by Howard Richards7. Post-Marxist (Post-Structuralist) Theories
8. Recommendations: How to Work for Justice in the Global Economy
9. Concluding Scientific Postscript
7. Post-Marxist (Post-Structuralist) Theories"Post--structuralist" is a name for a subset of the "postmodern." Although it does not capture the full range of meaning of that amorphous and ubiquitous term, I adopt Jean-Francois Lyotard's definition of the "postmodern" as "incredulity toward metanarratives." "Metanarrative" names something which all postmodern writers, and therefore all post-structuralist writers, do not believe. The "meta" in "metanarrative" is a synonym for "grand," "global," "big" or "comprehensive." The writers in question might, then, believe petite, local, small, or partial narratives. There is here an important presupposition. It is that if they were going to believe anything, it would be a narrative (a story) of some size. (They would not, however, necessarily characterize what they were doing as "believing;" they would indeed be more likely to characterize it as "taking a position.") For the thinkers in question it has been several decades since the time when social science was about testing hypotheses, models, or theories by assembling data (data = "the given." It is derived from the Latin dare, to give.) The context of incredulity toward metanarratives is already an intellectual climate where discourse is no longer transparent. Within postmodernism, people who call themselves, or are called by others "poststructuralists" are people who, if they had not embraced postmodern incredulity, would have structuralists. They work in a tradition where the voice of the 20th century French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the voice of Michel Foucault, are never silent. Within the class so designated, and not counting works which make important methodological points but do not bear directly on trade theory, I have only two books about the global economy to discuss: Encountering Development by Arturo Escobar, and The End of Capitalism by J. K. Gibson-Graham (the pen name of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson). 7a. The Disintegration of Social ScienceRichard Wolff spoke for many when he wrote: "The word `explain' is just too implicated in essentialist thought. It connotes fullness, completeness, fixity, closure, and the image of a statement about an object of interest that is not contradictory, particular, and evanescent. It should be displaced in favor of `intervention,' `position,' or `story.'" (Wolff qualifies his own position with nuances that I will not discuss here.) A few pages earlier in the same article Wolff (interpreting Althusser) gave another reason for eschewing what used to be the main aim of science, explanation in terms of cause and effect: "That concept [Althusser's concept of history as a dense network of overdeterminations, a process without a subject] holds that every aspect of history --an individual, an event, a social movement, and so on-- is constituted by all the other aspects of the social and natural totality within which it occurs. It has its existence (and each specific quality of that existence) only insofar as it is overdetermined in and through (constituted by) the relations that bind it to them all. The logic of overdetermined constitutivity displaces that of causes and their effects." (p. 153) Anti-essentialism and overdetermination. These two key words name reasons why post-structuralist writers deliberately do not offer explanations. Wolff lists some motives that inspire anti-essentialism. "Many of the contributors to anti-essentialism, including Althusser, rejected the sorts of essentialist thinking that they associated with existing social conditions, capitalist and other exploitative class structures, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. to which they were deeply opposed." They saw capitalism and the patriarchal family as strengthened by essentialist claims that capitalism alone conformed to human nature; or that market incentives alone could make the economy work; or that the patriarchal family alone could produce mentally healthy children. With evils so many and so great attributed to essentialism, and such great hopes for liberation from oppression pinned on anti-essentialism, it is no wonder that many social scientists want anti-essentialism to be true. The anti-essentialists are, like all the economists considered in these pages, on the side of the angels. "Essence," that which anti-essentialists do not believe in, is defined in standard dictionaries as, "that which makes a thing what it is." It is derived from the Latin esse, to be. Its current and philosophical meanings can be traced to esse and to ousia, a Greek word for "substance" or "being" that was the principal term Aristotle sought to define in his Metaphysics. Essentialist claims are sometimes called universalist claims, because if there is some essence that a thing essentially is, then it is that essence always and everywhere. Richard Wolff's discussion of the proposal that social scientists stop using the words "explain," "cause," and "cause and effect," because they are too closely tied to essentialism, lists some connotations of "essence" that anti-essentialists find false and undesirable: fullness, completeness, fixity, closure. "Essence" is also accused of obscuring what anti-essentialist writers do want to bring to their readers' attention: the contradictory, the particular, the evanescent. Whether it is really the case that philosophers and scientists necessarily fall into error when they employ the term "essence" (and related terms like "substance," "reality," "cause," "explains," and "cause and effect") has been debated for several thousand years. Circa 500 BC. Heraclitus succinctly stated an intellectual case for anti-essentialism: panta rei, "all is flux." It is old news that language itself, by its very nature and structure, impels humans to speak and write as if the world and their experience were more full, complete, fixed, and closed than they really are; and as if the world and experience were less contradictory, particular, and evanescent than they really are. Nevertheless, through the centuries, the realists (defined here as people who make the sorts of conceptual moves that anti- essentialists call "essentialism" and hold to be mistaken) have held up their ends of the debates --from Plato and Aristotle down to Carl Jung and his followers, Willard van orman Quine, Marie Mies (cited above), Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Mario Bunge, and Rom Harre. The general trend among anti-essentialists (e.g. Jacques Derrida) is to attribute to essentialists a view that is not plausible (in Derrida's case, in his Grammatology, a "metaphysics of presence") and then to deconstruct it. People who still advance philosophies of science where "explanation" and "cause and effect" play important roles; or who still talk about "nature" or "the real" as something that social constructions of culture ought to take into account and adjust to, generally do not call themselves "essentialists." They are more likely to call themselves "critical realists," "materialists," "deep ecologists," or advocates of a "naturalized epistemology." Without adopting the "essentialist" label as a self-description, they nevertheless hold views incompatible with a radical anti- essentialism -- but their "essentialisms" are more plausible than the "essentialisms" that anti-essentialists identify as their targets. Such more plausible views include, for example, Rom Harre's view that things have causal powers; the use by Fredric Jameson and others of Spinoza's idea of an "absent cause" which is at work in history even though in the nature of things human reason cannot fully grasp it; and Jacques Lacan's philosophy of psychoanalysis in which in addition to the Symbolic and the Imaginary, there is also a Real which resists symbolization absolutely. I think it is fair to say that neither Jacques Derrida nor Michel Foucault nor any other recent anti-essentialist has come up with any new and decisive argument, which proves that after all these centuries the contemporary heirs of the nominalists and skeptics have decisively won, while the contemporary heirs of the ancient and medieval realists have decisively lost. Anti- essentialists have indeed shown that there is no Truth with a capital T; and they have indeed shown in great detail that hidden (not obvious) platonic unities, hidden ideologies, and hidden machinations of power have often deluded people by making them think that socially constructed realities were natural realities. But they have not advanced decisive arguments for the proposition that all reality is socially constructed reality. On the contrary, in academic epistemology, critical realism has not lost ground in recent decades; if anything, it has gained ground. (This is not to say that mechanical, Cartesian, Newtonian, or statistical versions of cause and effect reasoning have gained ground. Indeed, advocates of realism, myself included, are generally allies of the anti-essentialists when it comes to criticizing the excessive, often surreptitious, use of mechanical root metaphors.) I conclude that anti-essentialism, in the strong form in which it requires abandoning scientific explanation as a goal of social science, is not for the contemporary social scientist an obligatory epistemological stance. The rejection of "causal models" of any and all kinds is not a rejection imposed by virtue of the outcomes of scholarly debates in which essentialism has been refuted, deconstructed in such a way as to be shown to be without merit or groundless, or unmasked as an ideological distortion of reality. Radical anti-essentialism is a political strategy. Some aspects of its merits as a political strategy will be considered in 7b and 7c below. Now I will turn to a second key argument in favor of deleting talk of "causes" from social science, the argument that social effects are "overdetermined." The idea of overdetermination comes from Sigmund Freud. He introduced it to denote a confluence of subconscious representations. The representations condense in a single dream image (or in a neurotic symptom) governed by an emotion. The leading instance of the use of the term is Freud's analysis of his own dream known as "Irma's Injection," which he dreamed the night of July 23-24, 1895. Irma in the dream was a representation of herself, a patient who had frustrated Freud by refusing to accept his analysis of the causes of her hysteria. The same dream image, Irma, also represented another woman who had not been Freud's patient, whom Freud had wanted to come to him for treatment, whom Freud supposed would have been more cooperative, more willing to accept his analysis. The same Irma (I am referring to the elaborated image, which includes, at one point, her appearing to have false teeth, at another her appearing pale and puffy .....) represents yet a third woman, and, collectively, children at a children's hospital where Freud had previously been employed. A Dr. M. In the dream was also both himself and a stand-in for several persons with whom Freud had interacted in real life. The emotion (Freud called it a wish-fulfillment) governing the dream was Freud's frustration over his analysis being rejected in the particular instance of Irma. A triggering incident the day before the dream reminded him of the rejection and, so to speak, touched the button that set him off. Frustration over Irma flowed together with frustration over other failures, and with resentment over being regarded as a quack by professional colleagues. (What made the dream a wish-fulfillment was that, as the dream turned out, Freud got support from allies and vindication. Part of the vindication was that the dumb idea of giving Irma a thoughtless injection with a dirty syringe was someone else's mistake, not Freud's.) It was Louis Althusser, in his essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination" who "borrowed" the idea of overdetermination in order to explain --or rather, to decline to explain-- historical events. The reason why I wrote, "or rather, to decline to explain," is this: The paradigmatic Enlightenment notion of explanation, which postmodernists are concerned to deconstruct, is a Newtonian one: A causes B as cause to effect is a mechanical relationship in which the impact of force A produces phenomenon B. As applied to international trade theory and economics generally, this paradigm suggests that the aggregate of self-interested acts of economic actors will produce predictable results. As applied to Marxist economics, this paradigm suggests that accumulation will lead to revolution. The historical event in question in "Contradiction and Overdetermination" is the Russian Revolution of October, 1917. When he borrowed the idea of overdetermination from Freud, Althusser declined to explain the revolution in the paradigmatic Newtonian sense of "explain." The coming of the revolution was not determined by the economy, not even in the last instance. It was not determined, either, by any quasi-machine analogous to an economy. It was "overdetermined." It is important to acknowledge that neither Althusser nor anyone else needs the concept of overdetermination to make the point that for any social phenomenon there are many factors that contribute to causing it. Mainstream social science research (which predominates even today, even while debates about postmodernism preoccupy the avant-garde) uses statistical regression analysis to quantify the many factors found to be associated with the phenomenon under study. For example, a study of violent acts committed by children might find: 15% of the variance explained by children seeing violence on television. 25% of the variance explained by learning violence from parents at home. 5% explained by learning violence from video games. 10% by learning stereotyped gender roles and machismo. 45% "error variance" not explained yet, although presumably further research would show what the rest of the explanation is. That in reality there are many factors (also known as "variables," or "forces") at work, and that sophisticated mathematical techniques may be needed to sort them out, is not a proposition that requires dissent from the metaphysics of the Enlightenment. Complexity in itself does not require any abandonment of the sorts of explanations that rationalists and empiricists have been refining, amending, affirming, and denying for the last several centuries. (Indeed, Freud himself probably did not intend to abandon the Newtonian paradigm --even though, as Jacques Lacan has shown, he did.) I think I have already shown in previous pages that although complexity does not require abandonment of Enlightenment metaphysics (i.e. of economic metaphysics), an appreciation of the fundamental roles that ethical premises play in economic explanations does. I will not belabor the point here. My question here is, rather, why Althusser, having decided, for whatever reason, that economics (which is part and parcel of Enlightenment metaphysics) does not determine the course of history, did not choose to revert to the older metaphysical traditions of the West, to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas ..... Hegel, in which, in one form or another, human action is characterized by deliberate choice in an ethical context. Acts embody concepts. Ideas do things. Althusser chose, instead, to borrow the idea of overdetermination from Freud. Althusser answers my question: "Je ne tiens pas expressement a ce terme de surdetermination (emprunte a d'autres disciplines), mais je l'emploie faute de mieux a la fois comme un indice et un probleme, et aussi parce qu'il permet assez bien de voir pourquoi nous avons affaire de toute autre chose que la contradiction hegelienne." I believe that a fair reading of Althusser's essay, and of his work as a whole, will show that he desired to serve the cause of Marxism, and therefore of materialism, by extirpating idealism. When Marx praised the "rational kernel" in Hegel, he was not to be understood, according to Althusser, as endorsing any sort of dialectic in which ideals function as causes in history. Those of us who do think that ideals function as causes in history can see, in this light, why Althusser does not agree with us. We can also see why Freud's concept of overdetermination served Althusser's purpose. "Overdetermination" does not function at the level of consciously chosen human ideals. It does not function at the level of cultivation of agreements, and of cooperative action, in public social space. It does not function at the level of the ego, the integrating element of the personality. It functions at night, in the rapid-eye-movement periods of sleep, when the emotions assemble images. Extended to history, faute de mieux, as the index of a problem in the social sciences, overdetermination is a confession that we really do not know why history happens as it does. It is also a profession that whatever the course of history may be, we should remain loyal to materialism, and we should reject the ancient metaphysical hierarchies. 7b. Escobar's Ethics"The global economy must thus be understood as a decentered system with manifold apparatuses of capture --symbolic, economic, and political. It matters to investigate the particular ways in which each local group participates in this complex machinelike process, and how it can avoid the most exploitative mechanisms of capture of the capitalist megamachines." Escobar calls his perspective "poststructuralist." Escobar's excellent book can be thought of as proceeding at three levels. At the ground level, Escobar gives an account of particular programs and projects carried out by development professionals in the third world; especially in his own country, Colombia; and within Colombia especially the anti-hunger programs; and among the anti-hunger programs especially one called Integrated Rural Development (Desarrollo Rural Integral, DRI). At the global level, programs like DRI are placed in the context of development discourse. Development discourse was called into being by the challenges faced by the United States after World War II. It was created by a few senior government officials, academics, and bankers, all of whom were white, male, and from the first world. They were almost all economists. Backed by the power of the World Bank and allied institutions, development discourse became a required language that the third world had to learn. At a philosophical level, Escobar treats development discourse as knowledge that is power, and as power that takes the form of knowledge. He calls for a reformed social science in which a reformed poststructuralist anthropology rather than economics would set the tone. But the leading role of the new anthropology does not consist of creating an alternative theoretical hegemony, which would vie to replace development discourse in particular or economics in general. "To think about alternatives in the manner of sustainable development, for instance, is to remain within the same model of thought that produced development and kept it in place. One must then resist the desire to formulate alternatives at an abstract, macro level; one must also resist the idea that the formulation of alternatives will take place in intellectual and academic circles, without meaning by this that academic knowledge has no role in the politics of alternative thinking." I believe that Escobar's choices at the philosophical level respond to his desire to make a useful contribution toward alleviating the enormous and endless human suffering endured at the ground level. Escobar's posteconomic deconstruction of "development" is, like postmodernism generally, an epistemology motivated by an ethics. The earliest of Escobar's ground-level Colombian development stories is about rice. Early in the 20th century, the Colombian elite realized that in order to compete in the international market it would have to exploit, as its comparative advantage, access to cheap labor. The people who were going to be the cheap labor force to whom the entrepreneurial elite and their financial backers would have access had to move from the countryside to the sites of industry, and, once there, they needed cheap food. Without cheap food they could not survive on low wages. The government pioneered and protected the rice agribusiness because it had the potential to produce high calorie food for the workers at low unit cost. Why are we not surprised? I will answer this question myself instead of paraphrasing Escobar, but I do not think I will say anything Escobar would deny, or anything he is not aware of. First, we are not surprised because the Colombian rice story is similar to many stories we have heard before. It repeats with variations an oft-told tale, classically stated in the early in 19th century in Ricardo's argument that the British corn laws should be repealed in order to decrease the price of food, and thus cheapen labor, and thus increase profits. (In the Colombian case a tariff was imposed, to protect rice agribusiness to get it started; in the British case a tariff was repealed; what makes them variations of the same story is that food policy was a function of the profit imperative.) Second, we are not surprised because the basic cultural (ethical) structure of modern society implies that such things will happen, and keep happening, again and again. Given, private ownership of the means of production. Given, that the incentive for production is the expectation of profit. Given, that profit can only be realized by the sale of the product, which can most effectively be accomplished, other things being equal, by bringing the product to market at a price that beats the competition. It follows that capitalists will seek profits by lowering the costs of production, and that they will seek them, other things being equal, by lowering labor costs. Escobar's Colombian rice story, in some form, will be told many times. The most up-to-date of Escobar's ground-level stories from Colombia appears to be the one about the ladies who pack shrimp in the port city of Tumaco. "The feminization of the labor force in some industries continues, and it is linked to development schemes; such is the case, for instance, with women in shrimp packaging plants in the port of Tumaco in Colombia. The vast majority of women working in these plants come from rural families who have lost their lands; they now work under precarious conditions." Why are we not surprised? First, because the feminization of the labor force, and the feminization of poverty, are a well-known aspect of the worldwide current trends commonly known as "neo-liberalism," or "flexible accumulation." These current trends themselves are similar to what Andre Gunder Frank in the 1960s called "the development of underdevelopment;" which is in turn similar to accounts of the destruction of African cultures by the slave trade and by the forced incorporation of Africans into European money economies; which are similar to histories of the driving of peasants from the land that Engels called "...the progressive pauperisation of the English countryside;" which are similar to the descriptions of the enclosure movement in England given by, among others, Marx in Capital.... Second, we are not surprised because the basic cultural structures of modern society set the stage for market behavior, and for the enlargement of markets. Markets, and especially larger markets, imply a drive toward more cost-effective profit- seeking. There is, for this reason, a systemic bias in favor of creating classes of workers who can easily be exploited, and therefore a systemic bias against the modicum of security enjoyed by small farmers, and indeed against any modicum of security enjoyed by anybody. The centerpiece of Escobar's ground level series is a pair of Colombian programs, PAN and DRI, which flourished in the heyday of development discourse; during the period after the invention and imposition of development discourse after World War II; and before today's disillusionment, which is leading to a decline of classical development discourse and its partial replacement by new forms of power/knowledge. PAN was a program for alleviating hunger, to a large extent by giving away food, although it included other components, such as nutrition education. A structural trap. Given the basic cultural and ethical structure of modern society, it could have been predicted that free food would depress food prices and discourage food production. PAN's companion program, DRI, proposed to spend public money (provided by the World Bank and allied institutions) with the principal objective of increasing food production. This was to be achieved mainly by introducing more scientifically advanced farming techniques. In the abstract, the increase in production due to DRI might be imagined as compensating for the decrease in production due to PAN. In reality, a complex series of political struggles, structural constraints, economic forces, illusions, and errors produced some net winners, some net losers, and, overall, no significant alleviation of hunger in Colombia. It could have been predicted that in the absence of a major surge in effective demand for food (i.e. purchasing power) the food supply would not significantly increase. It could have been predicted that treating food production as a scientific, physical, problem would result in favoring some farmers, and in damaging others, without significantly augmenting the total food supply, and with undesirable environmental and social side- effects. That is what happened. By the 1990s, DRI had largely been abandoned. It had proven the obvious: that there are no profits to be made in producing food for sale to people who have no money. I have embroidered Escobar's stories about ground level development projects in order to make crystal clear the operations of economic quasi-mechanisms to which he only alludes. He has a good reason for only alluding to them: from his perspective explanation in terms of economic quasi-mechanisms is universalizing, essentialist; his scholarly project is to show that a poststructuralist anthropological approach is more adequate than one which relies on a theory of political economy that is supposed to be universally applicable. His achievement consists of "making visible local constructions side by side with the analysis of global forces" so that the ground level facts are seen from a new perspective and in a new light, after having been seen for decades in the light of economics in general and development discourse in particular. "From the classical political economists to today's neo-liberals at the World Bank, economists have monopolized the power of speech." Now, with Escobar's help, the actions of development agents in remote third world hamlets are shown to be dramatic performances scripted by local discourses which are in turn shaped by the powerful texts of the development discourse promoted by the World Bank and its allies. It is the discourse that creates the actors and the objects. The actors are lived by powers they do not understand (or, in some cases, do understand, but are required to pretend not to understand in order to keep their jobs). Although Escobar does not offer explanations in the traditional sense; that is, he does not detect cause and effect mechanisms and relationships; he does use the word "explain" in the context of discussing why development discourse arose. An example concerns a famous speech the American president Harry Truman gave in 1948, in which he proposed to lift the poor people of the world out of poverty by sharing American know-how, by sending American technical experts to every corner of the globe to teach everyone else what to do to solve their problems. In retrospect, Harry Truman's "point 4" speech was naive and arrogant. What needs to be explained, the explanandum, is why what he was saying made sense to him and to his audience at the time. The explanans is development discourse. I should have said that development discourse is a quasi- explanans, which quasi-explains why Harry Truman and many others thought as they did. The story Escobar tells to "explain" why development discourse arose is more like a genealogy, a la Foucault, than it is like bringing a particular phenomenon under a general causal law, a la Newton. Further, it is important to Escobar's argument to insist that there was nothing inevitable about the rise of development discourse. Although it was an understandable response of the first world elite to the challenges posed by the times, it was not a result compelled to happen by factors that caused it. "The free enterprise system was in peril after the Second World War. To save such a system, the United States was faced with various imperatives to keep the core nations of the capitalist system together and going, which required continuous expansion and efforts to avoid the spread of communism; to find ways to invest U.S. surplus capital that had accumulated during the war (particularly abroad, where the largest profits could be made); to find markets overseas for American goods, given that the productive capacity of American industry had doubled during the war; to secure control over the sources of raw materials in order to meet world competition; and to establish a global network of unchallenged military power as a way to secure access to raw materials, markets, and consumers...." In such a context, development economics was an idea whose time had come. After World War II it took off as a subdiscipline within the science of economics, building on theories of economic growth written earlier in the century (some of which used the word "development"). It offered itself as a general scientific theory showing how to create a desired world, and how to avoid an undesired world. Its major prescriptions, as commonly advocated in the 1950s, were "...(1) capital accumulation, (2) deliberate industrialization, (3) development planning, and (4) external aid." Development discourse, regarded as a normative framework for public policy (supported by development economics as its academic legitimation and theoretical backup) was created after World War Two by a small first world elite, composed of government officials, academics, and bankers. Escobar names names, and gives the dates and places of the meetings where the language of development discourse was crafted, and where institutions that would play key roles in spreading the discourse were founded. "Development" was conceived by many to be a companion to the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan had saved Western Europe from Communism by rebuilding its economies; similarly, "development" would save the rest of the world from Communism. Created in the first world, the ABCs of development formed a curriculum that the third world had to learn. In every field -- health, education, agriculture, industry, water, electricity, transportation, women's rights.... -- new programs and projects were touted as keys to progress, and they required funding. The principal sources of funding communicated only with people who spoke their language. Power begat cosmology. Development discourse oriented the human spirit in space, in time, toward objects, and toward ideals. Spatially, the planet was divided into developed and underdeveloped regions. The arrow of time pointed from less development to more development; the poor majority of humanity was invited to see its own future in America's high paying union jobs, and in Western Europe's welfare states. The objects of the world were physical objects, to be manipulated by engineers applying science to produce abundance for all. The negative, what ought not to be, was underdevelopment; the positive, the ideal to strive for, was development. It took about two decades of bitter experience for "development," as Harry Truman and the founders of the World Bank conceived it, to lose its charm. Already in 1970, the World Bank, USAID, and the other leading funding agencies, were sponsoring the "basic needs approach," "growth with equity," "integral development," "grassroots development," and, later, "sustainable development." To remain credible, development discourse had to reform itself in order to focus directly on extreme poverty, on environmental degradation, loss of cultural identity, and violence against women; it had to include popular participation in struggles against oppression. During the 1980s Latin American countries experienced the harshest social and economic conditions since the conquest. A similar assertion could be made about Africa. A number of voices, of which Escobar's is one, called for the rejection of the term "development" altogether, seeing it as the name of a concept that was fatally flawed from the beginning, which could not be rehabilitated by any adjective one might select to write in front of it. The rise and decline of development discourse illustrates --yet again-- the absurdity and the tragedy of the situation of the human species on the planet earth. Physically --as the late R. Buckminster Fuller tirelessly repeated-- there is no reason why the resources of the earth cannot be mobilized to meet the needs of every member of a human species living in harmony with all living systems. But at this point in history humanity has not invented the cultural structures and the ecological practices it would need to enjoy the happiness that mother earth promises. (One need not romanticize the past to see the present as a tragedy; the gap between potential and reality is tragic, regardless of whatever consolation one might derive from comparing the relative magnitudes of the sorrows of today and the sorrows of yesterday.) It is important to try to articulate truthfully the reasons why "development" has done little to alleviate human suffering, and has probably made it worse. If Escobar is right in saying that the (or a) principal sin of development discourse was that it was essentialist, universalizing, then the last thing we will want is a postdevelopmental era guided by another essentialist discourse. Further, if Escobar is right, then we will expect major improvements to flow from the growing influence of poststructuralist perspectives. But what if he is wrong? or only partly right? or what if he has made it impossible to assign a meaning to the word "right"? Escobar is thus compelled, willy-nilly, contre coeur, to make judgments about causes and effects. If the widespread adoption of Escobar's poststructuralist theoretical position causes life to become more harsh, not less harsh, then the results will be inflicted (not just inscribed) on bodies. I cannot pretend to know whether, all things considered, the current trend toward poststructuralist scholarship like Escobar's will prove to bear delicious fruit; or whether it will prove to be un engano mas, another nail sealing the coffin of hope. Time will tell. But I would like to express two reasons why I do not believe that the results will be optimal. The first is that Escobar's poststructuralist approach puts him in an awkward position regarding non-western cultures and regarding traditional western values. One might have expected that a book calling for the empowerment of ordinary people in the third world would have included more than passing references to liberation theology (which Escobar mentions only in two footnotes), to Islam, and to Gandhi, and that there would be some discussion of progressive Buddhism, as found, for example, in the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. Although there are poststructuralists who have written at length on religion, Escobar's neglect of religion is typical, and, moreover, it is symptomatic of an inherent conflict between poststructuralism, which is an ultramodern philosophy; and traditional societies. Traditional societies, in their splendid variety, are not infrequently profoundly religious, and also not infrequently collectivist, hierarchical, patriarchal with carefully differentiated gender roles, homophobic, puritanical, xenophobic, and superstitious. (These are all, of course, western terms, and mainly pejorative ones used to describe others; the people who actually hold such views describe them in their own ways, and not pejoratively.) It does not take much reading between the lines of the works of authors Escobar cites with approval, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Taussig, Garcia Canclini, Dorothy Smith....; or much reading between the lines of Arturo Escobar himself; to see that their values are secular, individualist in the positive sense of favoring personal autonomy and what Carl Jung called individuation, democratic, feminist and tending toward gender equality, opposed to compulsory heterosexuality, sensual, internationalist, and critical. Poststructuralism is thus in an awkward position. There is no problem as long as it is a matter of criticizing mainstream modernist liberal thought for pretending to be universal and eternally rational. There is no problem as long it is a matter of citing attractive examples --of which there are many in Encountering Development-- of small and little known cultures which have their own ways of seeing things and doing things, which are just as legitimate, and often happier and more in harmony with nature, than the ways of the modern West. The problem is that although Escobar and poststructuralists generally do not believe that whatever the oppressed say must be right, it is built into their approach that it is hard to legitimate the fine tuning criteria needed for telling the difference between valores de rescate (values to be rescued), and temas superables (themes best forgotten and left behind). They have a wholesale ethical criterion for valuing whatever "the other" has to say; namely: no one should have a right to define someone else's reality for them; it is time for the voices that have been excluded and silenced to name their own worlds; it is time for "the other" to speak out and be heard. They also have a wholesale ethical criterion for rejecting many of the things non-Western and traditional people say when they speak; namely, to summarize in one word, freedom. The awkward mixed message ("the intellectuals from the university insist on our right to name our own reality as long as we agree with their corrupt, individualistic, materialistic, permissive, and effeminate values") is not an incidental feature of postmodernism, that can easily be corrected by noting oversights. It is intrinsic in the implicit and sometimes explicit reasons given for honoring everyone's right to have a voice. For example, Islamic fundamentalists are granted the right to a voice because they, like everyone else, are entitled to it according to a radicalized ethics of autonomy. But when Islamic fundamentalists begin to speak, those who hear them learn that "Islam" does not mean "autonomy." It means "submission." And when fundamentalist Muslims speak it is not to name their own reality, but to spread the teachings of the Holy Qu'ran. The ethic of autonomy, in turn, which is the source of the awkwardness involved, is intrinsically connected to Foucault and Escobar's central concept: power. Since the 17th century "power" has been, and it still is, the principal root metaphor with which western philosophy has erected secular alternatives to the older and more traditional religious worldviews of the West. Autonomy is what you have when you are not oppressed by power. (Thus Kant: autonomy is the principle of all genuine morality; heteronomy is the principle of all spurious morality.) Escobar's story of the rise of development discourse is a story about power and speech, and therefore it is a story about oppression and silencing, and therefore it leads to the conclusion that the oppressed should speak. And then, when they speak: confusion. Secondly, taking a poststructuralist philosophical position makes it unnecessarily difficult to talk about objective physical reality. In principle, there is supposed to be no such thing. The discourse defines the objects. This principle sometimes seems to be a philosophical opinion with no practical consequences, since poststructuralists are able to cope with objective physical reality in everyday life the same as everyone else. But sometimes it does have consequences. It makes a difference --at least so it seems to me-- when Escobar criticizes Samir Amin. Amin sees no hope for his continent, Africa, without major capital investments in agriculture. For Amin, as for economists generally, it is axiomatic that there can be no serious attack on poverty without capital accumulation. The relatively comfortable peoples of the first world are only able to enjoy their comforts because of the work of people in past generations whose savings and investments made it possible to create advanced technologies, install equipment, and build infrastructure. Whether capital is accumulated by a puritan ethic, by exploiting colonies, by extracting surplus value from workers ... or by forced industrialization under five year plans a la Stalin or a la Mao ... no people emerges from poverty without somebody voluntarily or involuntarily postponing present consumption for the sake of investing in future productive capacity. Given that Africa will be prosperous only after Africa makes capital investments in agriculture and industry; given that capital-poor Africa has for the last several centuries been to a great extent at the mercy of capital-rich foreign powers; given that the capital accumulation processes that history has seen so far have been cruel, destructive, and unjust: Amin has devoted himself to elaborating proposals for what he calls "autocentric accumulation." He wants to put the accumulation process under humane, ecologically-conscious, and democratic control. He wants Africans (and all peoples) to control their own destinies. He wants to use new appropriate technologies to achieve shortcuts that will make the tooling up process less painful than it was in the 19th century. He wants the burdens to be shared equitably by all, and in particular to redress the balances between towns and countryside, and between members of different ethnic, racial, and tribal groups. Amin's project would appear to be a wholly laudable one, but Escobar raises an objection to it. In principle. "It is necessary to emphasize, however, that Amin's prescriptions are written in a universalistic mode and a realist epistemology, precisely the kinds of thinking criticized here." Why does Escobar care so much about the issue of realist epistemology vs. poststructuralism that he finds it necessary to criticize Amin's constructive project on philosophical grounds? The answer is, I believe, that Escobar has written a two hundred and fifty page book which continually berates development discourse for being based on a realist epistemology. As Michel Foucault showed that prisons have indeed served their real purpose --extending power-- even though it was clear from the beginning that they would not serve their declared purpose --rehabilitating criminals--; so Escobar was able to show that development discourse has served its real purpose -- extending power-- even though it was clear from the beginning that it would not serve its declared purpose --lifting the suffering masses of the third world out of poverty. Development discourse pulled off the sleight-of-hand trick necessary to disguise its real purpose, and pulled it off in such a way that it was able to de-politicize poverty. What had been a conflict of interest between exploiters and exploited became a technical problem to be solved by experts. All of the problems were (supposedly) about objective physical reality. A realist epistemology guaranteed the credentials of the development economists and the other technical experts who were employed to solve, for example, "the problem of hunger," as development discourse had defined that "problem" into existence. Amin draws Escobar's fire because he agrees with his professional colleagues that the need to accumulate capital is indeed an objective physical problem. The concept "accumulation" is bifurcated. It is, first, another name for exploiting colonies and workers, and for the quasi-automatic machine-like global extension of capitalism; it is also, secondly, the name for the tooling up process without which no people can enjoy prosperity. Under its second name, it represents a fact of Nature. Lack of accumulation is a fact too, and a brutal one; it is like the swarms of locusts that God sent to devour the grain of the Egyptians. All of the priests of Egypt, with all their syntax and semantics, with all their synchrony and diachrony, with all their breaks and sutures, story and ritual, texts and subtexts, semiotics and grammatology, genealogy and deconstruction, could not stop the locusts from eating the grain. In Africa today the physical need to bring water to the land, before the seeds will germinate, grow, and produce edible fruit represents the irreducible resistance of Nature against the hegemony of Meaning; it represents the revolt of objects that refuse to allow any discourse to define them out of existence. Amin offers an alternative physical solution to a physical problem. His realist epistemology does him (and humanity) no harm at all. In the end Escobar and Amin are allies on the democratic left; Escobar recognizes the merit of Amin's work even though he thinks it must be "continuously destabilized." Nevertheless, Escobar's criticism of Amin's realism overshoots the mark. Showing that mainline development discourse rests on false realist epistemologies does not rule out the possibility that the work of Samir Amin and many others might rest on true realist epistemologies. In expressing the view that poststructuralism's consequences are likely to be suboptimal (because it makes it hard to discriminate better traditions from worse traditions; and because it emphasizes discourse too much, facts too little) I do not mean to be unappreciative. I do mean to suggest that the achievements of poststructuralism do not need to be purchased at the expense of discrimination and realism. 7c. Gibson-Graham's MetaphysicsThe tradition that takes its name from Aristotle's Metaphysics constructs first principles; or first archai, as Aristotle called them. Its inquiries into the first principles and causes of all things concern, above all, being or substance (ousia). Explanations of the global economy presuppose that the global economy has being; the global economy is assumed to be something that is. Even the most excellent explanation is stultified if the phenomenon that it purports to explain does not exist. The criteria for distinguishing being from non-being, existence from non-existence, become crucial when somebody thinks it important to deny the existence of something whose existence somebody else thinks it important to affirm. Famously, in the history of metaphysics, the first principles governing the concept of being have been invoked to prove, or to disprove, the existence of God. The present question, however, concerns not whether God exists, but whether the global economy exists. In The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy, the author argues that there is no global economy. "Like many political economists I had heretofore theorized the US social formation and `the global economy' as sites of capitalist dominance, a dominance located squarely in the social (or economic) field. But a theoretical option now presented itself, one that could make a (revolutionary) difference: to depict economic discourse as hegemonized while rendering the social world as economically differentiated and complex." (pp. x-xi) It becomes crucial to ask what sorts of reasons would count for or against the theoretical option that Gibson-Graham embraces, which includes denying (or declining to assert) that global capitalism or the global economy exist. "Metaphysics" is the usual name of attempts to discern why one should, or should not, attribute being to the entity allegedly or putatively designated by a contested concept like "God," or, now, "the global economy," or "capitalism." Taking Aristotle as a source and a representative of the mainstream ancient and medieval metaphysical traditions of the West, two salient differences between traditional metaphysics and the postmodern metaphysics of Gibson-Graham can be succinctly stated. First, Aristotle tends to favor attributing being to generalities; Gibson-Graham tends to favor attributing being to particulars. Thus Aristotle: "If there is nothing apart from individuals, there will be no object of thought, but all things will be objects of sense; and there will not be knowledge of anything, unless we say that sensation is knowledge." It is typical of Aristotle to think of a characteristic substance, or being, as a seed (which has intrinsic to it the form of the plant or animal it will become), or as a product produced by an artisan who had in mind the form of what was to be made before making it, or as a person with a continuing soul self-identical through its transient states (his favorite example is Socrates). "...we say the Hermes is in the stone, and the half of the line is in the line, and we say of that which is not yet ripe that it is corn." Ousia, finally, has two senses: "(A) the ultimate substratum, which is no longer predicated of anything else, and (B) that which being a `this' is also separable --and of this nature is the shape or form of each thing." Thus Gibson-Graham: "...a capitalist site is an irreducible specificity. We may no more assume that a capitalist firm is interested in maximizing profits or exploitation than we may assume that an individual woman wants to bear and raise children, or that an American is interested in making money.... When Capitalism gives way to an array of capitalist differences, its noncapitalist other is released from singularity and subjection, becoming potentially visible as a differentiated multiplicity." Generalities, such as The Global Economy, and Capitalism, appear in Gibson-Graham's book as false and oppressive. A discourse that celebrates protean variety, proliferation of differences, performs the service of making visible many things which ought to have been seen long ago; which the "hegemony" of the discourse of Global Capitalism has made invisible. Second, Aristotle thinks of his inquiries as discovering truth. Gibson-Graham "...invoke the constitutive or performative force of economic representation." For Gibson-Graham "the global economy" is an economic representation constituted by other people's performances, by the acts they performed in and by speaking and by writing. The global economy was called into being by discourse. Her own performance, the writing of the book The End of Capitalism, is designed to constitute a different discourse. "In the hierarchical relation of capitalism to noncapitalism lies (entrapped) the possibility of theorizing economic difference, of supplanting the discourse of capitalist hegemony with a plurality and heterogeneity of economic forms. Liberating that possibility is an anti-essentialist project, and perhaps the principal aim of this book." Gibson-Graham's aim is similar to that of most writers on the topics of capitalism and the global economy, in the respect that, like most others, she seeks to understand the way the world works in order to change the way the world works. But she takes the view that the very concepts most employed, viz. "capitalism" and "the global economy," have backfired. By attributing to the capitalist global economy an essence, a monolithic nature, they have contributed to its strength. It seems all-powerful because the theories of left-wing political economists tell us it is all- powerful. "For if capitalism's identity is even partially immobile or fixed, ... if it is the site of an inevitability like the logic of profitability or accumulation, then it will necessarily be seen to operate as a constraint or a limit. It becomes that to which other more mutable entities must adapt. (We see this today in both mainstream and left discussions of social and economic policy, where we are told that we may have democracy, or a pared-down welfare state, or prosperity, but only in the context of the [global capitalist] economy and what it will permit.) Gibson-Graham proposes a new anti-capitalist strategy. She deconstructs the concept of capitalism. She denies that it exists "as we knew it," i.e. as it has been conceived. This theoretical move serves to refocus vision, making what was previously invisible visible, making what was previously impossible possible. "Theorizing capitalism itself as different from itself --as having, in other words, no essential or coherent identity-- multiplies (infinitely) the possibilities of alterity." She borrows from the writings of other feminists, and from queer theorists, tactics for discourse analysis that deconstruct stereotypes. The same philosophical arguments that demolish the idea that there is such a thing as a typical woman, and which do battle against compulsory heterosexuality by demolishing conventional stereotypes of gays, are deployed to prove that there is no Capitalism, and no global economy. Never generalize. Hazel Henderson and others had already pointed out that if we count how many hours the people of the world work, we will find that the majority of the work done in the world is either unpaid household labor and child care, or work in the nonprofit or public sector, or production for direct use (such as gardening or do-it- yourself home improvement). Only a minority of the world's work is wage or salary labor done for capitalist firms. Gibson-Graham cites the same facts, and also counts the self-employed as non- capitalist. The middle level business executive who loses her job to downsizing and ekes out a living as a consultant, and the paupers who sell chewing gum on the streets of third world cities, count as part of the noncapitalist total. The informal sector, which Marx characterized as the industrial reserve army of the unemployed, is seen in a different light, since it produces a series of instances of economic diversity --as do the elements of feudal agriculture, household slavery, and patriarchal sweatshops which are found in one place or another of our diverse world. Gibson-Graham is not in favor of all this variegated misery, but she does use it to buttress her case that any general thesis which postulates that there is a world capitalist economy must be wrong. A considerable part of her book is about the "blokes" who work in Australian coal mines. Highly mechanized Australian mines are able to deliver coal to the world market at competitive prices; the workers are organized in militant unions with left ideologies. The blokes make good money; their wives, who may be nurses or teachers, sometimes make good money too; they may own several houses; they are likely to fly to Europe for vacations. Gibson-Graham's ethnographic account of "blokeland" reinforces her image of the world as a crazy-quilt of diverse economic forms, which does not at all resemble the world portrayed by Marx in Capital, where capital grew and accumulated through extracting surplus value from workers who were paid just enough to make it possible for them to survive. At this point I would like to engage in an imaginary dialogue with J. K. Gibson-Graham, running the risk that the words I attribute to her may be different from what she would say if she spoke for herself in a real dialogue. Critic: Surely you do not mean to say that capitalism is such a minor component among the rich variety of economic forms found in the world that if it were to crash again, as it did in the 1930s, there would be no problem, because humanity with all its rich variety of noncapitalist forms could get along quite well without it. Gibson-Graham: Of course not. Critic: So you do recognize that capitalism is an important institution in the world as it exists today? Gibson-Graham: If I didn't, I would not be writing a book about how to change it. Critic: You do not mean, either, that the economic policies of the world's governments are mistaken when they seek to attract investment, foster a favorable business climate, provide incentives and security for investors, build confidence in the economic stability and profit potential of whatever part of the world they govern, and generally work to keep up profits so that capitalism will run smoothly? Gibson-Graham: I think that profits could be considerably lower without the dire consequences that even supposedly leftist economists threaten will follow if workers and governments do not cave in to all the demands of capital. Critic: But you do recognize that in order to function capitalism requires some rate of profit? Gibson-Graham: Yes. Critic: And do you recognize that as a general rule, and other things being equal, entrepreneurs will seek the highest profits they can get? And that other economic actors, such as workers and bankers, also seek to maximize their returns? Gibson-Graham: No. Critic: Why not? Gibson-Graham: You are not understanding me very well. I am writing about political economy as discourse. I am not conducting an inquiry within that discourse about the phenomena of economics and how to explain them. I am not saying that Ricardo, or Marx, or Paul Samuelson, got the laws of profit wrong. I am critiquing the discourse that constructs "profit" as a category, defines "economic actor" as an entity seeking to maximize something, and makes it meaningful to talk about "laws of profit." Critic: So you think that economists should not even be trying to write general laws which explain and predict that under such and such conditions profits will be such and such? Gibson-Graham: It's disempowering. Critic: What do you mean by that? Gibson-Graham: Social reality is constantly being contested and renegotiated. If we think there are some supposedly scientific laws that determine how much the workers are paid, and how much profit capital has to get, then we will passively accept social reality as defined by someone else, instead of participating actively in creating social reality. Critic: The laws of economics may be disempowering, but I can't help thinking that they are to some extent true. Does it help the victims of the system when intellectuals convince them they have power that they do not really have, so that, like the rooster Chanticleer who thought he could make the sun rise by crowing, they think that if they talk tough and go on strike they will get high wages and benefits? Gibson-Graham: I do not deny that it is to some extent true that capital has power. The question is the extent. If you write economics as if the world economy were a monolithic system governed by inexorable laws of capital accumulation, then you create a myth that capital is all-powerful, the rest of us powerless. Critic: It seems to me --correct me if I'm wrong-- that you advance two types of reasons for concluding that capital is less powerful than most people think. First, you attack the concept of a monolithic global economy governed by inexorable laws, saying that the very idea of a capitalist global economy makes invisible the world's diversity of economic forms. This is a sort of negative proof of your thesis; you are telling us that "believing is seeing." All the evidence we think we see is filtered through the lenses of an essentialist discourse, so that if it were true (and you think it is true) that the social world is infinitely diverse and constantly under renegotiation and reconstruction, people would not see the truth. Gibson-Graham: I recognize (pp. 5-9) that in my book I am attacking a straw man, although not a straw man I have constructed by myself. There is probably nobody who holds that the capitalist global economy is as monolithic and powerful as it is in the image of it that I attack. Critic: But your straw man resembles the views of Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein .... and others, and it also resembles your own former views, since you yourself used to write about "the global economy." Gibson-Graham: My theoretical target is simplified in order to make my point, but it is relevant to what ordinary people and social scientists actually say and think. Critic: So part of your argument is that any theory as general as the straw man you attack must be wrong. But you do not specifically refute any thesis actually advanced by anyone. Gibson-Graham: I would not put it that way. It is true that I do not specifically refute anything that Fredric Jameson, for example, affirms, as if it were a matter of scoring points in macho intellectual combat, or a matter of one mathematician finding an error in another mathematician's proof. But I do elaborate an alternative to a Jamesonian vision. If you go back and read Jameson again after reading my book, you will find him less persuasive. Critic: So your work is illuminating. It makes real-live facts visible that, strictly speaking, could not possibly happen according to the straw man who thinks everything happens according to simple laws of capitalist accumulation. The straw man's discourse is similar enough to discourses that are actually employed --indeed, are dominant-- that by helping the reader to see its flaws, you also help the reader to see flaws in discourses that actually exist, like Jameson's. Gibson-Graham: I would not have put it exactly that way, but I won't object either. Critic: Apart from saying that the straw man must be wrong because in principle essentialism is always wrong, you also fill your book with anecdotes. Gibson-Graham: You mean facts, cases. Critic: Yes, for example, in the 1990s, after a protracted struggle, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), Local 5668, won a three year contract with Ravenswood Aluminum Company, in spite of the company's effort to use its bargaining advantage as a multi-national company to break the union by locking the workers out. The union's researchers established that the new owner of Ravenswood was a global commodities trader who had been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on 65 counts of tax fraud and racketeering. The union's tactic (which you call a "non-standard response") was to portray the company as an international outlaw, damaging its public image and triggering investigations by government agencies. "Terrier-like, the USWA pursued the company relentlessly around the globe yanking and pulling at it until it capitulated." (p. 129) Logically, this one case refutes the straw man (or perhaps a straw man even simpler than the one you construct); since if labor wins even once in a conflict with capital, then it is not true that capital always wins. Gibson-Graham: This is one of the stories that shows the value of my anti-essentialist approach to social theory. If the steelworkers union had believed the myth of the global economy, it might have given up without even trying. As it turned out, the workers met internationalism with internationalism of their own, and won. Critic: But you do not attempt to use a statistically significant sample of similar cases. You don't test a hypothesis about how often and for what reasons labor wins. You do not propose a causal mechanism, or a model, to explain the observed facts. You do not design tests that deliberately compel your theory run the risk that it might be shown to be false. You do not do any of the things that mainstream social scientists do to test their theories. Gibson-Graham: I don't. Critic: You do not even use descriptive statistics. You do not tell us how often the sorts of cases you describe occur. Gibson-Graham: I do think social reality is overdetermined, and I do not believe in causal models. Descriptive statistics are less objectionable, although they are often misleading because they mask differences among the cases grouped together. But anyway, quite apart from what I think about what positivist social scientists do or do not do, what I myself do is something different. I show how the dominant discourse about the global economy has defined capital as powerful, labor as weak, and thus has made invisible many things which actually happen. Critic: So the point of your discourse analysis is not to define a different causal mechanism (different from the mechanism of accumulation) which can be expected to regularly produce similar results. The point is not to claim that the cases you cite are typical, or even numerous. The point is not to identify the objective conditions under which labor's chances of winning improve. The great advantage of your poststructuralist postmarxism is, rather, that victims of oppression who accept your approach see more possibilities and have more confidence. Your theory is like a pep talk. Don't just assume that capital can move production wherever it wants! Don't just assume that it is impractical for labor to organize multinationally! Look at X! Look at Y! They had courage, fought back, and won! Gibson-Graham: "Pep talk" is a shallow way to describe what I do. A better way to describe the process of encouraging people to try what Paulo Freire called the "untested feasibility" is to think in terms of changing scripts. "The global economy" is not just a false generalization. It is a script, like the script for a play or a motion picture. It defines the roles of the actors. My book is an attempt to rewrite the script, so that people will transgress the present rules, and act in (now) non-standard ways, which will eventually lead to new standard ways, new scripts. Critic: Do the non-standard transgressions exercise power that people really have, but which the hegemonic script of the capitalist global economy leads them to believe they do not have? Gibson-Graham: I will answer with an example. I compare the rape script to the global economy script. (pp. 120-144) There is a standard script about men raping women, in which the role of women is defined as passive, powerless; the woman is a victim who lets herself be raped in order to save her life. By analogy, a similar script governs the rape of the third world by the MNC's (Multinational Corporations). Critic: Before we discuss the analogy, tell me why you know that rape is governed by a rape script. Have you interviewed a significant sample of rapists and rape victims and coded the interview data? Gibson-Graham: I borrow the "rape script" concept from other feminist writers. It is a concept that rings true to me, but not because there is a lot of empirical data verifying hypotheses about it. It rings true because it is an accurate interpretation of meanings that prevail in our culture. I think the "rape script" concept rings true to my readers for the same reason. We are all participating members of our culture, and we all know that "man" is defined as "strong," while "woman" is defined as "weak." Critic: You cite an example of a woman who refused to play the role assigned to her by the rape script. She grabbed the penis of her would-be rapist while he was hitting her head. He lost his erection and ran away. (p. 129) Gibson-Graham: Similarly, there is a prevailing script which defines MNC's as strong and third world people as weak. Critic: Is the implication that if people in the third world --or poor people generally-- would follow a different script, then they would be powerful? Gibson-Graham: I don't want to be backed into a position where I am obliged to defend the absurd thesis that all victims are more powerful than they think they are. Some victims are less powerful than they think they are. My point is that certain essentialist scripts define roles in which people are defined as powerless regardless of the facts; the script itself has performative force --it makes people less powerful than they otherwise would be. I shall conclude and stop now, my talk with Gibson-Graham. My imaginary speculations about what she would say, have been, I hope, not distant from her thought. Speaking now just for myself, I find, and I think the imaginary dialogue above illustrates, that J. K. Gibson-Graham, and poststructuralists generally, have an awkward relationship to the ancient question, "Why?" "Why do things happen as they do?" Their awkwardness is due to rejecting mainstream and Marxist paradigms of scientific inquiry, without sufficiently developing new (or reviving old) ways to answer "Why?" questions. (I have said above that the idea of "overdetermination" is, when applied to conscious waking social life, not so much a way to answer the question "Why?" as a way to justify not answering it. I will later suggest that ideas like "constitutivity," "script," and "performative performance" are more promising.) Their diagnoses and prescriptions necessarily seem haphazard as long as their allusions to the sources of problems, and their grounds for believing that the conceptual reforms and the courses of action they advocate will solve problems, remain inchoate. Aristotle thought that there were four archai, four main types of principle or cause, four main ways to respond to the question "Why?"
By the time Louis Althusser and the post-structuralists took up the critical examination of science, Aristotle had become identified with traditions that were erroneous and undesirable. The idea of final cause was thought to falsely attribute human purposes to nature. The idea of formal cause was thought (quite rightly) to confer the status of natural facts on social conventions by treating accepted definitions as hallmarks of true being; thus being-as-form favored aristocracy, divinity, and masculine privilege. Although efficient causes were what mechanistic science was all about, the "impacts," "forces," "impressions," "effects," and "variables" to which it attributed (efficient) causal efficacy and/or explanatory significance were not the sorts of sources of movement that Aristotle had in mind. Gibson-Graham cannot be expected to sympathize with a traditional anti-democratic worldview. As an anti-essentialist, she cannot be expected to sympathize with Aristotle's treatment of social conventions as if they were natural essences. She might, however, have some sympathy with regarding human action as praxis, and as a paradigm for explanation. Aristotle's vase-maker is not making a revolution, but at least he is making something. "`Cause' means ...the form or pattern ... [and that] from which the change or the resting from change first begins, e.g. the adviser is a cause of the action, and the father a cause of the child, and in general the maker a cause of the thing made, and the change- producing of the changing.... `Beginning' means ...that from which change naturally first begins, as a child comes from its father and its mother, and a fight from abusive language ... that at whose will that which is moved is moved, and that which changes changes, e.g. the magistracies in cities, and oligarchies and monarchies and tyrannies are called archai, and so are the arts... for all causes are beginnings." 2500 years ago, in his primitive, patriarchal, and naive way, Aristotle expressed some observations about why things happen the way they do that are in accord with Gibson-Graham's desire to encourage victims to become activists, and not to be misled and discouraged by mechanistic causal models. Any number of contemporary approaches to social science are reviving Aristotelian notions of deliberate human action, praxis. Once again, a human choice is a source of movement that explains an action. Formal causes, the patterns and implicit definitions built into language and accepted by common sense as the framework of action in everyday life, have returned as (for example) constitutive rules, institutional facts, symbolic interaction, dramaturgic social analysis, emic viewpoints, plans, performatives, phenomenology, language-games, scripts, ethnomethodology, act/action structures, and cognitive structures.... Meanings are causes. Again. Gibson-Graham is among the social scientists who offer explanations in terms of causes Aristotle would have classified as formal. (Or as efficient in a sense later centuries deleted from the idea of efficient cause-- as when he takes a human decision to be a source of movement; for example when a raid triggers a decision to go to war. For example: in The End of Capitalism a woman's submission to rape is explained by a rape script which defines her as powerless. However, Gibson-Graham is not mainly in dialogue with Martha Nussbaum, Alasdair MacIntyre or any contemporary neo-Aristotelian; she is not mainly in dialogue with Milton Friedman or any mainstream positivist economist; she is not mainly in dialogue with Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Rom Harre, or any social scientist influenced by recent mainstream Anglo-American analytic philosophy. She is mainly in dialogue with other feminists, with Althusserians and with Marxist political economists. She stands in a tradition shaped by Marx, and for that reason encounters a special conceptual impediment standing in the way of accepting a neo-Aristotelian model of human action. Marx begins Capital by writing that he is about to analyze, "that form of society where wealth appears as a vast collection of commodities." ("Commodities" is Waren in the original German; in the cognate English it would be "wares," things offered for sale.) Already in his first sentence Marx telegraphs the structure of his discourse. Capitalist common sense is an intrinsically illusory discourse. Wealth only appears as commodities; it appears in what Marx later calls commodity-form. But the commodity-form is not, for Marx, what Aristotle would have called a formal cause; for Marx commodity-form, i.e. exchange, is not the pattern of what truly is and not the source of movement; it is an illusion masking the deeper reality. The real essence of the commodity is not found on the surface of society; its essence is the quantity of labor embodied in it, its value. Marx's analysis asserts that as long as we remain at the formal level, at the level of circulation, we will never understand capitalism. Capitalism is essentially something that happens beneath the surface, at the level of production, where workers are exploited and surplus value is produced. For this reason anti-essentialist left intellectuals can regard themselves as remaining within the Marxist tradition only with great difficulty. Anti-essentialism cannot follow Marx in his move from surface to depth, from circulation to production, from formal appearance to material essence. If anti-essentialist left intellectuals would take just one more step --and I am not saying that they will-- they could undo not only Marx's demotion of circulation to the level of mere appearance, but also undo modernity's (e.g. Descartes', Locke's....) demotion of appearance to mere secondary qualities. They sometimes take this step in practice, e.g. in Gibson-Graham's recognition that the rape script has causal powers. Culture shapes vision so that one person appears as (is) the powerful man and another appears as (is) the weak woman. Meanings are causes. Perhaps they would consider recognizing in theory that what Marx called the "commodity-form," i.e. the meanings at work in the ritual of exchange, functions as an explanatory principle, a cause. It would follow that there really is a capitalist global economy. If one is accustomed, coming out of a Marxist tradition, to define capitalism in terms of the production relationships between owners and workers, then the variety of production relationships in the world might lead one to be more impressed by the differences than by the similarities, and to insist that there is no worldwide capitalism, only many capitalisms alongside many noncapitalist forms. If, however, one recognizes that Aristotle was not entirely wrong to attribute being to forms; then money, accounts, debts, investments, wares offered for sale, exchange relationships, markets ... everything that "appears" at the level of circulation, is among the "things that are." The global market, the commonality worldwide of the use of money, does not constitute a universal truth valid in every place and in every respect, but it does constitute a major feature of the world we live in. It is justifiable to say of the capitalist world economy that it has being, it exists --even if this means that "capitalism" is not defined in any way that Marx would have defined it. However, it does not follow that we are all powerless victims of a monolithic system governed by inexorable laws. If (pace Aristotle, and in agreement with Gibson-Graham) we see forms as (or mainly as) social constructions; then it follows that the capitalist global economy has been socially constructed. It can be socially reconstructed. 8.
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