ABSTRACT
Have economics and the economy always already been poststructuralist? In Foucault’s lectures on governmentality, he introduces economics as a discipline without a center:
[E]conomics is a discipline without God; economics is a discipline without totality; economics is a discipline that begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility of a sovereign point of view over the totality of the state that he has to govern. (Foucault 2008: 282)
This confronts discourse analysis and governmentality studies with a problem-at least if we assume that one of the aims of discourse analysis lies in showing the heterogeneous assemblage which constitutes a totality or an abstraction such as the market.1 One might ask: Why and how to decenter a totality which has never been a totality? Or, what might a critique of sovereignty contribute to economic analysis if modern economics has never conceived of the economy as a sovereign realm? I want to argue that the design of a poststructuralist account of the economy depends upon the nature of how it understands the “decentering the economy,” and that this understanding affects the empirical analysis of governmental technologies.
