Haunting the Knowledge Economy

摘要

This is an interesting if somewhat patchy volume, which suffers slightly from overselling. The authors claim that: '[A]s scholars of the future in the now, we accepted [Derrida's] provocative argument about the virtue of conversing with ghosts, and adopted his hauntology methodology' (p. 120). Hauntology undermines the certainty of ontological presence, by invoking the figure of the ghost. The ghost is there but also not-there, a figure from another time that we would prefer to ignore and forget. Kenway et al. argue that the knowledge economy generates spectral economies that haunt it: the risk economy, the gift economy, the libidinal economy, and the survival economy.