awkward questions about humanist economics

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Mon, 03 Aug 1998 21:58:30 -0400

I'm glad that Phil was stimulated by my effort at subversive questions
regarding both traditional and marxist economic theories of money. He makes
many good points that I would agree with in general, but there are a few
places where I am still far from satisfied with any answers I've heard so
far (and not just the ones from Phil).

His data on the preponderance of trade in financial products seems to me to
strengthen the view that this is all trade in signs with tenuous if any
connection to materiality (other than that of the signifiers themselves and
the trading technologies and participants ... note that all this trading of
nothing certainly absorbs an awful lot of lives and has vast labour input,
even if that seems not to matter at all to the value of the instruments
traded) ... these are free-floating signs, they are second-order signs in
relation to money itself as a first-order sign (or since I'm still a bit
unsure about money, maybe they are third-order to its second).

Phil seems to think this is all so unnatural that it can't last. I think it
is an awful waste of the lives of the people doing the trades, and perhaps
that is why it won't last, but an economy in which sign value at least is
traded along with and in addition to material value seems universal and one
in which sign value is traded more or less independently of other material
values seems a little silly, but not unable to long continue. Theology was
never an economy, quite, but it lasted a long time. So has literature and
art. Ideologies of the social value of cultural signs apart, if material
needs are met, people seem quite free to lose themselves completely in the
hyperreal. Perhaps this is the fatal flaw in our semiotic constitution ...
so long, historically, as survival needs were paramount, there was a check
on our will to live entirely in the fantasies of the meaning world, and
perhaps that may now, for more and more (if still few) people, be passing
away ... such dangers are often thrown in the face of virtual reality (VR
technology) development, but they seem well realized in the financial
markets already.

The link between money and confidence is important. The question is in what
do we have confidence and why? historically, that the money will buy the
goods ... and so that there are such goods and that the total system needed
to effect such exchanges is working ... it was not just the lack of money,
I think, in the 30s depression, but the breakdown of many links in a
complex and poorly understood system ... links that operated in both
material and semiotic terms and which we still do not understand today. I
doubt there is any complete model of ALL the factors that must operate
normally to permit even one simple transaction of the kind that exists only
in an industrialized capitalist economy ... much less of how they are
connected and how each connection is relevant. Economics, ultimately, is
consubstantial with the ecosocial system itself. Its complexity is far
vaster than any economic theory can cope with.

Perhaps the other point that most concerns me is the issue of the
anthropocentrism of humanist economics. I was being a bit frivolous in some
of my examples, but I do not believe that all capital is self-amplifying
technology, or vice versa, for capital is self-amplifying only in respect
of exchange value, whereas many of the new technologies are self-amplifying
in respect of use-value. I think that Phil is correctly applying and
interpreting marxist and generally labor theories of value in his responses
to my questions; it is the core assumption of these theories that somehow
human labor is privileged that I think is no longer true. It is true in one
sense, where we agree that economic activity consumes lives and that lives
have value to people. But not in the sense that it is inevitably human
labor that makes the historical material conditions that matter most to the
quality of our lives; that is a historically contingent truth. It was once
almost entirely true. It is less true now. I believe that in the next
century or two it will become very little true. Because people are only one
link in the chain (one nexus in the net, one actant in the network), and
formerly we were a privileged link, being the only link that was very
semiotically creative on relevant time scales (i.e. historical vs.
evolutionary time), and so we made history. We are losing this privileged
position, not because we are making robots that can dig ditches, but
because we are making "robots" that can imagine new kinds of cities. (The
importance of the cyborg concept here is both our fantasy of keeping the
heroic role for ourselves and the need for a link between machine
imaginations and human desires, else the two will diverge and the sub-nets
decouple: people might have no interest in non-human-imagined phenomena ...
maybe ... on this view the cyborg idea is a response to these fears). The
problem is not that people will not perform in AI dramas (simulating actors
is probably not that difficult), but that they will not form a part of the
audience for them.

Finally, a traditional gripe ... production tells only half the story ...
this was Baudrillard's starting point, and a good one I think, whether one
likes where he personally went with it eventually or not. Yes, it is
important to analyze the play in terms of the actors' labor and lives ...
but also in terms of the audience's labor and lives. Robot playwrights and
human actors, sure ... but what of robot and human audiences? much less of
a creative milieu where interactive productions dissolve the neat
distinction between the one and the other ... as in many other interesting
neo-economic cases, where consumption is an essential part of what makes a
sign-value (and even a material value) exist/operate ... and so is a kind
of production, a component of production ... and vice versa. Again the old
models of causality fail us in the middle of interactional networks, the
neat factorizations go with them.

Finally, the postmodern method of argument is not
"relativist-subjectivist", and indeed I have very little interest in issues
of metaphysics and epistemology built around what are to me the theologies
of a small philosophical subculture ... I think that the real revolution of
postmodernism, one that even postmodernists are very uncomfortable with, is
that it is profoundly anti-humanist. The distinguishing hallmark of
european modernism (i.e. Renaissance and after) is the gradual replacement
of the sacredness of the whole with the sanctity of the parts, and then
only some of the parts ... individual human social actors. Even the great
political divide between community as highest value and individual as
highest value mistakenly thinks a community is composed of just the people,
rather than of EVERYTHING it takes to make a village. Perhaps robots and
cyborgs will take a less narrow view, as did pre-capitalist cultures.

JAY.

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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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