Welcome to the online start up of Economics on the border

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Introduction

Economics on the Border is a student-run open seminar meant to fill the gap between economics and certain disciplines or fields of thought (such as continental and political philosophy) that are usually concidered as "unaffiliated" with the methods and practices of economic science. It is run jointly by master students enrolled in EIPE (Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics) and in the regular MA Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. It is a "work in progress" seminar, run independently of the university's curriculum and it is open to any philosophy and/or economics student that wishes to discuss certain unexplored or understated affiliations between the two (or more!) disciplines. For a more comprehensive description and info on the meetings please see below.

Economics on the Border

The science of economics is not related to philosophy only through the restrictive nexus of epistemology. And philosophy is not related to economics solely through the use of vague notions such as “capitalism” and “neoliberalism”. Obviously there is a large gap in front of us and it needs to be filled. And if the dimension of the gap is large enough to prevent most of us from a burdensome academic endeavor, it is not wide enough to swallow the curiosity of some students that are faced with the problem that it poses. This very curiosity is on the roots of Economics on the Border, an open seminar run jointly by students from EIPE and the Philosophy MA (EUR) in Rotterdam.

During the course of this seminar students will try to map the various possible borders between philosophy and economics:

• In the epistemological field an attempt will be made to link economics with certain currents in continental philosophy of science that focus on questions of scientific change, worldview and their relation with the history –and not only the method- of economic thought. We will discuss philosophers and historians of science such as Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, Georges Canguillem, Emile Meyerson, Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault.
• In the field of sociology we will try to connect distant (Max Weber) and recent (Bourdieu, Senett) social theory to economics as a social science and as a concrete practice. We will focus on notions such as demystification, craftsmanship, mechanization and public space and try to see whether the practice of economic theory has a share in their effects.
• In the filed of feminist studies we will discuss the gendered and racialized rationality of capital. We will try to connect these problems both to the field of epistemology (particularly economic) and to the problematic of globalization and neoliberalism and try to define their limits.
• In the field of the so-called “post-modern” philosophy an attempt will be made to define the borders between certain approaches to economics and capitalism and to economic theory and method. Special attention will be given at the concept of subjectivity and subject production in the works of Deleuze-Guattari, Foucault, Heidegger, Lévinas, Lacan, Benjamin. Furthermore we will try to explore some “radical” or alternative epistemological considerations that were or could be applied to economics –such as the idea of rhizome in Deleuze-Guattari,  the economics of “excess” in the work of Georges Bataille.
• Finally in the course of the seminar -since this list cannot be fully inclusive- we will trace certain affinities between economics and phychoanalysis, critical theory, aesthetics and other fields of philosophical thought and everyday practice. Of course this depends a lot on the active participation of new “members” of the seminar and on possible visitors from other institutions.

The seminar will be held (weekly or bi-weekly) on Dek22 at 22 Willem Buytewechstraat. Feel free to join our seminar. New participations and lecture proposals are more than welcome! 

But most of all: feel free to speak and dare to think!

Agenda 

-Thursday 8th of October, from 17.00 to 19.00 @ Dek22, Willem Buytewechstraat 22.

(this meeting will be used in order to set up the program, possible participants are invited as well whom will be send and invitation which includes the summary of Nikos)

Proposed contributions by Participants 

Marco Sachy

I will focus on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattary Mille Plateaux - Capitalisme and Schizophrenie. I will make a comparison between the modern and analytical metaphor of the 'tree' with the post-modern and continental one of the 'rhizome'. The thesis is  that on the one hand a configuration with the 'tree' as both a syntactic (Cf. Noam Chomsky's 'syntagmatic tree') and epistemic leading metaphor (Cf. Francis Bacon who 'reads and decrypts the Book of Nature') brings about a hierachical, top-down framework for producing scientific knowledge, and of course economic thought (not to mention the oligarchic structure of economic policy insitutions - WB; IMF; ECB; FED, etc.). This in turn leads to a limitation in the intrinsic possibilities of scientific knowledge whose production is in fact inherently and officially constrained in printed books and vertical-oriented university carreers  by the 'arborescent paradigm' of modernity with dichotomy as the main pillar. On the other hand and conversely, Deleuze and Guattari's 'rhizome' is a suitable metaphor to exemplify that in different configurations such as nets or webs, knots' connections are the outcome of a systemic process, which is a-centered, a-hierachical and horizontal. An intuitive example is the way  human brain cells do develop in reticular system and the consequent possible neural connections amongst them. The question is whether or not we - as humans rather than trees - should formulate through a hermenutic practice, a syntactic and epistemic framework more akin to the anatomy of our 'place of thought' (i. e. the collective knowledge mediated by computers such as this very wiki) in order to invite our brain to produce richer scientific - viz. economic - knowledge in a democratic process and, hence, to better cope with 'that which surround us' (i. e. the actual economic crisis).

Nikos Skiadopoulos 

• Economics and Existence -though not in a strictly marxian framework. The concept of alienation that lies at the heart of Marx's theory of value can be viewed as a truth that -on the other hand- cannot easily constitute a basis upon which one can build the foundations of an economic scienece. What is the status of this truth and how it is related to the truth of science? Are there two distinct notions of truth -as there can be two distinct images of man in social science: the one who reflects and the one who is reflected?
• To answer this question one can first of all adress the status of economics as a social science: does economics allow for reflexivity (Bourdieu) and can the positive character of its method prevent the effects of its fundamental reflexivity as a social science? 
• Secondly one has to question the anglo-saxon tradition in philosophy of science and try to apply some categories used by "continental" philosophers of science such as Bachelard, Koyré, Meyerson e.t.c. Can there be an epistemological break in economics? Would that epistemological break effect the real economy -or even more- will it arise from real economy? Can we accept the famous quote from Althusser that "philosophy is class struggle at the level of theory"?
• Another more fundamental approach is to introduce in economic thinking the concept of the subject -instead of the concept of individual. There one can study the possible ways that the subject is fashioned through -or with the use of- certain economical practices. This line of thought does not have to be strictly marxian (though Marx is the only economist that focused on the notion of the subject). It can as well take into account the thought of Martin Heidegger ("Being and Time", "Being, Dwelling, Thinking"), Emmanuel Levinas ("Totality and Infinity", "From Existence to the Existant", "Beyond Being"), Jacques Derrida ("The Gift of Time", "Spectres of Marx"), Georges Bataille ("The Accused Share"), Michel Foucault ("Securité, Territoire, Population", "Naissance de la Biopolitique", "L'herméneutique du sujet") of course Max Weber (apart from his protestant ethic, his methodological writings on the Ideal Type).
• To join economic science and economic experience is the fundamental thought that lies on the ground of this approach.

Chiara Bonfiglioli  

I am interested (althought would need time to think of a possible seminar) in discussing the gendered and racialized rationality of capital from the perspective of feminist and post-colonial studies. If we talk of critical epistemologies of science and  processes of knowledge production/subjectivation within capitalism (but also within ex-"real existing" socialisms), we cannot avoid to consider feminist and post-colonial/minor critiques to (apparently) universal epistemologies and subjects of philosophical and economical knowledge. "Race and gender, together with class, represent the privileged terrain for contemporary multicultural capitalism to organize and reproduce forms of control and domination." (from Uniriot.org- http://www.uniriot.org/uniriotII/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=392:space-invaders-corpi-e-differenze&catid=86:speciali&Itemid=288) Which processes of production, reproduction and differential inclusion take place in our post-fordist, globalized and neoliberal time-space? Is it possible to trace the gendered, racialized and class-based subtexts of economical and philosophical theories, even in the case of theories we like?  Of which economies of visibility and invisibility are we part of? (Inspiring texts: Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch; Nirmal Puwar's Space Invaders; Judith Butler's Precarious Life; Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible) 

Sanne van Driel:

This seminar will be devoted to 'Capitalism and Subject Production'. The focus will be on Felix Guattari's Three Ecologies and the way he describes what he calls Integrated World Capitalism as the dominant subject productionmachine, that is polluting our world. But Guattari also creates a meta-model through which the process of subject production can be understood and different ways of being in the world, au milieu, can be found, a space for other voices can be created. At the end of Three Ecologies Guattari cites Walter Benjamin from his text The Storyteller, in which Benjamin describes, comparing the storyteller to a craftsman, how the art of storytelling in our age has come to a decline. Considering the seminar on Sennett, we could again, from a different light, discuss the possibility of craftsmanship/storytelling/becoming-minor in our technocapitalist society.

Izaak Dekker:

In this seminar the critiques and theories of Richard Sennett (The culture of new capitalism, The craftsman, The uses of disorder) will be presented and evaluated. Furthermore I would like to use this presentation in order to discuss the broader themes Sennett brings up in his writings. For example the possibility of craftsmanship in a technocapitalist environment and the impacts of economical factors on culture and public life. Sennett has written much about the ways in which our public space is organised. Abstract ways of planning on enormous scale by the municipality a company or government fail in making living and vibrating neighbourhoods, can this be re-organised (or maybe dis-organised) and in what way?

Aetzel Griffioen   

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