Workshop: Finance, security, infrastructure – hegemonies in generative practices

Donnerstag - Freitag, 21. - 22. März 2019

Justus-Liebig-Universität | Hauptgebäude | Seminarraum 315 | Ludiwgstraße 23 | 35390 Gießen

organisiert von: Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl, Carola Westermeier, Amina Nolte

What do finance, security and infrastructure have in common? They become relevant and interesting for a critical analysis when looked at as constitutive forces that co-create the reality to which they ostensibly relate only in a secondary and derived manner. Far beyond serving the crediting and risk-absorbing function that finance still is politically associated with, finance becomes visible as a rele-vant factor for political and cultural economy when acknowledging that finance, and financial forms of knowledge, are involved in bringing about a reality that they then seem to merely correspond to. Security, in its turn, seems to make sense only when connected to questions like ‘whose security’, ‘security from what’, etc. Yet, security can operate not only in an intransitive sense, having become a major value in itself in contemporary societies that is little politically questioned, but also produces a ‘securitized’ reality. Finally, infrastructure – literally meaning a structure beneath whatever kind of ‘real thing’ – has become a ‘real thing’ in and of itself, be it for the self-imagination of modern western societies or for the creation of a sense of urgency regarding the fragility and criticality of contemporary infrastructures of data, mobility, energy, economic flows, etc. So, finance, security and infrastructure can be seen as practices that become specifically generative of social, economic, political and cultural structures precisely as they are held to merely serve those structures’ purposes. These notions become particularly noticeable when finance, security and infrastructure intersect as practices and rationales, for example in the field of cyber security, financial security and (urban) mobility.

To discuss these issues, hegemony seems to be a most promising theoretical candidate, as – for instance, in the reconstruction by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau – it combines a social theory of the constitution of the social with a political theory of how that constitution is, notwithstanding strategies to naturalize it, contingent and open to change. It is the aim of the workshop to broaden our understanding of how hegemony and finance, security and infrastructure interrelate, not only in the realm of linguistic discourse but also in that of materiality. The workshop seeks to open up the package of ‘hegemony theory’ itself to critical scrutiny and to invite exchange with other theoretical approaches (like, for instance, Actant Network Theory, STS-approaches, or other strands of discourse theory) in the generative fields of finance, security and infrastructure.

Programm

Donnerstag, 21. März 2019

Freitag, 22. März 2019