Workshop Abstract
The Performance and Politics of Markets: Aesthetics and International
Political Economy
From the point of view of Western states and media the centrality of markets to everyday life is
sacrosanct. News media warn of the catastrophic effects of ‘credit events’, sovereign defaults, a
potential ‘death’ spiral of compound interest, declining rates of growth, asset price collapse and
capital flight. While such hyperbole may strike many political economists as excessive, we would
argue that its existence is nonetheless important for constituting the future production and reproduction of the market. The bombardment of signs and symbols that now characterise the news
coverage of financial crises speaks of important aesthetic dimension to markets. Subjects require
narratives of becoming, ‘we’ need to picture a stable growing market, and political leaders readily
warm to an ‘other’ of good capitalism in order to legitimate their choices (be it the sub-prime
borrower, the sovereign defaulter, or the benefits scrounger).
The animating insight for this workshop is that the stuff of market making is equally (or more) a feat
of market meaning. While critical IPE has done much to question the power structures, range of
actors, and types of knowledge that underpin global capitalism, comparatively less attention has
been paid to the aesthetics of political economy.
Aesthetic IPE might be understood, broadly, as a concern with how art, literature, music, and film
are performative of markets. That is to say, against realist common sense, the market is not
understood as somehow separate from culture or aesthetics. Rather, culturally situated norms and
beliefs about, say, the ‘modernity’ or ‘efficiency’ of the market, form a context in which knowledge
about the ‘market-as-separate’ can develop. In so doing, the market is not just - or even primarily - a
function of technical knowledge about markets embodied in credit ratings or derivatives contracts; it
is also a function of aesthetics. Importantly, the aesthetic performance of markets holds within it a
certain degree of malleability, reflexivity, and democracy, in addition to the ‘danger’ so often
identified. This workshop will bring together IPE scholars and those working in cognate fields to
debate the role of aesthetics in IPE. Themes and questions to consider include:
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Why might aesthetics be important for IPE? What can IPE learn in this regard from other
fields of inquiry?
What do aesthetic practices contribute to understanding(s) of the ideational and material
dynamics of the market?
How would an aesthetic approach to IPE enter and transform existing debates?
Our intention is not to introduce aesthetics as a ready-made component of an established
theoretical paradigm which then reinforces or develops the central questions and proposals of that
paradigm. Instead, we seek to work in more pragmatic terms, asking what do aesthetic practices do,
how do aesthetic practices work, and how is this then relevant for IPE. Such an open ended
engagement refuses to enter into dichotomies between ‘rational academia’ and ‘creative cultural
producers’, or to postulate an instrumental code for determining the precise importance of a
particular film or play. Instead, it engages with a politics of meaning whether it is produced in
aesthetic or scholarly work, seeking to address the question of how the market is thought, and what
consequences might flow from such thinking.