Jeremy Gilbert

What is austerity

This is the edited transcript of a conversation between Rebecca Bramall, editor of this special issue, Jeremy Gilbert, editor of New Formations, and James Meadway, who at the time was chief economist of the New Economics Foundation and is currently advising shadow chancellor of the exchequer John McDonnell in a consultancy capacity. The discussion touches on the different meanings of ‘austerity’ in contemporary political discourse, the history of neoliberal austerity programmes and their political and social effects, the uneven implementation of austerity in the UK, and various other issues in understanding the cultural, social and economic politics of ‘austerity’ in contemporary Britain, today and in the future.

Writing and Resistance

This issue of New Formations presents a range of exciting new work which spans and connects the fields of cultural studies, literary theory and radical political philosophy. Two essays in the issue are concerned with the specificities of contemporary sexual politics. David Alderson’s ‘Acting Straight’ examines the deployment of the term ‘straight acting’ to describe men who have sex with other men but are not considered effeminate: a widespread and under-analysed categorisation. His paper looks at the significance of this term in relation to an intensified social self-consciousness of gender, especially in relation to sexuality, by focusing on the reality TV series, Playing It Straight; and he discusses the cultural political dynamics of masculinity and effeminacy in relation to increasing inequality, precarity and austerity. Naomi Booth’s essay, ‘Bathetic Masochism’, examines the privileged position given to masochism in some recent critical-theoretical work and argues that the recent Fifty Shades novels romanticise masochism as a shrinking of the female subject accompanied by an increase in her orgasmic and consumer power. Three articles are concerned with relationships between writing, disclosure and interpretation. Clare Birchall’s ‘The Aesthetics of the Secret’ departs from the recent revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, positing secrets as subject to and the subject of radical politics rather than merely as appropriate objects of regulation. Birchall turns from a hermeneutics of the secret towards an aesthetics of the secret, arguing that, considered as a Rancièrean ‘distribution of the sensible’, this aesthetics can help us to imagine a politics of the secret not bound to policy and legalities. Also concerned with the politics of openness and enclosure, Sarah Kember’s ‘Why Write? Feminism, publishing and the politics of communication’ deals with the enclosure and delimitation of a politics of communication within and across the knowledge and creative sectors, showing how this enclosure is enacted by reform agendas, and specifically by the alignment of copyright and access reform in the UK. The question of writing brings philosophy to bear on policies of openness but, Kember argues, in an environment of increasingly proprietorial knowledge and of creativity as market competition, the key question to ask of writing is not the metaphysical one (what is writing?) but rather the more provisional question: why write? Elizabeth Coles’s ‘Psychoanalysis and the Poem’ continues the theme of writing and interpretation, examining how returning to the issue of interpretation in twentieth-century psychoanalysis can help us reopen the question of the discipline’s bearing on literary studies, in particular the study of poetry. Reading the work of Sándor Ferenczi and D.W. Winnicott,