Naeem Inayatullah - Professional - The Cultural Constitution of Political Economy

The Cultural Constitution of Political Economy
David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah

(Presented at “Cultures of Resistance and Alternatives to Neo-Liberalism,” A Studies in Political Economy Conference, Carleton University, Ryerson University and University of Ottawa, February 23-25, 2006, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.)

I. The Utopian/Savage Slot

Michel-Rolph Trouillot has noted that “the savage is an argument for a particular kind of utopia.” The “West,” Trouillot explains, constructs itself in relation to a complex Other. On the one side, “the savage” serves as exemple of an early state of humankind, against which modern progress is measured and vindicated. On the other side, the savage is only possible as set against a notion of the “West” as a “utopian projection” -- a “universalist” and “didactic” project.
If as Trouillot emphasizes, anthropology came to fill “the Savage Slot” in this “field of significance” that constitutes the “West,” we suggest that what might be called the “Utopian Slot” comes to be filled mostly by Political Economy.

Political Economy serves to articulate our greatest ambitions and values—for wealth, social stability, ethical refinement, peace, equality and freedom -- to draw a list from Adam Smith and his Scottish Enlightenment fellows. Thus, Political Economy emerges from a cultural partitioning where Others serve as a kind of negative benchmark in comparison to which modernizing Europe is wealthy, civilized, and rational. These Others, the developmentally anachronistic, are appropriately poor, barbaric and irrational. The savage is precisely what the modern European self is not.

[slow] We might say, then, that Political Economy’s role within the field of significance of the “West,” reveals it to be less a discipline analyzing the commonality and variety of human experience and more a particular political/cultural project grounded in this splitting of Self and Other.

As we have developed at length elsewhere, this separation of savage and West is secured temporally. For example, the Scottish political economists attempted to ground Political Economy in the practices of observation and systematic comparison associated with the emerging conventions of Enlightenment science. Most specifically, the self of the West is located on a temporal register of development. The savage is constructed as historically interesting but ethically relevant only as a superceded moment of a heroic tale of social progress that culminates in the modern commercial self.

However, it is not at all clear that a Political Economy grounded in observation and comparison of varying human practices can reliably fill the Utopian Slot. The idealized self, the “nowhere” of Utopia, is difficult to secure simply against observations about savage Others. Though the savage may serve as the negative social option that continues to give Political Economy its ethical purpose as theory and practice, the idealized self of the West and the savage have multiple, overlapping, and intimate relations.
The Scots themselves seemed to sense this. Nevertheless, they worked to secure their vision from challenge and doubt with claims about the naturalness of the social order of Political Economy. Political Economy came to represent nothing less than a Providential unfolding of the natural order. The idealized self of the West became produced as the outcome of natural laws.
Though we have talked about this as a “temporal wall,” this architectural metaphor suggests a solidity that the temporal separation does not possess. The Other, though separated as backward, finds a continuing place in the Self, undercutting the calming certainties associated with Providential claims. The values and visions of the imagined savage, it seems, were never fully eradicated. Nor, more strikingly, could modern commercial beings do without the savage, since we continue to require those values and visions as a mirror for the idealized self and as a corrective for the shortcomings of modernity.
Further, this uneasy juxtaposition of an idealized image of a forward self and its backward other constitutive of Political Economy provides an opportunity for the “West” to domesticate its most serious anxieties and doubts.
[slow] Where better to bury our doubts than in our richest source of dreams and fantasies – a domain that seems to vindicate our best selves and represents our greatest historical achievements.
Yet our dreams are occupied by anxieties; our fantasies twisted with doubts. Political Economy becomes the site where the separation of self and other is most faithfully defended because the overlap between self and other lurks there most dangerously.
An investigation of the cultural constitution of Political Economy involves, then, not only understanding an identity formation that splits Self and Other, but also the overlapping of Self and Other that offers an alternative and transgressive vision. It is a space in which we find the modern “West’s” most enduring and most sacred social and political ideals, its greatest fears and anxieties, and it is a space where we can find potentially powerful alternative visions of social and political life. Exploring this terrain is also a means of recognizing that Political Economy sits in the domain of the cultural.

II. The Bifurcation of Culture and Economy
Political Economy and Culture are often set in opposition. Standard neoclassical economists proudly insist that economic laws operate regardless of the specificity of space and time, or the particulars of cultural landscapes. Classical political economy and most Marxist economics likewise uncover regularities and laws that operate despite the culturally attuned intentions of actors.

Thus, to promote a “culturally constituted political economy” is to invoke a tension. The modifier “culture” threatens to undermine the nomothetic elegance of general laws; it seems to make an aesthetic and logical mess of efforts to get beyond intentions and towards unintended consequences. Culture seems to align itself in our imagination as one with the ideographic – culture stands in for cultures and cultures suggest unique systems of meaning and meaningful interaction.

To give in to the cultural is to be:

newly sensitive to variation,
to downgrade economics from its status as natural law,
to confront alternative meanings and purposes than those central to the modern economy,
It is to transform economics into an ethnological science.
Economics as Ethnological Science – there is seems to be a necessary tension in that phrase. Despite and perhaps because of that tension, some scholars embrace economic anthropology – a type of study that has a wide range:

from a sensitivity to the cultural variables that serve as inputs into economic laws,
or the idea that economic laws are themselves as robust or as soft as cultural interactions,
to the notion that the very possibility of creating an economic science is historically constituted by a particular type of culture.
Economics as ethnology may leave us with more questions than answers.

Do cultural interactions themselves have patterns? Might we be able to study these?
Rather than starting with a deductive drive, can we mix a nomothetic sensibility with an inductive approach?
If there are patterns to cultural interactions, if unintended consequences result from cultural processes, how might we come to study these with neither the imperialism of the nomothetic approach nor a commitment to phenomena as sui generis.
Though we share the cultural critics’ concerns about the Economics discipline – and we take for granted that economy is culturally constituted in some deep sense – our purpose here is somewhat different.

[slow] As part of our understanding of an ethnological political economy we want to suggest the importance of taking the economy’s universalist and nomothetic aims seriously.

Understanding the social meanings and ethical purposes created by a putative acultural economics maybe a project with some merit.

If political economy tries to establish itself as the nomothetic or utopian self in contrast to which culture is the savage slot or the ideographic other, why does it do so?

Why has it been allowed to do so? What attract us to this bifurcation?

What work is enabled and produced for both sides of the divide by this bifurcation?

To ask these questions is not necessarily to absolve political economy of its imperial pretensions. Rather, we seek to probe how and why the bifurcation enables both political economy and ethnologically oriented others to stabilize, naturalize, and overlook the mutually constituting utopian and savage slots.

To destabilize and denaturalize the utopian/savage slot requires us to ask:

what meanings and ethical purposes are brought into social life through the acultural constitution of the political economy?
What meanings and purposes are highlighted by a nomothetically oriented economics? Which remain hidden?
How does deploying a culturally constituted political economy help us retrieve important themes?
Thus, our project is not simply a rejection; an overturning of modern economics or capitalism. Our project involves a recognition that Economics, despite itself, presents an intrinsically “ethical economy” – a domain of “moral sentiments and norms.”

We need to be wary not only of an imperial economics but also of a counter-agenda that continues the bifurcation of Culture and Economy. If, as we have noted, the Economic stakes a claim to the natural, the universal, and the nomothetic while the Cultural finds its home in the ideographic and in difference, then to uncritically embrace the Cultural may simply support the distinctiveness of the Economic. As Nigel Thrift warns, an emphasis on Culture has led many thinkers to take “remarkably little . . . note of economics.” Or, more strongly, by noting that this opposition is constitutive of elements of the cultural turn itself, he suggests that “Culture was culture because it had been purified of the taint of the economic.” To turn to Culture in this manner may simply reproduce this bifurcation. And the bifurcation has the result of emphasizing the distinctive logic of the economy – which is given a positive polarity by the economist and a negative polarity by the cultural critic.

III. The wound

It is interesting that both the economist and the cultural critic would end up sharing a common view of the distinctiveness of the logic of economy. It is even more curious that each deploys this claim to justify the purity of their scholarly activity. For the economist, the economy is cleansed of any cultural/political content that might challenge universal claims. For the cultural critic, enclosing economic logic allows culture a kid of purity from which to launch criticism against an ethically moribund economics.

Each needs the certainty of a boundary that cannot be defended and that thereby ends up sustaining our anxiety.

Seeing political economy as culturally constituted exposes the wound that is overlooked when social theory occupies the utopian/savage slot as either as abstract project or as abstract criticism.

We can finally face what the cultural critic obscures and the economists treat as a matter of nature. Here is what we might want to face: that the cold technical rationality of the economy is deemed acceptable because it allows for the acquisition of other, more important ends – wealth, and the freedom, equality, and individuality that wealth makes possible.

A culturally constituted political economy reveals what often remains hidden by both the economist and the cultural critic, namely, that wealth production giveth and it taketh away. That is, both economists and cultural critics have an interest in hiding the ambiguous ethics of capitalism -- but for different reasons:

The economists because of their virtually unquestioned commitment to the net benefits and to the superior ethics of capitalist practices;
the critics because of their refusal to either acknowledge or debate the possible virtues of capitalism.
Nevertheless, the implicit and often explicit persistence of this debate -- despite the effort to ignore it, is the wound; the pain of sustaining this debate is the real of political economy – both what it cannot avoid and cannot seem to face.

There is also good news. The resources needed to address this wound are not scarce. Our version of a culturally constituted political economy here draws on the rich legacy of Hayek, Smith, Hegel and Marx. We can find in these representatives of a more “classical” tradition an acknowledgement of this wound, a refusal, finally, to treat it as somehow “transcended,” either historically or dialectically.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot,” in Richard G. Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991), p. 27.

We draw on Ibid., pp. 18, 26-29

We have developed a version of this claim at length in Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York: Routledge, 2004) and David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, “The Savage Smith and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism,” in Beate Jahn, ed., Rethinking the Classics and IR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

See Blaney and Inayatullah, “The Savage Smith,” as in note 3.

We are reminded of the power and fragility of architectural metaphors by Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Numbers, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995), pp. 6-9.

See, for example, Carlo Trigilia, Economic Sociology: State, Market, and Society in Modern Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 120-5.

See Andrew Sayer, “(De)commodification, Consumer Culture, and Moral Economy,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21:3 (2003), p. 341. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York, Anchor, 1999), chapter 5, makes roughly the same point.

Nigel Thrift, “Pandora’s Box? Cultural Geographies or Economies,” pp. 692, 698-9. Peter Jackson, “Commercial Cultures: Transcending the Cultural and the Economic,” Progress in Human Geography 26:1 (2002), pp. 4, makes a similar formulation of the problem.