BROADENING THE HORIZONS OF ECONOMY

Abstract

From corporations to occupied factories, a growing number of widely accessible books and documentary films have emerged to represent an array of economic concerns and the groups gathered around them. Viewed as a new form of political association, these representations offer a lens to contemporary social change. This article draws on theories of performativity to explore the ways in which such diversely constituted assemblies might transform the economy. Representation has a number of different meanings; it relates to how economic concerns are discursively represented and thereby made real while also referring to the political representation of different groups gathered around that concern. Putting these two senses of representation together, this article examines the temporal and spatial composition of two alternative economic representations, the documentary films The Take and Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse [The Gleaners and I]. Through The Take I explore the way in which alternative economies are performatively brought into being. I argue that The Gleaners and I illustrates how one might go about representing and reassembling the geography of economy through the idea of the periperformative. Together these films offer a way of broadening economy that has implications for the performative potential of research more generally.

Keywords:

• representation
• film
• performativity

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Katherine Gibson for her intellectual support and encouragement in the development of this paper. Thanks also to Darren Boyd for helping me to capture the film stills and to Julie Graham and Brett Bowden for their support.