#8: The Marketplace of Good Ass Ideas
Hey what's up. This is part 8 of my ongoing series summarizing Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. To see previous entries in this series, check the archive.
Chapter 8: Postmodernism and the Market
Marx and Proudhon
Jameson opens this one with a nice bit of conceptual housekeeping about "markets." For Jameson, it's not really possible to talk about the market as a kind of abstract ideology or concept without talking about actual markets, and vice versa, because the actual operation of markets is the thing that generates the ideological or conceptual dimension of the market as such. Here's Jameson:
the ideology of the market is unfortunately not some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or embellishment that can be removed from the economic problem and then sent over to some cultural or superstructural morgue, to be dissected by specialists over there. It is somehow generated by the thing itself, as its objectively necessary afterimage; somehow, both dimensions must be registered together, in their identity as well as their difference (260)
This position is being pulled directly from our old pal Marx, who makes this argument in the Grundrisse in response to the Proudhonists, who "thought they would get rid of all the problems of money by abolishing money, without seeing that it is the very contradiction of the exchange system that is objectified and expressed in money proper and would continue to objectify and express itself in any of its simpler substitutes, like work-time coupons" (260).
Here's Marx:
the money system...is indeed the system of freedom and equality, and what disturbs [the Proudhonists] in the more recent development of the system are the disturbances immanent to the system, i.e., the very realization of equality and freedom, which turn out to be inequality and unfreedom. It is an aspiration as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, or that labour which produces exchange value would not develop into wage labour (Quoted in Jameson 262).
For Marx, the Proundhonists' big mistake is their belief that freedom and equality are the aspirational features of some Utopian image of the market that can be realized through gradual and incremental adjustment. A good contemporary analog for this kind of thing is probably something like the "democratic socialists" down in the states, or the NDP here in Canada, where the belief seems to be that markets are a kind of foundational element of societies as such, but they can be made to operate more fairly (i.e., closer to their "ideal" expression) through things like regulation etc.
This is a mistake, both practically and conceptually, because it assumes that there is some kind of "ideal" operation of market that is separate from the way that actual markets operate, when in fact it is the actual operation of markets that generates their ideological content. There is no idealized version: the market is what it is, and the kinds of unfreedom and inequality it generates, as well as the unrealizable ideals of freedom and equality that it promises, are its defining features.
Freedom and equality and the market
So the crucial thing to note here is that "freedom and equality" are in fact fundamental features of the market (or "money system") being described in the quote above. It's just that they're fundamentally unreachable. You can't actually have them, but by holding them up as an ideal, you are reifying the centrality of the market. Sorry! As Jameson describes, "everybody wants [freedom and equality]; but they cannot be realized. The only thing that can happen to them is for the system that generates them to disappear, thereby abolishing the 'ideals' along with the reality itself" (262-63).
Ultimately, it's a kind of rhetorical problem for the left, where guys like the Proudhonists, or today's various social democrats, have essentially tricked themselves into trying to combat the market system on its own terms. This problem has existed forever, but it's become particularly dire under late capitalism, where the logic and actual operation of markets have become so central to our lives that they (and their attendant ideals) seem sort of natural and inevitable. That's a big problem! Here's Jameson:
the rhetoric of the market has been a fundamental and central component of [the ideological struggle between Marxism and late capitalism], this struggle for the legitimation or delegitimation of left discourse..."The market is in human nature" is the proposition that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time (263-64).
So that's kind of the project here. We all know that the freedom and equality enabled by the market are fundamentally good and aspirational qualities of any modern society. But what this chapter presupposes is: maybe they aren't?
Becker
As an example of how the logic of the market has become naturalized, Jameson turns to Gary Becker, who argues, in his book The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, that you can describe literally all of human behaviour through economics: "the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour" (Becker 14). Okay!
This approach yields some kind of weird-sounding formulations of quotidian aspects of "human behaviour" that are nonetheless sort of accurate, albeit in a very narrow way. For instance, here's Becker describing families and "the household":
Similar to the typical firm analyzed in standard production theory, the household invests in captial assets (savings), capital equipment (durable goods), and capital embodied in its "labour force" (human capital of family members)...As an organizational entity, the household, like the firm, engages in production using this labour and production (Becker in Jameson 267)
Which, sure! Why not. What's weird about this is not so much that it's wrong (it isn't, exactly), but just kind of thin and flat. If you want to describe the various intangible benefits of having a family as a kind of "production," then I guess your kids and wife are sort of the labour force behind that production. But it's weird to do that! And it flattens out the complexities of intrafamily dynamics into a sort of math problem. And Becker wants to describe every aspect of human behavior like this!
For Jameson, this naturalization of economic logic suggests the same kind of denial of transcendence and plot that he's been characterizing as central features of the postmodern: "Such representation would reveal a world peculiarly without transcendence and without perspective (death is here, for example, just another matter of utility maximization), and indeed without plot in any traditional sense, since all choices would be equidistant and on the same level." (269).
Markets and human nature
The point here is that the market as such is useful as an explanatory mechanism because its totalizing structure, paired with its underlying flat plotlessness, is nicely aligned with the cultural logic of late capitalism itself. The panic-inducing lack of historical consciousness that is the hallmark of postmodernism as a cultural logic can be counterbalanced by the reassuringly atemporal logic of the market. It can help people orient themselves by way of a bunch of depersonalized transactions. Here's Jameson:
Market ideology assures us that human beings make a mess of it when they try to control their destinies ('socialism is impossible') and that we are fortunate in possessing an interpersonal mechanism — the market— which can substitute for human hubris and planning and replace human decisions altogether. We only need to keep it clean and well oiled, and it now— like the monarch so many centuries ago— will see to us and keep us in line (273).
That governments exist primarily as a means of facilitating the smooth operation of markets is now a pretty familiar idea. Philip Mirowski's great book from a few years ago about neoliberalism and the '08 financial crisis makes this case pretty exhaustively. What's more interesting to Jameson, though, and where this chapter ends, is the extent to which this naturalization of the market kind of boxes out the potential for other, more substantial and useful projects.
Planning
Jameson ends the chapter with an appeal to this kind of “great collective project” and the utility central planning:
What is wanted is a great collective project in which an active majority of the population participates, as something belonging to it and constructed by its own energies. The setting of social priorities— also known in the socialist literature as planning— would have to be part of such a collective project. It should be clear, however, that virtually by definition the market cannot be a project at all (278).
Ultimately, this is what's at stake for Jameson. The depersonalized, economic logic of the market serves as an unsatisfyingly totalizing framework for negotiating our relationship to other people.
The point here is that the market and this weirdly transactional economic logic promise us not only freedom and equality, but also a kind of clarity in the face of postmodern life. But just as it is unable to ever fully deliver on that promise of freedom and equality, the simplicity with which it reduces the whole messy world of human relations to a set of optimizable transactions leaves us with very little that is recognizably human. In more comfortable literary terms, there is no plot, no narrative, everything is just flattened out into this weird and blocky math.
The potential for any kind of alternative to emerge in the future lies in the outright rejection of the market as both an ideological formation and actual mediator of human relations. Not only does its economic logic warp our understanding of human behaviour and relationships into weirdly transactional terms, it also undermines the potential for other kinds of relationships to emerge.