Economic episodes: Crisis and the affective politics of everyday life
Item
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Title
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Economic episodes: Crisis and the affective politics of everyday life
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:13c25d5bf4bd:12007
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identifier
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12688
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Creator
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Andrews, John,
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Contributor
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Patricia Clough
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology | affect | neoliberalism | the economy
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Abstract
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This dissertation advances critical scholarship around the performative character of "the economy" in the wake of neoliberalism. I argue that public moods -- what Paolo Virno calls the emotional situation -- have become fundamental to how "the economy" is understood and represented by economists, politicians, pundits, and everyday people alike. Moreover, the emotional situation affects how the economy is experienced -- both psychically and culturally. I examine four economic moments in the last 40 years -- stagflation, Reaganomics, dotcom bubbles, and most recently mass home foreclosures -- alongside the respective moods attendant to them -- depression, burn-out, euphoria, and rage. A goal of my dissertation is to demonstrate how depression, burn-out, euphoria, and rage shape understandings and ideologies of what is economic or non-economic at different points in history since the 1970s. I argue that the barring of feelings and mood from the strictly economic has become a key mode of governance in the United States, even as "the economy" increasingly becomes the object of public concern and attention. Thus my dissertation takes to task how "the economy" functions as a kind of genre with reverberations in policy-making, mental disorders, social protest, to name a few.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
