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cross currents in culture variantnumber 39/40 winter 2010 free 2 | variant 39/40 | Winter 2010 Variant is published 3 times Variant, issue 39/40, a year. The most current Winter 2010 issue is posted on the Variant ISSN 0954-8815 website after publication of the newsprint edition. Variant is a magazine with the independence to be critical that To receive an e-mail informing addresses cultural issues in a you of these posts and to join contents social and political context. the on-line forum, send a blank Affect & the Politics of Austerity e-mail to: variantinfo-subscribe@ Variant is a constituted topica.com An interview exchange with Lauren Berlant organisation that functions with 3 the assistance of public support, Contribute Gesa Helms, Marina Vishmidt, Lauren Berlant subscriptions and advertising. 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There is a modality of excess to shame moral panics of youth deviancy or the influence of which means its deployment in political rhetoric is communitarian authoritarianism on New Labour social just as likely to turn on its handler as on its object policy. – as in all moralistic or moralizing discourse. Is it Yet, as the banks were folding it was neither the difference between individualizing shame or single mothers nor young NEETs (not in employment, collective shame? education or training) in black hoodies that were the Thus for background. Our question here would object of the public’s rage but the profession which be how you would relate the distinction you have continues to operate as the nerve centre of the UK made between the structures and experience economy: the bankers. Amidst calls for public apologies, of shame to the concrete political moment of financial business practices were re-cast as the reckless building a consensus around intensified neoliberal activity of individual ‘banksters’. Suddenly it seemed policies in the wake of the financial crash? that the whole celebrated financial industry, the LB: Polly Toynbee wrote a great sentence about backbone of London’s economy, and thus of the UK as the savage cuts of the new austerity: “The price a whole, had been driven into the ground by deviant of everything was laid out, but not the value of individuals frenzied by ‘perverse incentives’, a ‘bonus anything about to be destroyed.”5 What does it culture’ of greed, ambition and excess. Thatcher-era mean for a symbolic relation to be too expensive, cultural anxieties about ‘City boys’ resurfaced with a an unbearable burden? The image of the good life vengeance but with little of the class politics. is too dear; something has to be sacrificed. The Two years on, we can see how much of this outcry attempt to associate democracy with austerity by politicians has not led to a stronger regulation of – a state of liquidity being dried out, the way banking practices, but that indeed it amounted to wine dries out a tongue – is fundamentally anti- little more than a public shaming of the appetites of democratic. The demand for the people’s austerity bankers; an appeal to conduct their business a bit more hides processes of the uneven distribution of risk privately, not quite so visibly. The lack of any change was and vulnerability. Democracy is supposed to hold re-channelled into a call upon the decency of middle out for the equal distribution of sovereignty and England to sacrifice for the national good and to direct risk. Still, austerity sounds good, clean, ascetic: the their anger downwards on those who exploit the public lines of austerity are drawn round a polis to incite without ‘creating wealth’: people who flout the norms it toward askesis, toward managing its appetites through an ‘excess of dependence’, those who regard and taking satisfaction in a self-management in The big question is whether the popular Appetites/ “benefits as a lifestyle choice” (Conservative Chancellor whose mirror of performance it can feel proud and culture of a “civil society” unwilling to let go Sovereignty 1 George Osborne, interview 9th September 2010) . Their superior. In capitalist logics of askesis, the workers’ of the collective good life fantasy secured by a Claire Pentecost ‘shameless’ milking of state benefits allows them to live obligation is to be more rational than the system, beneficent state can mobilize its assertion of its (2003) in areas of Central London which low-paid workers can’t and their recompense is to be held in a sense of priority over market democracy in a way that can afford, and their reckless personal habits burden our pride at surviving the scene of their own attrition. fundamentally restructure the state’s adjudication cash-strapped public services. This looming overpresence of risk and the of capital, and meanwhile avoid fascism. But this is Little of this is new if we look back across UK leeching out of even the phantasm of sovereignty hard too. We remember that the bubble associating politics of the last 30 years but also if we look across across nations and persons translates into such a economic growth with civil rights of the last sixty to elsewhere in Europe or North America. However, complex assemblage. Under the current conditions years or so is an anomaly in world history. Besides as part of various discussions on how to organize and of debt and exposure, nation-states can’t bear to that, though, the demands of the present mean intervene, we felt it was important to consider more admit their abjection, can’t bear that they have protesting not only the state’s servility to capital carefully the affective register that is so forcefully called become mere supplicants for the wealth that they but people’s very own fantasies of the good life. upon. A register that talks of shame and excess outlined have allowed to become privately held on behalf Just as the relations of the market to the state against an assumed notion of a common-sense decency of a spectral growth on whose tithing the state are fraying and changing, so too the destruction still to be found in the working-class heartlands and has come to depend. The Euro-American state is and elaboration of fantasy in relation to what a which, so some argue, can be mobilized as part of a a cowardly lion, a weeping bully, a plaintive lover life is and what a good life is will need to shift progressive politics. With these questions in mind, we to finance capital. It cannot bear to admit that, about and reknot.