Article:

Nicht Nichtstun. Über Prokrastination

The essay regards procrastination as problematization. What are the power effects of this construction? How can we read and understand procrastination beyond therapeutic discourse or its everyday experience? The therapeutic discourse is based on governmental and neoliberal ideas, with a focus on academics and students. There are three characteristics: the individualization of the ‹problem›, the fact that all processing strategies are independent of the postponed, and that the activities that take place in the course of the postponement are hardly taken into account. The dicourse of procrastination and the gap of a so-called actual work conceal the fact that the possibility of procrastination is a class privilege. Within the problematization of procrastination, the actual work is replaced by an inauthentic work - a work that cannot claim to be such. Their devaluation via the practice of procrastination serves to valorise the actual work. Therefore procrastination is not resistance. Such a reading would not take into account the suffering of those affected, but above all class issues and rule. Rather, procrastination has to be placed in a larger context: «The Making of the Indebted Man» (Lazzarato)