Popular Culture and the Austerity Myth

Hard Times Today

Pete Bennett, Julian McDougall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317374251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary popular culture is engaged in a rich and multi-levelled set of representational relations with austerity. This volume seeks to explore these relations, to ask: how does popular culture give expression to austerity; how are its effects conveyed; how do texts reproduce and expose its mythic qualities? It provides a reading of cultural texts in circulation in the present 'age of austerity'. Through its central focus—popular culture—it considers the impact and influence of austerity across media and textual categories. The collection presents a theoretical deconstruction of popular culture's reproduction of, and response to, mythical expressions of 'austerity' in Western culture, spanning the United Kingdom, North America, Europe and the Middle East and textual events from political media discourse, music, videogames, social media, film, television, journalism, folk art, food, protest movements, slow media and the practice of austerity in everyday life

Part I

The Way We Live Now

Austerity Myths in Everyday Life

1 Trying to Discern the Impact of Austerity in Lived Experience

Gargi Bhattacharyya

If the question of the 19th century in the U.S. and in many places is the problem of the colour line, as DuBois writes, “what does it mean to be a problem?” – the problem of contemporary austerity politics comes from the state saying that the public is itself a problem, too expensive to be borne by the state that represents it.

Lauren Berlant

What strange times we live in and through. After lifetimes spent trying to argue for a proper balance between state responsibility and individual liberty, now in the regions of twenty-first-century austerity, states appear increasingly irritated by the burdens of their populations. Instead we are deemed to be too expensive, too ageing or aged, too needy, too unproductive, too many, too useless for the demands of the contemporary economy. After a twentieth century when much of Europe devised ways of organising social support in a manner that brokered a compromise between the needs of employers and the aspirations of workers, it is shock all round to understand that we are considered surplus to requirements. In this chapter, I try to explain why I think we should consider the twenty-first-century austerity of Europe and North America as an attempt to radically remake the relationship between state and population and what this suggests for those of us concerned to understand the construction of popular consciousness.

Understanding the Project of Austerity

For some years I have been working to understand the cultural project of austerity. My conclusion has been that this phase and incarnation of austerity, largely in Europe and North America, although echoing the dispossessions in the name of austerity that have been suffered by poorer parts of the world in earlier decades, represents a distinctive political and cultural project and has the objective of changing cultures around entitlement and the role of the state for the foreseeable future. Importantly, this is not a short-term set of measures, although the rhetoric of crisis has been central to its institution. Instead, I argue, we should regard this recent wave of austerity across the (until recently) affluent world as a concerted project to dismantle long-standing practices of welfare and social support forever. Alongside this, I think austerity also includes an active and damaging impact on working lives most obviously seen in the combined pressures to curtail workplace rights (in the name of liberalisation) and to maintain a low-wage economy (in the name of affordability).

This attempt to institute wide-ranging and long-lasting change in these such fundamental areas in shaping our quality of life should be understood as a particular kind of hegemonic project, akin to formations such as Thatcherism or Blairism but utilising a different set of techniques to pursue project goals. To understand the aspects of this project I have tried to split the process into a series of stages or strands. Each strand supports the others and they do not represent any form of linear progression; however, the first three interlocking themes create the enabling context for what I consider to be the central aspects of the austerity project. I summarise these themes as the primacy of the economic, the degradation of politics, the institutionalisation of despair and the diminishing of expectations.

Taken together these four configurations represent something distinctive about the space of political imagination in our time. I should also say here that my intention is to describe techniques of power, not necessarily the effectivity of their deployment. It is important to remember, of course and at all times, that the powerful do not have things all their own way regardless of the techniques that they employ. However, I also think that there is something useful about mapping state techniques of subordination and subjugation in our time (for a more detailed exploration of this entire argument, see Bhattacharyya, 2015).

By the primacy of the economic I am pointing to this quite extended period in which placating the unruly beast of the economy, as if that thing ‘the economy’ is elsewhere and apart from human life, becomes the central and primary consideration of electoral politics and of governmental policy. Others have described this moment, and it is a long and extended moment with no end in sight, it seems, as the corporatisation of government and sometimes more generally as just neoliberalism. Although I am indebted to these larger literatures I am trying to point to something slightly more precise. My interest has been in the shift to understanding the business of government in so-called liberal democracies as primarily and overwhelmingly a question of managing the economy. This claim of economic competence as the central requirement for election to government has entered the political processes of most of the more affluent world, although as Leif (1991) demonstrates, electorates may be interpreting such a claim in quite distinctive and local ways. In addition, and centrally for our interests here, economic competence in government has morphed into the ability to navigate the impact of the global economy. Troublingly, this had led all too often to a privileging of the needs of something called ‘the global economy’ above the immediate concerns of the local population: ‘beneath this ideology lies a bedrock assumption that governments that interfere with the free flow of goods, services, capital and information (but not people) impair their capacity to maintain a dynamic economy’ (Mayes and Farrar 2013, 1).

It is this subordination, or deferral in this account, of local needs that leads to the next element that sets the scene for austerity: the degradation of politics. By the degradation of politics I am referring to the long process by which formal political processes have become increasingly emptied of meaning for much of the population. In part, I am also referring to the active and wilful distancing of political process from everyday life and the electorates that political representatives purport to serve. My argument is to suggest that the repeated assertion from the political class that there is no room in political life for the likes of us is itself part of an active campaign to narrow space for alternative ways of thinking and being. One part of this has been an extreme prescriptiveness on the part of the powerful in relation to what can be acknowledged as legitimate protest or opposition. These prescriptions in themselves serve to limit and discredit the process of politics as we know it; in a survey of political disengagement across Europe, NatCen chart high levels of distrust in existing political institutions and processes but also point out that younger respondents in particular may conceive of their political engagement as occurring through other means (NatCen 2013).

At the same time, I use the phrase ‘the degradation of politics’ to describe a moment, be it a long moment, during which electoral process has become emptied of meaning or meaningful alternatives for many. This emptying is closely tied to the primacy given to a version of economic management that explicitly privileges the economic interests of some above others and of corporations above communities. It is this privileging of economic concerns above all others and to the exclusion of other political agendas that creates a space of formal politics in which mainstream political parties become increasingly indistinguishable. This is the danger that Tariq Ali describes as ‘the extreme centre’ (2015). Such convergence between electoral parties pushes out consideration of class or group interests from the electoral process and instead the terms of electoral engagement become determined by the supposed requirements of the global economy.

This framing of electoral choice around the supposed determinants of the global economy excludes the interests of any party, group or individual that does not absolutely identify with the tenets of global growth. In effect, such troubling factors as class interest or the needs of ordinary people are erased from the terms of political debate. Electorates across the world have registered this disrespect towards them and this, too, plays its part in shaping retreat from engagement with the democratic processes that exist. In addition, we have seen that where circumstances give rise to parties that seek to question the terms of membership in the global economy, such as Syriza, there is a rapid and cruel disciplining of any such aspirations through one or other form of reassertion of the power of the global markets. Syriza is the Greek political party that emerges from the ‘Coalition of Radical Left’ to win the 2015 national Greek election on a radical anti-austerity platform.

My argument is that these two long-running themes in political and social life, the excessive primacy granted to a narrow conception of economic health and the degradation of political spaces, taken together lead to outcomes that I characterise as institutionalisation of despair. By this I mean that quite distinct moment where institutional processes are restructured to work together to actively crush hope and to inculcate despair as the tenor of business as usual for many if not most lives. This is the moment where we are forced to accept that processes of support will have limited efficacy and that the process of accessing support will be, always and by design, painful and humiliating. Most importantly, things will not and cannot get better in this moment of institutional imagining, so we submit to the disciplines demanded for assistance in the knowledge that what we can receive will never be sufficient.

These three phases or overlapping formations create the space for my main interest and concern: the diminishing of expectations. If there is a refrain and spirit of our time, I fear that this is it. In this I agree with other commentators that austerity marks only an intensification of the shift away from universal entitlement and support that was imagined in the moment of high welfare (Wahl 2011). What I want to suggest, however, is that the diminishing of expectations is more than a more stringent phase of rationing and cutbacks. Of course, cutbacks have played an important role in remaking the institutional landscape and social fabric of our time. However, by the diminishing of expectation I mean something distinct from this slice-by-slice cutting away of what we have had before. The institutionalisation of despair may include the impact of cuts in creating a particularly unhappy structure of feeling but it relies on a larger formation in which cuts are only one small aspect of a shifting of consciousness in relation to entitlement and the state. The broader construction of a diminishment of expectations across societies entails a much more fundamental shift in how people understand the role of the state as both service provider and regulator and a further dismantling of the mythologies of economic progress that have motivated and/or disciplined previous generations. The outcome is that we are encouraged to expect less and less, in more and more spheres of life, from living standards to social mobility, from social care to pensions, from employers to consumer goods (with their ever-shrinking sizes). Expecting less has become a central theme of life in our time.

What Are the Cultural Processes of Austerity?

Here I want to look at the techniques that enable diminishing expectations and to try to describe the cultural formations that make such endeavours possible. In doing this I will try to point to the processes that create such structures of feeling. At the same time I will try to explain why I think that an over-focus on popular representation can lead us to misunderstand or miss key features of the techniques of power in the present conjuncture.

In arguing against too great a focus on representational structures I am trying to refocus the business of cultural studies in a way that seems more fitting to the challenges of our time. Of course, there is always a place for stories and to exchange our understanding of the world through stories. That exchange about the interpretation of narrative and images and feelings and the ways we are positioned by such things, or where we create an important alternative consciousness and the possibility of new ways of being, remains invaluable. However, to understand how the structures of the powerful impinge on our everyday lives and create us to be their creatures, something more than these habits of representational analysis are needed.

In part this is an attempt to unlearn my own obsession with representation. Among many others who have grown up and been schooled in the practices of a quite British-based approach to cultural studies, I have been enmeshed in the belief that popular representation is indicative of the workings of power in our time. This may not have implied that the processes of representation are a conspiracy or part of any master plan. However it has been an almost unquestioning assumption that the stories that circulate in public matter and can reveal secrets of some larger process of power.

Lately I have become more doubtful about the role played by popular representation in marking public political spaces. I still watch and listen and read with the same curiosity-fuelled attention but I am not so sure that this is where the powerful wield their grip over us. Instead this period of austerity has made me question the role of popular representation in tempering or informing public cultures. I will try to explain what I mean by these statements in the paragraphs to follow.

To make my argument, it is helpful to think back on the centrality of representational analysis to a certain strand of cultural studies. This was the world that had rediscovered Gramsci (think of the reception of Stuart Hall’s 1987 piece ‘Gramsci and Us’, Quintin Hoare’s translations of key aspects of Gramsci’s political writing appearing in 1977 and 1978 and, perhaps most importantly, the English translation of selections from the cultural writings appearing in 1985). It was a world where hegemony was born or lost in the everyday battles for hearts and minds on our TV screens and in the popular press. It was also a world where mainstream politics had come quite recently to engage with mainstream media. Into this rapidly mediatising world, the impact of dominant representations or representations that seemed to echo a certain kind of dominance felt immense. This was the world where we lost our innocence about factual representation (the Glasgow Media Group published Bad News in 1976 and More Bad News in 1980, transforming analysis of news media in the process), and where we came to see connections between political discourse and the discourses of popular entertainment. All of this stuff mattered.

Habits of representational analysis that we have inherited from the times of Thatcher, and to some extent of Blair, have remained focused on exclusionary stereotypes or on the depictions of abjected others. This is the important body of work that helps us to understand the complex imagining of social exclusion and the role of fantasy and representation in such processes. By understanding the manner in which some people are systematically presented as lesser and less deserving we come to learn how the boundaries of entitlement are drawn. I understand the importance of this project in its time. I too have been part of it. The push towards understanding the role played by representational strategies in relation to the distribution of power has also been part of my political formation and profess...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Tributes
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Hard Times Today
• PART I The Way We Live Now: Austerity Myths in Everyday Life
• PART II Popular Culture: Myths from the Front
• PART III Out on the Streets: Myths and Acts of Resistance
• PART IV Popular Culture: Mythical Symmetries
• Afterword: Hard Times for ‘Real’ Women?
• List of Contributors
• Index