Transitioning life after industrial closure: Desensitising melancholic bodies with memory and habit
Topics:
Keywords: melancholy, habit, loss, affect, industrial closure, coal transitions
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Vickie Zhang, National University of Singapore
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Abstract
This paper responds to conjunctures of economic change, affective crisis and embodied memory by exploring how affective transitions unfold for people caught in scenes of disrupted working life. Its empirical occasion is life in the wake of two closed coal mines in Australia and China. Addressing the disordered sensorium of workers affected by workplace closure, this paper centres the question of how to manage the intensities bodies already caught in the midst of feeling—in intensities of melancholy, intrusion, and loss. To do so, it offers habit as an alternative entry point into the micropolitics of embodiment and memory after events of disruption. In contrast to studies that situate post-closure memories and intensities as evidence of life as ‘closed down’ or gripped by the past, this paper animates these affects in order to attune to how memory can attenuate the exposures of being affected by changed circumstances. Rather than figuring desensitisation as a problem in embodied life, through habit it becomes something more restorative: precisely that which generates the anaesthetic assimilations and enfoldings that give everyday life its ordinary rhythm. By drawing on habit’s dual enabling and disabling operations, this paper offers an approach to memory as not just a passive remnant of a lost past, but an active force that is productive of present and future.
Transitioning life after industrial closure: Desensitising melancholic bodies with memory and habit
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Paper Abstract