Living on Thin Abstractions: More Power/Economic Knowledge

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. One of Georg Simmel's more contentious claims at the turn of the nineteenth century was that the abstract workings of a mature money economy were mirrored in the very ways that people interacted and made sense of their world. Drained of colour, the abstract character of money was thought by Simmel to bring with it a culture of calculation and a levelling of all things to matters of quantity, not quality. If we extend this image to economic knowledge today, then for some we are in the midst of a similar economic experience whereby the increasingly abstract nature of economic activity rests upon the intangible assets of knowledge and competence, and the broadly insubstantial nature of wealth production. In short, the immateriality of ideas and patented know-how provide a somewhat elusive cultural guide to our economic futures and only lately have we begun to wonder why we were so preoccupied with the bulky side to all things economic and their worn-out physical descriptions. Of course, we might also add is that whilst science, technology and innovation have beaten this path to high value-added abstraction, there has been recognition of the 'softer', more expressive forms of economic knowledge which chart progress in the cultural, arts and entertainments industries for example, and their more informal, performative nature. After all, not all kinds of knowledge and expertize take the congealed form of software or a set of digital signals on line. So even though the kinds of cultural crossover that Simmel envisaged from an abstract economy to a shapeless culture are perhaps a little far fetched, there is nonetheless something about knowledge and its immateriality which chimes with popular cultural experience. In a service-based economy it seems almost churlish to deny the largely insubstantial and abstract nature of economic growth, even to the extent that such descriptive metaphors as the 'weightless economy' or the 'thin air business' beloved by politicians and business journalists alike on both sides of the Atlantic are loosely entertained. But churlish we should be, not because it would be wrong to deny the more ambiguous, replete forms that economic knowledge has taken, but rather, I would argue, Draft Paper for E&P …