, like having to take care of someone at home, or economic barriers, like being unable to afford new shoes to go to a job interview. Clarifications out of the way, he opened with a question, gazing at the women with his eyes wide open in a slightly exaggerated way. ‘What is a human being made of?’ he asked. Juris spoke in a friendly manner; his narrative was always scattered with little jokes to put people at ease. However, the audience was rather difficult to liven up. For a while no one responded. Finally, a woman who looked to be in her 40s, and had said she was out of work for several years, uttered shyly, ‘From feelings’. Another participant suggested ‘emotions’. Not having received the answers he was looking for, Juris went on to present his model, ‘conceived among psychologists, psychiatrists and clergymen at a conference in St Petersburg’, as he explained. Writing on the whiteboard, Juris said that the human being consisted of flesh, soul and spirit. As a psychologist, he noted his particular interest in the soul. The human soul, in turn, consisted of reason, emotions and will. Only if these three were aligned, could action follow. And action was what he believed his audiences needed most. In his seminars, Juris liked to cite a saying, ‘you have to keep moving, in spite of everything!’ It was a quote from a book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. Juris had read the book in the early 1990s, found it helpful himself, and had been drawing on it in his work with job seekers ever since. During my fieldwork, I joined many such groups of 10 to 15 people where we learnt how to identify our strengths by working with lists of verbs and adjectives, how to set goals in life and how to ‘communicate effectively’ with others. The trainers helped people devise psychological coping strategies for finding new employment and advised them of the social networks that could be mobilised to assist in this process. Some of them engaged the unemployed in practising specific bodily techniques, such as breathing to reduce stress, while sitting in a circle. Entrepreneurship seminars encouraged people to ‘dream big’ and start their own business. The trainers liked to remind their audiences that ‘nobody would pour it into your mouth’ or ‘hand it to you on a plate’. Others were less euphemistic and declared ‘Stop waiting, nobody’s going to help you!’ Anete, a psychologist in her late 20s, liked to cite NIKE’s slogan in English, ‘Just do it!’ She summarised her 1-day seminar on preparing for a job interview by drawing 3 letters on the whiteboard: ‘R! R!! R!!!’ The ‘R’ stood for ‘Rīcība’, or ‘Action’. A self-acknowledged enthusiast of neuro-linguistic programming, she dictated to her audience word by word, ‘The–​way–I​–live​–toda​y–is–​a–res​ult–o​f–wha​t–I–d​ id–an​d–tho​ught–​yeste​rday.​’

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Governmentality studies have shown how ‘an active individual’ has been at the centre of the neoliberal political project (Rose and Miller 1992; Dean 1995, 1999; Barry, Osborne and Rose 1996; Rose 1999; Brown 2003; Ong 2006; Foucault 2008; Read 2009). As I discussed in the previous chapter, such activation had been framed in the expert discourse as necessary to rectify the passivity and docility of society, perceived as an unfortunate heritage of the Soviet socialist past. My ethnographic fieldwork at the unemployment office revealed a paradox, however. On the one hand, the ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars were saturated with the rhetoric of activation. Notions of ‘activity’ and ‘waiting’ were being problematised in daily encounters between civil servants, trainers who run these seminars and citizens. The vignette from the seminar run by Juris provides an illustration of how such problematisation worked. On the other hand, the fieldwork revealed how this and other welfare programmes produced more waiting. As I am about to show, the austerity meant scheduling people’s time and disciplining people’s bodies in various specific and minute ways. The policy of activation

The Latvian Ministry of Welfare describes the ‘competitiveness-raising’ programme as designed for ‘learning job search skills, [receiving] psychological support, and learning the basic skills and abilities necessary for the labour market’ (2011b: 22). While there were many different topics on offer, the majority of them fit within the two main categories. The first one targeted ‘social and civic skills’ and was aimed particularly at ‘becoming aware of one’s individuality’ and developing interactional skills (Latvian State Employment Agency 2012). Apart from the seminar on overcoming psychological barriers in the job search process, other popular topics, judging by attendance numbers, were ‘Stress and How to Overcome It’, ‘Conflict and Effective Communication’, ‘Raising SelfConfidence’ and ‘Ability to Work in Times of Change’. The second main group of seminars were meant to develop ‘self-initiative and entrepreneurship’ skills. At the time of my fieldwork, the most popular topics in this category were ‘How to Start a Small Business’, ‘Writing a Business Plan’, ‘Being a Self-Employed Person’ and ‘Accounting Skills for Self-Employed Persons’. Nearly 5,000 ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars on 43 different topics took place in Latvia over the course of the year 2011, when I was conducting my fieldwork. Fifty-two thousand unemployed individuals had attended at least one seminar that year. As the number of unemployed in the country was fluctuating between 130,000 and 160,000, this was the largest social assistance programme for the unemployed in terms of participation numbers, involving every third registered job seeker.2 By comparison, other programmes such as the 3-monthlong training courses on computer literacy, English or other skills commonly required in the labour market, had half as many individuals enrolled. Only about

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one-third of all the people registered as out of work were receiving monetary benefits at any given time, due to strict eligibility criteria. The emphasis was placed on activation and psychological empowerment classes, while less funding was assigned for other forms of welfare assistance such as vocational training, work placements or monetary benefits. Table 2.1 shows the participation numbers in these and other programmes between 2010 and 2014. These various programmes were popular among the unemployed; yet many of the programmes had long waiting lists. Some of the programmes provided a small monthly stipend, which was a draw when out of work and struggling to make ends meet. The longer vocational training courses were especially sought after as many were hoping to requalify or gain additional skills to improve their employment prospects. The waiting time for these longer programmes with a monthly stipend was estimated at about 9–12 months at the time of my fieldwork. However, when the fact of having to wait came up in interactions between employment agents or seminar trainers and the unemployed, this waiting was dismissed as a sign of insufficient ‘activity’ on behalf of the unemployed individual. The following vignette from my field notes captures one such exchange. Table 2.1:  Overview of unemployment rates and active labour market programmes in Latvia, 2010–2014 Unemployment rate (%) Number of people registered as unemployed ‘CompetitivenessRaising Activities’ (number of participants) ‘Work practice programme’ (number of participants) 3-month ‘informal’ training (number of participants) 9-month vocational training (number of participants)

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

19.5

16.2

15.0

11.9

10.8

161,000– 194,000

130,000– 164,000

104,000– 133,000

89,000– 107,000

80,000– 93,000

59,000

52,000

66,000

109,000*

81,000

53,000

32,000

31,000

32,000

19,200

44,000

26,000

15,000

21,000

15,400

13,000

9,700

8,400

8,600

4,700

Sources: Eurostat (2015) and Latvian State Employment Agency (2015). * The significant rise in the number of participants in 2013 is due to new counting rules.

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This morning’s workshop was called ‘How to Actively Search for a Job’. The trainer, Aina, was a woman in her late 50s, with a teacher-like demeanour. She had been working for the Employment Agency since the 1990s, initially as a staff member and now as a contractor. On this particular day, Aina had an especially challenging group. Gatis, a man in his 20s who had returned from Ireland where he had worked as a builder, kept questioning Aina’s points and cracking jokes that made the rest of the group laugh and thus disrupted the otherwise rather serious air that Aina’s seminars usually had. The morning part of the seminar was dedicated to covering job search techniques. Aina particularly emphasised ‘utilising one’s social networks’ and being otherwise an ‘active’ job seeker. A discussion arose regarding other channels to explore when looking for work. Aina asked the group, ‘So what would the Employment Agency be good for?’ Silence fell upon the room. ‘What do you think?’ she insisted. After more silence, Aina gave the answer herself, preceded by a slight reprimand: ‘You don’t even know! For the courses!’ She continued, ‘People say, “I’m not being offered anything”. But let me tell you, don’t wait to be offered anything. Go search by yourself, go apply by yourself!’ Gatis perked up, ‘But where can I find out? I’ve been waiting for a month!’ Another seminar participant turned to him with reproach: ‘A month! Others have been waiting for 2 years already!’ Hearing this dialogue, Aina energetically intervened: ‘That is negligence, to be waiting for 2 years! In that case it’s one’s own fault. If you only wait and wait and wait and don’t ask for yourselves then it can happen’. She then admitted, however, that it might indeed be the case that one had to wait a year for the most popular courses. Later in the day, Aina returned to the importance of being ‘active’. She explained: ‘As far as job search is concerned, I can warmly advise you to actively plan this process every week. Make a list of how many places you plan to go to, how many [letters of application] you’ll write’. Gatis intervened again: ‘I never plan anything, I wake up in the morning, check the Internet, and then check it again during the day and in the evening!’ Pinching her lips in irritation, Aina pointed to the whiteboard with the list of job search methods, discussed in the morning part of the seminar. Gatis scanned it and concluded, ‘I’ve covered all of those. What am I missing? Myself!’ He was referring to one of the items of the list, which identified ‘ourselves’ [paši] as an instrument of job search. As Aina had explained, it meant writing unsolicited applications and other forms of taking initiative. Unwilling to engage any further with Gatis, Aina returned to her point about the usefulness of planning: ‘As soon as we put it on paper, it organises us. It organises us and we can control the situation’. As if to enforce the veracity of her point, she added, ‘Abroad, children are already taught how to plan in the first grades’. The audience was silent, and Aina concluded with great import, ‘because, if a person plans, he accomplishes more’. This time even Gatis accepted Aina’s point in silence, as did the rest of the group.

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Politics of waiting

The Soviet past was mentioned often in the seminars, to further distinguish desirable ‘subject positions’ (Faubion 2011: 4) from undesirable ones. Over the months, I observed how the trainers juxtaposed Soviet ‘ways of thinking’ with ‘modern’ ones. They often drew distinctions between ‘nowadays’ v. ‘then’ and the new v. old ‘mentality’ and ‘thinking’. In the trainers’ rhetoric, ‘thinking’, ‘head’ and ‘mentality’ were all commonly identified as in need of ‘updating’. When making these comparisons, this past was parodied as grotesque, silly or outright absurd. For instance, Juris liked to use an example of a hypothetical drunkard uncle Vanya. In the Soviet kolkhoz, the tractor driver Vanya could fail to show up at work for a week but still keep his job because he was the only one who could drive the vehicle in that kolkhoz. As Juris explained, in the capitalist labour market, there were many people competing for jobs, and one could not rely on being the only option anymore. Similarly, Viktorija, another trainer whose seminars I attended regularly, explained the necessity for workers to be flexible and to be able to adapt to many different jobs during one’s lifetime and contrasted this to ‘the Soviet factory’. In this stereotypical factory, she told us that pens were produced which nobody wanted to buy. However, this lack of demand was addressed simply by building more storage as a place to store the unpopular product, rather than improving or abandoning its production. By smirking at this absurd praxis, as Viktorija’s audience did, it was made clear to everyone that each one of us in the room was on the right side of the normative distinction being drawn here.3 At the same time, the trainers, who were usually middle-aged and had themselves grown up in Soviet Latvia, occasionally invoked this common heritage to ‘break the ice’. Thus, Juris, who was ethnic Latvian, frequently used Russian words and expressions during his seminars. He would sometimes tell his audience an entire joke in Russian and then go on to translate it for me (my Russian was mediocre, being of a younger generation and having grown up in an ethnic-Latvian town in the northern part of the country). On numerous occasions I heard him deliver quotes to his audiences from Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (Kavkazskaya plennitsa) – a 1960s Russian comedy that was wildly famous across the Soviet Union. Explaining the capitalist economy, he would tie in funny examples on Soviet kolkhozs, shortages and queues for sausage. Anete, the psychologist who liked to repeat the NIKE slogan in her classes, used the example of Alla Pugacheva to explain the meaning of charisma (arguably useful to exude at a job interview). Pugacheva, a Russian singer enjoying steady popularity since the 1960s, was a celebrity that everybody in the room knew, rather than Thomas Edison or Henry Ford who featured in Anete’s other inspirational stories. Thus, such references created an environment where people felt comfortable, as most of them shared, and could relate to, this cultural knowledge. The references to Soviet times thus served as disciplinary rhetorical tools, while at the same time also creating a sense of insiderhood and togetherness between

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the trainers and their audiences. When Aina said that children ‘abroad’ set goals already in early grades at school, she was invoking a fantasy of the ‘Imaginary West’ (Yurchak 2006). During the Soviet times, it had been the ‘Other’ to daydream about. After 1991, ‘the West’ was equated with ‘normalcy’, and the political and socio-economic reforms were meant to return Latvia, just like the other post-socialist states, to this normalcy (e.g. Eglitis 2002; Rausing 2004). Aina’s reference to ‘abroad’ implied notions of ‘learned helplessness’ and an excessive reliance on the state, along with alleged inability ‘to plan’, i.e. to take responsibility for one’s life. Yet, by positioning themselves and their audiences as caught between ‘the Soviet’ and ‘abroad’, the trainers also created a sense of cultural intimacy – a feeling of togetherness and comfort in the knowledge of sharing a common, if embarrassing, past (Herzfeld 2005: 3; Hansen 2012). Enforcing idleness

While the audiences at the ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars rehearsed ‘active’ disposition towards life, it became increasingly apparent over the course of the fieldwork that other forms of state action at the same time produced physical and virtual stillness. To begin with, the spatial and temporal order of the unemployment office stood in stark contrast to the incessant activity advocated by the trainers. It was saturated with waiting. The waiting started with the registration process, as one usually had to spend hours in the waiting area just for personal details to be entered into the electronic data system. After this formal process was complete, the job seekers usually had to wait around 2 months for the first meeting with their designated employment agent. The long waiting times for the registration, the appointments and the courses were a direct result of the austerity. The number of unemployed had risen sharply while the government was cutting funding for state institutions. There was a shortage of staff at the unemployment office. Even though the appointments with employment agents were scheduled for specific times, there were always people lining the narrow corridors at the unemployment office, sitting idly, waiting. Some had come late or without an appointment, hoping they might get in. Sometimes the schedule overran, and everyone had to wait. Among the staff and job seekers alike, conversations and comments focusing on ‘the queue’ were ubiquitous. My notebook was filling up with talk I would overhear about waiting. Distinctions were commonly made between ‘morning queues’ and ‘afternoon queues’, ‘average queues’, ‘live queues’ and ‘queues by appointment’. A printed A4 note on one of the career counsellor’s doors announced, ‘Admittance according to the order of queue!’ (‘Pieņem rindas kārtībā’), a phrase that was reminiscent of a Soviet polyclinic. People’s time was treated as if it was without value by making them spend hours in the waiting rooms and corridors of the unemployment office. The fact that these spaces were often dilapidated and without basic amenities (e.g. I never

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Politics of waiting

saw toilet paper or soap in the toilets, some of which could not even be locked) added to this sense of worthlessness. Īrisa, a 60-year-old woman and frequent participant of the ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars, complained to me that she saw no point in having to sit around for hours on end in the corridor when the appointment with her employment agent amounted to little more than a couple of clicks on the agent’s computer through the same electronic database of vacancies that Īrisa was already using at home. ‘As if I have nothing to do!’, Īrisa said to me. Yet, if she were to miss the mandatory appointment without a valid excuse, her official ‘status’ as an unemployed person might be withdrawn. The consequence of that would be the loss of the meagre unemployment benefits and any chance to take part in the training programmes. Passive waiting was thus created and controlled by the spatial and temporal organisation of welfare assistance. The appointments with employment agents and the 9.00 a.m. seminars were ways of scheduling people’s time in small, mundane ways. Such primitive measures made this control of time almost invisible, yet created a sense of powerlessness (Auyero 2012). As one of my informants, Ārija, said, the unemployment office was like a labyrinth where you needed a thread like in the story about Hansel and Gretel to make sure you got out. While the visible idleness around the corridors and waiting rooms stood in ironic contrast to the rhetoric delivered within the seminar rooms, there were other forms of waiting that were entirely invisible but, arguably, with even more significant consequences for individuals. The very implementation of many of the programmes for people out of work, offered upon registration, was also structured around waiting. If a person applied for a 12-week training programme or a 9-month requalification course, it was common knowledge that they would have to wait for an indefinite amount of time until their turn came. The longer training programmes were popular among job seekers as they were seen to increase opportunities for new employment, and some of them entitled one to a small stipend (approximately 80–100 Lats or GBP 100–125 per month at the time of my fieldwork). With the unemployment benefits reducing every 3 months, until their payment stopped after 6 to 9 months in total, this was a promise of at least some form of income for many individuals living without wages.4 At the time of my fieldwork, there were approximately 9,000 people ‘in line’ for training in Riga, which was estimated, by employment agents, to amount to a 9-month wait. Several of my informants had been waiting for months and, in some cases, over 1 year until they could train in computer skills, learn English or pursue a new vocational education course. In a separate queue, I was told, there were another 1,000 people waiting for a several-month-long training course on writing a business proposal.5 Many of the unemployed people that I spoke to had signed up for one course or another, but none had been able to start right away, as there was always a backlog of thousands of others who were already in the queue. My informants would routinely recount how many months or even years

Temporalities of austerity

53

they had been waiting on one or another programme or appointment, comparing their waiting time to those of their relatives or acquaintances. For example, Ārija had decided to start a business as a gardener. This would be a second major requalification in her life, as she used to work at a chocolate factory during the Soviet times, before training as an accountant in the 1990s. Ārija considered herself exceptionally lucky to start the vocational course in gardening 6 months after applying. For some of the programmes, waiting was a formal criterion for eligibility: one was only allowed to participate after having been unemployed for a certain number of months. There was a 6-month waiting time before becoming eligible for a mobility assistance programme and the public works programme. The only assistance that the unemployed people did not have to wait for was the aforementioned ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars. The long queues for training courses offered to the unemployed as part of welfare assistance have been a persistent phenomenon in Latvia since the 1990s, though data are fragmentary. As a report from 1998 observed, ‘Although a few unemployed respondents expressed reluctance to embark on learning a new profession in the present economic situation, those who [were] willing reported serious difficulties’ (Dudwick et al. 1998: 17). It gave an example of Liepāja, the third largest city in Latvia, where, of the 1,000–1,500 people who annually applied for training, only a fraction received the opportunity (e.g. in 1997, 347 people participated in various training programmes). The same report noted that those who undertook training had a higher chance of subsequently finding employment (Dudwick et al. 1998). In 2000, only 36.6% of the 28,000 unemployed who applied for a re-qualification course across the country gained entrance. The rest had officially remained ‘in line’. The 100 Lats programme, designed to provide a social safety net for the parts of the population that were hit hardest by the crisis, meant further scheduling of time. As the labour market had shrunk rapidly, there were only 3,000– 4,000 vacancies in the entire country at any given time in the years 2009–2011 (Latvian Ministry of Welfare 2011a). Unemployment was rising. Yet, due to the high shadow economy and unofficial salary payments, many people who lost their jobs did not qualify for unemployment benefit. In 2011, 76% of people who were out of work were not receiving the benefit (Hazans 2012: 3). As discussed in Chapter 1, the Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) cash benefit did not effectively function as a social safety measure either, because of its strict eligibility criteria and the very small amounts of money it provided.6 Thus, there were thousands of people left with no income in the post-crisis period. The 100 Lats programme, officially called ‘Work Practice with a Stipend’, was the only option for many to receive some cash support. To receive the monthly payment, set below the minimum wage level, participants of this programme had to work for their local municipality. Instead of receiving basic subsistence support in the form of a GMI or unemployment benefit, thousands of people were made to

54

Politics of waiting

perform often dulling, repetitive work that symbolically expressed the workers’ own worthlessness. As people in bright neon vests were sweeping roadsides and raking parks, everyone passing by knew that these were ‘the hundred-latters’. In the media, reports were common about problems with these ‘workers’, as many were said to have alcohol addiction problems and often ‘miss work without a reason’ (Delfi 2010). One municipality was reported asking the police to do regular rounds of the programme’s work sites to check that people were not working while under the influence. Thus, a stigmatising discourse surrounded this programme. Furthermore, waiting was an inbuilt condition of participation. One could only enrol after having been unemployed for 6 months. As mentioned before, in total 180,300 unemployed people participated in this programme in the period 2009–2013 (LETA 2014). The government and the World Bank talked about ‘workplaces’ that were being created as part of this programme. Yet this certainly was not the kind of work that sociologists have analysed as providing dignity to the individual (e.g. Sennett 2009). Capturing bodies in manual labour for months became another form of etatisation of time that the post-crisis austerity brought. The state was taking control of people’s time, in this case of the part of the population that was most vulnerable and relying on the state for help through lack of other options. Representatives of the Ministry of Welfare argued that this programme ‘was a key part of the social safety net, lessened social tensions and provided support to the part of society that was most affected by the crisis’ (Paparde 2011, see also Azam, Ferre and Ajwad 2012). There are telling parallels here with taming social groups or populations that may turn to protest or social disruption by providing welfare support (Piven and Cloward 1971). A lot of work has been done in sociology and anthropology on the poor or dangerous classes and the various ways of disciplining them (e.g. Soss, Fording and Schram 2011; Wacquant 2009, 2012). Michael Herzfeld has noted how ‘mind-numbing routines of repetitive work also discipline bodies that, perceived as belonging to “dangerous populations”, might otherwise be disposed to revolution or other taxonomy-shattering, artistically original activities’ (Herzfeld 2009: 115). The 100 Lats programme combined such scheduling of time with manual, often repetitive labour. Its disciplinary effects therefore cannot be overlooked. All of the previously detailed evidence suggests that, alongside the rhetoric of activation, the very manner in which social assistance provision to the unemployed was organised perpetuated passivity and waiting. Registering job seekers for training programmes and then failing to allocate sufficient resources to provide the training means that those who could become more productive participants of the labour market were instead kept in a state of limbo. While the trainers emphasised activity, such organisation of these programmes produced waiting and made the unemployed, especially those with outdated qualifications, ‘durably unable to realise their goals’ (Jeffrey 2010: 3). The waiting and surviving that

Temporalities of austerity

55

the post-2008 austerity imposed on thousands of Latvians forced them to live in a worthless, enduring present. As Dace Dzenovska argues in her ethnography of the Latvian countryside, such a life in the present is characterised by an inability to conceive of the future (2012: 150–153). It is a life that can only be organised in the short term, living from pay check to pay check or from benefit payment to the next, all the while as ‘active planning’ and long-term thinking were valorised in the interactions between state representatives and the unemployed. A plausible explanation for such long waiting times could be scarcity of resources. Indeed, I am not arguing that it was a deliberate policy of the Latvian government, the Ministry of Welfare or the Employment Agency to keep people waiting. The head of the Employment Agency readily attributed the problem of the long waiting lists for the courses to insufficient funding.7 Due to the austerity budget following the 2008 crisis, the agency had to further reduce staff costs, and employment agents were made to take involuntary holidays while the number of the unemployed in the country was increasing. Scarcity of resources cannot serve as a sufficient explanation in itself, however. Rather, it reflects policy priorities and – more broadly – the kind of political rationality that underpins the welfare governance. If we regard any welfare regime as a two-layered system consisting of redistributive and interpretive apparatuses (Haney 2002: 7), we can recognise that redistribution of resources reflects the way that policy makers interpret social rights and entitlements. As Lynne Haney writes, States not only create provisions to redistribute benefits but also articulate historically specific conceptions of need. By constructing ‘architectures of need’, states define who is in need and how to satisfy those needs. Moreover, state processes of redistribution and interpretation stand in complex relation to one another. As states embark on given redistributive paths, they give rise to particular interpretations of need and images of the needy. (Haney 2002: 7)

Similarly, Verdery has argued in the case of socialist Romania that the Ceausescu government’s decision in the 1980s to pay off foreign debt had unintended effects of etatising people’s time: Behind these appropriations of scheduling lay political decisions about how to manage austerity so as to repay the foreign debt. It is impossible to prove that an additional conscious intention was to deprive the populace of control over its schedules, but this was indeed an effect of the policies pursued. (Verdery 1996: 45)

She therefore proposes ‘viewing the etatisation of time in Romania as the joint result of intentional projects of state-makers, unintended consequences of actions aimed at other problems, and structural properties of Romanian socialism as a social order sui generis’ (1996: 41). In the Latvian case, it was likewise a political decision made by the government, in consultations with international experts,

56

Politics of waiting

to organise the state revenue and redistribution system in particular ways and not in others. As shown in the previous chapter, factors such as undoing ‘learned helplessness’ and joining the Eurozone played a role here. Waiting and expecting in post-socialism

This paradox of activation and waiting gains an extra dimension in the postSoviet context because of the historically and geopolitically formed moral valuations of the different temporalities at stake. While thousands of unemployed individuals were waiting for appointments and courses, they were stigmatised by civil servants and trainers because their waiting was framed as demonstrating their ‘passive mentality’. As discussed in Chapter 1, waiting in queues was among many of the practices that contributed to the state’s claim on people’s private time in the Soviet Union. Waiting is linked in the popular imagination to a state socialist political ontology where the state is ‘a father who gives hand-outs to the children as he sees fit’ (Verdery 1996: 25). The citizens are imagined in this model as expecting these hand-outs and passively waiting for them. The ghost of the Soviet past is present particularly in the second meaning that the verb ‘to wait’ – gaidīt – has in Latvian. Namely, gaidīt can also mean ‘to expect’. This second meaning was invoked in an exchange between a broadshouldered, middle-aged man and an employment agent at the registration room. Upon reaching the end of the brief registration process, the man said in an agitated tone that he had been working hard and paying taxes for many years and now, having lost a job, was expecting some help from the state. The agent did not engage in a conversation with him and continued with the strictly scripted process of entering the man’s personal data into the electronic database. However, after he had left, she remarked loudly to her colleagues and me in the room that such a strong man, ‘a man like an oak tree’ (vīrs kā ozols), should just ‘go out there and work’, instead of waiting for assistance from the state. His claim for social rights was interpreted as passive reliance on the state. ‘A man like an oak tree’ is a common trope in the Latvian language. It usually expresses an appreciation of one’s masculinity. In Latvian folksongs, men are compared to oak trees while women are ‘slender like linden trees’. Yet, this trope has deeper nationalist connotations as well. The oak tree is a symbol invoking images of the self-sufficient Latvian peasant, living in his own farmstead with an oak growing in the front yard. This peasant’s resilience was placed at the heart of the national development strategy, as discussed in Chapter 1. In Soviet Latvia, a group of writers and artists started a famous movement to ‘liberate oak trees’. They travelled around the country and cleared large oaks of bushes and undergrowth (Schwartz 2007). This seemingly apolitical activity in fact symbolised tending to the national culture and expressed the resilience of the national spirit.

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They were symbolically rescuing Latvians and Latvianness. The little episode from the registration room also reveals how such nationalist imagery is gendered. When the civil servant told off the man, she was invoking a gendered idea of deservedness, noted in other contexts as well (see e.g. Haney 2002; Read and Thelen 2007: 9). Furthermore, men strong as oak trees are needed to defend the nation-state, as the national border is imagined as feminine and in need of protection (Verdery 1996). Such masculine nationalism plays a particularly central role in post-1991 Latvia as the state is imagined as constantly under threat from Russia. This remark is thus an example of a wider discourse denouncing dependency on the state and espousing individual responsibility, self-sufficiency and resilience. It is not straightforward to unpack here to what extent it expresses a neoliberal and to what extent a nationalist sentiment, in the way that the phrase was used by the civil servant. It is rather a mix of both, as I explore further in Chapter 3. A man asking for help from the state contradicts both the neoliberal and the nationalist visions of the ideal political subject. Due to these state socialist connotations, the trainers and civil servants either refused to recognise their clients’ waiting or stigmatised it as ‘Soviet’ or ‘outdated’. Waiting was often made invisible with the help of language. A highranking employee at Riga’s unemployment centre stumbled over the word ‘line’ when she explained to me how the social assistance policies worked. Immediately after mentioning that there was a queue for the courses, she corrected herself that it was not actually a queue, but rather people’s names were put ‘on a list’. The official went on to say that whenever ‘a client’ would tell her that they were ‘waiting in line’ for a course, she would point out to them that they were not ‘in line’ and were not ‘waiting for anything’. They simply had a queue number. Mentioning of queues was often avoided at the registration waiting room as well. A staff member handing out queue numbers for registration used to say in a euphemistic manner, ‘You can go walk around for about 2 [or 3, or 4] hours’, estimating the waiting time for that person but avoiding to refer to what they would have to do as waiting. The waiting was regulated with a ticket system, which in itself, as Zsuzsanna Vargha (2014) has shown, worked as a purifying measure in the post-socialist context. As Vargha argues in her study of electronic queuing systems in Hungary, such ‘elimination of queuing and its replacement with a high-tech allocation system is a strategy towards … “purification” [that is] ritualistic and symbolises the efficiency and freedom of post-socialist market economies and a discontinuity with the past. … Call-number systems are widely seen as more equitable and more “civilised”’ (Vargha 2014: 129). Demands for social rights, when made, were delegitimised when the trainers or civil servants denounced them as mere ‘waiting’ or labelled them as ‘outdated’. Associations with the Soviet waiting were often not allowing them to openly recognise that these were claims, in fact, for social justice.

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Politics of waiting Co-deploying activation and waiting in the austerity state

In these ‘cold, neoliberal times’,8 one is not supposed to sit around idly and wait. Constant movement and activity is the norm. At the same time, the era of advanced capitalism has relegated many across the globe to waiting. Movement in the contemporary world is a privilege disguised as the norm. Accordingly, we need to adjust our theories of neoliberalism as an ideology of homo economicus, entrepreneurial citizenship and activation, and recognise how powerless, indefinite waiting is a key part of this form of governance. Indeed, as the ethnographic data in this chapter have demonstrated, the politics of activation and waiting were co-deployed in a single institutional space. On the one hand, the civil servants and trainers sought to instil an enterprising ethic while, on the other hand, waiting was perpetuated by the way social assistance was organised. As the Latvian state has been channelling its policy efforts towards ‘catching up with Europe’ and investing national and EU resources into fostering active, entrepreneurial citizenry, its welfare system has been refocused on ‘competitiveness-raising’ and workfare programmes. While state resources are invested in providing psychological support and entrepreneurship training to the unemployed in the form of the 1–4-day seminars, those who are relying on the state for more substantial assistance have their time scheduled in ways they cannot control. At the same time as waiting is produced by the way public welfare is structured and funded, this waiting is also stigmatised. Rather than recognising social assistance as a matter of social rights, it is framed by state agents as a form of dependence on the state. Waiting is construed as synonymous with expecting care from the state. Yet, rather than being a Soviet remnant, as the policy makers, civil servants and trainers often interpreted it, the ethnography of the unemployment office shows how this waiting is a consequence of the shrinking social rights. The ubiquity of physical and virtual waiting of the unemployed in Latvia emerges as an effect of austerity politics despite having been framed since the 1990s as their target. The developmental vision of ‘catching up’ seeks to produce competitive individuals, yet at the same time imposes a state of suspended life. Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as a paper in the British Journal of Sociology (Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald 2016). 2 No statistics are available regarding the demographic composition of the participants. However, judging by my participant observations, the seminars usually had more female participants than male, and though all age groups were represented, middleaged people were most commonly in attendance. 3 Despite the way that the neoliberal activation is being pitted against the Soviet regime in the Latvian policy rhetoric, it is important to note that the Soviet state prioritised activity – and resulting productivity – as a criterion of worthiness as much as

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the post-Soviet Latvian state does. Just as there is emphasis on speed and movement today, along with pressure to reinvent oneself constantly through life-long learning and flexible, transferrable skills, there were Stakhanovite brigades in state socialism, overfilling targets of production and beating the deadlines. (See e.g. Lampland 1995; Kharkhordin 1999; see also Yurchak 2006 on the ways in which productivity and activity were administered and valorised in state socialism). 4 The importance of these training programmes comes into relief when considering that the highest proportion of unemployed in Latvia were those with vocational education, obtained mostly during the Soviet period and considered outdated by employers (Lipskis 2008). English and computer skills were also now commonly required. The economic crisis exacerbated this situation even further. Many former accountants and teachers could not find a new job in their professions due to a sudden fall in demand and were hoping to requalify. 5 Author’s interview with a civil servant at the Ministry of Welfare, 6 April 2011. 6 Lāce (2012: 154) notes a rise of GMI recipients in the post-crisis years, from 27,400 in 2008 to 79,500 in 2011. Yet, still only 14.75% of the population received the GMI or other cash support from their municipality in 2011 (Re:Baltica 2012). 7 Latvijas Radio 1 (2011). 8 I borrow this phrase from the title of the conference ‘Feminism and Intimacy in Cold, Neoliberal Times’ at Goldsmiths, University of London, 21 June 2013.

3

The anxious subject

Time and selfhood

‘The state simply is not thinking!’, Silva, a 40-year-old unemployed accountant, kept repeating over her second cup of black coffee. I had met Silva in one of the seminars, and we had since been chatting regularly about her experiences at the unemployment office, her attempts to find a job and her life in general. What did Silva mean when she said that the state was not thinking? Her claim came amidst a fast, meandering narrative recounting her personal hardships along with a broader critique of the state of affairs in Latvia. Having lost her job as an accountant 3 years ago, and unable to find a new position, Silva had decided to enrol on a Master’s degree programme at the University of Latvia to become an archivist. Her elderly parents were paying her tuition fees, though she later admitted feeling embarrassed about having to accept financial support from her family at the age of 40. About to graduate 2 years later, Silva was beginning to realise that the few archives that existed in Latvia were not actually hiring. She could not even find a proper internship placement for the last semester of the programme. Silva related the story of her internship search to me in frustration. The fact that she had been admitted to a university programme to gain a qualification for which there was no demand was for her one more sign of the state ‘not thinking’. At that point we had already been talking for 3 hours. I was hungry and tired, but she seemed to be gaining energy with every iteration of the ‘nonthinking state’. Were Silva’s words an expression of the learned helplessness that the reform experts had been talking about? Similarly, when Gatis, whom we met at Aina’s seminar in the previous chapter, said that he was ‘waiting for the courses’, did these words identify him as the waiting subject that the trainers were supposed to ‘activate’? Or was this waiting subject merely a rhetorical construct to discipline the job seekers? How were these subject positions, made available by the seminar discourse, inhabited? And how to examine such forms of subjectivity without replicating the ideological categories of ‘activation’ and ‘passive waiting’? So far, I have shown how time for Latvians has been ‘pressing rather than merely passing’ under various political regimes. In the previous chapter I interrogated the

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waiting that was both stigmatised and produced by austerity policies and workfare programmes. In this chapter, I wish to probe further how the post-Soviet politics of waiting and catching up have both shaped one’s sense of self and been enabled by particular forms of subjectivity. As Veena Das asks to this end, ‘What is the work that time does in the creation of the subject?’ (2007: 95). She notes that, for her interlocutors, time appears as having an agency: ‘Time is what could strike one, time is what could heal one’ (2007). Katherine Verdery argues in this respect that, ‘because social senses of self are intricately bound up with temporal investments in certain kinds of activity, incursions upon these activities have consequences for how the self is conceived and experienced’ (1996: 41). We have seen how time has constituted particular political rationalities. Yet, what kinds of political subjectivities has it produced? I trace in this chapter how such effects revealed themselves through the ethnography and approach this task by listening to the narratives of 3 of my interlocutors in the field – Silva, Aivars and Daina. There are 3 points I wish to explore in this chapter. First, waiting is not just a form of discipline; ‘doing time’ creates bonds between the citizen-subject and the state. Secondly, these bonds with the state need to be understood as having been shaped over a number of different political regimes. The post-1991 Latvian state is both the inheritor of the Soviet ‘authoritarian welfare state’ (Aidukaite 2003: 410) as well as the desired nation-state that was constructed in the late 1980s–early 1990s nationalist discourse as the fulfilment of the oppressed Latvian nation’s dreams. Thirdly, as waiting as a subject position is stigmatised, it produces anxiety. This anxiety puts in perspective some of the ways in which people reacted to the seminar rhetoric. A person is readier to acquiesce and reform herself if she is anxious about inhabiting the normative subject position effectively. Temporalities of catching up and waiting have shaped such anxious subjectivities. Thinking about the state by the bonfire

Silva’s words about ‘the state not thinking’ caught my attention because I had heard them so many times before. Valsts nedomā is one variation in a repertoire of common tropes for addressing the state, both in private conversations and in the public rhetoric. Other studies have shown how such language is prevalent among the Latvians who have emigrated in recent years to look for work abroad. For example, a Latvian respondent living in Ireland told the researchers inquiring about his motives for emigrating that ‘[in Latvia, the] government does not think about the people. In Ireland, one can feel that the government thinks about all people’ (Indāns in Eglītis and Lāce 2009: 342). In other instances, this lack of ‘thinking’ is framed as ‘being forgotten about’. A novel written by a Latvian author who picked mushrooms on an Irish farm along with other Latvian emigrants described her co-workers as people who had felt ‘unneeded, left-over’ in Latvia (Muktupāvela in Eglītis and Lāce 2009: 343). A city mayor from Latgale,

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the most economically deprived region of Latvia, while participating in political debates on national television, compared people living in Latgale to adolescents left home alone and starting to do ‘unsightly things’, their parents having forgotten about them. He announced that the Latgalians were organising a trip to the president of Latvia to tell him about their abandonment and plead with him to turn the government’s attention to them. In an advertisement for quick cash loans, a similar sentiment was exploited to summon potential customers. Large colourful letters shouted from the sides of public transport minibuses zipping through Riga, ‘Has the state forgotten about you? We haven’t!’ It is a language that has appeared in the political rhetoric as well. Valdis Dombrovskis, the prime minister who oversaw the post-2008 austerity, asked the nation to ‘think about the state by the bonfire’ when celebrating the Midsummer festival in June 2009. The economic downturn was dramatic at that point, which might have made the usually sombre, rational Dombrovskis – a man who was nicknamed ‘the accountant’ during his premiership – inclined to use such affective language. Yet, the words he chose were familiar ones. Another common trope in this repertoire was ‘the state’s attitude’. This was the phrase used by Aivars, a road engineer who had lost his job in the public sector amidst the crisis. His employment prospects were not looking promising, as the economy was recovering very slowly. The unemployment benefits would match his salary for the first 3 months, but afterwards they would reduce gradually, eventually stopping altogether. He was told at the unemployment office that there was a long waiting list for attending the 3-month vocational courses that he had been hoping to enrol on. Aivars felt the precariousness of his situation acutely and was bitter that the taxes he had been diligently paying meant ‘nothing’ when he lost his job: If there is somebody who has not paid any taxes at all, and there are such people among us, he is in the same category as I am. [He is] the 9,001st in the queue while I am the 9,000th. Well, that’s a totally nihilistic attitude from the state towards the private [individual]… and yet they want that person, having received such an attitude [from the state], to… he is going to be a fool if he keeps paying those taxes to get nothing in return! There is no differentiation in place. And that’s why people in the 1990s had a [positive] attitude towards the state, well, at the beginning, when the state was founded, a few thousand went on the demonstrations, they were hoping for something, for a [positive] attitude from the state and were ready to give a lot themselves, some perhaps even their whole heart and soul. But when you get nihilistic [treatment] once, then twice, and it does not change over the years, then… that love of the state [valsts mīlestība] dissipates for many. That’s why many are leaving the country [aizbrauc no valsts] [i.e. emigrating]!

We can guess that Aivars is speaking of himself here, experiencing the ‘state’s attitude’ as hurtful, and his love towards the state as unrequited. His intimate

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feelings of affection have turned into bitterness. Both Silva and Aivars speak of the state in a language that suggests proximity and an emotional attachment. Their words are suggesting a sense of a relationship and a bond felt with the state. Aivars even uses a language of love to invoke this intimate bond. Such at once critical and intimate talk about the state was common among the people I spoke to over the course of my fieldwork. What kind of political imagination was revealed by invoking the state in familial, intimate terms like ‘love’, ‘forgetting’, ‘thinking’ or ‘having an attitude’?1 This kind of language did suggest a form of waiting, but was it an expression of the ‘learned helplessness’ and ‘passiveness’ that the civil servants and trainers were concerned with? Was it an expression of nostalgia for the Soviet ‘authoritarian welfare state’ that insisted on taking care of its people (Aidukaite 2003: 410)? Intimate tyrannies

The query ‘why isn’t the state thinking, why does it not care?’ is made at the affective register (cf. Aretxaga 2005: 171). Sociologists and anthropologists have shown how the state functions as an idea, a fantasy, as much as it is a cluster of institutions and political actors (Abrams 1988 [1977]; Rose, J. 1996; Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Affects and emotions play a key role in the relationship between the citizen and the state (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 2012; Aretxaga 2003, 2005; Stoler 2007; Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015). The state ‘become[s] “real” through the mobilization … of affect’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015: 3). It is often ‘an object of emotional investment’ and thus ‘emotion is implicated in a variety of everyday and exceptional encounters between citizens, state agents, and the dispersed material traces of state power’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015: 3). The imagination of the state as a ‘guarantee of a certain social order’ (Hansen 2001: 222) and a provider of social justice is foundational, if always fraught. Thus, Begona Aretxaga notes that there is always a tension at the centre of the imagination of the state: The confluence of violence and paternalism, of force and intimacy, sustains the state as an object of ambivalence, an object of resentment for abandoning its subjects to their own fate and one desired as a subject that can provide for its citizens (Wendy Brown 1995; Ramirez 2001). The state is split into good and bad state, triggering an imaginary of the state in which desire and fear are entangled in a relation of misrecognition from which one cannot be extricated. (Aretxaga 2005: 268)

It seems plausible, though, that these affects take particular shapes in different political regimes and socio-cultural contexts. Though I am careful not to reproduce the stigmatising rhetoric that I often heard at the unemployment office, a brief look back at the Soviet past is merited here to better understand the intimate, familial language my informants used. As discussed already in Chapter 1,

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the Soviet state’s efforts to etatise time produced a sense of lack of control and weakening of agency. The Soviet Union was an ‘authoritarian welfare state’ that defined individuals’ needs and then insisted on its monopoly to satisfy them (Aidukaite 2003: 410).2 Forms of subjectivity emerged corresponding to this particular ‘architecture of need’ (Haney 2002). In Katherine Verdery’s words, the party ‘acted like a father who gives hand-outs to the children as he sees fit. The Benevolent Father Party educated people to express needs it would then fill, and discouraged them from taking the initiative that would enable them to fill these needs on their own’ (1996: 25). She has noted how the ‘socialist paternalism’ model ‘emphasised a quasi-familiar dependency’. Contrasting this socialist paternalism to the two meanings of the nation that Eric Hobsbawm had previously identified, namely citizenship and ethnicity, Verdery writes, instead of political or ethnocultural rights, it posited a moral tie linking subjects with the state through their rights to share in the redistributed social product. Subjects were presumed to be neither politically active, not ethnically similar to each other: they were presumed to be grateful recipients – like small children in a family – of benefits their rulers decide upon for them. The subject position thus produced was dependency, rather than the agency cultivated by citizenship or the solidarity of ethnonationalism. (Verdery 1996: 63)

Elizabeth Dunn adds that ‘the state assumed the role of parent, determined the needs of the citizens qua “children”, and doled out the “care”, largely via the workplace. Benefits like vacations in the mountains, concerts, and even the monthly allotments of soap and towels were not calculated compensations for labour but were the gifts of the parent-state to its child-populace’ (Dunn 2004: 151). Lynne Haney’s study of welfare regimes in Hungary demonstrates how in socialism ‘single mothers positioned the state in familial terms ... by treating it as a father figure’ and demanded to be ‘defended’ and ‘protected’ by it (2002: 82), mirroring the official discourse and thus achieving security and empowerment in their everyday lives. Similarly, Maria Galmarini shows how Soviet citizens who wrote petitions ‘for social assistance crafted subject positions that made sense vis-à-vis the [official] taxonomy of help and used labour/contribution and need/ suffering as the basis for what could be imagined and argued for (but also questioned) in relation to social justice’ (Galmarini 2014). Galmarini argues that ‘petitioners largely performed what Pierre Bourdieu has called “the official model of the self ” – a model that Soviet “deviant” subjects learned to strategically adopt and manoeuvre and might have even made their own because it had a real emancipatory appeal for them in terms of human dignity, social integration, and justice’ (Galmarini 2014, see also Petryna 2002).3 Thus, when Gatis said that he has been waiting for the courses, we can see here how the subject position of waiting is inhabited. For the unemployed, signing them up for a course that is months or even years away and putting them in a

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queue evokes a particular kind of a bond with the state, one that is historically familiar. It thus creates a subject position that they can recognise and assume. We can see waiting as a subject position that is available in this particular context (Faubion 2011: 65) (if, paradoxically, made available as much by the neoliberal state as it is a subject position inherited from the Soviet times). As a subject position, it can be inhabited, and it gives the individual’s waiting some meaning. The anticipation of the future allows escaping the worthless present. Here, ‘thinking between the posts’ of post-colonialism and post-socialism (Chari and Verdery 2009) can be fruitful. This bond with the state is shaped in particular ways in political regimes that carry within them an authoritarian or a totalitarian past. Thus, Achille Mbembe has observed the subtle and complex intimate bonds tying together the state and its subjects in post-colonial societies. Mbembe speaks of ‘an intimate tyranny’ binding together the citizen and the state: at any given moment in the postcolonial historical trajectory, the authoritarian mode can no longer be interpreted strictly in terms of ‘surveillance’, and ‘the politics of coercion’. The practices of ordinary people cannot always be read in terms of ‘opposition to the state’, ‘deconstructing power’, and ‘disengagement’. In the postcolony, an intimate tyranny links the rulers with the ruled …. If subjection appears more intense than it might be, it is also because the subjects of the commandement have internalised the authoritarian epistemology to the point where they reproduce it themselves in all the minor circumstances of daily life, such as social networks, cults and secret societies, culinary practices, leisure activities, modes of consumption, dress styles, rhetorical devices, and the political economy of the body. (Mbembe 2001: 128)

Mbembe points here to the subtle ways in which individual subjectivities are tied to, or embedded in, the authoritarian power. Because ‘the dominant and the dominated [are inscribed] within the same episteme’ (2001: 110), he argues, the ‘post-colonial subject’ is bound to the state power in ways more complex and ambiguous than simply submitting to it or resisting it. Alexei Yurchak (2008) has argued similarly, in the Soviet case, that it is simplistic to conceive of the socialist political subjectivity as a dichotomous split between, on the one hand, a public self that performed loyalty to an oppressive state and, on the other, a private self that dissented it. One’s relationship with the totalitarian state was necessarily more complex and ambiguous than this binary model suggests. Neringa Klumbyte points to the kind of political intimacy that thrived in specific ‘zones’ or ‘fields of social and political comfort’ in Soviet Lithuania (2011: 659). While the official public sphere was limited to formalised discourses and official rituals, Klumbyte identifies the Lithuanian humour and satire journal Šluota as one such specific ‘zone’ of ‘shared meanings and values’ where citizens could experience ‘relations of power entailing mutual closeness and belonging’ to the state (2011:

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659–663). Inhabiting this zone created a form of political intimacy between the power and its subjects, a form of ‘co-existence’, ‘togetherness’ and ‘dialogue’ (2011). The Soviet authoritarian welfare regime produced an intimate, if often also violent, bond with the state. This bond was rooted in the state’s omnipresence through totalitarian surveillance networks and practices, on the one hand, and its paternalistic welfare system, on the other. If power works through forming the self through its desires, as the Foucauldian argument goes, we can see how the Soviet subject was created through this intimate bond that was institutionalised through organising labour and need (Collier 2011: 67). Moreover, the total politisation and policing of all spheres of life, even if ever only imaginary, entrenched this bond with the state through discipline, self-censorship and fear (Verdery 1996; Skultans 1998). In the poignant words of Bulgarian dissident Zhelyu Zhelev, one could never separate oneself from the state, just like one could never separate oneself from one’s mother (Valiavicharska 2012). Attributing this intimate tyranny that manifested itself in the ways the state was spoken about solely to this authoritarian past would mean painting a too neat dividing line between the Soviet and the post-Soviet periods. When Aivars talked about the love of the state dissipating, he was expecting the state to deliver on a promise that had been made. Specifically, he was talking about the early 1990s and the popular demonstrations for independence. His critique of the state was couched in intimate language, but it was not simple nostalgia for the socialist state. When he spoke of love towards the state dissipating, he was talking about the state that was the dream of the 1980s–1990s nationalist movement. It was the nation-state promise that he invoked and that, he felt, had now been betrayed. Echoing a similar sentiment of betrayal, Silva suddenly threw this barrage of questions at me during one of our conversations: Latvian people from the US, from abroad, from Latvia donated their silver Lats, gold, everything else [at the beginning of the 1990s]. Where is it all? Where are the paintings? Where is all the silverware? Where is all the money? Thousands! Where is it? … Those 5 Lats [silver] coins, gold, silverware, people donated so much, without any reward, without signatures, without anything! But where is it all now?!

I do not think Silva was referring specifically to corruption among the political elites, although such critiques are also common. In the context of our conversations, I believe her words spoke of investing in the state not only in a material sense but also emotionally. The silver Lats that she mentioned refer to 5-Lats silver coins that were in circulation during the first period of Latvian independence, 1918–1940. Many had kept these silver coins as a material and symbolic treasure, had hidden them throughout the years of the Soviet occupation and had passed them on to their children. Silva’s words point to her sense that all that was begun in the 1990s had been squandered. Thus, we see in this trope of

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the non-thinking state a critique of the weak welfare state but also at the same time an appeal to the post-1991 nation-state. Rather than juxtaposing the Soviet Latvian republic with the post-Soviet Latvian state, as was common in the trainers’ narratives but also more generally in the popular imagination, it may thus be more helpful to think of the centrality of the state as further reinforced by the national independence movement of the late 1980s–early 1990s. It is the state as a guarantee of a social order that is being called to account, rather than the image of the former socialist welfare state per se. The newly re-established Latvian state was imagined, with great hope, as the guarantor of the well-being of the ethnos. When the post-Soviet Latvian state is perceived as unable to protect and nurture its ethnos, there is a sense of betrayal. Waiting thus emerges here as a complex subject position. There are intimate tyrannies that tie the individual to the state. But this is not simply the nostalgia for the paternalist Soviet state. It is also the idea of the nation-state as protecting the ethnos that is invoked here. The post-1991 nationalist rhetoric framed the state as the embodiment of the nation and its chief dream. As Aivars’ and Silva’s narratives show, there is waiting for what was hoped for on the Baltic Way, and there is bitterness about how little of what was hoped for and expected has come to be. We see a form of political intimacy that is based on a complex bond with the state – a desired but non-functioning welfare state, a totalitarian state that had etatised time and insisted on taking care in often violent ways, and a national state that embodies the ethnos. The post-Soviet state is at once the fulfilment of the nationalist desire as well as the carrier and embodiment of the totalitarian rule. This allows us to interpret the ambivalence in the attitudes towards the state. When my interlocutors talk about ‘the state’, they are invoking the post1991 nation-state, but also the neoliberal state and the Soviet state interchangeably, and sometimes at once. Anxious subjectivities

While there were a number of different state ideas overlapping and intersecting in the appeals to ‘the state’, these appeals were nonetheless framed as Soviet remnants in encounters between state representatives and job seekers, and often also in the everyday vernacular. The vignettes from the seminars in the previous chapter showed how such invocations worked. The relationship with these many ‘faces of the state’ (Navaro-Yashin 2002), and with the complex political past, was often a source of anxiety for my interlocutors. The construction of new forms of personhood as a central dimension of the post-socialist reconfigurations has been established in post-socialist studies (e.g. Dunn 2004, 2005). Yet, it has often been framed as a matter of the state or the capital seeking to produce new kinds of subjects. While that is not wrong, it has been less clearly shown and

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argued how this has also been a project of ordinary citizens themselves. This has been the case especially in the Baltics where the rejection of the Soviet past – and thus of what have been imagined as Soviet forms of personhood – has been especially pronounced (Skultans 1998). This project of undoing the past has taken the most politicised as well as the most mundane forms. I recall an interview on an evening news programme a number of years ago where an agricultural expert was talking about the orchards having been planted all wrong during the Soviet era. He was telling about the work that now had to be put in to rectify the applegrowing practices. It struck me how deep the sense of the past as wrong was among many Latvians. As the nationalist popular movement discredited the Soviet past, the postSoviet future was imagined as necessarily anything but like the Soviet past. This has been experienced at the level of personal identities as well. The novel Ēnu apokrifs (The Apocrypha of Shadows), set in 1990s Latvia, explores the effects of the post-Soviet transformations in the everyday lives of several ordinary people (Repše 1996). One of the central characters, Rauls, is asked by his wife during an argument, ‘who are you?!’ – and Rauls responds, ‘in any case, certainly not a Soviet man’ (cited in Ezergailis 2006: 337). I find his response evocative. What defines Rauls’s identity is the negation of the Soviet in himself. He has yet to formulate – and form – who he is now, living in post-Soviet Latvia. Alongside the political and socio-economic reforms, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-establishment of national independence also brought about a ‘subjectivity reform’, even if it was never officially pronounced. As I noted in Chapter 1, the economic and political reforms were framed in the policy and popular discourses as ‘catching up’ with Europe. Latvia became one of the ‘catching up’ economies also in the European Union’s discourse, its progress measured statistically in comparison to other former socialist bloc countries. However, it was not, of course, only about a new economic system; for Latvians, 1991 was about ‘regaining freedom’, as it was framed in the public discourse (e.g. Eglitis 2002). Becoming free meant not only regaining a sovereign right to self-governance as a nation but also reconstituting oneself as a citizen of a European liberal democracy. As policy makers and foreign experts spoke of learned helplessness and other Soviet diseases that needed to be cured to fulfil this freedom, many ordinary people suddenly experienced themselves in very intimate ways as ‘certainly not Soviet’, as Repše put it in her novel. This anxiety about the past and how it lingers was present in Aivars’ narrative. Aivars expressed it in relation to his own vocation. As a road engineer, he was preoccupied with what he thought was extremely slow progress on renovations of various infrastructure. Very carefully pronouncing his words, separating them with brief pauses, as if laying out crucial evidence, Aivars explained to me during one of our conversations:

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A: All the infrastructures, all that had been created in those USSR times, well… as much as we reject the USSR, actually a lot was built during the Soviet times. In the industry where I work, in the road industry, we are still using the roads that were built during the Soviet times. L: Yes? A: Yes. There is hardly anything at all that has been created anew [no jauna radies ir tik cik melns aiz naga]. All the roads that have been built [were built] during the Soviet times. During these 20 years [of independence], we have built anew the Saulkrasti roundabout, now we are building a road from… from… to Koknese, Tīnūži to Koknese. But that one too – the existing road is being renovated. [Only] the Saulkrasti roundabout has been built from scratch at a quality level. That’s all. And that is… 100 kilometres. And we inherited 20,000 kilometres. That proportion is enormous. … The hospitals, the schools, nothing new has been built. Everybody is studying in those same schools. Those same Soviet hospitals. Only now they are renovated, a little bit modernised, some new equipment has been bought. Well, the situation is improving, of course. But the heritage is from those times. We have not created 10% anew. We are still using 90%. So… and from scratch… it’s not even fair to ask from those people that they will suddenly… L: … be somehow different… A: … and will begin everything… that heritage. That whole generation that comes from those times, they are all quite corrupted. Used to taking from the state anything that is not tied [pieraduši no valsts paņemt to, kas nav piesiets]. [Aivars clears his throat.] And to create a new… a new life, a new society with such an attitude, well, it is quite difficult.

Aivars saw the past in the roads, in the infrastructure. That was, after all, his professional expertise. Yet, he linked the slow progress with reconstructing or building anew to the entire post-Soviet reform process. The Soviet roads and the corrupted minds are of the same heritage, as constructed in his narrative. Though he notes pragmatically the usefulness of the old infrastructure, his analysis has rueful undertones when he concludes, ‘we are in our nappies still. When the Latvian state was founded in the 1990s, nobody had gone to school or anything… they simply took over the [old] model that is… so to say, the one that the USSR had [implemented] and tried to improve it with all sorts of capitalist ideas [centās to uzlabot ar kapitālistiskiem visādiem nu tādiem ievirzījumiem]’. Renovation has been a matter of concern for Latvians in a number of respects. For instance, household renovations in the 1990s and 2000s had pervasively gained the label of eiroremonts – a literal translation would be ‘eurorenovation’. This meant that, for those who could afford it, gone were the draughty wooden window frames and patterned wallpapers or coloured decorations rolled straight on to the walls. Private apartments and public institutions alike were visually and materially updated to resemble what were imagined to be more ‘European’

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spaces. Aesthetically, this practice usually meant white plastic window frames, pastel-coloured walls (salmon and mint shades were popular in the 1990s and 2000s), hanging plastic ceilings and laminate floors. The rooms where the seminars took place at the Employment Agency and in various other locations were usually done up according to this standard. If somebody had got eiroremonts in their apartment, it was said with a sense of pride. In rental listings, an apartment with eiroremonts meant a higher asking price. Eurorenovation is an instance of ideologising space that Michael Herzfeld analyses in the Greek context (2009: 119): ‘To speak of a “Turkish toilet” as occupying the space of the present-day main doorway of a house is to make a statement about progress, couched in the terms of a state-approved, Eurocentric, evolutionist developmentalism’ (Herzfeld 2009: 119). It is a statement about one’s own worthiness if one has ‘eiroremonts’, regulated by particularly interpreted global hierarchies of value (Herzfeld 2005: 66). It is a statement about oneself as a new kind of a person, worthy of the new society.4 Yet, this re-make can rarely be ‘complete’. Most of the renovated apartments are in Soviet-built blocks of flats, so-called khrushchevkas (their building started during Nikita Khrushchev’s rule in the 1960s).5 The vital infrastructures are still the same old Soviet ones, as Aivars was so aware. His concern that we are still driving on the same roads and have not built new ones serves as an allegory for the dual sentiments regarding the post-Soviet self. Furthermore, it was not only a diagnosis applied by representatives of the state to the lay people. To give just one example, the head of the State Chancellery, in an article outlining public service reform goals, declared that ‘a capital renovation of values needs to be undertaken in the consciousness of state administration employees!’ (Dreimane 2013). Anxiety among Latvians about being tainted by the Soviet/Russian ‘Other’ was documented in the 1990s by anthropologist Vieda Skultans. Focusing on the life stories of people suffering from mental illnesses, Skultans observed that her informants told their life stories as a chronicle of the penetration and ultimate destruction of core Latvian values by Russian habits and traditions. … Phrases such as ‘We’ve learnt that from them’, or ‘That’s been brought over from there’ or ‘That’s what we have become’ recur both in narratives and in ordinary speech. Identity is perceived as invaded by otherness. The new identity is one of which people are ashamed and which sets them apart. (Skultans 1998: 126)

The epithet ‘Soviet product’ (padomju produkts) has become part of the local vernacular. This phrase, when referring to others, is openly dismissive. When used in a political debate, it serves to denounce the opponent.6 When referred to oneself, it signals a sense of inadequacy and inability to ‘modernise’ oneself sufficiently. A university professor criticised municipality election results in Riga (where the winning party was run by an ethnic Russian and advocating, if in a populist way,

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more left-wing policies) as a symptom of the ‘disease of Sovietism’ (Sovjetisma slimība). She identified it as ‘low individual responsibility, ignorance or excusing of over-spending by those in power, inefficiency (nesaimnieciskums), corruption, low national consciousness, ethnic borderlines and a view of those in power as the masters of all the social benefits’ (IR 2013). The past few decades have been an attempt not only to shake a certain past but also to make a particular kind of present into a past. To give just one recent example, a politician espousing the threats of political links with the Kremlin and the Kremlin’s influence in Latvian parliament elections argues that if pro-Kremlin political parties win the election, we may wake up on the day after the election and ‘find ourselves in a new situation where we won’t be speaking of a European state but of a post-Soviet republic’ (IR 2017). The possibility of a pro-Kremlin government means a return to the past and the loss of the catching up efforts. Time works as a source of anxiety here. At the same time, the Soviet past, and especially the popular culture of that era as well as the knowledge of Russian language itself, serves not only as a target of moral denunciation but also a sense of insiderhood (cf. Hansen 2012). Speaking Russian in public, especially in front of foreigners, is often condemned by ethnic Latvians. However, it is still common practice to switch to Russian if talking to an ethnic Russian in the workplace or on the street and tell old anecdotes in Russian. Just like in the seminars cited in the previous chapter, Russian cultural references are common in the Latvian public sphere and in private forms of sociality. Many watch TV channels broadcast from Moscow, while there is at the same time an increasing worry in the public sphere about the kind of grip that Russia is still – or yet again – exercising over Latvia in this way. The wide range of Russian swearwords that have become part of the local vernacular have only been partially replaced – or rather, perhaps complemented – by English equivalents (Latvian swearwords often seem to lack the punch). Films and music from the Soviet period are still widely known among Latvians who grew up during that time, and some of this heritage lives on. When I was visiting my friends in Riga to celebrate New Year’s Eve together a few years ago, the TV was playing the Soviet classic Ironiya sudby, ili S legkim parom! (The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy your Banya!). It is a movie that was traditionally watched on New Year’s Eve across the Soviet Union. When the movie would end on one channel, we only had to click briefly through other channels, both Latvian and Russian, to find it playing again. My friends were anticipating the best lines and we were enjoying the funniest parts over and over again, like one of the main characters, Ipolit, taking a shower with his fancy winter coat on in a frenzy of jealousy.7 Such rejection of the past, and yet its endurance, creates an anxious sense of self. It means that a critique of the neoliberal state cannot be openly framed on the basis of the memory of the socialist welfare state. Nostalgia was not available

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as a form of critique for my interlocutors. While we have seen forms of nostalgia for the socialist times emerge across the former Eastern bloc over the past few decades (Berdahl 1999; Boym 2001; Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004; Boyer 2006, 2010; Nadkarni 2010; Todorova and Gille 2010), there has been little space for nostalgia in the Baltics. In the Latvian discourse of freedom, the Soviet past has been framed as occupation by a foreign regime. The forms of life associated with it have been cast as an aberration. The relationship with the past is closer to what Thomas Blom Hansen describes, in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, as melancholia of freedom (2012). Hansen uses this phrase to refer to a way of experiencing the present when the past cannot be mourned but is still experienced as lost. We can observe a similar dynamic in the Latvian case. The past can be experienced as a warm sense of insiderhood (as when Juris was referencing jokes from Soviet movies and everyone laughed). But it is also a source of unease and often deep embarrassment (Hansen 2012: 81). The relationship with the past is tense, and therefore one’s relationship with oneself is tense as well in the moments when one recognises oneself as ‘a product’ of that past. The past is defined as absurd but also it is there in the roads and in oneself, as Aivars’ narrative reveals. Trainers appealed to this sensitive spot – of being a Soviet person – in the ways they used comparisons of ‘then’ and ‘now’ because they knew that such language resonated with their audiences. They were, after all, speaking about themselves as well. Subjectivity is always anxious, as Sherry Ortner has argued. She has drawn in particular on Clifford Geertz’s work to explore how the reflexive inhabiting of subject positions is often riddled with anxieties. For Geertz, we learn, ‘anxieties of interpretation and orientation are seen as part of the generic human condition, grounded in the human dependency on symbolic orders to function within the world’ (Ortner 2006: 119). Discussing the Balinese ‘stage fright’ that Geertz analysed as a particular form of subjectivity, Ortner notes that ‘the subjectivity in question has a certain cultural shape, but also a way of inhabiting that shape which is reflexive and anxious concerning the possibilities of one’s own failures’ (2006: 49). A model of subjectivity, thus, may be both successfully and unsuccessfully enacted. As James Faubion has noted, rather than the subject being created through hailing (as in Althusser’s famous ‘Hey you!’), it is always a process to inhabit a particular subject position (Faubion 2011: 65). In his words, Identities have a temporality, a historicity, completely different from that of the singular event of interpellation. They neither come nor go in the course of a single exhalation. (Faubion 2011: 65–66)

These anxious ways of inhabiting a subject position that is ‘certainly not Soviet’, to use the words from the novel previously cited, have been key to the post1991 neoliberalisation process and help us understand why the unemployed were

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willing to embrace the ‘work on self ’ that was advocated at the unemployment office. Just as anxious subjectivities played a role in producing the Western capitalism in the seventeenth century (Ortner 2006; Weber [1920] 2011), a particular kind of anxiety has been instrumental in the rooting of neoliberal capitalism in the former socialist region as well. This analysis puts into perspective the efforts that Aivars, just like many of my other informants, invested in working on himself. After our initial conversation, we met again a few weeks later. I had said I wanted to hear more about his own story – his past, his plans for the future. Aivars came prepared. We sat down at a table in a deserted casino restaurant at some point between breakfast and lunch. Aivars said he had picked the place because it was easy to park there. I was wondering whether it also had something to do with him trying to hold on to the kind of life he had been able to afford prior to losing his job. He pulled out a book from his black leather pouch, called Vaccination against Stress, or the Psycho-Energetic Aikido. It was written by a Russian psychologist and homeopath, Valeriy Sinelnikov, who had gained widespread popularity in many former Soviet countries with his self-help books and trainings. Aivars had become acquainted with Sinelnikov’s writing while staying in hospital with a badly strained leg muscle. Apart from Sinelnikov’s works, Aivars had also been reading and re-reading The Secret, a book on the power of positive thinking. The Secret had gained global popularity and had been in the top-10 charts of several Latvian bookstores in 2009 and 2010. A middle-aged man with an engineer’s degree and a serious, thoughtful manner of speech, Aivars did not strike me as the prime target audience of esoteric literature. Yet, it was clear that he had invested a considerable amount of his free time in studying these books. By his own admission, Aivars was at a turning point in his life. Over the past several months, he had been intensely studying Sinelnikov’s book, and his narrative was scattered with references to it. He compared his thoughts to ‘wild horses, running in all directions’ and pondered that ‘to get things in order in the material world, you need to be a shepherd of your thoughts. Through the thoughts, everything else gets orderly. Lately I have clearly understood that the world, the way it forms around me and those people that enter my life, all depends directly on me’. It was the studies of Sinelnikov’s books that had led to him realise that ‘everybody has it within themselves to live their life fully, benevolently, harmoniously, in material well-being, in emotional well-being. Only we don’t make use of it. Hardly anybody makes full use of everything that they have been endowed with’. Aivars said he was trying to get away from blaming the state for his problems: ‘Negative thoughts grow where there is the right soil for them. If a person is upset, angry, bitter, sullen, then that’s where the bad thoughts spring up about the state being bad, the society not delivering in this respect or that… all the time it’s somebody’s fault’. He had come to believe, after reading and reflecting for several months, that his successes and failures in life had originated from his thinking:

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The claims that one was the sole master of one’s life and self-examination was the first step towards success in life, made by the trainers at the unemployment office seminars, were ardently echoed by Aivars. He added, ‘It is daily work. Because it’s quite… I’m re-arranging my entire value system right now. It is about making quite a big inventory’. As Aivars’ narrative also shows, sometimes it was not clear what exactly was wrong or how the particular ‘psychological state’, to use his words, was inadequate. Yet, the sense of urgency to reconstitute oneself was strong. Limping behind

Daina’s story gives a further insight into this re-orientation of one’s self according to new hierarchies of knowledge and value. The co-existence of drawing on the past yet also sharing the anxiety of ‘catching up’ was particularly poignant in her narrative. Daina had been working as a German language teacher at a secondary school for 13 years. She was made redundant from the school as the number of pupils choosing German as their second foreign language had been decreasing in the recent years. English and Russian were the languages that dominated. Moreover, education was one of the sectors where the government austerity measures meant the steepest funding cuts, and school managements were desperately looking for ways to save money. To help Daina get a small additional income to supplement the unemployment benefit, however, the school had re-hired her to work for 2 months as a project co-ordinator for an EU-funded project. We had met at one of the seminars, and I had asked whether she would agree to meet for a one-to-one conversation. When I phoned Daina, she invited me to the school. Located in one of the suburbs of Riga, the school was an island of activity and buzz amidst a monotone scenery of apartment blocks. Daina moved through the corridors with embodied familiarity, greeting other staff members and children.

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She was clearly distraught at having to leave the place. As we found an empty room and sat down to talk, she described her ordeal: D: I was actually in shock from the layoff. … and my family as well, I am about to get divorced from my husband and as my children went to England until the spring, all that together was a bit too much and so my condition was quite unpleasant. If you have always worked and so on and now for the first time in your life you are in this situation… and so I thought it all over and thought it over and I thought I was not good for anything else at all. You know, do something else. I could not imagine where I could even go. So my nerves were quite worked up, I couldn’t sleep or concentrate. And so my family doctor [general practitioner (GP)] suggested that I went to a doctor and I went to the doctor and I got prescribed anti-depressants. Anti-depressants… and then I went to Marta [a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) for women in crisis situations]… Oh, first I went to the trade union, to the council of teachers’ trade union and I consulted a lawyer there. And she said that I could in theory ask for some bigger layoff compensation, since my working seniority [stāžs] in pedagogy is 16 years, of which 13 years in this school. But I felt I was in such a state that I was not able to demand anything, that I better… well, that I’m simply not able to ask for it. Because that ordeal of being fired and of losing in that battle of competitiveness [ka tanī konkurences cīņā tu zaudē], you know, it was so big that I could no more go somewhere asking for something. But it helped me a little bit that I started going around those institutions and overall getting to know my rights. They said I had to go to the Employment Agency, register as unemployed, that for 3 months I’ll get a bigger [benefit], well, they told me the scheme. L: At the trade union? D: Yes. The trade… that is the only thing that I have received from the trade union! I am a member of the trade union for all these past years, some 7, 8 years, and… that’s all the help that has been received. I have always paid those dues and now for the first time… yes… When this happened to me, nobody in fact defended me, nothing. [The only help was] when I went to them and received this [lawyer’s] consultation and they told me clearly, which also calmed me down, that in the next 4 years the situation will not be getting better as the number of teachers is constantly being reduced.

Daina invokes her stāžs (working seniority, from stazh in Russian) and trade union membership as bases for entitlement. Stāžs was a key element in one’s claims to the state in the Soviet Union. The number of years an individual had worked served as a token of their service to the collective cause and thus as a basis for receiving help when in need (Galmarini 2012: 41). Daina speaks, however, of her exhaustion from pursuing help. Perhaps she recognises that there would not be much she would accomplish in terms of entitlement, apart from the standard unemployment benefit. Trade unions wielded little power in post-1991 Latvia.8 The teachers’ union was one of the few trade unions to keep functioning in

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Latvia after the socialist years, but it carried little authority. At the unemployment office, she had already been told that any training in computer literacy or English, the two most commonly requested skills by employers, would not be available until some 5 months later. The next time we met, about a month later, Daina had started seeing a psychologist and a life coach at the Marta Centre, an NGO helping women in crisis. The framing of her problems had now changed. Going to a psychologist and a life coach was a new experience for Daina. This Western figure of koučs (the actual English word that she used with the Latvian ending ‘s’) suggests a superior knowledge of coping with problems. The coach wanted Daina not only to focus on work (‘career opportunities’), but to think carefully, as she put it, ‘about work, about friends, about men, anything. About interests. All areas, none is bypassed, all are addressed’. These areas of private life – her relationships with friends and family and her use of free time – were now to be regarded as key for the overall improvement of her situation. Meeting up with old friends could help with lifting her spirits but also, possibly, finding new job opportunities. When I asked whether Daina thought the coaching advice was worth following, she said with excitement, Yes, it makes sense! And she [the coach] says, ‘Not problems but tasks’. And what I like about this coaching method is that it gives optimism. So it didn’t go well? That’s alright, let’s see what we can actually change. What can be done in this respect – this, that. And if you succeed in doing it, then change happens. It does not happen quickly but it really does happen. So! So I like it, I was very sceptical but [now] I like coaching very much.

Instead of mobilising the trade union to help to defend her interests (which Daina felt too exhausted to do and did not have high hopes for anyway), she found the sessions with the koučs useful because they provided ways to look for solutions to her problems. The anti-depressants prescribed by the psychiatrist were also helping her to keep a level head, Daina admitted. As NGOs have partially replaced trade unions and state welfare structures in terms of providing support, new forms of coping are made available. Daina resents the fact that she will have a tiny retirement pension because she has not been able to afford to pay into the private pension funds promoted by the government. She noted that her salary is 8–10 times smaller than what teachers receive in Norway or Germany, in fact so small that she has not been able to afford to go to the dentist to repair her teeth for the past several years. Due to her vocation, Daina is particularly disposed to recognise these ‘new’ ways of being. Teachers belong to one of the professions that has lived through the postSoviet transformations while remaining in the state’s employment. In some ways teachers were spared the adjustments that many others had to make when former workplaces closed or professions became obsolete. Yet at the same time they have been expected to be at the forefront of the democratising process, instilling

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new values in the post-1991 generations and representing in their own practice the democratic ways (Ozoliņa 2010).9 Daina has been involved in many cooperation projects with schools in other European countries and has enjoyed travelling as part of these EU-funded projects as one of the best things about her work. She compares the schools ‘in the real Western countries’, as she put it, such as Germany and Norway, which she has recently visited, with her school in Riga. She tells me of practices, such as greater parent involvement, that she has observed there and has tried to introduce in her own school. However, she also notes that while the work is essentially similar irrespective of the country, the payment differs significantly. Daina is thinking of going to Germany for a while, as she speaks the language. She is not sure what work she would do there, but she is looking forward to getting away from her problems, earning some money and finally getting her teeth repaired. Daina soon started feeling frustrated, however, that she could not tackle her problems in the upbeat, easy manner that the coach expected. In one of our subsequent meetings, she told me that she had not made any progress on the advice that the coach had given her, such as re-connecting with old friends. Daina reproached herself for it: inside of me, I have disappointment that I’m not making any progress [nerisinu to neko uz priekšu]. … I’m dissatisfied right now because I’m lagging behind [man klibo] with NVA [the Employment Agency], where I want to start the courses, with the friends, with also the actual, yes, job.

The literal meaning of the words that she used – ‘man klibo’ – referred to having a limp. Daina felt she was ‘limping’ because of not being able to be as quick as required, not having the right tempo. She recognised that the language of stāžs and trade unions sounded dated in contemporary Latvia, while speaking of coaching and anti-depressants signalled a more socially appropriate personhood. Yet, she did not find it easy to embody the kinds of dispositions towards herself and her life that this individualising narrative prescribed. Her feeling of limping was an embodiment of living in delayed time yet feeling the urge to be fast, to be catching up. Inhabiting a proper self

The empirical material presented in this chapter draws attention to that which spills over the frame of the official rhetoric of activation and waiting. Rather than focusing on subjectivation processes at the unemployment office, I have examined political subjectivity here as a subject–state relationship and as a way one imagines oneself as a particular kind of a subject. ‘The state’ figures prominently in the social imaginaries, invoking both the socialist heritage, with its model of the state as the ‘benevolent Father’ dispensing goods, as well as the

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nationalist bond with the Latvian state as the embodiment of the independence movement ideals. When my Latvian interlocutors lamented that the state was not thinking, they were voicing a critique of the social order and an invocation of justice, expressed at the register of political intimacy. Yet, given how narrow the discursive ‘construction of need’ (Haney 2002) is in the contemporary austerity state, there was no rights-based language available to them. It was only in this affective language of ‘caring’, ‘thinking’ and ‘remembering’ that they could formulate their demands on the state.10 The language of the state ‘thinking’ and caring can in fact be read as invoking the welfare state that was the norm in both West and East in the twentieth century (Narotzky 2016). This language is thus akin to a moral critique of the neoliberal state that has emerged elsewhere in the post-crisis austerity states (see e.g. Narotzky 2016 on the Spanish case). Yet, such a moral critique cannot be effectively exercised in the Latvian context because it is framed in the public discourse and popular imagination as the lingering Soviet mentality. The bond felt with the state – both as a provider of certain rights and securities as well as a symbolic manifestation and embodiment of the ethnos – is dismissed as a relic from the past, disallowing critique. Work on oneself to inhabit certain subject positions properly or successfully, and anxiety about one’s failure to do so, therefore becomes the focus of attention. The narratives and observations in this chapter show that ideals of personhood – or, in Foucauldian terms, subject positions – that are made available within a given ethical discourse are not easily inhabited. This tension is important to investigate because political subjectivity is located in the inter-relation between hegemonic models, embedded, historically rooted forms of ‘conscience collective’ (Ortner 2006: 51) and one’s own ethical practices. As I have shown, this misfit is not only analytical; instead, it was poignantly perceived by my informants. Work on oneself to inhabit certain subject positions successfully, and anxiety about one’s failure to do so, emerge here not only as forms of state control but also a matter of concern of ordinary Latvians. Notes 1 When I use the word ‘intimacy’ here, I am referring to a particular imagination of the state as such where familial, intimate terms dominate, rather than the close contact between a citizen and a bureaucrat, which has been another sense in which this term has been used in literature. E.g. Susan Hyatt talks about intimacies of social policy, meaning ‘those encounters among individuals and between citizens and the bureaucracies that monitor their everyday lives’ and argues that ‘documenting them can reveal to us the underlying “common sense” that determines what operative ground rules are in play’ (Hyatt 2011: 108). 2 Jolanta Aidukaite offers this label as denoting a distinct category in addition to the Western welfare state models identified by Esping-Andersen (2003: 410). Linda Cook (1993: 81) also invokes the term in her discussion of the Soviet welfare policies.

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3 Another word that the unemployed used and that expressed a claim on the state was ‘status’. As Galmarini has shown, ‘having a status’ was a specifically Soviet way of being recognised as a citizen in the eyes of the state. 4 Acquiring goods, such as washing machines or cars, was another expression of ‘catching up’ (see also Fehervary 2013). The most resourceful went to Germany in the early 1990s to buy a used car or a washing machine, like a former labour minister I interviewed. 5 See Shevchenko on the cultural meanings of khrushchevkas in Moscow (2009: 199). 6 E.g. the mayor of Riga was denounced as ‘a true Soviet product’ by an opposition politician for listening to the position of a trade union. ‘Ušakovs like a true Soviet product will listen to the request of the trade union and Bemhens will stay in his position. How comical that employees decide on their boss’. (‘Ušakovs kā īstens padomju produkts ieklausīsies arodbiedrību lūgumā un Bemhens turpinās strādāt. Cik komiski darbinieki lemj par priekšnieku’.) (Pulks 2011). 7 Institutionally, citizenship and language policies have been adopted as a response to this anxiety. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, those inhabitants who could not prove that they were descendants of the Latvian citizens of the independent state of 1918–1940 were denied citizenship. These were mostly ethnic Russians or their descendants, who had immigrated during the Soviet period. They could now acquire citizenship by undergoing a nationalisation process (with history and language tests), but a significant share of people are still ‘non-citizens’ or ‘aliens’ as a result of this policy. At the beginning of the 1990s, as factories were closing down and unemployment levels were soaring, the Employment Law stipulated that only those citizens who spoke the state language (i.e. Latvian) were eligible for the services of the Employment Agency, including unemployment benefits. The institution would not serve those who did not speak Latvian and could not present a Latvian language certificate. This regulation excluded a significant share of the population. As Latvia was increasingly pressed throughout the 1990s by the European institutions to loosen its discriminatory policies towards non-Latvians, this rule was abandoned. Nonetheless, government institutions still monitor language use across a range of areas of social life and, for example, issue administrative warnings to employees of certain professions who cannot demonstrate a sufficient mastery of the Latvian language (Dzenovska 2013). 8 While in 1992 there were 625,000 people who were trade union members in Latvia, in 2011 this number stood at 100,000. Of all the people employed, only about 13% are currently members of a trade union. While the teachers’ union is one of the largest in the country, the number of its members has fallen from 72,000 people in 1992 to 31,930 people in 2013 (Worker Participation 2013). See also Woolfson (2007) and Sommers and Woolfson (2014). 9 On educational reform in Latvia, see Silova (2006). On the transition experiences of teachers in Russia, see Patico (2008). Larson (2013) has written on teaching reforms as part of the democratisation process in Slovakia. 10 Read and Thelen have analysed in the post-socialist context ‘how the reconfiguration of state/nonstate boundaries is experienced and negotiated via notions of emotional care and need’ (2007: 10).

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Standing in the rubble

In November 2013, the roof of the supermarket Maxima collapsed in the Zolitūde suburb of Riga, amidst Soviet-era apartment blocks and post-1991 high-rises. Fifty-four people died under the falling slabs of concrete. Police started an investigation, and a public debate ensued about the widespread use of low-quality building materials to reduce costs, about suspicious links between the construction industry and political parties, as well as about the costs of the post-2008 austerity. The opposition party, which was in charge of the Riga municipality, accused the austerity government of shrinking the budget of regulatory institutions. The State Building Inspection had indeed been one of the state-funded institutions to be closed during the ‘internal devaluation’ that the Latvian government implemented in the years following the financial crisis. All in all, twothirds of state agencies were shut or merged with others to cut public expenditure (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011). Yet, the government argued that it had merely consolidated resources and that municipalities were still in charge of controlling construction projects, shifting the blame back to their political rivals. I met Viktorija at a state-funded rehabilitation centre in the resort town of Jūrmala, half an hour away by train from Riga. A professional psychologist, she was part of the team mobilised to treat the survivors of the collapse. It was over a year after we had last met and since I had participated in her seminars at the unemployment office. I had arranged an interview with her on this follow-up fieldwork trip to talk more about the way she saw her role as a trainer. As I had arrived in Riga only a few weeks after the Zolitūde tragedy, the mood was gloomy and many of the people I spoke to were introspective, searching for answers to how such a tragedy could have happened in a supposedly ‘modern’ ‘European’ country at peacetime. Viktorija, though surrounded every day by victims of the collapse, seemed much calmer than most others. I had always admired the combination of energy and relaxed, laid-back air about her. She told me how she saw it as a professional challenge to help the victims of a calamity of such scale for the first time in her career. We sat down in one of the rooms where group support sessions usually took place. The chairs were arranged in a circle, a view of pine

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trees through a long row of windows provided a relaxing backdrop to the space that was quiet but tense. After we had caught up about what each of us was doing now over a year after we had last met, I explained to Viktorija that I was hoping to ask her some more questions about her work at the unemployment office. I said I was interested in learning how she understood the purpose of her work. She nodded, and then brought the conversation back to the recent tragedy and shared with me a story of one of the survivors she had been counselling: Here, I’ll give you one great example, I haven’t told it [to anyone] yet but I plan to remember it for my work with the unemployed and elsewhere that I work. A very vivid example. It has to do with Maxima, with the ones that passed away. A vivid example. And there will be a conclusion that I draw. So, the roof collapses in Maxima and there are little stores nearby [within the same shopping centre]. And a sales assistant is standing in one of the small stores and everything has collapsed in front of her. She did not get hurt, her store is fine, but it has all come down in front of the door. There is a small gap, though, at the top of the rubble and the rescue workers are approaching her and now she has to climb out and get out. The rescuers are saying, ‘Come on now, we’ll give you a hand and pull you out’. But she is standing there and calling her boss on the phone. ‘May I leave the store? … everything collapsed, there’s money in the cash register, my coat is here’, she’s saying something like that. So, what is going on in one’s head in the moment when the rescuer is saying, ‘Come, let’s get out!’ She is still standing there, ‘Wait, I have to finish talking to my manager’. She told me that she had then crawled on top of the rubble and climbed down and had seen the next little store. Again, a shop assistant is standing there and the rescuers are saying, ‘Come, we’ll get you out too!’ And she says, ‘No, go ahead’, and keeps talking to her superiors. ‘May I leave the store?’ And when [the first woman] got out she said that the rescuers had not been able to get [the other woman] out for 20 minutes because, ‘What to do with the goods, with the cash register, with money, with documents?’ Right…?!

Viktorija checked that I was following. I could perceive her rising agitation over the events as she recounted them. She continued, I call this a slave’s mentality. It’s about my life or death but may I leave now? Someone else will tell me whether I can save my life or not. If you tell me no, I will stay there. Right? This self-aware… who are you? Awareness of the self, daring, courage, making a decision. You decide how you’ll live.

The Maxima tragedy appeared to me to do with insufficiently regulated pursuit of profit. As one critical article put it in a volume uncovering the effects of the Baltic austerity, it was an instance of ‘the social costs of the pursuit of profitability over human wellbeing’ and of ‘regulatory erosion in neoliberal post-communism’ (Woolfson and Juska 2014: 149–150). Yet, Viktorija was telling me this story because for her it illuminated something else, a broader issue that she was encountering also in her seminars with people out of work. She was struck by

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someone’s lack of agency in a situation even when their life depended on it. And she saw it as her job at the unemployment office, too, to shake people out of such a state of disempowerment. I had been sceptical of the psychological discourse of empowerment that I had encountered at the unemployment office. The rhetoric of always having a choice and ‘just needing action’ appeared to be an ideological tool. Yet, it had been 1.5 years since the fieldwork. and I had felt that my writing was failing to fully access what was really at stake for the people I had got to know. In fact, one of my most vivid memories from the fieldwork in Riga was a sense of tension between my informants’ accounts and my own reading of their experiences. I regarded the ‘competitiveness-raising’ programme as a disciplinary technology seeking to produce responsibilised subjects. In this framing, the seminars were part of an attempt to transfer responsibilities, formerly belonging to the state, to individuals, while convincing them in the process that this was the ‘modern’ order. Yet, I increasingly felt that such a reading did not help me understand the appeal of the individualising framing espoused by the seminars. When Viktorija saw her work as a matter of empowering people and strengthening their ‘awareness of the self, daring, courage’, as she put it, was she wrong? Was she misrecognising the origins of this discourse she was employing and its disciplining effects? It troubled me that her reading and mine differed so starkly. Viktorija’s story about Maxima started opening up some of the questions that I had felt I had left unanswered. Were the competitiveness-raising seminars a disciplinary tool or did they, as Viktorija was to argue, offer an opportunity of starting to carve out a space for living a livable life? What are the moral and political stakes of choosing one or the other reading? By the time I had returned for this additional fieldwork trip, I was more open to listen. The Maxima tragedy was a story about unregulated capital and pursuit of profit. But Viktorija was right, it was also about one’s sense of self. Both women in Viktorija’s story were waiting. And this waiting could have been deadly in this instance. It was waiting that was a question of life and death. There was a second collapse of a part of the roof less than 2 hours later, as is common in such accidents. Three rescue workers lost their lives during this second crash. In a way Viktorija was telling me about the waiting subject, now entrapped not by the state but by the capital, fearful of losing a job, even more so than one’s own life. At a symbolic level, the women’s waiting in this story captured the very passiveness that had precluded any sustained protests against austerity. The post-2008 austerity was a similar catastrophic crash, as thousands upon thousands of people lost their source of livelihood (even this word symbolically captures the life that is at stake) and were captured in meagre benefits programmes, stuck for months and years in unemployment as the labour market shrunk dramatically. Many packed up and left for Ireland or England, but many more swallowed the toad. I will interrogate in this chapter the trainers’ perspective on their work and ‘tak[e]

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seriously’ (Laidlaw 2014: 46) the categories of ‘taking responsibility’, ‘making a life’, ‘being willing’. By zooming in on the ideas of ‘will’ and ‘willingness’, my intention is to deepen the analysis of the ways in which contemporary forms of state control work and how they are underpinned by historically and culturally formed ordinary ethics. Activity and will here emerge as ways to shape one’s life despite the precarity and uncertainty that neoliberal reforms have brought, rather than a way of submitting to the disciplinary rhetoric of the state. I will show how this is the case by drawing on Viktorija and other trainers’ stories about themselves as well as about their work with the unemployed. The analysis will focus on 4 trainers in particular, drawing on interviews conducted with them and casual conversations before and after the seminars during the initial period of the fieldwork as well as the later follow-up trip. Serving the neoliberal state

As Viktorija and I continued our conversation on that short December day at the seaside rehabilitation centre, I asked her more about her own life path and how she had come to her job as a psychologist. She narrated her life to me as a story of striving and resilience in the face of hardships. Viktorija’s adult life started just as Soviet Latvia was coming to an end. Right after completing nursing training in 1988, she got married, and soon her 3 children were born. She says she understood that ‘there would be no money in medicine’, but she needed money. Her husband did not have a job at the time, her children had to be fed, she had to act. So Viktorija started baking cakes in her own kitchen and bringing them to sell at a shop that a friend of hers had recently opened in the small town where they lived. For a year she got up every morning to bake 2 cakes even though she had never liked being in the kitchen. The 4 Lats (approximately GBP 5) that this brought in every day was enough to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner for 5 people. Then Viktorija and a couple of her friends living in the town came up with a business idea. They ‘sniffed in the air’, as Viktorija put it, that a beauty parlour may be a good chance to make some money. They decided to take a risk and took out a loan to open one. The business turned out to be very successful. In a country where summers are brief while standards of feminine beauty are very exacting, especially with the arrival of women’s magazines in the 1990s and the embracing of new ideals of femininity, a solarium was a great business to launch. The beauty parlour had clients travelling from far-away towns. Several years later, after part-time studies in psychology, Viktorija started working as a counsellor at a local school and eventually gave up the business. As she was still just making ends meet, Viktorija decided to try her luck abroad. Together with 2 other women, she went to the United States and found a job as a cleaner in Chicago. Realising, however, that her ‘life was back in Latvia’, and the extra money she could earn from simple jobs like cleaning did not make up for

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what she had lost, Viktorija returned home and went back to work at a primary school. A new requirement had just been introduced to have a resident psychologist at every school. A few years later, though, the government lifted the requirement as a money-saving measure, and Viktorija was out of work again. This time she moved to Riga and started working for the State Employment Agency as a trainer. Viktorija reflected on her life path as a string of decisions always adapting to the circumstances. Even now, she said to me confidently, she may be a psychologist today but could open a farm and grow potatoes tomorrow, if necessary. Living was like surfing, Viktorija said. She associated desire for stability and security with ‘a Soviet way of thinking’, speaking ironically of a brick house with a brick fence, a job in the factory and a wreath on one’s grave, paid for by the state. The only stability one can have in life nowadays is to stand firmly on the metaphorical surfboard and go with the waves, she told me, just like she liked to remind her audiences at the seminars. As I got to know Viktorija and some of the other trainers over the course of the fieldwork, I realised that they had to be ready to adapt because their jobs at the Employment Agency were not secure. They were all self-employed and worked on the basis of annual contracts with the agency. The agency issued a procurement call every year, and individuals or private firms could compete to gain rights to run seminars on specific topics in specific municipalities across the country. As I witnessed by assisting Vija, one of civil servants at the head office of the agency who was in charge of this procurement process, the submissions were checked for relevant professional experience, such as having worked in the field of adult education and having expertise in the particular area that the seminar focuses on (e.g. psychology, accounting, business coaching or law). Given that the relevant experience criteria were met, the winners of the contracts were determined by the lowest cost per seminar offered. Those trainers who bid the lowest price per hour of their work were awarded the annual contracts. The story of Tamāra, another trainer whose seminars I had been attending regularly, further illustrates this precarious position and how the trainers juggled it. Tamāra was a geography teacher by training and still taught at a secondary school, but she also owned a small business and for the past 3 years had been conducting seminars for job seekers on writing business proposals. When I called her to ask for a meeting, Tamāra invited me to her business premises, located in a suburb of Riga 20 minutes from the city centre by tram. Five-storey blocks of flats and some Soviet-era office and factory buildings were situated on both sides of a straight road stretching as far as the eye could see. Tamāra’s business was located on the first floor of an apartment block complex. It was a humble space that had previously probably been a couple of small apartments or a communal area for storing bicycles and children’s prams. She had bought it 10 years ago, from money that she and her husband had made from selling a piece of land. Many ground-floor spaces of suburban apartment blocks had been repurposed

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in this way since the 1990s to obtain relatively inexpensive rooms for running a business. It was quiet as I entered; only some children’s voices could be heard occasionally coming from a room full of computers. Tamāra was sitting at a small reception desk near the entrance, wearing a wool sweater. The rooms were not very well heated. Her business consisted of an Internet café, a youth centre and an adult learning centre all in one. Spaces were also rented out to a seamstress and for the purposes of a solarium. A sauna was for hire for sauna parties that were popular among Latvians. The variety of what was offered signalled Tamāra’s attempts to adjust to the changing winds of the market and to react to what was currently in demand. While Tamāra spoke of how much she liked running the seminars (she spoke endearingly of kursiņi – ‘courses’ in diminutive), she complained about the lack of stability. Since the contract to teach particular courses was only signed with the Employment Agency for a year, she needed to participate in a new procurement call annually and afterwards just hope that she would get lucky again. Tamāra also lamented having to offer the lowest possible price to stand any chance of winning. Just like many other trainers, she usually applied to run seminars not only in Riga, but also in nearby towns. However, although this meant that there was the potential for more hours of work, it was often barely profitable to go outside of Riga once travel expenses had been taken into consideration. Furthermore, it was sometimes difficult to gather enough people for a full group in rural locations. Tamāra recounted an instance when a seminar was planned but she only received the call a couple of days in advance to say that it was cancelled because of the lack of participants. This, of course, meant that she would not be paid. As both Viktorija’s and Tamāra’s stories show, the trainers shared many similarities with the rest of the precarious labour force in post-1991 Latvia. The Employment Agency did not hire them as members of staff with permanent contracts but instead outsourced the provision of the seminars. They had to offer their knowledge on the market, lowering the price as much as possible to stand a chance of winning. This meant that not only were their contracts temporary, but also the remuneration for the seminars was usually not sufficient to make a living. The contract was signed to teach particular topics (areas in which the trainer could claim expertise), so the actual hours to teach varied from person to person. Just like Tamāra, all of the trainers I got to know were juggling a number of jobs to make ends meet. Thus, Viktorija also worked as a psychologist at a private school and at the state-funded rehabilitation centre where we had met. Juris was a career counsellor and a lecturer at a university and served occasionally also as a pastor at a local church. Sarmīte owned 2 small businesses and worked as a trainer for several other institutions and projects. Moving from workplace to workplace, the trainers were themselves prime examples of mobile and flexible neoliberal subjects. As they were serving the neoliberal state, they literally moved from room to room for a day at a time,

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setting up to teach in a range of locations. As the Riga unemployment office did not have enough space to accommodate all the training sessions, rooms were also rented in the nearby Latvian Science Academy and on the third floor of a courtyard building in the city centre that doubled as a driving school the rest of the time. I observed how the trainers sought to re-create these random locations as transformative learning spaces that suited their particular goals. For instance, Viktorija always created a circle out of the chairs. I remember helping her push the old heavy desks back against the walls in a room on the eighth floor of the Science Academy. Viktorija approached the seminars as group therapy, and the ‘circle of sitters’ carries a particular significance in psychological and spiritual environments due to its perceived healing properties (Skultans 2007: 29; Muehlebach 2012: 124). For her seminar on creating business plans, Sarmīte once brought fresh maple sap into the driving school room, its walls covered with traffic sign posters. She offered sips of this local spring delicacy to her audiences to inject some energy in this small, crowded space where she was encouraging her audience to ‘dream big’. To save money and not to have to walk around looking for somewhere to eat lunch, the trainers usually brought their own food with them. Once, Juris kindly offered me chicory coffee from his thermos during a break. It turned out to be his last year working with job seekers, after 16 years of working for the Employment Agency. Although he had been highly regarded by many of my informants as a psychologist, he found out that he had not been awarded a new contract. I did not ask, but he probably had not bid a low enough price. The trainers were agents of the neoliberal state but also part of the workforce that, due to neoliberal social policies, was precarious. Understanding this helped me see more clearly how they thought their own life experiences were relevant for their work as trainers. Coming from the same social milieu as their audiences, they were familiar with the same worries and desires. Like the people in the seminars, they had had to devise coping strategies and ways of adapting to a precarious social reality. The fact that they shared these experiences was not just a matter of being able to empathise. As I came to learn, their own life experiences were a key part of what they taught at the seminars. While the topics of the seminars to be run each year were decided in co-operation between the Ministry of Welfare and the Employment Agency, the actual content of the seminars was up to the trainers themselves. Each applicant had to include an outline of their proposed seminars when submitting a bid in the annual procurement call. Yet, when I helped Vija, who was in charge of the procurement process, with processing the applications, I noticed that she paid little attention to these outlines. As she was leafing through the application files, she checked whether a written programme was submitted as part of the application pack, but I never saw her scrutinise its content. In fact, I was the one slowing us down because I tried to quickly read through the various course outlines proposed by the candidates.

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The experts could decide themselves what they would teach, and, to my knowledge, their plans were not made to align with some overarching agenda by the civil servants overseeing the programme. As I learned throughout the fieldwork, these trainer-experts shared lessons in the seminars that they had themselves drawn from the years of post-socialist transformations, as much as they applied their professional knowledge in psychology or business management. So, on the one hand, even if they did not regard themselves as state agents, the trainers had a part in instituting the neoliberal welfare regime and promoting neoliberal morals. On the other hand, they were not working from a neoliberal script. They would mobilise various fields of knowledge (such as economics, business administration, psychology, civil society building or pseudo-scientific approaches like neuro-linguistic programming), but they engaged with them in a selective, eclectic manner. The trainers regarded themselves, and approached their role, as entirely independent from their peers or the state. As Viktorija exclaimed in protest when I suggested that in a sense she was a state agent, ‘they would fire me if they knew what I was saying!’ Instead of a script, what the trainers had was their structural position of providing assistance and advice; their skills as teachers, preachers and therapists; and their personal lessons to share. Analysing the trainers and their positionality makes us wonder further about how to think about disciplinary and ethical discourses and practices. Neither ‘state agents’ nor ‘experts’ acting within a regime of government that works ‘at a distance’ (Rose and Miller 1992) were helpful framings to understand the role that the trainers played. Thinking of them as state agents was accurate only to a limited extent because they were representing the state and implementing a policy programme only in the most general sense. Thinking of them as experts regulating citizens’ conduct, as key actors in ‘governing at a distance’, was also a limited perspective. As I witnessed and as the trainers themselves insisted, as much as drawing on particular fields of knowledge (such as psychology or accounting), they were sharing their own life lessons. A number of recent ethnographic studies show how those who come to embody ‘the state’ also always bring their own affects and dispositions to their job. Studying neoliberal sovereignty reconfigurations in Ghana, Brenda Chalfin (2010) draws on Michael Herzfeld’s thesis that the divide between bureaucratic actors and those they act upon is always shadowy. She writes that the official, just like the client, ‘occupies a spectrum of subject positions and a spectrum of agencies’ (Chalfin 2010: 195). Those who are in charge of implementing a political rationality are always more than merely its translators for everyday use; instead, they re-interpret and re-make the content of such rationalities according to their own subjectivities and understandings. Characterised by social proximity, ‘state authorities and the private users of its services share, not only the same locations, but also the same normative arena, the same education and the same type of activities’ (Chalfin 2010: 44). Dominic Boyer has called for a shift in the analysis of experts ‘not solely as rational(ist) creatures of expertise but rather as desiring,

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relating, doubting, anxious, contentious, affective – in other words as human subjects’ (cited in Matza 2012: 808). Julie Hemment analyses youth programmes in Russia as ‘less a “systematic platform” than a site of chaotic productions and improvisations made by middle-ranking officials and the proektirovshiki (project designers)’ (Hemment 2015: 217). Accordingly, we need to be ready to recognise ‘these projects’ uncertain effects’ (2015: 217). Reflecting on the ways in which Viktorija and Sarmīte approached their work with the unemployed, it might be more appropriate to think of them as ‘ethical pedagogues’. This is a concept that James Faubion uses in his book An Anthropology of Ethics, arguing that ‘the ethical pedagogue is intrinsic to the ethical domain’ (2011: 60). As Faubion shows, such ethical pedagogues offer their own lives as examples to others and thus help them in inhabiting their desired subject positions. If we recognise that subject positions are inhabited as a matter of ethical becoming, we can recognise the role of the trainers as guiding this process in the seminar rooms scattered across the city. Their professional personal identities as teachers or leaders, and often their charismatic personalities, attest to this pedagogic role that they played. They offered themselves as examples to their audiences. Sarmīte’s story, which I turn to now, illustrates this role of an ethical pedagogue by example particularly well. How to have a good life

When I asked Sarmīte how she saw her role as a trainer, her answer was brief: I don’t recall if it was 2005 or 2006, I started participating in the [State Employment Agency] procurement calls related to training the unemployed. I teach the unemployed from my own experience: how to write projects [to apply for grants], how to start a business. I have 2 businesses running at the moment, they are small but they are running. I don’t know, I don’t have anything more to say.

This was Sarmīte’s snappy way of talking, her intonation always as if challenging the listener. She did in fact reveal more to me about what drove her work. Sarmīte taught courses on writing business plans, accounting for self-employed persons and household budgeting. Her seminars were so popular that there were often not enough seats to accommodate everybody. Apart from her work with the unemployed, Sarmīte also worked as a trainer for a state-owned bank giving seed capital to young entrepreneurs. Additionally, she mentored former job seekers who had turned to private business and ran 2 businesses of her own. We barely managed to arrange a meeting during my follow-up fieldwork trip due to how busy she was. Eventually we met at 9.00 a.m. at the Central Train Station, where Sarmīte had just arrived from the town near Riga where she lived. After our breakfast meeting over coffee and freshly baked pastries at a café inside the station, she had a full day of individual mentoring sessions ahead of her.

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‘Mentor’ was one of the words that featured a lot in her vocabulary, both during our interview as well as in her seminars that I had attended. Other words she used frequently were ‘dreaming’, ‘planning’, ‘writing projects’, ‘having a goal’ and ‘having faith’. Her vocabulary reflected her life experience: she had taken advantage of various civil society initiatives that became popular and received large amounts of foreign funding in 1990s Latvia. The Soros Foundation and other supporters of the nascent civil society in the newly independent Latvia had enabled her to make her own dreams come true. She gave me a very concrete example, speaking in her rhythmical, self-assured manner: S: When I was little, in the Soviet times, I had a dream to buy a silver-colour Ford. L: Ford, the car…? S: I created my own non-governmental organisation and of course I also earned some [money] and the first thing I bought for my organisation was a silver-colour Ford. And my parents cried when they saw it, when I drove in with a silver-colour Ford. Because I had known since my childhood that I would have one.

Just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sarmīte had lost a job at a school in Latgale, the Eastern part of Latvia where she grew up. Observing that many others were losing jobs in her town, including hundreds of factory workers, she applied for funding from the Soros Foundation to open a legal consultation bureau to offer free-of-charge advice to the unemployed. As she explained, When I decided that I’d open that legal bureau, nobody believed in me. Except for my mentor, my mentor believed in me. She said, ‘Sarmīte, it will happen’. And my husband didn’t even believe, he said, ‘stop talking nonsense, where are you going to get ten thousand dollars!’ To buy computers in those times... I thought, it’s a TV and then there is a box that comes with it. [But] if you believe and if you visualise it all and think about it, it comes.

Sarmīte has founded and managed a number of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) since the early 1990s and calls this experience ‘the best training’: ‘Thanks to my [NGO], which I lead up to this day, I understood what business was and I started creating projects’. She saw the NGO world as an opportunity: ‘I began to understand that I could make all sorts of things happen through nongovernmental organisations’ [Es sāku saprast, ka caur nevalstiskām organizācijām es varu visādas lietas izbīdīt]. And she had faith: Faith is terribly important. Right now people don’t have faith. I say it in my lectures that you have to believe. Have to believe in something. If you don’t believe in anything well then you might as well leave it all. If you don’t believe you’ll be the best teacher in that London university, there’s no point in writing that dissertation. You have to believe. I had faith that we’d have a prosperous life; we’d have a good life. And we were ready to work for it days and nights and ask for nothing in return.

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Many of the initiatives that Sarmīte got involved in were opportunities that she seized very deliberately. For instance, she once wrote a text-book for primary school children on the basics of market economy. When she mentioned it, I asked her how she came to do that. It turned out that Sarmīte and her colleagues from the Primary School Teachers’ Association, one of the NGOs she used to be part of, had been sitting in their office with not much to do and Sarmīte had said, ‘“Girls, I’ll open Diena [the main daily newspaper at the time] and we’ll have something to do!” And we did! We wrote a book on money economy!’ Four teachers with different specialisations, none in economics, decided to participate in a procurement call advertised in that day’s paper to write the book because they needed work. Sarmīte’s story reveals how the civil society building in Latvia has been closely linked to developing entrepreneurial spirit. As her case testifies, the lines between third-sector initiatives and business initiatives are often blurred. Many in Eastern Europe have approached the third-sector initiatives in an instrumental fashion, performing democracy and human rights initiatives through short-term projects to obtain foreign funding.1 Her journey through the civil society development initiatives is also symbolic of the shifting emphasis from the state to citizen initiatives. This civil society activism was encouraged to create a sphere of action outside and beyond the state in areas such as human rights or social assistance provision. Sarmīte embraced this new power discourse and appropriated the forms of knowledge and action that have been framed as superior in post-Soviet society and therefore also financially rewarded. It was a way of making ends meet and bringing about the kind of life she desired. Sarmīte saw it as her task to encourage and enable people to ‘get to the next level’, as she called it. She did not associate the passivity with the Soviet times, as some of the other trainers did, but regarded it instead as an eternally existing system. ‘May I draw something?’ Sarmīte asked me while already sliding my notebook over the small table towards herself. She started sketching concentric circles in the middle of the page. The smallest circles in the middle represented ‘the wise men’ and ‘the businessmen’. The larger circles were the self-employed and individual entrepreneurs, then the workers and finally bomži,2 the homeless ones or those who had nothing. It was the ‘natural’ order, according to Sarmīte, existing already for ‘hundreds of years’. Workers do not have to think, they work 8 hours and are free afterwards. They receive social benefits, but overall they are the least protected during crises. The businessmen, on the contrary, Sarmīte explained, ‘say that they don’t need social assistance. Because they are themselves their own social guarantor. Themselves. They know how to economise their money, they know how to deal with it, they employ others and they get more time for themselves’. The task for ‘the worker’ was to try and become a businessman; otherwise he always risked becoming bomži. Taking us both as examples, Sarmīte said,

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S: My task as a teacher is to show these workers an opportunity to move to the next level. My task as a woman is to show how women… See, you now get your doctorate, you are a worker, wonderful, but keep thinking what to do next. How will I create my own business. Don’t stay here. Because at this level it is easy to become this [she points to the outer circle of bomži]. In England, in the West it’s full of these ones. The socially protected. … But the people need to be told how to secure their back. That is the economic development. … People need to start their own businesses. L: So that’s the main goal… S: Well that has been given to me from God, that’s why I was kicked out of school and told that I couldn’t be a teacher any more.

From Sarmīte’s perspective, the 2008 economic crash was a further incentive for the people she worked with to take charge of their own well-being. As she was telling me that her audiences kept growing in size after the crisis, Sarmīte observed, ‘They are willing [viņi grib]. That period, thank God, [has ended], we have climbed out of the comfort zone. Many, including those who have declared bankruptcy, are starting to think what to do’. As we parted, Sarmīte wished me to ‘move to the next level’. Sarmīte’s goal, apart from securing her own life, was to empower her audiences, and in particular women. Knowing from her own experience the precarious situation her audiences were facing, in the context of the ‘lean and mean’ welfare state and the austerity politics, she gave advice on how to have a good life. Sarmīte had found that in her own case the safest way to make ends meet and maybe to earn even ‘some’ more, as she put it, meant becoming an entrepreneur. Recognising the potentially precarious situation I would face after gaining my degree, she was eager to convince me of the importance of setting up ‘something of my own’. Sarmīte’s language of ‘dreaming’ and ‘visualising’ and her celebration of entrepreneurship echoes the new-age rhetoric and the Pentecostal preachers that Mathieu Hilgers describes in a paper as espousing neoliberal ethics in the African context (Hilgers 2012: 86). As Sarmīte’s own life story shows, the language of taking responsibility and being active meant carving out a space for her projects and aspirations either in line with or sometimes by taking advantage of official rhetoric, such as that of ‘civil society building’. The trainers see this ethics of activity and responsibility as a way of adapting to a social reality that is ever more precarious. If they have crafted themselves into resilient neoliberal subjects, it is the kind of cynical subjectivity that Yael Navaro-Yashin has written about in the Turkish context and that Slavoj Žižek describes with words ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’ (Navaro-Yashin 2002: 159–161).

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Rethinking the notion of will

Recent ethnographic analyses that have examined such a discourse on ‘work on self ’, ‘good life’ and ‘individual responsibility’ in the post-socialist context have interpreted it as a process of disciplinary class formation. For example, Tomas Matza’s ethnographic research focuses on Russian youth whose wealthy parents pay psychologists to train their offspring in self-management and other psychological techniques to become more competitive and successful neoliberal subjects. Matza observes that ‘self-work … is a means of sorting value and of ascribing and managing social difference and futures’ (2012: 804). It shapes a ‘liberal subject of, and for, government’ (2012: 805). Here, such techniques of the flexible self are a privilege available to the upper classes. At the other end of the socio-economic ladder, Jarrett Zigon has conducted an ethnography of a church-sponsored rehabilitation programme for drug addicts in Russia. Zigon argues that the goal of the self-work that this programme prescribes and practises is for the former drug users ‘to become productive members of the new postSoviet working class’ (2011: 203). While Zigon frames his study as an analysis of ethics and morality, ethics is a corollary of politics in his analysis. Reaching a broader conclusion about the function of such self-work practices, Zigon states, the very process of coming to live a normal life in either an industrial or postindustrial consumer-driven society is a disciplinary process of ethically making oneself into a new kind of person. This has been particularly the case in postsocialist Eastern Europe, where both local and global investors, entrepreneurs, and business managers have considered the creation of a new class of self-regulating, responsible, and disciplined workers to be essential for a successful transition to a market-based economy. (Zigon 2011: 203)

Similarly, Elizabeth Dunn in an earlier study analyses how Western firms sought to ‘make the people it deals with in Poland into the kind of people it is familiar with’ (2004: 5, emphasis in the original). Dunn has argued that ‘one of the most fundamental aspects of the “transition” from socialism’ was that ‘the successful creation of a market economy requires changing the very foundations of what it means to be a person’ (2004: 6). Specifically, ‘techniques like niche marketing, accounting, audit, and quality control’ were used ‘to make people into flexible, agile, self-regulating workers’ (2004: 7). According to Dunn, ‘Employees were forced to reinvent themselves to enter these new labour market niches. … Given the ever-present threat of unemployment, it was also understandable that employees worked so hard to transform themselves and participated eagerly in the firm’s attempts to change them as persons’ (2004: 91–92). According to such a reading, it is the power of the capital to make people willingly submit to such work on self.

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While I do not dispute the class-formation effects that these authors describe, I do believe that the ethical and the disciplinary are often collapsed in such analyses. My observations in the field and conversations with my interlocutors have led me to a different reading of this work on self. In this respect, Matza’s ethnography goes some way in highlighting that class interests are not the full story. He notes that ‘self-work is entangled with, and yet not reducible to, post-Soviet class formation’ (2012: 804). It was also a form of ‘healing and care’ in the case of the Russian psychologists working with the youth as they saw their work as ‘overcoming past oppression’ and ‘promoting tolerance’ (2012: 804, 807–808). For example, one of the aims of their work was to ‘reverse the totalitarian parenting styles of Soviet upbringing’ (2012: 809). Their work was political in the sense that they sought to promote tolerance, seen as a deficit in post-Soviet Russia (2012: 808). This selfwork thus has its ‘own genealogies’, shaped during the late-Soviet perestroika years, and cannot simply be framed as a matter of global ‘neoliberal diffusion’ (2012). I wish to pursue here this line of analysis that goes beyond a critique of neoliberal subjectivation. Let us listen once again to Viktorija. At one point in our conversation, Viktorija explained to me how she perceived differences among the people with whom she worked. She contrasted her work at the unemployment office in Riga to working for the social assistance service in a number of rural municipalities. Viktorija made a distinction between those who ‘wanted something’ and those who ‘didn’t want anything’, or those who were ‘ready to work on themselves’ and those who were not. Viktorija linked this to urban–rural differences. In Riga, she explained, the majority came to her seminars because they already knew of her and were certain that ‘it was going to be good’, whereas in rural areas the audiences were more difficult to work with: V: Twenty-five kilometres [outside Riga] there is already a difference in people’s thinking, perception. L: In what sense? V: Ehm… There are ones like that in Riga too but… In Riga overall a person applies to these events because he [thinks], ‘there’s something I need, there’s something I want’. And he comes and we work for real. And as soon as you are 20 kilometres outside Riga, there is only a small percentage, maybe around 10%, of those who say ‘so, I’m coming here and looking for an opportunity. Maybe [there is an opportunity] here, maybe there’. And he comes, so to speak, with open arms because he is ready. So [most people] in Riga and 10% here [in Jūrmala] [come to the seminars] with [an attitude] ‘I’m ready, I’m ready to give it a go. And perhaps… perhaps I’ll take away 1% from this meeting’. Ninety per cent outside Riga have their, well, their arms and legs crossed, [as if saying] ‘The stupid state’. With a sense of being offended. ‘I’ve been wronged, I hate everything, so therefore – how can I not do something, how can I get away from this training. How can I not come here, how can I come for less [time] to just get [my] attendance marked’. And, yes, and unfortunately how to get more benefits.

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I probed further: L: How do you see your role – to help them? V: [Do you mean those] outside [of Riga]? The rest of them? L: Yes, so for example those unwilling ones, yes. V: Well we can philosophise a lot about it but overall it’s tough. I’ve been working for a couple of years now in the social [assistance] service in one local municipality in the wider Riga region. It’s a project like that, I go twice a month where they are really quite… so it’s also group work, sort of unemployed but… L: They are probably long-term [unemployed]… V: Yes, they are long-term on benefits, they live in the middle of the woods, in shacks somewhere. L: But then the Riga social service gathers them… V: The social service pulls them out and tries to…. Well, what? Now right after Maxima I’m thinking, I keep thinking how to work with them. I’m trying all sorts of approaches, what to do with them. I’m thinking after Maxima, ‘here is a good reason’. I’m telling them now, ‘here, see what happened. How do we assess our life up to now, how to perhaps move ahead’ and… well what I wanted… I forgot your question now but what I want to say is that with them… that we get to the point that they are sitting there, 1, 2, 3, some 8 of them in total, and some 3 of them say openly, ‘no, no, no’. And at the end I ask, so he doesn’t see the past, he doesn’t see the future, what does he want, he doesn’t know what he wants. ‘But do you want to live?’ And he says – no. And I – ‘so what do you want then?’ He says – ‘I have my mother in the graveyard’. This is a man in his 50s. ‘I have my brother next to her, it’s so good there, I have a spot left for me there, I’m waiting for that’. And on the one hand, why couldn’t a person choose? He has decided, his mother, he’s lived all the time with his mother, hasn’t worked, [has relied on] mother’s pension. Mother has died, right, and why couldn’t he have the rights. He says, ‘I don’t need anything. Nothing at all. I’d be happy if I can depart today’. The mother is near, right. And another one sitting right there – he says, ‘I don’t want to! Why do you think I want to live?!’ He says, ‘I’m surprised myself that I’m still here today. This [course] is offered to me, I come here and sit here but I don’t need anything’. And they said they didn’t need anything, ‘I don’t need anything, the only thing I’m waiting for is that one day I won’t wake up anymore and I’ll be next to my mother’. And here all these [social assistance] systems, ‘let’s think, let’s do something, how to inspire them more!’ But the individual…. so let’s not put ourselves in God’s place! He has come to this earth; he has lived his life somehow according to his consciousness. The consciousness, right, his consciousness is that he [thinks], ‘I don’t need anything more from this world’. So why should we try, right? And… I see many like that. … L: So there’s nothing you can… V: Nothing! L: Because something has led him at some moment to this, no…? V: Well yes yes, he has the right to choose. To live or not to live. What rights do I have to tell him that, ‘No, no, go on, keep on living, life is really cool!’ He says,

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‘Well, no, it’s not cool’. And that’s his experience. … At the end of the day, if that’s his level of consciousness, to sit under a fir tree and drink and hope that he’ll die, why should I save him? I don’t know whether this is useful for you or not, whether you’ll agree, but we live several lives. Go ahead and leave. You’ll come back again with a new experience and you won’t be sitting under a fir tree any more.

When I gently suggested that there had been something in a person’s life that had led them to such a desperate state, I was trying to challenge her from the sociological perspective that various social factors may have led these people to seeking refuge in alcohol and becoming disillusioned with life. But for Viktorija, it had, above all, to do with one’s sense of self, just like in the case of the women waiting in the rubble of the collapsing supermarket for a permission to leave and save their lives. Both Viktorija and Sarmīte spoke of the importance of ‘being willing’, whether talking about will to live, to work on oneself or to secure one’s own welfare. I am interested here in how attention to this category of ‘will’ and ‘being willing’ might reframe the reality we are looking at. Will has been one of the ideas, along with responsibility and freedom, that has been suspect in much sociology and anthropology (Robbins 2012). There is a tradition in critical social theory of treating will as a disciplinary concept (Valverde 1998; Cruikshank 1999; Rose 1999; Li 2007). Such critiques of ‘the will to empower’ and ‘improve’ are revealing in the sense that they show how politics – even democratic politics – regulates and produces, constrains and enables at the same time (Cruikshank 1999). They work with a post-structuralist conception of the subject as produced through such practices. Although Cruikshank insists that she is not casting the technologies of producing democratic citizens that she examines as either good or bad, her analysis in effect works to undo the myth of democracy as necessarily empowering.  Elizabeth Povinelli calls will ‘a quasi-mystical concept’ and argues that, rather than the will itself, we must pay attention to the ‘discursive power of the fantasy of the will’ (2011: 7). As Povinelli writes, ‘The will has long been an alibi of late liberal and neoliberalism. The will becomes a way of holding those who suffer accountable’ (2011: 33). She cites Spinoza that ‘the concept of human free will [i]s a result of men being “conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined”’ (2011). A number of social theorists have recently sought to rethink the concept of will (see e.g. Ahmed 2012; Povinelli 2012; Matza and O’Neill 2014). Matza and O’Neill argue that ‘the will need not merely trap its victim; the will can also incite’ (2014: 2). Matza and O’Neill frame their inquiry as focusing on a state of being ‘politically unwilling’ – a form of critique and a form of resistance, a quest for alternative politics and alternative social realities. As they rightly note, ‘it is the will, or at least invocations of the will, that makes compatible projects of capitalist accumulation, religious revival, and democratic reform’ (2014: 2). But,

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as their analytical goal is to challenge this compatibility, they are interested only in particular kinds of willing and wilfulness – ones that challenge the status quo. Theirs is ‘a deconstructive project’, as they put it (2014: 5). Povinelli similarly speaks of ‘the will to be otherwise’ that goes beyond agency-resistance categories. Yet, the very emphasis on ‘otherwise’, on alternative futures and on ‘counterpublics’ holding the potential to bring those about, reveals the analytical project at stake as being one of resistance. Povinelli is interested in the striving that she observes among her Australian aboriginal informants. It makes her wonder: Why does a certain strand of critical theory put such hope in potentiality? … We know that certain people strive (conatus) to persevere either individually or in relation to certain social projects. And we know that sometimes striving results in robust counterpublics, and that these counterpublics sometimes become hegemonic forms of life. But can social analysis account for why? (Povinelli 2011: 116)

For me, though, she jumps too quickly across a number of questions here. She is interested, above all, in the ways in which counterpublics can emerge and succeed. The focus is on resisting power, developing an alternative hegemony. But what if this striving does not result in ‘robust counterpublics’? And what if it does not at all aim at forming such counterpublics? Striving can, instead, be considered as an ethical issue. As Joel Robbins writes in a seminal article on the anthropology of the good, As with the construction of the good, there is a strong temptation to dismiss people’s investments in realising the good in time as mere utopianism, to smother their hopes analytically with what Clifford has recently called our own ‘wet-blanket “realism”’ (2009: 241). But if part of the point of the anthropology of the good is to return to our discipline its ability to challenge our own versions of the real, then we have to learn to give these aspirational and idealising aspects of the lives of others a place in our accounts. As Douglas Rogers has nicely put it, it is a matter of some theoretical importance to insist that ‘for our understanding of human social and cultural life, striving matters’. (Robbins 2013: 458)

Will, if seen similarly to striving as a myth or a misconception in the Durkheimian tradition of social analysis (Laidlaw 2002), precludes us from regarding a responsible subject as a human with a moral will and freedom to act. Can we suspend the doubt – or even what is often no longer doubt but already taken as a given – and take this idea of the will seriously? The will and willingness that my Latvian interlocutors were talking about would likely not be seen, according to this framing, as ‘progressive’ (Mahmood 2005). Yet, are we to dismiss their efforts as a mere ‘fantasy of the will’, an ‘alibi of … neoliberalism’ (Povinelli 2011: 33)? Viktorija saw it as her task to restore a sense of agency in the Zolitūde survivors as well as the unemployed people whom she worked with. In a way the story that Viktorija told me about the two women standing in the rubble, being torn

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between running for their life and being a responsible store manager, being stuck between life and death and standing still rather than running, is metaphorically the situation in which many of my informants have found themselves in the aftermath of post-socialist neoliberalism. As Dace Dzenovska writes, reflecting on the aftermath of the crisis in Latvia, ‘When things seem to be unravelling, concern with life takes centre stage’ (Dzenovska 2011: 237). What kind of a life can one make even as the structures around oneself are shaking and at times crumbling altogether? We do not know, of course, what the women were experiencing in that moment of the accident. Later in the interview, Viktorija went on to specify that Latvians needed to ‘abandon the slave mentality, the Soviet mentality, not somebody telling me in what factory I’ll work but I’ll decide how I’ll live’. Viktorija thinks it was a slave mentality, inherited from the Soviet times, that precluded them from exercising their own will and made them rely on someone else to decide whether they were allowed to escape. The image of a slave that Viktorija evokes directly implies a denial of freedom. Will, from this perspective, has to do with the exercise of freedom. For Viktorija and Sarmīte, to foster will was not to discipline someone as ‘a liberal subject of, and for, government’ (Matza 2012: 805) but to enable a life in freedom that the post-Soviet state project had promised. ‘Being willing’ is a way of exercising agency to gain control of one’s life where it is often removed by structural forces. It is about exercising agency despite being in a precarious position. The question of ethics emerges here not as a corollary of politics or as its function (though of course such an avenue of analysis is often justified). Rather, ethics can be regarded here as a self-standing question. How ought one to live? Or even – how can one live? The ethical pedagogues

Engaging with the perspectives of 4 of the trainers running the ‘competitivenessraising’ seminars, I have explored in this chapter the meanings behind the work on self that was practised in these seminars. As I have shown, rather than following policy guidelines, the trainers drew freely from their professional knowledge but also from their personal experiences to help their audiences aspire. The trainers’ narratives highlight the vital importance of the will to ‘work on oneself ’ to make a life in a situation when the social structures underpinning one’s existence are crumbling. Building on the anthropological argument that state agents are usually of the same socialisation as ordinary citizens (Chalfin 2010), it becomes possible to appreciate that they were voicing fears and anxieties, ideals and norms that resonated among many of their fellow citizens. The trainers’ life experiences were not dissimilar to those of many of my other informants. Coming from the same social milieu as many in their audiences, they shared the same anxieties and concerns surrounding the issues of reconstituting themselves as new types

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of persons in the post-Soviet state. Hired by the State Employment Agency, they found themselves in the structural position where they not only addressed these anxieties but also turned them into a normative, disciplining narrative. How do you make a life in the context of neoliberal acceleration of time, when life has turned precarious for many? Viktorija and Sarmīte see self-work as an opportunity to realise one’s agency. As I will show in the following chapter, many of my informants certainly experienced it that way. While I initially focused on the disciplinary dimension of this social assistance programme, the trainers and the unemployed often regarded it as a space of empowerment. While such ‘will to empower’ (Cruikshank 1999) has been critiqued as a discursive technique of subjection, I believe this critique falls short of understanding the ethical strivings of those whom we study, especially when they are our ‘ethical others’. At the beginning of my fieldwork I asked myself – why do those who are most adversely affected nonetheless embrace the neoliberal ethics underpinning the socio-economic regime that dispossess them? This chapter has enabled reframing this question as – how do such forms of ethics as taught and practised by Viktorija, Sarmīte or Juris help ordinary people exercise agency and act on their life? If these forms of agency do not seek to contest the existing political order, does that reduce them to a form of discipline? The trainers work as ethical pedagogues and see their role as enabling their audiences to make a life amidst the metaphorical rubble. It is the life in freedom that was promised in the 1990s but for many did not arrive, not least because of the neoliberal reforms dispossessing many individuals of a dignified existence. It could be critiqued that some of them, like Viktorija and Juris, built a stark and often mocking dichotomy between ‘the Soviet times’ and ‘nowadays’. Yet, when my Latvian informants worked with such a dichotomy, was it my place to dismiss it as ill-informed and simplistic or rather see what its effects are? Through this dichotomy, they imagined what it meant ‘to have a good life’, as Sarmīte put it, and sought to open that up for their audiences as well. Notes 1 On civil society building in post-socialist societies, see Hann and Dunn (1996), Hemment (2004, 2007), Kaldor (2003), Greenberg (2010) and Wedel (1998). On the reification of the category of ‘civil society’, see Navaro-Yashin (2002: 117–154). 2 Bomž in Russian stands for ‘a person of no fixed abode’.

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Value and values

‘Is anything beyond the logic of capital?’, Beverly Skeggs asks in her 2013 British Journal of Sociology Annual Public Lecture (2014). Has the economic value come to dominate all social relations as well as perceptions of self, or is human life always about values, in plural, even at this moment in time when the rule of the capital, enforced and propped up by the austerity state, appears unchecked? This question that Skeggs poses resonates with the inquiry I began in the previous chapter, where Viktorija’s story shows how what was at stake when the Maxima roof was collapsing could not only be understood in terms of an economic value. Following Viktorija’s lead, I started unravelling the political, ethical and conceptual links between ‘being willing’ as a disciplinary discourse and a form of agency, between waiting and freedom. In this chapter, I inquire further into carving out a conceptual space for theorising agency beyond resistance (Mahmood 2005) and ethical practices of self-work beyond ideological subjectivity construction. Conceptually, it means considering the ways of ‘recovering the self ’ that I observed ethnographically as well as the importance of ‘recovering the self ’ in social theory (Seidler 1994). As Victor Seidler has argued, this split between morality and social theory means treating identity as no more than ‘effects of dominant discourses’. The project of recovering the self requires moving beyond such a theory of subject (Seidler 1994: xii). As Seidler argues, it is about ‘the complexity of lived experience’ and the goal is to ‘reinstate an active subject… too often reduced to an effect of ideology or discourse within structuralism’ (1994: 2). I will engage with the life story of one of my interlocutors, Īrisa. By listening to her, we can come closer to understanding how the various self-help practices worked as ways of rehearsing new ways of relating to oneself and to one’s life. In this chapter, I continue with temporarily suspending the critique of the ‘competitiveness-raising’ policy programme as a form of state control and try to listen closely to what my informants were telling me about the seminars and their engagement with various self-help discourses. By listening to Īrisa, I aim to slowly get closer and recognise how they engaged idea of ‘being willing to work on oneself ’ to develop a different relationship with themselves and their lives.

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Building on Skeggs’ argument that there must be more than just the value in singular where human lives are concerned, and her encouragement to recognise the values in plural, I will show how the disciplinary space of the ‘competitiveness-raising seminars’, set up by the state, was turned into various other kinds of spaces. As I established in the previous chapter, this policy programme was largely in the hands of the trainers, and they often approached their role as that of ethical pedagogues and offered their own lives as examples. This meant, as I will show in more ethnographic detail in this chapter, that the trainers together with their audiences often turned the seminars, through improvisation, into spaces with pluralistic rationalities. They were occasionally spaces for reflection and contemplation, carved out within the broader social context where speed was valued. Here, at times, slowness did not mean passive waiting but was a chance to take stock, connect with one’s emotions and share them with others. The seminars were at times reproducing neoliberal ethics and thus reinforcing state control but also at times inventing and creating new ways of being. The psychological discourse that they espoused was used for the process of ethical becoming (rather than simply being interpellated) (Faubion 2011: 65). Thus, this analysis reveals how the seminars worked as both a space for rehearsing a particular – neoliberal – morality but also as a space for ethical self-formation that went beyond ideology and discipline. Writing one’s own destiny

I met Īrisa at a seminar on ‘Communication Skills’. She was taking careful notes throughout the 4 days in a neat notebook that said Kursi (‘Courses’) on the cover, written by hand. Īrisa later told me that she would take this notebook along to all the seminars and that afterwards she would share the ideas noted down with her peers at the senior women’s club she ran. Īrisa was in her early 60s. She had copper-colour hair, always beautifully coiffed, and she liked wearing brightcoloured, feminine blouses and delicate scarves. After seeing her at a few of the seminars, I approached her and explained my research. We started meeting regularly over the course of my fieldwork in one or another little café in the centre of Riga to chat about her experiences at the unemployment office and her attempts to look for a new job. Over a number of conversations, Īrisa also told me more about her life. She had once worked on Soviet trading ships as a crew member and had seen foreign lands and eaten foreign delicacies that most other Soviet citizens could only dream of. After getting married and having children, she settled at a public utility company in Riga and became a hot-water meter inspector, carrying on with the job when the company was privatised in the 1990s and then moving to another private housing corporation. Apart from her early sea-faring years, Īrisa’s life has not been an easy one. Early on, her husband developed an illness, which meant that she had to take on most of the responsibility of providing

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for the family. This became especially difficult in the 1990s, with the arrival of a market economy in Latvia. To improve her income over the past 2 decades, Īrisa had worked a second shift as a cleaner at a local music school, sold food supplements for a direct marketing firm and made a short-lived attempt at running her own small business offering healthy lifestyle classes. Her life’s motto is, ‘you’ve just got to keep digging!’ (Vajag tik rakt!), a line from a song from the 1980s performed by famous Latvian actor and satirist Edgars Liepiņš. When she was made redundant in 2007, Īrisa was out of work for the first time in her life. After finding a job as a housekeeper at a kindergarten, she had become unemployed again when I met her in 2011. Īrisa said she had ‘discovered psychology’ after being encouraged by her employment agent to have an individual consultation with a psychologist at the Riga job centre. This was right after she had lost her job of many years at the housing corporation and, according to her own account, was in a state of shock: ‘I immediately started crying as I entered, saying that it had never happened to me before that I’d be out of work and I couldn’t imagine how I would be able to handle it and so forth…’ She paused briefly and offered a retrospective assessment of herself with a hint of mockery in her voice, ‘…like a Soviet woman’. The consultation helped her to recover, Īrisa told me, and see that losing a job was ‘well, a fall, but there was a chance to stand up again’. Right after this consultation, Īrisa signed up for several ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars that the employment agent had offered. A 2-day class on fairy-tale therapy left a particular impression on her. ‘It’s as if my eyes finally opened!’, she exclaimed during one of our conversations. The key idea communicated at the fairy-tale therapy class was that one’s favourite childhood story had a special bearing over one’s dispositions and behaviour later in life. As Īrisa explained, ‘through drawing these parallels, it turns out that a person’s entire life is like an extension, continuation or reflection of this fairy-tale character. Completely unconsciously’. Īrisa’s favourite fairy-tale from the years of her childhood in the post-war Latvia had been about a little girl and the Twelve Months. This is how she told it to me: The evil stepmother sends the little girl to pick snowdrops in January. She goes to the forest, sees a little flickering fire, goes towards it and finds 12 men sitting there. The eldest, with a beard, is December. And January is the youngest, and March, and May. So each man is a month and they are dressed accordingly, and they are sitting around a fire. It is Christmas, [or] New Year, it’s the end of the year. The month of December is reflecting on how the year has passed. And [the girl] arrives, crying that her stepmother has sent her out looking for snowdrops but where to get them now! [Snowdrops usually crop up around March in Latvia as the first sign of spring.] Impasse, that’s it, all over, where to get them now! The stepmother had said, ‘Don’t come home without the snowdrops, or else angry dogs will attack you!’ And so the girl thought she would go to the forest and freeze to death and not be a nuisance to her stepmother anymore. And now she meets these 12 months and

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they feel sorry for her as she reveals her misfortunes to them. And each month gives her a gift. She receives something from each month, covering the entire year. She goes home with snowdrops and other gifts. The stepmother [asks]: ‘Oh, where did you get all that?’ – ‘In the forest’. And she ushers her other daughters out, ‘go, go!’ But they don’t find anything, of course, because nobody gives them anything. They return freezing, sick, exhausted, one of them has even been killed by the wolves. So, not everybody can go into the forest… But this is my fairy-tale, I find something beautiful for myself in each month of the year. Also in December, going into a cold forest, you are nevertheless going to find that little fire, if only you look for it. I won’t stand by a tree and cry, ‘Ah, what to do now!’ You’ve got to keep digging, like Liepiņš said.

The idea that successes and failures in life were somehow encoded in one’s psychological make-up appealed to Īrisa. Seeing herself as this resourceful girl always finding a way out and receiving kindness from others let her look at herself as someone able to find solutions and thrive despite hardships. Considering her life as a reflection of the behaviour pattern of the little girl in the fairy-tale, Īrisa was re-interpreting her life as her own, even if unconscious, making. As she put it, This fairy-tale therapy for me, I guess it was the first… it somehow shifted my thinking for some 180 degrees, towards the human being, and I wanted to start studying him. … And so all of a sudden I understood that it is so valuable for everybody to find this out for themselves, because for me, when I started looking at what I saw as misfortunes at that moment [and that] I would be crying about, I started looking at them a bit differently! Well, I won’t say that it happened to me immediately because I was going more and more to other, other psychologists and other… well, it was called differently, but there were different psychologists, different approaches. Putting it all together I also understood that sometimes those things that we perceived as misfortunes, that it was maybe not a misfortune after all, maybe just the opposite, that it was a new page in your life and you had a chance to read this page differently, maybe write it differently, if we turned over a completely new, blank page. Write it differently, behave differently, look at things that are happening around us differently. Well… so, hats off to the psychology courses!

It was the ability to see herself as in charge, able to ‘write the next page of her life’ differently, that appealed to her. In the suspended time of unemployment, Īrisa drew on this psychological discourse to reclaim her agency. Īrisa’s life story gives some more clues as to why she found this new-gained ability to read and write certain pages of her life in a different way particularly empowering. In the early 1980s, soon after she had married her husband, a terrible accident happened that made her experience first-hand the brutality of the totalitarian state. Her husband occupied a high position at an organisation responsible for public infrastructure in Riga. One night, the supply system broke down, and there were great material losses as a result of this failure. Her husband,

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as the man formally responsible, was taken into custody by the Soviet militsiya, ‘until all the circumstances are found out’. According to Īrisa, he was being blamed for the accident even though it was caused by a faulty mechanism in the equipment. They kept him imprisoned in the investigative isolator for 5 days and nights. Īrisa’s husband was eventually released and never formally charged or convicted. Subsequently, following the traumatic experiences he underwent while locked up (which Īrisa did not want to recount in detail), he developed a form of schizophrenia that he had been suffering from ever since. Īrisa did not engage in an outright critique of the Soviet totalitarian regime during our conversations; she only remarked quietly, ‘that machinery grinds up the human being, grinds up people’s destinies’. As a result, ‘it felt as if my beautiful married life, full of love, collapsed in a single day. … I could turn away and leave, but where was the guarantee that I would not have met an even worse man in my life. He was no drunk, no fighter, nothing [like that]. I wouldn’t have married him if he had been otherwise. He was very good!’ Afterwards, whenever a tense or difficult situation arose, Īrisa’s husband would react by irrational, excessive laughter. When other people would say that he seemed ‘funny’, Īrisa responded that he was ‘simply happy’. While married, she had to provide for the family and navigate all the twists and turns that life brought about mostly on her own. We can see in Īrisa’s story how the state literally had ‘the capacity to drive people mad’ (Aretxaga 2003: 404). Īrisa’s reflections on being able to release the grip of ‘misfortune’ and turn a new page in her life suggest that she welcomed a renewed sense of ownership of her destiny. The importance she assigned to turning a new page of her life and writing it differently needs to be understood in the context of the past. The Soviet totalitarian state insisted on the monopoly to tell one’s story. As Costica Bradatan put it, it is ‘the system that writes you’ (2005: 273–274). School children learnt to write their autobiographies by using vocabulary that was permissible by the state and in alignment with the official version of history (Skultans 1998: 64). The secret police collected biographies and often re-wrote them according to the regime’s need. Strikingly, Skultans reports how people spoke ‘of having a biography or autobiography and distinguish[ed] themselves from others who [did] not have an autobiography’ (1998: 65), meaning that a biography was equivalent with a secret police file. As one of Skultans’ informants told her, ‘I knew that those to whom I was interesting knew much more about me than I could ever know’ (1998: 65). Similarly, Katherine Verdery, in her analysis of state socialism, calls this a ‘“production” system parallel to the system for producing goods – a system producing paper, which contained real and falsified histories of the people over whom the Party rules’ (Verdery 1996: 24). While ‘the immediate product’ of this activity was ‘dossiers’ or ‘files’, ‘the ultimate product was political subjects and subject dispositions useful to the regime’ (Verdery 1996). Such writing of lives and destinies meant removal of agency, experienced in most profound ways. One’s story in the totalitarian system was often not one’s

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own. As a Russian woman said in one of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s studies, ‘I feel I’ve lived someone else’s life’ (Fitzpatrick in Bradatan 2005: 290). Revealing parallels can be drawn between the narrative of Īrisa and those interviewed by anthropologist Vieda Skultans approximately 20 years earlier. Skultans’s book The Testimony of Lives (1998) analysed life-stories collected in Latvia from 1992 to 1993. In many of the stories, her informants recounted their experiences of hardships and traumas during the Soviet years. Skultans found that her informants attributed these hardships and failed dreams to the injustice, irrationality and often cruelty of the Soviet regime. She noted that ‘the repercussions of world events on individual lives played a large part in personal narratives’ (1998: 15), as ‘human intentions’ were seen as ‘overridden by history’ (1998: 121). One of the narrative strategies these Latvians in Skultans’ study employed to make sense of their suffering centred on the notion of destiny. The difficulties that one had to overcome made more sense when imagining them as part of the destiny of Latvia itself. On the one hand, there was the (Soviet) state that was experienced as oppressive, irrational and unjust. Individual agency was imagined as regulated, conditioned or curtailed by such factors as ‘the government’, ‘the party’ or ‘the system’. On the other hand, there was the oppressed (Latvian) nation, the fate of which was imagined to be unfolding, and this grander narrative was giving greater meaning to individual suffering. This socially contextualised interpretation of one’s successes and failures in life provided a purpose, or at least a justification for one’s hardships. Attributing suffering to causes outside of the individual was a strategy for maintaining a coherent, positive sense of individuality in the face of a regime that was seen as thwarting individual agency. As Skultans put it, ‘memories of individual suffering derive meaning from their positioning within national history’ (1998: 47). This is not to say that everybody in the early 1990s had their life story embedded in the narrative of the nation. Rather, in those cases where one’s sense of agency was reduced because the forces of history were seen as casting aside one’s hopes and plans, it helped to tie one’s fate to that of the entire oppressed nation. This was ‘the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny’, to use Benedict Anderson’s words (quoted in Cerwonka 2004: 27). In Īrisa’s case, we see a similar attempt to recover the self but with different means. The 1990s, which for many Latvians came as a chance for retribution and justice, were not experienced by her in the same way. While many Latvians had participated in nationalist demonstrations and were welcoming the renewed statehood as personal liberation, Īrisa had been more preoccupied with everyday responsibilities and chores. She had to school and take care of her adolescent children, while her husband was spending a lot of time in hospitals. The early 1990s meant even more hard work than before to enable her to provide for her family. She took on a late-night cleaning job at the music school that her children attended. Her son and daughter would often help her finish the cleaning of the

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classrooms after their evening classes. The popular after-school musical education was an element of the Soviet education system that had been preserved in post1991 Latvia, although tuition fees were soon introduced and it became harder for ordinary families to afford it. In the Soviet times, Īrisa once reminisced, she had been attending the family club at the local culture house. Children would be kept busy by professional staff, and parents could engage in various educational or leisure activities together. They would go on trips together around Latvia. Then she remembers suddenly noticing that it was not affordable anymore, people had to pay for using the culture house for the meetings and it cost too much to hire the bus for the trips around the country. Īrisa recalls how she and the other parents were ‘dismayed’ by this turn of events. It was not national independence that brought a sense of liberation to Īrisa but rather the psychological discourse that she learnt through the unemployment office seminars and her own studies of neuro-linguistic programming and Gestalt therapy. Inspired, she started ‘working on herself ’, as she put it. Apart from the fairy-tale therapy, another one of the ‘various different approaches’ that Īrisa explored was called neuro-linguistic programming. This pseudo-scientific school of thought, popular in Latvia since the 1990s, insists that one can achieve whatever one desires through self-programming. She had attended a training course of several months entitled ‘Active Dreaming’. There, she had learnt how to draft 5-year plans outlining everything she wanted to become and to achieve. One of the goals she had set for herself was to negotiate a room of her own in her family apartment. Īrisa had come to a realisation that to be able to carry on as a caring mother and wife, she needed time occasionally to be by herself. She put her request to her family and, after some rearrangements, a small room became hers alone to use. I did not ask if she had ever heard of Virginia Woolf ’s essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, but the parallel struck me. To read the psychological discourse of ‘taking charge of one’s life’ as a disciplinary tool in this case would be to misrecognise what it meant for Īrisa. It enabled her to ‘pick up the pieces and to live in this very place of devastation’ (Das 2007: 6) where her husband’s tragedy had left her. And the language and the practices of ‘self-work’ offered for her a way of rewriting her own destiny and making her life ‘livable’ (Dzenovska 2012: 75) despite the circumstances. The practices my informants engaged in during the seminars, such as the one described in the previous paragraphs, as well as the self-help studies that many told me about, aim at reconfiguring one’s way of relating to oneself and the social reality. As I was listening to my informants’ stories, I would often hear about improving oneself, learning to manage one’s thoughts and gaining fulfilment internally rather than expecting it from ‘life’. I learnt about star alignments and energies in the space, about an eclectic array of sub-disciplines of self-help psychology and esoteric and religious schools. They span from Adolph Adler’s theory of life styles and Viktor Frankl’s tips for survival in the

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Holocaust to esoteric teachings, such as that of Ernst Muldashev, a healer from Bashkortostan, neuro-linguistic programming, lithotherapy or healing with stones, Valeriy Sinelnikov and psycho-energetic aikido, the law of attraction and movie The Secret, Hinduism and Buddhism, not to mention all types of fortune tellers and astrologists. The seminars offered at the unemployment office were seen by many of the people I spoke to as another form of such work on self. Communications scholar Anda Rožukalne, drawing on her analysis of media discourse in Latvia, suggests that ‘attention to analysis of socio-political problems is increasingly reoriented towards “knowing how to live [well]”, “enjoying life”, “loving oneself ”, “quality leisure”, “getting in touch with oneself ”, “having new experiences”, etc.’ (cited in Eglitis 2011: 438). Sociologist Daina Eglitis reads this as a sign of increasing consumerism and neoliberalisation and interprets this ‘dominance of a vocabulary of taste and lifestyle … as a hegemonic discourse, fostering the misrecognition and legitimation of post-communist stratification’ (2011: 441). While some consume the good life, others are relegated to not living but merely surviving, this argument goes (Eglitis and Lāce 2009; Eglitis 2011). I recognise that the media construct and sell identities as a commodity. Yet, what if we take this question seriously for a moment – ‘How to live [well]’. This question is an important one, and it is so in ways that exceed consumerist desires for possessing material goods.1 Furthermore, the parentheses around ‘well’ appear to be added in translation – is it really about ‘knowing how to live’ rather than ‘knowing how to live [well]’? The former version makes it an even more existential question. Even people with the least means and opportunities aspire to live rather than just to survive. When Īrisa was telling me about re-reading her own life through the perspective of her favourite fairy-tale, or when Aivars, whom we met in Chapter 3, was talking about ‘developing himself ’ and taming his thoughts ‘like wild horses’, they were describing deeply personal processes. While the ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars could be seen as a mobile neoliberal technology, one of many spreading across the world, appropriated in particular ways in particular places (Collier and Ong 2005), the self-work that they promoted could also be recognised as a particular cultural and historical expression in the long lineage of technologies of the self, a contemporary form of such historical techniques as ‘the physical exercises that the Greeks pursued in the interest of sustaining their personal vigour and military skill …; the Stoic collection of hypomnemata, “notebooks” or “jottings” through which one might “make one’s recollection of the fragmentary logos transmitted through teaching, listening or reading a means of establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, a relationship as adequate and accomplished as possible …; the interpretation of dreams …; the exchange of personal letters’ (Faubion, with citations from Foucault, 2011: 47–48, emphasis in the original).2 Perhaps, rather than framing this as either a space of discipline

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or a space of self-formation, we need to recognise this more ambiguous picture that emerges when we broaden our conceptual lens from discipline and state control to include forms of ethical practices. Crash survivors

My ethnographic observations from the unemployment office show how the competitiveness-raising seminars could function as one such space for recovering the self. As the following vignette will show, this disciplinary space was turned into a space for reflection and recognition. By shifting the attention away from my informants’ narratives and their individual efforts of learning to make a life and instead refocusing it on the kinds of interactive practices that they were engaging in, I seek to show how the seminars occasionally expanded on the kinds of ethical quests that were present in other areas of my informants’ lives. Additionally, I seek to highlight that it was not always a purely individualistic process but often turned into a relational one. Such an examination gives an insight into the reasons for the appeal of this programme, not negating its disciplinary nature but giving a more nuanced understanding of the spaces it could be turned into when the trainers acted as ethical pedagogues. One of the most popular seminars that Viktorija led was called ‘Communication Skills’. The course lasted for 4 days, Monday to Thursday. We were in a small room with a single window that the Employment Agency was renting for holding these seminars. I preferred coming to this room rather than going to the unemployment office, as the building was located in the city centre, in the courtyard behind the Riga Circus. It had the added benefit of once hearing a lion roar in the middle of the seminar. The only furniture in the small room was the whiteboard on one of the walls, a simple light-coloured wooden desk and some 20 black chairs lining the walls. As usual, Viktorija had arranged the chairs into a circle. Her own seat was part of the circle rather than at the ‘teacher’s desk’ in front of the room. People were trickling in one by one, hanging their winter coats on a couple of hooks next to the door. There were 14 participants, including myself. All age groups were represented, while women outnumbered men by 11 to 3. Judging by the way they carried themselves and how they were dressed, the people gathered there appeared to me as more middle-class than at the seminars on labour rights or preparing for job interviews, where people had often been sent by their employment agent rather than signing up voluntarily. When Viktorija asked the participants to introduce themselves and say why they had come, a number of women said they wanted to ‘learn something new’, noting in particular their interest in psychology. Several said that they were currently attending a number of courses. ‘Communicating freely’ or ‘more successfully’ was a motivation mentioned a few times. One of the men said that Latvians needed to be more aggressive in communication, to succeed in business.

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Viktorija always made a point of running her seminars in an open, inclusive manner. At the start of the session, she introduced the usual rules, such as ‘if somebody needs to leave or cannot come the next day, he should ask the group’s permission’, ‘all decisions regarding the working hours and the breaks are to be made jointly by the group’ and ‘everything that happens in this room, stays in this room’. (My presence in this respect was an exception, and it was agreed with the group that I may take notes of the meetings for research purposes.) People were free to take part in group activities to the extent that they ‘felt comfortable to’. The first exercise, after the introductions, was to learn all the names of the participants. Each person had to first repeat the names of the people before him or her and then say their own name. The last person in the circle had to repeat the names of everybody in the room. As the exercise was completed, Viktorija explained that people liked being addressed by their first name. Ina, a woman in her late 20s, responded enthusiastically that she had read this in a book by Dale Carnegie. After each person had repeated everybody else’s names, Viktorija gave the next task to the group. She said they had to imagine that they were survivors of a plane crash and had landed on a deserted island. Then Viktorija asked them to write down the following list of things: a 20-litre water barrel, blankets, a compass, canned food, matches, a small dog, a map, crackers, a first-aid kit, a knife, a battery, a gun. It was only possible to take 5 of these items with them. First, each participant had to make his or her own selection of 5. Then, the group had to agree on the 5 items they were taking. Armands, the man who had commented on Latvians’ need for aggressiveness, took the lead and announced that the group should vote on each of the items and the votes should be counted to see which items were the most popular. The voting took place smoothly and quickly. A discussion ensued only when 2 people were insisting on taking the little dog along. However, the voting principle was being enforced, as everybody was following Armands’s lead. The defenders of the dog were in the minority, so the dog was left behind. The last disagreement was on choosing between the canned food, the blankets and the gun. The group carried out a number of repeated rounds of voting until making the final decision. It was the food. Once the decision had been made, Viktorija asked people to share their observations about how they had approached the task. A couple of them suggested that perhaps there had not been enough discussion, and everything was decided too quickly with the voting and without debate. Viktorija agreed by saying, ‘You vote and vote, but where are the arguments?!’ Armands, who had been the main instigator of mechanical voting, stayed silent. Ina, the younger woman, disagreed, suggesting that if the list had been left open for discussion, there would have been only ‘a lot of shouting’. In her view, there was no point in debating with such a big group, and voting was sufficient. Another discussion ensued about the little dog. Ingars and Krista were disappointed that the dog had been

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left behind. Ingars argued, visibly agitated, that one lost one’s humanity by sacrificing the dog. Krista agreed. I also expressed my regret about leaving the dog behind, even though I had not said anything during the voting. Viktorija teased the man who insisted on taking the dog and turned it against him: ‘what did you do to convince them?’, she asked. ‘Why did not they listen to you? What could you have done to convince them to get your point across?’ Ingars, a middle-aged man with a short, bristly grey beard and gentle blue eyes, seemed to be missing Viktorija’s point that his argumentation was not strong enough. Rather, he was suggesting that his and the group’s values were simply different. Ingars spoke about ‘human values’ and ‘compassion’, while Viktorija focused on ‘business world’ and ‘ability to make strategic decisions’. Viktorija explained that such a situation could be played out in a job interview. One’s true self would come out and reveal whether one was more of a leader type or a passive implementer, whether one had argumentation skills or was left unheard. The dog, according to her, indicated the necessary distinction between ‘the social’ and ‘the business’ worlds and was in fact the main catalyst of this exercise, apart from testing communication skills. If one took the dog, one showed one’s unsuitability for the ‘business world’. ‘Those are social workers’, Viktorija asserted about the people unable to abandon the dog. As a business leader, she explained, such a person would not be effective, as they would not be able to make tough decisions like sacking people. It would be a different matter if one were to suggest that the dog needed to be taken as a resource – either to kill and eat him or to use him as a hunter of birds. That would be a person who thought like a leader, Viktorija explained. In another seminar, Viktorija advised the audience not to speak of one’s needs with a potential employer. To the entertainment of her audience, she enacted a hypothetical job interview where the candidate, with a pleading expression, was listing the number of children she needed to feed. She was offering here the kind of a narrative performance that state socialist citizens had learnt to stage in interactions with the state (Haney 2002; Galmarini 2014). Her little performance served to point out the uselessness of a narrative based on social justice claims in a capitalist society. The little dog was mentioned throughout the following 3 days. The next morning, as Viktorija asked the participants to reflect on the previous day, Ingars said he still could not get over the fact that other members of the group would not take the dog. Others also mentioned the dog debate as the most memorable from the day before. On the second day, there was a different exercise. In pairs, with our backs turned to one another, we were asked to talk about any topic, and when one person had said something, the other was supposed to reply, ‘it looks to me like you feel [an emotion] about this’ (sad, happy, excited, angry, etc.). I was in a pair with Ingars. We talked about how it felt living abroad. One of Ingars’ children was working abroad and so he wanted to know how I felt about ‘being away from home’. When we had completed the exercise, Viktorija asked each

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pair to share their experiences and observations. When Ārija’s turn came, she said she had been telling her partner about losing her job as an accountant. Ārija said that, as she was speaking, she noticed herself getting emotional. Being fired had made her feel ‘like that little doggy, being left behind’. ‘We had become like a family’, she told the group about her former workplace. The metaphor of the dog offered Ārija a way of connecting with her own feelings, while also invoking the lingering tension from the previous day between the market rationality and ‘human-ness’. Speaking, listening and conviviality

Making the participants imagine that they had suffered a plane crash and now had to devise a survival strategy could be seen as a metaphor for their real-life situations in the aftermath of the economic crash. (It strikes me that this is another story involving a crash, again told by Viktorija. This seminar, however, took place one and a half years before the Maxima tragedy.) Having lost one’s means of livelihood and having to survive in the aftermath of the crisis, how does one cope? Rather than facing it alone, the exercise put people in this situation together, thus resembling the seminar setup. The exercise was posed as a question of survival. However, it also prompted a number of wider questions, such as how to live together in a market democracy; how to reconcile one’s views of what is morally right with the values operating in the (labour) market; how to speak to be heard; and how to listen to understand. These were meaningful questions that were rarely brought up in everyday life. Indeed, this 4-day training seminar seemed to operate with a time that was slower, more paced, than the frenetic pace of life of advanced capitalism outside the seminar room. It was not only the sitting in the circle that had similarities with therapeutic settings. The group exercises created a space for ‘the person who is speaking’ (Seidler 1994: xiii).3 This speaking – and being listened to – was meaningful in a number of ways. Many of my informants spoke of the dread of ‘sitting at home’ and having nowhere to go. In meetings like these, there was a chance to feel included for those who had been marginalised through their loss of a productive status in society. Furthermore, the seminar exercises, like those just discussed here, were not solipsistic, autonomous practices of self-making. Viktorija put conscious emphasis on encouraging group communication. Through interactions with the trainer and with other participants, this space offered sociality and recognition. Listening to one’s partner and summarising what they had said and how they felt worked as a tool for sharing emotions, anxieties, hopes and plans. Viktorija asked the group at the beginning of each seminar I had observed, ‘how does it feel to be unemployed?’ She invited them to share what their goals in life were, what jobs they wanted and what places they wanted to travel to if they could. If we understand language as a form of

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living in the face of mere survival, language as a vitality that does more than just communicate,4 then we can see how Viktorija’s seminars offered a space for such vitality. In her analysis of emigration and the ‘emptying out’ of the Latvian countryside, anthropologist Dace Dzenovska writes about a ‘livable life’ (dzīvojama dzīve), borrowing the term from Judith Butler (Dzenovska 2012: 75). She emphasises that a good, or livable, life does not only depend on the size of one’s wages. Rather, an individual needs to be ‘recognised’ in relationships with others and with those in the positions of power. Dzenovska argues that ‘life may become less livable if an individual is not being recognised as a subject according to those parameters that form his/her own self-perception and agency’ (Dzenovska 2012). According to Dzenovska, neoliberalism and nationalism – what she identifies as the two dominant rationalities in contemporary Latvia – do not make life livable for large parts of the population. In the previous vignette, it was the opportunity to speak and to be listened to that offered a shift from feeling stigmatised to feeling recognised. Such recognition, to follow Dzenovska’s argument, helps make life more livable even when life is precarious. The act of speaking freely has a special significance in a society where, during the socialist years, the regime of power ‘depended on the regimentation of speech, text, and language’ (Yurchak 2006; Hansen 2012: 9). Īrisa’s husband could not speak back to the power and, as a result, silenced himself into mad laughter. For many others, self-censure was a way of making a life in the totalitarian system. National independence came with a renewed importance of speech (Skultans 1998). This concerns not only freedom of speech as a human right (though that too) but also more mundane interactions. It now became important to learn how to speak and listen to others after having grown up in a society where it was safer not to speak one’s mind (Jaanus 2006). As Maire Jaanus puts it in her discussion of coping with the totalitarian past in Estonia, ‘As long as I think, ergo use language, I am a subject, a speaking being’ (2006: 315). The group discussions and exercises, which involved sharing emotions and listening to one another, gain particular relevance in this context. In the previous example, the plane crash exercise became an opportunity to reflect on, among other things, how to communicate in a democracy. Was voting the best way forward? What about a debate? Viktorija’s insistence on having to argue one’s point and not stay silent echoed a broader concern in Latvian society about what it meant to live in a democracy. Discussion was now a value, a new skill to master for people who had grown up in the Soviet system. School children had to learn how to think critically, argue and debate. Teachers, most of whom were Soviet-educated, were retrained by the Open Foundation and other foreign and local organisations on how to foster discussions and pluralism of opinions in the classroom (Ozoliņa 2010; Larson 2013). The exercise with the plane crash thus was turned into a rehearsal for a democratic public sphere.

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The seminars, as this vignette exemplifies, had the potential to function as spaces of empowerment not only by virtue of imbuing one with a sense of agency but also through creating an environment, if only briefly, of togetherness and emotional support. The trainers whose seminars drew people and who wanted them to return saw it as one of their goals to create a space for such conviviality. Viktorija pointed out that the seminars were a valuable space for sharing with others and learning from others. She particularly encouraged sharing of emotions regarding job losses. When I asked her about her role as a trainer, she said, ‘where are you going to get to talk to strangers, there are no… I have my relatives, my neighbours, but when you sit down for real and think and draw conclusions… So my contribution is to start this process through a sort of forced gathering to enable people to gain from one another’. Similarly, Juris told me once how he saw the seminars as a space for ‘living among people’: We as a society are trying to jump over some massive ditch. But we can’t do it quicker than it’s possible. That involuntary collectivism [of the Soviet social order] is comfortable, it leads to comfort, but it is unnatural. Because an individual’s natural desire is to live among people but stay himself. [But] there are no people really there among whom to live but remain oneself [when one is unemployed]. The social hanging out [burziņš] is missing. The winners are those who have choirs, dance groups, [political] parties, or churches to socialise in.

Tamāra, one of the other trainers whom we met in the previous chapter, saw it as one of her roles to create a space where people could socialise and possibly help one another beyond the scope of the course. She therefore made an effort to always gather the participants’ email addresses and later photocopy the participants’ list and distribute it to the whole group. As she described it, Now I’ve realised what they like, namely to listen to one another. That’s why they also like that I scan and send them these sheets [with a list of participant names and contact details], so they can… Say, there is an accountant in the group, somebody else knows another field; IT [information technology], making homepages or something. This way they start communicating amongst themselves. Especially the 3-day groups. That’s such a good thing! … They help one another.

After the session, Tamāra not only sent the course materials electronically to the group but also invited the attendees to be her friends on the social networking site Draugiem.lv (a Latvian site similar to Facebook). This way, she also gained an additional audience for her business hub advertisements that she posted regularly on the website, as I soon found out myself. Likewise, Sarmīte stayed in touch with many of her seminars’ participants, several of whom she kept mentoring on their private business ideas. Sarmīte’s ‘trainees’ had even formed a ‘social club’, as she put it – an informal network of people she had met through the seminars and who had met each other there. She told me enthusiastically, in our last

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meeting, that the week before Christmas the ‘club’ had organised a get-together with snacks and drinks. In one of Sarmīte’s seminars I attended, Lilija, one of the participants, invited others to the sauna at her house, in exchange for a small cash contribution. Sarmīte herself took up the offer a couple of weeks later. Lilija, in turn, was happy to make friends with Sarmīte to ‘pick her brain’ about other opportunities available through the Employment Agency’s programmes. These kinds of contacts were one of the ways how Sarmīte thought she could help empower other women, as we learnt in the previous chapter. Juris was right when he pointed out that there were few opportunities for people to be with others. Īrisa had her women’s club, but she was an exception. Spaces for public sociality beyond one’s family, one’s close circle of friends and one’s work colleagues are limited in contemporary Latvian society. There are occasions of public togetherness that the state is keen to promote, such as national celebrations, the Song and Dance Festivals or the hockey matches with the participation of the national team. These are events when the people as a whole are meant to ‘come together’ and revive the sense of unity and common destiny. That is the kind of common sociality that was summoned by the former president when she raised her arms to the sky in front of the Song and Dance Festival audience and asked everyone to repeat with her, ‘we are strong, … we are beautiful!’ (see Chapter 1). National unity is constantly being appealed to in the public sphere, by politicians and intellectuals, as under threat and in need of protection and fostering. But these mass spectacles summon the political subject as one of the nation, either by being silent or singing. There is no space for speaking there. In the meantime, participation in social clubs and other free-time activities is very low, while the weekly working hours in Latvia are among the longest in Europe. Two-thirds of all Latvians do not participate in any free-time collective activities, social or hobby groups (Ījabs 2017). Thus, the therapeutic circles and the exchanges during the seminars provided an unexpected but welcome form of care and conviviality. They were a form of ‘local production of social security’ (Read and Thelen 2007: 13). As numerous people told me afterwards, it came as a surprising revelation to be able to engage in this way with strangers. They spoke of their experiences at the seminars as inspiring and uplifting, describing them as ‘a shot of energy’ or ‘a dose of positivism’. Ārija said that ‘after Viktorija’s seminars, you are practically half a step above the ground, flying’. Žanete, an unemployed vocational teacher, told me about Sarmīte’s seminar, ‘she steered us all in such a positive way: “You can do it all, you are lucky that you are here! Look, those who are there walking outside, are not as lucky!” [laughing] She really made us think this way and we were really happy people those 4 days! … We became like relatives, kissing goodbyes, promising to meet again!’ Indeed, I also recalled an ‘after-effect’ of Sarmīte’s seminar, as the participants, including myself, emerged from the tiny room with a special spring to our step. One of the job seekers I met at another of the

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4-day seminars, Einars, told me that the group had wanted to continue meeting and working together on 2 Saturdays per month. They were trying to convince Viktorija to run these sessions for a payment of 3 Lats per person (approximately GBP 4). Einars was inviting me to join as well. However, Viktorija felt too busy to commit, so the idea did not materialise. Sarmīte’s audiences, though, did manage to organise subsequent get-togethers that Sarmīte herself also took part in. Thus, the seminars functioned in these cases as a state-sponsored space for psychological empowerment and togetherness. On morality v. ethics

Scholars writing on anthropology of ethics make a distinction between morality as a set of norms and ethics as a practice of self-formation (e.g. Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2014). This conceptualisation allows recognising the competitivenessraising seminars as a malleable space that could be either disciplinary in the sense of rehearsing a particular moral regime (especially in the contrasts drawn between ‘Soviet’ and ‘contemporary’ ‘ways of thinking’ or ‘mentalities’) or ethical when the trainers and their audiences made it a more open space for reflection and selfformation. When the trainers stigmatised their audiences as having ‘outdated’ ways of thinking or spoke about ‘Soviet mentality’, the seminars functioned as a disciplinary space. A particular morality was rehearsed when Viktorija warned that wanting to take the dog along signalled a ‘dangerous pattern of thought’ that did not suit ‘the business world’. People like Ingars and Krista were cast, crudely, as ‘the social worker’ type. The frequent criticisms of ‘waiting’, as discussed in the previous chapters, also worked as a moralising discourse. As the prior vignette illustrates, a particular kind of speaking was also normative. When Ingars expressed disappointment at the group’s unwillingness to rescue the dog, Viktorija challenged his ability to reason with others when she asked, ‘But what did you do to convince them?’ The clash of values that Ingars sensed could have been avoided, according to Viktorija, had he been more skilled at expressing his point of view. It was not through some shared values but through persuasion, debate, ‘effective communication’ that this could and should be done in a market democracy. This normativity of speech became evident also in Viktorija’s interaction with another participant. Since the beginning of the seminar, Meldra had been withdrawn and had hardly said a word. During a break on the second day, as some of the group members had left the small room, Viktorija suddenly looked at Meldra and asked how she was feeling. Meldra, a woman in her 40s, with glasses and long wavy hair, responded timidly that she was feeling fine. Then Viktorija suggested that Meldra was not participating enough in the group work and that she would need to speak more. Meldra replied quietly, but equally rather assertively, that she did not feel like speaking more. Viktorija ventured on to say that it probably did not feel very good just

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staying silent. The woman disagreed, re-affirming that she felt fine. This obviously annoyed Viktorija and she lashed out, looking the other woman straight into her eyes, ‘you said at the beginning that you wanted to learn how to communicate! Well, if you don’t speak, how do you think you’ll learn?!’ Visibly upset, Viktorija turned her head towards the single window. I had never seen her react in such a manner, on the verge of hostility. While she assured participants at the beginning of every seminar that they were free to speak and share only as much as they felt comfortable with, Meldra’s firm reluctance to engage revealed the normative morality behind the work on oneself practised in the seminar. Expressing oneself, sharing, talking was an essential part of this work. In such moments, the disciplining nature of this programme became apparent. Reclaiming the waiting time

It would be a limited reading to see the psychological discourse of the seminars and other self-help practices merely as an ideological instrument of state control. In important ways these self-help practices did help people affirm a sense of self when they had lost work. Furthermore, as my informants’ stories in this and the previous chapters show, it was about redefining oneself when in important ways one felt one could no longer be who one was before. These ethical practices had particular significance in a context where, as Skultans and other scholars have shown and as Īrisa’s life story reveals, one’s destiny could feel as if out of one’s own hands. The psychological discourse offered a space for a practice of freedom through the opportunity for reflection that it opened up (Laidlaw 2014: 148).5 The hushed confrontations, like that between Viktorija and Meldra, do reveal the trainers’ attempts to instil in their audiences attitudes and dispositions that they perceived to be productive and to fit the market democracy. A normative morality was rehearsed in such instances. The unemployed were stigmatised by some of the civil servants and trainers as ‘waiting subjects’, as discussed in Chapter 2. Yet at other times the participants, under the guidance of the trainer, reclaimed this ‘waiting time’ as a time for reflection and connection. It was turned into an opportunity to let out emotions and to reflect on and share experiences with others in a similar situation. When Viktorija or Juris skilfully opened up the space for sharing experiences, emotions and dreams, the suspended time of unemployment, imposed by austerity, could become more than just waiting. This time could be used for re-evaluating one’s life or identifying one’s needs, as Īrisa was doing, or expressing one’s emotions and connecting with others, as Viktorija’s seminars allowed. There was space for practices of recovering the self. It is specifically where the trainers together with the attendees succeeded in turning this programme into such spaces for the practice of ethical self-formation and conviviality that it drew people and became so popular. The seminars then functioned as unlikely, surprising spaces of empowerment and support. In these respects, the

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groups had similar characteristics to the ‘consciousness-raising groups’ that were formed in the 1970s as part of the feminist movement (Seidler 1994). Where it did not work, they had disciplinary and stigmatising effects. The trainers and their audiences also turned this disciplinary space into an opportunity to both study and critique the status quo. The psychological group exercises were also reclaimed as spaces for rehearsing a democratic public sphere. Thus, the ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars functioned as both a disciplinary space as well as a space where people found time to listen to one another and engage at a different register than the commodified reality of most other public spaces allowed. As Les Back has noted, ‘listening is active, a form of attention to be cultivated. … active listening creates another set of social relations and ultimately a new kind of society, if only temporarily’ (2014). If not always a dialogical space, the seminars I observed often provided an opportunity for the unemployed participants to reflect and interact at a different pace and to gain a sense of recognition. At the same time, if paradoxically, this space was carved out by the decree of the neoliberal state itself. These were not spaces of resistance, however. I am not making an argument that the trainers and the audiences reclaimed the spaces in opposition to the original political rationality that they were formed within. Thus, when I say that the language of activation enabled exercise of individual agency, it does not mean that it empowered ordinary Latvians to challenge this normative morality. As mentioned in the Introduction, there was little sustained resistance against the neoliberal austerity. This language did not look for ‘alternative social worlds’ and did not form ‘counterpublics’ (Povinelli 2011: 7). It was not a form of ‘everyday resistance’ (Abu-Lughod 1990). However, Īrisa’s story shows powerfully how we must recognise forms of agency other than protest and resistance. If the psychological tools that she learnt at the fairy-tale seminar and elsewhere enabled her to reconstitute herself as in charge of her life even in seemingly small ways such as negotiating her own room in a crowded family apartment, we must be able to recognise it as a form of agency. The seminars – unexpectedly to me and to many of my informants – had the potential to become one of such spaces of recovering the awareness of the self that Viktorija saw was missing in the women who waited in the rubble for a permission to save themselves. These were spaces of the expelled that were teeming with life. Notes 1 Similarly, Jennifer Patico, in an analysis of post-Soviet middle classes, explores ‘how moral and material conceptions of value converged and diverged in teachers’ aspirations to “culturedness”, “middle-classness”, and “civilisation”, ideals they shared with so many other consumers in the world but which also carried specifically Soviet/ post-Soviet inflections’ (2008: 20). Michele Rivkin-Fish, in her study of the former

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‘intelligentsia’ that became the ‘aspiring middle-class’ in Russia, analyses them as an ‘imagined communit[y]’ ‘evoking the fantasised Western subject with whom many Russians associated the Western standard of living’ (2009: 81). She argues that moral distinctions are being mapped on to these class distinctions (2009: 80). 2 It is an intriguing question, and one that is important for theorising contemporary forms of governance, how the age-old impulse for self-improvement gets aligned with neoliberal economics and politics. 3 I thank Victor Seidler for pointing out similarities between the role that some of these seminars played and that of women’s consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s. As Seidler writes, these women’s consciousness-raising groups encouraged ‘learn[ing] to trust their emotions and feelings as source of empowerment, as part of defining their individuality more clearly’ (Seidler 1994: xx). 4 I thank Ruth Sheldon for bringing this notion from Wittgenstein’s work to my attention. See also Das (2007: 94). 5 Reflection is the first step towards freedom, it constitutes ‘a distinctive kind of freedom’, as James Laidlaw puts it (2014: 148). It is a conception of freedom that places an emphasis on ‘a self that is to a significant degree self-constituting and self-responsible’ and, as such, free (2014: 149). As Laidlaw also points out, the ways of reflecting, and constituting oneself through reflection, are formed ‘through socially instituted practices and power relations [and as such] are historically and culturally various’ (2014: 149).

Epilogue: Waiting for freedom

Where is your responsibility?

Drawing on ethnographic analysis, I have sought to make a number of contributions to social theory in this book. First, I have engaged with the recently emerging sociology of waiting and theorised waiting as a form of state control (operating at the meso, or policy, level of society), but also as a form of political subjectivity (at the micro level) and an organising logic legitimating a national austerity regime (at the macro level). Secondly, the analysis that I have laid out contributes to the theorization of the double tempo of acceleration and dead time as a key dynamic of the global political economy. In these two respects, my work takes the sociology of waiting to the context of the 2008 crisis and the austerity that ensued and speaks to the contemporary concerns of the forms of statecraft emerging in the wake of neoliberalism. Thirdly, I have sought to forge a novel perspective on austerity and workfare in the aftermath of neoliberalism by bringing to this analysis insights from the anthropology of ethics. Drawing on my ethnographic encounters with job seekers, trainers and civil servants and engaging with them as ‘ethical subjects’ has allowed me to take seriously the notions of ‘will’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘freedom’. We need to couple critical social theory with an ethnographic attention to ethics in our interpretation of contemporary logics of governance – otherwise we risk misinterpretation of what actually allows particular forms of political power to root. In this Epilogue, my goal is to more firmly establish the importance of reinstating the place of ethical categories like freedom and will in social theory. It was a cold, sunny March day, I was walking down a street in the centre of Riga and I had a long winter of fieldwork behind me. There was still snow around; it always lingered for a lot longer than anyone liked, often into April, some years even into May. But parts of the pavement were already clear and dry, and I was enjoying my stroll. I had always found walking through the slush of snow and mud on the streets one of the worst things about the Latvian winter. Suddenly I saw a stencil on the pavement right in front of me. It was a question written in white capital letters asking in Latvian ‘Where is your responsibility?’ (Kur ir tava atbildība?). The stencil made me wince – the audacity of the question! The admonishment! – but it also struck me because it was unlike any graffiti I had seen, either in Riga or any other city. Graffiti was usually a genre for

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speaking back to power, a way of challenging the hegemonic norms both in terms of its message as well as via the illegal format itself. Yet here was a stencil that sounded like some of the civil servants or policy makers I had been interviewing about the welfare reforms in Latvia. As I was contemplating it, I also noticed I was standing just outside the Social Welfare department of Riga City Council. We can probably safely assume it was not an employee of the welfare department who had made the stencil – this remains a genre and an activity of youth. Yet, these words were seemingly confronting the pedestrian with a neoliberal question, accusing them of not taking responsibility, possibly – of relying on the municipal welfare services. I kept returning to these words – ‘where is your responsibility’ – in my memory for many months after that March day, perhaps because they were making me think of a broader puzzle I was already detecting in my research but I was not able to fully make sense of. Where were these words coming from, what was the whole of which they were a piece? What was the cultural and political landscape within which it made sense to pose such a question to the passers-by? And what were the ways available to me for thinking about and for understanding it? A similar kind of rhetoric was, of course, present at the seminars that I had been attending at the unemployment office. The idea of taking responsibility appeared in my informants’ narratives as well. As I discussed in Chapter 4, Sarmīte said it was her mission to encourage other women to take charge of their own success in life by becoming entrepreneurs. She was talking about the women’s responsibility ‘to move to the next level’ in life and not remain dependent on others or the state. Aivars was talking of the need to govern his own thoughts. Īrisa embraced the idea of having the power to rewrite the pages of her life. I noted in the Introduction that this was a key challenge of this ethnographic research project – to find a language in which it was possible to analyse my informants’ accounts and the ethnographic experiences from the seminars in a way that would recognise what mattered to them. The ethnographic vignettes and analyses presented in the preceding chapters have shown how my informants – the civil servants, the trainers running the seminars, the people participating in them – engage with notions of responsibility, will and freedom, with questions of how to live (well) and how to have a good life, with ideas about being or becoming a particular kind of a person. Along with tracing how and when these sets of questions and ideas worked as a disciplinary discourse, I also felt compelled to recognise what these words meant for my informants and how the seminars functioned as both disciplinary spaces as well as spaces for ethical self-formation. In this Epilogue, I wish to reflect on what lessons can be drawn from this ethnographic analysis for critical social theory. What space is there in contemporary social theory to talk about freedom, will and responsibility?

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The particular terms I have noted – responsibility, freedom, empowerment, will – often appear in ‘scare quotes’ in sociological and anthropological writing. In her analysis of youth empowerment movements in contemporary Russia, anthropologist Julie Hemment gives a reason why. She writes, ‘During the nineties, democracy became “a vehicle with many other passengers”’ (2015: 34). Indeed, it arrived along with the shock therapy, wild capitalism, corruption and inequality. ‘“Democracy”, “civil society”, and “empowerment” were [therefore] compromised categories’, Hemment observes (2015). While they were promised freedom and democracy, what the citizens of the former socialist societies got was the rule of the market and the disciplinary ideology of individual responsibility, the argument goes. The freedom that was gained was more like an illusion. In the same year as the 10 East European countries were joining the European Union – imagined as a key milestone in the journey of democratisation – Elizabeth Dunn concluded her study of post-socialist Poland by arguing that the first post-socialist reformers ‘promised that the post-socialist transformation would bring both national sovereignty (i.e., freedom from economic and political policy dictated by the Soviet Union) and individual freedom. But both of these “freedoms” have turned out to be a part of social and economic regulation’ (2004: 166). As a result, becoming ‘free’ has thus made people less free than ever before or – freedom being hard to quantify – differently unfree. Economic regulation, private property, and the constitution of the person as an individual are inextricably linked in both ideology and practice, which leaves people with little choice as to the kinds of persons they will become. (Dunn 2004: 67, emphasis in the original)

The precarisation of many that the two waves of austerity, in the 1990s and after the 2008 crisis, have brought certainly provides grounds for such disillusionment. The ever-growing economic inequalities in most countries of the region do as well. People have been living with a sense of ‘permanent crisis’ (Shevchenko 2009) that does not even feel like a crisis any more. Some scholars even claim that we have witnessed a ‘moral breakdown’ in the societies of the former Soviet Union, as moral values lost their meaning for the disoriented and dispossessed post-Soviet subjects, and widespread drug use, youth promiscuity and various forms of criminality flourished (Zigon 2010). In fact, this diagnosis of what was hoped for and what has since happened has been so clearly established in the sociology and anthropology of post-socialism that many of the analysts have moved on to other issues or other regions of the world altogether. A study of post-socialism itself seems to be over; Russia and Eastern Europe have become full-fledged members of the global political economy. This discounting of ideas of freedom and responsibility as no more than disciplinary tools or empty ideological sweet wrappers, however, characterises more

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than these analyses of post-socialism. It has in fact become a common sense in critical social theory that the idea of freedom functions as a tool of power, a mechanism of subjectification, even a form of false consciousness. Analyses of the neoliberalisation of welfare systems, education and so many other spheres of society have proliferated over the past few decades, working on this premise. Anthropologists and sociologists have been tracing discourses and technologies of responsibilisation and empowerment across welfare programmes since the 1990s. This diverse scholarship has rightly drawn our attention to how social policies and welfare programmes have often been redesigned in ways that stigmatise and blame the people they are supposed to help. They have been especially powerful in critiquing the reconfigurations of both Western and post-socialist welfare systems and how those contribute to deepening social inequalities. The workfare programmes in Latvia, in the context of post-crisis austerity, can be read as yet another case of such political and economic disciplining of docile subjects. Such critiques of ideas of freedom and responsibility often draw on the Foucauldian scholarship of neoliberal governmentality. Nikolas Rose’s book Powers of Freedom (1999) is a case in point. For Rose, the idea of freedom works as a tool of government. We are being governed – and we govern ourselves – through the idea of freedom (1999: 96). According to Rose, Freedom does not arise in the absence of power: it is a mobile historical possibility arising from the lines of force within which human being is assembled, and the relations into which humans are enfolded. Freedom is the name we give today to a kind of power one brings to bear upon oneself, and a mode of bringing power to bear upon others. And freedom is particularly problematic when we demand to be governed in its name. (Rose 1999: 96)

He insists that ‘it is useful to try to ascertain the costs, as well as the benefits, of organising our experience, our aspirations, our relations with ourselves and with others, our politics and our ethics in terms of freedom’ (1999: 11). I think Rose is right about the need to reflect on the costs of freedom, and I will return to this point later. Here, I wish to note that his analysis is typical of a whole tradition of scholarly writing. Analyses in this tradition often seek to expose how what we may think of as objective knowledge or benign expert guidance is in fact a tool of power, a vector for exercising control (e.g. psychoanalysis, psychology, education, social policies). For example, in Aihwa Ong’s influential theorisation of neoliberalism (2006), we are either docile bodies or responsibilised active and flexible citizens. Similarly, Elizabeth Povinelli writes that since Bacon, social theory has thought to expose the illusion that is in fact the common-sense perception that people determine their actions (2011). Either way, any freedom we may think we have is illusory. It is freedom in scare quotes.1 Donna Haraway sounded an early warning of such critical scholarship in her book Situated Knowledges (1988). She wrote, ‘it is not enough to show radical

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historical contingency and modes of construction for everything’ (1988: 579). Such a theory is stifling because ‘we end up with a kind of epistemological electroshock therapy, which far from ushering us into the high stakes tables of the game of contesting public truths, lays us out on the table with self-induced multiple personality disorder’ (1988: 578). Ultimately, ‘the issue is ethics and politics perhaps more than epistemology’, Haraway insists (1988: 579). I find this point pertinent to my inquiry here. When the epistemological question is in focus, our attention is drawn to how knowledge – as political rationality and as selfknowledge – is constructed. However, such an analysis of rationalities of action does not necessarily enable us to understand what people live by. In a recent article offering a sweeping overview of the social science landscape, Sherry Ortner seeks to elucidate what she calls ‘the triumph of dark anthropology’, i.e. ‘anthropology that emphasises the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience, and the structural and historical conditions that produce them’ (2016: 49). She links this development to the prevalence of two key theoretical traditions today. Both the neoliberal governmentality paradigm – originating in Foucault’s thought – and the political economy paradigm – originating in Marxism – train the analyst’s sights on questions of power. Thus, David Harvey argues in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) that the idea of freedom has been co-opted by the governing elites and neoliberal economic thinkers to construe consensus around the neoliberal economic and political reconfigurations of the state. In a chapter entitled ‘Freedom’s Just Another Word…’, he writes that ‘the freedoms [that the neoliberal state] embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital’ (2005: 7). Harvey argues, ‘there is abundant evidence that neoliberal theory and rhetoric (particularly the political rhetoric concerning liberty and freedom) has also all along primarily functioned as a mask for practices that are all about the maintenance, reconstitution, and restoration of elite class power’ (2005: 188). As Clive Barnett (2005) has noted from the vantage point of human geography studies, analyses that draw on either the Marxist or the Foucauldian theoretical paradigm often assume ‘subject effects’ – as false consciousness or as responsibilisation of citizen-subjects – as if these were automatic processes (Barnett 2005). We are operating with a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in much of social theory today (Barnett 2017: 102).2 In an eloquent critique of too much critique, Bruno Latour also asked – if we (the sociologists) think of ourselves and those whom we love as more than subjects of power (‘consumers’, ‘docile subjects’, etc.), must not we grant the same to our research subjects (2004)? So, on the one hand we have claims about post-socialist disillusionment and even moral breakdown; on the other, we have the hermeneutics of suspicion underpinning critical social theory. As a result, there is little space for approaching many of the questions that animate human life – despite or along with the various post-socialist and neoliberal disillusionments. In the case of the people

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I met at the unemployment office seminar, these were questions, such as how to be more than ‘a Soviet woman’, as Īrisa put it, which posed challenges for living with one’s past when that past was now recognised as absurd and for remaking oneself into the kind of a person that was not merely ‘waiting on the state’. Or, as Viktorija wondered when working with unemployed men in rural towns, how not to give up and to preserve the will to live even when one has been dispossessed of a dignified life. Furthermore, while ‘democracy’ may appear like a compromised idea in many of today’s societies, the democratic values of free speech and self-determination were nonetheless important to those I studied, understandably in the context of the totalitarian past. Working under the loose banner of the anthropology of ethics, a number of scholars have been recently pursuing questions that have often fallen by the wayside in mainstream anthropology and sociology (Mahmood 2005; Das 2007; Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek et al. 2015). In most general terms, the recent studies in the anthropology of ethics seek to ‘counter the tendency in contemporary anthropology to reduce everything to power and resistance’ (Laidlaw 2014: 52). They argue that ordinary ethics are not reducible to social structure and social causation and suggest focusing on how individuals themselves engage with questions such as ‘How to live’, and ‘What kind of a person do I wish to be?’ Because individuals are not fully determined by the social dimension, the argument goes, they have the freedom, at least to an extent, to engage in such reflexive practices and to act on the basis of those. The ethical turn is about ‘seeing the ethical dimension in life’, as Michael Lambek puts it (2015: 10) – how people give value to what they do, how they go about their pursuits to live a good life. As such, the anthropology of morality and ethics is a direct challenge to some of the fundamental premises of dark anthropology. This is because it asserts the inadequacy of any form of social theory that persistently refuses to acknowledge, adequately describe, or attempt to understand the ethical dimension of human social life, and this conspicuously includes theories that seek to explain it (away) in terms of class interest and ideology or an economy of practices. (Laidlaw 2016: 22)

Engaging these recent studies of ordinary ethics equips us with a different kind of analytical vocabulary. First, forms of human agency go beyond resistance to power (Mahmood 2005). Secondly, the following string of themes therefore need greater attention: ‘freedom, judgment, responsibility, dignity, self-fashioning, care, empathy, character, virtue, truth, reasoning, justice, and the good life for humanity’ (Lambek cited in Ortner 2016: 59). As James Laidlaw argues, we need ‘the development of a notion of explanatory adequacy – of what an effective social explanation might be – that does not re-describe the conduct of responsible agents as the effects of causal “forces” or the mechanical self-reproduction of “objective structures”. This obviously requires making “freedom” a part of our

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conceptual vocabulary: not just a “discourse” that is an object of ideology-critique, but a concept we think about and also think with’ (Laidlaw 2014: 9–10). Back to the Baltic Way

Going back to that pavement in Riga, what would it mean to ‘think about but also think with’ the question that the stencil posed? Rather than dismissing it merely as a splinter of the harsh disciplinary discourse of the neoliberal state, what would it mean to take it seriously? I believe we need to recognise it as part of a Latvian discourse of freedom that is at once political and ethical. Rather than tracing the origins of this discourse to the corridors of the Ministry of Welfare or best practice policy advice from afar, we might need instead to return to the Baltic Way. The human chain stretching through the Baltics on 23 August 1989, which I spoke about in the Introduction, linked the political and the ethical in a particular way. It was a claim for national sovereignty but also at the same time a claim for personal freedom. It was a way of claiming popular sovereignty, where the state is sovereign ‘not because it is imposed from on high or stands outside of society but because it reflects the will of the people; that is, it is both popularly conceived and conceded’ (Chalfin 2010: 132). This popular sovereignty was demanded through embodying it in a chain of bodies. Thomas Blom Hansen has noted that the link that is commonly drawn between national sovereignty and individual freedom – indeed the inextricability of the two – is a peculiar twentieth-century invention (2009). When Latvians would say in the 1990s, ‘Even if in a poor man’s shoes, but we are free’, it thus referred to both national sovereignty as well as individual freedom. Questions of how to live well (one’s own, private life) and what it meant to live in a democracy (as a society) were thus intertwined. One’s own way of living in freedom was seen as linked up with sovereignty, the ability to self-determine at the collective level. This could also be clearly seen in the dissident movement elsewhere in Eastern Europe (here we think immediately of Havel’s (1978) writings as espousing this kind of a quest that was at once political and ethical). The saying ‘Even if in poor man’s shoes but we are free’ offered both a model of the world and model for living in the world (as all ethical doctrines do, Lambek 2015: 28–31). As a model for living in the world, it suggested readiness to sacrifice personal comforts for political independence. It thus espoused freedom as a key value. The plural form of the word ‘free’ (brīvi) suggests a sense of collectivity, togetherness in hardship, readiness to sacrifice individual well-being for collective national good. This phrase thus formed a part of the collective discourse about the post-socialist transformations and expressed an ideal that an individual may or may not live up to but that has nonetheless been recognised in Latvian society as an ethical maxim. Aihwa Ong has noted that nationalism, just like feminism, act as systems of thought that encompass ideas and values about a good life

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and ways of being human. She writes, ‘Ethical notions of citizenship include the expression of national spirit, a style of being subjects who express the key values of a particular nation. In the formation of nation-states, national culture, humanism, and religions have interacted in shaping an “imagined community”, a shared vision of the common good’ (2006: 22). Ethics, then, need to be considered as collective rather than individual – as originating from cultural and historical contexts rather than being a distinct individual phenomenon, having to do with each particular person’s own moral reasoning (Faubion 2011). The author of the stencil was probably not thinking of the independence events (although he or she may have stood on that highway as a small child next to their parents – 500,000 Latvians participated, 1 of every 4). Yet, this graffiti was possible as part of a discourse that formed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and has dominated social and political life in Latvia. This historical awareness is important for understanding the question it posed. This discourse of freedom was instrumental in shaping the political and economic reforms of the 1990s and 2000s. It manifests itself when Latvians refer to the year 1991 as ‘the regaining of independence’ rather than ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’. It is present when speaking of ‘returning to Europe’ or ‘living in a normal, free country’. This discourse manifests itself in the continuous juxtaposition of ‘normal’, ‘European’, democratic and free with ‘abnormal’, Soviet, socialist and totalitarian, whether discussing the right way to plant apple orchards or to raise children.3 In this respect we could treat freedom as a disciplinary discourse, legitimising particular policies and interpellating particular kinds of political subjects. But, as I have argued, it would be too linear a reading. The linking of national sovereignty and personal freedom necessitates a more complex account. It is worth noting here that Latvians have experienced this history differently than other post-Soviet societies. For Russia, the post-Soviet period was defined by the feeling of a loss of empire. For example, Serguei Oushakine (2009) focuses on the profound sense of loss that was caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and how ordinary Russians have mourned this collapse. He notes that this sense of loss and insecurity was particularly pronounced because no other social structure could readily be constructed and ‘normalised’ to replace the previous one: The disappearance of the Soviet country often implied the obliteration of individual and collective achievements, shared norms of interaction, established bonds of belonging, or familiar daily routines. The abandoning of old institutions and the erasing of the most obvious traces of Communist ideology did not automatically produce an alternative unifying cultural, political, or social framework. (Oushakine 2009: 1–2)

This quote rightly highlights the radical effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Numerous comparable ethnographic accounts have presented people referring to the post-1991 reality as a ‘total crash’, ‘complete disintegration’ or ‘the end of the

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world’ in which ‘everything had collapsed’ and ‘there was nothing to do’ (e.g. Ries 1997; Vitebsky 2005; Shevchenko 2009). The end of socialism has marked the time differently for Latvians. Choosing to say ‘regaining of independence’, rather than ‘collapse of the USSR’, signals a start of something valuable, rather than a sudden traumatic end. These words suggest a sense of the birth of something new, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s words. Arendt (1968) in her essay ‘What is Freedom?’ finds an answer to her own question in the words of Shakespeare’s Brutus, ‘That this shall be or we will fall for it’. For her, this quote captures the key element of freedom, namely ‘the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known’ (1968: 150). The re-establishment of national independence was framed in the popular imagination as bringing about such ‘freedom to call something into being’. This ‘something’ included not only a new system of governance but also new ‘ways of being and knowing’ (Chalfin 2010: 243) and new forms of personhood. How can one write about this gain when these past several decades have also meant dispossession and precarisation? The post-socialist story has been told by sociologists and anthropologists as a story about either losing the socialist welfare state, or becoming colonised again (this time by the global capital), or being dispossessed by those very heroes who led the singing revolutions. Furthermore, how does one write about this gain and this becoming when the reverse is also true – when there has been dispossession and a loss of ideals? Listening to these anxious narratives and writing out the ambivalent practices is one way to engage with this tension. A lot has of course happened since the days of the Baltic Way. The connection between personal freedom and national sovereignty is not at the forefront of an ordinary person’s concerns. Since the 1990s, the saying ‘Even if in poor man’s shoes…’ has been invoked more often with bitterness and a sense of nostalgia for the early independence years and the national unity that characterised them, rather than as a maxim relevant for the present context. And yet, questions of individual responsibility, of being willing to work on oneself, of making and remaking oneself into a particular kind of subject were frequently emerging in the seminars I took part in and in my conversations with the trainers and the ordinary people looking for work. Were we too quick to think that these categories had lost their meaning in the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism? A consciously ambiguous framing, as previously suggested, allows us to access a dimension of the social space of state–citizen relationship as a space that contains the kind of potentiality that Arendt speaks about. The seminars where I observed the interactions between the trainers and the job seekers could not be understood as a space of meaning making in the sense that, say, Goffman’s (1956) symbolic interactionalism would have it. There were, instead, invisible threads of meaning woven in those rooms that were stretching all the way back

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to the Baltic Way – and even further into the past. Thus, I have argued that the seminars functioned not only as a form of state control but also as an improvised arena in the public sphere for pursuing these unresolved questions of striving to become a free subject. They had the potential to function as an arena for practising being a free subject and all that was thought to come with that – being responsible for one’s own destiny, in charge of one’s own life, self-reliant, selfaware. While the seminars could be perceived as a neoliberal space to shift the burden of responsibility from the state to the individual citizens, I witnessed how they were frequently turned into pluralistic spaces as the questions of responsibility, exercising free will and taking charge resonated with this ethical imperative of re-constituting oneself as a free subject, as well as the anxieties around the idea of failing to do so. My informants often treated this space – and were drawn to it – as a space of reflection and a space of improvement to be able to fare better in the contemporary market democracy. Furthermore, it was their anxiety of remaining for ever a Soviet wo/man that was driving this work on self. It is also this ultimate undetermined-ness – that it could be either control or empowerment – that sociology needs to be open to in its analyses to escape the label of ‘a science of unfreedom’. In other words, this workfare programme both disciplined the unemployed but also served as a space for practising an ethics of freedom. Or, rather, the state could invoke this discourse of freedom as a disciplinary tool because it functions as an ethical and affective regime as well. It relies on this coupling, imagined to exist between national sovereignty and individual freedom. As national and individual sovereignty were linked in the political imagination, liberation of the self was as important as regaining national sovereignty. It was uncertain and, as my interlocutors’ narratives have shown, it was often seen as requiring work. Thus, the interaction between the ethical and the political has been at the centre of the post-Soviet state project. The right kind of subject has been not only a concern for the state and a target of policies but equally a source of anxiety and a subject position that one’s own self-work and care of the self has been aimed at. When Chari and Verdery speak of the unemployed as the ‘biopolitical debris of capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism’, they express hope that these realities can become ‘sites of struggle’ and ‘scattered counter-hegemonies’ (2009: 28). What my fieldwork reveals is the power of the neoliberal rationality when intertwined with a historically and culturally shaped discourse of freedom. Rather than forming sites of struggle or counter-hegemonies, the unemployed re-inscribed themselves more firmly within the austerity state project by immersing themselves in the work on self. The logic of neoliberalism has made sense for post-Soviet Latvians to the extent that it has aligned with the discourse of freedom, embodied on the Baltic Way and on the barricades, and the subsequent anxiety to reinvent themselves as ‘non-Soviet men and women’. This quest for individual responsibility and doing away with the state has been part

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of the post-Soviet structure of feeling, not merely a neoliberal plot to entrap more cheap labour in the global production process. The neoliberal state project has resonated with the day-to-day efforts to embody moral sovereignty – the project of liberal democracy. The paths to freedom have been defined by a neoliberal logic, but the neoliberal state project would not have succeeded to the extent that it did, had this moral sovereignty project not been unfolding as the flipside of the subjectivity shifts. This is not encouraging for those left-leaning intellectuals who long for democratic socialism, but it does give us a better understanding of how the austerity state functions. Harvey may be right to view neoliberalism as ‘a global process of elite class (re)constitution’ (Chari and Verdery 2009: 15), but, as I hope to have demonstrated in this book, it is also a mode of being that the post-Soviet subjects engage with in their efforts to ‘catch up with Europe’. Waiting as a sacrifice

In October 2011, commuters stuck in Riga’s Monday morning traffic caught an unusual sight; the very tip of the Freedom Monument was floating in the Daugava River. The female figure representing national liberty was barely above water, her hands holding the famous 3 stars precariously above her head, as if guarding them in despair. The monument usually stood in a square in the city centre, surrounded by linden trees and enclosed by Riga’s late nineteenth-century boulevards. It was erected in 1935 and funded by donations from thousands of citizens. The 3 stars represent the 3 regions of Latvia. During the Soviet years, the Communist Party had forbidden people to place flowers in front of the monument or show any other sign of recognition of its meaning. And now here it was, sinking. The improbability of the sight was warranted. A group of artists had made a mock image and floated it along the river in an effort to draw attention, according to their own statement, to the increasing number of suicides in Latvia (Apollo 2011). This was 2011; the economic crisis and resulting austerity measures were reaping their effects. While experts were insisting that the economy was starting to recover, ordinary people were battling a sense of sinking. The sinking figure of Liberty tells a larger story as well. It is symbolic that the artists chose to deliver their message by ‘sinking’ the Freedom Monument. It echoes what Silva said, in Chapter 3, about all the material wealth and symbolic value invested in the process towards liberal democracy having been lost. The artistic act speaks about a bond with the nation-state, as the sinking of its image is chosen as the most dramatic act of rebellion. It expresses disillusionment, regret and anger that the ideals of independence have been squandered. It also signals a feeling of insecurity and anxiety. This act calls attention to a double movement: on the one hand holding the sovereignty in highest regard, while on the other hand feeling short-changed.

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The rising number of suicides that the authors of this artwork wanted to draw attention to was one of the costs of the austerity. There were other costs as well. High unemployment, deepening poverty and rising emigration were also the price to pay for demonstrating ‘fiscal discipline’ to the international financial institutions and for ‘completing the European integration’, as the austerity prime minister Dombrovskis put it (Aslund and Dombrovskis 2011: 119). Over the course of the past several decades of neoliberalisation, birth rates have also fallen significantly. Altogether, the population has shrunk from 2.6 million in 1989 to 1.95 million in 2017. Well over 200,000 people have emigrated, though estimates vary. As Politico news website recently reported to its international audiences, Latvia is ‘a disappearing nation’ (Sander 2018, see also Dzenovska 2012). As the former Latvian president Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga (2018) put it in a recent speech, the demographic costs have been the price to pay for freedom.4 By invoking the ideas of freedom and democratisation, and by appealing to patience as a sacrifice for these, the government legitimated the two waves of austerity. As Prime Minister Dombrovskis called for patience and asked the citizens to bide their time and ‘to think about the state by the bonfire’, more suffering was imposed on ordinary people in the form of widespread austerity measures. Some more living in delayed time was the sacrifice that was asked in the name of securing ‘the return to Europe’, just like several decades earlier people were asked to make sacrifices for the ‘radiant future’ of communism. There was no Occupy movement in Latvia because waiting some more and ‘tightening the belts’ could be framed as a sacrifice worth making. More generally, the right-wing politics with little social security have been repeatedly considered by the electorate as a cost for securing the Europe-facing orientation of the government (and preventing a Russia-friendly government to be formed) (Sommers and Woolfson 2014: 10). Here I wish to return to Nikolas Rose’s words, cited already. He warns us that we should ‘try to ascertain the costs, as well as the benefits, of organising our experience, our aspirations, our relations with ourselves and with others, our politics and our ethics in terms of freedom’ (1999: 11). Indeed, how much is a fair price to pay? How much can one sacrifice? Perhaps it is too crude to put it in terms of a choice and its costs. According to Isiah Berlin, there is always tension between the various things we value. Berlin was born in Riga in 1909 and carried memories of the Bolshevik prosecutions in the Russian Empire into his exile in England. He built his philosophy of liberalism on a ‘fascination with ideas and [a] sense that they had the power to enslave men, no less than nature or institutions’ (Ignatieff 2000: 292). For him, the ideas of freedom and equality, independence and belonging, are always fraught, always in tension. It is the gist of the human condition to want both yet to face their incompatibility. To gain something, we often have to give up something else and experience it as a loss. Yet, we are always striving for both independence and belonging, freedom and equality. Similar arguments about the tension or

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incompatibility between freedom and equality have been put forward in political theory by Norberto Bobbio (2005) and go back to the writings of Tocqueville (2003). In anthropology, Joel Robbins similarly speaks of ‘the morality of freedom’ as having ‘to make choices between radically incompatible values’ (Laidlaw 2014: 130). If we can analytically recognise and examine these tensions, we could get out of the impasse where our critique of economic liberalism means inability to engage with political liberalism (Barnett 2005: 11). Democracy, freedom and empowerment are compromised categories after several decades of neoliberalism, but they also embody liberal democratic ideals that ‘we cannot not want’ (Brown 2000). Experience of freedom is fraught, then, not only because it is an ideological construct that, as a Trojan horse,5 has helped discipline the Eastern Europeans to become good subjects of the global political economy. It is so also because of this incompatibility of values. Pointing to this tension, Czeslaw Milosz, the Czech writer, has said of the post-socialist reform processes, ‘By choosing, we had to give up some values for the sake of others, which is the essence of tragedy’ (in Bradatan 2013: 5). This book can be seen as an ethnographic examination of the fraught experience of living in the contemporary market democracy. Such an approach has opened up several areas of broader social-theoretical questions, such as time, forms of state control and political subjectivity. It has told a story about the waiting that the two waves of austerity and the shrinking welfare state have brought about but also about the power of the idea of freedom. It is only if we take the ideas of freedom, will and responsibility seriously that we can understand the acceptance of living in suspended time as a sacrifice. The myriad forms of waiting that sustain the global economy can only be understood if we recognise the ethical dimension of human lives. Thus, this book has presented a story about the increasingly coercive forms of public welfare provision but also about the ways in which they align with and are thus legitimated by individual quests for a meaningful life. Only by engaging with ethical categories – and thus taking human aspirations and striving beyond the economic value seriously – can we understand the forms of statecraft that are emerging in the aftermath of neoliberalism. Notes 1 See also a recent critique of governmentality literature from the perspective of human rights studies by Anna Selmeczi (2015). According to Selmeczi, the argument of governmentality scholars appears to be that ‘government through freedom occurs by deception’ (2015: 1080). She questions the proposition that ‘human rights should be viewed as a technology of subjectification’ (2015: 1079). 2 See e.g. Laidlaw’s critique of Bourdieu’s sociology as similarly guided by a Marxist premise where freedom is merely an illusion as social reproduction is always ensured via shaping of individual habitus (2014).

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3 The workings of this nationalist discourse of freedom in political rhetoric and policy making have been covered in several scholarly works on Latvia and the Baltics (Skultans 1998; Nissinen 1999; Eglitis 2002; Bohle and Greskovits 2007, 2012). 4 Speech at the European Reconstruction and Development Bank, 27 March 2018, London. 5 I am referencing here Matza’s argument that ‘“psychological education” acts as a Trojan horse bearing the techniques of rule constitutive of an elite liberal subject of, and for, government’ (2012: 805).

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Index

abandonment 7–8, 15, 17, 62 acceleration 6, 9, 12, 21, 29, 30, 34, 40, 118 activation 12, 15, 17, 21, 31, 47–51, 54, 56, 58, 58n.3, 77, 116 ‘Active Dreaming’ 105 Adler, Adolph 105 affection 63 Agamben, Giorgio 8 Aidukaite, Jolanta 78n.2 Anderson, Benedict 104 anthropology 4–5, 54, 95, 96, 97, 120, 122, 130 of ethics 114, 118, 123 of suffering 2 Anthropology of Ethics, An (Faubion) 88 anxiety 6, 61, 67–74, 72–3, 74, 78, 97, 127–8 Apocrypha of Shadows, The see Ēnu apokrifs Arendt, Hannah 126 Aretxaga, Begona 63 Aslund, Anders 36–7, 38 Athens 1–3 austerity 1–3, 5–6, 8, 10–13, 17, 20–1, 22, 22n.1, 25, 26–7, 34, 36–41, 43n.19, 44, 51, 55, 58, 61, 74, 78, 80–2, 91, 118, 120, 127–30 Auyero, Javier 10, 16 Back, Les 20, 116 Baltics 29, 42n.16, 68 Baltic Way 13–14, 67, 124–8 bare life 7–9, 15, 24n.16 Barnett, Clive 122 Bauman, Zygmunt 7

‘being willing’ 95, 97, 99 Berlant, Lauren 24n.16 Berlin, Isiah 129 Bobbio, Norberto 130 Bourdieu, Pierre 64 Boyer, Dominic 87 Bradatan, Costica 29, 103 Brief History of Neoliberalism, A (Harvey) 122 Buck-Morss, Susan 29, 39, 42n.5 Butler, Judith 23n.7, 111 capital 36, 67, 70, 82, 88, 92, 99, 118, 122 capitalism 5, 6, 9–11, 13, 27, 41, 58, 73, 110 Carnegie, Dale 108 catching up 12, 14, 17, 20–1, 26, 29, 34, 38, 40, 58, 61, 68, 71, 74, 77, 79n.4, 128 Ceausescu, Nicolae 55 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 12, 16, 27 Chalfin, Brenda 87 Chari, Sharad 127 citizenship 7, 64, 79n.7, 125 civil society 89–90, 120 coercion 5–8, 12, 40, 130 communism 29–30, 40, 129 Communist Party 13, 128 ‘Competitiveness-Raising Activities’ 2, 4, 18, 33, 36, 45, 47, 51–3, 58, 82, 97, 99–101, 106–7, 114, 116 control, forms of 4–6, 11, 26, 40 conviviality 110–14 Cruikshank, Barbara 95

Index dark theory 120–4 Das, Veena 14, 17, 24n.15, 61 delayed time 6, 8, 11, 12, 20, 26, 29, 39, 40–1, 129 democracy 90, 111, 120, 123, 128–30 de Tocqueville, Alexis 130 disciplinary class formation 92 discipline 4, 8, 17, 19, 21, 26, 47, 61, 66, 106 discourse 6, 14, 16–17, 21, 22, 23n.6, 29, 31–4, 47, 54, 57, 64, 68, 72, 87, 90, 106, 114, 121, 124, 125, 127 Dombrovskis, Valdis 36–7, 38, 62, 129 Dunn, Elizabeth 11, 30, 64, 92, 120 Dzenovska, Dace 23n.7, 55, 97, 111 Eastern Europe 11, 12, 27–9, 39–40, 90, 92, 120, 130 EBRD see European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) EC see European Commission (EC) economic crisis 2–3, 5, 12, 20, 25–6, 34–5, 42n.16, 44, 59n.4, 128 Edison, Thomas 50 Eglitis, Daina Stukuls 41n.2, 106 electronic queuing systems 57 emigration 39, 61, 111, 129 emotions 63, 111, 112, 115, 117n.3 Employment Agency 42n.8, 45, 49, 55, 70, 75, 79n.7 Employment Law 79n.7 empowerment 6, 17, 19, 31, 32, 64, 82, 91, 98, 112, 114–15, 117n.3, 120, 127, 130 Ēnu apokrifs 68 etatisation of time 6, 11–12, 23n.8, 30, 38, 40, 54–5, 64 ethics 13–14, 16, 22, 91, 92–3, 99, 121, 123, 125, 127, 130 pedagogues 88, 97–8, 100, 107 of self-formation 17, 19, 100, 114–15, 119 ethnography 5–6, 10, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 47, 55, 58, 61, 87, 92–3, 100, 107, 118–19, 130

147 EU see European Union (EU) Euro, adoption of 37 Europe 1, 11–12, 31, 33, 38, 39, 41n.2, 68 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) 42n.12 European Commission (EC) 42n.12, 43n.18 European Regional Development Fund 45 European Social Fund 42n.8 European Union (EU) 27, 42n.8, 45, 120 eurorenovation (eiroremonts) 69–70 Eurozone 34, 36, 39, 40, 56 experiential time 9, 26, 41 expulsions 7–9, 15 faith 89 false consciousness 4–5, 121, 122 Fassin, Didier 40 Faubion, James 72, 88 Ferme, Mariane 10 financial crisis 1, 10, 22n.1, 55, 80, 91, 118 Finland 27 ‘The First Awakening’ 28 Fiscal Compact 37 fiscal discipline 1, 26, 37, 38, 129 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 104 Ford, Henry 50 Frankl, Viktor 46, 105 freedom 4, 6, 22, 23nn.13, 14, 72, 95–6, 97, 111, 117n.5, 118–19, 120–2, 123–6, 127–30, 130n.1, 130n.2, 131n.3 Freedom Monument 128 Galmarini, Maria 64, 79n.3 GDP see Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Geertz, Clifford 72, 96 generic time 9 globalisation 6, 9 GMI see Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) Goffman, Erving 126 good life 15, 22, 88–91, 92, 106, 119, 123, 124 Greece 1, 3, 34 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 33, 42n.11 Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) 33–4, 53, 59n.6

148 Hage, Ghassan 4 Haney, Lynne 42n.7, 55, 64 Hansen, Thomas Blom 72, 124 Haraway, Donna 121–2 Harvey, David 122 hegemony 16, 26, 29, 96, 106, 119, 127 Hemment, Julie 88, 120 Herder, Johann Gottfried 28 hermeneutics of suspicion 22, 122 Herzfeld, Michael 23n.7, 41, 54, 70, 87 Hilgers, Mathieu 36, 91 Hobsbawm, Eric 64 Human Development Report 31 human rights 90, 130n.1 Humphrey, Caroline 14 Hungary 57, 64 Hyatt, Susan 78n.1 idleness 51–6 Ījabs, Ivars 38 IMF see International Monetary Fund (IMF) inequality/equality 7–8, 120–1, 130 internal devaluation 20, 34–6, 38–9, 80 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 34–6, 37, 42n.12, 43n.18 intimacy 51, 63, 65–7, 78n.1 Jaanus, Maire 111 Jeffrey, Craig 10 Kalvītis, Aigars 25, 34 Khrushchev, Nikita 70 khrushchevkas 70 Klumbyte, Neringa 65 Knight, Daniel 10 knowledge 74, 87, 90 Krugman, Paul 2 labour market 19, 23n.4, 47, 50, 53, 54, 82, 92 Laidlaw, James 117n.5, 123, 130n.2 Lambek, Michael 24n.15, 123 language 2–4, 6–8, 14–15, 21–2, 28, 56–7, 61–3, 66, 71–2, 74, 77–8, 79n.7, 91, 105, 110–11, 116, 119 Latour, Bruno 122

Index learned helplessness 20–1, 30, 31–4, 39, 51, 56, 60, 63, 68 liberal democracy 4, 6, 14, 68, 128, 130 Liepāja 53 Liepiņš, Edgars 100 listening 6, 20, 110–14, 116 logics of governance 5–9, 11, 17, 118 Mahmood, Saba 16 Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl) 46 market democracy 25, 110, 114–15, 127, 130 market economy 11, 57, 90, 92, 101 Marxism 4, 41, 122, 130n.2 masculine nationalism 56–7 Matza, Tomas 92–3, 95, 131n.5 Mbembe, Achille 10, 23n.6, 40, 65 Milosz, Czeslaw 130 modernisation 26, 29, 40 modernity 7, 9, 29 morality 92, 96, 100, 114–15, 116, 123 Muldashev, Ernst 106 national identity 26, 28–9 nationalism 5, 111, 124 NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Navaro-Yashin, Yael 91 neoliberalisation 4–5, 17, 39, 41, 41n.2, 72, 106, 121, 129 neoliberalism 1, 4–9, 12, 15, 24n.16, 26, 58, 111, 118, 126, 127–8, 130 neoliberal state 4–5, 83–8 neuro-linguistic programming 105–6 New Latvians 28 nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) 89 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 27 nostalgia 71–2 Occupy movement 1, 129 OECD see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) O’Neill, Bruce 10, 95 Ong, Aihwa 121, 124 Open Foundation 111

Index ordinary ethics 24n.15, 83, 123 ordinary life 8, 15 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 27, 33, 43n.17 organising logic, time as 20, 26–7, 41n.1 Ortner, Sherry 72, 122 Oushakine, Serguei 125 Patico, Jennifer 116n.1 patience 40–1 personal identities 68, 88 personal income tax (PIT) 37 personhood 67–8 PIT see personal income tax (PIT) post-colonialism 65 post-Soviet state project 5, 12, 26, 27, 40 Povinelli, Elizabeth 8, 16, 24n.16, 95, 96, 121 power 16, 30, 65–6, 92, 111, 119, 121 precarisation 5, 10, 15, 17, 120, 126 Procupez, Valeria 23n.11 procurement process 84–6, 90 psychology coping strategies 46 discourse 82, 102, 105, 115 education 131n.5 techniques 92 public discourse 6, 31, 78 Pugacheva, Alla 50 qualified life 7–9 quick cash loans 62 rationality 87, 116, 122 ‘recovering the self ’ 99, 104, 115 responsibility 4–5, 16, 19, 22, 32, 51, 57, 83, 91, 92, 95, 97, 118–19, 120, 121, 126–7, 130 Rivkin-Fish, Michele 116n.1 Robbins, Joel 96, 130 Rogers, Douglas 96 Roitman, Janet 10, 40 ‘A Room of One’s Own’ 105 Rose, Nikolas 121 Rožukalne, Anda 106 Rust Belt 5

149 Sachs, Jeffrey 27 sacrifice 5, 22, 40, 128–30 Sassen, Saskia 9, 15, 41n.1 ‘The Second Awakening’ 28 Second World War 29, 32 Seidler, Victor 99, 117n.3 self 71, 74, 77–8, 116, 117n.5, 127 self-censorship 66 self-confidence 2, 18, 36 self-examination 2, 19, 74 self-help 99, 105, 115 selfhood 60–1 self-improvement 3, 117n.2 self-making 110 self-work 92–3, 98, 99, 105, 106 Selmeczi, Anna 130n.1 sense of self 82, 95, 115 Sharma, Sarah 10 shock therapy 11, 27, 39 Sinelnikov, Valeriy 73, 106 Skeggs, Beverly 99 Šķēle, Andris 25 Skultans, Vieda 70, 103–4, 115 social assistance programme 2, 18, 33, 45, 47–8, 54, 93, 98 social exclusion 32–3, 42n.8 socialism 27, 29–30, 40, 55, 64, 92, 126, 128 social safety 53–4 social theory 4, 22, 23n.6, 55, 95, 99, 118–19, 121–3 sociology 3–5, 20, 54, 95, 118, 120, 127 Sommers, Jeffrey 36, 42n.16, 43n.19 Song and Dance Festivals 113 Soros Foundation 89 sovereignty 124, 126, 127–8 Soviet Union 13, 14, 27, 29–30, 56, 64, 68–9, 71, 75, 79n.7, 88, 89, 120, 125 space 6–7, 15, 17, 19, 22, 51, 98, 99, 106, 110, 112–13, 114, 115–16, 119, 126–7 speaking 6, 110–14 speeding up 9–10, 12, 25 Stalin, Joseph 29 state-citizen relationships 8, 11, 20, 26, 126 statecraft 5–7, 118, 130

Index

150 State Employment Agency 2, 18–19, 84–6, 98, 107, 113 Stewart, Charles 10 Stoler, Ann Laura 17 subjectivity 12, 13–15, 19–20, 23n.13, 27, 29, 61, 64, 65, 67–74, 77–8, 87, 99, 128, 130 suffering 8, 14, 15, 64, 104 temporality 6, 9–10, 11, 12, 26, 27, 29–30, 40–1, 41n.2, 56, 61 ‘The Third Awakening’ see Trešā Atmoda Thompson, Edward Palmer 11 time 5–6, 8, 9–13, 20, 26, 30, 40, 41, 42n.4, 47, 51, 56, 60–1, 71, 118 see also etatisation of time totalitarian system 66–7, 93, 103 trade union 3, 75–7, 79nn.6, 8 Trešā Atmoda 13, 31 trust 31–2, 38 ‘2-speed Europe’ 27 UNDP see United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) unemployment 1–3, 6, 35, 38, 42n.8, 52–3, 57, 58, 59n.4, 79n.7, 82, 92, 102, 129 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) see Soviet Union United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 31–2 University of Latvia 60 USSR see Soviet Union

values 74, 99–100, 114 van den Berg, Marguerite 10 Vargha, Zsuzanna 11, 23n.10, 57 Verdery, Katherine 11, 23n.8, 30, 31, 55, 61, 64, 103, 127 Vīķe-Freiberga, Vaira 32, 129 vocational training courses 48 Wacquant, Loic 9, 40 WB see World Bank (WB) welfare state 2, 11–12, 21, 26, 33, 61, 63–4, 67, 71, 78, 78n.2, 91, 126, 130 welfare system 66, 87, 121 Western Europe 28, 33, 45 will 5, 16, 32, 83, 92–7, 96, 118–20, 127, 130 willingness 22, 83, 96, 126 Wolff, Larry 28 women 17 experiences 14 piety movement in Egypt 16 Woolf, Virginia 105 workfare programmes 2, 4, 6, 12, 17, 19, 22, 23n.4, 35–6, 38, 58, 61, 118, 121, 127 ‘work on oneself’ 4–6, 18, 73, 78, 92, 97, 127 World Bank (WB) 32, 34, 35, 36, 42n.12, 43n.18, 54 Yurchak, Alexei 65 Zigon, Jarrett 92 Žižek, Slavoj 91 Zolitūde tragedy 80, 96