Governing Inflation: Price and Atmospheres of Emergency

Abstract

Relative price stability is central to the security of valued forms of life in contemporary liberal democracies, and disruptions to price stability can be and have been understood and experienced as emergencies. However, while the relation between price and emergency can be understood in juridico–political terms, this article argues for the importance of attending to the affective dimensions of this relation. This argument is developed through a discussion of the affective life of price in relation to the disruptive event of inflation, an event characterized by an atmosphere of emergency that takes place as a disturbance of the rhythms and relations of which everyday life consists. Haunted by the spectre of this emergency, governing price in liberal democracies needs to be understood not only through regulatory measures designed to act directly upon price, but also in terms of efforts to act upon the affective spacetimes from which price-emergencies can emerge.

Keywords

affect atmosphere deflation emergency inflation price

Introduction

This article examines the relation between price and emergency in liberal democracies in order to contribute to understandings of the affective spacetimes that gather around particular versions of emergency (Anderson and Adey, 2011) as they take place in valued forms of life. The point of departure for the article is the claim that relative price stability is central to the security of these forms of life. Disruptions to this stability can therefore be and are understood and experienced as emergencies – that is, as immediate threats to the conditions that sustain and secure forms of life and which demand an urgent response on the part of governmental institutions and consumer-citizens alike. On one level, price-emergencies can be understood as symptoms and side effects of the emergence of other emergencies – war and weather events are obvious cases in point. In such circumstances, acting upon price through various specified and circumscribed measures becomes a way of mitigating some of the effects of a larger emergency. Here we might point, for instance, to the 1942 Emergency Price Control Act introduced to combat the threat of inflation during the Second World War. Or, to take a more recent example, albeit on a much small scale: in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, businesses in New Jersey were prohibited from raising prices by more than 10 per cent during a 30-day period following the declaration of a state of emergency in that jurisdiction.

Disruption to relative stability of prices can and has been understood as an emergency in and of itself, however: one which, whether in the form of either inflation or deflation, is perceived to have a force and import of its own beyond the status of a derivative effect of a qualitatively different emergency-event. Here we can point to a series of examples: the Weimar hyperinflation of the early 1920s; the inflation in Zimbabwe during the Mugabe regime; the inflation that characterized Western democracies such as the UK and US during the 1970s and early 1980s; and the persistent deflation that has characterized Japan during the past two decades or so. In each case, while the causes of either inflation or deflation might be located in various factors, they come to be defined as problem-events with their own unfolding dynamics and force. The emergence of a concern with such problem-events is an important part of the wider emergence of the economy as a set of relations whose volume and velocity have become targets for a range of biopolitical apparatuses of security in liberal democracies. In this context, the possibility of deviation from optimum levels of price stability demands and justifies the development and enactment of particular kinds of juridico–political, technical, and practical devices and measures designed to both anticipate price-emergencies – whether they take the form of inflation or deflation – and to act upon the processes that may give rise to these emergencies. In some liberal democracies, such as the UK and US, the net effect of this has been to generate the sense that generalized price-emergencies are no longer possible. Others, most notably Germany, remain haunted, at least in part, by the spectre of such emergencies. And others again, like Japan, have been compelled to enact emergency measures designed to act upon the effects of too little price inflation.

The various ways in which the relation between price and emergency figures as a problem for government points to the importance of its juridico–political framing in contemporary liberal democracies. However, while framing the relation between price and emergency in this way is important, it can and should be supplemented in a number of important respects. First, it is far too easy to understand this relation in terms of a more generalized understanding of emergency, which, following Schmitt (1985) and Agamben (2005), can be grasped as the juridico–political designation of a state of exception. Like others, I want to temper the claim that emergency is a generalized condition for contemporary liberal modes of governance, not because this claim lacks a degree of veracity, but because it can only be substantiated through examining the distinctive and different ways in which emergencies, or different ‘versions of emergency’ (Anderson and Adey, 2011), come to matter in and through disruptions of specific configurations of life. Relatedly, and second, a focus on how emergencies are framed juridico–politically can come at the expense of attention to the ways in which emergencies are experienced in the spacetimes of everyday life. Emergencies take place as variable disruptions in the rhythms and relations of which different forms of life consist. They slow down or accelerate some of these rhythms while either fracturing or intensifying relations between things and bodies. Third, and relatedly, this means that attending to the affective life of both price and emergencies is an important part of understanding how price-emergencies come to matter both within everyday life and for the apparatuses of security that take this life as their target.

In this article I argue therefore that even if price-emergencies should be understood in relation to the more general juridico–political framing of emergencies in liberal democracies, grasping the distinctive qualities of these emergencies requires engaging with three important issues. The first issue concerns the particular qualities of price as a material-semiotic (Çalışkan, 2007; Muniesa, 2007) and an affective participant (Smith, 2011) in valued forms of life. The second issue with which it is necessary to engage is the form of affective spacetimes in which price is a participant. Building upon recent work in the social sciences and humanities, in this article I consider these spacetimes as atmospheres. More specifically, I draw out the distinctive spacetimes of emergency that gather around price in relation to the atmospheres of volatility that characterize events of inflation. This discussion then forms the basis for an examination of a third issue: how the affective spacetimes in which price participates become targets of governmental practices and techniques designed to prevent their emergence in the first place. In moving towards a conclusion I examine briefly how the atmospheric politics of price materialize around different versions of emergency.

Securing Price Stability

In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault provides a partial genealogy of the relation between price and security as it is articulated in influential strands of political–economic thought. His starting point is the question of scarcity as a problem of security. As he notes, during the 18th century a shift occurs in political economy away from a concern with the prevention of scarcity though disciplinary mechanisms, and towards treating the reality of scarcity as one that demands a response that modifies and therefore nullifies the worst effects of this reality. In relation to prices, the focus moves from a narrow range of direct disciplinary price controls to a system in which prices are allowed to vary in order to accommodate the ‘self-curbing and self-regulating’ tendencies of the reality of scarcity as a potentially disruptive event (Foucault, 2009: 43). The assumption, as Foucault observes, is that there is a ‘spontaneous regulation in the course of things’ that ‘must replace a regulation by police authority’ (p. 344). This is linked, in turn, with the assumption that the outcome will be the ‘natural’, the ‘normal’, or the ‘good price’: that is, the price that will express adequately and truthfully the variable relations of which the markets consist (p. 31). Price, in other words, becomes an indicator of veridiction for the relations between governmental practice and the natural functioning of markets.

However, as Foucault continues, the relation between price and security comes to figure rather differently in the emergence of variations of neoliberal thinking during the 20th century. Instead of something left to vary as part of the natural functioning of markets, price is now something that needs to be stabilized to ensure that economic life and market activity can take place. In this context, the ‘main objective of regulatory action will necessarily be price stability, understood not as fixed prices but as control of inflation’ (Foucault, 2010: 138–139). As he writes, what is therefore to be secured or saved, ‘first of all and above all, is the stability of prices’ (p. 139). Critically, as Foucault makes clear, in this model of government, price is not something upon which one should act directly.

Brief as they are, Foucault’s remarks on price serve as an important point of departure for linking biopolitical concerns with the security of forms of life with an analysis of the relation between price and emergency. However, before doing so, Foucault’s remarks in this respect need some qualification. First, the relation between price, security and emergency has also been shaped by the necessity of dealing with other urgent threats, most notably war. While the relation between war and inflation is one that has figured regularly as a problem for government, we can point to the Second World War as a particularly important juncture in how this relation comes to be articulated through apparatuses of security centred on emergency. The significance of this event is that it was in many ways an enormous experiment in governing economic life. Price was critical here, not least due to the problems posed to the war effort by inflation. Thus, in the early years of the war, the Federal Government experimented with different emergency price measures, before enacting the Emergency Price Control Act in 1942 (see Freund, 1942). This act was framed by an understanding of the particular requirement of emergency war power that, as a ‘power not created by the emergency of war [but] a power given to meet that emergency’, is one that ‘permits the harnessing of the entire energies of the people in a supreme co-operative effort’ (Hughes, 1934, in Freund, 1942: 78). The significance of these emergency price measures in the US during the Second World War is not simply juridico–political, however: they also reveal how price becomes the focus of a quasi-experimental ensemble of systematic practices and technical measures that are periodically adjusted and modified as the emergency takes place.

Following the Second World War, the question of the necessity of emergency price controls continued to be debated in relation to the ongoing problem of securing post-war stability and, beyond that, in relation to the effects of the mobilization economy associated with the Korean War and the Cold War. Writing in 1951 during the Korean War, JK Galbraith (1951) made the case for the continued necessity of direct price controls as measures required to secure a particular form of life. As he put it:

if we are to be reasonably secure against long-continued and increasingly rapid inflation – and I shall not pause to argue the very great issues in simple equity, effective government, and conservation of democratic values which depend upon our avoiding this danger – we cannot exclude from use any weapon that is necessary for the defense. (p. 15; see also Galbraith, 1946)

Second, Foucault says little about how measures designed to secure price stability, either directly or indirectly, are accompanied by techniques for addressing the relation between these efforts and the security of the valued forms of life of those who will bear the cost of these controls. Here we might recall the fact that despite his concern with how domestic activity, including spending and saving, becomes part of the purview of governmental rationalities, Foucault (2010) tells us comparatively little about the reverse: that is, notwithstanding his emphasis, when writing in the 1970s, on how the ‘crisis of the apparatus of governmentality is currently experienced, lived, practiced, and formulated’ (p. 70), Foucault is largely silent on how governmental rationalities about price become present in everyday life through a range of presentational media practices. Insofar as the role of the media does not really figure in Foucault’s work more generally, it is hardly surprising that he does not attend to the significance of practices of mediated publicization in this process of governing economic life. These practices are particularly important with respect to efforts to govern prices, however. Thus, the imposition of direct price controls has often been accompanied and supported by public information campaigns designed to explain the broader context for these campaigns and to situate them in relation to a wider set of valued forms of life and the affects of these forms of life. The Second World War is a case in point here (see Katona, 1942). During this conflict, campaigns encouraged citizens to act prudently in order not only to help the war effort, but also to secure the conditions for post-war stability (see McCormack, 2012).

Equally, and remaining within the US context, we can see something similar in the radio and television addresses made by US presidents in relation to the periodic threat of price-emergencies. While there are obvious examples of such addresses during wartime, they were also an important part of the way in which inflation figured as an emergency in economic and political life during the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations in the 1970s and early 1980s. For instance, empowered by the 1970 Economic Stabilization Act, the Nixon administration introduced a series of emergency measures in 1971, including a 90-day wage and price freeze. On the occasion of the announcement of his New Economic Policy in 1971, Nixon made a televised address in which he emphasized how the ‘temporary’ nature of his price-freeze, and its reliance upon ‘voluntary cooperation’ in the absence of an elaborate enforcement administration, made this measure qualitatively different from strict systems of price controls about which many commentators had expressed such reservations. In June 1973 he returned to this issue, announcing another 60-day price-freeze. Again he noted that this measure was temporary, and was ‘not designed to get us permanently into a controlled economy’ but was designed as a ‘better way to get us out of a controlled economy’ (Nixon, 1973). In this context, everyday economic life becomes the focus of a range of emergency measures whose implementation is always accompanied by efforts to address publics through the rendering explicit of inflation as a matter of shared concern.

These examples suggest a third way in which Foucault’s remarks about the relation between price stability and security need to be supplemented. While Foucault points to the emergence of the imperative to secure price stability without acting upon price through direct controls, he actually says little about what it is that needs to be acted upon. On one level, as the experience of monetarism in the 1970s and 1980s suggests, we might say what is acted upon is the wider monetary basis for economic life through, for instance, interest rates. But there is also something else to which we should attend here. The presidential speeches of Nixon hint at what this is, based as they are upon the recognition that governing price, as much as any other ‘national effort’, requires both an appeal to collective action and the targeting of morale as something excessive of emergency measures while also apparently critical to their success (see also Anderson, 2010). For Nixon, speaking in 1969, the issue was framed thus: ‘To cool inflation, we must curb “inflation psychology”.’ Or, put otherwise, ‘We are converting the fear of perpetual inflation into a growing hope for price stability’ (Nixon, 1969: np).

The Affective Materiality of Price

To develop this discussion of the relation between price, emergency, and affect further we need to consider the kinds of things prices are and, moreover, how prices participate in both securing and destabilizing the spacetimes of valued forms of life. Foucault, of course, is not the only social theorist in whose work we find an engagement with questions of price. Here we might note Durkheim’s (1947, 1992) ideas about prices as social facts; Simmel’s writing about price in the context of his analysis of money and, relatedly, his fear of price inflation (Simmel, 1907); and Bourdieu’s (2005) consideration of the relation between price and taste (see Beckert, 2011). However, perhaps the most sustained engagement with questions of price as a participant in the generation of social worlds can be found in recent work in the social studies of finance on the economization and marketization of worlds. In such work, to be sure, the category of price remains an open one. Thus, as Fabian Muniesa (2007: 377) puts it, under the heading of price we can include ‘items as diverse as: an agreement to close a transaction between two counterparts, a tag on a grocery shelf, an expert’s indicative estimate of what the fair value of something should be or a synthetic input for a mathematical formula’.

Nevertheless, a number of important points about prices can be derived from such work. The first is that prices are not just indicators of socially embedded forms of economic life, but are performative devices that allow those forms of life to cohere in different ways as inhabitable spacetimes. That is, rather than aggregate outcomes of individual decision-making, prices are material-semiotic devices that facilitate the economization and marketization of a range of things and relations (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010). This is not to say that prices are stable market devices: as Çalışkan (2007) argues, even within relatively well defined market milieus, various price-forms and pricing practices contribute to the production of what is only later accepted as a market price. Second, prices shape the temporality of economic activity in ways that hold open and hold together spacetimes. Most obviously, of course, prices are devices for incorporating futures into the present. Equally, uncertainty about future prices may shape activity in the present, to the extent that prices participate in the sensed intensity and volatility of the present as a domain of economic life.

Then, and third, the form taken by prices – what Donald Mackenzie (2009) calls their material embodiment – makes a difference to how prices participate in the performative constitution and experience of economic and market activity. For instance, as Mackenzie observes, the material-semiotic form taken by prices in practices of arbitrage demands particular modes of organized response and learned styles of bodily comportment. This, in turn, points to a fourth important issue – the ‘affective fact’ (Massumi, 2005) of price. Price changes do not just register as abstractions on trading screens or in technical documents. They are felt as modifications of capacities to act, as contractions of horizons of possibility, or as demands to spend or save to different extents. They are felt as transformations in relations between consumers and things, between money and the materiality of value. They are a palpable dimension of the affective life or structure of feeling of the ordinary in relation to different experiences of markets such as those, for instance, that are organized around the buying and selling of homes (Smith, 2011). Thus, while there is no straightforward equivalence between price and affect, it is certainly the case that the movement of one can and has been taken as in some sense indicative of the variation of another. As Audrey Jaffe (2010) has demonstrated in relation to the stock market in the US, it is possible to trace an ‘archive wherein changes in the prices of stock and shares [come] to be inscribed in the bodies’ of individuals, in the same way that ‘hearts and pulses are said to echo what is defined, reciprocally… as the somatic rhythm of the market’s fluctuation’ (p. 19). Developing this further, we can understand prices as indicators of affect at the same time as they participate in the performative generation of affects within and across economic life and markets. It is this dimension of the life of prices to which Gabriel Tarde (see Latour and Lépinay, 2009) also encourages attention. Following Tarde, we can think of the movement and relative volatility of prices and price-indices as indicators of waves of affect as they flow across bodies and their orientations.

It is this affective dimension of the life of price to which I want to pay closer attention here, and more specifically the kinds of affective spacetimes in which price is a participant. Here we might note how prices participate in the localized generation of spacetimes of affective intensity defined by the relative urgency of acting in relation to a price and the surprise, anger, or joy that shape this response: something known in the US as ‘sticker-shock’. Much of the recent theorization of price has focused on relatively privileged market sites such as financial institutions, but we can also extend this to think about how price participates thus at a range of less privileged consumption sites, from street markets to supermarkets. Consider, for instance, how the material form price takes – small, discrete signs or loud, garish, brightly coloured signs – shapes the affective quality or atmospheres of a space. Or consider how the practice of price reduction on goods near the end of their shelf life in supermarkets, often near the end of the day, generates discrete and limited gatherings organized around the anticipation of securing a discount price below the norm.

This, in turn, points to a wider mediated structure of feeling in which price figures materially, semiotically, and affectively: a structure of feeling exemplified in popular cultural formats such as game shows. First aired in 1956, The Price Is Right is the longest running game show in the US. As a consumer experience, the show obviously celebrates the importance and spectacle of price in everyday life. It also demonstrates vividly, however, how prices participate in the generation of affective spacetimes. Affects – hope, disappointment, despair – gather round prices. And The Price Is Right deliberately engineers and modifies these affects. In this context, what counts as a good price is not just one that is right in terms of the process of veridiction about which Foucault writes. Insofar as a price is right, it is one that feels right. And this feeling is distributed across and between bodies.

The simultaneously localized and distributed qualities of the affects of price can be understood in terms of the concept of atmosphere. Recent work in social and cultural theory has sought to grasp the affective qualities of spacetimes in atmospheric terms (Ahmed, 2010; Anderson, 2009; Anderson and Adey, 2011; Berlant, 2011; Bissell, 2010; McCormack, 2008). Atmospheres are dynamic distributions of feeling generated as part of what Theresa Brennan (2004) calls the ‘transmission of affect’. As Ben Anderson (2009: 80) has outlined, the concept of atmosphere has been mobilized across a range of practices and disciplines to grasp the ‘indeterminate affective “excess” through which intensive space-times can be created’. Such an atmospherics provides a way of grasping the affects that circulate and emerge within discrete and relatively constrained spacetimes – a theatre, or a railway carriage, for instance, or the room in which an emergency scenario is staged. However, it can also be mobilized to grasp the qualities of spacetimes that are both more distributed and of much longer duration, and which serve as the generative conditions for economic activity – conditions that become the targets of governmental rationalities and practices.

However, by mobilizing atmosphere thus, the point is not simply to argue that nominally economic events, including those characterized by price volatility or inflation, can be described in atmospheric terms, as is already the case with a great deal of popular and journalistic commentary upon collective economic states of affairs. This is obviously the case in relation to inflation and deflation. It is worth noting here that the term ‘inflationary atmosphere’ is employed commonly by economists and economic commentators to name the quality of a period of inflation as an event distributed across economic life that exceeds rational decision making (e.g. Bailey, 1956; Baumol, 1958; Shiller, 1997). Within this context, atmosphere is used to name the collective affects of an economic conjuncture taken to be a real yet somehow inexplicable and therefore potentially ungovernable quality of that conjuncture. For instance, Keynes noted that ‘a gradual rising tendency will create the wrong atmosphere. And no-one can predict at what point a general movement of wages and prices will break loose’ (cited in Trevithick, 1975: 108).

The term ‘atmosphere’, like ‘bubble’, can often be employed as a conceptual device with which to name, without really getting analytical purchase on, the affective intensities of economic life (Garber, 2000). At the same time, of course, through their very deployment, the terms atmosphere and bubble become generative elements in the unfolding of the events they are used to name. Or, in the vocabulary of the sociology of finance, these terms become market devices that perform the conditions of which they are taken to be indicators. Here, however, I want to go beyond this by examining two issues in more detail. The first is the form that atmospheres take and, more specifically, the form they take in relation to periods of price volatility that are experienced as emergencies. However, and second, if emergencies are conceived in atmospheric terms then the question of how they are governed must also be addressed through attention to specific techniques and practices designed to render them in some manner actionable: that is, techniques and practices that generate or modulate – either by amplifying or dampening – the affective materiality of atmospheres (see Anderson and Adey, 2011).

Price and Atmospheres of Emergency

In developing this discussion, I consider inflation as a problem-event in which the affective life of price in relation to emergency is rendered especially starkly. There are of course different examples to which we could attend here including, for instance, Argentina (see Elena, 2007) and Brazil (see O’Dougherty, 2002). Equally, the problems of price volatility and inflation were central to the sense of emergency that characterized economic and political life in Britain during the 1970s and into the 1980s (see, for example, Sandbrook, 2012). Here, however, I want to focus on the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s (see Fergusson, 2010). This choice is framed in part by how this event figured as a traumatic and formative experience in the lives of a number of influential social theorists, philosophers, and indeed economic thinkers.¹ But this inflation is also particularly significant because the broader post-conflict condition of economic turmoil within which it took place can be seen as critical to the wider emergence, during the 1920 and 1930s, of ‘economic emergency’ as a category that names a distinct kind of political–economic problem-event within Western liberal democracies. This is an emergency that calls forth and demands appropriate measures, and which arguably becomes a important juncture in the articulation of biopolitical apparatuses of security (see Scheuerman, 1999–2000).

Regardless of the wider causes of the Weimar inflation, at the centre of this event is the experience of material, representational, and affective volatility in different domains of life. Price is critical here both because it links these domains while also amplifying a sense of volatility across them. In what sense, then, might we understand this event in atmospheric terms? As a starting point here we can note how inflation as an event takes place as an incorporeal transformation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988): that is, inflation as an incipient tendency within forms of life crosses a threshold such that it can be named and identified as an atmospheric event that disrupts these forms of life. This is the difference between inflation – as a sometimes slow, creeping, background process, and ‘an inflation’ – as a disruptive event in which price volatility becomes a condition of generalized crisis. This event has a profoundly incorporeal quality because it exists beyond the grasp of any individual body or entity: like a battle, an inflation can be understood in terms of non-localizable subject-less relations and forces that are neutral with respect to whatever or whoever is caught up in their affective intensities. This is an emergency defined by an urgent condition in which the affirmation of value becomes absolutely necessary and increasingly impossible in a condition of volatility that exceeds any apparent control (see also Widdig, 2001). At the same time, some caution is necessary here: it is easy to grant to atmosphere the quality of a kind of super-organic agent existing beyond the relations of which it is composed. The Weimar hyperinflation, as much as any inflation (or indeed a prolonged deflation), is an atmospheric event registering deeply in and sustained through the habits, affects, and orientations of those caught up in its volatility. Equally, this event is felt as a modification of and, more specifically, a diminishment of the capacity of bodies to act.

It is necessary therefore to be more precise about the form taken by the atmospheres of emergency that characterize price volatility. At least four points are worth making here. First, atmospheres of inflation are characterized by an increase in the velocity of everyday life such that the affective intensity and pressure of the present is heightened as confidence in the future becomes diminished. The present becomes more all-enveloping, and its pressure cannot be relieved by a sense of stability extending into the future. During an inflation, in Benjamin’s (2009: 62) words, it is ‘as if the column of air whose weight everyone carries had here-abouts, in defiance of all law, suddenly become palpable’. Equally, and second, atmospheres of inflation are generative of, and in turn sustained by, the affective movement of bodies – by their habits, gestures, and relations. During an inflation, the practices and habits of which everyday life consists are radically destabilized in response to the volatility of prices. The intensity of shopping, saving, and spending is transformed in response to the urgency of the event (see O’Dougherty, 2002). Indeed, these practices become everyday tactics for responding to the emergency. If, rather than a taken for granted figure, price presents itself as an indicator of emergency, then it demands an urgent response, whether this takes the form of immediate consumption or hoarding.

Third, and relatedly, these atmospheres intensify around, and can be precipitated by, the affective relations between people and objects – relations that are articulated in many cases through price. This process can be described in terms of a change in the affective tone or temperature of things as they participate in everyday life, a process outlined by Benjamin (2009: 62) as akin to the withdrawal of objects from people:

The warmth is going out of things. Objects of daily use are quietly yet insistently repulsing man. Altogether, he faces a huge task every day, overcoming the secret resistances (not just the obvious ones, either) that they put up. He must cancel out their coldness with his own warmth if he does not wish to stiffen at their touch.

Conversely, the acquisition of things promising to stabilize value provides a way of organizing the present such that it might be extended into the future with some degree of confidence. If price stability is an affective and material value, hoarding is a way of generating and storing this value. In this sense, the presence of a hoard, set aside for the future, is not just evidence of a material resource – it is also a specific kind of affective-material assemblage.² Moreover, if, as Benjamin reminds us, an inflation is characterized by the withdrawal of things from humans, then hoarding works in the other direction – things once again take on the powers of a strange attraction (see Bennett, 2012), generating warmth of association and promising the survival of a form of living on.

Fourth, the affects and effects of inflation are differentially distributed. For those on fixed incomes, inflation is a disaster and depreciation of enormous proportions. But it is an opportunity for many others, not least for those with foreign currency reserves and those who have debt. The critical thing here is that the differential effects of price volatility generate opportunities for mobilizing political affects of different valence, a process that can also be observed in circumstances where inflation has not crossed the threshold of an emergency, a point to which I return below.

A fifth and final point concerns the almost miraculous manner in which an inflation can be brought to an end. This seems to take place through the imposition of measures that are less about the return to some kind of economic security than they are about the modulation of an affective atmosphere. For those caught up in an inflation, it appears that this event will never end, and that all one can do is anticipate the ongoing arrival of the crisis through a form of vigilant watchfulness. Benjamin (2009: 58) puts it thus:

There is nothing to be done, consequently, but to keep on looking, in constant expectation of the final onslaught, for nothing but the extraordinary, which alone can bring salvation. This strained situation of the most tense, uncomplaining watchfulness, really might, since we are in secret touch with the forces laying siege to us, make the miracle happen.

Put this way, an event of hyperinflation seems to exceed the category of emergency as something actionable, that is, as an event in which planned intervention promises to make a difference (see Anderson and Adey, 2012). It almost seems to become instead a catastrophe that has already happened, in which there ‘is only one limit beyond which things cannot go on: destruction’ (Benjamin, 2009, p. 58). And yet, as Deleuze and Guattari (1988) note, in the context of the Weimar inflation, a miracle of sorts does occur. On 15 November 1923 an emergency currency, the Rentenmark, is introduced. This pragmatic act effects a strange, incorporeal transformation that appears to halt monetary inflation at a stroke (p. 20). Things slow down. People hold on to money for longer and longer. The duration and sensed stability of the present expands, tethered by things whose price is no longer so volatile.

In sum, prices participate in the performative generation of affective spacetimes that can be grasped as atmospheres whose intensity and velocity increase as they become emergencies. An inflation, in this sense, is an atmosphere of emergency in a radically incorporeal sense while also, critically, transforming the situated capacities of bodies to affect and be affected by others. And it is an atmosphere of emergency in the sense that it imbues everyday life with a feeling of urgency that demands a response in the form of consumption, hoarding, or saving, while at the same time always threatening to exceed the capacity of these responses to make a difference.

But an inflationary atmosphere in this sense also names the condition within which a particular kind of economic emergency may be incubating. The difficulty is in recognizing when these incubating tendencies cross a threshold such that they become a recognizable problem-event. With this in mind, it is easy to grasp the force of Canetti’s (1984[1960]: 187) claim that ‘in an inflation something happens which is certainly never intended and which is so dangerous that anyone with any measure of public responsibility who is capable of foreseeing it must fear it’.

Atmospheres of Vigilance and Promise

Canetti’s claim foregrounds the importance of the relation between inflation, security and foresight. And as such, they anticipate the more general emergence of a biopolitical concern with the relation between price stability and security in Western life as one that becomes the focus of governmental apparatuses. Central to these apparatuses of security is the importance of guarding against the emergence of price-emergencies before they develop. And key here is the elaboration of systems of vigilance through price-watching. Price-watching has been central to governing price and price-emergencies since the Second World War, during which techniques for monitoring and surveying price on an enormous scale established the basis for post-war systems of price control. Thus, a central part of the remit of the Office of Price Administration, established during the war, was to monitor prices throughout the USA, a task it undertook through the employment of an army of fieldworkers charged with visiting and checking stores and various retail outlets (Jacobs, 1997).

A concern with maintaining an atmosphere of vigilant price-watchfulness continued during the Cold War. A paper published in 1953 by Faragher and Heimann captures a sense of the urgency of this threat. It outlines the value of price-stability in relation to the peculiar nature of the Cold War as an emergency. The principles that should guide policies of price-stabilization in this context, they suggest, are as follows:

First, a stable economy is a paramount object of national policy; Second, we are in a limited emergency of unlimited duration; Third, for the duration of the emergency we face the prospect of serious threats to economic stability; Fourth, it is a responsibility of the national government to deal with these threats.

As they continued:

The underlying economic conditions of a cold-war period differ fundamentally from those of a total-war period. In an economy geared to the efforts of an all out war, inflation is like an acute disease. The danger is general and immediate. During a period of cold war, inflation resembles a chronic and at times a latent condition. The areas of infection are for the most part localised. However, there is an ever-present danger of general contagion. (p. 41)

Here we can see the emergence of a way of thinking about price-emergency that parallels developments in other areas of security and preparedness (see Collier and Lakoff, 2014). Price-emergency is not something immediate and urgent, but something that could become a systemic disruption within the context of a wider if limited emergency. It requires a system of vigilance for detecting any incubating price movement before it materializes as an emergency. For Faragher and Heimann (1953: 41), this was part of a four-stage strategy of preparedness, the most basic and continuous of which – the standby level –

would involve a constant searching appraisal of economic conditions. Inflationary forces must be discovered before they generate unstabilising price movements. Current studies must be maintained in all sensitive and major areas. Plans must be ready for all the more important contingencies.

For Faragher and Heimann, then, the task was to deal with a threat that would remain for the duration of the cold war, even if ‘its exact form’ would ‘undoubtedly … vary greatly at different times’.

While no longer always framed in relation to military and geopolitical threats, systems of vigilance and watchfulness remain central to apparatuses of security designed to govern price and guard against price-emergencies in contemporary liberal democracies. Through such systems, price is rendered visible, actionable, and potentially governable. On one level we can point again here to the emergence of systems for generating data about price, and for converting this data into averages and indices that are publicly presentable and recognizable, while remaining contested. Especially important here are price indices, such as the CPI and RPI, that, as ‘market devices’ (Muniesa et al., 2007), allow markets to be performed in particular ways, and which by making stability or volatility visible, contribute both to the distribution of economic affects while also making inflation potentially governable. Again, it is not insignificant here that such indices emerged in the US in the wake of the Second World War, and on the basis of the kinds of experiments in monitoring and collecting data that had been undertaken during that war. Equally important here is the more recent development of technologies of abstraction, such as the fan charts used by the Bank of England, that act as indicative arrays of possible futures for price stability.

These systems of vigilance are linked to the cultivated credibility of a promissory logic: that is, they are defined by the promise to maintain, as far as possible, the conditions in which the volatile atmosphere of price instability will be rendered impossible. Efforts to govern prices in Western liberal democracies over the past 30 or so years have shifted away from direct price controls to a more indirect monetary policy, crystallized under the heading of inflation targeting, a policy implemented in different ways (see also Mann, 2010, Truitt, 2013). If price controls are a disciplinary effort to act upon the present emergency in which price participates, inflation targeting aims to act upon a general atmosphere of expectation as an orientation towards the future. The aim here is to stabilize expectations and generate enough confidence about the future such that the urgency of emergency is no longer thinkable or palpable. In other words, inflation targeting aims towards the goal of price stability, but it does not act directly upon price: instead what it aims to act upon or modulate are the broader monetary and affective conditions within which economic activity takes place.

We can situate the promissory logic of inflation targeting in relation to the emergence of an ensemble of biopolitical programmes and activities designed to act upon and ensure the ongoing activation of economic life as an open field of processual activity (see Massumi, 2005; also Anderson, 2012; Rose and Miller, 1990). The affective spacetimes of price are governed here through an ensemble of apparatuses of security designed to prevent – through anticipating and targeting – the emergence of price-emergencies without imposing anything like price controls. In general terms one of the key effects of this shift has been – for governmental institutions and consumer citizens – the displacing of the relation between price and emergency into the future, even if the causal relation between policy and outcome remains impossible to ascertain. And yet, in such policies, inflation – and perhaps equally deflation – remains as a spectre insofar as it exists as ‘a possible event, an event that could take place, and which one tries to prevent before it becomes reality’ (Massumi, 2009: 33).

While media announcements and addresses have long been used to support the imposition of systems of price controls, central to monetary policy since the 1980s, and especially monetary policy under the aegis of inflation targeting, has been a recognition that the very fact that monetary policy is communicated, and the way in which this communication takes place, is a critical part of this policy. The effectiveness of the policy itself is assumed to be dependent upon how credible its communication makes it to those to whom it is addressed. The performative power of the policy announcement as a market device is taken as a given by those at the centre of key governmental institutions. Thus, as recently as 4 April 2013, the future Chair of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, in a speech about communication in monetary policy, observed that ‘sometimes the explanation is the policy’ (Yellen, 2013: np). Drawing a contrast between transportation policy and monetary policy, Yellen noted that it makes little difference to the success of the former whether or not it is ‘announced at a televised press conference or in a low-key press release – or even if there is no announcement’. Such claims in turn assume that the economy, and more precisely the market, is populated by price-watchers. As the Fed puts it in an explanatory document, ‘market participants closely follow data releases and statements by Federal Reserve officials, watching for clues that the economy and prices are on a different trajectory than had been thought, which would have implications for the stance of monetary policy’ (p. 17).

The Politics of Price-Emergencies

The efficacy or coherence of practices of watching and promising should not be overstated, however, and for a number of reasons. First, such efforts remain based upon the idea of a kind of national economic and affective community whose intensity, extent, and duration are variable, fragile, and partial to say the least. Appeals to the importance of imputed senses of affective togetherness are obviously more frequently made during periods officially or semi-officially identified as emergencies – indeed they may be part of what gives these emergencies their affective tone and tenor. Beyond these events, however, the target audience of efforts to act upon the affective life of price may be far more ill-defined, and fractured by all kinds of competing claims and affiliations. This is heightened by how the affects and effects of inflation/deflation are distributed across generations and between debtors and creditors. Moreover, and second, while targeted at the stability of forms of life in nation-states, efforts to secure relative price stability operate in a global context where volatility is potentially just as valued as stability, and, indeed, where the capacity to distribute inflation and/or deflation remains an important form of political and geopolitical power.

Third, while Foucault draws our attention to the importance of securing price stability without acting directly upon price, different governmental rationalities can and do co-exist in this regard. This, in turn, means that price-emergencies are experienced in different ways. Here we might point to how, in February 2013, the government of Argentina, after securing agreement with all large national and international supermarket chains operating in that country, imposed a series of price freezes intended to control spiralling inflation. Extended for two months at the beginning of April, these controls represented the latest effort by the Fernández administration to achieve a degree of price stability in a country where inflation has frequently been a fact of everyday life. Just as notable here, of course, was the fact that the government in Argentina had earlier prohibited the publication in popular media of ‘unofficial’ measures of inflation, measures that were at odds with official indices.

Fourth, this points to the importance of competing efforts to generate and politicize different versions of emergency. Part of this can involve producing indices of price volatility that attempt to render inflation explicit in ways that challenge official figures, something that is a feature of the Argentinian context noted above.³ But it can also involve the deliberate mobilization of the spectre of particular events as part of a politics of comparison designed to amplify the affective force of possible price-emergencies incubating in the present. Consider, for example, how, in the wake of the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the spectre of inflation seemed to return once again to the US (see Krugman, 2010). On 13 October 2008, the conservative commentator Glenn Beck let his audience in on a secret during his nightly TV show:

I got a call from a friend of mine who is very highly placed. Everybody I know, Glenn, is reading about the Weimar Republic, and I said, Oh Jeez, the loaf of bread, with the wheelbarrow full of money, republic? He said uh huh. It is what a lot of people believe is coming. Try to buy a book online about the Weimar Republic. You will have a hard time finding some of the books. A lot of them are suddenly, gone. Who is reading them all, and why now?

For Beck, the mere fact that the books were being read was proof enough that something was happening, or at least was about to begin happening. Someone, somewhere, was building a library about inflation, stealing a march on everyone else by preparing for its arrival as a crisis. For Beck, whoever was reading these books was capable of foreseeing inflation and must be fearing it, and was therefore acting in the present to mitigate against its likely effects. And the implication was that so should the audience. Meanwhile, above the screen banner of ‘inflation nation’, Beck proceeded to interview Peter Schiff, an ‘investment advisor’ and would-be politician, who claimed that the rate of inflation would be 20 or 30 per cent by 2010. According to Schiff, ‘government won’t admit it but it will be.’ Beck responded by saying ‘right’, but ‘we’ll feel it.’ The implication was of course that inflation would be palpable, even if official indicators would not reveal its true extent. Arguably, commentators such as Beck are engaged here in a version of the kind of price-watching outlined above, albeit one geared towards a constituency composed of preparedness enthusiasts and patriotic ‘moms’. Rather than promising to secure stability through vigilance, as in the case of the Federal Reserve, for Beck, conversely, this is about generating a low level atmosphere of fear through divining the signs of an incubating emergency. For Beck, prices are political devices precisely because they are the centre of an assemblage of sites, practices, bodies, and devices that give consistency to ordinary ways of going on in the world, while also providing an indicator of emergencies that might be threatening this consistency.⁵

Conclusion

Foucault’s (2009, 2010) analyses of price in relation to the problem of security and the emergence of forms of neoliberalism in the 20th century help us to grasp the biopolitical entanglements of scarcity and security (Nally, 2011), and provide a way of framing the significance of price volatility in relation to the wider emergency of emergent life (e.g. Cooper, 2010; Dillon, 2007). However, as I have shown, this analysis needs to be extended and supplemented in important ways. Specifically, thinking of price in terms of the affective spacetimes of security (see Anderson and Adey, 2011) allows us to develop an account of the distinctive kinds of emergencies in which prices participate. Moreover, it allows us to examine what is being governed when price becomes the target of techniques that make the affective spacetimes of price-emergency palpable and actionable by bringing them into the present or displacing them into the future.

While price controls remain available as emergency measures in contemporary liberal democracies, securing the right level of relative price stability is no longer normally a matter of acting directly upon price. Instead, it involves acting upon the conditions in which prices emerge and circulate and of which they come to be taken as indicators. To be sure, this still involves using monetary policy instruments, but in concert with efforts to generate the right atmospheres within which those instruments are understood. To some extent this is about managing surprise: about amplifying it or dampening the degree of surprise generated by policy announcements. There may well be important questions about the value of this approach when those making the announcements appear themselves to be surprised by turns of economic events. However, the ongoing significance of this approach was exemplified when, in March 2013, the Bank of Japan announced an extensive programme of monetary expansion. This was designed to end a two decade-long period of persistent deflation by generating inflationary expectations via the public naming of a price stability target of 2 per cent. This event was affective in at least two senses. First, it generated sufficient surprise to count as an event. Then, and second, central to the announcement of these measures was the effort to act upon the collective affects that shape economic life. Thus, one way in which the announcement of a policy of inflation targeting in Japan was understood was in terms of a concerted effort to act upon and modulate ‘Keiki’, a term taken to mean the atmosphere that characterizes business conditions (Junichi, 2013).

A final point worth noting here is that such emergency measures assume the possibility of a distinctive kind of power. In a discussion of financial derivatives, Melinda Cooper (2010) has argued that what is emerging in a post-financial crisis world is a kind of atmospheric power that trades on the turbulence of events that take place as distributions of volatility across different domains of life. Arguably, however, price volatility has always been atmospheric. It has been atmospheric in a meteorological sense: disturbances in expected weather patterns, or freak weather events, can generate sudden price increases. And price volatility has also long been atmospheric in an affective sense. Efforts to govern price-emergencies, both after they emerge and through apparatuses of security such as systems of vigilance designed to make their emergence unthinkable, therefore trade on the possibility of acting through a form of atmospheric power. This is a form of power that takes as its target affective spacetimes: spacetimes that while diffuse and distributed are also localized around price as one of the most important indicators of the stability and security of valued forms of ordinary life.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the editors, Peter Adey, Ben Anderson, and Stephen Graham, for the invitation to participate in this special issue. I am grateful to the TCS editors and the anonymous referees for their very helpful and constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

Derek McCormack is Associate Professor in the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on nonrepresentational theory, affect, and atmospheres. He is the author of Refrains For Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces (Duke University Press, 2013) and, co-author, with Alan Latham, Kim McNamara and Donald McNeill, of Key Concepts in Urban Geography (Sage, 2008).

This article is from a TCS Special Issue on Governing Emergencies (32.2, March 2015), edited by Peter Adey, Ben Anderson & Stephen Graham.

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