[PEN-L:8755] Re: Re: Definition: Of word or thing? Was ...Thomas

["Michael Hoover" <hoov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Carrol Cox wrote:
> >the sense Engels gave in *Classical German Phil*: Ideology is the
> >assumption that ideas have a history of their own. In this sense it is,
> >of course, one version or one aspect of false consciousness.
>
> Neoclassical economics qualifies as a complex of ideas, the first
> definition, but also as a material practice (the second) - its
> institutionalization as the reigning doctrine in economics
> departments, journals, and official institutions like the U.S.
> Treasury and the IMF. And it probably qualifies on the third too, at
> the level of "spontaneous" understanding of the world, insofar as the
> masses have accepted capitalism as part of nature, the atomized
> individual as the fundamental social unit, and the market as the
> realm of liberty, and equality, and Bentham.
> Doug

I don't take to Pierre Bourdieu much of the time but he seems on to
something in below which draws from both pejorative sense of ideology
and Mannheimian utopia...

"Is the economic world really, as the dominant discourse would have
us believe, a pure and perfect order, implacably unfolding the logic
of its predictable consequences and promptly repressing all deviations
from its rules through the sanctions it inflicts, either automatically
or, more exceptionally, through its armed agent, the IMF or the OECD
and the drastic policies they impose - reduced labour costs, cuts in
public spending and a more 'flexible' labour market?  What if it were,
in reality, only the implementation of a utopia, neo-liberalism, thus
converted into a political programme, but a utopia which, with the aid
of the economic theory to which it subscribes, manages to see itself
as the scientific description of reality?

This tutelary theory is a mathematical fiction, based, from the outset,
on a gigantic abstraction, which contrary to what economists who defend
their right to inevitable abstraction like to think, cannot be reduced
to the effect - constitutive of every scientific project - of object
construction as a deliberatively selective apprehension of the real.
This abstraction, performed in the name of a strict and narrow view
of rationality, identified with individual rationality, consists in
bracketing off the economic and social conditions of rational
dispositions (and in particular those of the calculating disposition
applied to economic matters which is the basis of the neo-liberal)
and of the economic and social structures which are the condition of
their exercise, or, more precisely, of the production and reproduction
of those dispositions and those structures.  To appropriate the scale
of the omission, one only has to think of the education system, which
is never taken into account as such at a time when it plays a decisive
role both in the production of goods and services and in the production
of producers.  From this original fault, inscribed in the Walsrian
myth of 'pure theory', flow all the omissions and shortcomings of the
discipline of economics, and the deadly stubbornness with which it
clings to the arbitrary opposition it causes to exist, by its very
existence, between specifically economic logic - based on competition
and promising efficiency - and social logic, subject to the rule of
equity."

from "Neo-liberalism, the Utopia (Becoming a Reality) of Unlimited
Exploitation," in _Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the
Market_, 1998

Michael Hoover (who doesn't take to Zizek much either)