Writing economies and economies of writing

Introduction

Anyone who publishes in EPA: Economy and Space both engages in writing economies and is subject to the economies of writing. We mean by the first term that the economy as an object of inquiry owes its origin and continued existence to authors writing about it, often, but certainly not always, economists. Economic geographers also contribute. As Buck-Morss (1995: 439) says, ‘every science creates its object’. In this case, it is chiefly the ‘science’ of economics along with other economic prefixed social sciences such as economic geography that through writings create the object of the economy.

Admittedly, there has been some confusion about the direction of causation. Economists (and economic geographers) did not begin writing about the economy because it was suddenly ‘discovered’, like some pre-existing star or planet. Rather, the economy only came into existence after economists (and economic geographers) began to write about it. Writing is formative, generative. Of course, activities that we now mark as economic have existed since time immemorial. The point, though, is that for a substantial period no one conceived them as economic. They became economic only once economics as a discipline was invented and labelled them as economic acts. Furthermore, there was no necessity for economics to have been invented. It was a socially contingent event. But once it came into being such activities took on an existence and status they never had before, with a life of their own, subject to manipulation and control.

Through our writing, including in this journal, we participate in (re)producing economies, contributing, circulating and contesting economic knowledges. In making economies discernible and knowable through our texts, we are making economies (Barnes and Christophers, 2018; Gibson, 2019). Furthermore, writing not only makes economies, but allows for the potential reconceptualization of them, for creating alternative versions. Here Gibson-Graham's (1996, 2006) work within economic geography has been exemplary. Their research and writing on postcapitalist economic spaces have helped produce them, offering up alternative possible economic worlds we might inhabit.

By the second term we return to a basic definition of an economy as a system of making and trading things of value. ‘Economies of writing’ highlights that the texts we write/make are valued and traded in our unique scholarly economies of knowledge exchange. That these economies of writing are part of our professional lives signifies both the worth of our texts and the pleasures we take in writing them. Put simply, we would not write if there was not some delight and value in this work. However, by focussing on the economies of academic writing we also emphasise that this journal and its authors are imbricated in complex, often politically fraught, power-laden relationships around writing. There are ever-increasing expectations of academics to publish widely, with impact, but refracted by a political economy of geographical and linguistic bias, structural inequalities and the corporatization and neoliberalisation of universities (Berg et al., 2016; Dufty-Jones and Gibson, 2021). Our writing circulates and ‘counts’ via digital platforms, citation indices and rankings – calculative devices that purport to be transcendent, ‘transparent’ forums for comparability, but that are abstracted from the uneven embodied experiences of academic work within and across different contexts and institutions, and from the realms within which corporeal capacities to write are actually maintained and reproduced (collegial relationships, the domestic sphere) (Mott and Cockayne, 2017). The result is often individual and collective stress and trauma affecting how we write, who we choose to write for, what and which places we choose to write about, who we choose to cite, the outlets in which we seek to publish, even the referencing style we use. But as with the case of writing economies, it is possible to push back, to envision and practice alternate economies of writing that run against the prevailing institutional grain. For example, to write as a collective, to blend authorial identities (as Julie Graham and Kathy Gibson did and still do despite Graham's death in 2010 – J. K. Gibson-Graham), to adopt experimental writing styles, or to write contributions posted on non-refereed social media platforms read by non-academic audiences.

Our intention in this Exchange section, along with a second in preparation that will be published in a subsequent issue, is to explore the themes of writing economies and the economies of writing. Writing is a fundamental component of our professional lives in the academy. It often occupies a significant portion of our day and we are frustrated when we cannot devote as much time as we would like to our writing craft. Writing is also one of the main criteria by which we are judged professionally, determining our cultural capital and social status within the university hierarchy, shaping our academic identity (Bourdieu, 1988). Yet, as a topic, writing is rarely explicitly discussed. Certainly, it is rare in the literature about economy and space in which this journal trades. Rather, writing as a theme is seen as a bit self-indulgent, possibly frivolous, secondary to what is essential: research on economy and space itself. In contrast, we and our contributors believe that economic research cannot be cordoned off from issues of writing. For this reason, the expression ‘writing up’ seems to us wrongheaded, implying that research and writing are two different activities; one taking precedence over the other. Instead, we contend, they are part and parcel of the same activity. Writing goes all the way down. Writing economies and the economies of writing are conjoined, Janus-faced, producing both effects and affects as they interleave, blur and clash.

Writing economies

It is now generally recognised that ‘the economy’ is a product of recent socio-technical practice involving some form of inscription. Depending on the author, ‘the economy’ emerged variously as a separate object of inquiry in Ancient Greece, the eighteenth, nineteenth or mid-twentieth centuries (Buck-Morss, 1995; Dumont, 1977; Foucault, 1991; Mitchell, 1998, 2005, 2008; Polanyi, 1944, 1957; Tribe, 1978, 2015). Without its definite article, ‘economy’ was originally a verb referring to ‘the proper husbanding of material resources or to proper management’. It was not a monolithic object, but ‘a way of acting …, [consisting of] forms of knowledge required for effective action’ (Mitchell, 2008: 1116).

At some historical conjuncture that changed. The economy took the definite article. It was no longer a verb but a noun. That transformation involved writing the economy, where writing is interpreted broadly to include various forms of inscription and calculation including not only words, but symbols, equations, accounting schemes, figures and diagrams (Callon, 1998; Mitchell, 2005). As the French economic anthropologist, Louis Dumont (1977: 24), put it, ‘there is nothing like an economy out there, unless and until men [sic] construct such an object’. In highlighting how economies are constructed through our writing we are not arguing that the materialities, relationships and politics that form the everyday substance of economic entities and practices are fictions. Indeed there is always something more-than-representational about our economies (Christophers, 2016). Approaches that emphasize the performativity of the economic are not incommensurate with historical-materialist conceptions of political economy (Christophers, 2014). Rather, acknowledging the performativity of writing allow us to eschew deterministic and monolithic understandings of economies. Economies are both (re)produced discursively and materially and always unfinished and uncertain.

Through writing, as Buck-Morss (1995: 440) argues, the economy is ‘see[n] whole as if from the outside’. The central elements of the economy along with their relationships become visible. As an outside observer, we see the economy as a separate, independent entity, a thing. Writing also does something else, says Buck-Morss. It allows readers once they have grasped ‘the whole’ to imagine themselves ‘from specific positions inside’ the economy, ‘to find their bearing’ (Buck-Morss, 1995: 440). In turn, this permits forms of management and control, and at the extreme, the possibility of full-blown transformation.

Interpretations differ, though, as to when exactly the economy was first written such that it became a distinct object. Mitchell (1998) argues it was very late, not even a hundred years old, associated with writings by Keynes and even more so metrological operations around national accounting linked to the emerging subdiscipline of econometrics. For others it was in the 19th century, taking its most complete form as neoclassical economics. That was based on a trio of writings all published during the 1870s by respectively Léon Walras, William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger and based on a mathematical analogy with classical mechanics (Mirowski, 1989: ch. 5). For yet others, the economy is older still. Buck-Morss (1995: 440) contends it first surfaced in writings by French Physiocratic economists and embodied in Quesnay's 1758 Tableau Économique, itself founded on William Harvey's earlier 1628 model of blood circulation. In turn, the idea of an economy defined by circulation was further developed in later writings by classical economists such as David Ricardo (his corn economy) and Karl Marx (simple and expanded accumulation). Some have pushed back the date of the founding text even farther. The economic historian and anthropologist Karl Polanyi (1957) in a famous essay suggested that the starting point was with the writing of Aristotle (384–322, BCE) in Ancient Greece, particularly his Οἰκονομικά (the economics). Whatever the date, if there is an exact date, the larger point is that through writing the economy became understood as an independent entity. Economists might claim ‘only to describe this object, but in fact they participated in producing it’ (Mitchell, 2008: 1116).¹

There is another issue here that stems from having multiple different discursive sources of the economy – Keynesian, neoclassical, Marxist, Ricardian, Physiocratic and Aristotelian. How do you choose among them? Which one do you write about? Which one can you write about? It is not possible to carry out an empirical test to know which account of the economy is true. As philosophers of science have recognised for close to a hundred years, theoretical verification cannot be incorrigbly proven even in the physical sciences let alone in the social sciences. Consequently, the economy remains up for grabs. Knowledge of the economy is overdetermined. There are too many explanations of the economy, with none of them definitively provable. The result is that each theoretical tradition writes about the economy from its own logic, but rarely engages the logic of other traditions (Christophers, 2014). They are like ships passing in the night. That said, there are always powerful social and political forces at work – the economies of writing – that shape how in the end the economy is written about at different times, in different disciplines and in particular writing venues.

For example, take this very journal. It began life in the late 1960s as plain Environment and Planning under the editorship of now Sir Alan Wilson. Influenced by the then prevailing national state-led technocratic Keynesianism (leavened by a dash of neoclassical mathematics) found in the UK where the journal originated, contributors typically wrote the economy as a set of equations, as an object to be manoeuvred and planned, to be improved. Under its most recent guise, however, EPA: Economy and Space whose managing editor is Jamie Peck and who in the interests of disclosure also includes as an editor one of this paper's authors, writes the economy quite differently. It is global not national, interconnected, buffeted continuously by crises induced in part by the state's changed function under neoliberalism, and mostly is beyond redemption. The theoretical inspiration is not mainstream Keynesianism, certainly not neoclassicism, but various heterodoxies that for the most part shun Greek letters for more or less standard prose. Likely few of the papers published in the journal's former incarnation would be accepted for publication in its later form and vice versa. The radically changed character of writing the economy even in the same journal points to complex determining forces – disciplinary, sociological, political and economic. Writing the economy clearly exceeds any supposed simple process of bolting on the right words to a pre-existing entity and lining them up in the correct order. There are no right words, no right order. Writing makes economies rather than economies make writing.

Yet, scholars rarely reflect on writing of any kind. Not only do we write economies but economies also make use of writing. The technology of writing was foundational to the ongoing socio-technical reproduction of economies. That importance goes back long into the past The first censuses carried out in Ancient Babylonia around 3800 BCE and written in cuneiform script provided crucial information about what we would now call the economy – numbers of livestock, quantities of butter, honey, vegetables and so on.

Writing, alongside map-making and tabulation, also underpinned colonial enterprises and their trading networks. Belittling the oral traditions of Indigenous cultures, European writing, in concert with charting and counting, rendered colonies and the extractable resources found in them knowable and controllable (cf. Mitchell, 2002). Writing economies was thus bound up in the validation of colonial extractivism with its attendant violence and erasures. The Spanish for example sought to maintain monopoly control over colonial riches through extensive correspondence and meticulous record-keeping. Seville's Archivo General de Indias – the grand archives of the Spanish empire – contain some 43,000 volumes and 80 million pages of documents collected since the 1500s: mercantile letters, bills of exchange, traders’ quotations and ledgers, lists of currency prices at leading ports, shipwreck insurance claims and account books.² In similar vein, the first English language text in economic geography, George Chisholm's (1889) Handbook of Commercial Geography, functioned as a how-to manual for British imperialism. Each page of the book provided basic information vital for maintenance of the British colonial economic geographical project.

Writing therefore unleashes significant epistemological (how do we know?) and ontological (what exists?) impacts on people and places (Dufty-Jones, 2020). Writing not only communicates calculations or findings, but codifies knowledges about economies, with material and social effects. We use writing to know and to make economies. To what extent and to what effect do we consider the impacts and outcomes of our writing about economies beyond the pages on which they are published? How has writing as a normative, creative, disruptive or tactical act, informed what we know about economies, and how have they structured and become manifest in the everyday lives of people and places?

In this Exchange, several contributors tackle dimensions of writing economies. Narayan and Rosenman (this issue) focus on what counts as ‘the economy’ and who decides. Reflecting upon the COVID-19 pandemic and governing choices made amidst emergency circumstances, they widen the scope to consider writing ‘the’ economy during both the crisis and non-crisis. Drawing upon their research on progressive social movements in India and the United States, Narayan and Rosenman consider an alternative conceptualization of economic activity. They ‘propose a public economic geography as a way to acknowledge that knowledge production about the economy is already embedded in the economy itself’, bound up with ‘the material effects of myriad discursive traditions and forms of expertise on the economy’ (Narayan and Rosenman, 2022: xxx).

Therein lies a significant challenge for writers of the economic. Institutionally, metrics exercises such as the Research Excellence Framework in the UK and Excellence for Research in Australia drive researchers to ‘make bolder claims, produce more “impact”, and frame our work against measures of excellence, which we are expected to produce more and more of, more efficiently’ (Saville, 2020: 98). Culturally, disciplines such as economics and economic geography have been accused of reproducing (white) masculine privilege (Dorling, 2019; Pugh, 2020). As criticisms mount over heteromasculine performances of ‘master’ academics controlling the disciplinary narrative and subjects – a charge one might suggest is especially pertinent in ‘economic’ writings – geographers are grappling with how to reconcile strident or negative critique with affirmations of diversity and ambivalence (Kern, 2021; Linz and Secor, 2021; Ruez and Cockayne, 2021; Saville, 2020). Decentring expertise over what constitutes ‘the economy’ goes to the writing practices at the core of discipline's systems of reputation and reward.

Stefan Ouma and Saumya Premchander (this issue) also believe it is important to include more history in writing economies. In their case, it is the history of slavery in the Americas from the 16^th century onwards. They do so because they contend that the origins of an extreme form of Taylorism currently found in some workplaces, such as Amazon warehouses, which control workers digitally, date back to slave plantations in the Caribbean and US South. Ouma and Premchander's writing experiment is to try directly to connect past and present. They are not interested in using ‘slavery’ as a casual metaphor, as in, ‘modern Amazon warehouse employees work like slaves’. Nor do they want to allude vaguely to history by saying that because slavery was a component of early capitalism it now casts a shadow in the present. Rather, their claim is bolder and more direct: that some of the very techniques used to wring maximum efficiency from slaves on plantations continue to be found unadulterated in contemporary digital labour practices (cf. Graeber, 2006). By ‘writing the plantation into the (technological) present-future’ they show interconnections that while not necessarily chronological are deeply historical.

In considering how economies are written, Simon Mair (next issue) points to how academic texts around sustainability are both produced by and contribute to the reproduction of ‘capitalist realism’. He argues that by failing critically to reflect on the relationship between scholarly writing and ‘capitalist realism’, we foreclose opportunities to create alternative economic systems that could more effectively address the multifaceted and material challenges around sustainability. Indeed, economics has often been used as a disciplinary bridge between science and public policy. In the area of sustainability this is especially the case. For example, Webber and Donner (2017) found that the use of commercialized business models to structure the provision of climate services to the Pacific Islands worked to limit the production of useful tools that could inform public policy decision-making around climate change adaptation. This was particularly in developing countries where the need for these services were high but the ability to pay for them was extremely limited. For Mair, undertaking ‘careful ontological’ work that allows us to consider post-capitalist economies presents both a pathway to sustainable economies but also opens up how we might write economies in relation to other ‘wicked problems’ challenging public policy makers.

Economies of writing

If writing is central to making the economy, economies of writing is integral to our performance as scholars. As Kamler and Thompson (2006: 15) contend, ‘we are represented by our writings and we are judged by them’. No wonder that writing – both the process and the product – provokes emotional anxiety, exhaustion and sometimes even paralysis (Berg et al., 2016; Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar, 2019). The geographer David Lowenthal and psychologist Peter Wason in a 1977 essay about academic writing based on a survey of 170 academics at University College London found that several respondents experienced writing as ‘unbearable’. For nearly everyone, ‘tales of procrastination’, especially writing the first page and particularly the first sentence, ‘were legendary’ (Lowenthal and Wason, 1977: 781). Writing is never easy, but given the current political economic regime of global higher education based on the recording, auditing and administrative scrutiny of scholarly performance measures, writing is what we must do. It denotes our value, disciplining us, determining our position in various institutional orders.

Yet, as DeLyser (2010; this issue) rightly contends, writing can be also personally affirmative, generating deep pleasure, feelings of fulfilment and accomplishment; an outlet for care and a manifestation of relationships; and allowing us perhaps the delusional belief that we’ve pulled off the odd God-trick. Writing is never just a technical exercise. Rather, it is a means to clarify for ourselves what we’ve found and believe. For many, writing is the key part of the research process, actively generating new ideas, approaches and findings. Writing is not passive but affirmative, generative and emergent (Dufty-Jones and Gibson, 2021). Through our writing we come to know what we know.

Of course, writing is never an isolated, individualized process, heavenly inspired. It is always materially grounded and politically inflected. The circumstances of where we write are structured and experienced through the physical world. Combined with the vocabularies and syntax we are schooled in and employ, where and what we write are sodden in politics. In the contemporary university, structural political conditions affecting how, when and where we write, are shifting. Research writing has become increasingly metricized and part of complex calculations that are used to measure individual, disciplinary and institutional ‘worth’. Distinctive geometries of power shape the everyday experiences of academic writers amidst such shifts. Gender, race, career stage, nationality and institutional context, disciplinary background and norms and caring responsibilities outside work, amplify inequalities built into academia when our writing is reduced to measurable ‘outputs’ against which individuals are compared (Davies et al., 2021). When uncritically accepted, the terms on which we write in the contemporary university can work to maintain and reproduce a global north, white, Anglophone, hetero-masculine academic norm.

In their contribution to the second instalment in this special intervention, Myriam Houssay and Renaud Le Goix describe the effects of neoliberalism within the French academy on both the terms of academic labour and the politics of scholarly writing. The ‘carpet bombing’ (Ravinet, 2012) of institutional reforms since the early 2000s generated a vexed scenario in which underfunded universities, dependent on human and financial resources from the national state, are legally required to welcome every student who finishes high school (baccalauréat), with very small registration fees, while subjecting academic staff to ‘excellence’ metrics and rankings (but without time allocations in workload models to write). Amid such pressures, Houssay and Le Goix reflect upon their own institutional interventions designed to push against neoliberal edicts, including pedagogical initiatives and intentions to make writing within academic work ‘visible’. Through practical measures, Houssay and Le Goix draw upon de Certeau's notion of ‘poaching tactics’ to carve out interstitial space and time for writing, taking time from other duties in order to ‘construct collective shelters to reclaim then protect colleagues and students’ writing.

Meanwhile, ceaseless pressures to publish, to publish in the ‘right’ journals, and to be ‘impactful’, contribute to a toxic culture suffused with individualism, mistrust and competition, in turn fuelling the wider crisis of mental health in the academy (Berg et al., 2016). Quantitatively, the publishing expectations of staff progressing through their PhD into junior academic positions have increased (Warren, 2019). If, as Davies et al. (2021: 1) contend, ‘failure is embedded in the structures of the academy’ as ‘an inherent part of academic knowledge production’, then its uneven power geometries are reflected in our writing.

That this is so invites an analysis of writing as a component of the academic labour process that occurs in concrete work places and work times. The neoliberal university does not simply impose marketized logics and metrics upon researchers, but obliges their internalization among academics who struggle with the various competing pressures of the job, while governing their own conduct to suit institutional prerogatives. This all comes to a head in our writing.

Contributors discuss the ‘emotional and embodied effects’ (Mountz et al., 2015: 1239) of the economies of writing, as well as the strategies to navigate, resist and cope with them both in our work and home life. Especially useful are feminist conceptions of economy and space that emphasise the embodied, intimate and affective dimensions of work both within and beyond the formal workplace (MacLeavy et al., 2016; McDowell, 2016; Werner et al., 2017). DeLyser considers the concepts and strategies that are required to make space for writing in everyday academic life, along with the shifting forms of publishing. The ever-fragmenting sense of time in academic working lives contrasts with the need both to publish ‘impactful’ research, while responding to increasing demands of social media and external engagement.

Annie Spenser's essay (next issue) is about the struggle to find time to write about economic geography in her doctoral thesis and in academic papers while being a sessional instructor teaching a course in economic geography. Ironically, one purpose of that course is to understand current oppressive conditions in some labour markets including for university sessional lecturers. Marked by a confessional style, Spenser cannot help herself. She cannot not write, in part because as Buck-Morss suggests, it is a means to understand one's situation and, if necessary, to think oneself out of it. Writing for her is not merely another task piled on to the rest, but a conceivable way out of no way, a means of producing a better possible future in personal and collective terms.

Emma Waight (this issue), like many of the authors collected here, also seeks to understand the conditions that both facilitate and hinder writing. Her focus are the ‘socio-materialities’ of academic writing. By that she means not only the social conditions under which we write, but also the physical machinery of writing from pen and paper to laptop and laser printer. Drawing upon Barad's (2007) concept of intra-action, Waight argues that we must consider how our economies of writing are assemblages of human and non-human materialities that ‘intra-act’ in sometimes unpredictable ways, sometimes productively, sometimes not.

Another aspect of the politics of writing is the choice of language. What has become apparent, though, is that there is no choice. As noted by several researchers, including those who write on economy and space, English has become hegemonic within the global academy (Hassink et al., 2019); it is Hobson's choice. To be promoted, even to acquire a job, university administrators in non-English language regions demand candidates write in English, their second or third language. For Houssay and Le Goix, expectations to publish in English rather than French enflame pre-existing ‘provincial binds’, wherein scholars through their writing choices risk being ignored by Anglophone readers, or of being accused of an allegiance to Anglophone theories and ‘ways of doing things’ – a ‘treason’ to French geography (see also Houssay-Holzschuch and Milhaud, 2013). This returns us to the earlier meaning of economy as the ‘careful management of available resources’ (Mitchell, 2008: 1116). What capacities exist to refine the craft and practice of writing given the conditions under which we are compelled to write? Whither sustained projects such as academic monographs ‘in an academic culture that increasingly measures ‘output’ as if it actually hails, machine-like, from the buried chambers of a mind divorced from all its embodied and circumstantial conditionings’ (Anderson, 2006: ix)? Such questions seem especially germane if we are precariously employed; not a native English speaker; we are continually compared against institutional metrics; or writing is put in competition with other mandatory demands on our time.

Within an Anglophone institutional context, Bob Wilson (next issue) reflects upon teaching research writing, including to many students from non-English backgrounds in a transnationalizing higher education sector where universities recruit PhD students internationally (see also Kleibert et al., 2021). With growing pressures to publish, combined with increasingly diverse cohorts of postgraduate candidates, the challenge is to act critically, and pedagogically, rather than assume writing skill accumulates simply by experience or osmosis (cf. Dufty-Jones and Gibson, 2021). Reflecting upon his Writing Geography seminar, Wilson discusses what is at stake for writing, writing training, and those involved on the ground.

Conclusion

To return to our opening phrase, it is worth contemplating what arises when the two themes – writing economies, and economies of writing – ‘interleave, blur and clash’. If writing is performative and calculative – bringing economic geographies into being through writing – and if our writing practices are in turn engulfed by an economy of knowledge production amid institutional pressures, wherefore do we write?

On the one hand, our research writing has become structured as a value-generating labour task undertaken as workers within a (proto-capitalist) labour process. Long-held practices and values of scholarly writing such as rigour, excellence and peer review have become colonized and form the basis of algorithmic surveillance by university managers – the basis of elevated institutional expectations. On the other, scholarly practices and values retain intrinsic merit as manifestations of collegiality and a commitment to the function of knowledge in society. With that paradox in mind, what might enable writing the economy differently as a strategy of liberation to release us from some of the economies of writing's most oppressive constraints (cf. Spenser's and Houssay and Le Goix's contributions)?

As DeLyser's essay suggests, we face many difficult choices in our writing. What can we ‘make space for in our lives and [in] our work’? In question is what or who we write about (or not), who we are and how we are positioned within structures of power, and what kinds of texts we pursue: a hard-hitting critique or an intricate empirical analysis; a journal article hurried-into-existence, or a book that might take years to write. These are political and constrained choices – to ‘play the game’ or to push back, positions in turn unevenly shaped by career opportunity and stage, precarity, geography, domestic context and subject positionality.³ They are also ‘economic’ choices, of audience, reach and the kind of ‘thing’ we seek to bring into the world. For journal articles, books or even tweets are ‘never simply a remarkable object. Like every other technology [they are] invariably the product of human agency in complex and highly volatile contexts which a responsible scholarship must seek to recover if we are to understand better the creation and communication of meaning as the defining characteristic of human societies’ (McKenzie, 1999: 4; emphasis in original). Writing economies and the economies of writing are at once political and ethical, material and performative, and strikingly illustrated in the contributions that follow.