IMPORTANTE: LE PREGUNTE CÓMO SE INFORMA SOBRE ARTE.

There have been several specific attempts to develop a framework capable of reconciling a culturalist perspective with that of political economy. Mosco (1996, 2004) has acknowledged Giddens’ structuration as a useful framework, but his critical interest in power leads him to locate

12 _{Interestingly, the confusion of polysemy with autonomy is also a shortcoming of the ‘popular’ cultural studies}

approaches that suppose variability in audience readings of media texts implies resistance/ empowerment (see, for example, Fiske & Hartley, 1978).

this as a dimension within a political economy framework that remains incomplete without the additional contribution of cultural studies. Indeed, despite recognising the cultural dimensions of the economy (most notably in relation to the ‘dot com’ bubble and the mythologisation of the potential of digital technology and cyberspace that underpinned financial market overconfidence in telecommunications and internet stocks), there remains a tension between the recognition that political economic and cultural processes are mutually constitutive. Mosco’s ‘bridging’ approach tends to treat the respective frameworks of political economy and cultural studies as opposite poles on a continuum. This draws on the insights of both without contradictory eclecticism, but also without synthesising them into a seamless framework.

Another approach to developing a cultural political economy is that of Sayer (2001). While accepting cultural economy’s corrective to the reductionist tendencies of mainstream economics and its failure to take account of cultural embedding, he is sceptical of cultural economy’s own tendency to reduce explanations of economic processes to the lifeworld. For Sayer, cultural economy’s emphasis on embeddedness overlooks the potential for economic and political systems to bring about disjunctures with the lifeworld and disrupt cultural embedding (such as the depersonalisation of market relations that monetary systems facilitate) as recognised in the works of Marx, Polanyi and Habermas. This tendency to overstate embeddedness means cultural economy risks engendering an uncritical descriptive ethnography that overlooks concerns about the ways normative dimensions of market activity might be implicated in the creation or perpetuation of structural inequalities. Sayer therefore proposes a critical cultural political economy to encompass both approaches while retaining a focus on power relations.

The starting point for developing this framework is Habermas’ (1984/1988) distinction between lifeworld and system, although here Sayer rejects what he regards as the cognitivist/ linguistic assumptions underpinning Habermas’ conception of the lifeworld. The specific reasoning underpinning this is that Sayer understands communicative action in the lifeworld to be a conscious, deliberative process (akin to Giddens’ notion of discursive consciousness) and therefore incapable of accounting for tacit, non-cognitive structural processes more akin to Giddens’ practical

consciousness or Bourdieu’s habitus. Sayer regards system forces (whether economic or political-

legal) as emergent macro-phenomena, independent of (but consequential for) agent activity (2001, p.689, also p.692).

His formulation also entails the conceptualising of the lifeworld as the source of cultural identity, discourses, norms and meanings, within which market systems are embedded. In maintaining this

type of duality, Sayer’s rendering of Habermas assumes the same objectivist position which is the

target of King’s respective critiques of Giddens and Bourdieu (1998, 2000). The point here is not to reject the distinction between lifeworld and system per se, but to question the supposition that the basis for this distinction is that norms, discourses, meanings and identities inhere only in the former. Although Sayer insists (citing Fraser, 1995) that culture should not be conflated with lifeworld nor economy with system (2001, p.693), he also points out that concrete economic institutions exist in

both system and lifeworld (p.690), arguing that the distinction between them is ‘fuzzy but illuminating’ (p.695). Although Sayer is right to problematise the task of specifying the precise line of

differentiation between system and lifeworld, his conception of the latter as the functional source of cultural identity, norms, discourses and meanings in which the former is embedded implies that precisely such a line has implicitly been drawn.

Sayer nevertheless makes a strong case for the development of a critical cultural political economy and demonstrates the complexity of separating out culture and lifeworld or economy and system. However, the theoretical framework he posits still cannot comfortably accommodate political economy alongside cultural economy. One key impediment to this is the structural/ objectivist assumption made in moving away from the linguistic/ cognitive aspects of communicative action, toward a more formal analysis of economic systems ‘disconnected from norms and values’ (Sayer, 2001, p.689). This means there is no adequate account of how agency and structure, and indeed, the socio-cultural and material dimensions of the economy, are mutually constituted. Although Sayer rightly recognises the importance of agents’ interpretations of signals and rules, he considers this inapplicable to the analysis of ‘delinguistified’ economic systems such as money (2001, p.689). This may be explained by Habermas’ own contrast (1984/ 1987) between communicative and instrumental rationality (in which the former emphasises creation of mutual understanding as a

basis for transforming social relations while the latter emphasises goal-oriented accumulation). Perhaps ironically, though, this diverts Sayer’s analysis away from a potentially useful focus on communicative/ symbolic processes in a more general sense that might have helped develop the combined socio-cultural and political-economic framework to which his work aspires.

Jessop (2004)13, meanwhile, has developed a somewhat different approach, adopting critical semiotic analysis alongside cultural political economy or CPE. This framework recognises the constitutive role of semiosis in economic and political processes and ‘adopts the ‘cultural turn’ in

economic enquiry without neglecting the articulation of semiosis with the interconnected materialities of economics and politics within wider social formations’ (2004, p.159). Semiosis is

defined by Jessop as the ‘intersubjective production of meaning’ (2004, p.161) which he deploys generically to refer to a range of processes encompassed by the cultural turn (including argumentation, narrative, rhetoric, hermeneutics, identity, reflexivity, historicity and discourse) on the basis that they are all ‘causally efficacious’ (p.161), i.e. performative and constitutive of economic reality rather than merely representations or interpretations of a distinct and separate positivistic ontology.

Although Jessop’s generalisation of semiosis arguably over-simplifies important distinctions between these various cultural/ semiotic processes, the intention is to develop a broad framework of analysis that can accommodate his evolutionary-institutionalist approach to political economy14. This broader conception of semiosis also avoids associating the production of meaning solely with linguistic processes15. For Jessop, the recognition that political and economic forces are discursively constituted and, as such, need to be understood as contingent social formations is an important corrective to the tendency to reify market forces in mainstream economics and classical Marxism:

‘CPE examines the role of semiosis and semiotic practices not only in the continual (re)making of social relations but also in the contingent emergence, provisional consolidation, and ongoing realization of their extra-semiotic properties. […] For if social phenomena are discursively constituted and never achieve a self-reproducing closure, isolated from other phenomena, then any natural necessities (emergent properties) entailed in the internal relations of a given object must be tendential.’

(Jessop, 2004, p.161).

This is a crucial argument since it ascribes a central role to communicative processes and intersubjective meaning in political-economic ontology. However, the reference to ‘extra-semiotic properties’ suggests that economic activity cannot be reduced to semiosis alone. Jessop (2004, p.162) goes on to argue that the contingencies of the economic totality emerging from the ‘chaotic’ aggregate of all interactions in the ‘actually existing economy’ are so unstructured and complex that it is impossible to adequately conceptualise the economy as a discrete object of calculation or governance. Instead, economic activity must be oriented toward partial subsets of this totality in the form of discursively constituted ‘economic imaginaries’ abstracted and materially reproduced through the actions of economic agents (see also Pryke & Allen, 2000).

Jessop argues that to avoid completely arbitrary semiosis, ‘these imaginaries must have some

significant, albeit necessarily partial, correspondence to real material interdependencies in the actually existing economy and/or in relations between economic and extra-economic activities’ and

suggests that their incomplete nature and inevitable exclusion of variables/processes impose limits on the ‘efficacy of economic forecasting, management, planning, guidance, governance and so on’. Incommensurate semiosis among individual economic agents deploying different schemata/

13

Note that both Jessop and Sayer hail from the sociology department at the University of Lancaster.

14

Much of Jessop’s work is a development of Regulation School neomarxist political economy and focuses on the ways that different regimes of global capital accumulation evolve and how contingent institutional configurations of state and capital can (de)stabilise those regimes in particular historical contexts (e.g. see Jessop, 2001a, 2002b).

15 _{This issue is also recognised by Sayer (2001), but his attempt to circumvent this problem, in the absence of}

an alternative broader conception of communicative processes, leads him to posit an objectivist conception of unconscious systemic forces.

imaginaries does not lead to ‘inappropriate variation’ on a meso- or macro-scale because this is prevented by ‘recursive selection of semiotic practices and extra-semiotic processes’ (2004, p.162). The emphasis on semiosis and social action as a constitutive but not unconstrained/ unstructured dimension of the economy would seem to bear some resemblance to the notion of structure as both outcome and medium of action in structuration theory (Giddens, 1984). Jessop rightly notes that the social structuration of capitalist formations involves semiosis and that the formation, reproduction, selection and transformation of social relations inevitably entails the generation of meaning (2004, p.164).

The recognition that capital accumulation regimes are contingent and take different forms in the context of historical, institutionally-specific arrangements (e.g. the shift from Atlantic Fordism to a knowledge-based economy) is important. However, Jessop’s distinction between an ‘actually- existing’ economy with ‘extra-semiotic’ dimensions in order to account for the limitation of semiosis and the relative coherence of economic activity among different actors is problematic: The argument that processes of economic forecasting or governance are necessarily incomplete because the economic imaginaries toward which economic action is oriented are partial representations of the totality implicitly assumes a distinction between representation and reality incongruent with the recognition of performativity and the constitutive aspects of semiosis. Indeed, Jessop posits a dialectical relationship between semiotic and structural dimensions of the economy to explain how texts not only generate meaning and thereby social structure, but how material, non- semiotic aspects of social structure limit the range of meanings and structures semiosis can produce (2004, p.163).

Jessop therefore eschews what he regards the semiotic reductionism assumed in some versions of cultural economy: ‘The risk here is that one cannot distinguish in material terms between capitalist

and non-capitalist economic practices, institutions and formations- they all become equally discursive and can only be differentiated through their respective semiotic practices, meanings, and contexts and their performative impact.’ (2004, p.171). As such, ‘CPE aims to steer a path between ‘soft cultural economics’ and ‘hard orthodox economics’ ’(p.171). He goes on to argue that, ‘a Marxist CPE would robustly reject the conflation of discourses and material practices and the more general discourse imperialism that has plagued social theory for two decades.’ (pp.171-172).

Although Jessop’s formulation is intended to challenge orthodox economics’ rigid demarcation between cultural and economic processes by recognising the semiotic aspects of economic activity, the position outlined here reasserts the materiality of those processes to avoid discursive reductionism. Consequently, this formulation inadvertently reimposes the very dualism between an objective material economy and the discursive/ semiotic dimensions of the economy that CPE is intended to redress16. This does not sit comfortably with Jessop’s insistence that all economic processes nevertheless entail a semiotic or discursive dimension, and it renders claims about performativity and the constitutive (as opposed to representative) aspect of economic semiosis problematic. The inconsistency appears to stem from two assumptions: a) that semiosis cannot on its own constrain social/ economic action, and that without the restriction of material reality or the ‘actually existing economy’, semiotic selectivity would not be sufficient to ensure the coordination of meaningful economic action; and b) that the material dimension of economic reality is non-semiotic. The first issue could be addressed by recognising that the conventions underpinning any form of semiosis, whether that be meaningful social action or linguistic utterances presupposes intersubjective agreement of code. As with syntactical structures in language, actors are not unrestricted in the ways they can speak, even when selectivity in linguistic utterances can, over time, transform the codifications that ensure intersubjective intelligibility. Likewise, non-linguistic social activity must follow intersubjective conventions demarcating the channels and modalities of meaningful action, and these codifications, while immaterial, both enable and constrain what actions are possible (for example, there are unwritten but nevertheless specific codes governing gift-giving, stipulating giver/receiver roles, occasion, and the appropriate form of present).

Jessop may be assuming a distinction between semiosis and discourse here, but discourse was included as one of the communicative aspects of semioisis in his earlier definition (2004, p.161).

In regard to economic behaviour, these codifications would include mutual recognition of symbolically constituted social relations including contractual agreements, legitimate monetary forms, and property rights which may relate to material forms (such as commodities) but which are

themselves immaterial (although clearly the physical world places objective limitation on what kinds

and quantities of goods and services can be produced and exchanged). Indeed, as Marx (1996) himself recognised, capital itself is a social relation, which is especially evident in the creation of financial securities based on credit with a fictitious value reflecting the anticipated future payment of debt.

Thus Sayer and Jessop both recognise that communication and shared meanings play an essential role in economic processes, but their respective formulations lead them into difficulties: Sayer’s (2001) approach to cultural political economy rightly discerns the limitations of a linguistic conception of social action, but dispenses prematurely with communicative processes in a wider sense. Similarly, Jessop’s (2004) approach recognises that economic action entails intersubjective meaning but regards semiosis as an inadequate basis to account for the structural, material constraints on economic agency.

The development of a more nuanced cultural political economy that foregrounds communicative processes, is nevertheless possible through the formulation of intersubjective codifications17 which demarcate and distribute access to the different channels and modalities/ genres of social action and allow social actors to ascribe shared meanings to their interactions. This does not entail a reductionism whereby base material conditions are assumed to have a semiotic/ discursive ontology, but rather, that the social actions involving changing relations to those conditions (such as the sale of material commodities) become defined as socially real through inter-subjective codification18 (ISCs). Nor does this formulation suggest a completely fluid, unconstrained agency whereby actors can transform social structures by subjective acts of interpretation; polysemy is not autonomy. The intersubjective basis of the codification process circumscribes the channels, modalities and resources available to any given actor, even though it is possible for some social actions to transform those codifications (such as a government passing a new law obliging or prohibiting some form of behaviour, or market speculators driving the valuation of a financial security up or down by heavy trading behaviour).

A further approach combining political economy and cultural economy has been developed by Graham (2006; see also Graham, 2000, 2002) in his work on ‘hypercapitalism’. This emphasises the mediated aspects of economic relations, particularly the central role of NCTs in accelerating and extending trading activity and also in helping create the meanings and valuations that underpin financial markets. Graham rejects both the idealist reductionism assumed in some postmodernist versions of cultural economy, and also any simple dualistic distinction between base and superstructure. Significantly, he asserts that actions that create economic meaning are constitutive of material relations, and that the creation of economic value and the reproduction/ transformation of economic relations involves social action:

‘Under conditions of hypercapitalism, forces and relations of production; base and superstructure; the valorisation process; material and non-material production; and production and consumption are analytically inseparable because of the immediacy and pervasiveness of the social and technical domains in which they operate and because of their intimate involvement with language and thought.‘ (2006, p.84).

17 _{The term ‘codification’ is used here in preference to ‘code’ in order to denote its applicability to both}

linguistic/ semiotic processes and rule-governed forms of meaningful non-linguistic social action and symbolic exchange, including economic transactions.

18

Thus the existence of a house is a physical fact, but its ownership by one person and not another is a social fact, even though the object of this relation is ‘material’. The existence of a monetary debt between two counterparties is a social fact, and even if this potentially involves the exchange of a physical monetary form such as coins or notes, the demarcation of those objects as money is also a social fact, even though money is used to mediate material relations among actors that involve physical objects.

Parallel to the work on cultural political economy by Sayer (2001) and Jessop (2004), Graham recognises the need for a framework that accounts for shared meanings in economic/ financial processes and an emphasis on mediation to connect political economic and cultural economic analyses. Although Graham is less explicit than Sayer or Jessop about the specific challenges of synthesising political economy and cultural economy, Hypercapitalism is premised on the recognition that Marx’s work can be usefully developed to take account of sociological and cultural perspectives on contemporary market phenomena. Toward this end, Graham adopts a linguistic perspective drawing on a linguistic reading of Marx19 (Fairclough & Graham, 2002) and Halliday’s (1993) sociolinguistics. Graham recognises that access to the institutional positions and symbolic resources to engage in such actions can be privileged (thus public statements issued by a central bank official, finance minister, or market analyst might induce market movement, while the same statement made by someone with no such status would probably be ignored). These privileged discourses or ‘expert dialectics’ underpin specialised forms of knowledge-production that ‘have

reached the point at which the value of whole nations can literally be ‘talked up’ or ‘talked down’ by people in privileged positions’ (Graham, 2006, p.6).

Graham adapts Maturana & Varela’s (1980) notion of autopoiesis to link the reproduction of the knowledge economy to language; ‘Once human knowledge becomes a primary commodity in

political economy, language becomes the primary means of production, exchange and evaluation’

(2006, p.56). Graham proceeds to link this to Halliday’s (1993) argument that language exerts direct control over physical systems, facilitated by the evolution of increasingly technologised forms of language and manifested through new media technologies (2006, p.76).

The recognition that cognition, mediation and communicative processes are necessarily involved in the reproduction of human systems is important. Following Halliday (1993), Graham places