Capitalism and Panorama

Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us. John Berger

Vision and value

In the context of a widespread preoccupation with the aesthetics of politics and the politicisation of art, less attention has been accorded to that area of practical and theoretical effort which we could temporarily class under the rubric of the aesthetics of the economy (we say temporarily, since a rigorous exploration of such an aesthetics soon enough challenges the separation between politics and economics). The latter comes to the fore with special urgency in moments of crisis, when our cognitive and political deficit, faced with the unravelling of a system whose intelligibility was always partial but is now suspended, can be registered at the aesthetic level – very broadly construed to include both artificially constructed representations and the individual and collective organs of perception.

As an initial methodological proviso, it is worth noting that representations of the economy and in the economy cannot be compartmentalised without losing the complexity of the question of representation itself. Susan Buck-Morss's essay 'Envisioning Capital' provides some orientation in this regard. Importantly, Buck-Morss presents the 'making' or 'fixing' of the economy as a fundamentally representational problem, to the extent that this process involves establishing agency and efficacy for an abstraction – 'picturing' economic relations and transactions as a unity, a totality, or even, to quote Marx, as an 'automatic subject'. Among other protocols, this mapping practice involves projecting a virtual external point from which to grasp and navigate a situation in which one finds oneself multiply embedded. Such an attempt at economic cognitive mapping is thus a kind of transcendence laboriously extorted from immanence, a painstakingly constructed dis-embedding.

In this story, the eighteenth-century invention and stabilisation of diagrams and images of the economy marks a kind of epistemic and political shift with significant repercussions for the very idea of representation. The economic representations which, in intimate conjunction with theoretical developments in political economy, allow one to envision capital, can, for instance, short-circuit or circumvent the problems of a linear, sequential discourse, as in the French physiocrat François Quesnay's reflections on his tableau économique: 'the zigzag, if properly understood, cuts out a whole number of details, and brings before your eyes certain closely interwoven ideas which the intellect alone would have a great deal of difficulty in grasping, unravelling and reconciling by the method of discourse'. The tableau thus allows for a kind of totalising snapshot of temporal and material movements, which a sequential diagram of production would be incapable of figuring.

Quesnay was trained as a physician, and in light of this fact we could also think of the disciplinary sources of these representations: for instance in the passage from blood circulation, to the circulation of humans in cities, to circulations of money and resources. The diagrams are not only diagrams of flow but also of origination (for the physiocrats, in the 'fertile' relation between landowners and farmers). It is crucial then also to think of the metaphorical reservoirs from which these representations draw, for instance the relationship to mechanical and organic models of the economy, with their varying presuppositions about the latter's integrity, composition, operation, degradation; and also to link these economic representations to their political counter-parts, thinking of the passage, for instance, from the visibility of Quesnay's table, overseen by legal despotism, to the charting of the effects of the division of labour over time in William Playfair's Commercial and Politics Atlas of 1786, the first major work to use statistical graphs (Playfair is credited with inventing bar, line and pie charts).

Writing on the origins of the economy as an autonomous and self-defined domain, Timothy Mitchell underscores the efficacy and influence of 'mechanical analogies for the functioning of economic processes':

At the same time, professional economists continued to imagine mechanical analogies for the functioning of economic processes. Irving Fisher's 1892 doctoral dissertation, which Paul Samuelson called 'the best of all doctoral dissertations in economics', developed a mechanical model of an economic market consisting of a network of cisterns, levers, pipes, rods, sliding pivots and stoppers, through which the flow of water represented the working of the principle of utility. In 1892 he built a working model of this contraption which he used in his classes at Yale for years, until it wore out, and in 1925 he replaced it with an improved model. Fisher argued that the model provided not just a picture of the market but an instrument of investigation, and that the effect of complex variations in the market could be studied by altering the positions of the various stoppers, levers and pivots.

These activities of modelling, diagramming, and envisioning are thus representational in what is perhaps a counter-intuitive sense, since they break with a model of representation as mirror, photograph, or correlation between signifier and signified, index and referent. As representations of practically-abstract processes and relations, they are also representations of invisibilities.

What is it that we see in fact, when we 'see' the economy? In Buck-Morss's account of Adam Smith's vision, only the results ('invisible except in its commodity effects'), from which, by induction, we infer a process (the division of labour, the real protagonist in Smith, whose distributional effects are spoken of in the providentialist, theological image of the invisible hand): 'We see only the material evidence of the fertile process of the division of labor: the astounding multiplication of objects produced for sale. Commodities pile up'. Parenthetically, we can recall here a famous dramatic flourish from Marx's Capital:

Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face 'No admittance except on business'. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We...