Lecture | Research Seminar
(CANCELED) Visible hands, audible voices: Economy as a Matter of Fact and a Matter of Concern
- Date
- Monday 31 January 2022
- Time
- Location
- Pieter de la Court
- Room
- 1.A01
This talk explores how the economy is related to what it means to be human and how the economy can subvert or annul our basic humanity. Specifically, I look at how the communicative protocols of a policy framework, known prosaically as “inflation targeting,” recast the contingencies of subject formation. A new technology of money—drawn out of a specific intellectual tradition and orchestrated by particular institutional actors—has had implications for the subjectivities animating our lives together. This is the stuff of our politics, an emergent politics that is only dimly reflected in conventional economic analyses, but fully available to us by other means. Building on the work of Bruno Latour (2005) I explore how “matters of fact” interact with “matters of concern.” In other words, I am interested in demonstrating how regimes of “science” and regimes of “policy” enliven reciprocally key elements of the human condition.
On location / Online
Due to the uncertainty around the Covid-19 measurements, this seminar might take place online. We aim to have an on-campus seminar, but keep an eye on this page.
About Douglas R. Holmes
Douglas R. Holmes is professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. He has published widely on topics ranging from the changing life worlds of Italian peasants, the rise and appeal of the far right in Europe, and the cultural worlds created in and through banking. Hehas a longstanding collaboration with George E. Marcus focused on the "re-functioning" of ethnography and the realigning of the roles and the relationships that animate the work of the ethnographer. His works include Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy (Princeton 1989), Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton 2000), and, Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks (Chicago 2014).