I senaste numret av Journal of Cultural Economy återpubliceras ett samtal från 2020 mellan Don Slater, Sean Nixon och Liz MacFall. Minns att jag följde det redan när det begav sig, men ändå intressant att läsa om det nu igen.

Jag tänker inte minst på Slaters kommentarer, eftersom hans reflektioner rör den period och miljö som jag själv var del av under min doktorandtid. Detta känns som en rimlig beskrivning av miljön bland ekonomiska sociologer på LSE och elsewhere:

If I think back either on the original motivations that got us into a room to talk that day or on what keeps that conversation going, a lot of it is fairly negative: simply, an absolutely rock solid and almost visceral opposition to economic abstraction. That’s what it all came down to. Cultural economy was not just some particular formulation of the cultural but also a resistance to the dominance, both politically and intellectually, of economics. That framed my own encounter with what was going on. Crucially, that model of economics – which is still in power, particularly with the ongoing march of neoliberalism – promotes economics as modelling, as measurement, as quantification, and as categories that present themselves as universal rather than culturally or ethnographically embedded in particular ways of life and in particular political and social projects. So the impetus for cultural economy was to ask: what are the different places one can stand in order to actually give the world flesh and blood again? (685)

Detta betyder att ”cultural economy” handlade att tänka på ekonomiskt liv utifrån idén om ”kulturella” aspekter av ekonomin måste med i bilden av vad ekonomin är. För Slater handlade det inte om att studera kulturifieringen av ekonomin, eller kulturella näringar.

At the time, I wasn’t personally interested in creative industries at all. I was interested in remaking economic categories in ways that were recognisably human, social and political. So the issue was, again, economic abstraction. Whether it was in creative or cultural industries or whether it was in the automotive industry really was, for me, not the point. So there’s a question right from the start about what we mean by cultural economy. Are we living in an economy that is more cultural, in some sense? Or are we living in a world that cultural and economic abstraction can’t make sense of – but in fact never could? (686)

På detta sätt passar min avhandling, handledd av Slater, om bilindustrin mycket väl in i ”cultural economy”-kategorin. I den lutar jag mot både Callon och Latour – teoripaketet ”visar varför Callon är Latourian” (Slaters formulering under handledningsmöte), i så motto att Callons resonemang i Laws of the Markets från 1998 kan placeras in i en We have never been modern-berättelse. Roligt nog fångar Slater upp detta:

What we were actually recovering through Callon at the time was a history of how economies and cultures came to be separated and then treated as things that had to be connected. So in many ways it’s a continuation of Latour’s ‘we have never been modern’ kind of argument. We’re all dealing with a legacy of a purification, where economy and culture were separated out, and Callon was basically saying you’ve got to actually start from the processes of purification themselves. So all that stuff about ‘externalities’ is about how things come to be seen as within or outside of an economy. (690)

Här fortsätter dock Slater med en viktig kommentar:

The problem was when, later in his work, that was seen to be a done deal. We actually lost a sense of historicity, the idea that economic man was actually accomplished. That seemed to pull the rug right out from under what we’d actually gained from him.

Det kanske mest intressanta i samtalet är just detta – diskussionen om vad Callon representerade då inom ekonomisk sociologi, och vad som sedan blev av hans program. När tanken om ”the cultural economy” kom i svang – och sedan blev underlag för en en antologi, och sedermera nämnda tidskrift – såg Slater Callon som en öppning för att tänka just kring relationen mellan economics och economy. Det program som sedan kom ur denna inriktning blev dock en besvikelse. Slater menar att det börjar spåra ur kring påståendet att ”homo oeconomicus verkligen existerar” – och även om det alltid var en fråga om hur denna agens sätts (eller inte sätts) samman kom senare arbete att glömma denna aspekt. Den protesiskt sammansatta ekonomiska aktören sågs som en done deal.

Sean Nixon kommenterar i samma anda:

I suppose I came back to a more ‘humanist’ position – informed by the critique of humanism but retaining some notion of qualified universalism – where there is a thicker human subjectivity there which things are acting upon. But I think in the ANT/post-Foucauldian tradition, it’s a very, very thin subject on which things can act. And it ends up with a view of, for example, digital technology where there’s no agency. You just have things done to you, as if there’s no human matter that might not be completely manipulable, that may push back in some way, however you want to theorise that. So I always feel like I’m more interested in psychoanalysis and there being much more human material there upon which things are acting. We are not just the effects of these devices. (691)

Slater fyller i:

The subject became so thin, it actually became unconvincing. But it also became unhistorical or atemporal. Subjects no longer had a biography. They simply were the result of the immediate apparatus of a market or the devices there at that moment. Whereas I know I enter into a market with a long history of all kinds of experiences and understandings and so on, which is part of what makes me both an economic and a cultural actor. All of that seemed to get lost in Callon, I think.

Denna kritik mot Callon har såklart cirkulerats – och debatten om devices-vs-cultures har exempelvis kommit upp inom valuation studies – men det är intressant att se hur denna kritik passas in i en historieskrivning om fältet.