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Decentring the economy
William Walters
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Economy and Society Volume 28 Number 2 May 1999: 312-323
Review article by William Walters
Decentring the economy
Text reviewed
J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It ) : A Femin-
ist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell.
'The economy' has not attracted the same sort of critical attention on the part
of poststructuralists and postmodernists as have many other areas of social, cul-
tural and political life. As a system of power, capitalism has not been subject to
the deconstructive turn in the way of other power relations like those associated
with 'race', gender, sexuality, class, nation or colonialism. Unlike such disci-
plines as sociology, legal studies, human geography and anthropology, political
economy, and especially economics, betray little interest in interrogating the
epistemological status of their basic concepts and objects.'
And yet for those who sense that some sort of critical engagement with dis-
courses of the economic is overdue, it is possible to identify a number of promis-
ing intellectual points of departure, across several disciplines. These might not
all describe themselves as poststructuralist, but they do nevertheless bring
various heterodox and challenging insights to bear on processes and topics con-
ventionally understood as 'economic'. We can give a few examples. The disci-
pline of economics has seen a move to interrogate the rhetorical and discursive
manoeuvres of economists and planners (McCloskey 1986; Mirowski 1990;
Mier and Bingham 1992), including studies which utilize poststructuralist
agendas (Amariglio et al. 1993; Escobar 1995). Meanwhile, some anthropolo-
gists have criticized world-systems theory: the latter is accused of reifying the
logic of the market at the expense of appreciating how the economic plays out
in terms of local and cultural processes (Sahlins 1994). Sociological and
anthropological work on consumption has certainly contributed to a decentring
of the economic, inasmuch as it has foregrounded a sphere of existence that had
hitherto been regarded as passive, reactive and secondary to the world of pro-
duction (Mort 1996; Shields 1992). In a similar vein, feminist work in political
economy has underlined the 'constructedness' of the economic by highlighting
William Walters, Department ofPoliticalSciences, Loeb Building, Carleton University, 1125
Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario KZS 5B6, Canada
Copyright O Routledge 1999 0308-5147
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Wzllzam Walters: Decentring the economy 3 13
the conceptual and political manoeuvres by which a great deal of female labour
(e.g., within the household) comes to be defined as non-economic (Waring 1988;
Bakker 1994). Finally, there is the burgeoning 'non-standard' economics litera-
ture which includes convention theory, an interpretative approach to economic
life which has certain affinities with the actor-network analysis of Michel Callon
and Bruno Latour (Wilkinson 1997).
In this essay I want to review two more research agendas which seem to offer
great potential for refocusing our perceptions of the economic. The first is
associated with research on governmentality, and will no doubt be familiar to
readers of Economy and Society. The second research programme has been set
out most impressively by J. K. Gibson-Graham in their/her recent The End of
Capitalism (As We Knew It),2 a book which combines poststructuralist feminist
theory with the post-Marxism of a number of researchers grouped around the
US-based journal Rethinking Marxism. It might be useful to set these approaches
side by side.
Work on governmentality has recently been criticized on the grounds that it
neglects the central concerns of Marxist political economy, such as class and
capitalism. Neither is this simply an oversight, it seems. It derives from the fact
that, however valuable Foucault's genealogies of modern power and subjecthood
may be, 'his writings are useless when it comes to explaining the macro-
economic processes of specific national and supranational forms of capitalist
accumulation' (Frankel 1997: 83).
In this section I want to suggest that this criticism is misplaced for at least two
reasons. The first is that it finds governmentality inadequate as a general theory.
Yet, as certain researchers active in the field of governmentality have been careful
to point out, this problematic should not be seen as an alternative to historical
materialism or some other comparable grand theory of historical and social
change (Barry et al. 1996: 3 4 ) . For studies of government are mainly concerned
with but one dimension of our existence - the governmental - and not the social
totality. The second point I make below is that, although governmentality might
not purport to analyse the 'material' world of underlying socio-economic struc-
tures, it has generated a number of studies which do intersect, albeit tangentially,
with the concerns of political economy.
Studies of government are not realist in the sense in which most political
economy and historical sociology is. As Rose and Miller (1992: 177) put it, 'We
do not try to characterise how social life really was and why. We do not seek to
penetrate the surfaces of what people said to discover what they really meant,
what their real motives or interests were.' Governmentality does not promise
access to the hidden realm of structures or processes. It does not claim to grasp
totalities. Its ambitions are in some respects more modest. These are to analyse
and emphasize two distinctive but now taken-for-granted characteristics of the
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3 14 Economy and Society
functioning of modern political power: a discursive aspect - the fact that govern-
ment presupposes the existence of various means for rendering the real think-
able, calculable and improvable; but also, a practical aspect - the point being that
governmental plans, programmes and ambitions always find themselves depen-
dent upon particular technologies if they are to have any prospect of shaping the
real, becoming actual.
Research in governmentality has therefore set the exercise of political power
against several key analytical axes. It has asked: what are the specific mentalities,
philosophies and other intellectual machineries that have conditioned the way
that the real comes to be posed as a problem for political authorities? What are
the technical knowledges and expertises, and the social technologies in terms of
which the real can be made an object of calculation and manipulation? What are
the programmes and strategies, the social and political alliances which serve as
the context for attempts to govern the real? Governmentality is not 'materialist'
in the Marxist sense. But it is materialist inasmuch as it insists that governmental
rationalities, knowledges, technologies and techniques constitute a dimension of
reality that is irreducible, and no less material - in some ways more material -
than, say, the social forces of class.3
It is in terms of such considerations as these that governmentality offers us a
new perspective on the economic, one that does not presume the prior existence
of a centred economic totality. For governmentality, 'the economy' is not a
transcendental or eternal thing. Instead, as certain economic historians and criti-
cal observers on economics have for some time now observed (Cutler et al. 1978:
243-57 cf. Tomlinson 1990: 8; Rose 1996: 337-8; Tribe 1978; Polanyi 1957) we
can understand the economic as a definite plane of existence which comes to be
regarded and treated as distinct from other dimensions of reality - the cultural,
the political, the social - only under specifiable historical and institutional con-
ditions. To use the language of Deleuze and Guattari, it is possible to speak of
'the economy' as something which is 'territorialized' in terms of a whole host of
technical and political interventions, each possessing their own history and
material density. Discourses like political economy and modern economics
which describe an economic space (Meuret 1988; Tribe 1978); administrative
concepts like 'unemployment' (Walters 1994) and 'balance of payments', and
knowledges like statistics which function to make the economy measurable; laws
and regulations which separate out a given range of activities as 'commercial'
(Hunt 1996) from the 'social' and the 'cultural'; a body of experts who come to
speak in the name of the economy and seek to optimize its forces (Brown 1997);
a field of economic policy techniques ranging from demand management to pri-
vatization for acting on the economy - these are but a few examples of the inter-
ventions which make 'the economy' a knowable and manipulable entity.
This territorialization is, of course, not a once and for all time event. Rather,
it is a question of how new planes and dimensions of the economic are constantly
being composed in response to the identification of new political problems and
objectives. Miller and Rose (1990) have vividly illustrated this process. One
example they give is post-war France where the political consensus on the need
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Willzam Walters: Decentring the economy 3 15
for societal 'modernization' is given technical expression in the institutionaliz-
ation of a vast apparatus for industrial planning. This includes a system of
national accounts, a representational device that will, for the first time, make 'the
economy' available for political argumentation in the form of a system of pro-
duction inputs and outputs.
Accordingly, the kind of account of economic change we can expect from gov-
ernmentality is not so much an evolutionary one where it is the dynamics of the
economy that centre the narrative. Rather, it is an 'eventalized' account. Instead
of an economy which unfolds, we are presented with discontinuous and contin-
gent re-territorializations of the economic. As commissions of experts, econo-
mists, planners, consultants and the like gather data and theorize problems of
'globalization', 'uneven development', 'regional competitiveness', 'inner-city'
unemployment or the 'stop-go' cycle, they are not simply uncovering the work-
ings of an economy-in-general that is already there. Rather, they are involved in
a creative activity. They are bringing new dimensions of the economic into exist-
ence, discovering new mechanisms by which its performance can be optimized
and re-engineered.
There is a second way in which a challenge to the conventions of political
economy could be constructed from research on governmentality. This would
concern questions of economic power. Foucault's significance for sociologies of
power and state is by now well established (Dean 1994; Rose and Miller 1992):
the need to conduct ascending analyses of power, which begin with its exercise
at a micrological level, in local settings and work up to consider larger aggrega-
tions and strategies; the point that power is exercised according to historically
specific rationalities, and in the context of particular knowledges; the argument
that power is not so much external to subjects, but operates through the consti-
tution of specific forms of subjectivity or person; and that power and resistance
are not exterior to one another but mutually forming.
However, by far the dominant tendency even within critical political economy
approaches is still to understand power as something that is possessed by states,
multinationals or international organizations like the IMF; something essentially
malevolent which is imposed on (and resisted by) workers, communities, and
nations (e.g. Stubbs and Underhill 1994). Nevertheless, some of the preceding
insights from governmentality and Foucault have begun to make an impact upon
understandings of economic power. This is no more evident than with critical
studies of accounting practices (e.g., Thompson 1986; Miller 1991 cf. Gibson-
Graham 1996). One of the most interesting arguments that have been made in
this respect concerns our understanding of the firm. Work within accounting
studies has suggested that it is not particularly helpful to assume that firms have
singular or eternal objectives like maximizing profit or accumulating capital. For
there are complex and historically changing discursive procedures involved in
the definition of appropriate objectives and how these should be measured.
Hence it is now possible to understand the firm not as a unitary rational actor or
unproblematic power-maximizer, but itself a contested site, the space of com-
peting definitions of ends and means.
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3 16 Economy and Society
We can conclude this cursory and in many ways partial overview of the sig-
nificance of Foucaultian research agendas for new, poststructuralist understand-
ings of the economic by mentioning historical work that has sought to unsettle
some of the conventional assumptions of political economy. Both Pasquino
(1991) and Procacci (1991) have criticized a certain tendency they associate with
Marxist and other political economy approaches. This tendency is to reduce
social and historical change to the logic of capital, and to see all social struggles
being waged solely on its plane. Hence these writers investigate discourses
associated with 'police' and 'social economy' (prevalent in nineteenth-century
France) respectively, and practices like charity, assistance, statistics. For these
interventions also played a determinative role in the shaping of the present. As
Procacci has put it, there is a need 'to outflank these massive declamatory cat-
egories [e.g., capital] which can be employed for the reciting of epics, in order to
rediscover instead the materiality of the lines of formation and transformation
of the social domain. This is a materiality which is composed not of macroscopic
relations of domination and submission, but of a multiplicity of social islands
dealt with at a local level' (1991: 152).
The interrogation of the economic has not ranked highly as an explicit
concern for researchers in the field of governmentality. Nevertheless, as I have
tried to indicate, a not insubstantial contribution has been made concerning the
government of the economy, and there is definitely potential for further work.
Inasmuch as governmentality has addressed the economic, this has been at the
level of power-knowledge relations. For work in governmentality the formation
of economic subjects and objects is seen to be always immanent to the plane of
technologies of power. In The End of Capitalism, as we shall see, Gibson-Graham
seeks to decentre the economy by a somewhat different course: through a decon-
structive re-working of Marxist political economy.
The End of Capitalism has obviously been written in terms of a dialogue with the
Marxist left. Unlike governmentality, which is not comfortable with the terms
of historical materialism, Gibson-Graham remains preoccupied with some of
the central concerns of Marxist political economy, such as the changing charac-
ter of capitalism, the social prospects for radical transformation and the role
which class and labour might play in this.
One of the book's central and most important observations concerns the
essentialism of mainstream, and radical discourses about capitalism. It notes that
historically the political left and right have disagreed about the moral virtues and
social consequences of capitalism. But what they nevertheless hold in common
is the assumption that capitalism is the dynamic, powerful, mobilizing, pene-
trating force which is everywhere, driving societal and historical change. Capital
is the structure of the world economy. It is the global logic. The capitalist
economy is a 'system', spanning the globe, integrating 'first' and 'third' worlds.
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William Walters: Decentring the economy 3 17
Wherever capitalism comes into contact with other modes of production, these
will invariably fall before its transformative force. For, compared with capital-
ism, other modes of production are always less efficient, less dynamic, less pro-
ductive. They are always found lacking. Quite tellingly, Gibson-Graham
observes that this view of capitalism is so well entrenched in our common-sense
that even poststructuralist critics, like Deleuze and Guatarri, or Laclau and
Mouffe, assume it.
Two things follow from this 'capitalocentrism'. First, because we assume that
capitalism is so dynamic, so pervasive, inexorably saturating the social space,
then we fail to recognize the extent of the non-capitalist forms of economic
activity which exist, and in some cases thrive in our midst, e.g., in the house-
hold, the 'third sector', self-employment, etc. Second, because we imagine
capitalism to be so entrenched, so mighty, we inevitably stand in awe of it, im-
mobilized by the seemingly insurmountable task of transforming this 'system'.
Therefore, Gibson-Graham endeavours to demonstrate that capitalism is not
unitary but partial, fragmented and discontinuous. Her argument is that once
we begin to see how all the relations between its various elements - markets,
private property, commodification, accumulation - are contingent and not neces-
sary, then we widen the space for economic innovation, experimentation and
change.
The theoretical resources which Gibson-Graham's project draw on are worth
noting. Unlike research in governmentality, which owes a considerable debt to
Foucault, it is probably fair to say that a different figure from the Parisian intel-
lectual scene has been more influential upon the American left, namely Louis
Althusser. In several places in The End of Capitalism, Gibson-Graham acknow-
ledges her debt to Stephen Resnick and Richard WolK These authors, she sug-
gests, have done 'pioneering work' which uses Althusser's concept of
'overdetermination' to point to the possibility of an anti-essentialist Marxism.
Seeing capitalism as always overdetermined means that:
a capitalist site (a firm, industry or economy) or a capitalist practice (exploi-
tation of wage labour, distribution of surplus value) cannot appear as the con-
crete embodiment of an abstract capitalist essence. It has no invariant 'inside'
but is constituted by its continually changing and contradictory 'outsides'. In
the words of Althusser, the 'existing conditions' are its 'conditions of exist-
ence'.
(Gibson-Graham 1996: 15-1 6)
Gibson-Graham develops the consequences of this notion of the 'constitutive
outside' for understandings of the economic by making links to its employment
within anti-essentialist and poststructuralist feminist thought. There it has been
utilized to decentre the category of woman. She argues that just as it is not poss-
ible to find invariant or transcendent properties upon which the identity woman
can be grounded, then neither can capitalism be universally defined. It cannot
exist outside determinations which are always historically specific. We should
speak of capitalisms rather than capitalism.
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3 18 Economy and Society
Why should we want to deconstruct capitalism? Again, the parallel with post-
modern feminism is instructive. As long as man remains a self-identical, under-
determined, definite identity, woman will always be 'deprived of positive being',
defined in terms of her lack, defined as 'non-man'. Deconstruction makes man
different from himself. 'If there is no singular figure, there can be no singular
other' (p. 14). A space is liberated in which the other can become 'potentially
specific, variously definite, an array of positivities rather than a negation or an
amorphous ground' (p. 14). Similarly, by affirming non-capitalist spaces and
practices, like production in households or voluntary work, as not just supports
for capitalism, not just its margins, but spaces with their own effectivity and sin-
gularity, then the possibilities for economic innovation and proliferation are
greatly improved.
Most of the substance of the politics of economic difference which Gibson-
Graham espouses is centred around her conceptualization of 'class'. Following
Resnick and Wolff (1987) she takes a minimal definition of class as 'the social
process of producing and appropriating surplus labor (more commonly known
as exploitation) and the associated process of surplus labor distribution' (p. 52).
Several things are worth noting about this definition. First, class is viewed pri-
marily as a process rather than a subject or group. Second, the conventional
privileging of exploitation over distribution in the definition of class identities is
rejected in favour of a position which asserts that there is no necessary hierarchy.
And, third, it is argued that class processes go on in households, businesses, com-
munities, under the terms of self-employment, and so on, wherever a surplus is
produced and/or distributed. Importantly, capitalist class relations by no means
exhaust the field of all class relations. Capitalist class processes are only one
form, usually involving wage labour and the surplus taking value form. In other
words, not only do we occupy multiple and non-reducible subject positions, as
postmodern theorists of identity have observed, so that we are always also race-
ed, gendered, sexualized, and so on. We also occupy multiple class identities as
well. While most people are engaged in the reproduction of capitalist class
relations, a large number are simultaneously active in other non-capitalist class
relations, since they are also active in voluntary work, household production,
self-help, community activity and so on. There is therefore no singular class
structure.
There is a political purpose in highlighting the multiplicity of class relations.
'By producing a knowledge of exploitation as a social process, we hope to con-
tribute to a more self-conscious and self-transformative class subjectivity and to
a different politics of class activism and social innovation' (p. 53).
As Gibson-Graharn sees it, the task of post-Marxist theory is to heighten con-
sciousness in society concerning the multiple forms of surplus labour appropri-
ation and distribution that actors are engaged in. For, wherever surplus labour
is present, there is always the potential for raising essentially political questions
about how it might be deployed in other ways. The types of reorganization in
which Gibson-Graham is interested are mostly where the balance between capi-
talist and non-capitalist appropriations can be changed in favour of the latter.
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Willzam Walters: Decentring the economy 3 19
For instance, this might mean finding new ways of regulating and taxing the flex-
ible firm. Such firms often rely upon homeworkers. At the same time that home-
workers are active within regimes of flexible accumulation, new regulatory
regimes could boost the potential for them to engage simultaneously in co-oper-
ative and non-capitalist forms of production and consumption.
But whereas Marxist political intervention has traditionally aimed at sharp-
ening class consciousness and fostering the emergence of a unified and radical-
ized working-class subject, the post-Marxism of Gibson-Graham seeks to
enliven class identities which are always going to be provisional, partial and tem-
porary solidarities and commonalities. Furthermore, these identities are always
mixed with other determinations. For Gibson-Graham there is no overarching
and singular class structure. Similarly, there is no telos of class-over(be)coming.
And whereas class is for Marxism a privileged identity, albeit one that is medi-
ated by other discourses and oppressions (race, gender, sexuality, nation), class
is for Gibson-Graham not ontologically prior, but simply the category she has
chosen to open up social relations. In terms of a politics, class is an axis of diver-
sification and exploration. We do not 'overcome' class, but use it to develop new
subjects.
There can be little doubt that The End of Capitalism represents a highly imagi-
native and bold synthesis of Marxist political economy and poststructuralist
feminism. However, such a project cannot be undertaken without giving rise to
certain tensions and ambiguities. Here I shall briefly discuss two which cluster
around the book's treatment of class.
Gibson-Graham stresses that class refers to social processes which involve the
exploitation and/or distribution of surplus labour. It is not meant to imply any
necessary social subject or political identity. Nor is it a privileged category of
analysis. 'For certainly economic space could be divided and differentiated in any
number of ways . . . we have chosen to proliferate differences in the dimension
of class, but it is only one potential matrix of differentiation' (p. 17). Presumably
other analyses of the economic are just as valid as class ones.
However, the book is also intended to be a political intervention, the making
available of a new type of economic knowledge about society that might help to
change it. It is in this respect that the selection of class as a potential axis for
building social solidarities and alliances seems to go against the grain of con-
temporary radical politics. Is class really a promising language for social theorists
to address social struggles and antagonisms with? Are actually existing social
activists predisposed to understand their political practice in class terms?
Certain sociologists of the post- or late modern have argued that, while social
inequality is a persistent and painful fact of contemporary societies, it is no
longer mediated, experienced or resisted primarily in terms of class. They link
this with developments such as the displacement of production by consumption
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320 Economy and Society
as the locus of social experience and identity formation (Crook et al. 1992) and
the individualization of production relations and security practices (Beck 1992).
We do not need to accept these rather totalizing and linear predictions of the
demise of class fully. Nevertheless we can still concur with them that there are
numerous other identities and political appeals which seem to have a greater
chance of resonating with popular antagonisms and desires than those based on
class. A few examples would include politics based on sexual identity, com-
munity, the environment, the rights of the consumer, and racial and ethnic
difference. While none preclude class articulations, their prominence suggests
that class is no longer the promising vehicle for politics that it was in the heyday
of Marxism.
There is therefore a risk involved in this revised politics of class which
Gibson-Graham espouses. Perhaps it will connect with and stimulate latent cur-
rents within the political culture, and contribute towards a reawakening of class
politics, albeit a class politics which is at ease with the pluralistic ethos of iden-
tity politics. Alternatively, this decision to stick with class, despite the fact that
radical politics seems to have moved on, might alienate people. There remains
something patronizing about that form of Marxist theory which informs politi-
cal actors that, whatever their own understanding of their particular struggles
might be, they are actually engaged in a class struggle. It would be unfortunate
were Gibson-Graham's book to be interpreted in this way.
There is a second major issue raised by the deployment of class within this
book. This concerns its relationship to Gibson-Graham's use of the Althusserian
notion of overdetermination. Overdetermination serves a specific function: it
allows the book to reconcile certain theoretical claims for class analysis with the
post-Marxist position that asserts that class lacks any ontological primacy. 'We
understand class processes as overdetermined, or constituted, by every other
aspect of social life . . . class is constituted at the intersection of all social dimen-
sions or processes - economic, political, cultural, natural - and class processes
participate in constituting these other dimensions of social existence' (p. 55).
Overdetermination is meant to complexify explanatory strategies and to avoid
reductionism. But it is still a problematic of determination. It does not really
resolve the problem of essentialism because all it does is multiply causal factors
and influences. It posits a social totality in which all moments - the 'economic',
the 'political', the 'cultural' and so forth - are determined by one another. In this
way, overdetermination has a tendency to substantialize these seemingly com-
partmentalized dimensions of existence, not deconstruct them.
This is where research in governmentality has certain merits. For it displays
a Nietzschean scepticism regarding analysis that is conducted in terms of the
causal, the problematic of determination. Instead, governmentality focuses on
surfaces. It is positively superficial. It does not take the economic or the politi-
cal as given, but employs genealogies to ascertain how these territories are his-
torically composed and recomposed, how they come to be separated off from
other spheres at a given time. In this way, it offers a more thoroughgoing decen-
tring of the economy than overdetermination.
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Wzlliam Walters: Decentring the economy 321
We began by setting The End of Capitalism alongside Foucaultian studies of
government, and suggesting that they hold out different possibilities for
developing a more decentred understanding of the economic. I would like to
conclude by asking what a governmentality perspective might take on board
from this book.
As we noted earlier, as a concept, capitalism barely figures in governmental-
ity analysis. There is a wariness of the term. Perhaps this has something to do
with the fact that within the social sciences, and within everyday life, capitalism
is frequently used to denote not merely a body of ideas, a particular ethos or
certain practices. For capitalism also refers to a socio-economic system, a centred
totality. As a system, it is generally invoked to explain events and phenomena -
from the 'crisis' of the state to the globalization of social relations. But govern-
mentality is sceptical of attempts to base modes of inquiry on such totalizing
claims. For such endeavours are themselves implicated in power relations.
Hence, rather than ask what is this social system and how does it work, research
in government would ask a different question. Where does this idea of a system
come from and what are its power effects? What function does it serve in making
the real thinkable and amenable to intervention? Who can speak in its name, and
what claims to authority can they make?
It is as an effect of discourse and power that governmentality researchers
might engage with capitalism. The profound contribution of Gibson-Graham's
book is to unsettle our assumptions about capitalism. For it has surely been far
more impervious to deconstruction than other terms (nature, state, man, woman,
etc.). That production is somehow more important than distribution; that
exploitation, markets, wage labour and private property are indissolubly and
necessarily linked; that the economy has a 'logic' or a 'centre' -these are the sorts
of assumptions which Gibson-Graham shows to be discursive effects rather than
necessary attributes of a capitalist system.
The intriguing prospect which this deconstruction suggests for a governmen-
tality perspective is the possibility of writing a history, or rather histories of
capitalism. That is, once it becomes possible to query the ontological integrity of
capitalism, the question is raised: how was capitalism ever made singular? in
whose interests? If we can no longer take the prior existence of a unified thing
called capitalism for granted, then one task for critical, and genealogical, research
becomes the reconstruction of trajectories of discourses and practices which pro-
duced a unified capitalism. For instance, we know that the word was not used
much in economic discourse until the second half of the nineteenth century when
it is employed by Thackeray and of course Marx to describe a particular kind of
economic system. It is only at the turn of the century that socialists in Europe
start to popularize the notion in their critiques of the power structure (Williams
1976; Cole 1964). If political economy offered governments an essentialized and
integrated conception of economic life with its narratives of the 'market system',
then socialism was to mirror it. While it was no doubt politically expedient and
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322 Economy and Society
in many ways necessary for socialists to construct capitalism as a monolithic and
dehumanizing system, to simplify it for the purposes of communication and
political mobilization, there were undoubtedly costs involved as well. These costs
are nicely captured in the title of the concluding chapter of the present book:
'Waiting for the revolution'. This chapter tells how the perception of capitalism
as monolithic, huge, and systemic has exerted a constant inhibiting effect on the
socialist movement. For it has always made the business of effecting genuine or
truly radical change seem too overwhelming.
Since one of the aims of genealogical analysis is the uncovering of local, minor
and often subjugated knowledges (Foucault), it would surely be a productive
exercise to seek out other descriptions of economic life which were marginalized
by the hegemony of capitalism within left discourse. What other ways of imag-
ining the economic and its power relations have existed, but were perhaps dis-
regarded as 'unscientific'. Gibson-Graham has deconstructed Marxism so as to
make other economic futures thinkable. There is surely also a case to be made
for historical work which might show that the past already contains fragments
for thinking such a possibility.
Notes
1 This apparent reluctance to engage with questions of political economy has fed
suspicions among some on the left that poststructuralism marks a 'retreat of the intel-
lectuals' into 'the cultural', a disengagement from questions of economic exploitation and
political power, precisely at a time when the power of capital over societies and govern-
ments has never been greater. For example, see Miliband et al. (1990).
2 Gibson-Graham is the 'single writing persona' of Katherine Gibson and Julie
Graham. The first person singular and plural is used in the book; I have opted to use the
former here.
3 This point can be related to Foucault's conception of knowledge in the Archaeology
of Knowledge. Mitchell Dean writes 'archaeology marks the advent of a materialist
approach to the analysis of knowledge and belief if by that is meant an approach that
respects the being of discourse, its materiality, its location in time and place, and seeks to
account for it in terms of its conditions of existence' (Dean 1994: 17).
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Economy and Society Volume 28 Number 2 May 1999: 325-326
Notes on contributors
Stuart Corbridge was born in Blackpool, England, in 1957. He read geography at
Cambridge University and completed a PhD there on the politics of Jharkhandi
ethnoregionalism in eastern India. He has taught at Huddersfield Polytechnic,
London University (RHBNC), Syracuse University and Cambridge University,
where he is lecturer in South Asian Geography. He was Visiting Professor at
Jawaharlal University in New Delhi in 1993. He is shortly to become Professor
of International Geography in the School of International Studies, University
of Miami. He has published books on development theory (Capitalist World
Development, Macmillan, 1996), the debt crisis (Debt and Development, Black-
well, 1993) and geopolitics (Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and Inter-
national Political Economy, with John Agnew, Routledge). His work on India has
been published in journals including Modern Asian Studies, Ethnic and Racial
Studies and Political Geography. He is the co-author, with John Harriss, of Rein-
venting India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Polity,
forthcoming) and co-editor, with Ram Dayal Munda and Sanjay Bosu-Mullick,
of A Documentary History of theJharkhan Movement (Manohar, 1999).
Paul Gilroy teaches sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Edward X. Gu is currently Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National
University of Singapore. He obtained his PhD degree from Leiden University,
the Netherlands. His publications have appeared in The China Quarterb, Democ-
ratization, The China Journal, Philosophy East 6 West, and so on.
Larry Ray is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, which he joined
in 1998. Prior to that he was a member of the Sociology Department at Lan-
caster University. He has recently published on social theory and modernity, the
crisis of communism and economic and cultural aspects of social movement.
William Tompson is Lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of
London. He holds degrees from Emory University and the University of Oxford
and is the author of Khrushchev: A Political Life and a number of articles on
Soviet/Russian high politics and on the contemporary Russian financial sector.
lames Tully teaches political theory in the Department of Political Science, Uni-
versity of Victoria, British Columbia. For many years he taught at McGill Uni-
versity, Montreal. He has published books and articles on present forms of
political thought and their history, including issues such as rights, struggles for
Copyright O Routledge 1999 0308-5147
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326 Notes on contributors
recognition and the self-determination of indigenous peoples. Recent publi-
cations include Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity
(1995), 'To think and act differently: Foucault's four reciprocal objections to
Habermas', in Foucault contra Habermas, ed. D. Owen (1999); he is co-editor,
with Abdellah Hammoudi, of Islamic Views of the Human and the United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1999).
Mariana Valverde's most recent book is Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the
Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge, 1998).
William Walters teaches political science at Carleton University, Canada. He is
the author of a forthcoming book on the government of unemployment as well
as various articles on the regulation of poverty. He is currently researching the
place of international organizations in the history of economic calculation.
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