5/15/09
Blog Swap is a great project
I am glad that I signed up. This week's topic is freedom, as you can see. It was a bit hard to decide which freedom to write about, but my guest blogger did a good job with the subject of freedom of decision. This Blog Swap post comes from another Joe, this time Joe Missionary.
5/10/09
Haunting the knowledge economy
I’ve been a bit tardy about reviewing this book, so it is no longer new. But it is worthy of attention because it does try to do something original; and also because it fails.
Ostensibly a social theory of the knowledge economy, arising from an ARC Discovery grant on ‘education policy discourse in Australia’ (p. ix), it is actually an attempt at a poetics of absence, although the authors prefer the word ‘politics’ (p. 27), in economic thought.
Hence the title – ‘haunting’ is meant to denote ‘things that are neither fully present nor fully absent’ (p. 6). So, in fact, the book is not about the knowledge economy at all, beyond a literature review of the ‘discourse’ in the first chapter. It is meant to be about the ‘threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible’, by means of which ‘we are able to identify the ghostly economies haunting the knowledge economy’ (p. 6).
The spectres in question are paraded for our inspection: the risk economy; the gift economy; the libidinal economy; and the survival economy. Each of them gets a chapter.
Thus the book proceeds by fourfold repetition (and one can’t help noticing that there are four authors, although one of them is rendered ghostly by the use of the word ‘with’). This is structurally elegant but chaffs somewhat in the reading, reminding this reviewer that repeating things four times is a standard pedagogical device for preschoolers, triumphantly exploited by the (four) Teletubbies of the eponymous TV series.
Here, then, are the four ghosts in the machine of knowledge:
- The risk economy is not only Ulrich Beck’s sociological ‘risk society’ (the dangers of modernity; the ‘bads’ of goods), but also the risks associated with entrepreneurial or Schumpeterian capitalism, and with commercially oriented techno-science.
- The gift economy, derived from Mauss’s anthropology of exchange to describe the non-market part of the economy, especially the public sector, including education.
- The libidinal economy is Lyotard’s ‘economy of desire’ and commodification; here set up as a pugilistic stand off between the creative industries and avantgarde art (the fight is fixed).
- The survival economy: diversity, sustainability and development; you might expect Ivan Illich’s ideas about frugality, but it is based on the work of Indian ecofeminist, Vandana Shiva.
All of the chapters open with an attempt to unsettle categories, by means of an extended ‘conversation’ (p. 121) between Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and a work called Specters of Marx by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The ‘contact’ for this ghoulish encounter is Karl Marx, whose spectre haunted nineteenth-century capitalism and who himself is treated as spectral – in a good way – by Derrida: ‘For Derrida, the ghost rattles the very foundations of existence and problematizes an ontology based on presence and informed by Heideggarian philosophy’ (p. 4).
In other words (and such passages probably warrant other words), the authors rather like rattling foundations. The book is not therefore an exercise in exorcising shades or unmasking pre-scientific superstitions, but rather it is an attempt to defamiliarise (in the Russian formalist sense); to render the ordinary uncanny, to make it strange in order to renew our understanding.
In a sense, this strategy is good for readers – it provides them with something to do; i.e. to see if they can recognise what lies beneath the ghostly sheets. While playing this game I noticed another shape – a hidden agenda, perhaps? – poking out from under the global theory. Although it is never stated, the authors have a predilection for citing work by women, or Australians, or both. So we get the local in the global: Derrida through Australian Niall Lucy; Schumpeter through Carlota Perez; Beck’s risk through Australian Deborah Lupton; Mauss’s gift through Australian John Frow; Lyotard’s libidinous through QUT (unheimlich!); and survival via Vandana Shiva, Australianised by John Braithwaite, Peter Drahos – and bush tucker.
Such interesting diversions aside, however, the problem with this book lies not in its insistence on uncertainty, but in the all-too-obvious underlying structure. Each chapter is really about something rather familiar:
- risk economy = market capitalism;
- gift economy = public good;
- libidinal economy = consumerism;
- survival economy = postcolonialism.
Thus revealed, it emerges that the clever writing is in the service of a rather banal endeavour, for a ‘moral economy’ is lurking not far in the background and the moralistic judgements are all too predictable: for market capitalism and consumerism, please boo; for public good and postcolonial resistance, please cheer. Just when we thought we might be glimpsing something new, the book simply reinstates academic structural Marxism – a binary opposition between commerce and its others.
That is bad news for readers of HERD, for the ‘knowledge economy’ turns out to have been a ruse to power by techno-scientific neoliberal economic policymakers like yourselves: it is ‘haunted by its own contradictions’; it wants to make ‘knowledge the centrepiece of economic policy’ and ‘economics the centrepiece of knowledge policy (research, education, learning)’ – a desire that is a ‘reductive formula’ (p. 27). Apparently, the dreaded discourse of the knowledge economy ‘proffers its views of itself as and its future trajectory as solid and certain’ (p. 27). The authors want us to think instead, as Marx and Engels famously put it, that ‘all that is solid to melts into air’.
But perhaps you don’t have to worry too much, for in the end the ghost-story is not all that frightening. Far from constructing ‘a distinct social theory for the twentyfirst century’, as claimed by series editor, John Urry (p. viii), Haunting the knowledge economy remains a rhetorical or ideological critique, not a substantial investigation of either knowledge or the economy. Tempting a tart response, it asks: ‘Is it all merely a matter of semantics or something more?’ (p. 12). The authors claim to be ‘scholars of the future’ (p. 120), but their strictures against knowledge-led innovation don’t deliver ‘something more’. They stick firmly to the semantics, spooked by the possibility that the knowledge economy might matter quite substantially. They just want it to go away and leave them alone.
You can buy this book here
Ostensibly a social theory of the knowledge economy, arising from an ARC Discovery grant on ‘education policy discourse in Australia’ (p. ix), it is actually an attempt at a poetics of absence, although the authors prefer the word ‘politics’ (p. 27), in economic thought.
Hence the title – ‘haunting’ is meant to denote ‘things that are neither fully present nor fully absent’ (p. 6). So, in fact, the book is not about the knowledge economy at all, beyond a literature review of the ‘discourse’ in the first chapter. It is meant to be about the ‘threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible’, by means of which ‘we are able to identify the ghostly economies haunting the knowledge economy’ (p. 6).
The spectres in question are paraded for our inspection: the risk economy; the gift economy; the libidinal economy; and the survival economy. Each of them gets a chapter.
Thus the book proceeds by fourfold repetition (and one can’t help noticing that there are four authors, although one of them is rendered ghostly by the use of the word ‘with’). This is structurally elegant but chaffs somewhat in the reading, reminding this reviewer that repeating things four times is a standard pedagogical device for preschoolers, triumphantly exploited by the (four) Teletubbies of the eponymous TV series.
Here, then, are the four ghosts in the machine of knowledge:
- The risk economy is not only Ulrich Beck’s sociological ‘risk society’ (the dangers of modernity; the ‘bads’ of goods), but also the risks associated with entrepreneurial or Schumpeterian capitalism, and with commercially oriented techno-science.
- The gift economy, derived from Mauss’s anthropology of exchange to describe the non-market part of the economy, especially the public sector, including education.
- The libidinal economy is Lyotard’s ‘economy of desire’ and commodification; here set up as a pugilistic stand off between the creative industries and avantgarde art (the fight is fixed).
- The survival economy: diversity, sustainability and development; you might expect Ivan Illich’s ideas about frugality, but it is based on the work of Indian ecofeminist, Vandana Shiva.
All of the chapters open with an attempt to unsettle categories, by means of an extended ‘conversation’ (p. 121) between Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and a work called Specters of Marx by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The ‘contact’ for this ghoulish encounter is Karl Marx, whose spectre haunted nineteenth-century capitalism and who himself is treated as spectral – in a good way – by Derrida: ‘For Derrida, the ghost rattles the very foundations of existence and problematizes an ontology based on presence and informed by Heideggarian philosophy’ (p. 4).
In other words (and such passages probably warrant other words), the authors rather like rattling foundations. The book is not therefore an exercise in exorcising shades or unmasking pre-scientific superstitions, but rather it is an attempt to defamiliarise (in the Russian formalist sense); to render the ordinary uncanny, to make it strange in order to renew our understanding.
In a sense, this strategy is good for readers – it provides them with something to do; i.e. to see if they can recognise what lies beneath the ghostly sheets. While playing this game I noticed another shape – a hidden agenda, perhaps? – poking out from under the global theory. Although it is never stated, the authors have a predilection for citing work by women, or Australians, or both. So we get the local in the global: Derrida through Australian Niall Lucy; Schumpeter through Carlota Perez; Beck’s risk through Australian Deborah Lupton; Mauss’s gift through Australian John Frow; Lyotard’s libidinous through QUT (unheimlich!); and survival via Vandana Shiva, Australianised by John Braithwaite, Peter Drahos – and bush tucker.
Such interesting diversions aside, however, the problem with this book lies not in its insistence on uncertainty, but in the all-too-obvious underlying structure. Each chapter is really about something rather familiar:
- risk economy = market capitalism;
- gift economy = public good;
- libidinal economy = consumerism;
- survival economy = postcolonialism.
Thus revealed, it emerges that the clever writing is in the service of a rather banal endeavour, for a ‘moral economy’ is lurking not far in the background and the moralistic judgements are all too predictable: for market capitalism and consumerism, please boo; for public good and postcolonial resistance, please cheer. Just when we thought we might be glimpsing something new, the book simply reinstates academic structural Marxism – a binary opposition between commerce and its others.
That is bad news for readers of HERD, for the ‘knowledge economy’ turns out to have been a ruse to power by techno-scientific neoliberal economic policymakers like yourselves: it is ‘haunted by its own contradictions’; it wants to make ‘knowledge the centrepiece of economic policy’ and ‘economics the centrepiece of knowledge policy (research, education, learning)’ – a desire that is a ‘reductive formula’ (p. 27). Apparently, the dreaded discourse of the knowledge economy ‘proffers its views of itself as and its future trajectory as solid and certain’ (p. 27). The authors want us to think instead, as Marx and Engels famously put it, that ‘all that is solid to melts into air’.
But perhaps you don’t have to worry too much, for in the end the ghost-story is not all that frightening. Far from constructing ‘a distinct social theory for the twentyfirst century’, as claimed by series editor, John Urry (p. viii), Haunting the knowledge economy remains a rhetorical or ideological critique, not a substantial investigation of either knowledge or the economy. Tempting a tart response, it asks: ‘Is it all merely a matter of semantics or something more?’ (p. 12). The authors claim to be ‘scholars of the future’ (p. 120), but their strictures against knowledge-led innovation don’t deliver ‘something more’. They stick firmly to the semantics, spooked by the possibility that the knowledge economy might matter quite substantially. They just want it to go away and leave them alone.
You can buy this book here
5/5/09
I can't resist a bit of comment on this post. I agree with Joe that we shouldn't think that the Almighty Father is really that concerned if our favorite football team doesn't win, or if we put on red socks or blue in the morning. I do believe in providential syncronicity, harmony in life. We should be confident that when we reside in Yahweh's love, we will make decisions according to His will and our conscience. But I do think that God has given us a very firm set of instructions for life, for our daily habits, weekly rests and yearly celebrations, those laws of the Bible. I'm sure Joe would agree with this, but his language is a bit free. I just wanted to make my thoughts known. My Blogswap for this week is posted at Tulip Girl. Thanks!
5/4/09
true incident
We have recently become a community of more than one-thousand members--more members, more jokes, yay! I invite you to celebrate this occasion by posting some true funny incidents of your life.
The incident I recall was very embarrassing for me, but what is embarrassing for someone is often funny for others. So I hope you may find it funny. You will understand the whole story from this email I received in 2001:
The incident I recall was very embarrassing for me, but what is embarrassing for someone is often funny for others. So I hope you may find it funny. You will understand the whole story from this email I received in 2001:
5/2/09
E-mails - Save the trees!
What is it with these environmentalist people that keep putting
"Stop! Think! Do you need to print this off?" at the foot of all their e-mails.
It's just when I print them off.. that's the line that appears on the second page.
"Stop! Think! Do you need to print this off?" at the foot of all their e-mails.
It's just when I print them off.. that's the line that appears on the second page.
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