CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE DISCOURSE OF FRUGAL MEASURES AND THE CAPITALISTIC HEGEMONY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Text topic: Culture Studies

Text author: Hajrudin Hromadžić

Basic aim of this text is to try to give a critical analysis of the discourse of austerity measures which is manifested in intensified production of a specific type of media, public and political narratives and symbolic metaphors such as painful cuts, tightening of belts, alleged necessities in enforcement of different social diets etc, as well as similar syntagms like favourable or unfavourable business climates or devastating stormy crisis which, in the end, result in ideological and hegemonic perpetuation of the political enomy of capitalism and its pertaining power. Such discourse is approached as ideologically fabricated naturalistic discursive formations which use seemingly benign metaphors to create an illusion of alleged non-ideological crisis of recent capitalist economy and its political and social aspects. A prevailing disciplinary/case approach in analysis of the given problem motif is in the domain of rich arsenal of conceptual culture studies ie theoretical schools (structuralism, semiotics, neo-Marxism, critical discourse analysis, theory of ideology, critical social theories etc) and authors (Bahtin, Gramsci, Hall, van Dijk, Barthes, Foucault …) that were significantly used in cultural studies both substantially and methodologically. In conclusion, examples of given syntagms provide evidence that hegemony cannot simply remain in the framework of the predictable and controlled language of technocracy, and is therefore unsuccessfully searching for a way out, for an escape into the connotation, symbolic allegory, metaphor, hidden meaning.