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Summer 2002

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Issue 43

Market Killing: What the free market does and what social scientists can do about it
Greg Philo and David Miller
Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 2001, Ł16.99

I asked the publisher for this on the basis of the title and the authors: Greg Philo has written many books for the Glasgow University Media Group (Bad News, More Bad News etc.) and David Miller is the author of Don't Mention the War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and the Media (London, Pluto, 1994). However the book's title is somewhat misleading. Although the book is partly about what the free market does, and has done in the UK since 1979, it is mostly an assault on post-modernism and its impact on the social sciences. Ah, you're thinking, post-modernism....or perhaps not.

I've skimmed a couple of accounts of post-modernism and, if it mattered, I could probably pull together a paragraph or three on what it apparently means. Happily, here I don't have to. My problem with the damned stuff is that when post-modernism is intelligible, it is just obvious twaddle. What needs explaining is how such nonsense came to be taken seriously, by anyone.

That something as vacuous as post-modernism got taken seriously in sections of British academic life was only possible because most academics - like most other people - are intellectual cowards, conformists and careerists. Or, as one of the essayists here puts it rather more politely:

'Unfortunately, given current academic politics and the fear of putting a foot wrong, some younger scholars may lack the confidence to point out the weaknesses inherent in some contemporary writing and may feel the need to sprinkle their work with the requisite terms....' (pp.74/5)

But this nonsense didn't just affect younger academics. The opening chapter is a 95 page essay by Philo and Miller which discusses and demolishes post-modernism, in particular in the fields of media and cultural studies. One of the 'stars' in that field used to be the Marxist writer Stuart Hall. The authors describe a 1977 essay of Hall's in which the concepts of ideology and hegemony (this was in the days of Gramsci) are central. 42 pages later they write the following (and this will give a flavour of the post-modernism debate):

'Some less consistent constructivist theorists still want to retain some notion of an external reality (sic). For them one key advance made by Michael Foucault is that his notion of discursive practice acknowledges that the real exists, but maintains that since reality is only appropriated through discourse, it is discourse which is important. Anything we (really) do in the world must (to have meaning) be a discursive practice. So even real events and actions become discursive.' (p.43)

After which the authors quote a Stuart Hall essay, written 15 years after his 1977 one. Hall, one of the foremost Marxist sociologists and cultural analysts of his generation, writes:

'My own view is that events, relations, structures do have conditions of existence and real effects, outside the sphere of the discursive........'.

To which I had two reactions. The first was no shit, Sherlock! But the second was amazement that someone of Hall's standing should feel it necessary to write such a sentence.

Anyone reading that long paragraph quoted above with a little knowledge of (English) philosophy - and a little is all I have - will see that the debate it alludes to resembles the debates about sense data going back to Bishop Berkeley in the 18th century: that is, since our perceptions of the world are actually perceptions of the data mediated by our senses, how do we know there is an external world beyond our senses? This debate was exploded in a famous event by Professor G. E. Moore around the turn of the century. My 30 year-old memory of reading about the incident says that, asked to give a paper on Proof of An External World, Moore strode to the podium and just held up his hand. Moore was saying - or 'saying' - that we all know what the 'external world' is and some questions aren't worth asking. Alternatively, while it may seem an interesting thing to discuss in a seminar, the idea that 'Anything we (really) do in the world must (to have meaning) be a discursive practice' wouldn't last long under machine-gun fire.

The authors deserve our thanks for forcing themselves to read enough of the nonsense to illustrate how wrong it is. They note that the rise of post-modernism in Britain occurred in the wake of the drive by the Anglo-American right in the 1980s to restore capital to primacy. Taking the post-modern route away from the analysis of the real spared the sensitive cultural analyst from those career-threatening conflicts with the line coming from the Conservative governments of the day. If the left was out, post-moderism provided an alternative to embracing the new right, a sideways step.

After the authors' long introductory essay - which will serve as a fine introduction to post-moderism, if you want one - there are a series of shorter essays, some commenting directly on the essay, others not; some relevant to it, some not. I enjoyed most Noam Chomsky, not bothering to conceal his intellectual contempt, politely dumping on post-modernism from a great height, and Jean Shaoul's account of the economics of privatisation.

One of the essays reminds the reader of the brilliant wheeze of Alan Sokal, an American physicist, who wrote a meaningless parody of a post-modernist essay and submitted it to one of the leading post-modernist journals - which accepted it and published it as real. Is there another intellectual field in which such a stunt could be successful?

At the beginning of the book there is this comment from Raymond Tallis: 'When the emperor is restocking his wardrobe, he usually shops in Paris'. There is an essay to be written on why the French language encourages obscurity and intellectual pretension.

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