Miserly Thinking/Excessful Geography: From Restricted Economy to Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

Against the horizon of Earthly depletion and social exhaustion, miserly thinking is once again on the ascendancy, catching hold of critical and radical thought as well as the popular and conservative imagination. Whatever its ethicopolitical inflection, miserly thought enjoins one to conserve, constrain, and sustain. It is consumed by scarcity: specifically, the inability of the world to accommodate itself to the insatiable demands that are placed upon it. Faced with lack, miserly thought advances its ethic of restraint, the target of which is everything that would exceed the paucity of means placed at our world's disposal. Pitching itself against miserly thinking, the paper unfolds a form of thought animated by excession rather than immiseration, by a world given as excess rather than as privation. This is accomplished in four parts, the first of which dislodges the grip of miserly thinking by recourse to Georges Bataille's notion of general economy. The paper then considers arguably the best-known form of excessful thinking: Marxian political economy, as rendered by David Harvey. Nevertheless, while this successfully reveals how social formations are animated by surplus rather than by scarcity, its desire to restitute excess remains mired in miserly thinking. Consequently, the third part of the paper considers the fate of excess once it suffuses the whole of existence. With its ontology of association, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory has gone the furthest in this regard. However, this ontology runs aground upon an inconsistent excess held in reserve: plasma. The final part of the paper addresses the limitations of Latour's actor-network theory by way of Alain Badiou's ontology of subtraction. In the final analysis, the sequence of ‘lack’, ‘surplus’, and ‘association’ gives way to the constellation of ‘multiplicity’, ‘situation’, and ‘event’, which is illustrated with reference to the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

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