Shaun French

The automatic production of space

This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chiefly to be found in the spaces of everyday life. The next part of the paper notes the way in which more and more of this software is written to mimic corporeal intelligence, so as to produce a better and more unobtrusive fit with habitation. The paper then sets out three different geographies of software and the way in which they are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life before concluding with a consideration of the degree to which we might consider the rise of software as an epochal event or something much more modest.

Financializing space, spacing financialization:

The paper develops a sympathetic geographical critique of the concept of financialization which seeks to account for the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to be manifest at a number of scales, from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households. In seeking to explain change within contemporary society, financialization has circulated less widely than similar and related concepts such as neoliberalization. While financialization has the potential to unite researchers across cognate social science fields, thereby building critical mass and recognition within social studies of money and finance, we argue that research has been insufficiently attentive to space and place, both in terms of processes and effects. Financialization is a profoundly spatial phenomenon, representing as it does the search for a spatial-temporal fix, or quasi-resolution of the crisis tendencies of contemporary capitalism. The paper explores a number of possibly fruitful directions for work on financialization, focusing in particular on the idea of financial ecologies.

On the reproduction of the musical economy after the Internet

The focus of this article is a crisis of reproduction that beset the contemporary popular music industry from the late 1990s onwards. In the early 21st century the music industry began to suffer from declining sales, negative growth and financial losses. Explanations internal to the music industry identified the cause of the crisis as the rise of Internet piracy, although the emergence of software formats, such as MP3, and Internet distribution systems is more accurately described as a ‘tipping point’ that brought into focus a set of deeper structural problems for the industry related to changing forms of popular music consumption. Drawing on research undertaken by the authors within US music companies, the article examines responses to the crisis in the form of three distinctive business models that represent different strategies in the face of the contemporary crisis of the musical economy, an arena within which a range of experiments are being undertaken in an effort to develop new ways of generating income. Nevertheless, there is reluctance within the industry to embrace the more radical organizational changes that might allow it to fully accommodate the impact of software formats and Internet distribution systems. A key reason for this, we argue, is the stakes that the leaders of the major record companies have in the preservation of the current social order of the musical economy.

The new, new financial system? Towards a conceptualization of financial reintermediation

This paper attempts to develop a conceptual framework for analysing the impacts of the Internet and e-commerce upon industrial sectors. While a great deal has been written about the so-called ‘new economy’ much of it has been either speculative and hyperbolic, as in the ‘boom’ years of the late 1990s, or cynical and dismissive, as in the period since the collapse of ‘dot.com’ stocks in Spring 2000. We seek to move beyond and between these positions by providing a means to determine what difference the Internet and e-commerce might make to industrial organization through a consideration of the retail financial services industry. We do this through a critical evaluation of the concept of disintermediation that, as we argue in the paper, is better understood as reintermediation. We argue that the potential impacts of the Internet and e-commerce upon retail financial services are non-trivial, and they are consistent with the individualization of risk and reward that have characterized wider processes of financial inclusion and exclusion over the past decade or so.

Excessive financialisation: insuring lifestyles, enlivening subjects, and everyday spaces of biosocial excess

The last two decades have witnessed, as part of a wider financialisation of British economy and society, a creeping privatisation of social welfare provision. Political justification for the expansion of privatised social insurance markets has frequently been couched in the language of responsibility. However, as the ‘credit crunch’ spectacularly attests and as studies of the dynamics of financialisation have succeeded in showing, financialised capitalism turns on excess. In this paper we explore some of the ways in which the reworking of long-term insurance or life assurance has contributed to the financialisation of everyday life. More particularly, we trace the emergence of what we call ‘lifestyle insurance’. Our purpose here is not only to begin to map the terrain and consider the consequences of this nascent modality of insurance in the UK, but in so doing to contribute to wider debates about the processes of subjectification that underwrite financialisation. In addition to pressing for a greater attention to be given to life assurance the paper suggests, by mobilising the figure of excess, three more areas to which studies of the financialisation of the everyday might productively attend: first, the financialisation of life itself; second, the ways in which financialisation is affectively charged; third, the spatial politics of financialisation.

‘We All Live in a Robbie Fowler House’: The Geographies of the Buy to Let Market in the UK

The buy to let market, produced through the re-regulation of the private rented market in the late 1980s and the promotion of a new mortgage product by the Association of Residential Letting Agents and private sector lenders in the 1990s, accounted for 12 per cent of all UK mortgage lending by 2007. Buy to let is popularly understood as a vehicle for speculative investment and as a means for securing long-term financial security through capital gains via property, and it represents an important aspect of financialisation, helping to call forth new investor subjectivities, which promulgate individualised forms of financial responsibility. Buy to let was also a profitable income stream for financial institutions in the UK which outperformed the mainstream mortgage market until problems in this market became apparent. This article reports on research carried out on the buy to let market and draws attention to the highly geographical nature of the market, which has distinctive regional and urban geographies. These geographies help to explain the differing fortunes of the buy to let market.

Re-scaling the economic geography of knowledge and information: constructing life assurance markets

Abstract This paper examines the geography of economic knowledge through research on ‘fields-of-learning’ within financial services. The paper argues that the current interest in knowledge and information has its roots in the concept of the learning economy and debates around globalisation and localisation. By exploring the way in which knowledge has been mobilised and conceptualised by theorists writing from each of these perspectives the paper argues that our understanding of the geography of economic knowledge is in danger of becoming fixed around a polarised local-tacit/global-explicit understanding of knowledge. With the aid of Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowing, and the work of Bruno Latour I offer an alternative account whereby geographies are constructed and do not emerge merely as a consequence of the perceived properties of tacit or explicit dimensions of knowledge. These arguments are illustrated through an examination of some of the knowledge networks which constitute the marketing and product development process within the life assurance industry.

Accounting for e-commerce: abstractions, virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital

This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics, consultants, journalists and practitioners, abstractions demonstrated considerable agency in the construction of e-commerce, and were used in an attempt to demonstrate that a new, and potentially hyper-profitable, form of capitalism was being born. This paper undertakes a critical evaluation of these processes and draws attention to the neglected role of the cultural circuit of capital and a range of practical knowledges that are continually being revised and which we argue are equally constitutive of e-commerce. While it is easy to dismiss the promises of e-commerce as so much hyperbole, particularly in the wake of the dot.com crash, we argue that the success of e-commerce is signaled by the fact that it has lost much of its rhetorical power and has faded into the business background. E-commerce now constitutes an increasingly ambient set of technologies and practices.

SPECULATING ON CARELESS LIVES

This paper is concerned with biofinancialisation; that is, with the ways in which contemporary processes of financialisation and biopolitics intermesh and interpolate. While the significance of the relation between the bios and circuits of finance has begun to be recognised, biofinancialisation remains little interrogated. In seeking to address this lacuna, the paper focuses on the recent transformation of the UK after-retirement market and, in particular, the invention of enhanced and impaired pension annuities. Enhanced annuity products like the ‘smokers’ pension’ provide, we argue, a striking example of the ways in which biofinancialisation works to fashion new worlds for capitalist accumulation, in this case through the capitalisation of morbidity and of the residual vital capacities of life, and the ways in which novel forms of biofinancial subject and subjectivity are produced to populate such worlds – to make them live. The paper concludes by identifying three political fracture points or fault lines in the enterprise to secure life biofinancially through the enhancing of annuities: first, the promise of reconciliation; second, the promise of autonomy and freedom; and, third, the promise of a good retirement.

Mapping alcohol: Health, policy and the geographies of problem drinking in Britain

While parallels can be drawn between contemporary problem drinking in Britain and apparently similar cases from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, little attention has been paid to the ways in which drink is represented as a spatial problem. Closer analysis reveals that the mapping of ‘clusters’ of alcohol outlets or trouble spots has waxed and waned over the last hundred and fifty years, and that the appearance, disappearance and re-emergence of the cluster in policy discussions owes a good deal to changing understandings of the nature of public drinking. Both temperance and contemporary epidemiological approaches favour the cluster because they assume that the supply of alcohol lies at the root of the problems seen to be associated with drink, and mapping clusters makes this supply visible. In contrast the disease theory of alcoholism favours individual rather than social causes, and has little use for maps of clusters; as a consequence the cluster seems to disappear from discussions in the middle years of the twentieth century. The paper concludes that the history of problem drinking demonstrates the need to pay closer attention to changing constructions of drink as problem and the need for a more sophisticated understanding of the history of medicine and public health. It also makes clear the need to look beyond the State and the market as spaces in which the risks of alcohol are calculated.