Economic Geography

For culture; against the cultural turn
In view of the discussion above, it seems fairly safe to say that only a few 
die-hards and philistines are likely to make strenuous objections to attempts to
bring culture more forcefully into the study of economic geography. In spite of
the neologisms and cliché-ridden prose that Martin and Sunley (2001) rightly
complain about, there is obviously a significant nexus of ideas in a more cultur-
ally-inflected economic geography that responds in a very genuine way to major
problems posed by contemporary capitalist society. Once this point has been
made, however, a number of the reforms of economic geography that have been
most strenuously advocated under the rubric of the cultural turn are rather less
obviously acceptable, and have recently been subject to heated debate by
economic geographers (see, for example, Martin and Sunley 2001; Plummer and
Sheppard 2001; Rodriguez-Pose 2001; Sayer 1997; Storper 2001).
This debate has tended to find its sharpest expression in relation to the curi-
ous reluctance by some proponents of the cultural turn to make any concession
to the play of economic processes in economic geography except in so far as they
are an expression of underlying cultural dynamics. In a number of their more
fervent statements, indeed, some of these proponents occasionally verge on 
an inversion of the classical Marxian conceit to the effect that culture flows 
uni-causally from the economy, by offering equally exaggerated claims about the
influence of culture on the economy. In a statement that displays much enthusi-
asm about the study of culture and much acrimony in regard to the discipline of
economics, Amin and Thrift (2000) essentially recommend withdrawal from
economic analysis, as such, and a wholesale re-description of economic realities
in terms of cultural points of reference. Thus, in writing about the problem of
eventuation they one-sidedly argue that ‘acting into the words confirms the
discourse and makes a new real’ (p. 6), so that in their formulation, the economy
becomes nothing more than a series of ‘performances’ derived from a script.
Elsewhere, Thrift (2001) further proclaims that the new economy of the 1990s
was fundamentally a rhetorical phenomenon. The argument here starts off
promisingly enough with an examination of the role of the press, business
consultants, financial advisors, and the like, in helping to foment the fast-paced,
high-risk economic environment of the period, but then it veers into the blunt
assertion that the new economy as a whole can be understood simply as a discur-
sive construct. In formulations like these, basic economic realities – the state of
technology, the rhythms of capital accumulation and investment, the rate of profit,
the flow of circulating capital, and so on – become just so much inert plasma to be
written upon this way or that as cultural shifts occur and as revisions of the script
are introduced. Certainly, words are a critical moment in the circuit of mediations
through which economic reality operates, and there can be no doubt that many
unique effects are set in motion at this particular level of analysis. Conversely, 
and it is puzzling that so trivial and obvious a point should need to be 
made, there are also deeply-rooted economic logics and dynamics at work in the
contemporary space-economy, and at least some of these (such as the dynamics
A perspective of economic geography
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of industrial organization, or the increasing returns effects that lie at the root of
industrial districts), require investigation on their own terms above and beyond
invocations of the causal powers of discourse and culture.
In a series of recent writings, Barnes (e.g. 1996, 2001, 2003), has pursued a
related line of investigation opened up by the cultural turn. Barnes’ work is much
influenced by Derrida and Rorty, and is centrally focused on the metaphorical
and narratological character of geographical writing. There is actually much of
interest in the approach Barnes takes. He has many useful things to say about the
ideologies and working habits of economic geographers, as well as about the
rhetorical devices that they deploy in their written reports. This helps among
other things to keep us focused on the critical idea that our intellectual encoun-
ters with the real are always deeply theory-dependent (Sunley 1996). But as the
plot thickens – or thins, according to your taste – we steadily lose sight of
economic geography as a discipline with concrete substantive concerns (such as
regional development or income inequalities), for these simply dissolve away into
the primacy of the text and its metaphorical perplexities. I am perfectly prepared
to admit that there may be strong elements of metaphor in, for example, a geog-
raphy of hunger, but I certainly have no sympathy for the idea that hunger is just
a metaphor, if only on the ad hominem grounds that it has painful physical mani-
festations and morbid long-term effects. Here, the legitimate claim that we can
only know the world through socially-constructed codes of reference seems to
have given way to the sophism that all we can know about the world is the codes
themselves.
An even more extreme case of the solipsism that haunts much of the cultural
turn can be found in the book by Gibson-Graham (1996) about strategic possi-
bilities for progressive social change in contemporary capitalism. The central argu-
ments of the book hinge upon the proposition that the criteria for validating a
theory are purely internal to the theory to be validated. As Gibson-Graham
writes (p. 60): ‘We cannot argue that our theory has more explanatory power or
greater proximity to the truth than other theories because there is no common
standard which could serve as the instrument of such a metatheoretical validation
process’. If this proposition were indeed true it would presumably undermine
much of the point in Gibson-Graham proceeding any further in her argument,
though she does in fact continue on for another 200-odd pages. In the course of
this discussion, the relativism of her main thesis is steadily transformed from 
a merely academic exercise into a political agenda of sorts. Thus, she announces 
(p. 260), ‘the way to begin to break free of capitalism is to turn its prevalent
representations on their heads’. Presto. Not even a hint about a possible transi-
tional program, or a few suggestions about, say, practical reform of the banking
system. The claim is presented in all its baldness, without any apparent
consciousness that attempts to break free of any given social system are likely to
run into the stubborn realities of its indurated social and property relations as
they actually exist. More generally, Gibson-Graham’s argument leads inexorably
beyond the perfectly acceptable notion that all intellectual work is theory-
dependent and into those murky tracts of idealist philosophy where reality 
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is merely a reflection of theory, and where theory produces social change 
independently of concrete practice and disciplined attention to the refractory
resistances of things as they really are.
So, quite apart from its dysfunctional depreciation of the role of economic
forces and structural logics in economic geography, the cultural turn also opens
a door to a disconcerting strain of philosophical idealism and political volun-
tarism in modern geography. The net effect is what we might call economistic
grand theory in reverse: a remarkable failure to recognize sensible boundaries 
as to just what precisely a cultural theory of the economy can achieve, and a
concomitant over-promotion of the notion that social and economic transforma-
tion involves nothing more than the unmediated power of theoretical ideas.
Again, nothing in this argument is intended to deny the important continuities
and intersections between culture and economy or the significance of the econ-
omy as a site of cultural practices; neither is it in any sense an attempt to eject the
study of cultural economy from geography. The problem is not ‘culture’ but the
cultural turn as it has emerged out of cultural studies with its militant project 
of reinterpreting all social relations as cultural relations, and its naïve, if under-
standable, attempt to humanize the iron cage of capitalist accumulation by
unwarranted culturalization of its central economic dynamics (Eagleton 2003;
Rojek and Turner 2000).