Let me start again.
Here is Foucoult on wealth, value, and economics.
`In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only
one EPISTEME that defines the conditions of possibility of all
knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a
practice. The monetary reform prescribed by the States General of
1575, mercantilist measures, or Law's experiment and its liquidation,
all have the same archaeological basis as the theories of Davanzatti,
Bouteroue, Petty or Cantillon.'
`The mutation that occurred in the entire Western EPISTEME towards the
end of the eighteenth century by saying that a scientifically strong
moment was created in just that area where the Classical EPISTEME was
metaphysically strong ... In fact, the analysis of production, as the
new project of the new `political economy', has as its essential role
the analysis of the relation between value and prices .... .'
`The end of Classical thought - and of the EPISTEME that made general
grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth possible - will
coincide with the decline of representation, or rather with the
emancipation of language, of the living being, and of need, with
regard to representation.'
********************************
Remember, I am an historian of thought, not a theorist or
politician. I ask questions to expose intellectual history, not to
propose anything.
P.R. Saul has stated, `After twenty two years of policies that
have governed the persistant relative decline of North America, the
source of those policies, the University of Chicago, has been awarded
eight Nobel Prizes.'
[The words are not exact, but I put them in quotes to indicate that
the statement is not an assertion of mine, or even, in the first
instance in this discussion, an assertion of truth. The statement is
data for analysis.]
QUESTION. Can the signs we use, the instruments of discourse, become so
disassociated from realty that they become disfunctional?
Alternatively, is there an EPISTEME, corresponding to postmodern
technical and informational circumstance, that is not expressible in
traditional economic discourse?
|