ABSTRACT
Suppose economy were to be approached from a different vantage point? The intellectually takenfor-granted world of analytical categories might shift, change, appear differently, lose certainty, expand to include new aspects, new things. Economic categories emerge from an intense scrutiny of the production of existence which pretends to the status of science. But this claim to scientific certainty is possible only by taking economy as the pure sign of history, by separating the economic from the social and cultural (to use equally confining categorizations), closely defining ‘economy’ around the immediate activities of production, distribution and exchange, thereby creating from the real mass of barely distinguishable, interrelated things, processes, ideas and emotions a realm of objects theorizable in objective terms. Moreover, economy is seen as a self-determining discrete entity, creating its own institutions, rationalities and conditions of existence. Economic motives such as profit-making, and overall economic logics such as capital accumulation, appear to be created by systemic functional efficiency, rather than historical, social and cultural agency. In bourgeois materialism, economic rationality is the direct impress on the mind of a seemingly natural efficiency.
