An Irrationally Exuberant Decade of Postmodern Moments: Response to Bergeron, Kayatekin, McCloskey, and Watkins

Abstract

In our response to Suzanne Bergeron, Serap Kayatekin, Deirdre McCloskey, and Evan Watkins, we recognize their appreciation of our uncovering and interpreting “postmodern moments” in modern economics. These moments—for example, the decentered body in late neoclassical economics—bring forth concepts that are at odds with the modernist conception of rational economic subjects. The commentators agree with our interest in pluralizing and democratizing the academic discipline of economics, which failed so miserably in predicting or even understanding the worldwide crash from 2007 until the present. Some commentators, though, find fault with what they perceive as an absence of discussion of the “politics” of postmodern moments. We respond by explaining our main interest was to affect the economics discipline and the “everyday” economics that is mostly outside academia. Our book can be used pedagogically to inform struggles against modernist hierarchies and rules that function to silence Marxists, among others, wherever “economics” is spoken.

Keywords:

• Postmodernism
• Uncertainty
• Marxism
• Modern Economics

Acknowledgements

We owe a very large debt to Suzanne Bergeron for organizing the session on our book that has turned into this symposium. We are also thankful to Ceren Özselçuk for working with Suzanne in getting the papers from all the commentators to be part of the symposium. We are truly grateful to Yahya Madra, who also joined forces with Ceren to prod us in order to get this paper out of our hands. And finally, we are indebted to RM's editor, S. Charusheela, for her patience, her willingness to juggle contents and schedules, and her support for our efforts.

Notes

¹“Irrational exuberance” is a term supposedly coined by the economist Robert Shiller in his attempt to explain the psychological mind-set of investors in causing the various bubbles in housing, stocks, financial assets, and so on that had been dangerously inflating before bursting either before (housing) or during (everything else) the official “crash” leading to the so-called Great Recession. Shiller and his coauthor, Nobel winner and eclectic thinker George Akerlof, wrote a best-selling book (Akerlof and Shiller 2009), which was published even while the financial crash was still reverberating, in which they connected the idea of irrational exuberant behavior to the earlier idea of “animal spirits,” put forward by Keynes as his characterization of how private investors—entrepreneurs, financiers, and “rentiers”—in a market capitalist economy would regularly set aside “rationality” in the face of promising but risky speculative situations in order to act, just act (or not). And animal spirits, emotions, and other deep psychological reactions and instincts, revised as “irrational exuberance,” once again, are thought by Akerlof and Shiller to have driven the upside of the financial bubble that then burst, disastrously, bringing both asset values, and exuberance, back down to a supposedly more rational and unexuberant world. See also the review of their book by Louis Uchitelle (2009).

²Our “pluralism” can be compared with other monographs during the past decade that likewise acknowledge and largely encourage pluralism in contemporary economics, including Fullbrook (2008), Reardon (2008), Groenewegen (2007), and Maier and Nelson (2007).

³For comparison's sake, readers may wish to juxtapose the comments from Bergeron et al. with those from the contributors to a different symposium on our book that appeared in the Review of Social Economy in June 2007. The symposium was titled “Postmodernism, the Subject, and Economic Discourse,” with contributions from economists Gillian Hewitson, Miriam Teschl, John B. Davis, William Milberg, and ourselves.

⁴The Harvard Students are coming after quite a decade of uprising on the part of the world's economic students. Indeed, throughout the past decade or longer, students across the globe have challenged the way economics is taught. Perhaps the most famous episode was initiated by a small group of French students who circulated a petition in June 2000 criticizing the “autistic science” and calling for the reform of their economics curriculum. It was followed by similar petitions from students at Cambridge University in England (in June 2001), students from seventeen countries who had gathered in Kansas City (in August 2001), and at Harvard University (in March 2003). Thus was born the Post-Autistic Economics Movement. Edward Fullbrook (2003) presents the early history of that movement. He edits its newsletter, which began as the Post-Autistic Economics Review and is now called the Real-World Economics Review. In April 2008, undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame joined the movement and posted an on-line petition in which they criticized their “one-sided education” and called for “diversifying the education in the field of economics.” The petition is located at http://openeconomics.blogspot.com/ (accessed 6 March 2009). Two of the students involved in that initiative, Sean Mallin and Nick Krafft, taught their own course on “alternative approaches to the firm” at Notre Dame. Mallin (forthcoming) discusses the ideas that served as the basis for the course.

⁵We cannot overstate the influence that the brief letter of Marx to Arnold Ruge in 1844, known as “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing” (in Tucker 1978), has had on our thinking throughout our careers and in the preparation of this book. There is no doubt that we were finely trained by our graduate school mentors and erstwhile coauthors Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff to approach Marx with the sharpest of critical knives and the softest of touches as well. We know that they, too, have always been under the sway, as have many Marxists, of Marx's earliest command to question everything, but always from someplace, from right here, right now. Nowhere is this idea better summed up than in Marx's stirring letter.

⁶We have been genuinely inspired by the work of our friend and colleague Maliha Safri, who moves with both great fluidity and determined sense of purpose between her roles as a college professor and as a participant and key contributor to the strikingly eloquent and theoretically opulent economic analysis that has come from Occupy Wall Street. In addition to teaching political economy every weekend, she wrote (see Safri 2011) what we regard as one of the more instructive and brilliant accounts of the kinds of economic processes and positions that were created and recreated each day of the earliest occupation in New York's Zuccotti Park. It is a model of how the academic and everyday can help to productively infuse rather than repel each other in creating new economic ideas and forms of representation. Closer to home, Ruccio (in the opinion of Amariglio), with his blog entitled “Occasional Links & Commentary,” is knocking out day after day some of the most ennobling and also invaluable “everyday” writing on the ongoing worldwide economic crisis, among many other topics. If not the Nobel, maybe the Pulitzer (asks Amariglio)? And Rick Wolff's weekly WBAI “Economic Update” show? We could go on at great length acknowledging the spate of rousing and original theoretical work heavily indebted to Marxism that has been stimulated by and situated within the realm of “everyday” economics in the post-crisis period.

⁷Please see Ruccio's “Introduction: What are economic representations and what's at stake” in his edited collection, Economic Representations (2008) and Amariglio's 2009 essay about “tracing” notions of economic value in modern art in a complementary coedited collection, Sublime Economy (Amariglio, Childers, and Cullenberg 2009).

⁸Clearly, the assumption of a postmodern—flattened, fragmented, contradictory—conception of the body does not suffice for Marxian theory (or, for that matter, within feminist or any other heterodox economic approach). Marxists would certainly also want to consider the roles of labor and exploitation as key features of the body. Our rather simple point is that, if Marxists decided to build on a more postmodern conception of the body, it would be possible to move away from the depth register of homo faber and begin to theorize the ways in which the body is the site, and not the origin, of the class (and, for that matter, nonclass) dimensions of society. Different bodies would, for example, be marked by the injuries and punishments of performing labor and being exploited—and marked, as well, by participation in the collective performance and appropriation of surplus labor. But there would also be other corporeal capacities and connections, including those associated with desire, sexuality, gender, race, nationality, and much else that play a role in the overdetermination of use value, abstract labor, commodity fetishism, and other key categories of Marxian value theory. Some intriguing suggestions of how Marxism can complicate its notion(s) of subjectivity and laboring bodies can be found in Kayatekin and Charusheela (2004) and Kayatekin (2004). The latter essay is especially noteworthy for introducing the idea of an “ambivalent” subjectivity, which is very much the kind of uncertainty we welcome at the core of Marxism. Finally, a different corporeality and subjective determination is the result of the decade-long, riveting Lacanian reading given to Marx by Yahya Mete Madra and Ceren Özselçuk (see Madra and Özselçuk 2010).