Effecting reality : intellectuals and politics in the current conjuncture

165 In this brief contribution, I take up three issues under the headings respectively, leverage, linkage and ‘economy’. The first might be called the current political economy of intellectual production; it asks the question what do social scientists do to affect reality. In the second part of the paper I try to alert us to the slipperiness of key institutions and concepts; it cannot be assumed that the functions of institutions conventionally central to social science enquiry remain the same as when they first attracted attention, and this is made more problematic by the fact that the concepts used to understand social institutions are themselves elusive. Finally, I take one especially weighty arena of the social world, ‘the economy’, and I suggest that social scientists either fetishize it or dismiss it (or by fetishizing it, they are able to dismiss it). In so doing they naturalize capitalism, thereby removing its various manifestations from proper critical enquiry. My argument is that a certain kind of social scientist, committed to a progressive society, is drawn into policy-oriented research the expert. The dictates of this kind of work encourage a strong empiricist rendering of the contemporary economy while mitigating criticism of capitalism. Another kind of social scientist, casting themselves in the role of critics, stress a different kind of empiricism that of the ‘experience’ of those they study. Insofar as elements of capitalism cannot be experienced, they fall beyond the realm of enquiry. The critique of capitalism here too therefore is impoverished. This leads me to the value of concepts: the one school soldiers on with the heavy artillery of an older conceptual armor, putting faith in the old architecture while adding a decorative gargoyle now and again (embedded economies, social capital, etc.); the other school fantasizes with an array of fanciful neologisms that, it is hoped, will make the world itself a different place (ethnoscapes, hybridity, etc.). Again the cost in both cases is the loss of critical edge. I argue two inter-connected points in response. One is that there are indeed elements in the reproduction (and transformation) of capitalism that are, what Harvey (1985) has called, ‘concrete abstractions’. They happen. It matters that they happen. Many actors, often for the very best of reasons, do not sense these effects as ‘experience’. We may wish to dismiss awful old terms like base or infrastructure, indeed all geological metaphors, as Levi Strauss referred to them, but it will not do to distract attention from these crucial moments of capitalism as a result. The other is to argue the flip side of this: with Raymond Williams, to argue that ideas, culture, discourse, have so powerful a role in social reproduction (and transformation) that, with suitable caution, we might talk of their materiality. The question and the challenge for a critical social science then becomes: how might the better understanding of current capitalism’s concrete abstractions help us to understand how this materiality is achieved and how might the better understanding of chains of meaning and structures of feeling help us to see how concrete abstractions appear to us to be more abstract than concrete, more transhistorical than conjunctural, more natural than engineered. Effecting reality: intellectuals and politics in the current conjuncture