THE CONCEPT OF ‘ATHONIAN ECONOMY’ IN THE MONASTERY OF VATOPAIDI

This paper investigates the underlying principle of ‘economy’ in the Greek Orthodox monastery of Vatopaidi, Mount Athos, in complementary relation to the monastic ideal of ‘virginity’ as the means of separating monastic from secular life. In this context, ‘economy’ represents an internal and external dichotomy: an economy within the spiritual self (‘economy of passions’) and the monastery (‘law of the house’), expressed in traditional practices, such as prayer, confession, psalmody, and painting; and an economy of relations between the monastery and the materialist ‘cosmopolitan’ world outside Athos, which is manifested by Vatopaidi's strong financial and political status in the Orthodox world. The material reveals the overlapping connection between the notions of the ‘self’, the ‘monastery’, and the ‘world’, in order to critically evaluate the cultural economy of Vatopaidi in relation to its historical past, and in connection to its present political and economic status within and against the Greek state.     

‘The current gold coin of the New Jerusalem’: perception,symbolization, and money in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

ABSTRACT

As an external visual marker of what is supposed by other characters in the novel as its wearer’s ‘internal,’ spiritual state, Hester Prynne’s Scarlet ‘A’ is, among other things, an emblem of a powerful American anxiety regarding the gulf between appearance and reality, symbol and meaning. The desperate and dangerous need for fixed signs and self-evident identities that obsesses Hawthorne’s Puritan-era characters is directly related to the gold-paper money debates that dominated the politics of Hawthorne’s own time, with their concern for issues of ‘character’ and value and what we might now call the gap between the symbolic and the real, or face value and material value.     

Fighting for the Other's Rights First: Levinasian Perspectives on Occupy Gezi's Standing Protest

This essay re-explores the tie between ethics and politics in the thought of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas and is specifically concerned with the political consequences that might be drawn from his unique account of ethics. In response to Victoria Tahmasebi-Birgani's recent reading of Levinasian politics as ethicoliberatory praxis, this essay attempts to exemplify such politics in relation to the silent standing protest that occurred throughout Occupy Gezi. As will be illustrated, this particular form of protest was symbolic of a struggle that was not tied to a classical notion of autonomous agency, but partially arose from ‘radical passivity’. It will be suggested that the protester's tacit participation in a shared endeavour to create responsive idioms for the Other can exemplify Levinasian ‘response-ability’ as a concrete praxis. Relying on Levinasian terminology, I suggest that Occupy Gezi's forms of silent protest created an ‘un-said Saying’ that disturbed the realm of politics from an ethical stance. Alongside a Levinasian reading, the protester's performed standstill will be explored in relation to what Butler and Athanasiou term ‘two senses of dispossession’ together with the concept implied by the Greek στα´σι? [stasis]. As I contend, stasis manages to escape from the principle of non-contradiction in Being through integrating Being's Other in implicating both movement and stillness, activity and passivity. Hereby, stasis potentially points to an-other peace before politics, thereby offering a prolific alternative to the classic Hobbesian account of a dichotomy between war and peace.     

Curating disaster: a way to turn science into action in times of the Corona pandemic

ABSTRACT

To cure Covid-19 on a medical, political, economic, and societal level, there is a need to ‘curate’ between science and politics in such a way that decision-makers and societies can address the practical requirements at hand. This commentary introduces and discusses ‘curating’ as a socio-material practice mediating between science and decision-making. It reflects on the current Covid-19 pandemic and compares ‘curatorial’ aspects here to the field of natural catastrophe risk finance. As both areas try to manage disasters, the space between scientific knowledge and economic and/or political decision-making becomes a particularly important node. By employing a focus on catastrophe simulation modelling, this essay looks at several issues of the natural catastrophe field that may yield ways to deal with epidemic crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. This commentary suggests putting greater emphasis on (and encourages a research focus on) the ‘curation’ between science and politics to improve decision-making for socio-material disasters.     

Financial performativity as evidence of immanence: the phenomenology of liquidity crisis in contemporary markets for risk

The sociologist Bruno Latour has often expressed aversion to immanent critique, framing actor-network theory in terms of focus on visible phenomena. In spite of this, research on financial performativity inspired by Latour’s perspective can still be interpreted in terms of immanent critique and related to Political Economy (a critical discipline), through Kant’s critique of metaphysics as a ‘regulative axiom’. Research on financial performativity has uncovered evidence of the existence of constructive processes that show how an idea (like a financial model) can become something like an ‘object’. This ‘objectivity’ appears to contradict Kant’s critique of metaphysics – that there always remains a gap between our ideas and the world itself. This paper therefore explores financial performativity as a ‘contradiction’, historicizing it to argue that ‘Barnesian performativity’ and ‘financial liquidity’ are ‘immanent’ to one another in the events of recent financial crises. The paper conducts this interpretation to provide a new conceptualization of ‘financial liquidity’ that is more empirically apparent, helping to overcome some of the limits in the discussion of ‘liquidity’ in Political Economy (that Latour might want to highlight), where discussion occurs in metaphysical terms difficult to connect to actual events.     

The Politics of Value in French Funeral Arrangements

This paper draws upon the history of the funeral market over two centuries to examine three major devices which have played a central role in the funeral economy, both in terms of defining the nature of the ‘goods’ and their attendant value but also in regulating the relations between the Pompes Funèbres and the other institutional actors involved. It highlights the ways in which these devices provide a ‘politics of value’ performing the articulation between the formatting of economic value and the pursuit of political concerns. First, observing the constitutional phase of the private industry, it examines the ‘system of the classes’ as a central device of managing dissonance between conflicting interests. Then, a historical jump leads us to half way through the twentieth century to the market infrastructure formed by the management of ‘care for the deceased’. As a third point, the exponential development of death insurance in recent years appears as an expression of rationalization of funeral arrangement. The analysis of the market devices will highlight an essential property, that is, the incorporation of a ‘calculation formula’ which set up both the profit sharing and the handling of moral and political issues.     

(De)politicising and Ecologising Bicycles

Self-service bicycle systems are today being set up in a number of cities across the world. Seen as a means to promote a sustainable city and new forms of ecology, and valued for their ‘planet friendly’ character, these systems have become a hallmark for cities that want to become part of the so-called green culture. Drawing from the experience of the Vélib’ programme in Paris and adopting a pragmatist perspective, this paper analyses the controversies which developed as this transportation infrastructure was implemented, as well as the definitions of ‘ecology’ which were at the centre of the dispute. In doing so it shows the capacity of the private firm involved in the system, JCDecaux, to ‘hijack’ and integrate the ecological critique, its rather powerful capacity to persuade other actors, and the popularity that the project achieved through a hard-won process of justification. At the same time, this paper argues that the mobility turn played a performative role in the justification and the definition of this new transport project.     

Human and non-human intermediation in rural agricultural markets

ABSTRACT

A central trope of the information society is that of ‘information flows.’ The implicit assumption underlying such a vision involves the removal of gatekeepers and intermediaries who are perceived to impede such flows. Drawing from field research on information circulation, trade, and money in rural markets in Myanmar and India, we show why intermediaries persist alongside information and communication technologies (ICTs) in trade and financial transactions in the ‘Information Age.’ We examine the range of roles, (human and non-human) actors, and material practices that are involved in conducting financial transactions, and we show the importance of historical legacies and politics in explaining why both cash and financial intermediaries persist in the digital age. Focusing on the different value that human and non-human intermediaries bring to financial encounters helps explain what characteristics make each resilient or replaceable in a time of change. By situating intermediaries and mediations in the social relations within which they operate, we bring back the role of power and politics – an element that is often missing in accounts focused on the unmediated and ‘free’ circulation of information using ICTs – in explaining processes of mediation and circulation.     

The moral economy of face: marketized gift and depoliticized solidarity in South Korea’s fair trade

ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.     

Valuation struggles over pricing – determining the worth of wind power

Public policies such as feed-in tariffs have been widely introduced to stimulate the development of renewable energies, and sustain a decarbonisation of the electricity sector. Proponents argue that these governance instruments safeguard public goods such as the climate – yet they are accused of creating political markets, and political prices, here understood as market distortion. This paper studies the ‘politics’ of pricing by following the adoption of the first feed-in tariff in France. Pricing as a way of achieving non-economic ends, such as climate mitigation, brings the values of several public goods into play, all the while prompting a translation of these values into a single price. Following the struggles over the pricing of wind power in the early 2000s, the study illustrates that rather than a pollution of the market sphere by that of politics, a politics of pricing can be observed in four distinct struggles: namely the framing of the public interest; valuation as the articulation of the future; the possible agencies of governance; and role of valuation methods and calculations.     

On the Symbolic Production of Digital Markets for Cultural Goods

This paper proposes and mobilizes a cultural economic framework to study the dynamic formation of digital markets for cultural goods. Adapting Hayek's theory of price to recent developments in the field of cultural sociology, it proposes the idea that an effective price system condenses information dispersed in society, and then enters into a performative process of symbolic communication that is perceived as ‘authentic’ by the consumers. After analyzing ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ current strategies aimed at producing digital markets for cultural goods, which are especially sensitive to the symbolic dimension of price, the article suggests the hypothesis that the digital market has been constructed as a zero- or quasi-zero-price economic space, and that it is the offline and material market of cultural products the one that collects the higher revenues derived from the ‘authentic’ generation of value taking place in the digital marketplace.     

Reassembling the Cultural

The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.     

THE PROPER COPY

Efforts to make (and keep) knowledge public have provided a powerful counter-model to the recent expansion of exclusive intellectual property rights in such arenas as information technology, digital media, biological research, and pharmaceutical access. While sympathetic to the impulse to counteract the new ‘enclosures’ with knowledge made public, this essay critically interrogates some of the constitutive limits – in fact, the constitutive outsides – to these counter formulations. Paying particular attention to how public domain initiatives, like their strict intellectual property counterparts, also police the line between the proper and the improper copy, I argue that mechanisms for keeping knowledge public do not just circle the wagons against the predations of the Monsantos and Microsofts of the world. In their rhetorical and normative commitments to the proper copy, they also risk reproducing some of the same constrictions and exclusions that we tend to associate with (privatized) acts of enclosure itself. I explore this argument first in reference to creative commons and copyright, which can reproduce a strong ideological commitment to improvement – ‘innovation’ or ‘creativity’ – against the mere copy. What is the cost, I ask, of making the idea of improvement the price of admission not just to intellectual property claims, but to participation in newly ‘democratic’ public and common spaces of knowledge production? Second, I look to global pharmaceutical politics – specifically, regulatory efforts to improve access to cheaper copied and generic drugs in Argentina – to raise questions about the public domain's normative place in the continued expansion and harmonization of intellectual property regimes in the so-called global South. Together, these discussions suggest how the public domain and the commons, like their IP counterparts, can rhetorically and normatively expand and be secured against the improper copy.     

Reading and Writing the Passions in Duchenne de Boulogne's Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine

This paper examines Duchenne de Boulogne's Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (1862) as a limit case between Foucauldian epistemes of signification. Electrically inducing ‘expression’ in his subject's face, Duchenne, a neuro-physiologist, claimed to have discovered the true ‘orthography’ of the passions. He photographed and published his experiments to offer the art world a positivist corrective to the historically ‘arbitrary’ representation of emotion. The narrative accompanying the photographs provides the basis for this analysis which focuses on how Duchenne used the image/text idea of an ’orthography‘ to shape his technologically mediated expressions with a Renaissance and Classical poetics of resemblance and representation. Making an analogy with linguistic ‘units’, Duchenne located a scene of writing under the facial flesh where action was ‘transfigured’ into passion. The Classical debate on the origin of language and the Renaissance physiognomic tradition inspired his discourse, which failed to grasp the modernity of his technologically mediated passions.     

Street Papers,Work and Begging: ‘Experimenting’ at the Margins of Economic Legitimacy

Street papers are publications produced specifically for sale by the homeless and other vulnerable people in many countries around the world. Their social status is, however, often conspicuously unstable: ‘Get a job!’ has been reported as a common insult addressed to vendors, and street paper organisations have responded with their own rhetoric and strategies that aim at disrupting any analogy with begging. The present analysis frames these rhetorical confrontations as a struggle over economic legitimacy, highlighting some of the ways in which social actors build and sever the normatively loaded associations that position them and others in social space, and how the ‘experimental’ combination of business and social responsibilities tests social actors' abilities to adapt to this practice.     

Against accumulation: lifestyle minimalism,de-growth and the present post-ecological condition

The post-2008 financial crisis era has seen an upsurge in popular cultural narratives that implicitly challenge principles of economic productivity, consumption and growth by lamenting a so-called ‘world of too much,’ advocating ethics of minimalism, and renouncing everyday busyness. Narratives range from lifestyle advice on simplicity and de-cluttering private homes, to quests for the reduction of individual labor, communication, social contacts and distraction. This article questions these narratives in terms of eco-politics. Using Kate Soper’s concept of ‘alternative hedonism,’ the article analyzes a selection of five self-help books and one blog that promote lifestyle minimalism in order to interrogate their potential in stimulating de-growth eco-politics through popular culture. Drawing on post-ecological theory, it argues that narratives of lifestyle minimalism are paradoxical in that they resist yet at the same time promote capitalist cultures of growth. To overcome this limitation, it is crucial to understand and transform the narrative premises of lifestyle minimalism in ways that contextualize problems of ‘excess,’ ‘clutter’ and ‘a world of too much’ as intrinsic to the current system of capital accumulation. The article concludes by reflecting on the potential of an eco-movement that joins the alternative culture of minimalist hedonism with the eco-political agenda of de-growth.     

Between business and morality: cultural politics in independent bookshops in China

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how cultural businesses may facilitate contentious political activity in authoritarian contexts. Existing research in Western liberal democracies has shown the widespread political activism of actors in the cultural and creative industries. Whether such activism exists in authoritarian society, how it may differ in character and form, and what implications this will have for our understanding of relations between business, politics, and culture in authoritarian countries remain to be addressed. Drawing on data collected from 55 ‘independent bookshops’ in China, I illustrate how these organisations perform ‘cultural politics,’ a type of political participation in which actors employ mainly symbolic means to express social and political concerns. The organisations’ economic relations and conditions facilitate their efforts to create spaces in which contentious questions can be raised, sensitive topics explored, and alternative ideas expressed, despite the Chinese state’s political regulation of the cultural sphere. The finding of the economic embeddedness of cultural politics sheds new light on our understanding of the political economy of cultural businesses in contemporary China.     

Competing Quality Conventions in the French Online Display Advertising Market

This paper builds upon an empirical study of suppliers of online advertising space in France in order to highlight the plurality of quality conventions that organize the activity of market intermediaries. We show that the market is organized around two different quality conventions, the ‘media’ convention and the ‘direct-response’ convention, each equipped with specific efficiency indicators, pricing methods and selling channels. Then we focus on the growing conflict of territory between the two conventions; we analyse the balance of power between the conventions and the arenas where they compete. We observe that the collective action of the defenders of the traditional world is not (yet) sufficient to contain the pervasiveness of the indicators and metrics from the world of direct-response.