Metastasis and retroactive causality in incentive rhetoric

ABSTRACT

Our contemporary moment is characterized by the pervasiveness of economics in social life, and the extension of “incentives” into new areas represents this movement’s keystone. Originally a fairly narrow term from neoclassical economic theory, politicians, journalists, and cultural figures deploy “incentives” to explain all manner of activity: judicial rulings, gendered wage gaps, and even whether soccer players score penalty kicks. To address this, I elucidate the trope of metastasis – the rhetorical mechanism by which social life is “economized.” Metastasis entails a figurative displacement, wherein cause shifts from one place to another. More than simply a spread of narrow economic ideas into culture, incentive rhetoric metastasizes. It displaces alternative explanations onto neoclassical market axioms. Since its proponents insist that incentives are causal mechanisms, I introduce Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of Aristotle’s discourse on causality. Lacan rereads Aristotle’s “final cause” from a rhetorical perspective, and forwards the retroactive causality of the symbolic order. Incentive rhetoric exemplifies this concept, in which all outcomes are explained as having been caused by a prior, unseen market force. Incentive rhetorics promise a universal code that unlocks the mysteries of human behavior that reduces all context to discrete individual choices, thereby providing a discursive alibi for economic inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalysis
• rhetoric of economics
• inequality
• rhetoric of trope
• economic culture

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editor Mary Stuckey, the anonymous reviewers, and all those involved in the editorial process for their invaluable contributions to the work.

Notes on contributor

Robert McDonald is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. A version of this essay comprised one chapter of a dissertation completed in August 2016 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, under the direction of Dr. Christian O. Lundberg.

Notes

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79. Chiappori et al., “Testing Mixed-Strategy Equilibria,” 1150. These simplifications nullify the analysis’ predictive value: predictive models are ultimately self-defeating according to received economic theory, since markets resettle at new equilibria once new information enters the system. Once shooters habitually kick down the middle, rational keepers will remain still and swat away the ball until behavior changes.

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81. The authors also transpose the data from professional club football onto the World Cup, played by national teams, with no reference to the relevant motivational differences. In fact, nationalism may provide a more robust “incentive” for certain actions over professional pride.

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