Austerity Melancholia

Event details

Speaker: Dr Esther Hitchen, Durham University

This talk introduces and develops the concept of austerity melancholia as a way of holding onto that which is made unknown or unknowable within the affective life of austerity. Here, the elusive loss becomes an explicit attempt to place the negative more centrally within affective everyday geographies. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with a borough-wide library service, North-East England, I explore the practice of ‘the cut’ that is often used to indicate the end point of a budget reduction; instead, however, I argue that ‘the cut’ is the starting point of a series of complex transformations that are taking place as budgets are being shrunk. Significantly, these transformations generate an ambivalence within the library space about what exactly has disappeared as a result of austerity – many losses, then, remain elusive.

Whilst there are localized acts of mourning, collectively, this generates the condition of ‘austerity melancholia’; here, losses are ingested whole and communities are unable to undergo a process of mourning as a result. Such losses, however, do not simply disappear; they (re)emerge throughout moments of the everyday, but they do so in a form that makes the loss unrecognisable – the loss is encrypted. Consequently, this generates a haunted presence in which an attunement to that which haunts emerges, yet its encryption prevents the loss from being revealed. This talk then goes on to explore the implications of this encryption within the wider context of a (negative) austerity politics.