The affective life of austerity: uncanny atmospheres and paranoid temporalities

Abstract

This paper moves beyond conceptualisations of austerity as a fiscal policy towards understanding austerity as lived and felt in everyday life, with a particular focus on its affective life. Through an ethnographic focus on public libraries, this paper argues that austerity can take the form of an affective atmosphere. Bringing together psychoanalytic and Spinozist-Deleuzian accounts of affect this paper explores austerity as an uncanny atmosphere, in which austerity is lived through a series of unknowns that re-emerge throughout the library space. Paranoia subsequently emerges as a way in which to live with uncanny austerity – to make known the unknowns generated by austerity. This paranoia cannot be attributed to ‘paranoid individuals’, but to practices that become paranoid due to the blurring of reality and fiction that uncanny austerity generates. As austerity continues year after year, the uncertainties that emerge as a result of continual budget reductions are at the same time felt as something already known. In other words, there is a felt sense that austerity will inevitably lead to the contraction of the library service. Lived austerity, therefore, now carries such weight and has a particular depth of experience due to the innumerable previous years of, and encounters with, austerity.