As Jessop and Sum outline in the CPE approach, the concept of the economic imaginary is part of the necessary process of complexity reduction that is the precondition for ‘going on’ in the world (Jessop 2010: 337). Constituted by semiotic configurations of mutually reinforcing discursive chains, economic
imaginaries selectively frame subjective experiences. In this way, they not only construe economic phenomena, but also are instrumental in the construction of economic relations and the practices, activities and identities therein. From the examples of CPE cited above, we have observed how economic imaginaries have informed economic practice at various levels of governance, including international, national and regional. We have also seen how they have impacted on particular key economic actors, such as policy-makers and even architects.
In summing up the applications of CPE, analysis has thus far been focused on identifying the production of economic imaginaries and their dissemination across various sites of action. For as much as CPE analyses have examined the affect on economic practices, this has until now largely been confined to whom we could term ‘elite economic actors’, whether in state or non-state institutions or professions. Once economic imaginaries have been institutionalised, operationalized and then embedded in the practices of these elites, we may ask, what then? In answering this question we must therefore consider the residual filtering effects of these imaginaries into everyday individualised economic practices, such as with our present concerns regarding the use of personal credit and debt. To apply the CPE approach with this in mind, it is worth considering the arguments of Fairclough et al (2004: 39), who recommend that: “at least equal weight […] be given to the consumption of semiosis as well as its production”.
In keeping with the inter-disciplinary character of CPE, the concept of the ‘imaginary’ has been mobilised across a diverse range of disciplines in the past, including anthropology, economics, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and sociology (Anderson 1983; Castoriadis 1987; Lacan 1977; Strauss 2006; Taylor 2002). By drawing on some of these other conceptual applications of the ‘imaginary’, we can start to develop an approach to the economic imaginary that facilitates an empirical connection to everyday economic practices at a local level, whilst retaining the overall CPE analytical framework.
3.4.1 Modern social imaginaries
Taylor’s (2002) conception of ‘modern social imaginaries’ focuses on the transition from pre-modern to modern societies. With the displacement of traditional notions of ‘community’ by the purported rise of ‘individualism’, Taylor sought to address how individual subjects were induced to conform to a social order without the binding ties of a community (Taylor 2002: 99). Taylor suggests this historical conjuncture was resolved to an extent with the formation of a new moral order. While initially emerging in theories promoted by a small group of influential thinkers and intellectual elites, it would eventually come to shape the social imaginary of entire societies (Taylor 2002: 92).
However, while the explicit theories of elites may come to shape imaginaries, they are not wholly commensurate to the implicit understandings of the people that make up societies. As Taylor (2002: 108) points out:
“for most of human history and most of social life, we function through the grasp we have on the common repertory, without the benefit of theoretical overview. Humans operated with a social imaginary well before they ever got into the business of theorizing about themselves”. So whereas social imaginaries shape the social existence of ordinary people, it is through the common understandings within and between groups, rather than through explicit theories. As such, according to Taylor, these theories facilitate the legitimacy of common practices and, as a consequence, carry with them the understanding that makes those practices possible (Taylor 2002: 106-7).
Taylor’s interpretation of the ‘imaginary’ demonstrates how commensurability between ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ and the wider population is not always apparent, but is nevertheless fundamental for informing societal practices. From a Gramscian point of view, it also highlights the significance of internal or ‘intra-class’ hegemony for pursuing external or ‘inter-class’ hegemony (Riley 2011: 15). When ideologies fail to resonate across class boundaries, it precludes the consensual moment of any hegemonic project.
Hegemony therefore requires the formation of a ‘higher synthesis’ that can be easily rendered into the ‘collective will’ of the people, as opposed to elite theories imposed from above, but detached from lived experience (Mouffe 1979: 184). Whereas intellectuals can draw from complex and abstract philosophies or worldviews, their contribution to the wider hegemonic project depends on translating these ideas into wider public sentiment. To this extent, such worldviews are subject to high-levels of abstraction expressed as ‘common sense’ and presented as “the spontaneous philosophy of the man on the street, but which is the popular expression of ‘higher’ philosophy” (Mouffe 1979: 186).
By applying Taylor’s inferences to a CPE economic imaginary, we can begin to understand how explicit theories come to penetrate implicit everyday understandings of the economy. While the coherence of economic imaginaries may not necessarily transfer to everyday economic practices as such, and may even be contradictory in some cases, by legitimizing those practices, at least some element of their logic remains present. What we must now consider is how we may locate economic imaginaries in everyday economic practices, whether they are explicitly present or in residual form. To the extent that common understandings are shaped by imaginaries, we will now therefore look at possible ways through which they can be directly connected to individual subjects.
3.4.2 The Lacanian ‘mirror stage’
In order to bridge the gap between the economic imaginary and the everyday, we shall now examine how the ‘imaginary’ features as part of a Marxist psychoanalytical approach. For Lacan, the object of psychoanalysis is the “demystification of subjective camouflages” (1977: 34). The foundation of this method is made up of three interrelated and multileveled dimensions that constitute individual consciousness and subjectivity. Lacan referred to these three dimensions as the orders of: ‘the Real’, ‘the Symbolic’ and ‘the Imaginary’ (1977: ix). However, these labels can be misleading. For example, ‘the Real’ does not equate to reality or objectivity, nor ‘the Symbolic’ to symbolism, or ‘the
Imaginary’ to imagination. Rather, ‘the Real’ relates to the world of concrete objects and experiences, ‘the Symbolic’ is made up of language and culture, while ‘the Imaginary’ represents the processes that structure the mind and influence perception (Ragland-Sullivan 1986: 138). Together, ‘the Imaginary’ works in combination with the Symbolic order to interpret the Real, which in turn shapes them both.
To explain the interdependency between the three orders, Lacan employed the model of the three-ringed ‘Borromean knot’. If one ring is broken or altered in any way, it affects the functioning of the other two, thereby transforming the constitution of the entire psyche (Ragland-Sullivan 1986: 130-1). The Imaginary order provides a representational reference point for perceiving the Real, but it requires the Symbolic order to give it form, otherwise it would only exist at a purely abstract level (Ragland-Sullivan 1986: 156). To illustrate the perceptual meeting point of the Real and the Imaginary, Lacan describes the phenomenon of a mirage, whereby: “a Real object is refracted by light rays and presents itself to the eye as if it were Real when, indeed, it is only virtual, or, […] Imaginary” (Ragland-Sullivan 1986: 143-4). The Imaginary order is fundamental to what Lacan refers to as ‘the mirror stage’. This is a reference to the formation of the subjective ‘I’ during an act of identification through which an individual recognises themselves within an image (Lacan 1977: 2-5). While the mirror stage in Lacanian theory more commonly refers to an infant’s early development, it nevertheless provides a significant insight into how an Imaginary order contributes to the formation of subjectivity through recognition.
3.4.3 Interpellation and ‘interpellations’
Drawing on Lacan’s conception of the mirror stage, Althusser (1971) introduces us to the concept of ‘interpellation’. Consistent with Lacan’s Marxist approach, interpellation describes the process through which ideology operates to ‘recruit’ subjects in the way it ‘hails’, or ‘interpellates’, individuals as recognizable ‘Subjects’ within an ideological framework of meaning (Althusser 1971: 162).
During this process of interpellation, ideology transforms individuals as free subjects into the ideological subject category they are hailed from. An individual may therefore be hailed as a ‘citizen’, ‘taxpayer’, ‘worker’, ‘consumer’, or any other categorisation that is a reflection of their existing or prospective subjective identity formation (Watson 2005: 187).
By recognising themselves when interpellated, the subjects ‘work by themselves’ in freely submitting to the demands of the ideological Subject position once it is assumed. As Althusser (1971: 169) claims: “there are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they ‘work by themselves’”. When material realities threaten the logical consistency of a perceived ideological unity to reveal its underlying contradictions, they must somehow be displaced in order to avoid an ‘ideological crisis’. With the interpellation of subjects, such displacement is often translated into a ‘crisis of identity’ to a particular subjected group, who are thereby problematized as the cause of the crisis (Laclau 1977: 102-3). For example, during economic downturns, governments have a tendency of treating the resultant unemployment as stemming from the identity of those who are unemployed. Rather than acknowledging the inability of the economic system itself to deliver sufficient employment, the blame is shifted to the unemployed themselves, either because of their inability to find a job or as a result their reliance on a ‘culture of dependency’ (Sayer 2001: 697).
The concept of interpellation has been criticised for overstating an ideologist view of social relations. Law (2000) takes issue with the ‘command and follow’ aspects of Althusser’s conception, although maintains the value of interpellation in the way “that the subject instantly recognises itself when it is addressed” (Law 2000: 15). From Law’s point of view, the constitution of the subject takes place prior to interpellation. Therefore, any act of rational decision-making is bypassed by the interpellated subject, resulting in instant recognition and location. Through personal narratives and stories, Law highlights how interpellation plays a role in the way people are made or remade in particular subject positions, thereby affecting the way they constitute the objects in
relation to them. Rather than a coordinated ideological framework that aligns subject positions, Law proposes that there are in fact multiple subject positions and multiple object positions (Law 2000: 18). Referring to this as “the heterogeneity of multiplicity”, Law identifies how individuals may adopt multiple narrative forms and multiple interpellations. This leads him to conclude that the semiotics of subject/object relations in personal narratives do not necessarily: “come in big blocks like ideologies [or] discourses” (Law 2000: 27). Instead, individuals adopt smaller blocks, contrasting semiotic logics, and differentiated ordering strategies that overlap and interfere with one another. Therefore, personal narratives cannot be conceived as unified accounts of lived experience as such, but as fragmented and sometimes contradictory assemblages of multiple subject positions drawn from multiple interpellations.
By examining the work of Taylor, Lacan, Althusser and Law, we may surmise that the relation between the everyday and the economic imaginary is far from straightforward. While economic imaginaries at the macro-level may bear the hallmarks of coherent and organised discursive configurations, their significance to everyday economic practice is likely to be more residual and fragmented. Nevertheless, the resonance of imaginaries relies not in their logical coherence in such contexts, but on the subject positions that they promote, thereby providing an entry point through which to draw in individuals and groups. So, as far as the production of economic imaginaries relates to an individual’s economic practices, there is bound to be some level of recognition, even interpellation and subjection to a certain point. However, as Law clearly illustrates, this is not simply a coherent top-down process, but a convergence of indeterminate influences from which an individual subject draws on to give meaning to their practices.
3.5 Conclusion
Throughout this conceptual and theoretical review, I have sought to assess the significance of CPE as a research approach and its application to an investigation of the historical development of personal credit and debt. As an
analytical entry point, CPE offers a coherent approach to the study of how social relations are maintained, reproduced and transformed within emergent capitalist formations. It provides us with the means to examine how such formations are rendered meaningful to social actors, both in the constitution of subjects themselves and their modes of calculation (Jessop and Sum 2001: 97). By embracing the methodological and conceptual tools of the cultural turn, CPE offers a major corrective to the functionalist tendencies of other political economy approaches, notably those of the Polanyi, Habermas and the regulationists.
The illustrative examples of previous CPE applications serve to dispel van Heur’s (2010a; 2010b) claims that the approach is inflected by the ‘ecological dominance’ of state regulation and capital accumulation. However, what these examples also reveal is a propensity of the approach to focus on elite economic actors at a policy-making level at the expense of everyday economic practices. Such a predilection reinforces van Heur’s view that CPE is currently lacking in terms of its ‘empirical specificity’ (2010b: 455). A key concern of this thesis is to therefore develop the CPE approach with a view to offering a more integrated account of individual and collective economic practices.
Of course, developing the approach in this way requires maintaining the delicate balance between the functionalist approaches that CPE has attempted to overcome and avoiding an approach dominated by methodological individualism. To this end, I have proposed two subtle, but significant adjustments to the conceptual application of the ‘economic imaginary’ in order to open it up to accounts of everyday practice. First, Taylor’s (2002) perspective of ‘modern social imaginaries’ suggests that everyday understandings and practices are conditioned not just by the explicit theories of elite actors, but by the intersubjective meanings shared between and within groups. The implications for how we view economic imaginaries in relation to everyday practices leads us to reason that the production of meaning at an elite level is but one stage and as much attention should be paid to how discourses are not only consumed, but appropriated and developed at various levels of society.
The second adaptation proposed focuses on how subjects relate to and engage with imaginaries through the concept of ‘interpellation’ (Althusser 1971). While CPE is concerned with how subjects are constituted through the construction of hegemonic discourses, the acceptance of such subject positions is not an entirely straightforward process. Indeed, as Law emphasises, whereas recognition is to some extent instant, most actors are exposed to multiple interpellations and multiple subject positions (Law 2000: 18). As such, we must therefore concern ourselves not only with how subjects are constructed from without, but also how those subjects engage with and insert themselves within subjectivities as knowing agents.
By applying these adjustments to the economic imaginary, we are able to broaden the methodological appeal of the CPE approach to connect the constructions of elite actors and institutions at one level with the everyday practices of individuals at another level. The next chapter develops this approach further with a methodological discussion of the ensuing investigation into the development of personal credit and debt in the UK.