Volume 24 Issue 3 July 2012
In this issue, we open with a symposium on a jointly authored book by the first two editors of our journal, David F. Ruccio and Jack Amariglio. The symposium is long in the making because Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics was published in 2003 and the commentators finalized their pieces prior to the 2008 crash. Yet, at the same time, the context of the dual crises of the capitalist world economy and modern economics suddenly gave the book and, along with it, the symposium a new meaning. Questions explored in the book, quite pertinent for the readership of the journal even in the absence of the crisis context, became more poignant and prescient than many would be willing to concede prior to the crash: the epistemological and ontological presuppositions of modern economics and its inevitable contamination by postmodern moments; the status of (fundamental) uncertainty in the eyes of economic actors (i.e., entrepreneurs, workers, bureaucrats, etc.) as proposed by Keynesian economists; the representations of the body in the history of economics from Smithian classical political economy to mid-century, high modernist general equilibrium analysis; the questions of gender difference and subjectivity as posed by feminist economists; the problem of value in modern economics as formulated by institutional economists (both as in the problem of the determination of economic value and the role that ethical stances and moral judgments play in economics and economies); the constitutive function that the trope of order serves in domesticating the overdetermined and disorderly processes of competition in Marxist economics; and the hierarchically structured field of diverse kinds of economic discourse, ranging from “scientific” to “everyday” economics.
Inevitably, each participant in the symposium approaches the book from the vantage point of only a subset of the various themes explored in the book. For instance, Suzanne Bergeron (whose Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender and the Space of Modernity, also published in the early 2000s, was itself an attempt to develop a postmodern approach to development economics) chooses to approach the text from the perspective of the notions of subjectivity at work. According to Bergeron, the concept of postmodern moments renders visible stories that call “into question the coherence and consistency of modernist economic narratives” that are perpetuated by both orthodox and heterodox (including some feminist) economic approaches. In particular, for Bergeron, the specific contribution of Ruccio and Amariglio's analysis of “the implicit theorizing of embodiment that goes on in economics” is its critique of heterodox modernisms that try to re-place the decentered body/subjectivity found in the abstractions of general equilibrium theory and re-center it around a foundational notion of a total and “real” human body. Nevertheless, Bergeron finds Ruccio and Amariglio's effort wanting for not further exploring processes of power that operate not only within economics (e.g., how the “processes of containment” of postmodern moments in modern economics do their work) but also in concrete economies (e.g., how their new postmodern forms of analysis can “provide an entry point into examining and challenging forms of power”).
Similar themes are explored in Serap Kayatekin's contribution to the symposium. Kayatekin welcomes the manner in which Ruccio and Amariglio put the economic pluralism that they promote into practice “by pointing out the multiplicity of approaches in economics and by seriously engaging with them.” In fact, as she underscores, a democratic academia can be possible only if all schools of thought take the plunge and begin to reflect on and question their own modernist assumptions, including those regarding their relation to what Ruccio and Amariglio name “everyday economic knowledge.” Otherwise, Kayatekin argues, modernist economists are “prone to antidemocratic practice” both within and outside the discipline, wherever knowledge about economics and the economy is being produced and exchanged. Kayatekin then proceeds to offer a comparative analysis of two competing conceptions of the body found in the book: the fragmented, flat, and sprawled-out body found in neoclassical (Arrow-Debreu) general equilibrium analysis, and the laboring body as the ontological referent for the essential source of value in Marxist economics. Kayatekin, however, is troubled by Ruccio and Amariglio's invitation to Marxists to acknowledge “the fragmentation of the human body and the dismemberment of theoretical humanism that may have been accomplished by some neoclassicals.” She asks, given the absence of a concept of exploitation in the body of neoclassical theory, what would be the basis for a Marxist's engagement with “neoclassical theory's implicit notion of the postmodern body”?
Deirdre McCloskey, a long-time interlocutor of the authors and an avant-garde neoclassical postmodernist, takes the theoretical framework and reading procedure articulated by Ruccio and Amariglio's book as the background for her reminiscences, and offers a reading of her own intellectual journey from “Samuelsonian” neoclassicism to postmodernism and beyond. In many ways, McCloskey's break from neoclassical modernisms parallels those of Ruccio and Amariglio (and Steve Resnick and Richard Wolff before them) from Marxist modernisms. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, McCloskey proposes the following hypothesis: “regardless of economic family, an economics becomes pomo—and scientific—when it realizes that truth is a mobile army of metaphors.” Taking this recognition of the materiality and performativity of language and rhetoric as her point of departure, McCloskey identifies such postmodern moments in Marxism (i.e., in Lenin's and Gramsci's criticisms of economism) as well as in the Good Old Chicago School (as opposed to the crypto-Samuelsonian Nouvelle Chicago)—in particular, in George Stigler's writings on the role of intellectuals and Frank Knight's broad critique of neoclassical welfare economics. McCloskey concludes by registering her disagreement with Ruccio and Amariglio's treatment of “everyday economics”—a concept that the latter two formulated in their attempt to criticize McCloskey's version, “ersatz economics.”
Evan Watkins's contribution to the symposium comes from outside the discipline of economics, from the perspective of someone who teaches in the humanities. For someone who teaches on economic issues (from Marxian perspectives) within the context of critical theory and cultural studies, he considers the book to have a particular pedagogical importance. Focusing on the chapter on modernist Marxian economics and its “obsessions with order,” Watkins considers the authors to be “very effective translators” across disciplines, welcomes their emphasis on everyday economics as a fertile terrain of intersection between economics and cultural studies, and, most important, appreciates their critique of ahistorical reasoning. Yet, Watkins also asks whether the binary of order/disorder is useful as a mechanism to cleanly divide modern from postmodern, whether it is enough for Marxism to repeat the ideas of social construction and historical specificity, and whether there is a role for making general connections (rather than totalizing narratives) in understanding “directions and tendencies in what's going on around and through us.”
Ruccio and Amariglio begin their substantive, article-length response with a very timely commentary on the state of economics in the post-crash context of the late 2000s and early 2010s. They are astonished to see how Keynes, Marx, Minsky, and other “long-forgotten names” are being reenergized, how ideas such as fiscal policy or herd behavior in stock markets are being rediscovered. In this spirit, they offer a reading of the pre-crash performance of modernist mainstream economics through McCloskey's “Samuelsonianism” construct and offer a more variegated representation of neoclassicism and its correlates throughout the postwar era, a representation that seems necessary to understand the reconfigurations of the disciplinary mapping in our post-crash times. In response to Bergeron, who wanted to see a more explicit formulation of an alternative postmodern approach, Ruccio and Amariglio emphatically recognize that they “resisted blueprints for how to replace modernism” and reconfirm their self-positioning as “opponents, indeed, enemies of all attempts to silence critical, and particularly radical thought.” In response to Kayatekin, who questioned the book's “vision of quasi-Utopian, cross-discursive conversation,” the authors claim that, while they are fully cognizant of the unlevel playing field structuring intradisciplinary conversations (or lack thereof even in the aftermath of the crisis), their text did advance “many strategic interventions, by dint of pursuing key postmodern moments” that could potentially “bring out the powerful recomposing and transformative force.” And finally, the authors tackle the two contrasting receptions of the book's treatment of Marxism: while McCloskey, a non-Marxist economist, finds their postmodern reading of Marxism welcome, Watkins, a Marxist non-economist, finds their postmodern historicism too timid. In response to the latter criticism, the authors reinstate their commitment to the concepts of conjuncture and overdetermination and claim that they “prefer to see ‘the economy’ produced and reproduced anew with whatever quirks, discordance, and so forth.”
In a full-length contribution, Mike Wayne offers a delicately and convincingly written reengagement with Kant and his philosophy of aesthetics, by reading Kant from the perspective of the Critique of Judgment rather than from the perspectives of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. The latter two, according to Lukács, in their abstract formalism where the rational pure ethical subject is clearly delineated from an equally pure object which obeys the a priori laws of nature, exemplified “the dualism of bourgeois consciousness.” In contrast, the Critique of Judgment, written later, “marks a methodological break” as it articulates “an objectivity that is permeated with subjectivity and a subjectivity that is permeated with objectivity.” According to Wayne, the concept of reflective judgment, mediating between form and content through induction and analogy, anticipates the “the missing realm of human praxis in the absence of the historical conditions that would allow praxis to be articulated in social scientific terms.”
A “semicollective text” edited by Thom Donovan, “Poetry during OWS” is composed of contributions from poets “based in text/language” that may be “concept based, or otherwise atypical of most printed objects traditionally identified as ‘poems’/‘poetry’” and address the struggles of the Occupy movement. Here are some fragments that are remixed: the metaphors gather in the walkways and plazas … I wanted to tell her that in the U.S., only artists lucky enough to be affiliated with a university can have health care. The poem and totality are mutually enriching and insubordinate. I put its money in its pocket … at city hall riot cops again line up to disperse the crowd … … people who are flooded by melancholy … … inside a rectangle now … OCCUPY WITH UNCERTAINTY. The structure and superstructures! From human microphone to People's Library … To sharpen antagonisms. Real plebes move in silence. … stealing a little bit of life in the metropolis … ZIZEK REMIX. My body, my signifier. “to reduce the risk of confrontation.” Long live the Oakland Commune!
The second symposium in this issue is on the book Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century (2008), by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, which begins to write a history of modes of production from the perspective of “the worker's desire for mobility” and analyzes “the relationship between contemporary migration flows, capitalism, and biopolitics.” The symposium begins with a brief programmatic essay by Stevphen Shukaitis that brings out the core autonomist proposition that the book reworks in its development of an “imperceptible politics” in opposition/relation to contemporary forms of power and representation: “resistance is the prior and determining dynamic.” According to Shukaitis, the imperceptible politics of fleeing from rights and representations as articulated by Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos (“to act below the overcoding regime of representation”) adopts an autonomist politics of refusal of work and representation for the new contexts of emergent postliberal forms of governmentality and provides new routes for “working from within, below, before, and through regimes of control.”
Esra Erdem approaches the book from the perspective of a poststructuralist Marxism, and explores the precarious and noncapitalist work practices articulated in Escape Routes through the diverse economies framework articulated by J. K. Gibson-Graham and the Community Economies Collective. Escape Routes, argues Erdem, is particularly valuable because it highlights the subversive potential of the “imperceptible” acts of extralegal, cross-border mobility without “romanticizing them” and argues that “the real obscenity of undocumented migration” is in the fact that migrants don't even pursue a politics of recognition and simply “prefer not to.” According to Erdem, however, while the authors do pose valuable criticisms of Marxian value theory (pertaining to the reproduction of labor power under post-Fordism and the status of an excess of “inappropriate/d sociability” beyond surplus labor), since all economic activity is subsumed under a notion of an all-encompassing capitalism, they leave no theoretical space for identifying and agitating for noncapitalisms. To remedy this shortcoming, Erdem proposes a conversation between the “imperceptible politics” of Escape Routes and the diverse economies project and sketches the contours of a possible encounter.
Anna Munster approaches Escape Routes from yet another perspective, that of the status of “life” and “experience” under the contemporary, biopolitical society of control. Munster lauds Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos for bringing out the excessiveness of life and experience as that which cannot be contained by successive regimes of control and that which becomes the locus of concrete and historically situated strategies of subversion and escape. In a supplementary move to further develop the authors’ discussion of networks, Munster notes that the problem is not so much the vertical aggregation (privatization) of the networks as it is the clustered aggregation of smaller networks that “tend to create ‘consistent’ relations with each other” (as exemplified in the way Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal “succumbed to the sway of the U.S. government” during the Wikileaks affair) over longer periods of time. And finally, Munster argues that, contrary to the authors who place continuous experience (and its excess) and representation on two sides of a divide, our connections actualize through a process that combines both signifying and ‘a-signifying’ components and excess “is generated by the indeterminate potentiality of a mixed-up being: The speaking-experiencing human animal.”
Serap Kayatekin, returning for her assessment of Escape Routes, once again meditates on the problem of power in the context of authors’ desire to distance themselves from both Foucaultian notions of power and their reading of Marxian notions of social transformation. Kayatekin finds the authors’ discussion of the constant formation and reformation of vertical aggregates in postliberal, transnational space “incisive, insightful, and inspiring.” Yet, she takes issue with the authors’ representation of their break from the traditions of Marxism and critical theory. First, Kayatekin objects to the too easy association of Marxist political practice with that of a grand narrative, and claims that a politics over class processes (of production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor), when considered within an overdetermined conception of the social field, could “be a very good companion to the imperceptible politics analyzed” in Escape Routes. Second, Kayatekin reminds us that, for Foucault, power successfully interpellates the subject only if the latter gives consent to its call. And third, she notes that the Gramscian concept of hegemony already incorporates a notion of “vertical aggregation” as a necessary articulatory process. Finally, Kayatekin examines the idea of the “autonomy of migration” and questions whether the migrant subject can really escape from national, ethnic, and class representations to become everybody.
In their candid response to their commentators, Tsianos, Papadopoulos, and Stephenson, like Ruccio and Amariglio, refer to the context of the 2008 economic crisis, argue that the class war of the rich against “global living labor” is a class war from above, and remind us that Escape Routes was written to rethink radical politics as a politics from below against the pervasiveness of capitalism. They agree with Shukaitis when he reads their text as a reworking of autonomist Marxism, but remind us that they do so “by decentering the workerist fixation” of the latter. They welcome Munster's “granulized network” as a very helpful model for understanding the current conjuncture of postliberalism, which they distinguish from neoliberalism in a number of axes, including increasing acceptance of state intervention, legitimization of illiberal practices, and modularization of the individual. In this new context, they argue in response to Kayatekin that no room is available for political projects of recognition, representation, or identity if only because postliberal interpellations do not differentiate between the public or the private, and always already operate over “many, many slices of subjectivity.” Instead, they argue for a radical politics of disidentification that breaks with the logic of representation (which always mediates between the subject and political power) and reclaims the power of politics in subjectivity and the continuous experience of being in a constant process of materialization. They see this process of materialization as the locus of emergence for contingent collectivities that Erdem seeks to explore through the diverse economies framework and its ontological reframing.
In a politically engaged Remarx commentary, Anjan Chakrabarti offers a class analysis of the inherent contradictions and identity crisis of the Indian communist movement in the context of neoliberal globalization and the recent transformation of the Indian economy. Chakrabarti argues that India's rapid integration into the circuits of global capital, when combined with its redistributive programs for redressing income inequality and social exclusion financed through high growth rates, led both of the two divergent routes of the communist movement into crisis. The parliamentary route of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), to the extent that it got subsumed under the nationalist project of capitalist development and combined a certain form of “‘vanguardism’ with the neoliberal art of governance,” slowly drifted into a major crisis of legitimacy. The armed-struggle route of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), on the other hand, to the extent that it did not have any room for ground-level democratization in its political imagination and praxis, ended up reproducing the model of governance that was adopted by the state which it opposed. For Chakrabarti, these shortcomings can be in part explained by modernist forms of thinking about politics, economy, and society in general and can in part explain the retreat of the radical left in India.
We close this highly urgent and packed issue with a review of a collection of essays edited by a member of the editorial board of the journal, Marcus E. Green. What is particularly remarkable for us is the fact that all the twenty-two essays gathered together thematically in Rethinking Gramsci were originally published in the pages of Rethinking Marxism. Reviewer Manual S. Almeida contextualizes the collection within the editorial history of Gramsci's incomplete and fragmentary manuscripts, and welcomes the volume as it provides “a healthy dose of interpretive sobriety.” Almeida considers the wide breadth of perspectives gathered together in the volume to be an indication of not only the wealth but also the dialogical nature of Gramsci's writing.
With this issue, Joseph Childers and Ceren Özselçuk step down as reviews editors. Faruk Eray Düzenli, however, continues to serve as a reviews editor, and is joined by Ian J. Seda-Irizarry and Peter Ives. Childers began serving as the reviews editor in 2003, a year after joining the editorial board, and has done such an impeccable job that we are compelled to turn to the reviews section immediately upon opening the journal. He did this job on his own until 2009, when Düzenli and Özselçuk joined him. Also in this issue, Joel Phipps, our production editor at Routledge, is stepping down and handing on the task to Elena Wright. The journal has benefited very much from Phipps's gracious support, which has gone well beyond the call of duty. We welcome Seda-Irizarry, Ives, and Wright to their new positions.
—The Editors
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