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ORIGINS OF THE CULTURAL ECONOMY 42 abolish) it, namely production and value. It knows a semi-autonomy, certainly, but not a full autonomy in which it would constitute a language or a dimension in its own right (Ibid.: 160-161). The financialization of capitalism brings a related shift in abstraction – effectively ushering in the postmodern condition – for Jameson sees financialization as “a play of monetary entities which needs neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does): which…can live on its own internal metabolism and circulate without any reference to an older type of content” (Ibid.: 161). In other words, an even more refined form of cultural abstraction emerges as “capital itself becomes free-floating,” and detached “from the ‘concrete context’ of its productive geography” (Ibid.:142). While money may have increased the degree of abstraction predominant in the perception and representation of social life during the “productive” moment of industrial capitalism across the mid-19 th to late-20 th centuries, it nonetheless remained partially grounded, Jameson argues, in its material origins, as “cotton money, or wheat money, textile money, railway money and the like” (Ibid.: 142). With the growing predominance, in the late twentieth century, of financial means of capital expansion and accumulation came an intensification of social and cultural abstraction, for “money capital [had] reached its ultimate dematerialization, as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world” (Ibid.: 154). Put simply, money, always a force for abstraction under capitalist production and exchange, is even further un-tethered from the social relations of capitalist production during a phase of financial expansion. Alongside these changes comes a related shift in the forms, or degree, of abstraction in cultural production and the representation of social life. It is worth noting here that Jameson’s argument, while distinctive in its own degree of abstraction, is not unique. Indeed, clipped and shorn of its more obtuse passages and claims, the core of Jameson’s argument linking finance capital to a less materially-grounded, more intangible and abstract set of cultural and social forms, sounds quite similar to some other influential macrolevel treatments of the economic and cultural dimensions of our times. For instance: Manuel Castells’ (2000a, 2000b, 2004) sprawling analysis of the “information age” in which he asserts that the rise of a “new economy” – centered on the production, distribution and consumption of intangible and dematerialized information – has driven transformations in social organization and relations. The network, in his view, is the paradigmatic organizational form of the information age; flows of information and finance capital through technology-enabled global networks are now the most salient determinants of social and economic development. Yet, finance capital – or “financial flows” – is so central to Castells’ framework that it becomes difficult to analytically distinguish the presence of a globally integrated financial system from these other elements of the “new economy” and “network society.” Likewise, David Harvey’s tremendously influential account of the transition to “post- Fordism” and postmodernity hinges on the emergence of new forms of small-batch, highly specialized, more “flexible” production firms within the interstices of a global industrial structure constricted by the rigidities of Fordist mass production and consumption, and the inherent contradictions of this system’s expansion to a growing proportion of the world’s population. Still, deep into the analysis, Harvey says:
43 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH What does seem special about the period since 1972 is the extra-ordinary efflorescence and transformation in financial markets…I am therefore tempted to see the flexibility achieved in production, labour markets, and consumption more as an outcome of the search for financial solutions to the crisis-tendencies of capitalism, rather than the other way round. This would imply that the financial system has achieved a degree of autonomy from real production unprecedented in capitalism’s history (1990: 194, emphasis mine). In sum, we encounter in all these perspectives a shared sense that an understanding of finance capital is crucial to any analysis of contemporary social change. Yet, for all three, there is a general analytical discomfort in actually incorporating financialization into an analysis of social change within the world-system of the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries. In all of these treatments 1 – to varying degrees and for somewhat different reasons – we also encounter a sense that the growing weight of finance capital is in some way connected to an expansion in the “cultural” dimensions of economic activity, a shift toward a more “intangible” or “immaterial” global economy, and an increasingly abstract cultural and socio-political realm. Getting Empirical with Jameson Jameson posits an intriguing connection between cultural abstraction and finance capital, but, on its own, the argument offers very little immediate direction to more empirically-grounded analysis. In Jameson’s own phrasing (1998: 146), his analysis is “epochal” in its ambition –it specifies a relationship at many levels of abstraction from concrete space and time. Certainly close analysis of various cultural texts could help us establish that these new forms of expression and abstraction exist and can be observed and delineated. However, the path is less clear to those of us seeking to understand how financialization is concretely and causally linked to what we might call the “production of abstraction” by specific agencies, actors and organizations. 2 Jameson provides one possible starting point when he argues: [A]ny comprehensive new theory of finance capitalism will need to reach out into the expanded realm of cultural production to map its effects: indeed mass cultural production and consumption themselves...are as profoundly economic as the other productive areas of late capitalism, and as fully integrated into the latter’s generalized commodity system (1998: 143-144, emphasis mine). This actually closely follows the argument Jameson made as part of his seminal essay on postmodernity: 1 And we could add Lash and Urry (1987, 1994) to this list as well. 2 Here I would appear to agree with Sean Homer when he notes that, “what this work [of Jameson’s] lacked…was any systematic account of the mediations between the individual subject and the world system” (2002: 186).
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