3

A caveat about the “primacy of economy”

AA: As we speak about the radical possibility and necessity of disrupting the terms that define the political in our times, let me unravel a concern and invite your response. As we revisit the political, ethical, and affective economies of dispossession, I would like to say that I am perplexed about a particular political and theoretical tendency to privilege and reify the category of the “economy” in light of the current financial crisis. Of course this tendency has been circulating for some time, along with its concomitant discourses of the division between “primary” and “secondary” conditions of oppression, whereby the former is represented by the “material” and the “economic” while the latter by the “merely cultural.”¹ Circulating among progressive intellectuals during the 1980s was an objection to the purported abandonment of the materialist project. It was the moment at which poststructuralism was demonized as politically paralyzing. I worry that at the present moment in left intellectual and political history that discourse might regain a currency, as neoliberalism compels us all to a renewed acknowledgement and affirmation of the so-called primacy of economy. The current moment might be portrayed as a new and reinvigorated incitation to economic discourse, which comes in various forms (very heterogeneous otherwise): either as post-political technocratic therapeutics and financial management, or as critical, anti-capitalist, and anti-neoliberal visions that take the economic realm to offer the only possible arena in which a comprehensive and rigorous political position against neoliberalism might be wrought. If I am right in the depiction I venture here, this resumption of economistic orthodoxy works epistemologically in tandem with neoliberal logic. Would this re-packaging of the economy’s primacy harbinger a resurgent social conservatism on the Left? I hasten to add, however, that there are certainly several left movements and collectivities in the world today that are aware of such predicaments and respond successfully to such challenges.

I have no doubt that “economy” is today a diffuse, insidious, and powerful interpellation through which subjects (and non-subjects) are called into formation and reformulation. But I would argue that the current historical moment is not merely about the economy itself (if such a thing exists), and, even more significantly, economy is not merely about the economic “itself.” Perhaps one might reformulate this caveat thus: there is nothing merely economic about economics.

JB: So you are suggesting that rendering the economic domain autonomous is a way of accepting the claims of economic science and calculation proffered by neoliberalism? I believe this follows upon an older point made by Marx – and Marxist economic anthropologists – that one of the achievements of capitalism was the analytic distinction between the domain of the social and the domain of the economic. “Disembedding” economic structures from their social and historical conditions and conventions is precisely the condition of economic formalism.

AA: This is exactly my point, but allow me to be more specific. The current regimes of power prompt pressing and complicated questions about how to think and how to act in order to counter these regimes as well as about how to engage with the materialities of life that are being produced through them. Unsettling the hegemony of capitalism involves opening up conceptual, discursive, affective, and political spaces for enlarging our economic and political imaginary. It requires exploring also what circulating forms and norms of surplus appropriation the formalistic preoccupation with neoliberal economics works to obscure. I think it is critical that we pay close attention to the ways in which neoliberalism is not just a mode of economic management and corporate governance, but rather, and even more significantly, a “political rationality” (in concurrence with Wendy Brown²), or a matrix of intelligibility that works to replace the political with technocratic, corporate, post-political governance. The production of dispensable and disposable populations (echoing the “surplus population” in Marx’s formulation) has everything to do with questions of racism, sexism, homophobia, heteronormativity, ableism, and familialism, all those questions that have been historically discounted as irrelevant to “real” politics. The capitalism of our times has everything to do with the biopolitics of social Darwinism – with all its implications of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability – inherent in neoliberal governmentality. My sense is that the biopolitical is at the heart of the logics, fantasies, and technologies that engender the political and moral economies of our late liberal times.

JB: But perhaps there are two different points here. The first is about the construction of an autonomous economic system, one whose workings require formal models that delimit and separate off economic processes from other social and historical ones. The second seems to be an argument with a form of Marxism that continues to argue for, or to presume uncritically, primary and secondary forms of oppression. How do we think the “extra-economic” within the economic in response to the first problem? And how do we refuse the dismissal of the “merely cultural” implied by the second? I gather what you are also saying is that some left criticisms end up reproducing the presumption of autonomy of the economic sphere, as well as its primacy in the determination of social and political reality. It seems, too, that you are suggesting that understanding neoliberalism as a political rationality (cf. Wendy Brown) is one way to cut across the economic/cultural divide and dispense with the model of primary and secondary determinations and its economistic reductions.

AA: Exactly. Of course, the concepts and epistemologies that we deploy in order to deconstruct the current orders of power are necessarily implicated in these orders, ones that divide the world into separate spheres (economy, society, culture, politics) and are invested in the production of a distinctive economic sphere. But I think we need to imagine and enact alternative (that is, non-economistic) ways to deploy the concept of “economy” beyond its common sense. It becomes necessary once again to raise the questions: Does capitalism, in its current neoliberal mutation as state of exception (that is, “crisis”), inevitably interpellate us today as subjects of economy and subjects of competitive economic struggle for survival? Does it also recruit us into an ideological framework that affirms the anachronistic division between the “material” and the “cultural”? How do we resist and fight neoliberal log(ist)ics without reducing our politics to an economistic politics? Are we perhaps running the risk of letting ongoing political contestation be colonized by a purportedly distinct economic configuration that masquerades as the only really serious and robust arena of politics? I think that one of the formative effects of this incitation to economic reductionism is the dismissal of apparently non-economistic, or uneconomic, perspectives as being preoccupied with secondary, derivative, particularistic, inessential, and, “in the final analysis,” trivial matters and forms of politics. So it is relevant to consider and offer non-economistic and uneconomic perspectives on contemporary politics. It seems to me that the challenge today is to better understand how the normativity of the economic in its neoliberal guise is inevitably and fundamentally linked to the reproduction of gender, sexual, kinship, desire, and biopolitical (that is, biocapital, human capital) normativity.

JB: In a sense, we are confronted again with the challenge taken up by socialist feminisms a few decades ago, and one that continues to be important to those who are thinking about the economy of the household, the reproduction of labor, the differential production of illiteracy and poverty. One reason I am interested in precarity, which would include a consideration of “precaritization,” is that it describes that process of acclimatizing a population to insecurity. It operates to expose a targeted demographic to unemployment or to radically unpredictable swings between employment and unemployment, producing poverty and insecurity about an economic future, but also interpellating that population as expendable, if not fully abandoned. These affective registers of precaritization include the lived feeling of precariousness, which can be articulated with a damaged sense of future and a heightened sense of anxiety about issues like illness and mortality (especially when there is no health insurance or when conditions of labor and accelerated anxiety converge to debilitate the body). This is just one example of how a condition crosses the economic and cultural spheres, suggesting that what we need precisely are a new set of transversal categories and forms of thought that elude both dualism and determinism.

Notes

1 See also the exchange between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser in New Left Review and Social Text for different views on the relationship between capitalism and heterosexism: Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” New Left Review, 227 (January–February 1998): 33–44 (previously published in Social Text, 52/53 [Fall–Winter 1997]: 265–76); Nancy Fraser, “Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler,” New Left Review, 228 (March–April 1998): 140–50 (previously published in Social Text, 52/53 [Fall–Winter 1997]: 279–89).

2 Wendy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory and Event, 7(1) (2003) (online journal).