Post-Modernism, Economics and Knowledge

Jack Amariglio, Stephen E Cullenberg, David F Ruccio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780415110266
• eBook ISBN: 9781134836673
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Only in the past twenty years have debates surrounding modernism and postmodernism begun to have an impact on economics. This new way of thinking rejects claims that science and mathematics provide the only models for the structure of economic knowledge. This ground-breaking volume brings together the essays of top theorists including Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey, Julie Nelson, Shaun Hargreaves-Heap and Philip Mirowski on a diverse range of topics such as gender, postcolonial theory and rationality as well as postmodernism.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

1

INTRODUCTION

Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio, and David F. Ruccio

Funeral by funeral, economics does make progress

(Paul Samuelson 1997: 159)

Modernism as dirge; economic knowledge as its fossil remains. Borrowing from Max Planck with just the minor addition of his own bailiwick (substituting ‘economics’ for ‘science’), the doyen of modernist economics, Paul Samuelson, motivates even Keynes's gloomy dictum about economics one step further in this cautionary epigraph, or epitaph, as the case may be.¹ Economics is not only the ‘dismal science’. Its ascension to the level of the ‘queen of the social sciences’ is by virtue of one shovelful after another, as the ‘Darwinian impact of reality melts away even the prettiest of fanciful theories and the hottest of ideological frenzies’ (1997: 159).

Samuelson, of course, is only the latest to conclude with morbid optimism that, in the end, the evolutionary nature of scientific practice amongst economists does lead to the growth of economic knowledge, even if, revisiting the spirits of Smith, Ferguson, and the Enlightenment Scots, it grows as an unintended consequence of its practitioners’ practice. There is a kind of utopia in this dystopic rendition; a kind of faith nonetheless in the idea that as long as economists remain committed to the norms of (some) scientific practice, the knowledge they produce, almost at times in spite of themselves, will prove to illuminate historical reality and enlighten future generations.² This grizzled confidence – no matter how tempered it may be as the new century and millennium is upon us – is a hallmark of modernism itself, those discourses and practices that have been associated with such ideas as ‘progress’ and ‘knowledge’ arguably throughout much of the post-Enlightenment period in the West.³

Yet, no matter how optimistic time and again throughout the past 100 and more years economists and the philosophers among them have remained, many of them come back somewhat nervously to survey the standing of economic knowledge in the landscape of modernist culture and science. Thus, we may say with the distinguished historian of economic thought, T. W. Hutchison, that ‘claimed to be the most “effective” or “mature” of the social or human sciences, or described as the ‘hardest’ of the “soft” sciences, economics seems destined for a somewhat ambiguous and problematic place in the spectrum of knowledge’ (1979:1).

There is no need to sing lamentations about this ambiguity. Instead, we can see that it speaks to the effervescent life (and not Samuelson's recursive life through incessant death) of economics as a set of discourses. And this life may be most attributable to the ‘undecidables’ and ‘aporia’ that can be said to characterize modern economics’ ‘ambiguity’, the fact that pure scientificity always seems out of reach as the ostensible achievement of the discipline.⁴ Now, of course, in some versions of this perceived ambiguity, the point is to clean up economics by removing the vestiges of past ‘errors’ (‘prettiest of fanciful theories’) and opinion (‘hottest of ideological frenzies’) that are seen to still remain in the debates among and between various schools.⁵ This, we take it, is mostly Samuelson's vision. Still other versions have it that as long as economics remains a ‘human’ science, then it will forever be impossible to accurately model economic behavior since humans, it is said, confound models in their resort to just plain inexplicable or indefensible actions, at times.⁶ And there are others who, in fact, speak to what they consider the pure blasphemy in economists’ trying to model human behavior at all, seeing such desire for mechanistic control in economic models as a violation of the basic freedom of human beings and of the fundamental dignity and meaning of human life.

We are not partial to any of these ways of thinking through the problematic of ‘ambiguity’ that Hutchison announces. Instead, in this book we take up the challenge that unearthing and engaging the ‘undecidables’ and ‘aporia’ of economic discourse is part of a broader realization of a new phase of self-conscious thought, a new phase even perhaps of society and history: that which has been labeled the ‘postmodern’.⁷

Categorizing the postmodern

The postmodern and its cognates (postmodernism, postmodernity, etc.) are notorious by now for the plethora of meanings that have been attached to them. One major difficulty then in engaging the theoretical and practical horizons sketched by the term postmodern is that ambiguity and undecidability reside even in the realm of their fundamental definition. Yet, in our view, there are ways to categorize the various literatures that have sprawled in the past 20 or more years in relation to this concept. We attempt such a tentative categorization below, trying as best we can to provide unfamiliar readers with some guidelines to key debates as well as to illuminate the partial context within which the essays that comprise this collection have been written.

For, as we see it, postmodernism is a relatively new development within economics, but one that has great promise in calling economists’ attention not only to the epistemological conditions of existence for their theorizing, but also to the general cultural milieu within which modern economics has both expanded and contracted. Modern economics has certainly had a right to claim, as Samuelson says, the ‘growth of knowledge’. But it also can be said that modern economics has run up against certain anomalies and fragmentations that have proliferated diverse knowledges in addition to putting on the agenda concepts and approaches that lead away from rather than toward a universalist science. While some may regard the current state of economic discourse as closer to ‘convergence’, we see and argue something rather different. That over a century after the marginalist revolution, economic discourse is more heterogeneous than one might expect from a supposedly ‘unified’ science.⁸ Again, this heterogeneity is nothing to bemoan, in our view. It might speak instead to the limits of modernism in economics, and just as much to the emergence of what we call the ‘postmodern moments’ within the official discipline.

The categories around which we discuss postmodernism are historical phase, existential state or ‘condition’, style, and critique. That is, we think it is possible to render intelligible most of the debates surrounding the term ‘postmodern’ and its implications according to these four categories.⁹ Postmodernism has been seen, by some critics, as a particular stage in the life history of modern capitalist economies. Postmodernism has also been seen, by these and others, as a ‘condition’, or a state of existence, describing the cultural/social dominant within which we experience the contemporaneous. There are also some writers who view postmodernism as a kind of literary/rhetorical or practical style (especially in the arts and architecture), one that affects even the philosophical stances that are seen to characterize much current discussion regarding the possibility and nature of knowledge and scientific method. Finally, we think that in relation to these previous notions and sometimes distinct from them, postmodernism has been intended and utilized as a critique, that is, as a critical stance attempting to create thought and action ‘outside’ of the perceived constraints of modernism (and here, modernism ranges from modernization and economic development strategies in a post-colonial world to the ‘high modernism’ of formalist literature and mathematics). In what follows, we elucidate each of these categories. This helps us to set the stage for a brief synopsis of the postmodern moments that we think have arisen within economic discourse as well as to provide a context for the papers included in this volume.

Postmodernity: the latest phase of capitalism?

In this vein, it needs to be said straightaway that the category of analysis that is represented least in the papers in this volume is the one that treats postmodernism more or less as a particular world-historical phase. Or rather, there is just a little here that will address what has become an entire literary industry within other disciplines, which is characterizing as ‘postmodern’ the latest stage in ‘late capitalist’ economies and especially the process of ‘globalization’. Some of the papers included here touch on these topics (certainly the papers by Milberg and Charusheela), but for the most part, the notion that we live in a new phase of human history brought about by the latest mutation of capitalism is primarily backdrop, and may even be refused as a preconception by many of the authors here. In any event, as we say, there is a vast literature by now that treats postmodernism as a name for the economic and cultural forms that have supposedly marked the onset of global capitalism.

Arguably, the best known advocate of this approach is the American cultural theorist Fredric Jameson. Jameson (1991) captures well the flavor of treating postmodernism as the cultural form of the latest phase of capitalist development in his frequent reference to three identifying aspects of ‘late capitalism’: mass commodification, a shift in the location and conditions of global production, and the rise of new industries (mostly in information technologies) that allow for the unbroken worldwide expansion of capitalist markets and, hence, profitability.¹⁰ Jameson, it should be noted, is a devotee of the late Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel (1978), whose book on ‘late capitalism’ serves as the veritable bible for those (mostly cultural critics) who are looking to describe and define, from the Left, capitalism's most recent trajectory.¹¹ Following in the footsteps of both the Marxian-inspired Frankfurt School of socio-cultural analysis (whose members included Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, among others) and the writings of the great Hungarian cultural theorist Georg Lukács, Jameson seeks to analyze, from a critical perspective, the forms of cultural expression that have aided, partly by becoming commodities themselves, this phase of capitalist development.¹² Hence, everything from the arts to philosophical thinking in this age, in some way or other, is seen to have a relationship to unyielding commodification and the post-industrialization of the previously industrialized nations, the latter of which is matched by the shift in economic production and ecological impact brought about by the globalization of capital.¹³

But perhaps it is the idea of commodification that has been most clearly identified as that which marks a new cultural phase, postmodernism, that corresponds to the new economic phase, late capitalism.¹⁴ And here, what is meant is not only that capitalism has inexorably expanded markets, both in terms of geographical location and in terms of what objects become marketed. But, this has also meant that culture has lost its relative autonomy (if this ever existed) and has now become almost entirely oriented toward the sale of commodities. This can be seen, according to some critics, in the growth of markets for cultural artifacts (and the fact that so little now is produced outside of an exchange economy), but more importantly in the fact that the arts and thought itself have become more shallow and slick, as they either uncritically mimic (as with Andy Warhol's ‘pop art’) or help to further the spread of commercial images. Indeed, the rise of ‘image’ or ‘surface’ as opposed to ‘content’ or ‘depth’, is said to mark most recent art forms that express this postmodern shift.¹⁵

It is interesting in this light to note that Jameson identifies, not surprisingly, Gary Becker (1991) as the quintessential postmodern economist, a view, paradoxically, that is almost the exact opposite of that which is expressed by most of the contributors to this volume. The reason for Jameson's attribution is fairly straightforward. Becker represents, in Jameson's view, the recognition among economists that most if not all areas of contemporary life are now prone to the logic of capital, and mostly to the vagaries of market forces. In fact, in a way according to Jameson, Becker captures the spirit of the age, as everything from marriage to drug addiction to death becomes a matter for market-inspired calculations. It is not so much that Becker is the latest disciplinary ‘imperialist’, seeking to speculatively displace most other non-economic approaches to culture by advocating economically rational principles, especially individual choice, as the foundation of all social life.¹⁶ It is, instead, that Becker gives voice in his theoretical oeuvre to that which has transpired ‘in reality’: the unfettered spread in the last century of capitalist markets and the commodification of just about everything. Becker's postmodernism, in Jameson's eyes, consists mainly in marking the extent to which market logics have in fact taken over for any and all non-capitalist, non-market social domains.

As we have said, this take on Becker's work is in contrast to much that is contained in this collection. Becker is treated, to the extent his work is considered, more in the vein of ‘high modernism’, a representative (along with the New Classical Economists) of the dominant neoclassical paradigm committed to formal modeling and the reduction of most human motives to a single purpose: individual gain (and this includes ‘psychic income’ from such motivations as ‘altruism’).¹⁷ Be that as it may, we note again that for many literary and cultural theorists like Jameson, the realm of the postmodern denotes rampant commodification, unchecked by oppositional forces – avant-gardes, say – that find themselves subverted or even co-opted by the very power and allure of the market. And, again, this world structured according to the object-life of the commodity has been thought to have received an enormous recent boost by the emergence of new information technologies, especially the internet. According to this view, computers have made commodity time and space ultimately traversable in ways unthinkable for past generations of producers and consumers. In addition to the use of computer technology in such ‘post-Fordist’ production methods as ‘flexible specialization’, it is claimed that one need not leave one's chair (in front of one's screen, of course) to be bombarded by commodity images and the cornucopia of goods that exist and are transacted in cyberspace. This obliteration of previous constraints of time and geographical location in buying and selling (lowering considerably transactions costs and reducing to rubble other past barriers to the international flow of financial capital and goods) reconstructs all notions and experiences pertaining to community and nation, hence the idea of the ‘global economy’ that is said to be the hallmark of the postmodern.

We note that opponents of this global spread of capitalist commodity production are often among those whose form of resistance, to the extent this is conceivable, includes seeking spaces for economic life, if no...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge
• Economics as Social Theory
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Modernism and Postmodernism
• PART III Reading symbols, changing subjects and discerning bodies in economic discourse
• PART IV Gendered subjectivities in neoclassical economics
• PART V Feminist/postmodern economics
• PART VI Postmodernism, economic rationality and the problem of ‘representation’
• PART VII Is there a (postmodern) alternative in economics? from markets to gifts
• Name index
• Subject index