THE ROLE OF SENSES AND SIGNS IN THE ECONOMY

Since some years back a number of scholars have argued that the analysis in social science, including the analysis of economic life, needs to take materiality into account. In this article, the author suggests that one way to do push the debate about materiality one step further would be to look at the role of the senses in mediating between outside materiality and the inside reality of the actor. Drawing on Georg Simmel's essay The Sociology of the Senses the author suggests how we may look at the senses from a sociological perspective; this article also discusses what an economic sociology of the senses might look like. In order to show the mechanism by which the senses operate when they mediate between outside materiality and inside reality, the author draws on the sign theory of philosopher Charles Peirce. The signs, and what they refer to, come together in the mind of the subject, Peirce argues. They also impact the subject, rather than the other way around.     

BROADENING THE HORIZONS OF ECONOMY

From corporations to occupied factories, a growing number of widely accessible books and documentary films have emerged to represent an array of economic concerns and the groups gathered around them. Viewed as a new form of political association, these representations offer a lens to contemporary social change. This article draws on theories of performativity to explore the ways in which such diversely constituted assemblies might transform the economy. Representation has a number of different meanings; it relates to how economic concerns are discursively represented and thereby made real while also referring to the political representation of different groups gathered around that concern. Putting these two senses of representation together, this article examines the temporal and spatial composition of two alternative economic representations, the documentary films The Take and Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse [The Gleaners and I]. Through The Take I explore the way in which alternative economies are performatively brought into being. I argue that The Gleaners and I illustrates how one might go about representing and reassembling the geography of economy through the idea of the periperformative. Together these films offer a way of broadening economy that has implications for the performative potential of research more generally.     

PERFORMATIVITY,CORPOREALITY AND THE POLITICS OF SHIP DISPOSAL

This paper provides a posthumanist performative reading of spaces of disposal as sites of economic activity. Its empirical focus is ship breaking, as practices and political techniques. Drawing on the work of Donald Mackenzie, Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, it frames ship disposal as a boundary-making intervention in the world and as part of the demolition assemblage. The paper challenges the oppositional politics that characterise international debate about ship disposal. Through an articulation of the academic register and literary narrative, the paper develops a material politics of ship disposal which draws connections, rather than making distinctions, between labouring bodies in different parts of the world. It reconfigures ship disposal through a material politics that centres the proximate intimacy of human bodies, demolition technologies and vital inorganic materials, highlighting the importance of shared corporeal vulnerabilities, a biopolitics of occupational health and a material politics of globalisation where the long distance associations are temporal, of a ‘now’ and future-past ‘then’.