Theoretical preliminaries

My approach to this topic draws on the Marxian critique of political economy and reinterprets it through what can usefully be termed ‘cultural political economy’. The latter is an emerging post-disciplinary approach that adopts the ‘cultural turn’ in economic and political inquiry but nonetheless affirms the importance of the interconnected institutional materialities of economics and politics.

Ontologically, cultural political economy stresses the contribution of discourse to the overall constitution of social objects and social subjects and, a fortiori, to their co-constitution and co-evolution. For example, orthodox political economy tends to naturalize or reify technical and economic objects (such as land, tools, machines, the division of labour, money, commodities, the information economy) and to employ impoverished accounts of how subjects and subjectivities are formed as well as of how different modes of calculation emerge, come to be institutionalized, and get modified. In contrast, cultural political economy holds that technical and economic objects are always socially constructed, historically specific, more or less

socially embedded or disembedded (or, perhaps better, entangled or disentangled in broader networks of social relations), more or less embodied (or ‘in-corporated’ and embrained), and in need of continuing social ‘repair’ work for their reproduc­tion. It also emphasizes the contribution of discourse and discursive practices to the forming of the subjects, subjectivities, modes of calculation, routines, and social arrangements that are involved in the production, reproduction, and consumption of these objects.

Cultural political economy can adopt both bottom-up and top-down perspectives and, ideally, should combine them. In the first case, it considers how particular economic objects are produced, distributed, and consumed in specific contexts by specific economic and extra-economic agents; traces their effects in the wider economy and beyond; and explores how different subjects, subjectivities, and modes of calculation come to be naturalized and materially implicated in everyday life.³ Conversely, when adopting a macro-level or top-down viewpoint, cultural political economy would focus on the tendential emergence of macro-structural properties and their role in selectively reinforcing certain micro-level behaviours from among the inevitable flux of economic activities - thereby contributing to the reproduction of a more or less coherent economic (and extra-economic) order.

To avoid misunderstanding, four clarifications are needed. First, emergent properties are constituted in and through action, always tendential, and always in need of stabilization. Thus any tendencies linked with particular accumulation regimes or modes of regulation, let alone with capitalism itself, are themselves always tendential. This doubly tendential nature of tendencies means that the very presence of the tendencies linked with a given accumulation regime or mode of regulation (whether or not such tendencies are actualized in specific circum­stances) depends on the extent to which the properties that generate them are themselves reproduced. This implies that the incomplete realization and/or subse­quent decomposition of a given social form will attenuate what would otherwise be regarded as its naturally necessary tendencies. Second, strategies are always elaborated in and through discourses; they are not the automatic product of rational calculation from pre-given positions. These discourses are complex, heterogeneous, and differentially associated with particular institutional orders and/or specific identities, values, and interests in the lifeworld.

Cultural political economy, the knowledge-based economy and the state 145 here are techno-economic paradigms, norms of production and consumption, specific models of development, accumulation strategies, societal paradigms, and the broader organizational and institutional narratives and/or meta-narratives that provide the general context (or ‘web of interlocution’) in which these discourses make sense (Jessop 1999; Jenson 1990; Somers 1994). Third, the implementation of strategies and tactics depends on organizational and learning capacities and is always prone to failure. Thus one aspect of the successful consolidation of new economic forms and relations is the capacity to learn from failure and to adapt activities, organizations, and institutional architectures accordingly (on governance failure, see Malpas and Wickham 1995;Jessop 2002). And, fourth, strategies are always pursued on a strategically selective terrain which makes some strategies more viable than others. This terrain is not purely economic, however, almost regardless of how broadly the economy is defined. It is always the product of the interaction of economic and extra-economic systems and social relations.

Epistemologically, consistent with this general approach, cultural political economy involves a critical approach to the categories and methods of political economy and to the inevitable contextuality and historicity of the latter’s claims to knowledge. It rejects any universalistic, positivist account of reality, denies the subject-object duality, allows for the co-constitution of subjects and objects, and eschews reductionist approaches to the discipline. But it also continues to stress both the materiality of social relations and the constraints involved in processes that operate ‘behind the backs’ of the relevant agents and the emergent structural properties and dynamics engendered by these processes. It can thereby escape the sociological imperialism of pure social constructionism and the voluntarist vacuity of certain lines of discourse analysis, which seem to imply that one can will anything into existence in and through an appropriately articulated discourse.

Substantively, cultural political economy distinguishes between the economy as the chaotic sum of all substantive⁶ economic activities and the ‘economy’ (or, better, ‘economies’ in the plural) as an imaginatively narrated, more or less coherent subset of these activities. There is a complex relation between these two: for there is no economic imaginary without materiality (Bayart 1994: 20-1; cf. Gallon 1988a). Thus, on the one hand, the operation of the economic imaginary presupposes a substratum of substantive economic relations as its elements; on the other, where that imaginary is successfully operationalized and institutionalized, it transforms and naturalizes these elements into the moments of a specific economy. For economic imaginaries identify, privilege, and seek to stabilize some economic activities from the totality of economic relations and transform them into objects of observation, calculation, and governance. In so doing, they accord the economy specific boundaries, conditions of existence, typical economic agents, tendencies and counter-tendencies, and a distinctive overall dynamic (Daly 1994; Miller and Rose 1993).⁷ These imagined economies can be discursively constituted and materially reproduced at different sites, on different scales, and with different spatial and temporal horizons (for the example of a local strawberry market, see Garcia

1986; and, for the neo-liberal global economy, Langley 2002). This always occurs in and through struggles conducted by specific agents, typically involves the asymmetrical manipulation of power and knowledge, and is liable to contestation and resistance. In this sense the ‘economy’ considered as an object of observation and/or governance is only ever partially constituted and there are always interstitial, residual, marginal, irrelevant, recalcitrant and plain contradictory elements that escape any attempt to identify, govern, and stabilize a given ‘economic arrangement’ or broader ‘economic order’ (Jessop 2002).

A further consequence of this approach is that the economy in its broadest sense includes both economic and extra-economic factors. On the one hand, capitalism involves a series of specific economic forms (the commodity form, money form, wage form, price form, property form, etc.) associated with generalized commodity production; but, on the other hand, as theorists including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Polanyi, and Michel Gallon have noted in one context or another, the reproduction of these forms cannot be secured purely through the logic of the capitalist market. It follows that the economy cannot be adequately conceived (let alone managed) as a ‘pure’ economic sphere that repro­duces itself in total isolation from the non-economic and that can therefore determine non-economic spheres in a unilateral manner. But it also follows that the economy should not be dissolved back into society (or culture) as a whole. For it does have its own specificities that derive from the distinctive extra-discursive properties of its various forms (cf Slater 2002a on the importance of the commodity and property forms in differentiating the economy from other social relations). Thus successful economic governance depends on the co-presence of extra- economic as well as economic forms and on extra-economic as well as economic regularization. It follows that the operations of the economy are co-constituted by other systems and co-evolve with them: these include technologies, science, education, politics, law, art, religion, etc. They are also articulated more generally to the lifeworld. The latter comprises all those identities, interests, values and conventions that are not directly anchored in the logic of any particular system and that provide the substratum and background to social interaction in everyday life. And, if this is true for the nature and dynamic of the circuits of capital con­sidered as a whole (abstracting from specific differences among its many constituent elements), it will be even more significant for specific forms of economic activity, economic object, economic institution, and economic subjectivity

Given the variety of forms that can be taken by the cultural turn as well as the wide range of institutional and evolutionary approaches to economic analysis, it follows that there are also many variants of cultural political economy. My own approach is rooted in Marx’s critique of political economy in the twin belief that capitalism is the dominant force in contemporary economic life and that Marx’s pioneering analysis still defines the unsurpassable horizon for critical reflection on capitalism. This does not mean that it is incontrovertibly true and cannot be improved - far from it. Instead it means that critical engagement with Marx’s

Cultural political economy, the knowledge-based economy and the state 147 critique of political economy is an essential reference point (if no longer - or not yet again - an obligatory point of theoretical passage) for any serious attempt to improve our understanding of the historical specificity and dynamic of capitalism. This claim refers to the Marx of Capital and its preparatory works rather than the many Marxisms claiming his legacy. In this context, and for present purposes, the most important reference point is Marx’s insistence that capital is not a thing but a social relation. For, as Marx notes in Volume I of Capital:

.. property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative - the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will.... capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.

(Marx 1967: 717)

Marx took this claim, which anticipates key arguments in mediology and actor­network theory, very seriously (on mediology, see Debray 1991, 2000; on actor­network theory, see Latour 1987; Gallon 1998a; Law and Hassard 1999). Thus, as Law’s general survey of actor-network theory suggests, ‘almost all of our interactions with other people are mediated through objects of one kind or another.. [or more precisely, through] a network of objects [and] networks of objects-and- people’. More generally, Marx emphasized not only the co-constitution of the forces and relations of production (thereby rejecting any simple-minded reduction of one to the other) but also the continuing dependence of capital qua social relation on the heterogeneous instrumentalities of things. This can be seen not only in the complex genealogy of the various elements that are eventually combined to produce and then reproduce the capitalist mode of production but also in his analyses of the technical and social division of labour, the complexities of the circuits of capital, and the tendential formation of the world market. In this context, for example, Marx shows how the transition from manufacture to machinofacture played a key role in the dominance of capital over wage-labour; how it transformed the individual worker and collective labourer into appendages of the machine; and how the increased cooperation and productivity enabled by the technical division of labour and machines within the factory contributed significantly to the accumulation process. Equally importantly, Marx stressed both the inherent improbability of continuing capital accumulation and the tendency for competition and class struggle to break through (or, to use Gallon’s language, to ‘overflow’) any emergent and contingent institutional frames and/or spatio-temporal fixes that might contribute to its regularization or governance through their capacities to displace and/or defer capital’s contradictions and tensions.

Marx also interpreted actors as complex ensembles of roles, masks, and social performances (Urbanek 1967), considered the specific material and social conditions in which capitalist calculation and calculating subjects emerged and could be reproduced (cf. Bryer 2000a, 2000b), and examined closely machine-person relations and their impact on mind and body (Marx: 1967: 351-485; Marx 1973:

690-706, 769-77; Harvey 1998; Marsden 1999). Indeed, in the last regard, Callard notes:

Marx depicts an economy characterised by parasitic and vampiric relations; an economy in which it is no longer clear whose organs are whose, whose agency (animate or mechanical) drives what, and whether organs should be understood as natural or mechanic entities; an economy replete with profoundly unnatural players - Cyclopean machines, dwarfish workers, the pulsating organ of the collective worker.

(Callard 1998: 396)

There are strong affinities between the relational materialism of Marxism and that of actor-network theory. While I cannot elaborate all of these here, it is worth noting four key ones: (a) a relational ontology based on the mutual constitution and interpenetration of the material and social linked to a determined refusal of rigid object-subject and material-cultural distinctions; (b) rejection of the fetishistic distinction between the profit-oriented, market-mediated, and self-reproducing economy and other ‘objectively necessary’ functional systems within the wider social formation; (c) denial of any fixed ontological distinction between the ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’ or the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ in favour of their mutual conditioning and continued interaction; and (d) interest in the interaction between mechanisms and strategies that gives some semblance of unity to economic and political agencies, the conditions and points at which these unities can break down, and the mechanisms and strategies that may restore these unities. Nonetheless there are also some significant differences between a Marxist critique of political economy inflected by cultural political economy and actor-network theory as Callon applies the latter to the economic sphere. Above all actor-network theory continues to reflect its origins in science and technology studies with the result that it tends to remain a generic theory analogous to the strategic-relational approach that informs cultural political economy (on the strategic-relational approach, see Jessop 1982, 1990, 2001b). This means that it lacks many of the concepts that Marx developed to comprehend the historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production, its directional dynamic (not to be confused with an ultimate telos), its distinctive laws of motion (i.e. its doubly tendential tendencies), and its unique organization as a political economy of time (Postone 1993; Jessop 2003). Accordingly, while Callon offers us many insights into the general conditions for the emergence of markets, the particular constitution of markets in specific groups of goods and services (defined in terms of their particular ‘qualities’), and the social preconditions of economic externalities, much of this critique is directed against the ‘hard political economy’ of orthodox economics. His more recent work is also directed in part against the assumption that there is a capitalist system that operates behind the ‘backs of the producers’. This leads him to emphasize the competitive strategies of particular actor-networks in a reflexive economic game of supply and demand without regard to the changing modalities and overall logic of competition (e.g. Callon et al., this volume). However, without taking account of the generalization

Cultural political economy, the knowledge-based economy and the state 149 of the commodity form to labour-power as a fictitious commodity, the peculiarities of capital as opposed to money, the competitive pressures on individual capitals to minimize socially necessary labour time and socially necessary turnover time, the interdependence of the different circuits of capital, and the disjunctions and crisis­tendencies inherent in the circuit of capital, actor-network theory as currently developed cannot fully escape the limitations of a ‘soft economic sociology’ that emphasizes the material institutedness, social embeddedness, and improbable reproduction of specific economic institutions, organizations, and activities but is unable to account for the generic crisis-tendencies and overall directional dynamic of capital in general.

This said, rather than insisting on a strict opposition between a Marxist approach and actor-network theory a la Callon, I want to suggest that they complement each other in some respects and hence that there is some scope for a productive dialogue between their respective advocates.⁸ For, whereas the sadly incomplete Marxist critique of political economy tends to provide excellent macro-analyses of capitalism and the capitalist social formation, it lacks many concepts crucial to a satisfactory exploration and explanation of the mechanisms of valorization, realization, and appropriation in specific branches of production and particular markets. In this regard, it is stronger on the overall logic of exchange-value than it is on the specificity of use-values. Conversely, while actor-network theory offers significant insights into specific mechanisms of qualification, calculation, and institutionalization in specific material-social-spatial-temporal frames, it lacks the theoretical tools to account for the overall logic of accumulation. We will certainly not find the answer in terms of the same modes of ‘translation’ that enable the state to act as if it were a unitary authority in the name of its subjects (Callon and Latour 1981: 278). For the operations of the invisible hand are different from those of the iron fist (perhaps in a velvet glove). In this regard, actor-network theory is stronger on the social construction of the material and immaterial features of marketized and/or marketizable use-values than it is on the logic of surplus­value and exchange value (Slater 2002b). Whether it is really possible to combine the two approaches into a coherent analysis remains to be seen. Here I wish to offer an alternative approach to solving some of the same deficits in the orthodox Marxist approach and, in so doing, hope to contribute to the dialogue between Marxism and actor-network theory.