Organizers: Derek McCormack (Oxford University), Peter Adey (Keele University), Ben Anderson (Durham University),
At a press conference on August 10th, 2011, Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, reminded his audience of what really precipitated the global financial crisis in late 2008. As he put it, “it wasn't the collapse of Lehman Brothers as such that caused the problem, it was that this triggered an extraordinary collapse of confidence, not just in the industrialised world but right around the world economy”. In doing so, King drew attention to the centrality of affective phenomenon in efforts to explain the crisis and its ongoing fallout. Invoking such phenomena is not, of course, anything new: exuberance and panic have long been linked to financial crises, for example. Thus, writing in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes highlighted the importance of animal spirits in economic life and activity (Akerloff and Shiller 2009). However, the global financial crisis over the past few years has highlighted with particular clarity the fact that financial and economic turbulence is also profoundly affective – it is felt within, distributed across, and seemingly motivates a range of actors, institutions, and subjects with different degrees of intensity.
Within this context, this session aims to provide a forum within which contributors can explore the affective dimensions of the space-times of economic life. Of course, such attention is implicit in much work by geographers and others concerned with questions of the economic. For instance, writing in 1919, Alfred Marshall coined the concept of industrial atmosphere to characterize the creative milieu associated with particular locations, an idea that can be traced through more recent writing about the ‘buzz’ of particular cities (Storper and Venables 2004). Emphasis on the more than rational elements of economic activity has been an important element of feminist scholarship (e.g. McDowell 2009; Ettlinger 2010; Gibson-Graham 2006). Equally, a range of research has begun to draw out the affects of diverse areas of economic life; work on the spaces of finance has also sought to identify the affective practices that sustain centers of calculation and decision-making drawing on the early work on contagion, motivation, radiation and the ‘invisible transmission of feelings’ identified by Gabriel Tarde (Thrift, 2005; Zaloom 2007; Latour and Lepinay 2009). Research has also shown how brands and branding establish connections between company and consumer at the level of affect (Lury 2004), whilst new forms of work have been characterized in terms of emotional and affective labour (Hochschild 1983; Hardt and Negri 2010), to name but a few examples. More broadly, and for the most part implicitly, connections have been drawn between different modes of accumulation and affective life; the confidence and panic of financialisation, economic ‘miracles’ and ‘bubbles’ and the ‘fear, shame, guilt and anger’ at collapse (Clarke and Brassett 2010), perhaps, or the traumas of accumulation by dispossession. Indeed, capitalism has long been engaged with as a complex of affects; the exertions of workers, the greed of capitalists, the storms and stresses of industrial production, and the outbursts of tension in unrest (Woodward & Lea 2010).
However, much more scope exists for geographers and other social scientists to explore the affective dimensions of economic activity and life. Here, insights can be drawn from the ongoing affective turn across the social scientists (Clough 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010). A number of questions emerge from this work, including but not limited to the following:
· How might we understand the affective qualities of nominally ‘economic’ processes and events such as inflation/deflation and depression?
· How do different modes of accumulation generate different forms of affective life?
· How are these forms of life articulated and governed through different practices, rationalities and logics?
· How are different affects mobilized in the generation of value and non-value?
· How are economic affects measured, calculated and represented, and with what effect?
· To what extent is participation in economic life defined by different affective subjectivities?
· How are the affective costs and consequences of economic activity distributed across and between bodies and subjects?
· What conceptual vocabularies might allow us to get purchase on the morphologies of economic affects, for example the movements of panic in a crisis or the rush of speculation?
We invite contributors engaging with these and a range of related issues to submit abstracts of not more than 250 words to one of the organizers by September 14th, 2011.
Peter Adey – [log in to unmask]
Ben Anderson – [log in to unmask]
Derek McCormack – [log in to unmask]