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Thursday, July 12, 2007
That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity
This is a follow-up to my previous post, responding to Mark Bauerlein’s proposal of an ‘anti-progressive’ syllabus. (Plus I haven’t written anything really holbonic for a while; here goes.)
Mark is a friend, but I find it hard to enter into the spirit of the proposal. Take, for example, his claim (in comments) that ‘triumphalism about the 60’s needs to be combated’, and the likes of Irving Kristol and David Horowitz will be helpful in this regard. My problem is: ‘triumphalism over the 60’s’ – i.e. the notion that one can safely mock and ignore the ‘damn dirty hippies’ – is a far more pressing concern, in political culture generally. Worrying about left dominance in academia is not quite rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—but I would feel better about Mark’s proposal if I were reassured that it incorporated a broader view: on the one hand, academic humanists are still not taking Irving Kristol seriously, even after all these years; on the other hand, outside academia, Bill Kristol is taken seriously, even after all these years. These two facts are not unrelated (although of course the relationship is complex.) Anyway, if you want a balanced intellectual ecology, you have to consider a broader ecosystem than just academia.
This isn’t a wind-up to some hypothetical horse-trading (we’ll let you have two anti-progressives on the syllabus if we can have one progressive on the teevee) but a precondition for analysis. The admittedly peculiar political situation in the humanities (I admit it’s peculiar) cannot be addressed in isolation because what goes on inside has to do with what goes one outside. (Indeed, this is Mark’s own point.) Let me quote myself, from comments:
It is obvious why anti-progressives (broadly speaking) will favor an anti-progressive syllabus. They find these opinions valuable because they think they are right (broadly speaking).
But why should progressives, who think these writings are not only wrong (broadly speaking), but also unduly influential in the public sphere, feel obliged to make significant room for them in the classroom? There are a couple ways for Mark to push his point against this very understandable resistance, and it makes a bit of difference which he picks (or how he mixes and matches possible lines). Mark B. should work harder to find some thing that ‘progressives’ (academics, anyway) already believe (and which Mark B. himself believes) - some commitment concerning the character of the liberal arts, some principle of tolerance, of pluralism, some principle of quality control - that implies the need for this thing.
It isn’t enough say that triumphalism about the sixties needs to be combated, because (as the laywers say) this presumes facts not in evidence.
If the purpose of including the anti-progressive stuff is to provide variety - to avoid ‘deadening uniformity’ - yet it isn’t an exercise in ‘ideological balancing’, exactly what IS it? What is the principle according to which the variety is cultivated, for its own sake, that isn’t some sort of principle of balance?
That note of skepticism struck, I do think there is something to the view that these deck chairs are in disarray and—since arranging them is sort of our professional duty, and perhaps the political ship won’t sink after all—we might as well tidy them. Mark’s proposals are, up to a point, sensible in this regard.
Rather than persist with the list game, however, let me take one example which is really picture-perfect for Mark’s purposes: 1) A typical enough academic paper, prominently published, not cherry-picked for its horror value. 2) It might have been a good paper. It’s an interesting topic, and the paper has genuine bright-spots. 3) In the end it is sunk by just the sorts of problems Mark sees. So Mark is right. (Up to a point.) 4) I just noticed that a draft (PDF) is available online. So we can read it together and discuss.
The paper is Bruce Robbins’ “Commodity Histories”, which appeared in PMLA (120:2, 2005, pp. 454-463). (It’s convenient to cut&paste from the draft, so I shall, but I have also read the paper. I think the draft is close enough for blog work.)
One striking characteristic of commodity histories, a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular non-fiction, is a certain overkill in their subtitles. A representative sample might include, say, Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance; Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization; The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World; The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug; Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World; and Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World. Only slightly less over-the- top than the “changed the world” clause, which also appears in recent histories of vanilla, house cats, ping pong balls, dishwashing liquid, and pocket lint, is the vogue for two-word titles in which an adjective, usually a commodity-identifying color, is paired with the most coveted of precious metals. Some examples are Blue Gold (water), White Gold (rubber), Black Gold (oil), and Green Gold (tea and marijuana). Such titles suggest that all of these commodities, even the humblest, have the power to get continents discovered, dynasties toppled, mountains moved. We take some of these commodities for granted, but all of them have changed the world.
Fine topic, brisk first paragraph.
But then:
Changing the world in the strong sense that Marx contrasted with merely interpreting it – changing the configuration of class and global power–is arguably more demanding than the invention of a new flavor or cleansing fluid, impressive as those accomplishments are.
We are off on the wrong foot. Obviously it is ‘arguable’ that inventing a new detergent could be less demanding/consequential than starting a Marxist revolution. The whole point of writing a book, arguing that cod/coffee/mauve ‘changed the world’, is that one might reasonably have supposed otherwise. Now maybe Robbins is just lightly ironizing over these over-the-top titles, but it seems to me that, early and often, he drops rather heavy hints that there is something blinkered about them. But—so I will argue—he never backs it up. He implies that there is something wrong with the ideas in these books, but he never engages with them.
What Robbins does, officially, is compare and contrast ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ commodity histories. He concludes—with qualification—that the ‘academic’ ones tend to better, more critical, more penetrating. To be fair, he gets in some solid cracks against the academics. He contrasts Zuckerman’s ‘popular’ history of the potato with a Gallagher and Greenblatt paper (“The Potato in the Materialist Imagination”) which stops suspiciously short, at a certain stage, “as if to freeze culture artificially in a moment of its pure and heroic self-expression,” i.e. the authors omit to mention that eventually people learned to eat the stuff.
Lest my criticisms get heavy handed, Robbins piece isn’t long, nor heavy-duty; he mentions dozens of titles, and manages to execute a decent, high-elevation pass. It’s a review piece. Apart from the unclarities I am about to allege, it is clear, lively, decently informative.
But I see serious problems. A long passage exemplifies them:
These books [the popular ones] do not merely take the existence of global capitalism for granted. They also tend to make a forceful argument on capitalism’s behalf. One central story line might be described as commodity democratization. You begin with a commodity like chocolate or coffee or tobacco which, when first imported into Europe, was restricted to courtly or aristocratic circles either by its price and scarcity or because it was blocked in its circulation by other antiquated and elitist vestiges of traditional society. Then you tell the story of how this protagonist, usually an underdog though also touched with a mysterious hint of natural distinction, managed to spread across the social spectrum, dropping dramatically in price as taxes and prohibitions were lifted and becoming triumphantly accessible to the eager masses. In a recent history of chocolate, for example, the trajectory leads from the first chapter title, “The Tree of the Food of the Gods,” to the last chapter title, “Chocolate for the Masses.” The villains of this narrative, numerous and colorful though also bumbling and ineffectual, are the kings, priests, moralists, and would-be experts who declaimed quaintly against the new products, whether in the name of loyalty to national tradition (beer or wine against coffee or tea) or fiscal greed or perhaps warning of dire effects on public health and apocalyptic scenarios of moral chaos to follow. But with rare national exceptions, these enemies of the consumer are always vanquished. The commodity always arrives at its proper, mass destination. This is capitalist propaganda of a very effective kind.
The problem is that this is some fine literary criticism. I hadn’t noticed it before but, yes, Robbins is right: these books are all structured like romances. Rather suspicious, that. He goes on to discuss this aspect of the books consistently well.
But he can’t do anything intellectually substantive with this worthy, rhetorical insight, largely because those first two sentences sink the conversation. “These books do not merely take the existence of global capitalism for granted.” Well, of course they do. It exists. “They also tend to make a forceful argument on capitalism’s behalf.” Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
‘Tends to make a forceful argument,’ as one might say, ‘tends to make a forceful smell, after the third day.’ Robbins clearly means this to be a prima facie serious objection, and expects his readers to regard it as such. And, of course, Robbins is entitled to his opinion; is likewise entitled to assume his readership will share it. But if we are going to rest the case on this point, and in effect he does, then Robbins’ article ought, by rights, to be a good deal shorter.
From the fact that the ‘popular’ commodity histories reach wrong conclusions, whereas ‘academic’ ones reach more correct ones, we can deduce that the academic works are more perceptive and critical, one the whole. Done. Obviously the elephant in the room is the set of ethical and/or economic assumptions you are prepared to make. Robbins never really talks about the elephant.
Reading on:
What a wondrous system this is, you are told, that has brought to your doorstep or breakfast table all these things you never would have known existed, yet things without which you would not, you suddenly realize, be yourself. With so much resistance to overcome from superstitious, self-interested, and intrusive authorities, you must be grateful that the commodity, or the system for which it stands, had an intrinsic power to overcome all obstacles of distance and dogma.
Again, are we just assuming the system by which all these things are brought to your doorstep/table is in no sense ‘wondrous’ (no reasonable person could regard it as such?)—because it is market-based? Either we are assuming this, and very strongly, which clearly begs the question against the views held by many of these ‘popular’ authors, not to mention many professional economists, not to mention many people. Or we are not assuming it, in which case: what is the objection supposed to be? Have these authors made some intellectual error? Is it economic? Or is it moral? A bit of both. (Clearly Robbins is objecting to something.)
Putting the point another way: Robbins offers sharp rhetorical analysis, but he can’t possibly be arguing from the fact that these books have a characteristic rhetorical shapes to the conclusion that their economic/moral outlooks must be flawed. That would be absurd. But then: what is his argument?
Now, more nice bits (but troubled):
The vanquishing of resistance to the commodity, which is the essential event in most of these narratives (even oil had to overcome entrenched loyalty to coal), is made comprehensible by the channeling of the system’s enormous scope and power into a personification. In effect, each commodity takes its turn as the star of capitalism’s story. One chapter title speaks for many: “Chocolate Conquers Europe.” Over and over, Europe is invaded, penetrated, conquered, rescued, seduced, and dominated. Actual scenes of seduction, a “first time” from which there is no going back, repeatedly accompany the birth of European desire, that is, the birth of demand. However jokingly, the authors attribute to their chosen commodities an exaggerated, mysterious, almost god-like power.
Ah, but if they attribute it jokingly enough—and why should we doubt that they do?— the authors are not attributing mysterious, god-like power. Rather, they are counting on the reader to recognize that their true subject is the way the market works, or what people are like, something human. The subject of these books is, obviously, people not potatoes. (Still, it’s true—and well put—the seduction bits, I mean. Brilliant, really.)
Rather than presenting the commodity as a self-sufficient protagonist, academic narratives largely focus on the concealed social relations behind it.
But this is absurd. Obviously this is what the popular books do, too. Framing the commodity as a protagonist is a rhetorical device. All of these books—academic and popular—are analyses of human relations. No one could seriously suppose that, for example, cod—as opposed to the people who caught, bought, sold, ate, salted, cod—changed the world in the ways this book argues.
Skipping ahead:
And yet this antithesis between academic and popular versions doesn’t quite work. For one thing, re-attaching the lives of the producers to the commodity they produce is by no means a guarantee that the commodity will be either criticized or shorn of its power.
There are two problems here: again, just because the commodity is personified, rhetorically, it doesn’t follow the ‘popular’ histories have made any intellectual error. (If Robbins has evidence they are naïve, he should indicate where they go wrong, besides having a somewhat cute rhetorical frame.) More seriously, notice how strong the assumption here is that commodity histories should criticize markets—indeed, that they have some duty to make commodities seem unappealing But why exactly is it right to make such a blanket ethical demand? Again, Robbins is perfectly entitled to his opinion. But if he is just going to stand on it, not argue for it by addressing those who clearly do not share it—not even really say what the ethical assumption is—there isn’t going to be a critical engagement.
At a number of points Robbins faults these authors for not exhibiting more awareness that government regulation/political activism could make markets work differently than they do. But this objection appears empty because, in a sense, it is obvious. Of course things could have gone differently, but mostly history writing is concerned with the way things did go. Robbins writes as if popular commodity history authors have been shirking their self-evident duty to get their backs into it, advocating on behalf of his favored political/economic solutions. Well, what are they? And what is so good about them? Robbins does not say.
Let me pause in my critique to make a general point about these books—of which I have read quite a few. How do they work?
Have you read Faraday’s classic of popular science, The Chemical History of a Candle? (Well, you might consider doing so..)
There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.
What is he, some sort of candle fetishist?
There is showmanship in Faraday’s approach—flourishing a single candle throughout an entire lecture series is a rhetorical device. But it also has a point. On the one hand, it is an exercise in making an ordinary object fascinating in its own right, in its uniqueness. It is good to see how narrow focus can therefore be rewarding. (And again, there is showmanship: I, the storyteller, promise to fascinate you concerning an everyday item.) But mostly it is an exercise in interconnection: universe in a grain of sand. You show how everything is related—how it all works—by focusing on just one point. The fact that it is even possible to treat so many scientific themes so solidly, on such a slender material basis, is a strong argument for the deep interconnectedness of all elements of natural science. (Faraday’s candle is a ‘resonant fragment’, as Greenblatt might say. And, I would say, Faraday is much more rigorous and scrupulous about setting his fragment resonating than many a New Historicist.)
Faraday-fashion is how these commodity histories work—at least how they try to. On the one hand, mundane stuff is made fascinating (the authors show off their storytelling chops). On the other hand, the point isn’t really to set these specific items—cod, coffee, whatever—on a pedestal. The charm of these books is to argue that these items are extraordinary yet perfectly ordinary: extraordinary in their ordinariness. Because the human forces at work behind the scenes in these cases are exactly the same, in kind, as the human forces at work everywhere else, only somehow they are showing up more vividly, forcefully, in the selected case. Faraday is not arguing that candles are extraordinary but that science is. Commodity historians are not arguing that cod/coffee/potatoes are so extraordinary, but that people are—society, culture, markets, crowds. (And, of course, candles are nice, too, once you start to think about them. And cod and coffee. We can have it both ways.)
Robbins misses this. He doesn’t talk about it, anyway.
Next, here’s the passage that bothered me the most:
Yet the academic writers have no monopoly over piety toward culture and cultures. This is one of the oddest features of the popular histories: seemingly uncritical deference to universalizing materialist explanation often goes hand in hand with a degree of respect for non-Western customs that is not merely eccentric, but frankly heretical. “Prior to legislation against them,” Dominic Streatfeild writes in his history of cocaine, “it was common knowledge that coca and cocaine cured various ailments … Coca chewing keeps the Andes on the go the way coffee keeps the rest of the world on the go (6). There is nothing on which popular and academic writers are more likely to agree. James Mills notes that cannabis in India, which like tobacco was used by the natives as a hunger suppressant, was only criminalized when the British state, for economic motives, began to crack down on the Indian hemp trade. Jeffrey Knapp notes that while so-called “savages” were supposed to prefer worthless trinkets, in the case of Elizabethan tobacco “Indian tastes assume a kind of authority” (282).
On the evidence of these books, the authority of non-Western taste is one subject on which popular and academic opinion have converged. Instead of the civilizational self-flattery one might have expected, the commodity histories again and again offer occasions for an energetic relativizing of Western civilization. Streatfeild underlines the parallel between coca and tobacco: “Admittedly, the idea of putting dried leaves in your mouth and adding caustic compounds to break them down is kind of left-field, but then the Indians who came up with it are cousins of the jokers who decided it would be a neat idea to put dried leaves in their mouths and set fire to them. They have a history of slightly off-the wall uses for plants”(6). And he mocks those gringos who debark in South America demanding an end to coca chewing as comparable to a foreigner arriving in England and suggesting everyone stop drinking tea (7). You are made to feel the utter artificiality of, say, the line between substances like cannabis or cocaine that the West considers “criminal” and therefore requiring regulation, yet are incomprehensibly not seen as evil in the areas where they are grown, and substances like chocolate and coffee, which no one would ever consider criminalizing–but which have in fact been criminalized in the past, with many or most of the West’s religious and scientific authorities fully behind the criminalization.
As I’ve noted, the commodity histories devote much attention to these authorities, who are repeatedly shown to have had no clue about the genuine properties or social effects of what they were trying to prohibit or regulate. In this light, “Western culture” reveals itself as a pageant of human silliness. The other side of the wonderfully refreshing spectacle of self-anthropologization thus offered is a strong suggestion that nothing much has changed – that today’s efforts to keep nicotine out of the lungs of children, for example, are absolutely continuous with priestly warnings against coffee, government crackdowns on chocolate, the puritanism of earlier temperance and prohibition movements, or the nationalism behind conspicuous acts of non-consumption like the Boston Tea Party. Control, censorship, regulation: these targets appear so regularly as to seem, perhaps, the whole point of the exercise. By flattering consumer desire as true, anarchic democracy at the global scale, in other words, the narrative can be seen as inviting the reader-consumer to intervene on behalf of the commodity-protagonist (who is all the more irresistible for needing a bit of assistance) in an effort to overthrow regulation once and for all.
There’s interesting stuff here, but it’s hopelessly dragged down by the fact that Robbins thinks he has got a ‘gotcha’: conservatives (they must be, because they are capitalists) apologizing for recreational drug use. Ha! But all Robbins has done is discover libertarianism. He brandishes, as a surprising (almost heretical) result, a tension within political-economic thought on the American right that—in commodity terms—approximately a bazillion gallons of ink was spilled over, in the 60’s, in the pages of The National Review. Frank Meier, fusionist, trying to square the circle by combining Kirk with Hayek. Far from being a ‘wonderfully refreshing spectacle’, I think there is no more hoary topic, in past half century of American conservative thought, than the ways in which libertarianism sits very awkwardly, alongside social conservatism. (Not that it isn’t interesting. I think it is very interesting. But damn it’s old and ought to be familiar to anyone presuming to venture into this area.)
So Robbins has discovered, roughly, that Reason Magazine is not The National Review, that Virginia Postrel is not Bill Bennett—the Cato Institute not Focus on the Family. But he hasn’t discovered the difference at all clearly since, bizarrely, he is treating it as a new thing, bubbling out of these commodity books. Plus: libertarianism is not anti-Western. That is a misreading of the impulses behind the tendency to belittle the authority of Western political, social, cultural, religious authority figures. (If Robbins were to read Hayek’s “Why I am not a conservative” a lot of this could have gone more smoothly.)
Next comes a bit I won’t quote where Robbins discusses how, occasionally, popular commodity histories acknowledge, even focus on, market failure (the cod case, in which the fish are driven to the brink of extinction in a tragedy of the commons). This is fine. But Robbins then plunges headlong, broadly gesturing at the need for strong, statist positions he does not trouble to even to specify. So what are we supposed to think he’s thinking? The possibility of market failure proves that markets are … bad? This is obviously woefully vague, hence insufficient argument (which is probably why Robbins does not formulate it. But the lack of it leaves his heavy hints just hanging in the air.)
It is telling that Robbins writes, in a footnote: “For an explicit defense of commodity-based culture against government regulation, see Daniel.” Well, I haven’t read Daniel—apparently the author of a well-regarded history of Southern agriculture after the Civil War. But it strikes me as distinctly odd that Robbins doesn’t say, for example: see any standard economics textbook for some reasons why you might think markets are good (yes, even if you haven’t mistaken the market for a romance novel.)
The paper’s conclusion:
Popular commodity histories are interesting, among other reasons, as answers to the question of how much sense ordinary Americans are making of the US’s economic ties with the rest of the world. Hearing of bashed Toyotas and countries (rather than corporations) blamed for “stealing American jobs,” one is sometimes tempted to say: not much. The commodity histories offer a somewhat more encouraging picture. They offer a necessary impulse to cultural relativism, and at their best they counterbalance it with an equally necessary impulse to state regulation, thus helping to re-channel a national solidarity that might otherwise be painfully misdirected. Regulation also and increasingly exists of course at the trans-national scale, where national and trans-national loyalties can therefore mingle. More reliable support for regulation might have been expected from academic writing, which often exposes how consumer demand has been at least partially constructed by state policies and could thus be constructed differently. If such support has not always been forthcoming, one reason is perhaps a commitment to culture that could arguably be described, in the humanities at least, as fetishistic. How else to explain an instinctive anti-statism that translates legitimate demands for scrutiny and accountability into complaints about the extension of surveillance?
We are still getting the conflation of libertarian, individualistic, pro-market ‘wisdom of crowds’ impulses with academy-style cultural relativism. This massively miscalculates the intellectual vectors. But never mind that, there are worse problems. If it is really just obvious (no argument necessary) that the right answer is some indefinitely specified form of economic statism/increased regulation, favored by Bruce Robbins, then he should have said so at the start. If ‘instinctive anti-statism’, plus clearly unwarranted concerns about increased state power are the only possible intellectual grounds one could have for dissenting from Robbins’ views (which are, to repeat, apparently so self-evident that they don’t even need to be placed in evidence, i.e. stated) then this paper should have been much shorter, and written very differently.
On the other hand, if Robbins is not, in effect, taking his own self-evident ethico-economic authority as a premise, then this concluding paragraph is question-begging. For quite obvious reasons.
I say it again: the problem isn’t that Robbins is not entitled to be severely skeptical about, say, the effects of globalization on the Third World. The point is he is not taking sufficient account of the intellectual gulf between ‘academic’ and ‘popular’, in the case of these books, to achieve a critical engagement.
For example, he could have made explicit that he was going to assume a certain ethico-economic perspective, for discussion purposes—on the assumption that sufficient numbers of readers would share it—and then examined works by authors who do not share that view, critiquing them in terms of it. That would have been fine. But it isn’t what he did. Because, after all, if he had taken that line, it would have been obvious the conclusion at which he actually arrives is trivial: just a repackaging of the very thing that was assumed, for argument purposes.
Robbins isn’t making clear what these books stand for, isn’t taking seriously their ‘strategic depth’, intellectually. And he isn’t really making clear what he stands for either. And it’s interesting to ask why this happened. I think there are reasons, beyond the generic one that somehow the paper didn’t quite work out.
Now I will make points that are speculative but I hope substantially correct. It will, at any rate, help tie these criticisms back to Bauerlein’s proposal. Does Robbins really believe that there is nothing to be said for markets? I am sure he does not believe that. He’s not a flaming red communist but some kind of progressive, far-left liberal Democrat. I am sure he appreciates, for example, that not all mainstream professional economists are self-evidently mistaken about nearly every single thing they believe about their subject matter. (Since, after all, no mainstream economist seriously denies that there is a colorable argument that some markets might be good in some ways. Economics, as an academic discipline, is not one big exercise in mistaking the workings of a market for a romance novel. There is a bit more to it than that.)
But the thing is: even though Robbins wants to talk about economics, even though he surely grants there is something to be said for the power of markets (if he doesn’t, he’s a crank), he has no academic vocabulary he is comfortable with, for talking about the degree to which markets might be good (so we can say where they should stop, and regulation start). Indeed, so far is he from having any vocabulary for talking about this that when he runs smack into a vocabulary for talking about it—Hayekian bits, bubbling up in these books—he regards it as a novelty, a refreshing discovery, which he proceeds to misidentify as a primitive form of something he already knows, i.e. academic-style cultural relativism.
Robbins is personally not so anti-market as he comes off, in this piece. Nor is he Hayek in disguise, of course, but if he familiarized himself with the terms in which his opponents think, he would do a far better job of locating himself, relative to them. As it stands, he has a weird habit of either not locating himself at all (as though what he thinks is self-evidently the only possible position) or weirdly left of where he probably is (as though he is a radical communist, who sees every manifestation of market forces as suspect, every appeal of the market as a rhetorical trick). Adding this ‘either’ to this ‘or’ produces the weirdest effect of all: Robbins writes as if positions that are obviously quite radical are so self-evidently correct as to be not even worth mentioning—let alone defending.
Speaking of being unclear, I’m really not sure how to put my next point. Here goes. I suspect the unclarity in Robbins’ self-positioning is somewhat a function of his habituation to talk about politics and economics, for academic purposes, in terms of a set of writings that are theoretically ‘canonic’ in humanities departments (where A to Z means Adorno to Zizek, shall we say.) The thing about these writings is: they are clean off the left side of the American political discourse map. Not that this means they are wrong. But it does mean that, if you do want to talk about what is going on in American politics - or in popular economic histories, say - you need (at the very least) a new set of terms, to supplement those off-the-map ones. Otherwise you can’t so much as name what you are seeing: look, a libertarian! Possibly even worse: this A to Z is significantly to the left even of the attitudes of those who habitually use this very alphabet, i.e. your average English professor on the street, who is typically liberal but not that lefty. As a result, if you write in a certain academic style, it is rather perilously easy to misplace yourself, either by placing yourself unclearly, or by placing yourself too far to the left - with respect to your own beliefs.
Bauerlein complains that 60’s triumphalism needs counter-balancing. There is a grain of truth to this (so long as one keeps track of how, everywhere outside academe, we have the exact opposite problem). The sorts of writings academic humanists are in the habit of centering themselves on do have a weirdly ’68-centric center of ideological gravity—one that probably isn’t even shared by the humanists. This produces weird and frankly ineffective rhetorical effects.
Let me indicate a few major qualifications to this generalization that must be worked out, but I don’t have the time:
1) the ‘taking seriously’ relationship is key, for producing these gravitational fields. Humanists have to take a large mass of left-wing thought seriously, when they write about politics. If you fail to telegraph awareness of what (say) Foucault was on about, you risk not seeming ‘disciplinary’. If you fail to telegraph awareness of what Hayek was on about, you will not get in comparable trouble. This doesn’t entail any strict obligation to believe Foucault, or disbelief Hayek, but it produces an odd skew, oddly disproportionate expenditures of attention. Robbins is in the habit of looking to the left, but not right, before crossing the street. In this case, it turned out to be a two-way street and he got hit by a bus.
2) There is an ambiguity in Bauerlein’s proposal that academic humanists should, in effect, ‘norm’ themselves with respect to the political mainstream. There is a sense in which this is true: especially in a case like Robbins’, you have to be prepared to state where the mainstream is, what it is like, where you stand with respect to it. But it is misleading in another respect: you don’t have to move towards it, just because it exists. Bauerlein gets a bit of illicit leverage out of treating the conversation outside academia as a fixed point, in a normative sense.
3) It’s not necessarily the case that libertarians or conservative intellectuals are automatically more clued into what’s really going on in American politics than academic Foucauldians, in their seminar rooms. There’s the Republican party. There are all those think-tanks. The latter are more tied in, plausibly, but that’s a bit different. (Republicans like the Cato Institute when they publish tax stuff, not when they publish stuff about legalizing drugs.) So Robbins isn’t obliged to equate the ideas behind these books with the ideas that are actually in force in American politics. But, since Robbins has bothered to read a pile of books that are libertarian in impulse, there is little point in not taking the impulse more seriously. That narrow point stands.
4) Let me put the point in terms of PMLA. It’s not exactly healthy that the contents of a journal like PMLA should be, at once, so consistently political and so consistently to the left of the American ‘mainstream’. I’ve made this point before and, at least some of the time, made a Broderish hash of it (probably because I used to be more stupid, in a Broderish way.) The proper way to put it is this: if your journal publishes lots of political opinions, but only ones as left as, or considerably leftier than, those one might find in, say, The Nation, you ought to self-conceive and self-present accordingly. PMLA‘s statement of editorial policy - “... of interest to those concerned with the study of language and literature ... large and heterogeneous association ... receptive to a wide variety ... all scholarly methods and theoretical perspectives ... best of its kind, whatever the kind” - will not do. It isn’t remotely true. This dissonance seeps into the PMLA-ish contents, such as Robbins’ paper. And this is inconvenient for conservatives and libertarians, who are dismissed on the grounds that they reach the wrong conclusions, so their arguments must be bad; but it also means that no one on the left turns to PMLA for incisive political commentary. It’s too muffled, unforthcoming about its own position, ergo rhetorically schizophrenic, etc. (And again, this isn’t necessarily because the writers of these pieces really are all personally to the left of contributors to The Nation. It’s because, as I said above, obligations to exhibit ‘disciplinarity’ exert a weird, and substantively misleading, leftward tug.)
What is the moral of this story? Well, for damn sure we need more Hayek to brighten up the place. More generally, I think Mark is right that it turns out humanists could do with reading more ‘mainstream’ political writings, in a certain sense. Conservatives (like Mark) have their obvious reasons for favoring his proposal. Progressives should favor something like it on slightly more oblique grounds: if Bruce Robbins just read some damn Kirk and Hayek, he would have been a hell of a lot clearer about what he doesn’t like about commodity histories. And one could easily multiply examples (Robbins case is typical, I think, though of course not universal.)
I meant to write this post up almost two years ago, making the very points I just did. I actually sat next to Bruce Robbins on a bus—he was in Singapore for a conference. And I ran a few of these points by him, specifically the point about how he conflates conservatism and libertarianism. And he more or less conceded these criticisms have merit. (But perhaps he was just jetlagged. Or perhaps he was so astonished to find himself sitting on a bus, next to someone who turned out to have read his PMLA paper, that he just nodded happily to everything the strange person said.)
Comments
This is an excellent, even magnanimous, post, John. Thank you!
I haven’t read Robbins but your account of his work makes it seem like he’s done most of the work that he needs to do.
It’s rather that the authors of these popular commodity books are often engaging in a deeply flawed method themselves: they usually assume a vulgarized version of Chicago School economics and aren’t themselves actually at all familiar with real theoretical economics. So, in their books, they use rhetoric (the structures of romance novels, for example) in place of serious economic analysis. A serious economic analysis will often reveal that the Chicago School economic assumptions simply don’t explain the the history.
It’s probably true that someone like Deidre McCloskey is much better qualified to tackle the subject than Robbins. But reading Hayek would not only not help Robbins, it would likely be either irrelevant or harmful - Robbins would ultimately need to take on a multi-year project on current economic thought, in which Hayek doesn’t play much of a serious role.
“Economics, as an academic discipline, is not one big exercise in mistaking the workings of a market for a romance novel. There is a bit more to it than that.”
Robbins is perfectly valid just in focusing on popular accounts, which, as I mentioned, nearly always completely elide any real economic analysis and assume vulgarized versions of Chicago School economics without much questioning. He’s allowed to limit his work to these popular accounts precisely because accounts do a lot more of the “heavy lifting” (propagandizing mainstream academic economic theory) than academic economists want to believe. I.E. the public believes in Chicago School economics partially because “there’s all these books which [falsely] purport to explain the world by using Chicago School analysis” but which are actually romance novels. And the public’s belief in Chicago School economics in turn can make some of their predictions true -MacKenzie’s performativity (MacKenzie showed that securities prices can change drastically whenever the academic theory attempting to explain their values changes - reality follows the model, rather than the model following reality). As well as the public’s belief having other real-life benefits to economists (higher salaries, prestige, a false image of practicality, etc).
burritoboy, even if I grant everything you say, my point still stands. Robbins didn’t actually say any of this stuff you say on his behalf. So he is, at best, unclear. Which is what I say in the post. I grant that his ‘romance novel’ point is good. Very strong, potentially. That’s why I specifically say it’s a paper that could have been good, but didn’t turn out to be. I agree with you about how the ‘romance novel’ point should be pushed. But Robbins doesn’t actually push it that way. It’s interesting to diagnose why he didn’t follow through on what was a strong opening, in effect.
I’m not sure I agree with you about the irrelevance of Hayek. (I did pick him as an example largely because Mark B. did.) If the ultimate point is to appreciate the problems with Chicago-style econ, I agree with you, Hayek doesn’t point in that direction. But if the point is to appreciate how people get enthusiastic and all ‘wisdom of crowds’ enraptured with the workings of markets, starting with Hayek is not a half-bad idea. Appreciating the broadly Hayekian spirit of these commodity histories needn’t be your end point. But it has to be among your starting points. And, frankly, I have a lot of respect for Hayek. So there’s that, too.
enjoy your blogs a lot, but it is getting less serious lately. a great book to recommend for your review: China and the new world order: how entrepreneurship, globalization and borderless busines reshape China and the world, by george zhibin gu, which is really exciting on current world politics and business affairs. love to read your review.
"But if the point is to appreciate how people get enthusiastic and all ‘wisdom of crowds’ enraptured with the workings of markets, starting with Hayek is not a half-bad idea. Appreciating the broadly Hayekian spirit of these commodity histories needn’t be your end point.”
Why Hayek in particular? For Robbins to really be as knowledgeable as you would like, he really does need to understand economics in a serious way. Austrian economics isn’t a particularly good representation of the current mainstream of economics - in fact, it’s generally LESS mainstream than many other heterodox economic theories.
Robbins would probably ultimately want to be conversant with such things as mainstream price theory, general equilibrium, market creation and so on. Austrian depictions of equilibrium are extremely radically different than Chicago School or neoneoclassical depictions of equilibrium. It’s considerably more important that Robbins understand the work of Samuelson, Arrow, Debreu, Lucas, Sonneschein, Becker, Griliches, Thaler, Sen, Fogel, North, Barro, Schelling and many others before spending a lot of time on Hayek.
Fair enough, burritoboy.
We are sort of wandering into different problem territory: on the one hand, Robbins needs to address economics more directly. On the other hand, PMLA isn’t an economics journal. He needs to take some stabs into deeper economic territory, by way of clarifying where he stands, and what he wants to say about these histories. This connects a point I made in my first post: namely, there is a tendency for the humanities to go all pear-shaped, with the English Department inadvertently obliging itself to be the Everything Studies Department. That obviously won’t do since it isn’t going to happen.
Assuming Robbins isn’t conversant with all this stuff (I’m not), but he’s got this pretty ok point about the rhetoric of commodity histories in pocket. And he’s writing a general review. How best to stake his position without talking through his hat? Well, it seems to me being frank about your ethico-economic assumptions is the ticket. He could be clear about his ethical concerns, and about his economic views (being duly modest about the limits of his technical knowledge). In a way this is obvious, but these sorts of problems seem to me to come up so often - with humanities profs. sort of inadvertently backing into other fields - that it is worth highlighting how best to combat the problems it leads to.
Thanks for the recommendation, Jeff.
John,
I take it that one way of understanding your objection is to say that Robbins sells these books short, both as compelling narratives that deliberately _deploy_ a romance shape to make history fun, and 2ndly as founded on pro-market, deregulationist assumptions that are in fact widely accepted and ought not to be dismissed out of (invisible) hand. I don’t think this is a fair criticism, probably for reasons similar to those given by burritoboy. Robbins is more interested in the reception side, on how such narratives _might_ (admittedly a big if) shape opinions; in other words, in ideology. But you mount a production side defence, protesting the “charm” and “depth” of these pop works, defending them from critical manhandling. When you say (exasperatedly?) “Framing the commodity as a protagonist is a rhetorical device”, I would imagine that this is something Robbins would readily concede. Also, what makes this kind of ideology critique legitimate is the fact that Robbins’s insight about the romance narrative is a pattern discerned across a whole genre - thus he can talk about it not as an individual author’s skilful story-telling, but some kind of cultural structure. The defence of authorial deftness becomes less compelling when you track the same neat manoeuvre across a succession of texts.
I get the feeling as well that the point you make about the self-evidence of an unacknowledged or unwitting targeting of “libertarianism” is belied by the strenuousness with which you evoke this supposed Ur-hoary topic. Either, you have done a nice piece of decoding or reading-between-the-lines, delivered with some savagery, and exposed an intellectual blindspot. (The sarcastic “Ha!”, the “bazillion gallons”.) Or, you have pointed out something so obvious that anyone not shut in a left-leaning echo chamber already knows it. But if the latter, why a) the heavy artillery used to expose this self-evident referent, and b) should Robbins even bother to spell it out? If this is such a howler, such a schoolboy error, wouldn’t it be a safe assumption that PMLA readers will attach the “libertarian” tag for themselves, or note the analogy to a moral conservatism-free market economics non-equivalence? (Ignoramus and foreigner as I am, I was unaware of this discussion in The National Review, although of course the issue goes back way further. Victorian Liberals squared the circle with the notion of “character” - a nanny state corrupts the manly Christian virtues.)
I guess I broadly agree with (part of) your conclusion - the need for more ecumenical criteria of theoretical competence - but I think Robbins has been stitched up here in a way that doesn’t seem fair to the argument he is making. (But having been too lazy to read the whole draft, I could well be wrong - sorry if I am way off base.)
In a quick read through the comments, I don’t think that people are really getting what I take to be the point; if you’re going to do a sort of cultural critique of libertarian commodity fetishism, you should be familiar with it (at least casually), and you should state your political commitments rather than assuming an implicit agreement on political economy to support your conclusions.
But no Hayek is really needed for this process, just greater familiarity with the U.S. political scene. Libertarians themselves have no real commitment to Hayek, or, for every one that does, there’s a great many more who have not internalized his work in any serious way (c.f. Henley trying to explain to his confreres that Hayek doesn’t stop at the water’s edge).
There should be some word related to cryptonormativism for this, shouldn’t there? I do think that there’s something about this style that tends to vitiate actual politics that might be done in these contexts. It’s not really crypto, bue perhaps levitational normativism, both in the sense of being not clearly supported, and of bringing the writer to a stance that one suspects doesn’t actually refer to where they are.
1) Repeating from the felicitous typo post at CT: “The trade of sugar resulted in the cornmodification of human life.” pg 17, “From Sugar to Soft Drinks: the changing cultural meaning of sweeteners from the industrial to the postindustrial era around the world.” [pdf] Buckland, J., Mini-thesis, Seminar in International Development Studies Apr ‘03. No discussion of fetishization would be complete without it, if you’re into that sort of thing.
2) As with typos, so to with paranomasia: Grand Potato remains an execrable pun. And other accidents may reflect politics, whether Marxist-Capitalist or otherwise: see “The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold, of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Chance, and the Cold War”, [pdf] Belletto, S., English Literary History V73n3, Fall ‘06.
3) Robbins’ logorrhea is loudly advertised by such sly phrasings as “flagrant after-the-colon excesses”—no sense in accusing him of silent-but-deadly emanations. Bauerlein proposes something ranker.
4) I am currently putting together a proposal for “Monetizing The Arcades Project“, using Benjamin’s embedded metatags as hyperlink fodder for correlated sampling a la Sortes Virgilianis to replace the ‘cookie’ functionality of early PC days, as an add-on which can diplay via pop-up or CNBC-style ticker.
1) Shouldn’t it be the job of a university distribution requirement as a whole, rather than an English department theory class, to make sure that Leftist literary critics read Hayek, Burke and the other elements of the campus conservative’s intellectual genealogy?
2) One more note about the following: “Framing the commodity as a protagonist is a rhetorical device.” It’s also what traditional advertising does, and, if “you believe that sort of thing,” the logic of the market. One day (hopefully?) there will be a Pepsi advert during the Superbowl that simply says, “Buy Pepsi, for we all-too-humans have been working hard on finding a way to chip away at Coke’s natural market superiority with clever image-manufacturing all year long.” Until then, we will get books like, “Pepsi: The Drink That Launched a Thousand Bombs Over Baghdad.”
3) Ain’t stating theoretical assumptions explicitly a rhetorical hangup of those trained in analytic philosophy (not that there’s anything wrong with that), a hangup that other humanistic disciplines find to be a drag? Are we back to the how-you-argue vs. what-you-say debate?
4) When will the English departments assign “Mimesis as Make Believe”? That’s the real question?
PS. Will no one point out the brilliant deployment of the “Holy Grail” reference? Or was it too obvious to mention?
Just a quickie:
I was struck by how different Robbins’ actual essay is from how John summarizes it here. For example, what about the ethical component of Robbins’ work here, as he shows how the popular commodity history focuses on consumers and business, whereas the academic commodity emphasizes the labor and uneven power dynamics?
It is this aspect of economics that is largely ignored when history is told as a romance with the commodity as hero. “Success” of the commodity hero equals consumption; “failure” equals being ignored by the metropolitan centers of power. Where in this narrative are the people who actually make the commodity?
What Robbins might have said is that popular commodity history is written under the sign of romance while academic commodity history is written under the sign of Bildung: how the commodity was made, by whom and through what social forces.
I also don’t buy the “it’s just a rhetorical device” defense. So was “nappy haired hos” simply rhetoric. All language is rhetoric. The point Robbins makes is that the sheer popularity of a certain ideological narrative suggests that this narrative is being taken not simply as a trope but as a reality. Tea changed the world (by consolidating all the powers that already held power). Not tea producers, but rather tea consumers and tea merchants. The tea producers of course had their world changed. Robbins wants us to contrast that popular idea of what it means to change the world with Marx’s ethico-political challenge to identify inequity and change the system that produces it.
Luther,
And let’s remember that the labor aspects of a particular product or good are just as equally valid objects of economic research as are consumption or marketing of the product. Thus, the rhetoric of the popular commodity accounts is actually suppressing rigorous investigations of actual economic mechanisms.
And that, in turn, indicates where Robbins is more serious than these works: instead of taking economics as a subject of serious discussion (whether one eventually decides that Hayek or any other economist is correct), these works prefer to keep their rhetoric more at the level of class politics ("just assume that this vulgarized version of Chicago School economics is valid because you’re a wealthy consumer rather than a poorer laborer") rather than actually using the text to prove things about economics. I.E. not everything about economics is necessarily political, but these books in the end rely upon politics (because their economics are so trivial and poorly done) rather than economics.
John’s post, in fact, gets to the heart of a problem with lots of academic commentary on public matters. John focuses on Robbins’ attribution of something wrong with popular commodity histories without really “engaging them.” He points out that Robbins doesn’t seem to distinguish libertarian from conservative thought, especially their break from one another over consumer behavior, as well as the mistaken alignment of libertarianism with academic cultural relativism. And he finds Robbins’ slight remarks about the market to be a “prima facie serious objection, and he expects his readers to regard it as such.”
In the last point we find the fatal flaw. Academics assume too blithely the moral valences of the situations they describe. Instead of making genuine, evidence-based arguments about the market and the commodities narrated, Robbins resorts to sarcasm and overstatement. He terms the popular histories “a forceful argument on capitalism’s behalf,” and yet he says elsewhere that the books work by “romance,” not by reasoning. He terms them “rites of capitalist self-celebration,” a tendentious label that he provides no support for. And he summarizes them as “capitalist propaganda of a very effective kind"--again, an overdone label without any support. This is not to say that there aren’t elements of truth in each characterization. But they are spoken so smoothly, so assuredly, that they reveal a complacent attitude on the author’s part. In other words, why provide evidence, and why consider other outlooks on capitalism, when Robbins is certain that his audience already agrees with him?
This is the problem with not taking other sides seriously, with becoming acculturated and abiding for decades in a monolithic political habitat.
One sees the academic parochialism at work in Robbins’ characterization of the popular texts. He begins with a “striking characteristic of commodity histories,” namely, the “overkill in their subtitles.” But anybody with any experience in the nonfiction trade world knows that subtitle overkill is as common as anything.
Elsewhere, he says that academic commodity histories have “fluorished alongside these popular narratives.” They have? How many academic versions have sold well in trade press terms? The difference between academic flourishing and public flourishing is a wide one, and should be acknowledged.
He says that the “overkill” subtitles may be a “sly acknowledgment that their fate depends on their ability to compete in the market.” It’s not a “sly acknowledgment,” it’s an open acknowledgment. Robbins seems to think that it must be sly because the authors feel some sort of guilt about their self-commodification, but most of them feel nothing of the kind.
In the next sentence, he says that “For this reason and others, one would not expect them to be strongly critical of the market.” Wrong again. For decades now, we’ve seen best-sellers take on capitalism, consumerism, etc., and Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool explains a key transition point in that story.
These narrow certainties take away from the genuinely promising and insightful points in the piece. Robbins says near the end, for example, “Control, censorship, regulation: these targets appear so regularly as to seem perhaps, the whole point of the exercise.” (I presume he forgets, strangely, about the profit motive here.) This is an important observation, but instead of expounding it, we end up with a resounding phrase about the “history of global injustice.” Readers would learn more from an analysis of the romance plot of commodity histories.
John,
Thanks for taking the time to write such a thought-provoking post.
I take it that your main point in reviewing Robbins is to illustrate what you take to be more widespread problems with discussions of political and social issues within humanities departments. I’m an outsider to those discussions, so I don’t know how much insight I have to offer, but I thought I’d throw a few things out there to get your reaction.
Now I’m a philosopher, and when I read what other philosophers have written, I’m mostly looking for insight into philosophical questions. When I talk about other philosophers in a paper, it’s because I want to discuss the positions that they’ve taken on philosophical questions, and the arguments they’ve advanced in favor of those positions. My point here is that I’m not out to construct some kind of intellectual history of philosophical discussions, or anything like that. From what I can tell, this is the attitude that most scholars take toward their fields. A historian writing a book on German history will discuss other books on German history, but with the goal of elucidating the history of Germany--not the history of books written about the history of Germany. Etc., etc.
So I guess what I find so confusing about Robbins’ paper is that, rather than being about, say, commodities history and what it tells us about the value of market economies, it’s just a paper about the books people have been writing about commodities history, with some scattered political comments whose relevance to the rest of the paper is unclear to me.
You were complaining that Robbins not only fails to argue for his controversial political positions, he also fails even to formulate those positions. You attribute this to the idiosyncrasies of the A-Z canon of humanities departments, but I wonder what you think of an alternative explanation: Robbins doesn’t formulate and argue for his political positions because, ultimately, he’s not writing a paper about politics or history--he’s writing a paper about some books that other people have written about politics and history.
Does that sound right to you? If so, do you think that is a problem? Finally, do you think that this feature of Robbins’ paper is a common one? Based on my limited exposure to English departments, it seems that way to me.
Anyway, I don’t know how useful all of that is. Please let me know your reaction if you have a chance.
Quick response to Luther: I DID leave out discussion of Robbins substantive charge that production gets neglected in these books, in favor of consumption. That is a serious argument, I admit, so it’s a serious omission on my part. It isn’t really very well supported in his essay, but it’s the sort of essay where you just don’t have time to offer much support. Here’s the thing: my impression of these works differs. I don’t think there actually is neglect of production. I’m not really prepared to defend that, because I don’t have a big pile of books by my side, read recently, but it’s my impression. (In writing, I couldn’t decide what to say about this, so I just forgot to say anything. Probably not the best result.)
The point about the ‘ethical component’ of Robbins’ piece seems to me wrong. I don’t deny that there is a large - extremely large - ethical component. I say it isn’t clear, not defended, left implicit. The large ethical component is question-begging.
burritoboy still seems to me to be suggesting what a better essay, in this area, would have been like, rather than defending the essay we actually have got. And, again, that’s my whole point: I can see how much better the essay could have been, if there were less ethical question-begging.
I don’t deny that Robbins is very ethically serious. His seriousness is just not finding effective expression.
I missed David’s comment, which was in queue. He writes: “A historian writing a book on German history will discuss other books on German history, but with the goal of elucidating the history of Germany--not the history of books written about the history of Germany. Etc., etc.”
Well, yes. But it would be possible to write a history of changing views of Plato, or Descartes, or Kant. That is, it would clearly be a worthwhile project to write the history of histories (granting that you are interested in history). This is, in fact, something quite a number of interesting histories of philosophy do. Many philosophers have a slenderer interest in history than will support this sort of exercise. But that’s a different matter.
The A-Z point in my paper seems, frankly, weakest to me. Robbins personally doesn’t seem so Adorno-to-Zizek. But I don’t think it is right that he fails to formulate his own ethico-economic position because that’s not what the paper is about. The paper is most definitely about his own views.
Well, I guess my point was that the Robbins paper seems like kind of a mishmash.
I didn’t mean for it to sound like I was denying the value of intellectual history, or the value of histories of histories, etc.--although a law of diminishing returns does seem to me to apply here. And hey, maybe the trend of popular commodities histories is an important enough cultural phenomenon to justify scholarly work on the trend itself. But clearly that’s not all that Robbins is up to. As you said, he definitely has his own views on the subject matter of the books he’s discussing, and part of the point of his paper is to express those views, and to criticize the views of the authors he’s talking about. But just take, for example, his discussion of the “narrative arch” of the popular commodities histories, where he compares them to romances. If his concern is just to examine the books as a cultural phenomenon, then this might be a pretty significant insight. But it’s not exactly a substantive criticism of market economies--just an interesting point about the structure of some books on the subject.
I thought your main point was that Robbins doesn’t do much to support or even clarify his own views--maybe I misunderstood, but that’s how I read you. What I was meant to be asking was whether a failure to distinguish between two fairly different aims which his paper might have--discussing economic history vs. discussing a recent trend in popular non-fiction--might have something to do with the problems you mentioned. I wasn’t trying to suggest that only one of these aims could have any merit.
Anyway, if you think I’m way off base here, I’ll take your word for it. I don’t feel like I have a great sense for what it was Robbins was trying to do. I guess I’m just not sure whether that was my fault or his.
No, that sounds about right, David. Failure to distinguish discussion of economic history from rhetorical analysis of a recent trend in popular non-fiction.
John, you’ve nailed it there: “Failure to distinguish discussion of economic history from rhetorical analysis of a recent trend in popular non-fiction.”
That’s a common sin when lit scholars take on non-literary texts. It’s even a common sin when they subject literature to “discourse analysis,” a la Benn Michaels and New Historicism. As Jameson points out in his critique of WBM in *Postmodernism*, WBM method only works so long as we can’t tell whether he’s talking about books or some cultural zeitgeist or The Market (or subsuming them all into “discourse").
Robbins has never struck me as a rigorous scholar. *Feeling Global* is guilty of the same sins, as he moves between evidence-less love-ins of NGOs and rather weak readings of John Berger’s and Mukherjee’s fiction. (I mean, in what world is Mukherjee a more serious political writer than Berger?)
But John’s right that this goes beyond an individual scholar’s sloppiness in a single essay draft. It’s symptomatic—as the kids used to say—of the sorts of elisions and unconceptualized—untheorized, actually—juxtapositions and connections we tend to associate with New Historicism, discourse analysis, cultural studies, etc.
"But it’s not exactly a substantive criticism of market economies--just an interesting point about the structure of some books on the subject.”
No, it’s actually an extremely critical point. Economists (at least in the mainstream neoneoclassical tradition) have generally refused to do much work on how popular understandings or ideologies of economics affects the reality of the economy. When the behavorial economists (as well as folks like McCloskey or Mirowski or Noble or MacKenzie) began recently examining the question, they found quite the opposite to be the case: popular understandings of the economy (which were often significantly distorted or even opposed to from academic theory) significantly changed the underlying actual economic events.
Secondly, since the academic field of economics explicitly wants to claim to affect public policy, it’s central to understand how well economic theory migrates into the popular understanding.
Of course, a single essay (which I personally don’t think is as focused as it could be) can’t make that case but a longer text examining different forms of popular economics-related writings is not only interesting, but very badly needed.
I think we can agree that the paper can make a potentially extremely important point without actually amounting to a substantive criticism of market economies. (We’re pretty much at the half-empty, half-full line.)
So wait… is Robbins a New Historicist?
No. He’s not. Why do you ask?
I was asking because of Luther’s reference to Jameson’s critique of the New Historicism, which really does seem to overlap heavily with your critique of Robbins.
I’d like to thank everybody, first and foremost John Holbo, for giving this short review essay of mine so much sustained attention. I’m grateful, and on the whole I don’t feel maligned or terribly misunderstood. At least two big points--that it would have been a good idea to refer directly to libertarianism, and that it would be helpful for me to know more economics--seem right.
I don’t agree, on the other hand, that I should have laid all my political cards on the table. No, I didn’t say whether (or why) the championing of the free market was undesirable. If every article on, say, a genre of narrative had to engage seriously at the level of political-economic first principles, there wouldn’t be any such articles, let alone articles with a 6000-word limit (which I exceeded, but not by much). By the way, I don’t think John gave my tone quite enough credit. I was trying to get people to reflect, and irony and implication (as Joh knows well) can be a better way to do that than in-your-face polemic.
This piece didn’t say that there shouldn’t be forceful arguments on capitalism’s behalf, it only asked readers to notice something about these books that w