Knowledge Circulations Flashcards
What are the functions of money for economic research?
- Circulates as a valuable commodity and makes it possible for other commodities to circulate
- Conveys knowledge about economies –> abstract accounting unit for comparison
- Performs culturally/symbolically –> exclusion, inclusion, resistance…
What are the classic functions of money in modern capitalism?
- Medium of exchange: ‘universal commodity’
- Store of value: holds value over time
- Unit of account: represent and measure prices of many different items
How is money a geographical phenomenon?
- Challenge social theorists that modern money forms are disembedded from place
- “Money is itself a geography” – money as a circulation is always on the move but also rooted in specific places; new geography of money via dematerialisation and trans-national circulation
Gilbert and Helleiner (1999)
How is money a political phenomenon?
- Money as an instrument of power
- States relation to national currencies
- Alternative currency arrangements for power and legitimacy for statements
What are money’s multiple origin points?
- Territorial state-backed currencies
- Minted under state supervision
- Bitcoin circumvent this as an individual can produce money
- Cosmopolitan ‘credit monies’
- Bank checking accounts
- Financial derivatives
- More recently: cryptocurrencies
Why is there a discomfort with paper and digital currencies ?
- Now floating
- Not backed by gold
How is bitcoin reliant on energy?
- Consumption of energy for bitcoin mining
- Reliance on the state
- Every individual Bitcoin transaction eats up 275kWh of electricity
How does money’s functions work in contradictory ways in modern capitalism?
- Act as a medium of exchange while remaining a store of value
- Challenge for capitalist states
- Problem of inflation: currency loses value, anyone holding it has lost purchasing power
What are special monies?
- Value of money decided in social relations they are used for
- Domestic money set apart from real money by ideas of family life
- Shaped by gender, class and age
- Distinct from rules of the market
- Domestic money remains hidden in dominant economic paradigm of rationalizing market money
Zelizer (1989)
How does special monies challenge neoclassical economic theory?
- Develop sociological model of multiple monies as a challenge to neoclassic economic theory
- Not only to study of money but other aspects of economic life, including the market
Zeilzer (1989)
How does money permit the separation of sales and purchases of other commodities in space and time?
- As seller of one commodity under no obligation to buy another (Harvey, 1982)
- Money enables the veiling of a commodity’s social and spatial background
What is Mann’s (2008) idea about money in relation to capitalism?
The stitch of capitalism’s space-time
What are the cases for following the money?
- God of commodities
- Culmination of fetishisms
- Embeddedness in the social
- Financialisation
Christophers (2011)
What is the god of commodities case for following the money?
- Marx regards money as “the commodity par excellence”
- Money is both universal medium of exchange and universal measure of value
- Commodity circulation in capitalist economy depends on exchange of money
Christophers (2011)
What is the culmination of fetishisms case for following the money?
- Money form conceals our social relations with others but also social meaning of value itself
- Money as the indispensible ingredient in commodity fetishism under capitalism
Christophers (2011)
What is the embededness in the social case for following the money?
- Creation and circulation of money, e.g. traditional forms of money
- Modern monies are not empty or abstract but are dependent on re-embedding in social relations
Christophers (2011)
What is the financialisation case for following the money?
- Money’s colonisation of our lifewords
- Monetisation of capitalism is more concerned with wealth of financial assets rather than goods or productive resources
- Money is so entangled in capital wealth we should focus on money in our attempts to expose fetishism of capital at large
Christophers (2011)
What is the indefinite circulation challenge of following the money?
- With other commodities there is a clear consumption (end) and production (beginning) point
- No final consumption point for money
- Traditional monies always remain in circulation (Harvey, 1982)
- What meaningful temporal framing of the process of circulation should be used?
Christophers (2011)
What is the distinguishably challenge with following the money?
- Loses this feature when individual unity enters hands of economic agent that handles multiple monetary units
- Money from source is identical in value and utility to money from another source –> both serve equally well for onward circulation
Christophers (2011)
What is the case for using credit as the focus of defetishising money ?
- Credit interiorises the future
- Has start and end point (crystallisation to repayment)
- Creation of credit occurred in past we can follow the ‘thing’ – debt servicing and repayment obligation – forward to moment that initial monetary sum became valorised
- Feed later valorisation back into former crystallization to contribute to its defetishisation
How does credit mitigates challenges of defetishising traditional monies?
- Circulation of money tied to particular credit contract has discrete beginning and end
- Credit is circular it returns: identity who issues credit and whom it is issued for
How has defetishising of money become more apparent?
- Become more apparent since practices of credit securitisation have led to traceability
- Historical geography of financial crisis concerning circulation of securitised subprime US home loans
How does defetishising money relate to crisis?
When value of certain monies is called into question, money’s social construction becomes clearer to see, i.e. in times of crisis and uncertainty
How does economic theory relate to political economy approach?
- Promoted by powerful interests and institutions
- Travel and mutate to produce various and contradictory outcomes
- Peck (2010) suggests that ideology of pro-market governance concerned with following flows between ideational, ideological and institutions over time and places rather than locating an essential centre
What is economic theory?
Generative force in production and reproduction of economies
What is the cultural economy approach to economic theory?
- Manifests structural power-knowledge
- Relational and processual terms
What does economic geography add to performance of the economy?
- Space
- Place
- Geographical circulation
Barnes (2009)
What are the four geographical perspective to performance?
- Performing the economic geography of markets
- Performing economic geography of economic theory
- Performing the geography of markets
- Performing spatial politics of market organisation
Barnes (2009)
How do you perform the economic geography of markets?
- Location theory – inherently spatial
- Spatial market performance
Barnes (2009)
How do you perform the economic geography of economic theory?
- All knowledge is local
- Knowledge travels: movements from one local knowledge to another
How do you perform the geography of markets?
- Place matters
- Traders in two places perform same equations, the performances are quite different between two sites
- Different commodity markets and have different material performances: maps of steamship routes, railway lines, major ports and urban markets
How do you perform the spatial politics of market organisation?
- Callon opens up alternative market experimentation that are different to neoclassicism
- Performativity opens up novel possibilities through experimental character of markets and market organisation
How do Gibson-Graham show that the economy is performed in many different ways?
- Political task is to recognise alternatives and begin to perform them
- Performed in particular places feeds into transformation of wider economy
- Very performance of research itself
Where did economic knowledge in circulation come from post 1960s
Came from number of centres – business schools, management consultants etc
How are circuit used to understand economic knowledge circulations?
- Emphasises throughput, return and feedback loops over flows in many directions
What does circuit thinkinh of economic knowledge circulations invoke?
- Invokes Marxist Political Economy account of ‘circuits’
- Productive circuit of capital create value, i.e. commodity production
- Financial circuits extracts ‘rent’ in return for credit investment, i.e. banking and financial markets
- Secondary circuit of capital also extracts ‘rent’, e.g. land and property markets
How does knowledge circulation act as a new set of markets for capitalism?
- Opening ‘black box’ of firm
- Cultural circuit also lies within centre of ‘knowledge economy’
- Capitalism entering a new phase where information circulations are crucial
- Cutting edge capital accumulation rests on availability of information (‘big data’) and analysis (i.e. knowledge creation) to extract value
What are the three market devices of knowledge capitalism?
- Affective economies
- Analysis of big data yields consumers’ feelings about and attachments to products incorporated back into the innovation process
- ‘Opinion mining’ uses algorithms through social media, for example
- ‘Capitalizing on identity as consumption is construction and affirmation of the self
- Attention economies
- Digital design, marketing and advertising treat attention as a scarce commodity
- Market devices that use filters to sell attention to advertisers and companies
- Blockchain technologies
How might we understanding economic geographies of circulation differently to mainstream economic conceptions and in critical terms?
- Social and political creation of markets
- Processes of commodification and their labour relations
- Flows and networks of knowledge which produce the capitalist market economy
From a political and cultural economy perspective, how are worlds of motion that comprise economic geographies of circulation constantly constituted and reconstituted?
- From capitalist commodity production and commodification to groupings of ‘follow the thing’ and material transformations
- From ideology and circuits to performativity and calculative devices
