Capitalist Monkeys Do Derrida

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been doing some readings in the discourse of globalization for this “Rethinking Economy” seminar, and I guess that’s where part of my motivation for yesterday’s post came from, since there was a very slight positivist/empiricist reaction against the poststructural thread to the readings. But most of the readings last week weren’t that way, except for maybe the couple chapters from Hardt & Negri’s now-no-longer-even-notorious Empire, and even that’s more of a sort of ludic Marxism than anything else. (I have to admit, though, that even having only read those couple chapters, I’m so all over the Rome metaphor; I’m like going through this Marxist stuff on globalization and scribbling “Yes! Tacitus!” in the margins. I’m a total dork. But now I gotta read the rest of the book.)

We had a few chapters of Greider’s Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, which everybody else thought was doom and gloom but I read as practically celebratory in its gleeful relinquishing of human agency to abstractions like “Finance” and “Technology” and “Capital”, as if loss of control was somehow a wonderful symptom of our new labor-saving devices. And we read Kevin Cox’s “Globalization and the Politics of Distribution: A Critical Assessment”, which pretty much shut that shit down with a quickness.

So, basically, Cox argues that understandings of globalization in the field of political economy have been shaped by their two contexts: distribution and regulation. The discursive context of distribution relies on an opposition of immobile labor to mobile capital, while the discursive context of regulation relies on an opposition of localized (national) regulation of economies to globalized (transnational) capital. And, in fact, many of the reductive binaries Cox reacts against seem present in Greider’s work: the opposition of new technology-dependent capital-intensive processes to old labor-intensive processes (28), nations versus markets (18), advanced wealthy cosmopolitan societies versus backward poor provincial tribes (20), and so on. Cox demonstrates that the differences and movements between “First World” and “Third World” (Greider actually usefully problematizes these terms) economies are hardly as pronounced or prevalent as common constructions of globalization make them out to be (118), and makes a similarly convincing case that the opposition between skilled and deskilled labor is hardly as simple as the discourse of globalization makes it out to be (119). The same holds true for the opposition between the just-in-time mobility hypothesized as a hallmark of globalization and the “old” economy’s boundedness in location (120).

Cox argues that the dubious cultural construction yoking these binaries together is “a conception of capital as an exchange relation” (128). However, this dubious and dominant construction is itself one half of a binary, its alternative being the “view of capital where the stress is on the social relations into which people enter in order to produce” (129). Cox offers little detail on the alternative view, choosing instead to spend the bulk of his essay focusing on the difficulties posed for the discourse of globalization by an over-reliance on that “conception of capital as exchange relation”, but one wonders if a more in-depth examination of those social relations might usefully rely upon a conception of the micro-technologies of power operating, as Foucault puts it, at the “capillary” level (Discipline and Punish). Such an examination could help remedy the bizarre absence of human agency running through Greider’s chapters: “technologies enable people” (12) without having to be understood, since technology “just works” (14) to the point where no one “is in charge of the revolution. The revolution runs itself” (26). Greider’s claim that “Economic revolution always originates with the invention of a new power source — a machine that can do the work previously done by human toil but cheaper, faster, more effectively” (27) struck me as not only essentialist and strange but as downright wrong (Hello? The Roman Empire? Feudalism?), and also as symptomatic of the same prevailing cultural trend that assumed, in Al Gore’s “Goals 2000” statement, that computers would be the rising tide that lifts all boats for education: we can simply spend money on technology and obviate the need for human agency — or perhaps a better term here for “agency” might be “labor”.

Which led me to some kinda obnoxiously monkeys-doing-Derrida-type thoughts, but ones that maybe bear comment. Plenty of good earnest deconstructing graduate students have cut their critical teeth on exploring how the metaphysics of presence play out in the discursive context of “culture” and its western/not-western binary; I’ve seen a few do the same with the discursive context of “politics” and its democracy/not-democracy binary. My own version of that play would be to ask what discursive context the binary of technological determinism/not technological determinism might play out in. (Any suggestions? Not Technological Determinism, as the subaltern term, is problematized as absence, lack, that which has no positive qualities: does that mean that we understand the absence of its determinism as the absence of technology itself and so react against it? Are we that stupid?) And one of my favorite things about the seminar is that our attention has started to focus on the the discursive context of “the economy” and its capitalism/not-capitalism binary.

The thing is, with that final thought, we’re also being asked to construct an understanding of “the economy” as not some brutal, implacable, monolithic force: as something with holes in it, inconsistencies, spaces for agency. And I want to think that, but at the same time, I also want to rely on what an understanding of economy-as-juggernaut does for the way I conceptualize class and the way capitalism just beats the shit out of people. So that’s my big theoretical dilemma. Reactions?

Anyway. I’ve been a slug about responding to comments, for which I apologize. Better soon, I promise. But — as an FYI — no blogging tomorrow, for probably guessable reasons.

Back Saturday. Take care.