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ANIMALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY ECONOMIC DISCOURSE

2013; Routledge; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17530350.2012.745440

1753-0369

Paul Crosthwaite,

Economic Theory and Institutions

Abstract This article is an attempt to classify the creature known as Homo economicus. Despite its name, Homo economicus' line of descent through classical and neoclassical economics indicates that it is barely an evolutionary relative of Homo sapiens at all – that, in fact, it has been traditionally understood less as a living organism than as a machine. Under the pressures of an increasingly hostile intellectual environment, however, Homo economicus is undergoing, if not extinction, then a strange mutation. This mutation once again bypasses the human, at least as conventionally understood: it is a metamorphosis from machine to animal, evident in fields ranging from a resurgent Keynesianism to behavioural finance to 'neuroeconomics' to theories of 'adaptive markets', and also registered in a number of prominent contemporary fictional narratives concerned with financial markets. While this 'animal turn' is to be welcomed for the challenge it poses to complacent claims for markets' infallible rationality and efficiency, as well as for the weight it (albeit unknowingly) lends to attempts in the field of animal studies to break down artificial species boundaries, it is nonetheless liable to critique for its tendency to re-inscribe, not merely normalized, but in a very literal sense naturalized, understandings of historically contingent, ideologically determined forms of economic behaviour. Keywords: capitalismeconomicsfinancenon-humanrationality ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Peter Knight, Nicky Marsh, members of the audience at the 'Zoontotechnics: Animality/Technicity' conference held at Cardiff University in May 2010, and the Journal of Cultural Economy's two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Notes 1. As explained later in this article, 'animal studies' is a multidisciplinary field in the humanities in which, in Kari Weil's words, 'nonhuman animals have become a limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power' (Weil Citation2012, p. 5). This article brings animal studies into contact with a separate body of work that I refer to as the 'new animal economics', and which consists of research in academic economics into the economic implications of the biological, psychological, and social continuities that exist between human and nonhuman animals. As I show, some of the key assumptions underpinning the new animal economics are reflected in popular culture texts and public discourse. Animal studies offers a means of critiquing the new animal economics and its popular manifestations. 2. 'As applied to stock thus sold, bear appears early in 18th c., and was common at the time of the South Sea Bubble. The term "bearskin jobber", then applied to the dealer now called the "bear", makes it probable that the original phrase was "sell the bearskin", and that it originated in the well-known proverb, "to sell the bear's skin before one has caught the bear". The associated bull appears somewhat later and was perhaps suggested by bear' (OED). 3. For an extended discussion of the origin and meaning of Keynes' term, see Terzi (Citation1999). 4. When, in recent years, Keynes' recondite philosophical and economic discourse has been made available for immediate consumption by a mass, non-specialist audience, the notion of 'animal spirits' has likewise been readily assimilated to enduring popular images of bankers, brokers, and traders as wild, rampaging beasts. See, for example, the cover image of George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller's Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism (2009) and the illustrations accompanying a review of Akerlof and Shiller's book (Uchitelle Citation2009) and two articles by Shiller on the theme of animal spirits (Citation2009a, Citation2009b). See also the headlines of articles on this topic in The Economist and Forbes: 'Wild-Animal Spirits' and 'Animal Planet vs. Economic Reasoning' ('Wild-animal spirits' Citation2009; Cooley Citation2009). 5. On financial thrillers, see Marsh (Citation2007, ch. 4) and Crosthwaite (Citation2010). 6. Important recent interrogations of the notion of the rational economic actor include Langley (Citation2007), de Goede (Citation2005), and Aitken (Citation2006)