In What Sense a Geopolitical Knowledge-Based Economy?

The concept of geopolitics is not often associated with the term knowledge-based economy. Yet, it has become quintessential to argue that we are currently living in an era marked by the prominence of knowledge in all societal, economic and cultural developments, as well as pronouncements about the knowledge-intensive form of capitalism as an important subtext for inter-state relations and inter-spatial competition. In this presentation, I seek to geopoliticize the purportedly geoeconomic present, particularly as it unfolds in the strategies of knowledge-intensive capitalism and associated societal developments. I do that by first introducing the concept of knowledge-based economization which refers both to the material processes of knowledge-intensive capitalism (including subject formation), and to the processes whereby this form of capitalism is constructed discursively through imageries and objectifying social practices. Second, I proceed to claim that the phenomenon of knowledge-based economization includes significant geopolitical dimensions. I lay a foundation for comprehending the geopolitics of knowledge-based economization through three constitutive dimensions: geopolitical discourses, the production of geopolitical objects in calculative practices, and geopolitical subjects. Finally, I demonstrate that the process of knowledge-based economization has shifted qualitatively since the early 1990s. It first emerged in the form of late-Keynesian technopolization, and was produced in the strategies of the “entrepreneurial state”. Since the late 1990s, knowledge-based economization has manifested itself in all sorts of imaginaries and practices that are predicated on the idea of “smartness”. After the global recession in 2008, knowledge-based economization has again proceeded through new forms. Its latest phase has become increasingly salient in the constitutive imaginaries of the so-called start-up economy. In this context, capitalist societies are witnessing an expansion in the processes of entrepreneurialization and urbanization of the nation-state.