Economic Geography

The Priesthood: no thinking about a world beyond Empire
A classic statement of the highly foundational ‘anti-foundationalism’ characteris-
ing the PCTEG asserts:
A capitalist firm cannot appear as the concrete embodiment of an abstract
capitalist essence. It has no invariant ‘inside’ but is constituted by its contin-
ually changing and contradictory ‘outsides’.
(Gibson-Graham 1996: 15)
This speaks not of evidence or logic, but desire and cultural authority. Even if
one buys (to use market-speak) into the first sentence as rejecting one kind of
simple reductionism, the second is a non-sequitur. To insist that a firm can only
be conceived of as a thing made up of ‘outsides’ is only to demand that the kinds
of questions asked, and the kinds of answers research comes up with, be compat-
ible with extreme ontological actualism (the empirical, the actual, and the real
cannot be distinguished). Insisting that things really are only what they appear
to be (if you squint this way or that) is of course philosophising of the most 
foundational, and authoritarian, kind.
Under the influence of this kind of thinking ontology and epistemology 
in much of economic geography has collapsed into a matter of choosing which
Deleuzian plane of immanence you fancy you can skateboard to the horizon on.
Geographical research accordingly becomes all about you, just like shopping.
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Since this rules out the earlier scientific ambition of trying to find anything that
might show some arrangements ought to be changed (as opposed to starting off
with that prejudice in mind), research has to be justified by criteria other than
discovery or claim-testing. Given the popularity amongst those doing the autho-
rising of the notion that knowledges are entirely discursive constructions, and
that the merits of different knowledges should be judged by the subjects, prac-
tices, and identities they ‘empower’, the answer was to see research as a matter
of benign compilation. So the disciplinary corridors began to fill once again with
(this time virtual) cabinets containing collections of specimens deemed, by their
collectors, to be particularly worthy.
Where the geographical authorities of nineteenth century imperialisms gave
names to colonised peoples and places, their equivalents in the twenty-first
Empire of difference and markets invent names for imaginary spaces (folded,
Third, Alternative, Resistant etc.), as if to fulfil that old prediction of the first
time as tragedy, the second as farce.

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John Lovering