Das Wissen der Schulden. Recht, Kulturtechnik und Alltagserfahrung im liberalen Kapitalismus
Abstract
The Knowledge of Debt: Law, Media Technique, and Everyday Experience in Liberal Capitalism. Performing an object such as ‘the economy’ hinges on practices of formatting knowledge. The article proposes to look at such instituting moments in connection with social conflicts over the legitimate rules of exchange. This is exemplified by way of recounting the story of the codification of Swiss bankruptcy law in 1889. In order to homogenize the legal procedures of debt collection and bankruptcy, two subject categories were instituted: ‘merchants’ and ‘non-merchants’. These different categories were thought to account for the diverging temporalities and spaces of credit exchange in everyday economic life. The introduction of the commercial register, a media-technical apparatus, enabled a formal distinction between ‘merchants’ and ‘non-merchants’. However, this boundary was contested and proved to be porose.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002%2Fbewi.201401678
Bühnen des Kapitalismus: Der Getreidehandel als Wissensobjekt zwischen den Weltkriegen
Abstract
Summary: Capitalism on Stage: Grain Trade as Objects of Knowledge During the Interwar Period. Between 1900 and 1930 the worldwide grain markets attained considerable attention in literature (Frank Norris’ novel The Pit of 1903), cinema (D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat of 1909), theatre (Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished play fragment Jae Fleischhacker in Chikago, 1924–1926), politics (e. g. Report of the Federal Trade Commission on the Grain Trade, 1920–1926) and economics (e. g. Wheat Studies by the Food Research Institute at Stanford University, 1924–1944). The paper discusses grain trade as objects of knowledge in paradoxical situations and entails a parallel reading of these texts by analyzing their epistemic practices and narrative techniques. Bertolt Brecht’s comprehensive plan to depict the laws of the allocation and distribution of grain markets on stage failed in 1926 and he turned to Marxism. In the meantime economic research focused on the aggregation of statistics relating to world grain supplies and prices. Studies about the relation between changes in the volumes of stocks and phases of trade cycles served furthermore as material for John Maynard Keynes’ abolition of the classical theory around 1930.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002%2Fbewi.201401679
Was zählt der Preis? Dogmengeschichte und Wissensgeschichte der Ökonomie
Abstract
What’s in a Price? History of Economic Ideologies vs. History of Economic Ideas. This paper suggests applying the approach of a historical epistemology to the field of economics. We observe that an assumedly fundamental opposition between the market and the state dominates popular images of the history of economic ideas. Two conflicting ideologies are roughly assigned to the two opposing sides in the Cold War. To this historical narrative the paper opposes a different view. The argument is that when taking the technical practices of economic knowledge production in the twentieth century into view, similarities abound across ideological ruptures. The chief characteristic change in the recent history of economics was a radical turn towards quantification, measurement, and mathematical modelling. A historical epistemology of economics could show how deeply both, admirers of the state and of the market, share a history. The paper concludes that to-date critique of political economy should also take into consideration a critical perspective towards the unfolding of this measurement revolution in the social sciences.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002%2Fbewi.201401677
Frakcija | 66-67 (2013)
The immunity of art
Quelle: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/frakcija/issue/2014-06-17.html