Chapter 34
The Cultural Turn and the Conjunctural Economy: Economic Geography, Anthropology, and Cultural Studies
The tasks of economic geography … must extend beyond network cartography, to embrace issues relating to the social, spatial, and scalar constitution of economic systems, identities, processes, and development paths. This means superseding the New-Economic-Sociological convention of visualizing networks in the analytical foreground, while leaving only fuzzily-defined and undertheorized ‘context’ in the background.
(Peck 2004: 6)
It is possible to argue that economic geographers have become some of the leading exponents of cultural geography.
(Thrift 2000: 692)
Throughout this essay, I’ve often used the two terms ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ as if they are self-sufficient, separate, and centered. They are not. One of the intellectual impulses behind the cultural turn in economic geography is to undermine dualities, and the dualism of culture and economy is one that should go. The hope is for a world in which the very distinction between economy and culture is no longer important. Such a re-orientation, though, is difficult, and disorientating. …
(Barnes 2003: 95)
Introduction
In April 2004 the University of Bonn SECONS Discussion Forum convened to discuss the Socio-Economics of Space. Billed as a dialogue with economic geography and economic sociology in post-disciplinary terms, the forum has generated what may be one of the most systematic and extensive interrogations of the sociological turn in contemporary economic geography. In his paper to the Forum, Jamie Peck (2004: 1) extolled the heterodox and pluralist nature of economic geography, with “its practices and positions encompassing spatial science and nonrepresentational theory, neoMarxism and new geographical economics, modeling and ethnography, feminism and post-structuralism, and just about everything in between.” Peck suggested that while there are still those who “lament the passing of more ‘centered’ forms of economic geography, in which first neoclassical economics/regional science and then political economy/industrial restructuring dominated the sub-discipline,” such centering now seems almost unthinkable; “in the wake of economic geography’s cultural, relational, and institutional turns during the 1990s there has been an increasingly widespread acceptance of the merits of a more decentered and heterodox intellectual culture.” In this heterodox economic geography, with stable epistemologies decentered, commitments have emerged to “socialized and plural conceptions of the economic, a commitment to primary data collection and grounded theorizing, a focus on ‘real’, situated economies, skepticism about the logical and normative superiority of markets, a healthy disregard for disciplinary boundaries,” with new possibilities for different forms of political and economic subjectivity.
In this process of opening up economic geography to take more seriously the role of culture and a diversity of cultural logics in the economy, many geographers, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars (among others) have argued that the artificiality of the distinction between economy and culture has now become a barrier to further thinking and action (e.g. Amariglio and Ruccio 2003; Barnes 2003; Grossberg 2010: 3). For example, in his commentary on Gibson-Graham’s (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) Arturo Escobar pointed out that while “ ‘culture’ is a crucial domain in which to advance as much the theorization of non-capitalism as the critique of capitalocentrism … culture as such is largely absent from the Gibson-Graham volume, [although] the book offers essential lessons for those wishing to revision the economy and ecology from anti-essentialist cultural perspectives. One would hope that the dialogue among the various manifestations of anti-essentialist thought (in political, economic, cultural, and ecological theory) will commence in earnest” (Escobar 1999: 61). From cultural studies and cultural economy, Du Gay and Pryke (2002: 1) similarly called for recognition of the deeply embedded (and ambiguous) relationship between the economy and culture, where “among these proliferating uncertainties has emerged – or better, re-emerged – a belief that something called ‘culture’ is both somehow critical to understanding what is happening to, as well as to practically intervening in, contemporary economic and organizational life.” Jamie Peck (2004: 6) suggested something similar when he commented that given the proliferation of social and cultural approaches in economic geography, it is surprising that no rich theorization of “context” and the radical contextuality of the cultural turn has yet emerged (see also Barnes 1989). For Grossberg (2010: 25, 28, 30), this is not a call for a general theory of culture, but for an understanding of culture as “always in relation to other contexts, producing complex sets of multidimensional relations and connections…. Within any given space, such contexts are always plural.” It is a cultural studies “committed to the reality of relations that have determining effects, but it refuses to assume that such relations and effects have to be, necessarily, what they are” (Grossberg 2010: 22).
There are, of course, many ways to engage with the reciprocal influences of anthropology, cultural studies, and economic geography on each other. Every economic geographer working in a particular region of the world no doubt has close attachments to and possibly working relationships with economic or cultural anthropologists or cultural studies scholars working on similar issues. In this chapter, I will focus on three related aspects of these interactions, in order to highlight some crucial epistemological challenges each discipline is currently bringing to the other. First, I describe the cultural turn in anti-essentialist economic geography, anthropology, and cultural studies as it engages with the new “economy-culture-society” formations to which Peck, Thrift, Barnes, Escobar, DuGay and Pryke, and Grossberg were all referring. Second, I reflect on the role of overdetermination in deepening the cultural turn in economic geography. I do so by briefly elaborating four research approaches to overdetermination: historical/genealogical, relational, diverse, and future oriented. Third, I discuss the role of conjunctural analyses and what this might mean for how culture and context are understood in economic geography.
The Cultural Turn and the Diversity of Geo-economies
In rejecting realist epistemologies, anti-essentialist economic geographies share with world anthropology and cultural studies a concern to avoid essentializing, reductionist, non-contextual economic models. In each, logics of economic transition are displaced by narratives of transformation. Essentialist notions of the economy and reductive analytics of markets are reworked in terms of complex determinations, interdependence, path dependence, and contested power relations. In each, “context” has become a central category driven in part by an ethnographic sensibility towards place, regional specificity and complexity, and a careful attentiveness to the social relations that sustain them. The cultural turn is first and foremost, then, a turn to “context.”
Such a turn is not without its problems. What we mean by culture and cultural context, and how we can ensure that turning to “context” creates analyses of greater, not less, coherence, are not straightforward issues. David Harvey (1996: 239) warned against too readily assuming that a turn to context can explain economic practices: “Where does context begin or end? Derrida will always say – in context. Quite simply, the notion of context as such cannot and indeed does not exist. Yet the term exists as such. So one must define context as such always according to the context.” Since context has no meaning in the abstract, the turn to “context” and its contingencies must be thought through carefully to avoid slipping back into naive empiricism or loose descriptivism. Discussing a similar opening to the heterodoxies of social theory in economic sociology, Michael Piore (1996: 742) expressed concern for the loss of rigor and focus such a turn might create: “Economics, whatever its other characteristics, has intellectual coherence … Against this background, economic sociology. … comes across as completely eclectic, an enormous hodge-podge of ideas and insights, existing at all sorts of different levels of abstraction, possibly in contradiction with each other, possibly just incommensurate, without a basic theory or structure to sort them out, to order them, or to serve as a guide for research.”
Ellen Meiksins Wood (1997: 1) sees the critical task of political economy as always having been to hold fast to the analytical power of abstraction for understanding and explaining concrete economic and social practices. While context clearly matters in the working out of specific economic practices “… for the first time, capitalism has become a truly universal system. … not only in the sense that it’s global, not only in the sense that just about every economic actor in the world today is operating according to the logic of capitalism, and even those on the outermost periphery of the capitalist economy are, in one way or another, subject to that logic. Capitalism is universal also in the sense that its logic – the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit maximization, competition – has penetrated just about every aspect of human life and nature itself … ” For her, the diversity of concrete economic practices must first and foremost be understood in terms of this broader logic.
In such expressions of concern about the loss of rigor, the hodge-podge of ideas, and the return to naive empiricism, some see attempts to hold firm to “older” traditions of economic or political economic analysis. Certainly, J.K. Gibson-Graham have described as “capitalocentric” what they characterize as centered and monolithic views of the economy – of which Meiksins Wood’s argument might be an exemplar. Such views, they argue, generate a bleak and depressing politics, representing the economy as a kind of iron-cage mechanism from which release comes only with the breaking of the chains but in which there is literally and figuratively no space for social action (Gibson-Graham, this volume). In the face of such a structured totality, individual community efforts to organize spontaneously, or to develop self-help mechanisms with commitments to shaping their own destinies, tend to be seen to be defensive with little hope of success. Place and community are reduced to units in a universal calculus of value and profit in which other forms of economic practice simply don’t much matter.
How we understand the changing rhythms of space-time, the meaning- and value-laden processes that shape economic and built environments, and the social, cultural, and class processes of everyday life, remains a challenge as we try to take the cultural turn seriously. This is both an empirical question and a politico-epistemological challenge, particularly given the close correspondence between the cultural turn in economic geography and some of its broader goals and future-directedness to expand the scope for economic subjectivities and elaborate the political possibilities on which much of its work focuses.
Overdetermination and the Cultures of Economies
A variety of scholars from economic disciplines and subdisciplines have engaged the cultural turn through Marxian, anti-essentialist, feminist, postcolonial, and non-representational analyses of the capitalist economy, including its articulations with state socialist, household, and everyday economies. Many of these efforts have been influenced by the concept of overdetermination. In contrast to deterministic arguments that seek to establish determinate causes for particular economic events, forms, or development trajectories, overdetermination understands causality as the product of complex relations in which economic and non-economic actors and forms are both a constituting cause and an overdetermined effect. Overdetermined analyses of the economy thus focus on the ways in which an economy is constituted in and by complex social and cultural practices, how these processes are only ever temporarily fixed, and how – even once fixed – they always presuppose a diverse array of economic and non-economic relations (see Resnick and Wolff 1987).
In this section, I distinguish four moments of overdetermined research on economic geography. Each does not necessarily reflect a discrete research tradition, but is more usually a moment among others in any specific research program.2 First, I focus on efforts to show how the economy is always produced historically and geographically through embedded social and cultural practices. Second, I turn explicitly to relationality and some of its consequences for understanding economic practices. Third, I discuss diverse economies predominantly in terms of their empirical focus where their goal is to make visible concrete economic practices and forms that are often elided by more dominant accounts of the economy. Fourth, I focus on the ways in which many of these approaches to economic diversity are also about the possibility of different futures, where the primary goal is to elucidate the ways in which different economies, subjects, and worlds are (or might be) possible.
The Produced Economy
Historical approaches to the economy have been in particular influenced by science studies, actor network theory, and the genealogical studies of Michel Foucault, particularly in the later Paris Lectures (2003; 2010a; 2010b), the recent translation of which into English has stimulated renewed rounds of rich analyses of “the economy” as a produced object shaped by regulatory and discursive regimes at particular times and places. Many of these have focused on biopolitics, governmentality, and neoliberalism (Larner and Walters (2004); Arnold and Pickles 2011; Nast 2011). A great deal of this work was influenced by Arturo Escobar’s (1994) Encountering Development. In it he drew on Foucault’s analysis of discourse and power in the representation of social reality to show how Western models of development were universalized and extended geographically with the result that local cultural economies were destabilized and dismantled. In The Rule of Experts and elsewhere Timothy Mitchell (1998; 2002; 2005a) similarly showed how the idea of the national colonial economy was produced through a whole series of technical and institutional practices and is of relatively recent origin. By the 1930s it had taken on very specific meaning, referring to “new forms of consumption, marketing, business management, government planning, financial flows, colonial administration, and statistical work” (Mitchell 2005b: 298).3 In economic geography, Trevor Barnes has drawn on broader histories of science and science studies to show both the cultural embeddedness of spatial and economic science (e.g. Barnes 1991; 1996; 2001a; 2001b; 2004) and how, as Grossberg (2010: 25) suggests, “the space of a whole way of life is a fractured and contradictory space of multiple contexts and competing ways of life and struggle.”
These analyses of the production of the economy in terms of various possible contextualizations (hegemonic notions of development, technical and scientific regimes of governmentality, or spaces of embedded practices) are in some ways equivalent to Stuart Hall’s (1995: 53–54) understanding of social formation. In contrast to his apparent public image as a scholar of race, Hall has argued that “I have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory. I have always worked on the whole social formation which is racialized.” In this view, race – like the economy – cannot be separated from the particular context in which it is located and into which it is directed, a context to which he gives the name “conjuncture” (in Grossberg 2010: 21).
The Relational Economy
The second modality of anti-essentialist cultural analysis focuses on concrete analyses of contemporary capitalism. The intersection of economic geography, anthropology, economic sociology, and cultural studies has been particularly productive in elaborating the capitalist economy as socially embedded and performative (Thrift 2005; 2008). Through it, the cultural turn has been heavily inflected by broader social and cultural theoretical concerns with representation, ethnography, and politics.
In autonomia or autonomous Marxism, the link between re-thinking Althusser, local struggles over the economy, and direct social action has been particularly strong. In what writers such as Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti refer to as their “Copernican revolution,” autonomist scholars “reversed the classical relation between capitalistic development and workers’ struggle, to identify in workers’ struggles as the real dynamic element (the real ‘mover’) of capitalistic development and to affirm the latter’s subordination to workers’ struggles. … An emphasis on the subjectivity of what Marx used to call especially in the Grundrisse ‘living labour’ was since the beginning a distinctive feature of ‘Workerist’ theory, whereas a dynamic concept of class made the investigation of its shifting composition possible” (Mezzadra, in Cobarrubias, Casas Cortes, and Pickles 2011; see also Casas Cortes 2009 on precarias a la deriva). In the resulting “workerist” (operaismo in Italian) and post-workerist struggles and debates in Italy after 1968, most recently and most visibly in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s trilogy Empire (2001), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009), but by no means restricted to them, new forms of open Marxism became intellectual gathering grounds for scholars and activists from many backgrounds and regions. These movements were also shaped by (and in turn shaped) 1960s black radical thought in North America, particularly about autonomous economies and politics and more recently through zapatismo and other autonomous struggles in Latin America (Reyes 2007; Reyes and Kaufman 2011).
Anthropologists, particularly Latin Americanists, have been deeply involved in these movements and have insisted on the irredeemably local and diverse nature of all economic practices be they capitalist, non-capitalist, or anti-capitalist, while geographers and cultural studies researchers have challenged any potential localism or individualism at the heart of these shifts to cultural specificity and social embeddedness, particularly through its concern for articulation and conjuncture (Massey 2005; Hall 2010; Grossberg 2010). All three meet at various new installations: the World Social Forum and its debates over multiplicity and alternative paths for development (de Sousa Santos 2004); operaismo and struggles over local autonomy and postcapitalist politics and ethics (Cobarrubias, Casas Cortes, and Pickles 2011); gender politics and the reframing of the locus and singularity of the economic actor (Gibson-Graham 2008; 2006; 2003a; 2003b; Gibson and Cameron 2001); the new anarchism embedded in social movement struggles in the global North and South (Graeber 2001; 2004); and postcolonial efforts to think geographically about multiple modernities and the historical and anthropological legacies of colonial discourses and practices (Escobar 2005; 2010; Reyes and Kaufman 2011).
Together these constitute exciting new research programs in cultural economic geography that open up the category of the “economic” on multiple fronts, expanding notions of economic subjectivity well beyond those framed by the methodological individualism and abstract analytics of economics and rational choice perspectives (see Lee and Wills 1997; Barnes 2001b; Sheppard et al. 2003; Amin and Thrift 2004). As the Rethinking Marxism project has so well demonstrated, however, this is more than a shift in empirical focus to more diverse forms of economy: it is a shift in epistemology to engage theoretically with contextuality and conjuncture, and one that repositions relations of theory and practice.
The Diverse Economy
One particular response to Althusserian notions of overdetermination has been the emergence of a third way of thinking about the economy. This focuses on what have variously been called “diverse,” non-capitalist, and/or informal economies (Smith this volume). Callon, Meafe, and Rabeharisoa (2002: 196) distinguished these wider forms of economics – “economics in the wild” – from what he referred to as the “caged economics” of university and state policy. In stark contrast to the reductive tendencies in contemporary economic thought, which write the economy as if it were a preexisting, atemporal object of concern and study (a natural economy of prices, value, rent, and profit), Callon and his colleagues script the economy as a cultural/technical intervention that aimed to capture and domesticate in discrete concepts the wider economic practices of everyday life. That “wild” life was always essentially untamable, revealing a dialectical tension in which economic practices are never fully reducible to their other.
Commenting on The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Ruccio (1999: 57) suggests “Any effective response [to the limits of universal and reductive accounts of the economy] requires a knowledge of the actual context and conditions of the relevant situation – in other words, a ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation.’ Rather than resting on a crude empiricism, this way of approaching the problem would appear to draw on the best legacy not only of Lenin but also of Gramsci and the ‘aleatory materialism’ of Althusser” (Callari and Ruccio 1996). Here, a concrete analysis of the concrete situation is a claim about the need for an epistemological, as well as an empirical shift of focus. Ruccio goes on to argue that such an attempt “to create a space for new discourses of capitalism, especially new class discourses, raises a question about where such discourses might exist and how they may be being created and enacted before our very eyes” (p. 57). Against earlier understandings of the everyday, the popular, and culture, which collapse the quotidian with mystification, false consciousness, or “common” sense, Ruccio (1999: 57) asks “to what extent might there exist everyday class discourses – of both capitalism and non-capitalism? Those may or may not be the same as academic discourses; indeed, they may have a logic all of their own – their own discursive structures – which always already serve to create imaginaries of class transformation. … If so, then a new project emerges from The End of Capitalism, one that requires a more anthropological kind of investigation in order to recognize and negotiate these everyday economic and social discourses. We may find class discourses and forms of political affect that are quite different from existing academic ones – but interesting and innovative and worthy of our attention all the same. … Descending from the academic tower, listening and looking as we walk the streets and enter the suburban malls below, we may encounter and learn to produce all kinds of new discourses of capitalism and imaginaries of noncapitalism.”
As Lee (2010: 118) asserts: “Diversity is there in all economic spaces and times. … Even within capitalist practices, a wide variety of notions of value are always simultaneously at work, always informing economic action.” In this vein, research on alternative and local currencies not only destabilized a monolithic notion of the economy as a single, centered, and known entity, but also revealed the differential spatialities, temporalities, and rhythms of economies organized through specific and different kinds of currencies (e.g. Leyshon, Lee, and Williams 2003; Thrift 2000; 2005; Lepofsky 2007; 2009; and Pollard and Samers 2007).
The Economy to Come
Whereas Callon’s rather static caged-wild binary seeks to provide a schematic map of the diversity in actually existing economies, others focus more on the anthropologies and geographies of emergences that aim “to identify and enlarge the signs of possible future experiences, under the guise of tendencies and latencies that are actively ignored by hegemonic rationality and knowledge” (de Sousa Santos 2004: 241). This is an intellectual and political project that requires collective work on “the production of meanings that escape the straightjacket of liberal categories, concepts and norms. … [to figure] the possibilities and ways to advance beyond capital and the state” (Aguilar 2009) and that reveal “new or different problems or problematics” (Osterweil 2008).
In geography, anthropology, and cultural studies, “diverse economies” is particularly associated with the efforts of J.K. Gibson-Graham to create a language and practice that fosters an ontology of economic difference through which diverse economic subjectivities are liberated. Its goal is not only to begin to write more complex geographies of economic practices but also to perform new economies (J.K. Gibson-Graham 2008: 613). This is particularly clear in the Community Economies Collective, a collaboration between academic and community researchers and activists in Australia, North America, Europe, and South East Asia that seeks to “theorize, discuss, represent and ultimately enact new visions of economy. By making multiple forms of economic life viable options for action, the Collective aims to open the economy to ethical debate and provide a space within which to explore different economic practices and pathways” (http://www.communityeconomies.org/Home) (Community Economies Collective 2001).4
For Gibson-Graham (1996: 126) and for many movement activists “the question is, how might we challenge the dominant script of globalization and the victim role it ascribes to workers and communities in both ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds?” Roger Lee (2010: 118) refers to this as the heroic championing and advocacy of theory, out of dialectical relation with practice on the one hand and on the other an understanding of the economy as “an ongoing set of performative and contested social relations.” For me, at least, this is where economic geography has been most vigorously engaged in conversations with and challenged by anthropology and cultural studies.
A related approach is the “solidarity economies” movement in Latin America. Long associated with social movements and with World Social Forum debates and struggles about alter-globalization, solidarity economies refer to grassroots forms of cooperative economics, often inspired by Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, and more recently Gustavo Esteva and Bonaventura de Sousa (Brazilian Forum of Solidarity Economy 2006). Their broader goal is to sustain alternative local and community development projects by building on local capacities, subjectivities, and knowledge, while linking them into extended and sustainable translocal networks (see Fórum Brasileiro de Economia Solidária, Brasília http://www.fbes.org.br/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=915&Itemid=10.
Especially with the rise of the World Social Forum, alter-globalization movements, and the enormous re-vitalization of civil society movements in the global North and South from the 1990s, the question of alternative economies – declared a dead project with the demise of state socialism (Fukuyama 1992) – has, in fact, flourished and has been a crucial stimulus to the interactions among geographers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists. For de Sousa Santos and Rodríguez Garavito (2005: 1) “[t]he beginning of the new millennium has witnessed a groundswell of proposals for the transformation or replacement of the national and international legal institutions underpinning hegemonic, neoliberal globalization. Put forth by variegated counter hegemonic movements and organization and articulated through translational networks, these proposals challenge our sociological and legal imagination and belie the fatalistic ideology that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberal institutions.”
Context and Conjuncture5
With the various discursive, social, and cultural turns in critical economic geography, it is now taken as given that context matters (see, particularly, Lee and Wills 1997; Leyshon, Lee, and Williams 2003; and Amin and Thrift 2004). Geographers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists have expanded our understanding of diverse and alternative economies through their engagements with meanings of context in the new discourses of cultural economy, “open” and “heterodox” Marxism, and approaches to diverse economies, alter-globalizations, and alternative modernities. Yet Jamie Peck (2004: 6) warns us of a parallel tendency in which geographers leave “only fuzzily defined and untheorized ‘context’ in the background” when turning to issues relating to the social, spatial, and scalar constitution of economic systems, identities, processes, and development paths. In this section, I sketch some ways to think about “context in the background.”
In his debate with Austin and Searle, Derrida spoke directly to the meaning of context, and it may be useful here to follow his argument a little. As Harvey indicated (above), for Derrida (1994a) there are only contexts, but these contexts cannot be “saturable or exhaustively determinable.” Context cannot be a given existing space or framework of objects and relations within which specific identities are formed and determined. It cannot be a conceptual space of relations that could, in principle, be filled out by the pursuit of more detailed research and writing. For Derrida, meaning is (temporarily) stabilized or fixed through the play of difference in an infinite chain of similarly unstable relations of signification; always fixed, but always open to deconstruction, re-interpretation, and reworking; to re-writing and re-inscription. Context itself is always overdetermined by contexts other than itself, which in turn are overdetermined by other contexts. Meaning is not free-floating, but deeply embedded and overdetermined by the contexts within which it gains any stability as meaning and identity (see Barnett 1999). This always open possibility of meaning contains the potential for real social transformation which is precisely why power seeks to impose order, rule, and law.
Perhaps paradoxically, given the at times uneasy relationship between Derrida and cultural studies, radical contextuality is the strongest commitment defining cultural studies – both its object and its practice. Cultural studies is about interrogating and constructing contexts (Grossberg 2010: 20). Like many contemporary forms of “constructionism,” cultural studies understands the world as relational; it understands historical reality as the constant and ongoing struggle to make, unmake, and remake (“articulate”) complex, mobile, and often contradictory configurations or relations of relations. From this, cultural studies draws unique and profound consequences for its own practice: first, despite its name, cultural studies is never about culture but about socio-geo-historical context. Second, its commitment to complexity and refusal of any reductionism means that cultural studies is necessarily interdisciplinary – even anti-disciplinary. Third, articulation means that there are no guarantees in the world (Gilroy, Grossberg, and McRobbie 2000): the world did not have to become what it is, but that does not mean that the relations and structures that constitute reality are not in fact “real.” Neither analysis nor politics can be built on the simple act of deconstruction, for human life is the continuous actualization – construction and reconstruction – of effective structures that constitute specific geo-historical realities of power. Fourth, and perhaps most radically, cultural studies assumes that the questions it must ask, the theoretical tools it needs to deploy, and the political stakes it aims to support, can only be decided upon through engagement with a specific context. Although it believes that theory is absolutely necessary, cultural studies has no single theory, no pre-constituted political constituency or issue, and makes no assumptions that it knows in advance the questions that define the work it must undertake. Precisely by “re-articulating” a context, it seeks to open up further possibilities for struggle and articulation.
For cultural studies, conjuncturalism is a political choice, based on the assumption that there are certain kinds of political struggle and possibility that are best approached at a certain level of analysis understood as the attempt to establish a temporary balance or settlement in the field of forces. As with Doreen Massey’s (2005) understanding of place, conjuncturalism involves constructing a context as an articulation, accumulation, and condensation of multiple crises, contradictions, and struggles: a fusion of different currents or circumstances (see the Massey–Hall interview in Hall 2010). A conjuncture is a description of a social formation as fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and processes of struggle and negotiation. It has to be constructed as the complex product of multiple lines of force, determination, and resistance, with different temporalities and spatialities.
A conjuncture need not be a national context; the unity of a conjuncture is never complete, stable, or organic, but is constituted as/by a particular problem-space(s) or problematic (or set of problematics) within the analysis itself. For Stuart Hall (2010) “A conjuncture can be long or short: it’s not defined by time or by simple things like a change of regime - though these have their own effects. As I see it, history moves from one conjuncture to another rather than being an evolutionary flow.”
Conjunctural analysis (as a theoretical-analytical-political practice) poses two tasks: first, figuring out the boundaries, however fragile and porous and multiple, between conjunctures. When do we enter a new conjuncture? This is inseparable from defining the conjuncture as a specific problem space. Second, it requires the researcher to carefully attend to the distinctions between and the relations among the old (as both continuities and re-articulations) and the new (emergent), between what Gramsci called the organic (or relatively permanent structures of the economy) and the conjunctural (the immediate and ephemeral), and between transformation and the ways it is mediated. Conjuncturalism stands opposed to the all too common forms of analysis that assume either that the present is basically just like the past, or that the past is irrelevant because the present is entirely new. Conjuncturalism above all is committed to complexity, the complementary and contextualized work of theory and empirics, and the analysis of complexes of social, spatial, and temporal mediations and articulations (Grossberg 2010).
This is a thoroughly non-essentialist project, sensitive to the contextual and embedded nature of all cultural practices, including economic practices. Its primary goal is to describe and analyze the diverse forms of economic practice, social embeddedness, and class processes at work in the new economic geographies of globalization, and the way they change. It asks how economic geographies can be attentive to the rhythms and contexts of everyday life, and to the diversity of forms, practices, and class processes that constitute this matrix of diverse and alternative economies (the deepening of contemporary capitalisms, the proliferation or demise of non-capitalisms, or their articulations in concrete regional economic geographies) (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2000). It is a narration that seeks to disseminate “economic” subjectivities in a way that locates economic identities and subjectivities within the diversity of economic contexts, rhythms, and articulations (Amariglio and Ruccio 2003).
Conclusion
In Specters of Marx Derrida (1994b) explains “contexts” in terms of the specters that haunt the present, constituting the conditions within which the material transformations of the past two decades have taken place. Specters of Marx thus serves as a critical and crucial work in transition theory, a much needed articulation of a deconstructive politics, and an important engagement with the question of the relation between Marxism and deconstruction. In rejecting what he calls totalitarian logics, deconstruction cannot imagine a future without the memory and inheritance of Marx. “It will always be” Derrida (1994b: 32) says “a fault not to read and reread and discuss Marx.” Tom Lewis (1999) suggests that Specters of Marx intervenes in both a scholarly and a political context, specifically the end of the Cold War at the moment of transition. At this particular moment of rupture, with the end of Stalinist party programs as a basis for politics and the transparent failure of the promises of neoliberal hegemony in the new world disorder, Derrida sees the political function of deconstruction becoming clearer; there is an opening – a conjuncture – for a new type of thought and politics.
At this moment of possibility, new economic geographies should take seriously both deconstruction and the spirit, problematic, and analytic of Marx. That is, they must strive to enervate the spirit of Marx as interminable critique, suspicion of closures, and the struggle to open the sutures wrought by hegemonic forces in the name of a particular notion of justice.
Indeed, the cultural turn in economic geography can be thought of as a conjuncture – an event (in Derrida’s terms) – at which openings are multiplied, and the awareness of the opportunity and necessity to act is heightened. At such moments, the always open and contingent nature of social categories, spatial fixes, and institutional/economic arrangements become more manifest or evident, the choices become more immediate, and the necessity of a decision in a context that is open, undecidable – aporetic – becomes clearer. The enormous ruptural movements associated with globalization, the dismantling of the party state in central and eastern Europe, the installation of a neoliberal hegemony with its global war on terrorism, and the apparent bankruptcy of the Washington Consensus and resulting inadequacies of the Bretton Woods organization, all heighten the importance and possibility of multiplying diverse economic practices, “tracing” out the dynamic historical geographies of “context,” and articulating spaces for renewed political struggles across actually existing alternative economies and new possibilities to come.
Notes
1 This chapter emerged as part of a project of co-teaching with Larry Grossberg and Arturo Escobar on issues relating to Rethinking the Economy in the University Program in Cultural Studies and Departments of Anthropology, Communication Studies, and Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is linked with the Counter Cartographies Collective, the Social Movements Research Group, and the Money Group. I am indebted to Larry Grossberg and Arturo Escobar for these collaborations and I am particularly grateful to Larry Grossberg for comments on and contributions to this text. I have drawn extensively on his Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010) which is, perhaps, one of the most fully and carefully elaborated cultural studies, anthropological, and geographical readings of the conjunctural economy.
2 These moments are not exhaustive. They elide an enormous amount of work on diverse and community cultural economic struggles in economic geography, anthropology, and cultural studies. Most obviously, they do not deal adequately with the many cultural economic geographers who have seriously engaged with anthropology over many years. I would mention the urban cultural geographies of David Harvey, Neil Smith, Don Mitchell, Rich Schein, etc., the articulations projects around post-socialism of Adrian Smith (this volume), Alison Stenning, Adam Swain, and others; the community struggles over land or oil in political ecology in the work of Michael Watts, Wendy Wolford, Paul Robbins, et al.; Doreen Massey’s analysis of the space of the economy; cultural studies approaches to capitalism by Larry Grossberg, John Clarke, Stuart Hall, etc., and the work of Escobar, Mignolo, Blaser, and others on modernities-colonialities and the disarticulation of capitalist modernities and non-capitalist indigeneities.
3 I am aware, of course, of the many challenges that might be lodged against this discursive and historical framing of “the” economy. However, I think Mitchell’s claim is interesting because of the way he points to the emergence of an object – the economy – that by the early twentieth century was being constructed differently than earlier, particularly in terms of its relationship to the state, and such legal entities as the corporation, firm, monopoly, and space.
4 The subject areas that structure the work of the Community Economies group illustrate well the range of approaches to rethinking economy outlined here, and how they might overlap in any one project: Rethinking the “Economy”; Researching Diverse Economies; Community Economies; Subjects of the Economy; Politics of Economy; and Research Practice (http://www.communityeconomies.org/Publications/Articles-Chapters/Recent-to-past).
5 I am grateful to Larry Grossberg for his substantial contributions to this section on conjuncturalism.
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