CPE Conference 2017-Plenary (Jessop) 14/09/2017 Bob Jessop Outline • Cultur e al Political Economy • Varieties of cultural turn Remain curious, • Mr Greenspan’s ontological doubt everything, tolerate ambiguity reflections • Ontic and epistemic complexity • Articulating the ‘C’ and ‘PE’ in CPE • Steering between Scylla and Charybdis • Variation, selection, and retention What does it mean to • Conclusions make a “cultural turn” in political economy? Cultur e al Political Economy - I Cultureal Political Economy - II • CPE is a broad ‘post-disciplinary’ current (not a school • CPE studies role of semiosis in construing and and with no ambition to become one) in institutional and constructing economic, political (and social) ‘realities’ evolutionary political economy • CPE argues that semiosis is both causally effective and • It makes a 'cultural turn' in economic and political studies meaningful. Events and processes and their effects can be (or political economy) to enhance their interpretive and interpreted and , in part, explained by semiotic practices explanatory power (this turn is also useful in other fields) • CPE notes that, while all construals are equal , some are • It focuses on the nature and role of semiosis (sense- and more equal than others; it aims to explain this through meaning-making) in the dynamics of economics and dialectic of cultural and social factors politics and puts them in their wider social settings • CPE has evolutionary approach: starting from variation in • It can contribute to critiques of ideology ( Ideologiekritik ) construals, what factors (semiotic and extra-semiotic ) and domination ( Herrschaftskritik ) shape differential selection, subsequent retention ? Ontological and Reflexive Turns in CPE Making (Cultural) Turns The more or less consistent elaboration of the • CPE builds on thematic and methodological turns to intuition, hypothesis, or discovery that ‘culture make an ontological turn: semiosis reduces complexity matters’ in one or more theoretical, empirical, of a world pregnant with many possibilities for action or practical contexts where its role or relevance • CPE may also make a reflexive turn, studying genealogy was previously missed, noted but ignored, or of different social sciences and approaches, incl. CPE, quite explicitly rejected their methods, social embedding, and social effects – There is wide variation in how culture is defined, the • CPE is not limited to semiotic themes, methods, or ways in which it is deemed to ‘matter’, and the motives and arguments for suggesting that it does semiosis nor must it begin with them: it can begin with – ‘Cultural turn’ applies to trajectories of individual the structuration of social life, turning to semiosis later scholars; general developments in given approach; • Technologies and agency affect semiotic and structural changes in relative weight of approaches in a broader disciplinary field; or general trends in the moments and their spatio-temporal configurations humanities and social sciences 1
CPE Conference 2017-Plenary (Jessop) 14/09/2017 Mr Greenspan’s Ontological Reflections Ontic and Epistemic Complexity … REP. WAXMAN: Do you feel that your ideology • ‘Everyone’ must simplify the natural and pushed you to make decisions that you wish you social world to be able to ‘go on’ within it: had not made? – selective observation of real world, MR GREENSPAN: remember what an ideology is: – reliance on specific codes and programmes, a conceptual framework for people to deal with – use of categories and forms of calculation, reality. Everyone has one. You have to - to exist, – sensitivity to specific structures of feeling, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. ... I’ve found a flaw. I don’t – reference to particular identities, know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve – justification via ‘vocabularies of motives’ been very distressed by that fact ... A flaw in the – conjunctural calculation of short- to long- model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so term interests, to speak (Congressional Hearing, 23 Oct 2008) – and so on Chair, Federal Reserve, 1987-2006 ... and the Economy Caution! Yet more Complexity • The ‘actually existing economy’ is the chaotic • Economic imaginary is a ‘term of art’ that can include sum of all economic activities and cannot be technological paradigms, production norms, labour grasped in all its complexity. process, forms of economic organization, competition, • So the economy as an object of observation, enterprise, markets, the public sector, taxation, and so on calculation, management, or governance • Content of economic imaginary is not pre-given but some never comprises all economic activities but is an ‘enforced selection’ of a more or less economic imaginary is necessary to ‘go on’ economically coherent subset of all economic activities • The enforced selectivity of an imaginary may assist • Simplifications may aid economic steering if successful economic steering when it has requisite they have requisite variety and are reflexive variety and is reflexive – but it can also lead to steering • Greenspan admits to flaws in his economic failure due to the ‘revenge’ of what has been ignored imaginary: ‘efficient market hypothesis’ is a • The same points hold for other types of social imaginary bad simplification Contesting Social Imaginaries - I Contesting Social Imaginaries - II • Imaginaries are not pre-given mental • Social imaginaries have key roles in struggles for ‘hearts categories: they are the creative products of and minds’ and over exploitation and domination semiotic and material practices that have • What Greenspan calls ‘ideologies’ are better seen as more or less performative power personal frameworks shaping ‘lived experience’ and/or • Social forces try to make their imaginary the as simplifying ‘social imaginaries’ to deal with the world hegemonic or dominant ‘frame’ in particular • Some imaginaries are more powerful because they are contexts and/or to promote it as a sub- or promoted by dominant apparatuses/institutions that use counter-hegemonic imaginary. Successful technologies to advance semiosis and structuration framing leads to an historical bloc (Gramsci) • These hegemonic (or, at least, dominant) imaginaries • This contestation and struggles re mediated shape leading ways of thinking about social relations, via semiosis, structuration, particular their crisis-tendencies, and crisis-management routines technologies, and specific agents 2
CPE Conference 2017-Plenary (Jessop) 14/09/2017 Putting the ‘C’ into CPE - II Putting the ‘C’ into CPE - I • All construals are equal (semiotically); some are more equal • Intersubjective meaning making develops via semiosis as than others in their constitutive, constructive effects a socially adequate form of communication-cooperation • The key question is how construals are mediated: how do that presupposes and posits (further develops) language they vary, why are some selected as basis for action, why • Language has lexical, semantic, and pragmatic features: are some retained and institutionalized as bases for more weight given to one or other depending on context efforts to construct (transform) natural and social worlds? • Not all words or signs are created equal: some are more • Only construals that grasp emergent extra-semiotic fundamental to structuring interaction and limiting features of social worlds and mind-independent aspects possible combinations of social relations than others of the natural world are likely to be selected and retained • These categories provide fundamental forms of thought • Some in turn create changes in the extra-semiotic aspects and modes of being in the world and thus shape social of the world and related (always) tendential social logics relations: they merit Ideologiekritik and Herrschaftskritik Structuration • Structuration sets limits (however achieved) enforced sense-making structuration selection on the articulation of sets of social relations such that ‘not everything that is possible is compossible’ structured sedimented variation, • This involves selection, complexity meaning – stabilizing cognitive and normative expectations retention – guiding individual and organizational learning – deploying disciplinary technologies Potential Semantic fix Structural fix – securing institutional complementarities disjunction – establishing principles of social organization – also related to structural coupling and co-evolution Depiction of the contribution of sense- and meaning-making and structuration (setting limits to compossible sets of social relations) – and to ecological dominance of certain systems to the relative stability of specific socio-institutional formations The Good Ship CPE Scylla Putting the ‘PE’ into CPE • CPE insists on specificities of at least some emergent aspects of the form, content, and logics of social relations of ‘political economy’ and its products • As enforced selection , economic imaginaries ignore key features of actually existing economies, which continue to have real effects, including: – contradictions, dilemmas, and paradoxes – extra-economic conditions of existence and effects – spatio-temporal depth, breadth, rhythms, sequencing , etc • So CPE studies structuration and dynamic of economic (and economically-relevant or conditioned) activities, Charybdis thereby contributing to Herrschafts- and Ideologiekritik 3
Recommend
More recommend
