Global Assemblages: NeoLiberalism and the Market

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Global Assemblages Neo-Liberalism and the Market
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A new political geography of capitalism?

• 1. Neo-liberalism and the Market

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• The Knowledge Economy

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• 3. Ethical Capitalism Anti-Globalisation and
  Corporate Social Responsibility
• 4. Military Neo-Liberalism

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Analytical Themes

• 1) Global government through the market new
  spaces of government

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• 2) Changing Imaginative Geography of Capitalism

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• 3) The media (and brands) are integral to the new
  politics of capitalism
• 4) Enormous uncertainty in the rate and direction
  of change

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Singapore the global schoolhouse(Thrift and
Olds 2005)
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1. Knowledgeable subjects Creating a new breed
of Singaporean

• The key idea is the creation of a virtuous
  circle draw in the best universities with
  global talent this talent then creates knowledge
  and knowledgeable subjects these knowledgeable
  subjects, through their actions and networks,
  then create the professional jobs that drive a
  vibrant KBE (Thrift and Olds 2005 103)

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2. Biopolitics Exporting political dangers

• Singapore is known to poor but resource-rich
  neigbours as a sanatized, Chinese dominated
  island that absorbs the wealth of surrounding
  Malay lands while exporting its wastes and
  political dangers. Its offshore industrial zone
  permits Singapore not only to take advantage of
  cheap Indonesian resources and labour discontent
  onto the Riau islands Aihwa Ong, Island
  Nations in Harrison, Pile and Thrift (eds)
  Patterned Ground, 2004, 271-272

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• The environmental contradictions of the
  Singaporean knowledge economy
• Participants in the National Youth Forum on
  Water Conservation visit Singapore's NEWater
  Visitor Centre

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3. The Cultural Circuit of Capital

• a) Capitalism has voracious appetite for new
  knowledge
• b) Business schools are key nodes in the global
  cultural circuit of capital an ideoscape (Arjun
  Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 1996)
• c) Knowledge has effects part of the
  experimental character of capitalism

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• .capitalism is performative it is always
  engaged in experiment, as the project is
  perpetually unfinished. Capitalism is therefore a
  highly adaptive and constantly mutating
  formation it is a set of poised systems. The
  whole point of capitalism, then, is precisely its
  ability to change its practices constantly, and
  those who run corporations must be able to surf
  the right side of the constant change that
  results, or risks being washed up on the reefs of
  irrelevance.. (Thrift 2005 3)

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• 150 states have agreed to abandon a bit of
  sovereignty to the WTO thats extraordinary
  French Minister of Foreign Trade speaking at
  Chicago Business School, Singapore

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• d) no clear distinction between academic and
  non-academic business knowledge
• e) the business school as global assemblage
  (Thrift 2005 94)

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Economists and the Economy Timothy Mitchell and
Michel Callon

• The economy is an invention of the 1930s-50s
  (Mitchell)
• Generally territorially defined the national
  economy

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• Implies a distinction between what is economic
  and what is extra-economic.
• This can be challenged and transformed through
  social and geographical knowledge e.g. by
  making visible domestic or migrant labour, or
  pollution, within the frame of the economy
  (Callon)