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.     

From shanzhai chic to Gangnam style: seven practices of cultural-economic mediation in China and Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.     

SOURCES OF FINANCIAL SOCIABILITY

This article investigates the sources of sociability in modern financial systems as a prelude to assessing the prospects for financial regulation. Three sources are identified: sociality dependent upon contract, upon relational interdependency, and upon the operation of will and passion. Each of these would provide its own rationale for regulation but it is the third that is stressed here as a radical conception, one that needs to be more fully addressed than has so far proved possible in an analytical context. And it is this conception that connects most closely to a second overall theme of the article which is to explore further the nature of ‘irrationality’ as manifest in financial crises. When the contours of both these aspects of financial calculation have been elaborated, the article moves on to consider how they might shape regulatory responses to the seeming inevitability of financial crises in modern capitalist economies.     

Subjective well-being in cultural advocacy: a politics of research between the market and the academy

This paper responds to a trend of contracting out subjective well-being econometrics to demonstrate social return on investment (SROI) for evidence-based policy-making. We discuss an evolving ecology of ‘external’ research taking place ‘between’ the academy and commercial consultancy. We then contextualise this as waves of research methodologies and consultancy for the cultural sector. The new model of ‘external between’ consultancy research for policy is not only placed between the University and the market, but also facilitates discourse between policy sectors, government, the media and the academy. Specifically, it enables seductive but selective arguments for advocacy that claim authority through academic affiliation, yet are not evaluated for robustness. To critically engage with an emergent form of what Stone calls ‘causal stories’, we replicate a publicly funded externally commissioned SROI model that argues for the value of cultural activities to well-being. We find that the author’s operationalisation of participation and well-being are crucial, yet their representation of the relationship problematic, and their estimates questionable. This case study ‘re-performs’ econometric modelling national-level survey data for the cultural sector to reveal practices that create norms of expertise for policy-making that are not rigorous. We conclude that fluid claims to authority allow experimental econometric models and measures to perform across the cultural economy as if ratified. This new model of advocacy research requires closer academic consideration given the changing research funding structures and recent attention to expertise and the contracting out of public services.     

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.     

Core task and organizational reality

Reflecting a wider trend in the social sciences, the field of organization studies has adopted an increasingly general and metaphysical vocabulary to guide and frame its analyses of life and dynamics in organizations. Where classic organizational analyses would describe organizations in terms of core objects such as ‘task’ and ‘coordination,’ contemporary organization studies emphasize, much like other social science disciplines, broader topics such as ‘network,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘change.’ The paper argues that this altered focus and vocabulary is accompanied by a diminished ability to specify and intervene into the practical reality of organizations. It further argues that a discipline's core objects are not anachronisms to be discarded with, but crucial for specifying reality in ways that have proven practically relevant and still are.     

Korea's blacklist scandal: governmentality,culture, and creativity

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the relationship between culture and governance, exploring how the practice of government has invoked conflicts and crises in the Korean culture industries. The Park Geun-Hye regime used culture as a central engine to boost Korea's national economy by adopting the new slogan, ‘Creative Korea’, to embody the country's national values within the international community. However, the regime's constant emphasis on creative economies came under attack when it was discovered that the Ministry of Culture and Tourism abused its authority by censuring 9,473 artists who were critical of the regime. Through an analysis of journalistic interviews with artists, critics and cultural practitioners, this paper examines how the relationships of governmentality, culture and creativity have been negotiated in the process of regime change. In addition, this paper explores how the Korean Wave phenomenon – the transnational expansion of Korean popular culture – during the past two decades has reshaped the society's perception of the governor–governed relationship within the cultural sphere.     

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.     

Towards a commodity theory of token money: on ‘Gold standard thinking in a fiat currency world’

ABSTRACT

Via a discussion of public debates surrounding the potential minting of a trillion dollar platinum coin in the context of the American debt ceiling crises of 2011 and 2013, this essay seeks to make sense of the popular persistence of ‘commodity’ or ‘metallist’ understandings of money's value in the face of a scholarly consensus that all currency is ‘token’ or ‘fiat’ in nature. Scholars from Knapp to Desan have elaborated token theories of commodity money, wherein both precious and non-precious currencies are treated as the products of social construction. By contrast, I suggest the need to supplement such approaches with what I term a commodity theory of token money, wherein money objects made from both precious and non-precious materials are treated as inherently valuable. Exploring the semiotic convergence between gold, Bitcoin and modern paper money, I suggest that the broadly Peircean notion of rhematization in which symbol and indexical signs are (mis)taken for iconic ones is particularly suited to unpack the continuing social salience of commodity theories of money across the gold/paper divide. Moreover attention must be paid to how we define the icon itself.     

MATERIAL,LITERARY NARRATIVE AND CULTURAL ECONOMY

In this paper I argue that thinking about the material in cultural economy has much to gain from culture itself. Specifically, I explore the potential of literary narrative for conceptualizing and writing material within a performative cultural economy. Drawing on the industrial short stories of Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, The Wrench, A Tranquil Star), I provide a literal reading of these works, highlighting their foregrounding of material encounters, the importance of process (and not just product), and materials’ instability in process, and their connections to theorizations of economies as assemblage. The paper also explores how Levi writes material to presence using the techniques of narrative discourse, particularly mimesis. The paper concludes by arguing that narrative is a means to writing a performative cultural economy and that cultural economy needs to rekindle the arts of story-telling. Paying attention to literary narrative shows how this might be achieved.     

The social life of measurement: how methods have shaped the idea of culture in urban regeneration

Although ‘culture-led regeneration’ has been critiqued as both a concept and practice, it is clear that policy-makers continue to make efforts to use cultural activity of varying forms to achieve ends which could be (and are) described in terms of urban ‘regeneration’. Whilst the idea of culture-led urban regeneration had gained considerable prominence in a range of policy by the early twenty-first century, many questions have remained over how exactly such ‘regenerative’ outcomes could be convincingly demonstrated, despite much activity to attempt such demonstration over the course of preceding years. The desire for convincing evidence can be seen in a continued, and increasing, focus on evaluation, and methods aimed at providing evidence of impact and outcomes. In light of the renewed political focus in recent years on ‘proving’ the effects and value of cultural activity, this paper considers the continuation of practice in this area, and asks what lessons, if any, have been learned in evaluative practice which seeks to demonstrate the regenerative effects of culture. In light of the continuation of apparently problematic practices, the paper seeks to delineate and account for what has been learned, and what has not.     

Knowledge for the West,Production for the Rest?

This article develops the argument that a ‘knowledge economy,’ despite its cheerful optimism, is also an elegant incarnation of the demise of Western economies. An analysis of policy documents, research statements, and national accounts reveals this paradoxical coexistence of anxiety and progress in the discourse on knowledge economies. While the concept is often hailed as a temporal concept (superseding other forms of economic production), this article argues that a knowledge economy is best understood as a spatial concept – it is a way of contending with global reorganizations of production. This spatial approach is elaborated to tackle three paradoxes. (1) A knowledge economy enfolds defeat with progress. (2) A knowledge economy downplays the importance of industrial labor and simultaneously depends on it to materialize its ideas. (3) While seemingly intangible and ephemeral, a knowledge economy is fixed in place in national economies through government and corporate policy (including through the emergent phenomenon of ‘knowledge-adjusted gross domestic products’). A spatial approach provides a view of the tenuous global interconnections and specific conditions that prop up a knowledge economy, and shows how the concept is mobilized to redraw the map so that endangered economies can regain their challenged sense of centrality in a world economy.     

‘Stars’ and places: exploring the spatial organization of media and entertainment industries in China

ABSTRACT

Drawing on an innovative ‘big data’ method, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the geography of media and entertainment industries (MEIs) in China, by examining the specific activities that are performed by celebrities, the key actors in these industries. Compared to previous research on cultural and creative industries, which primarily rely on more traditional statistical data, our study demonstrates a new approach to systemically investigate the spatial organization of the dynamic production process in MEIs. The outcomes reveal that activities focusing on the different value segments of MEIs display rather diverse geographical patterns. Depending on the availability and combination of specific local assets, different locations perform varying functions in the production networks of MEIs. Therefore, the agglomeration of MEIs only partially overlaps with the existing urban hierarchy. In addition, celebrities catering to different media and entertainment markets also exhibit distinct activity patterns, indicating a close and reciprocal relationship between the popularity of celebrities, the activities they perform, the platforms that are chosen, and the commercial value that can be generated as a result. This study contributes to our understanding of the complex development patterns and consequences of MEIs in emerging economies.     

Commodifying Passion

This article explores the cultural framings that all too frequently pass un-noticed in standard cost-benefit accounts of development economics. Our purpose is not simply to add our voice to those who argue for the importance of ‘bringing culture back in’, for we assume that in contexts of modern development economics ‘the cultural’ cannot simply be added to the technical or the economic, as these perspectives are explicitly elaborated as an abstraction from the cultural. Rather, we are interested in how an exploration of the cultural dynamics of technical process leads us to a disjunctive (rather than an additive) mode of ‘inclusion’. Building on approaches from science studies and social anthropology, we draw on our ethnographic and historical investigations of road-building in Peru to explore divergent modes of connectivity through which a politics of cultural engagement is played out. Taking the example of a highway under construction in a frontier zone not generally considered of economic importance to the wider national economy, we discuss the historical desire for ‘connectivity’, highlighting the instability of the physical and social environments on the margins of a marginal state. In this context we find that the vital energies of the frontier – entrepreneurial, innovative, experimental and unruly – consistently disrupt the vision of smooth, orderly, technical integration. We argue that this tension between the cultural and the technical, so clearly manifest at the frontiers of capitalist expansion (but characteristic of technological expansion more generally) is a driver rather than an obstacle in the development process. Attempts to produce a political resolution to a perceived lack of integration on the margins of society too often proceed through further attempts at securing smooth continuity (via further technical modes of intervention) rather than building on the diverse (disjunctive) modes of engagement that already exist.     

Consumer databases as practical accomplishments: the making of digital objects in three movements

This paper aims to reflect on some key issues linked to the production of digital objects in business settings. In doing so, it problematizes current social science scholarship, which emphasizes the analysis of digital data and analytics, and reinforces the magnitude of its consequences and ‘data power’. The paper proposes making three corrective ‘movements’ that might enrich our approaches to how databases and analytics are assembled in business settings. The first movement involves the problem of ethnographic access to data-making practices. We propose taking seriously the issue of fabricating an ethnographic encounter where the process of making digital objects is exposed. The second movement concerns the visibility and the type of politics taking place in data practices. We argue for the need to displace attention from data impacts and results to the myriad of mundane practices and devices through which these objects are assembled. The third movement we suggest requires a focus on examining error and failure as key aspects of the manufacturing of consumer databases. Each of these movements is illustrated by ethnographic vignettes from a 9-month ethnographic experiment that involved participating in the first stages of the manufacturing of an online financial retail company's consumer database.     

The cinematic mode of production: towards a political economy of the postmodern

Cinema marks a profound shift in the relation between image and text – indeed it is the watershed of the subjugation of language by image. Cinema as an innovative shift in both industrial capitalism and cultural practice marks, therefore, the restructuring of language function in accord with the changing protocols of techno-capitalism. The ‘talking cure’, otherwise known as psychoanalysis, is itself a symptom of cinema. As a precursor for TV and computing and Internet, cinema transacts value transfer across the image utilising a production process that can be grasped as founded under the rubric of what I call ‘the attention theory of value’. The deterritorialised factory that is the contemporary image, is an essential component of globalisation, neo-imperialism, and militarisation, organising, as it were, the consent (ignorance of) and indeed desire for these latter processes. Thus ‘cinema’, as a paradigm for image-mediated social production, implies a cultural turn for political economics. It also implies that it is the interstitial, informal activities that transpire across the entire surface of the socius as well as in the vicissitudes of the psyche and experience that are the new (untheorised) production sites for global capital – and therefore among the significant sites for the waging of the next revolution.