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But it is a difficult task in that so few of the cultural theorists actually study economics relying instead on inherited ideas at second-hand - Mauss taking from Durkheim; Benjamin from Simmel; Derrida from Marx, and so on. This course will instead face a broader and richer history of economic concepts and ideas and attempt to position them within an intellectual-political matrix. At the same time, it will attempt to theorize the ubiquitous gestures towards the economic by theorists operating in philosophical or aesthetic modes that, curiously enough, take their stand by vigorously rejecting economic determinations and, in general, casting skepticism on the "economism" of certain trends in philosophy and social theory.

The present prominence of these issues stems from a long and venerable tradition of sociologists, misfits, autodidacts, philosophers, and poets - that is, precisely not economists, since economists themselves were (and are) rightly seen as basically apologists and ideologists with no scientific validity whatsoever. One of the theses of this course is that this maverick economic has rarely been perceived as a tradition as such. From them emerged startling modes of questioning that exploded many of the claims of political economy, and constituted an influential challenge to the claims of economic expertise. Although setting out from disparate points of departure (revolutionary cells, avant-garde broadsheets, muck-raking journalism, or the lurid voyeurism of ethnography), they all in their own way dislodged economics from the ponderous arithmetic and impenetrable graphs of the discipline's own pseudo-scientific grandeur. Marx's title for The Grundrisse was "A Critique of Economic Categories." As if in answer, a tradition of thought opened up vast new unexplored areas of inquiry: the concept of "expenditure" seen as substitute for "accumulation," for example; the "image-function" of the global periphery; the concept of "over-development," the trope of the commodity fetish, capital mobility's decoupling of space and place; "reification," and the surpassing ofthe mode of production paradigm. In this course, we will try to pin down what these concepts mean, where they come from, and what their stakes are.

The point is not so much to march through the various schools of thought within economics in order to show their failings as to point out that "economics" - or what that science supposedly treats - has been creatively, and very skeptically, addressed by a host of non-economists for the last two centuries. In fact, these thinkers constitute a tradition that has never been named. One doesn't find here so much a debate with economists as an attempt to move the whole discussion of what economics nominally treats (value, material reproduction, the circulation of goods, the satisfaction of needs, development) to broader areas of culture and the human sphere.