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Two Months Before the
Mast of Post-Modernism
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley and NBER
2005-07-15
html:
http://tinyurl.com/dl20161231b
pages:
http://tinyurl.com/dl20161231a
pdf:
http://www.parlorpress.com/pdf/framing-theory-empire.pdf
4410 words
1
I. The Discussion of “Theory” Is too
Theoretical
Over at
The Valve
1
, they are talking
2
about the book
Theory's Empire
3
—
and thus about the damage done by
“
Critical Theory
”
and its spawn on the American
humanities over the past generation.
But most of it
strikes me as
all too... theoretical.
4
For, after
all, what w
ork can you do with statements
and arguments
like
these
:
•
“
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
…”
5
•
“
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
2
constructionism’s success... it is the school of thought
most congenial to current professional workplace
conditions of scholars in the humanities
…”
6
•
“
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
…”
7
•
“
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): calicifi ed mind, learned but
unoriginal and philosophically fi ckle, whose passions for
3
other people’s patterns generates predictable readings of
literary works
…
"
8
•
"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
…
"
9
•
"[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
…”
10
?
There is a certain bloodlessness here: the dry bones hop
about and clatter, but there is no flesh on them
. M
uch too
little is said about how High Critical Theory changed—for
good and for ill—how "we" "read" "our" "texts".
11
4
II. Two Months in 1981
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.
A. Scrambled Eggs Mixed with Cottage
Cheese
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 fi ll with something sorta original.
5
B. Michael Donnelly and Keith Tribe
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
.
12
And Tribe
had read and been hypnotized by Foucault—specifi cally
The Order of Things
13
and
The Archaeology of Knowledge
.
14
I began to read Keith Tribe.
He said very strange things.
C. The
Wealth of Nations
He said that the
Wealth of Nations
15
that economists read
today
was not the
Wealth of Nations
that Adam Smith wrote
and published in 1776
.
The Wealth of Nations
that
economists read
, he said,
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 fi ve books:
•
Book I on the "system of natural liberty
”.
•
Book II on accumulation and the profi ts of stock
.
6
•
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
. A
nd
•
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 fi nances. This was conceived in a
manner analogous to the domestic-economic management
of household fi nances. 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:
16
7
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.
III. The
Episteme
of Political
Economy
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.
A. A Recipe for Intellectual History
It is—or, at least, I read
the two as
as—an injunction to
analyze a school of thought in more-or-less the following
way:
8
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 fi nd in
these books—but don't.
5.
Think hard about what rhetorical, conceptual, and
intellectual moves you do not expect to fi nd
prominently in these books—but that you nevertheless
do fi nd.
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.
9
And I became convinced that Tribe and Foucault were
right.
B. David Ricardo as the First “Economist”
It was, indeed, only with
David
Ricardo
17
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
18
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.
10
