Download Cultural (Re-)Turns in Critical (International) Political Economy

Cultural (Re-)Turns in
Critical (International) Political
Economy
Bob Jessop
CPERC
Lancaster University
Outline
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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
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Culture and subculture
Culture is ordinary
Everyday culture
Financialization
Professional culture
Epistemic communities
Consumption & Leisure
Mass media
Knowledge Economy
Intellectual Property
Branding
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Material Culture
Nature-Culture
Cyberculture
Body
Haptics
Identities
Memory
Cultural industries
Creativity
Cultural policy
Ethics
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Methodological Turns
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Ideational turn
Interpretive turn
Narrative turn
Rhetorical turn
Argumentative turn
Literary turn
Translational turn
Post-colonial turn
Post-structural turn
Identitarian turn
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Linguistic turn
Discursive turn
Visual turn
Haptic turn
Iconic turn
Reflexive turn
Constructivist turn
Deconstructive turn
Performative turn
Practice turn
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Permutations
Methodological
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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
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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
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Contingent evolutionary mechanisms matter
* Variation, selection, retention
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History matters
* Path-dependence
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Timing and sequencing matter
* Dialectic of path-dependency and path-shaping
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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