Division III Contract, First Draft

This is the first draft of my project proposal as it appears on my contract.


Changing the Subject: Elements for an Ontology of Economy

Ontology of economy: what does this mean? Economics as a science is the investigation of an empirical field, into the phenomena we observe within this field and the way these phenomena operate. If 'empirical' designates what appears to our senses, then by ontology we mean what 'really is', apart from the way it appears to us. This is the famous Kantian distinction between the thing for us and the thing-in-itself. Yet, as Kant makes clear, we by definition cannot know the thing-in-itself, what 'really is there', as our knowledge is always knowledge in and of the empirical realm. Thus, he designates the a priori forms and categories structuring this field, which is to say, our experience of it, and hence what we can know.

We are not strictly Kantian on this matter, but we nonetheless find in him an insight: the ontology of any scientific field, in this case, the economy, would designate precisely the limits, the horizon, of that field in terms of the concepts and categories that delimit and define our experience of it. So in the first instance, we are investigating these concepts as they structure this field. Yet we must go further: why do we have these conceptual orientations at all? Why are there several orientations of this type, as evidenced in the split between different schools of economics? Is direct access to the empirical economy even possible, or is it constitutively mediated by these categories?

Thus, while ontology in the first sense refers to the modes in which the empirical field is disclosed, 'what really is' then referring to how the appearance appears, how we experience it and know it, in the second sense it must seek out that mysterious thing that causes diverse modes of disclosure to come about, that necessitates this mediation in disclosure, and yet is not disclosed itself. This thing is nothing empirical, it does not appear, and yet it is that 'real' that all appearance presupposes. This 'real', though a priori unknowable, is nevertheless not to be foreclosed or ignored. We propose that the real precisely has no existence apart from the problem it poses, that it is the very being of the problem. Different modes of disclosure, conceptual orientations, 'world views', result from different ways of posing this problem and subsequently different solutions, however inadequate.

Science in general, in this way, deals with the cases of solution, and not with posing the problem which delimits its horizon, structuring its field of inquiry. In contrast, philosophy has the two-fold task of analyzing the ontological consistency of the empirical field, of what 'merely is', and of positing the ethical imperative of our relation to it as actors, and so what 'ought to be'. Philosophy has historically been characterized by this mysterious gap between ontology and ethics, neither of which appear as evident empirically.

This brings us back to economy. Economics occupies a unique position among the sciences insofar as it claims to discover within its empirical field, and hence its ontological horizon, an immanent ethics. From the classical political economists to the neoclassicals of today, all that is necessary for a 'good' society to come about, and for us as actors to act ethically, is that every individual maximizes his rational self-interest. The distribution that would result, through exchange between actors, would thus tend toward the best possible outcome, and would spur production to grow, causing society to progress and develop. Hence, we need not look to a 'beyond' to find some divine ethical imperative: insofar as we are rational, we already act ethically, by virtue of our very composition.

Economics is thus a sight of philosophical interest, as it seems that ethics, far from standing apart from 'what is', instead is already immanent in it. Yet this brings us back to our opening considerations: did we not say that 'what really is', abstracted from all particular experience, exists only as a problem or set of problems which refract the disclosure of the empirical into different conceptual (com)positions? My thesis is that, far from either abandoning or foreclosing truth, i.e. 'what really is', or from claiming to have solved this problem whose solution is by definition unknowable, economics has historically taken a far more subtle and subversive position with regard to the famous immanent ethical mechanism, the market, and the implicit relation between ontology and ethics.

So I propose to analyze the considerations above in greater detail, and in doing so, to set the stage for a historical investigation into the conceptual.

~

I realize this is only a teaser, and will publish a somewhat more substantial explanation of the project soon.

The Possibility of Politics

A convergence of several different lines of thought has led me to contemplate a question: what makes politics possible at all?

One line was drawn from my international trade class, in which we've been working on a fictive declaration for a non-oppressive and non-detrimental approach to trade and international relations in general. The first thing we discussed, and this ended up taking so much time that we had to cut it short and move on, was the unit of analysis in economics. The major dichotomy in economic theory and political science on this issue is between individual persons and nation-states. As you might expect, no one in our group found either of these alternatives adequate, but that begs the question: where does analysis begin, and following from that, what becomes of the person and the state?

We talked about possible candidates for a proposed new unit, ranging from communities and affinity groups to institutions in general. Eventually, it came up that perhaps this issue, while not unimportant, was excessively academic for a document whose intended audience would be average everyday people, be they in 'North' or 'South' countries. We ended up including some brief comment on focusing on institutions, but dropped the question for the most part. Yet I couldn't help but wonder whether this approach was presumptuous, perhaps even condescending.

To be fair, this was just a class exercise with a limited scope and length of time, and it was probably for the best that we moved on. Yet if we had been working on some real project, say, for an activist group of some kind, I suspect a similar tendency would take over. "We're talking to real people, we should talk about concrete issues, not intellectual squabbles." Why is there this dominant assumption that discussing theoretical issues, such as the unit of analysis, will alienate the majority of 'average' people? We all agreed that the issue was important, but there seemed to be an unspoken sentiment that it was best kept confined to academic circles. I find this to be an extremely condescending position: don't worry about that, don't think to hard, we'll take care of these things, you just go about your everyday life.

Perhaps it is the case that average people don't care, can't be bothered, or wouldn't understand such 'high and mighty' discourse, but I don't think it is. In fact, this notion of the 'average person' itself already assumes a standard unit of analysis, doesn't it? For that matter, so does democracy; insofar as democracy depends upon a demos, that is, a population taken together as an entity, it thereby depends upon a standard unit it can apply to the group, and thereby 'count' the population. This strips the individual of all singularity, all possibility of producing a difference that would exceed or escape the collective entity (the political system), substituting a regularity, a normality, an identity. The problem isn't that existing democracies are corrupt or have been co-opted by illegitimate power; on the contrary, as Zizek so often says in his political articles, what we have now is democracy tried and true. We shouldn't be looking for a more original or authentic form of democracy, but thinking otherwise, toward another possible politics.

What does all this mean? To return to my original question, I've been suspecting that looking at possibility and the conditions for possibility is the wrong approach. In a sense, any possible politics depends upon a difference, a specifically political difference, but this is not enough, it begs the question of this difference and leaves our real orientation with a vague formal shell. Instead, if we are to take hold of the rich potentialities open to this orientation, we must ask what are the conditions of the reality of politics. It is not enough to recognize political difference as an empty form of possibility - political difference must be made, it must be realized, and this can only be achieved through an experimental engagement with the real. Every orientation, every politic, every political actor or unit, is unstrippably unique, and its conditions must likewise be approached as such. There is no general politics, no general subject of politics, no 'average person', and hence every politic and every subject is singular, composed of singular points and passions.

Approaching 'depoliticized' orientations, groups, actors, would thereby necessitate an experimental approach to constructing a politics; not the imposition of values the group is presumed to understand, and to take or leave, but the creation of immanent evaluations between them, and that means between the group and the 'activists' who engage them in the first place. This entails a constant problematization of encounters and engagements, a constant openness to new connections, prerogatives, and catalysts, and a constant negotiation and navigation of complex arrangements or territories. This whole approach that criticizes 'liberal' or 'leftist' or 'radical' groupthink misses the point entirely: we shouldn't be trying to 'think for ourselves' any more than we should 'think for the cause'; we should rather be focused on making thought think in the first place, producing a unique way of thinking within every arrangement or orientation. It is the navigation of the space between these complex arrangements that becomes the objective of politics, a navigation that necessitates a cautious and creative engagement with unstrippably singular problems.

This points to an approach to the question of the unit of analysis: analysis should begin with the singular arrangements constellated by the problem or problems being analyzed - processual arrangements that underlie every concrete individual, be they persons, states, institutions, ecosystems, markets, communities, or even particular transactions, interactions, or conversations. This is the renewed sense of methodological individualism DeLanda proposes in A New Philosophy of Society: 'individual' must be taken in the sense of individuation, a process of individuation bound up in a concrete machinic arrangement, a self-consistent and autopoietic agglomeration.

Subjectivation and Economic Theory: A Brief Survey

For mainstream economists, subjectivity is understood as a given. (And who can blame them? It is the same for most of the human and social sciences, most of academia.) The tradition of moral philosophy from which economics was born provided the substance – a pre-Kantian subject overdetermined by uncritical conceptualizations of the time – which has been modified, supplemented, and articulated throughout the centuries by a whole host of theorists, but which has also maintained the same stiflingly orthodoxical makeup all along. Raising the matter of subjectivity is not a 'postmodern' conceit, nor is this matter epiphenomenal to the true science of economy. Rather, subjectivity is the very ground on which any foundation of the science and philosophy of economy must be built, and as such, the problem of its production, distribution, and consumption should be raised and negotiated wherever possible.

The reason I ascribe such an import to subjectivity and its production is precisely because it is only in and through these processes of production that we are able to act, that we are 'produced' as actors or agents. Thus a subjective production or 'subjectivation' is the condition of our reality as actors; it is the 'mode' of acting in which we become agents; it is agency. A production of subjectivity is simultaneously a production of agency, and agency is the cornerstone of economics. There is a fundamental subjective presupposition, an opinion (orthodoxy = “right opinion”), at the heart of the orthodox account of economic agency which ensures the consistency of economic theory as we know it: we all know what it is to have agency, to choose and decide, to desire and prefer, to think and act. Economists are therefore unwilling to question how these characteristics are produced, how they imply heterogeneous compositions of elements, be they individual and personal, familial, social, politico-legal, religious, linguistic, ecological, machinic, aesthetic, ethical, customary...

The orthodox account is content to homogenize subjectivity (capitalism produces a 'subjectivity of generalized equivalence', as Félix Guattari says), to disregard the heterogeneity of the factors and processes of its production, of its internal components and external connections. Yet we can see trends within economic theory that, while not directly challenging the subjective presuppositions, may lead us to engage the rich problematic of multifarious productions of subjectivity and agency, and the multiplicity of unique, singular subjectivations, as they relate to and indeed ground economic activity. We can already see such trends in the history of economic theory in the work of Marx and the institutionalist movement, and it seems that they are reemerging, in perhaps a less radical form, in the mainstream reappropriation of the latter movement known as 'neoinstitutionalism' (Marxian thought has itself suffered from an unfortunate 'orthodoxication', although the last few decades have also witnessed creative and aberrant appropriations thereof).

Douglass North, a neo-institutionalist, expresses such a trend in reviving the problem of incentive structures and their composition, against the assumption of perfect rationality, in his article “Economic Performance Through Time”. The processes of learning and development that produce individual subjects feed into the evolution and transformation of the social institutions in which they are involved and invested, and these institutions in turn react back on these subjects, shaping their own processes of change through limitation and facilitation. This reciprocal relation of production underlies the performance of economies, as it endows subjectivated persons and groups with the unique ensemble of habits, tools, and investments (of 'irrational' desires as much as 'rational' interests) that define its agency and hence its actions and decisions. Thus, North is able to raise the problem of transaction and information costs as primary in economic interactions, and to challenge the tendency in neoclassical theory to disregard them.

This impels us to think of markets in terms of the cost structures that they rest upon, which entails that truly 'efficient' markets are not the norm, but an exceptional case. Neoclassical theory tells us that information and the models in which we employ it may initially be imperfect, leading to significant cost structures, but that these will self-correct over time and tend towards perfection, thereby leading to negligible transaction costs. North rejects this: “Individuals typically act on incomplete information and with subjectively derived models that are frequently erroneous; the information feedback is typically insufficient to correct these models. Institutions are not necessarily or even usually created to be socially efficient; rather they, or at least the formal rules, are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to create new rules.” [North, 359-60] This presents 'socially inefficient' institutions, and the detrimental power relations that breed them, as an obstacle to be overcome. Of course, this begs the question of whether 'correct models' are at all possible, at least in the traditional sense; perhaps if our information is always incomplete, our models always necessitating assumptions and chance, our desires and investments always confused and complicated, then we should think of models not in terms of an objective validity, but a functional efficacy and ethical consistency in relation to the subjectivations that engender them and whose processes of production they react upon.

Elsewhere, we can find the problem of the production of subjectivity raised in literature on geographic factors in economic composition [“Geography and Development” by Henderson, Shalizi, and Venables]. This article engages the question of unequal distributions of economic activity throughout the world, and subsequently investigates the forces and arrangements that produce dense, highly active clusters in some areas while neglecting and excluding other areas. “Why do so many economic decision takers choose to locate close to each other? And, for those who cannot locate in an economic center, what are the consequences of being outside, and possibly remote from, existing centers?” [Henderson et al, 81-2] Although they pose these questions in a geographic context, one should not take this as implying a 'geographical determinism'. Rather, they are investigating the geographic factors that are involved in certain processes of subjectivation, particularly urban and rural subjectivations. It is not that the actors do not 'choose for themselves', but that the decision that selects a choice is produced by the conjunction of many heterogeneous forces, components, and connections, a conjunction that is coextensive with the production of the 'agency' of the actors themselves; hence the emphasis on forces of agglomeration and dispersion and connections to the ‘outside’ – external markets, other regions, etc. – that condition the development of urban centers of subjectivation.

A third instance of this trend can be found in literature on international relations. Alexander Wendt gives us a promising formulation of the nature of State agency in his article "Anarchy Is What States Make of It". Rather than ascribing self-interested and self-serving egoism to some fundamental, eternal, primordial human nature, and hence reducing such attributes on the part of States to this nature (as the realist school is wont to do), Wendt rejects such easy answers. This is not to deny that egoistic structures of agency exist, but rather than ascribing these to a primordial nature, Wendt is interested in inquiring into how they are produced and constructed as such. Thus, rather than defining international anarchy (i.e. the fact that no central authority completely constrains the actions of States) negatively, as a default condition in which self-interested actors find themselves, he follows a positive definition that construes it as productive, possessing a 'causal power'. To understand the sense of this power, one must understand Wendt's constructivism. This prerogative sees knowledge as constructed by the ensemble of social forces, conditions, and customs in which it is situated, and this includes an actor's own self-knowledge, and hence his or her identity and interests. Knowledge does not relate to an objective, external reality, but rather only to a contingent and relative production of structures of agency.

Despite the emphasis on production, Wendt's constructivism seems to fall short of the potential force of the constructivist prerogative, insofar as it remains epistemological, that is, concerned with knowledge and its conditions. It does not call into question the construction of the subject of knowledge and the production of subjectivity itself; it begins with the subject presupposed, and with subjects as involved in social relationships through which meaning is constructed. This suffers from a relativism in which reality and the knowledge thereof are reduced to social conventions, and it thereby seems impotent as the basis for positive interventions into reality. We would prefer an ontological constructivism, one in which not only meaning and knowledge, but subjectivity itself, is constructed through converging productive processes. Reality is no longer reducible to or irrecoverable from socially relative conventions and meanings; rather, sociality and meaning are themselves results of the processes of production that make up reality. The emphasis is thereby no longer on knowledge and meaning as relative to the social conditions of a subject, but on functional connections and capacities as relative to the real conditions of subjective production or subjectivation. Meaning is only one (or several) field(s) constructed through such processes and implicated in subjectivations, but it is by no means the be-all end-all of the inquiry.

Shortcomings aside, Wendt does provide salient insights regarding the construction of State agency. Rather than deriving from an essence or nature of humanity, the dispositions, interests, and tendencies of States result from the processes of production with which they are involved: both the internal processes of their own constituencies, and the international processes of war, alliance, trade, and so on. States may often be disposed to self-interest, but we must explain how this disposition is produced, through what encounters, connections, and processes. In this sense, the anarchy of international relations is not a neutral default in which States express their essential nature, but a 'causal power' endowing States implicated in international encounters and relationships with a capacity to mutate, to produce new dispositions and interests, to alter the structures of agency involved, on the basis of the undetermined and open-ended nature of such relations.

In the literature on international relations, the trend can also be found in Kenneth Oye's article "The Conditions for Cooperation in World Politics". Oye's problem is basically how we might produce cooperation between States, and hence, States with an agency disposed toward cooperation rather than aggression, competition, or isolation. He isolates three different aspects of the process through which States become disposed toward each other, and hence in which their agency is produced. These are the payoff structure, which conditions the formation and prioritization of interests of parties involved in a cooperative relationship; the repeatability of a 'game' or encounter, and thus the duration of the relationship of the parties; and the number of parties involved in a game or encounter. Through these variables, he analyzes the conditions that facilitate or deter enduring cooperative relationships. These variables are aspects of the dispositions, that is, the structures of agency (what Wendt refers to as 'structures of identity and interest') that makeup State subjectivity. These structures should be understood as being engendered by, but also reacting back upon, the processes of production that we have called 'subjectivation': processes from which subjectivity, and hence the power to act, to decide, result. Oye's understanding is very limited, and certainly contains presuppositions regarding agency and interest that we could do without, but overall he adequately expresses an approach to these through production and construction, rather than essences and natures.

These trends beg the question: how can a focus on the production of subjectivity reorient economic theory, and what are the potential trajectories for invention it draws within, and on the edges of, that field?

Proposal for Division III Project (Senior Thesis)

tentative title - Clandestine Agency: Blueprints for a Machinic Economy

areas of study - Philosophy, Economics

description - Economics has as its object of inquiry the arrangements of productive, allocative, and consumptive forces composing material and social life, and specifically those arrangements involving humanity as their defining element. The way in which this inquiry is conducted, as a scientific analysis of empirical phenomena on the one hand, and a prescriptive formulation of policy and strategy on the other, will depend upon the philosophic conception of the relation between the former and the latter. Thus the concepts involved and the models in which they have determinate relations both account for and actively shape the passage or movement between arrangements as existing, actual things available for analysis, and arrangement as the process of actualization by which things are produced and situated as such, and which we hope to guide and direct strategically.

The problem I wish to raise is twofold: what are the concepts and conceptual models employed by economic theory, constituting its frame of reference, both currently and historically? And how does it understand the process by which concepts are created or recreated and related in models that are then applied to the actual world? Such a research program will require analysis of the key concepts in economic theory, including agency, free will and choice, individuality, the nature of social bodies, markets, corporations, utility and desire, exchange and value. My hypothesis is that analyzing these concepts along with the processes that engender them and relate them to each other and empirical reality will shed light on overlooked potentials for the conceptual composition of economic theory. Perhaps there are modifications to be made to existing concepts, other concepts to be created or taken up, dynamic new models to draw, a superior consistency and practicality to be attained. Perhaps an emphasis on the process of conceptualization will give new impetus and new insight to the positive and normative aspects of economics, and make room for an ethics of economy at the very heart of the field.

I plan to survey the history of economic theory, from Smith, Ricardo, and Bentham to Jevons, Walras and Keynes, as well as the more neglected Marxian and Institutionalist lines, reading them through this double problem. I will draw on histories of economic thought, especially the fine accounts provided by Philip Mirowski, among others, in order to map the processes of conceptual modeling at work in these different thinkers. To chart alternative directions and possibilities for economic concepts and models, I will look to the pioneering work of Herbert Spencer on decision, agency, and rationality; Fernand Braudel's rich accounts of the historical processes composing economic reality; the growing literature on non-linear dynamics and dissipative structures in economic systems; and to a lesser extent, the approaches of World-Systems analysis and neo-institutionalism.

Finally, I will construct my overall approach, both the analytic and creative aspects, by using the works of philosophers Manuel DeLanda, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Their canons, particularly those of the latter three, are very difficult and specialized, but I am confident I can mobilize the relevant concepts in a manner that will be clear and comprehensible for readers without a strong background in philosophy and the specific niche they occupy. In this way, I hope to channel the inspiration and conceptual creativity I find in their works into a project that will be accessable to economists and offer a renewed approach to the field of economic theory.