Postmodernism, Economics, and Knowledge (review)

This book brings together essays and commentaries adapted from a 1995 conference in Riverside, California, which focused on the "the postmodern" within the field of economics. Economics, being saturated with what the editors call "modernist formalism, essentialism, scientism, and so forth" (37), is especially ripe for the kind of historic self-revaluation that is now commonplace within the humanities, and which often, albeit controversially, goes under the label of postmodernism. The editors' goal here is to provide "an up-to-date précis of where the discussion of postmodernism within much of the economics profession stands," as well as to spark "a cross-disciplinary discussion of the postmodern turn in economics" (38). The book therefore also includes scholars from outside the discipline of economics proper, although the intriguing interlocution with literary and cultural studies that appears to have characterized the original conference has unfortunately been diluted in this published version.

Readers such as myself, who are not economists but who have a penchant for both interdisciplinarity and "the economy" in its broader senses, will appreciate the opportunity to observe social scientists wrestling with problems of signification, metaphor, metaphysics, and gender politics, all of which are now familiar to theorists across the humanities. However, as this wrestling proceeds through the book, its usefulness becomes decreasingly clear, especially when literary theory and philosophy become the default source for terminologies that might more fittingly have been generated out of the discourse of economics itself. In particular, the term postmodern is lent a dizzying variety of definitions that, by the end of nearly 500 pages, seriously diminishes its worth as a touchstone for a cross-disciplinary discussion of economic issues, whatever merit it may retain as conventional or political code within economics itself. "The postmodern" is characterized variously as an "antithesis to modernism's thesis" (61), a "hypersensitivity to the overdetermined and complex character of everything existing" (79), "the move from persons and people to information systems" (188), an "insistence that identity and subject position are slippery concepts" (263), and so on. Because the book's meta-theoretical debate rarely progresses out of this haze, specific contributors are almost always more persuasive and informative when they ignore that debate and get down to concrete work. For example, Gillian Hewitson's analysis of how economists interpret surrogate motherhood, revealing "the sexed construction of exchange in neoclassical economics" (239), provides a nice example of the direction the book as a whole might have taken, as her essay is most persuasive precisely when she resists the temptation to describe her critique as "poststructural." Similarly compelling when at work, rather than when preoccupied by "postmodernist" self-description, are Stephen Gudeman's discussion of the evolution of the concepts of gift and exchange, and Judith Mehta's case study of bargaining strategies and the difficulties they pose for conventional economic terminologies. The trajectory in these pieces—away from indistinct epochal characterizations and toward specific critical issues—seems a more productive means of discovering whatever might be the postmodern turn in economics overall, because the work of these writers is generated immanently, within the very terms, concepts, and methods that presumably have given rise to that larger turn.

Less successful, although far more common in the book, are forays into philosophy and literary theory that mainly cite the now canonical critique of metaphysics undertaken by twentieth-century French theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault (surprisingly, Deleuze is not discussed). Despite routinely embracing terms such as deconstruction and poststructuralism, the writers in this book invariably decline or fail to interpret adequately the contexts from which this technical vocabulary is appropriated, and indeed much of it appears to have been filtered through relatively undependable secondary sources. For instance—and what follows is intended only to represent larger tendencies in the book—Dierdre McCloskey, while alluding to Richard Lanham and Wayne Booth (odd choices), asserts that "deconstruction in substance is not...