Shock and subjectivity in the age of globalization

Abstract

This article considers the nature of `shock' as both an experiential category and as a strategy used in the processes of globalization. I examine the trope of shock in the lives of coal miners in Romania's Jiu Valley region. The argument contrasts two definitions of shock — the `mimetic' view and the `productive' view (the latter embodied in Ferenczi's notion of Erschütterung) — and shows that, while the strategic goals of globalizing economic institutions (IMF, World Bank) and empire-building states strive for a `productive' shock, what global processes tend to produce in communities marginalized from global flows is a `mimetic' shock and a `shocked subjectivity'.