Empty versatility and the art of the circular reading

Timothy Brennan

pp. 102-119

in: Begüm Özden Fırat, Sarah De Mul, Sonja van Wichelen (eds), Commitment and complicity in cultural theory and practice, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

By relying on a discourse of trade conditions, import percentages, financial instruments, and the creation of free labor (when, indeed, "labor" enters the equation at all, which is seldom), traditional economic thought overlooks entire areas of potential inquiry. At key moments in the past, cultural theory called upon the sciences of psychology, literature, and ethnography to develop a revisionary understanding of profit and value. In this spirit, cultural theory's work on affect, desire, and ideology in the work, for instance of Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel and Georges Bataille, although it is often posed today in terms of the wildly new, was really only returning political economy to its classical self. The likes of David Hume or Adam Smith would have found it very strange, for example, to investigate the economy without supplying a theory of human nature, and both did as the inaugural gesture of their famous studies. If psychological and emotional questions are not exactly banished from today's economic calculations (they play a large role in "rational choice" theory, for instance, and are at the very heart of claims to "immaterial labor" and "human capital" in business policy circles), they are quickly forgotten in debates over the forms of value that are quickly quantified and placed under ownership when imported under conditions of globalization.¹

Cited authors

Simmel Georg

Hume David

Bataille Georges

Smith Adam