I disse Verdensbank-tider vedlegger jeg en interessant artikkel om
postmodernisme som ubrukelig grunnlag for kritikk av markedsliberalistisk
økonomisk teori. Den er tatt fra et nett-tidsskrift, POST-AUTISTIC ECONOMICS
REVIEW, som er en meget interessant bevegelse startet av økonomistudenter i
Paris i juni 2000. Se mer om det aller nederst, og www.paecon.net .
Trond Andresen
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Why Critics of Economics Can Ill-afford the “Postmodern Turn”
Yanis Varoufakis (University of Athens and University of Sydney)[1]
The dissident’s nightmare
It is a sad irony when the activities of dissidents help shore up the
establishment they set out to subvert. The point of this piece is to warn
the ‘economic’ dissident: Beware the Postmodern Turn! The argument will turn
on the thought that postmodern criticisms of economics serve the twin
purpose of (a) releasing pent-up frustration with the profession while, at
once, (b) reinforcing its ideological backbone.
Every era has a tendency surreptitiously to guide young dissidents toward a
specific ‘umbrella movement’; one that ends up shaping their milieu.
Existentialism, structuralism, neo-Marxism, etc. have given their place, in
our era of devalued political goods, to Postmodernity and Deconstruction.
Without wishing to discuss the ‘postmodern condition’ generally, I shall
concentrate entirely on its likely effects on the struggle to ‘civilise’
economics. In this regard, the problem with postmodern thinking is that it
stands no chance of success.
Postmodernity’s criticism of grandiose Theory may be terribly satisfying to
those who adopt its grandiose pronouncements. However, the satisfaction at
having lambasted all Theory is momentary and the ensuing subversion
short-lived. To paraphrase Marx, the subverters will be, eventually,
subverted and, tragically, the neoclassical establishment will come out
stronger and better equipped to obfuscate social reality than ever
before.[2] If I am right, the task of the PAE movement must be to clear the
way for radical criticism that avoids the postmodern trap as resolutely as
it opposes economic autism.
Dissidents or the economists’ handmaidens?
Modernity marginalised Religion, but retained religious transcendence by
worshipping Theory. Economics emerged as the highest form of this secular
creed and enchanted all of its practitioners; free-marketeer and
protectionist, liberal and Marxist, Keynesian and monetarist. It now seems
that some economists are breaking ranks; joining the ‘other’, the
postmodern, side which defines itself in anti-theoretical tones that exude
an atheist’s anti-religious fervour. The danger is that the legitimate anger
of students (which has given rise to the PAE movement) will draw them to an
apostasy without a future. For despite its considerable oeuvre, postmodern
criticisms of economics are doomed to shrivel and be absorbed by mainstream
economics; the predator turning into unsuspecting prey. I risk this
prediction for two reasons.
First, postmodernists allow economics to parade as equally scientific as the
natural sciences (albeit on the grounds that no discipline is truly
scientific). They are right of course to think that all theory resembles
religion, since it also seeks to give meaning to the practices and
expectations of whole communities. However some theories are capable of
transcending religion and approaching objectivity better than others.
Nature’s habit of working independently of our beliefs about it means that
the natural scientist can devise experiments which have the power
disinterestedly to discard falsity and thus forge knowledge and progress.
Society, on the other hand, is corrupted to the very marrow of its bones by
our collective beliefs about it, and can therefore provide no objective test
of social theory (the latter being part of the very web of beliefs that
society is made of). Thus social theory, unlike thermodynamics, is condemned
to remain untestable, and stuck in the realm of opinion. Economics valiantly
attempts to extricate itself from this fate with a touching commitment to
mathematics but, sadly, it only ends up as a religion with equations.
Postmodernity errs in thinking of this as the inevitable failure of all
Modernist enterprises. It lambastes economists’ churlish reliance on an
Outer Wall of Algebra and an Inner Wall of Statistics but overlooks their
success at never even coming close to the nature and the dynamics of
contemporary capitalism, thus shielding the latter from rational criticism.
But such is the fate of all idealisms which give language an existence
independent of the material conditions of social life and reproduction. If
only postmodernist critics understood theology and mathematics a little
better! Perhaps they would have recognised in economics the greatest proof
that Modernity is saturated with its negation.
Which brings me to the second part of the argument: Postmodernity not only
lets neoclassical economics off the hook but, more worryingly, reinforces it
copiously before dissolving into it. Consider what the postmodern rejection
of metanarratives means at the individual level: It means the loss of any
capacity to scrutinise one’s private urges rationally on the basis of some
collectively constructed notion (or metanarrative) of the Good. Stripped of
those capacities, the individual fragments into a community of selves, a
bundle of ordinal preferences, and ends up with no one self whose
preferences those are.
In this Empire of Ordinal Preference the only possible data that social
theory can go to work with are the differences in individual whims and
freely chosen identities. These data are then, courtesy of their ordinal
properties, impossible to compare across persons (for this would require a
metanarrative) or procure a view of capitalism as a system. Thus in a
fully-fledged postmodern schema, social relations are confined to interplay,
voluntarism, tolerance and exchange; society is the playground where the
latter unfold; and discussions of the General Will, exploitation and
developmental freedom make no sense. Does this all sound familiar?
If it does the reason is that neoclassical economics went down that alley
decades ago. The asymptotic limit of postmodern fragmentation is the
neoclassical general equilibrium economic model. Both Neoclassicism and
Postmodernity espouse a radical egalitarianism which is founded on the
rejection of any standard or value by which either individual action or the
institutions of late capitalism (e.g. the labour and capital markets) can be
subjected to rational criticism. In short, whereas the problem with
modernist mechanism was that its view of our world excluded value from the
outset, the problem with Postmodernity is that it ends up having no view of
the world and becomes easy-pickings for a similarly viewless/valueless
tradition, one which bears the additional weaponry of intricate mathematics
and endless econometric ‘evidence’.
For Oscar Wilde the supreme vice was shallowness. For Postmodernity it is
the New Jerusalem. Its playfulness allowed it to thrive in the friendlier
waters of literary and cultural studies at a time when ‘margins’ were
becoming central and classical stuffiness was going out of fashion. But now
postmodernists have entered shark-infested territory. Neoclassical
economics, another purveyor of shallowness, threatens to bend them to its
will,[3] gain strength from them and subsequently reinforce hierarchies more
oppressive and totalising than those the postmodernists set out initially to
dismantle.
When the IMF dictates its policies to some hapless Third World country,
there is a strong whiff of the radical egalitarianism shared equally between
general equilibrium and Postmodernity. The same whiff accompanies, and
legitimises, the inexorable devaluation of political goods, the vulgar
commodification of human bodies and values, the impossibility of
conceptualising freedom-from-the-market, the depiction of Central Banks as
‘independent’ only when under the thumb of financial capital, the confusion
of liberty with the freedom to exploit and to demean and, above all else,
the portrayal of coercion as tâtonnement. Thus Postmodernity unwittingly
blows fresh wind in the sails of neoclassicism, the undisputed champion of
the deconstructed human agent. While warning us correctly that new
authoritarianisms will be born when we get caught up in our own rhetoric, it
offers no resistance to the current authoritarianism of neoclassical
economics and, more so, the socio-economic system that it serves.
Conclusion: The dissidents’ dilemma
When a fresh wave of criticism is unleashed, it picks up along the way
pre-existing discontents, hitherto bopping along hopelessly near the
surface, and propels them toward the shores of exposure and respectability.
Lonely dissidents suddenly find a new ‘movement’ that will have them. New
hope of escaping obscurity is thus born.
In recent years many dissident voices had to adapt themselves to
postmodern-speak in an attempt to be ‘included’ on the postmodern bandwagon.
The PAE movement must release such voices from this obligation. Social
criticism of economics must reclaim an awareness that to reject the
scientific status of economics is not to reject science in general or to
espouse postmodernism.
Indeed irony and ambiguity were utilised, long before Postmodernity, by
thinkers eager to come to what a more confident past once knew as the truth.
To re-establish irony, ambiguity and indeterminateness in the discourse of
economists would be a triumph of the spirit. But it would not be a
postmodern turn. For the latter has no monopoly on an appreciation of the
radical indeterminacy of social processes (as Hegel would be all to eager to
remind us) or the importance of not taking our selves, and our theories, too
seriously. On the contrary, Postmodernity undermines itself by offering
Modernity’s most awful purveyor another means of extending its dominance.
So, we have arrived at the dissident’s dilemma. The postmodern kernel within
neoclassical economics forces a stark choice: Submit to homo economicus and
model our messy world’s dynamic as if a series of suburban disputes between
postmodern neighbours. Or, seek an historically grounded understanding of
how systematic patterns of power and economics are the joint products of the
continual feedback between technological developments and evolving social
formations. The difference between the two options is not theoretical; it is
ideological. The postmodern turn will be chosen by pseudo-dissidents whose
prime interests lie in acquiring a chic image; one that the self-effacing
postmodern criticism is good at imparting. The less fashionable option of
working towards historically grounded knowledge will appeal to the truly
‘unreasonable’ dissidents; those driven by an unbending commitment to a
rational transformation of society.
Notes
1. Department of Economics, University of Athens, 8 Pesmazoglou Street,
Athens 10596 and Department of Economics, University of Sydney, Sydney,
Australia. Email: yanisv@econ.uoa.gr
2. Recently, Routledge published a volume on the nexus of Postmodernity with
economics edited by Jack Amariglio, Stephen Cullenberg, and David Ruccio
(2001). The following thoughts have been extracted from my review of that
book (forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Methodology)
3. Courtesy of a more sophisticated take on the same type of philosophical
shallowness.
References
Cullenberg, S., J. Amariglio and D. Ruccio (2001). Postmodernity, Economics
and Knoweldge, London and New York: Routledge
Varoufakis, Y. (2002). ‘Deconstructing Homo Economicus?’, Journal of
Economic Methodology, forthcoming.
_______________________________________
Yanis Varoufakis’ most recent book is Foundations of Economics : A
Beginner's Companion.
SUGGESTED CITATION:
Yanis Varoufakis, “Why Critics of Economics Can Ill-afford the ‘Postmodern
Turn’””, post-autistic economics review, issue no. 13, May 2, 2002, article 1.
<http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review/issue13.htm>
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