This article applies cultural political economy to the global economic and ecological crisis. After theoretical preliminaries concerning economic and ecological imaginaries, the article highlights the multi-dimensional nature of the current crisis and struggles over its interpretation, and concludes with comments on the prospects of a ‘no-growth version of the Green New Deal imaginary.
Territory, Politics, Governance Annual Lecture recorded at the AAG Meeting, 2015.
A Collaboration between: Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Department of Sociology, and the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University Lancaster University Management School Geography Department, Sheffield University White Rose Social Science Doctoral Research Centre Graduate School of Education, Bristol University School of Environment, Education and Development, Manchester University Management School and Department of…
Interview with Bob Jessop, Conducted by Jerko Bakotin, for Jacobin. Recorded in Potsdam, Germany, 5 June 2015. This version may not be identical (for editing reasons) to the version on Jacobin. How do you explain the Conservative’s triumph in British elections? What were the preconditions that set the stage for such a development? We should not…
This paper develops multi-dimensional analyses of socio-spatial relations. Building on previous research, we identify some tensions associated with different dimensions of sociospatiality and introduce the theme of compossible and, more importantly, incompossible sociospatial configurations. Two short studies are deployed to highlight the socio-spatial implications of the principle that not everything that is possible is compossible. The first shows the power of thinking varieties of capitalism compossibly (via the concept of variegated capitalism) and
This essay seeks to reframe recent debates on sociospatial theory through the introduction of an approach that can grasp the inherently polymorphic, multidimensional character of sociospatial relations. As previous advocates of a scalar turn, we now question the privileging, in any form, of a single dimension of sociospatial processes, scalar or otherwise. We consider several recent sophisti- cated `turns’ within critical social science; explore their methodological limitations; and highlight several important strands of sociospatial theory that seek to transcend the latter.
State theorists have usually attempted to theorize the state but this is a misleading focus that risks treating the state as a simple instrument or machine, a reified apparatus that is primarily a source of constraint on political action, or a more or less rational subject that exercises power. Such positions have been criticized from many alternative theoretical positions as well as proven unhelpful in empirical analyses.
This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the practical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for ‘going on’ in the world.
This article revisits Foucault’s analytics of power in the light of his lectures on governmentality and biopolitics in Society must be Defended (1975-6), Securité, territoire, population (1977-8) and Naissance de la biopolitique (1978-9). Foucault is renowned for his criticisms of state theory and advocacy of a bottom-up approach to social power; and for his hostility to many theoretical and practical manifestations of orthodox Marxism.
For some, the landslide victory of the Labour Party in 1997 held the promise of a reversal of the socio-economic transformation of Britain that had been achieved through nearly eighteen years of Conservative government. But it did not take long for the Blair government to disappoint these hopes. For, in many ways, the three successive Labour Governments under Blair’s continuing authoritarian plebiscitary tutelage have deliberately, persistently, and wilfully driven forward the neo-liberal transformation of Britain rather than halting or reversing it.
Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is characterised by the spatialization as well as historicization of its analytical categories. These theoretical practices are deeply intertwined in his ‘absolute historicism’. Highlighting the spatiality of Gramsci’s analysis not only enables us to recover the many geographical themes in his work but also provides a useful counterweight to the emphasis on the historical dimensions of his historicism.
This contribution adopts a dual state- and regulation-theoretical approach to analyze the European Union as an emerging political system and its role in capital accumulation. It does so in three respects. First, in state-theoretical terms, I reject the two main rival descriptions of the EU in the 1980s and 1990s as a supranational state or a site of interstate struggles and propose a third interpretation.
My contribution to this celebration of Limits to Capital (hereafter Limits or LC) approaches it as a magisterial work that is also a ‘classic’ text. Even though Harvey recently described it, with justified regret, as the least discussed and used of his books (2000), it is a work of massive theoretical ambition and solid accomplishment. As Harvey remarks elsewhere, Limits ‘seeks to integrate the financial (temporal) and geographical (call it global and spatial) aspects to accumulation within the framework of Marx’s overall argument.
A case is made for ‘cultural political economy’ (CPE) by exploring the constitutive role of semiosis in economic and political activities, economic and political institutions, and social order more generally. CPE is a post-disciplinary approach that adopts the ‘cultural turn’ in economic and political inquiry without neglecting the articulation of semiosis with the interconnected materialities of economics and politics within wider social formations.
Two recent major studies by Manuel Castells and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have addressed the future of the capitalist economy, the modern state, and social struggles in the light of new information and communication technologies, new paradigms of production, and the dynamic of globalization.
Bob Jessop 