Post-Modernism, Economics and Knowledge

POSTMODERNISM, ECONOMICS AND KNOWLEDGE

It is only in the past ten years that the debates surrounding modernism and postmodernism have emerged within the discipline of economics. This new way of thinking moves beyond the prior emphasis of the philosophy of science – challenging the belief in the progressivity and modernity of economics and rejecting claims that science and mathematics provide the only models for the structure of economic knowledge. This highly important volume is the first to bring together the essays of top theorists to debate issues in the following areas: • • • • • •

Modernism and postmodernism: Sheila Dow, Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey and Jack Amariglio Reading symbols, changing subjects and discerning bodies in economic discourse: Jack Amariglio, David F. Ruccio, Jean-Joseph Goux, Regenia Gagnier and John Dupré Gendered subjectivities in neoclassical economics: S. Charusheela, Gillian Hewitson and Brian Cooper Feminist/postmodern economics: Ulla Grapard, Julie Nelson, Jane Rossetti and Suzanne Bergeron Postmodernism, economic rationality and the problem of ‘representation’: Stephen Cullenberg, Indraneel Dasgupta, Shaun Hargreaves-Heap, Judith Mehta and Henry Krips Is there a (postmodern) alternative in economics? From markets to gifts: William Milberg, Philip Mirowski, Stephen Gudeman and John Davis

Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge does not require the reader to have an economics background; it is an accessible text providing diverse views of each topic, followed by critical commentary to end each section. From the editors’ introductory essay through the individual contributions, this book will serve as an invaluable reference tool for all studying economic methodology, postmodernism and the history of economic thought. Stephen Cullenberg is Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Riverside. Jack Amariglio is Professor of Economics at Merrimack College. David F. Ruccio is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame.

ECONOMICS AS SOCIAL THEORY Tony Lawson University of Cambridge Social Theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies and of the types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are reemerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest of society, and between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. There is a renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organization, power, probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty, value, etc. The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics, the label ‘theory’ has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical ‘modeling’. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the ‘Theory’ label, offering a platform for alternative rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorizing. Other titles in this series include: ECONOMICS AND LANGUAGE Edited by Willie Henderson

ECONOMICS AND REALITY Tony Lawson

RATIONALITY, INSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIC METHODOLOGY Edited by Uskali Mäki, Bo Gustafsson, and Christian Knudsen

THE MARKET John O’ Neill

NEW DIRECTIONS IN ECONOMIC METHODOLOGY Edited by Roger Backhouse WHO PAYS FOR THE KIDS? Nancy Folbre RULES AND CHOICE IN ECONOMICS Viktor Vanberg BEYOND RHETORIC AND REALISM IN ECONOMICS Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. O’Gorman FEMINISM, OBJECTIVITY AND ECONOMICS Julie A. Nelson ECONOMIC EVOLUTION Jack J. Vromen

ECONOMICS AND UTOPIA Geoff Hodgson CRITICAL REALISM IN ECONOMICS Edited by Steve Fleetwood THE NEW ECONOMIC CRITICISM Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen WHAT DO ECONOMISTS KNOW? Edited by Robert F. Garnett, Jr POSTMODERNISM, ECONOMICS AND KNOWLEDGE Edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio THE VALUES OF ECONOMICS An Aristotelian perspective Irene van Staveren

POSTMODERNISM, ECONOMICS AND KNOWLEDGE Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio

London and New York

First published 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2001 Selection and editorial matter, Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio; individual chapters, the respective contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Postmodern, economics and knowledge/ edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio p. cm – (Economics as social theory) Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Economics–Philoosophy. 2. Postmodernism–social aspects. I. Cullenberg, Stephen. II. Amariglio, Jack. III. Ruccio, David F. IV. Series. HB72 .P64 2001 330.1–dc21

00-045954 ISBN 0–415–11025–4 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–11026–2 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-41070-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-71894-1 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS

List of illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

ix x xv

PART I

Introduction 1 Introduction

S T E P H E N C U L L E N B E R G , J A C K A M A R I G L I O A N D D AV I D F. R U C C I O

PART II

Modernism and postmodernism 2 Modernism and postmodernism: A dialectical analysis

SHEILA DOW

3 Late modernism and the loss of character in economics

ARJO KLAMER

4 The genealogy of postmodernism: An economist’s guide

102

DEIRDRE McCLOSKEY

5 Writing in thirds

129

JACK AMARIGLIO

CONTENTS

PART III

Reading symbols, changing subjects and discerning bodies in economic discourse 6 From unity to dispersion: The body in modern economic discourse

143

J A C K A M A R I G L I O A N D D AV I D F. R U C C I O

7 Ideality, symbolicity, and reality in postmodern capitalism

166

JEAN-JOSEPH GOUX

8 Chacun son Goux? Or, some skeptical reflections on flat bodies and heavy metal

182

REGENIA GAGNIER AND JOHN DUPRÉ

PART IV

Gendered subjectivities in neoclassical economics 9 Women’s choices and the ethnocentrism/relativism dilemma

197

S. CHARUSHEELA

10 The disavowal of the sexed body in neoclassical economics

221

GILLIAN HEWITSON

11 Comment on Charusheela and Hewitson

246

BRIAN COOPER

PART V

Feminist/postmodern economics 12 The trouble with women and economics: A postmodern perspective on Charlotte Perkins Gilman

261

U L L A G R A PA R D

13 Feminist economics: Objective, activist, and postmodern? JULIE A. NELSON

286

CONTENTS

14 Postmodernism and feminist economics

305

JANE ROSSETTI

15 No more nice girls? Feminism, economics, and postmodern encounters

327

SUZANNE BERGERON

PART VI

Postmodernism, economic rationality and the problem of ‘representation’ 16 From myth to metaphor: A semiological analysis of the Cambridge capital controversy

337

S T E P H E N C U L L E N B E R G A N D I N D R A N E E L D A S G U P TA

17 Postmodernity, rationality and justice

354

S H A U N H A R G R E AV E S H E A P

18 A disorderly household – voicing the noise

374

J U D I T H M E H TA

19 Postmodern encounters

399

H E N RY K R I P S

PART VII

Is there a (postmodern) alternative in economics? From markets to gifts 20 Decentering the market metaphor in international economics

407

WILLIAM MILBERG

21 Refusing the gift

431

PHILIP MIROWSKI

22 Postmodern gifts

459

STEPHEN GUDEMAN

vii

CONTENTS

23 Gifts and trade: Mirowskian, Gudemanian, and Milbergian themes

475

J O H N D AV I S

Name index Subject index

483 487

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Tables 2.1 13.1 13.2 18.1 20.1 20.2

Pluralism in economics The contemporary definition of economics Extremist binary oppositions in the modernism/ postmodernism debate Summary of results Intra-firm trade, USA, Japan and Sweden Cumulative current account balance, selected countries

63 289 300 383 418 423

Figures 9.1

13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 16.1 16.2 17.1 17.2 17.3 20.1 20.2 20.3 21.1

Analyzing decisions in a choice-theoretic framework: decision tree showing the analyst’s choices and decisions in deciphering agent actions The hierarchical dualism The gender/value compass Separation and connection Detachment and engagement Unity and multiplicity Reswitching and capital reversal The semiology of myth Conflict over a resource Conflict between a Utilitarian and a Rawlsian Equal relative concession Organization and location of a transnational corporation: hypothetical case Varieties of international intra-firm integration of production Alliances among airline computer reservation systems Sahlins causal structure ix

201 291 292 294 298 301 342 345 359 361 370 417 420 422 443

CONTRIBUTORS

Jack Amariglio is Professor of Economics at Merrimack College. He was one of the founders of the interdisciplinary journal, Rethinking Marxism, and served as its initial Editor from 1988 to 1997. He has published widely on the philosophy and history of economic thought, as well as on the intersection of economics and culture. His book with David Ruccio, entitled Postmodern Moments of Modern Economics, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Suzanne Bergeron is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Social Sciences at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She received her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Notre Dame. She has written on postmodernism and economics, gender and development, and globalization. S. Charusheela is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She received her doctorate in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She served on the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism, and is an active member of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA) and the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). Brian Cooper is Assistant Professor of Economics at State University of New York at Oswego. He has research interests in and has published articles on the economics of the family, the history of economics, the economics of race, gender, and class, and the intersections between literary theory and economic theory. He is currently finishing a book, Family Fictions and Family Facts: Harriet Martineau, Adolphe Quetelet, and the Population Question in England, 1798–1859, to be published by Routledge.

CONTRIBUTORS

Stephen Cullenberg is Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of The Falling Rate of Profit (Pluto, 1994) and co-author of Economics and the Historian (University of California Press, 1995) and co-editor of Marxism in the Postmodern Age (Guilford, 1994) and Whither Marxism? (Routledge, 1994). Indraneel Dasgupta is Lecturer, School of Economics, University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests lie primarily in the fields of microeconomic theory and development economics. Publications include papers in the Journal of Economic Theory, European Economic Review and Oxford Economic Papers. John Davis, Professor of Economics and International Business, Ph.D. in Philosophy (University of Illinois-Urbana, 1983) and Ph.D. in Economics (Michigan State University, 1985), teaches International Trade and International Economics at Marquette University. He is the author of Keynes’s Philosophical Development (Cambridge, 1994), editor of New Economics and Its History (Duke, 1998), and co-editor of The Handbook of Economic Methodology (Elgar, 1998). He is President-Elect of the History of Economics Society, and has been the editor of the Review of Social Economy since 1987. Currently he is working on a book to be published by Routledge on theories of the individual in economics. Sheila Dow holds a Personal Chair in Economics at the University of Stirling, having previously worked as a government economist. She has published widely in the areas of history of thought, methodology of economics, monetary theory, and regional finance. She is author of several books, the latest being The Methodology of Macroeconomic Thought (Elgar, 1996). John Dupré is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He works in the philosophy of science, specializing in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of economics. As well as numerous articles in philosophical journals and anthologies, he is the author of The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Harvard, 1993), and the editor of The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality (MIT, 1987). Regenia Gagnier is Professor of English at the University of Exeter and has written extensively on culture and economics. Her books include Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986); Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832–1920 (Oxford, 1991); and The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000).

CONTRIBUTORS

Jean-Joseph Goux is the Lawrence Favrot Chair at Rice University where he currently teaches French philosophy in the Department of French Studies. He has also taught at the University of California (San Diego, Berkeley), the University of Montreal, Brown University and Duke University. His major books translated into English are: Symbolic Economies(CornellUniversityPress, 1990), Oedipus,Philosopher(Stanford University Press, 1993), The Coiners of Language, (Oklahoma University Press, 1994). He is co-editor of Terror and Consensus: The Vicissitudes of French Thought (Stanford University, 1998) and Frivolité de la valeur: essai sur l‘imaginaire du capitalisme, (Paris: Blusson, 2000). Ulla Grapard is Associate Professor of Economics at Colgate University. Her teaching specialties include gender in the economy and the political economy of the Scandinavian welfare state. Her publications and research are focused on theoretical issues of gender in the history of economic thought and feminist economic methodology. Stephen Gudeman is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He has carried out fieldwork in several Latin American nations focusing on Spanishspeaking peoples in the countryside and, more recently, in urban areas. He examines social and symbolic organization but has a special interest in economic anthropology and local models of economic life. Shaun Hargreaves Heap teaches at the University of East Anglia. His research is in macroeconomics and philosophy and economics. He is particularly interested in the role of rationality assumptions in economics and his most recent research is in the economics of the media. Gillian Hewitson is a lecturer in the School of Business at La Trobe University, and teaches macroeconomics and money and banking subjects. Her Ph.D. was a metatheoretical discussion of neoclassical and feminist economics from the perspective of feminist poststructuralism (published by Edward Elgar, 1999). She has also published in the area of endogenous monetary theory. Arjo Klamer is currently Professor in the Economics of Art and Culture at the Erasmus University. Recently he edited the volume The Value of Culture: On the Relationship Between Economics and the Arts (Amsterdam/Michigan University Press, 1996). Before returning to the Netherlands, he taught at The George Washington University, University of Iowa and Wellesley College. During his American period he pushed hard for the rhetorical perspective on economics. His best-known book is Conversations with Economists (1984).

xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Henry Krips is Professor of Communication and of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published extensively in the areas of cultural studies and philosophy of science. His major publications are The Metaphysics of Quantum Theory (Oxford University Press, 1989), and Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (Cornell University Press, 1999). Deirdre McCloskey is Professor of the Human Sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago and Tinbergen Professor at Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She has written many books, some with postmodern themes, such as The Rhetoric of Economics (2nd ed. 1998), If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economics Expertise (1990), and Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994). Her latest book, about her change of gender, is Crossing: A Memoir. Judith Mehta is a Lecturer in Economics at the Open University. Her teaching and research focus on decision-making and economic organization, overlaid with a concern to locate new kinds of conversations in response to challenges posed by recent French philosophy. William Milberg is Associate Professor and Chair of Economics at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at New School University in New York. He has worked on the staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Council of Economic Advisors and UNCTAD. His research focuses on international trade, technological change, trade policy and economic methodology. Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Against Mechanism and More Heat than Light, and the editor of Natural Images in Economics, Edgeworth on Chance and The Collected Economic Works of William Thomas Thornton. His book Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and a reader on the economics of science, prepared jointly with Esther-Mirjam Sent, entitled Science Bought and Sold, will be appearing from the University of Chicago Press. While not himself a post-boasty, he is convinced that economics has been more influenced by cultural movements like poststructuralism than it likes to make out. Julie A. Nelson does research on the relation of feminist theory to economics and the analysis of household behavior. She is the author of Feminism, Objectivity, and Economics (Routledge, 1996), coeditor (with Marianne A. Ferber) of Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1993), and author of articles in journals including the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the Journal of

xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Labor Economics. She currently has a fellowship at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jane Rossetti has taught Economics at Williams College, Occidental College, and Franklin & Marshall College. She is currently an unaffiliated scholar. David F. Ruccio is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame and editor of the journal Rethinking Marxism. He is the author of numerous articles and essays on economic development and postmodernism and economics and the coeditor of Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory (Wesleyan, 1996). He is currently working (with Jack Amariglio) on a book manuscript for Princeton University Press entitled Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics.

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for granting permission to reproduce material in this work: Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce extracts from Deirdre McCloskey (1994) Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics. Critical Review for permission to reproduce extracts from Deirdre McCloskey (1991) ‘The Essential Rhetoric of Law, Literature and Liberty’, 5 (Spring) 202–23. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions.

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 3

CULLENBERG, AMARIGLIO AND RUCCIO

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. 4

INTRODUCTION

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.

CULLENBERG, AMARIGLIO AND RUCCIO

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 sociocultural 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

INTRODUCTION

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 marketinspired 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 7

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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 not for economic theorizing, in pre- or non-capitalist social processes.18 Among other things, the sense that capitalism threatens to seep into every existing pore of the worldwide social skin leads some cultural critics to hail the gift, and any realm of economic activity not reducible to market exchange, as offering one possible way out. This set of concerns arises in this volume in papers by Mirowski, Gudeman, Davis, and in a way Goux, as they all touch upon the degree to which the commodity and/or discourse about the commodity is omnipresent, even in the attempts to construct the ‘anti-economics’ of gift theory. If the postmodern age is one in which culture is merely an accompaniment to capitalist economic expansion, then it is a legitimate question if it is possible under the circ*mstances to think about such issues as value and exchange in any register ‘outside’ the regime of the commodity as, in Marx’s phrase, ‘the general equivalent’.

Postmodernism as the ‘condition’ of the contemporary The idea of the postmodern as a ‘condition’ or the state of life today is sometimes connected to the previous notion of postmodernism as a historical stage. Yet, in the work of the best known theorist of this ‘condition’, Jean-François Lyotard (1984), most of the baggage of ‘late capitalist’ discourse is discarded for a different emphasis, one that connects living in a postmodern world with changes in discourse itself, including (and perhaps especially) those that concern knowledge and science. Lyotard’s focus on science and knowledge is matched by still others who describe the current state of social existence (mostly in developed 8

INTRODUCTION

Western capitalist nations) as characterized by the decentering of individual selves and society, a shift from ‘global’ to ‘local’ politics and ethics, the ‘saturation’ of psyches and imaginations by an amazing array of discontinuous images and events, and much else. In Lyotard’s important book The Postmodern Condition, however, the central themes have to do with a shift in the ways in which knowledge and science are both conceptualized and practiced. A shift, we note, that opens up a chasm between modernity and postmodernity.19 Lyotard’s ‘report on knowledge’, as he calls it, is concerned largely with two interrelated issues. One is rejection and (hoped-for) disappearance of what he terms the ‘grand metanarratives’ that have structured much thought and practice since the Enlightenment. Hence, to the degree that ‘modernity’ may be said to be contemporaneous with the rise and spread of Enlightenment thinking, Lyotard is offering a diagnosis of life after modernism. These metanarratives have ranged in their overarching scope from the promise of political independence and human liberation through representative democracy and/or the victory of the masses to the claims for the efficacy of scientific knowledge as the harbinger of social progress through victory over a now mostly tamed nature and through social engineering. Lyotard calls particular attention to those metanarratives, like liberalism and Marxism, that have held out the hope for total change in society and culture (and economy) through advocacy of particular principles and perspectives. In both liberalism and Marxism, for example, there has been the tendency to measure human progress partly in terms of the ability of humankind to harness technology and science to human designs, most especially the end of political oppression and/or economic exploitation. Lyotard is hostile to such stories insofar as they themselves contribute to a ‘totalizing’ vision of the world, one in which progress is in the nature of history, and in which social practices are linked in a kind of reinforcing signifying chain in the name (or cause) of freedom, happiness, and autonomy. That is, Lyotard sees that much damage has been done in the advent of such grand causes, and he identifies them with the narratives, broadly held and interpreted, that give them their extra-discursive power. But, additionally, Lyotard sees as well the attempt to reduce the relative autonomy of science and culture in the service of these master narratives as either illusory or dangerous, or both. Thus Lyotard eschews the story, so prevalent, for example, in the history and philosophy of economics, that knowledge has both simply progressed and that it has been the dynamic force behind social progress, as truth inevitably drives out error and knowledge comes to increasingly replace ideology.20 Indeed, a distinguishing aspect of modernist thought is the widely and fiercely held belief in the narratives about the clear benefits and merits of scientific knowledge. (A chemist who is a 9

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colleague of one of us declared recently in a public audience that the only thing in the entire past century he could identify as clearly contributing to a ‘better’ world was science; his evaluation of every other sphere of human endeavor, from the arts to social and political movements for enfranchisem*nt to sexual revolutions to the spread of the marketplace, have resulted in mixed results, at best, and most probably social devolution!) Lyotard seems more intent to talk about what he perceives as the fact that current scientific preoccupations and practices are no longer (in his view) wedded to narratives about the ultimate knowability of the world and the beneficial dimension of such knowledge. The world of science that he consequently describes is more taken with images, concepts, and activities of discontinuity. It is a world of nearly infinite and diverse information flows (of course, made possible by the computer revolution) and it is rife with scientific ‘games’21 in which meaning and consequence (of these games) are always in play or at stake. This is a world, he feels, that is developing more along the lines of considerations of chaos and uncertainty, of indeterminacies and fracta, rather than in accordance with a view of the unified structure of nature and of the predictably sanguine (and utilitarian) results of scientific knowledge.22 This is a world, too, in which the fundamental discursivity of science is not only celebrated, but becomes almost a new master narrative enlivening current scientific endeavors, as everything from biotechnology and human genome research to contemporary astrophysics may increasingly be seen as a ‘reading’ or a Wittgensteinian game of particular fields as inscribed within a kind of ultralinguistic system. Lyotard identifies these considerations and games as constituting, to a large degree, the postmodern condition, at least where knowledge production and dissemination are concerned. The postmodern condition Lyotard describes has its corollaries in a variety of fields of human activity. Regardless of the originating causes of this condition (whether it reflects capitalism’s most recent developments, or the information revolution, or the decline of community and the evaporation of universal moral norms, or the effects of affluence for some and continued agony for others, and so forth), many others in addition to Lyotard have joined in to note the changed conditions of life in more developed societies during the past 40 or more years.23 Lyotard’s ‘report’ highlights in many ways the central terms of this altered life experience (that is, compared to the modernism that is said to either precede or coexist with it).24 These terms include a sense that individual lives and social entities have been ‘decentered’; that we live in a variety of psychological and social states/positions, each of which ‘overdetermine’ our identities and subjectivities; that modern science and technology contribute possibly as much to ‘barbarism’ and destruction (the atom bomb, pollution, germ warfare, etc.) as they do to the betterment of 10

INTRODUCTION

human life and the natural environment; that the metanarratives of progress and liberation have either failed or have contributed to sociopolitical outcomes that are repulsive; that knowledge and ethics are contextspecific and time-specific; that there are radical discontinuities in the way we experience most everything we encounter; that there is little that can be considered ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ in culture (nor ought there to be); that power is dispersed rather than concentrated; that the search for unique meaning and transcendent truth are no longer meaningful or constructive quests; and that social inequalities and race, class, gender, and ethnic oppression continue in direct contrast to modernism’s promises of freedom, justice, and equality for all. This brief list speaks to modernism’s putative exhaustion and anomie, but it also speaks to altered circ*mstances, some of which are happily embraced by theorists of postmodernism. These changed circ*mstances, expressed perhaps most fully in recent art and literature, speak to the extent to which many of the touchstones of modernist culture and society have been or are now being decomposed, discarded, or ‘deconstructed’. Therefore, while the ‘postmodern condition’ can and often does span a wide spectrum of social, cultural, and even economic currents, let us spend a few more moments talking about three areas in particular that are of primary concern for many of the papers in this volume: the nature of the contemporary ‘subject’, the state of scientific knowledge, and the sense that we live in a world pervaded by uncertainty. As we mention above, so much talk about postmodernism has been about the human subject and the dissolution of psychosocial unity in the face of an increasingly fragmented existence.25 In some postmodern strands of writing, the subject is said to be overloaded, or ‘saturated’, by images and identities that are made possible today – indeed are forced on the poor subject – by the excess of images, cultural events, and social relationships that are the result of everything from the increased volume and pace of market transactions to MTV. Again, the idea here is that changes in how we experience time and space have both paradoxically expanded the social world and, in a way, themselves been compressed as a result of this same world getting smaller (because becoming increasingly ‘global’). The cultural psychologist Kenneth Gergen (1991) gives numerous examples that depict this saturation of the prototypical postmodern subject through the ‘lengthening’ of social experience and the shortening of time and space. Here are just a few: a call to a Philadelphia lawyer is answered by a message recorded in three languages. (2)

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I gave a short speech at a birthday party in Heidelberg last year. When I returned to the United States three days later, a friend on the opposite coast called to tell me about the guests’ reactions to the talk. He had gotten the gossip two days earlier via electronic mail. (2) Fred is a neurologist who spends many of his spare hours working to aid families from El Salvador. Although he is married to Tina, on Tuesday and Thursday nights he lives with an Asian friend with whom he has a child. On weekends he drives his BMW to Atlantic City for gambling. (171) Leaving aside any consideration for the moment of the class, race, gender, nationality or any other ‘privilege’ that these examples may exemplify, Gergen claims to be describing a growing phenomenon. In his view, the compression of time and space accomplished by technological achievements like jet travel and the internet, along with the accompanying possibilities of crossing, or even living in, a variety of ‘cultures’ has now pervaded the everyday lives of a vast world-wide populace. The assault on singular personality and focused rationality, and the dispersion of the putative ‘unity’ of the ego and the intentional subject, are the consequence of the fragmenting of social life that is considered the hallmark of postmodernity.26 Now, this fragmentation is either celebrated or lamented, determining to a large degree whether or not one sees the postmodern condition as a beneficial or negative development. Yet, for those who believe that the condition of existence for most of the world’s population has indeed changed in the direction of increased fragmentation but also increased ‘possibility’, the passing of the unified subject and its replacement by the ‘decentered subject’ is a defining moment of a world-historical change. As we have said, the emergence of the decentered subject has been hailed or reviled. And these alternative evaluations have often depended on whether or not one sees the resulting dispersion of self and society as an evil, brought about by the insidious commodification that those like Jameson describe, or a good, announcing the abandonment of the great modernist, humanist metanarratives that Lyotard has attempted to elucidate. Be it as it may, the perception that the subject may not be as unified and rational as modernist science and literature had once supposed marks one of the key ways to trace the impact (perhaps potential) on such fields of social theory as economics. For there is no question that for generations of mainstream economists, the rational subject who is capable of identifying or at least representing 12

INTRODUCTION

a consistent (at a moment in time) set of preferences is the starting point of much consequent economic theorizing.27 Yet, it is possible that the postmodern condition is one that has been dimly grasped in some corners of the profession (even in some unlikely places, like game theory). More importantly, the postmodern condition may be said to open up a very different research agenda for economic scientists should they choose to disown what many regard as the necessary ‘fiction’ (defended by many, in the end, for containing more than just a grain of truth about human subjects) of the unified self and move, instead, to a different fiction (but one supposedly more in tune with contemporary reality), the decentered self. We return to these issues below. For now, suffice it to say that the idea that psychic fragmentation – and here we are not describing a supposed ‘irrational pathology’, as is said to be the case with schizophrenics – and the decentering of selves might alter economic analysis considerably is one that is represented to a degree in some of the essays in this collection (see footnote 25), and is, after all, one of the strongest challenges that the postmodern condition, if one accepts its ‘reality’, poses to the discipline.28 The recognition that subjects may in fact be ‘decentered’ in the contemporary world has considerable spillover effects on notions of the status and nature of knowledge in the postmodern condition. There is a sort of paradox operating here. On the one hand, subjects are seen to occupy so many different positions and to hold a bewildering variety of perspectives that the possibility of stable and commensurable knowledge among and between people is seen as highly questionable. In this view, knowledge is seen to be local (not universal) and subject to persistent uncertainty. The fragmentation of subjects (within themselves as well as among themselves) leads each and every one to hold mostly incommensurable concepts and notions, as universal truths retreat into the background or remain a thing of a supposed past, one in which hom*ogenizing forces were presumed to be more determinative in constituting a horizon of transcendental intelligibility. On the other hand, subjects may also be seen to reflect the particular locations in which they find themselves, thus leading to the idea that the unique experiences either of individuals or the groups to which they belong are today productive of ‘situated’ knowledges that, while not entirely translatable or transmittable, are at least stable enough to contribute to well-developed, ‘standpoint’-based understandings. This view is based on the idea that fragmentation or decenteredness is not a matter of pure solipsism. Instead, the view is that knowledge may be ‘relative’ to the diversity of cultures and set of experiences – which may be widely shared, but not universally so – that are thought to determine human consciousnesses. The plurality of such identity-based knowledges – often reflecting the particular experiences people may have 13

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because of race or gender or class or national distinctions – makes it impossible for knowledge to pass itself off as ‘unsituated’ and ‘uninterested’. In this view, the ‘god’s eye perspective’ or the Platonic desire for a view from nowhere that were thought, alternatively, to be the underlying premises of modernist notions of the possibility of knowledge and science are rejected in favor of the notion that knowledge is always/already influenced by, if not an outright expression of, the ‘standpoints’ that various and discrete subjects may hold. The standpoint approach to knowledge and science is one that, perhaps, brings certain postmodern theorists close to the perspectives brought to bear by feminists, multiculturalists, and those who stress the importance of post-coloniality for the ‘social construction’ of knowledge and science. Thus, while one may argue that the postmodern condition is characterized by rampant globalization, caused primarily by multinational capital flows and the increased mobility of worldwide labor, an irony may be that different voices – or at least their ‘breakthrough’ into the discourse and consciousness of Western societies and cultures – have remained intransigent in rejecting and blocking easy assimilation and formation into a globally agreed upon knowledge. The globalization that Jameson and others have described may be occurring apace, but this has only meant increased differentiation in the field of discourse and culture, as identities and standpoints turn out to be more resistant to integration than is often thought. Hence, the postmodern condition may be one that not only calls attention to the race, gender, class, and national privilege that allowed for the ‘scientific revolution’ brought about by the Enlightenment to occur. It may also be one that keeps in play irreducible differences as the bases for all contemporary knowledge, even in fields that are self-described as ‘hard science’. As subjects and societies are decentered by the proliferation of experiences and cultural identities, so too is knowledge and science in this postmodern world. And, note that the effects of such a decentering accompanied by a profusion of voices, in which one’s standpoint matters, includes the possible indeterminacy and/or multiplicity of knowledge(s) not only for the subjects described within any field of thought, but of course (and perhaps even more importantly) for the scientist/observers themselves. Economic agents, living in a postmodern world, are thus considered to be both situated and saturated. Giving voice to the confusion, but also the clarity, that results from an overload of possibilities, situated nonetheless in the multiple positions and identities that globalization has enhanced rather than eliminated. Agents are not irrational. They possess different, simultaneously experienced rationalities, expressing the likely cultural locations and histories whence they arise. Choice in this scenario often appears like a crap shoot, or something even more random than 14

INTRODUCTION

this (some Marxian theorists would call such a situation an ‘overdetermined conjuncture’). Scientists, too, are confronted with a welter of choices. Theories contend and overlap, but they also are just plain different and non-reducible or transcendable by a transdiscursive Method. Theory choice may be more a matter of aesthetic taste, as the playing field for all such knowledge games is constituted as a collage of relatively autonomous strategies, tactics, and their outcomes. Thus, the postmodern condition for knowledge production is often represented as a kind of relativism, a situation in which there can be no ultimate appeal to a predetermined or attainable Truth, but in which taste and power and interest are shown to be part and parcel of why one theory flourishes while another may dwell in the shadows (see Foucault [1980] on the relationship between power and knowledge). As we say above, the postmodern condition, as it is often described, is one that evinces indeterminacy and uncertainty rather than limpidity and predictability. Agents and observers of their behavior are constantly thinking and acting in the face of ‘just not knowing’. So, then, as might be expected, the issues of how to behave or how to theorize under conditions of uncertainty have risen to the top of the agenda for natural and social scientists, that is if postmodern theorists like Lyotard are to be believed. Indeed, it is arguable that for the past 75 or more years the theme of uncertainty has been central to so many new developments in the arts and sciences, and this includes economics of course.29 From the sheer randomness of Dada poetry to the indeterminacy of quantum physics to the role of uncertain expectations in organizing agent behavior in a market economy, this theme emerged during the twentieth century as opening up a new range of creative possibilities for thought and action.30 Thus, some argue, postmodernism is simply the recognition of this reality, as theory brings up the rear in self-reflection on already changed world historical circ*mstances.

The style of the postmodern: self-reflecting and deconstructing The preceding comments bring us to our third category for postmodernism. That is, postmodernism as a ‘style’ of writing, thinking, acting, and creating. In this vein, postmodernism has been associated once again not surprisingly with a vast number of different stances, genres, and movements, encompassing many things from self-reflexivity and bricolage to deconstruction and pastiche.31 Postmodern styles in music, art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and culture have brought to the fore the undecidability of meaning, the discursivity of the non-discursive, the inconceivability of pure ‘presence’, the irrelevance of intention, the insuperability of authenticity, the 15

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impossibility of representation, along with the celebration of play, difference, plurality, chance, inconsequence, and marginality. Postmodernism, as an agglomeration of styles, contributes to the sense that there is indeed a postmodern condition to which all these styles are directly or obliquely referring. And, of course, some of these styles are intended as well as oppositional to – as critiques of – the prevailing sensibilities and formations that are thought to make up the various modernisms in these fields and disciplines. But, whether or not these all speak to a set of changed historical and empirical circ*mstances, and indeed whether or not the emergence of these styles speaks too to some central historical cause, like the spread of global capitalist commodity culture, it remains the case that within the past 40 or more years, one can successfully document the rise of the ‘postmodern’ in aesthetics and ethics. That is, postmodernism as style affects the fundamental determinations of ‘value’ and ‘meaning’ as they are encountered throughout the social and cultural landscape.32 It is, of course, impossible for us to render intelligible such diverse stylistic movements in the questions of value and meaning in a brief introduction like this. Yet, since in fact some of the essays here draw upon certain strands of postmodern styles of thought and presentation, we will dwell upon just a few. One, of course, is the style that goes under the name of deconstruction.33 This style, sometimes converted into a method, was pioneered and made famous by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1976, 1978). Now, like everything else discussed under the rubric of postmodernism (and its close relation, poststructuralism), deconstruction as literary/philosophical style has meant many different things to many different people. We encounter it most often, though, as a textual reading in which the play of words and signs within a text, presumed to produce stable and intelligible meanings, is shown to the contrary to precisely undo such stability and significance. For many who practice deconstruction, the goal is to demonstrate the impossibility of pure presence, that is, the inability of any sentence or text to stand for singular meanings and, hence, to eliminate contradiction, ambiguity, multiplicity, and so forth. In this view, texts can be ‘deconstructed’ by means of a close and careful analysis to reveal the ‘aporia’ and the ‘undecidables’ that are everpresent. Hence, a text is always gesturing – mostly in spite of itself – to other texts and to other referents, as it is shown to be the site of ‘differance’ (a mixed word that attempts to connote both ‘difference’ and ‘deference’ – the act of deferring).34 Deconstruction as a style of textual analysis calls attention to the radical indeterminacy of meaning, the inability to reduce the incessant play between signifiers (such as words and symbols) that never settles down into univocality. Deconstruction as a style of writing is a deliberate attempt to bring forth all those things that can be said to undermine – deconstruct – the supposed central and fixed meanings of textual 16

INTRODUCTION

compositions. So, for example, Derrida and others have often composed texts that are seemingly dialogic in nature, with simultaneous columns that in some way refer (or defer) to one another (if for no reason other than they occupy a privileged space on the same page). Likewise, these columns and other devices (marginal notes, cross-outs, and so forth) are utilized as means to show that there is something both arbitrary and even concealing about textual composition. Arbitrary, since the juxtaposition of words and images produces certain random possibilities simply by occupying the same space; concealing, since the eradication of erasures and the placing in margins of notes and other references often hides the conditions of production of texts and the importance of this marginalia in determining the range of possible meanings. That is, deconstruction as literary/philosophical style is often employed to show that what at first seems secondary or even superfluous to the main meanings turns out, in many ways, to either unsettle those meanings or, more seriously, displace those meanings in a reversal of signification. Two texts by the economist Judith Mehta (one published here) show some of these elements at work in the composition of a piece of economics writing. In ‘Look at Me Look at You’ (1999), Mehta makes use of by now familiar deconstructionist textual strategies of composition. She combines images with texts, and has fragments of text overlapping on the page. At times, there are multiple columns. She writes with a variety of typefaces and font sizes. She intersperses quotations that, at first, may seem to be tangential to some other parts of the text. The ‘voice’ of the text toggles back and forth from more ‘personal’ to more ‘objective’ modes of presentation. There is little if any deference to disciplinary bounds, as economic ideas freely mingle with discourse concerned mainly with photography, art history, and much else. And so forth. Indeed, looking over her text, it is hard to ‘center’ it either on the page or even in terms of what constitutes a primary argument (thus, deconstruction as a style of literary or artistic creation deliberately conjures up the notion of ‘decentering’ we discuss above). Yet, of course, it is possible to see this text as being concerned with several points. One is the idea that all texts achieve whatever meaning possible by reference and deference to other texts (hence the deliberate use of quotation). Another is that knowledge production is a messy affair, one that has as a condition of existence a multiplicity of sources and strategies. There is no single or sure road to meaning. Another is that readers are active (rather than passive) in constructing meanings in and out of texts. This is achieved largely by making the text unfamiliar in ways that challenge readers to be more engaged and conscious of their roles in ‘discovering’ what a text is trying to say. In her essay for this volume, Mehta stages for readers the ‘noise’ that she finds expressed in most experiments involving economic bargaining 17

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games. Rather than the neat formulaic representations that game theorists are used to in modeling such strategic situations, Mehta chooses to run dual columns in certain parts of her text, one of which contains the ‘actual words’ of participants in a bargaining game experiment she and other colleagues ran, the other containing a typical neoclassical game theorist’s abstract rendering of such a game. The point is, as Mehta maintains, to ‘voice the noise’, and to show that these two columns of text cannot be reducible to one another and that, in some important way, they signify quite different things that are unrecoverable in acts of ‘translation’ and synthesis. In opposition to the idea that there are few authorized and acceptable ways to ‘represent’ such experiments and their results, Mehta invokes a cacophony of voices in order to model in a different way deconstructing a game theorist’s modernist text. Indeed, more generally, deconstructive styles of writing give vent to discursive and semiotic play. But a kind of play in which discursive layers are tossed down on top of other layers with no particularly clear ‘reason’ for doing so. Thus, while some deconstructionist texts are quite deliberately created to embody indeterminacy, other texts are seemingly more slapdash and randomly constructed and take the form of a bricolage, a mishmash of presumably unrelated elements and images. The ‘jokey’, ‘ersatz’, and even ‘nihilistic’ quality of such writing and construction (as with postmodern architecture, which is often linked to an excess of ‘quotation’, ornament, and playfulness in contrast to a primary concern with function) unleashes a host of possible reevaluations, or, if one is critical of these strategies, the very demise of value itself. As opposed to the minimalism and parsimony thought to be characteristic of many ‘high modernist’ moments in culture and theory, postmodernist, deconstructionist style is overflowing with meanings, causes, and effects galore. The saturation we describe above is an effect of some postmodern creations, and this excess of everything is seen, alternatively, to signal a new age of possibility, a proliferation of meanings, a voicing of previously repressed desires, the cultural emergence of marginalized ‘others’, or the destruction of intelligibility, knowledge, and community. While deconstruction may be a preferred stylistic strategy within what could be considered postmodernism, there is also no question that a similarly adopted stance is what has been called ‘self-reflexivity’. One rendition of this idea is the practice that any agent or author ‘locate’ themselves in the process of producing artifacts, actions, and their effects. Agents and authors, then, seek to show not only that they are themselves ‘implicated’ in their works and deeds, but also that these productions cannot be entirely separated from such constituting aspects as one’s histories, identities, interests, values, and so forth. Warren Samuels states that in matters of knowledge, postmodernism ‘points out

INTRODUCTION

the fundamental assumptions of all claims to knowledge, including, in a self-reflexive manner, its own’ (1996: 66). Self-reflexivity may be something other than subjective self-awareness. It is more concerned with the argument that all things, from politics to philosophy, are intimately bound up with the situatedness of those engaged in these activities. And that identifying the locations from which people speak, write, and act matters for the kinds of meanings and values that can be produced. In our own field, E. Roy Weintraub argues, for example, that ‘all knowledge, a fortiori economic knowledge, is local and contingent and connected to a community in which that knowledge was produced or interpreted or otherwise made significant’, and he goes on to state that it is ‘not useful to speak about economic knowledge without also speaking about economists and the communities in which economic knowledge was produced and communicated’ (1992: 53–4). A number of essays in this volume speak or employ, either directly or in passing, a self-reflexive style. It is believed, for example, that it simply will not do to ‘hide’ the desires and wills of economic scientists that can be seen to determine their own ‘preferences’ in theory choice, methodology, and so much else besides.35 So, not only do several authors here make clear the positions from which they believe they are writing, and what privilege or authority they seek, express, or are trying to subvert,36 but, they also want to ‘out’ all other economists, especially those who maintain that one’s politics or morals or cultural identities have had or should have no bearing on the kinds of economic analysis that they have been disseminating. In a different way, a self-reflexive style can be said to be at the heart of the ‘discursive turn’ that many commentators of postmodernism and poststructuralism have noted for the past 20 years. In this view, postmodern forms of theorizing and fictionalizing have in common an inward focus, a focus on the conditions of writing and discoursing as opposed to the connection of the word with the world or to just ‘revealing’ the world in all its fullness and glory. Thus, postmodernism has been very closely associated with the self-conscious, incessant play with words and images that comprise an assault for some and a celebration for others of modes of discursive creation and representation. The ‘self-consciousness’ of many postmodern writers and thinkers that takes the form of showing the discursive conditions of a text’s existence, and a showing that one is showing, and so on sometimes into potentially infinite recursiveness has been seen either as a retreat of philosophy, art, and social theory away from the pressing issues of the day (presumed to exist ‘outside’ of these realms) or, more benignly, as a new appreciation for the way rhetoric, metaphor, speech acts, and other figures of writing and

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speech shape fundamentally the ideas and events of both the discursive and the non-discursive world. Whatever the case may be, there is strong evidence that one important way that postmodernist style has entered a field like economics has been through exhortations and explications of the ways language and sign systems in general (like mathematics) are or should be most under scrutiny in the formation of economic analysis. Monographs and collections in economics with titles such as Adam Smith’s Discourse (Brown 1994), Economics as Discourse (Samuels, ed. 1990), Economics and Language (Henderson, Dudley-Evans, and Backhouse, eds. 1993), Economics and Hermeneutics (Lavoie 1991), The New Economic Criticism (whose subtitle is Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics) (Woodmansee and Osteen 1999), and of course The Rhetoric of Economics (McCloskey 1985), The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric (Klamer, McCloskey, and Solow, eds. 1988), Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (McCloskey 1994), and Conversations with Economists (Klamer 1983) have appeared in the past 20 years and mark this kind of self-reflexive moment in economic thought.37 And, of course, many if not all of the essays in this volume are marked as well by this type of self-reflexivity, by a consideration of the ways economists write and think according to well-known literary and semiotic devices, all of which supposedly give the lie to the claim, then, that words are simple transparencies allowing privileged economic scientists to apprehend truths that are just simply ‘out there’. Perhaps self-reflexivity is witnessed as well in the extent to which the problem of knowledge within postmodern circles is posed largely in non- or anti-epistemological terms. Or rather, the problem of knowledge, for many postmodernists, is not an issue at all since there is a wholesale refusal of the polar opposites that structure most epistemological dissertations at least since the Enlightenment (and likely going back much further in historical time). The problem of knowledge for so many ‘modernist’ philosophers of knowledge had been to specify how a knowing subject could apprehend a mostly dumb and intractable world of objects. But, postmodernists have often written on the question of knowledge from the point of view that this problem is really a red herring. That is, postmodernists often claim that the problem of knowledge in classical epistemology is built upon a misspecification of the nature of the subject and ignores the impossibility of ever pulling apart the knower from the known. In this light, postmodernists have argued that knowledge production is not a matter of a subject/scientist finding the right ‘tools’ to ‘penetrate’ the world of objects, finding the nuggets of truth contained within the outer sheaths of extraneous dross. To the contrary, subjects are active in the construction of truths, and their very observations and perceptions structure those truths irresistibly.38 Subjects therefore can see themselves 20

INTRODUCTION

or their practices and their effects in the truths they produce (a classic reference is to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), and this gives rise, then, to another moment of self-reflexivity.39 Unable to claim any disengagement and disentanglement from the world under analysis, postmodernist practitioners give full voice to their own ‘presence’ in their constructions. Again, this style of writing and analysis is in evidence in several of the essays presented here.

Postmodernism as critique: from antimodernism to ‘postmodern moments’ Self-reflexive and deconstructive styles of writing are most often used in the service of critique. Modernism is the object of the critical stances and styles that comprise postmodernism. Now, of course, there are diverse and divergent understandings about what modernism means in all of its manifestations. For our purposes, we refer readers to several texts that attempt to summarize those aspects and understandings of modernism that are of most concern for a large number of postmodern theorists and practitioners.40 We will specify, though, some of those aspects insofar as they show up as the likely foil for many of the essays contained here. First, however, we need to clarify exactly what it means to regard postmodernism as a critique of modernism and modernity. For some postmodernists, the forms of social and cultural life that have been ushered in as part of the ‘modern age’ are sufficiently debilitating and faulty as to warrant simple opposition. That is, postmodernism is sometimes encountered as an anti-modernism. In this case, postmodernism often joins forces with neo-traditionalists (neoAristotelians, for example – see the discussion of this tendency in Klamer’s essay in this collection) who see modernism in many of its forms as having brought about the demise in older values – some even promised as a feature of modernism – that stressed (local) community, moral goodness, tolerance, social justice, and individual freedom. Since modernism is seen to have failed, either partially or catastrophically, in cultivating and upholding such values, postmodernism then provides a perspective from which to critically evaluate and ultimately transcend modernity. The tendencies to be sensitive to difference and alterity, to question expertise and authority, especially in the name of the state or science, to value conversation and discourse, to desire ecological conservation rather than economic transformation, to refuse the prerogatives usually according to supposedly inexorable technological progress, to criticize the fiction of the self as an independent, unified entity, and to see the murderous flaws in grandiose, global schemes for human liberation, are all thought to be dimensions of postmodernism in its critical moments. As we say, often these moments amount to a hope of 21

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recovering elements of a pre-modern world of values and characters and community and sociality. At the very least, modernism is seen here as presenting the opportunity for a future, not in its ‘completion’, but rather in suggesting exactly the points at which it can be opposed.41 Postmodernism as anti-modernism takes modernity as the negative blueprint for much of what it hopes to erect. Yet, for other postmodernists, being simply ‘against’ modernism is both impossible and besides the point (see, e.g., Dow in this book). In this view, postmodernism’s critical bearing leads towards a ‘nonmodernism’, that is, an attempt to escape in some way the oppositions – seen to be caught within modernism – that are seen to structure so much of modernist thought (subject/object, essence/appearance, and so forth). The pressure to be ‘either/or’ is seen to be precisely what modernisms present as the only real options. Hence, postmodernism, to be truly ‘other’, cannot be reduced to the play of modernism’s oppositions, just the other side of the modernist coin. And, for many writing and creating in this postmodern critical mode, the point is to be ‘truly other’. To be radically different is to suggest a sea-change rather than a search and recovery mission (finding the remnants of a discarded pre-modernism at the bottom of the vast modernist ocean). The critical edge then in this type of postmodern work consists of elisions, of somehow escaping the snares that are presented by modernist ways of thinking and behaving, of being just out of reach of either/or couplets. This type of nonmodernism is often infuriating to modernist and other critics since postmodernists seem to avoid the kinds of battle that their critics desire. Hence, postmodernism as a non-modernism often appears as avoidance behavior, a retreat into non-confrontational stances distinguished by an emphasis on play, the relativity of perspectives, self-absorption, and the inconsequence of theory, interest, value, and meaning. Elements of both these attitudes – postmodernism as an anti- and nonmodernism – appear in our own work and in the papers in this book. There is, however, another possibility which we think worth exploring. This is to view modernism and postmodernism to always be ‘incomplete’, unable to achieve the pure presence that we discuss above. That is, we take seriously the deconstructionist idea that it is impossible for various modernisms to ever totalize any field of discourse, art, or work to the extent that their meanings and effects are unequivocal and determinate. To the contrary, we prefer to think of modernism and postmodernism as constituting horizons or, better said, moments that are, themselves, transient and porous, lacking the ability to suture time and space – to create discernible boundary lines for historical ages and within the vast terrain of the social – in discursive and non-discursive realms. One critical component of such a view lies in the idea that one can show the tenuous, even if tenacious, hold on imaginations and 22

INTRODUCTION

institutions that attend the appearance of modernism (or postmodernism for that matter) in any field of inquiry or action. Another critical element consists of demonstrating that, despite its best efforts, modernism is unable to close the circle, to completely hegemonize political, economic, and cultural spaces, and that crucial postmodern moments arise and are effective in beckoning us toward alternative ways of thinking ‘beyond’ modernism. Showing then the postmodern moments that have emerged within fields dominated (but only partially) by modernism can give rise to adumbrating the paths of its supercession. Thus, to the extent that modernism is seen to produce less than salutary effects, highlighting the postmodern moments within a field can be tantamount to a kind of immanent critique.42 Two additional remarks. One is that our interest in exhibiting the postmodern moments within economics is not much directed to the obvious point that modernism and postmodernism coexist in the present. Nor, really, it is directed to the point that postmodernism might be profitably viewed as the latest stage of modernism, a continuation in some sense of many of the themes developed over the course of the past century in art, literature, philosophy and so forth. Indeed, some cultural critics have belittled the overarching notion of modernism and postmodernism found in other non-literary fields (in economics, for instance) since, in their view, including such elements as indeterminacy, the critique of representation, and the decentered (if not the alienated) subject within the confines of postmodernism misses badly the emergence of these and other themes within what they regard as the ‘high modernism’ of their own fields of work and study. In this view, postmodernism may be said to be a strengthening rather than a weakening of certain crucial components of modernism, that is, a moment in the continuous development of modernism. Or, the term postmodern might be reserved to describe still other irruptions. This brings us to the second remark. Our use of the term postmodern moments is also directed at the idea that there are what we perceive as ‘uneven developments’ within and between fields of thought and practice. So, perhaps it makes more sense to label as postmodern the attack on the unified subject and notions of more or less certain knowledge within a field like economics, where modernism may appear as a strict and dogged adherence by a majority of practitioners to such notions. Yet, in other fields, literary studies say, postmodernism may be more concerned with issues having to do with deconstructive techniques, reader response, canonical texts, and still other concerns. Hence, to bring forth the postmodern moments in any field or endeavor is to acknowledge that modernism(s) may have many faces that appear here and there, with no necessity for a single visage ever to emerge ‘full-blown’ (whatever this fullness may be thought to consist of). And, by extension, 23

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postmodernism(s) are likewise dispersed and multiple and follow no logic that mandates they appear everywhere in the same form at the same time. Since much of our interest in this volume is disciplinespecific, we steer the remainder of our remarks toward the postmodern moments within economics, paying attention to the extent to which postmodernism as critique is directed at the forms of modernism we can identify within economic discourses.

The objects of postmodern critique: modernity’s ‘isms’ Whether anti- or non-modernist or dedicated to showing postmodern moments, what does it mean to treat postmodernism chiefly as a critique of modernism? What elements of modernism within economics are found by critics to warrant opposition and/or transcendence? What moments of postmodernism can be discerned as disturbing the modernist waters of economics as a discipline? First, we enumerate what we regard as among the primary objects of postmodern critique within this field. These include essentialism, foundationalism, scientism, determinism, formalism, and humanism in addition to the notion of the unified, intentional, rational agent.43 In some ways, postmodernism shares with other viewpoints and whole schools of thought (and here we include feminism, Marxism, institutionalism, and other ‘heterodox’ approaches within economics) an attack on one or another of these objects. Yet, there is also a connection between some of the critiques that are considered specifically postmodern, and so we attempt to show how, for example, the postmodern critique of the unified agent may weigh heavily as well on postmodern considerations of the content and process of producing knowledge. Representation and essentialism Modernism is thought to be imbued with representational logics and forms of display. Here, what we mean is the idea that there are at least two levels of thought and/or practice for each and every object. A shorthand way of looking at the relationship between these levels is to call them ‘appearance’ and ‘essence’. Now, it is possible to show that so much of modernist notions of science and culture speaks to this crucial distinction. In much modernist philosophy of science, for example, the world of appearances is said to be incapable of yielding up the ‘meaning’ and/or ‘true nature’ of objects and their relationships among themselves. The role of the trained scientist is then to be able to perceive the patterns or meanings that reside either within objects themselves or in the interactions between them. ‘Discovery’ is a practice which is all about finding the essential order that lies beneath a presumed chaotic and even 24

INTRODUCTION

ornamental surface. Indeed, the scientific critique of common sense, ersatz, and/or other supposedly non-scientific thought consists of showing that, in these discourses, appearances are mistaken for essences (or rather that there is no discernible difference observed between them). Representation structures as well the self-consciousness of scientific practice. The scientist’s words are thought to correspond, in some important way, to the world they are intended to describe. That is, language is seen to be mostly representational, at least in the hands of scientists who are trained not to let ‘mere words’ obfuscate the truths that have been thus discovered.44 Whether that language is professional prose, or mathematics, or formal logic, and so forth, the view that many regard as exemplary of a modernist conceit or prejudice is that language is a second-order condition. Language and signs are only useful or necessary to communicate truths that have been discovered and that require representation through language. The idea here is that language can be utilized in a way where it does not ‘distort’ the essential truths that scientific practice and thought have unearthed.45 Hence, language is reduced to appearance (not essence), but a necessary one if the gems of truth excavated in the world are going to be put on display and allowed to shine. One form of this cult of representation, then, is what has been called essentialism – the idea that there are essences to discover, that there are tried-and-true methods of uncovering these essences, and that appearances are to be suspected but also probed for the hidden truths or meanings lying beneath their surface. There is no question that so much postmodern critique has been in the form of a refusal of representational schemas and logics, and of course a rejection and/or subversion of essentialism. In place of these schemas and logics has been an aesthetic or ethic of ‘depthlessness’. Postmodernism can be distinguished in many different arenas as repudiating the search for and representation of essences, proclaiming in contrast notions of juxtaposition, simultaneity, and so forth. That is, for many postmodernists, there are no meanings hidden in texts or in the world, and therefore there are no hierarchies of elements, some living as appearances and others as essences, or alternatively, some occupying the space of cause while others simply effects. While there may be nothing, therefore, waiting for just the right technique or act of genius (or accident) to be discovered in this non-representational logic, there is instead an appreciation of the play of elements that comprise pure surface. It is attention to the constructedness as well as the arbitrariness of any given meaning or value that marks many postmodern approaches. It may not be that the world is meaningless or valueless. It may just be that meaning and value are not ‘essential’ or at least implicit in objects and their relations. The shift to looking at how knowledge is produced from how a subject/scientist comes to 25

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extract truth from a world of simultaneously glittery but also inarticulate appearances distinguishes, once again, the postmodern turn.46 Note that so much else is implied in this postmodern critique of representation and essentialism. For example, formalism as a preferred mode of presentation is based on the presumption that there are languages better suited than others for representing discovered truths.47 The idea that there is, in fact, an important distinction between form and content belies the notion that form can be adequate to content if and when the appropriate linguistic or semiotic devices are employed. The defense of formal modeling and the heavy reliance on mathematics in economics, for example, depends crucially on the view that such forms of presentation are better able to allow truths to shine through (or at least hypotheses to be tested for their potential veracity or acceptability) than non-formal devices.48 If there are no truths waiting to be apprehended and displayed by the right formal language, then the power and privilege accorded to mathematics in fields like economics are likely denied. Formal presentation and modeling become just ‘other’ discursive means of economic knowledge production, with no better access to underlying essential truths than any other such means. Which is simply to say that formalism may be important in producing economic knowledge, but it is production once again (and not representation) that is in evidence.49 The postmodern critique of essentialism resounds as well in thwarting attempts to escape some forms of representation, as can be seen in some versions of economic philosophy in which words and numbers are said not so much to represent or describe a real world outside of discourse as to present testable propositions for their ability to predict outcomes. The shift from the ‘realism’ of assumptions to the ‘as if’ hypotheses of Milton Friedman and his followers is often defended as an implicit critique of essentialism. This is because Friedman and others may claim not to have any particular notion of the correlation between words, numbers and underlying truths but, instead, seek accuracy (or at least less falsehood) in prediction that follows from a causal hypothesis. Yet, this response fails to eliminate the recourse to some notion that it is possible to discern transdiscursive truth via a method of ascertaining regularities through scientific observation. Such observation ‘reads’ essences (now discussed in the form of abstractions) in the myriad perceptions that are picked over for what is necessary or useful in testing the proposition and what is not. Appearances still are suspect, and need to be arranged and interpreted properly in order for the scientist to verify or falsify the proposition in question. Foundations for knowledge Postmodern critique in areas dominated by ideas concerning scientific

INTRODUCTION

knowledge has concentrated largely on an assault on foundationalism, the notion that there is a transdiscursive basis upon which such knowledge can be erected.50 The foundations in question usually range from certain modernist epistemological positions (which include empiricism and rationalism and their offshoots, like positivism) to ‘proper’ experimental methods. What postmodern criticism amounts to, in light of the refusal of essentialism, includes an alternative view that there are multiple bases for the production of knowledge; that there can be no ultimate conceptual arbiter of different truth claims (though there may indeed be the perception that these claims have different effects, some of which can be preferred to others); that discourses concerned with knowledge production are often irreducible, largely non-translatable, and therefore mostly incommensurate; and that settling the priority or hierarchy of different truth claims must always be connected to persuasiveness and power. Though relativist nihilism is certainly one possible outcome of this anti-foundationalism, it is not the only one.51 Postmodern critique calls attention not only to the play of power and persuasion in the current or past status quo within scientific practice.52 It also calls attention to the fact that such forces are considered, in a sense, legitimate in the adjudication amongst and between discourses.53 Rather than shying away from, or simply decrying, the way rhetoric, privilege, authority, and networks of power are all entwined in knowledge production and especially in claims for any one discourse’s superiority in constituting truth, an alternative position, one embraced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1972, 1980), is to acknowledge precisely that this is the way the world of knowing and convincing (and enforcing) works. The imbrication of power and knowledge, in fact, was the focus of much of Foucault’s work, and postmodern critics have taken from him the view that there is nothing much to be ashamed of in the recognition that there are ‘wills’ and ‘desires’ to knowledge that have as much to do with power as they do with anything else.54 Power can be contended over; it can be the object of struggle over who gets to speak and produce authoritative knowledge and who does not. This, of course, is exactly what is at stake in the attempts to storm the citadels of knowledge production occupied and controlled by those (usually Western and white men) who disseminate their ‘normal sciences’ in the form of canonical knowledge. That is, power to produce, speak, and disseminate, as well as to subvert and displace traditional notions of knowledge and particular conceptual content are often the objectives of oppositional forces – in economics comprised of heterodox thinkers and doers, including Marxists, feminists, postcolonialists, and many others.55 It is true that some of this opposition holds precisely the same modernist view that scientific knowledge ought to be disinterested, unsusceptible to power, unmoved by rhetorical flourishes, unattached to other 27

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networks of power in society, and so forth. But, in effect, the postmodern position à la Foucault is that power and persuasion are not science’s dirty little secret, and postmodern critique has attempted to bring them into the light (sort of like a previously perceived deviant behavior, which has now been shown to be undeserving of ostracism), not in the form of sensational revelation or staged revulsion, but as an assertion of the norms necessarily operating in the everyday life of scientific disciplines. Science or scientism? What this postmodern critique makes possible though is a sweeping rejection of scientism, the view that scientific concepts, methods, protocols, and the like are exclusively entitled to the power and privilege they have achieved with modernization. If the growth of scientific knowledge is the key accomplishment of the past three centuries in the West, it has been accompanied by an elaborate philosophical defense of a variety of exclusionary practices by which those deemed to be untrained or unreceptive to such science are shunted aside and oftentimes even denied opportunities to speak (since they are the voice of unreason). We need not belabor this point here since so much of the controversy surrounding postmodernism – indeed, many of the visceral reactions it has provoked – has been in the challenges it has thrown up in contending over the exalted status of science within modernism. However, again, it should be noted that the attack on scientific privilege does not necessarily imply a disinterest in or refusal of scientific practice.56 Indeed, the postmodern critique has often been more on the selfcongratulatory aspects of the philosophy of science and the attempts to insulate scientific practice from scrutiny of its own rules of discursive formation, its implicit epistemological norms, its own situatedness in contemporary culture and social life, and much else. In many of the essays included here, inspirited to greater or lesser degrees by postmodernism, so-called scientific practice in economics is investigated through a critical lens for its rhetorical structure, for its values and norms, for its connections to other centers of power and authority, as well as for the construction and interplay of the ‘internal’ elements that give any particular theory or approach discursive force. Postmodernism as critique of scientism then connects up with other, perhaps non-postmodern, critics of science and the philosophy of science, such as Thomas Kuhn (1970), Paul Feyerabend (1978), Bruno Latour (1993), Sandra Harding (1986), and Barry Barnes (1985), who can each be read in different ways to have promoted the idea that ‘agreement’ (voluntary, forced, and every combination inbetween) in science is what needs to be understood and investigated, and that those theories that often succeed at any given moment in time in shaping a field of thought are either bound to more 28

INTRODUCTION

general social institutions and patterns of status, wealth, and power, or are able to hegemonize the field by ‘normalizing’ the conditions under which that theory arises, and maybe both. The postmodern critique of scientism is close as well to the view of Feyerabend that there are no singularly exceptional methods that are productive of science, and even that actual scientific ‘progress’ is the result of scientists’ refusal to codify and obediently follow any philosophically prescribed road toward truth.57 As we have said, when one empties the world of the distinction between appearance and essence, and any method that claims to uniquely bridge the gap, one gives vent to a plurality of approaches that are potentially productive of knowledge, scientific or otherwise. The critique of essentialism and foundations opens up the question then of the privileged status of scientific discourse. If science has no prior purchase on uncovering embedded and veiled truths, then it is not possible to sustain the hierarchy of discourses in which only science is productive of knowledge and all else – opinion, faith, ideology, art, etc. – is productive of, well, all else. If postmodernist critique is effective in the attack on essentialism, then one possible repercussion may be the leveling of the field of knowledge. Thus, as argued elsewhere (Amariglio and Ruccio, 1999), postmodern critique makes one start from the premise that what are today regarded as ‘ersatz’ or ‘commonsense’ or ‘everyday’ – read: confused, aberrant, and irrational – understandings of economics can be shown to be likewise productive of knowledge worthy of analysis and consideration, if not acceptance.58 In other words, the trappings of science do not amount to a protective shield, and much of importance would be achieved, we think, if all would-be knowers treated seriously the possibility that truth and useful knowledge can perhaps come from these ‘other’ discursive formations and locations. We note that this leveling of the field of knowledge makes it also impossible to sustain a meaningful distinction between metadiscourse and discourse. To take just one example, there exists a hierarchy well established and respected within academic economics such that talk about economic discourse (which includes such specializations as the history of economic thought and the philosophy and methodology of economics) is seen once again as ‘second-order’, and ‘doing’ economics (which involves mostly building and testing economic models) is seen as primary, the stuff the discipline is essentially made of. Now, one presumption here is that economic model building and even ‘high theory’ (which often has no particular testable model as its consequence) have a priority in defining professional economic discourse since they are not commentary on texts but, in contrast, have direct access in some way, shape, or form to economics’ ‘content’ (either the ‘real world’ or mathematically derived abstract truths). Here we see that if we conjoin the critique of essentialism with other poststructuralist tenets 29

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regarding the textuality of any world ‘read’ by a scientist/observer, then we can appreciate the impossibility of maintaining the ‘meta’ distinction that accords, once again, so much power and privilege to those thought capable of ‘doing’ economics as opposed to merely ‘talking’ about it. If doing economics is just one other means of ‘reading’ the world, and consists no more nor less of ‘commentary’ on it, then one can at least challenge the first-order, epistemological privilege that is accorded to high economic theory and/or econometric analysis. Admittedly, the objects of such discourse may be different from that which is the object of the history of economic thought, but perhaps that is all that can be said. Neither tells the truth better or worse, and neither is closer (or further) from the supposedly primordial ‘real’ with its hidden meanings. Determinism Modernism is accused by postmodern critics for its persistent recourse to deterministic arguments where questions of cause and effect are concerned. In some versions of this critique, modernist explanation consists mostly of establishing the necessary or, less strongly, contingent patterns that link particular events as causes with other events as effects. Indeed, theory is the realm in which such explanations reign, and the absence of causal explanations is often viewed as the absence of theoretical activity. Now, while it is by no means necessary for causal explanation to be consistent, unilinear, and determinate, postmodern critics see the reduction of causation to these elements in most of what they observe in modernist discourses and disciplines. Determinism is a way of summing up these elements, as deterministic arguments are characterized by the search for principal causes that are said to have the largest weight (sometimes the only weight) in consistently bringing about a particular cause. In the idealized world of the ‘marketplace of ideas’, some causal explanations are preferred if they either identify an essential, underlying, and necessary cause (hence, determinism can be another form of essentialism) or capture a statistically predictable correlation between two distinct events, where one event is seen to nearly almost always ‘follow’ in time and perhaps in space from the other. Postmodernist thinkers, though, have proposed alternative ways of conceiving of causation that avoid, in their view, the destructive consequences of determinism (and these range from the intolerant fanaticism of those who feel that they have found the one and only explanation for events to the passivity produced in human agency and social action when deterministic understandings posit the impossibility of alternative courses of behavior). Determinism comes in many shapes and sizes. Within modernist social and natural sciences, everything from biology to culture to the 30

INTRODUCTION

economy to subjectivity has been pronounced, often simultaneously, to be the first, last, and perhaps efficient cause of many different events and human actions. In economics, of course, determinism has a variety of familiar forms, the most common being economic determinism, in which the economy or some sub-particle of it is seen to structure an array of predictable effects. Hence, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ is not just taken by many economists as an adage of what should count in the political opinions of social agents. It’s taken even more to describe a grand chain of social causation, in which ‘the economy’ (here including alternative entry points as labor, utility, rational choice, and so forth) is seen as the motivating agency behind all consequent social outcomes. Indeed, as we discussed above, the extension by Becker, Richard Posner (1992), and others of economic reasoning into cultural spheres is based on a type of privilege economists think redounds to economic explanation, since, by this logic, most human activity can be reduced in explanation to a matter of economizing, maximizing choices.59 The attack on determinisms of all sorts has been among the main contributions of postmodern critique. Alternative, specifically postmodern interrogations have emphasized the randomness of causation and the effectivity of chance, the indeterminacy of events, the multiplicity of possible causes, the fluidity of the relationship between seeming causes and their effects, and the reversibility of positions between putative causes and effects. Such interrogations have proceeded through the use of such notions as ‘overdetermination’, juxtaposition, synchronic simultaneity, fundamental uncertainty, and so forth. But, rather than surrender to the claim that theory is all but impossible if causation is not rendered in some form of determinism, postmodern non-determinists have answered by stressing the role of theory in positing rich conjunctural analyses, limited, of course, to more ‘local’ and specific occurrences. Some, for example the Marxist economists Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff (1987), have argued further that the rejection of determinism does not require even a different ‘entry point’ into analysis. What it does require, though, is the idea that this entry point – which is a discursive ‘choice’, often connected to a multitude of other values and desires – not be presented as favored ‘cause’ in the world one is describing. Borrowing the term ‘overdetermination’ from the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, Resnick and Wolff show how entering a discourse with any privileged concept such as class does not mandate causal explanations in which class then is said to determine (either directly or even in a mediated but distinguishable form) other social processes and events. In economics, of course, economic determinism is less a function of the reduction of the social world to effects of class but much more a similar reduction to the effects of individual economic agency. Postmodern critique adds one more voice to an already noisy chorus of 31

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objections to the idea of hom*o economicus.60 The notion of subjectivity that founds much economic (particularly neoclassical) theorizing has been railed against and dissected for its faultiness by dissenting voices for most of the past century. Postmodern critique, though, identifies the rational, maximizing agent as only one element within the context of a broader theoretical humanism, another distinguishing aspect (according to postmodernists) of the rise and dominance of modernist modes of thinking and being. Theoretical humanism Much of the postmodern critique of theoretical humanism has been closely connected to the writings of Foucault, Althusser, Lyotard, Derrida, and other ‘poststructuralist’ analysts. Perhaps Foucault, though, is best known for his thoroughgoing offensive against humanism, or rather, his claim that recent writing and philosophizing (in the postmodern vein) has shown glimmers, blessedly, of the ‘death of Man’.61 Foucault (1973) outlines what he terms certain ‘epistemes’ that he believes have structured much of Western thought since the Middle Ages, and when he gets to the Enlightenment and thereafter, he sees many roads in thought and practice leading to representational modes in which what is represented and/or signified is most often humanity as the originating subject of all knowledge and consequent history. Placing humanity, rather than god, say, at the center of a discursive universe is, in Foucault’s writings, one noticeable characteristic of post-Enlightenment thinking (that is, perhaps until the middle of the twentieth century). Foucault argues that so much social thinking and cultural activity is directed to knowledge of and control over human subjectivity (and here, subjectivity becomes again the motivating agency in tracing all historical movement). Foucault (1979) goes further and identifies the human body as the site of so much surveillance and discipline, and he sees this desire to ‘know Man’ and his/her body as behind projects of knowledge and social ordering – the exercise of power – varying in subject matter from utilitarianism to existentialism.62 The idea that the human subject is the sine qua non – the bottom line – for all thought and practice in the modern era is taken up as well by Althusser (1970; Althusser and Balibar 1970), who concentrates some of his own critique on the idea that history is most frequently understood within modern thought as a process with a subject (usually, but not exclusively, a human subjectivity, like individuals seeking progressive freedom from natural or social constraint, or classes seeking the overthrow of exploitation and oppression). Placing humans at the center of schemas of progress and history and meaning is what distinguishes theoretical humanism, as the human subject is thus the beginning and ending 32

INTRODUCTION

point of all movement from the growth of knowledge (which is now understood as undertaken by, for, and through human subjectivity) to the transformation of the natural world (through science and technology orientated to human desires and ends, such as happiness). Poststructuralist feminism contributes another major voice to this critique of humanism. While of course not all feminisms have been interested in challenging the presumptions of the essential commonality of humans and/or the notion that progress must be human-centered, quite a few strands of contemporary feminist thought move beyond expanded enfranchisem*nt and ‘equal rights’ (battles still mandatory to fight) to interrogations of the humanist (read masculinist) assumptions and practices that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment. One group most committed to rethinking issues of subjectivity and identity through a focus on the ambiguous meanings of sex and gender has been poststructuralist feminists. Here we have in mind such writers as Judith Butler (1990 and 1993), Jane Flax (1990 and 1993), and Elizabeth Grosz (1994), among others.63 While differing in important ways, each of these thinkers takes on the assumption that progress for women is a matter of establishing a stable subjective identity of their own – looking a lot like the model of the human subject that was formulated with modernity, or based on the modernist assumption of irreducible biological difference. Butler and the others trouble the notion that subject positions and identities could be (or ever were) stable, and thereby challenge the essentialism (either in the form of cultural determinism or biological destiny) that sometimes accompanies the claim that gender produces clearly distinguishable subjects. Not only, then, do poststructuralist feminists call attention to the implied or often explicit and enforced masculinism (or ‘phallocentrism’) that one can ‘read’ in the notion of the human subject and the cult of Reason as they have evolved over the past 300 years in the West.64 But, poststructuralist feminists go on to question the possibility of finding an alternative construct of the human, and certainly one that fixes sexual and gender identity in a bipolar fashion, that can be utilized strategically or not for current and future struggles against sexism, discrimination, and the oppression of women. As Gillian Hewitson (1999) has described it, stressing ‘performed’ as opposed to inherited or natural gender difference (and actually placing heightened emphasis on the body than on ‘consciousness in the determination of performed identity’), poststructuralist feminists have refused the ‘add women and stir’ conception of expanding the modernist notion of humanity as a way to remedy how and where sex and gender identity become marks of affliction. Thus, such feminists ‘view the ideal of equality, which involves reducing difference to sameness, and the ideal of difference, when reduced to biological difference, as problematic, since both replicate phallocentrism’ (Hewitson, 1999: 128). 33

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If nothing else, postmodern critique has identified the ubiquity of theoretical humanism in characterizing the modern age, but it goes on to propose a much-needed decentering in which the human subject is not only displaced from its structuring role as entry and exit point (and ‘represented’ at every stage along the way), but also in which human subjectivity is shown in all its varieties to be capable of deconstruction and fragmentation. Not only, then, are ‘forces’, ‘processes’, and ‘wills’ (along the lines specified by Nietzsche) disembodied in some postmodern thought – going even beyond ‘structuralism’ – and shown to construct subjects rather than being ‘emissions’ or manifestations of subjectivity, but, subjectivity itself is seen to be indeterminate and unstable, as much in flux as in an incessant process of de- and recomposition. The decentered subject, found in Foucault, Althusser, Butler, and others, and the decentered social totality (with the subject no longer that which seeks its own representation in and through art, philosophy, technology, etc.) are unsuitable because troubling essences for much existing modernist social thought, and this is why for some critics of postmodernism, the assault on theoretical humanism is viewed as making theorizing itself simply impossible. Yet, of course, postmodern critique shows precisely how one can incorporate the ideas that human subjectivity is complex, uncertain, and irreducible and that this same subjectivity is as much effect as it is cause in scenarios of historical movement. We note, by the way, that the attack on humanism is one that implicates many critics of the notion of hom*o economicus along with its mostly neoclassical purveyors. So, for example, complaints that neoclassicals and others haven’t captured the ‘real’ human subject in championing hom*o economicus starts from similar premises that there is some such previously unrepresented, unified, and distinguishable human subjectivity that can and should, if properly specified, begin or at least make an appearance within all economic thought. Postmodern critique, then, should be distinguished from those forms of humanism (found in all sorts of heterodox schools of economic thought, including Marxism, feminism, institutionalism, and so forth) that seek to reinstall rather than end the primacy of a ‘lost’ or missing human subjectivity in economic discourse. One can see in the essays in this volume, for example, the tensions felt by those unhappy with neoclassical (and often masculinist and Western) notions of economic agency, but hesitant to go the way of an anti-humanism. We expect these tensions to persist into the foreseeable future.

Postmodernism and economics: a stylized genealogy Most surveys of postmodernism in the contemporary scholarly landscape have little or nothing to say about the discipline of economics, 34

INTRODUCTION

though as we have stated, there are lots of attempts mostly in cultural fields to talk about a postmodern economy. In her 1991 article, Sheila Dow in fact asked the question of whether there were signs of postmodernism with economics. A decade later, we can answer this vigorously in the affirmative. For, not only have there been important essays, like McCloskey’s 1983 article on the ‘rhetoric of economics’ that have set off a wave of subsequent debates and discussions about modernism within economics, but as this volume attests, there are by now a significant number of different scholars within the field of economics who are either writing about postmodernism or who, consciously or otherwise, employ postmodern approaches within their works. For some of these economists, and this is true of many of those represented here, postmodernism enters in its critical guise, as the modernism of mainstream economics is roundly censured in their writings. While not all those who are attracted to postmodern critique are outside of the mainstream of the profession, it has been the case that postmodernism has been useful for those who seek more visibility for their approaches or who wish to displace entirely the long tradition of neoclassical economic theory as dominant within the field.65 Much is at stake, some of the critics feel, in the struggle to obviate the centrality of hom*o economicus, to decenter notions of economic totalities, to revive interest in morality and values and power as determinants in economic discourse, to scale down the pretensions of economics as a ‘science’, to open up spaces for plural perspectives, and to resist the ‘imperialism’ of economics as a master discourse capable of shaping cultural fields (see especially the essays by Klamer, Milberg, and Hewitson in this volume).66 These are often, and rightly we feel, linked to other struggles, such as those dedicated to breaking down barriers to entry of women and minorities into the economics profession, or those that attempt to redress the excessive exercise of expertise and authority, with their pervasive exclusionary effects, that can be found within pecking orders of universities, journals, and so forth.67 It is no accident, then, that many of the papers in this volume have multiple purposes. They not only weigh the import (and come up with different judgments, we should add) of postmodernism within economics, but they often take up additional or related causes – decanonization, as one instance, or the elimination of gender bias, as another – that are either highlighted or obscured by postmodern critiques. Parts of what we describe here as postmodern critique can be traced to different movements within economics over the past 25 years. Certainly, if one is looking for progenitors, then one must mention at the very least Keith Tribe’s often overlooked 1978 treatise on Smithian and preSmithian economic discourse. In this book, Tribe employed specifically poststructuralist critiques of humanism and other forms of essentialism 35

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in modernist histories of economic thought (shaped by the idea, which we saw in Samuelson, of the inexorable growth of knowledge, funeral by funeral) to rethink the claim that Smith was the initiator of a new, modernist economics. And, one can look at the entire body of work of Resnick and Wolff over the past 25 years as well, as they have advocated, with others, everything from the critique of classical epistemology to economic determinism in their attempt to refound a postmodern Marxian theory as something distinct from neoclassical and other mainstream economic thought, as well as distinct from Marxism’s own inscription within its past modernist projects. And, of course, for many McCloskey’s 1983 article on the rhetoric of economics pointedly criticized at least the official methodologists and epistemologists among economic philosophers for their modernism, even if it didn’t make the concepts and constructs of neoclassical economics its primary object of scorn. There may be other progenitors as well, and in fact the onset of postmodernism has led some historians of economics to find similar critiques of the tenets of modernism in a wide variety of writers and thinkers, often, however, out of the mainstream (this, for example, is much of what Ulla Grapard does in her paper for this volume by locating Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘social constructivism’ as an early expression of this more or less postmodern element). And, of course, there is fertile ground in economics to find such critiques since, in fact, the braggadocio that has accompanied ‘advances’ made possible by formalism and other supposedly ‘scientific’ methods of analysis and proof has often been met with annoyance and resistance by those left out of the resulting conversations. Perhaps then the next few decades of work in the history and philosophy of economics will be dedicated at least in part to ‘unearthing’ the mostly anti- or non-modernist sympathies of past and present economists and others made to live in the margins of the official discipline.68 While postmodernism has been mainly available to economists as anti- or non-modernist critique of the modernist mainstream, the ‘postmodern moments’ approach has a somewhat different emphasis. Here, the point has been to show those elements of postmodernism that have arisen in the midst of economics as a modernist enterprise. That is, in addition to evaluating and criticizing neoclassical and other schools for their pervasive adherence to modernism, ‘finding’ the postmodern moments with these schools of thought has been tantamount to deconstructing economic discourse to demonstrate, in the end, troublesome anomalies that pertain to uncertainty, the instability of subjectivity, the possibility of various rationalities, simultaneous multicausality, persistent and irreducible disequilibrium and still more. In some cases, calling attention to these postmodern moments has been with the intent to show that, despite proclamations to the contrary, economic discourse in much

INTRODUCTION

of the past half century has not been able to build a stable consensus around a ‘core’ of supposedly superior ideas and approaches. Or, differently, discussing postmodern moments is likewise aimed at depicting even mainstream economic discourse as, perhaps unwittingly, increasingly preoccupied with postmodern themes and ideas despite the claims that fundamental uncertainty, decentered subjects, and so forth are either negligible or manageable within existing theoretical approaches. There are now numerous articles, for example (three that immediately come to mind are by Varoufakis (1993), Mehta (1993), and Hargreaves Heap (1993)) that attempt to show the lacunae pertaining to problems of assuming stable, directed, contained, and unfragmented rationalities that become evident in economic game theoretical approaches. Varoufakis, in particular, argues that anxiety about modernist rationality assumptions are increasingly pervading the field, and that in their wake postmodernist approaches to subjectivity have been considered, even if still underrepresented. In our own past work, we have tried to show the postmodern moments of uncertainty, of the economy as a decentered totality, of the human body as a site of fragmentation, and much else that is not only evident in heterodox schools of economic thought, but perhaps is just as much evident within neoclassical orthodoxy.69 Again, the point here has been to call attention to these elements both as recognition of just how much modernist economics has been unable to exclude, let alone address, its own aporia and undecidables, and as a prolegomena to a research program, in which these postmodern moments are finally embraced as worthy of direct consideration. We realize of course the ‘threat’ that such an embrace represents. The historian of economic thought, Mark Blaug, puts it succinctly: ‘in one way or another, postmodern arguments always amount to “anything goes”’ (1998: 29). But, from our perspective the dissolving effects of uncertainty, decentering, epistemological relativism, and the like on well-formulated economic models are already in process, for better or worse, and are just as much the unintended consequences of modernist formalism, essentialism, scientism, and so forth as they are ‘importations’ from postmodern critics. Though we are not interested in prognostication (our postmodern training, perhaps) we do propose at least one improbable hypothesis: modernist economic discourse, so intent on maintaining its scientific identity, may be seen through the perspective of postmodern moments to be in the process of becoming ‘other’. Perhaps then postmodernism in economics allows for a restatement of Samuelson’s paraphrased maxim: funeral by funeral, economics does become other. While modernism still has a death grip on the imaginations of many in the profession, postmodernism beckons those with

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breath left in them to another site, another graveyard, possibly. Be that as it may, the economists, philosophers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists who are published in this volume have been willing, at least for now, to pick up their shovels and temporarily consider relocating – some as diggers, others as mourners – to this other site. Postmodernism cannot, and will not, promise ‘progress’ in economic knowledge as a result of all that repositioned digging. All it can do is show that even if the quest for progress is dead and buried, still the excavation goes on, and transformations of this different terrain present new opportunities and new discourses for economic knowledge, funeral by funeral. This volume had its inception in a conference entitled ‘Postmodernism, Economics, and Knowledge’ at the University of California, Riverside in March, 1995. The conference was generously supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside. The conference stimulated the idea for a book that would take off from the papers presented at this conference. In addition to soliciting papers from the conference, we sought out wherever necessary additional contributions and commentary in order to include more and different perspectives. The conference had as one of its premises a beginning of a cross-disciplinary discussion of the postmodern turn in economics, and both the original list of presenters and discussants and the present lineup include scholars who do not earn their living by the sweat of an economics brow. In the time leading up to the publication of this book, the papers originally presented at the conference were revised and edited and can be read then, along with the additional contributions, as an upto-date précis of where the discussion of postmodernism within much of the economics profession stands. We would like to thank all the authors here for their cooperation and patience, and we want to thank as well Carlos Vélez-Ibá–ez, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Stanley Fish, Bernd Magnus, Susan Feiner, Joseph Childers, Marc Herold, Warren Samuels, and Diana Strassmann, all of whom participated in the 1995 conference. We would also like to thank Ayesha Khanna for invaluable bibliographic and research support.

Notes 1

While Samuelson’s reformulation – with a difference – of Planck’s credo occurs in this 1997 essay paying tribute to his Economics textbook, it occurs as well in his (1998) fiftieth anniversary paean to his ‘lucky’ book (Foundations of Economic Analysis). This time, though, he not only credits Planck for the loan, but also proceeds in paraphrasing a different adage, as when he tells us that in economics, ‘often the dance must proceed Two Steps Forward and One Step Back’ (1998: 1379). Whether digging or dancing, though, Samuelson

INTRODUCTION

labors just the same in his confident assertion that ‘soft and hard sciences are cumulative disciplines’ in which ‘we each bring our contributions of ‘value added’ to the pot of progress’ (1998: 1378). It seems that there must be thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of easily accessible statements by economists in which this optimism is a necessary component. One does wonder why it is necessary to keep incanting such confidence. One of these thousands is the following. Talking about his own theory of ‘bounded rationality’ and its relative neglect to date by practicing economists, Herbert Simon (1991) reflects that ‘science, viewed as competition among theories, has an unmatched advantage over all other forms of intellectual competition. In the long run (no more than centuries), the winner succeeds, not by superior rhetoric, not by the ability to convince or dazzle a lay audience, not by political influence, but by the support of data, facts as they are gradually and cumulatively revealed. As long as its factual veridicality is unchallenged, one can remain calm about the future of a theory’ (364–5). In the course of his discussion of the citing of precursors for one’s own authoritative stance, E. Roy Weintraub summarizes ‘Whig’ histories of the history of economic thought like this: ‘Science as the exemplar of the march of reason, and economics, as science, leads the Whiggish historian of economics and the typical economic scientist to think in terms of successes and failures, precursors and blind alleys, heroes sung and unsung, and all manner of retrospective gold medals and booby prizes’ (1997: 186). Compare the view that ambiguity means absence of scientific precision (and thereby progress) with the comment by Paul Feyerabend where he emphasizes ‘the essential ambiguity of all concepts, images, and notions that presuppose change. Without ambiguity, no change, ever. The quantum theory, as interpreted by Niels Bohr, is a perfect example of that’ (1999: viii). Consider, for example, this blast at ‘neowalrasian theory’ leveled by Robert Clower (1994). After declaring this theory ‘scientifically vacuous’ and concluding that there ‘is no way to make progress in economic science except by first discarding neowalrasian analysis’ (810), Clower really gets down to business: ‘in my opinion, what we presently possess by way of so-called pure economic theory is objectively indistinguishable from what the physicist Richard Feynman, in an unflattering sketch of nonsense “science” called “cargo cult science” ’ (809). Clower, by the way, goes on to make a pitch for a reversion to ‘induction’, as though this would indeed provide a straight shot to science. This confounding of science due to human behavior includes, of course, the all-too-humanness of the economic scientists themselves. Or, at least this is the gentle conclusion of Tjalling Koopmans (1957), who sees in the supposed discrepancy between the logic of correct scientific procedures and the persistent departures from this norm by economists a kind of understandable human failing in wanting to cut to the chase, a failing that could be called uncharitably the ‘will to distort’. In Koopmans’s own (understated) words: ‘often we are more preoccupied with arriving at what we deem to be true statements or best predictions, in the light of such knowledge as we have of the phenomena in question, than in exhibiting the postulational basis, and thereby the ultimate observational evidence, on which our statements rest’ (143). We have found the following surveys of postmodernism useful in our teaching and research: Bertens (1995), Rosenau (1992), Best and Kellner (1991), Docherty (1993), Connor (1989), Rose (1991), and Nicholson (1990).

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10 11

Our depiction here of postmodernism thus draws on all of these, but also differs in some important respects, as readers can check. Though, of course, there are studies (e.g., Alston, Kearl, and Vaughan 1992) showing a great degree of ‘consensus’ among a sample of economists on numerous theoretical issues. As Fuchs, Krueger, and Poterba (1998) argue, though, their own studies dealing with questions of policy based on parameter estimation techniques demonstrate considerable amounts of disagreement among economists within particular fields. This result is interesting since it suggests that the empirical and practical implications one draws from common theoretical outlooks (that is, even if one concedes this point) can vary widely among aspiring scientists because of differences in estimates, but even more so because of the economists’ ‘values’. Stephen Brown (1995) speaks of the seven ‘key features’ of postmodernism. He lists them as ‘fragmentation, de-differentiation, hyperreality, chronology, pastiche, anti-foundationalism, and pluralism’ (106). As readers can ascertain, these features are dispersed throughout our treatment of the ‘four categories’ that follow. For another list of distinguishing characteristics of postmodernism (or at least of poststructuralism), see Amariglio (1998). Manuel Castells’s monumental recent three volume analysis (1996–98) of globalization, information, and identity foretells a new global information age that might be understood as the phase of postmodernity par excellence. For a first-rate depiction of the way Jameson utilizes Mandel, see Norton (1995). Norton also argues that Jameson ‘contains postmodernism within a modernist narrative’ (66) by invoking the unifying vision of a stage-theory of capitalism. Culture here should be understood to include the forms of subjectivity that global capitalism is said to produce. Needless to say, in the Jamesonian vision, post-colonials seem increasingly to hold identical subject (or should we say, subjected) positions , including of course that of class. Kayatekin and Ruccio (1998) challenge the idea that processes of globalization create a single subjectivity and argue, instead, that it is both possible and desirable to locate/produce multiple social (including class) identities in the post-colonial world. A similar frame of analysis marks David Harvey’s 1989 book, The Condition of Postmodernity. If not on a par with the influence of Jameson, then Harvey must be seen as not far behind in affecting investigations of postmodernism in terms of the latest phase of capitalism. For an alternative take on capitalism and globalization, one that challenges from a feminist, poststructuralist viewpoint the totalizing vision implicit in Jameson and Harvey, see Gibson-Graham (1996). Bruce Pietrykowski (1994) provides a different reading from Jameson and others who have argued for a one-to-one correspondence between consumer culture and postmodernism. Pietrykowski presents evidence that many of the elements of ‘fast capitalism’ and ‘ephemerality, fragmentation, juxtaposition, surface, and depthlessness’ that are currently attributed to post-Fordism and postmodernism can be seen clearly in the rise of consumer services and the particular aesthetics or designs of many commercial sites, from gas stations to department stores, during the heyday of Fordism in the early twentieth century in the USA. Pietrykowski’s main point is that there is no clear-cut division, when it comes to commodity culture, between modernity and postmodernity.

INTRODUCTION

15 For an excellent overview of the many art forms that have characterized the postmodern from diverse postminimal styles to deconstruction and commodity art during the last thirty years, see Sandler (1996). 16 For an excellent evaluation of Becker’s notion of culture as it enters economic analysis, see Koritz and Koritz (1999). Amartya Sen names Becker as one example of economists whose understanding of establishing ‘close relations’ with different disciplines takes an ‘imperialist’ form. As Sen states more generally, ‘Sometimes the proposed relation has been given a rather “imperialist” form, with economic theorists adhering strictly to their astonishingly narrow methodology and then applying, with remarkable confidence, that slim methodology to other disciplines as well’ (1991: 76). 17 Charusheela and Hargreaves Heap in this volume challenge the formal modeling of the neoclassical paradigm and its reduction of human motives to rationality. McCloskey, while critical of the strategies of formal modeling, or ‘blackboard economics’ as she has called it elsewhere (1996), supports the neoclassical metaphor of the rational individual, at least in major part. 18 Or, consider, for example, this understanding of postmodernity as resistance to ‘economics’, a resistance that is informed by the experience of post-colonial subjectivity: ‘Post-modernity already exists where people refuse to be seduced and controlled by economic laws. It exists for peoples rediscovering and reinventing their traditional commons by re-embedding the economy (to use Polanyi’s expression) into society and culture; subordinating it again to politics and ethics; marginalizing it – putting it at their margins: which is precisely what it means to be “marginal” in modern times’ (Esteva and Prakash, 1998). 19 Dow and Klamer in this volume both interrogate the tenuous links between modernity and postmodernity as it affects discourse. For Dow, the postmodern is the dialectical emergence of the antimodern, while for Klamer neoclassical economics’ turn to ‘high modernism’ augurs its imma(i)nent implosion. Amariglio’s commentary treats the ultimate success or not of Dow, Klamer, and also McCloskey to steer a path between or away from modernism and postmodernism. 20 Cullenberg and Dasgupta’s paper for this volume shows that the ‘high modernist’ debate over capital theory between the two Cambridges was as much about a contestation of mythologies as it was about the logical correctness of various theoretical propositions put forth. McCloskey, among others, also challenges in her paper here the view of the progressive and inevitable triumph of ‘better’ theory. 21 If there is an icon of postmodernism, it is likely the computer. According to Wise (1995), computer science ironically holds much the same position in regard to high theoretical science as did mathematics before the last part of the nineteenth century. Wise states: ‘Not until the end of the nineteenth century did mathematical expression by itself attain high status among natural philosophers, ultimately as the very foundation of “modern” physics. (Its formerly suspect boundary position has now been taken over by computer science, halfway between proper science and practical engineering, which in turn is rapidly becoming the foundation of “postmodern” science’ (357). 22 Paul Cilliers in his recent book Complexity and the Postmodern (1998) brings together developments in neurosciences logic, linguistics, computer science, the philosophy of science and deconstruction and poststructuralism to provide an interdisciplinary approach to questions of representation and organization in postmodernity. Building explicitly upon Lyotard, Cilliers

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argues that postmodern societies meet all of what he specifies as the main criteria for ‘complex systems’. In his 1986 book, The Control Revolution, which treats the rise of ‘the information society’ during the past 40 or so years, James Beniger produces a daunting list (on pages 4 and 5) of names given by a wide range of social theorists to the ‘major social transformations identified since 1950’. This list, which stops at 1984, includes such labels as ‘postindustrial society’, ‘postliberal age’, the ‘age of discontinuity’, the ‘new service economy’, and much more, posited by such writers as Peter Drucker, Alvin Toffler, Daniel Bell, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, just to name a few. Of course, the past 15 years have seen even more terms and many other authors that could easily be added to his list. In an earlier text, Libidinal Economy, Lyotard (1993, original French edition in 1974) ventures into discussions about the nature of economic crises during the past century (though, of course, this venture follows a different agenda of subjecting modernist economic discourses to poststructuralist interrogation). Brian Cooper and Margueritte Murphy (1999) conduct an insightful close reading of Lyotard’s libidinal economics. The idea of the decentered or fragmented subject has certainly received much attention in feminist literature. In this volume, Hewitson, Charusheela, Nelson, Bergeron, and Rossetti all consider the role of the feminist subject – fragmented or not – in its relationship to neoclassical economics. In a related way, Amariglio and Ruccio develop in their chapter Judith Butler’s work on the body to show how a decentered body can be seen both in opposition to and in terms of the leading traditions in the history of economic thought. In contrast, Dupré and Gagnier take issue with Amariglio and Ruccio’s claim that the body can be read in terms of a decentered subjectivity in the high modernism of the Arrow-Debreu model of general equilibrium. Simon (1991), no theorist of postmodernism, yet describes the situation of a less-than-unified, dispersed self (our words, not his) this way: each of us is ‘a committee of urges, wants, and needs, housed in body and mind’ (362); ‘each of us “time-shares”, alternating our many selves’ (363). We have chosen to keep our comments about the rationality assumption to a minimum and instead focus attention on the presumption of a unified form of subjectivity for the economic agent. One reason for our choice is that there is a vast literature by now defending and contending against the notion of rationality as the starting point for economic analysis. This theme has been overworked to a degree that we feel confident that postmodernist approaches add little to what has already been said on one side or another of this debate. However, here is a smattering of references presenting different points of view for those who are looking for a place to start mulling over this issue: Arrow (1987), Sen (1977 and 1987), Bausor (1985), Simon (1978), Sugden (1991), Sent (1997), Gerrard (1993), England (1993), and Hollis and Nell (1975). For some who explicitly consider postmodernism and rationality as it is used in economics, see Hargreaves Heap (1993), Varoufakis (1993), and Sofianou (1995). Louis Sass (1992) is a clinical psychologist who has years of experience working with schizophrenics in institutional settings. His book constitutes the most serious treatment of the loose claim that schizophrenia is an apt trope for describing the general state of ‘postmodern’ subjectivity and its manifestation in the arts. An example of the more casual (but not necessarily incorrect) use of this idea is the following discussion of channel surfing – a prototype for postmodern subjective activity – from the composition theorist,

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Lester Faigley (1992): ‘The experience of flipping across television programming approximates the consciousness of the schizophrenic living in the intense, eternal present. The viewer watches a series of spectacles from around the world – “smart” bombs exploding buildings, sports heroes in the elation of victory, royal marriages, plane crashes, assassinations, rock concerts, ranting dictators, shuttle launches, hurricanes, scandals, earthquakes, revolutions, eclipses, and international terrorism – all issued in an economy of images competing for attention’ (13). Sizing up the state of economic analysis in the mid-1950s, Koopmans concluded that ‘our economic knowledge has not yet been carried to the point where it sheds much light on the core problem of the economic organization of society: the problem of how to face and deal with uncertainty’ (1957: 147). Writing 30 years later, Amartya Sen indicates the degree to which the issue of uncertainty had become the primary context for much economic analysis such that the all-important notion of agent rationality had to be framed in terms of the general case of decision-making in the face of uncertainty. As Sen puts it: ‘behaviour under certainty can be formally seen as an extreme case of behaviour under uncertainty…in this sense, rational behaviour under certainty must be subsumed by any theory that deals with rational behaviour in the presence of uncertainty’ (1987, 1999) Some reading on the question of how uncertainty, ‘indeterminism’, and disorder became central themes across the cultural and disciplinary landscape during the past two centuries includes Hacking (1990), Stigler (1986), Plotnitsky (1994), Dupré (1993), Sass (1992), Kern (1983), Hayles (1991), Krüger, Daston and Heidelberger (1987), Krüger, Gigerenzer, and Morgan (1987), and Krips (1987). Nigel Wheale (1995) attempts a summary of postmodern style in the arts like so: ‘A definable group of strategies and forms recur in the description of postmodern arts and this lexicon orders them into a hierarchy. An all purpose postmodern item might be constructed like this: it uses eclecticism to generate parody and irony; its style may owe something to schlock, kitsch or camp taste. It may be partly allegorical, certainly self-reflexive and contain some kind of list. It will not be realistic. Now construct your own program to meet these demands’ (42–3). For a recent collection of essays that interrogates the relationship among value, culture, meaning, and art, see Klamer (1996). Essays in this volume where deconstruction is a major motif include those by Hargreaves Heap, Mehta, and Rossetti. Krips offers a critical reading of the essays by Cullenberg and Dasgupta, Mehta, and Hargreaves Heap for not pushing poststructuralism and deconstruction far enough. Krips’s critique speaks perhaps in part to the more fully developed use of deconstruction and poststructuralism in fields like communications studies and cultural theory. Useful overviews of Derrida’s work include Caputo (1997), Norris (1988, 1991), Norris and Benjamin (1989), Gasché (1986), and Culler (1983). For an introduction by an economist to the concept of deconstruction and the discussion of this notion of ‘differance’, see Ruccio (1998). Jane Rossetti must be named as among the first to declare a deliberately deconstructive reading of economics texts, as she does in her important 1990 essay on Robert Lucas. See also Rossetti (1992). One common criticism, which is not at all limited to those who pledge allegiance to postmodernism, is that the desires and wills of economists, like others, is largely a function of prestige, power, and even relative wealth. Donald Katzner (1991a), in his thoughtful defense of formalization within

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40 41 42 43

economics, admits the point that at least some of the obsession with formal modes of presentation in economics is because ‘that is where the rewards of publication, recognition, support money, promotion, and tenure are…even the selection of the problem to work on is subject to the same reward pressures. And the structure of these rewards tends to be set by the established standards of what constitutes relevant and significant questions, and what makes up the appropriate assumption-content of analyses which purport to provide answers. Clearly the existence of established standards provides a powerful rationalization for the continued use of formalization’ (22). See especially the essays in this volume by Klamer, Amariglio and Ruccio, Goux, Milberg, and Mehta. Though the title may not be as suggestive as the others we cite, we should add Salanti and Screpanti’s edited volume, Pluralism in Economics, in which some of the essays call for or employ self-reflexivity within economics. In addition to McCloskey (1983), an important early article reflecting on language in economics that is cognizant of postmodernism and poststructuralist thought is Milberg (1988). Cullenberg (1994) discusses this issue in more general terms as the ‘co-determination’ of theoretical discourse and material reality. He concludes that this co- or over-determination implies the impossibility of an independent standard of truth since ‘a standard of truth requires an independent or absolute point of reference. But in this case the independence has been corrupted by the mutual interaction between theoretical discourse and material reality’ (13). Indeed, the very meaning of a ‘fact’ has been shown in a number of instances to be socially constructed, thus imbricating the subject/scientist in what modernist discourse considers the objective character of natural or social reality. See Latour and Woolgar (1986), Poovey (1998), and Porter (1995) for detailed studies of the construction of social and natural facts. A sampling of these texts are Toulmin (1990), Kern (1983), Gablik (1984), Sass (1992), Xenos (1989), Ross (1994), and Berman (1982). The sociologist Anthony Giddens is one who has argued that the modernist project (e.g., justifying a commitment to reason in the name of reason) fails to complete itself: ‘modernity turns out to be enigmatic at its core’ (1990: 49). Hargreaves Heap’s critique of justice and rationality in his essay, along with the essays by Mirowski, Gudeman, and Davis’s commentary in this volume, provides such an immanent critique, we would argue. In what follows, we discuss formalism (or, rather, mathematical formalism) in passing. We note though that, for many commentators and critics, the rise of modernity has grown up hand-in-hand with a mathematized culture. And modernism in certain disciplines certainly has meant the move from prose to probability distributions. There are some excellent and diverse discussions, such as Ruccio (1988), Mirowski (1989), Morgan (1990), Porter (1995), and Stigler (1986), of this and related theoretical moves and what they have meant within the discipline of economics and elsewhere. In addition, we provide the following sentences from Katzner, a respected mathematical economist, who nicely links modernity and math: ‘we moderns, it seems, attempt to measure everything…measurement is relatively easy and convenient. It has become natural for us. It makes us feel good because it imparts the (frequently illusory) impression that we know something. And it is often not difficult, and even tempting, to ignore what cannot be measured. We seem to be caught up in a culture of measurement which we are unable to let go’ (1991b: 18).

INTRODUCTION

44 Compare this view with that of the Physiocrat disciple and French state bureaucrat Turgot, who saw language as the essential ingredient, bar none, for the emergence of genius. Manuel and Manuel summarize Turgot’s theory which postulated that the progress of language would make it ‘destined to become an even better instrument; it would be stripped of its rhetoric, cleansed of its ambiguities, so that the only means of communication for true knowledge would be the mathematical symbol, verifiable, unchanging, eternal’ (1979: 471). Manuel and Manuel proceed with this wonderful account of Turgot’s view of what happened to scientific genius with the fall of the Roman Empire: ‘In the past one of the unfortunate consequences of the conquest of a decadent higher civilization by vigorous barbarisms had been the linguistic confusion which followed the disaster. A long period of time elapsed before the victors and the vanquished merged their different forms of speech and, during the interval, language, the only receptacle for the storing of scientific progress then available, was lacking. Geniuses continued to perceive new phenomena, but since they were deprived of a stable body of rational linguistic symbols their observations were stillborn…The babel of languages resulted in a protracted period of intellectual sterility during which it was impossible for a creative genius to express himself because there was no settled linguistic medium for scientific thought’ (471–2). 45 Robert Solo, in fact, criticizes the use of mathematics in economics and advocates the use of a ‘natural language’ precisely because the latter ‘alone conveys an image in the mind that can be checked against the observed and experienced’ (1991: 103). 46 One good example is Andrew Pickering’s ‘posthumanist’ account of Rowan Hamilton’s construction of the mathematical system of quarternions in which ‘the center of gravity…is positioned between Hamilton as a classical human agent, a locus of free moves, and the disciplines that carried him along’ (1997: 63). There are, of course, many more examples, as during the past 20 years, there has been much written about the ‘social construction’ of knowledge, though not all of which embraces postmodernism. For just two accounts with different foci, see Longino (1990) and the essays in Lynch and Woolgar (1990). 47 Formalism also connotes, for many, ‘rigor’. And this attribute is often seen to comprise the acid test for deciding if a statement is possibly scientific or otherwise. It is interesting to note that in the same issue of Methodus, we get two different accounts of the place of the value of rigor for modern economic science. The first, by Sen (1991), amounts to the claim that furors about formalization sometimes are blown out of proportion since, by now, most economists have some formal training. And, ‘furthermore, the aura of glory that was associated once with being “rigorous” “exact”, and “modern” – available only to the chosen mathematical few – has rather dimmed in recent years’ (73). The second, by Solow (1991), is directed to the confusion sometimes between ‘abstraction’ and ‘rigor’. Losing patience (Solow’s comments come as a response to a ‘debate’ of sorts between McCloskey and Katzner over formalization in economics), Solow blares, ‘there is no excuse for lack of rigor. You can never have too much rigor. To make non-rigorous statements is to make false statements’ (31). And finally, ‘there is not a category of nonrigorous truths, not in theory’ (31). It seems Professor Sen hadn’t yet spoken to Professor Solow. One more view on rigor will suffice. This is from Mark Blaug’s recent salvo fired at formalism in economics: ‘If there is such a thing as “original sin” in economic methodology, it is the worship of the idol of mathematical rigor, more or less invented by Arrow and Debreu in 1954 and then canonized by Debreu in his Theory of Value five years later, probably the

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most arid and pointless book in the entire literature of economics’ (1998: 17). Professors Sen and Solow, meet Professor Blaug. We have gotten used to the very familiar soliloquy in which famous economists, many of whom pioneered the use of these models and nearpyrotechnical mathematics, late in their careers wonder how in the world such ‘tools’ ever got so out of hand in the training and consequent work of economists as to displace all other forms of argumentation, a concern for ‘reality’, and discursive borrowings. One such example is the recent confession by the new economic historian Richard Easterlin (1997), in which he bemoans that ‘model building is the name of the game. Empirical reality enters, if at all, chiefly in the form of “stylized fact”. Econometrics, though a formal course requirement everywhere, plays a surprisingly small part in economic research – showing up in perhaps one dissertation in five. There is no such thing as descriptive dissertations or theses devoted to the measurement of economic magnitudes. Although topics in disciplines other than economics are not uncommon, there is little or no use of the work done in the other disciplines’ (15). On this point, postmodern approaches in economics have much in common with critical realists, such as Tony Lawson who emphasizes that ‘knowledge is a social product, actively produced by means of antecedent social products’ (1997: 25). Indeed, while there are obvious disagreements one can find between postmodernists and critical realists, we are moved here more by important similarities regarding the social production and distribution of economic knowledge, a commitment to (at least some forms of) non-reductionism, a dislike of scientism, and much else. For more on critical realism, see also Fleetwood (1999). There is no question that a defense of foundations for knowledge consists largely of the view that establishing bases expands the realm of what can be considered worthy of scientific study. Yet, postmodernists often follow the line of reasoning found in Rorty (1979), in which foundationalism is seen to be about constraint and exclusion. In Rorty’s words, ‘the desire for a theory of knowledge is a desire for constraint – a desire to find “foundations” to which one might cling, frameworks beyond which one must not stray, objects which impose themselves, representations which cannot be gainsaid’ (315). We can not overemphasize, by the way, the impact of Rorty’s work on postmodern philosophies. Indeed, Bruna Ingrao charges E. Roy Weintraub with plunging into an ‘extreme relativism’ because of his insistence that the ‘sequence of ‘facts’ in the history of the discipline is fluid and mutable, according to the contingent problems with which each community of scholars is concerned’ (1997: 227). In our view, Weintraub’s work does not lead to ‘extreme’, ‘radical’, or ‘nihilistic’ relativism precisely because it involves the production of concrete stories about specific episodes in the history of economic thought. The mathematical microeconomist David Kreps admits that ‘the rise of mathematics’ in economics can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that ‘the use of a powerful and somewhat obscure tool confers power on the user. As economists became convinced of the value of mathematical rigor, the reward system (based on peer review) reinforced this tendency’ (1997: 64). Weintraub (1992) asserts, ’power does matter’ (55). Yet, of course, some like Roger Backhouse (1992) aren’t persuaded. Though Backhouse admits that the dependence of knowledge on power may be a ‘fact of life’, he concludes there is still ‘no place’ (by which he means no legitimate place) for power in economic methodology (73).

INTRODUCTION

54 As Chris Weedon explains, ‘the theory that all discursive practices and all forms of subjectivity constitute and are constituted by relations of power is…only disabling if power is seen as always necessarily repressive’ (1997: 175). 55 Postcolonial theory has become an important literature over the last twenty years and shares in many ways the concerns of some postmodernists, feminists, and Marxists, though, of course, there are important differences as well (for one comparative treatment, see Appiah 1992). Postcolonial theorists are concerned with the literary and cultural constructions of those in the former colonized nations as well as those diasporic locations outside these countries. Postcolonial theory often builds upon the idea of ‘sub-alternity’, ‘otherness’, and ‘resistance’. The idea of the subaltern and otherness refuses the binary of the postcolonial subject and experience in simple opposition or contrast to the West. Rather, otherness is often conceived in a nonessentialist and nontotalizing recognition of the myriad differences between and among postcolonial people and groups and their colonial pasts and postcolonial presents. Resistance is often thought of as subversion or mimicry, often with the recognition that the act of resistance not be fully separated from that being resisted. The idea of hybridity is an important conceptual marker signaling a recognition of the integration of cultures and practices and the impossibility of a fully self-referential or ‘authentic’ postcolonial life. Postcolonial writers are also concerned with many of the other concepts that have occupied postmodern theory, such as identity and difference, subjectivity, fragmentation, and representation. For an excellent collection of essays dealing with many aspects of postcolonial theory, see McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat (1997). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999) provides a brilliant critique of postcolonial studies, and she pushes the field to consider seriously the conditions of transnational culture and globality. 56 David Hollinger (1994) is right in his claim that ‘scientism is sometimes taken to cover a range of ideas broader than either naturalism or positivism, but the common denominator of its many definitions is a highly censorious tone…scientism is normally an opprobrious epithet directed at what the speaker regards as an arrogant or naive effort to extend the methods or authority of science into a field of experience where it does not belong’ (34). Hollinger, in his defense of some variant of modernism in the human sciences, is also correct in stating that not all ‘aspirations toward a scientific culture’ have been scientistic. But, again, we argue that the negative connotation in the term scientism is precisely oriented toward defenses of science that, when faced with people who do not buy into this form of thinking or its presumed results, lead either to a sneer or the advice (often followed by an enforcement) to ‘shut up’. 57 Of course, one does not have to buy into postmodernist critique to hold a methodological pluralist position. For a spirited defense of methodological pluralism in economics, see Caldwell (1982). 58 In his interesting and valuable collection of Austrian, neo-Austrian, and libertarian essays about the possible and actual contributions of economists to public discourse, Daniel Klein (1999) describes the practitioner of economics as ‘Everyman’. Now, this label is a tip-off for what is to follow: ‘the practitioner of political economy is typically highly ignorant of basic economic ideas’ (2). This diagnosis leads surely to a prescription. Klein quotes Adam Wildavsky: ‘It is up to the wise to undo the damage done by the merely good’ (7). We hope that readers will forgive us for wincing when we read Klein’s follow-up: ‘The economist’s good works rarely bare fruit in any direct way. The economist’s advice seems to fall on deaf ears. When good advice is

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rejected, the rejection is brusque and ignorant. Even in the rare case when the advice takes root, the sage’s influence is long lost and he receives no credit. For the most part, participation in public discourse is like tutoring an ornery and spoiled child. The economist must plead to get attention; once he has attention, his appeals consist of elementary ideas, rehearsed earnestly and painstakingly, and illustrated by imaginative stories and examples. Just when he thinks the public and policymakers are taking his precepts to heart, they suddenly abandon his instruction and for no good reason. His only recourse is to keep on hoping and pleading’ (8). For a different story about the possible ways economists might interact with ‘everymen’ (and women), see the essays in Garnett (1999a). The latest variant of this extension, of course, is the claim that all human behavior worth studying can be crammed into game theory. As the Nobel Prize winner John Harsanyi (1995) states, for himself and for many economists ‘in principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants’ (293). In fact, Harsanyi argues that, paradoxically, the assumption of perfect competition in markets was one of the chief obstacles to the ascendance of game theory since it implied the inability of any particular agent to effect much in the way of change in market price. Among more recent critics, feminist economists have been prominent. Some readings include Feiner (1999), Grapard (1995), Strassmann (1993), Nelson (1996), and Hewitson (1999). Hewitson’s book, especially, is written from a self-consciously poststructuralist point of view, as is her essay for this volume. The journal Feminist Economics is a good place to find such critical takes on hom*o economicus. There is an enormous literature that treats Foucault’s work. We recommend the following as an introduction to this commentary: Rabinow (1984), Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), Smart (1993), and Shumway (1992). For one discussion within economics that evaluates the Foucaultian themes of power/knowledge and their effects on the human body, see Amariglio (1988). Readers can also evaluate arguments for and against poststructuralist feminism and postmodernism more broadly in Nicholson (1990). Carole Biewener (1999) offers a valuable assessment of the hoped-for effects of poststructuralist feminism on a decentered Marxism (and vice versa). The essays in this volume by Grapard and Cooper consider the manner that early feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Harriet Martineau confronted the enforced masculinism of their day. The essays by Charusheela, Hewitson, Nelson, and Rossetti explore many of the issues of poststructuralist feminists in the field of economics, albeit in different ways. This is true of most of the essays that composed the special symposium entitled ‘Postmodernism, Economics, and Canon Creation’ that appeared in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 1991 (see Beed et al. 1991). Post Keynesianism has turned out to be a welcome ground (relatively speaking) to raise issues of postmodernism, as the influence of Keynes (especially his 1937 article) and Shackle (1961, 1966, 1990) in particular on questions of uncertainty and the indeterminacy of agent choice , not to mention ideas stemming from Keynes on persistent tendencies toward disequilibria, have been felt within some branches of this school. Once more on disciplinary imperialism. Consider this one from Jack Hirshliefer: ‘There is only one social science…What gives economics its imperialist invasive power is that our analytical categories – scarcity, cost, preferences, opportunities, etc. – are truly universal in applicability…Thus

INTRODUCTION

economics really does constitute the universal grammar of social science’ (1985: 53). 67 Easterlin (1997) captures again nicely some of the arrogance and exclusions, supposedly in the name of science, practiced by economists in this summary of what he terms his own ‘indoctrination’ to the economics profession in graduate school: ‘And then there was my education in the values of the economics profession. I learned that economics is the queen of the social sciences. I learned that theory is the capstone of the status hierarchy in economics. I learned the brand names whose research I was to revere and respect. I learned that tastes are unobservable and never change. I learned that subjective testimony and survey research responses are not admissible evidence in economic research. I learned that what was then called “institutional economics” (Commons, Veblen, etc.) was beyond the pale, as were other social sciences more generally. I learned that there is a mere handful of economics journals really worth publishing in, and that articles in inter- or extra-disciplinary journals count for naught. I learned that economic measurement as then practiced by the National Bureau of Economic Research was to be denigrated as “measurement without theory” (13). 68 In addition to work we have already cited, and the essays in this book, such work includes Hands’s (1997) rediscovery of Frank Knight’s contextualist pluralism and Burczak’s (1994) focus on the postmodern moments in Friedrich von Hayek’s work. In a similar way, Cullenberg (1999) points to the postmodern moments and similarities in certain traditions within Marxism and institutionalism by emphasizing their decentered affinities, and Garnett (1999b) takes this Marxist-Institutionalist dialogue about postmodernity a step further in his consideration of heterogeneous approaches to non-neoclassical value theory. 69 On uncertainty, see for example Amariglio (1990), Ruccio (1991), and Amariglio and Ruccio (1995); on the decentered totality, see Cullenberg (1994 and 1996); on the fragmented body, in addition to the paper in this volume, see Amariglio and Ruccio (forthcoming).

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Flax, Jane (1990) Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, Berkeley: University of California Press. —— (1993) Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy, New York: Routledge. Fleetwood, Steve (ed.) (1999) Critical Realism in Economics: Development and Debate, London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Harper and Row. —— (1973) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage. —— (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage. —— (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, New York: Pantheon. Fuchs, Victor R.; Krueger, Alan B.; and Poterba, James M. (1998) “‘Economists” Views about Parameters, Values, and Policies: Survey Results in Labor and Public Economics’ Journal of Economic Literature 36 (3): 1387–425. Gablik, Suzi (1984) Has Modernism Failed? New York: Thames and Hudson. Garnett, Jr., Robert F. (1999a) What Do Economists Know? New Economics of Knowledge, New York: Routledge. —— (1999b) ‘Postmodernism and Theories of Value: New Grounds for Institutionalist/Marxist Dialogue?’ Journal of Economic Issues 33 (4): 817–34. Gasché, Rodolphe (1986) The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gergen, Kenneth J. (1991) The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, Basic Books. Gerrard, Bill (ed.) (1993) The Economics of Rationality, London: Routledge. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell. Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Grapard, Ulla (1995) ‘Robinson Crusoe: The Quintessential Economic Man?’ Feminist Economics, 1 (1): 32–53. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Hacking, Ian (1990) The Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hands, D. Wade (1997) ‘Frank Knight’s Pluralism’, in Andrea Salanti and Ernesto Screpanti (eds) Pluralism and Economics: New Perspectives in History and Methodology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 194–206. Harding, Sandra (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hargreaves Heap, Shaun (1993) ‘Post-Modernity and New Conceptions of Rationality in Economics’, in Bill Gerrard (ed.) The Economics of Rationality, London: Routledge, 68–90. Harsanyi, John C. (1995) ‘Games with Incomplete Information’ The American Economic Review, 85 (3) 291–303.

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Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hayles, N. Katherine (ed.) (1991) Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henderson, Willie; Dudley-Evans, Tony; and Backhouse, Roger (eds) (1993) Economics and Language, London: Routledge. Hewitson, Gillian J. (1999) Feminist Economics: Interrogating the Masculinity of Rational Economic Man, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hirshliefer, Jack (1985) ‘The Expanding Domain of Economics’ American Economic Review 75 (6): 53–68. Hollinger, David A. (1994) ‘The Knower and the Artificer, with Postscript 1993’, in Dorothy Ross (ed.) Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 26–53. Hollis, Martin, and Nell, Edward (1975) Rational Economic Man: A Philosophical Critique of Neo-Classical Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchison, T. W. (1979) Knowledge and Ignorance in Economics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ingrao, Bruna (1997) ‘Comment’ in ‘Frank Knight’s Pluralism’, in Pluralism and Economics: New Perspectives in History and Methodology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 227–31. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Katzner, Donald W. (1991a) ‘In Defense of Formalization in Economics’ Methodus, 3 (1): 17–24. —— (1991b) ‘Our Mad Rush to Measure: How Did we Get into This Mess?’ Methodus, 3 (2) December: 18–26. Kayatekin, Serap, and Ruccio, David F. (1998) ‘Global Fragments: Subjectivity and Class Politics in Discourses of Globalization’ Economy and Society 27 (February). Kern, Stephen (1983) The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Keynes, John Maynard (1937) ‘The General Theory of Employment’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 51 (2): 209–23. Klamer, Arjo (1983) Conversations with Economists: New Classical Economists and Opponents Speak Out on the Current Controversy in Macroeconomics, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld. —— (ed.) (1996) The Value of Culture: On the Relationship between Economics and the Arts, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Klamer, Arjo, McCloskey, D. N.; and Solow, Robert M., (eds) (1988) The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, Daniel B. (ed) (1999) ‘Introduction: What Do Economists Contribute?’ in What Do Economists Contribute?, New York: New York University Press, 1–26. Koopmans, Tjalling C. (1957) Three Essays on the State of Economic Science, New York: McGraw Hill. Koritz, Amy, and Koritz, Douglas (1999) ‘Symbolic Economics: Adventures in the Metaphorical Marketplace’, in Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (eds) The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, New York: Routledge.

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Kreps, David M. (1997) ‘Economics – The Current Position’ Daedalus 126 (1): 59–85. Krips, Henry (1987) The Metaphysics of Quantum Theory, New York: Oxford University Press. Krüger, Lorenz; Daston, Lorraine J.; and Heidelberger, Michael (1987) The Probabilistic Revolution, 1: Ideas in History, Cambridge: MIT Press. Krüger, Lorenz, Gigerenzer, Gerd; and Morgan, Mary S. (1987) The Probabilistic Revolution, 2: Ideas in the Sciences, Cambridge: MIT Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve (1986) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Facts, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lavoie, Don, (ed.) (1991) Economics and Hermeneutics, London: Routledge. Lawson, Tony (1997) Economics and Reality, London: Routledge. Longino, Helen (1990) Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lynch, Michael, and Woolgar, Steve (eds) (1990) Representation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge: MIT Press. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Foreword by Fredric Jameson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (1993) Libidinal Economy, trans. Ian Hamilton Grant, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mandel, Ernest (1978) Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Manuel, Frank E., and Manuel, Fritzie P. (1979) Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McClintock, Anne; Mufti, Aamir; and Shohat, Ella (eds) (1997) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCloskey, D. N. (1983) ‘The Rhetoric of Economics’ Journal of Economic Literature 31(June): 434–61. —— (1985) The Rhetoric of Economics, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. —— (1994) Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1996) The Vices of Economists, The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Mehta, Judith (1993) ‘Meaning in the Context of Bargaining Games – Narratives in Opposition’, in Economics and Language, (eds) by Willie Henderson, Tony Dudley-Evans, and Roger Backhouse. London: Routledge. —— (1999) ‘Look at me look at you’, in What Do Economists Know?: New Economics of Knowledge, (ed.) by Robert F. Garnett, 37–59. New York: Routledge. Milberg, William (1988) ‘The Language of Economics: Deconstructing the Neoclassical Text’ Social Concept 4 (June): 33–57. Mirowski, Philip (1989) More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Morgan, Mary S. (1990) The History of Econometric Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Julie A. (1996) Feminism, Objectivity and Economics, New York: Routledge. Nicholson, Linda, (ed.) (1990) Feminism/Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. Norris, Christopher (1988) Derrida, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —— (1991) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. _____ and Benjamin, Andrew (1989) What is Deconstruction? New York: John Wiley and Son. Norton, Bruce (1995) ‘Late Capitalism and Postmodernism: Jameson/Mandel’, In Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg, and Carole Biewener (eds), 59–70. New York: Guilford Press. Pickering, Andrew (1997) ‘Concepts and the Mangle of Practice: Constructing Quaternions’, in Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory, (eds) Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, Durham: Duke University Press. Pietrykowski, Bruce (1994) ‘Consuming Culture: Postmodernism, Post-Fordism, and Economics’ Rethinking Marxism 7 (1): 62–80. Plotnitsky, Arkady (1994) Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida, Durham: Duke University Press. Poovey, Mary (1998) A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porter, Theodore M. (1995) Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Posner, Richard A. (1992) Sex and Reason, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rabinow, Paul, ed. (1984) The Foucault Reader, New York: Random House. Resnick, Stephen A. and Wolff, Richard D. (1987) Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Chicago; University of Chicago Press. Rorty, Richard (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rose, Margaret A. (1991) The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial: A Critical Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenau, Pauline Marie (1992) Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ross, Dorothy, (ed.) (1994) Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rossetti, Jane (1990) ‘Deconstructing Robert Lucas’, in Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists, Warren Samuel (ed.), 225–43. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. —— (1992) ‘Deconstruction, Rhetoric, and Economics’, in Post-Popperian Methodology of Economics: Recovering Practice, Neil de Marchi (ed.), 211–34. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Ruccio, David F. (1988) ‘The Merchant of Venice, or Marxism in the Mathematical Mode’ Rethinking Marxism, 1 (4): 37–68. —— (1991) ‘Postmodernism and Economics’ Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 13(4): 495–510. —— (1998) ‘Deconstruction’, in The Handbook of Economic Methodology, John B. Davis, D. Wade Hands, and Uskali Maki (eds), 89–93, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

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Salanti, Andrea, and Screpanti, Ernesto, (eds) (1997) Pluralism and Economics: New Perspectives in History and Methodology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Samuels,Warren J., (ed.) (1990) Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. —— (1996) ‘Postmodernism and Economics: A Middlebrow View’ Journal of Economic Methodology 3 (1): 113–20. Samuelson, Paul A. (1997) ‘Credo of a Lucky Textbook Author’ The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11 (Spring), 153–60. —— (1998) ‘How Foundations Came To Be’ Journal of Economic Literature, 36 (September), 1375–1386. Sandler, Irving (1996) Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, New York: Harper and Row. Sass, Louis A. (1992) Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sen, Amartya (1977) ‘Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (4): 317–44. —— (1987) ‘Rational Behaviour’, in The New Palgrave: Utility and Probability John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman (eds), 198–216. New York: W. W. Norton. —— (1991) ‘Economic Methodology: Heterogeneity and Relevance’ Methodus 3 (1): 67–80. Sent, Esther-Mirjam (1997) ‘Sargent versus Simon: Bounded Rationality Unbound’ Cambridge Journal of Economics 21: 323–38. Shackle, G. L. S. (1961) Decision, Order, and Time in Human Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1966) The Nature of Economic Thought: Selected Papers 1955–64, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1990) Time, Expectations, and Uncertainty in Economics: Selected Essays by J. L. Ford (ed.). Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Shumway, David (1993) Michel Foucault, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Simon, Herbert A. (1978) ‘Rationality as Process and Product of Thought’ American Economic Review 68 (May), 1–16. —— (1991) Models of My Life, New York: Basic Books. Smart, Barry (1993) Michel Foucault, London: Routledge. Sofianou, Evanthia (1995) ‘Postmodernism and the Notion of Rationality in Economics’ Cambridge Journal of Economics 19: 373–89. Solo, Robert A. (1991) The Philosophy of Science and Economics, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Solow, Robert M. (1991) ‘Discussion Notes on “Formalization” Methodus, 3(1), 30–1. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: A Critique of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stigler, Stephen M. (1986) The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Strassmann, Diana (1993) ‘Not a Free Market: The Rhetoric of Disciplinary Authority in Economics’, in Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and

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Economics, Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, (eds) Chicago: University of Chicago Press 54–68. Sugden, Robert (1991) ‘Rational Choice: A Survey’ Economic Journal 101:751–83. Toulmin, Stephen (1990) Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tribe, Keith (1978) Land, Labour and Economic Discourse, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Varoufakis, Yanis (1993) ‘Modern and Postmodern Challenges to Game Theory’ Erkenntnis 38, 371–404. Weedon, Chris (1997) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, 2nd edn Cambridge: Blackwell. Weintraub, E. Roy (1992) ‘Roger Backhouse’s Straw Herring’ Methodus 4(2): 53–7. —— (1997) ‘Is ‘“Is a Precursor of” a Transitive Relation?’ In Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Thought Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky. (eds), Durham: Duke University Press. Wheale, Nigel (ed.) (1995) The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader, London: Routledge. Wise, M. Norton (1995) The Values of Precision, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Xenos, Nicholas (1989) Scarcity and Modernity, New York: Routledge.

PART II MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

2 MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM A dialectical analysis Sheila Dow

Postmodernism addresses the fragmented nature of meaning arising from discursive processes. This chapter takes a process approach to postmodernism itself, seeing it, not as an end-state, but as being itself part of a discursive process. The ‘post’ in postmodernism is thus taken seriously as referring to the temporal framework of discourse. The premise is that modes of thought in economics, or any discipline, arise from the wider cultural/political/technological context, so that the focus is on broad trends; this approach is not incompatible with ‘moments’ of reaction, which may be part of the engine for change in thought. It will be argued here that postmodernism evolved out of modernism as the antithesis to modernism’s thesis. Postmodernism is also antimodernism; it will be argued that postmodernism has carried forward modernism’s dualism and it is the consequences of this dualism which are driving thought beyond postmodernism. In other words, just as implosion is immanent in modernism, so implosion is immanent in postmodernism. Already apparent in postmodernism is evidence of a transition to the next, synthetic, stage which goes beyond the dualism of modernism/postmodernism. The argument will be introduced first in terms of monism and pluralism, where monism is understood as the ideal of unity and pluralism the ideal of plurality (see Salanti and Screpanti, eds, 1997, for a discourse on pluralism). Modernism’s monism will be depicted as giving way to postmodernism’s pure form of pluralism, which in turn is giving way to a modified form of pluralism which transcends both sides of the previous dual. In the following section, the argument is made more generally for a dialectical interpretation of this process. Finally, the process is put in historical context by suggesting comparison with earlier periods in which ideas may be seen as evolving according to a similar process: the period of the Scottish Enlightenment, with its influence on

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Smith, and the period immediately following the First World War, with its influence on Keynes. I am conscious, in the process of presenting this argument, of employing categories which may be regarded as incompatible with postmodernism. The notion of broad sweeps of thought may smack of modernism. Also I shall refer to modernist, postmodernist and synthetic thought as entities, in spite of their obvious diversity, in order to emphasise the key elements in common which allow us to construct these categories. Indeed attitude to singularity and plurality will be a key distinguishing feature. I shall employ the categories of ontology, epistemology and methodology in the discussion of pluralism, categories which many postmodernists may regard as inadmissible. But there is no escape from using some set of categories. The best we can do is to be aware of the particularities of the categories we are using and be clear in explaining to which approach they belong. My approach in this chapter is the synthetic approach which it is partly the purpose of this chapter to explain.

Pluralism Identifying different strands of discourse in thought has become confused by different usage of common terms. We focus here on the term ‘pluralism’, which is associated with postmodernism, but which has been employed increasingly outside postmodernism. Not only does it have different meanings depending on the mode of thought employed, but it also has different meanings depending on the level of analysis: ontological, epistemological, methodological or method. In what follows we attempt to distinguish between these levels for each of three modes of thought: modernist, postmodernist and what I shall call for want of a better term ‘synthetic’. (This approach could also usefully be termed ‘political economy’, but a concern with political economy as such is not the issue here; see Dow, 1990a.) The different positions with respect to pluralism are set out in Table 2.1. Vision of reality At the ontological level, the modernist vision of reality is monist in the sense that reality has an objective existence, and its nature is that there are unifying forces which it is the business of science to discover, and encapsulate in laws. For universal laws to be justified, reality must be understood to be a closed system, precluding the emergence over time of new forces, other than as exogenous shocks. Modernism involves a pervasive application of dualism; in the case of vision of reality, monism is understood dualistically and justified by the presumption that, if there were not unifying principles, then there would be chaos. 62

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Table 2.1 Pluralism in economics Modernism

Postmodernism

Synthesis

Vision of reality

Monist; unifying forces in nature; scope for discovering laws from objective facts

Pure pluralist; fragmentation of nature. Or deny ontology altogether

Each school monist; but open system; regularities rather than laws

Theory of knowledge

Monist Words have fixed meanings; test re. facts; only one best way of gathering knowledge

Pure pluralist No means of comparing understandings. No regularities so no schools of thought

Modified pluralist Open system of knowledge means scope for schools of thought

No role. Methodology Monist, prescriptive Identifies best way of Or pure pluralist gathering knowledge. Pluralist, descriptive if cannot identify best way Method

Monist Pluralist if cannot identify best way of gathering knowledge

Modified pluralist. Can have reasoned debate on different methodologies, by criteria of any one school of thought.

Nothing to say since Modified pluralist no methodology. Or Range of methods pure pluralist limited by vision of reality and theory of knowledge

The postmodern reaction to modernism is completely different in terms of the vision of reality. As Rosetti (see Chapter 14) explains, the view is taken that there is no essence; meaning is taken from context and conveyed by language. From this comes the view that it is illegitimate to distinguish the ontological level from the epistemological level (see Amariglio, 1990). Thus statements may still be made in the postmodern literature as to the nature of reality, as embodied in discourse. These statements suggest the dual of the modernist vision of reality, most notably that reality is fragmented. Our understanding of reality arising from discourse is thus fragmented (which we shall come on to again at the next, epistemological, level). It is therefore in the nature of reality itself to be fragmented, since reality takes its meaning from discourse. Thus for example Amariglio (1988) discusses the fragmentation of the self. Reality further is understood, through discourse, as an open system, whereby fragmentation and lack of determinism hold the potential to disturb any regularities. While there is a refusal within postmodernism explicitly to distinguish a postmodern position on ontology, as distinct from epistemology, we can nevertheless think of postmodernism as 63

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being founded on a particular ontological position, which is bound up with the distinctive position taken in turn on epistemology, methodology and method. Postmodernism thus generates a pure pluralist understanding of reality. The synthetic approach transcends the opposition of monism and pluralism by incorporating aspects of each to create a third vision of reality. The synthetic approach sees reality as being an open system, subject to new and unexplained influences, and evolving in undeterministic ways. But there is scope for a wide range of visions of this economic process; indeed difference of vision is inevitable if the economic system is seen as open, and complex; then there is scope for seeing the essence of the process in very different ways. Marxians, for example, see the economic process in totally different ways from neo-Austrians, while both may see the economy in open system terms. From openness it follows that no school of thought can be said to presume unifying forces which can yield universal laws. Rather, there can at best be a presumption that reality involves some regularities. Nevertheless, the existence of regularities may be regarded as the sine qua non of science. The synthetic approach is thus pluralist in its vision of reality in that scope is seen for a plurality of regularities from which schools of thought may select what they see as the essence of the economic process. Nevertheless, each school of thought is monist in the sense that each has its own, singular, vision of reality. Indeed I define schools of thought according to the particular vision of reality held (see Dow, 1990a), the implication being that different visions of reality cannot be sustained within a school of thought. (From this perspective, the fragmentation of vision in postmodern discourse limits the scope for theoretical development.) Theory of knowledge The theory of knowledge associated with modernism is, like the vision of reality, monist in the sense that knowledge is built up with reference to ‘the facts’, where these facts are objective representations of reality. The words used to convey these facts have fixed, singular, meanings (see Hacking, 1981). The facts are used to identify the universal laws which would reflect the unifying forces of nature. Indeed, testability against the facts is defined as the identifying feature of science. The goal of science is to develop true knowledge; science progresses (unidirectionally) as its stock of true knowledge grows. Further, because the economic system is seen as being closed, a closed system of knowledge is applied to it, modelled on the world of classical mechanics (see Mirowski, 1989). Again, we can tease out from the composite ontology/epistemology of postmodernism a distinctive approach to epistemology. The postmodern approach reacts against the monism of modernism with a pure pluralist 64

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theory of knowledge. Since there are no real essences to discover, there is no subject-matter for knowledge other than discourse itself. Within this discourse there is a plurality of understandings and no independent means for comparing them because language is so context-specific. There is no scope whatsoever for classifying any piece of knowledge as true, because of the incommensurability of knowledge among different economists, and by the same economist with respect to different circ*mstances (see Amariglio, 1990). There is thus no common ground of shared knowledge on which to build schools of thought. Indeed, McCloskey (1994) argues that the use of schools of thought labels impedes conversation. The postmodern approach thus advocates tolerance on the grounds that no one economist can lay claim to the truth. The synthetic approach again employs a modified pluralist position. Starting from the view that the economic system is (to human eyes, at least) an open system, the synthetic approach applies to this system an open system of knowledge. This implies that not all relevant variables are known, or knowable, requiring that any system of knowledge itself be partial. This opens up the scope for different schools of thought to choose to develop different partial systems of knowledge; these systems correspond to the vision of the economic process of each school. The theory of knowledge is thus pluralist in that pluralism of knowledge is entailed in an open system. Further, the synthetic approach has absorbed from postmodernism the argument that language is not neutral and the reporting of facts not a purely objective process. As a consequence it has inherited from postmodernism a tolerance of alternative systems of economic knowledge on the grounds that none has a prior claim on the truth. On the other hand, the synthetic approach takes from modernism a concern with criteria for good practice in generating knowledge. Thus, from the perspective of a school of thought, it is regarded as legitimate to argue for the system of knowledge chosen by that school. But, unlike modernism, there is no presumption that any one school has identified the route to true knowledge. Methodology Methodology refers to the system of techniques employed in order to generate knowledge. There has been some confusion generated by using the term ‘methodological pluralism’ when what is meant is ‘pluralism of method’; the latter refers to the methodological choice in favour of a plurality of techniques; this will be discussed below. I shall use ‘methodological pluralism’ to refer to what methodologists do. As far as the modernist approach to methodology is concerned, again the approach is the dual of pluralist: it is monist. Traditionally, methodology was seen as being prescriptive, i.e. as setting out rules for good scientific practice. 65

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Implicit was the notion that it was possible to identify one set of rules as being the best – hence the long-running battles between inductivists and deductivists, for example. But this approach to methodology has lost force, not least because it took its lead from the philosophy of science, which has long since moved beyond methodological monism. Now Blaug (1980 and 1991) is one of the few remaining standard-bearers of traditional methodology in economics. It is in methodology that postmodernism has had its greatest (or at least its most direct) impact, deflating the confidence previously held in the capacity to identify best practice. Traditional methodology has thus gone through a sea-change by emphasising description over prescription (see, for example, Weintraub, 1989). But the field gives the impression of being in limbo, with the modernist predilection for rules for best practice periodically being voiced as something which might still come out of all the descriptive work (see de Marchi, 1991). The orthodox methodology approach is thus now predominantly pluralist, with methodologists providing accounts of theorising; but monism, as the wish to return to a single, preferred set of rules, is still evident. For all the influence of postmodernism on modernist methodology, postmodernism does not in fact espouse a pluralist methodology; it denies the role of methodology altogether. This point was made most forcefully by McCloskey (1983). She argued that, once the contextual role of language was appreciated, it would become apparent that there was no role for methodology (by which she meant prescriptive methodology). But of course, as became apparent from the furore that she caused in methodological circles, McCloskey could not avoid methodology, even in denying methodology. The sense in which postmodernism also denies even descriptive methodology is that the concept of methodology requires some regularity in techniques for acquiring knowledge. Knowledge acquisition is too fragmented in the postmodern approach to identify methodologies. But even the act of identifying modernism requires the perception of modernist methodology as a regularity; criticising it goes even further down the methodological path. Indeed, Amariglio (1990) explains the difference between McCloskey and most postmodernists in that the latter explain the implications of modernist rhetoric for its methodology. But it is difficult at times to identify what postmodernists wish to put in its place (see Wendt, 1990). This follows from the postmodern conclusion that an overarching methodology is rendered impossible by the fragmented nature of discourse-based knowledge. The synthetic approach adopts a pluralist approach to methodology, in that methodologists accept that there are no external criteria for arriving at the best methodology. The methodology of each school of thought, therefore, should be analysed critically in its own terms. However, 66

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pluralist methodology derives from a pluralist ontology and epistemology. Just as there is no ultimate objective account of reality in general, there are no grounds for expecting that a methodologist can somehow escape this in describing a plurality of methodologies. For the methodologist, the language used to analyse methodologies is specific to the context and the methodologist’s perspective. Pure description is thus not feasible. Any methodologist brings to the analysis some criteria which correspond to a particular methodology. On these grounds the methodologist is equipped for critical analysis, on the basis of these criteria; as these are the methodologist’s preferred criteria then the methodologist can engage in argument about the relative merits of different methodologies. It is not a question of whether or not this is desirable; it is a question of it being inevitable. But it is less harmful the more explicit the methodologist is about her starting point. In contrast to the modernist search for universal criteria, the synthetic approach entails a plurality of criteria, combined with the basis for argument as to the relative merits of different sets of criteria. Method Modernist economics is generally identified with general equilibrium economics; the unifying method is thus the equilibrium method (see Weintraub, 1985 and Hausman, 1992). Yet mainstream economics has been characterised lately by some degree of fragmentation (see Dow, 1996). This is due in part to the reassurance from McCloskey (1983) that methodology was no longer an issue; although it has to be said that economic practice had not generally conformed at all closely to professed methodology (as Blaug, 1980, demonstrated). Some leading mainstream economists such as Solow (1988) and methodologists such as Boland (1982) have indeed advocated pluralism of method, because of the difficulties involved in theorising about the complexities of the economic system. However, if the ontological and epistemological positions have not changed, then the hope must still be there, as with methodology, that the single best set of techniques will again be identified. Otherwise, pluralism of method lacks foundation and is thus antithetical to the foundationalist approach of modernism. Because postmodernism denies the prescriptive role of methodology, it is consistent that nothing may be said about method. Nevertheless, it can be argued that, implicit in the postmodern critique of the monist modernist general equilibrium method as a means of establishing general laws in economics is an advocacy of pluralism of method. Certainly there is no explicit advocacy of an alternative range of methods, leaving pure pluralism of method as the only remaining possibility. But on what grounds may pure pluralism of method be justified? If 67

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reality is indeed fragmented, then there is no scope for identifying any regularities on which to theorise; if the fragmentation is only partial, then the nature of the fragmentation requires explicit discussion. If knowledge is pluralist also in the pure sense, there is no common ground for discussion among theorists; if it is not purely pluralist, then again the scope for regularities requires explicit discussion. If a pure pluralist position is taken on methodology, again there is no basis for discussion, but further, there are no grounds for preferring something other than the monism of method of modernism. If on the other hand there are grounds, on the basis of agreed views on reality, on knowledge or on methodology (i.e., departures from pure pluralism), for advocating either pure pluralism of method, or a modified pluralism, then these require discussion. The synthetic approach is consistent with its positions at the other levels by adopting a modified pluralist approach to method as to everything else. Modified pluralism of method is indeed entailed by the modified pluralist methodology. Where an open system form of theorising is advocated, a range of methods is entailed to capture different aspects of the system in a partial manner, which is all that any theorist can aspire to. These methods may well be incommensurate because of the incommensurability of different parts of an open system. The range of methods adopted by any school of thought will be determined by the vision of reality and theory of knowledge peculiar to that school. Thus for example, neo-Austrians might rule out formalism and employ other methods more suited to focusing on behaviour within firms, households and governments. Orthodox Marxians may rule out market analysis as being of minor relevance to their vision, while allowing a limited degree of formalism to represent causal processes in historical time. An open system epistemology allows for, and indeed encourages, debate within and between schools of thought as to the appropriate range of methods. But the starting point is a chosen methodology which is part of what defines a school of thought.

A dialectial interpretation Having characterised modernism, postmodernism and the synthetic approach in terms of pluralism, the next stage of the argument is to make the case that the three can be understood as stages in a dialectical process. The argument to be made is that, just as modernism proved to be unsustainable, so the postmodernism that grew out of it will ultimately also prove to be unsustainable; there is a third, synthetic, approach which can be seen as growing out of modernism and postmodernism and which is sustainable. Klamer (1988) has referred to postmodernism as representing a ‘moment’ in the development of economics (see also pp. 83). Similarly, 68

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Amariglio (1990) and Amariglio and Ruccio (1995) identify points at which uncertainty has been addressed as postmodern moments within modernism. Further, it is noted that attention to pure uncertainty and its implications have been gaining increasing attention of late. Postmodernism entails impermanence, and more generally the rejection of the notion of universal truths. So it comes naturally to think of postmodernism itself in transient terms, rather than itself involving some final truth. It is this feature of postmodernism, however, and the difficulties postmodern economists face in adhering to it, which means that its implosion is immanent, just as it was for modernism. The first question to address is how applicable is the chronology of modernism-as-thesis and postmodernism-as-antithesis. McCloskey (Chapter 4) quite correctly points out the ancient origins of both; something like modernism and postmodernism have jostled for position over the centuries. Further, the synthetic position also has firm roots in the history of economics (notably in the work of the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, and the major figure of twentieth-century economics, Keynes; we shall focus on the context of their thought in the next section). Nevertheless, McCloskey argues that the twentieth century can be understood in terms of a particular flowering of modernism and its reaction in postmodernism. It is possible to identify this development in broad cultural terms, within which economics is only a part. (How far it was influenced by external developments, and how much it influenced them, is a different, and large, question.) The implication of this historical perspective is that the dialectic can be expected to play itself out again and again. But we concern ourselves here only with the current dialectic. Certainly the bulk of the postmodern literature seems to identify modernism with the early years of the twentieth century, and postmodernism with developments in the second half of the century (the exact decade varying with the field of enquiry). To what extent can postmodernism be considered as the antithesis of modernism’s thesis? Such a construction requires that postmodernism can be shown to have evolved out of modernism, so that postmodernism contains some elements of modernism and cannot be understood other than as a reaction against modernism, i.e., postmodernism entails opposition to modernism in terms of particular principles. Klamer (Chapter 3) and McCloskey (Chapter 4) both refer to the evolutionary aspects of postmodernism. Klamer cites Jencks as noting the technological improvements of modernist architecture being carried forward into postmodern architecture. He then proceeds to list the features of modernism which postmodernists reject. I would argue that it is in this rejection that a key element of modernism is continued in postmodernism: dualism. As Chick (1995) argues, there is a range of reactions open to those who choose not to adopt the dualistic, modernist approach, of which rejection 69

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is only one (the others being containment, paradox and synthesis). But of course, rejection is a dualistic reaction. And it is dualism, I would argue, which was unsustainable in modernism, and which will prove unsustainable in postmodernism. Dualism in modernism and postmodernism can be discussed with reference to the different positions of the two approaches with respect to pluralism. Modernists have a dualist vision of reality: either it conforms to order or it conforms to chaos. The dualist position on knowledge is that there is one best way of observing reality and theorising about it in terms of a closed system; closed systems in turn entail dualism in the concepts of endogeneity and exogeneity, known and unknown, etc. Modernist methodology is dualist: either there are absolute rules for good science, or there are none (in which case methodology can only be purely descriptive). Even the view on method is dualist: either there is one best method, or set of methods, or else any method may be employed. The discussion in the previous section suggested some ambiguity in the postmodern position on pluralism, which arises in large part from the postmodern view that these categories are themselves modernist. In the case of each level (vision of reality, theory of knowledge, methodology, and method) the position is either the dual of modernist monism in the form of pure pluralism, or it is that nothing may be said. Certainly ‘nothing may be said’ is something other than the dual of monism. (It is however the dual of the more general position that ‘things may be said’.) But if indeed this second possibility does represent postmodernism more accurately than pure pluralism, then nothing may be said. Full stop. Herein lies the unsustainability of postmodernism. If the position is one of pure pluralism at any of the levels, then it requires justification in terms of the other levels of analysis. That such justification is required finds support in Klamer’s criticism of modernism for lacking a philosophical foundation (see Chapter 3). On the other hand, if ‘nothing may be said’, then postmodernism is a purely negative position with respect to any knowledge, and any grounds for action, in general as well as in science. Postmodernism is, as Amariglio (1990) points out, nihilist. That such a position is unsustainable is evident in the fact that much (and much that is useful) is said by postmodernists. It is for this reason that many postmodernists might not recognise themselves in the above account. In a way this is the point. Discourse is unsustainable if either nothing, or absolutely anything, may be said. Thus, Nelson (Chapter 13) offers an account of the way forward for feminist thought, starting from postmodernism but moving beyond it, which is compatible with the synthetic approach being presented here. Further, Milberg (Chapter 20) offers a very constructive analysis within international trade theory which advocates a preferred approach which corresponds with what I 70

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would identify with the postmodern vision of reality as fragmented and evolving; but Milberg suggests regularities to that fragmentation and evolution which provide the basis for theorising. Indeed this identification of regularities and advocacy of theoretical approach inevitably appear whenever postmodern economists address a particular field of enquiry in economics. Many postmodernists’ work corresponds more closely to the synthetic approach outlined here simply because the professed postmodern approach is unsustainable when it comes to discussions of methodology, theory or method. Just as it has proved very unhelpful for modernist economists not to address the foundations for their theorising, the same applies to postmodernists. To assert, as many postmodernists do, that foundations are irrelevant is to ignore the position on vision of reality, theory of knowledge and methodology implicit in any economic analysis. Since the ‘nothing may be said’ position removes any justification for analysis, and is in any case itself a foundationalist position, it does require discussion; further, in order for ‘things to be said’ there needs to be discussion of the basis for such things to be said. But a return to the monism of modernism is not required in a discussion of foundations; the synthetic position outlined above is well articulated within heterodox economics. By definition, as a synthetic position, it has absorbed much of what is good in postmodernism: the tolerance of different approaches, the awareness of the need to develop theory within context, the need to encompass human creativity and unknowability into economic theory, and so on. It is also a sustainable position because it avoids the dualisms of modernism and postmodernism (see Dow, 1990b, and 1996). The synthetic position is explicit in non-orthodox schools of thought and is, I would argue, implicit in postmodernist applied economics. It is also possible to argue that it is implicit in much of modern neo-classical economics. As McCloskey (1983) points out, modernists find it impossible in practice to live up to their modernist principles. What is alarming however is the refusal by most neo-classical economists to recognise the disjunction and its implications (see Dow, 1997a). Further, there is evidence in other fields of such a move beyond dualism. In chemistry, for example, Prigogine and Stengers’ (1984) theory of self-organising systems avoids the order/chaos dual by considering chemical systems as open systems. Then, rather than order and chaos being mutually exclusive as in orthodox science, chaos is the precondition for order; under certain conditions, chaos generates processes which reinstate order in a new form. Mathematics too has been addressing issues raised by open systems. Fuzzy mathematics (see for example Dubois and Prade, 1980) avoids the dualism entailed in known boundaries of sets. Indeed Chick (1995), in exploring developments in fields 71

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other than economics, has argued that there is evidence of a physiological evolution among humans which is shifting the balance between dualistic (left brain) thought processes and non-dualistic (right brain) thought processes in favour of the latter. The rise of postmodernism can be seen as early evidence of this change; but, in that it itself entails dualism in its rejection of dualism, it will ultimately be inconsistent with non-dualistic modes of thought.

Earlier dialectics It may be helpful in considering the current process of development in modes of thought if we consider briefly two earlier periods when similar processes were at work. The first period we consider here is the period of the Scottish Enlightenment, building up to Smith’s contributions to the development both of philosophy and economics. The second is the period building up to the philosophic and economic contributions of Keynes. Both cases are admittedly controversial given the debate over the relationship between the Enlightenment and modernism, and over whether or not Keynes should be regarded as a modernist. Both periods were characterised by the rejection of authority: in the case of the Enlightenment, Church dogma, and in the case of the early twentieth century, Victorian values. In the first case, the rejection of authority arose from the social, political and technological upheavals of the emerging Industrial Revolution while in the latter case it was the result of a disillusionment about the inevitability of progress brought on by the experience of the First World War and the shifting disposition of economic and political power. The Newtonian era saw the emergence of rationalism and an increasing faith in the power of science to uncover truth. Similarly, economics at the turn of the twentieth century was in the throes of mimicking classical mechanics in an attempt to portray economics as a science rather than a moral science (see Drakopoulos, 1991). The philosophical reaction among the sceptics in the Enlightenment period (such as Locke and Berkeley) was to point out the severe limits to the scope for rationally grounded knowledge. Bertrand Russell in many ways can be understood in similar terms at the turn of this century. Both periods were ones of intellectual ferment, not only over particular questions about scientific knowledge, but also about how to ask and answer questions, i.e., about the foundations of knowledge. The Scottish Enlightenment was distinctive in a way which is captured in the denomination of the key figures as ‘sceptical whigs’ (see also Chapter 4). While Hume and Smith were keenly aware of the limits to certain knowledge, they were driven by practical concerns to theorise in any case, backed up by detailed observation of real historical processes. The aim was to establish some connecting principles as a basis for theory, 72

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but it was recognised that these could not be regarded as ‘true’ and that they required careful adaptation in the light of the detail of particular contexts. Fundamental was a theory of the commonality of human nature; but because that nature was social, it manifested itself differently in different contexts. Further, while behaviour was governed to a considerable extent by social convention, it was at times intentional, but even then was often deluded. The theory of knowledge as being limited and social was thus incorporated directly into theory. Smith’s (and Hume’s) work can thus be understood as conforming to the synthetic position outlined above, reacting against the scepticism of the rationalists. (See Dow, 1997b, for a fuller expression of this general argument.) The characterisation of the early twentieth century is more difficult, in that it is often seen as signalling the beginnings of modernism proper (see for example Klamer, 1995). In fact, it would be possible to identify elements of postmodernism in philosophy, physics and in literature. But Keynes can be seen as combining elements of what we now know as postmodernism with elements of modernism in a synthesis which belies his characterisation as either modernist (Phelps, 1990) or postmodernist (see Amariglio and Ruccio, 1995, and Klamer, 1995). Keynes came to economics from philosophy, and a concern to establish the basis for action in belief under uncertainty. Like Smith, Keynes appreciated the importance of rhetoric as a vehicle for persuasion in the absence of demonstrable propositions. His discussion of uncertainty, further, countered the deterministic analysis of the orthodox economics of the time. Nevertheless, he proceeded to theorise about decision making under uncertainty, albeit in a social context, and to draw some generalisations at the macro level. Keynes thus employed postmodern ideas about the nature of knowledge but used them creatively in his analysis of economic behaviour in order to arrive at some explanations for observed regularities. Keynes thus also conformed, I would argue, to the synthetic approach outlined above. But of course ideas in economics moved on. In philosophy, eighteenthcentury scepticism turned into a focus on rational knowledge, whatever its scope, as exemplified by the French Enlightenment (see McCloskey, pp. 108). In the case of classical economics, Smith’s approach was overtaken by the formalism of Ricardo which had much in common with modernism. The competing interpretations of Smith to that offered above are interpretations from a modernist perspective (see for example Arrow and Hahn, 1971; see Winch, 1997, for a detailed critique). Similarly, Russell’s scepticism turned into an undue focus on certain, rationally grounded knowledge, whatever its scope, an approach from which Keynes (1972) explicitly distanced himself in terms of an alternative view of human nature as entailing passion as well as reason. Keynes’s ideas were more clearly overtaken by modernism in a manner which is well 73

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documented (see Coddington, 1976, for example). In the case of both periods, the crucial elements of uncertain knowledge and the social nature of behaviour were squeezed out, allowing a deterministic theory of atomistic behaviour which purported to demonstrate truth with certainty. It is only in the last twenty years or so that there has been a postmodern reaction to this modernism, and now an attempt at synthesis. Does this historical experience suggest an inevitable cycle, with modernism or something akin to it repeatedly gaining control? One possible way of addressing this question is to consider that the synthetic approach has been the victim of its own success. When economies and societies are stable (or growing in a stable fashion) then the uncertainty of knowledge, and changes in the social nature of knowledge, assume less importance. Only in times of turmoil, as in eighteenth-century Europe, or the turn of the twentieth century, do established grounds for belief come under suspicion, and the foundational questions again come to the surface. This is much more than a postmodern moment – it is something which can persist for decades, and requires some resolution. What has been suggested here is that the resolution of the postmodern reaction to the failures of modernism has taken the form of a synthesis which provides for theorising, but incorporates fundamentally postmodern ideas about knowledge and discourse. The argument here is that we are reaching this stage again now and, if the transition to the synthetic stage is to be successful in the sense of not reverting to modernism, it would be helpful for postmodernists to move even further in the direction of constructing new theories, even if this requires abandonment of what were originally the hallmarks of postmodernism, defined by its rejection of modernism.

Conclusion This contribution is offered in the spirit of postmodernism, applying the process-of-knowledge approach to postmodernism itself. Postmodernism represents an advance on modernism with its critique of the idea that regularities in nature could be identified by means of unitary facts, analysed within methodologies conforming to rules of best practice; that the resulting theories had universal application in time and space; and that science necessarily progresses. The result has been a much greater awareness of the inevitability of differing perspectives generating different theories, none of which could lay claim to truth; the need for theory to be context-specific; and the view of science as sometimes taking wrong turnings. But the contribution has in many ways been a negative one, in the sense that it is expressed as the justification for rejecting modernism. As far as alternative approaches to economics are concerned, postmodernism 74

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can be interpreted as saying either that anything is acceptable, or that nothing may be said on the subject. In practice, either has been an impossible position for postmodern economists to take. Postmodernists do make statements, and they do, explicitly or implicitly, express judgements about alternative approaches (to methodology, or theory). In practice, therefore, postmodern economists tend to adopt the modified pluralist position of the synthetic approach which does have an articulated position on vision of reality, theory of knowledge, methodology and method. To build constructively on this synthetic development would be welcome as a way of moving economics forward in a way which might forestall a reversion to modernism.

References Amariglio, J. L. (1988) ‘The Body, Economic Discourse and Power: An Economist’s Introduction to Foucault’, History of Political Economy, 29(4). —— (1990) ‘Economics as a Postmodern Discourse’ in W. J. Samuels (ed.) Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economics, Boston: Kluwer. Amariglio, J. L. and Ruccio, D. F. (1995) ‘Keynes, Postmodernism and Uncertainty’ in S. C. Dow and J. Hillard (eds) Keynes, Knowledge and Uncertainty, Aldershot: Elgar. Arrow, K. J. and Hahn, F. H. (1971) General Competitive Analysis, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Blaug, M. (1980) The Methodology of Economics; Or How Economists Explain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2nd edn 1992. —— (1991) ‘Afterward’ in N. de Marchi and M. Blaug (eds) Appraising Economic Theories, Aldershot: Elgar. Boland, L. A. (1982) Beyond Positivism, London: Allen and Unwin. Chick, V. (1995) ‘ “Order out of Chaos” in Economics?’ in S. C. Dow and J. Hillard (eds) Keynes, Knowledge and Uncertainty, Aldershot: Elgar. Coddington, A. (1976) ‘Keynesian Economics: The Search for First Principles’, Journal of Economic Literature, 14(4). de Marchi, N. (1991) ‘Introduction’ in N. de Marchi and M. Blaug (eds) Appraising Economic Theories, Aldershot: Elgar. Dow, S. C. (1990a) ‘Post Keynesianism as Political Economy: A Methodoogical Discussion’, Review of Political Economy, 2(3). —— (1990b) ‘Beyond Dualism’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 14(2). —— (1996) The Methodology of Macroeconomics: A Conceptual Analysis of Schools of Thought in Economics, Aldershot,: Elgar. —— (1997a) ‘Mainstream Economic Methdology’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 21(1). —— (1997b) ‘Hume, Smith and Critical Realism’, University of Stirling mimeo. Drakopoulos, S. (1991) Values in Ecoomic Theory, Aldershot: Gower. Dubois, D. and Prade, H. (1980) Fuzzy Sets and Systems: Theory and Applications, London: Academic Press.

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Hacking, I. (1981) ‘Introduction’ to Scientific Revolutions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hausman, D. (1992) The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keynes, J. M. (1972) ‘My Early Beliefs’ in Essays in Biography: Collected Writings X, London: Macmillan, for the Royal Economic Society. Klamer, A. (1988) ‘Economics as Discourse’ in N. de Marchi (ed.) The Popperian Legacy in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1995) ‘The Conceptions of Modernism in Economics: Samuelson, Keynes and Harrod’ in S. C. Dow and J. Hillard (eds) Keynes, Knowledge and Uncertainty, Aldershot: Elgar. McCloskey, D. N. (1983) ‘The Rhetoric of Economics’, Journal of Economic Literature, 21 (June). —— (1994) Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mirowski, P. (1989) More Heat than Light, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phelps, E. S. (1990) Seven Schools of Thought in Macroeconomics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984) Order Out of Chaos: Man’s Dialogue with Nature, London: Heinemann. Salanti, A. and Screpanti, E. (eds) (1997) Pluralism in Economics, Aldershot: Elgar. Solow, R. M. (1988) ‘Comments from Inside Economics’ in A. Klamer, D. McCloskey and R. M. Solow (eds) The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weintraub, E. R. (1985) General Equilibrium Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1989) ‘Methodology Doesn’t Matter. But History of Economic Thought Might’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 91. Wendt, P. (1990) ‘Comment’ on Amariglio (1990), in W. J. Samuels (ed.) Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economics, Boston: Kluwer. Winch, D. (1997) ‘Adam Smith’s Problems and Ours’, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 44(4).

3 LATE MODERNISM AND THE LOSS OF CHARACTER IN ECONOMICS Arjo Klamer

Modernism continues to characterize dominant economic discourse. Yet, its implosion must be imminent. The epistemological foundations in shambles, modernist economics is without a coherent philosophical justification. Consistent implementation of its strategies and heuristics has led to a gradual deconstruction of fundamental concepts. Undermining it further is the incredibility of the metanarrative that motivated the modernist project in economics. Original motivations have unravelled and turned into ironic commentary. Without credible hope of affecting the worlds around them, including the everyday lifeworld, modernists are left to their own devices and doomed to find gratification only within their own community. Even so, modernism continues to characterize dominant economic discourse. There we go again: Bold conjectures, if not gross generalities, followed by a long monological exposition in support. Take the postmodernist sensitivity only half seriously, and such a presentation becomes suspect for pretending what it is not: a straight argument carefully articulated and composed. In the pomo vein we are led to think of this as a performance that we put on to impress, entertain and intimidate other academics, the only possible implied audience. Let’s face it, staking out one more claim in this field of chaos and adding another noise to the cacophony of academic babble is futile and presumptuous. Yet the show must go on. In the following I intend to diagnose the tensions and contradictions within modern neoclassical economics that augur its imminent implosion. But before getting to that, I am compelled to deal with the problem of characterization. 77

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William Ashmore (1989) and others of the Edinburgh school of sociology of knowledge ironized academic practices by interrupting their own monologues with dissenting voices. The interruptions underscore the inevitable ambiguity of making assertions about the world while withholding epistemological and ontological judgements at the same time.

The problem of characterization The buzz about modernism and postmodernism seems to indicate that there are real presences of ‘modernisms’ and ‘postmodernisms’ out there. Use the terms a lot and they become real. In the meantime they are characterizations that are meant to capture elusive and complex ‘realities’. In line with the postmodernist stance, we come to think of them as social constructions that serve as tools to sustain endless conversations in support of mainly academic communities. Ironically, both in postmodernist and modernist moments characterizations are suspect, including the characterization of ‘postmodernist’ and ‘modernist’. Yet the reasons for the resistance appear to differ. In the postmodernist spirit the complexity of a phenomenon such as ‘postmodernist discourse’ overwhelms so much so that no single category, no term, refers unequivocally. The pluriformity and the fragmented nature of things resists any single label. Apply the label ‘postmodernism’ to characterize a practice in economics, and the knee-jerk reaction will be to turn the characterization inside out, confront it with its own inconsistencies (as I am doing here), and expose its incompleteness. No characterization will withstand a well executed deconstructive move, certainly not a simple one like ‘postmodernist economics’. So what are we talking about? The least we can do in the postmodernist spirit is to erase the concept as soon as we use it. Within alleged modernist circles the application of ‘modernism’ does not make sense because it is in the character of modernist discourse to resist any characterization for its superficiality. National characters and moral characters are of no use in modernist treatises and novels. In search for deep structures that reveal universal characteristics (like the structure of a dynamic general equilibrium system) there is no need for differentiation in the form of characterizations of surface phenomena. Any character dissolves in the process. The same happens in modernist economics. The representation of the market structure is successful only if it transcends contingent properties and identifies the invariant underneath unstable appearances. The only persuasive characterization would be in terms of the deep structure

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exposed, as in syntactics and semantics. Accordingly, the modernist project aims beyond characterizations of temporal and particular phenomena to cast its nets in the deep waters where the truth must lurk. Modernist critic: Postmodernist critic:

What other way is there? You’re falling into the modernist trap with your desire to characterize. Give it up!

Maybe. Maybe not. I am in the business of characterizing a very complex reality even while I sense the ubiquitous presence of traps and suspect disapproval and dissent all around. How can we avoid characterizations anyway? We do it all the time. We do it for example when conveying our impressions about a person to someone who does not know that person. Surely, we could benefit from an analysis of the DNA structure of that person (‘Please, do you mind if I take a hair from you?’) or submit that person to a psychological test. Even so, the information will not suffice and may not be in the form that our audience will comprehend. So we interpret, inducing and abducting features from the confrontations between what we observe and what we know and then assimilating our findings into a characterization, that is, the verbal representation. As is common knowledge in the hermeneutic tradition, we make the same moves when coping with phenomena in general. Critical is the conveying of our findings as the need to communicate forces us to wring our vague, fuzzy, and multidimensional understanding into the straitjacket of language. Forced to communicate our undoubtedly complex and nuanced comprehension of the phenomena under discussion, we will do the same in this paper. Characterization is what this paper is, to a great extent, all about. It should be possible to characterize without the modernist claim to capture the invariant, or the essential, features. At the same time we can resist the postmodernist hypersensitivity to the overdetermined and complex character of everything existing by taking the pragmatic stance. For it is in communicative action that characterizations operate, receive resistance and get reformulated. In action we necessarily and inevitably fall back on characterizations, their imperfection being a condition for action. Let Erasmus be the example with his Praise of Folly; all action, after all, requires a suspension of disbelief as well as a momentary erasure of systemic knowledge to make room for the Fool in us. Contrary to what is commonly believed, the Fool does not condemn us to the merely irrational (whatever that may mean), but encourages us to act in accordance with principles, ideas and values which, if put to the modernist and postmodernist tests, would crumble and dissolve. The Fool can be reasonable and pragmatic.

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Intermezzos The interest in characterization is similar to the recent interest in character. On the latter MacIntyre notes in After Virtue: To understand [characters] is to be provided with a means of interpreting the behavior of actors who play them, just because a similar understanding informs intentions of actors themselves; and other actors may define their parts with special reference to these central characters. (MacIntyre, 1981: 26) Exceptions support the characterization of modernists as resisting the characterization of modernist. One exception is Edmund Phelps, who in his introductory textbook (1985) identifies modernism in the ‘new vocabulary’ with concepts such as incomplete information, transaction costs, customer markets, ‘asymmetric’ information, rational expectations, and credibility. The question is why he sees these concepts as modernist. The reference to architecture on the front cover indicates that the modernism as it is identified in that practice is on his mind. The reader is left to wonder how the organic forms of Wright’s Guggenheim museum and the rectangular buildings of Van Der Rohe compare to the forms of rational expectations and transaction costs. Another exception is McCloskey, who put the concept of modernism on the agenda in her seminal work on rhetoric in economics (1985). But then she is not quite the conventional economist given her Old Chicago stance and attention to our classical heritage, literature, and rhetoric. Her attacks on modernism in economics, which she mainly recognizes in positivist beliefs, and her attention to rhetoric have earned her the reputation of being a relativist. When the only terms available to us are ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’, her critique of modernism should make her a postmodernist. Yet she is not. The relativist label does not stick very well either. Neo-traditionalism McCloskey’s case calls for alternative labels. Calling her an Old Chicago economist, as she herself prefers, may do fine in the context of economics, but fails to capture the more global sentiment that her work reflects. The label that I prefer is that of the neo-traditionalist. Currently, it represents respect for tradition, place, authority, values and roots coupled with the (postmodern) recognition that all these entities are socially constructed and subject to change. The neo-traditionalist urge is to revisit the pasts of family, of nation, of discipline and take along what seems of value for the

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present life – to activate memory, as Christopher Lasch puts it in his last work (1995). It makes one suspicious of radical programs, yet at the same time makes one susceptible to change. It makes one oppose any form of fundamentalism including the fundamentalist adherence to what once was. Neo-traditionalism cuts through modernist dualisms, twentieth-century ideological oppositions; it encapsulates modernist elements together with postmodernist sensibilities and then some more, such as interest in, and concern for, the traditions that frame our lives.

Modernism and economics In earlier exercises (Klamer, 1987 and 1993), I have attempted a characterization of modernism in economics with the visual arts and architecture as bases for comparison. After a great deal of testing against texts and skeptical audiences, I settled on the following eight characteristics: Eight characteristics of modernism 1

Problematization of representation. Appearances deceive: reality is not as it presents itself. When appearances deceive, the representation of reality becomes a problem. (cf. physics, Marx, Freud.) Exploration of the invariant structure of reality while recognizing its ephemeral appearance. In order to highlight the problem of representation some modernists wanted to express the ‘transient, the fleeting, the contingent’. Others were intent in exploring and determining the fundamental, invariant structure that underlies the appearances. Predilection for formal, reductionistic and axiomatic representations. For those looking for the invariant, logic, geometry and mathematics were the preferred languages; the dominant heuristic prescribes the development of formal systems from a minimal set of axioms, of which at least some concern the characteristics of the most basic units of the system (particles, individual decision makers). The machine as a dominant root metaphor. The machine suggests the possibility of perfection and control. As such, it answers the ideal of a better life. A break with history. Commitment to the new called for a liberation from tradition. The future, and not the past, should determine the present (cf. the avant-garde, the shock of the new, the bulldozer). The turn inwards. The medium becomes the issue. The significant audience comprises the initiated, the insiders, that is, colleagues and knowledgeable critics. Much of modernist work is self-referential 81

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and reflexive. One implication is the distinction between high-brow and low-brow, that is, academic art (or economics) from popular art (or economics). Another implication is the professionalization of the arts and sciences, and the departmentalization of their instruction in universities. The square versus the circle. Modernism operates both in the square and the circle. The square is the domain of the scientific, the circle of the therapeutic. The sharp distinction of the square and the circle in modernist consciousness accounts for a basic tension within modernism. It is responsible for the gulf that separates the humanities and the sciences in modern academia, as well as professional and personal life in general. Endorsem*nt of the Enlightenment metanarrative. Modernists seek to overcome historical and cultural barriers in the search for universal truth, peace, a better world, or all three.

According to this characterization, the problem of representation is the central theme in modernism. Exemplary in economics is the work of Paul Samuelson. Highly abstract, reductionistic and formalistic, it seeks to expose the deep structures of economies in forms that transcend historical and cultural, and hence all contingent conditions to claim universal validity. Whether it is the theory of revealed preferences, international trade or business cycles, Samuelson’s theory is devoid of references to historical situations or human subjects. His theory is reflexive in the sense that the main subject is the medium, that is, the theoretical strategy itself. Modernist economics, as in Samuelson’s work, is foremost about itself. The only real character that inhabits its world is its author, that is, the economist him-, or herself (as I have tried to show in Klamer, 1995). The bulldozer (see point 5 above) symbolizes the levelling strategies within modernism. Like Corbusier in architecture, Samuelson and his modernist colleagues appear to erase old frameworks to level their playing field so that they can build new models from first principles. They speak of liberating the discipline from the verbiose and empiricist practices that dominated into the 1940s. The purpose of this scientific revolution in economics was world improvement, in accordance with the Enlightenment narrative. Before I can claim confidently that modernist economists actually subscribed to this metanarrative, more research is needed. General impressions derived from textbook presentations, perusal of academic articles, research proposals, and endless conversations with academic economists indicate that economic policy has been the legitimating and motivating factor in academic economic research. Abstract arguments found their justification in possible policy consequences. In a survey among graduate students, world improvement continues to be a rationale for 82

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studying economics. This rationale speaks to the continuing strength of the Enlightenment narrative in economics. Yet that strength appears to be waning: and with it the persuasiveness of the complex of values, strategies, attitudes, and sentiments that define modernism in economics.

Moments There are plenty of problems with my characterization of modernism. One of these is the narrative that accompanies the eight-point list. A narrative needs to begin somewhere, but it is unclear how to begin this narrative. It has been customary to begin with Descartes, who is credited with the introduction of various dualisms into the collective modern consciousness. In the table above these dualisms are captured in the square–circle opposition, which sets apart factors such as the rational, the objective, and the public from the emotional, the moral, the subjective, and the personal. Toulmin (1990) problematized this beginning – how could anyone not do so? – and proposed to begin the narrative of the genesis of modernism with Montaigne. The great advantage of Toulmin’s narrative is that it generates a better transition to postmodernism, since Montaigne seems to anticipate postmodern sentiments. Another, related problem is that of periodization. Claim modernism in economics and the question is ‘When did it start?’ followed by ‘If it has ended, when was that?’ Should we mark the beginning with Von Thunen, or is Walras the modernist pioneer in economics? No to both, I would argue, because their formal and reductionistic approach was incidental and did not inform the dominant practice of their respective times, which continued to be historical, empirical and conceptual. If formalism and reductionism are the criteria, we should go back to at least Pythagoras! So dominance – or, to use Gramsci’s term, hegemony – is what counts. Whereas art changed apparently around 1910, with painting turning to abstract or surreal techniques and concerns, modernism began to affect the representation in economics only in the 1930s. For it is then that formal annotations started to crowd out empirical tables and historical descriptions from the journal pages. Throw in the numerous instances of economic work during the twentieth century that take exception to my listed characteristics, and the characterization appears to blow up in our faces. What shall we do with Keynes, Schumpeter, and Hayek, to name just a few paragons of twentiethcentury economics? Their work is insufficiently formal, reductionistic, mechanistic, and self-referential to be called modernist. Amariglio and Ruccio (1995) would even go as far as to label Keynes and Knight as postmodernists. Milton Friedman’s work resists the characterization too, as does the entire oeuvre of the Old Chicago school. When one of its avowed members, Deirdre McCloskey, fulminates against modernist 83

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economics, something is amiss. So what are they if not modernists? Are they ‘pomos’? Amariglio provides a sensible way out of this conundrum in his important paper ‘Economics as a Postmodern Discourse’ (1990) with the notion of ‘moments’. In an allegedly postmodernist move he suggests that ‘while economic discourse is characterized by a self-consciousness of modernism, within this modernism we can discern various postmodern “moments” ‘ (1990: 15). As one of such postmodern moments, he identifies the concern with uncertainty in the work of Keynes and Knight because that concern would undermine, he purports, the epistemological foundations on which modernist economics is built. By highlighting the postmodern moments in modernist economics, Amariglio’s characterization avoids the wholesale character of modernism outlined in the list above. It furthermore brings out the tensions and contradictions within modernism that may lead to its implosion. The notion of moments has the additional advantage that it alerts us to the possibility that modernism, postmodernism and something like traditionalism are indeed just that: moments that can operate simultaneously. Accordingly, when modernist moments are perceived to dominate, postmodern and traditionalist moments may very well continue to operate, or vice versa. The avowed modernist may know moments of radical doubt – the postmodern moment. They may subsequently return to a reductionistic analysis of an economists’ problem (like the equilibrium solution in a non-cooperative game) – the modernist moment. And on the side they may be indignant about sneering in the profession – conceivably a traditionalist moment. It may be even in the nature of discursive activities that all three, and possibly more, moments concur. Further speculation on this count I leave for another occasion.

Late modernism Apart from allowing for postmodern and traditional moments, my characterization of modernism behoves further differentiation to distinguish Samuelsonian modernism from more recent forms, as in game theory, new classical and new Keynesian economics, new growth theory, chaos theory and so on. To characterize these more recent forms as postmodern would not be appropriate. For none of them exhibit the radical doubt, the fragmentation, the duplicities, the stylistic mixtures that are typical for postmodernist practices (or moments). It would be more appropriate to call these forms ‘late modernist’ in imitation of the nomenclature applied by readers of the scenes in the arts and architecture. A brief detour through the world of the arts may clarify this move. Conventional wisdom in art history presents Andy Warhol as the artist who broke with modernism in the arts. His reproduction of 84

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familiar images is interpreted as an argument against the internal, selfreferential, and abstract language of modernism (as in abstract expressionism and neo-plasticism). Not a modernist, he has to be a postmodernist. What else could he be? In architecture we witness a trend away from the taut, formal buildings of Mies Van der Rohe and the Bauhaus towards buildings with relief, intricate forms, and display of technological devices, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Are such buildings to be named postmodern? Is Warhol a postmodernist? The answer on both counts is no. Jean-François Lyotard (1984), in his characterization of the ‘postmodern condition’, emphasizes the loss of metanarratives that accompanied modernism. According to one such metanarrative, as interpreted by Lyotard, ‘the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethics-political end – universal peace’ (1984: xxiii–iv). The inhabitants of a postmodern world, he claims, do not believe in such a possibility anymore. They do not believe in the possibility of universal truth and beauty and in the value of monolithic methodologies; they also have given up the modernist conviction that intellectuals and artists can reform the world and shape a better future. Postmoderns instead practise plural methods. In their world a thousand flowers bloom. The critic Suzi Gablik (1984) considers a significant segment of Lyotard’s postmodernism still as part of modernism. The search for the new, she claims, reflects a modernist spirit. The same could be said about the attachment to abstract representations and the use of exclusive jargon. In his little book What is Post-Modernism? Charles Jencks sorts out some of the confusion. He proposes that we label pop-art, minimalism and buildings such as the Centre Pompidou ‘Late Modern’. His characterization is as follows: ‘in architecture it is pragmatic and technocratic in its social ideology and from 1960 takes many of the stylistic ideas and values of Modernism to an extreme in order to resuscitate a dull (or clichéd) language’ (1986: 35). Late moderns, according to Jencks, may have lost the original faith of moderns, but still practise much of what the moderns preached. Although many late moderns abandon the formalism of modern methodology, they still celebrate the future (through their appreciation of the ‘new’) and the abstract. Some may have tried to popularize their discourse, but many late moderns, especially the minimalist and conceptual artists, continue to operate for a select, well-informed audience. These artists construct ‘strange objects’, fill a gallery with sand, throw a heap of cloth in the corner of a museum, that is, they do things that an amateur will find hard to understand. ‘The morality of Late Modernism consists in […] integrity of invention and 85

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usage; like Clement Greenberg’s defense of Modernist morality the work has to be judged as a hermetic, internally related world where the meanings are self-referential’ (Jencks, 1986: 39). Jencks’s Late Modernism is the Post-Modernism that Ihab Hassan describes as ‘essentially subversive in form and anarchic in its cultural spirit…[Post-Modernism] dramatizes its lack of faith in art even as it produces new works of art intended to hasten both cultural and artistic dissolution’ (cited by Jencks, 1986: 33). Accordingly, in Jencks’s characterization, late modernism, although often a reaction against modernism, still adheres to its critical values. Postmodernism is the label we best reserve for those expressions which intend to reclaim the territory that modernism erased. Jencks terms postmodernism ‘that paradoxical dualism, or double coding, which its hybrid name entails; the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence;…an architecture [Jencks’s main subject] that was professionally based and popular as well as one that was based on new techniques and old patterns’ (1986: 7, 15). He refers to classical patterns in otherwise stylistic buildings, to the reintroduction of symbolism and allegories in painting. Among painters, the Italians Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia, and the Americans David Salle and Eric Fischl provide good examples of the postmodern interest in culture, history and symbolism. They have brought back figures into their painting: Cucchi paints the sacredness of the land in which he grew up; Fischl takes his viewer behind the façade of American middle-class life (cf. also the movie Blue Velvet); Salle divides his canvas into a modernist and a postmodernist part, thereby asking the viewer to make the connection. Recent developments in the world of the arts attest to the strength of modernist sentiments, as late modernist work maintains a strong presence. The work of conceptual artists, such as Donald Judd and Joseph Beuys, is still going strong. The neo-expressionists (Cucchi and Chia) and neo-traditionalists (Fischl?, April) have retreated into relative obscurity. Nobody seems to know what the art scene is about right now. Confusion, maybe. Loss of direction, perhaps.

Late modernism in economics: the case of new classical economics I have provided a story for the arts, or at least an impression of it. Now we can return to the world of economics. The argumentative strategy that Hicks, Samuelson et al. introduced into macroeconomic discourse requires the writing down of models and, in a later version, the derivation of macrorelations from the neoclassical assumption of individual maximizing behavior. The intent is the construction of a universal model that, after adjustment for the values of parameters, can apply to any situation in any period of history in any culture. The favored expression is 86

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formal, i.e. a series of equations that facilitate mathematical solution procedures. New classical economists take over this strategy from the Keynesians, but ‘take it to an extreme’. Their argument is that neo-Keynesians have not been consistent and strict in their adherence to this strategy. Robert Lucas, for example, argues that the dynamic properties of neo-Keynesian models were ad hoc. ‘While Keynes and the other founders of what we now call macroeconomics were obliged to rely on Marshallian ingenuity to tease some useful dynamics out of purely static theory, the modern theorist is much better equipped to state exactly the problem he wants to study and then to study it’ (Lucas, 1987: 2). He means that the new classical strategy has produced models that are dynamic and make rational choice explicit, which is what the Keynesian dynamic models (cf. the models of the Phillips curve) failed to do. In conversation, new classical economists make clear that they want to talk in terms of models. ‘I want to write down a model’, thus goes a standard expression of intention, ‘that makes explicit the structural properties (is grounded) and accounts for…’. New classicals want to be explicit, precise, and exact. Being in the mathematical mode, they expect logical consistency, that is, consistency which can be checked through mathematical operations. I distrust discursive analyses. Why is that? They are vague and speculative. Later, after more careful analysis, we often discover that they contain inconsistencies. I think that we ought to write down models that are explicit and so can be shown to be consistent. Aren’t you afraid that if you adhere strictly to this strategy, you end up not being able to say anything. No. Thus new classicals have picked up and run amok with the mathematical values that Samuelson et al. instilled, leaving Keynesians to say: ‘Yes, but we didn’t mean it that way’. In addition new classicals carried through the axiomatic approach in the traditions of Hicks-Samuelson and Arrow-Debreu. While physicists are still looking for the most elementary particle and the unified force, economists appear to have found their fundamental axiom in the notion of the maximizing individual unit. New classicals resemble the minimalists in the arts in the sense that they strive to construct complex models with a minimal number of assumptions. They are conceptual artists in the sense that their work communicates abstract ideas which only those within the inner circles can grasp. 87

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Deconstruction Much of the work that critics place under the label ‘late modernism’ turns to preceding work – usually modernist work – to do a number on it. The intent is critical; the idea is to show the contradictions within that work by turning the work against itself. This is the art of deconstruction, an art that was theorized and perfected by Derrida. When pursued with persistence, deconstruction leaves the critic and the reader lost in the rubbles and illusions of modernist constructions. Deconstruction is an important element in new classical economics, too. New classical economists do not subvert the Keynesian strategy – they do not seek distinction by returning to, say, institutionalism or historicism. No, they use the Keynesian strategy to turn it against the Keynesian edifice. Taking the Keynesian search for microfoundations to an extreme, new classicals dismantle macroeconomics, the preeminent Keynesian construction. Lucas writes: The most interesting recent developments in macroeconomic theory seem to be describable as the reincorporation of aggregative problems such as inflation and the business cycle within the general framework of ‘microeconomic’ theory. If these developments succeed, the term ‘macroeconomic’ will simply disappear from use and the modifier ‘micro’ will become superfluous. We will simply speak, as did Smith, Ricardo, Marshall and Walras, of economic theory. (Lucas, 1987: 108) Furthermore, by giving a radical interpretation of the Keynesian strategy to connect macro with neoclassical economics and by grounding the theory of expectations in this way, new classicals took away the footing upon which Keynesian policy conclusions rested. But that is an old story by now.

Naturally, economists operate under conditions that are to a great extent very different from those that operate in the world of artists and literary critics. The differences are important; one does not step without consequences, social and personal, from one world into the other. Nevertheless, when we eavesdrop on ‘conversations’ in both worlds – as I have been doing – common strategies, values and intentions become too obvious to be ignored. They are even more remarkable because the worlds are so different.

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Turning inwards One characteristic of modernism, revealed in the disciplines of the arts as well as economics, is the conscious separation of the discipline from others. Painters historically separated themselves from sculptors; they also separated themselves from the ‘public’ and continue to consider other painters their main audience. Thus they have produced a highbrow culture, only to be fully understood by the initiated. A similar trend is discernible in economics. Along with professionalization, the language of economics has become more complex and difficult. When the mathematical strategy took over from institutional, empirical and discursive approaches (in the US this happened sometime in the 1950s), academic economics got out of reach for non-Ph.D.s or those Ph.D.s who work outside academia or the major research institutes. Thus, communication turned inward. In the art world this product of modernism was challenged in, for example, pop-art. The attempt was to de-academicize art and bridge the gap with the public. It is not unreasonable to assume that in this cultural climate, challenges to the abstract and ‘obscure’ nature of economics could also surface during the 1960s and have some impact on the profession. But just as in the art world, attempts to connect high with low brow enjoyed only brief popular support. Artists returned to their explorations of form and to intricate internal discussions (cf. minimalism and conceptual art); art became difficult again. (‘What does that heap of old cloth in the corner of a museum room mean?’). The most devastating criticism of a work was, and still is, the charge of it being entertaining or decorative. Entertainment was certainly not on the mind of new classical economists either. They may not have set out to make economics difficult, but that is what it became (unless one enjoys and is good at topology, differential calculus and all that). To become a ‘serious economist’ (a common way of putting it) one needs to undergo a rigorous mathematical training. New classical economics is for ‘serious economists’, and thus not for anyone who is ‘simply’ interested in economics. Politicians, for example, can expect little support from economic practitioners.

Reflexivity Deconstruction, which is, as we saw, an integral element of late modernist practice, tends to stimulate self-consciousness, a mode in which one reflects on one’s own constructions. Often mentioned in this context is Saussure’s linguistics. Saussure conceives of language as a system of signs in which the signs derive meaning not from connections to external or non-linguistic ‘objects’, but through differences with other

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signs. Language would thus be a self-referential system in which meanings are interdependent. (Saussure was inspired by the sign ‘money’, which signified not because it stood for something, but because of the way in which it operated within a system of signs, i.e. an economic system.) Modernist economists, too, adopted the notion of an interdependent system. Signs such as ‘market’, ‘price’, ‘demand’, ‘supply’, ‘money’, ‘equilibrium’ derive their meanings from the context within economic discourse in which they are used. Their precise meanings vary with variations in the system. (Economists usually call these self-referential signs theoretical terms.) When meanings are attributed through references to the ‘real’ world, the modernist economist is likely to be uncomfortable, if not dismissive. New classicals took the self-referential character of the modernist model one step further. In Keynesian (and monetarist) models, expectations referred to ‘objects’ outside the theoretical model. The rational expectations hypothesis incorporated expectations into the model; in a new classical model expectations are consistent with the predictions of the model itself and thus come to refer to the model. Game theory and the applications of the rationality assumption in the analysis of government behavior are the next steps in the development towards a self-referential system. Current Keynesians are made nervous by this development, even though their older generation made significant contributions in its early stages. Samuelson et al. showed the power of abstraction, of the movement away from direct representation. Samuelson’s multiplier-accelerator model is a good example of a self-referential system that generates a business cycle with minimal reference to extra-theoretical factors. His notion of ‘revealed preference’ is another; it served as a ploy to eliminate the need for references to subjective and thus extra-theoretical preferences. In his work one hears the echo of Mondrian’s statement that ‘life is becoming more and more abstract’. The Keynesian commitment to the creation of abstract, self-referential systems, however, was not complete. This became clear when Keynesians had to deal with Milton Friedman’s challenge regarding the probable (and desirable) unreality of initial theoretical assumptions. Samuelson and others came out to assert the importance of the realism of their assumptions. Friedman went too far for them. But he did not go too far for the new classical economists; they continue to use his epistemological argument to justify their highly abstract and self-referential models. Lucas refers to his models as analogies, which is the rhetorical term for ‘as if’ devices. The step towards a rhetorical interpretation seems small from here. Most new classical models still allow for an interpretation that links 90

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the theoretical terms with ‘real’ phenomena. Such an interpretation is made impossible in time-series analysis; in this strategy, which is closely connected with the new classical program, virtually all reference to economic ‘reality’ is erased.

The rejection of the modernist metanarrative I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse [which makes] an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of reasoning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth…I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarrative. (Lyotard, 1984: xxiii–iv) On the final truth of economics I am completely agnostic. Until such truth is unequivocally revealed I hold all coherent theorising as worth of attention and respect. (Hahn, 1984:19, 20) As stated above the introduction of modernism into economics was accompanied by a metanarrative that glorified: the character of the enlightened and reasonable person; the possibility that reasonable people would be able to comprehend economic processes through scientific methods; and thus the possibility that armed with scientific knowledge reasonable people could withstand ideological fanaticism and plain stupidities to stabilize the economy and make the world a better place to live. To recognize this metanarrative at work we only need to remind ourselves of the large econometric models, the notion of ‘fine tuning’, and the involvement of economists in the Keynesian Camelot days during the early 1960s. The belief in the scientific possibilities of economics, however, gradually eroded beginning with the realization that the validity of theories could not be proven empirically. Many economists probably still adhere to the Popperian falsification criterion but the avant-garde appears to have come to recognize the impossibility of the falsification of general theories. Econometric practice has become suspect, as robust results and empirical constants fail to materialize. Consequently, one may hear agnostic comments such as the one by Hahn cited above. New classicals might still believe in economics as a science (they say 91

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they do), but they seem to deny the possibility or, better still, the desirability of realistic representations of the economy. Thus they dismantle the major part of one side of the Keynesian metanarrative. The dismantling of the other side appears even more far-reaching. The dominant tone in new classical discourse is against government intervention and, hence, against the belief that we can stabilize the economy and thus improve the world. Typical is Lucas’s comment to the question of what he would do if he were on the Council of Economic Advisors: ‘I would resign’. New classicals take the line that our knowledge of the economy is imperfect and that we therefore cannot know how to tinker with the economy. The Keynesian presence in Washington seems to annoy them; they perceive pretensions which are unjustified given the state of economic knowledge. Consequently, new classicals do not volunteer advice to politicians. They stay away from the political realm and prefer communication among themselves.

The great disappearing acts The new classical project shows some similarities with Wittgenstein’s project in philosophy. While Wittgenstein applied the tools of logic and ‘precise’ statements, he realized that little, if anything, constructive could be said with certainty. He stripped the positivistic project from its positivities and left an emptiness that frightens some and excites others. New classicals, too, appear to work towards such an emptiness where nothing positive or constructive can stand. Pursuing consistency and exactness, they show us more and more what we cannot say. Carrying their arguments to their logical extreme, we could end up with the deconstruction of economics as a discipline. We have noticed already several disappearing acts. Macroeconomics as an autonomous subject would disappear if economists would only consistently ‘ground’ general relations in microeconomics. Furthermore, in line with the modernist intent, new classicals have erased the human subject from their discourse. Although they may be aware of the subjective and the psychological factors in their own lives, as Lucas is, they consider them out of bounds in their discussion of ‘individual’ behavior. The individual in their analysis is nothing more than an isolated unit that operates according to a rational strategy; possible associations with human beings are of no relevance. The disappearance of the human subject demands more attention. Here it is.

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The loss of character in economics And all at once, in the midst of these reflections, Ulrich had to confess to himself, smiling, that for all this he was, after all, a ‘character’, even without having one. (Musil, [1930] 1979: 175) ‘To understand’ means to grasp the total intention …the unique way of existing, that finds expression in the properties of the public, the glass, or the piece of wax, in all the deeds of a revolution, in all the thoughts of a philosopher …Everything has a meaning; we find, beneath all its relationships, the same structure of being. (Merleau-Ponty, 1969: xiii–iv) The main character in the new classical story is Max U (although it could be argued that the story is really about ‘us’, the scientific community). Max U is a silent character who is certainly not preoccupied with his ends. These are given to him, and he is supposed to know. Insofar as he talks, it is to consider the constraints under which he operates and to assess the benefits of the best alternatives. Subsequently, he is deleted with a few key strokes to re-emerge in the form of a constrained maximization problem. ‘The cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things, and life is becoming more and more abstract’, declared the Dutch painter Piet Mondriaan in 1919. Starting in the 1930s, economists followed suit and, just like Mondriaan in his paintings, conceived the abstract as a system of stylized forms. Max U became their main character.1 No matter how effective the character of Max U has proven to be – it certainly has stimulated plenty of writing – he remains an odd character. For Max is a character that has none. Like Musil’s Ulrich, Max is a man without the qualities that would make a subject human; Max U has no history, is devoid of moral sentiments, does not know tradition, and is oblivious to the uncertainties and insecurities that plague anyone who has to make choices. Max U is caught up in lifeless problem-solving exercises. He is not a particular individual being, conceived to represent a deeper structure. In his Hamiltonian form, Max U reminds one of a scientistic representation of physical phenomena: energy fields, if we believe Philip Mirowski.2 The furious response by neoclassical economists to Mirowski’s thesis, however, suggests that the metaphor of energy fields is rejected by those who are interested in weaving plots with Max U’s character. Has Max become a mere form, the absent subject in a formal structure that has meanings because of its own formal properties? If the answer is yes, and Max U makes one think ‘as if’ the formal problems posed by the 93

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constrained maximization set-up are all that really matter, then the human subject in economics is dead. A formal Max U is lifeless. Just like a cartographic map cannot tell us human mortals how to find a path through life, this Max U cannot tell us how to live. He also cannot tell me why I am writing this paper. Max U is characteristic of the late modernist phase in economics, although the advanced stage of deconstruction in new classical economics and other contemporary research programs may announce the arrival of postmodernist moments in the discourse. I venture that if Max U is taken to his perfect expression, Max U will deal the death blow to economics as a living subject in the world at large.

Thinking human action The character of Max U shows a life reduced to a string of choices. As if moments of choice are what life is about. Could we conceive of life in any other way? Is it possible within economics to figure a character that is endowed with moral qualities, has a history, is connected with traditions, and deliberates, just like the characters we live with in the world outside neoclassical economics? Within the constraints of neoclassical discourse alternative characters prove to be difficult to imagine. In spite of the badgering of the figure of Max U, the numerous expositions of its unrealistic and silly nature, it remains a very obstinate character. And justly so. Take it away and much of the work done by economists over the last sixty years will add up to a big heap of insignificant mumblings, on a level of the work of the cameralists. For Max U is the metaphor around which the neoclassical narrative revolves. The resilience of Max U owes a great deal to the conviction of the community of its creators. Apparently, academic economists find meaning in the numerous exercises that the analysis of Max U produces. Max U, I would argue, is the subject that allows them to sustain the metanarrative that Lyotard (1984) identified as characteristic of the Enlightenment project. It is the metanarrative of the scientist who, through the applications of stylized reconstructions of reality, knows how to intervene in and improve on that reality. Max U gives its manipulators a sense of control. Methodologically, Max U enables the application of analytical skills. It prods the analytical mind to set up problems, work out an algorithm, and find the solution. Max U makes for what Schumacher called ‘convergent thinking’ (Schumacher, 1977) But is there another character that makes for a mode of thinking that more closely mimics the thinking of those involved in markets and writing papers? I do think so. Oddly enough, my assertion is bold only 94

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in the world populated by Max U. In virtually any other world this assertion is a commonplace. In reconstructing the alternative character – for that is what is called for under the current circ*mstances – we need to begin, so I propose, with thinking of human action. The question is: what makes us act? The proposal, which I have worked out elsewhere (Klamer, 1991), is to imagine action as a way of coping with a problem. Something is amiss, something is problematic, and we act to solve or remedy the problem. The action can be a gesture, a movement, a fleeting thought, a verbal expression or whatever people do. Through the action we ignore the problem, subsume it into what is in place in the form of concepts, interpretative frameworks, traditions, and models; or we work with the problem, allowing it to transform the existing arrangements and thus give cause for further actions. In this framework Max U is the agent that by its definition subsumes each problem by solving it with a predetermined algorithm. Analysis defines this action. Incidentally, no real choice is involved, the neoclassical characterization notwithstanding. At best, Max U may choose not to do what his character tells him to, namely the act upon the solution of the constrained-maximization problem. The action is mechanic; the subject that acts solely in this manner is lifeless. Similar to Max U is the subject submerged in structuralist thinking. Philosophers and novelists respond by exclaiming that the subject is dead. Left without real choices, without meaningful subjectivity, Max U may be declared a dead subject as well. It is only if we allow uncertainty, including the probable that cannot be translated in stochastic arithmetics, that human action will come back to life. This is the action through which individuals call attention to the problems they are facing, the problems of experiencing, knowing, seeing, and believing. This is the action that produces narratives, metaphors, ‘artistic’ images; this is the action that can cause the ‘shock of the new’ as it is said in the art world. This also produces ‘the moral character’. If Max U motivates its manipulator to be preoccupied with the constraints for action and to assume Max’s objectives – to be given in the form of the utility function– the moral character makes these objectives the problem. Thinking about moral actions starts from the recognition that individuals do not know the consequences of their actions. Values enter as a way of coping with this uncertainty. We value honesty and say we do so for its own sake because, the observer will note, we cannot foresee what follows when we lie. If the value were to be clear cut and clearly identifiable, the character of Max U might be saved by simply subsuming it to its utility function. Yet, following Aristotle, the value as such is problematic; as stated it is vague and requires further interpretation in every situation where it is applied. (‘One does not tell the truth to 95

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one’s enemy, so do we tell the truth to one’s teacher?’) Characteristic of the moral character is the engagement in interpretative acts (this point is elaborated upon in both Nussbaum, 1986 and MacIntyre, 1981). This is the character featured by Aristotle in Politics and Nichomachean Ethics. Behavior in his books is moral behavior; the acting subject is supposed to ask what is called for given his character and to act in accordance with the virtues associated with that character. The liberal man will not be mean, nor will he be prodigal, but by means of giving he will want to be somewhere in between – since giving determines his virtue as a liberal man. Somehow he has to interpret what that golden mean – or perhaps third dimension – is. No book, no algorithm, will tell him that. In contemporary terms, it is only through knowledge of the discursive context, including its history and traditions, that he or she will be able to do so. This character is still alive in Adam Smith, although in an enlightened form. Adam Smith, too, thinks of human action with that third dimension. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith instructs his 15 and 16-year-old students that it is in their nature to feel ‘sympathy’ towards their fellow being, and that ‘to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety’ (Smith, 1969). Like Aristotle, Smith stresses our need for praise; like Aristotle his characters have no resolute solutions to their problems; and he even seems to think, like Aristotle, that individuals enact roles in their lives. That is how the following paragraph reads, a paragraph, incidentally, that was added after completion of The Wealth of Nations: We desire to be respectable and to be respected. We dread both to be contemptible and to be contemned. But upon coming into the world, we soon find that wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt. We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent. To deserve, to acquire, and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind, are the great objects of ambition and emulation. Two different roads are presented to us, equally leading to the attainment of this so much desired object; the one, by the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue; the other, by the acquisition of wealth and greatness. Two different characters are presented to our emulation; the one, of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity; the other of humble modesty 96

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and equitable justice. Two different models, two different pictures, are held out to us, according to which we may fashion our own character and behaviour; the one more gaudy and glittering in its colouring; the other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline; the one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the other, attracting the attention of scarce any body but the most studious and careful observer. ([1853] 1976: pt I, section III, ch. III) Yet, in this eloquent presentation of two characters, Smith suggests to his audience a choice. It should be clear which choice is deserving of his praise, but, he continues to tell them later, even if they pursue selfish ends, the invisible hand will turn their action to the good of society. In other words, although people’s actions may be lacking in virtue – woe the follies of men – God’s design is such that those actions turn out to serve good ends anyway, unintentionally. This does not free his audience to do as they wish and pursue their vain desires as they wish. Smith’s hero is the prudent man: The prudent man is always sincere, and feels horror at the very thought of exposing himself to the disgrace which attends upon the detection of falsehood. But although always sincere, he is not always frank and open… The prudent man, though not always distinguished by the most exquisite sensibility, is always capable of friendship. But this friendship is not that ardent and passionate, but too often transitory affection, which appears so delicious to the generosity of youth and inexperience. ([1853] 1976: pt VI, section I) He continues that the prudent man is guided by ‘the sober esteem of modesty, discretion, and good conduct’. It is the self-interested man, but not the selfish man for which Smith is so often held accountable. The prudent man pursues his interest because he knows he cannot know the consequences of his actions. But the prudent man also is endowed with the moral sentiments that will make him act, when appropriate, with benevolence towards his fellow beings. In this characterization, Adam Smith does not derive virtuous behavior, as did Aristotle, from the role one has in the theatre of life. Smith shows himself to be part of the Scottish Enlightenment project in which human reason and passions overtake the will of the gods. The Deity oversees the world as he deems necessary, but the individual fills it. Yet, in Smith’s discussion of moral character, Max U is hard to detect. With the seeming implosion of late modernist economics, are we moving into a stage of economic discourse in which the moral subject will rise again? 97

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Conclusion Late modernism in economics has ushered in the disappearances both of the Keynesian metanarrative of public welfare and the long-standing concern in economic discourse – at least since Smith – about the character of the economic subject. In its ultimate expression, with the erasure of the Keynesian metanarrative, new classical economics makes the economic enterprise seem absurd for anyone who still wants to believe in the public activist’s way of perceiving, defining, and influencing the world. Radical interpretation of the rationality assumption by the new classicals, for example, eliminates the possibility of any contribution to the improvement of economic behavior. If individual units act optimally, there is no reason for any input of economic knowledge – there is no way of improving actions that are already optimal. In a recent vintage of new classical models, the same reasoning is applied to the behavior of policymakers. Accordingly, if economic policy-makers act optimally, further economic knowledge becomes irrelevant. Voilà, the end of any social responsibility of economic science! All that is left to economists is the intellectual enjoyment of ‘neat’ and aesthetic systems. Late modernism in economics means the most extreme formalism, which implies in turn the most extreme passivity in the public sphere on the part of economists. The moral character of the economist is reduced to that of the voyeur. The disappearance – or loss – of moral character in late modernist economics has at least one further implication. This can be seen in the recent fascination of new classicals with computer language as a metalinguistics to guide economic analysis. Even though new classical discourse seeks to establish a self-referential system in which meanings are generated ‘internally’, this ideal of complete self-referentiality is ultimately unattainable. (It has become cliché to mention Gödel’s theorem in support of a statement such as this.) Thus, new classicals signify through connections – mostly intentional – to other late modernist discourses and practices, such as artificial intelligence and the ‘information revolution’. In particular, new classical economic discourse signifies in relation to a continuing fascination with machines – not the productivist machines that stood as the central metaphor for many of the Keynesian models, but instead the new information-processing machines, specifically computers. New classical models are largely about information processes and the ‘noises’ that regularly occur within these processes. On the one hand, this fascination has rendered the new classical economist into a new kind of technocrat, one who is intrigued by the intricacies of fully articulated systems, just like a computer analyst who is intrigued by the ‘possibilities’ of a computer program. The desire of the new classicals to speak in a purely technical language which requires only precision and allows primarily for mathematical operations to take place. In this way, new classicals increasingly take on the attributes of 98

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their favorite character, the problem-solving, soulless Max U. On the other hand, again, new classicals are increasingly likely as well to divorce information from the subject him/herself. This explains, for example, how and why Shannon has become important for new classicals. New classicals are inclined to follow Shannon’s lead in perceiving information as entirely self-referential, without any need to figure out how such things as values and morality might in fact permeate ‘information’ in and through the human subject. So, new classicals remain active in emptying the subject of economics of any and every form or moral character. Max U becomes morally thinner and thinner over (late modernist) time. Perhaps we are between ages. Perhaps again the late modernist project will simply implode due to its own irrelevance or absurdity. Perhaps finally late modernism in economics will embrace one moment in the postmodern age, that of neo-traditionalism. One thing is clear, however, late modernism – for all its technical skill and virtuosity – has impoverished economics by its erasure of the Keynesian metanarrative, and even more by the loss of moral character it has championed. We can only hope for a next stage, whatever it may be called.

Notes 1 2

The credit for the name ‘Max U’ goes to Deirdre McCloskey. The analogy between painting and economics is explored further in my unpublished 1987 paper, ‘The Advent of Modernism’. Mirowski eloquently expounds upon this thesis in his 1990 book, More Heat than Light.

References Amariglio, Jack (1988) ‘The Body, Economic Discourse, and Power: An Economist’s Introduction to Foucault’, History of Political Economy, 20(4): 583–613. —— (1990) ‘Economics as a Postmodern Discourse’ in Warren J. Samuels (ed.) Economics as Discourse, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Amariglio, Jack and Ruccio, David (1995) ‘Keynes, Postmodernism, Uncertainty’, in Sheila Dow and John Hillard (eds) Keynes, Knowledge and Uncertainty, Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Ashmore, William (1989) The Reflexive Thesis: Writing Sociology of Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Connolly, William E. (1983) The Terms of Political Discourse, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Connor, Steven (1989) Postmodernist Culture, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Foster, Hal (ed.) (1983) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press. Franscina, Francis and Harrison, Charles (eds) (1982) Modern Art and Modernism, New York: Harper and Row. Gablik, Suzi (1984) Has Modernism Failed? New York: Thames and Hudson.

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Hahn, Frank (1984) Equilibrium and Macroconomics, Cambridge: MIT Press. Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Jencks, Charles (1973) Modern Movements in Architecture, New York: Anchor Books. —— (1986) What is Post-Modernism? New York: St Martin Press. Kern, Stephen (1983) The Culture of Time and Space, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klamer, Arjo (1984) Conversations with Economists, Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld. —— (1987) ‘The Advent of Modernism in Economics’, unpublished manuscript. —— (1991) ‘Towards the Native Point of View, or How to Change the Conversation’ in Don Lavoie (ed.) Economics and Hermeneutics, London: Routledge. —— (1993) ‘Modernism in Economics: An Interpretation Beyond Physics’ in Neil de Marchi (ed.) Non-Natural Social Science: Reflecting on the Enterprise of More Heat than Light, Durham: Duke University Press. —— (1995) ‘The Conception of Modernism in Economics: Samuelson versus Keynes’ in Sheila Dow and John Hillard (eds) Keynes, Knowledge and Uncertainty, Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Klamer, Arjo, and Leonard, Thomas (1993) ‘So What’s an Economic Metaphor?’ in Philip Mirowski (ed.) Natural Images in Economics, New York: Cambridge University Press. Lasch, Christopher (1995) The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, New York: Norton. Lucas, Robert E. Jr. (1987) Studies in Business-Cycle Theory, Cambridge: MIT Press. Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCloskey, D. N. (1985) The Rhetoric of Economics, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. —— (1990) If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacIntyre, Alisdair (1981) After Virtue, Notre Dame: University Of Notre Dame Press. Merleau-Ponty (1969) Phenomenology de la Perception, Paris: Mirowski, Philip (1989) More Heat than Light, New York: Cambridge University Press. —— (1991) ‘Postmodernism and the Social Theory of Value’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (Summer): 511–24. Musil, Robert (1930) trans. as The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1, London: Pan Books, 1979. Nussbaum, Martha (1986) The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phelps, Edmund (1985) Political Economy, New York: Norton. Rabinbach, Anson (1990) The Human Motor, New York: Basic Books. Ruccio, David (1991) ‘Postmodernism and Economics’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (Summer): 511–24. Samuels, Warren J. (ed.) (1990) Economics as Discourse, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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—— (1991) ‘“Truth” and “Discourse” in the Social Construction of Economic Reality: An Essay on the Relation of Knowledge to Socioeconomic Policy’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (Summer): 511–24. Samuelson, Paul (1939) ‘Interactions Between the Multiplier Analysis and the Principle of Acceleration’, The Review of Economic Statistics, XXI: 75–8 Schorske, Carl E. (1981) Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, New York: Vintage Press. Schumacher, E. F. (1977) A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Gate. Skidelski, Robert (1983) John Maynard Keynes, vol. 1, New York: Viking Penguin. Smith, Adam (1853) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976. Szostak, Rick (1992) ‘The History of Art and the Art in Economics’, History of Economics Review (Summer): 70–107. Toulmin, Stephen (1990) Cosmopolis :The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: The Free Press. Wallis, Brian (ed.) (1984) Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art. Zola, Emile (1867) ‘Edouard Manet’, reprinted in Franscina and Harrison (eds) Modern Art and Modernism, New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

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4 THE GENEALOGY OF POSTMODERNISM An economist’s guide Deirdre McCloskey1

I suppose that what I am asking, without being entirely sure that it is possible, is for a leap over modernist battlefields to the postmodern rediscovery that the primal symbolic act is saying yes to processes like the wrenching one in which you are engaging. (Booth, 1974: 204)

As directly as it can be put, ‘postmodernism’ names a tendency since 1970 or so to doubt the tenets of ‘modernism’. In economics it would be against the high modernism, for example, of Paul Samuelson’s program. Though postmodernism more generally has been appropriated by writers innocent of economics or maths or statistics, there is nothing inevitable in this. I am saying that in adopting a pomo attitude an economist need not fear contamination from literary critics, psychoanalysts, and the politically correct. Postmodernism can be given an economic and classical liberal – I did not say ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’ – reading.

1910 Modernism The definition of ‘postmodernism’ depends on what one means by ‘modernism’. ‘On or about December 1910’, declared Virginia Woolf in 1924, ‘human character changed’ (Woolf, 1924: 320). As the word ‘modernism’ is usually employed, then, it refers to scientific and artistic movements beginning in the decades around the First World War, among them cubism, futurism, philosophical neopositivism, stream-of-consciousness fiction, functionalism, surrealism, behaviorism. Modernism was for half a century the faith of élite culture in Europe and its offshoots, replaced only in the 1960s, and then not completely. It filled the gap left in the élite culture by the decline of religion. 102

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Two kinds of 1910 modernism need to be distinguished at the outset, one artistic in origin and the other scientific. They need to be distinguished because in the modernist theory they come from opposite cultural worlds. One kind, usually called ‘literary modernism’ and instanced by Woolf, Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky, attacked Science with a big-S. It attacked, that is, the elevation of Science to a religion. It was anti-rational, or more exactly it appealed to the deeper rationality of the myth or the unconscious. Literary modernism entailed ‘dislocation of conventional syntax, radical breaches of decorum, disturbance of chronology and spatial order, ambiguity, polysemy, obscurity, mythopoeic allusion, primitivism’ (Lodge, 1981: 71). The other modernism might be called ‘architectural’. Instanced by Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Bertrand Russell, and Paul A. Samuelson, it worshipped Science with a big-S. It was pro-rational, appealing to the surface rationality of proof, logic, axiom, explicitness. Look at the downtown of a modern city, the glass towers circa 1970, and you see modernism built, called in this version the ‘international style’ (flourished 1945–75; cf. Jencks, 1973; Brolin, 1976; Kolb, 1990). It simplified conventional syntax, stressed Scientific decorum, elevated chronology and spatial order to mechanical rules, and fled from ambiguity, polysemy, obscurity, mythopoeic allusion, and primitivism. Economics has been influenced by the architectural kind of modernism. Economists call it by various names, not all of them accurate: positive economics, scientific economics, rigor, serious work. In a word it is ‘Samuelsonian’. What Paul Samuelson conceived in the late 1930s and published in 1948 – such as ‘the problem of stability of equilibrium cannot be discussed except with reference to dynamical considerations’ (Samuelson, 1947: 262) – was carried out by, for example, Robert Lucas in the 1960s. A standard paper in economics looks now like a building in downtown Dallas. It defines itself as the opposite of The Waste Land or Sacre du Printemps. The two modernisms, however, come from the same intellectual culture. One of the pair sometimes drops out of discussions of 1910 modernism, but it is a commonplace to link them. The literary critic Wayne Booth, for example, uses the word to describe both Bertrand Russell and James Joyce (Booth, 1974: 43 and throughout; Booth 1988: 246–51). The literary and architectural modernism share an optimism about form, a distaste for the ungeneralizable, an obsession with provability, a fascination with novelty, a celebration of the future, an affection for timeless axioms, a glorification of the individual, an aversion to ethical reasoning, a high value on separating fact from value, a belief in the theory that facts are independent of theory, and above all a strong feeling that reason and feeling are opposed realms. Arjo Klamer has an illuminating way of talking about the two kinds of 103

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modernism (Klamer, 1991). He draws side-by-side a square and a circle, representing the two ways of talking according to the modern theory. Either you are square, rigid, and logical or you are circular, loose, and illogical. (Feminists will note the gender valence.) Modernists adopt a sensibility that dissociates the two. Science or art, numbers or words, fact or value, work or play. Klamer’s point, and Booth’s also, is that the two are necessary for each other, defining each by its opposite. In more ways than one they are like stereotypical men and women. The two kinds of modernism were formed out of a Marriage of Modernism, which in its popular version left a mechanical notion of Science with one half of the culture and a romantic notion of Art with the other half. (The feminine associations of Art in 1910 modernism troubled artists like Ernest Hemingway or Jackson Pollock, who compensated by drinking too much; the feminine associations of artistic story telling troubled social scientists, who compensated by measuring too much [cf. Laslett, 1990: 429].) An example of the dichotomizing of modernism is the micro-culture of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Einstein institute. On the one hand the Institute provides space (suitably modernist) for serious work, either mathematical physics or traditional history (wedged between the two is the School of Social Science, in whose postmodern appointments the physicists and historians routinely interfere). On the other hand, after 5:00 there are concerts, treated as sacred rites, to which the ladies are invited. Robert Oppenheimer, later Director of the Institute, builds a bomb and then quotes Sanskrit religious texts at the site. The mathematician proves theorems and then plays the violin sublimely, or at least competently. Literary and architectural modernism of 1910 are two sides of the same dichotomizing impulse. In economic terms they are dual and primal. When I told Robert Fogel some years ago that since about 1980 I had been reading in the humanities he asked me amiably whether I had ‘become a mystic’. Fogel, whose brother was a professor of English and who is a cultivated man, was using the mental categories of 1955, at the high tide of 1910 modernism. In 1955 you were either a scientist or a touchie-feelie. You could be rational, scientific, empirical; or alternatively you could be into Zen and emotion. Einstein or Ezra Pound. Man of science or mystic. That was it. The mental categories of 1955 are symbolized in a fact of geography. The world capital of rationality since about 1955 has been the Rand Corporation, which is located in the world capital of irrationality since about 1955, Santa Monica. The Rand people have got along fine with the City, called in the old days ‘The People’s Republic of Santa Monica’. The getting along fine fits the categories of 1955 (they were nothing like all bad in their effects). In 1955 you would choose sides, scientism or humanism, physics or tao, but then you were not supposed to bother the 104

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other people, or make them read your stuff. The ideal was an amiable lack of contact or understanding, which Fogel was reflecting. Humanities? You mean ‘mysticism’. Hey, man, whatever turns you on. Jack Amariglio notes that both kinds of 1910 modernism were determined to shake off history, to transcend time and space (Amariglio, 1990: 18). In science or in art, or both, modernism is the elevation of being modern to the acme of creative work. It is the triumph of the avant garde and the defeat of tradition. The virtue of hope takes all. Wayne Booth notes the modernist ‘belief in the future as somehow more real than the past or present’ (1974: 22n). ‘The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past’, writes Umberto Eco, ‘then…destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract.… In architecture and the visual arts, it will be the curtain wall, the building as stele, pure parallelelpiped, minimal art; in literature, the destruction of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white page; in music, the passage from atonality to noise to absolute silence’ (Eco, 1985: 66; cf. Klamer, 1991). Modernism of both kinds believes that form and content can be divorced, leaving formality to do the work, letting ‘the business be done’, as Francis Bacon put it at one of the numerous dawns of modernism, ‘as if by machinery’ (Bacon [1620] 1965: 327). Ornament, history, culture are in modernism mere error terms. Its characteristic projects are Hilbertian mathematics, imagist poetry, twelve-tone music, and abstract general equilibrium. An instance is the stick-figure international language, elaborated at successive Olympic Games (quick: what’s the stick figure for the women’s luge?). It is most commonly seen on the door to the gents’. The figures could just as well be realistic representations, even photographs – of a woman zooming down a hill on a sled or of a man striding into a men’s room; or for that matter the words in English ‘Women’s Luge’ and ‘Men’s Room’, which are widely understood. Someone had to invent the notion that it would be better, more up-to-date, more modern, to simplify, axiomatize, standardize, deculturalize, universalize along modernist lines. Consider: it is the future we are serving. As one might have expected, the inventor of the stick figures was a leading positivist thinker, Otto Neurath (1882–1945), in the metropolis of modernism, Vienna during the 1920s. In answering the question, Why not words on the men’s room door? He saw verbal language…as a disfiguring medium for knowledge, because be believed its structure and vocabulary fail to be a consistent, logical model of objects and relations in the physical world.… Sociology on a materialist basis…knows only of such behavior of men that one can observe and ‘photograph’ scientifically. …The silhouette [on the men’s room] emulates the 105

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shadow…a rationalized theatre of shadows, in which signs are necessary geometric formulae cast by material things – Plato’s cave renovated into an empiricist laboratory. Flatness suggests a factual honesty, as opposed to the illusionism of perspective drawing. (Lupton, 1989: 145, 150, 152) The stick figures are like the mathematics in economics or the formulas in social engineering. In modernism of either type, words fail.

Postmodernism The postmodernism in the late twentieth century, then, is the doubt that 1910 modernism in such matters had it entirely right. In deciding whether it has been a good idea or not to have such a doubt, one needs to exercise humility. The radicals and the conservatives in the Culture Wars have not always done so. ‘We are within the culture of postmodernism’, observes the critic Fredric Jameson, ‘to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it as complacent and corrupt’ (1984: 381). In light of this wisdom it is surprising that the critics of postmodernism, of pragmatism, of rhetoric, and the like are so confident they have grasped the writings they disdain. Consider for instance the writings of Richard Rorty – the same applies to Paul Feyerabend, Jacques Derrida, the Modern Language Association, and other bogeymen in the conservative night. The conservatives (and some of the Marxist materialist radicals and a lot of newspaper people who do not like to give credit for common sense to a professor anyway) think Rorty is trivially easy to contradict. But does it seem plausible that Rorty cannot handle the points that simpletons writing for the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times are able to devise after a few minutes of thinking lite? The hypothesis does not seem plausible on its face: Rorty, eminent philosopher, well-known as an analyst, full professor at Princeton, university professor at Virginia and now at Stanford, first of the MacArthur Fellows, scourge of his profession, president of the Eastern Division of the philosophers, etc., etc., is trivially easily shown to be guilty of circularity, confusion, contradiction, naïveté, and falsehood. The critic Charles Altieri noted recently that the modernists used ’ironic strategies to undo the expectations elicited by representational art’ in aid of realizing experience directly, ‘rebuilding a formal site where the spirit learns to dwell reflexively within its own deepest powers’ (Altieri, 1993: 793). Notice that this is not postmodernism, but is on the contrary as old as Van Gogh or Henry James. Some have never recovered from the insult of Picasso’s painting the eyes of a woman on the same side of her face. 106

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Their indignation against what they take to be postmodernism (‘It doesn’t say or show anything’) is better directed at modernism itself. On the other hand, the radicals need to admit that architectural modernism in, say, economics was a worthwhile and even noble teaching, from which much has been learned. Literary modernists such as early Eliot or late Yeats or early and late Wallace Stevens will endure. Getting beyond modernism does not mean tossing out the modernists, ignoring their rat experiments or burning their paint-splattered canvases or forgetting how to solve a dynamic programming problem. It does not mean being against modernity, taking the fruits and running. It is merely against the elevation of modernity to a religion, modernism. As the architectural historian Brent Brolin writes, ‘Although these truths were represented as logical deductions from the spirit of the times [viz., modernity], they were actually articles of faith, rhetorical statements whose moral overtones made them as unquestionable as Divine Law’ (Brolin, 1976: 45). Postmodernism means questioning whether a stick figure on the men’s room is the only possible way to solve a practical problem. Note that Altieri’s words – non-representational art providing ‘a formal site…to dwell reflexively’ – would serve as a description of music or of pure mathematics. Modernist art and science aspired to the condition of music and pure mathematics. The two were correlated in modernist culture. The joke of the Oppenheimer generation was, ‘At the Institute, what’s the definition of a string quartet? Three physicists and a mathematician’. The postmodernist has doubts that poetry or economics is best reduced entirely to music or pure mathematics. Postmodernism aspires to the condition of…what? Nothing in general, because it does not believe in timeless generalities. At most it aspires to a civilized conversation among equals, what the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas calls ‘the ideal speech situation’ and what the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called ‘the conversation of mankind’. The chief problem with modernism, say the postmodernists, is its loony aspiration to speechlessness. Shut up: I have a proof. Shut up: this is avant-garde painting. Shut up. The aspiration to this or that transcendent and ineffable Truth made for much of modernism’s guff. Modernism was a reaction to Romance, but it clutched to the Romantic striving for the infinite, das Streben nach dem Unendlichen, which has done so much mischief in the twentieth century. When otherwise hardnosed astrophysicists become dewy eyed about the High Frontier one is hearing an echo of Romance (and of a cash register). No eighteenth-century astrophysicist would have thought of making such an airy appeal. He justified his projects as providing better time-keeping for ocean navigation. The point was the same in the art 107

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business at the time. Samuel Johnson had no more patience than did Andy Warhol with the assumption that art and commerce conflicted. In 1776 (about a month, it happens, after the appearance of The Wealth of Nations) Johnson remarked that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. The Artist separated from bourgeois culture is a recent and romantic invention, c. 1780 in Germany, universalized in England c. 1800. Martha Woodmansee has recently shown its close connections to the economics of copyright and publishing (Woodmansee, 1994), and I have written on the longer history of the divorce of art from money (McCloskey, 1994b). Postmodernism might therefore be called irony or self-awareness or merely sophistication about the way we talk – anything but the earnest romanticism and modernism, romance tied to chemistry, that led to the Somme and Auschwitz and the Gulag. Umberto Eco has given a characteristically postmodern definition. Postmodernism, he writes, is the attitude of: a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’.… He will have said…that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. (Eco, 1985: 65)

The earlier modernisms: the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and Plato Any age of lost innocence will do. There were modernisms before 1910. In consequence there were also earlier postmodernisms. I want to make a lot of this simple point. To speak of the postmodern without some argument is to commit a characteristically modernist mistake of believing that we moderns are of course unique. Postmodernism by contrast doubts that on or about December 1910, or any other date, human character changed and became once-and-for-all modern. In the form of this mistaken conviction that Now We Have It, modernisms keep being reinvented. The theory that theory can do it, that we are about to have a unified science, has been invented and reinvented dozens of times, first by Plato, then by Aquinas, then by Bacon, then by Rousseau and Condorcet, then by Comte, then by Pearson, then by Russell, then by Neurath, then by Samuelson, then by some other bossy genius. John Ruskin, the nineteenth-century art critic (I do not on the whole 108

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recommend his views on economics, though recently I am beginning to see that they have something to say even to economists), noted that the search for a crystalline ideal has been an incubus on classical and Renaissance – and now one may say modernist – architecture. He attacked the tyranny of the lonely genius, seeking by contemplation in a warm room a system to impose upon us all. Of the Renaissance he wrote: its main mistake…was the unwholesome demand for perfection at any cost.… Men like Verrocchio and Ghiberti [consider Marx or Samuelson] were not to be had every day.… Their strength was great enough to enable them to join science with invention, method with emotion, finish with fire.… Europe saw in them only the method and the finish. This was new to the minds of men, and they pursued it to the neglect of everything else. ‘This’, they cried, ‘we must have in our work henceforward’: and they were obeyed. The lower workman secured method and finish, and lost, in exchange for them, his soul. (Ruskin [1853] 1960: 228–9) Ruskin’s argument also fits modernism (in economics and elsewhere) which seeks an all-embracing, testable Theory apart from the practical skills of the statesman or of the economic scientist. An ‘interpretive economics’, as Arjo Klamer, Metin Cosgel, and Don Lavoie began to call it at the end of the 1980s, would turn the other way, as economists do in practical work (see Lavoie, 1990a, 1990b; Cosgel and Klamer, 1990). It is in Ruskin’s term ‘Gothic economics’, an end to searching for a grail of a unified field theory, an awakening from Descartes’s Dream. In such terms, interpretive economics is another postmodernism. The Gothic spirit is seen in the best works of applied economics, from the economic historian Robert Fogel, say, or the agricultural economist Theodore Schultz, from the financial economist Robert Shiller or the statistical economist Edward Leamer. It is not seen in the routine science of the field nowadays, servile to the undoubted genius of Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Lawrence Klein. The point of postmodernism is that the program of the genius to subordinate everyone to his conveniently brief plan never quite works out. Expressing such a doubt is not the same thing as saying that it was stupid to try, merely that it is wrong to use a claim of transcendence as a stick to batter the opposition. The same Otto Neurath became Editorin-Chief of a transcendent project on the Foundations of the Unity of Science: Toward an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. The project died, though nineteen of its volumes were published by the University of Chicago Press from 1938 to 1971 (among them Gerhard 109

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Tintner’s Methodology of Mathematical Economics and Econometrics, 1968). The most important book in the series, ironically, was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which showed why such attempts to end the scientific conversation once and for all are impossible. Reinstating history and politics in science studies, Kuhn showed why we do not now Have the Transcendent It. So there have been as many modernisms as there have been spectacularly successful geniuses claiming transcendence. And therefore one can find corresponding postmodernisms in Greek rhetoric or Elizabethan urbanity or early eighteenth-century equipoise or American philosophical pragmatism c. 1900. But there’s something to be said for taking the present-day reaction to modernism as special, as the end of some history. (I see the danger in this move that I will end up committing the modernist fallacy of thinking that Now We Have It; I will take care). It is a matter, to be pomo about it, of choosing the story that makes most sense to us. For example, an alternative date to December 1910 for the onset of modernism is the French Enlightenment about 1751 to 1775. Such a story gives modernism longer standing, dating from the French philosophes rather than from the Italian futurists. Amariglio has argued that modernist economics, like modernist everything else, contained a contradiction, what Paul Wendt calls in a comment on Amariglio ‘the immanence thesis’, that ‘postmodernism is immanent in [1910] modernist economics’ (Wendt, 1990: 47). But in essentials the contradiction is of two centuries standing, though heightened in the latest, 1910 modernism. The contradiction is known as ‘the aporia [indecision] of the Enlightenment project’, a phrase that every young person anxious to do well on the co*cktail-party circuit should commit to memory. The philosopher Stanley Rosen describes it as ’a conflict between mathematics and Newtonian science on the one hand and the desire for individual and political freedom on the other.… The understanding is in essence the formulation of and obedience to rules. Since there are no rules for the following of rules…the understanding must be a spontaneous “project”…of freedom…Kant’s unstable attempt to ground reason in spontaneity’ (Rosen, 1987: 3, 4, 8). In a sentence: being unreasonably rational will eventually enslave us to rules (compare Ruskin on the Renaissance, or Lucas on the Federal Reserve). As Amariglio puts it, ‘the desire to know Man, to control him for purposes of efficiency and utility through this increased knowledge, produces the notorious exercises of power in the modern age’ (Amariglio, 1990: 21). Amariglio’s story is a good one, fitting economics well. In line with the immanence thesis, modern economics has turned back on itself in a postmodern way, especially (as Amariglio points out) in the treatment of uncertainty. Uncertainty evokes prediction. Economics is a particularly 110

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thoroughgoing example of Enlightenment rationality, turning back on itself for example in the conflict between an Austrian and the earlier neoclassical views of prediction. Thus Robert Lucas and the other developers of rational expectations pointed out in an Austrian style that a predictable economy is not one in which government policy can work. If economics is a good imitation of (some high-status branches of) physics, a capital-S Science in the definition offered by philosophers around 1955, or as understood by eighteenth-century admirers of Newton, then it should predict. But then we are thrown into paradox, aporia, indecision: if economics is Scientific, we can predict; but a predictable future is a freedomless nightmare; and is anyway impossible when the predictor can invest in her predictions (McCloskey, 1990). Friedrich Hayek said once that ‘I believe I can now…explain why…[the] masterly critique by Mises of socialism has not really been effective. Because Mises remained in the end himself a rationalist-utilitarian, and with a rationalist-utilitarianism, the rejection of socialism is irreconcilable.… If we remain strictly rationalists, utilitarians, that implies we can arrange everything according to our pleasure.… In one place he says we can’t do it, in another place he argues, being rational people, we must try to do it’ (Hayek 1994). It is what is wrong with some of modern economics, this utilitarian rationalism – in Stigler’s political economy as against Friedman’s, or in Richard Posner’s law and economics as against Ronald Coase’s. Utilitarianism is the French element in British thought, so contrary to British empiricism. Jeremy Bentham was the problem, tempting economics away from its Scottish common sense about the world. Hayek was in this respect two centuries behind the times, a product of the quite different Scottish rather than the French Enlightenment, a spiritual resident of Edinburgh rather than Paris, an exponent of bourgeois virtue rather than aristocratic expertise. By the end of the twentieth century he became old-fashioned enough to be postmodern. You read it here (and in Burczak, 1994 and Don Lavoie in many places): Hayek has more in common with Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty than with Bentham and Comte and Russell. A still earlier dating pushes the onset of modernism back to Descartes, and makes our present postmodernism the culmination of a three-andhalf-century genesis. The men (I choose the word carefully) of the seventeenth century were in this history the patriarchs of modernism (cf. Bordo, 1987). A case can certainly be made that modernist ideas have ruled since Descartes. What is emphasized by choosing a seventeenthcentury birthdate for modernism is the fall of rhetoric, which had been for 2,000 years the education of the West. The inventors of rationalism in the seventeenth century – Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza – had a paradoxically low opinion of the power of reasoning in human affairs. Ancient and medieval writers had more faith in the power of speech to 111

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move people towards the light. The men of the seventeenth century had seen words induce people to kill over the doctrine of transubstantiation, and they sought therefore a way to disarm the words. Their refuge was ‘crushing’ proof and ‘compelling’ demonstration, that which cannot possibly be doubted, ‘putting Nature to the rack’, as Bacon delicately put it. They assigned everything else, as for example Hobbes did in his book of 1681 on rhetoric, to mere ornament, suited only to arousing a feminine passion. We fellow moderns have inherited their low opinion of reasoning. Actually, all the modernisms are suspicious of reasonable persuasion. In 1910 modernism, for example, the studies in the 1930s of propaganda and public opinion and the hardening in 1950s of an American intellectual contempt for commercial free speech called for conviction rather than persuasion. ‘Conviction’ comes from a Latin legalism, itself from vincere, victus, ‘to defeat, defeated’. ‘Persuade’ by contrast comes from per [thoroughly] suadere, the latter meaning ‘to seek to persuade that’, and is from the same Indo-European root as English ‘sweet’. Persuasion, like free exchange, is sweet and mutually beneficial. The anti-bourgeois character of modernism in all its forms testifies to a lordly tendency among intellectuals to spurn persuasion. Intellectuals make up modernisms, and want them to be exclusive and regulated. Modernism is proudly, even obnoxiously, élitist. The Amariglio/Wendt ‘immanence thesis’ says that postmodernism grew out of 1910 modernism. I have a second immanence thesis. The modernisms were attacks on bourgeois culture. ‘The noblest acts of mind [in modernist theory] would be those resisting the triumphant bourgeois order’ (Altieri, 1993: 792). But – here is the immanence – out of each attack from the earliest modernism to the present grew a defense, successively stronger, and now strongest. The antibourgeois character of modernism has taken many forms: scientific elitism, standard Marxism, the anti-capitalist line that élite literature in Europe and its offshoots began to follow around 1848. In 1910 modernism the exclusivity was directed more at the lower middle class than at captains of industry. The anti-modernist English poet Philip Larkin in the 1960s complained about the ’irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction to human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso’. (Or the fourth P, Paul [Samuelson].) Larkin explained the [Charlie ‘Bird’] Parker reference in one of his columns on jazz: [Said another jazz critic] ‘After Parker, you had to be something of a musician to follow the best jazz of the day’. Of course! After Picasso! After Pound! There could hardly have been a conciser summary of what I don’t believe in art.… The artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical 112

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experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage. Piqued at being neglected, he has painted portraits with both eyes on the same side of the nose,…or a novel in gibberish.… And parallel to this activity…there has grown up a kind of critical journalism designed to put it over.… Basically the message is: don’t trust your eyes, or ears, or understanding.… You’ve got to work at this.… I mean, this is pretty complex stuff.… [After Parker, jazz] was split into two, intelligence without beat and beat without intelligence. Larkin, 1985: 22–5 Modernism does that, dissociating the sensibilities. Francis Bacon warned against persuasion: For it is a false assertion [of Protagoras, the Greek sophist] that the sense of man is the measure of all things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well as of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it. (Bacon, [1620] 1965: XVI) Modernism’s main mode of operation in both its literary and architectural kind was and is to exploit the charm of what’s difficult. I mean, this is pretty complex stuff. When T. S. Eliot versified in The Waste Land about the lower middle-class suburbanites coming to work – ‘Unreal City,/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many’ – he required two footnote references, one to Baudelaire and the other to the Inferno, III, 55–7. The avant-garde was in this way fleeing its bourgeois origins and keeping clear of the masses. It was making itself, at any rate in its imaginings, into a new aristocracy. John Carey writes in a book chronicling the élitism of literary modernism, ‘The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them from reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand’ (Carey, 1993: 16). The obscurity of modernism kept literature (and music and painting) in the hands of cultured chaps. It kept it out of the hands of suburbanites, clerks, Eastern European immigrants, and the other nasty creatures growing in such numbers. ‘All those damn little clerks’, says a character in an H. G. Wells novel of 1901 quoted by Carey. They have ‘no proud dreams and no proud 113

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lusts’. The ‘swarms of black, brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people…have to go’. George Bernard Shaw wrote the same way in 1910: ‘Extermination must be put on a scientific basis’. And D. H. Lawrence, who in Aaron’s Rod (1922, quoted again in Carey), advocated ‘a proper and healthy and energetic slavery’, in 1908 had written presciently, ‘If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly.… Then I’d go into the back streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed’. Carey piles up the evidence for the proposition that fascism and modernism were more than merely chronologically linked. George Moore, a leading figure in the Irish renaissance, wrote in 1888, ‘Injustice we worship.… What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh’s lash or Egypt’s sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look upon.… I would give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire’. Lordly indeed. Clive Bell, an art critic and friend to Woolf and to Maynard Keynes, had this to say in 1928 about political theory: ‘To discredit a civilization it is not enough to show that it is based on slavery and injustice; you must show that liberty and justice would produce something better’. It was not just modernist literary men who talked this way, of course. They were seconded by modernist scientists – and not, as is sometimes claimed by old-fashioned philosophers of science, by mere ’pseudoscientists’, either. In 1900 the great Karl Pearson, who invented modern statistics, wrote in his neopositivist bible The Grammar of Science: ‘What we need is a check to the fecundity of inferior stocks.… It is a false view of human solidarity, which regrets that a capable and stalwart race of white men should advocate replacing a dark-skinned tribe’ (1900: 369). In 1925 he advocated in a scientific paper stopping Jewish immigration to Britain. Postmodernism by contrast is plebeian and ‘middle class’, at least in the sense that 91 per cent of Americans call themselves ‘middle class’. Carey’s antimodernist hero, the novelist Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), wrote in 1901 that ‘everyone is an artist, more or less’, in their lives and perceptions. This would be an impossible sentiment in Virginia Woolf. Unlike Woolf’s modernism, postmodernism is proudly, even obnoxiously, democratic, deriving more from Atlantic City than from Princeton. When a French critic described the Disney World outside Paris as ‘une catastrophe culturale’, the postmodernists merely giggled. The anti-élitism is what drives cultural conservatives into a rage about the latest postmodernism, a critical literature discussing reruns of the Brady Bunch. It is horrible to say that movies or (shudder!) TV or (gak!) style in clothing and automobiles can be studied seriously and then compared seriously, or for that matter unseriously, with the sacred cultural products of high modernism. Charles Newman’s book 114

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attempting to bring a (non-economic) theory of inflation to a criticism of postmodernism has this difficulty, that it has no cultural interests beyond the modernist high canon. Postmodernists by contrast delight in such absurdities as the movie I.Q., with Walter Matthau as a postmodern Einstein fascinated by 1950s-style convertible cars and rock music. The movie was shot on the very grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study. The Director (of the Institute, not the movie, which was amusing and pointed) must be losing his grip. One can of course find exceptions to these propositions. Not all modernists are élitists (that is, aspiring aristocrats) or anti-bourgeois, either in their theories of themselves or in their actual effects. But the institutions of high modernism were, I think, hostile to capitalism even as they used it, angry at the middle class even as they relied on it, ignorant of the economy even as they lived in it.

The first modernist All this leads back to the earliest possible dating of the onset of ‘modernism’, at old aristocratic Plato himself four centuries before Christ, and therefore of an ancient ‘postmodernism’ in opposition to Plato. Such a choice of origin makes modernism nearly two and half millennia old, and makes it identical to the philosophical as against (always ‘against’) the parallel rhetorical tradition. The modernisms of 1910 or of the Enlightenment or of the seventeenth century were recycled Plato, attempts to get underneath merely human persuasion to the bedrock of certitude. Therefore postmodernism in this biggest of stories is the denial of certitude. Plato the system builder detested the sophists – the lawyers and law professors of his time – and detested the democracy their talk supported. Through his influence, ‘rhetoric’ (he may have invented the very word) and ‘sophistry’ were identified with clever fallacy. Plato separates belief (pistis; or doxa, mere things heard, common opinion) from knowledge (episteme; or eidenai, the thing seen, certitude): Socrates: Then would you have us assume two forms of persuasion–one providing belief without knowledge [without the thing seen], and the other sure knowledge [episteme]? Gorgias: Certainly. Socrates: Now which kind of persuasion [peithô] is it that rhetoric creates in law courts or any public meeting on matters of right or wrong? Gorgias: Obviously, I presume, Socrates, that from which we get belief [pisteuein].

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Socrates: Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief [peithoûs…pisteutikês], not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong. Gorgias 454E-455A The attempt to lay down the law once and for all is aristocratic, and in modern times has taken the form of a lofty expertise. The historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin quoted once a revealing remark by Comte, who like Plato and the rest in the anti-rhetorical tradition was quite certain he had his hands on the transcendent (cf. Phaedrus, 247E): ‘If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology’, asked Comte, ‘why should we allow it in morals or politics?’ (Berlin, 1958: 151). Why indeed? The editor of Science could not express the dogmatism of science as religion more flatly. This is what is wrong with the notion that we can ascertain a Truth which all must obey for ever and ever. It is right to try to persuade each other and right to ask for an audience – this against the modernist suspicion of attempts to persuade an audience of, say, cold fusion. It is not right to contemplate, with Comte, ‘allowing’ free thought, as some sort of luxury. As Berlin pointed out, Comte’s question exposes the rot in political rationalism – that is, in Platonism: ‘first, that all men have one true purpose…; second, that the ends of all rational beings must of necessity fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern, which some men are able to discern more clearly than others; third, that all conflict…is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational’ (1958: 154). Where in economics have you heard such premises? Berlin explains that the ‘rule of experts’ comes from the argument, prominent in Plato, and then in worshippers of experts such as Bentham and Comte, that my ‘real’ self must be rational and ‘would’ want me to obey the guardians or confess in a show trial. The expert therefore, in my own real interest, issues the order for my execution. In the Spanish Inquisition, that exemplar of paternal expertise, if a Jew under torture renounced his religion he was baptized and immediately executed, as ready now to enter Paradise. Free persuasion, unlike the coercions of modernism, shares many qualities with free exchange. Speech is a deal between the speaker and his audience. Persuasion and exchange share the unique feature as devices of altering other people’s behavior that the people so altered are glad the alteration was made. It’s not surprising to find aristocratic Plato equally outraged at the ‘flattery’ of hoi polloi by democratic orators and at the taking of fees by the professors of rhetoric. In the Republic he showed, consistently, that he was opposed to free exchange in the market place as well. The postmodernism of the sophists was, against Plato’s authoritarianism, the chief support of Athenian (and Greek Sicilian) democracy and 116

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commerce (Jaeger, [1933] 1965; Guthrie, 1971; Kerferd, 1981). A new free politics and capitalist economics, as in Eastern Europe now, required a new art of persuasion in law courts and legislative assemblies. The Greeks, being reflective sorts (they had adapted the Phoenician alphabet a couple of centuries before, and were mad to use it), made the give and take of persuasion into a theory of language. It was a theory of language as an autonomous influence on free people, rhetoric, ‘the first humanism which the world had seen’, which ’made Greece conscious of her own culture’ (Jaeger, [1933] 1965: 302–3). Anti-rhetorical thinking, in ancient times the dogma that truth is transcendent and in modern times the dogma that truth is ideological, claims that the persuasion [peithos] of free men is merely another coercion. The modernist theory of persuasion is that there’s no such thing as persuasion, only interests. The modernist philosopher P. H. Partridge stipulates that ‘uncoerced’ entails ‘unmanipulated’, where ‘manipulation’ includes ‘the persuasive machinery of totalitarian governments’. One imagines a right of a free man to unmanipulated opinions, a world free from beer commercials and sound bites, free from dishonest appeals to read my lips and free from governmental programs for bringing children up as environmental radicals. Such a world is impossible to legislate. Trying to achieve it by dropping the distinction between physical and verbal coercion is a mistake. If Goebbels merely talks persuasively to the German people, even lies to them, or even runs a splendid film about Nazi successes in the Berlin Olympics in their presence, he is not in a useful sense engaged in ‘coercion’. Michael Taylor has argued that ‘coercion’ must be confined to physical action or to ‘the successful making of credible, substantial threats’ backed by physical coercion (1979: 11–21, 147). Otherwise blackjacks and prisons are ‘merely’ rhetoric. We had better stick with a distinction between rhetoric and coercion. Keeping the distinction does not deny that rhetoric works within structures of power – in academic economics itself, for example. But a gun is different from a denial of promotion. The claim to do for others through the state what they cannot do themselves – since after all coercion is merely another persuasion if people would only look on it rightly – justifies modernist social engineering. It was Bentham’s obsession. No advocate of laissez faire was he, who saw levers in the state for law reform and the construction of rational prisons. In Berlin’s terms, social engineering of the Benthamite sort seeks ’positive’ freedom, such as the freedom to eat well, as against the ‘negative’ freedom of the Smithian sort, such as the freedom from oppression by Benthamite social engineers. In 1929 Frank Knight noted the rhetorical contradiction in the idea that we can be helped by social engineers: ’natural science in the “prediction-and-control” sense of the laboratory disciplines is relevant to action only for a dictator standing in a one-sided relation of control to a society, which is the negation of liber117

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alism – and of all that liberalism has called morality’ (1929: 38). It is again the aporia of the Enlightenment project. The postmodern liberalist in the late twentieth century has plenty of reason to doubt that we have the knowledge for prediction and control (as Comte put it: ‘savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pouvoir’). To doubt in this postmodern way that the Federal Reserve can fine tune the economy (thus Milton Friedman the postmodernist) is not ‘mere relativism’ or ‘irrationalism’ or an advocacy of ‘anything goes’. A recent student of the sophists noted that ‘The time is surely long past when the rejection of any transcendent reality can be taken as evidence that the search for truth has been abandoned’ (Kerferd, 1981: 175). A claim that one has found the way to determine a transcendent Truth diverts effort from the search for terrestrial truths. It is the intellectual’s substitute for theism. Only in God’s eyes is the Truth settled now and forever.

Deconstruction The mention of ‘relativism’ will bring swimming into the mind of most American readers of the New York Times the D word, ‘Deconstruction’. It may be surprising that I haven’t mentioned it yet, considering how the op-ed pages view literary criticism. In truth ’deconstruction’ is now elderly in literary criticism, long since pushed from the center of the stage by feminism and the new historicism. And there is a minority view inside literary criticism, with which I agree, that in any case deconstruction was a reinvention of ancient rhetoric, acquired by the French inventors of deconstruction during Greek class at their lyceés. The rhetorician Richard Lanham complains that ’the “theory” world is forever taking bits of classical rhetoric and tarting them up in new French frocks’ (Lanham, 1993: 263). He notes too that the American Kenneth Burke invented deconstruction forty years before Jacques Derrida. Only willful ignorance keeps the Parisians and their epigones from recognizing it. Only willful ignorance of another sort, however, keeps the editorialists snarling at deconstruction. People have a way of seeing a novelty through the strangest version with which they imagine they are familiar. Thus outsiders to economics think they can reject a modest version of supply side economics by attacking what they imagine to be the opinions of Arthur Laffer. Richard Posner in his egregious book Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (1988) used this rhetorical trick in dismissing literary criticism as applied to law. When explaining to his conservative readers among lawyers Everything You Need to Know About Literary Studies But Were Terrified to Ask you can imagine the terrifying subfield he started with: Chapter Five, Section 1, ‘Deconstruction and Other Schools of Literary Criticism’. One hopes that his decisions as a federal judge are not so transparently rigged. 118

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The reason people play such mind games is that they are conservative, intellectually speaking, and would rather avoid investing in a new set of thinking tools if they can get away with it. Thinking gives one the headache. It has to be admitted, though, in extenuation of the conservatives’ nonthinking, that the deconstructionists do not make it easy. Many academics these days adhere to the modernist conviction that obscurity is the same thing as profundity, and therefore write with trowels. You’ve got to work at this. I mean, this is pretty complex stuff. Still, deconstruction in substance is not all that hard. Jane Rossetti has given some examples (Rossetti, 1990 and 1992). Here I can illustrate one of its main points, using a couple of sentence she quotes but does not deconstruct from the great and dangerous American economist Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948): ‘it must never be forgotten that the development of the social sciences (including economics) is still a social process. Recognition of that view…leads one to study these sciences…[as] the product not merely of sober thinking but also subconscious wishing’. The sentences contain at least these half-spoken hierarchies ready for liberating deconstruction (reading back to front, the terms in square brackets being those implied but not mentioned): sober-subconscious; thought-wishing; product-[mere ephemera]; sciences-[mere humanities]; study-[beach reading]; one-[you personally]; leads-[compels]; view[grounded conviction]; sciences-[mere] processes; development-[mere chaotic change]; must-[can]. The first term of each is the privileged one – except that in the pairs leads-[compels] and view-[grounded conviction] they are in fact polite self-deprecation, with ironic force: Mitchell is on the contrary claiming the commanding heights of compelling and grounded conviction, in modernist style, not the soft valleys of mere gently leading ‘views’. That’s quite a haul for two sentences, and suggests that deconstruction (or for that matter the Greek rhetoric from which it derives) might be onto something of use to the economic reader. It’s worth doing with Mitchell – and always easier to do with figures from olden times than from the present (for an English professor’s interesting attempt to deconstruct Thatcherian economic rhetoric, see Selden, 1991). To put it in the vernacular, Mitchell is playing all kinds of mind games on his readers and we had better watch out. Mitchell, of course, is not special in this. He espoused, for example, an erotic fascism that was nothing special among modernists in the 1920s but needs deconstruction: ‘In economics as in other sciences we desire knowledge mainly as an instrument of control. Control means the alluring possibility of shaping the evolution of economic life to fit the developing purposes of the race’ (quoted in Adelstein, 1991: 13). Savoir pour pouvoir. You will notice that nothing in deconstruction says that the world does not exist or that you cannot say anything about anything or that we 119

DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY

do not look both ways when crossing the street. What it does say is the message of postmodernists from the Greek sophists to the present. As Wayne Booth puts it, ‘Man is essentially…a self-making-and-remaking, symbol manipulating creature, an exchanger of information, a communicator, a persuader and manipulator, an inquirer. The terms will differ depending on one’s philosophical vocabulary, but what will not vary is the central notion that man’s value-embedded symbolic processes are as real as anything we know’ (Booth, 1974: 136).

The proposals of postmodernism: toggling in the market place of ideas To put it another way, postmodernism is and always has been thoroughly rhetorical. Richard Lanham use the notion of a ‘toggle’, that is, in computerese the keystroke that allows one to move from, say, looking at a stripped-down version of a text on a screen to looking at a fully formatted version with all ornaments in place (Lanham, 1993). The age of oratory before Gutenberg and the age of keyboarding after the silicon chip, Lanham argues, both elevated toggling to the master art. They reacted to a modernism, which wants the toggle always off. Modernism is flatfooted. Postmodernism is ironic. Lanham quotes the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead on the multiple roles played by graceful living in the world: ‘It is the social process itself that is responsible for the appearance of the self; it is not there as a self apart from this type of experience. A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal’ (Mead, 1934, quoted in Lanham, 1976: 153). In being a self and a citizen, argues Lanham, ‘the same technique is required – holding opposite worlds in the mind at once’ (1976: 154), an attitude that ’oscillates from realism to idealism and back again’ (Lanham, 1974: 39). You must know that the President’s inaugural address is merely a speech, and note its figures at the same time that you grasp its values, for what they are worth. To be unable to toggle between the two knowings is to be either a cynic or a fool. Lanham contrasts th

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What is the main idea of post modernism? ›

As a philosophy, postmodernism rejects concepts of rationality, objectivity, and universal truth. Instead, it emphasizes the diversity of human experience and multiplicity of perspectives.

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What is the problem with postmodernism? ›

Incompatibility with individual freedom

Michael Rectenwald argues that postmodernism "is incompatible with liberty, first because it sees the individual as a mere product, as constructed by language, social factors, and so on. As such, postmodernism effectively denies self-determination and individual agency.

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What is postmodernism in simple terms? ›

Postmodernism is a way of thinking about culture, philosophy, art and many other things. The term has been used in many different ways at different times, but there are some things in common. Postmodernism says that there is no real truth. It says that knowledge is always made or invented and not discovered.

What is the postmodernism theory? ›

Many postmodernists hold one or more of the following views: (1) there is no objective reality; (2) there is no scientific or historical truth (objective truth); (3) science and technology (and even reason and logic) are not vehicles of human progress but suspect instruments of established power; (4) reason and logic ...

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What are the 5 themes of postmodernism? ›

There are five key characteristics to Postmodernist Poetry: the embrace of randomness (Postmodern works reject the idea of absolute meaning), playfulness (black humor, word play, irony and other techniques of playfulness often are employed to dizzy readers and muddle the story), fragmentation (collage-style forms, ...

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What are the three main concepts of postmodernism? ›

The primary tenets of the postmodern movement include: (1) an elevation of text and language as the fundamental phenomena of existence, (2) the application of literary analysis to all phenomena, (3) a questioning of reality and representation, (4) a critique of metanarratives, (5) an argument against method and ...

Do postmodernists believe in God? ›

Postmodern religion considers that there are no universal religious truths or laws. Rather, reality is shaped by social, historical, and cultural contexts according to the individual, place, and/or time.

What is postmodernism for dummies? ›

Postmodernism is best understood as a questioning of the ideas and values associated with a form of modernism that believes in progress and innovation. Modernism insists on a clear divide between art and popular culture. But like modernism, postmodernism does not designate any one style of art or culture.

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What is the basic belief of postmodernism? ›

In the Post Modern view there are no absolutes of any kind and there are no universal truths nor universal criteria for beauty and nor are there universal principles of the GOOD. Thus, there is a return of relativism in the sphere of morality. With that return there is also the threat of chaos which relativism spawns.

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Do we live in a postmodern society? ›

Postmodern theorists believe that the era we are living in can be classed as postmodern due to its fundamental differences from the age of modernity. This monumental change lead sociologists to argue that society must also be studied differently now.

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Who is the father of postmodernism? ›

Jean-François Lyotard is credited with being the first to use the term "postmodern" in a philosophical context, in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

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What are the criticism of postmodernism? ›

The most common critique is that it is a grand narrative to claim that, universally, it is true that there are no grand narratives, only particular perspectives that get taken to be universal. The issue is whether that claim is itself universal and therefore postmodernism is self contradictory.

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What does postmodernism focus on? ›

Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

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What is one of the ideas behind postmodernism? ›

Question: One of the ideas behind Postmodernism is pluralism, which proposes that artshould focus on the future and leave the past behind. historically follows an obvious progression and advocates a dominant direction. can take many directions at the same time, all of them equally valid.

What is the main point of modernism? ›

Modernism refers to a global movement in society and culture that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life.

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What is the defining feature of post modernism? ›

Postmodernism has been defined as an “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Metanarratives, otherwise known as grand narratives or master narratives, aim to offer. a totalizing schema for interpretation of events and experiences – historical or. contemporary.

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What is the main idea of post modernism? ›

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