Affect & the Politics of Austerity
An interview exchange with Lauren Berlant
Gesa Helms, Marina Vishmidt, Lauren Berlant
The political climate in the UK found a new affective register with the financial crisis: the invocation of public and personal shame. Amidst calls for public apologies, financial business practices were re-cast as the reckless activity of individual ‘banksters’. Two years on we see how this outcry has not led to stronger regulation of banking practices, but amounted to little more than a public shaming of appetites. The lack of change was re-channelled into a call upon the decency of middle England to sacrifice for the national good and to direct their anger downwards on those who exploit the public without ‘creating wealth’: people who flout the norms through an ‘excess of dependence’, those who regard “benefits as a lifestyle choice”. We felt it important to consider more carefully the affective register that is so forcefully called upon. A register that talks of shame and excess outlined against an assumed notion of a common-sense decency still to be found in the working-class heartlands and which, so some argue, can be mobilized as part of a progressive politics. With these questions in mind we approached Lauren Berlant, a cultural theorist whose work has provided sharp and nuanced analysis of the relationship between ‘cultures of affect’ and social structures.

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About the Elephant in the Room
Peter Conlin interviews Stefan Szczelkun
An edited interview with Stefan Szczelkun; artist, organiser and one-time member of the legendary Scratch Orchestra, who set up ‘Working Press: books by and about working class artists’ in the 1980s, and more recently co-organised the ‘Agit Disco’ project, in which people are invited to write a playlist of their favourite political music. Peter Conlin is an artist, writer and organiser, now active with rampART3 social centre collective and researching self-organisation in neoliberal times. The interview, conducted prior to the implementation of the ‘austerity’ cuts, presents views from different generational and national contexts, and attempts to use these differences as a way to articulate thoughts on working class identification and dis-identification, oppression and solidarity. The questions are vast and some of the issues potentially divisive. The intention of this interview is to contribute a larger discussion about the current lived experience of class beyond being an object of academic research and outside the terms of the mainstream media.

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The Real Broken Society
Tom Jennings
Mainstream moral fascism, forensically dissecting and punishing failure to thrive, is mirrored in Reality TV’s gratuitous sadism. Humiliation heaped on willing supplicants subjected to shaming exhortation and judgement echoes the miserable dishonesty of alienating employment and institutional relationships. ... Myths and fairytales of a ‘Victorian values’ bourgeois nuclear unit assuage fears by way of reinforcing forlorn hopes for an advancement that has stalled – hence being benchmarks for contemporary gloss across popular documentary and dramatic entertainment. However, a range of recent, less commercially obsequious films buck the trend, scrutinising personal and family dysfunctions among the middle- and upper-classes – whose trials and tribulations it’s perhaps timely to dwell on, as the Old Etonians cover up the failings of the rich by hammering the poor with renewed gusto. A brief survey below sketches some contours in these rather nebulous realms of cinematic endeavour.

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Poverty Porn and the Broken Society
Gerry Mooney and Lynn Hancock
We are living in the deepest recession and economic crisis since the 1930s, yet for successive governments and for large sections of the media there is another crisis, one characterised as key to the economic ills which grip much of UK society today: ‘Malingering and Illness Deception’. Underpinning this political discourse is an even more explicitly US-style workfare model, framing ‘the problem’ as one of the individual behaviour of the least powerful, those living in poverty. This political approach is accompanied by a pervasive media assault on people experiencing poverty – including some of the most disadvantaged groups. A range of TV documentaries, reality TV shows, and the like, allow ‘experts’ to adjudicate on the faults of working class and disadvantaged lifestyles, emphasising the need for self-improvements and self-help. TV programmes such as Jeremy Kyle, Tricia, Secret Millionaire, Saints and Scroungers are among the most notable of a seemingly growing list that fit in what is now increasingly being referred to as the ‘poverty porn’ genre.

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Real Phôné
Howard Slater
"It seems that one of the original divisions of social life, one which to some degree defines the practice of politics, could well be that which splits off the domestic and reproductive spheres of existence from that of public life. The discriminations that ensue extend to a mode of speech that is permitted into the polis and a mode that, in being akin to animal-life, is excluded. … If it could be said that the working class was formerly in the position of the excluded and seeking access to representation, then, the reframing of its anger and suffering into the language of politics, has to a degree made it a consensual figure. Its visibility by means of representation has made it into a 'figure possessing a specific good or universality' upon which a hoped-for practice is based. Is this maybe why Rancière asserts that 'politics cannot be defined on the basis of any pre-existing subject'…? …This may go some way to guessing at Rancière’s reasons for the abandonment of class struggle politics, but it does not explicitly explain what ‘supplement’, what non-existent subject, could come to take its place and effect what could take on a pro-revolutionary hue: the ‘redistribution of the sensible’."

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Protest in the Park
Preliminary Thoughts on the Silencing of Democratic Protest in the Neoliberal Age
Ronan Paddison
Paddison contextualises a 2009 demonstration against a proposal to install a novel recreational facility proposed for a major historic park in Glasgow, a demonstration fixed by its timing to coincide with the site visit to the park arranged for the councillors on the City’s Planning Committee, to explore the post-politcal thesis of the annulling of democracy with consensual managerial governance: "The events that morning, together with the other meetings and demonstrations that took place to oppose the Go Ape proposal need to be understood against the wider politics of the city which in Glasgow, as in many other cities, have come to be dominated by the practices of entrepreneurial governance David Harvey discussed some two decades ago. Following the lead of Mouffe, Žižek, Rancière, and others, here I want to explore whether the politics of the city has in fact become a post-political and post-democratic configuration where, as Erik Swyngedouw outlines, 'the post-political condition is one in which consensus has been built around the inevitability of neo-liberal capitalism as an economic system' – that is, 'a political formation that actually forecloses the political, that prevents the politicization of particulars [by mobilizing] the vast apparatus of experts, social workers, and so on, to reduce the overall demand (complaint) of a particular group to just this demand, with its particular content'.”

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Hierarchies of Risk
John Barker
"Risk assessment and management is a serious business; professionalised and a major interdisciplinary field of academic research. … While a degree of professional knowledge is required, this is no guarantee that either assessment or management will produce an ‘objective’ outcome. There are interests at work in shaping criteria, interpretation and implementation; predominantly these interests are of capital accumulation via profit making. There is no guarantee that an analysis is disinterested just because it is mathematical." Barker calls into play Melinda Cooper's 'Life as Surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era', identifying the 'selective fatalism' at work in representations of an economic and technological future spoken of as a perpetual promise combined with risk: "Ours is the only way, it says, great things are on the way, but don’t be looking for guarantees; you know the score, shit happens."

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In a Class all of their own
The incomprehensiveness of art education
John Beagles
"There has been a steady flow of publications, magazine articles and impassioned letters decrying the current state of and gloomy future prophesied for art education. … The majority of these often-impassioned defences and polemics focused on and were united by their condemnation of the impact of New Labour’s enthusiastic advancing of neoliberal ideology upon state funded ‘public’ university education – aka ‘corporate pedagogy’. … Reading the varied discussions [however], the defences and alternatives felt hampered in their potential by a blind spot. The majority of these exchanges paid insufficient attention to the ongoing, but now it seems exponentially increasing, problem of class exclusion within art schools and the resultant rise of a homogeneous student body. … This is an old story but it’s clearly getting worse and will continue to do so – not least due to tuition fee increases and ‘globalisation’ representing the imposition of this neoliberal ideology on a transnational scale. The consequences of this are dire, and not just for art schools. The one solution I can see is a renewed, reimagined, core insertion of comprehensive education values as absolutely essential."

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Aesthetic Journalism in Practice
Manifesta 8 and the Chamber of Public Secrets
Maeve Connolly
Connolly reviews curator Alfredo Cramerotti’s 'Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform Without Informing', "one of the first monographic studies dedicated to this identification of journalistic and documentary turns in contemporary art. … Cramerotti identifies 'early patterns of aesthetic journalism' in the eras of Reformation and Enlightenment, before charting the rise of 'art as social criticism' in the 1970s… Cramerotti argues, however, that the more self-consciously journalistic turn evident in recent decades can be partly understood as a response to a crisis in traditional journalistic media."

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