"Two Months Before the Mast of Post-Modernism" Recycled: Hoisted from the Archives

John Holbo is turning The Valve's discussion of Daphne Patai and Will Corral's Theory's Empire into a book: Framing Theory's Empire (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press).

God, my contribution is good!

I do need, however, to make an abject and public apology to a humanist for using him as a straw man. If I were writing it over, I would prefer to change things like:

What work can you do with statements like...

to things like:

Let me try to help Adam and company by putting some personal experiential meat, sinew, and skin on their dry theoretical bones...

---

Over at The Valve, they are talking about the book Theory's Empire--and thus about the damage done by "Critical Theory" and its spawn on the American humanities over the past generation. But most of it is all too... theoretical.¹ What work can you do with statements like:

• "Derrida is... the greatest and most exciting thinker of the 20th century.... Derrida is in many respects... very conservative... one must start from that conservatism in order to measure the ways in which he is radical... can seem highly radical to thinkers who are attempting to graft Derrida into a tradition... in which many of Derrida’s key reference points have historically been marginal.... How much does that affect the way you read a sentence where someone asks to have a button undone? Probably not much..."
• "This polarizing, personalizing rhetoric indicates that social constructionism has an institutional basis, not a philosophical, moral, or political one. It tramples on philosophical distinctions and practices an immoral mode of debate. Though it declares a political goal for criticism, it is not a political stance.... Herein lies the secret of constructionism’s success... it is the school of thought most congenial to current professional workplace conditions of scholars in the humanities."
• "I liked theory, even when I felt I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on, because if nothing else you could sense the energy behind it.."
• "The older philosophical critics, Jameson suggests, lacked Hegelian seriousness: in place of an aggressive commitment to the consequences of their premises, they were 'content' to 'simply' muse about literature 'in an occasional way'.... His sinecured dilettanti mass-produced 'curiosities of an existential or phenomenological criticism, or a Hegelian or a gestalt or indeed a Freudian criticism.' Burke, Empson et al. avoided indenture in the Curiosity Trade, Jameson argues, by processing literature in accordance with a personal interpretive ethos, one resonant with a nonsystemized theory nonetheless compulsively applied in a rage for symmetry. Jameson’s notion of a virtuoso critic (of the good camp) can be summed up thus: a thinker of original temperament but suitable Hegelian seriousness whose passion for patterns generates interesting reading of literary works. His notion of a virtouso critic (of the bad): calicified mind, learned but unoriginal and philosophically fickle, whose passions for other people’s patterns generates predictable readings of literary works..."
• "I apologize for Heidegger’s highly convoluted and neologistic prose. (I imagine that some readers are already thinking, 'come back, Derrida, all is forgiven').... In Heidegger’s reading, we could say that the discovery of Neptune in 1846 could plausibly be described, from a strictly human vantage point, as the 'invention' of Neptune.... [B]efore we began to look for it, the planet 'Neptune' simply did not exist in any human consciousness.... And yet once humans had invented... Neptune, they understood [it]... as [a thing]... not susceptible to mere human invention..."
• "[It] takes the already deeply problematic arguments and style of the dominant superstars like Spivak, Prakash and Bhabha and operationalizes it as yeoman-level banality"

?

There is a certain bloodlessness here: the dry bones hop about and clatter, but there is no flesh on them: much too little is said about how High Critical Theory changed--for good and for ill--how "we" "read" "our" "texts".²

So let me get down and dirty: in the boiler room, at the contact point, before the mast. Let me recount the two months--November and December 1981--that I spent enthralled by the High Critical Theory of Michel Foucault.

By day I would rise late, eat a strange late breakfast of scrambled eggs mixed with cottage cheese (a kind of breakfast which I ate only from November 1981 through January 1982, never before, and never since), and then walk across the Charles River footbridge to the Kress Collection of the History of Economic Thought in Baker Library. I would read. I would hasten out into the lobby where I was allowed pens and take notes. I would go back in and read some more. I would hasten out into the lobby. After dinner I would sit in my room, either staring at the wall wondering what my thesis was going to be about or reading secondary works on the history of economic thought, hoping to spot a hole that I could fill with something sorta original.

It was Associate Professor of Social Studies Michael Donnelly's fault. He knew I was trying to write an undergradute thesis about the British Classical Economists and how they understood the economy of their time. He gave me a book by Keith Tribe, Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse. And Tribe had read and been hypnotized by Foucault--specifically The Order of Things and _The Archaeology of Knowledge. I began to read Keith Tribe. He said very strange things. He said that the Wealth of Nations that economists read was not the Wealth of Nations that Adam Smith wrote. The Wealth of Nations that economists read was made up of two books: Book I on markets and Book II on capital. The Wealth of Nations that Adam Smith wrote was made up of five books: Book I on the "system of natural liberty," Book II on accumulation and the profits of stock, Book III on the economic history of Europe and why the empirical history of its economic development had diverged from its natural history, Book IV on the mercantile and physiocratic systems of political economy, and Book V on the proper management of the affairs of the public household by the statesman.

The Wealth of Nations, Tribe said, could not be a book of economics because a book of economics had to be about the economy. And there was no such thing as the economy in 1776 for a book of economics to be about. What was there? There was the undifferentiated stuff of the mixed social-cultural-political-trading system that governed production and distribution: material life. There was the study of the management of public finances. This was conceived in a manner analogous to the domestic-economic management of household finances. Just as--to Robert Filmer and others--the King was the father of the people, so the King's household--which became the state--had to be properly and prudently managed.

In the words of James Steuart, who wrote his Principles of Political Oeconomy nine years before the Wealth of Nations, in 1767: "Oeconomy, in general, is the art of providing for all the wants of a family, with prudence and frugality. What oeconomy is in a family, political oeconomy is in a state." It is managing affairs to make the people prosperous and the tax collections ample by governing "in such a manner as naturally to create the reciprocal relations and dependencies between [inhabitants], so as to make their several interests lead them to supply one another with their reciprocal wants."

There wasn't, Tribe argued, an economy that an economist could write a book of economics about until the 1820s or so.

Strip Tribe's (and Foucault's) arguments of their rhetoric of apparent contradiction and you can understand that within the mystical shell there is a rational kernel. It is--or, at least, I read them as--an injunction to analyze a school of thought in more-or-less the following way:

1. Read not just one or two important books, but a whole bunch of books that talk to our past each other and use the same or similar vocabulary in order to identify the school you will look at.
2. Strip your mind of what they must be talking about, and look with fresh eyes on what they are talking about.
3. Examine what rhetorical, conceptual, and intellectual moves are common within the examples you have of this "discursive formation."
4. Think hard about what rhetorical, conceptual, and intellectual moves you would think you would find in these books--but don't.
5. Think hard about what rhetorical, conceptual, and intellectual moves you do not expect to find prominently in these books--but that you nevertheless do find.
6. Present to the world, in as clear and straightforward a way as you can, what this particular form of discourse was--what it thought the world was like, what it saw as important, what its particular blindnesses were, what its particular sharp points of insight were.
7. Do not, ever, grade a discursive formation of the past by how much it falls away from the ideas of the bien-pensant of today. The past is another country.

And I became convinced that Tribe and Foucault were right. It was, indeed, only with Ricardo that the operation of what we now say is the economy--the production, exchange, and distribution of goods and services all mediated through market exchange--was seen as something that was important enough, or separate enough, or coherent enough to be something that it made sense to write books about, and, indeed, something that it made sense to be an expert in. David Ricardo was a political economist. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher. To try--as somebody like Joseph Schumpeter was--to grade Adam Smith as if he were engaged in the same intellectual project as Schumpeter was somewhat absurd.

Tribe applied this methodology to Adam Smith, his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. What they were doing, before Ricardo, was Political Oeconomy--writing manuals of tactics and policy as advice to statesmen, although manuals restricted to what Adam Smith would have called (did call) a subclass of police: how to keep public order and create public prosperity. Hence for Adam Smith Book V of Wealth of Nations is the payoff: it tells British statesmen what they ought to do in order to make the nation prosperous, their tax coffers full, and thus the state well-funded. Book IV is a necessary prequel to Book V: it tells the statesmen in the audience why the advice that they are being given by others in other books of Political Oeconomy--by Mercantilists and Physiocrats. Book III is another necessary prequel: it teaches statesmen about the economic history of Europe and how political oeconomy of various kinds has been practiced in the past.

But Tribe's (and Foucault's) methodology collapses when we work back to Books II and I of the Wealth of Nations. For Adam Smith is not the prisoner of the discursive formation of Political Oeconomy. He is not the simple bearer of currents of thought and ideas that he recombines as other authors do in more-or-less standard and repeated ways. Adam Smith is a genius. He is the prophet and the master of a new discipline. He is the founder of economics.

Adam Smith is the founder of economics because he has a great and extraordinary insight: that the competitive market system is a remarkably powerful social calculating and organizing mechanism, and that the sophisticated division of labor to which a competitive market system backed up by secure and honest enforcement of property rights give rise is the key to the wealth of nations. Some others before had had this insight in part: Richard Cantillon writing of how once you have specified demands the market does by itself all the heavy lifting that a central planner would need to do; Bernard de Mandeville that dextrous management by a statesman can use the power of private greed to produce the benefit of public utility. But it is Smith who sees what the power of the "system of natural liberty" that is the market could be--and who follows the argument through to the conclusion that it forever upsets and overturns the previous intellectual moves made in and conclusions reached by the discursive formation of Political Oeconomy.

And once I had worked my way through to this conclusion, I could start to write my own thesis. I had broken the thralldom. Foucault's ideas of "discourse" and "archaeology" were not my masters, but my tools. And as I wrote it became very clear to me that between David Ricardo and even the later John Stuart Mill the discursive formation that was Classical Economics did not produce anybody like Adam Smith. There was nobody who made the intellectual leap--produced the epistemological break--that Smith had done that shattered Political Oeconomy and enabled the birth of Classical Economics. I could write my thesis about how the British Classical Economists never understood the Industrial Revolution that they were living through.

--J. Bradford DeLong, B.A. in Social Studies summa cum laude, June 1982.

Comments

[Ethan]

Cool post.
Reminds me that the word "economics" comes from two Greek words basically meaning "to manage a household".
Are we using the tremendous power of the system of natural liberty in a way which best manages our national household to make our several interests lead us to supply one another with our reciprocal wants?
Humm ... sometimes yes, sometimes no. Makes one think doesn't it?

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

When I started reading this my first thought was: Where is Michele Berube when you need him.

[Virginia Postrel]

Reading Smith's "History of Astronomy" only strengthens your argument about what he was up to.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Lemme see if I got this right. After a deep immersion in Tribe and Foucault, Brad was able to see in a flash of inspiration that Adam Smith was a genius.

What further triumphs might have been laid at the feet of Theory if that eye had turned to Darwin or Archimedes?

[MQ]

Excellent post.

I would add that of all the British Classical Economists, Marx came closest to understanding the industrial revolution -- although of course Marx was a very odd species of classical economist. Perhaps he was a Hegelian before he was an economist.

Also, a question: do economists, even now, truly understand the industrial revolution? If they do, I would argue that the heritage of classical economics (neoclassicism) is a barrier more than an aid to such understanding.

[nick]

ok, but why the little parenthetical cheap shot at Foucault's methodology about 2/3 of the way in? Foucault talked about certain figures as initiators of discursive practices (Freud and Marx to name two); there's no reason, on Foucault's account, to assume Smith is a "prisoner" of anything--unless you want to associate Foucault with a straw-man modish determinism......

[Roger Albin]

The implication seems to be that Foucault and Prof. Tribe were aiming primarily at a non-anachronistic understanding of how people, particularly important intellectuals, thought in the past. This would not be particularly novel. Important historians like JGA Pocock had been attempting exactly this, and quite fruitfully, well before Foucault became an intellectual celebrity in the English speaking world.

[Robert Waldmann]

Uhm Brad you wrote "the ... exchange ... of goods and services ... mediated through ... exchang"
I think you might have spent a bit too much time in Theory's Empire.

I would write "the *market* economy the economy--the production, and distribution of goods and services all mediated through market exchange" . The problem is that this would imply that the old Oeconomy (and the current one mediated largely through taxes and transfers) are economies.

Who of those you dealt with 1982 thought that "The Economy" is "The market" not Smith, not Kafka and certainly not Barsugli.

[Robert Waldmann]

Above I am nit picking and joking, but I think that there is something important to say. Smith clearly discussed markets. Smith clearly did not think that the economy consisted only of markets. To to identify the concepts of "economics" and "the study of market interactions for given market institutions and structures" is to set up a straw man. Consider the other example -- Neptune and, what I hope and trust, is a miss translation of Heidigger

"In Heidegger’s reading, we could say that the discovery of Neptune in 1846 could plausibly be described, from a strictly human vantage point, as the 'invention' of Neptune."

The qualifying "from a strictly human vantage point" makes the claim tautological. I think the debate is whether things exist aside from their presence in a human field of view. If so, discovery is different from invention. Once you decide that you are talking only about human thought, new to us and new are the same.

Another example, the first pages of Berkeley's Enquiry. Berkeley claims to prove that all that exists are minds and ideas. He says something along the lines "The reader may doubt me and think of something like a glass in a cupboard, but this simply proves my point, since the thought is in your mind". I am quoting/parodying from memory, but the circularity of Berkeley's logic is apparent in the original. His opperative assumption is that only what we imagine can exist and his conclusion is that only what we imagine can exist.

Did Heidigger and his followers have anything original to add to this ? The translation/paraphrase concerning Neptune strongly suggests that they didn't, as does the effort to claim that "economy" must mean "market" although all economists (even including Gary Becker himself) disagree.

[admiral tirpitz]

We no longer need to say nice things about Foucault to be considered polite company.

[wetzel]

When I was an undergraduate I fried my brain with Hegel and Foucault and pasted 200 little pictures of Foucault's portrait from my Reader on all four walls and the ceiling of my room. Sitting in the room I was in a panopticon with Foucault as the guard. I didn't get a thesis out of it but took a long vacation instead.

[stringingalong]

Echoing Nick, not only is there *no call to* slam Foucault for somehow trying to force Adam Smith into the straitjacket of contemporality with the mercantilists and physiocrats, but Foucault is quite clear that Smith is one of the figures (along with De Sade and whatnot) who demarcate the transition to a new episteme.* However, the way that Brad writes it would make it fairly clear to anybody who has actually read "The Order of Things" that he has a substantive disagreement with *Tribe,* not with Foucault.

To Robert Waldmann: I would not recommend trying to understand Heidegger through off-hand comments on blogs. But the comparison with Berkeley is not particularly apt. Or, at any rate, it is only apt insofar as Berkeley was one of the people (Heidegger thinks the most advanced was Kant) who saw the problems that arise from ways of understanding the world that go back to Plato's Ideas, but were unwilling to get to the bottom of where philosophy went wrong.

So did Heidegger actually claim "Humans invented Neptune"? Well, only if you understand what Heidegger meant by humans, invention, and Neptune. If you are actually interested in Heidegger, you would be better advised to start reading his works or an academic summary of his works, than try to muse about Neptune. Keep in mind that the bit about Neptune is Brad DeLong lampooning slightly confusing contributions from the other writers, and properly so.

[stringingalong]

*Foucault makes a great deal of noise about how on questions of use value, exchange value, and their relation to labor Smith is quite close to Cantillon and Turgot, but that noise is only to puncture certain Marxists fads in Smith-interpretation. The real rupture, Foucault thinks, is in how Smith forces political economy to move "in the direction of an anthropology that will call into question man's very essence" on the one hand, and on the ohter "a political economy whose object would not longer be the exchange of wealth, but its real production." That doesn't sound like it contradicts anything Brad is saying.

[Barkley Rosser]

While I have no problem at all in saying that there was an "economy" prior to Ricardo, and not just a "political oeconomy," it certainly can be argued that within the English-language tradition, Ricardo was the first to in a sense have a fully theoretical perspective on economics. Smith generated (or in many cases restated from others) genuine theoretical insights about economics and how the economy works, but it is within his more general moral philosophical perspective. Arguably the predecessors of Ricardo would be among the French, such figures as Quesnay and Turgot.

I am someone who fairly quickly gets bored/frustrated with most post-modernist philosohpical and literary analysis (my usual complaint: great criticism, but where's the beef of an alternative explanation?). However, I think that Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge is really excellent. The other work by a hard core PMer that is relevant to economics is Derrida's Spectres of Marx, although a bit more out there.

Speaking of Marx, he is the clear other figure who stands out as a genuine breakthrough figure in a truly overwhelming sense, even if he was wrong about a lot of things.

[monboddo]

I think Roger's right--haven't you just rediscovered Pocock, Skinner & the Cambridge School?

[Jon Fernquest]

"Theory's Personality Cult" is more accurate than "Theory's Empire."

Jim Jones cool-aid party with Derrida and Foucault as hosts.

Auteur-theorist gives one lecture per year from the pinnacles of all pinnacles, the College de France.

"Discourse is everything," he pontificates as shrieks of pain from torture are overheard in the backroom.

While the rest of the world is wallowing in democracy, the world of theory perpetuates a world of disciples following masters slavishly, striking poses in hopes of being noticed by the master, in a grand winner takes all fashion show of ideas.

No need to make sense. Defending Nazis like Heidegger and De Mann just adds an irrational aura and mystique to "fun fascism."

Debate about plans to end global poverty (or even the end of history!) while others hard at work search for actual solutions, sipping warm espresso, sucking in the smoke of filterless cigarettes, paid for by Daddy's allowance...

Watching the guru Derrida give a lecture to an adoring worshipful audience in college was enough to cure me of disillusions about this sort of rot.

[Robert Waldmann]

Point on actually reading Heidegger is valid. I will *not* read Heidegger, so I shouldn't comment on him (also thanks for not correcting my spelling). The quoted bit about Heidegger is clearly tautological. I made the analogy with Berkeley to note that Berkeley made a similar tautological argument.

I do think I have a point about a rehtorical trick. I believe that some have done the following

1. Find a blindingly obvious claim
"Beliefs are socially created"
"Everything that we imagine is just an idea in a mind"
"Humans discovered Neptune"
"Early 19th century Germany has a ruler"

2. Replace one word with a new word so that it becomes a shocking claim which many will consider absurd (perhaps because it is)

"Truth is socially created"
"Everything that we perceive is just an idea in a mind"
"Humans invented Neptune"
"Early 19th century Germany has a constitution"

3. Define or explain the new word so that the shocking statement becomes equivalent to the obvious claim. Pretend that you have refuted those who said the claim was absurd which demonstrates that it is arguably valid yet so original as to appear, at first, to be absurd.

I consider this to be an extraordinary waste of time. I am very confident that it is a common practice.

[Sissy Willis]

Then there's the extension of economic logic from human nature to Mother Nature, as revealed by blind paleontologist Geerat Vermeij in his book Nature: An Economic History, from the Princeton University Press:

From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources. This universal truth unites three bodies of thought -- economics, evolution and history -- that have developed largely in mutual isolation. Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems -- competition, cooperation, adaptation and feedback -- govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle.

http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2005/02/cracking_poppin.html