In the recent decade the perspectives of historical epistemology have turned economic practices into a novel object of study: the focus lies on how discourses, techniques of measurement and valuation produce economic facts.1 The research on the historical epistemologies of economic facts belongs to a broader scholarly endeavor that takes place in cultural anthropology, social theory, literary studies, political theory and history. This interdisciplinary work brings to light how deeply economic issues are constituted by intermingling a set of cultural, political, (...) technical and legal distinctions, which distinguish what counts as properly economic from what does not.2 In this perspective, the very definition of economy becomes a hybrid and contentious affair.The central theoretical question for the historical epistemology and cultural anthropology of economy is currently how to conceptualize the link between epistemic practices and acts of ‘doing the economy’. This special issue on the Historical Episte mology of the Economic pushes us to think about this crucial link. Monika Dommann, Daniel Speich Chassé and Mischa Suter explore different modes of approaching the interlacing of epistemology and economy. These modes can be discussed under the following headings: 1) Pragmatics and Poetologies of Knowledge, 2) Economic Discourses and Epistemic Techniques, 3) Boundaries of Economy. On the basis of the richness of the historical material and the finely grained arguments that these papers bring forth, I will elaborate on the conceptualization of these linkages between epistemology and economy. My discussion culminates in the attempt to clarify an analytical distinction that is freely used in this special issue but that deserves further discussion: the distinction between the economic and the economy as an object of historical epistemology. My question is, does it matter if we write a historical epistemology of the economic or of the economy? What distinction do we wish to make by juxtaposing these two? (shrink)

This article explores nationalist interpretations of blood donation activity, examining how some Indians read integrative messages into the practical procedures through which blood is donated and distributed. The first post-Independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed the need for `national integration' as a bulwark against a myriad of linguistic, caste and ethnic agitations that threatened to disrupt the unity of the newly formed nation-state. This article shows that a striking manifestation of the Nehruvian ideology of national integration possesses a (...) compelling presence in the Indian blood donation milieu. Scholars of India have long been preoccupied with documenting attempts by the Hindu right to redefine the nation in exclusively Hindu, anti-Nehruvian terms. Questioning the prevailing assumption that the only thing that counts politically in India today is the debunking or overriding of Nehruvian ideals of the secular inclusive nation, this article rehabilitates Nehruvianism as an important ethnographic subject. In so doing it demonstrates the roles of anonymity, enumeration and an array of technical and imaginative gathering points in the formation of the `difference-traversing gift'. The article also highlights ways in which technology may be employed for the imagining of social diversity. (shrink)

This article argues that Foucault’s account of the intersection between population, liberal economy, and biopolitics needs to be reconstructed in light of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population. Taking Malthus into account brings to the fore how deeply the question of population is tied to a colonial hierarchy that differentiates between dangerous ‘savage’ and economic ‘civilized’ life. ‘Savage life’ is depicted as a catastrophic form of life, which uses resources in a non-economic way due to its forgetfulness of the (...) future. The article shows how this notion of ‘savage life’ broadens the concept of liberal economic governmentality. Most importantly, it highlights the role of passions and futurity for liberal governmentality. As the discussion of Malthus’ texts demonstrates, the passions of hope and fear assume a crucial role for engendering futurity in the economic subject. As will be shown, while the more ‘savage life’ is considered to be made governable through fear, the more civilized life is supposed to be allured by hope. The article points out the implication of this analysis for Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in relation to liberal economy. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière, in his essay ‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’, puts forth a challenge that is ever more pertinent to our times. What constitutes the unrepresentable today? Rancière frames his answer in a very specific way: the question of unrepresentability leads directly to the way in which political violence may or may not be put into an image. Offering an alternative to Rancière’s approach, the present article turns instead to the information society, asking if and how something might be unrepresentable in (...) a world saturated by data and information. Thus one approaches the issue of transparency and secrecy here from the perspective of the relative perspicuity (or opacity) of data visualization. Two theses structure the argument, first that ‘data have no necessary visual form’ and, second, that ‘only one visualization has ever been made of an information network’. The tension between these two theses leads to a disconcerting conclusion, that the triumph of information aesthetics precipitates a decline in informatic perspicuity. One is obligated therefore to call for a strong reinvigoration of poetics and hermeneutics within the digital universe, so that representation as such can take place, perhaps for the first time. (shrink)

Although the theological elements of Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy have received careful scrutiny, his reflections on economic issues have largely been overlooked. This article takes a small step towards redressing this state of affairs. Rather than argue that Boyle – like John Locke or David Hume – was as interested in political economy as he was in discovering the nature of Nature, the article treats him as a point of entry for considering how early-modern England negotiated the revolutionary cultural and (...) economic changes that emerged as capitalism took command. More specifically, it uses one of Boyle’s less-famous inventions – a hydrostatic device for discriminating between real, degraded and counterfeit coinage – in order to explore how economic exchange began to acquire a patina of ‘objectivity’ in the 17th-century imagination. (shrink)

This work contributes to recent transdisciplinary efforts to view the Haitian slave revolt (1791–1804) as the historical inspiration for Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Reconstructions offered by contemporary postcolonial scholars argue that the Haitian revolt was chronicled in Minerva as Hegel raced to finish his Phenomenology. Benhabib recently recognized the Hegel-Haiti thesis as entailing the sort of inclusive dialogical learning process necessary to validate subaltern experiences. The thesis has also drawn its share of sceptical scrutiny as Badiou claims that it risks forcing (...) an unnecessary moral dissymmetry, neglects objectionable features of enslavement and imposes a mismatch between apolitical subject and revolutionary. In reply, we appeal to the pioneering work of Tavares to show that the asymmetrical construction of classification schemes for persons of mixed-racial statuses accords with decades of documented literary exchanges between Hegel and Gregoire. We then turn to the work of James on the role of mixed-race merchants in the testimonial accounts of late 18th century French historians to show that European literate publics were well aware of the extremely coercive forms of commodified labour found in Saint-Domingue. We then invoke the archival work of Du Bois on French, British and American parliamentary proceedings that show the provisional colonial identities ascribed to Caribbean subjects did not hinder their self-conscious exercise of political agency. Viewing Hegel in terms of the historiographic records of the racial ontologies of early modern transatlantic literary exchanges helps explain how he adapted these tropes concerning mixed-race subjects in a manner that better explains many of the anomalous features of the dialectic. However, conferring the Haitian revolution its proper world-historical warrant as inspiration for his infamous master-slave dialectic need not lead us to overlook Hegel’s complicity with many of the epistemic and ontological flaws of colonial tropes held in early modern transatlantic print. (shrink)

ArgumentSpace projects represent, after World War II, the archetype of large-scale organization of scientific practices that are flexible, temporary, and oriented towards specific goals. A new form of activity, the project, emerged through the management of technical means, allocation of skills, and coordination of various players. Project management emerged as the synthesis of a set of social practices designed to subordinate as well as synchronize the initiatives of researchers, engineers, and technicians who had temporarily joined forces. This article presents the (...) genesis and deployment of the Franco-Soviet space program ARCAD 3 whose purpose was to study the magnetosphere with a satellite. This study is situated at the junction of three historiographical dimensions: scientific writings, links between action and graphic forms, and Big Science. The diagrams, organization charts and schedules produced by the French space agency throughout the entire project form the documentary substrata of this analysis. These graphic management tools define the role of each player, designate fields of competence, and specify the temporality of actions. A self-monitoring system as well as surveillance instrument, diagrams, organization charts and schedules are linked to form a certain vision of authority along the lines of the “neoliberal governmentality” defined by Michel Foucault. By defining in advance and in writing all the possible (or impossible) relationships, the chronological order of activities as well as the actions to be performed, graphic project management tools contribute to the transfer of coercive panoptic mechanisms towards a minimal organization of relationships between individuals. (shrink)