While the field of cultural studies (American and otherwise) has paid much attention to other organizing concepts, such as nation, class, gender, society, and of course culture itself, it has often left the idea of the economy untouched. There have been a number of interesting studies of different “representations” of the economy. These usually assume, however, that the economy itself remains as a kind of underlying material reality, somehow independent of the intellectual equipment and machinery of representation with which it is set up and managed. In the same way, academic economics is often criticized for misrepresenting the “true nature” of the economy. The task now is to account for the great success of economics and related forms of expertise in helping to make the economy in the first place.

This is an excerpt from Timothy Mitchell’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 95).