Culture, Government, Capital

Like “capital,” “economy” and “culture” also have an ambivalent status in our contemporary political imagination. On the one hand, the emergence of a global economy is often said to bring culture into a more direct relation with the economy. A globalizing economy, it is often argued, gives new prominence to the “cultural” industries, to an economy of signs and images, or to a “culturalization” of economic space and process. On the other hand, the economy and the categories and persons located at its core are often still conceived as material things or as already-existing forces beyond cultural or historical processes. The economy still seems to evade the kind of cultural critique to which other categories of social and political life are subject. As Timothy Mitchell suggests, the kinds of cultural analyses that have helped reconceive categories of nation and gender as “constructed” and culturally constituted domains have not as readily been taken up in relation to the economy. “The economy,” confirms Mitchell, “is a concept that seems to resist analysis … Perhaps the term [“economy”] seems more basic because it is still thought to refer to a material substrate, a realm with an existence prior to and separate from its representations, and thus to stand in opposition to more discursive constructs of social theory” (1998; see also Mitchell 2002, 2005a).