Bad Economics: Hard Cash /Soft Culture
The intention of this article is not to offer a counterargument for interdisciplinarity or to argue that a cultural reading of finance does not necessarily amount to doing bad economics. Rather, I want to offer a performance of “bad economics”, informed by the belief that culture and economy have “always already” been fused. From this perspective, thinking about economy outside the context of a conjunctural analysis of cultural knowledge and practices—including popular culture—is not an option and, therefore, collapsing into a reductive “us versus them” default position is ruled out from the outset. In other words, this article brings cultural studies to questions of economics in life and death issues as a means of addressing the present moment and the changing ways in which we now talk about economies. Throughout this essay, therefore, I will argue from the assumption that culture and economy are as inseparable from one another as the sides of a sheet of paper.