ÌÇÐÄTV

Dr Michael Mack (Durham): Crises and Contaminations

Apprehensions of crises go hand in hand with a fear of contaminations. The fear of deteriorating circumstances, of a decline in our living conditions causes the felt need for a tightening of borders in order to keep out those who are conceived to be strange, weird: the strangers, the immigrants. The financial crisis of 2008 has by now already turned into a political crisis where issues of policing borders, of identity, race and nationality are the exclusive focus of public discussion while issues of economic benefit such as employment, tax income and trade have almost become irrelevant. In the 2014 book Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis I have proposed the provocative thesis that after the financial crisis a certain economist paradigm which reduces diversity to the spurious and identifying 'evidence' of numbers has become the exclusive consideration which subsumes all aspects of life from health to ethics. By comparing two early twentieth-century classics -- D H Lawrence’s Women in Love and Kafka’s Das Schloss -- my talk analyses why and how an economist obsession with numbers determines contemporary politics and policy especially at those points where it avows to diminish the role of business or, in other words, economics as such (when leading Brexiteers claim that they are not interested in the economic benefit of immigrants from EU countries but instead attempt to restore the integrity and purity of English culture which is apparently threatened by these immigrants). We need a theory of contaminations (such as attempted in my 2016 book Contaminations) in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of why the political focus on policing borders and keeping out foreigners obfuscates its specific economistic motivation: one that reduces human beings to numbers.