Economic Rhetoric as Taxis

Abstract

This essay expands the rhetoric of economics conversation started by economist Deirdre McCloskey. Through a close engagement with Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1979, concerning the dual problematics of liberalism and biopolitics, we argue for theorizing economic rhetoric as a governmental problem of order, or taxis, which arranges value among divergent subjects beyond the dichotomies of material/cultural and global/local. This approach toward rhetoric, we further contend, takes as its strategic form what Foucault and Agamben have called a dispositif. We demonstrate this premise through a case study of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's notion of freakonomics, suggesting that it can be understood as a rhetorical dispositif working within the broader political rationality of neoliberal governmentality. We end by gesturing toward a rhetoric of the common as an alternative to the dispositif of freakonomics.

KEYWORDS:

• rhetoric of economics
• biopolitics
• agency
• freakonomics
• neoliberalism

Notes

1. On POROI, see John S. Nelson and Allan Megill's (1986) essay ‘Rhetoric of Inquiry: Projects and Prospects.’

2. For a discussion of constitutive rhetoric, see Maurice Charland (1987) and Greene (1998). While Greene appreciates Charland's model of rhetorical effectivity, he is suspicious of its paradoxical positioning of the speaking subject outside of historical and ideological influence. It is this materialist paradox that Greene, with his emphasis on apparatus, attempts to escape.

3. Aune's take on Marxism is illustrated in greater detail in his earlier book Rhetoric and Marxism (1994). Without addressing this earlier work explicitly, Aune's orientation toward Marxism remains consistent in his later project Selling the Free Market (2001).

4. This is true as well of rhetorician Dana Cloud's (1994, 2001, 2011) work on economics. In fact, she may be the flip side of McCloskey in that she sees capitalism to cause economic devastation for many while McCloskey views capitalism as the cause of economic prosperity.

5. On the concept of technologies of public persuasion, see Gaonkar and Povinelli (2003).

6. Foucault's early interest in political economy stems, at least in part, from the close intellectual relationship he shared with his mentor, the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser. For further discussion of Foucault's relationship to Marxism, see Foucault's Remarks on Marx (1991), Étienne Balibar's ‘Foucault and Marx: The Question of Nominalism’ (1992), and Warren Montag's (1995) ‘The Soul is the Prison of the Body.’

7. Thomas Lemke (2012) defines political rationality as ‘a discursive field in which exercising power is “rationalized”’ (p. 86). While, for us, political rationalities and dispositifs are crucially intertwined, the two are not mutually substitutable with one another as one is a rationality and the other is a mode of power distribution.

8. For a discussion of this expanded ontological notion of rhetoric, see Bender and Wellbery (1990), Schiappa (2001), and Rickert (2013).

9. In tracing this intellectual trajectory, it is important to note that a single lecture on biopower and governmentality was circulating for over a decade before the full course of lectures was made available in book form. A February 1978 lecture was transcribed and translated into Italian. It was then translated into English as ‘Governmentality’ and included in Graham Burchell, Collin Gordon, and Peter Miller's The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991). Thus, scholars engaged the concepts of governmentality and biopower for sometime without full knowledge of how Foucault theorized the two concepts.

10. To be clear, the lecture distinguishes among sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower. While each form of power comes into history at a particular moment, none simply supersedes or replaces the other. Rather, they complement each other, complicating the practices and purposes of power relations as history progresses. Agamben (1995, 2011) makes the inseparability of these three types of power even more explicit.

11. This parallels Goodnight and Green's (2010) argument that rhetoric is an act of mimesis that recursively produces order (the singular) out of multiple differences.

12. Bitzer (1968), for example, defines rhetorical situation as a pragmatic response to an exigency and Chaput (2010) redefines this within neoliberal circulation. This attention to concrete, historically contingent situations is likely why Foucault is often understood as a functionalist (see Brenner 1994). However, it should be stressed that this description of the dispositif clearly aligns more with a rhetorical logic of practical reasoning than with a philosophical emphasis on the discovery of truth (see Farrell 1993; Greene 1998).

13. Foucault (2008) connects this call for a neoliberal utopia to Hayek, describing it as a ‘fairly free reformulation of Hayek's reflections in his post-script to The Constitution of Liberty’ (p. 234, n11). Certainly, Hayek calls for a more robust representation of his philosophy in this postscript. But elsewhere he explicitly calls for a utopia. Earlier, in his 1949 ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism,’ Hayek (2005) calls for ‘a liberal Utopia’ through the creation and circulation of sound bites capable of encapsulating the complex concepts of neoliberalism (p. 128).

14. Foucault discusses Gary Becker throughout much of his 14 March 1979 lecture in Birth of Biopolitics. For a more conservative reflection on that chapter and Foucault's interpretation of Becker, see ‘Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker et al. (2012).’

15. Although Levitt and Dubner are listed as coauthors of the two books referenced in our analysis, we parenthetically cite only Levitt because he is the trained economist responsible for the content of the books.