[ecrea] The New (Ab)Normal - Keele University

The New (Ab)Normal:
The Cultural Politics of the New Authoritarianism
 27th June, 2017
 Keele University
Chancellors Building
CBA1.021
 Organisers:
 Dr Mark Featherstone
Sociology
Keele University
Office: 01782 734179
Mobile: +44 7450 989969
 Dr Eva Giraud
Media, Communications, and Culture
Keele University
Office: 01782 734258
 The New (Ab)Normal:
The Cultural Politics of the New Authoritarianism
 Following the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent tightening of 
economic conditions resulting from massive bank bail outs many of the 
major western liberal democracies lurched towards the right politically. 
The crash created a hole in public finances that increased economic and 
consequently social and cultural stresses with the result that rightist 
politics based upon law, order, discipline, hard work, and the policing 
of borders became more popular. In the immediate aftermath of the 
catastrophe this hardening of attitudes towards others remained inside 
the political mainstream and essentially took the form of a militarised 
version of (neo)liberalism intolerant of weakness and vulnerability.
 It is possible to argue that the political objective of this new 
militarised approach to policy was two-fold. In the European context, 
where the economic consensus suggested that it was necessary to balance 
the books, the aim was to claw back the money spent saving the financial 
system from public services deemed unproductive and too expensive. In 
order to defend this turn to austerity, the second policy aim of the 
hardening of the liberal agenda was to justify the move to an austere 
society and an austere cultural attitude through the denigration of 
others (the poor, ethnic minorities, immigrants, the disabled) who it 
was claimed were a drain on squeezed, scarce, resources. While the rich, 
and particularly the super-rich, remain necessary in this story, because 
they are seen to grow the economy and effectively keep people in work, 
various others are represented as redundant, unproductive, useless, and 
exorbitant. They cost too much and can no longer be afforded. They are 
the waste product of the stressed, austere, society and in this cultural 
politics they are effectively dehumanised.
 However, the problem with this social and cultural approach, which was 
designed to maintain the integrity of (neo)liberal consensus that has 
ruled since the end of the Cold War at the expense of the weakest and 
most vulnerable, is that it appears to have unleashed social and 
cultural forces that the mainstream seems no longer able to control. 
These social and cultural forces, which seem to be based upon the 
resentment of the old working classes towards a model of globalised 
society they feel abandoned them long ago and the fear of the middle 
classes who want to protect what they have managed to build in the good 
years, are transgressive of the (neo)liberal mainstream because they are 
organised around ideological coordinates that run counter to those that 
support the hegemonic global social, economic, political, and cultural 
order. While the hard language that speaks to those threatened by the 
effects of increasing economic stress emerged from the mainstream, it 
appears that it has now been taken over by populist leaders (Farage, 
Trump, Le Pen) who have advanced the original austerity narrative of the 
insiders in such a way that the (liberal) ‘system’ is now somehow 
supportive of the other who threatens normal, ‘hard working’, people and 
therefore must be replaced by a new social, economic, political, and 
cultural system based upon meeting the needs of the silent majority.
 But is this new narrative, which we are provocatively calling the new 
(ab)normal, truly revolutionary in its attempt to over-turn the 
(neo)liberal hegemon which has organised American-led processes of 
globalisation since the 1980s? If this is, indeed, the case, and we have 
entered a new cultural sphere of radical (ab)normality, then we wonder 
what the future holds. In many respects it seems that the new turn to 
the right is wholly negative, simply because its key figures have no 
positive programme for change. Instead the turn to a politics of 
anti-liberal (ab)normality, which have ironically come to the fore in 
the home countries of neo-liberal globalisation (Britain and America), 
appear to be based in little more than a violent rejection of otherness 
in all forms and a valorisation of borders, boundaries, and defensive 
formations. In this way the new (ab)normal, which we have seen emerge 
from the rhetoric of Farage, Trump, and Le Pen, seems to be founded upon 
an ideology of intolerance that recalls the Italian fascism and German 
national socialism of the 1920s and 1930s. Or perhaps this is hyperbole 
and there is actually very little that is new about the new situation. 
Perhaps the idea of anti-liberal (ab)normality is simply about the 
retrenchment of white, male, power which has effectively dominated the 
west from the very beginning?
 Given the possibility of the rise of these new cultural politics, 
which appear to legitimate racism and sexism in the name of a kind of 
anti-intellectual populism, should we now speak of a new 
authoritarianism that has been more or less entirely normalised? In the 
face of the potential rise of this new discourse, which we want to think 
about in terms of the new (ab)normality, the objectives of this workshop 
are to (1) try to make sense of the emergence of what appears to be a 
new form of intolerance, which seems to have very quickly moved from the 
margins into the mainstream and managed to construct itself in terms of 
an apparently radical, but also entirely reasonable and pragmatic 
response to the critical state of the old (neo)liberal hegemon; (2) 
think about whether academics need to develop new ways to respond to 
this potentially new cultural politics of violence through the use of 
knowledge, evidence, theory, and pedagogy in the name of creating a 
space for a more constructive, positive, inclusive cultural politics 
able to shape the future for everybody; and finally (3) to develop a 
proposal for a special issue of Cultural Politics, concerned with these 
issues, questions, and debates.
 Schedule
 10am – 10.30am
 Coffee
 10.30am – 11.00am
 Mark Featherstone (Keele University, Sociology) – Introduction: ‘The 
New (Ab)Normal: Sociology in Extremis’
 11.00am – 11.30am
 Ronnie Lippens (Keele University, Criminology) – ‘Rothko’s Chapel in 
Houston, Texas (1970): Luciferian Notes on the Age of Light’
 11.30am - 12.00pm
 Eva Giraud (Keele University, Media) and Sarah-Nicole Aghassi-Isfahani 
(Keele University, Sociology) – ‘Has Critique run out of Memes? 
Interrogating the ‘Post-Truth’ Media Landscape’
 12.00pm – 1.00pm
 Deborah Frizzell (Art, William Patterson University, USA) – 
‘Trajectories of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Chthulucene: A Case Study 
of “Outcast” Women Artists’
 1.00pm – 2.00pm    Lunch
 2.00pm – 2.30pm
 Kirsten Forkert (Media, Birmingham City University) – ‘Austerity, 
Right Populism and the Public Mood’
 2.30pm -3.00pm
 Seb Franklin (Kings College, London) and Penny Newell (Kings College, 
London) – ‘The Economics of Abnormality’
 3.00pm – 4.00pm    Steve Hall (Criminology, Teeside University) – 
‘System Reboot: Steve Bannon’s Dream as the Restoration of the 
Pseudo-Pacification Process’
 4.00pm – 4.30pm
 Coffee         4.30pm – 5.45pm
 Doug Kellner (Education, UCLA, USA) – ‘Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, 
and Authoritarian Populism’
 6.00pm – 7.00pm    Arthur Kroker (Political Science, University of 
Victoria, Canada) – ‘Fake Futures’
 Limited places are available. If you would like to attend this event, 
please contact either Mark Featherstone or Eva Giraud at Keele University.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please
use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------