Cultural Production in the Age of Austerity

By Yesenia Barragan 
Source: teleSUR English

Red lipstick stains. Lines outside the cash-for-gold-shops. Expired soup cans bouncing down a lonely sidewalk.

I spy from the corner of my eye…fragments, little traces of this curious, present moment: the age of austerity. While politicians push paperwork to slash investments in whatever vestiges of public health or education remain, anxious women are flocking to the clean aisles of pharmacies and malls to grab red lipstick, an inexpensive luxury whose sales are said to be booming in this crisis. As I document in my recently published book, Selling Our Death Masks: Cash-for-Gold in the Age of Austerity (Zero 2014), a radical, surrealist historical ethnography, the number of cash-for-gold shops, where struggling people exchange their gold jewelry and mementos for some cash, has skyrocketed in the West since 2008. And across the street from those pharmacies and wandering cash-for-gold vendors, a handful of recently expired soup cans sit beside a supermarket trash bin, rejected pickings from a crowd of newly homeless economic refugees of the crisis.

This is the landscape, the physical geography of austerity. Innumerable newspaper articles and studies have been written and re-written over and over to show us how bad it all is for the most of us (and yes, it is very bad). But our current moment demands more than this strictly political and economic inquiring. The physical geography of austerity urgently requires its revolutionary geographers and cultural workers to help us all make sense of the times, of the red lipstick and lonely soup cans, to prepare us for the “the profound reorganization of ideals and institutions and human relationships,” as the philosopher Melvin Rader noted in 1947 reflecting on the post-war cultural crisis of America. Indeed, it is time to ask how austerity looks, feels, smells, and tastes…

But how do we this? How do we begin to taste or really feel a bit of austerity? Writing in 1936, Walter Benjamin observed the revolutionary nature of film, and in particular the close-up technique, a potential guiding post for the future geographers and cultural technicians of the crisis. “By close-ups of the things around us,” Benjamin explained, “by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.” Radical close-ups of austerity—in multiple mediums—can help clue us into its unnoticed rules and, more importantly, the abounding possibilities of social transformation.

Toward a Cultural Production of Austerity

By the time I arrived in Madrid in late 2012, the cash-for-gold craze had already reached its peak. By 2010, at the height of the crisis, cash-for-gold shops tripled to nearly 500 in southern Spain, while Madrid alone hailed 700 shops by 2011. Working-class and middle-class Spanish families struggling to make ends meet were flocking in droves to the country’s cash-for-gold shops, often the last and final financial resort, trading in their treasured communion rings and passed-down necklaces for euros to pay for rising electricity or health bills. It’s a quite emotional sight, I was told by multiple cash-for-gold vendors, who at least in Spain tend to immigrant men from Latin America and are deemed “thermometers of the crisis,” as their continuing presence means that the economy is still struggling. People from all walks of life come to them crying, telling the cash-for-gold guys that they really don’t want to sell their necklaces or rings, rich with memories and time. But, as a cleaning lady and widow from the island of Mallorca named María José Rigo warns us, “you can’t eat gold,” waking us up from this fetishistic love affair with this shiny yellow stuff. ‘Get on with it,’ Rigo appears to remind us.

Meanwhile, in Greece, another frontline of the empire of austerity, militants carry attacks on the cash-for-gold shops, trashing storefronts not just because they’re accused of ‘taking advantage’ of the crisis, but also due to ties with Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi fascist party with rising popularity throughout the country. One poster against the cash-for-gold shop states that the owners buy gold because “I know that you are in despair and that you don’t know how to resist, that you’re scared. I know, therefore, that you’ll take whatever I give you, and that you’ll even thank me on top.” In Selling Our Death Masks, I document these and other tales of the present life of the elusive cash-for-gold shop, to really feel what austerity is like from inside the shop, connecting the cash-for-gold shops in Madrid and anti-fascist mobilizations in Greece to slavery in Colombia and foreclosed homes in Detroit. As the anthropologist Michael Taussig notes in the foreword, “The banks proved the mystic hollowness of what is called ‘the economy,’ far more mystical than millennia of myth making concerning gold.”

But cash-for-gold shops are just one signpost on this harsh economic terrain, and others have also produced close-ups of austerity’s remaining signboards. Take, for example, the popular British comedy-drama and mockumentary, Derek (2012), written and directed by the British comedian Ricky Gervais, the original creator of the famous television show The Office(2001). Led by Derek, a sweet, goofy assistant caretaker with special needs played by Gervais, the show is set in a nursing home somewhere in present-day, working-class England and documents the everyday world of its aging residents, caretakers, and workers. But the residents too, feel the ax of austerity, as staff confront slashing funds and the constantly looming threat of having to shut down altogether as the crisis makes its way into the nursing home. Indeed, across the U.K., nursing homes are increasingly being shut down with rising cuts for adult social services. Forget about the U.S., the western wonderland of capitalism, where meals for seniors and social workers are being axed for a healthier robust budget. “It’s not pleasant, it really isn’t—going hungry,”expressed Jo Anne Murray, a retired then-66-year-old nurse who lives on social security and food stamps in Michigan. With no more senior meals, her refrigerator only held bread and butter. Is this, then, what austerity (or shall I say, late capitalism) tastes like, a slap of cold butter smeared awkwardly on Wonder Bread?

Or does it look like the ethnically ambiguous immigrant woman escaping fascists in a dark, graffitied alleyway of Athens, one of the scenes in a recent, fifteen-minute film written by Greek filmmakers Yiorgos Bakalis and Eliana Kanaveli? The short film invites viewers to connect the overlapping struggles of migrants and anti-fascists in neoliberal Greece.

Or does the crisis smell like fire, whose reddish-orange flames are captured by the California artist Alex Schaefer in his 22-by-28 inch oil painting of a burning Chase bank in Los Angeles? Schaefer was visited by police who asked if he was a terrorist. He told The Los Angeles Times that his painting, “Chase Burning,” is a “visual metaphor for the havoc that banking practices have caused to the economy.”

Or is it found in the thirty “snap-shots” documented in The End of the World As We Know It? Crisis, Resistance, and the Age of Austerity (AK Press, 2014), one of the few, recent, critical studies on the crisis and movements against edited by the sociologist Deric Shannon. With thirty essays written by a range of people – activists, organizers, academics, and other workers – the goal of the anthology is not to, as Shannon notes, “tell the whole story of the crisis or various responses to it, but rather a way of sharing stories and analysis in one place, so we might learn from each other.”

The time is ripe to dig deeper, to urgently ask and begin to answer these questions, to calculate the social meaning of the lipstick sales, the empty classrooms, the increasingly naked faces of capitalism. Does austerity, borrowing from Benjamin, have a “secular cult of beauty”? What are the aesthetic politics of the crisis? Where does the economic narrative of “tightening our belts” meet the fatphobic politicians and cultural obsessions with deadly thinness? And what color is late capitalism? Is it whiter and whiter, like American cities where the grandchildren of the white-flighters are escaping back to, or blacker and browner, like the suburbs across the US with broken transportation systems and alarming rates of poverty?

Our generation urgently requires a radical, cultural production of austerity. “We need an analysis of culture, of meaning-making, of daily life alongside a general understanding of the institutions and structures that largely organize the experience of daily life,” Deric Shannon recently told me. “It’s this way that social movements are capable of transforming individual acts of refusal and resistance into the collective processes necessary to alter the forms of life available to us in any given historical moment. A cultural approach that fails to make those sorts of connections can easily lead to a boutique form of activity, relegated to fringe countercultures. But without an understanding of culture, and without engagements with meaning-making, we risk boring ourselves to death with structural details without ever understanding how they are reproduced and, importantly, how they can be altered.”

Yesenia Barragan is a PhD Candidate in Latin American History at Columbia University. Based out of NJ/NYC, she is the author of Selling Our Death Masks: Cash-for-Gold in the Age of Austerity on Zero Books.

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Cultural-Production-in-the-Age-of-Austerity-20150117-0021.html