Ten years after: it’s the economy and culture, stupid!

This issue marks the start of the tenth anniversary volume of the Journal of Cultural Economy. The editors, together with the new chair of the editorial board, Fabian Muniesa, decided to use the anniversary as an opportunity to return to the vexed question of what it means to think about the economy through, and with, culture. We have planned a series of initiatives that will take place over the next year or so, beginning with contents in the main section of this issue that have been specially selected to reflect something of the scope and range of the questions that currently preoccupy our readers, reviewers and writers. In the Review and Commentary section, we feature Diane Coyle’s review All to Play for in Measuring the Economy; we reassert our commitment to providing a forum to enhance the circulation of non-Anglophone scholarship by publishing a revised and translated version of Antoine Hennion’s important essay on attachment and deliver on our previously expressed aim (McFall 2015) to be a little faster to respond to world events by publishing Koray Caliskan’s reflections on the Turkish coup attempt of 15 July 2016 in what we hope will be the first of a series of rapid response essays.

Writing this Introduction in the week that Donald Trump secured victory in the US election, this seems more important than ever. Having gone to bed on 8 November, comforted by the unequivocal polls predicting a Clinton win, we woke to the post-factual upset that the big data analytics industry had overpromised again. Take that, science, measurement, quantitative modelling! Qualitative researchers were on Twitter the day after to demand that the big data power tool fetishes now be set aside and questions of meaning, interpretation and yes – culture, be given proper regard. It is far too soon to reflect seriously on the election result but there is something about culture, how it is thought about and addressed practically, in relation to politics and economies, that is implicated in the stunned shock surrounding Trump’s ascendancy. Thus, when Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic in September about the fact-checking bamboozlement surrounding so many of Trump’s claims, ‘the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally’ (2016) she struck at the heart of what was happening.¹ This is something that Stuart Hall (1984) was at pains to point out when he remarked on the importance of the kind of stories people tell over their content. While Trump and his followers grasped meanings ‘already concealed or held within the forms of the stories themselves’ (1984, p. 7), narratively constructed in ways that infused a certain version of the world, the press, pollsters and the Democratic campaign sweated over analytics² and content that in the end seem to have mattered much less. That Trump’s rhetoric was empty, slight, inaccurate, fantastical and inflammatory aided rather than undermined the circulation and consumption of his familiar stories about greatness heroically restored. As Katherine Murphy wrote, forensic interrogation of Trump and strong editorial lines ‘perversely helped Trump’s campaign, fuelling his grievance narrative and making him stronger’.³

Hall’s account of the narrative construction of reality of course is only one of the myriad ways that culture matters in shaping how political and economic events unfold. The important question is whether we have thought hard enough about this since the first bloom of cultural studies – and there is not a simple answer to that. To explain how this came to be the case, it is worth briefly rehearsing how some of the historical connections between cultural studies and cultural economy played out.

The articulation of ‘culture’ and ‘economy’, it should not be forgotten, was foundational to the discipline of cultural studies. The notion that culture could not – or could no longer – be relegated to the ideological superstructure and was therefore imbued with the work of economic value was the defining insight of British cultural studies, expressed in different ways by Raymond Williams (2005) and Stuart Hall (2016). Yet, this insight has evolved in ways that the founding figures of cultural studies could hardly have foreseen. At its beginnings, cultural studies was concerned with culture from the point of view of consumption and the possibilities of subversion that might arise from within it. Cultural theorists often understood the rise of mass consumption after the Second World War in the most optimistic terms, as the democratisation of what had hitherto been understood as an elite form of enjoyment, and as the springboard for multiple forms of countercultural consumption. Popular cultural production was rarely conceived as an economic form in itself within this optic; rather cultural production by and for minorities was understood as somehow outside and beyond the sphere of economic exchange, subversive by default.

These assumptions have long proven unsustainable, not least because the so-called industries of mass cultural production were already busily catering to minority, countercultural tastes by the 1960s. But beyond this, it hardly needs pointing out that the rise of post-Fordism – with its focus on intellectual, creative and cultural labour – definitively complicated the categorical distinctions between production and consumption that were axiomatic to early cultural studies. We live in an era where the large Fordist cultural industries have long since given way to a process of vertical disintegration incorporating diffuse networks of independent cultural producers and consumers, where the boundaries between the corporate production of culture and the democratised economy of ‘sharing’ are increasingly porous, and where consumption itself is conceived as an act of production (the prosumer). This is a democratisation of culture that has benefited the right, indeed the far-right, as much as the left, as the role of social media in disseminating online vigilantism and securing Trump’s victory made all too clear.

Cultural production today is much more obviously leveraged as a form of labour, albeit precarious, poorly paid and very often unwaged, making it impossible to sustain the optimistic theory of subversive consumption implicit in the early work of cultural studies theorists (Neilson & Coté [eds.] 2014). A significant aspect of the work currently being undertaken within the field is interested precisely in the labour of cultural production – an articulation of contemporary labour studies and culture that could hardly have been imagined by the founding figures of cultural studies (Gill 2014). These enquiries intersect with and are often closely informed by a multitude of other traditions of thought, from Italian autonomist Marxism to feminist and postcolonial theories of labour. For those who have witnessed various third way governments promote the economic virtues of the creative economy, it is becoming increasingly clear that the democratisation of higher education – and thus cultural production – has produced a new lumpenproletariat of high-skilled, creatively literate but permanently contingent workers. Such developments signal the inadequacy of theorising culture from the exclusive point of view of consumption. Culture seems increasingly to work as a force of production and a vector of circulation, a form of value that circulates with all the liquidity of money, both everywhere and nowhere. This perhaps accounts for the evanescence of the terms in recent theory, where it appears as simultaneously all-powerful and elusive, relentlessly productive yet prone to constant failure and breakdown.

The empirical privileging of consumption as the exemplary topic for cultural analyses took place despite the explicit acknowledgement of the instability and provisionality of the boundaries between production and consumption in Marx’s Grundrisse, and the conceptual models by cultural theorists like Stuart Hall (1980; cf. du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay & Negus 1997) and Richard Johnson (1987) that developed from it. This left Meaghan Morris (1988) to demand an end to what she called the banality in cultural studies of treating the various activities surrounding consumption as enigmatic, but those surrounding production as already known through Marxist and structuralist explanations of the functions of economy. A stream of literature over the next decade or so⁴ that redressed the imbalance followed culminating in the publication of the cultural economy collections compiled by du Gay and Pryke (2002) and Amin and Thrift (2004). By that time, the view that ‘something called ‘culture’ is both somehow critical to understanding what is happening to, as well as to practically intervening in, contemporary economic and organisational life’ (du Gay & Pryke 2002, p. 1) was firmly established and the ‘cultural turn’ had placed substantive and epistemological questions about representation in disciplinary inquiries ranging from social policy to geography and management and organisation studies.

One of the consequences of this was a more concrete recognition that economies, markets and organisations, far from being independent of descriptions of them, were constituted through such descriptions. The idea that economic stuff was framed, formatted and performed was accompanied by an increasing preoccupation with documenting the detail of the human bodies and ‘prostheses, tools, equipment, technical devices, algorithms, etc.’ (Callon 2005, p. 4; cf. Thrift 2007) involved. This renewed interest in the practical and material character of economic life, shaped as it was by the cultural turn, thus turned again, almost ironically far away from the preoccupations of earlier cultural theorists with the hermeneutic puzzles of meanings and interpretation. In literature within and influenced by Science and Technology Studies, actor-network theory and non-representational theory, questions of culture have figured rarely and faintly (cf. Entwistle & Slater 2014). In the years immediately preceding the launch of this journal, this re-enchantment with the ‘matter’ of economies was accompanied by a degree of fatigue in relation to questions of culture – what more was there to be said after all? Our editorial commentaries were not immune to this, often emphasising our concern with exploring the character of relations, the means of connection between nexus, rather than theorising culture per se. As our first editorial placed it:

it is the contingent and mutable mechanisms that connect diverse elements into practically operative and performable networks of relations that have to be analytically netted at the levels of both theoretical conceptualisation and empirical investigation. And it is becoming increasingly evident that achieving this objective requires not that culture be put back into the place of the dependent variable from which the cultural turn rescued it, but that it be put into a new place where it is the nature, character and operation of its relationship with other entities be they social, natural, economic, or technical that is at stake rather than its role as a force endowed with constructive capacities that derive from another level. (Bennett, McFall & Pryke 2008, p. 2)

Still, culture, like ‘the social’, is not that easy to dispense with. As the contents of the journal accumulated, cultural politics, value, industries, work, intermediaries and consumption have, alongside cultures of finance, branding and promotion, been recurrent themes.⁵ More often than not, though, the word ‘cultural’ in our contents archive marks out an empirical topic and there have been few explicit or extended, analytical deliberations on what ‘cultural’ means in research on economies, markets and organisations. Instead, two other tendencies might be observed. The first is a preponderance of either dimensions or near synonyms of culture in analyses of rhetoric, discourses, affect, talk, myth, myth, metaphor, fictions and narrative. The second is a proliferant emphasis on processes and phenomena that stand in place, elaboration or correction of the constructive capacities of culture. Performativity, assemblage, agencement, device, attachments and the social life of methods occupy this position, more or less, in their efforts to more precisely capture the relation between what is said and done and the material shape of the world. When Michel Callon remarks that the ‘constantly renewed process of performation encompasses expression, self-fulfilling prophecies, prescription and performance’ (2007, p. 330), it is this lineage he is pronouncing.

More recently, attention has turned to the practices and processes surrounding economisation, valuation and value.⁶ This work demonstrates an engagement with the explosion of techniques of measurement, quantification, capitalisation, monetisation that has taken place since Michael Power’s (1999) prescient account of audit society and with the new means afforded for researching such topics through big data and algorithmic analyses. A whole succession of things – uncertainty, reputation, natural disasters, terror threats, frozen tissue, well-being and mood – formerly regarded as somehow beyond measure have emerged in this work as subject to it. These projects have cultural stakes. They are rooted in the long-standing concern with figuring out what culture is, what it does, what it is to be delineated, preserved or protected from. If an unanticipated consequence of the broader recognition that ‘culture’ mattered, both in terms of understanding and intervening in contemporary economic and organisational life, was that culture seemed to mean everything, and therefore nothing, the work to make sense of it has continued – only often without identifying itself as such. This has been a useful strategy but one that is not without costs. Discussion of valuation, attachments, arts, and so on, may allow researchers to explore some dynamics and processes that may formerly have been ascribed as ‘cultural’ within economies – but this does not resolve the empirical and epistemological reductions and assymetries at play when culture is relegated to a status as a simple artefact of modernist thought or the category separating work of intellectuals (cf. Entwistle & Slater 2014). To mark our tenth anniversary, we therefore plan, through a series of initiatives and events, beginning with the contents selected here, to promote more direct engagement with questions about what culture adds to analyses of economic and political life

In this, we reflect a growing ambition within our community to think more directly, notwithstanding all its difficulties, about how culture matters. This is evident in a number of recent and forthcoming publications including Muniesa et al.’s (2017, forthcoming) programmatic intervention on adopting a cultural approach to capitalisation which they explain as follows.⁷

Our hypothesis is precisely that the problem with capitalization may be missed if approached with the lens that capitalization itself favors the most – i.e. that of economic calculation. This is surely not a book on the economics (heterodox or not) of capitalization. But, then, on the what of capitalization is it? Is there not a quick, convenient way to phrase the nature of the scholarly standpoint that we are putting together? One would be tempted to use here the word ‘culture,’ and to do so quite gladly had the notion not been spoiled by pages and pages of ambivalences and disagreements. But the notion still works, after all. So culture it is, then, understood with all its nuances and contradictions, but presented with a number of caveats: culture defined primarily against economic reason (Sahlins 1976), considered also indeed as what gives economic reason its very shape (Zelizer 2010) and eventually as the stuff economic reason is just made of (Du Gay & Pryke 2002; Best & Paterson 2010; Sum & Jessop 2013; Jessop, Young & Scherrer 2015). We certainly gain some clarity, despite the word’s obscurities, from calling ‘cultural’ our inquiry into capitalization – especially if we present it, as we do, as some sort of a guided tour. (2017, p. 20)

It is this concern with the problems that are being missed through an overprivileging of economic, technical and material processes that seems to underlie the reassertion of more overtly cultural approaches. An underappreciation of how significant a role culture plays in making economic and political reasonings is surely involved in the shock of the post-factual turn. Many of the expressions that have appeared or gained new currency throughout 2016; Brexit, the rustbelt, baskets of deplorables, liberal elites, post-factual, point to the sheer heft underpinning contests of meaning and interpretation. The processes and dynamics signalled by such expressions should remind us of both the limits of quantitative modelling, even that powered by big, heterogeneous and interlinked datasets and algorithmic analyses, and the stakes of neglecting culture in, and for, all of its ambivalent senses. Whether culture is taken primarily to signal more or less distinguishable ways of life, meaningful practices, interpretation and representation, rhetoric, arts or civilisation or some fluid combination of all these, it should be clear that culture is doing some work that quantitative analysis is not rendering visible.

The papers we have chosen to include in this anniversary issue present a cross-section of many of the concerns we have covered here. These papers explore the construction of infrastructures ranging from the densely material, in the case of Janette Webb and David Hawkey’s analysis of attempts to assemble sustainable energy markets, to the seemingly immaterial in the case of David Beer’s account of the (over) promises of the data analytics industry and Will Davies’ of real time mood monitoring, ultimately complicating the boundaries between the two. Davies analysis of how moods, monitored through multiple technologies dedicated to the valuation of affect in real time, have become central to contemporary economies of immaterial or affective labour resonated with Peter Campbell, Tamsin Cox and Dave O’Brien’s account of the technologies of measurement mobilised to render the ineffable stuff of culture in urban regeneration projects. At an analytical level, each of the contributions engages the question of performativity and its failures. Brett Christophers contributes to an emerging literature on the gravitational pull of the yield curve in calibrating economic expectations, while Beer and Davies investigate the performativity of data-production at the macro and micro scales. Finally, Matthew Watson’s analysis of Rousseau’s Crusoe myth and Diane Coyle’s review of Matthias Schmelzer’s The Hegemony of Growth expose the historical conditions under which hegemonic economic models such as Gross Domestic Product or homo oeconomicus are produced and normalised, undertaking the critical task of genealogical excavation which may help us to better question such models in the present. Antoine Hennion’s essay on the collective origins of the concept of attachment locates it alongside detachment as ‘the permanent work of economy’ in ways that lead straight to the theorisation of economic performativity.

The continuing prominence of performativity is closely connected, even if the connections are left implicit, to understandings of culture. Judith Butler’s performative theory of gender as cultural signifier had an enormous impact on the field of cultural studies in general and (perhaps surprisingly) on the social studies of finance in particular.⁸ In Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) had replaced a simple cultural constructionism with a more flexible understanding of performative speech acts, insisting that structure could be subverted as well as reproduced through the continual iteration of signs. At her most utopian, Butler envisaged the cultural signifier of gender as infinitely liquid, somehow abstracted from all foundational reference in the body, and capable of circulating in an autonomous semiotic realm, like money. Butler nevertheless understood this circulation of signifiers as fully performative – indeed materialist – in that it actively and continuously reinscribed bodies with new values, remaking the world in its own image.

In retrospect, Butler (2010) herself has highlighted the philosophical and political weaknesses of this position. In its efforts to eschew all foundationalism, performativity theory runs the risk of generating a hypernominalism, where the utterance of speech acts is sufficient to produce its own reality. Particular performances may be subverted, but performativity itself never falters, forever findings its truth inscribed in the material world (Cooper & Konings 2016). Arguably, this is precisely the problem that now confronts the social studies of finance, which in recent years has become prone to a kind of ‘hagiography of knowledge’ (Bryan, Martin, Montgomerie & Williams 2012), convinced that models make their own economic world and that any alternative to this position would signify a hopeless retreat into foundationalism. The impasse became flagrant in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, when theorists within the social studies of finance, like many others, found themselves struggling to account for the seemingly mundane problem of economic and epistemological failure.

The impasse between performativity debates and theorising culture means culture often appears, as it does in most of these articles, as an emergent property, an ineffable something that emanates from the contingent connectivities of material and immaterial infrastructures across multiple scales and time horizons. Following Randy Martin (2013), we might argue that what we once called ‘culture’ appears to have succumbed to the ‘derivative logic’ of contemporary economies of circulation. Or to paraphrase Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, culture, like the derivative, now appears to signal ‘the contestability of fundamental value’ itself (2005, p. 37); not only is it deprived of all essential attributes, but also it functions as a scrambling device whose overall effect is to constantly undermine the premise of culture as essence.

And yet, this economy of derivative culture is constantly interrupted and challenged by political forces that seek to revive and enforce the very opposite claim, that is, the idea of culture as fundamental value. Indeed, it is the cultural far-right, or alt-right, that has emerged as the most potent political forces of recent years increasingly monopolising the language of anti-capitalist critique. Recep Erdogan’s Turkey is only one example of an authoritarian regime that has made its peace with neoliberalism, precisely because it is able to offer a political salve in the form of a brutal cultural nationalism. The not-so-latent xenophobia mobilised by the Brexit campaign, the victory of Donald Trump and the rising fortunes of Marine Le Pen, all point to the ascendance of a cultural foundationalism that is logically at odds with the derivative logic of culture but operationally synergistic. Caliskan’s reflections on the failed coup attempt in Turkey testifies to this new reality and should help open up a new horizon of conceptual enquiry for this journal. Increasingly it appears that the ‘derivative logic’ of culture constantly incites and provokes renewed appeals to cultural foundation, in much the same way that the financial derivative recurrently demands some sort of anchoring in safe assets or stable institutional referents. How to conceptualise the relationship between culture and economy in light of this contradiction presents itself as one of the key challenges before us as we go forward.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge our gratitude to the outgoing chair, and founding editor, Tony Bennett for his exceptional work in establishing the journal and thank Fabian Muniesa for taking on this new role.

Notes

1. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-makes-his-case-in-pittsburgh/501335/

2. On the role of data analytics in US election campaigns, see Kreiss (2012) and on the Clinton campaign’s reliance on algorithms, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/09/clintons-data-driven-campaign-relied-heavily-on-an-algorithm-named-ada-what-didnt-she-see/

3. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/11/dont-blame-the-media-trumpland-is-a-place-where-truth-doesnt-matter?CMP=twt_gu

4. This is a vast literature, but see, for representative examples, Allen and Pryke (1994), du Gay (1996, 1997), McFall (2004), Miller and Rose (1990), Mitchell (1998), Negus (1992), Nixon (1996) and Thrift (2001).

5. http://www.journalofculturaleconomy.org/jce-archive/ for a snapshot of the complete archive.

6. See, for example, Pallesen (2016), Radin (2015), Helgesson and Kjellberg [eds.] (2013), Lehtonen and Hoyweghen [eds.] (2014), Newsinger and Green (2016) and Trompette (2013).

7. See also Jessop, Young and Scherrer [eds.] (2015) and Maurer et al.’s forthcoming Bloomsbury 6 volume series on the Cultural History of Money including volumes on the Age of Enlightenment (Desan [ed.] 2017), the Age of Empire (Nieburg & Dodd [eds.] 2017) and the Modern Age (Nelms and Pedersen [eds.] 2017). The contributors to Cochoy, Deville and McFall [eds.] (2017) tackle related questions in a collection exploring the ‘arts of market attachment’ while the Economics, Communication and Society group were recently successful in their efforts to get issues surrounding the rhetoric of economics, cultural studies of the economy, the political economy of communication, and organisational communication established as a permanent division of the National Communication Association, see also Hanan and Chaput [eds.] (2015).

8. As evidenced by the fact that her 2010 article Performative Agency, remains, by some margin, the most circulated and cited article ever published in the JCE.