The Meaning of Unemployment

            The two things may seem unrelated but as I was reading about Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes in a book about cultural studies the blog o desemprego tem rosto (unemployment has a face) immediately came to my mind. The website is a one-year long project described by the newspaper which publishes it as a photographic essay made with the aim of giving the Portuguese unemployed a voice of their own: a touch of human actuality to help break down the hegemony of cold statistics and faceless numbers. In terms of layout the concept is remarkably simple: over a dark background a black and white close-up photograph of a face and a mini-interview with questions such as how old are you, how long have you been unemployed, what was your last job, what are your educational achievements, what do you expect the future to be. 

         It is certainly interesting to note how people articulate their speech or, more specifically, their self-representation in the face of the particularly difficult context of their lives and in the broader scope of Portuguese society in general. Contrary to the apparent homogeneity of the mainstream narrative of unemployment, common people show a remarkable variety of stories about this alarming social concern. The fact is that the wearied talk about the economic crisis reverberates kaleidoscopically in popular expressions of actual unemployment, according to the specific circumstances of each person’s life. Ideology, as Barthes refers to it (the mainstream meaning of unemployment disseminated, with the help of the traditional media, by both the political and economic elites, with the maintenance of the status quo in mind), thus echoes increasingly dimly within the people who actually have to face the social and individual consequences of unemployment on a daily basis. 

           As ideology wanes so the legitimacy of the whole political system begins to falter: in the specific case of Portugal it would be fair to say that we’re living the final days of a social grand narrative which started with the Carnage Revolution. The question that nowadays dominates social debate is, however, one of alternatives: all over the West, and most likely beyond it, the what to do of the whole thing is far more a blank than the already contentious affair of the how did we end up in this mess. This blank, translated in the general moral void into which society has fallen, is a huge challenge to social agents of signification everywhere. The most interesting point about the aforementioned blog is how this challenge is being individually met by common people in the field. 

            A reading of its entries shows how the poorest among the poor cannot even articulate the proper words to define their situation. Their laconic answers and meagre use of language bears testimony to the real nature of their poverty: in fact, they’re in a state of utter symbolic deprivation. Referring to what Stuart Hall calls the struggle to signify it is fair to say that they lost the battle of signification before it had even begun. Others, usually younger and holding a university degree, opt to call for a narrative of action in the hope of change, but do so without reference to any intellectual framework: thus action, change and even revolution become in their speech signifiers without signified, failed attempts at meaning-making. Others still are significantly despondent, finding themselves lost somewhere outside the realm of social meaning after the collapse of the symbolic pillars which had previously sustained their biographies: not altogether defeated in their struggle to signify, they are still grappling to understand where they are. It seems to me that these are the most interesting of them all: people in the middle of difficult process of self-reinvention, only their faces can properly signify the deep and painful mutations Portuguese society is going through.