| This dissertation is a historical and anthropological examination of Euro-American articulations of a 'knowledge economy.' I take this to be a socio-political concept that exists owing to cultural practices that help to produce it, and specific histories in which it has acquired traction. In this economy, ideas are likened to resources such as land and raw materials, in short as capital. I examine this purported shift in the organization of value through three studies of processes where 'ideas' can be seen to with what can be broadly called 'economy.' They comprise, firstly, the shifting articulations of the metaphor of the 'marketplace of ideas,' which narrate the emergence of expertise as a separate and specialized realm of knowledge. I show how this metaphor, introduced in 1919 as a placeholder for free speech, only recently came to connote market -exchange. And secondly, by detailing shifts in accounting categories and economic models---from their emergence in the Great Depression to the present interest in 'intangible assets' and 'knowledge-adjusted models'---I show how ideas about ideas changed towards valorized, organized things, which are regulated as a productive force. And thirdly, I show that there is a material history to the idea that 'creative thinking' is a productive activity. I describe how, for example, ideas were introduced as valuables in the Second World War; how ideas were again conjured as valuables during the de-industrialization of the 1960s, in which Johnson's 'Great Society' was reframed as a 'Creative Society'; and how in the 1990s ideas were a panacea for the crisis in value production that emerged when manufacturing started to 'travel.' I conclude my dissertation with a thesis that the present-day valorization of ideas connotes not so much a supersession of an industrial economy but a spatial displacement of offshored production processes. That is, even though a knowledge economy prides itself as a next historical stage of value production, it is also a continuation of a manufacturing economy. |
