黛西·约翰逊,幸福兑换券 电视剧,泡椒网空间刷刷
Abstract 摘要
本文探讨了从文化政治经济学（CPE）的角度危机中复苏。它会检查（反）国部队在构建金砖四国（巴西，俄罗斯，印度，中国）为恢复驱动程序的作用。首先，它评论一些“文化经济”研究和指示CPE方法的价值。其次，检查“金砖四国”为“希望”知识符号凝聚，并显示在这个符号在三个重叠的时刻指的是其作为投资者，消费者和贷款人的角色如何演变。第三，它认为金砖四国话语的吸引力，尤其是金砖四国通过经济刺激方案在全球金融危机取得的信誉的物质基础。第四，它表明中国的“黄金标准”的经济刺激计划是如何强化一些深层次的政治紧张局势，损害贱民群体。最后，它反映了CPE如何促进危机和复苏的研究。This paper explores crisis recovery from a cultural political economy (CPE) perspective. It examines the role of (trans-)national forces in constructing BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) as drivers for recovery. First, it comments on some ‘cultural economy’ studies and indicates the value of a CPE approach. Second, it examines the ‘BRIC’ as a symbolic condensation of ‘hope’ knowledge and shows how this signifier evolved in three overlapping moments referring to its role as investor, consumer and lender. Third, it considers the material basis of the appeal of BRIC discourses, especially the credibility acquired through BRIC stimulus packages in the global financial crisis. Fourth, it indicates how China’s ‘gold standard’ stimulus package has intensified some deep-rooted political tensions and harmed subaltern groups. Finally, it reflects on how CPE can contribute to studies of crisis and recovery.
544 Economy and Society
Introduction介绍 This paper explores discourses and practices of crisis recovery from a cultural political economy (CPE) perspective. Many recent accounts of ‘crisis recovery’ and the imaginaries on which they draw are national and state focused, especially when referring to government stimulus or austerity packages. In contrast, this paper employs CPE to redirect attention to the imaginaries used by (trans-)national and/or intergovernmental forces in identifying and promoting another road to recovery. Specifically, it focuses on how entities such as international investment banks, economic strategists, international organizations, think tanks, intergovernmental agencies and business media have (re-)imagined the role of the ‘BRIC’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies as drivers of recovery in the context of financial crises in the US and Europe. The paper has five parts. The first briefly addresses the rapidly developing literature on ‘cultural economy’ and the ways in which the proposed CPE approach can add to a micro-macro understanding of (financial) (dis-)orders. Part two applies this approach to the roles of nodal (trans-)national forces in making, negotiating and circulating ‘BRIC’ as an economic imaginary. It argues that this involves constructions of ‘hope’/‘strength’ in three overlapping moments: an investor narrative, then an investor-consumer tale and, since 2009, an investor-consumer-lender story. The changing BRIC imaginary has both transnational and national significance and its resonance depends not only on developments in the ‘financial’ and ‘real’ economies but also on specific discourses, practices and knowledge technologies. The third part addresses the structural/material contexts in which the BRIC discourses were popularized by private-and public-sector actors in response to the continuing financial crisis that became visible in 2007. In this conjuncture, the BRIC economies were identified as sites that could facilitate ‘economic recovery’. This imagined recovery was made more credible when the BRIC countries developed their own stimulus packages. China was seen as leader of the pack here and its large national package was described by one international economist (Lardy, quoted in Baldwin, 2009) as ‘gold standard’ (see below). Part four examines how this package intensified some deep-rooted tensions in central-local relations. More specifically, it posed tremendous fiscal challenges for local authorities, which rely heavily on land as a source of revenue and mortgage loans. The resulting intensified commodification of land has further inflated the ‘property bubble’ and stimulated more land dispossession/ grabbing. This harms China’s subaltern groups in various ways, illustrated below by the cases of ‘house slaves’ and the plight of migrant workers’ children. Though some measures have been taken to dampen the property market, their impact has been limited and social unrest continues. The final part comments on CPE’s contribution to understanding the micro-power relations involved in constructing hope as well as on some macro-structural issues involved in attempts to stimulate recovery.
Ngai-Ling Sum: A cultural political economy of crisis recovery 545
Towards a cultural political economy of imagined recovery 朝想象复苏的文化政治经济学 CPE partly overlaps with the rapidly developing literature on ‘cultural economy’ found in the work of Callon (1998), MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu (2007), Pryke and du Gay (2007) and others. Their post-structural concern with the cultural orderings of the economy highlights the importance of microlevel devices in (re-)producing market knowledge and the performative effects of economic imaginaries in creating/changing subjectivities. The emphasis on ‘how’ knowledge is created and performed in the market and reaches into everyday life has gained much academic attention. Regarding financialization, for example, studies include: (a) knowledging technologies in identifying, calculating and marketing risk as profit (e.g. de Goede, 2004); (b) the performative qualities of financial theories and calculating techniques such as the Black-Scholes model in constituting and altering markets and market behaviour (e.g. MacKenzie, 2004, 2006); and (c) the construction and cultivation of financial subjects and agency (e.g. Aitken, 2007). While this literature has advanced understanding of the micro-foundations and technologies in building (financial) markets, it has been criticized for reinforcing and reifying the power of rational calculation as articulated by neoclassical economics and for downplaying the political nature of the market (see the criticisms in Montgomerie, 2008; Pryke & du Gay, 2007; Slater, 2002). This critique is reiterated by Paterson who, with Best (Best & Paterson, 2010), promoted ‘cultural political economy’ as a ‘field of study’ that seeks to bring politics into the cultural economy literature (Descheneau & Paterson, 2012, p. 67). This contribution is useful in its own terms but can add little to ‘cultural economy’ or ‘political economy’ more generally unless more is said on: (a) the processes and mechanisms of politicization; (b) the role of power relations, especially in privileged sites of capital accumulation, in framing discourses; (c) the role of nodal discursive networks in shaping and being shaped by (financial) market building; (d) the intertwining of the macro-structural imperatives of global capitalism, economic narratives and more micro-social relations; and (e) the interaction between material structure and agencies in uneven and contested remaking of social relations. In this regard, the CPE approach developed here (as opposed to ‘cultural political economy’ as a broad field of study a` la Best and Paterson) explores the micro-macro interface between the discursive and material moments involved in reproducing and remaking capitalism (Jessop & Sum, 2006; Sum, 2005, 2010, 2011; Sum & Jessop, 2006, 2013). Accordingly, this theoretical agenda highlights the articulation of the more discursive moments (including subjectivities, identities, economic and political categories, knowledge production, modes of calculation and structures of feeling) of economic-political relations as well as their structural features (including social forms, their institutional mediations, contradictions, crisis-tendencies and class relations). These discursive-material interactions become more visible during crisis conjunctures when sedimented social relations are
546 Economy and Society re-politicized. Actors seek to interpret the crisis as a basis for crisis management and/or recovery, including developing and justifying stimulus packages, austerity programmes, new investment sites, etc. This paper applies CPE to the emergence of the ‘BRIC’ imaginary as a possible new path towards crisis recovery. As objects of ‘hope’/’strength’, the BRIC quartet were imagined in three overlapping moments. It was first identified during the post-9/11 security crisis in 2001 and, in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, it has been re-imagined as well as translated into different rationalities and material practices. This has involved what neo-Foucauldians call knowledging technologies (Dean, 1999; Miller & Rose, 2008) as well as processes of selection, recontextualization, circulation and sedimentation. The CPE approach proposed here not only examines ‘how’ knowledge is constructed, but also investigates ‘when’, ‘who’ and ‘what’ issues. These questions point beyond discursive technologies to the role of nodal discursive networks of individual and institutional actors in remaking social relations. For present purposes, this agenda can be re-specified as follows: (1) when does a particular economic imaginary (e.g. BRIC) and its related discursive networks begin to gain credence; (2) who gets involved in the discursive networks that construct and promote objects of ‘hope’/‘strength’; (3) what additional ideas and practices are selected and drawn upon to recontextualize and hybridize the referents of these objects; (4) what governmental knowledging technologies are involved in constituting subjectivities and identities; (5) how do these imaginaries, subjectivities and identities become normalized, translated and negotiated and, in particular, how do they change everyday financial practices or enter the policy field; (6) how far and in what ways do these changes have uneven impacts across different sites and scales (e.g. the lives of subaltern groups); and (7) how are they being negotiated and/or resisted in the rebuilding of social relations?1 Adequate answers require attention to discourse, power and structural materialities. This paper explores these questions through the case of the BRIC imaginary and its differential appropriation and uneven impact especially at local sites. |
