Yes Virginia, There Is a Role for Cultural Theory
November 18th, 2008 admin Posted in libertarian |
A point was raised in the comments to my previous post, which deserves a separate post, so here goes.
Shouldn't Austrians do or at least acknowledge cultural theory? (The claim was, if I recall, we don't appreciate its import.)
We've already been there. Back in the day we formed with Don Lavoie a weekly readings group studying cultural theory. Heck, we even read Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. I was off on my own reading Adorno's criticisms of the spontaneity of jazz music, Marcuse's criticisms of pop news and entertainment in Time Magazine, and who knows what else. I still have their books, all marked up, on my shelf. Yes, Frankfort School Theorists, who nevertheless were pioneers in the fields of cultural analysis from, of course, a Marxist-structuralist approach. Strive to do it over from an Austrian approach.
We went further. Don and Pete and I attended Peter Berger's three week faculty seminar on Economy, Values, and Culture. (Yes, Berger the co-author of The Social Construction of Reality.) Pete and I discussed and debated with Dan Rose, the radical ethnographer. Pete and I wrote up a $10,000,000 proposal to establish a center at the University of Kansas that would focus upon comparative political economy and ethnographic research. I vividly recall Dan banging on the door to my dorm room, asking what all the noise and debate and laughter was all about. He was surprised to see only Pete and I, who, in Dan's words, "were manically writing in a fog of ideas and cigar smoke." He could not believe that this was all done in the context of a multi-million dollar grant idea that just popped into our heads.
What's the point? We were hoping to establish a cultural-analysis program for applied Austrian economics.
What followed? Pete went on his "Just Do It" Nike philosophy -- go out and do the ethnography. One of my main criticisms here was not that our theory wasn't developed enough, but that we (i.e., Pete's students) don't know how to do ethnography. Ethnography is not simply standing three weeks at a street corner in Moscow taking it all in. I learned at least this much from the ethnographers (methodological and applied) whom I had read, let alone from Rose's Living the Ethnographic Life.
I had first hand experience: my original proposal for my Fulbright grant -- which was accepted -- was to "get inside" a bureau of the planning apparatus and try to make sense from the planner's perspective of their everyday life and surroundings. Language, and esp. political barriers, prohibited such a project. I still think I could've done a "Jokes from a Planning Office" paper (a twist on Hop Jan's "Notes from a Planning Office"). Hell, I think we should now do a "Jokes from the Treasury Office" paper.
But there have been real successes. Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright published a book on the subject. Virgil Storr has been doing fine applied cultural research.
What about a cultural analysis of the profession? Well, Pete and I had that idea very early on, and hoped to use some of that 10 mil for a major research project on the impact of the Ford Foundation and the Cowles Commission in shaping contemporary economic theory and debate, tenure, promotion, professional expectations, and so on.
Alas, it hasn't happened. Maybe Pete and I should edit such a work, and encourage some of Pete's best students to write the chapters. (Pete, we need $$$!)
Anyway, the call for cultural analysis by and among Austrians is nothing new. Some of it has already been accomplished. Some of it is still promising. I don't know of the other heterodox schools that have launched such a project. If they have, I'd like to see their results.
