Walters 1999 Decent Ring the Economy

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Economy and Society Volume28 Number 2 May 1999: 312-323

Review ar t ic leby Will iam Wal ters

Decentring the economy

Tex t reviewed

J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996)The End of Capitalism (As WeKnew It) : A Femin-ist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell.

'The economy' has not attracted the same sort of critical attention on the partof poststructuralists and po stmodernists as have many other areas of social, cul-tural a nd political life. As a system of power, capitalism has not been subjec t tothe de constructive t urn in the way of other power relations like those associatedwith 'race', gender, sexuality, class, nation or colon ialism. Unlike such disci-

plines as sociology, legal studies, hum an geograp hy and a nthropology, politicaleconomy, and especially economics, betray little interest in interrogating theepistemologica l status of their basic concep ts and objec ts.'

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 nu mber of promis-ing intellectual points of departure, across several disciplines. These might notall describe themselves as poststructuralist, but they do nevertheless bringvarious heterodox and challenging insights to bear on processes and topics con-ventionally understood as 'economic'. We can give a few examples. T h e disci-pline of economics has seen a move to interrogate the rhetorical and discursivemanoeuvres of economists and planners (McCloskey 1986; Mirowski 1990;Mier and Bingham 1992), including studies which utilize poststructuralistagendas (A mariglioet al. 1993; Escobar 1995). Mea nwhile, some anthrop olo-

gists have criticized world-systems theory: the latter is accused of reifying thelogic of the market at the expense of appreciating how the economic plays outin terms of local and cultural processes (Sahlins 1994). Sociological andanthropological work on consum ption has certainly contributed to a decentringof the econom ic, inasmuch as it has foregrounded a sphere of existence that hadhitherto been regarded as passive, reactive and secondary to the world of pro-duction (Mo rt 1996; Shields 1992). In a similar vein, feminist work in politicaleconomy has underlined the 'constructedness' of the economic by highlighting

William W alters, Department ofPoliticalScien ces, Loeb Building, C arleton U niversity,1125Colonel By Drive, Ottaw a, OntarioKZS 5B6, Canada

CopyrightO Routledge 1999 0308-5147


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Wzllzam Walters: Decentring the economy 3 13

the conceptual and po litical manoeuvres by which a great deal of female labour(e.g., within the household) com es to be defined as non-economic (Waring 1988;Bakker 1994). Finally, there is the bu rgeoning 'non-standard' economics litera-ture w hich includes convention theory, an interpretative approach to econom iclife which has certain affinities with the actor-network analysis of Mich el Callonand Bruno L atour (Wilkinson 1997).

In this essay I want to review two more research agendas which seem to offergreat potential for refocusing our perceptions of the economic. The first isassociated with research on governmentality, and will no doubt be familiar toreaders of Economy and Society. The second research programme has been setout most impressively byJ. K. Gibson-Graham in their/her recentThe End ofCapitalism (A s We Knew I t),2a book which combines poststructu ralist feministtheory with the post-Marxism of a number of researchers grouped around theUS-based journalRethinking Marxism. It might be useful to set these approachesside by side.

Work on governmentality has recently been criticized on the grounds that itneglects the central concerns of Marxist political economy, such asclass an dcapitalism. Neither is this simply an oversight, it seems. It derives from the factthat, however valuable Foucault's genealogies of mode rn power and su bjecthoo dmay be, 'his writings are useless when it comes to explaining the macro-economic processes of specific national and supranational form s of capitalistaccumulation' (Frankel 1997:83).

In th is section I want to suggest that this criticism is misplaced for at least tworeasons. Th e first is that it finds gov ernmentality inadequate as ageneral theory.Yet, as certain research ers active in th e field of gov ernm entality have been carefulto point out, this problematic should not be seen as an alternative to historicalmaterialism or some other comparable grand theory of historical and socialchange (Barryet al. 1996:3 4 ) .For stud ies of government are mainly concernedwith but on e dimension of our existence- he governmental- nd not the socialtotality. T h e second point I make below is that, although governmentality mig htnot p urpo rt to analyse the 'material' world of underlying socio-economic struc-tures, it has generated a numb er of studies which d o intersect, albeit tangentially,with the concerns of political economy.

Studies of government are not realist in the sense in which most politicaleconomy and historical sociology is. As Rose and Miller (1992: 177) put it, 'Wedo no t try to ch aracterise how social life really was and why. We do not seek topenetrate the surfaces of what people said to discover what they really meant,what their real motives or interests were.' Governmentality does not promiseaccess to the hidden realm of structures or processes. It does not claim to grasptotalities. Its am bitions are in some respects more m odest. Thes e are to analyse

and em phasize two distinctive but now taken-for-granted characteristics of the


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3 14 Eco nom y an d Society

functioning of modern political power: a discursive aspect - he fact that govern-ment presupposes the existence of various means for rendering the real think-able, calculable and improvable; but also, a practical aspect - he point being thatgovernmental plans, programmes and ambitions always find themselves depen-dent upon particular technologies if they are to have any prospect of shaping thereal, becoming actual.

Research in governmentality has therefore set the exercise of political poweragainst several key analytical axes. It has asked: what are the specific mentalities,philosophies and other intellectual machineries that have conditioned the waythat the real comes to be posed as a problem for political authorities? What arethe technical knowledges and expertises, and the social technologies in terms ofwhich the real can be made an object of calculation and manipulation? What arethe programmes and strategies, the social and political alliances which serve asthe context for attempts to govern the real? Governmentality is not 'materialist'in the Marxist sense. But it is materialist inasmuch as it insists that governmentalrationalities, knowledges, technologies and techniques constitute a dimension ofreality that is irreducible, and no less material - n 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 anew perspective on the economic, one that does not presume the prior existenceof a centred economic totality. For governmentality, 'the economy' is not atranscendental 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) wecan understand the economic as a definite plane of existence which comes to beregarded and treated as distinct from other dimensions of reality - he 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 oftechnical and political interventions, each possessing their own history andmaterial density. Discourses like political economy and modern economicswhich describe an economic space (Meuret 1988; Tribe 1978); administrativeconcepts like 'unemployment' (Walters 1994) and 'balance of payments', andknowledges like statistics which function to make the economy measurable; lawsand 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 tospeak 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 - hese 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 constantlybeing composed in response to the identification of new political problems andobjectives. 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 315

for societal 'modernization' is given technical expression in th e institutionaliz-ation of a vast apparatus for industrial planning. This includes a system ofnation al accounts, a represen tational d evice that will, for the first time, mak e 'theeconomy' available for political argum entation in the fo rm of a system of pro-duction inputs and outputs.

Accordingly, the kind of acc ount of econom ic change we can expect from gov-

ernme ntality is not so much an evolutionary one where it is the dynamics of theeconomy that c entre th e narrative. Rather, it is an 'eventalized' account. Insteadof an economy which unfolds, we are presented w ith discontinuous an d contin-gent re-territorializations of the economic. As comm issions of experts, econo-mists, planners, consultants and the like gather data and theorize problems of'globalization', 'uneven development', 'regional competitiveness', 'inner-city'unemploym ent o r 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 ina creative activity. Th ey are bringing new dimensions of the economic into exist-ence, discovering new m echanisms by w hich its performance can be optimizedand re-engineered.

There is a second way in which a challenge to the conventions of politicaleconomy could be constructed from research on governmentality. This wouldcon cern qu estio ns of econo mic power. Foucault's significance for sociologies ofpower and state is by now well established (Dean 1994; Rose and Miller 1992):the need to cond uct ascending analyses of power, which begin w ith its exerciseat a micrological level, in local settings and work up to consider larger aggrega-tions and strategies; the point that power is exercised according to historicallyspecific rationalities, and in th e context of particular knowledges; the arg umen tthat power is not so muc h external to subjects, but o perates throug h the consti-tution of specific forms of subjectivity or person; an d tha t power and resistanceare not exterior to one anothe r but mutually forming.

However, by far the do minan t tendency even within critical political economyapproaches is still to understan d power as something that ispossessed by states,multinationals or international organizations like the I M F; som ething essentially

malevolent which is imposed on (and resisted by) workers, communities, andnations (e.g. S tub bs and Un derhill 1994). Nevertheless, some of the precedinginsights from governm entality and F oucault have begun to make an impact uponunderstandings of economic power. This is no more evident than with criticalstudies of accounting practices (e.g., Tho mp son 1986; Miller 1991 cf. Gibson-Graham 1996). One of th e most interesting arguments that have been made inthis respect concerns our understanding of the firm. Work within accountingstudies has suggested that it is not particularly helpful to assume that firms havesingu lar or eternal objectives like maximizing profit or accum ulating capital. Forthere are complex an d historically changing discursive procedures involved inthe definition of appropriate objectives and how these should be measured.Hen ce it is now possible to understand the firm not as a unitary rational actor orunproblematic power-maximizer, b ut itself a contested site, the space of com-peting definitions of ends and m eans.


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We can conclude this cursory and in many ways partial overview of the sig-nificance of Foucaultian research agen das for new, poststructuralist understan d-ings of the econom ic by mentioninghistorical work that has sought to unsettlesome of the conventional assumptions of political economy. Both Pasquino(1991) and Procacci (1991) have criticized a certain tend ency they associate withMarxist and other political economy approaches. This tendency is to reduce

social and historical change to the logic of capital, and to see all social strugglesbeing waged solely on its plane. Hence these writers investigate discoursesassociated with 'police' and 'social economy' (prevalent in nineteenth-centuryFrance) respectively, and practices like charity, assistance, statistics. For theseinterventions also played a determinative role in the shaping of the present. AsProcacci has put it, there is a need 'to outflank these massive declamatory cat-egories [e.g., capital] whic h can be employed for the rec iting of epics, in order torediscover instead the materiality of the lines of formation and transformationof the social domain. Th is is a materiality which is composed not of macroscopicrelations of domination and submission, but of a m ultiplicity of social islandsdealt w ith at a local level' (1991: 152).

The interrogation of the economic has not ranked highly as an explicitconcern for researchers in the field of governmentality. Nevertheless, as I havetried to indicate, a not insubstantial contribution has been made concerning thegovernment of the economy, and there is definitely potential for furth er work.Inasmuch as governmentality has addressed the economic, this has been at th elevel of power-knowledge relations. For work in gove rnmen tality the form ationof economic subjects and objects is seen to be always immanent to the plane oftechnolo gies of power. InThe End o Capitalism,as we shall see, Gibson-G rahamseeks to decentre the econom y by a somewhat different course: through a decon-structive re-working of Marxist political economy.

The End of Capitalism has obviously been w ritten in term s of a dialogue with theMarxist left. Unlike governmentality, which is not comfortable with th e term sof historical materialism, Gibson-Graham remains preoccupied with some ofthe central concerns of M arxist political economy, such as the changing charac-ter of capitalism, the social prospects for radical transformation and the rolewhich class and labour might play in this.

One of the book's central and most important observations concerns theessentialism of mainstream, and radical discourses about capitalism. It notes th athistorically the political left and right have disagreed about the moral virtues andsocial consequences of capitalism. But w hat they n evertheless hold in commo nis the assumption that capitalism is the dynamic, powerful, mobilizing, pene-tratin g force which is everywhere, driving societal and h istorical change. Capitalis the structure of the world economy. It is the global logic. The capitalist

economy is a 'system', spanning th e globe, inte grati ng '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, thesewill 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-Grahamobserves that this view of capitalism is so well entrenche d in ou r common-sensethat even poststructuralist critics, like Deleuze and Guatarri, or Laclau and

Mouffe, assume it.Two things follow from this 'capitalocentrism'. Fir st, because we assum e thatcapitalism is so dynamic, so pervasive, inexorably saturating the social space,then we fail to recognize the exten t of the non-capitalist forms of econom icactivity 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 imaginecapitalism to be so entrench ed, so mighty, we inevitably stand in awe of it, im-mobilized by the seemingly insurm ountab le task of transformin g this 'system'.Therefore, Gibson-Graham endeavours to demonstrate that capitalism is notunitary but partial, fragmented and discontinuous. Her argument is that oncewe begin to see how all the relations between its various elements- markets,private property, commodification, accumulation- re contingent and no t neces-sary, then we widen the space for economic innovation, experimentation andchange.

T h e theoretical resources which Gibson-Graham's project draw on are worthnoting. Unlike research in governmentality, which owes a considerable debt toFoucault, it is probably fair to say that a different figure from th e Parisian intel-lectual scene has been more influential upon the American left, namely LouisAlthusser. In several places in The End of Capitalism, Gibson-G raham acknow-ledges her deb t to S tephen Resnick and Richard W olK Th ese authors, she sug-gests, have do ne 'pioneering w ork' which uses Althusser's conce pt of'overdetermination' to point to th e 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 s urp lus value) cannot appear as the con-crete emb odim ent of an ab stract capitalist essence. It has n o invariant 'inside'but is constituted by its continually changing and contradictory 'outsides'. Inthe 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 'constitutiveoutside' for unders tanding s of the economic by making links to its employm entwithin anti-essentialist and po ststructuralist feminist though t. The re it has beenutilized to decen tre the category of woman. Sh e argues that just as it is not poss-ible to find invariant or transcend ent prop erties upon which the identity womancan be grounded, then neither can capitalism be universally defined. It cannotexist outside determinations which are always historically specific. We shouldspeak of capitalisms rather than capitalism.


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3 18 Economy and Society

Why should we want to de construct capitalism?Again, the parallel with post-mo dern feminism is instructive. As long as man rem ains a self-identical, un der-dete rm ined , definite identity, woman will always be 'deprived of positive being',defined in term s of her lack, defined as 'non-man'. Deco nstruction makes mandifferent from himself. 'If there is no singular figure, there can be no singularother' (p. 14). A space is liberated in which the other can beco me 'potentiallyspecific, variously definite, an array of positivities rather than a negation or anamorphous ground' (p. 14). Similarly, by affirming non-capitalist spaces andpractices, like production in households or voluntary work, as not just supportsfor capitalism, not just its margin s, but spaces with their own effectivity and sin-gularity, then the possibilities for economic innovation and proliferation aregreatly improved.

Most of the substance of the politics of economic difference which Gibson-Gra ham e spouses is centred aro und her con ceptualiz ation of 'class'. FollowingResnick and Wolff (1987) she takes a minimal definition of class as 'the socialprocess of producing and appropriating surplus labor (more comm only knownas exploitation) and th e associated process of surp lus labor distribution' (p.52).Several things are w orth notin g 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 isrejected in favour of a position which asserts that the re is no necessary hierarchy.And, t hird , it is argued that class processes go on in household s, businesses, com-munities, under the terms of self-employment, and so on, wherever a surplus isproduced and /or distributed. Importantly, capitalist class relations by no m eansexhaust the field of all class relations. Capitalist class processes are only oneform, usually involving wage labour and the surplus taking value form . In otherwords, not only do we occupy multiple and n on-reducible subject positions, aspostm odern theorists of id entit y have observed , so that we are always also race-ed, gendered, sexualized, and so on. We also occupy multiple class identities aswell. While most people are engaged in the reproduction of capitalist classrelations, a large num ber are simultaneously active in oth er no n-capitalist classrelations, since they are also active in voluntary work, household production,self-help, comm unity activity and so on. Th ere is therefore no singular classstructure.

There is a political purpose in highlighting the multiplicity of class relations.'By producin g a know ledge of exploitation as a social process, we hope to con-tribu te to a more self-conscious and self-transform ative class subjectivity and toa different politics of class activism and social innovation' (p.53).

As Gibson-G raharn sees it, the task of post-Marxist th eory is to heighten c on-sciousness in society concerning the multiple forms of surplus labour appropri-ation and distribution that actors are engaged in. For, wherever surplus labouris present, t here is always the poten tial for raising essentially political questionsabout how it might be deployed in other ways. Th e types of reorganization inwhich Gibson-Graham is interested are m ostly 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 m ight m ean 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 regulatoryregimes could boost the po tential 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-M arxism of Gibson-G raham seeks toenliven class identities which are always going to be provisional, partial and tem-porary solidarities and commonalities. Furthermore, these identities are alwaysmixed with other determinations. For Gibson-Graham there is no overarchingand sin gular 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 ot her discou rses and opp ressions (race, gender, sexuality, nation), classis for Gibson-Graham not ontologically prior, but simply the category she haschosen to open u p social relations. In ter ms of a politics, class is an axis of diver-sification and exploration. We do not 'overcome' class, but use it to de velop newsubjects.

Th er e can be little doubt thatTh e End o Capitalism represents a highly imagi-native and bold synthesis of Marxist political economy and poststructuralistfeminism. However, such a project cannot be undertaken without giving rise tocertain tensions and ambiguities. Here I shall briefly discuss two which clusteraround the book's treatment of class.

Gibson-G raham stresses that class refers to social processes which involve theexploitation and/o r distribution of surplus labour. It is not meant to imply anynecessary social subject or political identity. Nor is it a privileged category ofanalysis. For c ertainly econom ic space could be divided and differentiated in any

number of ways. . .

we have chosen to proliferate differences in the dimensionof class, but it is only one potential m atrix of differentiation' (p. 17). Presum ablyothe r analyses of the econom ic are just as valid as class ones.

However, the book is also intended to be a political intervention, the makingavailable of a new type of econom ic knowledge about socie ty that might help tochange it. It is in this respect that t he selection ofclass as a potential axis forbuilding social solidarities and alliances seems to go against the grain of con-tempo rary radical politics. Isclass really a promising language for social theoriststo address social struggles and antagonisms with? Are actually existing socialactivists predisposed to understand their political practice inclass terms?

Certain sociologists of the post- or late modern have argued that, w hile socialinequality is a persistent and painful fact of contemporary societies, it is nolonger mediated, experienced or resisted primarily in term s of class. Th ey link

this with developm ents such as the displacem ent of production by consumption


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as the locus of social experience and identity formation (Crooket al. 1992)andthe individualization of production relations and security practices (Beck1992).We do not need to accept these ra ther totalizing and linear predictions of thedemise of class fully. Nevertheless we can still concur with them that there arenumerous other identities and political appeals which seem to have a greaterchance 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 ethnicdifference. While none preclude class articulations, their prominence suggeststhat class is no longe r the prom ising vehicle for politics that it was in the heydayof Marxism.

There is therefore a risk involved in this revised politics of class whichGibson-Graham espouses. Perhaps it will connect with and stimulate latent cur-rents w ithin the political culture, and contribute towards a reawakening of classpolitics, 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 thatradical politics seems to have moved on, might alienate people. Th ere remainssomething patronizing about that form of Marxist theory which informs politi-cal actors that, whatever their own understandin g of their particular struggles

might be, they are actually engaged in a class struggle. It would be unfortun atewere Gibson-Graham's book to be interpreted in this way.

There is a second major issue raised by the deployment of class within thisbook. This concerns its relationship to Gibson-Graham's use of the Althusseriannotion of overdetermination. Overdetermination serves a specific function: itallows the book to reconcile certain theoretical claims for class analysis with t hepost-Marxist position that asserts that class lacks any ontological primacy. 'Weunderstand class processes as overdetermined, or constituted, by every otheraspect of social life. . . class is constituted a t the in tersection of all social dimen-sions or processes - economic, political, cultural, natural- and class processesparticipate in con stituting the se other d imen sions of social existence' (p.55).

Overdetermination is meant to complexify explanatory strategies and to avoidreductionism. But it is still a problematic of determination. I t does not reallyresolve the problem of essentialism because all it does is multiply causal factorsand influences. It po sits a social totality in wh ich all mom ents- he 'economic',the 'political', the 'cultural' and so forth- re determin ed by one another. In thisway, overdetermination has a tendency to substantialize these seemingly com-partmentalized dimensions of existence, not dec onstruct them .

Th is is where research in governm entality has certain merits. For it displaysa Nietzschean scepticism regarding analysis that is conducted in term s of thecausal, the problematic of determ ination. Instead, governmentality focuses onsurfaces. It is positively superficial. It does not take the economic or t he 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 fromothe r spheres at a given time. In this way, it offers a more tho roughg oing 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 ofgovernment, and suggesting that they hold out different possibilities fordeveloping a more decentred understanding of the economic. I would like toconclude 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 dowith the fact that within the social sciences, and within everyday life, capitalismis frequently used to denote not merely a body of ideas, a particular ethos orcertain practices. For capitalism also refers to a socio-economic system, a centredtotality. 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 totalizingclaims. For such endeavours are themselves implicated in power relations.Hence, rather than ask what is this social system and how does it work, researchin government would ask a different question. Where does this idea of a systemcome from and what are its power effects? What function does it serve in makingthe real thinkable and amenable to intervention? Who can speak in its name, andwhat claims to authority can they make?

It is as an effect of discourse and power that governmentality researchersmight engage with capitalism. Th e profound contribution of Gibson-Graham'sbook is to unsettle our assumptions about capitalism. For it has surely been farmore impervious to deconstruction than other terms (nature, state, man, woman,etc.). That production is somehow more important than distribution; thatexploitation, markets, wage labour and private property are indissolubly andnecessarily linked; that the economy has a 'logic' or a 'centre' -these are the sortsof assumptions which Gibson-Graham shows to be discursive effects rather thannecessary attributes of a capitalist system.

Th e intriguing prospect which this deconstruction suggests for a governmen-

tality perspective is the possibility of writing a history, or rather histories ofcapitalism. That is, once it becomes possible to query the ontological integrity ofcapitalism, the question is raised: how was capitalism ever made singular? inwhose interests? If we can no longer take the prior existence of a unified thingcalled capitalism for granted, then one task for critical, and genealogical, researchbecomes the reconstruction of trajectories of discourses and practices which pro-duced a unified capitalism. For instance, we know that the word was not usedmuch in economic discourse until the second half of the nineteenth century whenit is employed by Thackeray and of course Marx to describe a particular kind ofeconomic system. It is only at the turn of the century that socialists in Europestart to popularize the notion in their cr itiques of the power structure (Williams1976; Cole 1964). If political economy offered governments an essentialized andintegrated 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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in many ways necessary for socialists to construc t capitalism as a monolithic and

dehumanizing system, to simplify it for the purposes of communication andpolitical mobilization, t here were undoubtedly costs involved as well. The se costsare nicely captured in the title of the concluding chapter of the present book:'Waiting for the revolution'. Th is cha pter 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 ortruly radical change seem too overwhelming.Since on e of the aims of genealogical analysis is the uncovering of local, minor

and often subjugated knowledges (Foucault), it would surely be a productiveexercise to seek out oth er descriptions of economic life which were marginalizedby the hegemony of capitalism within left d iscourse. What other ways of imag-ining the economic and its power relations have existed, but were perhaps dis-

regarded as 'unscientific'. Gibson -Graha m has deconstructed Marxism so as to

make other economic futures thinkable. Th ere is surely also a case to be madefor historical work which might show that the past already contains fragmentsfor thinking such a possibility.

Notes

1 This apparent reluctance to engage with questions of political economy has fedsuspicions among some on the left that poststructuralism marks a 'retreat of the intel-lectuals' into 'the cultural', a disengagement from questions of economic exploitation andpolitical 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 JulieGraham. The first person singular and plural is used in the book; I have opted to use theformer here.3 This point can be related to Foucault's conception of knowledge in the Archaeologyof Knowledge. Mitchell Dean writes 'archaeology marks the advent of a materialistapproach to the analysis of knowledge and belief if by that is meant an approach thatrespects the being of discourse, its materiality, its location in time and place, and seeks toaccount 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 atCambridge 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 atJawaharlal University in New Delhi in 1993. He is shortly to become Professorof International Geography in the School of International Studies, Universityof Miami. He has published books on development theory (Capitalist WorldDevelopment, 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 hasbeen published in journals including Modern Asian Studies, Ethnic and RacialStudies 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 o 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, NationalUniversity 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 joinedin 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 ofLondon. He holds degrees from Emory University and the University of Oxfordand is the author of Khrushchev: A Political Life and a number of articles onSoviet/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 ofpolitical thought and their history, including issues such as rights, struggles for

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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 toHabermas', in Foucault contra Habermas, ed. D. Owen (1999); he is co-editor,with Abdellah Hammoudi, of Islamic Views of the Human and the Uni ted NationsUniversal Declaration of Human Rights (1999).

Mariana Valverde's most recent book is Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and theDilemmas o f Freedom (Cambridge, 1998).

William Walters teaches political science at Carleton University, Canada. He isthe author of a forthcoming book on the government of unemployment as wellas various articles on the regulation of poverty. He is currently researching theplace of international organizations in the history of economic calculation.

Documents

Walters 1999 Decent Ring the Economy