For a critical engagement with aesthetics in IPE: Revitalizing economic imagination in times of...

AUTHOR COPY

Original Article

For a critical engagement with aesthetics

in IPE: Revitalizing economic imagination

in times of crisis

Claes BelfrageSchool of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary College, University of London,

Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.

Abstract Advanced capitalism is at a historical conjuncture in which aestheti-cization and financialization combine to intensify and deepen the ‘cult of capitalism’at the expense of economic imagination. International Political Economy (IPE) is,however, not only poorly equipped to understand the implications of these closelylinked transformations, it also avoids considering them by shunning aesthetics. Tocontribute to the rejuvenation of economic imagination, IPE must explicitly aim atboth understanding these processes and their confluences, and engaging with them.Rescue cannot come from orthodox IPE because of its embededdness in the reified‘Kantian Desire’, which promotes the neglect of recognition in aesthetics and thecomplexities of human agency under financialization. Critical IPE is more apt atgrasping related struggles, which it has shown in for instance research on thefinancialization of everyday life. Nevertheless, its engagement with aestheticsremains modest and inadequate. Critical IPE concerned with financializationshould see it as one of its core tasks to turn to and engage with aesthetics as a meansto contribute to critical economic imagination. To this end, the article outlines acritical IPE approach to aesthetics, inspired by Frankfurt School Critical Theory.International Politics (2012) 49, 154–176. doi:10.1057/ip.2011.36;published online 20 January 2012

Keywords: aesthetics; financialization; aestheticization; International PoliticalEconomy; Frankfurt School Critical Theory

The best hope of critical theory is that it is aesthetic, emotional andembodied, because without this aesthetic aspect, no amount of allegedly‘rational’ argument would matter. If this claim is accepted, then it will notbe only because it has the force of a better discursive argument, but alsobecause it has some rhetorical, emotional or aesthetic effect.

(Simons, 2008, p. 210; original emphasis)

r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748 International Politics Vol. 49, 2, 154–176www.palgrave-journals.com/ip/

AUTHOR COPY

Introduction

‘Aesthetics’ has been a core concern of modern European philosophy sinceBaumgarten’s Aesthetica ([1750] 2010), yet not in International PoliticalEconomy (IPE) (see nevertheless some recent efforts Belfrage, 2008, 2010;Gammon, 2008; Davies, 2010; Di Muzio, 2010).1 The reified and dominantmeaning of aesthetics is the result of deep struggle and is linked to dominantideological forms in the capitalist economy, of which IPE forms part. Indeed,‘aesthetics’ itself has come to play a key role in the reproduction of capitalism.‘Aestheticization’ (Benjamin, 1999) of the capitalist economy has served,undoubtedly, to strengthen, not challenge, the popular legitimacy of capitalistnorms and practices. While arguably ‘invented’ by bourgeois philosophy(Eagleton, 1990; Buck-Morss, 1995), aestheticization in capitalism hasenhanced the influence and significance of the logic of the market in theproduction of knowledge. Indeed, the construction of advanced consumercultures has hinged on it.

Picking up speed in the 1970s, ‘financialization’ entails the institutional andnormative promotion of the structural conditions in which people are requiredto weigh up the market performance of their financial assets when makingeveryday decisions between and about saving and consuming (Boyer, 2000;Froud et al, 2002). As everyday economic praxis becomes financialized, welfarebecomes increasingly asset-based. In the endless gambit of speculation thatfollows, it is the aesthetics of others, and indeed potentially our own, that areobjectified. Finance is taking centre stage in everyday life (Martin, 2002), withpotentially reifying effects. Aestheticization has, as most recently evidencedby the housing and consumption boom, served to popularize this structuralmoment of everyday life and strengthen popular commitment to policies offinancialization (cf. Watson, 2008). As such, financialization is just as mucha matter of formal institutional change as it is a matter of transformedeveryday experience (Belfrage, 2008). Rather than testifying the fragility ofthese tendencies, recent and ongoing capitalist crises point to the power of theconfluences of ‘aestheticization’ and financialization.

I will here argue that critical engagement with aesthetics may not justgenerally present ‘an unusually powerful challenge’ to dominant ideologicalcapitalist forms (Eagleton, 1990, p. 3), but is also one that is crucial to make atthis historical conjuncture in advanced capitalism in which economicimagination appears startlingly limited in order to revitalize economicimagination. While ‘critical engagement’ necessarily involves analysis, critiqueshould also be ‘aestheticizing’, that is, stimulating an embodied, sense-perceptive response. Selectively and creatively drawing on Axel Honneth’swork on recognition and reification (2005, 2007, 2008), critical engagementhere must be both founded on and seeking to stimulate a recognition of our

For a critical engagement with aesthetics in IPE

155r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748 International Politics Vol. 49, 2, 154–176

AUTHOR COPY

relationship to others as one based on and worthy of care. I contend that thismay drive a deeper urge for more progressive political economy, as wellas economic organization. Paraphrasing Simons (2008, p. 209), aesthetic IPE isfar from new, and is as such in many ways itself a misnomer, suggesting thatIPE problematically is and should not be aesthetic; it is inherently aesthetic,and we should aim at making bodies, including our own, shiver at the projectedthought of alienation and exploitation.

Challenges to the currently confluential power of aestheticization andfinancialization have been exceptional rather than the rule with the absenceof widespread, deep and radical contestation and imagination testifying ofcurrent constraints on economic imagination (for example, in Iceland,although perhaps an extreme case, see Belfrage et al, 2010). Historically,this would seem like an ‘irregularity’, considering the tendency of aestheticupheaval and revitalization of economic imagination to follow periods oftime-space compression and financial expansion, as entailed with financializa-tion (cf. Jameson, 1997). Indeed, the absence of alternative ‘economicimaginaries’ (Jessop, 2004) capable of gaining popular legitimacy at a timeof objectively overdetermined economic crisis confirms the latter’s subjectiveindeterminacy and thus the urgency of critical engagement.

IPE is guilty of shunning a deep understanding of everyday life, and itsmodes of sense-perception, rhythms, processes and dynamics, which areconstitutive of, and serving to legitimate, the capitalist economy. Despite thepower of the confluences of aestheticization and financialization in currentcrises, all articulated in their own nationally specific ways,2 mainstream IPEcontinues to pay no attention to aesthetics. Critical IPE, in spite of, or perhapsdue to, its intellectual pedigree from the Frankfurt School, has made limited, ifany, effort to understand this confluence, not even in the context of currentcrises. It is as such high time for critical IPE to face up to this challenge. Yet,this is a challenge both epistemologically and ontologically. Ontologically,it requires a deep rethinking of the fundamental assumptions of IPE.Epistemologically, taking aesthetics seriously demands a reconsideration ofwhat counts as epistemic knowledge. Despite its current limitations, onlyIPE’s critical tradition can make this endeavour and, in so doing, live up to itsclaim of critical understanding and ambitions for critical consciousness, andto contribute to the envisaging of alternatives. I claim that an importanttask for critical IPE should therefore be to ‘critically engage’ with the historicalconjuncture of financialization and aestheticization, so that economicimagination can be revitalized. Critical IPE should promote alternative modesof representation that can help challenge the current narrow scope of economicimagination. This can serve to liberate ‘new lines of [sense-perception] thatallow for critical reappropriations’ of the popular economic imaginary(Buck-Morss, 2002, p. 97). Carefully considering aesthetic representation must

Belfrage

156 r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748 International Politics Vol. 49, 2, 154–176

AUTHOR COPY

of course be an integral part of the endeavour. Such efforts, I will go ontoargue, must be made by revisiting the Lukacsian notion of ‘reification’(Honneth, 2005). To restate the message, at this important historicalconjuncture of aestheticization and financialization, critical IPE should leadthe way for enquiry into aesthetics.

The article is divided into three sections and a conclusion. First,I demonstrate the above-mentioned aversions held towards engaging theaesthetic in both orthodox and critical IPE. This clears the path for outlininga critical approach to aesthetics in IPE in the second and third sections.I do this in two stages by developing an analytical framework inspired byFrankfurt School Critical Theory, and particularly the work of Frankfurtdoyen Axel Honneth in two stages. In the first stage, I make four fundamentalclaims about the role of aesthetics in mediating between subject and object,individual and collective and space and time. In the second stage, I tie theseclaims further together by contextualizing them in the current historicalconjuncture of financialization and aestheticization. I conclude by summariz-ing the argument, and by identifying some important current issues that criticalIPE should concern itself with in this historical conjuncture.

Illuminating IPE Aversions Towards the Aesthetic

[T]he further Kant goes [in the Critique of Judgement] the more he ridshimself y of the prevailing sentimentality of ‘the age of sensibility’.(Cassirer cited in Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 5)

Despite the historical conjuncture of financialization and aestheticizationoutlined above, orthodox and critical IPE so far shun engaging with theaesthetic. I here demonstrate how. This will clear the path for developing acritical approach to aesthetics in IPE in the subsequent sections.

In the case of orthodox, ‘problem-solving’ approaches to IPE (Cox, 1981),negligence derives from its ‘Kantian Desire’ (cf. Eagleton, 1990). Refusing toacknowledge that power in the liberal world order is itself aestheticized,forged as it is in sentimentality and sensibility, this Kantian Desire, followingKant’s own efforts in the Critique of Judgement, purges itself of aestheticconcerns and makes a habit of relying upon a rationality postulate, whichmarginalizes the recognition of human empathy only to implicitly promotethe idea of human beings as self-interested ‘pleasure machines’ (Edgeworth inWatson, 2005). By ostensibly elevating itself above such ‘irrationalities’, it is atradition that reproduces dominant ideological forms in the capitalist economy.As I will claim in the next sections with the help of the work of Honneth (2005,



AUTHOR COPY

2008), this ‘project’ contributes to ‘reification’, by which recognition of humanempathy is forgotten and made ‘irrational’.

The Kantian Desire lodged itself deeply in orthodox IPE at its origin withthe influence of the Rational Choice Revolution in Economics in the 1960sand 1970s, premising analysis of the economy on choice under scarcity(Watson, 2005). Abstract Post Hoc methodological individualism subse-quently made great strides to embed itself in IPE (Palan, 2009). Rational-choice neoliberals and neorealists conceive agents in the abstract world ofPost Hoc as over-intelligent and impressively informed pleasure seekers,capable of transforming uncertainty into calculable risk by means ofdifferential calculus and probabilities. Any sense of uncertainty is managedin a non-sensuous and disembodied manner, regardless of the socio-economic position or history: any ‘miscalculation’ is dealt with stoically andimmediately forgotten (Forslund, 2005, p. 15). Anxiety and trauma do notfeature; just memory-less, calculated desire. The sensuous complexity oflived life is effectively sterilized and memory wiped out. The notion ofrationality is appropriated and reconstructed on the basis of assumptionsof transhistorical hedonistic calculi. Premised on these assumptions, ortho-dox IPE reduces the experience of capitalism to transhistorical categories byprioritizing empiricist research of observable phenomena. Indeed, suchassumptions of economic behaviour and resulting methodologies arenaturalized by orthodox IPE and institutionalized through contemporarydominant paradigms of economic policymaking, with the clear normativepurpose of promoting the market economy.

More recently, orthodox IPE has continued its allegiance to the Kantiandesire by leading the recent expansion of the Neurosciences and BehaviouralEconomics into IPE. Neuroscientific methods of enquiry, originating frompositivist Psychology, are enthusiastically employed in areas directly relatedto aesthetics, such as perception, consciousness, intersubjectivity and memory,to ostensibly bring about greater accuracy in the data (for example, Elms,2008). In this ‘neurological turn’, ‘brainscanning’ of the neurological processesthat supposedly inform economic decision making are made to supplementIPE theory by pointing to the inaccuracies produced by using HomoEconomicus as the baseline for enquiry. However, rather than seeking todeeply understand the sources of agency, it settles for identifying patterns ofbehaviour with the assumption that the latter can be ‘nudged’ in the rightdirection by more ‘efficient’ economic policy (see Thaler and Sunstein, 2008).Consequently, if orthodox empiricist enquiry into the experience of capitalismhas already been simplified by being reduced to transhistorical categories,it is now becoming the object of Neuroscientific methods. This aims at littleother than a rudimentary enhancement of consumer choice, hardly emanci-patory consciousness (see ibid.).

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

As such, the Kantian Desire in IPE discredits any serious considerationof the aesthetic as historically and spatially specific, and marginalizes it asan explicit and legitimate object of intervention. Consequently, the aesthetichermeneutics in which the scholar is embroiled when observing andrepresenting the economy are even further ignored. Indeed, at a historicalconjuncture when the aesthetics of capitalist experience seem particularlyinfluential, orthodox IPE’s Kantian Desire thus serves reifying functions inthe reproduction of the capitalist mode of production by treating it astranshistorical and measurable by means of positivist research methods. Yet,while methodological innovation occurs with the Neurological turn in IPE,Neuroscientists themselves acknowledge that aesthetics remains a matter ofphilosophy, not simplifying observations (see Albright et al, 2000, p. 48).

In contrast to this orthodoxy, critical IPE holds promise for an engagementwith aesthetics. However, despite its intellectual pedigree deriving from theFrankfurt School and other critical traditions interested in aesthetics, criticalIPE has so far with few exceptions (Belfrage, 2008, 2010; Gammon, 2008;Davies, 2010; Di Muzio, 2010) also shunned any such undertakings. Even lesseffort, consequently, has been made to analyse the confluences of financializa-tion and anesthetization in advanced capitalism. This neglect of aesthetics isvery much part and parcel of the gradual dilution of the core principles ofCritical Theory, which we can witness in critical IPE (see, for example, Worth,2012). It has thus come to struggle to perform its nominal functions of critique,critical knowledge and emancipation implicit in the writings of Marx, and ofcourse also of Kant, and central to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

The neglect of aesthetics in critical IPE is two dimensional. Firstly,analytically, it tends to be reifying of capitalism’s everyday agents. Via apreoccupation with structural and historical change (Bruff, 2012), everydayagents are inadvertently conceived as rational utility-maximizers (Watson,2005). Much neo-Gramscian and neo-Polanyian scholarship provides cases inpoint. As Panitch and Konings (2009, p. 68) point out in relation to researchon financialization, the application of neo-Polanyian terminology of(dis-)embeddedness has tended to serve to reproduce the neoliberal era’s‘hegemonic self-representation’ by constructing financial market liberalizationas ‘deregulation’, suggesting the ‘disembedding’ of everyday life from financialmarkets when its embedding was the very business idea of neoliberalism.Whereas Gramsci’s work holds considerable potential in grasping theaesthetics of everyday life (see, for example, Holub, 1992), neo-Gramsciananalysis all too frequently prioritizes research into ideational struggles on‘higher levels of analyses’, rather than the material messiness of everydayaesthetics. This has the consequence that ‘critical’ IPE is detached from themicrofoundations of the global capitalism it is supposed to engage. Shunningaesthetics tends to undermine concerns with how the capitalist economy



AUTHOR COPY

becomes comprehensible, operational and legitimate to its participants. Inagreement with Buck-Morss (1995), I argue that central to this is theeconomy’s aestheticization. Critical analysis in IPE must consider aestheticsto start to be able to understand the powerful confluences of aestheticizationand financialization.

Secondly, there is a widespread aversion within critical IPE to theaestheticization of analysis. This scepticism towards aestheticization of IPEhas two sources. On the one hand, it originates from the experiences ofFascism’s ability to aestheticize its politics according to the notion of populist‘false reconciliation’, asserting harmony and unity ‘by [forcibly] ignoring,denying and overwhelming “real” class contradictions’ (Simons, 2008, p. 225).On the other hand, it derives from a critique of late capitalist consumerism,according to which the moment something has been aestheticized it runsthe risk of being commodified. From this perspective, critique must avoidaestheticization, and with that emotionalization and embodiment. Left-wingscholarship has tended to prefer moral and discursive superiority of argumentand reason. However, this position is mistaken. To Walter Benjamin (1999),‘to aestheticize’ implied making use of new technology to re-enchant sense-perception, to seek ‘rhetorical, emotional or aesthetic effect’, to shock, andthus to revitalize critique and imagination. While acknowledging Adorno’scritique that aestheticization lends itself to commodification (Adorno, 2002),Benjamin maintained that its potentially shocking effects could sparkepistemological shifts (Buck-Morss, 1992). I agree. Shunning aestheticization,critical IPE forfeits much of its potential for contributing to an epistemologicalshift towards the critical imagination necessary for formulating alternativeeconomic imaginaries. In fact, as Simons argues, ‘all good critical theoryhas always been aesthetic’ (ibid.). We only need to go to Marx to find apowerful example of how political economy can capture ‘the imaginationof so many by attacking an image of capitalist alienation and exploitation,which was challenged by an image of workers’ solidarity’ (Simons, 2008,p. 209). The aestheticization of critical IPE would not inherently lend itselfto right-wing ideology, nor would it merely be absorbed by processes ofcommodification. Critical IPE should be aestheticizing because that can haverevitalizing effects on economic imagination.

In the context of current crises, in which receptivity to alternatives notonly to financialization but more fundamentally to capitalism itself shouldlogically be imaginable, both tendencies within the critical tradition of IPEundermine challenges to hegemonic economic imaginaries sustaining theexploitative dynamics of capitalist accumulation. Indeed, the lack of vision inongoing capitalist crises provides ample evidence for this claim. Here, criticalscholarship has proven stultified by either a catastrophism equating eachblip in capitalism with the latter’s crisis, or a moralizing re-regulationism aimed

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

at the rejuvenation of capitalism, not emancipation within or from it. Indeed,‘crisis-talk’ has not so far enabled us to imagine alternatives, but has insteadbeen hijacked to sustain the status quo of which, for instance, the recent ‘Green’visions of recovery demonstrate (Aldred and Tepe, 2009). It is therefore hightime for IPE to engage with aesthetics, and for by now obvious epistemologicalreasons this engagement must come from the critical tradition. Critical IPEmust open itself up to aesthetic analysis and shed its fears of aestheticization inorder to succeed in this undertaking. The next two sections constitute anattempt to stake out a critical path towards such an emancipatory project bytaking the first steps towards a critical engagement with aesthetics in IPE.

A Critical Engagement with Aesthetics in IPE: On an Emancipatory Path

[B]orn as a discourse of the body y [aesthetics] is nothing less than thewhole of our sensate life together – the business of affections andaversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, ofthat which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from ourmost banal, biological insertion into the world.

(Eagleton, 1990, p. 13)

The original field of aesthetics is not art, but reality – corporeal, materialnature y [The senses’] immediate purpose is to serve instinctual needs –for warmth, nourishment, safety, sociability – in short, they remain a partof the biological apparatus, indispensable to the self-preservation of boththe individual and the social group.

(Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 6)

In the remainder of the article, I want to briefly outline what engaging withthe aesthetic in critical IPE can bring and should involve at this historicalconjuncture of financialization and aesthetization. As shown above, aestheticsmust be approached differently than in the orthodoxy’s Kantian Desire, andaccept a greater degree of aestheticization of scholarship than what critical IPEhas allowed for so far. Yet, it is critical IPE that can lead the way. To illustratethis, I will, in this section, set out the cornerstones of an approach inspired bythe Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, before further adapting it to enablehistorically specific analysis in the following section.

Broadly following the tradition of the Frankfurt School, I here understandaesthetics in the context of liberal capitalism3 from a Historical Materialistperspective, as embodied sense-consciousness, which is shaped intersubjectivelyby historically specific and uneven processes of ‘reification’ (cf. Honneth,



AUTHOR COPY

2005). Let me explain. Aesthetics mediates between subject and object, theindividual and the collective, ideas and the material, in historically andspatially specific ways. However, before turning to the specific processesthrough which financialization and aestheticization confluence to accelerateand deepen reification, I need to outline four ‘aesthetic’ features of Westernmodernity, all of which potentially have the capacity to challenge or reproduceliberal capitalism.

First, the body can never be fully ‘civilized’, or ‘domesticated’; the bodyalways retains the ability to make ‘uncivilized’ corporeal resistance to socialprocesses. For instance, regardless of how affluent a lifestyle, owing to a refluxback from conscious experience and intergenerational memory, there is awidespread affectivity relating to metabolic scarcity. Such embodied fears ofmetabolic scarcity can generate bodily responses that are often autonomouslyexpressed and in excess of consciousness (cf. Clough, 2008). Thus, ‘uncivilized’corporeal resistance has the capacity to challenge the social order (cf. Coole,2007). However, affectivities of metabolic scarcity can also, of course, beexploited to promote, for example, a consumer culture conspicuouslyconcerned with luxury consumption in which appearances of abundanceafford social status, as Frankfurt School-forerunner and fellow-travellerWalter Benjamin was already concerned with in his Arcades Project (2002).Second, such affectivities are intersubjectively mediated. While cognition isfundamentally embodied, the limits of the body are liminal (for example,Butler, 2004, pp. 20–22). As Buck-Morss (1992, pp. 12–13) claims:

[a]s the source of stimuli and motor response, the external world must beincluded to complete the sensory circuity The field of the sensory circuitthus corresponds to that of ‘experience’, in the classical philosophicalsense of a mediation of subject and object, and yet its very compositionmakes the so-called split between subject and object y simply irrelevant.

Individual experience thus forms part of a relatively open, ‘synaesthetic’system, which in itself is constitutive of the mediation between subject andobject, linking individual experience to the ‘external world’ (ibid.). Inter-subjectivity thus is in a dialectical relationship to aesthetics, and with that thepotential for corporeal resistance, as well as that of the reproduction of liberalcapitalism. This brings me to my third claim, which concerns the significance oflearnt empathy for aesthetics.

Learnt empathy, or ‘recognition’, is both ontogenetically and categoricallybefore contemplation, or ‘detached’ cognition. Categorically, while our sensesmay perceive communicative gestures, bodily movements and facial expres-sions in interaction with others, this cognition generates no meaning unlesswe have learnt to feel their expression. To ‘feel’ others ‘constitutes a

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

nonepistemic prerequisite for linguistic understanding’, indeed for symbolicthought altogether (Honneth, 2005, pp. 122–123). According to Honneth (ibid,p. 111), ‘recognition’ is a ‘stance of empathetic engagement in the world y

[, which] embodies our active and constant assessment of the value that personsor things have in themselves’. As such, emotional receptivity is a prerequisitefor our ability to ‘objectively’, in a detached way, cognize others, that is, toappropriate and employ multiple viewpoints to reflect upon them (Heidegger,Dewey and Cavell in ibid, pp. 119–124). Ontogenetically, as developmentalpsychology has demonstrated, the young child acquires the ability to cognize‘objectively’ by mimetically communicating with a figure of attachment,typically a ‘psychological’ parent (ibid, p. 115). Thus, cognition, always andnecessarily, ‘contains an element of involuntary openness, devotedness, or love’and can thus not be understood merely in detached cognitive or epistemicterms (ibid, p. 117). Embedded here, clearly, is a potentiality for a ‘sense’ ofsolidarity and cohesiveness, conducive to political organization. However,the child’s attainment of the ability to cognize ‘objectively’, the development ofa stance of cognition, is also a key moment in its liberation from thepsychological parent (ibid, p. 115). Indeed, the development of a stance ofcognition contains the seeds for processes of reification. We will return to therelationship between the stances of cognition and recognition below, butthe point here is that cognition is fundamentally impossible withoutrecognition, which in itself is an intersubjectively, and thus bodily, shapedprocess, and thus the contemplative evaluation of others can never becompletely severed from empathetic affectivity with its potentiality for a senseof solidarity and cohesiveness. Closely linked to ‘recognition’ is the fourthclaim about ‘self-recognition’ and its centrality to Western modernity, whichI wish to make.

Despite the onslaught of postmodern logics challenging the coherence of theself (see, for example, Jameson, 1991), modern psychoanalytical culture, orideology, promoting reflection upon the development of the self remains. Tounderstand the meaning and significance of this culture, the concept of‘self-recognition’ is central. Self-recognition is the subject’s drive to free thewill, that is, its emancipatory drive (Honneth, 2007). Ontogenetically, this driveoriginates from the child’s separation from the safety of the Mother’s womb atbirth, which makes us, as Freud puts it, ‘a little bit nervous’ (in Honneth,2007). In the affective communication with a figure of attachment, the youngchild seeks to calm that nervousness by seeking to attain the ability tocontemplate. This effort gives rise to a lifelong quest to free the will from thisanxiety through retrospective reflection upon the development of the self. Thisinvolves trying to understand how it has empathetically sought recognitionfrom others, and to contemplate the meaning of such efforts in order toimprove upon self-understanding and self-actualization. This implies that there



AUTHOR COPY

is a commonplace desire in the modern subject to seek ‘self-recognition’.Further, this implies fundamentally that consciousness develops dynamically inrelation to the ‘external world’ as it deals with the perceived conflicts andcontradictions in the self. Although these processes may come to challengeour learnt empathy, it too has the potential to challenge any social order ofpower as it may, if effectively (and thus ‘affectively’) channelled, driveprogressive politics. Nevertheless, as, for example, Butler (2008) and Lear(2008) have pointed out, such reflections are also undertaken by the narcissistwith the purpose of exploiting others’ empathy purely for his or her own gain.Indeed, as we will see below, capital, not least at the current historicalconjuncture, often undertakes verisimilar activities to the narcissist in its questfor profit. In sum, these four, essentially aesthetic, features of Westernmodernity, corporeal affective resistance, embodied intersubjectivity, recogni-tion and self-recognition, bring a fundamental unpredictability to the socialorder. This fundamental unpredictability in the liberal social order has ofcourse been of great concern to bourgeois philosophy.

Uncertainty in the reproduction of social unity in the liberal capitalist orderis quite arguably the original reason for European bourgeois philosophy’sconcern with aesthetics. As Eagleton puts it, in economic life ‘individualsare structurally isolated and antagonistic[, and] ‘at the political level therewould seem nothing but abstract rights to link one subject to the other (1990,p. 23). Liberal capitalism brings about a tendency towards the infinitecompetition between capitals, which produces a desire for relative superiority.This determines a tendentially hegemonic profit logic, which, expressed sociallyand spatially, reinforces the unevenness of capitalist accumulation, andconflicts over the distribution of resources (Harvey, 2001). Further, workersare deprived of the ownership of the means of production with only theirown labour to sell on a competitive labour market, yet without receiving thefull proceeds from its sale price. It is easy to see how this social ‘order’ is notconducive to social unity, and how it would benefit from stabilization.Exploitation, social hierarchies and inequality must in such a social system bejustified to avoid the outbreak of large-scale social conflict (see Boltanskiand Chiapello, 2005). The bourgeois state has come to play a key role in therepresentation of the market economy as the producer of fair outcomes, andthus to uphold social unity. Nevertheless, the state is not a functional requisitefor capitalism to exist; it is historical, resulting from local challenges to local,absolutist forms of domination. The bourgeois state form, with its establish-ment of formally (that is, legally) equal subjects and contractual forms ofexchange, emerged, in historically and spatially specific ways (Buckel, 2007,p. 132; Gerstenberger, 2011, pp. 68–69). Yet, abstractions such as rights andjustifications alone are not sufficient to uphold social order because they donot immediately present themselves to experience, that is they cannot be

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

materially tested or appealed to (cf. Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006). And, whilemonopolizing the legitimate use of violence within its territorial boundaries,the bourgeois state cannot legitimately use force to uphold social order to thesame extent that its precursor, the absolutist state, could. What, then,fundamentally must bind the social order together are the very sources of itsinstability, its ‘habits, pieties, sentiments and affections’, in other wordsaesthetics (ibid, p. 20). Liberal capitalism must be aestheticized and givenan iconography, because without aestheticization, acting upon the ‘object’ ofthe market remains an act of faith in its representations. Indeed, aesthetics,aestheticization and objectification are closely related here. As bourgeoisstates must rely on forms of cultural domestication to secure social unity,bourgeois philosophy becomes concerned with how authority can best besustained through the aestheticization of its economic processes and normativeorders.

These are of course the origins of the aestheticization of the ‘liberal illusion’,of projects of aestheticization, which aim to brush over the inherentcontradictions of liberal capitalism by naturalizing the separation of thepolitical from the economic, the individual from the collective, subject fromobject, and body from mind, and thus to constrain the potential challengesto itself emanating from the aesthetic of Western modernity listed above. Fromthis viewpoint, then, the weaknesses of this liberal project start to becomeperceivable. Yet, while the perceptability of these fundamental weaknesses inthe liberal project provides us with an emerging insight into its ambitionsand weaknesses, it is not without, firstly, a critical social-theoretical analysis ofhow it tendentially transforms everyday aesthetics and, secondly, knowledgeof how to aestheticize our analysis, that we can start to challenge it. To takesteps in this direction, I will outline Honneth’s work on ‘reification’,the concept so central to much of the Frankfurt School.

After a period of neglect, the concept of ‘reification’ has recently enjoyed aresurgence of interest, not least through the work of Martha Nussbaum (2000)and Honneth (2005, 2008). In Nussbaum, reification is understood as a form ofmoral misconduct of objectification, from which we can and should abstain(Nussbaum, 2000, pp. 213–239). Returning to its Lukacsian origins in Historyand Class Consciousness (Lukacs, 1971, pp. 83–222), Honneth, in contrast,explores reification as a form of praxis that is structurally false. This is morerelevant to the concerns of this article because, as I will go on to show, at thecurrent historical conjuncture of financialization and aestheticization, allparticipants ‘are being socialized into a reifying system of behaviour’(Honneth, 2005, p. 100). Reification at this historical conjuncture is as suchnot morally objectionable, but a set of social processes that requires criticalengagement. Yet, without refinement, as Honneth claims, Lukacs’ conceptua-lization becomes problematic. As Honneth argues, along with Jurgen



AUTHOR COPY

Habermas, Lukacs’ understanding of reification is transhistorical, and thussimplistically totalizing and economically determinist. This translates into anunderstanding of the logic of the market as immutably proliferating from therealm of the market to all other social spheres and thus marginalizing humanempathy (ibid, p. 102; Habermas, 1979a, p. 359). Nevertheless, Lukacs’antidote is realist socialist art, which, contrary to what his initial analysissuggests, makes ‘reification’ something rather superficial and easily remediable.For Habermas, on the other hand, ‘reification’ is only problematic if itcolonizes the ‘lifeworld’, and critique should thus be restricted to this sphere.Indeed, in the ‘system world’ reifying logics and behaviour serve positivefunctions, and are thus legitimate (1979b, Chapters 6 and 8). As will becomeclear below, not least in the current historical conjuncture characterized bypowerful confluences of aestheticization and financialization, such functionalseparation is untenable and deeply problematic as it makes regulation difficult,while putting resistance on a back-footing.

Honneth, instead, picks up on hints in Lukacs’ text that point to a moresocial-theoretical understanding of the specifically modern origins, limits andpotentialities to social resistance (2005, pp. 96–101). He thus emphasizeshistorically specific agency rather than Lukacsian economic determinism, andis more radical than Habermas’s functionalist apologetics towards reification.He claims that reification involves a transformation of the subject’s own styleof acting with its modes of behaviour and sense-perception. This is drivenby rationalizing logics and practices, of which commodity exchange is justone example, particular forms of modern warfare another (Honneth, 2008,pp. 156–157). While this rationalization is rendered more sophisticated andtendentially organic by bourgeois theory, the potentialities for reification are, asmentioned above, in place already with the young child’s pursuit of autonomyand self-recognition through contemplative acts of cognition, and has thepotential to proliferate through embodied intersubjectification. Reification herepushes social practices away from recognition of innerly involved empatheticengagement, and towards detachment, passive observation and contemplation ofeverything – as things. The behavioural representation of reification is then the‘stance of cognition’. However, as I have argued above, the stance of recognitionprovides the potentiality for resistance to this, not least because cognition isfundamentally premised on empathetic recognition.

Honneth goes on to define reification as meaning ‘forgetfulness ofrecognition’, that is, ‘the process by which we lose y consciousness of thedegree to which we owe our knowledge and cognition of other persons to anantecedent stance of empathetic engagement and recognition’ (ibid, p. 128).Here, he identifies two forms of knowledge: one is sensitive to recognition; theother has lost all trace of its origin in antecedent acts of recognition. From thisfollows two modes of interrelationship between the two stances: the first is

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

conscious of its epistemic prerequisities in recognition as well as the potentiallyreifying consequences of cognition, represented both transparently andaccessibly; the second is delusional of its autonomy from these empatheticepistemic foundations, rendering them obscure and inaccessible. The knowl-edge resulting from the latter, in the terms of Theodor W. Adorno, is anexpression of ‘identity thought’ (1997, p. 226). Knowledge becomes autistic,pathological and sceptical, tending to perceive other persons as mere insensateobjects representing the loss of the ‘ability to understand immediately thebehavioral expressions of other persons as making claims on us – as demandingthat we react in an appropriate way’ (Honneth, 2005, p. 129). Emanating fromthe latter mode also is the ‘increasing transformation of social practices intoindifferent, observing activity y due to the constraints imposed upon subjects’interpretive habits by their own involvement in merely calculating processesof exchange’ (ibid, p. 107). Returning to the above discussion of modes ofknowledge production in IPE, orthodox and critical, the Kantian Desire oforthodox IPE contributes to the naturalization of such calculating processesof exchange, having ‘forgotten’ the empathetic origins of contemplation anddetached cognition. It thus ends up producing autistic and pathologicalknowledge tending towards the perception of other persons as mere insensateobjects. It is this type of reified and reifying knowledge and its stanceof cognition that must be challenged by a critical engagement with aestheticsin IPE.

I will next proceed by analysing ‘reification’ in the historical conjunctureof aestheticization and financialization, and the aesthetic potentialities forstruggle against it. Indeed, reification is only fully understandable in itshistorically specific context.

Critically Engaging the Confluences of Aestheticization andFinancialization

In this section, I will continue my development of this critical IPE approach toaesthetics by providing an initial historical analysis of processes of reificationin the current conjuncture of financialization and aestheticization. This willenable, in the conclusion, the identification of some key issues that criticalIPE, acknowledging the significance of aesthetics, should concern itself with.It will also take steps towards knowledge capable of fundamentally guiding theaestheticization of such analyses.

Major audio-visual technological developments, through which artworkbecame technologically reproducible on a mass scale (see Benjamin, 1999), hadby the affluent 1950s and 1960s significantly contributed to, although unevenly



AUTHOR COPY

and in historically specific ways (see Trentmann, 2004), the establishment ofmass consumer cultures across the advanced capitalist economies.4 This wasfacilitated by the Keynesian creation of varieties of welfare capitalisms withtheir different structures of social assimilation and differentiation (Haupt,2003), while reinforcing and exploiting growing tensions in dominant modernaesthetics, not least relating to norms and practices of decency and worth.These consumer cultures thrived on intensification, as opposed to preservation,of life, on the satisfaction of desires for status-enhancing luxury commoditiesrather than the satisfaction of needs (Bohme, 2003).5 Playing on the long-standing affectivity of metabolic scarcity, a sense of ‘aliveness’ becameconstructed as possible to attain and be represented through acts of‘conspicuous consumption’ (cf. Trentmann, 2004, pp. 389–391). In addition,processes of self-recognition were targeted for commodification, as it wasprojected as achievable by means of ‘self-realizing’ leisure activities (Binkley,2007). Further, to conspicuously display such consumption for the purpose ofstatus enhancement was aesthetically represented as acceptable. Targeting‘anticipatory consumer groups’ such as students, the lifestyle advertisementindustry grew rapidly (Englis and Solomon, 1995). Experiential ‘authenticity’was becoming commodified. The aestheticization of liberal capitalism wasaccelerating; ‘aesthetic economies’ were emerging.

As Bohme argues, in the aesthetic economy, the exchange value ofcommodities is increased by means of aesthetic representation, that is, through‘aesthetic labour’ (2003, p. 72). Representational, or ‘staging’, values (pace ‘use’and ‘exchange’ values) are constructed through different media to enhance thecommodity’s ability to dazzle, attract and socially empower. Although theserepresentational values are in a sense useful or made use of, they form a newand semi-autonomous type of use value geared towards staging, costumingand intensifying life, rather than having anything to do with utility andpurposiveness (ibid.). Specifically targeting the unpredictable, but potentiallyexploitable, modern aesthetics, ‘aesthetic labour’ clearly took a stance ofreification in its praxis. Indeed, it systematized such a stance by employingsophisticated technologies to reify modern aesthetics.

The construction of these representational values also implies a projectionof the imagery of capital with its different market representations (forexample, of price developments or physical evidence of commercial success)(Buck-Morss, 1995), giving it an iconography, which can be worshippedor paid allegiance to. As Mondzain puts it: ‘no power without an image’ (inBuck-Morss, 2007, p. 183). In the aesthetic economy, acts of faith in the ideaof the market are thus effectively superseded by acts of ‘cult’ (cf. Lowy, 2009);belief in for instance the Pareto optimal outcomes of the market economyare supplemented by the embodied worship of the image and experience offor instance luxury consumption. This aestheticization aims at strengthening

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

the popular legitimacy of particular capitalist norms and practices, andthus enhancing the position of the logic of the market in the productionof knowledge.

Although the affluent 1950s and 1960s saw a remarkable intensificationof capitalist cult with the commodification of dominant tendencies in theaesthetics of the time, the unpredictability of the latter also served asconstraints on reification. Therefore, the completion of the aesthetic economyparadoxically required the rupture generated by the 1960s protest movementsand the ‘psychic habitus of the new age’ reinvigorating the quest forexperiential authenticity in order to wrest itself free from dominant valuesand practices (cf. Jameson, 1991, p. xix). The alternative, more spirituallifestyles sought were soon mapped out by aesthetic labour through‘psychographic research’, combining methods taken from clinical psychologyand motivational research to identify market segments of consumers with theirspecific consumption patterns (Wells, 1975). This knowledge informed theaestheticization of the market and the capitalization on it by means of themarketing of more individualized commodities. Aesthetic labour hadcontributed to the successful transformation of large segments of a generation,which had vociferously been protesting against the ‘waning authenticity’ incapitalism, into lifestyle consumers expressing their identities throughindividualized consumer choice (Binkley, 2007). This transformation, I argue,should be seen as an outcome of aesthetic labour’s production of knowledgeexploiting stances of recognition and leading to the strengthening of the stanceof cognition. As I will claim next, the acceleration of financialization hasmarkedly contributed to these developments.

From the late 1970s and onwards, aestheticization and financialization havesignificantly confluenced to reinforce processes of reification, although inhistorically specific, uneven ways. Technological developments, not leastinformation technological ones, have played a central role in generating andmagnifying the power of these confluences (for the digitalization of theaesthetic economy, see Terranova, 2000; cf. Leyshon et al, 2005; specificallyfor the digitalization of financial markets, see, for example, Berry, 2011,pp. 156–162; 2012). As financialization and aestheticization confluence toshape capitalism, tendentially accumulation has come to centre on thecalculation of the market risks of everyday aesthetics and the cultificationof their exchange. Representational values have been constructed to play threekey roles in coupling financialization with the aesthetic economy. First, theirproduction has targeted further popularization of lifestyle consumption, aimedat the intensification of life and enhancement of social status. Second, andmore importantly, representational values have been produced to legitimate,promote and exploit state-specific shifts towards asset-based welfare andcredit-based consumption. On the supply side, financial innovations, such as



AUTHOR COPY

securitization, have sought to transform the unpredictability of everydayinvestor and consumer aesthetics into tradable risk (cf. Montgomerie, 2006).Indeed, financialization is informed by a fundamentally derivative logic,capable of giving anything an exchange value by transforming it into calculablerisk and pricing it (see Bryan and Rafferty, 2007). On the demand side,everyday aesthetics consequently become a crucial object of risk management.Participation and market power in this economy is premised on the marketvalue of individual risk profiles, with implications for the management of theself. With representational values constructed around knowledge of riskmanagement, ‘each of its subjects [are invited (if allowed to participate)] toprofit from minor differences in a gambit of endless arbitrage’ (Martin, 2009,p. 346). A practice such as ‘flipping’, turning ‘home’ into investment objects(see, for example, Langley, 2006), is a case in point. In addition, byrepresentational values being projected onto financial services themselves,both use and exchange values of financial services are tendentially augmented.This is directly linked to a third process set into motion through theconstruction of representational values: financial market self-legitimation.Enabled by the state, financialization has fed on aestheticization to cultifyfinancial markets, that is employing various forms of aesthetic labour toprovide financial markets with an iconography of economic leadership worthyof worship (see De Cock et al, 2009). Yet, no matter how powerful suchrepresentational values have been in promoting the stance of reification, thefundamental unpredictability of modern aesthetics render such processesuncertain, and thus provides opportunities for resistance, if recognized. Indeed,not the least in the current period of crisis management and struggles between‘imagined recoveries’ (Belfrage et al, 2010) in which the production ofrepresentational values to relegitimate scrutitinized praxis is in full swing, thecritical engagement with the production of these reifying processes is, froma critical perspective, urgently needed. Critical scholarship must inspire thedemand for and institutionalization of a stance of recognition, which informsthe production of knowledge in acknowledgement of its epistemic prerequi-sities in recognition, in addition to the transparent and accessible representa-tion, indeed aestheticization, of the potentially reifying consequences ofcognition.

Conclusion

Having stated above the urgent need for critical IPE to engage with aestheticsas the only theoretical tradition within IPE capable of doing so and havingoutlined my own preferred approach to aesthetics, I will conclude by, followinga quick summary of the argument, outlining some key issues that research into

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

the historical conjuncture of financialization and aestheticization should payattention to. This enables me to fulfil the aim of this article: to give directionfor IPE research into aesthetics, not least crucial in the context of the currenteconomic crisis and weak economic imagination.

In sum, aesthetics is a peculiarly neglected area of analysis in IPE. This isparticularly problematic in the midst of ongoing capitalist crisis, in whicheconomic imagination appears stultified. With its Kantian Desire, orthodoxIPE aims to ostensibly marginalize ‘irrational’ concerns with aesthetics whilesimultaneously promoting the idea of human beings as self-interested pleasuremachines. The critical tradition remains the only basis for engagementwith aesthetics in IPE. However, critical IPE has shunned aesthetics becauseof a fear of the politics of aestheticization associated with Fascism, latecapitalist consumerism and a preoccupation with ‘top-down’ analysis ofthe global economy. Not least in this current historical conjuncture, criticalIPE can and should critically engage with aesthetics. This should imply boththe contemplative critique of the confluences of aestheticization andfinancialization and the aestheticization of critique itself. Good Critical theoryhas always been aesthetic! Critical IPE should to this end revisit the Lukacsiannotion of ‘reification’, as it enables both a return to some of its nominallycentral concerns and an illumination of orthodox IPE’s neglect of aesthetics.This, obviously, involves providing a much-needed social-theoretical founda-tion for studying IPE, for which this article has been an explicit call. However,returning to ‘reification’ requires caution to avoid, on the one hand, totalizingclaims and, on the other, its reduction to moralization. I have thereforeproposed to explore the approach of Axel Honneth, the current doyen of thethird generation of the Frankfurt School. He refines reification to mean a formof praxis that is structurally false. The knowledge produced following suchpraxis is informed by a ‘forgetfulness of recognition’, through which we losethe awareness of the extent to which our knowledge and cognition of otherpersons depend upon an antecedent stance of empathetic engagement andrecognition. The habitualization of such ‘forgetfulness’ is the project toculturally domesticate, indeed exploit, resistant and unpredictable aesthetics.In liberal capitalism, much aesthetic labour, itself exploited and alienated, hasbeen deployed to operationalize this project, particularly effective since theemployment of new technologies in the 1950s.

However, concern with aesthetics is only meaningful if carefully integratedinto a Historical Materialist framework, which puts the historically specific,uneven processes of capitalist exploitation and reproduction at the forefront ofanalysis. Following such an analysis, although merely tendential, I have arguedthat while financialization is just one of many sets of processes in capitalismwith which aestheticization has combined, the particularly powerful reifyingconfluences of this historical conjuncture is one which critical IPE must not



AUTHOR COPY

ignore to ensure that economic imagination is expanded to incorporatea political economy of recognition. Indeed, I have claimed that capitalistreification has been significantly furthered through the confluences ofaestheticization and financialization, and IPE, in both its orthodox and criticaltraditions, has directly contributed to these processes by supporting orneglecting them. As such, it is high time for critical IPE to engage withaesthetics and to intervene in this historical conjuncture. Next, I will provide asample of seemingly pressing questions for this engagement.

How, and using which technologies, are representational values in relation toglobal finance produced? How are such values produced in historically specific,uneven ways? Exactly how does this aestheticization of finance impact onprocesses of financialization of national economies? How significant hasfinancializing welfare state restructuring been here? What do the commoditychains for these processes look like? What forms of aestheticizing labour can beidentified here and how is aesthetic labour exploited and alienated in theproduction of such representational values? How do existing fractions oftransnational capital participate in and transform these processes, and arenew ones emerging in relation to these new economic structures? What roledoes their competition play in shaping these processes? Or, can we identifyforms of ‘alliance capitalism’ in the production of these values? How is thisaestheticization impacting on (inter-)regional and global production and tradepatterns? What is the significance of these for the uneven distribution ofstances of reification and recognition? What role is the regulation of theproduction of representational values in relation to finance at different levels ofgovernance, from the global to the household, playing for this distribution?What are the geopolitical dimensions of the forces at work in this historicalconjuncture? What forms of resistance to these confluences can be identified,and how should such resistance be understood? Following the crisis of finance-led capitalism, how is regulation of the production of representational values,at different levels of governance, from institutions of global and regionalgovernance to that of the household, changing in response to the crisis? Hasthis had any impact on the production and projection of representationalvalues? Have forms of resistance to reification in relation to the confluencesof financialization and aestheticization emerged? To what extent are thesefacilitating an enhancement of economic imagination?

Not only must critical IPE seize to neglect these aesthetic concerns for thesake of a much-enhanced understanding of the global economy, it must alsoembrace the aestheticization of its analysis to powerfully illuminate processesof reification and resistance to it. In a historical conjuncture in which economicimagination has proven so stultified, yet so badly needed, it must seek togenerate an epistemological shift that can serve to broaden it. It is high time forcritical IPE to critically engage with aesthetics.

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

About the Author

Claes Belfrage is Lecturer in International Politics, School of Politics andInternational Relations, Queen Mary, University of London. He works onEuropean Political Economy, Social Democracy, financialization, Aestheticapproaches to Political Economy and Critical Theory. He has published inPolitics & Society, Public Administration, Journal of International Relations andDevelopment and Contemporary Politics. He also has an article forthcoming onthe Icelandic Financial Crash in Economy and Society.

Notes

1 In contrast, in the ‘Aesthetic Turn’ in International Relations, political economy shines in its

absence (Holden, 2006, p. 802).

2 While this is not the space for a more concrete analysis of a state-theoretical analysis of the

historically specific ways in which the confluences of aestheticization and financialization are

articulated in this historical conjuncture, I will below suggest how to understand this.

3 ‘Liberal capitalism’, here, refers, imprecisely, to the range of social formations that have emerged

in ‘the West’, including, ideal-typically, social democratic, (neo)liberal and conservative market-

coordinated capitalisms.

4 Although far from in any straightforward, modernization sense (Haupt, 2003, pp. 117–160).

5 However, as Trentmann argues, as ‘a dominant social formation [they were] limited to particular

regions and cities as well as to particular classes’ (2004, p. 382).

References

Adorno, T.W. (1997) Negative Dialectic, Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum.

Adorno, T.W. (2002) Aesthetic Theory, In: G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann (eds.) Translated by

R. Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum.

Albright, T.D., Jessell, T.M., Kandel, E.R. and Posner, M.I. (2000) Neural science: A century of

progress and the mysteries that remain. Neuron 25(Supplement): 1–55.

Aldred, R. and Tepe, D. (2009) Scrappage and motorways: Towards identifying historically specific

mobility regimes in Germany and the UK. Presented at the Decarbonising the Car workshop,

LSE Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation; 8 July.

Baumgarten, A.G. ([1750] 2010) Aesthetica Scripsit. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar.

Belfrage, C. (2008) Towards ‘universal financialisation’ in Sweden? Contemporary Politics 14(3):

277–296.

Belfrage, C. (2010) Towards a Benjaminist political economy. In: A. Pusca (ed.) Walter Benjamin

and the Aesthetics of Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 171–192.

Belfrage, C., Bergmann, E. and Berry, D. (2010) Imagined recovery: Justificatory regimes after the

crash of Icelandic Viking capitalism. Paper presented at the European Consortium for Political

Research Standing Group of International Relations Annual Conference; September,

Stockholm, Sweden.

Benjamin, W. (1999) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In: W. Benjamin (ed.)

Illuminations. London: Pimlico, pp. 211–244.



AUTHOR COPY

Benjamin, W. (2002) The Arcades Project. London: Belknap.

Berry, D. (2011) The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. Basingstoke,

UK: Palgrave.

Berry, D. (2012) The relevance of understanding code to international political economy.

International Politics 49(2): 277–296.

Binkley, S. (2007) Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005) The new spirit of capitalism. International Journal of

Political Cultural Sociology 18(3–4): 161–188.

Boltanski, L. and Thevenot, L. (2006) On Justification: Economies of Worth, Translated by

C. Porter. Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Bohme, G. (2003) Contribution to the critique of the aesthetic economy. Thesis Eleven 73(1): 71–82.

Boyer, R. (2000) Is a finance-led growth regime a viable alternative to Fordism? A preliminary

analysis. Economy and Society 29(1): 111–145.

Bruff, I. (2012) The relevance of Nicos Poulantzas for contemporary debates on ‘the international’.

International Politics 49(2): 177–194.

Bryan, D. and Rafferty, M. (2007) Financial derivatives and the theory of money. Economy and

Society 36(1): 134–158.

Buck-Morss, S. (1992) Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered.

October 62(Autumn): 3–41.

Buck-Morss, S. (1995) Envisioning capital: Political economy on display. Critical Inquiry 21(2):

434–467.

Buck-Morss, S. (2002) Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West.

London: MIT Press.

Buck-Morss, S. (2007) Visual empire. Diacritics 37(2–3): 171–198.

Buckel, S. (2007) Subjektivierung und Kohasion. Zur Rekonstruktion einer materialistischen Theorie

des Rechts, [Subjectivization and Cohesion. On the Reconstruction of a Materialistic Theory of

Law]. Weilerswist, Germany: Velbruck Wissenschaft.

Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Butler, J. (2008) Taking another’s view: Ambivalent implications. In: A. Honneth and M. Jay (eds.)

Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 97–119.

Clough, P.T. (2008) The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory, Culture &

Society 25(1): 1–22.

Coole, D. (2007) Experiencing discourse: Corporeal communicators and the embodiment of power.

British Journal of Politics & International Relations 9(3): 413–433.

Cox, R.W. (1981) Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations theory.

Millennium 10(2): 126–155.

Davies, M. (2010) ‘You can’t charge innocent people for saving their lives!’ Work in Buffy the

Vampire Slayer. International Political Sociology 4(2): 178–195.

De Cock, C., Fitchett, J. and Volkmann, C. (2009) Myths of a near past: Envisioning finance

capitalism anno 2007. Ephemera 9(1): 8–25.

Di Muzio, T. (2010) The world’s affluent playground: Dubai’s architecture of doom & the future of

globalized social reproduction. Presented at the Annual Conference of the European Consortium

of Political Research Standing Group of International Relations, ‘Politics in Hard Times:

International Relations Responses to the Financial Crisis’; 9–11 September, Stockholm, Sweden.

Eagleton, T. (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Elms, D. (2008) New directions for IPE: Drawing from behavioral economics. International Studies

Review 10(2): 239–265.

Englis, B.G. and Solomon, M.R. (1995) To be and not to be: Lifestyle imagery, reference groups,

and ‘The Clustering of America’. Journal of Advertising 24(1): 13–28.

Belfrage


AUTHOR COPY

Forslund, D. (2005) The membrane and the failure notch: Notes on the clash between private

finance and political economy in the new pension system in Sweden. Presented at the British

International Studies Association’s 30th Anniversary Conference; 21 December, University of

St. Andrews.

Froud, J., Johal, S. and Williams, K. (2002) Financialisation and the coupon pool. Capital & Class

78(Autumn): 119–151.

Gammon, E. (2008) Affect and the rise of the self-regulating market. Millennium 37(2): 251–278.

Gerstenberger, H. (2011) The historical constitution of the political forms of capitalism. Antipode

43(1): 60–86.

Habermas, J. (1979a) Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston,

MA: Beacon Press.

Habermas, J. (1979b) Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston,

MA: Beacon Press.

Harvey, D. (2001) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge.

Haupt, H.-G. (2003) Konsum und Handel: Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Gottingen, Germany:

Vandehoeck & Ruprecht.

Holden, G. (2006) Cinematic IR, the sublime, and the Indistinctness of art.Millennium – Journal of

International Studies 34(3): 793–818.

Holub, R. (1992) Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism. London: Routledge.

Honneth, A. (2005) Reification: A recognition-theoretical view, given in the Tanner Lectures on

Human Values; 14–16 March, University of California, Berkeley.

Honneth, A. (2007) Appropriation of freedom: Freud’s conception of the individual self-relation,

given in the Psychology as A Social Science lecture series; 21 June, London School of Economics.

Honneth, A. (2008) Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Jameson, F. (1997) Culture and finance capital. Critical Inquiry 24(1): 246–265.

Jessop, B. (2004) Critical semiotic analysis and cultural political economy. Critical Discourse

Studies 1(1): 1–17.

Langley, P. (2006) Securitising suburbia: The transformation of Anglo-American mortgage finance.

Competition & Change 10(3): 283–299.

Lear, J. (2008) The slippery middle. In: A. Honneth and M. Jay (eds.) Reification: A New Look at

an Old Idea. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 131–145.

Leyshon, A., French, S., Thrift, N., Crewe, L. and Webb, P. (2005) Accounting for e-commerce:

Abstractions, virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital. Economy and Society 34(3): 428–450.

Lukacs, G. (1971)History and Class Consciousness, Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.

Lowy, M. (2009) Capitalism as religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber. Historical Materialism

17(1): 60–73.

Martin, R. (2002) Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Martin, R. (2009) Whose crisis is that? Thinking finance otherwise. Ephemera 9(4): 344–349.

Montgomerie, J. (2006) The financialization of the American credit card industry. Competition &

Change 10(3): 301–319.

Nussbaum, M. (2000) Sex and Social Justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Palan, R. (2009) The proof of the pudding is in the eating: IPE in light of the crisis of 2007/8.

New Political Economy 14(3): 385–394.

Panitch, L. and Konings, M. (2009) Myths of neoliberal deregulation. New Left Review 2(57):

67–83.

Simons, J. (2008) Aestheticisation of politics: From fascism to radical democracy. Journal for

Cultural Research 12(3): 207–229.



AUTHOR COPY

Terranova, T. (2000) Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text 18(2):

33–58.

Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.R. (2008) Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and

Happiness. London: Yale University Press.

Trentmann, F. (2004) Beyond consumerism: New historical perspectives on consumption. Journal

of Contemporary History 39(3): 373–401.

Watson, M. (2005) Foundations of International Political Economy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Watson, M. (2008) Constituting monetary conservatives via the ‘savings habit’: New Labour and

the British housing market bubble. Comparative European Politics 6(3): 285–304.

Wells, W.D. (1975) Psychographics: A critical review. Journal of Marketing Research 12(2):

196–213.

Worth, O. (2012) Accumulating the critical spirit: Rosa Luxemburg and Critical IPE. International

Politics 49(2): 136–153.

Belfrage


For a critical engagement with aesthetics in IPE: Revitalizing economic imagination in times of...

Documents

Transcript of For a critical engagement with aesthetics in IPE: Revitalizing economic imagination in times of...