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Cultural (Re-)Turns in Critical (International) Political Economy Bob Jessop CPERC Lancaster University Outline • • • • • • • • • • • Taking Turns Varieties of Turn Thematic Turns Methodological Turns Ontological Turns Reflexive Turns Critical Takes on the Cultural Turn The Cultural Turn in Critical IPE What’s International about IPE? Grossberg on Economism Some Conclusions Taking Turns • Cultural turn: the more or less consistent elaboration of the intuition, hypothesis, or discovery that ‘culture matters’ in one or more theoretical, empirical, or practical contexts where its role and/or relevance was previously missed, recognized but ignored, or explicitly rejected. – Wide variation in how culture is defined, ways that it is deemed to ‘matter’, and the reasons for suggesting that it does. – Can be applied to intellectual trajectories of individual scholars; general developments in given approach; changes in relative weight of different approaches in broader disciplinary field; or general trends in humanities and social sciences as a whole. Varieties of Turn • Thematic: intuition, hypothesis, or discovery that cultural phenomena (events, practices, processes, institutions, objects, policies, etc) belong to key themes of enquiry. • Methodological: cultural aspects of social life provide a fruitful or even, indeed, the most productive entry point for exploring and explaining social world even if research later extends to other themes or explanatory factors. • Ontological: culture is (co-)constitutive of social existence and must therefore be foundational aspect of any enquiry • Reflexive: one or more types of cultural turn in social sciences themselves, making them object of analysis Thematic Turns • • • • • • • • • • • • Culture and subculture Culture is ordinary Everyday culture Financialization Professional culture Epistemic communities Consumption & Leisure Mass media Knowledge Economy Intellectual Property Branding …… • • • • • • • • • • • • Material Culture Nature-Culture Cyberculture Body Haptics Identities Memory Cultural industries Creativity Cultural policy Ethics ……. Methodological Turns • • • • • • • • • • • Ideational turn Interpretive turn Narrative turn Rhetorical turn Argumentative turn Literary turn Translational turn Post-colonial turn Post-structural turn Identitarian turn …… • • • • • • • • • • • Linguistic turn Discursive turn Visual turn Haptic turn Iconic turn Reflexive turn Constructivist turn Deconstructive turn Performative turn Practice turn …… Permutations Methodological • • • • • • • • • • • Narrative turn Rhetorical turn Argumentative turn Identitarian turn Linguistic turn Translational turn Discursive turn Visual turn Haptic turn Iconic turn Performative turn Illustrative, non-exhaustive permutations Thematic • • • • • • • • • • • Everyday culture Professional culture Financial markets Consumption & Leisure Mass media Nature-Culture Embodiment Identities Desire Memory Cultural industries Ontological Turns • Cultural turn is ‘umbrella’ concept for diverse (re-) discoveries of role of semiosis as a constitutive (or co-constitutive) moment of social relations. Notion of semiosis ‘fixes’ common features of different types of methodological & ontological cultural turn • Semiosis: at its most abstract, a mode of complexity reduction via Sinnmachung (meaning-making). It is basis of all later developments of specific discourses, genres, styles, etc; has emergent properties, e.g., intertextuality, genre chains, salience • Structuration: at its most abstract, it reduces complexity of social relations by limiting combinations of (inter)action; has emergent properties, e.g., structured coherence, structural coupling, relative primacy of different sets of social relations Social and/or Cultural? • Social versus cultural is an analytical distinction that enables us to distinguish different ‘moments’ of a complex social world • Whereas ‘social' refers to structuration and its emergent properties, 'cultural‘ (or semiotic) refers to meaning making and emergent properties of discursive formations • Insofar as social relations are discursively constituted and meaningful, they are cultural; and, insofar as cultural phenomena are realized in/through social relations, they are social • A complete analysis must involve both social and cultural properties, dynamics, and effects Semiosis and its Limits • Semiosis in construal and construction of economic, political (and other) realities, i.e., making and remaking of social worlds • There are many construals, only some of which have constructive i.e., transformative effects on realities construed, subject to a range of extra-semiotic and semiotic conditions/ contingencies • Semiosis in evolutionary analysis: mediating variation, selection, and retention of diverse construals and attempts to construct (transform) natural and social worlds. Only some construals get selected as basis for efforts at social construction and only some of these succeed, if only in specific time-space envelopes • Only construals that grasp emergent extra-semiotic features of social world as well as mind-independent features of natural world are likely to be selected, retained and operationalized in changes in extra-semiotic properties and their tendential social logics Reflexive Turns • Rhetoric of economic discourse • Metaphors in classical political economy • The other canon project • Cold-War narratives in international relations • Developmentalities • Critical innovation studies • Critical accounting studies • Orientalism in area studies • Geopolitics of academic writing Some Critical Takes on the Cultural Turn • Culture as a chaotic conception • Risk of reification of culture • Dematerialization of culture • Decorative – or aesthetic – turn • Uncritical – or de-politicizing – turn • Crypto-capitalist turn Don Mitchell on Chaotic Concepts ‘it is strikingly rare, in both cultural geography and cultural studies more generally, for empirical studies to actually operationalize any of the myriad definitions of culture that have been offered in recent years. Instead of a specification and development of culture, showing how it works in society, there has instead been a proliferation of examples that presumably constitute culture: everyday life, works of art, political resistance, economic formations, religious beliefs, styles of clothing, eating habits, ideologies, ideas, literature, music, popular media, and so on. Culture seems to be little more than a list of activities that the analyst has deemed “cultural”’ (Mitchell 2000: 73). Hagopian on Semantic Embarrassment A disciplinary subfield can accommodate many different specialisms, but a problem arises when its core designation has so many competing and inconsistent meanings. … A more serious problem arises if the ready availability of such a labile term too conveniently substitutes it for the hard work of drawing, rather than implying or assuming, connections among ways of seeing, modes of expression, ethnic or group identities, traditions, ways of life, and emotional or intellectual dispositions. … [T]he overuse of an under-theorised term may preclude the rigorous examination of some of the most challenging problems in history – say, for example, that of causation. Even if one sees things in terms of mutual shaping or reciprocal effects, rather than unilinear causal relationships, … one has to distinguish concepts or phenomena, not lump them together, in order to discern their relationships. Culture’s capacity to accommodate within itself all the things we might want to link together may make it an attractive term for the same reason that it is a deeply problematic one. Mitchell on Reification [There is] a deeper problem with new theories of culture. They have had the unintended effect of further reifying an essentially empty concept. Culture, which signifies nothing, is turned into a stable referent with clear edges, boundaries, and effectiveness. ... What is needed is a new conceptualization that understands right from the beginning that there is no such ontological thing as culture. At best “culture” is a handy term, but in the end it represents no identifiable process. ... There is no culture in the world, only differing arrays of power that organize society in this way, and not that. … Seen in this way, the invocation of “culture” becomes a means for representing relations of power. ... The idea of culture is not what people are doing; rather, it is the way people make sense of what they have done’ (2000: 74, 77). Mitchell on De-Materialization ‘with its multi-faceted concern with (and some would say uncritical wonder at) all matters cultural, and its retreat from studies of economic systems and processes of exploitation, coming as it did just as the political and economic right gained ascendancy – as marking a rather complete surrender to the forces of reaction. ... a squandering of intellectual resources. It, like cultural studies as a whole, also represents a retreat from the sorts of concerns that animated Williams’s cultural materialism, which explicitly sought, after all, to theorize the indissolubility of ‘culture’, ‘politics’, ‘economy’, and so on’ (Mitchell 2000: 59-60). Rojek & Turner on Decorative Turns ‘Culture' has eclipsed the ‘social’, and literary interpretation has marginalized sociological methods. ‘Decorative sociology' is a branch of modernist aesthetics which is devoted to a politicized, textual reading of society and culture. …. the intellectual roots of cultural studies inevitably mean that the textual level is pre-eminent. In emphasizing the aesthetic dimension we seek to challenge the political self-image of decorative sociology as a contribution to political intervention. … While the cultural turn has contributed to revising approaches to the relationships between identity and power, race and class, ideology and representation, it has done so chiefly at an aesthetic level. …[The] greatest achievement of the cultural turn has been to teach students to ‘read politically’. … [But] … the ‘aestheticization of life’ has not translated fully into the politicization of culture (2001). Sayer on Uncritical Turns Cultural turn risks “a shift from vulgar materialism to a 'vulgar culturalism' which is as dismissive of, or reductive about, economy as vulgar materialism was about culture. If cultural studies is concerned with signifying practices, then anything that society registers can be seen to have a cultural dimension since it can signify something. Yet, it does not follow from this that there are no other dimensions, so that social life is reducible to texts or text-like objects, whose signifying qualities are the only aspects that matter … The common postmodern suspicion of 'normativity' discourages criticism of the aestheticisation of moral-political values, 'demoralisation' and depoliticisation in contemporary society, and disqualifies distinctions between use-value and exchange-value, substance and appearance which are at least a necessary component of any kind of critical stance’ (Sayer 2000) Sewell on Crypto-Capitalism ... it is essential to recognise that the cultural turn was also fuelled, in ways we were essentially unaware of, by a secret affinity with an emergent logic of capitalist development. Cultural history’s tendency to celebrate the plasticity of all social forms made good political sense as a critique of Fordist social determinisms, as well as of the entrenched social determinisms of gender and race. But its critical force in the context of a capitalist regime of flexible accumulation is far more ambiguous. Indeed, such a celebration indicates an unacknowledged and troubling complicity between the cultural turn and the emergence of contemporary flexible forms of capitalism. Cultural history’s lack of interest in, indeed effective denial of, socioeconomic determinations .. [is] potentially disabling in an era when such determinations are so clearly at work in the world, including in our own conceptualizations of historical process (2005: 201). Cultural Political Economy • A broad ‘post-disciplinary’ current in institutional and evolutionary political economy • Makes a 'cultural turn' in economic & political studies in order to enhance their interpretive and explanatory power • Examines connection of semiosis to the inter-linked materialities of economics and politics in wider social settings ‘Taking turns’ in CPE • Cultural turn is not just thematic – don’t limit CPE to ‘culture/creative industries’ • Nor is it just methodological – avoid a ‘soft economic sociology’ that starts and ends with economy’s cultural aspects • Cultural turn is also ontological – avoid a ‘hard political economy’ by noting inherently cultural (or semiotic) nature of economic categories Putting the ‘C’ into CPE • Semiosis in the construal and construction of economic, political (and other) ‘realities’, thus in making and remaking social worlds • Semiosis in evolutionary economics, especially in mediating variation, selection, and retention • Semiosis in comparative institutional analysis (e.g., stages/varieties/variegation of capitalism) • Semiosis in contingent emergence, provisional consolidation, and ongoing realization of extrasemiotic properties and tendential social logics Putting the ‘PE’ into CPE Some evolutionary arguments • Contingent evolutionary mechanisms matter * Variation, selection, retention • History matters * Path-dependence • Timing and sequencing matter * Dialectic of path-dependency and path-shaping • Hence periodization and conjuncture matter * But no master periodization What’s International about IPE? • Beyond methodological nationalism beyond methodological internationalism • Beyond national-global dichotomy “relativization of scale” and multi-scalar meta-governance • Territorial logics vs space of flows combination or articulation of these structuring principles • The territory-place-scale-network scheme and its role in theorizing multi-level, place-oriented, multiscalar, and multi-networked political economy • Against “flat ontologies” in (post-)IPE Structured TERRITORY PLACE SCALE NETWORKS Past, present, and emergent frontiers, borders, boundaries Distinct places in a given territory Multi-level government Inter-state system, state alliances, multi-area government Core-periphery, borderlands, empires, neo-medievalism Locales, milieux, cities, sites, regions Localities, globalities Division of labour linked to differently scaled places Local/urban governance, partnerships Scalar division of political power (unitary state, federal state, etc) Scale as area rather than level (local through to global), spatial division of labour (Russian doll) Vertical ontology based on nested or tangled hierarchies. Parallel power networks, nongovernmental international regimes Origin-edge, ripple effects (radiation) Stretching/folding Cross-border region, inter-state system Global city networks, polynucleated cities, intermeshed sites Structuring TERRITORY PLACE SCALE NETWORKS Flat ontology based on horizontality with multiple entrypoints. Networks of networks, space of flows, rhizome Structuralist Scylla, Constructivist Charybdis • Hard political economy: – Grasps distinctiveness of specific economic categories and their structured/structuring nature – But reifies these categories, fetishizes structures, agents being seen simply as Träger of economic logics – Risk of economic determinism • Soft economic sociology – Focuses on semiotic-material construction of social relations, revealing social embedding and – But how to understand specificity of economic relations compared to other types of relation? – Risk that all social relations are equally discursive, differentiated only in terms of content of semiosis Larry Grossberg on Economism Political economy cannot realize the potential of the cultural turn due to its economistic bias. So students of culture should – engage with economics as a discipline, not just a few preferred theorists or schools; – address concrete complexities of economic life, relations and discourses: pure theory cannot analyze economic contexts – collaborate across disciplines – not unreflectively privilege certain forms of academic knowledge and its production A CPE Response to Grossberg • CPE engages with cultural studies as a whole, not just with one preferred theorist or school, • CPE addresses complexities of semiosis & explores discursive and material mechanisms that shape how ‘ideas matter’ in PE rather than merely asserting this or using narratives • CPE works in trans- or post-disciplinary way rather than in ‘multi-disciplinary’ teams • CPE studies not only academic knowledge (production) but also everyday economic imaginaries and their associated struggles Finally, what work can CPE do? • Simple cultural turn is inadequate: cultural turns work better when tied to analysis of materialities • Combining critical semiosis and critical political economy, CPE, in its different variants, can provide basis for: – Ideologiekritik: a critique of hidden assumptions, normative implications, inconsistencies, fallacies, and interests associated with particular imaginaries, categories, etc. – Herrschaftskritik: a critique of latent structures that limit (through variable combinations of coercion, consent, structural power, technologies of domination, etc) capacity for specific social forces to advance emancipatory projects • Similar principles of critical semiosis can be applied in other areas of inquiry, they are not limited to political economy