2 Analytical advances to address new dynamics
V. Spike Peterson
We need a revamped materialism that will allow us to see the virtual realities of the globe.
(Eisenstein 1998, 11)
It is now a commonplace that the meaning, constitution, and effects of borders – conceptual and territorial – are being radically transformed by globalization dynamics. To address the challenges posed by the speed, scale, and complexity of these changes, we require new theories of international political economy or, more appropriately, global political economy (GPE). This chapter takes as a start- ing point that the disciplines of economics and IR that produce the prevailing accounts of GPE remain dominated by productivist, masculinist, and modernist commitments that are analytically inadequate and politically problematic. In particular, prevailing accounts neglect significant aspects of globalization (increasing informal sector activities, feminization of flexibilization, crises of welfare delivery, diasporic identities and migration flows, shifting sexual politics and family forms) and pay little attention to how these are shaped by geopolitics, gender, and race/ethnicity. Moreover, political economists are just beginning to analyze the singular importance of financial (as distinct from monetary) institutions on a global scale, and only a few are epistemologically prepared for (or interested in) grappling with a virtual economy of signsrather than goods.
As a contribution to addressing these new dynamics, I begin this chapter by introducing an alternative analytics – an “RPV framing” – that rewrites GPE as
“reproductive, productive, and virtual (Foucauldian) economies.” Under the rubric of overlapping systemic “shifts” – of scale, production, and finance – I then discuss globalization as it shapes our lives today, and with uneven effects.
Throughout this discussion, I implicitly and explicitly argue that new dynamics are more readily acknowledged and more productively addressed by adopting an alternative analytical framing that affords transdisciplinary, multilevel, and multicausal understanding. The need is for analytical advances that not only accommodate new developments but also cultivate the identification of relationships among disparate features of globalization, including the links among discourse,
identity, culture, economy, and “the virtual.” The RPV framing is an important dimension of this larger project.1
An alternative analytic: the RPV framing
The complicity between cultural and economic value systems is acted out in almost every decision we make.
(Spivak 1987, 166) The RPV framing recasts GPE as the interaction of reproductive, productive, and virtual economies, the latter understood not in the conventional but in a Foucauldian sense of mutually constituted (therefore coexisting and interactive) systemic sites through and across which power operates. In Patrick Hutton’s words, economy in Foucault’s conception signifies the “production of linguistic and institutional forms through which human beings define their relationships”
(Hutton 1988: 127, citing Foucault in Power/Knowledge, pp. 88–92, 158–65). This involves normalization processes of subjectivation and subjectification that are key to personal and collective identifications and their political effects. In short, the reproductive, productive, and virtual economies expand the terrain of inquiry beyond conventional economic phenomena. As systemic sites of power, involving meaning systems, normalization and institutions, they enable us to map identities and culture in relation toconventional social structures.
My elaboration of three interacting, overlapping, and coexisting economies is offered as a more nuanced and indeed “realistic” framework for the study of political economy. The RPV framing specifically rejects the separation of culture from economy, economics from politics, agent from structure, or domestic from international politics. Although analytically distinguishable, the three economies must be understood as not only overlapping but also mutually constituted and always dynamic. Hence, the framing is transdisciplinary, multi-institutional, multilevel, and “multicausal.” Less a theoretical elaboration than a mapping technique, the framing directs our attention to more features of globalization and illuminates linkages and relationships across an expanded terrain.
In effect, the framing brings the identities, ideologies, and practices of “social reproduction,” welfare, non-wage labor and informal sector activities into relation withthe familiar “productive economy” of commodity exchange, as well as with the less familiar but increasingly consequential “virtual economy” of financial markets, cyberspace, and the exchange less of goods than of signs. The point is to move beyond the masculinist, modernist, and materialist preoccupations of prevailing accounts without abandoning their insights and while addressing significant features of today’s GPE. Specifying and retaining the productive economy permits continuity with conventional economic analyses. At the same time, the productive economy proposed here is expanded both by including more features and by being inextricably linked to other economies. Specifying and including the reproductive economy invites attention to otherwise neglected agents and activities, and acknowledges the importance of gender- and
race-sensitive research and analysis. For example, it renders visible the densely gendered increase in both licit and illicit informal sector activities, the feminization of flexibilization, the gendered and racialized nature and implications of welfare crises and citizenship claims, and the heterosexist politics of “the family” and its divisions of labor and resources. Specifying and including the virtual economy extends our analysis of dematerialization and how symbols and expectations mediate our constructions of “economic” value. It insists on the political significance of financial globalization, takes seriously the accelerating pace of technological change and time–space compression, and enables us to address an economy of signs.
The fluidity and flexibility of the framing pay the price of nonspecificity, but mapping is not designed for, nor capable of, generating causal predictions. Rather, it facilitates shifts in how we seethe terrain and hence how we understand and might respond to it. In particular, the framing proposed here insists we recognize that social reproduction is constitutive of social relations, that identities, culture, and structures are mutually constituted, and that the virtual economy shapes and is shaped by everyday practice and uneven resource distribution. The framing attempts to acknowledge complexity while making sense of it, and to politicize globalization by exposing the sense that it makes. This involves three overlapping objectives: to demystify the operating codes of capitalism – the pursuit of profit as a social logic – and expose profit-seeking’s domination dynamics, a project of particular difficulty yet urgency in today’s world; to expose how gender/hetero- sexist coding permeates symbols, selves, and systems, and fuels denigration of all who are “othered” as feminine2; and to analyze, in a Foucauldian sense, the specificity of mechanisms of power – especially those most taken for granted – to build strategic knowledge.
Reproductive economy
Preoccupied with waged/commodified labor and market exchange (“productive”
activities), neoclassical and most Marxist theories ignore the reproductive economy.3Preoccupied with what they cast as “politics” and “economics,” liberal theories ignore sex/affective relations and social reproduction. In contrast, the reproductive economy in my account is central – even fundamental – to social theory, being extensively and inextricably linked to culture, politics, and economics.
Because it is so neglected, I briefly suggest five ways in which the reproductive economy is key.
First,intergenerational reproduction: The reproductive economy involves negotiations regarding the conditions under which social members will be biologically reproduced. This involves cultural norms, demographic dynamics, reproductive technologies, and disciplinary regimes in regard to sex/affective relations. It also includes the meaning and valorization of erotic desires and sexual expressions (e.g. globalized media representations, sex tourism), agency and identities in relation to biological reproduction (e.g. “bride markets,” international adoptions), conditions of health, choice, and technologies of reproduction (e.g. expensive
fertilization clinics for some, forced sterilization for “others”), and the spatial and temporal constitution of social relations (“families,” support groups, communities) that enable parenting/intergenerational reproduction. And of course, the capitalist–patriarchal dynamics of family property and patterns of inheritance are crucial for reproducing hierarchies structured by class and gender.
Second,social/cultural/institutional reproduction: We shift here to the social relations within which biological reproduction is embedded. These include ideological reproduction of beliefs about sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, class, religion, and other axes of “difference.” Stated simply, social reproduction involves not only parenting practices and institutions but also linguistic, cultural, educational, religious, economic, political and legal institutions. Subject formation is about socialization into – and selectively retaining – the norms and orderings of one’s culture. While early childhood is psychosocially formative (not least because dependency fosters “passionate attachment” that is nondiscriminating [Butler 1997] ), selective socialization is a lifelong process and especially shaped today by global media.
Third, continuity and change: Whatever its institutional forms, processes of parenting are embedded in and reinscribe power relations because infants are helpless and children are variously dependent. The “ordering” (language, cultural rules) we uncritically imbibe at an early age is especially resistant to transformation, both in a psychoanalytic sense of “split selves” to which we lack complete access and/or control and in the sense of deeply internalized identity (especially gender) commitments, the disturbance of which feels threatening. At a minimum, we must recognize how psychic investments and early socialization shape both the direction of and the willingness to change (recognizing that subject formation is not simply “contained” in infant life or family dynamics). A further point is the need to take seriously how symbolic and psychic ordering mediate material manifestations that we may wish to transform. At the same time, the private space of familial relations may be a key site of social resistance and transformation, as recently evidenced in the transformation of centralized state regimes in eastern Europe.
Fourth,consumption: Until recently, economists’ concern with production was at the expense of taking consumption seriously. The latter was gendered as feminine and associated with the private/household sphere as a passive activity (De Grazia and Furlough 1996; Firat 1994). Today however, expanded marketing activities create and fuel desire for constantly changing consumer goods and render consumption a focal point of production and investment strategies. Here I note simply that the family/household constitutes both the traditional site of savings and consumption (linking reproductive, productive, and virtual economies) and a structural link between “first world” consumption patterns and “third world”
production options, as producers conform to first world desires increasingly shaped by marketing forces rather than (sustainable) subsistence needs. The politics of consumption also include and link: gender-differentiated contributions to and control over household resources and decision-making regarding purchases, savings, and investments; identity issues insofar as “you are what you buy” and the
creation of one’s self is postmodernity’s big business; and political-economy issues as consumer rights movements favor “voting with dollars” (as in consumer boycotts) and neoliberalism favors private sector goods and services over public sector regulation, accountability and provisioning.
Fifth,non-waged labor/informal sector activities: The significance of these activities is increasing and is increasingly acknowledged in mainstream accounts, but several points warrant emphasis. First, non-waged labor is a condition of – not coincidental to – the so-called productive economy and their interaction must be acknowledged.
Second, the reproductive and productive economies overlap, especially as informal- ization accelerates and merges with flexibilization. (Racialized) gender as signifying system and division of labor is deployed throughout, both to structure and depoliti- cize hierarchical arrangements. Third, the value of any one of the resources pooled within households cannot be interpreted independently of its relation to the entire pool, and the value of wages derived from the formal economy cannot be interpreted independently of resources pooled in the informal/reproductive economy. At issue here is the extent to which households, rather than capital, pay the costs of socially necessary labor, and how this is related to global accumulation.4 Fourth, these linkages and their gendered structuring are particularly visible in relation to public welfare provisioning, which is decreased with economic restructuring that favors capital mobility and the “competition state” (Cerny 1990). The “leaner and meaner”
practices of neoliberalism have particularly devastating (though not homogeneous) effects on women as the (structurally) most vulnerable and also as the caretakers of society’s dependent members.
Links to the virtual economy
The reproductive economy is key to identities, socialization, and ideological reproduction that sustain (or may disturb) the “taken-for-grantedness” of capitalist social relations and accumulation processes centered in the virtual economy. In more conventional economic terms, the reproductive economy is structurally linked to the virtual economy insofar as household savings and investment strategies are influenced by monetary policies that establish interest rates, but household strategies also affect – through savings, consumption, and investment practices and political activities – the economic decision-making that determines monetary policy. As Castells and Portes (1989: 6) put it, “research on [reproductive and informal] activities thus affords a unique glimpse into the ways in which individual strategies connect with the broader accumulation process and the superstructures that rely on it.” Others argue that women’s work has always been “an important source for the primary accumulation of capital” (Broad 2000: 34; also Mies 1998).
Moreover, women’s reproductive labor has historically been the primary source of human capital: “the knowledge, skills and other attributes relevant to working capabilities” (Gardiner 2000: 4; also Cloud and Garrett 1997). As an investment made in the family/household sector and a decisive component of labor and formal production processes that generate profits, human capital links all of the economies.
Productive economy
For the most part, this is the economy of conventional narratives, revolving around the identities and activities of production and consumption. It presupposes specialized (also gendered and racialized) divisions of labor and the production of goods and services for market exchange. Conventionally, its primary sites are workplaces, firms, corporations, transportation networks, and markets – but reproductive and virtual economies are not separable from these sites. The state shapes the rules, disciplines participants, and provides infrastructure. The global assembly line and decentralized networking have altered the geography of production (see Taylor, Chapter 3 this volume) and flexibilization has transformed the process of production. Transnational corporations and intergovernmental agencies (the IMF, World Bank) increasingly shape the context and range of gov- ernmental decision-making. Shifts in production are better accommodated in the RPV framing, as polarization, degraded manufacturing, flexibilization, and infor- malization can be analyzed in context and in relation to reproductive and virtual economies. For example, movement of people – for pleasure, work or political freedom – can be seen as embedded processes; the importance of investing in human resources becomes visible; and gentrification can be linked to urban hous- ing issues and the international “maid trade.” Perhaps most productive is illumi- nation of links among the economies: how technologies shape reproductive choices, flexibilization practices, and innovations in financial instruments; how racial stereotypes shape whose reproduction is encouraged, how jobs and incar- cerations are distributed, where tourists go and what they do, and how elite networks repeat historical exclusions.
Virtual economy
Specifying this economy extends our analysis of symbols and how they mediate our constructions of “economic” value. It enables us to address two of the most enigmatic aspects of globalization. The first is the explosive growth in financial transactions manifesting varying linkages to – and even delinked from – the real economy. We need new models for thinking about the meaning and value of abstractions in the sense of being nonmaterial(intangibles, information, services,
“symbolic money”). We need to be able to link what are apparently disembedded but nonetheless socially constructedsymbols – such as “credit money” (Thrift 1996) – to expectations, identities and practices of related economies. The second
“enigma” is the exchange of abstractions – pure data – in the sense of virtual real- ities (cyberspace, computer-enabled communications, and time–space compres- sion). Here we confront both the speed of circulation and the “emptying out” of meaning, “in which things and people become ‘disembedded’ from concrete space and time” (Lash and Urry 1994: 13), and we engage complex issues regard- ing the real and the virtual, responses to postmodernity, and questions of agency in the face of dematerialization read as deconstruction.
Specifying the virtual economy does not produce answers but does permit us to situate these developments in relation to financial transactions, dematerialized
production, and symbolic ordering born of reproductive economies. We can, for example, explore information and communication structures as networked flows in relation to cognitive reflexivity (Lash and Urry 1994: 6–7). Or we can rethink Baudrillard’s claims about advertising and representation in relation to marketing as a question of circulation in the productive economy (Sawchuck 1994). And explorations of desire in this framing can be linked to psychoanalytic discourses and the reproduction of heterosexist identities in service to consumer capitalism.
In sum, insofar as prevailing accounts of the GPE are dominated by productivist, masculinist, and modernist commitments, they in fact impede adequate under- standing of and critical practice in regard to the new dynamics of globalization. The RPV framing offers an alternative analytic for making sense of and responding to these dynamics. To better appreciate the need for analytical advances, the next three sections consider three interlinked and overlapping substantive shifts: of scale, production, and finance. These are simply an organizational device to further specify globalization dynamics and to illustrate the value of alternative analytics.
Shifts in scale, space, and time5
We are confronted not by one social space but by many – indeed by an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces which we refer to generically as
“social space.” No space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local.
(Lefebvre 1991: 86 emphasis in original)
In terms of space, the most obvious shift is from the social space of the territorial nation-state to supraterritorial “global” space “above,” beyond, and encompassing all particular states. This resonates with references to the world as a “single place”: “…an awareness reinforced by everyday experiences of diet, music and dress, as well as by photographs from outer space showing planet Earth as one location” (Scholte 1996: 46). The image of a global village or a seamless biosphere may heighten consciousness of our interdependence as global citizens and/or our bio-environmental dependence on a fragile ecosystem. But it may also fuel totalizing narratives and/or a “whole earth” naturalism that disembeds environ- mental devastation from its social context – with the effect of privileging a feminized nature over actual women.6
Regional blocs – agglomerations of nation-states – are another social space of increasing salience. Critics of “globalization” argue cogently that prominent scalar shifts are more a matter of regionalismthan globalism.7They point to the significance of formal economic arrangements constituting the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement. And the statistics on economic activity among what Tooze (Tooze 1997a: 223) calls the Triad – the three most developed regions: North America, Western Europe, and Japan/SE Asia – confirm that flows of capital, trade, and knowledge are heavily concentrated within and among these three, effectively marginalizing countries outside the Triad.
Specifically, triad countries (with approximately 15 percent of the world’s population) accounted for 65 percent of total world exports in 1990 and 66 percent in 1999; 68 percent of all imports of manufactured goods in 1990, and 69.5 percent in 1999 (United Nations 2001: 260– 4). In effect, more than half of all developing countries are marginalized from the benefits – credit, infrastructural develop- ment, technology transfer – of foreign direct investment (FDI). Moreover, due to the world economic downturn, FDI flows declined dramatically in 2001, with little expectation of recouping this decline in 2002 (United Nations 2002: 14).
One effect of new regional concentrations is that previous regions, solidarities, and identities are reconstituted. For example, Smith argues that the “third world”
has been “restructured out of existence” (Smith 1997: 174). Whereas more pros- perous “newly industrialized countries” (Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) have moved out of third world status, sub-Saharan Africa has been “redlined” in global capital markets, effectively relegated to “fourth world” status “as an object of poor relief and riot control” (Cox 1991: 337).
The national to global shift is rendered visible and materialized by reference to the “global assembly line.” This image reminds us that commodities are less frequently produced at a single site (as in the Fordist factory) but in dispersed loca- tions, with diverse workers performing specialized tasks. This fragmenting of production displaces older identities – of factory floor unionists or proud “Made in America” automobile boasts – even as new identities are created in merchant banking ( McDowell and Court 1994), offshore production sites, and border maquiladoras. In Chandra Mohanty’s words: “An international division of labor is central to the establishment, consolidation, and maintenance of the current world order: global assembly lines are as much about the production of people as they are about ‘providing jobs’ or making profit” ( Mohanty 1997: 5; also Pyke 1996). New identities may emerge from or destabilize conventional socialization into economic roles and division of labor expectations.
The geographical unevenness of production sites – and their employment opportunities – engenders internal and external labor migrations: to urban areas, export processing zones, seasonal agricultural sites, tourism locales, and global cities as hubs of the financial sector. Some migration is of skilled workers (linked to transnational corporatist opportunities, or the “brain-drain” from poor or repressive source countries8), but most of the growth in migration involves semiskilled or unskilled workers9 who are rendered most vulnerable by current restructuring. Flexibilization (centered in the productive economy) and informal- ization (centered in the reproductive economy) are key to ‘seeing’ and analyzing these movements. Consistent with structural vulnerabilities and the nature of the jobs available (cleaning, harvesting, domestic service), it is no surprise that migrant worker populations are especially marked by race/ethnicity and gender (Sassen 1998).
These shifts in scale and the compression of time and space are materially possible because of the “revolution” in information and communication technolo- gies. The rapid expansion of computer technologies and satellite communication have profoundly altered social life and our “sense” of time and space. Today’s