“The Vital Force”: Visuality and the National Economy
Title:
“The Vital Force”: Visuality and the National Economy
Author:
Aitken, Rob
Appeared in:
Journal for cultural research
Paging:
Volume 10 (2006) nr. 2 pages 87-112
Year:
2006-04-01
Contents:
Although it has often been conceived as a material or already-existing kind of category, the “economy”, before it can be governed, must first be “made up” and constituted in particular ways. This paper seeks to contribute to recent genealogies of the “economy” by highlighting the role of one particular “cultural” technology-the techniques of visuality-in the making up of the national economy during the interwar and postwar periods. To develop this analysis, this paper reviews the ways in which private and public financial initiatives turned to visuality and advertising as a way to appeal more directly to and mobilize working class and everyday populations. In these appeals to “popular finance” visual techniques were used to diagram both a reworked conception of the national economy as well as the modes of citizenship key to this rationality of national economic space. This case also helps underscore the heterogeneity with which the national economy was assembled as a mode of economic governance constituted in multiple and never-completed kinds of ways. Highlighting this heterogeneity, this paper concludes, is important especially in the context of discussions of “globalization” which are, once again, provoking questions relating to the very making of economic space, practice and identity.
Journal description