. . .what happens to readers when they confront the theorems, equations, and verbal explanations in and through which the Arrow-Debreu model is presented? What do we see, what kind of narrative do we construct? In particular, what images of the body emerge from our engagement with the text? In many cases, as we have discussed above, readers do not see a body at all-or at least a body which conforms to their expectations. Therefore, in searching for a particular set of familiar images, they conclude that the body is missing. Our own reading is, as we have indicated, quite different: because we refuse to make assumptions about a "naturalized" or "full" body, and thus a body which must serve as a ground for representation in economic discourse, we come away with a diverse (although, as we explain below, not necessarily rich or imaginative) set of corporeal images. Therefore, in our view, neoclassical value theory does represent an extended allegory about the mechanisms and capabilities of the body.
We can see this in the treatment of both the "producer" and the "consumer." As we follow the presentation of the nature and role of each in the texts of neoclassical theory, we are struck by the extent to which they are treated as distinct, "relatively autonomous" sites in which various and differentiated bodily orders reside and function.
Producers, for example, are often defined as operating within a commodity space in which inputs are transformed into outputs according to technological possibilities and the rule of profit-maximization. Clearly-and this we grant to the critical stories concerning neoclassical theory we referred to above-this kind of "activity" analysis (and the "netput" vector conception of the location of the results of production in commodity space) rules out some of the most famous bodies that have populated the history of treatments of production. We do not find, for example, the value-creating laboring bodies of classical theory or the pain-avoiding bodies of the early neoclassicals-or, for that matter, the heroic entrepreneurs of the Austrian economists. Indeed, the familiar outlines of laboring, pleasure-seeking, and entrepreneurial bodies, along with the (legal, sectoral) boundaries of the enterprise itself, tend to fade into the background or disappear altogether. What does emerge, however, is a different set of bodily functions, for example, those associated with the meticulous bookkeeping necessary (if only implicitly) to choose, from among all the possible production sets, those that meet the criterion of profit maximization. Without this practice of accounting, of keeping track of inputs and outputs (and their respective "given" prices), no choice of profit-maximizing production plans would be possible. Perhaps even more important (certainly in terms of explicit discussion), we see the bodily orders and capabilities associated with the assembly, transformation, repackaging, and so on of one set of objects (inputs) in order to end up with a different set of objects (outputs, including new potential inputs for the next round of production). Neoclassical production is thus rendered as a collection or assemblage of heterogeneous elements and materials, a set of operational linkages and external relations between things, machine connections (if not a "whole" machine), in which a discontinuous series of bodily organs, processes, and flows (for example, "the labor of a coal miner, of a truck driver, of a member of some category of teachers, of engineers, of draftsmen, of executives, etc." [G. Debreu, Theory of Value [New York: Wiley, 1959], 30-31) come together with other things (the divisible "raw materials, semifinished products; land and equipment or their uses…at various dates and locations" [ibid., 38]) according to the available codes, the technologies of production.
It is the characteristics of these codes which tend to receive the most attention in neoclassical theories of production. Here we find the ubiquitous discussions of the assumptions, conventions, and restrictions required to define a "closed, convex cone" of production possibilities. Technology, in this scheme, plays the dual role of being an extension of the body, the ability to coordinate the alignment of services and other inputs at particular points in space and time in order to produce ouputs, and a way of writing on the body, to the extent that neoclassical economists have taken on the project of specifying the rules that these technologies must adhere to so that firms' output suppy functions assume the appropriate forms. In the first case, then, the technical codes invoke a body or corporeal agency which determines the possible linkages among and between factor services and (produced and nonproduced) inputs. In the second case, the body operates as a surface on which the requirements proposed by the theorists can be inscribed. Both are central to the neoclassical theory of production.
What is apparent (at least to us) in this treatment is that production itself is deprived of any depth (in comparison to other, classical or early neoclassical theories, that is). It serves merely to determine a particular vector of outputs from the set of all possible outputs. Production is not conceived to be governed, for example, by the bodily imperative of reproduction (as it was for the classicals and still is for the Sraffians) or of the body's experience of pain or disutility (which could be compensated by a corresponding increase in utility in consumption for Jevons and the other early neoclassicals). Instead, the realm of production in contemporary neoclassical theory consists of a diverse set of bodily functions and activities-the calculations of profit-maximizing conditions, the flows and intensities of factor services, the ability to assemble or bring together disparate body movements and objects, and so on-which have no "underlying" purpose or "compensating"
relief other than to move from one point to another through commodity space.
In our view, then, neoclassical economists' theory of production, in eschewing both the unity of a single "productive" or "entrepeneurial" body and any hierarchy of functions and requirements, creates an openended terrain in which distinct and separate bodily orders literally meet and engage in activities that result in the supply of new commodity outputs. Obviously, this horizontally (dis)integrated conception of the "producing" body is similar, in outline, to what some regard as a pure "machine." Yet, of course, this machinic conception of the body has a long history in Western thought and, while subject to a humanist critique, it is, nonetheless, still one important way in which bodies have long been recognized, known, and performed in economics and elsewhere.
Kelley, R. D. G. 1997. "Playing for Keeps: Pleasure and Profit in the Postindustrial Playground." In The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. W. Lubiano. New York: Pantheon Books.