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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
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Popular culture and anti-austerity protest
More LessThe prevailing description of our times as an ‘age of austerity’ has hardened into an axiom with extraordinary rapidity. Focusing on contemporary popular and consumer culture in Britain, this article makes a contribution to the task of subjecting the discourse of ‘austerity’ to the consideration it properly demands. I identify and interrogate the meanings that ‘austerity’ has in contemporary culture, and recall the contingency of the processes through which these meanings have been consolidated,a task that is all the more urgent, I suggest, when it feels like one prevailing signification has already ‘won out’. The article is organized around the discussion of three dominant meanings of austerity: austerity as ‘responsible politics’, deficit reduction and coalition government policy; austerity as the ‘other’ that defines left-political struggle; and austerity as ‘austerity chic’. The latter points to a conception of austerity as object of desire, an element that I develop and use to question the currently dominant critical position in left-cultural politics, the position of being ‘anti-aust rity’.
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Nostalgia and Austerity, or, the never-ending dream of excess
More LessThe article is an attempt to examine the transformation of the neo-liberal ideology of consumption that has taken place since the onset of the global recession in 2008. The first section is an examination of Karl Marx's account of the antagonisms inherent in classical economic theories of happiness, desire and prosperity, and how these have been intensified in the neo-liberal culture of consumption. The second section analyses the present conditions of class and identity formation that the UK Conservative Party has called ‘Broken Britain’. Specifically, I will look at the relationship between the culture of ‘chance’, as it has crystallized into the discursive and aesthetic figure of ‘the underclass’, and the forms of ressentiment that are its ideological counterpart. The final section will examine the significance of this configuration of the prudent and the profligate, the decent and the obscene, for the possibility of social and political change.
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Precarious objects, precarious lives: Grounded aesthetics in poverty contexts
Authors: Carla Lunghi and Maria Antonietta TrasforiniThis article will present and discuss results from a research study on aesthetics and poverty, recently carried out in Milan (Italy). Beauty, as a quality usually connected with art objects and tied to property and wealth, has been investigated in the ‘unusual’ context of economic poverty, where ownership of objects is precarious or indeed non-existent. Using ethnographic observation and instruments of visual culture (photos), the research investigated the meanings of particular daily objects (i.e. pictures, clothes, religious images, etc.) displayed during meetings with a sample of Italian and immigrant people, living in indigent conditions. The results suggest a critical review of P. Bourdieu’s theory on aesthetics and on taste as distinction practice, focusing instead on the ethical and relational dimensions of a grounded aesthetics. As anthropology and material culture studies suggest, the aesthetic object acts in people’s lives as a polysemic item, contiguous with usefulness, rituality, relation. At he crossroads of the aesthetics of existence (Foucault) and daily practices (De Certeau), certain objects considered beautiful become containers of affection, tools for public representation of the self, personal narrative and memories, displaying a practical and emotional control of a present difficult daily life.
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Protest and video activism
More LessAlmost every one of the popular protest movements that have sprung up in the past couple of years in different parts of the world has taken to the Internet in a big way to organize and express itself. Indeed activists have proved extraordinarily adept in the use of the social media. There is a paradox in the way that growing numbers of people are using the products of consumerism to try and combat the power of the same global corporate capitalism that sells them these very tools and instruments of free counter-cultural production to begin with. This paradox has a history that this article brings back to mind, because one of the things about capitalism is that it not only creates the technologies employed in the mass media, but it cannot resist making consumer versions of the same gear – it is a simple question of maximizing the opportunities for consumption and profits – and the consequences are often contradictory.
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The health and safety of the fine arts: Austerity, politeness and litigation culture
More LessBy looking at an episode of censorship of a student’s artwork dealing with explicit visualizations and naming of sex, this article discusses the relationship between austerity measures and the spread of litigation culture in current academic life. My aim is not to defend the artwork, but to understand how the institutional ‘straight mind’, operating for the health of public morality, may become a threat to the safety of art teaching in times of austerity. Jacques Rancière’s elaborations on the stultification of contemporary culture provide a theoretical framework to show how litigation culture is an effect of austerity measures, which, by pre-empting any space for intellectual disagreement, may erode the relationship between education and citizenship.
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New progressive architecture: Designing for cities in end times
More LessAlongside investment banks and bankers, architecture and architects should be blamed for the global economic crisis that hit cities in 2008. Risky financial speculations were driven by a real estate bubble that relied on the production of spectacular, expensive buildings by the architecture industry. Four years later, contemporary architecture (especially in Europe) still fails to engage with or promote socially aware, progressive urban thinking. The tradition of socially engaged architecture has almost vanished. That attitude is apparent only in remnant form – small initiatives focused on buildings rather than on the built environment as a whole. Our new cities of austerity require a reassessment of this attitude, and a fresh generation of architects must be educated to address the challenges facing our urban environment.This article presents a theoretical framework of a new paradigm of radical architecture and radical architecture education, as a function of strong social and political positions taken by students. This framework is the current result of three years of work conducted at the M.Arch. programme at the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom, including projects from 2009 to 2012: one in Riga, Latvia, the second in Gdansk, Poland and the most recent in Zielona Góra, Poland. It will illustrate how architecture and urban design could become a tool for social and political change and a means to create liveable cities from the ruins of the neo-liberal model.
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Saying No!: Profligacy versus austerity, or metaphor against model in justifying the Arts and Humanities in the contemporary university
More LessDemonstrating an analysis of two musicals that both disclose and seek imaginatively to resolve political and economic conflict, an analysis that was the product of the radical interdisciplinary ‘studies’ movements of the culture wars in the late twentieth century university, this article seeks to examine what modes of defence are available to the critical projects in the Arts and Humanities, developed in that moment, when now faced with the culture of austerity. Under the twin rationalizations of audit culture with the accountable excellence and the new model that defines the Arts and Humanities as ‘profligate’ expenses in an age of financial rationing based on economic necessity and required technological orientation, there is a temptation to fall back on nostalgia for an imagined period of academic freedom identified, problematically but not untruthfully, with struggles for democracy through and in education. Based on Hannah Arendt’s defence of thinking via a reading by Judith Butler, and with Gayatri Spivak’s notions of teaching to read as a necessary route to the creation of a planetary community, the article seeks to go beyond the historically compromised defences of self-determining academic freedom, themselves shown to be founded in nationalist and imperialist agendas of the past.
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