Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to connect Rorty’s heuristic of solidarity vs. objectivity developed in the second chapter with the discussion of how economics textbooks produce knowledge found in the third chapter. I already suggested at one point in the third chapter that economics textbook can be understood as an attempt to generate meaning by positing a world of objectivity in Rorty’s sense. In this chapter, I want to highlight how language can also be used to create bonds and empathy. In order to do this, I want to think of as language as reflecting and producing particular cultures. One can thus think of economics textbooks as producing a culture of objectivity and novels as producing a culture of solidarity.
In order to develop this argument, the chapter proceeds in four parts. First, I revisit some of the points raised in the second chapter about the notion of language games and how language games can be used to understand culture simultaneously as being reflected in the kind of language games that are being played and as being produced by those very same games. In particular, I want to think about the nature of language games along the lines of Rorty’s objectivity vs solidarity. The second section then develops this argument further by showing that novels are one site which indicates the kinds of language games a particular community likes to play – they reflect a particular culture and can thus be used to understand the concerns, issues, and questions a particular culture grapples with. The third section enlarges this point by arguing that the relationship between novels and culture is more complex than suggested in the second section. Novels not only reflect culture but also actively produce and transform it. I end the third section by suggesting that novels are a better way to foster solidarity than economics textbooks. In the fourth section, I give a brief outline
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of why this is the case: Novels are intrinsically more open than economics textbooks. It is this openness that ultimately is a prerequisite for solidarity.
Language as culture
The idea that language is a cultural tool and artefact is by no means uncontroversial.277 A large number of scholars still think of language mostly in terms of a tool to describe reality. A more nuanced version of this view is the theory of universal grammar developed by Noam Chomsky which has been adapted in numerous different guises, most notably Stephen Pinker’s The Language Instinct. Their differences aside, all scholarship sympathetic to universal grammar shares the conviction that all languages share at least some of the same properties which are innate to every normal human being. As a result, language does not have to be taught. Every human is naturally equipped with the syntactical structures to speak any language and universal grammar will reveal what exactly these structures are. Universal grammar effectively posits that all language use can be understood through a few universal grammatical rules. For those following universal grammar, the meaning of a sentence is a straightforward extension of its grammatical structure.
Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, provides a very different account of language. For Wittgenstein, all language rules are local. There are no universal rules that tell us what an expression means. Rather, we have to strenuously learn the meaning of different utterances. The derivation of the meaning of an utterance is the result of a complex interplay between experience, grammatical structure, word choice, and context. Wittgenstein employed the term language games to demonstrate and capture how an utterance itself does not carry the rules by which it can be understood. Rather, we already need to have learnt the rules of an utterance in order for us to be able to correctly grasp its meaning. Wittgenstein uses the
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I have borrowed the phrase cultural tool from: Everett, Daniel, Language: The cultural tool, New York: Random House, 2012.
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wonderful example of an arrow or signpost. Even though we all take an arrow to be guiding us in the direction of its head rather than its nook, the arrow itself does not tell us that this is how we ought to apply the rule. We have to have mastered the rule before we can understand what the arrow is trying to tell us. Wittgenstein phrases this issue wonderfully by writing: “To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.”278
Because understanding a language requires mastery of a certain technique, language is best regarded as an instrument. And we have to learn how this instrument is to be used. Wittgenstein asks his readers to “think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue pot, glue, nails, and screws – The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities).”279
As instruments could be used in many different ways, the exact ways in which we do use them shows our belonging to a group with whom we share this usage. This is one of the reasons why Wittgenstein calls speaking language a form of life. Another way of saying this would be to say that language is a cultural tool, as Daniel Everett does.
One of the ways we can therefore think about the nature of our culture is to think about what expressions are used and learnt. The question becomes “how did we learn the meaning of this word (“good” for instance). From what sort of examples? In what language games?”280
Because every word can be used in a variety of language games, each word can be regarded as belonging to a family of resemblances:
We see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.281
278 Wittgenstein, Ludwig , Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, §199. 279 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, §11. 280
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, §77.
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This vision of language was also espoused by one of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries, J.L Austin. Austin also provides a great contribution to an understanding of the cultural nature of our language. Where Wittgenstein uses the term language game, Austin uses the term speech act.282 Austin argues that some speech acts are performative utterances. A performative utterance brings about something just by the mere fact that is has been uttered. Austin’s wonderful example is a priest uttering ‘I pronounce you Man and wife’. What is interesting about such utterances is that certain conditions must be fulfilled for to these utterances to function. Even though Austin never used the term himself, these conditions are generally known as felicity conditions today. In other words, if a friend at some bar pronounces two people as man and wife, the felicity conditions have not been met, and utterance does not carry any weight. The utterance itself, however, does not tell us anything about whether these conditions are in fact fulfilled, or even, what they are. Not only do we need to learn what these conditions are but they can differ fundamentally between different cultures.
Felicity conditions play an important role in the production of economic knowledge and economics as a discipline. It needs to be remembered that the question of who counts as an economists in many ways is decided by the collective self-understanding of the community of economists. And this self-understanding is reflected in the kind of work that is deemed admissible in research journals and doctoral dissertations. If I briefly allow the autobiographical angle to break through to the surface of the narrative again, it might be worth noting that this dissertation is also characterised by not being the kind of work that is admissible in an economics department. As it stands, I would not be awarded a doctoral degree in economics at any of the top tier school in Anglo-Saxon countries for the kind of work I am writing here. Despite the fact that I explore how economics knowledge and ideas
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are produced, this dissertation does not meet the felicity conditions of being considered a doctoral dissertation in economics. Again, one would not be able to infer this from the nature of the text alone – one needs to know what those conditions are in the first place.
The felicity conditions that are imposed on research in turn have grave consequences for the way economics is taught at university. It may make sense to think of a doctoral dissertation as a membership card to a private club. Once one has received the card, one is in principle a member. One may not be considered a full member at the outset but one is, as the saying goes, at least part of the club. By virtue of having been granted this club membership (which is frequently the prerequisite of teaching in an economics department), one fulfils the felicity conditions in order to create performative utterances within a classroom environment. By virtue of being appointed as a lecturer or professor in a university context, one’s utterances about what counts as economics take on a performative character: Economics is, whatever it is, because one has said so. There may be disagreements amongst colleagues about the exact nature of economics but this becomes secondary in the classroom. A lecturer or professor is invested with the authority to enforce his vision of the subject on the students.283 Given that most people’s vision of the subject also influences the kind of work which they personally research, the style of one’s research is often reflected in the kind of teaching one does.
It is obviously true that there are limits on the kind of utterance that can be made performative in a classroom environment. Just saying ‘the world is flat’ will not make the world flat. Nor would it even convince most students that the world is flat. In other words, there is a certain background knowledge and understanding of the world which the economist as teacher needs to tap into in order to make his utterances truly performative. In the third section of this chapter, I suggest that novels can be understood as one vehicle which helps to
283 I should also note that this authority is generally more pronounced in the American system than in the British
system. In the American system, all work is graded by the professor in question whereas in Britain there is a chance that the grading is done by third parties.
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contribute to this background understanding (as could movies, social media, newspapers, etc.).
One important aspect to the performance of an economist as teacher, or all performance for that matter, is sociality. In participating in acts of communication, we become part of social interactions. In fact, language can only enact its performative character if the community bond amongst different speakers of that language is recognised. If the community does not take the words “I now pronounce you man and wife” to be in any way binding, the pronouncement will lose the meaning which we would currently attach to it (as somebody who is part of a community where this pronouncement under the right felicity conditions is indeed transformative of the social context of the two people in question). In other words, we can see how the idea of homo communicandis is inherently tied to a social conception of human nature. But it also implies that language is somehow part of the processes by which our culture is created. Claire Kramsch puts this issue nicely when she states: “Language is the principal means whereby we conduct our social lives. When it is used in the context of communication, it is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways.”284
Daniel Everett provides a useful way of thinking about what constitutes culture vs language:
Language is how we talk. Culture is how we live. Language includes grammar, stories, sounds, meanings, and signs. Culture is the set of values shared by a group and the relationship between these values, along with all the knowledge shared by a community of people, transmitted according to their tradition.285
One important aspect to this interrelation between language and culture is the very creation and consolidation of social bonds. Everett tries to emphases this dual role of language:
all human languages are tools. Tools to solve the twin problems of communication and social cohesion. Tools shaped by the distinctive pressures of their cultural niches – pressures that include cultural values and history and which in many cases account….for the similarities and differences between languages.286
284 Kramsch, Claire, Language and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p.3. 285
Everett, Daniel, Language: The cultural tool, New York:Random House, 2012, p.6.
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Everett is following a number of other scholars to try to emphasise the role and contribution of langue to human evolution.287 Everett and others are interested in how “it is that the values we hold as members of a human societies shape the ways in which we communicate….Our cultures, linguistic forms, and minds evolve together from birth to death and even beyond the lifespan of any individual – each language is a history of symbiosis of grammar, mind, and culture.”288
I share the concerns of Everett and other evolutionary scholars but I am also interested in the reverse story, namely how the ways we communicate shapes our cultural values. Hence my interest in economics textbooks and other artefacts that produce economic ideas.
This realisation is the starting point of the excellent work of many cultural historians. Stuart Hall provides one the best examples of how language can be used to understand culture. In The Hippies – An American Moment, Hall relates the language and slogans of the Hippie movement in the US to their overall cultural project. He writes:
I try to view the Hippie Style as a project for a certain section of American youth (rather than a symptom). I stress that this is both a description, and an interpretation, because, as will be apparent, I am trying to manifest what are, by definition, the latent meanings of a way of life: a way of life which rejects and despises, precisely, the language and act of interpretation.289
Hall uses Hippie slogans as an example of how “most subcultures dramatise the gap between their own world and the world of ‘others’ in language – the most expressive mediation or objectivation of all.”290
This is because, and I think Hall is right in making this claim, the chosen language reflects a particular vision of what make life worthwhile. Hall writes:
The symbols, expressive values, beliefs, and attitudes, projects and aspirations of groupings like the Hippies constitute, taken together, a significant, meaningful way of being in the world for them. It is by learning to read the meanings of these
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See: Hurford, James, The Origin of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Boyd, Brian, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Carey, Susan, The Origin of Concepts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
and the Origin of Concepts
288 Everett, Daniel, Language: The cultural tool, New York:Random House, 2012, p.9. 289
Hall, Stuart, “The Hippies: An American Moment”, University of Birmingham, 1968, p.2.
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‘signs’ that we come to understand the global vision of the world, the weltanschauung, the project which organises and makes coherent the many disparate strands.291
Other cultural historians have taken up the idea that language can be traced in order to understand historical developments. Alan Munslow’s Discourse and Culture is a great example in this regard. Munslow uses the work of Hayden White as a starting point. White argues that “each of the epochs in Western cultural history, then, appears to be locked within a specific mode of discourse, which at once provides its access to “reality” and delimits the horizon of what can possibly appear as real.”292
Given this background, Munslow argues that “the explanations for American cultural formation in the late nineteenth-century are to be derived not only from the examination of the evidence of factory life and urban living conditions, but also from the analysis of discourse of dominant and subordinated groups represented in the voices of class, race and gender.”293 In order to accomplish this task, Munslow “examines five language terrains or discourses which were integral to the creation of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”294 He identifies these as “the language of capital accumulation and enterprise, the producer tradition that was largely destroyed by economic change, the nationalist discourse of written history, the language of social reconstruction and the constitution of gender, and finally the language of race.”295 Munslow tries to understand the nature of each of these discourses by focusing on the work of a single representative individual – Andrew Carnegie, Terence V, Powderly, Frederick Jackson Turner, Jane Addams, Booker T Washington, and W.E.B du Bois. In this way, he aims to “assess [each discourse] through the role of a key intellectual chosen for his
291 Hall, Stuart, “The Hippies: An American Moment”, University of Birmingham, 1968,p.4. 292
White, Hayden, “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground”, History and Theory, 12( 1), 1973, p. 34.
293 Munslow, Alun, Discourse and culture: the process of cultural formation in America 1870 – 1920, London:
Routledge, 1992, p.1.
294 Munslow, Alun, Discourse and culture: the process of cultural formation in America 1870 – 1920, London:
Routledge, 1992, p.5.
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Munslow, Alun, Discourse and culture: the process of cultural formation in America 1870 – 1920, London: Routledge, 1992, p.5.
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or her significance in the process of cultural representation and ideological formation.”296 In some ways, the methodology of the next chapter follows Munslow’s ethos since I try to