Imagined futures in mineral exploration

ABSTRACT

This paper uses ethnographic and archival data to analyze the creation and legitimation of predictions in industrial mineral exploration in Sweden. The search for exploitable ore deposits is a finance intensive process of resource creation in which mineral explorationists (e)valuate mineral deposits in order to assess their future minability. This paper builds on the recent literature on ‘imagined futures’ and futurework and combines it with the conceptual toolkit provided by (e)valuation research in order to outline how mineral explorationists establish a deposit’s existence and its future minability. Arguing that the creation of imagined futures plays an important role in mining and other social and economic phenomena, this article shows how imagined futures are created, and by whom, in the field of industrial mineral exploration, and how the creation of these futures is situated in a universe of actors’ beliefs, of valuation devices, and of norms and standards. The paper also shows how industrial standards guide this predictive enterprise and provides legitimacy to the results.     

Uncertain hog futures: life,death, and arbitrage on the factory farm

ABSTRACT

Between 2013 and 2014, PED virus (PEDv) swept through American pig farms, killing millions of animals and causing a market panic that drove the prices of both physical pork and lean hog futures to all-time highs. However, a divergence between pricing in financial markets and on-farm realities allowed some producers to reap record profits via a unique form of biological arbitrage. This arbitrage was novel in that it allowed for an underlier (pigs) to be used to profit from fluctuations in the price of a derivative (lean hog futures). This article explores the case of PEDv to examine the entanglements and divergences between ‘real’ and ‘abstract’ values in financialized industries, paying particular attention to the schisms between the imaginaries and practices of actors in the financial and tangibly productive links of the agricultural value chain. To do so, it examines the historical co-constitution of American agriculture and the financial sector, and shows how in the contemporary moment these two ever-more-intertwined sectors are nonetheless marked by important differences. It argues that the nature of agricultural production can confound the expectations of finance, and highlights the fact that financialization entails contextually-specific practices that can lead to uneven and unexpected market outcomes.     

Re-imagining the future in finance capitalism

ABSTRACT

What is the role of imagination in the constitution of finance capitalism? How do the fictions, myths, and (ir)rationalities of finance shape society's ability to imagine the future in the face of mounting political instability? Well over a decade since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, today's financialised economies are still marred by stagnation and uncertainty. Against this backdrop, the increasingly speculative nature of economic forecasting, and the accelerated trading of promises of all sorts (from algorithmic and derivative markets to contemporary electoral politics) put the role of imagination centre stage. This special issue contends that, contrary to conventional wisdom, imagining the future is not necessarily equal to ‘fantasising' or to ‘irrational exuberance' or the ‘animal spirits'. Rather, it points to something much more fundamental: the power of finance to produce new social and political morphologies under conditions of radical uncertainty. The articles of the special issue confront these issues by mapping out a novel field of investigation into different, unique types of imagination undergirding finance capitalism in the years since its most recent crisis: from the future-making practices of mineral exploration and agricultural derivative markets, to the imagined futures of financial education programmes, the financialisation of creative work, and the role of future-oriented legitimacy in today’s populist politics.     

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.     

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.     

Deal or no deal? Some reflections on the ‘Baker-Thompson rule,’ ‘matching,’ and ‘market design’

ABSTRACT

This article raises the issue of why the idea of a ‘deal’ has become so prevalent in the discussion of political matters and policy proposals associated with future economic developments. It does this by linking the deal with several features of market design. Principal amongst these are game theory and matching algorithms. The Barker-Thompson Rule is presented as an example of a particular type of market construction operating in a game theoretic context, while the ‘matching engine’ is explored in a variety of contexts where it is argued to have become a standardized technique indicating to a possible reshaping of the economic terrain more generally. The consequences of these developments and trends are the emergence of a ‘dealing culture’ that threatens to overwhelm other forms of decision-making and consume the policy-making environment with the immediacy of its dealing logic.     

Nation branding in contemporary Taiwan: a grassroots perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper, based on textual analysis and interviews, offers a complementary perspective of scholarly studies of nation branding which focus on the state and corporate elites involved in such undertakings. It places grassroots initiatives in branding Taiwan through tourist souvenirs and other video and graphic materials against the larger background of cultural policies and official branding campaigns, and shows grassroots actors’ complex entanglement with official institutions, policies and discourses despite declared scepticism towards the latter and a low degree of direct collaboration. It compares official and grassroots messages and argues that the latter are more coherent; capture a local specificity and encourage a tourist gaze centred around the ‘human touch’ theme; distance themselves from China, the significant ‘other’ of Taiwanese nationalism; and markedly highlight an epistemological and representational strategy based on individual, sensorial experience, which may constitute a response to biased and untrustworthy state national narratives of the martial law era.     

Facing future uncertainties and risks through personal finance: conventions in financial education

ABSTRACT

A crucial component of the neoliberal regime is the shift of responsibility for individuals’ financial well-being and security from the state and other public bodies to the individuals themselves, who are required to take responsibility for their own financial decisions and their current and future economic situation. This project of responsibilization presumes a world in which calculative subjects can estimate and manage future risks. Nonetheless, compelled to engage with the financial sphere as a key means of assuring their economic security, individuals are exposed in fact to the fundamental uncertainty of financial markets. In this article, we examine conventions formulated and communicated by financial education programs as cognitive devices geared to prompt individuals to imagine and engage with finance as a site of knowable, calculable and manageable risks, rather than as a site of fundamental uncertainty. Aiming to instill among the general public a particular cognitive frame based on the idea that possible futures are assessable and the risks that they carry can be managed through engagement with financial products and services, these conventions contribute to the normalization of financial logics in everyday life and the incorporation of the general population into the process of financialization.     

Digitalizing consumer society: equipment and devices of digital consumption

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy focuses on the digitalization of consumption and its social, cultural, ethical, political, and gendered implications. It thus answers the call for more research on how digital devices spread from the purely personal domain to multiple sociocultural domains. Through their use, new cultural practices have emerged between consumers and these devices, and devices and markets, that lead to change, in terms of consumer demand, consumption norms, and issues of ethics, culture, and power. Closely examining the role that devices play in consumption behavior enables us to address the supposed manipulative power of hi-tech companies, infrastructures, and systems at the global level, and the view ordinary market actors hold of digital appliances as empowering tools at the local level. The papers in this volume bridge ‘actor network theory' and ‘consumer culture theory' from the perspective of market ‘agencements.’ Ruckenstein-Granroth and Beauvisage-Mellet, and Arriagada-Concha focus on the device-mediated relationship between large digital market infrastructures and consumer behavior; Petersson McIntyre and Licoppe unveil the societal and cultural underpinnings of digitalized markets. Last but not least, Sörum and Soujtis address the political dimensions and implications of our new digital consumer equipment and society.     

Ginzburg in Harlem: History,Structure and the Politics of Primitivism

Abstract

The historian Carlo Ginzburg is renowned for his critique of modern, scientific reason and his articulation of an alternative form of knowledge which he labels ‘conjectural’. This form of knowledge, supposedly more attuned to the historian’s interest in the singular and specific fragment, as opposed to the abstract and universal concept, is so rooted in the practices of the prehistoric hunter that Ginzburg sometimes describes it as a ‘venatic’ form of deduction, binding ‘the human animal closely to other animal species’. In this essay, I explore the ramifications of this alternative form of knowledge, attending especially to its relationship to the modernist theme of ‘primitivism’. I do so by juxtaposing Ginzburg’s critical appraisal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous literary invention, Sherlock Holmes, and Rudolph Fisher’s own literary invention, John Archer, the physician who sometimes aids criminal investigations in African American Harlem. I argue that the differences between Archer and Holmes draw attention to some troubling implications of Ginzburg’s historiographical argument. Folding this analysis on itself, however, I also suggest that what might be at stake, when Ginzburg insists so troublingly on the importance of the singular, venatic trace, is the evocation of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the historical ‘event’.     

The Dangerous Individual('s) Dog: Race,Criminality and the ‘Pit Bull’

Abstract

Though it is generally acknowledged that there is a relationship between racist discourse and the figure of the non-human animal, this relationship is almost always assumed to be analogical: oppressed groups are compared with or treated as non-human animals. But the recent dogfighting case against NFL Quarterback Michael Vick and the attendant suspicion of ‘pit bulls’ suggests that racism today has a more complex relationship with (certain types of) animals than the analogy would capture. An analysis of this discourse both calls for and revises Foucault's notion of ‘the dangerous individual’ as an explanatory concept for contemporary racism. The concomitant revulsion toward both dogfighting and ‘pit bulls’ suggests an expression of fear of a perceived threat to normative whiteness, insofar as these ‘dangerous’ dogs are figured as carriers of the contagion of racial abnormality.     

Creativity versus branding: totemism,animism and the pursuit of uniqueness in fashion

ABSTRACT

In the contemporary organization of the economy, creativity and branding constitute two distinctive imperatives which generally point in different directions: the former towards newness and change, the latter towards continuity and recognisability. Numerous agents in corporate organizations thus face a conundrum of creativity versus branding, which is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the fashion business. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a fashion company, I argue that these seemingly incompatible imperatives are inextricably entangled, as their paradoxical relation is solved, even dissolved, in a dynamic interplay between ‘a totemic logic’ and ‘an animist practice’. Thus, a dynamics of totemism and animism unites creativity and branding in the continual pursuit of uniqueness. While totemic and animist modalities are most commonly associated with non-western ontologies and perceived as mutually exclusive, I contend that they are also at work in contemporary commercial processes and that they are enmeshed in, and propelled by, each other. This suggests that these modalities operate together particularly when the making of distinctive identities is critical – as in economic competition today.     

A care-infused market tale: on (not) maintaining relationships of trust in energy retrofit products

ABSTRACT

Issues of maintenance offer exceptional opportunities for advancing our understanding of how market-driven innovation can meet societal objectives for energy transitions. In this article, I present a case study of ongoing attempts by two spin-outs and one start-up to stabilise innovative socio-technical agencements – ‘customer journeys’ – designed to catalyse economic exchange of certain singular goods – energy retrofit products – in the Netherlands. This market-driven innovation relies on sustaining carefully crafted relationships of trust among supply-chain actants and homeowners. I mobilise the analytical lens of ‘care’ to show how the multiplicity of connections that form through socio-technical agencements – and function as a market – are tentative, contested, and unpredictable. Trust relationships are in a constant process of becoming through contestation and convergence among supply-chain actants. In doing so, I expose the precarious and arduous work involved in maintaining a market for singular public goods. This implies a knowledge politics as well: in a call to sensitise us, market scholars, to processes of maintenance integral to market-driven innovation for energy transitions I propose to advance Callon’s call to civilise markets by sharing troubled, though encouraging, care-infused market tales in an effort to counteract the storification of energy transitions as innovation fairy tales.     

The neurotic academic: anxiety,casualisation, and governance in the neoliberalising university

Based on empirical research conducted with academic staff working on fixed-term contracts, the article explores the subjective experience of anxiety in the UK’s ‘neoliberalising’ higher education (HE) sector. As HE undergoes a process of marketisation, and the teaching and research activities of academics are increasingly measured and scrutinised, the contemporary academy appears to be suffused with anxiety. Coupled with pressures facing all staff, 34% of academic employees are currently working on a fixed-term contract and so must contend with the multiple forms of uncertainty associated with their so-called ‘casualised’ positions. While anxiety is often perceived as an individualised affliction for which employees are encouraged to take personal responsibility, the article argues that it should be conceptualised in two ways: firstly, as a symptom of wider processes at work in the neoliberalising sector; and secondly, as a ‘tactic’ of what Isin [(2004). The neurotic citizen. Citizenship Studies, 8 (3), 217–235] refers to as ‘neuroliberal’ governance. The article concludes by proposing that the figure of the ‘neurotic academic’ is emblematic of the contradictions facing the contemporary academy.     

Haute finance in the not-so-quiet revolution: colonialisme Anglo-Saxonne and the bombing of la Bourse de Montréal

ABSTRACT

This paper examines a situation in which finance is perceived as imperialist – as immanent to, and serving the interests of, a single ‘culture’ in the colloquial sense. The analysis centres on the long-forgotten 1969 bombing of the trading floor of la Bourse de Montréal (the Montréal Stock Exchange), a moment in an intense phase of the Québécois movement for independence from Canada. Because of the way in which the bombers framed the attack, and its political-economic and discursive contexts, the bombing presents an opportunity to think about key features of the relation between finance and cultural domination or imperialism. These features relate to finance’s specific articulation to the future, uncertainty, and, in the words of the séparatistes of the time, cultural ‘destiny’. The paper has three parts. The first describes the bombing of la Bourse and the public, media, and state responses, linking it to Québécois cultural-political geographies at several scales. Part two places the bombing in the longer-run cultural-politicization of finance in the francophone independence movement, to outline a specifically Québecois critique of finance capital. The third part considers finance’s perceived and real connection to, and thus capacity to shape or constrain, the cultural-political construction of collective possibility.     

The Elasticity of Thought: A Note on the Drive in Worringer and Freud

Abstract

The essay approaches recent discussions of ‘life’ and biopolitics from the historical context of early 20th century German vitalist thought. By closely analysing the concept of the ‘drive’ in art historian Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the essay shows how the paradoxes of those texts prefigure and contribute to the contemporary problematic of ‘life’ in theoretical discourse across the humanities. In Worringer and Freud, the drive is an ‘elastic’ concept stretching beyond – and yet constitutive of – the epistemological object (‘life’) that it is called upon to describe. The distortion of the drive in each author's thought – from an impulse of organic vitality to a principle of inorganic primordiality – manifests the contradictory ‘life’ of vitalist concepts themselves in their elastic potential for transformation, regression and contradiction.     

The Dedisciplining of Peer Review

The demand for greater public accountability is changing the nature of ex ante peer review at public science agencies worldwide. Based on a four year research project, this essay examines these changes through an analysis of the process of grant proposal review at two US public science agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Weaving historical and conceptual narratives with analytical accounts, we describe the ways in which these two agencies struggle with the question of incorporating considerations of societal impact into the process of peer review. We use this comparative analysis to draw two main conclusions. First, evaluation of broader societal impacts is not different in kind from evaluation of intellectual merit. Second, the scientific community may actually bolster its autonomy by taking a broader range of considerations into its peer review processes.     

On the Real Limits of Self‐consciousness: Gazing Back at the Subversive Subject with Marco Bellocchio

Abstract

This article looks at Marco Bellocchio’s 2002 film My Mother’s Smile to re‐assess the central feature of Bellocchio’s cinema, i.e. its attempt to delineate a subjective strategy of subversion against a social order perceived as fundamentally repressive. In line with the director’s previous output, the film takes the Catholic Church and the family as its explicit polemical targets, endeavouring to unmask the nefarious ideological pressure they exercise on the ordinary individual in today’s Italian society. However, my reading draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to try and locate the disavowed (unconscious) kernel of Bellocchio’s narrative. Deploying Lacan’s controversial musings on ‘the gaze’, ‘desire’ and ‘femininity’, I suggest that the true stance of rebellion voiced by the film’s protagonist hinges on his recognition that the inconsistency of the ideological predicament he consciously struggles against paradoxically coincides with the traumatic inconsistency at the heart of his own attitude of defiance.     

Giving Perverse Accounts

Abstract

This paper critically examines the questions of agency and subject‐formation in Judith Butler’s book Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). The article problematizes Butler’s defense of agency and argues that her theorization of the subject (however in‐process) as individuated and differentiated from the other involves an economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership) that establishes the self as a Gestalt totality that must be symptomatically, i.e. narcissistically and aggressively, defended. In contrast to Butler’s ‘account’ of ‘oneself’ I proceed to offer a non‐humanist, non‐individualist, non‐Oedipal perverse model of the subject that rejects the ideological demand of Gestalt totality of identity and destabilizes the borders between self and other. In such a model of perverse personhood there is no identifiable and coherent ‘one’ for which to give an ‘account’.     

Regulating belonging: surveillance,inequality, and the cultural production of abjection

ABSTRACT

Conditions of abjection are increasingly viewed as problems to be managed with surveillance. Across disparate domains, bodies that challenge normalized constructions of responsible neoliberal citizenship are categorized, monitored, policed, and excluded in dehumanizing and often violent ways. This paper explores the role of surveillance in such processes. The registers covered include everyday abjection (welfare systems, battered women’s shelters, and homelessness), criminalized poverty (police targeting of the poor and emerging ‘poverty capitalism’ arrangements), and the radically adrift (the identification, tracking, and containment of refugees). In each of these cases, surveillance is yoked to structural inequalities and systems of oppression, but it also possesses a cultural dimension that thrusts marginalized and dehumanized subjectivities upon the abject Other. Therefore, I argue that in order to critique the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of contemporary surveillance, it is necessary to take seriously the mythologies that give meaning to surveillance practices and the subjectivities that are engendered by them.