Fortuna.
Blind luck. Pure chance. That's how I got the Rockefeller Foundation's
invitation to organize a team residency at the Bellagio Study
and Conference Center and to invite all of you to participate.
I'd fantasized about going there ever since I heard of its existence
many years ago. But this was the first time that I'd applied to
the use the Bellagio facility and, much to my surprise, they actually
accepted my proposal.
It's not that the idea of investigating economic representations across the disciplines was a bad one. Quite the contrary, at least from my perspective! I was-and remain-excited by the project. But we all know that there are lots of good ideas that are never funded, and probably even more bad ones that are.
So, I received the invitation and set out to gather together a group of truly creative, hard-working, personable academics from various disciplines and geographic regions to join me in pursuing this project. Most of you I know personally and through your work; some I do not. I presume that's true for you, too, with respect to me and the other participants. (I don't think anyone in the group knows everyone else.) So, let me introduce myself--and invite you to do the same.
I've already distributed copies of the grant proposal in which I explain some of the inspiration and basic ideas behind the project. And I'll develop those ideas even further in the paper I deliver at the workshop. What I want to do here is give you a sense of who I am and how I came to be interested in this project (including the "chance encounters" that brought me into contact with many of you).
Over the years, I've worked in three distinct but overlapping areas: economic development (especially in Latin America) and international political economy, Marxism (both theoretically and institutionally, with the journal Rethinking Marxism), and economic methodology (focused, in particular, on the "postmodern moments" within modern economics). I also have a strong interdisciplinary bent, especially with respect to literature and the arts. All of which means I work--teach, write, and publish--on (or, by some accounts, beyond) the margins of the discipline of economics.
I have lived in Brazil and Peru (in the 1970s), visited Cuba (in 1980), and spent a good deal of time in Sandinista Nicaragua (in the mid-1980s). In conventional terms, this is the more empirical and applied side of my research. During the course of working on a wide range of problems and issues concerning Latin American development, from the theory and practice of socialist planning to external debt and macroeconomic stabilization and adjustment programs, I discovered that economics "matters." Let me explain. I have never been enamored of the idea that the "root problems" of the continent are economic in nature (although there are significant economic problems) or that the "right" economic analysis would turn things around (but I do believer that different economic stories would have radically different consequences). But I have become increasingly aware of the way economic discourse (especially, but not only, mainstream-neoclassical and Keynesian-economics) has been invoked to "discipline and punish," to undermine oppositional social agendas and rule out alternative paths of development. And the effects of that discourse about the problems and prospects of Latin American economics are felt not only in Latin America but also in the United States and elsewhere. So, I have endeavored to produce stories that run counter to the mainstream ones, with particular emphasis on introducing class concepts into areas and on issues where nonclass analyses prevail. A recent essay, that I coauthored with Julie Graham and Kath Gibson, does just that with the "post-development literature," arguing that the almost-exclusive focus on capitalism tends to rule out a consideration of noncapitalist class possibilities.
I got my Marxism in Latin America (as a critique of and alternative to the then-prevailing dependency theory) and, of course, in the United States (as a high school-age civil rights and antiwar activist in Connecticut). Later, in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of "modes of production" and "social formations," I stumbled across Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst's Precapitalist Modes of Production and, through them, Louis Althusser's writings. Both texts were rough going but, when I read that Fidel had tried to decipher the first 50 pages of Reading Capital and then put it down, well, that was good enough for me. Until I started the graduate program in economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where, with Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff, and their students, I began to discover and produce a Marxism quite different from the economistic, scientistic traditions associated with Monthly Review and other schools of thought with which I had become increasingly dissatisfied. For me, Marxism was "opened up"--as a radical break from the epistemological and methodological commitments of mainstream economic and social theory, as an expansive theoretical tradition instead of a closed set of disciplinary protocols, and as a new set of conversations across disciplines and theoretical paradigms. We created our own version of "a room of one's own" by forming the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (where I first met Julie and, through her, Kath), which sponsors the journal Rethinking Marxism (of which I was a founding member and now serve as editor) and an ongoing series of international conferences (where I encountered many wonderful people, including Evan Watkins). Rethinking Marxism itself was created to explore the diverse traditions within Marxism and to bring Marxism into new forms of engagement with other traditions of critical social theory (including the Consortium for Social Theory, based at the University of Kentucky, where Dwight Billings teaches).
Althusser's work was also my door to the French tradition of post-positivist approaches to philosophy and social theory. Coupled with my interest in graphic design, literature, and the arts, this grew into a full-blown engagement with postmodernism (together with poststructuralism and deconstruction). Ironically enough, postmodernism has created the space for me to develop a new interest in and relationship to the discipline of economics, exploring what I call the "postmodern moments" that have erupted with respect to a wide variety of themes-including the body, uncertainty, and values-in diverse economic discourses- from neoclassical and Keynesian to feminist, institutionalist, and Marxian approaches. As I see it, the discipline of economics is becoming "other," as these postmodern moments are recognized and begin to recast the way economics is thought about and practiced. This project has spilled over into other areas, such as a general concern with disciplinarity (it was at a conference on that topic at the University of Minnesota where I first met Stephen Gudeman and presented my first paper on the differences between academic and everyday economic knowledges) and the relationships between economics and literature and between economic and aesthetic value (smaller, interdisciplinary conferences where I often have the pleasure of seeing Judith Mehta).
Now, as I look forward to this next project, I'm desperately trying to finish up the last chapter of a book on the postmodern moments within modern economics. (It will be finished before Bellagio, I keep telling myself!) In many ways, the project on economic representations is a natural sequel. It comes, as I explain in the grant proposal, from a recognition that there is a great deal of economic analysis and a widespread use of economic concepts currently taking place outside the discipline of economics, among noneconomists (in literature, sociology, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, and so on, in the work of Tim Mitchell, Ruben Oliven, Kin Chi Lau, and the other members of our Bellagio group) and nonacademics (from antiglobalization activists through participants in community-farm alliance and alternative currency experiments to advocates of living wages and fair trade). I am struck both by the disdain that academic economists express toward the way others carry out economic analysis and the extent to which noneconomists treat economics as a singular entity. My interest in creating new forms of recognition of the economic representations that are produced outside the discipline is thus threefold: (a) to dethrone the privilege often accorded to academic economics and its "naturalized" concepts of economic processes and activities, (b) to "borrow" some of the contributions of noneconomists for the purpose of revising and rethinking the existing concepts of academic economics (including those of Marxian theory), and (c) to investigate the "common senses" concerning economic issues and themes that are produced and circulate outside (but not independently of) the academy. In this, the project on economic representations is designed to dovetail with what I know of the interests and work of the other team participants, including the research that Julie and Kath are currently conducting on alternative regional economies.
So, that's how I got here. I'm still at the beginning of this project. I've recently taught a graduate seminar on "economic differences" (with students from a wide range of fields, from economics to political science and theology) and I have lots of ideas about where I want my work on this topic to go. But I'm mostly looking forward to expanding the conversation and learning about how the various members of the team (including those of you whom I will meet for the first time in Bellagio) approach the issue of economic representations across the disciplines.